Sweetheart (13 page)

“I don’t know,” Wade said with the hint of a frown and a sudden wince in his stomach. He was wearing an old knit tie, and he gently tightened the knot. “Are you accepting the offer?”

“I haven’t decided,” she said with a stinging look. “Something’s happening I don’t know about. I feel somebody’s pulling strings, somebody’s yanking me from one place to another. Is it you, Chris?”

He shook his head.

“If it was, I’d never forgive you.”

“I would never interfere in your life.”

“I’d like to believe that.”

“Tonight,” he asked, “would you like to go to the movies?”

“No, Chris, I wouldn’t,” she replied, rising to her feet, regret in her voice. “There’s something you’ve got to get through your head. I don’t love you anymore.”

He gazed up at her in injured silence.

“And there’s something else you should admit to yourself. You don’t love me.”

Watching her slip away, the sun glancing over her, he murmured, “You’re wrong.”

• • •

Ten minutes later, plunged into the gloom of a cocktail lounge, Wade made himself reasonably comfortable at a miniature table, lit a cigarette, and listened to a piano player ripple out airs of the forties for a few middle-aged lovers. Flicking an ash, he stared at the bare legs of the waitress who approached with a smile too rigid to be friendly. “I suppose,” he said, “you have a husband or a boyfriend.”

“Both,” she said. She was of indeterminate age, her hair a haze of old gold, which was almost the color of her diminutive costume, her breasts propped up by the tight top.

“Then I’ll try not to bother you,” he said.

“You can bother me all you want as long as you don’t expect too much.”

“What would I expect?”

“The world. Men do. But you I probably don’t have to worry about. I don’t think you’re interested.”

His eye turned more sensitive. “What makes you say that?”

“The way you make with the talk, it’s automatic. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“You’ve been on the job a long time.”

“Too long,” she said succinctly. “I’m forty-one years old. Look how I’m dressed. I feel like a fucking freak. What can I get for you?”

He took a moment to concentrate. “A dark Heineken,” he said, and she screwed up her face.

“That’s funny. I thought you’d want something with a jolt.”

“No,” said Wade. “I’ve already had one.”

A moment later he got up, squeezed by tables, found a phone, and deposited a dime too thin to work. He came up with another, which dropped true. He pressed out a number, the pips inordinately loud. The line crackled. A voice in his ear said, “Yuh.”

“Gardella.”

“He ain’t here.”

“When will he be in?”

“Don’t know.”

“Is he at his home?”

“Don’t know.”

“Is he still in Rye?”

“Look, fella, I don’t know.”

“Tell him I want to see him. Something personal to talk about. Tell him I’m pissed off.”

“Who the hell is this?”

“He’ll know,” Wade said.

When he returned to his table, the waitress had delivered a bottle of Heineken and was pouring out a token amount into a frosted glass. He sat down with an air of fatigue. She tossed him a tight little look and said, “You want to know what’s the most boring business in the world?”

He waited. The piano player was rendering a tune that, he remembered, Perry Como used to sing.

“It’s talking to a lonely guy who doesn’t know what he wants. You know what’s worse?”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“Going to bed with him.”

“You’ve set me straight,” he said with a slow smile, which she more than matched. Hers was warmer.

“You should be glad. You know what I look like in the morning? Phyllis Diller.” She pushed the beer glass toward him. “Drink up. It’s on me.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a cop.”

• • •

Anthony Gardella and his wife left Rye Beach in the early evening, the sun still brilliant. The wide surface of Interstate 95 glistened with mirages. Gardella rested his head back and half closed his eyes while his wife drove with a solid foot on the accelerator. At one point, during a close stretch, she touched ninety. Gardella said, “You got a death wish or something?”

“I’m a good driver.”

“I’m not disputing that, but you’re bucking the odds. Slow down.”

She slowed to seventy-five and gradually to sixty, her hands slackening on the wheel, her mouth set apologetically. “Did I scare you, Tony? I didn’t mean to.”

“You didn’t scare me,” he said quietly. “I simply forgot how young you are.”

“Don’t do that, Tony.” For an instant she held back her breath. Her hair trembled. “Don’t put me down like that. I’m not a child.”

“Then don’t try to live dangerously. Trust your instincts, never your luck.”

She drove at varying speeds, down to fifty, back up to sixty, then somewhere in between, and she watched the sun lose its strength. Eventually the traffic thickened and Boston loomed. It seemed muted, unfamiliar to her, threatening in a vague way, which made her reluctant to enter it. On Mystic Tobin Bridge a decrepit car swerved in front of them, youths in it, and then a pickup truck rolling high on outsize tires eased her into another lane. Gardella gave her money for the toll.

“Back at Rye everything seemed so simple,” she said, “so … right.”

“And now?”

