Toughs Page 2

  Mrs. Marcello, at the top of their stoop, held her face in her hands and practically screamed. "Loretto!" She hurried down the steps to meet him. "What happened?" She held him at arm's length and looked him over.

  Dominic said, "He got blood all over him tryin' to help one of those kids that got shot."

  A middle-aged woman widowed since her twenties, Mrs. Marcello had been standing guard in front of her building from the moment she'd heard the shooting. Her late husband had left her the building when he'd died in the 1918 flu epidemic, along with most of the rest of her family.

  "I'm taking a bath," Loretto said, and he gently extricated himself from Mrs. Marcello's grasp.

  "Dominic," she said, leading both the boys up the steps and into the dim hallway, "go get the kerosene out of the basement. I got a five-gallon jug at the bottom of the stairs."

  "Yeah, but that's yours," Dominic said.

  She shushed him. "Take it." Her eyes filled with tears at the sight of

  Loretto in his bloody clothes. "Go! Go!" She pushed Loretto up the steps with one hand and Dominic down to the basement with the other.

  When Loretto opened the door to his apartment, he found it suffocatingly hot, though neat and in order, thanks mostly to Dom, who had taken to picking up after him and doing most of the cleaning. Now he crossed the sparsely furnished living room and made his way to a bowed triptych of windows that looked out over 107th. He opened the windows to let the heat out. At the scene of the shooting, crowds were still gathered behind police barricades, though the last of the ambulances had departed, leaving only police cars and a swarm of cops and reporters. Loretto'd known Vince Coll since he was seven years old and Vince was nine, when Vince and his older brother, Pete, had been sent to Mount Loretto after their mother died. This, shooting children—this was something Loretto couldn't figure.

  Dominic entered the apartment carrying a glass jug of kerosene. He lugged it over to the big silver water heater in the kitchen and knelt to fill the tank.

  "What are you doing?" Loretto tossed his jacket onto a chair, sat on the window ledge, and went about taking off his shoes.

  Dominic filled the tank and screwed the top back on the jug. "What's it look like I'm doing?"

  "Are you crazy?" Loretto peeled off his socks. "Don't light that thing! It's a hundred and ten degrees in here and you want to light the water heater so I can take a hot bath? You and Mrs. Marcello, you're both crazy."

  Dom sat on the floor and crossed his legs under him. He squinted as if trying to work out a problem. "I don't know what I was thinking. Must be the shooting's got me rattled."

  Loretto took off his pants and undershirt and tossed them on the chair with the rest of his clothes. "Do me a favor." He gestured toward the chair. "Throw my clothes in the trash for me." He went into the bathroom, where he sat on the edge of the tub in his underwear and turned on the water.

  Dominic gathered Loretto's clothes from the living room chair, tucked them under his arm, and paused a minute at the window to look down at the crowded sidewalks around Richie Cabo's club. The words Now he's gone and done it rattled around in his head as he watched a small army of cops and reporters mingling with the crowd, trying to get someone to talk. The cops in their blue uniforms and the reporters with their press cards were not likely to have much luck. This was a Sicilian neighborhood and people here wouldn't be inclined to talk with any stranger, let alone a cop or a reporter. When he looked at his reflection in the window glass and saw that his tie was askew and his hair was mussed, he dropped Loretto's clothes on the chair again and took a minute to straighten himself out. He was short and stocky, with a pudgy face that was so flat it looked unnatural. He ran a pocket comb through his hair, doing the best he could to keep the black curly mop of it in place. When he was finished he picked up Loretto's clothes again and left the apartment, passing the bathroom on the way. Loretto was still sitting on the rim of the tub in his boxers, looking at the blank wall as though a movie were showing there.

  On the street, Dom stuffed Loretto's clothes into a battered metal trash can under the stoop. Mrs. Marcello had started chattering at him in Italian as soon as he stepped out the door. She wanted to know how Loretto was doing, had he been hurt, was it their friend Vince Coll that did it, like everybody was saying. Dom answered that Loretto was fine and neither he nor Loretto had any idea who did it. On his way back into the apartment, at the top of the stoop, he asked her what she'd heard about the kids who'd been shot.

  Mrs. Marcello answered in English, with a shrug. "It's a miracle no one was killed."

  "Yeah?" Dominic said. "I thought that little one was dead?"

  Mrs. Marcello pursed her lips and shook her head. "Not yet," she answered. "He's hanging on. So is his brother. It's the Vengelli boys, Mi chael and Salvatore. And the baby, little Michael Bevilacqua." She shook her head again.

  When Dom asked her why she was shaking her head, she shrugged.

  "They don't think they're going to live?"

  Again Mrs. Marcello shook her head, meaning no, they didn't think the boys would live.

  "Who else?" Dom asked.

  "Flo D'Amello and Sammy Devino. But they're okay."

  Dominic started to ask her how she knew all this and then stopped. No doubt she'd already talked to one of the relatives or friends of the families who'd passed by her stoop, which was how she knew everything she knew about the neighborhood—which was everything. "Five kids shot," Dominic said, talking to himself. And then he added, "Now Irish's gone and done it."

