He didn’t answer and he never would. He woud never drink the Murphy’s or throw a shot glass at his dead son’s photo. He’d never again call anyone nigger or Jew cunt or spic or dot head. He’d just rot in a grave like everyone he hated.
I opened the storm door and put some light pressure on the front door. It fell back at my touch. The hallway was dark. Not the black dark of night, but the beige-brown shadows of frayed canvas shades and deep green wallpapers that only the blind would not find depressing. I slid along the hallway expecting to find death in the kitchen. I was not disappointed.
The giant lay on his belly, head away from me, legs twisted, disheveled and still. He looked like a magic trick that someone had forgotten to finish. I flipped on the chandelier, but somehow the room didn’t brighten much. There’d be no profit in checking for signs of life, so I didn’t. Funny thing was, I couldn’t immediately make out what killed him. On my hands and knees now, I looked for clues in his glassy, opened eyes that reminded me of those on the freshly dead fishes in Sheepshead Bay.
There was blood; a hint, a trickle where his lumberjack shirt over lapped his cheap belt. When I lifted him up a bit, the hint became a flood. I stepped out of its path. He’d been belly-shot at close range. I couldn’t say how many times. A shirt full of scarlet goo sort of obscures things. I patted him down, checking for whatever it was he was trying to sell me. Unless it was an empty pocket, he didn’t have it on him. For a flicker I considered the possibility that he was bluffing, but I pushed that thought away. O’Toole wasn’t the type.
There would be cops. I couldn’t sidestep them, but I made another call first. The phone rang a few times before someone picked up. The voice at the other end was one I hadn’t heard for awhile.
“MacClough’s Rusty Scupper.”
“Johnny?” I asked out of nerves more than anything.
“How’s the ribs?” he wondered matter-of-factly.
“I’ll live,” I answered, unconsciously running my hand along the tape beneath my shirt. “You know where your old partner O’Toole’s house is?”
“Why?” McClough’s tone cooled considerably with one syllable.
“I’m there right now. I think you should join me.”
“Put that old donkey on the line,” the bar owner demanded.
“Let’s just say he’s indisposed, Johnny,” I offered sardonically, looking down at the dead man. “I’ll wait for you.” I hung up.
I sat down in the chair I’d parked in during my last trip here. I didn’t like the fact that Johnny didn’t need directions to the house. O’Toole and Johnny didn’t strike me as two guys who would’ve kept in touch. I asked the lifeless giant about that. He didn’t answer. I asked him what it was he was trying to pawn off on me and where it might be hiding? He was as mum as the fishes in Sheeps-head Bay or the ones on the Scupper’s walls. I got tired of not getting answers, so I stopped asking questions.
I wanted to do a cursory search of the dead cop’s joint, but couldn’t risk how that might look to the detectives when they showed. And they would show. Besides, I didn’t know what I was hunting for. I just looked around from my seat and saw what there was to see in the diffuse brown light. That took a quick fifteen seconds, give or take ten.
I caught myself staring at the ornately framed portrait of O’Toole’s elephant-eared kid in military dress. Something about it bothered me. I thought it might be the pain in the dead kid’s expression, but no. That had been there the first time I’d seen the photo, the first time O’Toole had hurled his shot glass at it. I kept staring.
Bang! It hit me, but with a little less force than Mac-Clough’s right fist or left shoe. There was something askew, but not with the photo itself No. The glass that’d covered it previously was out of the frame, missing. Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe O’Toole’s shot glass aim had improved and he’d hit his target once before passing from this earth. Or maybe it meant the glass had been purposely removed to clear some space for storage behind the dead boy’s photo.
Before dissecting the frame, I ran my fingertips over the glass-free photo. I could feel there was more behind that dead Marine’s expression than just pain. The contents poured out of the frame easily enough. Sandwiched in between the blackened cardboard backing and the snap of O’Toole’s dead son were some curious odds and sods. There was a brittle yellow newspaper clipping, a list of phone numbers (some in pencil, faded and smudged; Some in pen, bright and recent) and a couple of other photographs.
There was one old Polaroid shot of Azrael and a young, uniformed John Francis MacClough taken at some garish and probably long since bankrupted restaurant. They held hands across a Peter Max printed tablecloth. Johnny was mugging for the camera. The girl’s soul and smile were fixed on the man holding her hand. There was a head shot of just the girl. The lifeless gray hair I’d seen tucked under the ratty mink was once chestnut brown with auburn highlights in the sun. It was thick. God, it was thick; the kind of hair a man could lose a hand in, the kind of hair that came from God and not from any bottle. The dead eyes I’d seen searching the cloudy Christmas Eve sky were yellow-green crystals two decades ago. Her lips were just this side of thick and her lashes were sleek, dark feathers. Hanging against the tanned, freckled skin of her chest was a familiar heart-shaped diamond pendant. The heavy orange make-up of middle age was absent. Maybe she had less to hide back then. She was, as its said in Brooklyn, a woman to die for. Some probably had.
Behind the snap of Azrael came another photo almost identical to the one of Johnny and the girl; same restaurant, maybe even the same table. Only in this one, the chestnut-haired girl held hands with a very different man. The stud in Johnny’s shoes was modelishly handsome with curled brooding lips, sable hair, cold black eyes and a chiseled chin with a cleft that could hold a pearl. He did not mug for the camera. He would not have to. The camera loved him. Two things about Azarel were markedly different in this Polaroid; the orphaned heart was missing as was the love and admiration in her eyes.
The last photo was recent. It was oversized, satin-finished and lacked the white border of both older pictures. Unfortunately, the photographer and his subject had botched the job. The picture was blurry, overexposed, done with the wrong speed film and taken from too far away. Other than that it was perfect. This masterpiece was a side shot of a woman between the ages of twenty and thirty getting into a car. What car? What woman? I couldn’t tell you. But if this was the best shot on the roll, I’d hate to see the rest.
The yellow newspaper clipping had been cut out sans date but the print said that it came from the Times. The words told me mostly what I had expected. Mostly. The article recapped the events surrounding the trial of a certain mob figure. It seems that the government had failed to prove its case in spite of the compelling testimony of its star witness-Azrael Esther Wise, born Esther Wiseman in Brooklyn, N.Y. on V-E Day 1945-the paramour of the defendant’s oldest son. Nothing terribly enlightening here. I’d guessed at the greater part of this anyhow. The one surprise came in the letters that spelled the defendant’s last name: Gandolfo.
That’s right, Gandolfo. Gandolfo, as in Dante “Don Juan” Gandolfo. Gandolfo, as in Larry Feld’s biggest client. The trial had been that of Dante’s father, Roberto “The Boot” Gandolfo, and the star witness had been Dante’s girl. Sometimes the world is too small a place to suit me, much too small a place.