The possibilities, when Louis was calm enough to think through his more immediate financial problems, seemed endless.
This week, however, his window-cleaning salary wouldn’t come anywhere near covering his gambling nut. He needed to score some grass he could sell fast and then he’d need to take another street loan to pay the two bookies he owed. Louis had no idea how much money Albano collected over the weekend, but however much it was, Louis needed it and he would have to move fast to get it by the end of the week. Otherwise, he didn’t know how he’d pay off the close to seventeen hundred dollars he owed two bookies, much less the two grand he still owed Jimmy.
He called in five bets on the trotters at Roosevelt and stood to lose another two hundred dollars he didn’t have. He’d already lost sixty dollars on two Saratoga bets earlier in the day, a straight twenty-dollar win and a ten-dollar exacta that didn’t come through. Lady Luck had been cruel lately, running ice-cold it seemed. His luck had to change fast or Louis had to rob John Albano sooner rather than later.
Lieutenant Detective Sean Kelly, at thirty-nine years of age, was a sixteen-year veteran and the senior detective in a task force investigation into the illegal distribution of the recently banned porn film Deep Throat. Kelly wore sweatpants, a baseball cap and an oversized Led Zeppelin T-shirt as a disguise to throw off any surveillance watching the mobbed-up bar on the first floor of the apartment building he’d entered five minutes earlier. He smirked at the sounds of sex he could hear through an apartment door, then leaned against it, cupping his left ear. He smiled as the woman’s yelping grew to a crescendo.
Kelly waited until the man began to grunt before knocking on the door.
“Shit,” he heard Eddie Vento say.
Kelly gave it a moment, then knocked again.
“Fuck,” Vento said. “Get offa me.”
Kelly smiled. He heard light footsteps running away on the other side of the apartment door, then heavier footsteps approaching it. He was about to knock again when the door opened.
“I waited until I thought you were finished,” he said.
Eddie Vento, wearing a white wife-beater and light blue boxer underwear, stood in the doorway smirking. “You shouldn’t spend all your money on clothes like that,” he said. “I didn’t know you I might shoot you.”
“Can I come in?”
Vento stepped back to let the detective inside.
Kelly passed through the doorway. He heard a toilet flush and turned in time to see a woman pull on a pair of black bikini underwear. She was naked from the waist up. She saw Kelly looking and slammed the bathroom door shut.
Vento had just closed and locked the apartment door. He turned and saw Kelly was staring toward the bathroom. “She works downstairs weekends,” he said.
“Pretty girl.”
Vento grabbed a half-smoked cigar from an ashtray on the coffee table in front of the couch. “She’s a ballbreaker is what she is. Non-fucking-stop, sometimes.”
Kelly spotted a black bra on the couch. He picked it up.
Vento finished lighting his cigar and motioned at Kelly with it. “You enjoying yourself?”
Kelly set the bra on the coffee table as he sat on the couch. “Can we talk?”
Vento took a seat in an armchair facing the detective.
“This thing with the movie,” Kelly said. “I need to make a bust soon. Now this guy turned up in a Queens dumpster, I need something to show I’m doing my job.”
“Can’t it wait a few weeks?”
“Not anymore. It’s an issue now, this movie. City Hall expects arrests. Leaving the guy without his hands may keep other guys from stealing, but it also made it easy for reporters to learn his business. Today they know a guy was whacked, tomorrow they’ll know where he dropped his last load.”
The bathroom door opened down the hall. Both men turned toward the sound of footsteps as Bridget Malone entered the room wearing an open pajama top and panties. She stopped a moment to button the top.
“Got a better look now?” she asked Kelly.
“You wanna give us some privacy here?” Vento said. “We’re talking business.”
“Excuse me,” said Bridget with sarcasm. “Can I breathe? Is that okay?”
Vento bit his lower lip. Kelly watched Bridget head into the kitchen.
“She’s awful young,” he whispered.
“Don’t kid yourself,” Vento said, “she’s been around the block.”
“Been around what block?” Bridget said. She was standing with her back to them as she looked through a cabinet.
“Never mind,” Vento said. “Get whatever you want and go.”
“Fine,” Bridget said. “I’ll eat my chips in lockup.”
She was holding a bag of potato chips. Kelly sniggered as she fingered a chip from the bag to her mouth. She forced a smile and he watched her rump wiggle back down the hall.
“Lockup? Where’d she learn that one?” he asked Vento.
“From sitting in one,” Vento said. “She was dating some druggie when she first come to work downstairs. She was with him when he got pinched moving horse. She’s no stranger to the system. Like I said, she’s been around.”
It was uncomfortable information. Kelly turned toward the hallway again.
“She’s got a mouth on her like every other broad, but she’s alright you look past the front she puts on,” Vento said. “She keeps an eye on the old lady upstairs can’t do the stairs. Looks in on her a couple times a day, goes to the store and so on. She don’t know you is all.”
Bridget suddenly returned. “Can I get a soda so I don’t choke from thirst?” she asked.
“You could’ve got that before,” Vento said.
“Can I get it now?”
“Make it fast. Me and Mr. Horse have business.”
Bridget exaggerated a chuckle. “Mr. Horse?”
Vento glared at her.
“I’ll be gone in two minutes,” she said. “I have to go upstairs anyway. Mrs. G wanted me to rub her feet.”
“Wipe her ass while you’re at it. She shit herself the other day, stunk up the stairway.”
“Christ, Eddie, she’s eighty-six years old.”
“Good for her.”
“What’s your excuse?”
Vento stood up out of the chair.
“I’m going,” said Bridget as she darted into the kitchen. “I’ll be gone in two minutes.”
“You see what I gotta put up with?” Vento said to Kelly.
The detective wasn’t smiling. He watched Bridget as she moved around the kitchen.
“Not only this bullshit I gotta listen to,” Vento said, “but she wants to go in the business and do a porno.” He thumbed over his shoulder. “She thinks it’s glamorous.”
“Tell him my life story, why don’t you?” Bridget said. She pulled the tab on a can of Coke and sipped.
“She’s pretty enough,” Kelly forced himself to say.
“Thank you,” Bridget said. “Like it would make a difference to him, I did a fuck movie.”
Vento slapped his hands together in frustration.
“I thought you liked when I talked dirty, Eddie.”
Vento turned and glared at her again.
“What?” she said.
“Get lost.”
“He’s got all these connections, but he won’t do anything for me,” Bridget told Kelly.
“I said get lost,” Vento said.
“I should make my own connections,” she said. “I know at least one person who’d love to know what he likes in the sack.”
“You’re pushing your luck, cunt.”
Bridget had started toward the door, then stopped in her tracks, her face flushed red. “Cunt?” she said. “Fuck you, Eddie. Go fuck your wife. Let her talk dirty for you.”