“I guess that wasn’t the moment to bring up Sacred Heart again,” Karp said.
Marlene laughed bitterly. “Oh, right. The last time I did she bit my head off. I explain the advantages, I tell her she’s not going to be happy in public school ninth grade, and I get, I’m not going to leave my friends and that’s final, Mother.”
“It’s her life,” said Karp.
“It’s not her life,” cried Marlene, and then sighed and in a tone of false brightness she asked, “And how was your day, darling?”
“Great. I just shit-canned a case out of Felony that took a year and a half to construct, and probably drove some kid ADA to drink or worse.”
“Was it fun?”
“Made my week. I’m going to have to ream Jimmy Sullivan’s ass again. The thing never should’ve gotten this far in the first place. But look, why I called, whatever the Chens say, I’m going to find the ADA on this Chinatown thing and get the full story. I assume you’re looking into it, too.”
“I have Jim on it-he hasn’t got back to me yet,” said Marlene, after which static intervened and she clicked the thing off.
Atlantic Avenue Paint amp; Body was located on that thoroughfare just after it crosses Woodlawn Avenue, in the Ozone Park neighborhood in the borough of Queens, and consisted of the usual one-story concrete-block loft, with an asphalt apron in front packed with vehicles. It was painted bright blue, with the name of the firm picked out in fancy shadowed white lettering. Marlene had grown up six blocks away and would never have considered taking her trade anywhere but Lopata’s, as the place was called locally. Although at this point both her paint and her body were fine.
Marlene sat in her car for a while, feeling the sun through the windshield, warm but not unpleasantly so, listening to the rumble of the dog’s breathing from the back and the sounds of metal bashing from inside Lopata’s, and letting the old neighborhood soak in. Contra the famous saying, Marlene, unlike New Yorkers from Iowa, say, could go home again and did so fairly often. Her family and their neighbors thought she was crazy but not a danger to anyone but herself, and the mild celebrity she enjoyed did not hurt. Lately, her mother had started asking why Marlene did not appear on the talk shows, since she “knew more than all of those idiots they got on there put together.” Also, although she would have denied it, the stability of this neighborhood was a comfort. Ozone Park had been inhabited by Italians and other Catholics of the old immigration when Marlene was born, and it was inhabited by them and their children still. Ordinarily, Marlene rather enjoyed dwelling in one of the districts of the city most boiling with ethnic weirdness, but sometimes not, as now; in the wake of the Chen unpleasantness she had paisan hunger, and had semiconsciously contrived a business excuse for a journey here to assuage it.
Through the dusty window of the garage she could see a burly man in a filthy pinstriped mechanic’s coverall speaking on the phone. His gestures as he spoke were eloquently violent, and she could imagine the tenor of his language. Remembered, more than imagined, and that went for the gestures, too. Rocky Lopata as a high school junior had been a lean, cocky, mildly criminal kid with a duck-tail haircut and a black motorcycle jacket, the heartthrob of the whole girls’ eighth grade at St. Joseph’s parochial school. He hung with the kind of bad girls who wore their collars up in back and hung Chesterfields from their scarlet mouths, and it was a known thing that Terry Riccio had gone all the way with him. It was therefore a wonder to the school when little Marlene, of the straight A’s and perfect behavior record, laid a heavy flirt on him at the Holy Martyrs basketball game (to which he, of course, responded, she being at the time as beautiful as the dawn) and even more of a wonder when Terry came after her with claws out after the game and Marlene knocked her sprawling with three punches. This, naturally, won the heart of Rocky, and there followed three months of educational evenings in the back of Rocky’s chopped Plymouth out by the airport, the planes roaring overhead, while Marlene learned what she wanted to know about the physical aspects of love. Rocky never got her to go all the way, but he wasn’t complaining, considering what he was getting, and thinking himself in love until the day when she skillfully dumped him. It was his first heartbreak, and Marlene’s first as a breaker, though far, far from her last.
Rocky finished his call, slammed down the phone, felt eyes on him, cocked his hand to shade a peering look through the window, and then walked out to her car. He grinned as he came closer.
“I thought to myself, that can’t be Marlene Ciampi in a orange Volvo,” he said, “but I was wrong. All right, she had the VW, she’s a old hippie, I can live with that, but a Volvo?”
Marlene grinned back and got out of the car. “They’re very reliable,” she said primly.
“Oh, yeah, and safe. Hey, I got a cherry ’78 Trans I could put you in. Silver flake lacquer?”
“Rocky, give me a break. I’m an old lady with a big dog.”
“So get a poodle. You belong in serious wheels, Marlene.” He looked her boldly up and down. “Meanwhile, you’re still the hottest thing in the borough.”
“Thank you. You probably clean up pretty good yourself. How’s Terry?”
After that they spent a pleasant fifteen minutes catching up on the old gang, many of whom had stayed close to home.
“So, what’re you, visiting the folks?” Rocky asked when that had run its course.
“Yeah, I’ll fall by after, but really, I needed to talk with Chester.”
Rocky’s face took on a pained expression. “Ah, shit, Marlene. .”
“No trouble this time, honest to God, Rocky, I just want to talk to him.”
“He quit on me, Marlene. I ain’t seen him in a week.”
“Horseshit, Rocky.” She gave him that look, the one they had both learned from the nuns. He sagged, sighed, said, “Not with the dog, Marlene.”
“No dog, and there wouldn’t have been one last time, if he hadn’t tried to bash my head in with a body hammer.”
Rocky was still frowning and shaking his head when Marlene leaned into him, grabbed the collar of his coverall at an unsoiled spot, and said, “And I also came by to see a real good old friend,” with which she planted a semi-sisterly kiss full on his mouth.
He gasped. He rolled his eyes to heaven and flapped his hand, as if it were on fire. “Oh, marone!” he said, and then, “Marlene, you’re gonna burn in Hell, you know that.”
“Yeah, but they’ll have to catch me first. Where is he?”
Rocky punched a thumb over his shoulder. “Back in bay three. Be nice, now.”
Marlene stood in the doorway of the cinder-block room and watched Chester Durrell fill a dent. He was a small, narrow, dark man of mixed Latin and Irish ancestry, with long black hair tucked under a reversed ball cap. His sleeves were rolled back, showing muscular forearms, the dun skin elaborately illustrated with blue, red, and green tattooing. His long fingers worked a pad of wet sandpaper back and forth on a gray patch of Bondo on the neatly masked rear fender of a new black Lincoln. Marlene knew that Chester had a city-wide rep as a body guy, and that in a couple of hours you would need an electron microscope to know that the bright black surface had ever been marred.
Marlene loved to watch a competent craftsman mold the physical world. As a girl she had begged her father to be allowed along on weekend plumbing jobs, where if the old man was feeling good, she would get a shot at turning a pipe cutter. Chester rubbed his patch to perfection, tossed his sandpaper into the water bowl, stretched, scratched, and reached behind him for a spray can of primer, at which point he saw Marlene.
He’s looking for the dog, thought Marlene as she observed the tension in Chester’s body and the jerking of his head. His pleasantly goofy face showed a near ludicrous apprehension, like the kind you see the doomed bit-part actors wearing just before the jaws snap shut in the early scenes of a monster movie.