  Mrs. Marcello's eyes narrowed. "Animale," she hissed. "Beastia!"

  Dom said, "I didn't see anything myself. It's just everybody else is saying it was Vince."

  She held Dominic steady in her gaze. She didn't look convinced.

  "I got to go," Dom said. When he was out of Mrs. Marcello's sight and on the stairs, he slapped himself on the forehead for being stupid. Once back in the apartment, he went directly to the bathroom, where he found Loretto up to his neck in sudsy water, working shampoo into his hair. "Nobody's dead yet," he told Loretto, "but the Vengelli boys and the Bevilacqua baby . . . It don't look so good for them." He sat on the edge of the tub, at Loretto's feet, and repeated everything Mrs. Marcello had told him.

  "Jesus. They think all three might die? Vince'll be Public Enemy Number One."

  "Sure, but that's not our problem right now," Dom said. "Cabo's our problem. He thinks you were Vince's lookout."

  "You think Cabo'll come after me?"

  "Cabo or Irish."

  "Irish?"

  "Irish'll put you on the spot if he thinks you can identify him. It don't matter how long we all been runnin' together. Look what he did to Carmine."

  "That was different. That was business."

  "Yeah? Then what about May? What'd she ever do except see him give it to Carmine?"

  Loretto watched a clump of suds slide down his neck and into the bath water. May was Carmine Alberici's girl. Vince had killed Carmine for siding with Dutch, and he'd killed May because she was a witness.

  "You know Vince liked May," Dom said. "We all liked May. That didn't stop him from blowing half her head off to keep her from talkin'."

  Loretto dropped down under the water and ran his fingers through his hair. He could hear his heart beating, thumping through the water. He remembered sitting on a brownstone stoop with May and Carmine, the two of them chatting and laughing, at ease with the world. When he came up, he said, "So what do you think we should do?"

  "I think we shouldn't stay here." Dom got up and leaned against the door frame. The porcelain rim of the tub was chipped, and the mustard-yellow wallpaper peeled slightly where it reached the ceiling. "How come we live in such a dump?"

  "Because your uncle don't pay us enough."

  "Get dressed." Dom went to a closet in the bedroom and came back with a suit fresh from the cleaners. "I'll drive you over to the Barontis'. You can wait for me there while I go see my uncle. Maybe he can figure something."


  "Cabo won't be scared of Gaspar," Loretto said. "Your uncle ain't that big."

  "I'm not thinking Gaspar," Dom said. "I'm thinking Maranzano. If Don Maranzano tells Cabo to lay off, he'll lay off. He won't want trouble with the Castellammarese."

  "You think Gaspar will talk to Maranzano for us?"

  "Yeah, sure. He's my uncle, isn't he?"

  "And what about Irish?"

  "I don't know about Irish." Dom pulled a towel down off a shelf next to the bathroom door and tossed it to Loretto. "Get dressed," he said. "We'll worry about Irish later."

  Loretto watched Dominic walk through the kitchen and into the living room, the late-evening sun casting a reddish tint throughout the apartment. He started to get out of the bathtub and then slumped down again as if he didn't have the energy. He saw the boy on the street with a bloody gash in his leg where the bullet had gone through, and the little one in the arms of the old woman. He couldn't figure it. Vince and Mike, Tuffy and Patsy, even Frank, the only one he hadn't known from the time they were all kids like the others . . . If he hadn't seen them himself, he wouldn't have believed it.

  The nuns had tried everything, even for a brief period tying him to the bed at night, but he always ran first chance and the chances came easy till he was spending less time in the orphanage than he was on the street with Vince and Pete and Tuffy and Patsy and dozens more kids like them whose parents had given up or were dead or gone and they were living with old people, aunts and distant relatives, who couldn't keep them in school. There were hordes of kids like him and he preferred their company to the nuns. They stole packages off the backs of delivery trucks, they broke into railroad cars, they burglarized empty apartments. They joined gangs. They went to work for bootleggers. They got mixed up in rough stuff. Sure, they did all these things. But something like this. Shooting kids. This he couldn't figure.

  "Hey!" Dom called from the living room. "What are you doing?"

  Loretto shook off his thoughts and stood up dripping in the tub. Through the bathroom window he saw a clothesline stretched between buildings, the thin white rope wrapped in a loop around metal pulleys. Dangling from the rope, pinned with wooden clothespins, were three summery women's dresses, one red, one yellow, the other blue. They were fluttering in a breeze outside his window as if they were alive and watching him as he watched them, mesmerized by their colors, by the way they hovered like bright ghosts against a pale sky.

  6:42 p.m.

  Frank drove down a concrete ramp, into the mouth of a midtown garage, and cruised past a line of parked cars. Behind him, in the rearview, late-evening sunlight blazed at the garage entrance before ending abruptly at a sharp black line of shadow. In the back seat Tuffy and Mike were laughing over something one of them had said. Frank hadn't been listening. He couldn't figure what might be so funny, and he half wanted to turn around and put a gun in their faces just to shut them up. Mike was a kid. He'd just turned nineteen, making him thirteen years younger than Frank, who was the oldest of the gang. They should have had more sense. The car was hot as hell, they were all baking in the heat, and Tuffy and Mike were laughing like a couple of kids.

