Authors: Nancy Martin
She drove farther up the hill into Bloomfield, the city’s version of Little Italy, pulled next to the curb near Bruno’s, and parked. She gave Nooch all the cash left in her pockets, and he clambered out and headed into the pizza shop in the rain, leaving Roxy alone to further wonder about Henry Paxton.
Had he guessed she had the statue? His fishing trip seemed to say so. Had she successfully diverted him? She figured the answer was no. She listened to the clack of windshield wipers and idly rubbed Rooney’s head, thinking about her next move.
Her cell phone rang, and she picked up.
“Roxy? Charlie McManus. You want to take a look at a duplex I just bought in Morningside? We’re cutting it into apartments and there’s some windows and shutters and shit we’re tearing out.”
Charlie McManus, absentee slumlord extraordinaire. He tended to buy lousy houses and make them lousier rentals, meanwhile living in a fancy suburb. Chances were good the windows were broken and he simply wanted somebody to haul his junk to the dump.
“How long are you there today?” Roxy asked.
“For another two more hours, that’s it. Take it or leave it.”
Definitely he wanted a run made to the dump. Roxy wasn’t that desperate this week. She said, “I’m tied up today, Charlie. Call me next time.”
“You got it,” he said, no hard feelings, and they hung up.
The passenger door popped open, and Roxy yelped.
“Jeez,” Nooch said, apparently forgetting he’d been shot at once already today. “Why so jumpy?”
He climbed into the car balancing a wet pizza box in one hand. He pulled a smaller package out from under his sweatshirt. He handed it over, fighting off Rooney’s interest in the pizza.
Roxy hefted the package. “What the hell is this?”
“Your uncle Carmine gave it to me. For you.”
The hair on the back of Roxy’s neck prickled.
She glanced into the rearview mirror, which had an excellent view of the sidewalk in front of Annamaria’s Italian Specialty Market, home of the best hot Italian sausage in the city. The market was also a hangout for a handful of old men from the neighborhood.
At tables set up under the market’s awning out of the rain, a bunch of old guys sat huddled in layers of coats and sweaters, sipping espresso, same as every day, except Sunday, no matter what the weather. They came to get away from their wives for a couple hours, to buy lottery tickets and gossip in Italian. Roxy didn’t have to get out of the car to know the codgers were reminiscing about the days when they ran the neighborhood.
The old mobsters liked to think they were still in the game.
Like most of the small neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, Bloomfield started when immigrants were attracted by good jobs in the steel mills. The men walked down the hills to work in the mills while their families built up the various ethnic neighborhoods on the hillsides above the smokestacks. The Polish immigrants located on one hillside, the Slovaks on another, and Bloomfield grew into a Little Italy. Each had its own markets, restaurants, and version of the Catholic Church. And petty crime. When the steel industry left for the Far East, the families who could manage it left the crime for a better life elsewhere—the suburbs or other cities with jobs, like Charlotte or Houston. Those who stayed were too poor or too old or too stubborn to get out. But now, students from the universities were edging in, making the crazy quilt of neighborhoods even crazier.
And her uncle Carmine Abruzzo kept watch over it all.
In the car’s mirror, Roxy could see him watching her. The shriveled old man looked a lot like a lemur—hunched over, big eyes staring.
Before she ripped open the edge of the package—a thin plastic grocery bag wrapped around a hunk of something approximately the size of two pounds of Land O Lakes butter—she knew what was inside. Cash. Plenty of it.
“How much?” Nooch asked, elbowing Rooney’s big tongue away from the pizza box.
Roxy ran her thumb down the side of the twenty-dollar bills. They had been neatly bundled, probably counted. At least twelve thousand dollars, she decided. “Enough to fly you and me to Vegas, if we need to make a quick getaway.”
Enough for Sage’s school fees, too. With some left over to live on.
Sounding wistful, he asked, “Is Celine Dion still in Vegas?”
Roxy ignored the question and contemplated her situation. “Unless Carmine is giving me an early birthday gift, this must mean the old coot still makes a living with the video poker machines. Why’d he give it to me?”
“Phil went to jail last month.”
