Gavin glared at Charles Barton. “You knew that wild trip to Brentwood was a phony?”
“I told you at the beginning that I was going to get my children back.”
Gavin turned to Eduardo. “Were the bonds marked? Were their serial numbers recorded?”
“No,” Eduardo said.
“The bonds are just out there somewhere with hundreds of thousands of other bonds bought last Thursday.”
“Yes,” Eduardo said.
“All right. I want all the details. I want every shred of information from you about where you made the pickup and a description of the methods and people which turned the babies over to you. Did you recognize the people who held the babies?”
“No,” Eduardo said.
A large picture of the ruined and bloody Rocco Sestero was on the front page of the New York DAILY NEWS and the Philadelphia papers that were delivered to the Sestero apartment in Atlantic City on Sunday morning. The FBI and the local police had been there since seven-fifty that morning. Mary Sestero had become hysterical under the questioning, but she held to the story that she knew nothing about her husband’s business except that he had worked at the casino of the Mirabelle Hotel. When the police left she turned on her son.
“Angelo Partanna killed your father, whatta you gonna do about it?”
“Angelo?” Beppino said.
“You were here when your father said it! This whole thing, the kids, was Angelo’s idea. Angelo set up the whole thing. Angelo was the only one who knew about it, so Angelo had somebody do the job on your father.”
“I didn’t know. I mean I never figured it that an old guy like Angelo would—”
“He set up Santo, didn’t he? You were here. You heard your father say it that Angelo put out the contract on Santo?”
“Angelo gave it to Poppa. Okay. I’m going to New York and give it to Angelo. I know what I gotta do.”
Angelo Partanna passed away in his sleep because of heart failure at 1:27 A.M. while his night nurse, Agnes Brady, was making some strong black coffee in the kitchen. At 4:00 A.M. she got out of her chair in Angelo’s bedroom to make the regular four-hour check on his vital signs. She put a thermometer in his mouth and picked up his wrist to time his pulse. She knew he was dead. She was dialing Dr. Winikus’s telephone as Beppino Sestero let himself into the house by the front door and came into the bedroom. She looked up and had the chance to ask sharply, “What are you doing here?” before he shot her; then he stood beside the bed and shot Angelo twice through the head, crossed himself, and left.
Dr. Winikus heard both shots. He telephoned the police from his house in Brooklyn Heights, dressed, and drove to the Partanna house in Bensonhurst. The police were there when he got there. He identified the bodies at 4:55 A.M.
After the forensic squad had made their measurements, looked for prints, and taken their pictures, the bodies were taken to the city morgue for autopsy. Keifetz, the homicide sergeant, asked Dr. Winikus for Angelo Partanna’s next-of-kin.
“I don’t know of any,” Winikus said. “Do you know who the old man was—or is that before your time?”
“Who was he?”
“That was the right-hand man to Corrado Prizzi.”
“Angelo Partanna? That was Angelo Partanna?”
“The only name I have to call is his executor, Charles Macy Barton.”
“That is his executor? Holy shit, I’m gonna get my name inna papers.”
At 9:07 A.M., Sergeant Keifetz called Charles Macy Barton at his office while Barton was in a meeting to reorganize a steel company having seventeen subsidiary companies, identifying himself as NYPD, Homicide. Miss Blue asked the policeman if she could take a message. Sergeant Keifetz said he would prefer to speak to Mr. Barton. Miss Blue said it was impossible for Mr. Barton to come to the telephone. Sergeant Keifetz said the message was urgent and that it involved Angelo Partanna, whose executor, he understood, Mr. Barton was. Mr. Partanna was dead. Mr. Partanna had no survivors known to his doctor; therefore it was necessary that he advise Mr. Barton.
“May we call you back, Sergeant Keifetz?” Miss Blue, having been with Edward S. Price for twenty-two years before she served Mr. Barton, knew Angelo Partanna, who had, from time to time, come to see Mr. Price. It was apparent to Miss Blue that Angelo Partanna had some unusual connection with Barker’s Hill if, after years of association with Edward Price, it now had happened that Mr. Barton was Mr. Partanna’s executor and that Mr. Partanna was dead.
