While My Pretty One Sleeps

  Restlessly he swung his body around and began walking down toward Beach Ninety-eighth Street. He’d go until he could see the roller coaster and then start back. The guys were coming to pick him up. They’d go to the club first and then have a celebration lunch on Mulberry Street. A sign of respect for him, but he didn’t kid himself. Seventeen years was too long to be away. They’d gotten into stuff he never would have let them touch. The word was out that he was sick. They’d complete what they’d started in these last years. Ease him out. Take it or else.

  Joey had been sentenced with him. Same amount of time. But Joey got out in six years. Joey was in charge now.

  Myles Kearny. He could thank Kearny for those extra eleven years.

  Nicky bent his head against the wind, still trying to cope with two bitter pills. His kids might claim they loved him, but they were embarrassed by him. When Marie went to visit them, she told their friends she was a widow.

  Tessa. God, she’d been crazy about him when she was a little kid. Maybe he’d been wrong not to let her visit him all these years. Marie went to see her regularly. Out there, and in Connecticut, Marie called herself Mrs. Damiano. He wanted to see Tessa’s kids. But her husband thought he should wait.

  Marie. Nicky could feel the resentment in her for all the years she’d waited. It was worse than resentment. She tried to act glad to see him, but her eyes were cold and veiled. He could read her mind: “For what you did, Nicky, even among our friends we were outcasts.” Marie was only fifty-four and looked ten years older. She worked in the personnel office of the hospital. She didn’t have to, but when she took the job she’d told him, “I can’t just sit in the house and look at four walls.”

  Marie. Nick Junior, no, Nicholas, Tessa, no, Theresa. Would they have been really sorry if he’d had a heart attack in prison? Maybe if he’d gotten out in six years like Joey it wouldn’t have been too late. Too late for everything. The extra years he’d served because of Myles Kearny, and he’d still be there if they’d been able to figure a way to keep him in.

  Nicky had passed Ninety-eighth Street before he realized he hadn’t noticed the lumbering structure that was the ancient roller coaster, then was startled to see it had been torn down. He turned and began retracing his steps, shoving his chilled hands into his pockets, hunching his shoulders against the wind. The taste of bile was in his mouth, blotting out the fresh, salty tang of the sea on his lips. . . .

  The car was waiting for him when he got home. Louie was behind the wheel. Louie, the one guy he could always turn his back to. Louie who didn’t forget favors. “Any time you’re ready, Don Sepetti,” Louie said. “It’s good to say that to you again.” Louie meant it.

  Nicky saw the hint of sullen resignation in Marie’s eyes when he went into the house and changed his sweater for a suit jacket. He thought of the time in high school when he’d had to do a short-story report. He’d chosen a story about a guy who disappears and his wife thinks he’s dead and “she comfortably settled herself into her life as a widow.” Marie had comfortably settled herself into a life without him.

  Face it. She didn’t want him back. His children would be relieved if he vanished, Jimmy Hoffa style. Better yet, they’d like a nice, clean, natural death, one that didn’t need explanations for their kids later on. If only they knew how close they were to having it all work out for them.

  “Will you want supper when you come home?” Marie asked. “I mean, I’m on the noon-to-nine shift. Should I fix something and leave it in the refrigerator?”

  “Forget it.”

  He was silent on the trip down the Fort Hamilton Parkway, through the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, into lower Manhattan. At the club, nothing had changed. Still a shabby storefront exterior. Inside, the card table with chairs grouped ready for the next game; the oversized, tarnished espresso machine; the pay telephone that everyone knew was tapped.

  The only difference was in the attitude of the family. Oh sure, they clustered around him, paid their respects, smiled, phony welcoming smiles. But he knew.

  He was glad when it was time to go to Mulberry Street. Mario, the restaurant owner, at least seemed glad to see him. The private room was ready for them. The pastas and the entrees were his favorites from the years before jail. Nicky felt himself start to relax, felt some of the old power flow into his body. He waited until dessert was served, cannoli with rich, black espresso coffee, before he looked from face to face of the ten men who were sitting like two identical rows of tin soldiers. He nodded, acknowledging those on his right side, then those on his left. Two of the faces were new to him. The one was okay. The other was introduced to him as “Carmen Machado.”