  "Where the hell are they?" In the back, his fedora pulled down so that his face was hidden behind the brim, Vince was still as a corpse, his hands folded in his lap, a big automatic on the seat beside him.

  Frank dropped one hand to the butt of a sawed-off shotgun that lay snug against his leg. He was the only one in the car completely sober: Tuffy and Mike had been drinking gin all day, and Vince had been snorting coke. He brought the car around so that it was facing the garage entrance and parked in a shadowy corner. "We should have planned this all out better." He pulled off his tie, undid the top buttons of his shirt, and blew at the sweat on his chest.

  "Ah, shut up, Frank, will ya?" Tuffy threw his hat. It bounced off the back of Frank's head and landed in Vince's lap.

  Mike jumped up and leaned into the front seat. "That son of a bitch Cabo is bulletproof," he said. "Him and Diamond."

  Vince was silent. This was the second time they'd tried to get Cabo and the second time he'd walked away without a scratch. Vince wasn't talking but Frank knew the kid well enough to know he was steaming.

  "We should have planned it better," Frank repeated.

  "Ah, don't be a crumb," Mike said, and he fell back next to Tuffy.

  Vince pushed his hat back off his face. "This don't look good for us, especially after we screwed up getting Diamond."

  "That wasn't nobody's fault," Tuffy said.

  Vince rubbed the back of his neck. He handed Tuffy his hat. "Still don't look good for us."

  Tuffy found a flask in his jacket pocket and burned down another slug of gin.

  Frank considered saying something about the kids they'd just shot up and decided against it. There was nothing to be done about it and less to be said. Vince had taken a shot at Cabo, and then Tuffy and Mike had started shooting. Frank had aimed a shotgun blast at the storefront even with Cabo already out of sight. He still didn't know why he did it. He hadn't noticed the bloody kids until the shooting was done.

  In the back seat, Vince ran his fingers through a mat of wavy, sandy-blond hair. It was easy to see why the others had followed him when he'd split with Dutch. They'd all grown up on the streets together, the whole lot of them, including Dutch, and between working for Dutch or Vince, who wouldn't rather be with the kid? Frank was the outsider. He walked out on Dutch and went with Vince because he liked him. He liked his style. That and Dutch was a cheap son of a bitch who didn't like anyone enough not to put a bullet in him if he felt like it.

  "That's them," Vince said.

  The boys exploded out of the car at the sight of Sally and Lottie pulling

  into the garage, Lottie at the wheel of a tan Buick Roadmaster and Sally beside her. Frank tossed the keys under the front seat, checked to make sure nothing was being left behind, and then joined the others in the shadows just as Lottie got out from behind the wheel and hurried to Vince. She was wearing high heels and a red dress and a red cloche hat that came all the way down to her neck on the left, hiding that side of her face entirely. Vince took her hand and got into the back seat with her, along with Tuffy. Sally threw her arms around Frank's neck, kissed him on the lips, and got into the front seat between him and Mike.

  "Any coppers out there?" Frank turned the car around and drove slowly toward the bright sunlight at the garage entrance.

  "We didn't see any," Sally said, "did we, Lottie?"

  Lottie had wrapped herself around Vince. She leaned into him, nearly climbing onto his lap, with one arm wrapped around his arm and her free hand caressing the back of his neck. She had known the moment she'd seen him get out of the car that things hadn't gone well. "Come here, baby." She pushed her body into him, pulled his head down to her, and kissed him on the lips.

  Sally looked into the back seat. "Where's Patsy?"

  "We dropped him off," Frank answered without looking at her.

  Sally tried to snuggle closer to Frank, the way Lottie was snuggling with Vince, but he pushed her away. He drove cautiously up the ramp, out into the sunlight, and merged with a line of traffic heading out of the city.

  Mike said, "Son of a bitch Cabo is bulletproof. Him and Diamond."

  "Ah, give your jaw a rest, will ya?" Tuffy was slumped next to the window with the wide brim of his hat hiding his eyes.

  "Where we going now?" Sally asked Frank.

  Frank was at first angered by the question, but he softened when he saw the way Sally was looking at him. She was nineteen and though not the beauty Lottie was, still she was a looker, with her finger curls and big brown eyes and a face like an angel in a church painting. "Sit tight, doll," he said. "Things'll be hot for us for a while."

  "Yeah?" Lottie said. "How come?" She said this first to Frank but then turned immediately to Vince.

  "We missed Cabo," Vince said, "and a couple kids got shot when the lead started flyin'."

  "Kids?" Sally said. "You me
an like little kids?"

  They were coming up on the Williamsburg Bridge. Lottie asked, "How many kids?"

  "Three or four," Tuffy said from under his hat. "At least."

  "Are they dead?" Lottie knocked the hat off Tuffy's face. "Who the hell started shooting at kids?"