Shadow Roll (3 page)

Now what?  Scratch the burn victims in their jellied body bags.  Forget the guys with half their heads blown off or those with missing limbs.  Especially erase the sight of the piteous schnook with no arms
or
legs.

Since it had to be someone intact and also someone who worked here, that someone must know the place and where to get rid of the evidence.  Who worked here?  Kitchen staff.  Cleaners.  So it was down to the basement.  Where better to get rid of a sheet and maybe a pair of pants with blood on the knees than the basement furnace?  Little hope of finding anything like that, but some hope of finding something, anything, to help me out here.

Pulling the string that switched on the overhead bulb, I found myself frozen, standing at the top of the narrow wooden stairs.  I was staring, I was stuck in place, if I didn’t get moving, I was lost.

The brick building with its four towers looked like Dracula’s New York City address, but the basement looked like the Inquisition’s tool shed.  Always knew the Zawadzkis were bats, but this about beat all.  Right below me had to be an altar.  Over to the left was a confessional, no doubt about it.  The rest of the space was filled up with me, several piles of varied scary junk, about seventy statues of JC plus friends.

And the furnace.

Chapter 5

Took me awhile, but I finally got the furnace door open, one too small for an entire body to fit through—seemed logical that if one
could
of been, it
would
of been—when someone cleared his throat behind me.  I must have jumped a foot straight up in the air.

When I got back down, I gasped, “Holy smoke, it’s you.  You spooked me.”

Mister’d come out of the dark, one eye squinted like Popeye due to the smoke traveling up his narrow face from the butt stuck between his thin lips.  “Work here.”

“Of course you do.”

“You don’t.”

“Never a truer word spoken.”

“So whatchoo doin’ here?”

“A stroll down memory lane?”

“Oh yeah?  And whatchoo remember about the basement?”

“Aside from the shed where you used to listen to the radio, you were always down here.”

“You got that right.  Still do.  Like the radio.  Now I like Jack Benny most.  And after him, I like
The Burns and Allen Show
.”

“Makes sense.  Gracie being dumb and all, and George being smart.”

Mister gave me a cagey look.  Was that an insult?  A compliment?  Since he didn’t know and never would, he said, “You said it.”

“Not a great day for the old school, Mister.”

“Whatchoo mean?”

“A child killed.”

Mister spat out the butt.  It landed on the filthy cement floor and died there.  “That one.  That wasn’t no child.  Not no more.”

“She was a child, Mister.”

“Not in the eyes of God.  And don’t no one got bigger eyes than God.”

“Excuse me, but what are you saying?  You saying she had it coming?”

“Ain’t sayin’ nothin’.”

I’d seen it before.  Seen it over and over when I was growing up.  Mister was getting hinky.  And when Mister got hinky, us kids usually took a powder.  The guy wasn’t a gem at the best of times.  At the worst of times, a kid didn’t want to be anywhere near.

He was leaning over, picking something out of a pile of somethings, but his pale gooseberry eyes never left my face.  He’d shut his mouth, but those eyes were still talking to me.  They were saying: you bet she deserved it.

“You do it, Mister?”

“Do what?”

“Put her in the family way?”

Mister’d found what he’d been looking for, an old tire iron.  Faster than I could get the gun out of my pocket, he’d swung at me hard as he could.  Missed me by about a foot, but he was shouting so loud his spittle made it all the way to the sleeve of my favorite jacket.  “Full of the Devil, that’s you!  That was always you whatever your real name is!  You haven’t even got a real name, nope, never.  Me and Flo didn’t even bother to give you one, not if God didn’t.  Bastard born and bred.  Why I didn’t send you back to Him when you was liddle, I’ll never know.  But you’re goin’ now!”  And this time the tire iron was aimed at my head.  It missed me only by inches.  He wouldn’t get another chance.  I’d finally gotten my gun in my hand and had it pointed right between his eyes.

“Mister!”

Cringing in unison, Mister and I turned startled faces towards the basement stairs.  Mrs. Z was standing there, hands clenched, muscles in her forearms bunched like cables.  Behind her stood Lino.  And behind him stood the comb-over beat cop with the moustache.  Behind them could of been the Marx Brothers, we wouldn’t have noticed.  Flo was more than enough.

“You stop that right now, Mister!  And you!  Russo!  Put the gat away.  Where do you think you are?”

