Little Brothers Read online

  On the screen Doc asked what happened. It broke, Louis said. He had another.

  “Wow!” Alice said.

  The sound of the drill again.

  The scene changed to the Bellini kitchen. The wife and kid: Louis was Italian.

  The scene changed to the crooked lawyer’s wife: she was talking to herself about a pill.

  Alice let go of Angie’s head. “Stupid broad,” she said, “and wait till you see the one coming up now.”

  Angie wasn’t much interested in the lawyer’s wife. He glanced at Alice: her robe was falling open again, little by little. He was fascinated to see if it would get stuck on the nipple—like it was a button.

  To Doll, the girlfriend of one of the burglars, who was also talking to herself, Alice said, “Honey, what you don’t know about men would fill a book. Tell him to go screw somewheres else!”

  The action returned to the jewelry shop, the sound that of the drill. Louis stops at the sign from Doc. Everybody listens. Silence. Then the high, far-off whine of police sirens. Louis goes back to work. Doc smokes. Angie glanced again at Alice. The nipple was out. He felt her hand on his thigh, edging higher and higher. The sirens drown out the sound of the drill. On screen, Doc says: How close are you now? Louis says, I’m packing it in.

  Angie kept staring at the screen although he didn’t really know what was going on there anymore—or anywhere else, exactly. Alice was on her knees on the floor in front of him, her face in the dark but her hair lighting up from the glare of the screen in the bright shots.

  “Angie, you’ve never done it before, have you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then just let yourself go, honey. Relax, and leave the driving to me.”

  “Angie? Are you asleep?”

  He opened his eyes. The room was blue, a very dark blue, but outside it was daylight. “Sort of,” he said. He wasn’t. He was thinking of the Little Brothers, what had happened to him with Alice, and where it would fit in their code.

  “Then wake up.”

  “I’m awake.” There were patterns on the ceiling, white squares with circles that had curly shapes inside them. When he concentrated he could make faces out of them.

  “I tell you what we’ll do. Do you remember what time the plane’s supposed to leave?”

  “I don’t think it says.”

  “What we’ll do,” Alice resumed, “at eight o’clock we’ll take a taxi to the East Side terminal where all the airlines have ticket offices. I’ll go up and say my brother got a ride back to California with somebody who was driving out there, and I’ll ask them to refund the money.”

  Angie tried to picture this happening. “Who will they refund it to?”

  “Me. Is there a name on the ticket?”

  “Phillips.”

  “Then I’ll say I’m Alice Phillips. Or I’ll say Phillips was my maiden name in case they ask for identification. I’ll say the trip is going to be much more educational for you … No. People do it all the time. I won’t say anything, just that I want the money back. Was there anything else in the pockets?”

  “No.” Angie thought of the key, but didn’t mention it. It might be to a locker in the terminal. He did not want to go any further than the plane ticket.

  “I’ll wear my gloves and my good purse. Wear something sensible, my mother always said. It’ll be like looking for a job.”

  “What if he’s already told the airline?” Angie asked.

  “It’s just tough luck, but that’s why we’re going right away, to be there first thing. I got a feeling he’ll think it over for a while. I just hope it’s a man that’s working on the desk I have to go to.”

  Angie turned and looked down at her. Her side of the daybed was lower than his. “You sure do know a lot, Alice.”

  She pulled him down beside her, the frame of the bed a cold rod at his back. She locked her arms and legs around him. “Some day you’re going to be a wonderful lover.”

  “Thanks,” Angie said, not entirely happy.

  “Look, honey, for the first time out …” She swung him off the bed onto the floor and got up, wrapping herself in the blanket. “We ought to get started. I’ll make coffee as soon as I pee. Then you can have the bathroom.”

  Angie tried several expressions in the mirror over the sink while he washed. His eyes were bloodshot, but that didn’t make him look older. Only sick. He saw Alice’s razor on the shelf and felt his chin. As smooth as his behind. It was only the sports coat that made him look older. He went to the door. “Alice, what if he did go to the police? Wouldn’t they check the airline? I wouldn’t want you getting into trouble.” He smelled the wool where she was pressing the sleeves of the jacket.

  “I got it all figured out. That’s why I’m taking back the ticket, not you. You don’t even know me when we get there. Then, if anything goes wrong, I’ll turn around and say I found the ticket on the restaurant floor when I was closing up last night. They can’t blame a girl for trying to pick up a few bucks. It’s free enterprise if you look at it that way.”

  4

  IN THE TERMINAL LOBBY they agreed to meet at the top of the escalator and then went off in opposite directions. As soon as Alice was out of sight, Angie looked for the public lockers. The key in his pocket bore the numeral 39, but it could be to a locker almost anywhere: so he warned himself unnecessarily. The locker sprang open before Angie had really made up his mind to turn the key. Inside was a black leather suitcase. Angie closed the door at once and put fifty cents in the slot. He got away from there as quickly as he could. He did not want Alice to think he was holding out on her, but he did not want to get in any deeper either.

  He was waiting at the escalator when she came gliding up, all smiles. As soon as she landed she removed the big floppy hat she’d decided to wear and pushed her hair up as high as it would go.

