Chapter 5 - The House on Adams Street
By 4:15 a.m., the rain had stopped over the Passaic, leaving the marshes between Newark and Jersey City covered in a dense, yellow-gray fog that smelled of diesel exhaust, burning tires, and the low-tide rot of the Hackensack River.
Winnie Doyle sat on the vinyl bench of a wooden booth in the back of the Starlight Diner on Adams Street, her feet propped on an empty milk crate to keep the blood from pooling in her ankles.
The diner was three-quarters dark.
The neon sign in the window—an outline of a coffee pot that had lost its blue neon steam back during the Carter administration—hummed with a dry, buzzing click that sounded like an angry cicada. The grill was cold, scraped down to the gray steel and coated with a thin layer of lard to keep the salt air from rusting the burners before the five o'clock shift arrived.
Across from her sat her sister, Maeve.
Maeve was forty-eight, four years older than Winnie, with the same broad Irish cheekbones and the same thick, dark hair pulled back into a net, but her face was thinner, worn down by twenty-two years of standing over a sixty-inch griddle with two bad knees and a husband who had walked out the door in ninety-nine to buy a pack of Kools and had never found his way back across the bridge.
In the center of the Formica table sat two things:
A white ceramic mug of black coffee, strong enough to peel the varnish off a deck, and a four-inch stack of fifty-dollar bills bound with the thick, blue paper bands of the Commercial Trust Bank of Union City.
"Winnie," Maeve whispered, her hands clasped around her own mug so tightly the knuckle bones were white through the red skin. "Where did you get that paper?"
Winnie didn't touch the coffee. She reached into her pocket, pulled out the nine-dollar pharmacy watch she had wiped down with an alcohol pad in the basement of the mansion, and laid it beside the sugar dispenser.
The glass face had a hairline crack running from the six to the twelve, right where Rhett Marquetti’s thumb had dug into the bezel while she was driving the needle into his radial vein.
"It’s not paper, Maeve," Winnie said, her voice flat, tired, carrying the weight of seventy hours without sleep. "It’s fifteen thousand dollars. It pays the gas company the four thousand we owe on the back meters, it buys the two new compressors for the walk-in cooler, and it leaves nine thousand in the savings book under your name so you don't have to take the meat deliveries from Silvio’s drivers on credit."
Maeve’s eyes widened, her gaze darting toward the plate-glass window that looked out onto the dark, wet asphalt of Adams Street.
"Silvio?" Maeve choked out, the word barely clearing her teeth. "Winnie... you took money from Silvio?"
"Silvio didn't give it to me," Winnie said.
"Then who—"
"The boss gave it to me."
"Marquetti?" Maeve let out a short, wet gasp, crossing herself with her right thumb in a quick, superstitious flutter that touched her forehead, her sternum, and both shoulders. "Winnie, he hasn't been out of that house on the hill in six months! The boys down at the docks say he’s got the cancer in the throat! They say Silvio’s been running the envelopes since Easter!"
"The boys down at the docks don't know shit, Maeve," Winnie said, reaching out with her thick forefinger and turning the stack of bills ninety degrees until it sat flush with the edge of the napkin dispenser. "And Silvio isn't running anything anymore. Silvio’s sitting in a room behind the boiler in the basement with Miller and two men from the North Ward, explaining why there was thirty milligrams of heart poison in the scotch decanter."
Maeve went completely still.
Outside, on the wet street, the sound of a heavy, eight-cylinder engine rumbled through the fog.
Not a municipal bus.
A long, black Lincoln Town Car—the old kind, with the square chrome grille, the heavy doors, and the dark blue curtains drawn across the rear quarter-windows—pulled smoothly up to the curb outside the diner’s neon sign.
The engine didn't cut off. It sat idling at six hundred RPM, the exhaust pipe puffing two steady plumes of white vapor into the freezing river air.
The driver’s door opened.
Gianni stepped out onto the sidewalk.