“Different, that’s all.” Blindly she sought his hand, found it, and brought it up to her cheek. “Look at me, Tony. Look at me and love me.”

Soon they were on the Central Artery, a pall of industrial smoke drifting high over it. Gardella had liberated his hand so that she would use both of hers on the wheel. Traffic was frantic, pounding in their ears. He said, “What’s the matter with you, Jane?”

“The letdown. Being back.” She spoke through an upsurge of feeling she fought to control. “And the air, Tony. None of it’s fresh.”

“What’s really bothering you?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you worried about us? You shouldn’t be. There’s nothing we can’t handle.”

In Hyde Park they drove through a neighborhood that had long ago deteriorated, past the broken metal bars of a playground fence, down a street of condemned properties, ruined sidewalks, naked lots. Then, gradually, the cityscape softened. In time they coasted into a section that preserved its charm, its orderliness, its trees, many already beginning to bud. As they neared home, Gardella turned his head around for a glance through the back window.

“How long has that car been behind us?”

“I don’t know, Tony. I haven’t noticed.”

“You should always notice.”

She shuddered, as if too much were pulling on her. Her eyes were in the rearview. “Who is it? I can’t tell.”

“Our friend,” Gardella said, staring straight ahead, almost smiling.

“What friend?”

“Christopher Wade.”

S
ARA
looked done in. At Rita O’Dea’s direction, Alvaro escorted her upstairs, showed her to a room, and gave her towels for a bath. Later Rita O’Dea told Alvaro to make himself scarce. She wanted to be alone with her husband. Ty O’Dea, who had avoided Alvaro’s eyes, was sitting awkwardly on the sofa. Rita O’Dea approached and said, “Alvaro’s my houseboy.”

“Is that what you call him?” he said. He was tired, a little punchy. His head lolled.

“I was being cute, Ty.” She studied him. “I think you could use a drink,” she said and went to the liquor cabinet, where she dug out a bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey. The amount she poured was generous, and he accepted it gratefully, his hand trembling a little. She said, “You still got a liver left?”

“I don’t drink like I used to,” he said.

“You could’ve fooled me. Be careful, Ty. Everything catches up. Everything can hurt.” She dropped herself into a chair near the sofa, beside a small marble-top table that held upright pictures of her mother and father. Her eyes filled. “You should’ve come up for the funeral.”

“I didn’t think you’d want me there.”

“You should’ve come, anyway. They never liked you, Ty, but they’d have wanted you next to me. You know the way they were.” Her voice broke a little. “You think they’re in heaven? You think there’s such a place? No, I know you don’t.”

Ty O’Dea peered into his whiskey, as if assessing its potential jolt. His blue eyes looked more washed out than ever. “You die, you die, Rita. That’s what I think.”

“I have to believe there’s something more, for their sake and my own. I don’t have a choice. I have to stay sane.”

Ty O’Dea took a long taste. The whiskey seemed to go down slowly, warming him in odd places, his upper arms, one side of his stomach. His chest heaved as he coughed. He had a smoker’s raucous cough, and he brought a fist up to temper it.

“You look like an old man,” she said. The two days of stubble on his face looked like a week’s worth, all of it white. His underlip quivered. “You’re a case of nerves,” she said.

“I’m all right now.”

“All that time in Florida, you got no tan. And that cough makes me wonder if you got emphysema or something.”

“I’m fine.”

“You look beat. Take your shoes off and stretch out.”

“I oughta go up and see Sara.”

“Don’t bother her. She’ll want to sleep.” She watched him put the whiskey glass aside and remove his shoes. He had a hole in one stocking, which he tried to hide. “No class, Ty,” she quipped, and he appeared stung. His background was a poor South Boston neighborhood, where his bedroom window in a top-floor tenement had overlooked trash barrels and marauding rats. His father had spent his life in a labor pool. “That’s right,” she said, “lie back. Use the pillow.”

Inertia set in as soon as he lowered his head. A good portion of his face collapsed.

“Look at me, Ty.” She wanted him to relax, not to fall asleep. “I’m going through a lousy time,” she said tentatively. “Everything I do feels … final.”

He did not know what to say and so said nothing. He wanted to keep his eyes closed, to pretend he wasn’t there.

“Things that are mine I want to hold on to harder than ever,” she said ominously. Then, heavily, pound by pound, she lifted herself out of her chair. “Let’s talk about the woman.”

“Sara?”

“Sara who?”

“Dillon.” He screwed up his courage and spoke from his heart. “I love her.”

“You love her. You
think
you love her.”

“No, Rita. I really do.”

She stood massive, her dress clinging to her legs, which made her stance seem predatory. She took three steps, yawing on the second and hovering on the third. Her voice was deep, as if her throat were a brass pipe. “Tell me about her.”