Suddenly meek as his savior’s lamb, Mister dropped the iron.  The clang it made hurt my teeth, not to mention my headache.  Me, I slipped the “gat” back in my pocket.

Flo was across the gritty floor and had her arm around her husband’s shoulders as fast as he could wield the iron.  “Now, Mister, this ain’t what we believe, is it?”

Without raising his eyes, his arms hanging slack at his sides, he said, “No.  Don’t.”

“Look at me, Mister.”

Mister raised his eyes to hers.

“What do we believe?”

“Only the ones God tells us.”

“That’s right.  And who does God tell us needs doin’?”

“The bad ones.  The ones He needs to start over with ‘cause they came here all spoilt.”

“That’s right.  That’s good.”  Mister’s eyes, still on hers, brightened.  She asked him, “And if you were to take one God didn’t tell you to take?”

“I’d be the bad one.”

Right about here, Lino who’d been listening to this without expression, caught my eye.  His own eye rolling, he said: “Blow me out a whale hole.  It was Mister?  He killed that poor child and her baby?”

Flo turned first to Lino and then to me, her gaze steady, her voice calm.  “Mister has always done the cleaning up around here.  Even the sheets.  Good thing them sheets are cheap.”

Chapter 6

Listening, Lino lost his “heard it all before” deadpan.  His face was like the sign at Times Square.  Every little thought was running across it, round the back of his head, and right back across his face again.  Gotta hand it to him though, his next question was clear enough.  “And how long would that be, this ‘cleaning up’?”

“Well, damn, Morelli.  Whatchoo think?  As long as me an’ Mister’ve been here.  Thirty years, year or two either side.  Mister’s never at a loss for something that needs cleaning up.”

“And no one’s ever noticed?”

“Why should they?  Where you think you are?  You oughta know these ain’t kids anybody wants.  One or two, even ten, go missin’, who’d notice?  If they ask, we tell ‘em they ran away.  ‘Course, nobody asks.”

“But the other children, don’t they see?”

“Hah.  In your day, wasn’t as much to hide.  But these days are bad days, right Mister?”

“Very bad.”

“And them others know to keep their mouths shut.  That right too, Mister?”

Mister, hangdog a moment ago, smiled.  It wasn’t pretty.

If Lino was like the Times Square sign, I was like the light bulbs at Coney Island.  All lit at the same time, all different colors, and all flashing.  What Bonnie Jean said, what she didn’t say, it all made sense.  The pictures I’d lived with growing up, they made sense.  The kids I remember I’d see one day and not the next, they made sense too.  Flooded with understanding, I tried to keep my own mouth shut—but it opened on its own and someone inside blurted out: “When I… when my mother got here, God was talking to you then?”

For that I was rewarded with one of Flo’s arched eyebrows, as bushy as a Fuller brush.  “God don’t talk to me.  He talks to Mister.  And since you’re gonna ask anyhoo, I’ll answer you right now.  That little slut came here to get rid of you, didn’t she, Misssster Rooooso?  Obvious as daylight.  It was her gave my Mister the call.  He knew soon as he saw that one getting shoved out of a po-lice car, her belly big with evil, oh yeah, he knew what his duty was.  Right, Mister?  That very night, what did you say to me?”

“I said God talked to me.”

Flo reached out and grabbed Lino’s checked tie.  “Would God lie to a good man like Mister?  God would not lie.  So Mister did what he had to do.  Buried her where all the others are now.  In our wood.  Mister calls it ‘Good Riddance Acre’.”

And with that, added to all my other sudden understanding—which was close to unbearable—came the deepest understanding I’d ever known.  I understood the places in the woods we’d sometimes see, places we thought Mister was burying garbage.  If I’d spoken right then, my voice would of been as high pitched as Caruso singing Mozart.  The Maple Wood?  Where I climbed trees?  Built forts.  Pretended I was Earle Sande bringing Zev home in 1923’s Kentucky Derby or Gallant Fox in 1930?  Where I got my first kiss and my first brush with a female breast?  Our woods, the only place we ever felt free—all of us running oblivious over a graveyard.

My mother was just a kid in a jam.  A kid nobody wanted or asked about.  She hadn’t left me here.  She’d never missed me, never made it big somewhere.  She’d never left at all.

I had to ask, throat as dry as Flo’s heart.  “Why not me too?  Why not like the last one?”

