Peril

  “I’m not sure he’s playing straight with me,” Mortimer said. His fingers squeezed the hat. “My friend, I mean. What he tells me, I can’t be sure it’s on the up-and-up.” He watched Stark, straining to see some sign of a reaction, but the man peered at him silently, and with what now appeared a sad contempt. “About the job, I mean,” he added, trying hard not to sputter or to cringe despite the fact that he felt like a third-grade kid before a disapproving teacher. “The thing is, I ain’t sure we’re the only players.”

  “The only players?”

  “I get the feeling he might have some other guy working this thing.” Mortimer stopped and waited, but Stark continued to stare at him without expression. “You ain’t seen no sign of that, right? Some other guy?”

  “Why would you think your friend had a second man?” Stark asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mortimer answered. “Just a feeling that—” He stopped again, staring now into Stark’s stony features. “Anyway,” Mortimer said quietly. “That’s where I’m at in this thing.”

  “Which is where, exactly?”

  “Where I said. I don’t think I’m getting the straight story.”

  “So your friend is lying to you?”

  “Well, maybe not exactly lying. Just not telling me everything.”

  “There’s no difference between those two,” Stark said sternly.

  Mortimer saw something register darkly in Stark’s face, a look he’d never seen before, that of a man who’d suddenly glimpsed another man’s demise, knew the hour and the manner of his impending death. “I wish I could get you off this thing,” he said.

  “It’s too late for that.” Stark said it grimly.

  Mortimer glanced down the darkened corridor that led to the right and noticed a black curtain hung across it.

  “What’s the matter?” Stark asked sharply.

  “Nothing,” Mortimer answered.

  “In that case,” Stark said. He opened the door and a wide swath of light passed over them, deathly pale, with swirling flecks of dust. “Unless there’s something else.”

  Mortimer faced Stark in the mottled light. “No. Nothing.” A grave premonition swam into his mind, the dreadful sense that he would never see Stark again. “Sorry for how this turned out,” he said.

  For an instant, he thought he saw something move across Stark’s face, some glimmer of affection shaded by regret. Then it passed, and Stark stepped back into the shadowy depths of his apartment, and closed the door.

  Mortimer had never been so coldly dismissed, but there was nothing to be done about it. And so he walked out of the apartment and down the stairs, where he turned right, thinking that he could use a drink, maybe a little talk with his best friend, Abe. At the corner he glanced back toward Stark’s apartment, recalled the black curtain that hung over the corridor, and wondered if his first suspicion could possibly be correct.

  The light changed, but Mortimer remained in place. He knew he had to focus on the situation, and so, walking now, he started first with a chronological arrangement of events, recalling how Caruso had brought up the missing wife. No. It hadn’t begun there. It had begun with his owing Labriola fifteen grand, and what that meant was that everything that followed was his fault. If he hadn’t bet on Lady Be Good, he’d never have gotten into this position. But Lady Be Good had been a good bet. Several of the old stoopers at the track had told him so. So, when you looked at it, it was really their fault for giving him a bad tip. He shook his head, realizing that he’d done it again, gotten completely off the track.

  And so he started again, this time carefully recalling the stages by which he’d gotten into this bind. Sure, it came back to owing Labriola fifteen grand, but that really didn’t matter now. What mattered was that at the end of the process, everybody would be okay. Except the woman, of course, because what happened to her didn’t really matter. Why should it, because when you got right down to it, it was all her fault anyway. If she hadn’t taken a fucking hike, none of this shit would have happened.

  Bullshit, he thought. He shook his head at the absurdity of his own conclusion. It wasn’t the woman’s fault at all. Like everything else, it was his fault, goddammit. Every fucking bit of it was his fault and nobody else’s. He’d gotten into debt with a rotten old hood, then tried to pay off that debt by lying to Stark and cheating him, and now he had to fix it because Stark had gotten wind of something screwy in this thing, and God only knew what dark and bloody thing he’d done to the guy he’d caught following him.

