Chapter 3 - The Blood on the Keys
The house in Englewood did not smell of lemon wax. It smelled of old cedar, unburned fat in the iron skillet, and the cold, gray mud that the gardeners dragged in on their boots from the rose beds.
Lucas Moretti sat on the piano bench in the sunroom, his forearms resting on the lid of the Steinway. The wood was walnut, dull from four years of neglected oiling. Beneath the lid, three of the copper-wound bass strings had gone sour from the river humidity, their pitch slipping down into a dull, flat growl that rattled the music stand whenever the wind off the Palisades hit the bay windows.
Across from him, in a straight-backed cherry chair that had belonged to Lucas’s mother, sat Paulie Vitucci.
Paulie was seventy-one. His ears were long and hair-tufted, his knuckles swollen from forty years of handling heavy crates on the West Side piers before the containers came and ruined the work for everybody who knew how to use a hook. He wore a cardigan with two mismatched horn buttons, and his tea was cold in a cup he held with both hands between his knees.
"You should’ve killed him in the gravel, Lucas," the old man said. His voice was like two bricks being rubbed together in the bottom of a dry well. "You had the slicer in your hand. Hallowell was sitting in the front seat with his mouth open. You should’ve opened Victor right there on the blue-stone and let the rain wash it down the drain before the cook came in."
"Victor has eight captains between here and Red Bank," Lucas said. He didn't look at Paulie. His fingers were tracing the faint white ring on the walnut lid where Isabella had set down her porcelain mug of ginger tea the morning before the car went into the canal. "If I take Victor on the gravel without a sit-down, half the Jersey families think I’ve gone soft in the head from the asthma. They think the lack of air made me paranoid."
"You *are* paranoid," Paulie spat. "You’ve been paranoid since they pulled the Lincoln out of the salt water. And you were right to be. A man who isn't paranoid when he’s sitting on sixty million in dry-dock real estate is just a dead man who hasn't bought his plot yet."
Lucas lifted the piano lid. He struck middle C with his middle finger.
The note was clear enough, but it died quickly, dampened by the felt that had swollen with the October rain.
"Isabella used to tune it herself," Lucas murmured. "She had the wrench with the wooden handle. She said the men from Manhattan charged ninety dollars just to come across the bridge and then they didn't set the pins tight enough for the damp."
"Lucas," the old man said, his voice dropping an octave into that warning rumble he used when the old Don—Lucas’s father—was about to throw an ash-stand through a plate-glass window. "Stop looking at the piano. The girl is in Newark. Martha called her sister from the payphone by the tracks. The sister has a flat in Scranton. Nobody knows them in Scranton. They’re coal people. Victor doesn't have an uncle in Scranton."
"Victor has an uncle everywhere there’s a Western Union office," Lucas said.
He stood up from the bench. He had changed his shirt for a heavy black roll-neck sweater that covered the purple bruise on his throat, but his trousers were still damp at the cuffs where the sleet had soaked them during his ten-minute conversation with Dr. Hallowell beside the Cadillac.
Hallowell was currently in the basement of the carriage house, sitting on an overturned lard tub with five hundred milligrams of sodium pentothal working its way through his femoral vein. He had already told them about the prescription pads. He had told them about the warehouse in Secaucus where the generic albuterol was being repacked into German canisters with lead-weighted bases to make them feel authentic.
He had not yet told them who gave him the sixty thousand dollars in bearer bonds that were found in the spare-tire well of his Fleetwood.
"The girl saw his shoes," Lucas said.
"Shoes don't hold up in front of the Commission, Lucas," Paulie said. "You go to the Commission with 'a six-year-old in pink pajamas saw tan wingtips,' and Sal Mangano will laugh you out of the room. He’ll tell you to take a vacation in Miami. And while you’re in Miami, Victor will take the Fulton Street leases, and you’ll come back to find your locks changed and your name off the bank accounts in Curaçao."