Phil Tolucca had passed himself off as a mob lawyer for as long as anyone could remember, but mostly he took care of moving Carmine’s cash around and fixing whatever trouble popped up. Everybody knew Phil—grandmothers, and little kids who begged him for the penny candy he kept in his pockets. He wore silk suits and imported ties. For years, he had been the smiling face behind Carmine’s operation. The money launderer. The bag man. The guy who took care of problems, too. Sometimes with rough stuff. Roxy remembered him as the “uncle” who bought her a gold wristwatch for her high school graduation and told her which shops she shouldn’t use when it came time to hock it.
Nooch said, “Maybe he’ll meet your dad in jail.”
“Shut up,” Roxy said automatically. “What did Phil go in for? Jaywalking on his way to the bank?”
“I forget. No wait, I think they got him on indecent exposure.”
“Get out!”
Nooch shrugged. “That’s what I heard at the gas station.”
Chances were good Nooch heard the story wrong or some asshole was pulling his chain for the fun of it, but Roxy made a mental note to ask around.
She rewrapped the package again and plunked it on the dashboard, not pleased with the new situation that seemed to be coagulating around her.
Nooch said, “Maybe Carmine heard how good you are at helping out friends.”
Salvage being mostly a cash business, Roxy often found herself turning cash into gift cards and phone minutes to help friends conceal income from the IRS. Or she accepted cash and wrote checks out of her account to help people who worked at jobs that didn’t look good on a tax return.
No big deal.
There were other favors, too. Sometimes she helped straighten out misunderstandings or ran errands others were afraid to run.
Then, of course, there was the whole business of finding apartments for a few women who needed to start their lives over.
To Nooch, Roxy said, “I don’t want to be Uncle Carmine’s new gofer either.”
Nooch nodded. “Doing favors for Carmine is dangerous. You say that a lot.”
Being a girl in the Abruzzo family used to mean learning to cook large quantities of food and getting knocked around on a Saturday night when the man of the house had a few drinks. But the feminist movement had finally come to the family. Her cousin Connie ran a sports betting operation in Jersey, and there was an aunt who collected on loans for another cousin. Neither one of them had any kids, though.
Seeing her half brother Mick after he’d come home from jail—a tough guy all spooked and half dead inside from his stint—Roxy had decided to stay out of the family trade. It had taken Mick nearly ten years to recover. But now, with all her male cousins either in jail or swearing off the organization, here was Carmine offering Roxy a piece of the action.
Roxy said, “I gotta find a steady income to pay for Sage’s college.”
“Oh, man.” Nooch stared at her. “You’re gonna take Carmine’s money?”
“Shut up.”
“Maybe I should just deliver it back to him.” Nooch reached for the package.
“He’d be insulted,” Roxy predicted. “Maybe shoot you for dissing him.”
Nooch snatched his hand back. “Forget it, then.”
This was a development Roxy hadn’t seen coming. Carmine was asking her for something. He was just paying her before he told her exactly what.
Roxy started the Mustang’s engine. “Why does everything happen at the same time?”
“What everything?”
“Never mind. Hide this package under the seat until I decide what to do. Meanwhile, let’s take some lunch to Sage.”
Nooch brightened. “Great! Maybe she’s baking cookies.”
Roxy drove around the block and past Annamaria’s, but Carmine was gone already. Sneaky SOB. She took the side streets, weaving her way through Bloomfield before hanging a left at a defunct car dealership.
Over the car dealer’s empty lot hung a giant billboard advertising a law firm that specialized in elder law. Three lawyers were pictured on the ad, including one woman with huge breasts barely contained by a business suit. To offset the
Playboy
aspect of the picture, she wore eyeglasses. Her two partners—dead ringers for Hugh Hefner—appeared to be admiring her cleavage, but the printed message said, “Seniors! Protect your assets!”
Roxy turned right onto the side street where her aunt Loretta’s home stood.
Like all the other houses on the narrow street, Loretta’s brick Foursquare had a wide front porch with an aluminum awning. Autumn leaves from a lone maple tree had already been raked out of the front yard—hardly bigger than a parking space—and the walk was swept. The windows gleamed. The grass had been mowed one last time before winter.
Loretta owned the house next to her late husband’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Radziewicz, who lived next door even after their son passed away. For reasons beyond Roxy’s understanding, Loretta kept the house and even took occasional meals to her ungrateful in-laws. The in-laws reciprocated by spying on Loretta and criticizing everything she did. They couldn’t forgive her for using her husband’s life insurance to pay for law school. Apparently, they expected her to set up a shrine in her front yard instead.
