grocery on Florida Avenue, talking to Teddy and his two soldiers, Joey Snails and Richie Amato.
“So I’ve been asking myself,” said P.F. with a hand over his stomach. “Who would wanna do a thing like that to poor Larry DiGregorio? Senseless.”
The heat was like a gorilla suit. Teddy, sitting on a milk crate, pried open a clam, sucked out its insides, and threw the shell into a white plastic bucket at his feet.
“That’s three times I been asked the same question,” he told P.F. “First I had the feebs. Then the state troopers and now I got you. The man was a friend of mine. Ask anybody. I never wanted to see him chopped up like that.”
On their milk crates nearby, Richie and Joey Snails exchanged bad-boy smiles and talked about the movie
P.F. felt the gorge rising in his throat. “Well the word is you were having some kind of problem with Larry’s son Nicky . . .”
“Ah, bullshit.” Teddy struggled for a few seconds with a clam that wouldn’t open and then tossed it into the bucket at his feet. “You know the only reason you come around asking questions like that is because I have a last name that ends in a vowel. It’s discrimination, that’s what it is. Being Irish and a drunk like you are I would’ve expected better from you.”
P.F. gave up a smile he’d meant to keep to himself. On his crate, Joey Snails put his fingers up to his head like horns and told Richie “de-tonka” was Indian for buffalo.
“God forbid a robin should fall out of a tree, I’d get blamed for it,” Teddy went on. “Why don’t you do something about real crime? I heard there was a shooting down in the Inlet last night. I don’t see you working on that.”
“I had no idea you were so concerned about the violence in our minority community. You ought to think about organizing a volunteer patrol.”
“There’s crime going on everywhere, you wanna look for it. Look across the street there.”
Teddy pointed to a small Vietnamese restaurant with a yellow-and-red sign out front. “Every night I see twelve guys coming and going out the back of that place,” he said. “So don’t tell me they haven’t got a card game going back there or an illegal shipping operation.”
Three young Asian men dressed in black and wearing sunglasses got into a white Lexus and drove away laughing.
“Sure that’s not just jealousy?” asked P.F.
He’d heard Teddy was getting squeezed these days. Something about Jackie from New York coming into town.
“Poor fuckin’ buffalo,” said Joey Snails. “They hadda go whack most of ’em. But there are still a few left. I saw some the other day when I was driving up the Turnpike ...”
“Get the fuck outa here,” said Richie, admiring the new biceps and traps the steroids had given him. “There ain’t no buffalo in Jersey. They’re all in upstate New York. That’s why they named a town after them ...”
Teddy coughed uncomfortably and dropped another clam in the bucket. “You know,” he said, looking up at P.F. “I hope you didn’t come by here looking for a payoff again, like you used to with your old partner.”
The memory and the gorge in P.F.’s throat seemed to rise simultaneously. Twenty years ago. Coming by with Paulie Raymond, to collect televisions and carpets as bribes.
“No,” P.F. said, trying to keep himself bottled up. “That was Paulie’s game. I was just along for the ride.”
“Good thing too,” Teddy grumbled. “’Cause there ain’t any more where all that came from. A man oughta work for a living anyway.”
“I had occasion to think of those days recently.” P.F. cleared his throat. “Michael Dillon. He was a friend of yours too. I wonder whatever happened to him.”
Teddy took part of a clam into his mouth and spit the rest of it into his bucket. “I don’t know. Maybe a building fell on him. He wasn’t too cautious, you know. Mike.”
P.F. remembered. The smiling tan face. The shoes that he couldn’t afford. And the payoff Paulie took to stop investigating his murder. Thinking about it was like picking at an old scab.
“I wouldn’t go around asking too many questions about that,” Teddy warned him with hard, slitted eyelids. “It might reflect badly on you, if you know what I mean.”
Joey leaned over and asked Richie if he thought a buffalo would make a good coat.
P.F. put up a hand like he was trying to slow traffic. “I just came by to see what you knew about Larry,” he said. “I remembered he was a friend of yours and thought you might have something to add to the investigation.”
“And I already told you. I don’t know nothing about nothing.” Teddy went back to concentrating on his clams.
“Beautiful,” said P.F. “No wonder you go around confused all the time.”
14
VIN HAD FINALLY ARRANGED for me to pick up theweekly envelope from the roofers’ union, but I wanted nothing to do with that. I was determined to raise the boxing money legitimately. What I found out, though, is when you try doing things in a legitimate way, people can get hurt too.
A week after I’d seen Elijah Barton at his house, I was home having dinner with my wife Carla. The kids were in the next room, watching some piece of mayhem on the VCR. He-Ra the Slaughterer or She-Man the Magnificent, one of those superhero cartoons about people getting their skulls crushed. I was eating the Spaghetti-Os that Carla had heated up—little ringlets of death—and thinking about how I’d improve my diet once I started to make some real money.
Then out of the blue, Carla looked up and said, “I got a call from Mr. Schwarzberg at the bank today.”
We’d barely spoken since that blowup we’d had about the couch. I just sat there, stupefied.
“Yeah, what’d he want?”
“He said you were talking to him this morning about us getting a second mortgage.” She opened her right hand like a fan. She’d painted all five nails fire engine red.
The house we lived in wasn’t what you’d call spacious in the best of times. But now I felt the off-white ceiling getting a little lower.
“Schwarzberg called you about the mortgage?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You didn’t say nothin’ to me about that.”
She took out an emery board and began filing her fingernails with it. I felt sick. Not just because chipped bits of fingernail might go flying in the red sauce, but because it was the type of thing her mother might do. Marie the cow.Teddy’s sister. Filing her nails over a steaming plate of linguini while her husband Jack droned on about scamming auto insurance companies.
“Well, we haven’t been saying much of anything to each other lately,” I said.
Even though we’d been fighting, I hadn’t quite lost all the feeling I had for Carla. Maybe because we’d been through so much together. She turned sideways in her chair and rested her hand on where the baby’s spine would be.
“And what kind of second mortgage you think we’re gonna get?” she asked as if she was just curious.
“I don’t know. I thought we could maybe renegotiate a home equity mortgage. See how it goes. What’d we start off with? A house worth fifty-five thousand dollars? I figure it’s worth almost twice that now.”
Her face got all knotted up and for a second I thought the baby must’ve kicked her in the kidneys. Something about having this third kid had really put the years on Carla. All of a sudden she was starting to look like her mother, heavy under the chin and sad around the eyes.
“What’re you, crazy?” she said. “You think this house is worth more now than when we bought it? You take a look outside lately?”