Lucas walked to the bay window.
Below, the lawn fell away in three terraces toward the river. Through the bare November oaks, he could see the gray streak of the Hudson, sluggish and grease-filmed, carrying the garbage of four counties out toward the Narrows.
A black town car—an old model with the chrome trim stripped and the side panels painted with the logo of a commercial linen supply company—was idling at the turn in the drive.
"Is that Tommy’s car?" Lucas asked.
"Tommy and the two cousins from Staten Island," Paulie said. "They’ve been sitting there since three. They don't like it, Lucas. The word is already out on the street that you had an attack on the service floor. A boss who falls down in front of the housekeepers don't stay a boss through the winter. The boys are wondering if they’re going to be collecting from the fish market for you or for Romano come December."
"Tell Tommy to bring his car around the back," Lucas said.
"Why?"
"We’re going to the church."
Paulie paused, his cup half-way to his lip. "St. Jude’s? Father Michael don't open the basement on Tuesdays, Lucas. He’s got the novena for the Italian widows."
"Not St. Jude’s," Lucas said. He didn't turn around. "Our Lady of Sorrows. On Tenth."
Paulie set the cup down so hard the cold tea slopped over the rim, pooling in the saucer around a dry saltine.
"That’s Mangano’s parish, Lucas. If you cross the river without three cars behind you, Victor won't even need to use the inhaler. He’ll just drop a dime to the precinct captain on Twentieth Street, and you’ll spend forty-eight hours in the Tombs with three guys from the Westies who’d carve your liver out for fifty dollars and a carton of Chesterfields."
"Sal Mangano doesn't want me dead," Lucas said. "Not yet."
"How the hell do you know what Sal wants?"
"Because Sal was Isabella’s godfather," Lucas said softly. "And he still thinks I was the one who was driving the car when it hit the bridge abutment."
***
The rain on Tenth Avenue was different from the rain in the Palisades. Out in Jersey, it smelled of dead oak leaves and wet sod; here, it hit the hot asphalt and the iron gratings over the subway vents, rising again as a thin, yellow steam that carried the stench of rotten cabbage, stale beer, and the grease from the deep-fat fryers at the Greek luncheonette on the corner.
Our Lady of Sorrows was wedged between a six-story cold-water tenement and an abandoned horse stable that had been converted into an auto-body repair shop. The limestone facade was black with fifty years of soot from the locomotives on the High Line, and the bronze statue of the Virgin above the double doors had green streaks running down her cheeks like dried salt.
Lucas walked in alone.
He left Tommy and the Staten Island boys three blocks south, parked in front of an empty coal pocket with their engines running and their wipers set to the lowest notch.
The vestibule was dark, smelling of beeswax, damp winter coats, and the cheap paraffin candles that burned in red glass jars before the shrine of St. Anthony.
At the rail of the seventh pew, a man was kneeling.
He was seventy-five, with shoulders that looked like two bags of wet salt under a black cashmere coat that had seen twenty winters. His hair was cropped close to his skull, white and stiff as pig bristles, and his hands—knotted with arthritis and liver spots the size of nickels—were moving slowly along the beads of an olive-wood rosary.
"You look like hell, Lucas," Sal Mangano said without turning his head.
Lucas didn't kneel. He slid into the pew behind the old man, his knees resting against the worn oak of the kneeling bench.
"I had a bad morning, Sal."
"I heard," Mangano murmured. The beads clicked—*pat, pat, pat*—against the back of the pew. "They said you were on your back in the hall. They said the girl from the kitchen had to blow down your neck to keep your brain from turning into cold polenta."
"She didn't blow down my neck," Lucas said. "She had a tube."
"Same thing," Sal said. He made the sign of the cross—quick, perfunctory, the gesture of a man who had squared his accounts with heaven forty years ago and was only checking in to make sure the interest was being paid on time. He turned his head sideways, his profile sharp as an old nickel against the flicker of the red votives. "Victor was here an hour ago."
