“Well, how’s he going to feel,” Tricia said, “when he does come back, if he finds out you stopped me from doing what Colleen asked?”
He twitched like an animal caught in a trap.
Finally he threw up his hands, slapped the keys into Tricia’s waiting palm. “It’s your neck, lady,” he said. “You’ve got the keys, you do what you want. But let me tell you something. You do not want to mess with Royal Barrone.”
“Barrone?” Tricia said.
“It’s your neck,” the man repeated and hightailed it out of sight.
23.
The Last Quarry
While Borden drove, first onto the F.D.R. and then north along the rim of Manhattan, Tricia straightened her hair in the lighted fold-down mirror on the passenger side. The ride was smooth and silent, the seats plush and supple. It hardly felt like they were moving, yet outside the windows the world swept past in a blur.
“Where are we going?” she said, touching a fingertip to the corner of her mouth to fix a spot where her rouge had smeared.
“Who cares?” Borden said. “Anywhere’s better than where we were.”
“You know how to get us back to Nicolazzo’s place?”
“Sure, corner of Van Dam and Greenpoint, near the cemetery. But why would we go there?”
“My sister’s there,” Tricia said. “So’s Erin. You want to get them out, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Borden said, with all the conviction of a soldier told to exit the nice, comfortable foxhole he’s been cowering in. “But driving up to the front door with no plan and no resources is not a way to get them out. It’s just a way to get us captured, too.”
“Fine. So where are we going?”
“How about finding this Barrone? He obviously likes your sister, if he gave her this car; and the way that guy acted back there, Barrone must pull some weight. Maybe he’ll help us.”
“Yeah, but, see, that makes no sense,” Tricia said. “If he’s who I think he is, he’d have no reason to like Coral, and every reason to like Nicolazzo.”
“Why’s that? Who is he?”
“Nicolazzo’s brother-in-law.”
Borden drove on in silence for a while.
“His brother-in-law,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Nicolazzo’s—”
“Brother-in-law. His sister married a man named Barrone. Who else could it be?”
“There’s probably more than one Barrone in New York City,” Borden said.
“Probably.”
“But you think this one’s the same one...”
“Don’t you?”
Borden reluctantly nodded. “So what’s Barrone’s connection with...what’s your sister’s name anyway, Coral or Colleen?”
“What’s your name, Carter or Charley?”
“Touché,” Borden said. “Let’s just call her Colleen, then. What’s Colleen’s connection to Barrone?”
“I’d have said there isn’t one,” Tricia said, “except that when I went to her apartment, the neighbor who watches her son accused me of working for Mrs. Barrone. Made it pretty clear that Mrs. Barrone, at least, is no friend of Colleen’s.”
“Aha,” Borden said. “The mister is, the missus isn’t—classic case of hot pants in the Barrone household?”
Tricia considered this. “Wouldn’t be the first one. Robbie Monge was married to the Barrones’ daughter, and he was unfaithful—that’s what Nicolazzo said, anyway. Before he killed him.”
“Runs in the family, then. Like father, like son-in-law.”
“But why my sister? How would Barrone even have known her?”
“You said she worked at Nicolazzo’s clubs,” Borden said. “If Barrone’s part of the family, he’d probably have shown up from time to time—maybe he even has some sort of role in them, owns a piece or something. Not hard to imagine them meeting.”
“And then...”
“Exactly. And then. Like Cole Porter wrote. Birds do it, bees do it.”
Tricia shuddered. “He must be sixty years old!”
“What, you think you won’t want company in bed any more when you’re sixty?” Borden looked over at her, and she hoped that in the darkness he couldn’t see she was blushing. She was grateful when he turned back to the road.
“I see,” he said. “There hasn’t been a Mister Trixie yet, has there.”
“I’ve had plenty of boyfriends,” Tricia said. “Back home.”
“I’m sure—to share malteds with at the soda shoppe, hold hands at the drive-in. It’s okay. I understand. Things don’t move quite as fast in South Dakota.”
“I’ll have you know,” Tricia said, coldly, “things move plenty fast in South Dakota. Boys have more hands there than a wall of clocks. Coral had to—Colleen had to beat ‘em off with a stick.”
“Oh, is that what she used?” Borden said, and Tricia felt herself blushing again.
“There’s no need to be vulgar, Mr. Borden,” Tricia said.
“Charley,” Borden said. “Call me Charley. Everything we’ve been through together, we should be on a first-name basis.”
Tricia looked down at her hands. “Tricia,” she said.
“Tricia,” Charley said, as they tooled along the highway at a whisper. “Pleased to meet you.”
He reached out a hand and patted hers, and for the first time in a long time she felt a bit of relief, a trace—just a trace—of comfort. She wasn’t in this alone.
But the moment passed. Charley took his hand away and said, “So. Barrone. Where are we going to find him?”
“Don’t look at me,” Tricia said. “I don’t know.”
“Well, this is the man’s car. There’s got to be something in here that’ll give us an address. Check the glovebox, why don’t you. Maybe he’s got the papers for the car in there. Or something with his address on it.”
Tricia unlatched the glove compartment, swung it open, and a little light inside flickered on. She started sorting through the contents. “He does have some papers, let’s see...here’s a map...a brochure...two ballpoint pens...a writing tablet...a—”
“What?” Charley said, after she’d been silent for a bit. “What else?”
“Pull over,” Tricia said.
“What? Why? Here?”
“Pull over,” she said again, and when he turned to look she held up a slim leather box filled with photographs.
In the wan light from the dashboard, from the illuminated mirror, and from the glove compartment, the two of them flipped through the photos. There were somewhere between twenty and thirty of them—closer to thirty, Tricia thought. Each was a stark black-and-white image, and each showed a combination of people—some vertical, some horizontal; some living, some dead. Halfway down the stack she found two that included Mitch. In one he was holding a knife, maybe the very stiletto she’d seen him pocket earlier that night; if not, one much like it. The man at his feet had bled copiously, though in black and white you couldn’t quite tell where the blood ended and the dark tile floor began.
In one she saw Robbie, and though he wasn’t holding a weapon himself what he was holding was nearly as bad: He held another man’s arms behind his back, much as Mitch had held his, and the man he was holding was coming to a similar bad end. The circle of life.
Each photo had a date inscribed by hand on the back, along with a location: Umberto’s, Central Park Boathouse, Corner Mulberry & Hester. Each had names: Monge, Mitchell, Paulie Lips. And on each, one of the names was crossed out. On one, two names were crossed out, and turning it over Tricia saw a pair of dead bodies on the front, a man and a woman caught naked in what looked like a basement rec room. She felt her stomach rebel, forced herself to fight her rising gorge.