“Not a dud,” Frank said. “Whoever packed it with powder packed it with just enough to make a big bang and scare shit out of everybody.”
The grenade’s shell casing was cracked, but the explosion hadn’t been enough to break it into the destructive splinters that do the damage.
“Like I said before,” Frank said, “somebody’s trying to scare us. Somebody’s playing goddamn games with us.”
“In Vietnam,” Cummins said, “they called it psychological warfare.”
Frank nodded.
Cummins turned to the confused, relieved, but badly shaken group of people, who were standing around the rectangular coffee shop like passengers in a surrealistic subway car, and began to speak in loud, reassuring, authoritarian tones. Pretty good for a guy who a few seconds ago was bawling, Frank thought.
Frank walked back over to the booth, where the broken window gaped; shards of glass filled the seats and littered the table. He went on to the adjacent booth — whoever’d been sitting there before was making no move to reclaim it — and sat down.
On the table was a playing card.
10
Francine DiPreta was sitting on her bed, which was shaped like a valentine and soft as custard. The spread was fluffy, ruffly pink. The room around the bed was pink, also: pink wallpaper, pink colonial-style dresser with mirror; even a pink stuffed animal — a poodle — peeked out behind pink pillows resting against the bed’s pink headboard. When Frank, Rosie, and little Francine had moved into the house some ten years before, the little girl had loved the pink room. But Francine was a big girl now and kept in check her intense dislike for the room in all its nauseating pinkness only because it held for her father too many memories of Francine’s childhood and those happy years when Mother was alive. Besides, next year, the year after maybe, she’d be moving out. She was, after all, nineteen years old and a college freshman. Living in this child’s room was a beautiful young woman, with platinum blonde hair and China blue eyes and a trim, shapely figure. As she looked around, she shook her head and thought of the line from that Carly Simon song — “Daddy, I’m no virgin” — but knew that particular sentiment was one she’d never find nerve to express to her own Daddy.
This morning, she sat on the pink elephant of a bed, wearing a pastel-blue cashmere sweater dress, and no panty hose (her summer tan was holding up nicely, her legs looked nice and dark) and thought about the death of her Uncle Joe and wondered what it meant. She’d heard the whisperings, of course, from grade school on up, of how the DiPreta family was supposed to be part of the Mafia, which seemed so silly to her she’d never really got upset about it. Once, though, when she’d asked her father about it, he’d laughed and said, “Everybody who’s got an Italian name, somebody’s gonna think they’re the Mafia... too much stupid TV, honey.”
But every now and then there were indications that maybe her father was into something — well — shady, or something. He did, after all, carry a gun at times, but he had his reasons (“I carry a lot of cash, ’cause of the business, honey. There’s lots of crooked people who would take a man’s money if he let them”) and she’d long ago dismissed that. And then there were the occasional men who would come around, the sort of men her father would stand outside on the porch and talk to, or hustle into the study and shut the door. Big men, with odd faces — faces that seemed somehow different from a normal person’s face, colder or harder or something; she didn’t know what. And when she would confront her father with these men, accidentally bump into him while he was talking with one of them, or burst into his study while he was conferring with one or more of them, he would never introduce her. Oh, sometimes he would say to the men in an explaining way, “This is my daughter.” But never would he say, “Mr. So-and-so, this is my daughter, Francine. Francine, this is Mr. So-and-so.”
And now Uncle Joe getting shot. Why would anybody want to shoot Uncle Joe? Everybody in the family regarded Joe as the baby. Even Francine, his niece, less than half Joe’s age, thought of him as the spoiled kid of the clan, the genial loafer, the golf bum, a practical joker, a kidder — but somebody who somebody else would want to shoot? That was crazy.
But then so were the rumors about DiPreta Mafia connections. So crazy Francine didn’t take them seriously, even found them laughable. Look at Uncle Vince, for example. Chairman of half the charities in town, one of the all-time biggest contributors to the Church, besides. Uncle Vince was one of the most socially concerned citizens in all Des Moines. And her father, Frank, who like all the DiPretas belonged to the swankiest country club in town, counted among his close friends men in city, state, and national government, senators, judges, the highest men in the highest and most respected places. Were these the friends of a “gangster”?
Her father was a gentle man, a kind man, although he did keep his emotions in and might seem cold to, say, some of the people he did business with. Even Francine had considered her father somewhat remote, aloof, until she finally got a glimpse of the sensitive inner man when her mother died six years ago. Her mother had been killed by a drunken driver one rainy, slippery night, just two miles from home. (The road in front of their house in the country was then narrow and treacherous, and only recently — partly through her father’s pulling of political strings — had that road been widened and improved and watched over diligently by highway patrol officers.) Francine, crushed, stunned and (perhaps most important) confused over her mother’s death, had wondered why her father didn’t show his grief more openly, why he seemed almost callous about the loss of his wife; and, as a child will do — and she’d been a child then, just having entered junior high and loving that pink room of hers — she had asked him straight out, “Why, Daddy? Why don’t you cry for Mommy?” And the tears had flowed. The dam had burst, and for several minutes Frank DiPreta had sobbed into his daughter’s arms. She had cried, too, and had felt very close to her father then for perhaps the first time. There had been no words spoken, just an almost momentary show of mutual grief; but it was the beginning of her father’s transference of worship for his wife to his daughter, and thereafter anything she’d asked of him, he’d given. She had tried not to take advantage, but it hadn’t been easy.
He was a remarkable man, though. What with all the silly Mafia rumors and all, you might think of him as the kind of man who would harbor thoughts of violence and revenge where his wife’s killer was concerned. But Francine had never heard her father say even one word about that man who’d run his car over the center line, in a drunken stupor, forcing Rose DiPreta off the road and killing her. Francine remembered saying, “I could kill that man, Daddy. I could just take him and kill him.” And her father had said, “You mustn’t say that, honey. It won’t bring Mommy back.” He had seemed content to let the courts handle the man, who’d been arrested at the scene of the accident. Of course poetic justice or fate or whoever had taken care of things, ultimately. Before the man could be brought to trial, he himself was, ironically enough, run down and killed by a hit-and-run driver.
And now, with Uncle Joe’s death, her father was again reacting in a subdued manner, though she could tell — or at least guess — that he was very much moved by the loss of his brother. The DiPreta men were a dying breed anyway, this branch of the family at any rate. Joe had been a bachelor; Frank had only one child, Francine herself; and Vince’s only son had died of leukemia a few years back. Uncle Vince seemed more visibly shaken by his brother’s death than her father, but then ever since Vince’s son had died he’d been walking around under a cloud. That was the bad thing about Uncle Vince, sweet as he was: You could get depressed just thinking about him.