  Mortimer’s mind raced through the grim possibilities—everything from kicking his ass to cutting his throat—but he couldn’t determine the likelihood of Stark doing one thing over the other.

  But the real question, Mortimer decided, was why Stark had done anything at all. What threat had he perceived in the guy he’d caught tailing him? He was just an ordinary guy, according to Caruso. And yet Stark had gone after him hammer and tongs.

  Why?

  The answer came with such force and certainty that the word itself escaped Mortimer’s mouth and hung in the late-morning air like a strand of Marisol’s coal-black hair.

  Lockridge.

  TONY

  He couldn’t stop thinking about Sara, about the fact that if something really had happened to Eddie, then she was in more danger than he could possibly have imagined. Before now he’d feared that one of his father’s goons might strong-arm her. It might stop at intimidation, or it might involve grabbing her arm and giving it a painful squeeze. All of that would be wrong, he knew, and none of it would ultimately work. You didn’t keep a wife that way. Well, some people did. His cousin Donny kept Carla that way. And, of course, his father had ruled with the same iron fist. But he did not want to be his father, or have a wife who lived with him the way his mother had lived with the Old Man, cringing, terrified, reduced to shadow, a mere reflection of her dread. He wanted Sara the way she was when he’d first met her. He wanted the young woman who’d stood alone before an old piano and sung her heart out. Her courage astonished him suddenly, the sheer grit she’d had to have just to do what she’d done that night. He had taken that brave young woman, so perfect, and chipped away at that perfection, coaxing her to the suburbs, reducing her to baby factory—or at least trying to—and then, when no babies came, he’d rubbed her face in this failure, as if she were the one who’d done everything wrong, she the one who’d ruined his life.

  He went to his car and drove away, leaving his employees to fend for themselves. Suddenly it didn’t matter if they came in late, lay down on the job, misplaced some form, or sent a load of fish to the wrong restaurant. He’d run the business the way he’d run his marriage, under the sword of his father’s instruction. You have to show the people who work for you that you’ve got the muscle, his old man had told him. You have to show that woman who’s boss.

  And so he’d done that, Tony thought. For sixteen years he’d worn the pants, laid down the law, gotten his way. And now he’d reached the end of the way he’d gotten, the barren crossroads of his life.

  He drove aimlessly along Sunset Highway, all the way to Montauk Point, where he stood on the beach and watched the waves tumble one after another onto the vacant shore.

  It was noon by the time he returned home. He hadn’t intended to go there. There were bars and diners where he could have sat through the afternoon, the night, even the early-morning hours. And yet, here he was, staring at the empty house, the gray, cheerless windows, imagining the bedroom where she’d never sleep again. But dire as that reality was, it was not nearly so dark as what might yet happen to Sara. He knew that she’d wanted only to leave him. She’d taken not a dime of his money. She’d left the Ford Explorer in the driveway. What else could her message have been but that she wanted nothing of him and nothing of his. She had wanted only to be rid of him and had probably never guessed that anyone else might be looking for her. Certainly she would not have dreamed that the Old Man would have hired some thug and set him loose like a dog i
n the woods.

  Something moved behind his car. He twisted to the rear and peered through the back window, where he saw Della coming toward him.

  “Hi, Della,” Tony said as he got out of the car.

  A thin smile labored to hold its place on her lips, then expired. “I need to talk to you, Tony.”

  “You want to come inside?”

  She shook her head.

  “Okay,” Tony said. “What’s on your mind?”

  DELLA

  She knew exactly what was on her mind, but the words were a problem. How do you tell a man that his father is a crazy old bastard, completely out of control and dangerous and who, at that very moment, was scaring the living hell out of her?

  “Have you heard from Sara?” Tony asked.

