He hesitated a moment, then replied, “Yeah. Sure. She’s my wife. What’s she going to do? Go to college and work for IBM?”
“Is she as unhappy about the move as she was about moving here?”
“You got to ask? She never wanted to leave her mother’s house, for Christ’s sake. You know, you think about them immigrant women coming here from sunny Italy with nothing and making a life here in the tenements of New York. And now those women’s daughters and granddaughters have a fit when the fucking dishwasher breaks. You know? But hey, we’re no better. Right?”
“Right.’’ I said, “Maybe she’ll adjust better to Italy than to Lattingtown.”
“Nah. All Italian married women are unhappy. They are happy girls and happy widows, but they are unhappy wives. I told you, you can’t make them happy, so you ignore them.’’ He added, “Anyway, my kids are still here. Anna is going nuts about that. Maybe they’ll want to come over and live. Who knows? Maybe someday I can come back. Maybe someday you’ll walk into a pizza joint in Brooklyn, and I’ll be behind the counter. You want that pie cut in eight or twelve slices?”
“Twelve. I’m hungry.’’ Actually I couldn’t picture me in a pizza joint in Brooklyn, nor could I picture Frank Bellarosa behind the counter, and neither could Frank Bellarosa. Some of this was just an act, maybe for me, maybe for the Feds if they were listening. A guy like Bellarosa may be down for a while, but never out. As soon as he got out from under the thumb of the Justice Department, he’d be back in some shady business. If he was ever in a pizza joint, it would be to shake down the owner.
He said, “Well, you got me wondering about that favor I owe you.”
I put down my glass of wine and said, “Okay, Frank, I’d like you to tell my wife it’s over between you two and that you’re not taking her with you to Italy, which is what I think she believes, and I want you to tell her that you only used her to get to me.”
We stared at each other, and he nodded. “Done.”
I moved toward the door. “We won’t see each other again, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t shake your hand.”
“Sure.”
I opened the door.
He called out. “John.”
I don’t think he’d ever called me by my first name before, and it took me by surprise. I looked back at him sitting in bed. “What?”
“I’ll tell her I used her if you want, but that wasn’t it. You gotta know that.”
“I know that.”
“Okay.’’ He said to me, “We’re both on our own now, Counselor, and in years to come we’ll think of this time as a good time, a time when we took and we gave and we got smarter by knowing each other. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“And watch your ass. You got some of my
paesanos
on your case now—Alphonse and the other guy. But you can handle it.”
“I sure can.”
“Yeah. Good luck.”
“You, too.’’ And I left.
I had decided to visit Emily in Galveston, and I was packing enough clothes for an extended trip. Visiting relatives is sort of like walking out but under cover. Susan had her turn at it, and now that she was back, it was my turn.
I was going to take the Bronco rather than fly, because maybe the states west of New York were not just fly-over states, but places that should be seen, with people that should be met. It was a step in the right direction, anyway.
I was looking forward to my first stop at a McDonald’s, to staying at motels made out of concrete blocks, and to buying an RC Cola at a 7-Eleven. The thought of self-service gasoline, however, was a bit anxiety-producing, because I wasn’t sure how it was done. I suppose I could watch from the side of the road and see how everyone else did it. I think you pay first, then pump.
Anyway, I intended to leave in the morning at first light. It had only been a few days since my last call on Frank Bellarosa, and in that time, Susan had come home from her trip to Hilton Head and Florida looking very fit and tan. Her brother, she informed me, loved Key West and had decided to finally settle down and do something with his life.
“Like what?’’ I asked. “Get a haircut?”
“Don’t be cynical, John.”
She had greeted the news of my cross-country trip with mixed emotions. On the one hand, my absences removed a lot of strain from the situation, but she honestly seemed to miss me when we were separated. It’s not easy to love two people at the same time.
Anyway, as I was packing that night, Susan came into the guest room where I was still in residence and said, “I’m going for a ride.”
She was wearing riding breeches, boots, a turtleneck, and a tailored tweed jacket. She looked good, especially with her tan. I replied, “The bulldozers have changed the terrain, Susan. Be careful.”
“I know. But it’s bright as day tonight.”
Which was true. There was a huge, orange hunter’s moon rising, and it was such a beautiful, haunting sort of night that I almost offered to join her. With the two estates about to become subdivisions, and Fox Point about to become Iranian territory, and with the remaining landed gentry not speaking to us, the days of horseback riding were drawing to a close, and even I was going to miss that. But that night, I decided not to ride. I think I had sensed she wanted to be alone.
She said, “I may be late.”
“All right.”
“If I don’t see you tonight, John, please wake me before you leave.”
“I will.”
“Good night.”
“Happy trails.”
And she left. In retrospect, she had seemed perfectly normal, but I told you she was nuts, and that full moon didn’t help.
• • •
At about eleven
P
.
M
., I was contemplating retiring for the night as I wanted to be up before dawn and I had a long day on the road ahead of me. But Susan still wasn’t home, and you know how husbands and wives are about falling asleep before the other is home. I suppose it’s partly concern and partly jealousy, but whatever it is, the person at home wants to hear the car pull up in the driveway, even if they’re not speaking to the other person.
In this case, I wasn’t waiting for a car to pull up, of course, but for the sound of hoofbeats, which I can sometimes hear now that the stable is closer to the house. But it
was
a car that pulled up in front of the house, and I saw its headlights coming up the drive long before I heard the tires on the gravel. I was in my second-floor bedroom at the time, still fully dressed, and as I came down the stairs, I heard the car door shut, then heard the doorbell ring.
