The End of Brooklyn, page 1
Books by Robert J. Randisi
Nick Delvecchio Novels
The End of Brooklyn *
The Dead of Brooklyn
No Exit from Brooklyn
Other Novels
The Bottom of Every Bottle *
You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Kills You
Hey There (You with the Gun in Your Hand)
Luck Be a Lady, Don’t Die
Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime
Alone With the Dead
Arch Angels
East of the Arch
Blood on the Arch
In the Shadow of the Arch
Short Stories
The Guilt Edge *
Anthologies (Editor)
The Shamus Winner Volume I (1982-1995) *
The Shamus Winners Volume II (1996-2009) *
Hollywood and Crime
The Eyes Have It
*Published by Perfect Crime Books
THE END OF BROOKLYN. Copyright © 2011 by Robert J. Randisi. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored by any means without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Crime@PerfectCrimeBooks.com.
Perfect Crime BooksTM is a registered Trademark.
Cover Image Elements @ 2011 by BigStock and iStockphoto. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, entities and institutions are products of the Author’s imagination and do not refer to actual persons, entities, or institutions.
Perfect Crime Books Original Trade Paperback Edition
June 2011
Kindle Edition December 2011
Prologue
Somewhere in the Midwest, 2010
Brooklynites have no imagination.
For the most part, it’s Florida for vacation, and Florida for retirement.
I wasn’t on vacation, or retired.
I was hiding out.
And not in Florida.
Actually, that part about no imagination goes for most New Yorkers.
I was a native of Brooklyn, and a lifelong resident, until about fifteen years ago. Since then I’d been moving around, living in different places, doing odd jobs that had some connection to what I did for a living for years—I was a private detective.
These days I did jobs for people that didn’t involve paying me with a check, because I didn’t have any bank accounts.
I was spending the morning sitting on my deck with a cup of coffee, a forty-five, and looking at the Mississippi, which spread out panoramically below me. At fifty years old, the past fifteen years had not gone the way I might have thought. In my early thirties if you had told me I would live anywhere but Brooklyn I would have told you that you were crazy.
I certainly never would have expected to be living in a house in the Midwest, on a bluff above the most famous river in the world. I liked the isolation. The long driveway that led to the house from the main road was all gravel, which meant vehicles driving on it made a lot of noise. And the only vehicle that drove on it was the mail truck.
The gravel also crunched underfoot—my own security system. So when I heard that crunching sound, being caused by more than one set of feet, I knew they’d found me, and I was in trouble.
I wasn’t finished with my coffee.
I tucked the forty-five underneath my left butt cheek, and waited. Running at this point was not an option. Besides, I’d been running for fifteen years. I was getting a little too old for it.
“Nick Delvecchio?”
I turned in the direction of the voice. Three men had come up the steps and onto my deck, which spread the entire width of the house. So at that moment they were about twenty feet from where I sat. I’d once come out on the short end of a shootout at this range.
“Who’s asking?”
“I think you know,” the spokesman said.
“I like to deal in names.”
“Names don’t really matter,” he said, “but let’s go with . . . John.”
“I detect a Brooklyn accent,” I said, “so I’ll bet as a kid it was Johnny.”
He didn’t respond. He was about my age, probably grew up in a neighborhood like I did. The other two were younger, maybe late thirties. They weren’t talkers. They looked Italian, but the spokesman had a different look to him.
“Are you Delvecchio?” John asked.
“I think you know I am.”
“I need confirmation.”
I shrugged. “Then I am.”
John looked around.
“I can still hear a little of it in your voice.”
“Most people can’t.”
“This is a long way from Brooklyn.”
“You said it.”
“That coffee?”
I nodded.
“Any more?”
“Inside,” I said. “The kitchen. Have one of your . . . friends go and get it.”
“Thanks.”
He looked at one of them. The man went inside for a few moments, came out with a mug of coffee. Just one. That established the pecking order for me. I would only be talking to John.
I was sitting in a wrought iron chair, one of a set of four, at a matching table.
“You mind?” he asked, gesturing with the mug.
“Not at all.”
He sat to my right, which meant he couldn’t see the gun butt sticking out from beneath my ass.
“Nice out here in the fall,” he said.
“Lots of bugs in the summer.”
“Been here long?”
“Not that long.”
“You‘ve led us on a pretty good chase.”
“You, personally?” I asked.
“Well, no,” he said, “I meant . . .”
“I know what you meant.”
He sipped his coffee, looked down at the river. The other two leaned against the railing. One watched me, one watched John.
“Parked down at the entrance to your road,” John said. “Didn’t want you to hear us drive up.”
“I probably would’ve thought it was the mail man.”
“Still . . .” he said, with a shrug.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “there’s what we’re supposed to do, and then there’s what I’d like to do.”
