Her voice rising on a triumphant note of discovery.
Warily, Sarah went to her.
She was standing beside a stubbled, potbellied man wearing brown woolen gloves with the fingers and thumbs cut off, a green hat with earflaps, baggy brown corduroy trousers, and soggy high-topped workmen’s boots. His row of trees, strung with tiny lights from one end to the other and flanked by a Chinese restaurant on the left and a dry-cleaning shop on the right, leaned against the brick side of the building behind them. One of his gloved hands was buried in a sheaf of branches and wrapped around the slim upper trunk of the tree Mollie had selected. Chewing on the stub of a dead cigar, he raised his eyebrows expectantly, awaiting Sarah’s verdict.
Her daughter stood before the casual cascade of strung lights, proud that she had found such a perfectly formed tree, no taller than the eight feet Sarah had prescribed, full and thick and dense with the bluest green needles. Touched by the faint glow of the lights, Mollie’s hair — cut straight to the shoulders and brushed in casual bangs on her forehead — took on the momentary look of soft beaten gold. Snowflakes fluttered past her face. Her eyes were wide in anticipation. A sudden gust of wind sent tendrils of blond hair drifting across her face, passing over her pale blue eyes like a silken curtain. All the innocence of Christmas seemed to glow in those suddenly revealed eyes, luminous and hopeful, as Mollie stood beside her cherished prize, her ferreted and coveted treasure, her eyes begging approval and acceptance. For one evanescent moment, Sarah felt this would be the last time she ever saw such innocence on the face of her child.
“It’s lovely,” she said, and went to her and held her close.
The message was on the answering machine when they got back to the apartment. The machine’s red message light blinked like a monster’s eye.
“Michael,” the woman’s voice said, “this is Jackie Diaz. Can you get back to me right away? I’m still at the office.”
They both looked up at the clock.
Six forty-seven.
Seconds later, the machine’s metallic voice announced the date and time of the call.
“Monday, December twenty-first, six thirty-one p.m.”
“Who’s Jackie Diaz?” Sarah asked.
“Narcotics, Manhattan South.”
“It can wait till after dinner,” Sarah said.
“Might be important,” Michael said.
He was already reaching for the phone.
“Michael, please,” she said. “I’m about to start...”
“This’ll just take a sec,” he said, and looked through his personal directory for Jackie’s number. Frowning, Sarah went to the freezer. Michael dialed. On the other end, the phone rang and rang and...
“Narcotics.”
“Detective Diaz; please.”
“Who’s calling?”
“ADA Welles.”
“Hold, please.”
Michael waited. Across the room, Sarah was noisily tossing plastic dishes into the microwave. In the television den, Mollie was tuned in to MTV.
“Michael, hi, sorry, I was down the hall. Can you get here right away?”
“What is it?”
“I just ran a routine buy-bust, six ounces of coke from a turd named Dominick Di Nobili. I’ve been questioning him for the past two hours. He’s ready to squeal like a pig.”
“About what?”
“Mob shit, Michael.”
“Be in my office in half an hour.”
The light snow had turned into a full-fledged blizzard.
If no one had mentioned the mob, no one would have been here on a night like tonight; the meeting would have been postponed at least till the snow stopped. But someone had mentioned the mob, and so Detective/Second Grade Jacqueline Diaz and Deputy Unit Chief Michael Welles were here in room 667 at One Hogan Place to hear what Dominick Di Nobili had to say for himself.
Jackie was twenty-three or — four, Michael guessed, a diminutive redhead of Puerto Rican ancestry, born and raised in Brooklyn, and educated at John Jay. She was still wearing the blue jeans and hooded sweatshirt she’d been wearing when the routine buy went down. Michael had worked with her before, when she was an undercover with Street Crime and he was a prosecutor in the Career Criminal program. She liked working with him, and she’d called him now because it looked like she’d stumbled onto real meat in his new bailiwick, which happened to be organized crime.
Di Nobili had begun shaking in his boots the minute she flashed the tin and clapped the cuffs on him and her informant, who’d been taken off in another car, never to be heard from since; good snitches were hard to come by, and she didn’t want to burn him. Di Nobili, on the other hand, was looking at fifteen to life on an A-1 felony, which was the sale of the six ounces of cocaine. Even before she read him his rights, he was begging for mercy, telling her they’d kill him, telling her she had to let him go, this was the first time he’d done anything like this...
“A virgin, huh?”
“No, I mean it, please, you got to listen to me, they’ll kill me, I mean it.”
“Who’s that?”
“All of them!”
“Which narrowed the field a bit,” she told Michael now. “What it turned out...”
What it turned out was that Di Nobili, although a waiter by profession, happened to be an inveterate horseplayer by avocation. Worse than that, he was a gambler who invariably lost, and it seemed he was now into a Manhattan loan shark for some fifteen thousand bucks, and had failed to meet last week’s minimum payment of $750. This oversight had earned him a severe beating, witness his two black eyes and his swollen lip. Moreover, the shy had threatened to kill him if he didn’t come up with the full fifteen K plus two weeks’ interest by Christmas Day, which was arbitrarily chosen as settlement date, little coal in Dom’s stocking this year.
“Now this is where it gets really interesting,” Jackie said. “Di Nobili takes his case to a lady friend of his who’s very well connected, hmm? Her connection, according to Di Nobili, is a capo in Queens, where Di Nobili lives. The Colotti family, do you know the people?”
“I know the people,” Michael said.
“I go uh-huh, because now I’m beginning to smell roses here, even though I know he may be full of shit because he got caught selling six fuckin’ ounces of coke. The capo he’s talking about is the lady friend’s cousin, and he owns a restaurant in Forest Hills. His name is Jimmy Angelli, also known as Jimmy Angels, ring a bell?”
“Vaguely.”
“So the lady friend takes Dom to her cousin, and Dom explains that he can’t possibly come up with fifteen K plus interest before Christmas, at which time this loan shark’ll kill him. He really believes this. Now you know and I know that nobody ever kills anybody who owes him money because then he’ll never get the money back. But Dom doesn’t know this, so he’s wetting his pants because he thinks he’s going to hell for Christmas. Jimmy Angels listens patiently because Dom’s lady friend is his cousin, after all, and he owes at least this much respect to his father’s brother. He asks Dom who this loan shark might be, and Dom tells him it’s a person named Salvatore Bonifacio, also known as Sal the...”
“Sal the Barber,” Michael said. “The Faviola family in Manhattan.”
“The Faviola family,” Jackie said, and nodded. “Who so far, since Anthony went bye-bye, is still on good terms with the Colotti family.”
“That’s what we think, anyway,” Michael said.
“That’s what we think too. Territories nicely divided, nobody killing anybody for stupid reasons. So far.”
“So far,” Michael agreed.