“Right away, please,” Keifetz said. He gave Miss Blue a number.
“Sergeant? Was Mr. Partanna murdered?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll get right back to you.” She hung up.
Miss Blue sat at her desk and typed a note to Mr. Barton. It said: “Sergeant Keifetz, NYPD Homicide, called urgently. Mr. Angelo Partanna has been murdered. Sgt. Keifetz urgently wishes you to call him back.” She folded the message slip and took it into the meeting. She passed it to Mr. Barton.
Charley read the message twice before he understood it. The world fell out from under him. He had been waiting for something like this all his life until he had finally decided that it could never happen. That Pop had been over eighty years old didn’t change the meaning of what had happened to him. Pop had grown up at the center of this, always knowing that it could happen, never excusing himself from the possibility because he was getting older and older even though he had been the one to see the don die in bed. It was Pop who had made him a man; Pop who had taught him everything. Pop, unassailable, invincible, and everlasting. And somebody had walked into his house in the night and had done the job on him. Business. That fucking business. Maybe Mom was right. Maybe it was better being respectable where the business was only in doing the job on whole companies, then walking away with them and leaving whatever you had to leave behind. Nobody tried to shoot you for it. They gave you testimonial dinners instead. Pop was gone. He had to begin to understand that. Somebody had zotzed Pop.
“Mr. Barton! Are you all right?” The entire table of twenty-six men and women was staring at him.
Charley stood up. He walked unsteadily out of the room, Miss Blue and Carleton Garrone directly following him. In Miss Blue’s office, he took Keifetz’s number and dialed it.
“Keifetz,” the voice said.
“This is Charles Barton.”
“You the executor of the late Angelo Partanna?”
“Yes.”
“Meet me at the morgue in half an hour. We gotta confirm the identification.”
Charley asked for his driver. As they got into the elevator, Charley said to Miss Blue, “Please call Mrs. Barton and tell her what has happened.”
49
Keifetz talked to Charley in a small room at the morgue after Charley had made identification.
“I wanna tell you, Mr. Barton, for what it’s worth. The autopsy shows that Mr. Partanna had already been dead from heart failure for over two hours before the assailant came in and shot him.” Keifetz was a young man who was studying at Delahanty for the lieutenant’s examination. He was a dark, affable man to whom every case was another gold star on his personnel record.
Charley made no comment.
“Did you know that Mr. Partanna had been a considerable figure in organized crime in this city?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“As executor, can you tell me the extent of the victim’s estate?”
“We’ll have to wait for probate on that.” Charley knew that his father’s estate would only include the house and his collection of beer steins that Charley’s mother had accumulated so she could line them up on the shelved molding that ran all around the dining room. There were his clothes and about four-hundred-odd dollars, all of which he had left to the Salvation Army. All of the money he had accumulated over the years, about three hundred and thirty million dollars, was in numbered accounts in banks in Panama, Hong Kong, and Bahrain, and only Charley knew the numbers.
“How did you come to be Mr. Partanna’s exe
cutor?”
“When Edward S. Price resigned from our company to seek the nomination for the presidency of the United States—” Charley paused to let that sink into the sergeant’s scoring system—“he divested himself of all pecuniary and eleemosynary responsibilities and asked me to take over, as I had taken over his other duties, to represent Mr. Partanna as executor.”
“What was Mr. Price’s relationship with the victim—if he was the victim’s executor.”
“I don’t know, sergeant. You’ll have to ask Mr. Price.” Charley put an edge on his voice. “When will the body be released for burial?”
“Give us another day.”
“I’ll get on with the funeral arrangements then. Good day, Sergeant. Will I tell Mr. Price that you have questions for him?”
“No, sir. That will not be necessary.” Keifetz thought maybe he might have gone too far with Charles Macy Barton. He fumbled an envelope and a pen out of his inside breast pocket. “Mr. Barton? I wonder if I could have your autograph for my boy, Brom?”
