Philadelphia Noir

Where’d ja hide it, damnit?!

Holding the phone, I hesitated, wondering if callers were required to identify themselves. Hmm. I had to think about this. After all, it’s a big deal to call the cops on your neighbors. Did I really want to get involved? Obviously, some families just yelled a lot and said awful things. That’s just how they “communicated.” And I had never actually witnessed any physical abuse.

I decided to defer to the collective wisdom of my Bella Vista elders, whose official word on the street was invariably: I didn’t see nuthin.

But I sure did hear a lot: and it was mostly from colorful characters who charmed the hell out of me. The Happy Guy who strolled down our street every day at lunchtime, for instance, belting out a respectable version of “Volare.” Or the trio of highly seasoned bookies who worked our block and the local convenience store, assuming their positions every day on this or that corner, in rotation. Aging wiseguys with chewy old skin like the Italian dry sausages hanging on strings from the ceiling of Claudio’s in the market. The way they made themselves laugh at their own jokes never failed to crack me up from afar.

When I passed these bookies on the street, they were flirty, but always respectful, and they took to greeting me playfully with a nickname: Hey, Smiley.

Between these guys and the nosey neighbor ladies (of which I soon became one, being home all day), I felt relatively secure. Not to worry, hon, one of the native grandmas reassured me when we first moved in as newlyweds. They only kill each other.

Good to know, I humbly thanked her.

And then she asked me why I wasn’t pregnant yet-a question she continued to ask every time she saw me for the rest of her life, which she lived out mostly sitting in her folding lawn chair in front of her house. I would just play the blushing bride-Smiley-although after several years she eyeballed me suspiciously, and then sympathetically, and finally in complete senility, at which point I could only pat her hand gently and say: Not to worry, hon.

I had to wonder at my own tendency to be blase about the wiseguy-on-wiseguy crime that made our neighborhood legendary. We got our slices at Lorenzo’s on the corner of 9th and Christian, and ate them just down the street under the two-story mural of the late Mayor Frank Rizzo looking vaguely off. It didn’t disturb my appetite for splashy red tomato pie to know that mob boss Sal Testa almost got his arm blown off in this same spot, eating a bucket of raw clams.

And then there was the night Nicky Scarfo, Jr. got hit at Dante & Luigi’s, a beloved old family restaurant two small blocks away from us. I actually heard that one. October 31, 1989, a balmy Halloween evening, perfect for trick-or-treating, and the kids were skipping and squealing in the streets below, all hopped up on sugar, while my husband was downstairs manning the candy bowl at the front door-also hopped up on sugar. I was in my office when I heard an unusually loud: Pop pop… Pop pop pop… Pop pop pop.

I assumed some older kids-hooligans!-were setting off firecrackers over in Palumbo Park. But within a minute I heard the sirens descending from all directions, their strobes overreaching the rooftops.

Urban dwellers are nonchalant about sirens, as long as they keep on moving-Nothing to see here-farther and farther away. We live for this Doppler effect, and only drop whatever task at hand when we hear the sirens stop, followed by that dreadful sound of police cars, ambulances, and, scariest of all, the fire engines coming to a breakneck halt. It’s way too close to home if you can hear the static-y radio dispatchers talking about your neighbors.

Nicky, Jr., a big baby-faced kid in his mid-twenties, was dining at Dante & Luigi’s, enjoying a plate of his favorite white clam sauce (always the clams-what’s with the clams?), when he was approached by a grown man in a Batman mask, carrying a plastic trick-or-treat bag emblazoned with a fiendish pumpkin. Batman reached into his candy bag and pulled out a MAC-10 machine pistol, shooting Nicky, Jr. eight times about the head and neck.

Batman took flight, eluding capture.

And Nicky, Jr. was lucky he had a very thick neck. Nine days later, he walked out of the hospital, shrugging off the assassination attempt for the local TV cameras.

As for my neighbors, everybody saw nothing.

Curious, considering so many people were always watching: mostly grandmas and great-grandmas looking out their windows and doors, or tending to their pretty flower boxes or elaborate seasonal decorations, when they weren’t sitting in their lawn chairs in yards of concrete.

Some Saturdays these ladies-in their floral-patterned house dresses, rolled Supp-Hose, and sensible nun shoes-would appear in the street with buckets of soapy water to clean their stoops and sidewalks.

The wiriest grandma, who lived in one of the houses across from us, would wash her front window standing on a stepladder, making me nervous, afraid that she would fall “on my watch.” I couldn’t concentrate on my work when she was out there. I would carry my phone around the house, peeking constantly out my own front windows just in case I had to call 911.

And yes, of course, I offered to help her. But she appeared to take this as some kind of insult, because she gave me the stink-eye. I figured it was probably because I didn’t feel compelled to give my house a bath every month. I like to think that’s why Mother Nature provided us with weather.

But I did sweep occasionally, and the first time I ventured out with a broom, I was love-bombed by the whole lot of them. Ladies I had never even seen before poked their heads out their front doors to wave and wish me a good morning. One grandma actually crossed herself. Another kissed the crucifix on her rosary beads in my general direction.

The solidarity I felt with them as a result, not to mention my appreciation for the spontaneous benediction, increased my empathy when I heard the horror story about the last young couple that had moved into the neighborhood, around the corner on 9th Street. The husband, an untalented stockbroker who wasn’t much better at dealing drugs, stabbed a guy to death-twenty-seven times-in his row house during a cocaine deal gone bad. The panicky killer rolled the profusely bloody body in a drop cloth and dragged it outside, in the darkest hours, down our block-only yards from our front stoop-to deposit it in Cianfrani Park on the corner of 8th Street, where dozens of residents would be walking their dogs at dawn. So it was immediately discovered.

When the cops arrived at the park, they literally just looked down at the sidewalk and followed the bloody trail on foot, back to the murderer’s house, right up the marble steps to his front door, where they rang the bell and the homicidal imbecile answered. Case closed.

But it wasn’t the shocking murder that disgusted my neighbors-since the victim was dealing cocaine, he got what he deserved. It was the thought of that unholy mess the murderer left all over the sidewalk, and who the hell was going to clean it up? And what about the killer’s own stoop around the corner? Did he have a wife who would get out there and put a scrub brush with Clorox and Lysol to those blood-stained steps?

The sound of my neighbor ladies’ collective outrage rebounded off the houses.

Fortunately, their cleaning concerns were washed down the storm drains thanks to a deluge that lasted for days. I refrained from saying I told you so.

But it was only because I got out there with a broom that I heard the illicit history of our own house, which had been a front for a still during Prohibition. This explained why the center of our basement was walled in with concrete. For some inexplicable reason, previous owners had decided to brick in the whole contraption instead of removing it. The walls were so excessively reinforced you would have thought they contained a radioactive core. I couldn’t help but think that maybe it also served as the final resting place of a bootlegger or two, who got what they deserved in a booze deal gone bad.

During the fifteen years we lived in that house, I was always looking for “the body”-or some hidden treasure. Upstairs, I found a secret hiding place in the floorboards, and used it to stash a small metal lockbox of valuables. While installing the air-conditioning ducts, our contractor discovered an amber beer bottle still sealed with an old- fashioned wire and rubber stopper, sunk into disintegrating cheesecloth, the beer having evaporated down to dust. Holding that bottle up to the light, I had to wonder at the idiots who made alcoholic beverages illegal. Imagine being compelled to hide a bottle of beer in your wall because it could get you arrested.

When spring came one year, I was anxious to let in some fresh air, and during that first week of mild days,