I frowned. “I think you mean gullible.”
Ralph, who was moving with more rapidity than grace, knocked over an empty wine glass while clearing the dishes.
“Careful!” I grabbed it before it could roll off the table, then I wiped up the spot where a few remaining drops of red wine had spilled.
“Oops! Sorry,” Ralph said anxiously. “Did it spill on you?” He almost tipped over another glass as he gestured at Jimmy.
“Watch out,” I said, moving this other glass out of Ralph’s reach before he wound up knocking it into Lucky’s lap.
“Sorry!” Ralph said again, agitated now. “Are you okay?”
“We’re fine, kid,” Lucky said to the bus boy. “But do us a favor and back away slowly with your hands in plain sight.”
Coming from a notorious Gambello hitter, the comment, though intended as a joke, obviously made Ralph nervous. I thought he probably didn’t have the temperament for working at Stella’s. Or the coordination to work in a crowded restaurant.
Jimmy Legs confirmed that impression, after Ralph headed toward the kitchen with his load of dirty dishes, by saying, “That kid nearly scalded me last week when he was topping up my coffee. He’s a menace to society.”
“They shouldn’t oughta let guys that dangerous circulate freely,” Ronnie said with a disapproving frown.
Going straight back to the topic that I had hoped was finished now, Lucky squinted at me and said dubiously, “So you and Mr. NYPD really ain’t together?”
I didn’t have to answer, since Ronnie jumped in: “Jesus, give it a rest, would you? The cop’s out of her life. She said so. Let’s not go diggin’ up that corpse.”
I winced at the imagery.
Jimmy Legs added, “Ronnie’s right, Lucky. If Esther broke the engagement—”
“We were never engaged,” I said.
“—then you should leave it alone. She can do a lot better than that guy.” Jimmy continued, “Good riddance to him. He don’t know how much he’s lost, letting go of a girl like her. Someday he’ll regret it. But there it is. Whaddya gonna do?”
Oh, great, now I felt like crying again.
“I’ll go get your drinks,” I said quickly. “We’re getting close to midnight. The bar is swamped, but I’ll try to make it quick.”
When I returned to their table a few minutes later, Lucky had decided to accept the drab news about my love life. “I gotta admit I’m surprised,” he said, “but I guess it’s just as well you’re not dating the detective.”
“This is what I been saying!” Ronnie clinked glasses with Jimmy.
“Because, lemme tell you,” Lucky said with feeling, “that guy is giving me such a pain in my . . . you know where.” He didn’t like to use crude language in front of a lady.
“Uh-huh,” I said, setting down his coffee.
“The boss’ lawyer has been on the phone every day this week with the DA’s office. And with OCCB, too, so he’s talked to your boyfriend a bunch of times.”
Well, that’s probably making Lopez’s holidays merry, I thought with grim satisfaction. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
“The boss is protestin’ their outrageous intrusions into his family’s perfectly legitimate business interests.”
“I see.”
“I swear, by now those mooks at OCCB probably know how many times the boss gets up at night to use the john.” Lucky shook his head. “Victor Gambello don’t need this kind of aggravation at his age.”
I tactfully refrained from pointing out that the Shy Don could have avoided all this by choosing a different career.
“You figure that’s why the boss might want to see you later?” Jimmy Legs asked Lucky. “More trouble with OCCB? And on New Year’s Eve, for the love of God!”
“Probably,” Lucky said gloomily.
“The nerve of those guys,” Ronnie fumed. “Ruining the boss’ holidays. There oughta be a law.”
Jimmy grunted in agreement.
Lucky said to me, “So it’s not like I’d be dancing at your wedding to Detective Lopez, kid.”
“We weren’t engaged,” I said wearily. In fact, the closest Lopez and I had ever even gotten to a dinner date was when he bought me a chili dog in the park a couple of nights before Christmas.
“Hey, Esther, we need another song!” Freddie the Hermit called from his table. He was here tonight with a date—and his companion wasn’t Mrs. Freddie. In any other setting, I’d have thought she was a hooker, based on her big hair and tiny clothing; but among wiseguys, very few of whom practiced monogamy, her look was fairly standard for girlfriends and mistresses.
“As soon as the ball drops,” I promised Freddie over my shoulder. Midnight was only minutes away, and Stella had turned on the TV so we could watch the annual countdown ritual in Times Square, about fifty blocks north of here.
“A duet!” shouted Tommy Two Toes. “Esther and Ed should do a duet!”
“Ned,” said Ned. “My name is Ned.”
“Whatever. We want you should do a duet with Esther.”
“As soon as the ball drops,” I repeated.
Brushing past me on his way to the bar, Ned muttered, “Anything but Mack the Knife again.”
“Agreed.”
“I swear, I hear that song in my sleep ever since I started working here.”
“I’m glad you weren’t as serious with Lopez as I thought,” Lucky said to me, still riffing on his theme. “Because it really burns me up that he ain’t helping us at all.”
“That bum!” said Jimmy Legs.
“Well, he is an OCCB detective,” I pointed out, though I had no interest in defending Lopez. “Helping the Gambello family isn’t anywhere in his job description. Just the opposite, in fact.”
“But he knows we wasn’t involved in the Fenster hijackings!” Lucky said in outrage. “He knows that better than anybody, since he’s the one who arrested the real culprits. And now who’s suffering for the crimes committed by a couple of rotten kids with too much time on their hands? We are. How is that fair? But is your boyfriend standing up for us? No!”
“He ain’t her boyfriend,” said Jimmy Legs.
“Good riddance,” said Ronnie, clinking his glass again with Jimmy’s.
After several heavily loaded Fenster trucks were hijacked during the Christmas shopping season, the NYPD came under heavy pressure from the media to solve the crimes. Consequently, OCCB came under heavy pressure from the Police Commissioner, because the Gambello crime family, who had a history of hijacking Fenster trucks, were the obvious suspects. But, actually, the heists were the brainchild of a vengeful Santa and a demented Fenster who used mystical means to recruit unwitting accomplices for the robberies. (According to news accounts this week, the NYPD vaguely attributed the couple’s control of their unwilling accomplices to drugs and “psychological conditioning.” None of the dupes could remember anything about those events, there was no evidence against them, and the two villains who had manipulated them were pleading guilty. So it looked like the case file was closing quickly on that one.)
Nonetheless, the initial erroneous assumption that the Gambellos were involved in the heists meant that OCCB—which “had to show juice,” as Lucky had put it, due to all the media scrutiny—brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “thorough investigation,” digging deep into the Gambellos’ lives in their search for evidence. And this was still proving to be extremely uncomfortable for the Gambellos, though they were cleared in the Fenster hijackings when the arrests were made a week ago.