Pigtown Page 5

  When morning came, a crowing rooster brought Andrea out of her sleep. Sunlight washed over her bedroom, etching irregular outlines of leaves on her bed and walls. She stretched, savoring the comforting warmth of her quilt. She sprung up, tossing off the covers. Had it been one of those dreams that seemed real? She leaped from her bed and ran into the kitchen. “Shit!” She took a broom, mop, and a pail with two big yellow sponges inside and began cleaning up the mess.

  Two hours later she rested her chin on the mop handle and surveyed her work. Good job. She liked a neat, clean house; it made her feel good about herself and her life. She’d come a long way since the days she was peddling her ass to buy drugs. She looked up at the sunflower clock above the sink: 8:45 A.M. She was glad today was Wednesday, and that she had only one class tonight. She had to be behind the stick at the bar by ten-thirty to set up for the lunch crowd of truckers and taxi drivers who wolfed down Holiday’s awful food and seemed to love every mouthful.

  She wanted to shave her legs and take a nice, slow shower. She smiled when she realized that she was naked. She went into the bedroom and looked at herself in the closet mirror: flat stomach, firm breasts with large pink crowns. Her bush was sprouting wings. If she had still been into men, she’d have taken a run over to her electrolysis lady on Ocean Avenue for a tree trimming, but since she wasn’t, she could live with all the hair. Sucking in her gut, she preened for herself.

  “Just like every other guy I’ve met in my life, Stuart wants to help me,” she said to her reflection. “I’m a barmaid ex-junkie with a rap sheet, and this guy wants to be my friend, and he won’t come in my mouth, either. Gimme a fuckin’ break,” she said, and stepped into the shower.

  That Wednesday morning, Franklin Gee and James Hollyman, the Rastafarians who were always talking their secret shit with Holiday, were huddled around a table near the kitchen when Andrea walked into the bar just after ten. When the door closed behind her, it cut off the bright sunlight, leaving her in a dark, dank place stinking of stale beer and cigarettes.

  Paddy Holiday’s cold eyes swept over her. She felt his chilling stare and hurried behind the bar, depositing her pocketbook in the drawer under the antique cash register. Except for Paddy and his friends, the place seemed empty. She wondered how long it took the Rastafarians to braid their dreadlocks. She figured it had to take hours.

  She reached under the bar for a roll of paper towels and a bottle of spray cleaner and began wiping off the top of the bar and emptying ashtrays. She caught the faint aroma of simmering sauces wafting out of the kitchen. After cleaning the bar, she began setting paper placemats in front of each stool. She had just reached for the silverware tray under the bar when she looked up to see Paddy and the dreadlock twins standing at the bar. The Rastafarians were giving her that damn toothy Jamaican grin of theirs.

  Hollyman leaned over the bar, his face inches from hers. “One day I’m goin’ to catch you, woman, and we’re goin’ to have ourselves a party.”

  She slapped down a knife on the side of the placemat. “Even if you caught it, you couldn’t ride it,” she hissed, placing a spoon next to the knife.

  “How are things going?” Paddy asked.

  “Good,” she said, setting another mat.

  Paddy clutched the bar with his hands and began doing standing pushups. “Did Stuart break your balls yesterday?”

  Her stomach went hollow. “He questioned me for a while, then I walked. No big deal. I came back here, but you’d already split for the day, so I went to school.”

  “You tell ’im anything?” Paddy asked, moving backward.

  She tried to put on a convincing smile. “There was nothing for me to tell him, was there?” She started to move off. Holiday grabbed her wrist, pinning her to the bar. The dreadlock twins’ grotesque smiles grew larger. Holiday moved his face close to hers. “How’dya like livin’ the clean life?”

  “I like it, Paddy.”

  “Think you’ll ever forget how to give head?”

  Fear crept up her back. “Are you kidding? It’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget.” She tried to break his grip on her wrist.

  Holiday smiled at the two men. He looked back at Andrea. “Think you’ll ever forget who your friends are?”

  “No,” she said weakly.

  Holiday’s fist caught her on the temple; she fell, sprawling onto the floor. Gee and Hollyman rushed behind the bar and dragged her out.

