"Hello?”
“Mr. DiGeordano?”
“Yes.”
“Nick Stefanos.”
“Nick, how are you? Happy New Year.”
“Thanks, same to you.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I apologize for calling you at home on the holiday, but I need to ask a favor.”
“You want to speak to Joey?”
“No, sir, it’s you I’d like to speak to.”
Louis DiGeordano cleared his throat. “Go ahead,” he said in his high rasp.
“Not over the phone, if you don’t mind.”
“Is this about the Goodrich girl?”
“Some of it is,” I said. “Most of it’s about something else.”
DiGeordano’s voice went in and out as he mumbled for a bit. I sat on the couch at my apartment, sipping coffee. He put his mouth closer to the line. “The family’s coming over for New Year’s dinner,” he said, “at five. I suppose I can meet you this morning, for a short while.”
“How about in about an hour? Say, eleven o’clock?”
“Fine.”
“Hains Point, is that okay? Parking Area Six. You know where that is?”
“Do I know it? Nick, it was me that took you to Hains Point for your first time, nearly thirty years ago.”
“Can I pick you up?”
“No, I’ll have Bobby drive me. See you at eleven.”
I waited for another dial tone, then rang Darnell. He lived alone in the Shaw area of Northwest, with only a mattress on the floor and a small table and chair set in a bare-walled efficiency. The holidays were rough on guys like me, rougher on guys like Darnell.
Darnell said, “Yeah.”
“Darnell, it’s Nick.”
“Headin’ down to Hains Point. Want to come along?”
“Hains Point? While the hawk flies? Shit.”
“I’ve got to meet a man. It won’t take long. But it’s a nice day, thought you might want to take a drive. Matter of fact, thought you might want to drive.”
“You know I ain’t driven a car since I checked outta Lorton. Don’t even have a license, Nick.”
“Come on, Darnell-what’re you going to do today, sit around, watch beer commercials in black and white? You don’t even drink.”
Darnell thought it over. “I can drive?”
“Yeah.”
“You swing by my way?”
“In a half hour.”
Darnell said, “Right.”
We caught the park off Thirteenth at Arkansas and took the express route downtown. Heavily clothed joggers bounded coltishly through blocks of sunlight on the path to our right, the wind at their backs.
Darnell wore his brown overcoat, his matching brown leather kufi tight on his head. He drove my Dart with one hand on the wheel, his left elbow resting on the window’s edge. Darnell had brought his own tape-Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On- for the ride, and he slipped it in as soon as he had slid gleefully into the driver’s seat. He had rolled down the window right after that, and I had let him do it without objection, seeing the involuntary, childlike grin on his face, though it wasn’t a day for open windows. The bright sun barely dented the cold front that had fallen into town overnight.
We passed the Kennedy Center and drove along the river to East Potomac Park, winding finally into Ohio Drive. Darnell eased off the gas as the road went one-way, a line of naked-branched cherry trees to our left, the golf course to our right. After another quarter-mile, at Parking Area Six, Darnell pulled the Dart into a small lot that faced Washington Channel.
There were few cars circling the park, and only one-a red Mercedes coupe with gold alloy wheels-in the lot. In the light I could make out the outline of a shaven head behind the tinted glass of the coupe’s driver’s side. I rolled my own window down and pushed the lighter into the dash. When the lighter popped out thirty seconds later, I used it to burn a Camel.
Darnell rocked his head and softly sang the chorus to “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa.” He turned the volume up a notch and looked across the channel to the restaurants and fish stands that lined Maine Avenue. I blew a jet of smoke out the window and watched it vanish in the wind.
“Nice day,” Darnell said, breaking away from his own song. “Thanks for askin’ me out. You been decent to me, man, and I appreciate it. To most people, it’s like I’m invisible.”
“Thought you might like to drive.”
“Been a while,” he said, staring toward the water. The sun made sailing shards of glass on the channel. “Funny how a simple-ass thing like a drive down the park”-he stopped, shook his head, and smiled weakly. “Drivin’s what got me my bid in Lorton in the first place, you know that?”
“I heard you got caught up in something.”
Darnell laughed shortly and without pleasure, then shook his head. “More than caught up, Nick. I knew what I was doin’, in the way that any kid knows he’s gettin’ into somethin’ wrong, knows it but can’t stay away.”
“What happened?”
