Chapter 3 - The Cold Ledger
The kitchen smelled of burnt sugar. Sophie had left the wooden spoon resting against the rim of the copper saucepan when my entrance had shattered their small afternoon, and the brown syrup was now smoking lazily against the iron trivet, curling toward the exhaust hood with a bitter, charred stink.
Mrs. Donnelly stood by the dry sink with a sheaf of butcher’s receipts in her fist, her spectacles hanging from a mother-of-pearl chain around her withered neck. She had been my father’s housekeeper before she was mine, a woman who remembered the old days in the South Village when men were buried from their living rooms with plates of dry salt placed on their bellies to keep the bloat down.
"Dominic," she said, her voice dry as dead corn. "The car from Manhattan is at the gate. The laundry service."
"Turn them around," I said.
I was sitting at the heavy maple table, the Five-by-Seven photograph lying flat between two salt cellars. I hadn't taken off my shoulder holster; the leather harness was dark with my own sweat under the arms, and the butt of the Kimber .45 sat clear of my ribs, three inches above the edge of the wood.
"The linen is already sorted, Dominic," she persisted, her jaw setting into the hard, peasant stubbornness she had used on three generations of Romano men. "The driver—"
"I said turn them around, Mary." I didn't look up from the photograph. "Tell the gatehouse that if anyone enters the perimeter before eight tonight who doesn't live here, Sal is to shoot the tires out. If they keep rolling, shoot the windshield."
She stared at me for three long seconds. Her tongue clicked against her dentures, a tiny, dry sound of disgust, but she dropped the butcher's paper onto the zinc counter and walked toward the hall phone without another word. She knew the tone. It was the tone my father had used the night the Maranzano people burned the lumber yard in Greenpoint.
Grace came through the swinging louvered door from the pantry. She had taken off her apron. Beneath it, she wore an ordinary gray wool sweater that had seen too many washes; the cuffs were slightly frayed, pulled down over the heels of her hands. She carried a small tin tray with two cups of black coffee—the cheap, chicory-heavy roast the staff drank, not the dark Italian beans I had brought in from the North End.
She put one cup down five inches from my elbow.
"They're upstairs," she said.
"Asleep?"
"No. Olivia is reading to the other two. The book about the little train that goes through the snow. She's reading the same four pages over and over again because she likes the way the word *whistle* sounds in her mouth. She hasn't heard herself say it since she was six."
A sharp, hot spike drove into my ribs, directly behind my sternum. I picked up the coffee. It was scalding, bitter enough to coat the tongue with acid, but I drank half the cup without setting it down.
"You knew about Greenport," I said.
Grace stood on the other side of the table, her hands tucked into the pockets of her gray skirt. "I knew about the boatworks."
"How?"
"My brother was Frank Bennett."
The name hung in the humid air of the kitchen between the smell of scorched sugar and lye soap.
Frank Bennett had been a detective third-grade in the Suffolk County homicide unit. Eighteen months ago—four months before Isabelle was taken out in the gravel outside Saint Jude’s—Frank Bennett’s unmarked Dodge had gone off the bridge at Ponquogue into fifty feet of salt water with sixty thousand dollars in marked federal bills in the spare-tire well and three grains of morphine in his liver. The coroner had ruled it an accidental drowning following an overdose. The department had buried him without an escort, and the union had denied the pension to his widow.
"Frank wasn't dirty," I said, my voice flat.
"Of course he wasn't dirty," Grace said. Her voice didn't rise; it had that same terrifying, even rhythm she had used with the children. "He was looking at the slips in Greenport. He found three hundred gross tons of Canadian seed wheat coming through the Sound without customs clearance. Only it wasn't wheat. It was high-grade hydraulic machine tools from the old naval yard in Montreal, being crated for shipment to the Dominican Republic."
"That was my run," I said. "That was the Red Hook logistics."
"It was *supposed* to be your run," Grace countered, leaning forward slightly, her knuckles coming down against the maple wood. "Except Paulie Castiglione wasn't routing it through Red Hook. He was running it through the North Fork. And your uncle Thomas was signing the bills of lading with an old rubber stamp from nineteen-eighty-four that still had the maritime union seal on the inkpad."
