“Now? I haven’t finished my drink.”
Tito merely looked at him.
“Right,” Santo conceded, replacing the glass on the bar. He slid off his stool and accompanied the big man through the large, plain, undecorated room to a narrow door in the middle of the back wall. There were only about four men in the place, and none of them so much as glanced in their direction.
Tito opened the door and stood aside.
Feeling much as he had the night before, when that car door had opened up and its dark interior exerted its force on him, Santo followed the invitation with dread. He hadn’t really figured out who those three were last night.
This man, on the other hand, he knew.
“Does Dante want to see me?” he asked hopefully, crossing the threshold.
The answer was flat and curt. “No.” Tito gave him a little shove before following him into the dark room.
Joe Gunther was old enough by now that his concept of female beauty had shifted away from the universal norm. To him, the youthful denizens of catalogs, magazines, mall displays, and TV shows had all become a little surreal, as if the majority of them-at least from a distance-ran the gamut from animated mannequins to overendowed, asexual children. Beautiful young women weren’t something he encountered very often, in any case, and the women he did see regularly, like Gail and Sammie Martens, were too practical, business-minded, and lacking in vanity to qualify as models. Also, he’d come to cherish the lines he saw in those faces and the experience he could see in their eyes.
All of which made meeting Peggy DeAngelis with Willy and Lil in tow a shock, in spite of his having once seen her from a distance. When she opened the front door to his knock and stood three feet away from them, he felt rooted in place, his mouth half open in greeting but speechless.
“Yes?” she asked them.
“We’re the police,” Willy said, his voice tense. “We need to talk to you.”
Joe cut him a glance, having seen this kind of reaction before. Whether it was his deformity, bad luck as a teenager, or simply his usual orneriness, Willy had his own way of responding to aesthetic wonders.
Real concern furrowed DeAngelis’s forehead. “What happened? Is everything all right? Is it Gino?”
“Oh, it’s Gino, all right,” Willy said bluntly, “but not the way you think.”
He stepped up onto the threshold, forcing her to either yield or get pushed back. Still smiling politely but looking worried, she yielded. Willy led the way into the front hall.
“Gino’s fine, Miss DeAngelis,” Joe said quickly. “We just need to ask you a few questions.”
Peggy was by now looking thoroughly confused. “I don’t understand.”
Now acting eccentrically even for him, Willy was almost bristling. “We’ll use simple language,” he said caustically.
Joe shook his head wearily. He touched Peggy’s shoulder lightly to reassure her. “Don’t mind him. Bad day. It is true, though, that Gino’s gotten himself into some legal trouble. We do need to talk.”
Her fingers hovered at her mouth. The gesture somehow made her look almost coltish. “I don’t know,” she said doubtfully.
“Could go harder for him if you don’t talk to us,” Willy said.
“But I don’t know anything,” she protested. “What do you think he’s done?”
Willy’s response was rich with an overstated puritanical resentment. “He’s screwing around with you, for starters.”
Her mouth dropped open as Joe finally swung around to face him from inches away, his expression grim. Willy muttered, “Okay, okay, fine,” before Joe could say a word, and went to stand behind Lil.
Joe returned to Peggy. “I’m sorry. Maybe we should start over again. My name’s Joe Gunther. I’m from Vermont. The cranky guy’s Willy Kunkle, and that’s Lieutenant Lil Farber, from the Essex County prosecutor’s office. You are Peggy DeAngelis, right?”
“Yes. Why are you from Vermont?”
Joe was grateful for Willy’s lack of a response. He gestured to the living room behind her as he spoke. “Mind if we sit down? It’s a bit of a long story.”
“No, no,” she said immediately, which automatic courtesy he’d counted on.
They all settled on a sofa and a couple of armchairs.
“What exactly do you know about Gino?” Joe asked in his best fatherly tone.
She concentrated as if she’d been asked a test question. “He works at the docks as a trucker, drives an eighteen-wheeler, and”-here she shot Willy an angry look-“I know he’s married, which is something he’s trying to end.”
“Does he tell you about the trips he takes?” Joe continued.
She smiled, which suffused an already perfect face with a sunny radiance. “He sends me postcards sometimes.”
“Could I see them?”
She half rose from her chair before shaking her head. “I’m not sure I should do this. I don’t think he’d like it.”
Joe looked up at her, his elbows on his knees, trying to appear relaxed and casual. “Why’s that? You want to help him, don’t you?”
She frowned. “Of course. That’s what I’m saying.”
“We’re here already,” Joe explained pointedly. “You do realize that not cooperating will just turn a small investigation into a big deal-attract a lot of attention and involve lots of people.”
“Aren’t you supposed to have some piece of paper you have to show me?”
Joe and Lil both laughed. He explained, “That’s only when we’re about to search a place or arrest someone. We’re just here trying to make sense of a few things.”
“What things?” she asked, still standing.
“It’s a bit complicated, Peggy, and we’re figuring it out, but my colleague’s tough-guy imitation notwithstanding, we may end up finding Gino’s got nothing to do with any of it. You could help us with that and make this go away twice as fast.”
“Clearing him of suspicion?”
“We just want to know the truth,” Joe equivocated.
She hesitated one last time and then nodded slightly. “All right. I’ll be right back.”
She left the room, and they heard her climbing the stairs two at a time with rapid, light footsteps-still a kid inside that fully adult body.
Lil waited until she was sure Peggy was out of earshot. “So,” she asked, “you two always work this well together? You ought to write a how-to book.”
“Cute,” Willy growled.
Joe rose suddenly, holding his hand up for silence, and moved to the hallway door, listening to something upstairs.
“Stay put,” he said over his shoulder, before following the girl’s example and heading for the second floor.
On the top landing, he could more clearly hear Peggy’s voice speaking in an urgent whisper, down a short hallway and behind a partially closed door. He approached it quietly and pushed it open.
Before him, sitting on the edge of her bed, Peggy was talking into a phone. She raised her eyes to his as he filled the doorway, her expression so much like a child’s in trouble that he had to smile.
“Calling Gino?” he asked.
She paled visibly. For a moment, he thought she might even try to hide the phone behind her back. Instead, she ducked her head slightly, as if for privacy, said, “Never mind. No message,” into the receiver, and reluctantly hung up.
“I couldn’t get him,” she admitted.
Joe leaned against the doorjamb. “You didn’t have to come up here to do that. We wouldn’t have stopped you making a call. For that matter, we can leave, if you want.”
She seemed on the verge of tears. “How much trouble is he in?”
Joe decided to play it straight, within limits. “It’s looking pretty bad.”
“Did he kill someone or something?”
“Why do you ask that? Has he ever been violent around you?”
She shook her head. “No, not ever. He’s always very sweet.”
“But…” Joe suggested.
“No, no. No buts. It’s just that I could see him getting angry at someone if he was pushed.”
“He has,” he reassured her. “I think you already know that in your heart.”