Darnell rubbed a skeletal finger down the bridge of his long, thin nose. “Round about the mid seventies, I was runnin’ with this Southeast boy. I knew he owned an army forty-five, used to brag how he bought it off some vet in the street. One day, he asked me to drive him down to see this girl he knew, down his way. I was known in the neighborhood as a guy who knew cars, see, knew how to make ’em move. I did it, even knowin’ he was on somethin’, talkin’ more bullshit than usual that day, actin’ strange. Anyway, on the way down he told me to pull over in front of some market, down off Minnesota Avenue. I parked out front, left the motor run-he said he’d be back right quick-and then this stickup boy I was runnin’ with, he started shootin’ that forty-five of his inside, shootin’ that motherfucker all to hell.”
I dragged off my smoke and flicked ash. Darnell stopped, took a long breath, and continued. “The way it ended, somebody died, and the police were all over the joint straight away, and they ran in and killed that boy too. I stayed in the car, didn’t even try to run, knew it was over then, let them pull me out, my hands up, let them push my face right into the street.” He glanced in my direction but averted his eyes. “Later on, they told me that boy was hard on the Boat. Had enough green in him to knock down a horse.”
“You paid up,” I said.
“I did, man. More than you know.”
A black BMW pulled into the lot and stopped alongside the Mercedes. The driver, a young man wearing a black jacket with a large eight ball embroidered across the back, stepped out and gave the world a tough glance. The Mercedes’ door opened and a man not yet twenty wearing a parka with a fur collar put his foot out onto the asphalt. They shook hands elaborately, and then the driver of the BMW walked around the passenger side of the Mercedes and got in. Both doors closed, leaving only an armor of tinted glass.
Darnell said, “What do you think that’s about?”
“Couple of young professionals. Doctors, maybe, or lawyers. Right?”
“Nick, man, what the fuck happened to this town?”
“I can’t tell you what happened. Only that it did.”
Darnell leaned closer to me on the seat. His eyebrows veed up and wrinkles crossed his forehead. “Remember 1976, man? The way pean?/div›ople acted to each other, everything-the shit was so positive. Groups of kids on bicycles, blowin’ whistles, ridin’ in Rock Creek Park. The message in the music-Earth, Wind and Fire, ‘Keep your Head to the Sky.’ Even that herb-smokin’ motherfucker George Clinton, Parliament, ‘Chocolate City’-‘You don’t need the bullets, if you got the ballots, C.C.’-you remember that, Nick?”
“I remember.”
Darnell sat back and spoke softly. “When I got out, in ’88, it was a new world, man. There wasn’t no hope, not anymore-not on the street, not on the radio, nothin’. Nothin’ but gangster romance.”
I looked in the rearview and said, “Here comes our man.”
A black 1974 Eldorado turned in to the lot and pulled three spaces down from our car. The engine cut, the passenger door opened, and Louis DiGeordano slowly climbed out. He looked in my direction and titled his head toward the concrete walk that ran around the park at the water’s edge. I nodded and stepped out of the Dart.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes, Darnell,” I said before I closed the door.
“I’ll be waitin’ on you right here,” he said.
I buttoned my overcoat. DiGeordano was down on the walkway, facing southeast toward the brick edifice of Fort McNair. I walked to the driver’s side of the Caddy and watched the window roll down. Bobby Caruso sat behind the wheel.
He filled a shiny suit, the French cuffs of his shirt four inches ahead of the sleeves on his jacket. His hair was gelled and spiked, and the fleshy rolls of his neck folded down over the collar of his starched shirt.
“What is it?” he said, his face stretched in a constipatory grimace.
I leaned on the door. “That day in the market, when we went at it.”
“I remember. What about it?”
“I called you a name that day. I want to apologize for that.”
Caruso relaxed, letting the boyishness ease into his face. He looked then like the kid he was, dressed for the P.G. County prom. “Forget about it,” he said.
I shook his hand and walked away. Caruso yelled, “Hey, Stefano,” and I turned. “That shit you pulled on me that day, with your hands-where’d you learn it?”
I smiled. “From my doctor.”
Caruso smiled back, showing his beaver teeth. “I thought doctors were supposed to help people, not hurt ’em.”
“Take care of yourself,” I said, and walked across the grass, through the thin branches of a willow to the concrete walkway, where I stood beside Louis DiGeordano.
“Let’s walk,” DiGeordano said. “Shall we?”
