Bloodline: A Novel Read online

  Tommy called out, then walked along with her to make sure she got home safely to her apartment, which was near the river, only a block away from his regular patrol path. He had not made a pass at the tall, buxom blonde, and when he left he politely wished her good night and thought no more of it. It soon became a habit for Tommy to walk her home. The walk was a pleasant respite from the normal lonely monotony of his job.

  They talked about his college work and the long path to law school that was still ahead of him. For her part, Mabel occasionally talked about her unhappy life in Atlantic City, where she’d met her husband, who seemed to have devoted the years before their divorce to unwanted rape and undeserved assault. But what Mabel Fay really liked to talk about was the movies. Apparently, she never missed seeing one, and she confided in Tommy on one walk home that she was saving her money to go to Hollywood.

  “Where’s Hollywood?” Tommy asked.

  “In California.”

  “Why go to California?”

  “To be in the movies,” she said. “I seen all those movies, and I don’t want to be blowing my own horn, but those girls don’t have any more than I got.”

  “I thought they made movies over in Jersey.”

  “They do. I still go over to Fort Lee and watch them. A couple of times they let me be in a crowd scene. But the weather is better in California. They don’t even have a winter there, I hear.”

  “That must make it tough to make movies about Eskimos,” Tommy said.

  “Oh, Tommy, you’re such a joker.”

  “Well, I’m not joking now,” he said. “You go to California and you’re going to be a big star.”

  “You think so?”

  “You can’t miss,” said Tommy, who rarely went to the movies because he spent all his free time studying his college work.

  Mabel’s apartment building was just up ahead. He stopped with her in front of the flight of steps leading to the main entrance of the three-story walk-up and squeezed her hand, in a brotherly fashion, as he did every night.

  This time she had a key in her hand and she transferred it to his.

  “What’s this?”

  “That’s my key. Why don’t you come up when you’re done?” Mabel said. “Two-B. Second floor, on the right.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Mabel walked up the steps into her house. Tommy slipped the key into his trouser pocket and went back to his regular patrol rounds.

  When his tour ended at 5:00 A.M., he walked back to Mabel’s apartment. He planned to tell her that she owed him nothing for walking her home and then he would have a cup of coffee and leave. Feeling very noble, he used the key to let himself into Mabel’s apartment.

  It was dark inside when he closed the door behind him, and he softly called, “Mabel?”

  “In here,” she answered. A dim light came on down at the other end of the railroad rooms. He picked his way through an amazing clutter of furniture and found himself at the open door of her bedroom.

  A small lamp burned on an end table. Mabel lay on the bed naked, the covers clustered in a lump at the foot of the mattress. Two kerosene heaters glowing cherry red in the room made it summer warm. Mabel’s body glistened in the faint light, as if she had oiled her skin. Her breasts were even larger than he had imagined them to be. Tommy gulped and Mabel said, “I’ve been waiting for you. I hoped you’d come.”

  Still on her back, she extended her arms toward him. “Come here, Tommy,” she said in a throaty voice. “And get out of those clothes.” A minute later, Tommy was in her bed.

  Tommy’s sexual experience had consisted of a couple of visits to French whorehouses while he was overseas. He had always assumed that being with Parisian prostitutes had made him a man of the world, but in the hands and other parts of the experienced Mabel Fay he quickly found out how wrong he was. Mabel did things to him that Tommy had only heard of in barracks and locker rooms.

  When they were done, he rolled onto his back and lay there breathing heavily. Mabel instantly reached for a cigarette on the night table, casually lit one, and smoked quietly in the semidark room.

  Tommy felt he should say something, but when he tried to speak she shushed him by putting an index finger across his lips and pursed her own lips.

  He lay in the dark, vaguely annoyed, somehow convinced that some words should follow their act. She did not have to say that she loved him; he was not going to say he loved her. But he felt they should say something, just to prove that they were there together.

  Her silence left him with a curious sense of dissatisfaction and just reignited the confusion he had always felt when trying to understand women’s ways.

  It was still dark outside when Tommy got up to go; Mabel did not protest; she did not ask him to stay, and when he went out Tommy left the apartment key she had given him on the kitchen table near the front door.

  That was the first time with Mabel. He did not see her again until the following week, when she told him that the boss had just changed her hours at the restaurant. She now worked late each Tuesday night, getting off just around Tommy’s quitting time of 5:00 A.M.

  “Walk me home?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Tommy answered, and wound up in her bed again. And so for almost two years, it had been a regular Tuesday event for Tommy, spending a few hours after work rolling around on the sheets with Mabel.

  She still did not talk much after they made love, but Tommy came to accept that. It was enough that on that one night a week they needed each other and they had each other. If it made the rest of the week better for both of them, who could complain about that? Except for his brother, Mario, and what he did not know wouldn’t hurt him.

  One thing Tommy learned was that he was able to talk to women much more easily now than he had before. The great tongue-tying mystery of sex was not such a puzzle anymore, and with the mystery gone, the awe had gone, too.