  Nicky studied him carefully. About thirty, dark thick hair and eyebrows, blunt nose, scrawny, but tough. He’d been around three, four years. Been in the slammer for auto theft when Alfie got to know him, they said. Instinctively Nicky did not trust him. He’d button Joey down on how much they really knew about him.

  His eyes came to rest on Joey. Joey who had gotten out in six years, who had taken over control while he, Nicky, was locked up. Joey’s round face was creased in lines that passed for a smile. Joey looked like the cat who swallowed the canary.

  Nicky realized his chest was burning. Suddenly the dinner was lying heavy in his stomach. “Okay, so tell me,” he ordered Joey. “What’s on your mind?”

  Joey continued to smile. “With respect, I got great news for you. We all know how you feel about sonofabitch Kearny. Wait till you hear this. There’s a contract out on his daughter. And it’s not ours. Steuber is gonna waste her. It’s almost like a gift to you.”

  Nicky jumped up and slammed his fist on the table. Awash with rage, he hammered the heavy oak. “You stupid bastards!” he shouted. “You stinking, stupid bastards! Get it called off.” He had a momentary impression of Carmen Machado, and suddenly knew he was looking into the face of a cop. “Get it called off. I tell you to get it called off understand?”

  Joey’s expression turned from fear to concern to pity. “Nicky, you have to know that’s impossible. Nobody can cancel a contract. It’s too late.”

  • • •

  Fifteen minutes later, beside a silent Louie at the driver’s wheel, Nicky was on his way home to Belle Harbor. His chest was aflame with waves of pain. The nitroglycerin under his tongue was useless. When Kearny’s kid got hit, the cops wouldn’t step till they hung it on him, and Joey knew it.

  Drearily he realized he’d been a fool to warn Joey about Machado. “No way that guy worked in Florida for the Palino family,” he’d told Joey. “You were too dumb to check him out, right? You stupid bastard, every time you open your mouth you’re spilling your guts to a cop.”

  • • •

  On Tuesday morning Seamus Lambston woke after four hours of sleep that had been plagued with troubled dreams. He’d closed up the place at two-thirty, read the paper for a while and silently crept into bed trying not to disturb Ruth.

  When the girls were young, he’d been able to sleep later, get to the bar at noon, come home for an early dinner with the family and then go back till closing. But in the last years as business fell off in a relentlessly unchanging pattern and the rent doubled and doubled again, he’d let bartenders and waiters go and cut down on the food until now he had only a sandwich menu. He did all the buying himself, got to the place by eight or eight-thirty and, except for a rushed dinner, stayed until closing. And he still couldn’t keep his head above water.

  Ethel’s face had haunted his dreams. The way her eyes bulged when she was angry. The sardonic smile that he’d eradicated from her face.

  When he’d arrived at her place on Thursday afternoon, he’d pulled out a snapshot of the girls. “Ethel,” he’d pleaded, “look at them. They need the money I’m paying you. Give me a break.”

  She had taken the picture and studied it carefully. “They should have been mine,” she said as she handed it back to him.

  Now his stomach squeezed in apprehension. His alimony payment was d
ue on the fifth. Tomorrow. Did he dare not write the check?

  It was seven-thirty. Ruth was already up. He could hear the splashing of the shower. He got out of bed and walked into the room that served as den and office. It was already harshly bright from the rays of the early-morning sun. He sat at the rolltop desk that had been in his family for three generations. Ruth hated it. She wanted to be able to replace all their old heavy furniture with modern pieces in light, airy colors. “In all these years, I’ve never bought so much as a new chair,” she liked to remind him. “You left Ethel all your good furniture when you broke up, and I’ve had to live with the junk from your mother. The only new furniture I ever had were the cribs and beds for the girls and nothing like what I wanted for them.”

  Seamus put off the agony of decision about Ethel’s check by writing some of the others. The gas and electric, the rent, the telephone. They’d canceled cable TV six months ago. That saved twenty-two dollars a month.