He was no longer wearing his four-hundred-dollar loafers; he wore a pair of heavy, black leather service boots that had been laced to the top, a dark wool overcoat that fell past his knees, and a gray flat cap pulled down low over his ears. His face was gray, the skin tight across his cheekbones, but his hands were steady as he reached into the back seat and pulled out an ash-handled industrial mop and a five-gallon galvanized steel bucket.
He didn't look at the houses across the street. He didn't look at the bakery on the corner.
He walked up the three concrete steps of the diner, pushed the screen door open with his elbow, and set the bucket down on the rubber mat inside the threshold with a heavy, metallic clang.
Inside the bucket was a brand-new five-pound box of carbolic soap, three rolls of heavy-duty paper towels, and an envelope made of thick, heavy cream cardstock with no writing on the front, sealed with a circle of red wax that bore the impression of a brass caliper.
Gianni stopped five feet from the booth.
He took off his flat cap with his right hand, holding it against his ribs in that ancient, formal posture of an apprentice standing before a master carpenter’s widow.
"Miss Doyle," the boy said, his voice dropping an octave into that deep, flat cadence that men in the Ironbound used when they were reading the announcements from the union hall.
Winnie didn't move. Her hands stayed resting on the edge of the Formica. "Gianni."
"The boss sent the bucket," Gianni said.
"I see the bucket."
"He said the mop head you were using was frayed at the edges," the boy continued, his eyes fixed on the salt shaker between the two women. "He said a woman who knows how to hold an oak door shouldn't have to clean with five-year-old cotton."
He set the cream envelope on the table beside the fifteen thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills.
"What's in the letter, Gianni?" Maeve asked, her voice trembling so hard the coffee in her mug shivered.
"It’s not a letter, ma'am," Gianni said, his eyes flicking to Winnie for half a second before dropping back to the linoleum. "It’s the deed to the property. The diner. The three apartments upstairs. And the parking lot across the alley where the milk trucks turn around."
Maeve let out a sharp, bird-like cry, her hands flying to her mouth. "The... the deed? We’ve been paying the ground rent to the estate since nineteen-sixty-two! My father paid twelve hundred dollars a year to old Salvatore—"
"You don't pay the ground rent anymore, Mrs. Gallagher," Gianni said. "The boss had the notary in the study at four-thirty this morning. The land is free and clear. Taxes paid through twenty-thirty."
He stepped back toward the door, his heavy boots making a solid, rhythmic thud-thud against the linoleum.
"Gianni," Winnie called out.
The boy paused, his hand on the brass handle of the screen door. "Yes, Miss Doyle?"
"Where's Silvio?"
Gianni’s jaw tightened. Just a millimeter. The muscle beneath his fresh razor burn bunched into a small, hard knot that hadn't been there when he was holding the ringer lever three hours ago.
"Silvio took a drive," the boy said quietly. "With the Greek."
"To Delaware?"
"Further south than Delaware, Miss Doyle," Gianni whispered.
He pushed the door open, stepped out into the freezing fog, and climbed back behind the wheel of the black Lincoln.
The car didn't speed away. It turned slowly in the intersection, its tires hissing against the wet tracks of the trolley line, heading back toward the hill where the big house sat among the hemlocks, watching the smoke rise from the industrial chimneys along the bay.
Winnie looked down at the cream envelope on the table.
She didn't open the wax seal. She didn't touch the three-inch stack of fifty-dollar bills.
She reached out with her rough, calloused fingers, took her chipped white ceramic mug by the handle, and lifted it to her mouth.
The coffee was cold. It tasted of chicory, old grease, and forty years of her father’s sweat.
She took a long, slow swallow, set the mug back down on its saucer with a firm, solid click, and looked at her sister.
"Maeve," she said.
May you like
"What, Winnie? Oh God, what?"
"Turn the griddle on," Winnie said, rising from the booth and reaching for the clean apron hanging behind the cash register. "The five o'clock shift from the chemical works is going to be here in fifteen minutes, and this floor hasn't been mopped since yesterday afternoon."