DiGeordano put his hand on the two-tiered rail that ran along the channel, and began to move. I walked beside him, taking a last pull off my smoke.
He was wearing a gray lamb’s-wool overcoat with a black scarf over a suit and tie, and a matching felt fedora. The brim of the fedora was turned down, with a slight crease running back to front in the crown. A small red feather was in the band, the same shade of red as the handkerchief folded in the breast pocket of his suit. A liquid wave of silver hair flowed under the hat, swept back behind his ears.
DiGeordano smoothed the black scarf down across his suit and pulled together the collars of the overcoat, against the wind. “Those two in the parking lot,” he said. “You see them?”
“Yes.”
“Titsunes, ” he said. “Drugs, guns, and titsunes. That’s what this park is now. That’s what this whole city is.”
“I don’t know. I come down here in the summer, ride my bike down here quite a bit. I see a little of that. But what I mostly see is families having picnics, getting out of the heat. Old men fishing, couples holding each other, sitting under the trees.”
“It’s not like it was.”
“It’s exactly like it was. It’s people, enjoying their city.”
DiGeordano looked across the channel and shook his hand in the air as he walked, the wag of his fingers meant for me. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, Nicky,” he said. “You’re not old enough to remember.”
“I guess not,” I said, deferring to his age, though in one sense he was right. We lived in the same city, but a million miles apart.
He put his hand back in his side pocket, his brown eyes squinting now in the wind. “We always walked this side of the park, in the old days, every Sunday. The Potomac side, looking toward Virginia; it gets too much wind, and too much spray from the chop.”
“You said you were with me and my grandfather the first day I came down here.”
DiGeordano’s pink lips turned to a smile beneath his gray mustache. “Yes. This was very early in the sixties, you were maybe five years old. Nick had bought a cheap fishing pole for you and baited it with a bloodworm. You were holding the pole-he was holding it, really, standing over your shoulder-and a perch hit the line. Nick yanked it from the channel and removed the hook, and this little perch, it was no bigger than the palm of your hand, it flipped off the walkway and back into the channel.” DiGeordano laughed deeply. “You were wearing a pair of denim overalls with a red flannel shirt underneath, and I’ll never forget you chasing after that fish, trying to scoot under the railing. Nick grabbed you by the straps of your overalls and pulled you back-he laughed the rest of the day about it, talked about it at our card games, how you tried to go in after that fish. He talked about it for years.”
I stopped walking and put my hand on his arm. “I need your help, Mr. DiGeordano.”
He looked me in the eyes, shrugged, and made a salutatory motion with himotont size="s hand. “Anything.”
We walked on. A low, thick cloud passed beneath the sun. Its slow shadow crossed the channel in our direction. “Do you remember a murder last year, a young white man in his apartment on Sixteenth Street, a reporter for a small newspaper in town?”
DiGeordano withdrew a lozenge from his overcoat pocket, unwrapped it, and popped the lozenge into his mouth. He clucked his tongue, staring ahead. “Yes, I remember it. It was in the papers, every day. Then nothing.”
“That young man was a friend of mine,” I said.
“Go on.”
“He was researching a story on a pizza place called the Olde World and a man named Bonanno at the time that he was killed. I think the people that run the Olde World have an arson business and gambling operation as well, and I think my friend was murdered because he got too close.”
“Bonanno’s a filthy pig,” DiGeordano said.
“You know him?”
“Of course.”
I stopped and struck a match, cupping one hand around it, lighting another cigarette. Then I blew out the first sulfurous hit and ran a hand through my tangled, uncombed hair. DiGeordano leaned his back against the rail and looked at my unshaven face. “You’re deep into this,” he said, “aren’t you?”
I took a fresh drag off the smoke. “Bonanno’s a fat man, bushy gray sideburns, right?”-DiGeordano nodded-“and there’s two more with him, a guy named Frank and a tall man with bad skin. Who else?”
“No one else,” he said tiredly. “Bonanno and Frank are small-time hoods out of Jersey. The tall man goes by the name of Solanis. Contract mechanic, from Miami. They say he killed a cop and drifted north. Caught some buckshot in the face while he was drifting. Bad business, that-killing cops, and outsiders-it isn’t done. Very sloppy. They’re not going to last.”
“What are they into? Organized gambling?”
DiGeordano chuckled. “Not too organized, from what I hear. As far as bookmaking goes, they don’t know shit from apple butter. They still work from chits, for Christ’s sake, and notebooks.”