He sat up on his elbows. A bone creaked and did not sound real. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” she said. “Your life depends on it.”

• • •

Alvaro slipped into the room without knocking, leaving the door ajar so that he would hear anybody coming up the stairs. Sara Dillon stared at him. She looked drab after her bath. Blotches and blemishes stood out. Her breasts were swollen. The traces of gray in her damp head of hair made her look older than she was, which was thirty-one. “Get out,” she said.

“In a minute.” Though she was pregnant, which he had surmised with a swift eye, there was a certain deadness about her. “You’ve been around, I can tell that,” he said and stroked his beard.

She covered herself.

“You know all about me,” he said accusingly.

“What makes you think so?”

“You’re Ty’s woman. Ty doesn’t keep his mouth shut.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said listlessly and with a subtle weight shift covered herself more adequately. “You should worry about yourself.”

He glided to her and stood close, giving her a whiff of piquant cologne, which he had worked into his beard. Extremely white teeth flashed from his dark mouth. “You’re an unknown factor. See my position?”

“I only know my own.”

“You give me trouble, I’ll cut your heart out, Ty’s too. Understand?”

“Perfectly.”

“Good,” he said with a ruttish look, “now we can be friends.”

“No, we can’t.” She dodged his hand. “Don’t touch me.”

He seemed surprised.

“I don’t like pretty men,” she explained.

“You’re right,” he said. “We can’t be friends.”

• • •

Two men who worked for Anthony Gardella were inside his house; they’d been looking after it. Each stood with a hand inside his jacket, fingers on a weapon. Each gazed hard at Christopher Wade, who ignored them. “Nothing to worry about,” Gardella said lightly and dismissed them with his eyes. Wade watched them leave. Gardella smiled. “You’ve got guts.”

Jane Gardella said, “I take it you two want to be alone.”

“I don’t know, do we?”

Wade nodded.

“Follow me,” Gardella said.

They sat in a room that was a cave of shadows, though each could clearly see the other’s face. It was Wade who did not want a light on. Wade murmured, “One thing you shouldn’t have done was mess with my wife.”

“For your own good, and hers,” Gardella said in a discreet voice. He waited to be interrupted but wasn’t. Head lowered a little, he gazed at Wade speculatively under his eyebrows. “I didn’t want you compromised. I figured I owed you. Right?” Again there was a pause. This time Gardella slowly retracted his gaze while maintaining his half smile. “You don’t know, do you? I do business with Benson. Not much, but enough.”

Wade’s face faded back. “I don’t know if that’s true or not. I can check.”

“Yes, check. This guy Benson, he’s a phony in every way. He didn’t even pay your wife a decent salary. Gave her fringe benefits instead. She tell you about her trip with him down to Biscayne? Hotel Sonesta.”

Wade twitched.

Gardella said, “Beats me what she saw in him.”

“You’d better shut up.”

“Sure, I know how you feel.”

Wade rested dry hands on his knees. The only light came from the open door, which gave him a sensation of being in a subterranean world that was much too quiet, somewhat dusty, bulky in places. The room had books.

“This is my library. I read. That surprise you?”

“Why should anything surprise me?” Wade asked with a growing remoteness. “Why, most of all, should you surprise me?”

“I’m glad you said that,” Gardella said mysteriously.

“Is anyone hungry?” The voice came from the lit doorway, from Jane Gardella, whose tentative entry into the room was gentle, a few soft steps that did not take her out of the light. She waited for a response.

Wade said, “I’m not.”

Gardella rose with a shake of his head. “I have to get something. Entertain the lieutenant for a moment.”

Left alone with her, Wade became aware of too many details: the shades in her hair, the length of her hands, the neat fit of her trousers over long hips. Her eyes were disturbing, hostile even as she smiled, and for the moment he disliked her. “At Rye you surprised me,” he said.

She stood fixed, showing careful eyes. “How did I do that?”

“From the start I expected a Kewpie doll. You’re not that at all.”

“That doesn’t even come close to being a compliment,” she said coldly. “Actually it’s an insult to Tony.”

“I guess it is,” he said, passing the flat of his hand over his jaw, an absent gesture. “You’ll have to forgive me.”

“I don’t have the power,” she said glibly on her way out. “Only Tony does.”

Gardella returned to the room but not to his chair. For a number of seconds he stood near shadowy shelves of books, his back to Wade. His shoulders slackened some as he traced a finger over titles he couldn’t clearly see. “I feel a little old tonight, I wonder why.” His smile was rueful as he turned around. “ ‘No longer mourn for me when I am dead.’ A poet wrote that. I got him here somewhere. See, I told you I read.”

“I never said I doubted you,” Wade uttered from the gloom.

