“Yeah, Ma, it’s fine.”
The old woman looked at her sternly. “So stop worrying about that neighbor of yours. It ain’t your problem.”
“Right,” Della said. She saw Sara in the city, trying to start over, unaware of the mad dog that was hot on her trail, a vicious old dog that was tracking her relentlessly but one she could not tell Sara about for fear that it would turn on her as well. “Right,” she repeated. “Not my problem.”
And yet if that were true, she wondered, then what was this pain she felt and which seemed to grow larger by the minute. She felt nothing but that deepening distress for a moment, then glanced up and saw that her mother’s eyes were bearing down with the old relentlessness she remembered from her girlhood, questions fired like rockets toward her ever-crumbling defenses, That boy treating you good? You letting that guy touch you? You pregnant?
“Mike raise his hand to you?” the old woman asked sharply.
“No!” Della shot back. “You know Mike. He wouldn’t-”
“Della,” her mother said, cutting her off. “I look at you, and I see scared. Something’s scaring you.” She planted her fleshy arms on the table and leaned forward. “Now, what’s scaring you?”
There was no point in lying to her, Della realized. For nearly forty years, the old lady had seen through her like a sheet of cellophane. “I don’t know what to do, Ma.”
Her mother’s scowl was dark and fearsome. Even sitting, even completely still, she looked as if she were strapping on a gun.
“You tell me right now, Della,” she commanded. “And don’t leave nothing out.”
Della hesitated briefly, then said, “It’s Leo Labriola.”
Her mother looked at her as if she’d just blurted out the ingredients of a secret recipe. “How you know him?”
“My neighbor. Labriola’s his father.”
“What’s that got to do with you?”
“His wife ran off, like I said, and Mr. Labriola is looking for her. He came to my house. He wanted to know if I knew anything about Sara, that’s my neighbor, Tony’s wife, the one that ran off, who Labriola is looking for. And he… threatened me, Labriola did.”
Her mother’s face seemed to gray and flush at the same time, like firelight on a stone. “He done what?” she asked.
“He threatened me,” Della repeated. “Grabbed my arm. Right there.” She rubbed her arm softly. “He scared me, Ma.” Her face was wreathed in shame. “And I didn’t tell Sara about it. That he was looking for her, I mean. But more than that. The way he’s looking, you know?”
“What way?”
“Like… mean. I didn’t tell Sara about that.”
“How could you tell her? You talked to her?”
“Yeah.”
“You know where she is?”
Della nodded. “But not exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“She always talked about the city. I figure that’s where she went.”
Mrs. DaRocca offered a surprisingly bright smile. “I’ll straighten this out, Della,” she said.
“What?” Della asked unbelievingly.
“I’ll straighten it out,” Mrs. DaRocca repeated. She patted her daughter’s arm. “Stop worrying about it.”
And Della, to her vast surprise, did exactly that.
CARUSO
He felt smart, and he loved it when he felt smart. He’d always wanted to feel smart more than he’d wanted to feel anything else. More than he’d ever wanted to be good-looking or tough. You could be tall, dark, handsome, but none of that lasted very long. And in the end, nobody really admired a guy just for his looks. You admired a guy who was tough, could take a trimming, give back what he got, but only if he weren’t a dope at the same time. A moron with guts was mostly just a moron. But a guy with brains, that was a guy everybody admired. He’d heard somewhere that when a dolphin met a shark eye-to-eye in the ocean, it was the shark that blinked. That was what brains did for a guy, he thought, made the idiots give way.
A soaring wave of self-esteem swept over him, and on the crest of that wave he picked up the phone, dialed the number, smiling pleasantly until Labriola answered.
“I got it done,” Caruso told him.
“Why you talk to me like a dope, Vinnie?” Labriola barked. “Huh? Why you do that?”
Caruso felt the hot-air balloon deflate. “Well, I…”
“I answer the fucking phone, right? And you don’t say who it is I’m talking to. You don’t say what it is you’re talking about. So answer me this, Vinnie. How do I know I’m not talking to some fucking cop, huh?”
“I thought you’d-”
“What?” Labriola snapped.
“Recognize my voice,” Caruso said lamely.
“Your voice?” Labriola cackled. “Like you’re Marilyn Monroe, or something? Why would I recognize your voice, Vinnie?”
“Well, I mean, we talk a lot and so-”
“Forget it, Vinnie,” Labriola interrupted irritably. “What’s on your mind?”
Now Caruso hardly knew what to say, all his cleverness gathering like a pool of urine at his feet. Not smart, he told himself, not smart at all.
“Vinnie!” Labriola yelped.
Caruso shuddered. “Uh… I just wanted you to know that I’m doing it.”
“Vinnie, you think I got all fucking day to pull shit out of you? What the fuck you talking about?”
“Them guys,” Vinnie answered, working to control the lacerating contempt Labriola made him feel for himself. “I got…”
“What guys?”
“The ones could be looking,” Caruso answered. “For Tony’s wife.”
“What about them?”
“I’m keeping an eye on them. Like you asked me.”
“So?”
“I just… well… I…”
“I told you to keep an eye on them, didn’t I?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, why wouldn’t you be doing it?”
“I just-”
“You just nothing, Vinnie,” Labriola said. “You just woke me up for fucking nothing.”
Caruso’s head drooped forward. “Sorry,” he muttered.
Labriola’s voice sawed into him. “The next time you call me, you better have something I want to hear.”
“Yeah, I’ll…”
A click at the other end, and the phone went dead.
Caruso held the cold black receiver in his hand. It felt as dark and thick and lifeless as the inside of his skull, a dense, unlighted thing that only fooled him when it seemed to spark.
ABE
The super swung open the door and waved Abe into the room. “You caught me just in time,” he said. “I was gonna call the Salvation Army to come get the rest of this stuff.”
Days before, Abe had gone through Lucille’s meager possessions, selecting a few mementos, leaving the rest for the super to dispose of in any way he wanted. Now he was relieved to see that the piano remained, along with a scarred kitchen table and a second table Lucille had used as a desk. “You said she was paid up till the end of the month, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I have this woman who-”
“Gotcha,” the super said with a leering grin.
Abe looked at him sternly. “Needs a place,” he said emphatically. He peered about the room a final time. “No creeps in the building, right?”
The super shrugged. “There’s creeps in every building, but the ones we got here, they wouldn’t hurt nobody.”
“Okay,” Abe said.
On the way back to the bar, he replayed the last few minutes of his encounter with Samantha Damonte, saw again the desperation that had suddenly overtaken her. He knew that no matter what he might have done at that moment, she would have raced away, told him nothing more, simply disappeared, leaving nothing behind.
But she had left something behind, a tiny bit of information, and he was going to use it.
“Hello.”
Her voice still bore the same strain he’d heard when she’d fled the bar.
“It’s Abe,” he said. “Morgenstern.” He waited for her to respond, but she offered nothing. “You okay?”
“Yes.” Her tone was very nearly metallic.