“So what’s their game? Arson?”
“Their game?”
“They moved their shops near a string of pizza parlors called the Pie Shack, and every one of the Pie Shacks got burned out. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“It’s not,” he said. “But arson’s not their source of income. Neither is gambling.”
“What is, then?”
DiGeordano said, “Pizza.”
I dragged off my cigarette and looked out into the water. The cloud had passed, leaving the channeing l shiny and brilliant in the noon sun. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s simple,” he said. “The pizza business is very profitable. Bonanno moved into proven, established neighborhoods and burned out the competition. Solanis was there to make sure there weren’t any belches. The guy who owned the Pie Shack simply left town, and felt lucky to leave alive. Bonanno puts a couple hundred thousand in nontaxable income in his pocket every year. The gambling is their kick, and the business end of it just covers their losses. No drugs, prostitution, nothing like that-just a bunch of hoods, selling pizzas.”
“What about the law, the fire people?”
DiGeordano shrugged. “Bought.”
I flipped the remainder of my cigarette out into the channel. “A cop by the name of Goloria, and his partner, a woman named Wallace, they paid me a visit a while back.”
“Goloria,” DiGeordano said.
“That’s right. Things got rough-he said it was about April Goodrich, but something wasn’t right. Is Goloria connected to your son Joey?”
“No. My ties with the law in this town go farther back, and higher than that. We don’t have to get down in the shit with cops like him. He tried to approach us, once. I sent him on his way.”
“He’s been talking to people I know about the young reporter’s murder.”
“That’s not a surprise-I would think he’d be a little nervous that you’re looking into it.”
“Why’s that?”
DiGeordano ran his fingers along the brim of his hat. “Goloria’s in with Bonanno.”
I leaned on the railing and looked down into the gray channel. A dead catfish floated on the surface, near a large sheet of packaging paper. I felt feverish and dizzy in the cold wind, and I unfastened the top buttons of my overcoat as I turned to DiGeordano. “Who killed the reporter?” I said.
“You should have talked to me from the beginning,” he said. “There’s still very little going on in this town that gets by me. I know you disapprove of me, and my son. I can only tell you that in all my years, I never shed any innocent blood, in anything I did. In fact, there was very little violence at all. That’s why I can’t stomach what’s happened to this city. People like Bonanno-they’re vampires, but fragile as dust. Their own ignorance exterminates them. Do you understand?”
“Who killed the reporter?” I said again. The wind whistled through our silence, and water slapped the concrete.
“The knife job,” DiGeordano said. “That’s the signature of Solanis.”
“That’s what I needed to know.”
“Before you act on this,” he said, “you’d better think things over.”
“I’m fine,” I said. The cold win. T” d stung my face.
DiGeordano studied me. “There’s something else?”
I nodded. “There’s one more piece of business.”
“You’re talking about my son’s problem, with April Goodrich.” DiGeordano waved his hand slowly in front of his face. “Like I said, nothing gets by me. You found the girl, and she’s dead. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes. But there’s more to it.”
“Such as?”
“Have Caruso pull the Caddy next to my Dart,” I said, pushing away from the rail. “I’ve got something to show you.”
I worked early shift at the Spot for the next four days. At the end of each shift I changed clothes, drove out to Gallatin in Northeast, and parked my car in front of the row of brick colonials. Then I walked into the woods and waited for them to arrive at the Sears bungalow, and on each of the four nights, they showed with the pillowcases filled w ith gambling chits, at roughly the same time. Occasionally there were visitors, interchangeable ruddy-faced men in dark clothing who drove through the woods in Buick Electras and Pontiac Bonnevilles and stayed for a few quick, stiff drinks. But always at the end of the night there were the three of them-Bonanno, Frank, and Solanis.
On the fourth night, a Wednesday, I returned to my apartment, poured a drink, phoned Dan Boyle, and told him everything I knew.
On Thursday afternoon Boyle walked into the Spot with a gym bag in his hand and took a seat at the bar. He put the bag at his feet, ordered a draught, and asked for it in an icy mug.
“What’s in the bag, Boyle?” I said as I wiped down the bar.
“You’ll find out soon enough.” Boyle put a Marlboro to his lips and pointed a thick finger past my shoulder. “This beer’s gettin’ lonesome,” he said. “How ’bout a hit of that Jack?”