  From the kitchen he heard the sound of the coffeepot being put on the stove. A few minutes later Ruth came into the den, with a glass of orange juice and a cup of steaming hot coffee on a small tray. She was smiling and for an instant reminded him of the quietly pretty woman he’d married three months after his divorce. Ruth was not given to affectionate gestures, but when she set the tray on the desk she bent down and kissed the top of his head.

  “Seeing you write the monthly checks makes it really sink in,” she said. “No more money to Ethel. Oh God, Seamus, we can finally begin to breathe. Let’s celebrate tonight. Get someone to cover for you. We haven’t gone out to dinner in months.”

  Seamus felt the muscles in his stomach twist. The rich smell of the coffee suddenly made him nauseous. “Honey, I just hope she doesn’t change her mind,” he faltered. “I mean I haven’t got anything in writing. Do you think I should just send the check as usual and let her return it? I really think that would be best. Because then we’d have something legal, I mean, proof that she said it was okay to stop paying.”

  His voice choked to a gasp as a stinging slap snapped his head over his left shoulder. He looked up and winced at the murderous outrage on Ruth’s face. He had seen that look on another face only a few days ago.

  Then Ruth’s expression dissolved into bright-red spots on her cheekbones and weary tears that welled in her eyes. “Seamus, I’m sorry. I just snapped.” Her voice broke. She bit her lip and straightened her shoulders. “But no more checks. Let her try to go back on her word. I’ll kill her myself rather than let you pay her another dime.”

  6|

  On Wednesday morning, Neeve told Myles about her concern over Ethel. Frowning as she spread cream cheese on a toasted bagel, she voiced the thoughts that had kept her awake half the night. “Ethel is rattlebrained enough to fly off without her new clothes, but she had made a date with her nephew for Friday.”

  “Or so he claims,” Myles interjected.

  “Exactly. I do know that on Thursday she turned in the article she was writing. Thursday was freezing cold, and it started to snow late in the day. Friday was like the middle of winter.”

  “You’re turning into a meteorologist,” Myles observed.

  “Come on, Myles. I think something might be wrong. All of Ethel’s warm coats were in her closet.”

  “Neeve, that woman will live forever. I can just see God and the Devil telling each other, ‘Take her, she’s yours.’” Myles smiled, enjoying his joke.

  Neeve made a face at him, exasperated that he was not taking her concern seriously, but grateful for the bantering tone. The kitchen window was open a few inches, bringing in a breeze from the Hudson, a hint of salt that managed to camouflage the inevitable exhaust fumes of the thousands of cars that traveled the Henry Hudson Parkway. The snow was vanishing in the same abrupt manner it had arrived. Spring was in the air and maybe that fact had helped Myles’s spirits. Or was there something else?

  Neeve got up, went over to the stove, reached for the coffeepot and freshened both their cups. “You seem pretty chipper today,” she commented. “Does that mean you’ve stopped worrying about Nicky Sepetti?”

  “Let’s just say I spoke to Herb and I’m satisfied that Nicky won’t be able to brush his teeth without one of our boys gazing at his cavities.”

  “I see.” Neeve knew better than to ask Myles any more about that. “Well, as long as you stop fussing over me.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get moving.” At the door, she hesitated. “Myles, I know Ethel’s wardrobe like the back of my hand. She vanished on Thursday or Friday in bitterly cold weather without a coat. How would you explain that?”

  Myles had started to read the Times. Now he put it down, his expression patient. “Let’s play the pretend game,” he suggested. “Let’s pretend that Ethel may have seen a coat in someone else’s show window and decided it was just what she wanted.”

  The pretend game had started when Neeve was four and had helped herself to a forbidden can of soda. She’d looked up from the open refrigerator door, where she was blissfully draining the last drop, to see Myles eying her sternly. “I’ve got a good idea, Daddy,” she’d said hurriedly. “Let’s play the pretend game. Let’s pretend the Coke is apple juice.”

  Neeve suddenly felt foolish. “That’s why you’re the cop and I run a dress shop,” she said.