  It was deep into the early morning hours near Washington’s Birthday in 1922 when Tommy left Mabel’s apartment. He was outside only a few minutes before he shivered and cursed. He should have stayed with her; it was just too damned cold to be outside on a night like this. The thermometer had been in the single digits for seventy-two straight hours and everything was frozen. Underfoot, the snow was so cold that it squeaked and moaned as he walked on it, and in the moonless pitch of the night he felt as if he were walking through a graveyard.

  All he wanted to do was to get home quickly, and he turned off the main street and into a long commercial alley that ran for two blocks between banks of small factories and warehouses.

  The wind whipped through the alley as if it were a mountaintop. There was not even a welcoming doorway to step into to get out of the wind. He walked faster. He never should have had that good-night cup of coffee with Mabel ten minutes earlier. It had tasted good, warmed his insides, but he had not reckoned on the consequences. Everything that went in had to come out, and in cold weather it seemed to have to come out that much faster.

  He hesitated at just urinating in the broad alley. He was no longer a rookie policeman, but he still took the job seriously enough to worry that if someone drove through the alley he would not be setting a very good example by being seen urinating against a wall. He had arrested people for things like that.

  He saw to his right another half alley leading back between two old brick warehouses. He walked down there, then could not wait anymore, and, turning his back to the main alley and the wind, partly from modesty, partly to keep from spattering himself, he let loose a long steaming torrent. He sighed with relief, rebuttoned his pants, and turned to go back to the main street.

  Then he stopped to listen. The cold night air carried sounds that at other times might have been lost. Some sound was coming from farther back in the small alley.

  His first thought was that a burglary was taking place, and he cursed under his breath. All he wanted to do was to go home and get warm.

  He considered walking away, for only a split second, then unh
olstered his revolver and moved over toward the darker side of the alley and slowly began moving forward, trying to be silent, all senses alert for trouble.

  As his eyes grew more accustomed to the deeper darkness back here, he noticed a dogleg turn in the alley, a turn that had been invisible until he was right up on it.

  The indistinct sounds grew louder, clearer. Tommy took a deep breath and stepped cautiously around the corner, and the sounds, no longer muffled by the wind and the walls of the buildings, became instantly clear. Ahead, he could hear the sound of two different motors running. The sound clearly came from two dark splotches in the night. He could hear the sound of scurrying feet but could not tell how many people they belonged to. He stopped for a moment, trying to will his heart to stop pounding so loudly, to stop making so much noise. It did not work. He could hear voices, voices talking softly in Italian. He understood the language well enough to know they were cursing good-humoredly, cajoling each other to work faster.

  Tommy stepped back against a building wall and tried to think clearly. Whatever was happening was nothing small. Not with two trucks involved. This had the smell of being a professional job of some sort. Probably bootleggers, and that meant big trouble because bootleggers always went on jobs carrying enough weapons for a small army. The sensible thing to do was to get the hell out of the alley, find the nearest call box, and call up reinforcements.

  That was what he would do, Tommy decided. There were too many of them for him to handle by himself. He would get out of here and call for help.

  Then he heard another sound. It was a moaning wail. He had heard that sound before, heard it in Belleau Wood, and he would never forget it. It was the sound of a wounded, perhaps a dying, man.

  Tommy cocked the hammer on his service revolver and started toward the spot where the two trucks were parked.

  Suddenly a flashlight flicked on from close by, its beam striking him in the eyes with the force of a quick left jab. He hesitated for only a split second, but it was too much.

  “Don’t move,” another voice said from behind him in Italian. “Put the gun down.” He felt the cold barrel of a gun against the back of his neck.

  “Jesus Christ,” came the voice from the man who was somewhere in front of him holding the flashlight. “It’s a goddamn cop. Shoot the bastard.”

  The flashlight beam wavered for just a split second, and as it did, Tommy made an instantaneous decision. He dropped to one knee and fired a round at a spot directly above the light. Then he lunged backward against the legs of the man behind him, trying to turn his body as he moved so he could fire another shot.

  He heard a man curse in pain and then the metallic clatter of the flashlight rolling across the graveled deck of the parking lot. He tried to free his gun hand to take out his other attacker, but somebody had a death grip on his hand.

  And then he felt another body crunch down onto his and another pistol was poked roughly into his neck.

  “Stand up,” said the voice behind him. “And let go of that gun.”

  Tommy did as he was ordered.

  “Move,” the voice ordered.

  He hesitated and somebody kicked him, sending him sprawling forward, and then he saw a starburst as he was cracked across the back of the head and dropped to the ground. He lay there in a crouched position, struggling to maintain consciousness, but he could see nothing and all the sounds seemed distant and echoing.

  “What’s this?” another voice called out in Italian.

  “A cop. He shot Vinnie.” This came in English from somewhere behind Tommy. He wanted to turn his head to see who was speaking, but he could not move.

  The voice spoke rapidly, and Tommy could not make out all the words, but the ones he understood said: “Then kill him and let’s get out of here before anybody else comes. Shoot him and get it over with.”

  “I’ll only do it if the Kid says to.”

  There was a moment of palpable crackling tension and Tommy thought that death was at hand. He wondered if Mario would conduct the funeral Mass. It seemed such a waste to have survived the war and beaten morphine, only to die like this. He thought about his family, all of them he would never see again, and he kept his eyes tightly closed.