“You?”  For the first time, I was gifted with Mrs. Z’s full regard.  “Because you slithered out before Mister got to that little bitch.  But that last one, the one you just found?  You wanna know what a good man Mister is?  He tried to save that baby.  Tried to get it out of her.  ‘Cause it ain’t the liddle one’s fault, not really.  Took ‘em up to the roof, laid out a nice sheet so God’s new life wouldn’t get dirty, even used a clean saw.  Show ‘em your saw, Mister.”

Mister reached behind the furnace and brought out a nice new hand saw.  Cleaned and put neatly away.  “My favorite,” he said, as proud of the thing as London’s Saucy Jack must have been proud of his knife.

Flo smiled at Mister and Mister smiled at Flo.  True love was always touching.

But then the deep crease between Flo’s blameless eyes got deeper.  “But all he got for his trouble was a lot of stupid screaming from the slut, so he had to sock her one.  It was all that blood made him stop.  Mister’s not used to too much blood.  So he threw the whole mess off the roof.  Must be why he left it lying there.  The shock, you know.”  She leaned towards Lino.  She did it so she could whisper, “Mister’s getting forgetful these past few years.”  She shook her head, tears welling in the corners of her eyes.  “Been thinking of getting him to see a doctor.”

My head was throbbing, but I still heard myself say, “I hear good things about Bellevue.”

Maybe someone heard me, maybe not.  Didn’t matter.  Lino Morelli had solved a double murder case.  On Staten Island, of all places.

I needed to get over to South Jersey.  I might be just in time to catch the fifth at Monmouth Park.  I had a tip on a horse that couldn’t lose.

But most of all I needed a drink.  Maybe a lot of them.

Chapter 7

A week later, I was lying on a bed they would of used for kindling back when I was cannon fodder on the island of Luzon, along with the rest of the 26
th
Cavalry Regiment.  The bed was in 4-A, the one room I called “home.”  From its single smeared window I could see exactly one tree in the Tompkinsville Park.  Mostly I saw the dark brick building across Stapleton’s Bay Street that was sure to have a guy just like me in a room just like mine.  Only he wouldn’t be reading my dog-eared copy of
The Bride Wore Black
because I was reading it.  What he’d more likely be doing was watching television.  I already hated television.  Who could like television when they had a radio?

I was chain smoking; the fug in the room was dense enough to crash a plane in.  The only other reading material within reach was a week old copy of the Staten Island
Advance
with a shot of Lino top of the fold.  Morelli should of arrested the photographer for grievous facial rearrangement.  He looked like something in the back of a special cage at the Bronx zoo.

I shouldn’t of been chain smoking since about a buck fifty three was all that stood between me, a few more meals, a few more packs of Luckies, and the rent.  Reading a book I’d read about five times already, I’d already reached the conclusion that the ciggies were more important than the rent—this cheap little room was giving me the Blues worse than listening to Billie Holiday on one of her sadder days.  They all seemed to be sad to me, so sadder meant suicidal.

I was coming to the part in the book when Lew Wanger—my favorite thing, a detective—was beginning to realize what had seemed to the cops to be unrelated murders, were anything but, when the phone rang.  A phone ringing in my room was about as unusual as a naked woman in my room (times were dry in so many important ways) so could I help it if I threw the book in the air, knocked the overflowing ashtray off the edge of the end table, and stepped in the reeking mess on the bare wood floor in my only clean pair of socks?

What with all that, I still caught the call before the phone stopped ringing.

“Yes?  Hello?  What?”  I said this before I remembered I was a PI and this was supposed to be an office phone.  “Sam Russo here.  What can I do for you?”

“You’re coming up to Saratoga.”

“I am?”

“You the guy solved that murder on Staten Island?”

I glanced over at the
Advance
again.  My name wasn’t mentioned.  As usual.

“How—?”

Whoever was talking caught that one before I pitched it.  “Never mind.  You that guy?”

“I am.”

“Then you’re the guy we want.  There’ll be a ticket waiting for you at the ferry.  It’ll include a transfer to a train out of Manhattan that’ll take you all the way up here to Saratoga Springs.”

My heart did a double dip.  Saratoga Springs was where they kept the oldest and greatest race track in America.  The one that topped ‘em all with the best jocks and the best horses and the best… well, the best of everything you’d want if you were like me, a horse racing fanatic.