Chapter 5 - The Carriage House
The rain turned to sleet by six o'clock, rattling against the corrugated zinc roof of the old stable with the sound of birdshot. The carriage house sat three hundred yards behind the main residence, hidden behind a double row of blue spruce that my father had planted in the seventies to screen the sight of the grease pits and the fuel tanks from the terrace.
I walked through the dark without a flashlight. I didn't need one; I had known every root, every drainage dip, and every broken flagstone on this acre since I was six years old and Isabelle used to hide behind the stone urns during the family confirmations.
Paulie was walking three paces ahead of me. His right arm was twisted behind his back, held by the short leather strap of my dog’s old training lead, looped once around his wrist and twice around his neck. If he tripped, he would hang himself before he hit the mud.
"Dominic," he wheezed, his shoes slipping on the wet pine needles. "Thomas is seventy-two. He's got a bad valve. You don't have to do this like this. We can put him on the boat to Florida. He won't ever come north of the Delaware again."
"Shut up, Paulie," I said.
The wind off the bay brought the smell of fuel oil and wood rot. The carriage house had once held four carriages and six horses; now it held an old Dodge power-wagon with a cracked block, forty cords of split maple, and the green Buick with the upstate plates that sat in the central bay with its radiator ticking as it cooled.
The small side door—the one the stable boys had used—was unlatched, swinging two inches in the gusting wind, clicking against the cedar frame with a rhythmic, wooden beat.
I shoved Paulie forward. He stumbled through the opening, his knees hitting the greasy gravel of the floor, let out a dry, sobbing gasp as the strap bit into his throat.
I stepped in behind him, pulling the door shut with my heel.
The interior was warm, heated by an illegal kerosene salamander that roared with a blue, drum-tight flame in the center of the bay. The light it cast was orange, flickering, and threw massive, distorted shadows of the rafters against the whitewashed stone walls.
Sitting on a three-legged stool near the heater, his gout-swollen feet tucked into a pair of fleece-lined slippers, was my mother’s brother.
Thomas "The Bishop" Vane did not look like a monster. He looked like an retired butcher from Corona who had done well enough to buy a cottage with some hydrangeas. He had white, thinning hair combed straight back from a high, liver-spotted forehead, and he was wearing a heavy cardigan of brown Shetland wool that Isabelle had knitted for him three winters ago.
On the folding card table beside him sat a plate of salt-cod salad, a loaf of crusty pane di casa, and a half-gallon jug of Carlo Rossi red wine.
He looked up when the door clicked, his watery blue eyes squinting against the glare of the salamander.
"Dominic," he said. His voice was cracked, wet with phlegm, the voice of a man who had smoked three packs of Chesterfields every day since the Korean War. "You're late. Paulie was supposed to have the paperwork signed two hours ago."
He saw the lead strap around Paulie’s neck.
He saw the Kimber in my hand.
He didn't drop his fork. He took a piece of the salt cod, chewed it slowly with his back teeth, his jaw working with the deliberate, patient motion of an old cow, then reached for his wine glass.
"The girl spoke," Thomas said. It wasn't a question.
"Both of them," I said.
"I told Paulie," the old man sighed, setting the glass down on the green baize of the table. "I told him three times. When you leave children behind, you're just planting teeth in the dirt. My father told me that in thirty-one when the Maranzano people took the trucks in the Bronx. If you don't take the root, the tree grows back with iron in the bark."
Paulie made a small, strangled sound in his throat, his face turning the color of an eggplant as the strap tightened.
"Why, Thomas?" I asked. I didn't raise my voice. The salamander was too loud anyway, its fan roaring like a jet engine on the runway. "The annuity was sixty thousand a year. You had the house in Cooperstown. You had the box at Saratoga."
The Bishop looked at me, and for the first time, I saw the man who had run the policy games in Harlem before the black families took them over—the man who had personally put three city marshals into the foundation of the Whitestone Bridge.
"Because you were letting it rot, Dominic," he spat, his watery eyes suddenly hard as flint. "You were sitting up here in the trees with that schoolteacher wife, pretending you were one of the Vanderbilts. You wouldn't touch the narcotics. You wouldn't touch the port authority docks because the federal monitors had three cameras on the gate. You wanted to be a gentleman."