“When I was a kid, my mother and father wanted me to be a professor of something, anything, didn’t matter what. They never liked what I got into, but they understood. My first wife, God bless her, never said a word, but deep down she was ashamed, I always knew that. Tell me something, Wade, what you do, is it always clean?”

“No, but it’s usually right.”

“Neither of us, we’re not angels, would you admit that?”

Wade grimaced, the victim of a muscle cramp. Slowly he straightened a leg. “What can you do for me?” His voice was stark. “I mean, what
really
can you do for me? What have you got that I’d even consider? That wouldn’t mean you’d own me forever?”

“You want to talk, talk naked.”

“You think I’m wired?”

“I don’t want to think about it, I want to know.”

Wade brought his face forward and let it spread into view. With much effort, he rose to his full height. He removed his jacket, his knit tie, his shirt. The room was warm. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head, smoothed his hair down, and stood bare-chested, his holstered Beretta snugged against a hip. “Satisfied?”

“Peace of mind means a lot. You don’t have to stay that way.” Gardella’s tone was mellow, his eyes hooded. “My sister was here, she’d whistle.”

“You trying to fix me up with her?”

“I love my sister, but I wouldn’t wish her on anybody,” Gardella said without inflection and stepped away from the shelves. Wade began to redress. He had trouble with his tie; the knot went stubbornly askew. Gardella came up close and fixed it for him.

“Ever smoke a joint, Wade?”

“No.”

“Back in school maybe? In the army?”

“Never.”

Seemingly from nowhere, Gardella produced two roughly rolled cigarettes. The paper was dark. “These are my wife’s,” he said with a faint mix of amusement and sadness. “She thinks I don’t know she has them. She’s just a kid, you see, which I sometimes forget. Here.”

Wade stared at the gift pressed upon him. He twisted it carefully around with a thumb and finger. “What do I want this for?”

“Because life’s short.” Gardella spoke with strange authority. “Because you’re a sociable guy. Because I don’t like to do things alone.” A flame sprang up between them. “You smoke it like a regular one except you breathe in deeper and hold it longer.”

After an almost imperceptible hesitation, Wade bent his head. “I think I can figure it out for myself,” he said.

• • •

Rita O’Dea watched television on a small set, a Sony, which she had placed on an end table. The program was local, a segment on the effects of toxic waste that had been dumped for years in nearby Woburn. A dark-haired woman reporter, buttoned up against the breeze, cited a high incidence of leukemia. Then the camera cut to a mother with a dying son. The boy was bald. From the sofa, Ty O’Dea mumbled, “What are you watching that stuff for?”

“Go back to sleep,” she said, and he did, almost immediately. He was under a blanket, which she had placed over him earlier. Her eyes returned to the television, but not for long. For some reason her hand trembled when she lifted it to her hair, some of which she coiled in her fingers. She was restless and bothered, and when she forced herself from her chair she felt spongy and unwieldy. Before leaving, she gave her slumbering husband a haggard look.

Upstairs, in the room given Sara Dillon, she lit the small pink-shaded lamp on the bureau and, leaning over an open suitcase, sifted through Sara Dillon’s things. The underwear was either black, magenta, or sheer. In a normal voice she said, “This how you turn him on?”

Her eyes open, Sara Dillon spoke from the bed. “I don’t like people going through my stuff.”

“You could’ve stopped me. You could’ve sat up and said something.” Rita O’Dea approached the bed, and the other woman sat up. “Well, Sara, you look better than what Ty usually runs around with. You really pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“You and I both know it’s not Ty’s. And he knows too.”

“He’s pretending it is.”

Rita O’Dea’s eyes softened, as if there had been too many mistakes in her past, too many irreversible decisions. “Yes,” she said, “I can understand Ty pretending, like life’s not real. The kid, it won’t be black or something, will it?” She expected anger and observed indifference.

“It will be white.”

Rita O’Dea’s eyes hardened. “Ty’s no bargain, but I guess I don’t have to tell you that. What I
do
have to say is more important. You ever hurt him, you’ll both get it, you and the kid. I make myself clear?”

“I won’t hurt him.”

“Good. One other thing. I’m Catholic. Catholics don’t get divorces.”

“That doesn’t bother me.”

Rita O’Dea smiled thinly. “I didn’t think it would.”

• • •

The bakery was on Route 1 in Saugus, a take-out operation that stayed open until midnight, with a back section of a few tables for customers who wanted to sit down and indulge. A self-serve coffee urn was available. Victor Scandura carried three coffees on a tray to a corner table, where two men waited. “Much obliged,” said one. He was wide-faced and thick-necked and had heavy pouches under his eyes. The other man, who was extremely pale, as if he feared fresh air, said, “I shouldn’t drink it. Fuckin’ stomach. How’s yours, Victor?”