  “Perfectly simple,” she said as they left the building. “They wanted to send us a check, but I said the cash was important because you wanted to pay your share of the gasoline.”

  “I would,” Angie said.

  She looked at him as though he wasn’t all there. She moved into stride. “Now we’ll find a nice restaurant and have breakfast. I want to leave the waitress a big tip.” She hooked her arm through his. “We’re going to have a lovely time.”

  He tried to stay in step with her. “Alice, whose suit is it, the one hanging in your closet?”

  “Oh, just a friend’s. He’s in the army now, in Japan or some place.”

  “Wouldn’t he mind—you and me, I mean?”

  She laughed. “Honey, you got to realize, I’m not exclusive. What I mean is, maybe he’ll get killed over there, and I wouldn’t want him waiting to come home. Like waiting for me exclusively. Besides, I know he wouldn’t, and if he finds some nice geisha girl, that’s fine with me. Then when he comes back, we’ll see. It’s no big deal to take a suit of clothes out of a closet.”

  Angie thought about it, and he thought again of the girl on Mulberry Street and the man whose coat he was wearing. “How much money did you get, Alice?”

  “I was waiting for you to ask. A hundred and forty-nine dollars.”

  Angie’s first thought was what if he ever had to pay it back? but all he said was “Wow.”

  They walked to Fifth Avenue which was her favorite street and then crossed and recrossed it so that she could look in the windows of Altman’s, Lord and Taylor, Arnold Constable. Angie kept seeing his own reflection, the smooth sports jacket and the bluejeans. At least she’d fixed the cuffs so that he didn’t look like a circus clown. Across from the Public Library, Angie said, “I’ve been in there.”

  “You got a real thing on books, don’t you?”

  “Books and movies. Would you like to go to a movie? You could maybe say you’re sick and take the night off …”

  She giggled. “We got television at home. Remember?”

  He didn’t think he would ever forget it, but he didn’t say anything.

  “You’re
so funny,” she said. “I didn’t think there was anybody as bashful as you anymore.”

  “Maybe there isn’t. I mean I’m different.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  She chose Stouffer’s Restaurant and asked for a table by the window. Angie felt more at ease when he was seated opposite her, his sneakers and jeans concealed beneath the table. Alice groped for his knee and gave it a squeeze that made him jump.

  “Silly, take it,” she said.

  Angie put his hand to hers and discovered that she was trying to give him a wad of money. He took it and, without looking, stuffed it in his pocket.

  “Now, how do you feel?”

  “Better,” Angie said.

  A dream inside a dream inside a dream: how far down the tunnel could you go without coming out in your own room? But if he had been dreaming, he couldn’t see how a girl like Alice would show up there. He’d never known anyone like her. The tunnel idea came from the fact that they were walking through the long passageway in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, past news stands, donut shops, hamburger stands, gift shops, trying to get to where they could buy a ticket for a bus that would take them to the Palisades Park. Angie would still have preferred Coney Island no matter what the class of people. He had only been across the Hudson River once in his life, to visit his Uncle Dom’s chicken farm. He couldn’t remember much about it except the smell.

  He kept wishing his mother would wake him up. Only she wasn’t going to: he knew that. What he ought to do was telephone her at the bakery: he would say he stayed the night with a friend. She’d want to ask him questions, but not on the phone. Her boss would be listening.

  As they were passing a Ladies Room Alice said, “I’d better pop in here for a minute. They don’t have johns on buses.”

  The idea of a long bus trip and then her suddenly leaving him alone in a place he had never been before made Angie want to cut out and run, to lose Alice from his life forever. But he had in his hand the shopping bag they had bought to carry her hat in and for all the prizes she expected to win that afternoon. Not very far away was a row of phones. He decided to call the bakery, and so that Alice would spot him when she came out, he left the shopping bag at his feet, facing the Ladies Room. You couldn’t very well miss it, red, white, and blue stars with the face of a movie personality in every star.

  The phones weren’t very private, with only glass partitions in between, but other people did not seem to mind. Angie dialed and waited. The phone was ringing but the shop was busy at this time of day. In the next stall, the man was reading a newspaper while he listened to whoever was on the other end of the phone; Angie could hear him say “Yeah” every once in a while. It was on the page facing Angie that the boy noticed the heading: “Shopkeeper Knifed To Death in Lower East Side Hallway.”

  The whole building seemed to tip, Angie going over with it. He could hear his mother shouting “Hello” into the phone. That voice steadied him. When she hung up, he hung up too. He leaned closer to the partition and read a few words before his eyes went bleary: “Benjamin Grossman, a man considered …”

  5

  THE RANKING DETECTIVE ON the scene, Lieutenant David Marks of Homicide and the precinct man, Sergeant Gerald Regan, stopped talking when they saw the blond girl approach the police barricade. She shaded her eyes to better see what was going on inside. Marks glanced at Regan who had just got through saying he knew the neighborhood like the back of his hand: he’d ought to, having spent most of his twenty years on the force there. Regan’s face registered a sour approval of what he saw. In a kind of chain reaction, the men working within the shop stopped, one by one, to have a look. Wally Herring, a black detective who, with a narcotics man, had been smashing the statuettes, ran his tongue over his lips and had, then, to spit. He was in white face from the dust.

