“Do you see him?” Brown asked La Bresca.
“Not yet,” La Bresca said.
They walked the length of the line slowly.
“Well?” Brown asked.
“No,” La Bresca said. “He ain’t here.”
“Let’s take a look upstairs,” Willis suggested.
The line of job seekers continued up a flight of rickety wooden steps to a dingy second-floor office. The lettering on a frosted glass door read:
MERIDIAN EMPLOYMENT AGENCY
JOBS OUR SPECIALTY
“See him?” Willis asked.
“No,” La Bresca said.
“Wait here,” Willis said, and the two detectives moved away from him, toward the other end of the corridor.
“What do you think?” Brown asked.
“What can we hold him on?”
“Nothing.”
“So that’s what I think.”
“Is he worth a tail?”
“It depends on how serious the loot thinks this is.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I think I will. Hold the fort.”
Brown went back to La Bresca. Willis found a pay phone around the bend in the corridor, and dialed the squadroom. The lieutenant listened carefully to everything he had to report, and then said, “How do you read him?”
“I think he’s telling the truth.”
“You think there really was some guy with a hearing aid?”
“Yes.”
“Then why’d he leave before La Bresca got back with the pail?”
“I don’t know, Pete. I just don’t make La Bresca for a thief.”
“Where’d you say he lived?”
“1812 Johnson. In Riverhead.”
“What precinct would that be?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll check it out and give them a ring. Maybe they can spare a man for a tail. Christ knows we can’t.”
“So shall we turn La Bresca loose?”
“Yeah, come on back here. Give him a little scare first, though, just in case.”
“Right,” Willis said, and hung up, and went back to where La Bresca and Brown were waiting.
“Okay, Anthony,” Willis said, “you can go.”
“Go? Who’s going anyplace? I got to get back on that line again. I’m trying to get a job here.”
“And remember, Anthony, if anything happens, we know where to find you.”
“What do you mean? What’s gonna happen?”
“Just remember.”
“Sure,” La Bresca said. He paused and then said, “Listen, you want to do me a favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Get me up to the front of the line there.”
“How can we do that?”
“Well, you’re cops, ain’t you?” La Bresca asked, and Willis and Brown looked at each other.
When they got back to the squadroom, they learned that Lieutenant Byrnes had called the 115th in Riverhead and had been informed they could not spare a man for the surveillance of Anthony La Bresca. Nobody seemed terribly surprised.
That night, as Parks Commissioner Cowper came down the broad white marble steps outside Philharmonic Hall, his wife clinging to his left arm, swathed in mink and wearing a diaphanous white scarf on her head, the commissioner himself resplendent in black tie and dinner jacket, the mayor and his wife four steps ahead, the sky virtually starless, a bitter brittle dryness to the air, that night as the parks commissioner came down the steps of Philharmonic Hall with the huge two-story-high windows behind him casting warm yellow light onto the windswept steps and pavement, that night as the commissioner lifted his left foot preparatory to placing it on the step below, laughing at something his wife said in his ear, his laughter billowing out of his mouth in puffs of visible vapor that whipped away on the wind like comic strip balloons, that night as he tugged on his right-hand glove with his already gloved left hand, that night two shots cracked into the plaza, shattering the wintry stillness, and the commissioner’s laugh stopped, the commissioner’s hand stopped, the commissioner’s foot stopped, and he tumbled headlong down the steps, blood pouring from his forehead and his cheek, and his wife screamed, and the mayor turned to see what was the matter, and an enterprising photographer on the sidewalk caught the toppling commissioner on film for posterity.
He was dead long before his body rolled to a stop on the wide white bottom step.
Chapter 3
Concetta Esposita La Bresca had been taught only to dislike and distrust all Negroes. Her brothers, on the other hand, had been taught to dismember them if possible. They had learned their respective lessons in a sprawling slum ghetto affectionately and sarcastically dubbed Paradiso by its largely Italian population. Concetta, as a growing child in this dubious garden spot, had watched her brothers and other neighborhood boys bash in a good many Negro skulls when she was still just a piccola ragazza. The mayhem did not disturb her. Concetta figured if you were stupid enough to be born a Negro, and were further stupid enough to come wandering into Paradiso, why then you deserved to have your fool black head split wide open every now and then.
Concetta had left Paradiso at the age of nineteen, when the local iceman, a fellow Napolitano named Carmine La Bresca moved his business to Riverhead and asked the youngest of the Esposito girls to marry him. She readily accepted because he was a handsome fellow with deep brown eyes and curly black hair, and because he had a thriving business of which he was the sole owner. She also accepted because she was pregnant at the time.
Her son was born seven months later, and he was now twenty-seven years old, and living alone with Concetta in the second-floor apartment of a two-family house on Johnson Street. Carmine La Bresca had gone back to Pozzuoli, fifteen miles outside of Naples, a month after Anthony was born. The last Concetta heard of him was a rumor that he had been killed during World War II, but, knowing her husband, she suspected he was king of the icemen somewhere in Italy, still fooling around with young girls and getting them pregnant in the icehouse, as was her own cruel misfortune.
Concetta Esposita La Bresca still disliked and distrusted all
Negroes, and she was rather startled — to say the least — to find one on her doorstep at 12:01 A.M. on a starless, moonless night.
“What is it?” she shouted. “Go away.”
“Police officer,” Brown said, and flashed the tin, and it was then that Concetta noticed the other man standing with the Negro, a white man, short, with a narrow face and piercing brown eyes, madonna mia, it looked as if he was giving her the malocchio.
“What do you want, go away,” she said in a rush, and lowered the shade on the glass-paneled rear door of her apartment. The door was at the top of a rickety flight of wooden steps (Willis had almost tripped and broken his neck on the third one from the top) overlooking a back yard in which there was a tar-paper-covered tree. (Doubtless a fig tree, Brown remarked on their way up the steps.) A clothesline stiff with undergarments stretched from the tiny back porch outside the glass-paneled door to a pole set diagonally at the other end of the yard. The wind whistled around the porch and did its best to blow Willis off and down into the grape arbor covering the outside patio below. He knocked on the door again, and shouted, “Police officers, you’d better open up, lady.”
“Sta zitto!” Concetta said, and unlocked the door. “You want to wake the whole neighbor? Ma che vergogna!”
“Is it all right to come in, lady?” Willis asked.