A strange car in the driveway at eleven
P
.
M
. and a ringing doorbell is not usually good news. I opened the door to see Mr. Mancuso standing there with an odd expression on his face. “Good evening, Mr. Sutter.”
“What’s up?’’ was all I could think to say with my heart in my throat.
“Your wife—”
“Where is she? Is she all right?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . . she’s not hurt. But I think you should come with me.”
So, wearing corduroy jeans and a sweatshirt, I followed him out to his car, and we got in. We didn’t speak as he made his way down the dark drive. As we went past the gatehouse, I saw Ethel Allard looking out the window, and we were close enough so that our eyes met, and I wondered if I looked as worried as she did.
We swung onto Grace Lane and turned left toward Alhambra. I said to Mr. Mancuso, “Is he dead?”
He glanced at me and nodded.
“I guess he wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest this time.”
“No, he wasn’t.’’ He added, “Do you have a good stomach?”
“I saw a man’s head blown off on a full stomach.”
“That’s right. Well, he’s uncovered, and I guess you’ll see him, because we held off on calling the police. I came and got you as a courtesy, Mr. Sutter, a favor, so you can speak to your wife before the county detectives arrive.”
“Thank you.’’ I added, “You didn’t owe me any favors, so I guess I owe you one now.”
“All right. Here’s the favor. Get what’s left of your life together. I’d like that.”
“Done.”
Mancuso seemed in no hurry, as if he were unconsciously hesitating, and it took us a while to get up the long cobble drive. I noticed, irrelevantly, that every window in Alhambra was lit. Mancuso said to me, “What a place. But like Christ said, ‘What is a man profited if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’”
I didn’t think St. Felix understood the true nature of Frank Bellarosa. I replied, “He didn’t sell his soul, Mr. Mancuso. He was more in the buying business.”
He glanced at me again. “I think you’re right.”
I said, “Is Mrs. Bellarosa here?”
“No. She’s in Brooklyn.”
“Which was why my wife was here.”
He didn’t reply.
I added, “In fact, it was very convenient for Mr. Bellarosa and Mrs. Sutter having Mrs. Bellarosa packed off to Brooklyn for extended visits.”
Again no reply.
I said, “You not only allowed that, you aided and abetted it.”
He replied this time, “That was not our business, Mr. Sutter. It was your business. You knew.”
“I know you have to keep your witnesses happy, Mr. Mancuso, but you don’t have to pimp for them.”
“I understand your bitterness.”
“Understand, too, Mr. Mancuso, that neither you nor I are as clean and pure as we were last Easter.”
“I know that.’’ He added, “This was a very dirty case. And I can’t even say that the ends justified the means. But I’ll make my peace in my own way. I know you’ll do the same.”
“I’ll give it a shot.”
“Professionally, no one is very happy that Frank Bellarosa died before he could tell us everything he knew. No one is very happy with what Mrs. Sutter did. So maybe we got what we deserved for what we did, for bending the rules and letting her come here and never even running a metal detector over her. We have some answering to do for this. Maybe that makes you feel better.”
“Not a bit.”
The car stopped in front of Alhambra, and I got out quickly and went into the house. In the palm court were six FBI men, two in casual clothes with rifles slung across their backs and four in suits. They all turned and looked at me. I was approached by two of them and frisked, then got the metal detector routine that they should have given to my wife.
The first thing I noticed as I looked around was a large potted palm lying on its side near the archway that led to the dining room. The clay pot was cracked open, and soil and palm fronds were spread over the red tile floor. Partially hidden behind the big pot and the foliage was a man sprawled on the floor. I walked over to him.
Frank Bellarosa was lying on his back, his arms and legs outstretched and his striped robe thrown open, revealing his naked body. I could see the healed wounds and pockmarks where the shotgun blasts had hit his arms, neck, and legs some months before. There were three new wounds, one above his heart, one in his stomach, and one right in his groin. I wondered which shot she had fired first.
There was a lot of blood, of course, all over his body and his robe, all over the floor, and even on the plant. The three wounds had partly coagulated and looked like red custard. I noticed now that there was blood splattered some distance from his body, and I realized he had fallen from the railed mezzanine above. I looked up and saw that I was standing under where his bedroom door would be.
I looked back at Bellarosa’s face. His eyes were wide open, but this time there was no life or pain in them, no tears, only eternity. I kneeled down and pressed his eyelids closed, and I heard Mr. Mancuso’s voice behind me, “Please don’t touch anything, Mr. Sutter.”
I stood and took a last look at Frank Bellarosa. It occurred to me that the Italians had always understood that at the core of life’s problems are men with too much power, too much charisma, and too much ambition. The Italians made demigods of such men, but at the same time they hated them for these very same qualities. Thus, the killing of a Caesar, a don, a duce, was a psychologically complex undertaking, embodying both sin and salvation in the same act.
Perhaps Susan, not the sort of person to think of harming anyone for any reason, had absorbed some of her lover’s psyche along with his semen, and had decided to use a Bellarosa solution to solve a Bellarosa problem. But how do I know that for sure? Maybe John is projecting.
Mancuso tapped my arm and drew my attention to the far side of the palm court.
Susan was sitting with her legs crossed in a wicker chair, between a pillar and a potted tree, out of the line of sight of the corpse. She was fully dressed in her riding outfit, though I did not know then nor would I ever know if she had been fully dressed earlier. Her long red hair, however, which had been tied up under her riding cap, was now loose and disheveled. Otherwise she looked very composed. Very beautiful, actually. I walked toward her.