“Are they very different?”
“Yeah, they are.”
“What would you like to do?”
“Talk.”
“And what’re you supposed to do?”
“I think you know that, too.”
“So,” said, “let’s talk.”
“I’m curious,” he said.
“About what?”
“About what happened fifteen years ago.”
“Why?”
“Because I was around then,” he said. “You wouldn’t remember. I wasn’t anybody at the time, but I was around. I know a little about what happened, but only the obvious stuff.”
“So what do you wanna know?” I asked.
“Nick, I wanna know what happened,” he said. “I wanna know what made you do what you did, and then bolt. Leave Brooklyn. Because I can’t imagine leavin’ Brooklyn. Just bein’ out here among all the trees . . . I mean, it’s nice and all . . . but I’d get the heebie jeebies after a while.”
“Takes some gettin’ used to,” I said.
“So . . . you mind talkin’ for a while?”
“Considerin’ the alternative . . . not at all. Where would you like me to start?”
“Anyplace you feel comfortable startin’.”
I looked at him for a minute, then asked, “You ever go to any of your high school reunions?”
One
Brooklyn, 1995
“I’m not going.”
“Why not?” my neighbor, Samantha Karson, asked.
“Because it’s stupid,” I said. “I mean, come on. Eighteen years? Don’t they usually have reunions at fifteen, and twenty? But eighteen?”
“Did you go to your fifteenth?” she asked.
“I didn’t go to the tenth or the fifteenth,” I said. “And I’m not going to the eighteenth—or, for that matter, the twentieth.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Don’t you think your high school buddies will find you being a private eye exciting? Or the girl? Didn’t you have a girl in high school?”
“I had lots of girls in high school,” I admitted. “What I didn’t have was a girlfriend.”
“Braggart,” she said.
She put the invitation down and picked up her turkey club. She was on another diet, which was why we had lunch together a few times a week. She said it helped her. She came across the hall and made us lunch. Today she had a turkey club while I just had a good old turkey sandwich—piled high!
She was a lovely, full-bodied blonde who, as far as I ever knew, was proud of that fact. Why then was she always trying to lose five pounds?
She took a bite of her sandwich and said, “I think you should go.”
“Why?”
“Why shouldn’t you go? Didn’t you have some friends in high school?”
”Sure, I had some . . .”
“But not a lot?”
“A few.”
“And no girlfriends?”
“Maybe one or two . . .”
“And aren’t you curious about what’s happened to them? What kind of adults they’ve become?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
< br /> “I might be disappointed.”
She stared at me, then asked, “Or maybe you think they’ll be disappointed in you?”
Okay, so I decided to go to the damned thing.
The reunion was held in Marine Park, at a hall on Avenue N called the Something-or-other Chateau. A chateau in Brooklyn . . .
I admit to some nervousness as I walked through the front door. Brooklyn was a big place and although not many of us had left, we had spread out across the borough and hardly saw each other over the years. That suited me. High school was not something I thought back on fondly.
But as a huge apparition appeared in front of me, arms spread wide, I also admit to being glad to see him.
“Nicky-D!” he shouted, grabbing me in a bear hug and just about squeezing the life out of me.
“Tony Mitts!” I surprised myself by shouting back at him with almost as much enthusiasm.
It was then I silently thanked Sam for talking me into attending.
It was later that I cursed her for it . . .
Tony Mitts was just the start of the reunion. In rapid order I met up with Sammy Carter, Joey “the Nose” Bagaletti and Sal “the Ace” Pricci. The five of us used to hang out together in high school, which a lot of people found odd because while the rest of us were Italian, Sammy was black. We used to tell people he was “black” Italian. Among ourselves we also said that if anyone had a problem with him hanging out with us, “Fuck ’em!”
We staked out a place at the bar, watched the girls go by and talked about Gina Gershon making out with Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls and the fact that the Yankees were going to finish second to Boston this year.
“But they’re gonna get the wild card spot,” Sal said. “Still gonna make the playoffs.”
“Boy,” Sammy said, “most of these girls have really porked up, huh?”
Showed you the difference between Sammy and Sal, one talking girls, the other baseball.
“What are you bitchin’ about?” Tony said. “I thought skinny black guys like you liked your women with big asses.”
Sammy fixed Tony with a hard stare. “You gonna start that ‘fat-assed black girl’ stuff again, Mitts? You were always doin’ that in high school and I didn‘t like it then.”
“Yeah, yeah . . .” Tony said.
It was true. This was an old argument from high school, but the rest of us knew that the two of them always secretly enjoyed the argument.
I examined my four high school friends. What I had told Samantha was close to the truth. In four years of high school I had made four friends. That counted as a few.