He pointed a crooked, yellow-nailed finger at my chest.
"Your grandfather didn't die in Atlanta so you could have three little girls who don't know the difference between an Italian and an Irishman," he said. "Isabelle was the one who told you to pull the money out of the South Side. She was the one who told you to let the trucking contracts go to the unions. She was turning you into a clerk."
"So you had the driver use the hammer," I said.
"The driver was an idiot," Thomas said without hesitation. "He was supposed to do it on the highway. He was supposed to make it look like a hijack on the van. But she saw him at the gas station in Mineola. She ran for the school because she thought the nuns would save her."
He shook his head, looking down at his cod salad with mild annoyance.
"Nobody gets saved by nuns, Dominic. You know that. You went to Saint Michael's."
I let go of the dog lead.
Paulie fell forward onto his hands and knees, sucking in air with great, whooping gasps, his forehead resting against the oily gravel.
"Where is the ledger, Thomas?" I asked.
The Bishop looked toward the Buick. "In the trunk. The spare tire well. Everything's there. The names in the county prosecutor’s office. The receipts for the morphine Frank Bennett took. Paulie kept good books. I'll give him that. He's a thief, but he's an accountant."
"Get it," I told Paulie.
Paulie scrambled to his feet like an animal that had just seen the cage door open an inch. He ran to the back of the Buick, his hands shaking so violently he dropped the keys twice into the dirt before he could get the trunk lock to turn.
The lid popped with a dry squeak.
Inside, resting on top of a greasy hydraulic jack, was a thick, ledger bound in gray canvas—the same kind of ledger my father had kept in the safe behind the wine cellar in sixty-eight.
"Bring it here," I said.
Paulie brought it. He held it out with both hands, like an offering, his eyes wide and white in the kerosene glare. "Dominic. Look at it. My name isn't on the payoffs. Just Thomas. Just the Bishop. I only ran the trucks. I didn't know about the school until it was over. I swear to you—"
I didn't take the book.
I shot Paulie Castiglione through the bridge of the nose.
The report in the enclosed bay was deafening, the muzzle flash lighting the rafters like lightning. The impact blew him back across the card table, smashing the jug of Carlo Rossi and sending the red wine and the salt-cod salad flying across the Bishop’s fleece slippers.
Thomas didn't flinch. He picked a piece of broken glass from his lap, his fingers completely steady, and dropped it onto the floor.
"You always were too quick with the iron, Dominic," the old man said, his voice dropping into that wet, phlegmy whisper again. "Just like your father. Carmine never could wait for the roast to finish before he carved it."
"Stand up, Uncle," I said.
"No," Thomas said, leaning back against the wall, his swollen legs stretched out in front of him. "I don't think I will. I'm seventy-two years old, Dominic. It's thirty degrees in here, and my knees feel like they're full of broken glass. If you're going to do it, do it while I'm sitting down. My mother wouldn't like you shooting an old man while he's standing in his socks."
I looked at him for five long seconds.
The smell of cordite was thick, mixing with the stink of the kerosene and the sour, fruity smell of the spilled wine. From somewhere high in the rafters, an owl that had taken shelter from the sleet let out a low, questioning hoot.
"You're right," I said. "My mother wouldn't like it."
I holstered the Kimber.
The old man’s eyes widened slightly. A faint, triumphant gleam appeared in his watery irises. "I knew it. You've got too much of her in you. She always was the soft one in the family. She used to cry when Carmine drowned the barn kittens."
"I'm not going to shoot you, Thomas," I said, reaching down and picking up the canvas-bound ledger from where it had fallen into the red pool of wine.
I walked to the door.
"Dominic?" The Bishop’s voice lost its edge, turning thin, dry, and old. "What are you doing? You can't leave me out here. The car’s out of gas. Paulie had the cans in the truck."
I stepped out into the freezing sleet.
"The salamander runs on kerosene, Uncle," I said through the six-inch gap in the door. "It's got about twenty minutes of fuel left in the tank. After that, it gets very quiet out here."
"Dominic!" he screamed, his voice cracking into a high, reedy screech that sounded like an old woman’s. "Dominic, you bastard! The phone line's cut! Dominic!"
I turned the heavy iron padlock through the hasp on the outside of the stable door.
May you like
The click of the tumbler was the only answer he got.
***