  She’d not expected the sudden change in his voice, the way the tone went from a question to a plea. But it was the question itself that caught her off guard. She’d come to tell him that his father had confronted her, and later her mother, and that these confrontations had really frightened her and so she’d decided that he needed to know about them. That was as far as she’d intended to go. Certainly, she’d had no expectation of admitting that Sara had called her, even hinted at where she was and what she was doing. But Tony had asked her outright, and so she knew that the moment had come—the moment of truth, they called it in the movies—when you had to confront the full and awesome nature of your peril or live a coward all your life.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I have, Tony.”

  His eyes caught fire, and she saw in that instant the depth of his love and the torment of its loss. “Is she okay?” he asked softly.

  “Yeah,” Della answered. “She’s fine.”

  She expected a volley of questions to follow, hard and blunt, raining down upon her like a hail of bullets. But instead, Tony shrank back against the car, folded his arms, and let his head droop forward for a moment. “Good,” he said.

  “I don’t know where she is,” Della said. “Just that she’s okay.”

  Tony drew himself up and settled his gaze on the empty street. “That’s all that matters.”

  She had never heard a man say a more wholly selfless thing. She’d thought he was like his father, filled with the Old Man’s seething violence, but now he seemed merely broken, and in his brokenness curiously baffled, like a man who’d been badly beaten in some bar brawl and was struggling to understand how the argument began.

  “You and Mike,” he said. “You’re happy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s good.” He started to speak, then stopped, and in that awkward gesture Della saw the young man Sara had first met, so vulnerable and uncertain, seeking love, infinitely kind.

  “The thing is,” he began, then stopped, glanced once again into the night, then back to Della. “Before you know it, things get out of hand.”

  “They do, Tony.”

  “And the years go by, you know?”

  “They do, yeah.”

  He gazed at his shoes, kicked lightly at the cement pavement. “So, that’s how it goes.” He studied the deserted yard. His face grew somber. “You think she might come back, Della? On her own, I mean.”

  She shook her head.

  “No, I don’t either,” Tony said. “So, what now? You got any ideas?”

  “Just one thing, Tony,” Della said. “You gotta be careful about your father.”

  “My father?”

  “He’s scary, you know?” The rest burst from her in a torrent. “The thing is, I told my mother about him coming over. I know that before I told you he didn’t come, but he did. And, Tony, he was really scary, and so I told my mother about it and she went to see him ’cause it turns out they knew each other in high school, and so she figured she could put in a word for me.”

  “A word about what?” Tony asked.

  “Like, leave me alone. That kind of word. Because, the thing is, he grabbed me. When he came over that time. And so my mother went over to tell him to, you know, leave me alone, but she didn’t get anywhere with that because he was the same way to her. You know, like real threatening.”

  “He threatened your mother?”

  “He scared her,” Della said. “And she came back and she told me to just stay out of it because he—your father—he was . . . dangerous.”

  “Dangerous,” Tony repeated softly.

  “Yeah, Tony. So that’s why she said I should stay out of it.”

  Tony’s gaze was oddly admiring. “Why didn’t you?”

  “I couldn’t do it,” Della answered. “Because . . . if he’d hurt me, and then my mother, well, I had to think what he might do to Sara, you know?”

  Tony looked like a man who’d long expected terrible news but was only now getting the full report of just how terrible it was. “Thank you,” he said quietly, then reached out and touched her arm. “Thank you, Della.”

  TONY

  He’d been waiting for almost half an hour when his father’s dark blue Lincoln turned into the driveway. The Old Man drove the car himself now, the days when he’d been chauffeured around by some gorilla long gone. Tony knew that even in the old days his father had never been very high in the criminal pecking order. He’d carried himself like a big shot, though, smoked expensive cigars and dressed in fancy double-breasted suits, and hired muscle he didn’t need, usually some has-been boxer who chauffeured him from one crummy shylocking operation to the next. But now the great Leo Labriola was alone behind the wheel, a big, blustering man still, but one without backup.