Angelo Partanna was buried beside Corrado Prizzi and his daughter, Amalia, at the cemetery of Santa Grazia di Traghetto on Staten Island. The church ceremony was attended by the 2,100 former members of the Prizzi family, by 812 members (police/FBI count) or representatives of the fratellanza from across the United States, and by members of Black, Hispanic, and Oriental organizations with a light admixture of federal, state, and municipal politicians, church dignitaries, Hollywood celebrities, and great sporting figures, as well as Angelo Partanna’s executor, Charles Macy Barton, without his wife, who attended the services and the burial with the other great and near great national figures to pay homage to a dear little old man who no one could ever believe could have been one of those people who had so openly and so colorfully defied Prohibition all those long years ago.
The Bartons rode back to Sixty-fourth Street in one of the undertaker’s limousines. Mary Barton had sat out both the church and the cemetery services in the car, with purdah windows, not able to mingle with the other mourners but feeling that she owed it to her husband’s father’s memory to attend.
“Who did it, Charley?” Mary Barton asked him.
“One of your cousin Rocco’s people, I guess.”
“You gonna talk to them?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“Maybe it’s a technicality, but the autopsy showed that Pop was already dead before he was hit. Whatta you want me to tell you?”
50
On October 28, at 8:50 A.M., the senior nanny, Nanny Willmott, asked to see Mrs. Barton. Mary Barton, in bed, was studying the new fashions in W, trying to resolve the political risk of whether or not it would generate more power if she switched dressmakers, weighing what the consequences could be if she put one foot wrong in the delicate but necessary shift of her weight as she climbed higher toward the top of the tree.
“Good morning, ma’am,” Nanny Willmott said, curtseying as required, pronouncing “ma’am’ as “mom.”
Mary Barton put the paper aside. “Good morning, Nanny Willmott,” she said. “How are my boys this morning?”
“That’s just it, ma’am. In the past week or so, Baby Conrad has been either mewling too much of his time or sleepy when he shouldn’t be.”
“You mean as compared to Angier?”
“Angier is just right, ma’am, as Baby Conrad always used to be.”
“Is it something we should worry about?”
“Not by itself, ma’am. But when I change his diaper, it seems to be that there is something wrong with Baby Conrad’s right leg. And although Baby Angier has been pulling himself up in his crib and in his playpen to stand on his two chubby little legs, Baby Conrad cannot stand, ma’am. We’ve stood him up with his little hands on the railing, but he falls right down upon the mattress.”
Mary Barton threw off the covers and got out of bed. “We’ve got to call the doctor.”
“I think perhaps a specialist, ma’am. A neurologist.”
“Get him ready. I’ll be in with you as soon as I am dressed.” Mary Barton picked up the phone and called her husband.
“Charley, the baby—Rado—Nanny Willmott says something is wrong with his right leg.”
“Well, Jehoshaphat, Mary, call the doctor.”
“Not just the doctor, Charley. You’ve got to get the best neurologist in the country over here. Nanny Willmott is very worried.”
“I’ll call you back.”
Barker’s Hill Enterprises controlled a company that operated 391 hospitals across the country. Charles Barton got its board chairman off the golf course in Palm Springs by grace of an electronic beeper.
“Yes, Mr. Barton?” the chairman said, out of breath.
“Mr. Farb, you can do me a great service. My infant son needs a neurological examination, and I want the best. I want you to get on the phone and in conference with your best people, call me back within ten minutes to tell me the name of the best child neurologist in New York and to say that he is—as you talk—on his way to my house in New York. We’re in the book.”
“A house call, Mr. Barton?”
“The baby cannot be moved. Call me.”
Charley called Mae back. “He’ll be there in about a half an hour. I don’t know his name but he’ll tell you.”
“He makes house calls?”
“This one does,” Charley said grimly.
“Are you coming over?”
“I can get there in about forty minutes. Now, please—take it easy—we’re on top of everything.”