  “Local product?” Marks asked, indicating the girl.

  “I’ve seen her around,” Regan said, not committing himself.

  The patrolman on duty outside went up to her, touched his cap, and asked her to move on.

  “Damn fool rookie,” Regan said of his own man.

  The young woman walked away with an exquisite erectness which her shaggy shorts and tailored blouse only emphasized. It was the kind of angular beauty that got to Marks.

  “That’s a chick with too much gristle for me,” Herring said. Most of the men agreed.

  Marks stepped outdoors in time to see her go into the delicatessen. Detective Tomasino was in there so Marks turned his attention once more to the clean square in the plate glass window. He kept trying to figure out what it meant. For all the technical attention already paid it, the measurements of angles of vision, photography of and through the glass, Marks went back to his own calculations. If the square had been made in order that someone could better see inside the store, that someone was not much over five feet tall. If it was made to erase an obscenity—he was thinking of the swastikas newly scrawled on the hallway walls—traces of the marker ought to have shown under power photography. The natural way to go about cleaning a spot in a dirty window, or to rub something out, would be to use a roughly circular motion. To Marks this was a window within a window, but what did it mean?

  So far there were no witnesses. Nobody wanted to talk about Grossman, not even those who liked to talk and presumably trusted the precinct men who went round with the detectives for good will. Perhaps that was the trouble: too much good will. Marks had felt from the moment he arrived that the shop was a cover and the discovery on the premises of a good deal of money reinforced that belief. If it were so, the precinct men ought to have known it. Regan said that himself, but what Marks had to bear in mind about Regan was that he was a precinct man. When the Commissioner of Police had abolished the precinct detectives in favor of district squads of specialists, Regan, a former detective first grade, chose to go back into uniform and settle for his sergeant’s stripes and a locker in the old stationhouse.

  Marks hunched his six feet down to five and studied what came within his line of vision. The display counter; there was not even a cash register, only a tin box on the back shelf with its few dollars in change untouched. He could plainly see the wall safe, now open, but which, on the arrival of the police, had been closed and concealed behind a rolltop desk. A watcher would have seen only the desk. A back panel to the desk was removable. The safe had contained over eighty thousand dollars in small bills which Marks doubted would yield any useful information to the Treasury Department tracers.

  The question raised by the large amount of money, so far as Homicide was concerned, went to whether or not it was left intentionally. If it was, a practice common to the Mafia, it suggested “family” involvement. If it remained in the safe because the assailant did not know it was there, what was the motive? Nor was Grossman attacked in the shop: it appeared that his assailant had waited for him to close the shop. The attack had occurred outside the door to his second-floor apartment.

  Marks went indoors again. Regan muttered something about having to get back to the stationhouse and yet he could not bring himself to leave. The word cooperation had been flung about all morning like confetti at a wedding: in former days Regan would have been in charge. Marks had asked him, as soon as they sprung the safe combination and counted the money, where he would start. Loan sharking. Which was why, when he had to speak to the reporters on hand, Marks had suggested that Grossman might have died a rich man: he hoped that money might smoke out witnesses. He had little faith himself in Regan’s theory. There was neither ledger nor pledges among Grossman’s meager effects.

  Regan picked up the Post which a technician had brought in with him. “It says here he was a violinist. Where the hell did they get that information?”

  “Not from me,” Marks said.

  “The rest is gobbledygook.” It was a word Marks had not heard since his youth. Regan turned to the sports page. Marks wished he would go. No. What he actually wished was that he had not come himself. It was Tomasino, a very com
petent young detective, who had answered the complaint. The case should have rightly remained his, but the combination of swastikas in the hallway and the tattooed numerals of the Nazi concentration camp on the victim’s wrist had prompted Tomasino to call in his superior. Which irritated Marks, an irrational response; by the same token, Tomasino could ask why he had been dispatched to Little Italy.

  Marks was irritated with himself, that was the trouble. He had fallen into a lugubrious exchange with Regan in which he wound up saying that some of the greatest bastards he knew came out of the concentration camps, that it went with survival; but what it sounded like was his saying that any Jew with a number on his arm was probably a bastard. Grossman had been the only Jewish merchant on the block, and the fact that his ostensible wares were religious articles, Roman and Orthodox Catholic, only made things stickier.

  Regan was finally half-way out the door when Tomasino appeared with the blond girl in tow. He made way for them to enter by stepping back into the shop himself, and of course he stayed.

  “This is Miss Julie Borghese,” Tomasino said. “She saw Grossman at eleven-thirty last night, alive and kicking his cat.” He introduced Marks and Regan.

  In view of the fact that the cat had been killed along with its master, Marks said, “Actually kicking it?”

  “Oh, yes. He frequently kicked it. I threatened him once with calling the ASPCA.” Her speech placed her origins far from the Lower East Side. “He said it was none of my business. Did I butt into every family quarrel in the neighborhood? Maybe it was a family affair. No matter what he did to it, the cat always came back for more.”