  “What are you doing here?” the Old Man said as he pulled himself out of the car. He was wearing flannel trousers and a floral shirt. In such attire he looked as if he should pass the autumn of his life playing pinochle in a retirement community in Florida instead of hiring some goon to track down a woman.

  “What?” Labriola snapped. “What you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” Tony said with a shrug.

  “You curious?”

  “What?”

  “You curious where I been?”

  “No.”

  “With Belle,” Labriola said, his eyes daring Tony to say a word about it. “She blew me.”

  “Jesus,” Tony said disgustedly.

  “You don’t like it?” the Old Man barked.

  Tony shrugged again. What did it matter what he liked or didn’t like about his father’s life? Belle Adriani had been the Old Man’s mistress for as long as Tony could remember, a bleached-blond club dancer with long fire-engine-red fingernails and a perpetual pout. Labriola had picked her up when she was twenty and had kept her as his personal sex slave ever since. Once he and his mother had run into them at a local street fair. His mother put her hand on Tony’s arm, led him in the opposite direction, and never uttered a word about it.

  “Belle does what I tell her.” The Old Man laughed. “Not like that fucking hayseed you married.”

  “We need to talk,” Tony said.

  Labriola scowled, then elbowed past Tony and headed up the cement walkway that led to the house. When he reached the front steps, he turned toward his son. “Okay, so? Talk.”

  “It’s about Sara,” Tony said.

  The Old Man waved his hand. “That’s being taken care of.”

  “How is it being taken care of?”

  “I told you I’d find her.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “What difference does it make how I do it as long as it gets done?”

  “You know anything about Eddie?”

  “You mean that mick works for you? What about him?”

  “He’s missing.”

  Labriola laughed. “So what? Jesus, some fucking mick works for you goes missing and you think I know something about it? What’s the matter with you, Tony? What I got to do with this guy?”

  “I need to know who’s looking for Sara,” Tony said.

  Labriola glared at him. “You don’t need to know nothing I don’t want to tell you.”

  “
Who’s looking for Sara?” Tony demanded.

  “What’s that got to do with this fucking mick?”

  Tony started to answer, then stopped. If he told the truth, Caruso’s head was on the block.

  “I want you to stop looking for Sara,” he said instead.

  Labriola squinted, as if against an unexpected flash of light. “You what? You want me to stop looking for that—”

  “Don’t call her names,” Tony blurted out.

  “What, you a tough guy all of a sudden?”

  “I mean it,” Tony said firmly. “Don’t call her names.”

  “You’re still pussy-whipped, Tony. She’s still got you by the balls.”

  “Stop looking for her,” Tony said.

  Labriola’s face had become a smirking mask. “What, you think you can find her? You couldn’t find your own dick, Tony. And what if you did find her? You gonna beg her to . . .” He studied his son’s face for a moment, as if trying to read the mind behind it. Then he shrugged. “Okay,” he said lightly. “Okay, fine, Tony. You find her.” He grinned malevolently. “Good luck,” he said, then turned and trudged up the stairs, his great arms pumping massively, as if warming up for some final title fight, the great belt in contention now, the championship of the world.

  FIVE

  Someone to Watch Over Me

  MORTIMER

  He took his usual place at the dark end of the bar, and it struck him unpleasantly that he had always tended toward shadowy corners. Like a bug, he thought.

  Jake stepped over and poured a drink. “You look like shit, Morty.” He gave the bar a quick wipe, then slid over a bowl of beer nuts. “Like shit,” he repeated like some doctor who was making sure his professional observation had not gone unnoted.

  “Yeah,” Mortimer said. He knocked back the round. “Where’s Abe?”

  “Back in his office,” Jake said.

  “I hear he’s got a girlfriend,” Mortimer said, allowing himself the small pleasure that Abe had shared this intimacy. But that was what best friends did, wasn’t it, share things they didn’t share with other guys? It was the only thing that gave relief, he decided, the warmth of friendship, all that trust. “He told me about her,” he added as if displaying a medal he’d won for good service.