“Been using the car much?” Bobby asked.
So that was it. Triani thought Billy had been using the company car for his own pleasure. But then why had he slipped him the two K?
“Yeah, well, you know,” he said, “Mr. Faviola’s a busy man.”
“What I want to ask you, Billy...”
Here it comes, Billy thought.
“You been driving many girls in the car?”
“Hey, no, Mr. Triani,” Billy said at once, “I never use the car on my own. This is a company car, I wouldn’t dream of...”
“For Mr. Faviola, I mean,” Bobby said, and winked.
Billy looked at him.
“You drive girls for him?” Bobby asked, and winked again.
“Well, yeah, every now and then. Not too many nowadays, though. Nowadays, he’s got like a steady.”
“You know the names of these girls?”
“Well... yeah. I guess.”
Billy still didn’t know where this was going. Was Triani asking to be fixed up with one of these girls? Was that what the two thou was for? Billy waited.
“You know their addresses, too?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah, I wrote them in my book. ’Cause they were regulars I used to pick up and drop off all the time. Nowadays, though, like I said, there’s only the...”
“I want all their names and addresses,” Bobby said.
“I don’t know all their home addresses.”
“The ones you know.”
“’Cause some of them, I only picked up after work.”
“Give me the ones you know.”
“The work addresses, too?”
“Yes.”
“Well... I better get a piece of paper from the office.”
Billy dropped the polishing cloth on the hood of the car and walked to a corner of the garage where there was a small, glassed-in office. The driver of a long white stretch that looked like a wedding limo tooted his horn and came rolling in. Bobby watched a short Spanish guy in a chauffeur’s uniform get out of the stretch and saunter toward the men’s room. When Billy came back, he was carrying a pencil and a lined yellow pad.
“Okay, let’s see now,” he said, and went to where his jacket was draped over a railing and took a black notebook from it. Thumbing through the book, he casually asked, “Why do you need this, Mr. Triani?”
Bobby looked at him.
Billy simply turned away, avoiding Triani’s gaze, leaned over the hood of the car, and kept leafing through the pages. “There’s this redhead he used to see all the time,” he said. “On my block, she’s the winner.” He was still thinking Triani was looking to lay one of these girls. “She lives in Brooklyn, but she works here in the city, in the Time-Life Building,” he said, and wrote the name Oona Halligan and then both addresses. “There’s also this girl in Great Neck,” he said, “her name is Angela Cannieri, she’s got black hair and tits out to here,” and wrote down a single address for her. Bobby watched as he copied more names and addresses onto the yellow pad, Maggie Dooley and Alice Reardon, both living and working in Manhattan, Mary Jane O’Brien and Blanca Rodriguez, with home addresses in the Bronx and work addresses in Manhattan, and “the only one he’s been seeing lately,” Billy said, and wrote the name Mrs. Welles on the pad, and then her address on Eighty-First Street.
“What’s her first name?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know. That’s all he gave me.”
“Mrs. Welles.”
“Yeah.”
“Where does she work?”
“I don’t know. I usually pick her up somewhere around Fifty-Seventh, Fifty-Ninth, the neighborhood there.”
“You think she works someplace around there?”
“I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t know. I never pick her up at the Eighty-First Street address no more, that was only the first time. I usually drop her off someplace in the neighborhood there. I pick her up midtown, drop her off uptown. She’s married, is what I guess it is.”
“Mm,” Bobby said. “Who’s this Angela Cannieri in Great Neck? Tony Cannieri’s daughter?”
“I don’t ask those kind of questions,” Billy said.
“I’ll bet it’s Tony’s daughter,” Bobby said. “He’s fuckin’ a spic, too, huh? Rodriguez. That’s a spic, ain’t it?”
“Well, I told you, Mr. Triani, all I do is pick ’em up and drop ’em off. I don’t ask questions whose daughters they are or whether they’re spies or Chinese.”
“One of them is Chinese?” Bobby asked, surprised, scanning the list of names again.
“No, no, I’m just saying.”
“You got phone numbers, too?” Bobby asked. “For these girls?”
There it is, Billy thought. Just what I figured.
“No, sir,” he said, “I don’t. But maybe Mr. Faviola can help you there.”
Bobby looked at him again.
“I don’t want Mr. Faviola to know you gave me these names, capeesh?” he said. He reached into his pocket and took out another roll of banded bills, smaller this time. “It might piss him off at you, he found out,” Bobby said, and tucked the roll into the shirt pocket with the other one. “You want to drive me home now?” he asked, and grinned like a shark.
Up here on the roof, Luretta could see the George Washington Bridge spanning the river, see the lights on the Jersey cliffs, see clouds scudding by on a stiff breeze. She sometimes thought the roof up here was the safest place in all Washington Heights. Wasn’t safe in the streets, wasn’t safe in the apartment, wasn’t safe anywhere but here on the roof. Night like tonight, quiet night like tonight, she could stand here near the parapet and look out over the river if she liked, or else move to the other side of the roof and look down at the lights of the cars moving by on the streets below. Up here she was queen of her own kingdom and she could do whatever she felt like doing.
You went to the movies, you saw men in tuxedos and women in long shimmering gowns, they’d be standing on a terrace someplace in midtown Manhattan, looking out at all the glittering lights of the city, sipping martinis in long-stemmed glasses. Here on the roof, Luretta sipped Diet Pepsi from a can, and looked out at the lights on the Jersey side, but she knew that someplace in New York there really were people like the ones in the movies, most of them white. Only time she’d ever seen black people in tuxedos and gowns was when her cousin Albert got married. Luretta had worn a pretty dress her mother’d made for her, this was before she’d started taking up with the Hundred Neediest, dragging in any junkie who’d share her bed and call her darling.
She knew her mother was doing crack.
Suspected it a month ago, learned it for sure this past Tuesday, when she found an empty vial in the bathroom. Knew it wasn’t Dusty’s because Dusty was on heroin, Dusty wouldn’t bother himself with something cost only seventy-five cents a rock, oh no, Dusty was a big man hooked on the big stuff. So here was her mother with a baby five months gone inside her, sleeping with a junkie and smoking crack that’d hook the baby, too, sure as shit. So what was Luretta supposed to do?
Up here on the roof, she had no worries.
Up here, she could feel the cool breeze touching her cheek.
Could look out over her kingdom.
Smile a little.
Little enough to smile about these days.
A tugboat was moving up the river. Chugging along, moving under the bridge, lights strung like diamonds in the sky.
The door to the roof opened.
“Thought you might be up here!”
His voice came like a cannon shot, exploding on the stillness of the night, spilling diamonds from the sky. Startled, she dropped the can of soda. It fell to the roof at her feet, rolled away trailing syrup. She started, to move from the parapet, attempting a flanking maneuver, trying to pass him and get to the metal door behind him. But he recognized what she was trying to do, and moved diagonally to intercept her, so that she was still standing with her back to the roof’s edge, the low parapet behind her.