  “In the storeroom,” Holiday ordered, going and locking the front door.

  They carried her through the swinging kitchen doors. The elderly man who cooked the mediocre lunches for Paddy looked down at the pots on the stove. He continued stirring his gravy as if it were perfectly normal to have women dragged through the kitchen every day. Gee opened the storeroom door. Cartons of liquor and tins of condiments were stacked against the wall, along with demijohns of cherry peppers. They tossed her into the crowded space. She cowered up against a case of single-malt whiskey.

  “Why are you doing this?” she screamed at her tormentors.

  Holiday filled the doorway. “You’re fucking over your friends, kiddo.”

  “I am not!” she shouted.

  Holiday moved his face closer. Little black hairs sprouted out of his nostrils. “You forgot to tell me that Stuart drove you home last night.”

  Mary, you bitch, you fucking spy. “There was nothing to tell, Paddy. He was waiting for me when I got out of school. He drove me home, said he wanted to help me. He didn’t even ask me any questions about the case, I swear.”

  Holiday tossed her an impatient look. “I don’t like being bullshitted.”

  “I’m not. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  Holiday’s eyes narrowed, searching her face for the lie. He saw only her fear. He looked at Gee and Hollyman. Mimicking their Jamaican singsong, he said, “What you t’ink, man?”

  “I t’ink maybe da woman got a sweet pussy for da policeman,” Gee said.

  Holiday kneaded her left nipple. She cringed at his touch. “You got the hots for Stuart?” he asked, squeezing hard.

  “I don’t have the hots for anybody,” she said, slapping his hand away from her body.

  “Does he have the hots for you?” Holiday asked.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “I want you to get close to that policeman. Give ’im head, fuck ’im, do whatever you gotta do. I wanna know whatever he knows about Beansy.”

  She brought her eyes up to Holiday’s face, confused. “You know I don’t do that stuff anymore.”

  Holiday slapped her, snapping her head against one of the stacked cartons. “You’re goin’ fuckin’ do whatever I tell you to do.” He reached under his shirt and slid a .38 Colt Detective Special out of his in-trouser holster. He grabbed her hair with his left hand, yanked her head back, and forced the revolver’s barrel into her mouth. He cocked the hammer. “You don’t do what I tell you, you’re dead meat. Understand?”

  Gagging, she managed to mumble, “Yes.”

  “Good.” He uncocked the hammer and withdrew the revolver from her mouth. “My two friends here would like to find out if you can still ride that bicycle.”

  “Please, Paddy. Don’t make me do that. I’ll get close to Stuart, I promise.”

  Holiday adjusted his expression, smiled. “Oh, I guess everyone’s entitled to one fuck-up. But, please, Andrea, work with me on this.”

  “I will, Paddy.” At that moment she would have done anything to get out of the storeroom, just so that she could breathe and escape from the place where, she knew, she had touched death.

  Daniel Lupo got up from behind his desk and walked out onto the terrace.

  He was dressed in an immaculately tailored gray Armani suit, blue shirt, and dark blue tie. His suite of offices was on the twenty-sixth floor of the Chanin Building in Manhattan, across the street from the Grand Hyatt Hotel on Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street.

  He walked across the dark red tiles to his telescope and pressed his eye against
its eyepiece, turning the focusing knob as he carefully scanned the windows of the hotel. The curtains in one of the bedrooms were split, a man and woman were in bed. The man was on top of her; her legs were wrapped around his hips, and she was gyrating wildly. Lupo’s heart beat faster; he sharpened the focus. Finally tearing himself away from this free bit of entertainment, he muttered, “Back to work,” and went back inside.

  Frank “Frankie Bones” Marino sat on a leather sofa next to his nephew, Carmine, a thirty-eight-year-old MBA with manicured nails, dark wavy hair, and a dark business suit. An open attaché case lay on the sofa beside Carmine.

  Lupo sat in his chair, still thinking of the couple across the street in the hotel. “What’s on the agenda?”

