“What can I say, Marlene? You know how I feel about what you do.”
“Yes. Yes, I do know. And you know what? I feel the same way.
I know that I shall meet my fate,
Somewhere among the clouds above.
Those I fight I do not hate,
Those I guard I do not love.
“Yeats. I have to go out.”
“Marlene, don’t be crazy.”
She came up to him and touched his cheek and kissed him. “You poor man. I’ll be fine. I’ll walk between the bullets.”
Before he could say another word, she ran into the bedroom and came out carrying her purse. She stalked up to him, grabbed his head, and kissed him again, this time solidly on the mouth.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
Then she was out the door. He heard her running down the stairs, and began to worry.
Chapter 20
They had repaired the door at the East Village Women’s Shelter. It was now a steel-sheathed monster with a small glass porthole in it, suitable for a nuclear submarine. Marlene pressed her face against it, and Vonda buzzed her in.
“Nice door, Vonda,” said Marlene.
“About time you showed,” said the guard, with her usual glower. “She’s in the kitchen.”
Marlene sought the woman out and found her on her back, surrounded by tools, replacing a fitting behind the shelter’s ancient gas stove. She lifted her head an inch when Marlene came and stood at her feet. The work light shining on her grease-smeared face gave it a theatrical Phantom of the Opera look. She frowned when she saw who it was.
“Where the hell have you been, girl? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for a week. Have you heard from Brenda?”
“In a manner of speaking. She tried to kill me with your gun.”
“Chingada! What happened?”
Marlene told her. Mattie was not pleased. “You had her arrested? Jesus, who the fuck’s side are you on? What about the goddamn boyfriend? He’s the one should be in jail.”
At that, Marlene felt she had two possible options: smash the woman’s skull with the fourteen-inch pipe wrench that lay conveniently to hand, or laugh. She laughed, ever the correct response to fanatics, and walked away.
“Hey, when am I gonna get my gun back?” Mattie called after her.
Up in room 37, Marlene found that Vivian F. Bollano had settled in for a long stay. The small room now held a color TV, with VCR, both set up on a new chest of drawers, a larger bed with a thicker mattress, a thick rust-colored area rug, and a teak and leather sling chair. A tape of The Sound of Music was playing on the VCR. Vivian switched it off after letting Marlene in, and sat on the bed. Marlene sat opposite in the sling chair and examined her client. Vivian had had her hair done, by whom Marlene could not imagine, and looked rather more doll-like than she had before. But there was a fuzziness about her expression that indicated the presence of dope, probably prescription downers, since Mattie had a ferocious rule about the nonprescription sort. Aside from that, Marlene imagined, Mattie was perfectly happy to indulge this resident in every legal way. There was a sliding scale of payment at the EVWS: most women owned only the clothes they fled in and paid nothing, but Vivian was clearly at the top of the scale. She could probably have had a suite in the Plaza for what she was paying here, for the day or so before the Bollanos found her and dragged her through the gilded lobby by her hair.
“Well, Vivian, since our last interview, I’m happy to report I’ve made some progress.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mild interest only: she was tranqued out.
“Yeah. Your father did not commit suicide, as you suspected. He was murdered.”
“Uh-huh. Do you know who killed him?” No excitement, no shock, Marlene noted, and put that down to the meds.
“Yes, your husband did it, assisted by a man named Carlo Tonnati. I’m reasonably sure of my informant, and there are some other suggestive pieces of evidence. But I don’t know why it was done, and I don’t have enough at present to go to the cops with.”
Vivian nodded, and her face seemed to deflate a fraction.
“You don’t seem all that surprised,” said Marlene.
The woman shook her head and turned her face away. “I guess that’s it,” she said in a ghost’s voice. “Thank you for your help.”
“Well, actually, Vivian, it’s not quite it yet. Because when you enter into a contract like we did, there are mutual obligations. My obligation is to give you honest service and keep your secrets. Your obligation is to tell me everything relevant to the case. You fail to do that and I could poke into a hole that I think’s got no bear in it, and the bear is waiting and I get my head bitten off.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Vivian to the blank television. “I just had some suspicions and-”
“No, Vivian, you had much more than suspicions, and ordinarily I would let it slide because it comes with the territory-clients lie, or they conceal. What else is new? But this time I got blindsided, because when you mess with the Mob, you might put yourself at risk, but not your family, because by and large, the Mob doesn’t go after family. It’s not like Sicily here. But because you didn’t tell me what was really going on, my children were put at risk. Your father-in-law sent a thug after my babies. And I thought to myself, What would make a don send a thug after my babies? It would have to be something outside the normal run of Mob business, wouldn’t it? What was it, Vivian? What’s got Big Sally so scared?”
Her mouth was slightly open, like a hungry little bird unsure of whether that large shadow was really its mother. She shook her head again, reached for a beaded purse on the nightstand, took from it an amber plastic vial. Marlene jumped from her chair, snatched it away, and moved back to the chair. She tossed the pills into her own purse.
“Excuse me, I have to take my medication. What do you think-”
“No, Vivian, no pills. We’ll save them for after, okay? Don’t want to talk, huh? Vivian, I will have the truth out of you, if it takes all day and all night.” Dumb silence. The woman now had the glazed and stupid look of a shot antelope. “Okay, Vivian, let’s see if we can prime the pump. We start with the peculiar case of the Chinese gentleman Mr. Leung. Or Mr. Lie. This person has some interesting characteristics. He is a gangster, a triad member, in fact. He is in business with your husband’s organization. He seems to have an uncanny understanding of American law. He went through a lot of trouble to kill one of your father-in-law’s two chief subordinates and hang the murder on the other one. It seems that Mr. Leung doesn’t like the Bollano family at all. No reaction? Well, you might say he’s a gangster trying to take over the Bollano family. True enough, but that’s not all that’s true. This particular Chinese had a relationship with an American in Macao. My daughter found this out, by the way. Mr. Leung can speak English with a New York accent. So, now remember, Vivian, Mr. Leung knows something about New York law, can speak phrases with a New York accent, has it in for the Bollanos, and was in close contact with an American in Macao. Can you make a guess as to whom that American might be? Excuse me, I didn’t hear you.”
“Bernie Kusher,” said Vivian, just above the limits of audibility.
“Yes, it would explain a lot that is otherwise very strange indeed. It would explain one of the two big questions I’ve been wanting to ask you ever since I started on this, and which I would’ve asked you if your husband hadn’t kicked me in the head that night. Why you suddenly, after twenty years, bailed out on Little Sally. Bernie’s dead now, apparently, but he was obviously working on this a long, long time. He didn’t want to contact you until he had his little guided missile in place and ready to fire. Leung saw you, didn’t he?” Nod. “And he brought word from Bernie about who really killed your father, didn’t he?” Nod.