Nooch wrestled his way out of the car and moved the broken kitchen chair Loretta kept on the street to save the parking space in front of her house. Roxy slid the Mustang into the space. Rooney jumped into the front seat and landed on the pizza box.
Loretta came out of the house, but stood on the front porch to keep her hair out of the drizzle. Like many Pittsburgh women, Loretta wore her blouses cut low and her hair big. The bigger the hair, the closer to God. At all times, her gold crucifix lay nestled between her voluptuous breasts. She had been saving for breast reduction surgery for twenty years, but other expenses always seemed to pop up to delay her doctor appointments.
Father Pete over at St. Dominic’s once speculated that maybe some men in the parish had sabotaged Loretta’s roof back when it looked as if she had finally saved up enough for the surgery. Seeing as how Father Pete might have gathered insider information in the confessional, the rumor hung around long after Loretta paid for new shingles.
Meanwhile, Loretta’s cup size was going to waste, because she was a pious widow who attended mass every morning at St. Dom’s before she went to work.
Roxy had run away from home after her mother died and arrived on Loretta’s doorstep as a teenager. Newly widowed and childless, Loretta welcomed Roxy into her house. Since then, they’d forged a sort of family of their own—made stronger when Sage came along. Between the two of them, they managed to attend all of Sage’s parent-teacher conferences and sat in the stands at all of her basketball games. Loretta had been thrown out of the gym once for telling a ref where to stick his whistle.
Today, Loretta was dressed in a gray pin-striped suit with a tight, short skirt that showed her spectacular legs. She carried a fancy briefcase, fancy purse. Her shoes were probably some fancy brand, too, but Roxy couldn’t keep all the designers straight. Her mascara had been laid on thick, and her makeup was flawless.
Rooney dashed up the sidewalk, barking with joy. Next door, a curtain twitched, and the pinched face of Mrs. Radziewicz appeared in the window long enough to register disapproval. Nooch waited at the curb.
Loretta did a dance to keep her shoes away from the dog’s dirty paws, but she patted Rooney on the top of his huge head, crooning to him. He crooned back.
Roxy said, “Damn, Loretta, I just saw the billboard on the corner. You look like a porn star.”
“I thought the eyeglasses might help, but, no.” Loretta looked up at Roxy. “Where’s your truck? Did you trade it for that cute car? It’s adorable.”
“The car’s borrowed.”
“You should consider making it permanent. Red is the color that most catches a man’s eye, did you know that?”
The other thing she claimed would attract a suitable husband for Roxy was the ability to make pasta. Despite her law degree, Loretta still had the mentality of a Bloomfield housewife, circa 1953. But Roxy would rather stick a fork in her eye than learn to roll her own ravioli.
“Who’s car is it?” Loretta asked.
“One of Nooch’s cousins’.”
“It’s got holes in it.”
“I got stuck behind a truck in traffic. It kicked up a bunch of gravel.”
Loretta looked unconvinced.
Roxy went on the offensive. “I just heard about Phil Tolucca.”
Loretta’s whole face turned a rosy pink. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“How come you didn’t mention it before?”
“I don’t want to discuss that man or anything else associated with him.” Loretta’s blush spread southward down her neck and into the foothills of her cleavage. “We were barely acquainted. We simply nodded in church a few times, that’s all. Nothing more.”
“Right. Sure.” Roxy decided not to mention the dinner dates at a neighborhood restaurant known for its private alcoves and gossipy waiters. “But, wow, embarrassing, huh? Was he really exposing himself?”
“Certainly not to me,” Loretta said. “I’m putting that whole sordid chapter out of my life.”
“I don’t blame you.” Dying to learn more, Roxy figured now wasn’t the time—particularly within earshot of Loretta’s in-laws. So she said, “Why aren’t you at work?”
“I had the mother of all hot flashes in the office this morning. Soaked clear through my blue blouse.”
“Wow.”
“All the men in the firm avoid me now, for fear I’ll start gushing sweat. Or they’re afraid I’m going to snap their heads off and prop their dead bodies in a room with the air-conditioning turned so low they’d never decompose. Anyway, I was on my way home to change my clothes when I got an emergency phone call from Abby Ricci. Can you deliver a covered dish for me to St. Dom’s? It’s Abby’s night to supply the soup kitchen, but she’s having a gallbladder attack.”