“How...?”
He spread his arms and made a little unsteady bow. He really was quite drunk.
“A gentleman never kisses and tells,” he said.
“Renata got them for you?”
“No,” he admitted, “I grabbed them on my way out, saw them sitting on Barrone’s dresser—but still. The point is I have them. Now, where’s my thank you? Where’s my ‘I’m sorry, Charley, I’ll never do it again?’ Huh? Tricia?”
“I think you ought to get some sleep,” Tricia said. Taking him by the arm, she tugged him toward the back room. “We can talk about it when you’ve sobered up.”
“Ah, sleep and sobriety,” Charley mumbled. “You see, Mike, she does care about me. You were wrong when you said all those scurrilous things about her.”
Mike said, “I didn’t—”
“No, I guess you didn’t, it must’ve been me.” Charley leaned heavily on Tricia, his boozy breath just inches from her nose, his bruised flesh a rainbow of purple and yellow. “You do care,” he said, “don’t you?”
She brushed something out of her eye—a reaction to the whiskey fumes he was breathing on her, she told herself, nothing more. “Go to sleep, Charley,” she said. “You’ll feel better when you wake up.”
“I’ll feel like hell when I wake up,” he mumbled.
“Well, I’ll feel better,” she said. “Do it for me.”
She deposited him heavily on the mattress and went back for the bag. By the time she returned, he was snoring.
While he was out cold, she went through all the material in the bag. There was a great deal of it. Coral had been putting the pinch on five men in all, some of them for years; six if you counted Paulie. He really seemed to believe he was the father of her child—but who’s to say the others didn’t? And Tricia had a feeling Coral had been hitting him up for more than just locker room space.
Thinking of Paulie as another of Coral’s marks helped answer a question that had been nagging Tricia: If Coral kept all her other incriminating materials in the locker at the Moon, why had she kept Nicolazzo’s box of photos in the glove compartment of the car she’d extorted from Barrone? The only answer that made sense was that Coral had wanted to make sure Paulie didn’t find them, couldn’t destroy them—especially the one he’d have been most likely to destroy, the photo of himself. Which suggested that Coral had wanted to have something on him.
Of course, maybe she just liked having something on everyone she knew.
Barrone, meanwhile, was a bit of a puzzle himself. If it was his son who had died a month ago, not him, where had Royal been for the past month? On an assignment for Nicolazzo? Or lying low somewhere, to keep away from Nicolazzo?
And Renata—what was she doing holed up in the old man’s headquarters downtown instead of living at home with her husband? Or, if she and Robbie had been on the outs (made her finger itch, indeed), why wasn’t she living at her parents’ house, or some place of her own...somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t a Lower East Side boy’s club filled with gunmen and criminals?
But the big question wasn’t Paulie or Barrone or Renata—it was Nicolazzo. One question, of course, was who had broken into his safe and taken the money out, and Tricia had a feeling she’d need to answer it before this was all over. But more urgently, where would the man have gone with his hostages when his location on Van Dam Street was blown?
Tricia scoured every letter, every photograph, looking for a clue and finally she found one, near the bottom of the pile. It was in a note Barrone had sent to Coral, dated a year earlier:
Can’t meet you in the city, it said, that’s final. N wants us all out at his place at the track while he’s waiting out the investigation. O’Malley’s getting too damn close to play games. I’ll call you with a location and you’ll come out there if you want your goddam money.
And penciled in the margin, in Coral’s handwriting, was the information she’d presumably copied down when he’d called: AQUEDUCT, STABLE 8, STALL 3.
Charley stirred, turned over on his side. He didn’t wake.
Tricia took the leather box from the corner of the mattress and slipped it into her pocket beneath the gun. One way or the other she’d be prepared.
She stepped out into the hallway.
“How’s he doing?” Mike asked.
“Sleeping,” Tricia said. “Probably the best thing for him.” She made her way to the front of the bar.
“What should I tell him when he wakes up?”
“Tell him I said to stay here. That I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“And if he asks where you went?”
“Tell him you don’t know. It’ll be the truth.”
“Are you sure it’s smart to go off on your own like this?” Mike said.
“No,” Tricia said, and went.
34.
Fright
If you want to get your money’s worth from a New York City subway ride, you’ll do as the song says and take the A train, whether it’s to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem or to Rockaway Beach way down in Queens. It’s a thirty mile ride from one end to the other, the longest you can take, and it’ll occupy the better part of two hours if you let it. If you get tired before it’s over or don’t want to spring for the extra fifteen-cent fare that kicks in right before you hit the beach, you can trade the promise of sun and sand for a day of playing the ponies at the Aqueduct Race Track in lovely South Ozone Park. Or at least you could before the State Racing Commission turned over control of the track to the newly formed “New York Racing Association” in 1955. One of the first things the new association did was to shut down the Big A and launch a renovation project that promised to deliver to gamblers the most modern racetrack of the Atomic Age. Almost three years and thirty million dollars later, the project wasn’t finished and the track was still shuttered, though plenty of pockets had gotten handsome new linings along the way. Mostly in nearby Ozone Park, which was South Ozone Park with redwood instead of aluminum siding on the walls but just as much garlic in the marinara sauce.
Tricia watched the construction site loom as she climbed toward it from the subway station.
One problem with a 200-acre racetrack, of course, is that even when you’ve shut it down you can’t shut it down—you can stop racing horses there, but just try to keep people out. Even if you fenced the thing in, curious neighborhood kids would find a pair of diagonal cutters and make their way inside on a dare. And the construction crew at the Aqueduct hadn’t bothered with a fence, relying instead on the low walls and shrubbery already in place to keep people out.
Which made it pretty easy for Tricia to enter. The track was surrounded on three sides by huge empty parking lots, all converging on an entry gate to the main building, which looked like it was destined to be a combination clubhouse for high rollers and grandstand for the rank-and-file. The first two stories had been constructed and girders poking out the top showed it was due to keep climbing for at least a few stories more. There was a giant crane standing immobile by the side of the building, its steel cable dangling with a weighted ball at the end to keep it from swinging free. As you’d expect on a Sunday, no one was sitting in the cab of the crane or walking along the girders. At first glance, no one seemed to be on the grounds at all, though Tricia had to assume there was at least some security staff around, maybe making their rounds on the other side of the lot.
Past the torn-up dirt of the racetrack itself, Tricia saw the dozen wooden buildings of the stable area and she headed over with what she feared was an excessive sense of purpose. Knowing where Barrone had met Coral once a year earlier wasn’t the same as knowing where Nicolazzo was holding her today. But what she did know was that there was a precedent for Nicolazzo going to ground here, and like the proverbial drunk with his missing keys, Tricia figured she had to start searching where the light was best.