  No bullet came. He tried to open his eyes and felt himself bathed in light. Someone behind him was shining a flashlight on him. He heard another voice, almost familiar, speak softly in Italian. It too sounded far away.

  “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “We’re loaded, ready to go, and this cop wanders in here and shoots Vinnie. We was just waiting for you.”

  “I’ll take care of him. The rest of you get the hell out of here. And take Vinnie with you. Get him fixed up.”

  “You going to kill him, Kid?” another voice asked. It belonged to the man who earlier wanted to shoot Tommy.

  “That’s none of your damned business, Rico. Just get that truck out of here. I’ll take care of this.”

  “If you want him killed, I’ll kill the bastard.”

  “You just move your ass,” snapped the one they called Kid.

  Tommy listened with a sort of detached fascination. It was as if they were not arguing about killing him but were talking about someone else. The flashlight’s beam stayed fixed on Tommy, and he was afraid to try to turn his face from the wall.

  He heard people running and then the sound of doors slamming and the two trucks grinding into gear. They crunched over the gravel as they pulled from the lot. He saw their headlights slash across the walls as they drove away. The silence of the night closed in around him. He wondered if everyone had gone. Maybe he could flee. If only he could get to his feet.

  He heard footsteps approaching him from behind. Involuntarily, his shoulders tensed as he expected the loud crack of the bullet.

  Instead, he heard a voice close by his ear. It spoke in English this time, and while it was muffled and soft, he thought he recognized the voice.

  Before he could react, the voice said, “Sorry,” and even as he heard it, he felt another thud against the side of his head. His face smashed forward against the brick wall and he sensed himself losing consciousness. The last thing he heard before he settled onto the icy gravel was the sound of footsteps running away.

  He mumbled to himself. “Nilo.” And then he lay still.

  * * *

  TOMMY CAME TO, cradled in the arms of a uniformed policeman who squatted down on the frozen gravel next to him.

  “Easy, Tommy.” Tommy recognized one of the precinct sergeants, Artie Tracey. Tommy was surprised at the officer’s apparent concern; he could not remember Tracey ever speaking to him in the station house, except to give him an order.

  “How you feeling?”

  “I’m okay,” Tommy said. “I think so anyway.”

  He did not know how long he had been unconscious

  He sat up slowly. There were four other policemen wandering around the now-empty parking lot.

  “How’d you find me?” he asked.

  “Somebody phoned the station house, said we’d find you here. Good thing, too. You could’ve frozen to death out here.”

  “You know who it was?”

  Sergeant Tracey shook his head. “He didn’t give no name. But he was one of your goombahs. He talked with an accent. You got any idea who it was?”

  Tommy hesitated, then shook his head. He tried to get to his feet, but Tracey would not let him.

  “You stay put,” he said. “An ambulance’ll be here any minute.”

  He stood, took off his heavy overcoat, and wrapped it around Tommy’s shoulders, then squatted next to him again. “What went on here? Can you tell me?”

  “I was on my way home and I heard noises in the alley. When I looked, it was some guys in two trucks. I guess they were heisting stuff from one of these warehouses. A couple of them jumped me and then they bopped me and got out of here.”

  “Get a look at any of them?”

  “No. They had a flashlight in my eyes. But before I
went down, I think I shot one of them. I heard them call him Vinnie.”

  “That might be. We found your gun over there,” Cole said. “One bullet was fired. I hope you killed the son of a bitch, whoever he is. You hear any other names?”

  “Just Vinnie. And there was somebody named Rico.”

  “There always is,” Tracey said drily.

  A siren neared then silenced abruptly, and Tommy heard its tires crunching over the gravel as it came down the alleyway.

  “What is this place anyway?” Tommy asked.

  “Well, it’s supposed to be a warehouse, but it’s actually one of Joe Masseria’s stills. From what you say, somebody heisted two truckloads of his booze. They busted some watchman’s skull.”

  That was the moaning he had heard, Tommy realized.

  “He all right?” he asked.

  “He’s not complaining about anything. One of the trucks rolled over him on the way out of here. He’s dead.”

  It was murder, Tommy thought. And Nilo was part of it.

  * * *

  DESPITE TOMMY’S ANNOYANCE, the doctors at St. Luke’s insisted on admitting him so they could monitor his progress for at least a few hours.

  “I’m telling you I’m fine. I’m getting out of here.”

  “And I’m telling you you may have sustained a concussion, and if I release you too soon, you may keel over in the street and derail a trolley car, and then there’ll be hell to pay.” The speaker was a courtly old doctor with a thin pencil-line mustache and rimless glasses that perched on the end of his nose. He smiled at the young patrolman, who sat in a hospital bed, propped up by pillows behind his back. Outside, a cold winter sun bounced its light off the rooftops of other smaller hospital buildings into the room.

  “Now you can just cooperate or I can call the chief’s office and have you ordered into this hospital. And then you’ll stay for three days, minimum, because they’ll want to protect themselves from criticism. I’ll leave it to you.”