I looked down at the photograph again. At Paulie’s laughing face. At the way his thumb was hooked through his belt loop, easy, familiar, like an older brother who had earned the right to stand behind another man’s wife while the lake water lapped at the dock.
"Isabelle found out," I said.
"Isabelle was smarter than you were, Dominic," Grace said. She didn't flinch from using my first name now. The distance of the housemaid had dropped away completely, revealing the hard, cold core of a girl who had grown up in a house where the county police radio was always on in the kitchen and the men kept their service revolvers in the bread box. "She didn't look at the manifests. She looked at the checkbook. She saw the household account paying six thousand dollars a month to a fuel-oil depot in Riverhead that had been closed since the hurricane of seventy-six. She went to see Paulie at the terminal to ask him why he was billing her personal account for diesel fuel."
"She didn't tell me."
"Why would she tell you?" Grace asked, and there was real, vicious contempt in her gray eyes now. "You were in Chicago with the Merlo family for six weeks, trying to buy two hundred hotel rooms near O'Hare. Every time you spoke to her on the telephone, you had three bodyguards in the room and you were talking about what the commission would allow. Isabelle was trying to keep three children from growing up in a house where the windows have lead foil in the sashes to stop the parabolic microphones."
I set the cup down. The porcelain clicked against the saucer, a sound no louder than a trigger catching on the half-cock notch.
"Why are you here, Grace?"
"Because Frank died for nothing if I don't see who paid for the morphine," she said simply. "And because those three girls were sitting in that library like little gravestones, and nobody in this house had the sense to realize that children don't go quiet because they're sad. They go quiet because they're terrified that if they make a sound, the thing that took their mother will remember they're still in the room."
The phone on the wall near the pantry gave a short, double-chirp.
I didn't move for three seconds. Then I reached across the table and picked it up.
"Yeah."
"Dominic?" It was Paulie. His voice had the background roar of the Long Island Expressway behind it—the rhythmic thumping of concrete expansion joints and the heavy whistle of truck tires in the wet. "The delivery from Queens is offloaded. The boys are at the diner in Maspeth. You want me to come out to the house or head down to the docks?"
I looked at the Five-by-Seven frame on the table.
"Come out to the house, Paulie," I said, my tone as smooth and heavy as olive oil. "The girls want to see you. Olivia found an old picture from the lake."
There was an infinitesimal pause on the line. Not more than a quarter-second. The length of time it takes a man who has lived forty years in the rackets to calculate the distance between his ribs and the nearest brick wall.
"From the lake?" Paulie said, his laugh coming through the receiver slightly too loud, slightly too high. "Man, that was a good week. Remember that four-pound smallmouth she brought in on the yellow spinner? She wouldn't let me gut it. Kept it in the live-well until it died of old age."
"Yeah," I said. "I remember. Come through the back gate. The paving crew is working on the main drive."
"Be there in thirty, Boss."
I hung the receiver back on its chrome fork.
I looked at Grace. She was already reaching into her pocket. She didn't pull out a housekeeper’s key ring. She pulled out a small, flat notebook bound in black oilcloth, the kind the Suffolk County detectives used to carry in their breast pockets to avoid sweat damage during July road-watches.
"He's not alone," she said.
"Paulie never travels alone," I said, reaching for my coat. "He's got two of the boys from South Ozone Park in the back of the Lincoln."
"No," Grace said, her slate eyes fixed on mine. "Not the boys from South Ozone. I called my cousin at the precinct fifteen minutes ago, Dominic. The car that just came through the toll plaza at Throggs Neck behind Paulie’s Lincoln isn't a company car. It's a dark green Buick with upstate plates. The Bishop’s old Buick."
I stopped with my arm half-in the sleeve of my overcoat.
"Thomas is with him?"
May you like
"Thomas doesn't leave the carriage house unless he's coming to collect what's left," Grace said. "If Paulie thinks Olivia is talking, he isn't coming to explain himself. He's coming to finish the audit."
***
