The streets passed, one by one, and her legs grew sore from exertion, but she didn’t stop, didn’t even slow, didn’t dare. Somewhere down by Washington Square Park, a three-year-old boy was waiting for his mother to come home; and a box of photographs that could send who knew how many men to jail was sitting out on a table or hidden behind the public toilet tank down the hall or waiting in the dust under the bed. If the cops had let Mitch go—and they might have, they easily might have—he’d be heading down there as well, and faster than she could hope to make it. He didn’t have an address, but Cornelia Street was only one block long, maybe a dozen buildings on either side—he didn’t need an address, just time enough to canvass them all. And he surely had money with him; and he had a car; and his gun, he had that, too.
Oh, please, she thought, please let them at least have found his gun. Let them have locked him up tight, and no phone call back to Uncle Nick in Queens, not yet.
But Tricia had limited confidence in the value of prayers. So she walked, fast as she could, through the night.
17.
A Touch of Death
The lights were on in all the second- and third-story windows, and in one or two of the storefronts besides: a pagoda-roofed restaurant on the corner of Cornelia and Bleecker, a 24-hour laundry halfway down the block. Tricia made her way to the grey stone building near West 4th where the taxi from the train station had dropped her off what felt like such a long time ago. The hand-lettered NO VACANCIES sign was still—or again—in the window by the front door. She looked around for Mitch, or Bruno, or anyone of comparable appearance, but there was no one in sight. Except for a collarless dog sniffing at one of the sidewalk’s scrawny trees, the block was empty.
Which either meant she was in time or that she was too late.
Tricia leaned on the buzzer till she could hear footsteps approaching from the other side and didn’t release it until she heard the cover slide away from the peephole. She stepped back so the person looking out could see more than the top of her head.
“I’m Colleen King’s sister,” she said. “Trixie...Trixie King.”
“Not here,” came a woman’s voice, accented as much from cigarette smoke as from what sounded like some sort of Eastern European upbringing.
“I know, I was just with her, she asked me to come by, give something to her son. To Artie.” When there was no response, she added, “Please, I’ve walked a long way.”
Whether that was what did it she’d never know—but the locks turned and the door swung open. Behind it a woman no taller than Tricia but quite a bit older stood in a flower-print wrapper, hairnet over a tangle of grey curls, slippers on her feet. She had the doorknob in one hand, the burning stub of a Marlboro between the knuckles of the other.
“You sister?” She drew deeply on the cigarette, consuming half its remaining length in one pull. “She look nothing like you.”
“She takes after our mother,” Tricia said. “May I go up to her room?”
“You have key?”
Tricia nodded, hoping the woman wouldn’t ask her to produce it.
“Okay,” the woman said. “Is 3D, like Duck. But child is in 3F. Like Fox.”
“Thank you,” Tricia said, wondering what sort of zoo-based primer the woman had used when learning English. She made her way to the staircase in the corner of the room. The woman retreated to a doorway near the foot of the stairs where she smoked the remnant of her cigarette and watched Tricia climb with a look on her face that seemed caught halfway between suspicion and apathy.
When she reached the third floor, Tricia went from door to door, scanning the heavy brass letters screwed into the wood—‘A’ like Alligator, ‘B’ like Bat. She tried the knob at D-like-Duck, but it was locked. ‘F’ was across the hall and she knocked briskly.
“Sh,” a voice came, a husky whisper. “You’ll wake him.” The knob gently turned and the door swung slowly ajar, a soft creak escaping from the hinges despite all the care to avoid it. A scarred face appeared in the opening, the pink and white of old burns on both plump cheeks and across her chin. It was a face Tricia recognized from the Sun, from one of the times she’d visited the club early to scope it out while plotting Chapter 10. Tricia had even put her in the chapter, given her a little cameo to address the lousy treatment she’d seen her bear at the hands of the other girls on the cleaning crew.
“Heaven,” Tricia said. “I didn’t know you lived here.”
“What are you doing here, then?” Heaven LaCroix spoke English with only the faintest hint of a Belgian accent, having come over on a refugee ship at age seven. She stood just half a head taller than Tricia but she was as broad across the shoulders as Coral; she had the arms, too, thick and muscled.
“It’s a long story,” Tricia said, “and it’s probably going to sound crazy to you, but I’m Colleen’s sister—I know, we don’t look anything alike. But it’s true. And she’s in trouble. I need to get into her room, get something she left there. You’ve got a key, right? You must, if you take care of Artie.”
“Now hold on,” Heaven said, stepping out into the hallway and pulling the door shut behind her. She was wearing a heavy robe, something frilly peeking out at the collar, like she’d been in bed when Tricia knocked. “I don’t know you, except that you dance for a living and ask a lot of questions. That time you came by, I almost got in trouble myself, you kept me so long with your questions.”
“I’m sorry, Heaven, I was just new and curious about a lot of things.”
“I’ll say.” Heaven crossed her arms over her chest. “Now you want to get into my friend’s room and you’ve got a story about how you’re her sister, but how am I supposed to know that’s so? You could be anybody. You could be working for Mrs. Barrone, for all I know.”
“I don’t know anyone named Barrone,” Tricia said, though she realized as she said it that it wasn’t true: Nicolazzo’s sister had married a man named Barrone, had raised two daughters also named Barrone: the unfortunate Adelaide, victim of a malarial fever in North Africa, and her older sister...Renata? Tricia thought that’s what she’d read in the News. Something like Renata, anyway.
“I’d show you my birth certificate if I had it,” Tricia said, “but I don’t. I don’t have anything on me other than what you see. All I can tell you is that the man who runs the Sun has Colleen locked up right now because he thinks she stole something from him and he wants it back. He let me out to come here and get it. If I don’t bring it back to him in the next hour or so, he’s going to hurt her real bad, maybe even kill her. You want her son to grow up without a mother?”
“You’re really something,” Heaven said, “you know that? Even if I believed you I still couldn’t let you rummage around Colleen’s room, taking things, without her telling me it’s okay.”
“She can’t tell you,” Tricia said, “she’s locked in a cellar somewhere in Queens.”
“Where?”
Tricia sighed. “I don’t know exactly. Somewhere just the other side of the river.”
“Well, if you don’t know exactly, how’re you going to get whatever it is you want to get from Colleen’s room back to her?”
It was one hell of a good question and it stopped Tricia in her tracks. Without Mitch, she had no way back.
She opened her mouth to answer, not sure what she was going to say—but before she could get a word out, a pounding came at the front door, loud enough that they heard it two stories up. Tricia crept to the staircase, listened over the banister as the woman downstairs opened the door.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” came a man’s voice, “but have you seen a young woman come by tonight, about so tall, blonde hair—”