Dr. Norman Lesion, who carried an alphabet of degrees and medical honors and who understood tax shelters better than the secretary of the treasury, also could analyze the panic and dismay in Farb’s voice from faroff California, and he reasoned instinctively that any medical condition that could shake up a man like Farb this much had to be worth a silo full of money. He sat for a moment in his Mercedes with the MD plates, parked in the No Parking zone in front of the Barton house and calculated to within thirteen dollars and some change what his eventual fee would be. He got out of the car, climbed the broad steps and rang the Barton doorbell at Sixty-fourth Street twenty-three minutes after he had taken the call from Farb. He was led to the nursery, where Mary Barton and the two nannies awaited him. Mary Barton explained the problem. Angier Macy Barton was standing in his playpen, jolly-jaunty, grinning and drooling. Conrad Price Barton lay on his back in the same playpen, listless.
“We’ll have him up on the changing table, please,” the doctor said. Nanny Willmott made the transfer deftly. She disrobed the baby. Dr. Lesion began his examination, which took him eleven minutes. When it was over, he said he’d like to talk to Mary Barton. She took him into an upstairs sitting room.
“Has the baby had an accident in the past two months or so, Mrs. Barton?”
“No. I don’t know. I mean, I can’t—not that I know of, doctor.”
“Your baby nurses are reliable women?”
“Unquestionably.”
“It seems quite certain the baby must have had an accident of some kind.”
Mary Barton thought of her cousin, Rocco, and of his hamhanded wife. She thought of Rocco’s short, simian arms and his clumsy hands like bear paws, covered with hair. She saw Rocco, again, as he shot Al Melvini.
“What is it, doctor?” she said, wanting to die.
“A child’s brain is especially vulnerable during the first few months of life,” Lesion said, slowly and carefully. “If an injury occurs at that time, it can result in a dysfunction that mainly affects the motor performance.”
“But—”
“It is possible—I cannot say until we run our tests—that your baby is suffering from a form of spastic cerebral palsy”—Mary Barton drew in her breath so sharply as to straighten herself in the chair; she caught her lower lip between her perfect white teeth—“which is characterized by hemiparesis, partial paralysis of the leg on one side. In addition to the weakness, the baby’s right
leg is thinner and smaller than normal.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Motor function can be improved, however, and the success rate is high if the treatment begins early.”
“You can make him normal again?”
“It is too soon to say that, Mrs. Barton. Right now, I’d like to have him admitted so that we may possibly forestall epileptic seizures.”
“Epileptic seizures?” She wasn’t able to follow this man. “Isn’t there any way that surgery—”
“It’s just too soon to think about surgery, Mrs. Barton. What we must do now is to watch the baby carefully so that we may be sure that there will be no fixed joint and limb deformities—or even a more severe functional disability.”
Charley came into the room. Mary Barton introduced the doctor. “It’s terrible, Charley,” she said. “Terrible.”
Charley sat down and stared at Dr. Lesion.
“Somewhere, somehow, there was an accident,” the doctor said. “The baby fell, or was dropped, or was struck sharply near the left frontal lobe of his head. There may be clotting. Depending on when the accident happened the infant may be suffering from either acute, subacute, or chronic subdural hematoma.” He sighed, wishing he did not have to look at them.
Mary Barton decided she would stay at the hospital in the room with her son. At nine-fifty that night, she and Charles Barton sat in a waiting room that was down the hall from the suite where Baby Conrad had been billeted. They were alone in the room, under harsh fluorescent light, facing each other in chairs, their knees touching.
“Nothing has turned out the way I thought it would,” Mae-rose said.
He reached out and took her hand. “What the hell, Mae—what does?”
“I don’t mean just the baby—no one can know what is going to happen to children. I mean everything. We’re here and everyone else is gone. My grandfather, my father, your father, Aunt Amalia. They were there, but now they aren’t there anymore.”
“Well, we’re here. And we know mostly what we’ve got to do.”
“It just should have been different. What the hell. Good night, Charley.”