  A confident smile lit up Carmine’s handsome face. “Those wires you ordered placed inside the law firms are beginning to pay off. Wiggham, Golden and Klein are working on the acquisition of the Lancaster Group by the Marcum Corporation.”

  “How far along are they?” Lupo asked, lacing his hands behind his head and leaning back.

  “They’re hoping to announce in about a month,” Carmine said.

  Lupo smiled out of one corner of his mouth. Installing wires in telephones, lamps, and chairs of the big law firms was one of his more brilliant ideas. He snapped forward, exchanging a satisfied smile with his great, thick-necked friend, whose forehead was pitted with acne scars. We’ve been together so long, we can hear each other’s thoughts, he thought, picking up his eyeglasses from the desk and cleaning them with the bottom of his tie. “What did Lancaster open at today?”

  “Thirty-four and five-eighths, down a quarter from yesterday,” Carmine said.

  “Has the stock been getting a lot of play?” Frankie Bones asked his nephew.

  Carmine consulted his spreadsheet. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  Lupo put his glasses back on and said to Carmine, “I want you to start our offshore guys buying up Lancaster stock.”

  “How much do you want them to buy?” Carmine asked.

  “As much as they can,” Lupo said, noticing the gleam in the back of Carmine’s dark eyes. “Any other deals ready to go?”

  “There are a few things we should take a look at in a couple of months, but nothing right now,” Carmine said, taking a stack of spreadsheets out of his attaché case. “Here are the profit statements on our video stores for August. Want me to go over them with you?”

  “Put them on my desk, and then leave your uncle and me alone for a few minutes. We got some personal things to talk over.”

  “Of course,” Carmine said. He placed the sheets on the desk and walked from the room.

  When the door closed, Frankie Bones said, “I never trusted that kid.”

  “He’s your brother’s son, for crissake.”

  “That means blood, not trust.”

  Lupo’s eyebrows rose quizzically, seeming to slide up his long, balding forehead. “What happened?”

  Frankie Bones raised his stubby hands and let them fall onto his lap. “Holiday fucked up. He had two black guys drive Beansy to the meet. They go inside the house with him, one of them wised off, told Beansy no Italian was going to tell the Brothers how to spend their money. Beansy cold-cocks big-mouth, and the other nigger takes out a piece and shoots ’im. Afterward they realize they just whacked a made guy, they panic, and stuff ’im in the fuckin’ icebox.”

  “You were supposed to be there to talk to Beansy when he got to the house.”

  “Danny, I got stuck in traffic on the damn bridge.”

  An exasperated sigh. “Do we know who these guys are?”

  “Yeah, we know.”

  “Why are we still using Holiday? He ain’t one of us, he’s a cop.”

  “We use him to deal with the niggers, and he’s got quality wires into the police department. Over the years his information has always been on the money. He saved us a lot of heartaches.”

  Lupo shook his head impatiently. “But we know his sources. They’re all on our payroll.”

  “But they’ll only deal through him.”

  “Do the cops have anything on Beansy?”

  “No, they don’t know shit. Holiday’s on top of it, he’ll keep us informed.”

  Lupo got up and prowled around the room, trying to see all the angles. “We’ve been washing dirty money into legit businesses for the past twenty years. I’d hate to see it blow up in our faces because of screw-ups in the street.”

  Frankie Bones responded confidently. “Ain’t no way what happened in Pigtown is goin’ to reach us here.”

  “It’s already reached us here, Frankie Bones. You think we can afford to let a curly-headed nigger do one of our people and walk?”

  “I guess we gotta do something.”

  “Yeah, and soon.” Lupo sat down and played idly with a gold letter opener on his desk. “We’re losing respect on the street. People we do business with are afraid, they don’t know who can be trusted. Sammy Bull, the underboss, rolls over on John and testifies, he testifies against his boss. Unfucking heard of, I still can’t believe it.”

  “I know, I know,” Frankie Bones said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “We can steal more money with less risk by being legitimate, but we gotta maintain respect in the street.”

  “Whaddaya want me to do?”

  Lupo had already come to a decision. “I want you to take both of them out, I want it done now, and I want it done messy.”

  “You want I should use our people?”