Lucas didn't blink. "I figured."
"He had two of the boys from the union local with him," Mangano continued. "He said you were slipping. Said the lung thing is getting into your head. He said you accused him of tampering with your medicine because you found some dirt on the carpet."
"The valve was shaved, Sal."
"A lot of valves are shaved," Mangano said. He turned all the way around now, his rheumy, yellow-gray eyes fixing on Lucas’s throat. "Hallowell’s an idiot. We all know that. He’s been writing scripts for the girls at the Latin Quarter since 1952. If you wanted a real doctor, you should’ve gone to Columbia like the rest of the people with money. But you wanted somebody who wouldn't put your name on the state register in Trenton."
"Victor cut it," Lucas said.
"You got proof?"
"A girl saw him."
Sal let out a short, wet wheeze that might have been a laugh if there had been any humor in his chest. "A girl. What girl? The housekeeper’s kid? The one who shouldn't have been within five miles of your house? You think the Commission is going to listen to an eight-year-old mick whose mother can't pay her union assessment?"
"Six," Lucas said. "She’s six."
"I don't care if she’s six months," Mangano snapped. "The street don't run on the word of children, Lucas. The street runs on who can pay the interest on the three-million-dollar bond for the pier renovation on Thursday. Victor says he has the draft from the bank in Jersey City. He says you haven't signed the release because you’re locked in the library with your wife’s music sheets."
Lucas reached into his coat pocket. He didn't pull out Lily’s inhaler this time. He pulled out a small, flat brass key—the key to the safety deposit box at the Manhattan Trust on Forty-Second Street.
He laid it on the worn wood of the pew between them.
"What’s this?" Mangano asked.
"The manifest for the *Isabella*," Lucas said.
The old man went very still. The rosary stopped clicking.
"The boat was scrapped three years ago, Lucas. The insurance company settled."
"The hull was scrapped," Lucas said. His voice was lower now, barely louder than the hum of the oil burners in the church basement. "The cargo wasn't. The cargo was four hundred cases of Swiss timepieces and twelve crates of machine tools from the factory in Bridgeport. The manifest Victor showed the Coast Guard said the hold was full of scrap iron from the rail yards."
Sal looked down at the brass key. His old fingers, crooked with gout, twitched toward it, then pulled back.
"Victor told me the cargo went down with the deck," Sal whispered.
"The cargo went into the Secaucus warehouse three days before the boat hit the bridge," Lucas said. "The bridge didn't fail, Sal. The steering cables were cut with a cold chisel while the boat was tied up at the fuel dock in Bayonne. Isabella was on that boat because she went to meet the surveyor. Victor told her the papers were in the master’s cabin."
Sal Mangano looked up from the key. His face was no longer that of an old man sitting through a novena; it was the face that had run the West Side piers during the war, when bodies were found in the river with their tongues pinned to their collars with upholstery tacks.
"You knew this for three years?" Mangano asked.
"I suspected it for three years," Lucas said. "I knew it thirty minutes ago, when Dr. Hallowell told me where Victor was keeping the ledger for the repackaged medicine."
The old man looked toward the high altar, where the gilded tabernacle caught the faint, gray light from the clerestory windows.
"Victor Romano was like a son to me, Lucas," Sal said.
"He was like a brother to me," Lucas answered. "And he left a six-year-old child to watch me suffocate on the floor so he wouldn't have to explain the pier money to you on Thursday."
Sal Mangano picked up the brass key. He didn't look at it; he just slid it into the watch pocket of his cashmere coat with a motion so smooth it looked like an illusion.
"The girl," Sal said. "Where is she?"
"She’s out of the state."
May you like
"Keep her out," Mangano said. "Because if Victor gets to her before we get to Victor, she won't be telling nobody about yellow shoes. And if she dies, Lucas... I’ll have to assume you made the whole story up to cover your own bad lungs."
***