  But by the time she had showered and dressed, in a boxy cocoa-brown cashmere jacket with bracelet sleeves and turned-back cuffs and a softly gathered black wool midcalf skirt, she had located the fallacy in Myles’s thinking. Long ago the Coke hadn’t been apple juice, and right now she’d stake everything she had that Ethel hadn’t purchased a coat from anyone else.

  • • •

  On Wednesday morning, Douglas Brown awakened early and began to expand his domination over Ethel’s apartment. It had been a pleasant surprise on returning from work last night to find it sparkling clean and as reasonably tidy as any human being could make it, given Ethel’s massive piles of papers. He’d found some frozen meals in the freezer, selected a lasagna and sipped a cold beer while it heated. Ethel’s television set was one of the new massive forty-inch units, and he’d set up a tray in the living room, eating while he watched.

  Now, from the luxury of her silk-sheeted four-poster bed, he eyed the contents of the bedroom. His suitcase was still on the chaise, his suits draped over the back on hangers. Screw it. It wouldn’t be smart to start using that precious closet of hers, but no reason he couldn’t settle into the other one.

  The front closet was clearly a catchall. He managed to arrange the photo albums and stacks of catalogues and piles of magazines so that he could use the clothes pole for his suits.

  While coffee perked, he showered, appreciating the sparkling white tile, the fact that Ethel’s rubble of perfume bottles and lotions was now neatly arranged on the glass tray to the right of the door. Even the towels were folded in the bathroom linen closet. That thought brought on a frown. The money. Had that Swedish kid who cleaned for Ethel found the money?

  The thought made Doug jump from the shower, rub his lean body vigorously, wrap the towel around his middle and rush to the living room. He’d left a single hundred-dollar bill under the carpet near the wing chair. It was still there. So either the Swedish kid was honest or she hadn’t noticed it.

  Ethel was such a dope, he reflected. When that check came in every month from her ex, she had it cashed into one-hundred-dollar bills. “My mad money,” she told Doug. That was the money she used when she took him out to dinner in an expensive restaurant. “They’re eating beans and we’re dining on caviar,” she’d say. “Sometimes I go through it all in a month. Sometimes it piles up. Every so often I look around and send the leftover bucks to my accountant toward clothes. Restaurants and clothes. That’s what the stupid worm has kept me in all these years.”

  Doug had laughed with her, clicking glasses as they toasted Seamus the worm. But that night he’d realized that Ethel never kept track of how much cash she had hidden around and so
would never miss a couple of hundred bucks a month. Which was what he’d helped himself to these last two years. A couple of times she’d half suspected, but the minute she said anything he’d acted indignant, and she’d always backed right off. “If you’d just write down when you spend that money, you’d see where it goes,” he’d shouted.

  “I’m sorry, Doug,” Ethel had apologized. “You know me. I get a bee in my bonnet and start shooting off my mouth.”

  He blotted out the memory of that last conversation when she’d demanded that he run an errand for her on Friday and told him not to expect a tip. “I took your advice,” she said, “and kept track of what I spent.”

  He’d rushed over here, sure of his ability to sweet-talk her, knowing that if she dumped him she’d have nobody she could order around. . . .

  When the coffee was ready, Doug poured a cup, went back into the bedroom and dressed. As he knotted his tie, he surveyed himself critically in the mirror. He looked good. The facials he’d started having with the money he pilfered from Ethel had cleared up his skin. He’d also found a decent barber. The two suits he’d bought recently fitted him the way clothes were supposed to fit. The new receptionist at Cosmic had big eyes for him. He had let her know that he was only doing this crummy desk job because he was writing a play. She knew Ethel’s name. “And you’re a writer, too,” she’d breathed in awe. He wouldn’t mind bringing Linda here. But he had to be careful, for a while at least. . . .

  Over a second cup of coffee, Doug methodically went through the papers in Ethel’s desk. There was one cardboard expansion folder marked “Important.” As he flipped through it, his face drained of color. That old windbag Ethel had blue-chip stocks! She had property in Florida! She had a million-dollar insurance policy!

  There was a copy of her will in the last section of the folder. He couldn’t believe his eyes when he read it.

  Everything. Every single dime she had had been left to him. And she was worth a bundle.