  “I want you to coordinate the hit. Use our people to stalk them, but bring in a ‘Dixie cup’ to do the job, someone we can toss away in case there’s a problem. That way we wouldn’t have to take out one of our own.”

  “Done like a dinner.”

  Lupo reached into the humidor on his desk and took out a cigar. He lit it slowly, his eyes fixed on Frankie Bones. “How’s the other thing going?”

  “We’re almost ready to move. I’m worried, Danny. Too many people know about this thing.” Frankie’s big, bald, oversize head retracted between his shoulders as he instinctively assumed a defensive posture. His shrewd, piglike eyes glittered with menace.

  Lupo tried to reassure him. “I know, but we can handle it.”

  “Remember, we’re talking serious money here. We were supposeta take part of the shit out of the Queens plant and hide it in the cheese factory. It’s too risky leaving it all in one place. Now what are we gonna do without Beansy? He was the key to this whole thing.”

  “I’ve been thinkin’ on that. I figure we’re gonna have to deal with Beansy’s niece, Angela.”

  Frankie’s expression conveyed his doubts. “She’s straight, and besides, she hates our guts.”

  “Ain’t nobody that straight. I’ll feed her a line of shit and offer her three or four grand a week. Our old friend greed will bring her around.”

  “It’s worth a shot. Maybe she still got the hots for you?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  Frankie Bones lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the onyx ashtray. He looked at Lupo and said, “Sammy the Milkman called earlier.”

  Lupo’s tongue fished a sliver of tobacco from between his front teeth. “How is our milk hijacker?” he asked.

  “He grabbed a load of liquid milk off the turnpike last night and unloaded it at the bottler in Glendale. Like always, he drove the empty tanker to the docks, where it was supposeta be loaded onto one of Charlie Kee’s ships. The Chinaman pays us sixty grand for the tanker and then sells it in China for two hundred and fifty K.”

  “Ain’t capitalism wonderful,” Lupo said, holding the cigar under his nose, savoring the aroma.

  “The problem is that the ship that was supposeta take the tanker truck back to China broke down. She’s carrying a bunch of boat-jumping Chinamen that gotta be unloaded somewhere along the East Coast, so by the time they’re ready it’ll be another week and a half. The cops and the milk company are searching high and low for the tanker
truck. It ain’t easy stashin’ a big thing like that.” He dragged on his cigarette and said, “The Milkman wants us to hide it until the ship gets here.”

  Lupo got up and walked over to the sliding doors that led out onto the terrace. He stared out at his telescope, lost in thought. “Tell me about those liquid tanker trucks.”

  “They’re shiny oval tubes sitting on top of an eighteen-wheel flatbed. They got their own refrigeration unit and valves in the back that pump out the milk.”

  As his mind raced, Lupo said absentmindedly, “The guy in Glendale sells the milk to large discount food chains, right?”

  “Yeah. All those big outfits got their own labels.”

  “How do they load the milk into the tanker?”

  “Through a hatch on top of the tanker.”

  “How big is this hatch?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but it’s big enough for a man to climb inside. Federal health regulations make them disinfect the inside after each load.”

  Lupo walked away from the sliding doors and crossed the room to the sofa. He sat down next to his friend. “I’ve been thinking that we oughta find another way to ship the shit to Camacho in Chicago. We’ve been using those moving vans too long. We could ship the stuff inside the tanker. In a week and a half we could make two, maybe three trips. That way if something should happen, we’d only take a hit on one load.”

  “I like that idea, Danny,” Frankie Bones said. “We’d need clean paper on the tanker, but that ain’t no problem.” He leaned over the arm of the sofa and crushed the cigarette in the ashtray. “How we gonna stop the stuff from sliding all over the inside of the tanker, maybe breakin’ open?”

  “We could wedge in some wood around the sides of the load, or build some kinda corral to hold the stuff in place, or we could just lay each wheel flat and wrap them up in bubbly plastic or something.”

  “Yeah. It should work. Let’s do it.” He turned sideways and looked at Lupo. “On that other thing, the dreadlock crew might get pissed when we ice their brothers. Could get messy, bad for business.”