Tony had always been big, well over six feet, but he’d never been fat, and he still wasn’t. He’d kept himself in remarkable shape, but then as an athlete he would. We called him “Tony Mitts” because he had hands the size of catcher’s mitts. His real last name was Bologna, but our nickname was better than what they used to call him in junior high—“Tony Baloney.” Ah, junior high kids had no imagination.
Sammy Johnson was as skinny as ever, but his hair had receded to the halfway point of his head. The bald part gleamed the way Lou Gossett’s or George Foreman’s did. I wondered why he didn’t just shave it all off?
Sal had gone to fat, which he had always been leaning to in high school. His arms and shoulders still threatened to burst the seams of his clothes. We would have called him “the Arm” but Tony was “Mitts” and we didn’t want another body part in the group. So, because of his affinity for cards—poker, mostly—we called him “the Ace.”
Joey’s nose was as big as ever, which had made his nickname very easy in high school. It was a family trait, he was always pointing out to us, and all the men in his family were proud of it.
“Anybody seen Mary Ann?” I asked.
Suddenly, Tony smiled.
“She’s here,” he said.
“Yeah,” Sal said, slapping Tony on his broad back. “She came with Tony, the lucky dog.”
“Man,” Sammy said, “she looks good, even if she don’t have an ass on her.”
“You wanna see her?” Tony asked me. He was anxious.
“Sure.”
I agreed not only because he was apparently so eager to show her off, but because I was curious. Mary Ann had been the best looking girl in our class—maybe in the whole school. I wondered what she looked like eighteen years later.
A couple of girls went by. I didn’t recognize them, but they had adopted the new looks of bare, pierced belly buttons, and they shouldn’t have.
“Come on.” Tony grabbed my arm in an iron grip and dragged me across the floor.
I had never gotten to know Mary Ann Grosso well in high school, although I knew a lot of guys who bragged they had. They all claimed to have scored, too, except for Tony. He not only said he hadn’t, but that nobody else had, either.
He pulled me over to a table where a bunch of people were sitting. I was able to pick Mary Ann out with no trouble. She was even more beautiful at thirty-six than she had been at eighteen. She’d grown into her beauty. She had dark hair that hung down to her shoulders. I recalled that she had always had beautiful skin—smooth and creamy and free of acne. She still did.
“Mary Ann, here’s Nicky!” Tony said. When she frowned he said, “Come on, you remember, Nicky-D!”
“Of course,” she said. “Nicky.” I knew she wasn’t lying. She remembered me, if not right away. She held out both hands warmly, and I took them. “It’s good to see you.”
“And you, Mary Ann. You look . . . great.”
“Don’t she though?” Tony blustered right over her soft, “Thank you.” He was obviously very proud of her, and when he told me that they were to be married, I realized why.
By the following week, Mary Ann was dead.
Two
All death is tragic.
Particularly when it’s accidental. After all, someone dying as result of a fluke? An accident? Or an act of carelessness? Tragic, to say the least. Now natural causes, that’s probably the least tragic of all—if you can use the words “least” and ”tragic” in the same sentence. I mean, what can you do about that? A man goes to the doctor one week, is given a clean bill of health, and then drops dead the next week. Happens all the time, right?
So where does murder fit into the equation? Well, in my opinion, murder is just a step below accident. After all, what’s tragic about one person taking the life of another? That’s not tragic—it’s just a damn shame!
And where does suicide fit in?
Who the hell knows.
I stared at the casket from my seat in the back of the chapel. I chose to sit there alone because I was not family. As a matter of fact, I was not even a close friend. I was someone who had known the deceased in high school, and then met her again one evening eighteen years later. And a week later, she’s dead.
High school was not a favorite time of my life. I know people of varying ages who claim that, given the opportunity to go back in time, they’d go back to high school and do it all again. Best time of their lives. My opinion of people like that is they can’t deal with having grown up.
Given the opportunity to go back to any time of my life, I’d choose to stay right where I am. That either means that this is the happiest time of my life, or I haven’t had it, yet. I choose the latter. Why? It means I still have something to look forward to.
To me, looking forward is much better than looking back.
From my vantage point in the chapel I could see Tony Bologna’s broad back. His shoulders were shaking. Sitting to his right was his mother. Her shoulders were ramrod straight. On his left was Mary Ann’s mother. She was alternately patting and rubbing his back, the way I thought his own mother should have been doing.
I looked up toward the casket again, where Mary Ann Grosso was lying, all dressed up and made to look “good” in death. At my mother’s funeral I would have throttled anyone who said aloud, “She looks good.”
Mary Ann Grosso just looked dead.
After the service I decided not to accompany the family and friends to the cemetery. I stopped to tell Tony that and he grabbed my arm tightly.
“Come to Mary Ann’s mother’s house, Nicky.”
