“Oh, right-spare me,” Willy complained, taking a few steps backward. But his face had turned red.
Joe laughed and shoved his colleague toward the elevator bank. “Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.”
“Fuck you, Joe. You are so full of it.”
Gunther hit the down button, pleased at having put Willy on the spot. Joe was inordinately fond of Sammie Martens-a colleague of theirs back home and currently Willy’s love interest. But he knew of her self-admitted track record with men, and he was no more optimistic than anyone else that she and Willy would make a lasting couple. As a result, anything he could do to delay what looked like the inevitable, he would.
They stepped into the elevator. Willy, still smarting, channeled his embarrassment by glaring at his boss accusingly. “So that’s it, then? We beat feet with a picture of some guy who may not even be our torch, and hope we get lucky? Glad I could be a part of this. Good use of my time.”
Joe let him finish before saying with a conspiratorial smile, “I only told her we’d get out of her hair.”
Strictly speaking, the Silver Lake area where Gino Famolare lived had no official designation. It was no more than a neighborhood straddling Newark and Belleville, a few blocks northeast of Bloomfield Avenue. That last detail, however, was significant for two reasons. Not only did Bloomfield, commonly referred to as simply the Avenue, run diagonally, southeast to northwest, across almost the entire county, neatly splitting it in half, but what remnants there were of the Mafia still dominated most of this corridor. When the racial explosion hit Newark in 1967, it was said that the rioters did not cross the Avenue because, according to Willy, “they knew they wouldn’t get out alive.”
Certainly, it was true enough that Silver Lake did feel and look different from the East Orange area that Joe and Willy left when they departed the task force offices. Unlike the crowded urban sprawl encircling it, Silver Lake felt more suburban, even small-town. Buildings were serried and low, sidewalks crowded with leisurely strollers, and several of the signs were almost quaint in what they advertised: a butcher, a baker, a neighborhood social club-mostly written in Italian, cementing the locale’s predominant ethnicity.
Willy, however, saw something else. Looking around as Joe navigated the car through the narrow streets, he commented, “Not what it used to be.”
“Which was?”
“Little Italy, all the way down to street vendors and overhead banners. You could walk three blocks and not hear a word of English.” He pointed at a Starbucks as it slipped by. “You wouldn’t have seen any of that.”
Joe once more tried to get him to open up. “Almost sounds like you lived over here.”
Willy laughed uncomfortably. “Felt that way sometimes. A lot of New York cops lived here back then. Cheaper.” He paused before conceding just a little. “And a lot of bad shit went down that nobody talked about. The NYPD brass didn’t mind, either, since it took the heat off them-out of state, out of mind.”
Joe knew of Willy’s checkered past-a year on the New York force before shipping out to Vietnam and a traumatic tour of duty ending in emotional chaos and alcoholism. He didn’t doubt that his colleague had tasted more than one forbidden fruit while on the job-he’d been in the right time and place to do so.
Which was exactly why Joe now didn’t want to know any of the details.
“We getting close to Famolare’s address?” he asked instead.
Willy gestured up ahead. “Two more blocks, take a right, second left.”
Joe followed directions and quickly found himself in a quiet, leafy neighborhood of substantial houses and well-kept lawns.
“This guy drives a truck?” he asked, looking around.
“Don’t be too impressed,” Willy cautioned. “The whole town is full of hoaxes and scams like this-things looking like what they aren’t. These houses would run you three hundred grand and up out in the burbs. Here they go for half that, sometimes less. This is old-time Mob territory-like a rent-controlled neighborhood for Italians only, so it’s a little different. But sections right next door don’t have that kind of protection. They look the same on the surface-fancy digs and big lawns-but you better think twice before going out at night. Doors are barred, windows wired, Dobes and rotts run around the backyards, hoping you’ll jump over the fence. The riots did a number on all these areas, and none of them have really come back. In the seventies, you could buy mansions for the tax bill alone. It’s getting better, but it’s slow.” He pointed suddenly. “There it is. On the left.”
Joe slowed the car and pulled over opposite a large, low gray house with a porch running along its front. There was nothing particularly distinguished about it. It shared the stolid bearing of its neighbors. But there were clear signs of better times gone by, when it and its brethren had been symbols of the upward mobility so cherished in the 1950s.
Willy was scanning the block, twisting around in his seat. “We gonna do a sit-and-wait?”
It wasn’t a complaint. Despite his hard-earned reputation for cutting corners, Willy could be a patient man, especially when he was on a scent.
“Unless you have something better,” Joe answered him. “Farber’s chances of success notwithstanding, I figured we can’t lose by at least seeing a couple of the players in motion.”
“Works for me,” Willy said, “but I think we better get off this street. Even lying low, we’ll probably get burned before the day’s out. Too many people around here learned to spot a surveillance while they were sucking mother’s milk.”
Joe pulled away from the curb.
In the huge, crowded maze that was the Port of Newark, Gino Famolare maneuvered his eighteen-wheeler with practiced grace past towering stacks of shipping containers. A constant flow of workers and loading machinery crisscrossed before him like minnows avoiding a large fish. He was heading for the company’s main depot, coming off a week of driving, looking forward to some time off, and a whole lot more besides.
He backed into a slot alongside a fleet of similar trucks, collected his paperwork and travel kit, and swung out of the cab. He walked toward the dispatch center, exchanging greetings with other drivers along the way, and filed his trip with the woman behind the counter, also handing over the keys.
In exchange, she gave him a wad of phone messages and a check.
The check, he was expecting; one of the phone slips, he was not.
He crossed over to a pay phone mounted on the wall, knowing from the name on the slip that the use of his cell would be breaking one of this man’s cardinal rules. “Too many people sniffing the airwaves,” was how he put it. “They can still tap a line, but they have to find it to tap it.” Given the man’s reputation, Gino wasn’t going to challenge his logic. He dialed the number.
“Tito,” he said after the third ring was answered. “It’s Gino. You called?”
“Thought you should know,” Tito’s voice came back. “That trip up north? Not too clean.”
Instinctively, Gino glanced around. He was the only one on this side of the counter, and the dispatcher was back at her console, well out of earshot.
“What do you mean?”
“A kid died.”
“Bullshit.”
“Fine,” Tito said, and hung up.
Gino stared at the phone. The abruptness was just Tito. It was his message that cut deep. Gino had his pride, after all, and it had just taken a direct hit.
Chapter 14
“That must be the missus,” Willy said, slouched in the passenger seat, his eyes at half-mast. They’d been watching the house for five hours already, moving the car from place to place to keep suspicion to a minimum, sometimes parking over half a block away. At the moment, they were situated on a side road that T-boned into Famolare’s street, not quite across from his home. An attractive woman in her mid-forties, solidly built and well tailored, had opened the front door, purse in hand, and was impatiently standing there, apparently waiting for someone who was taking their time.