Lullaby Town

'Don't mention it. We're a full-service agency.'

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I called Joe Pike at seven-thirty that night, L.A. time. 'It's me. I'm in New York on this thing, and it's heating up. Looks like the mafia is involved.'

'Rollie George.'

'You got his number?'

Pike gave me a phone number. 'Where are you staying?'

I told him.

'Wait ten, then call Rollie. Try to survive until I get there.'

He hung up. That Pike. Some partner, huh?

Fifteen minutes later I called the number and a deep male voice said, 'I've got an apartment on Barrow Street in the Village, just east of Seventh. You need a place to stay, it's yours.' Roland George.

'How ya doin, Rollie?'

'Can't complain. My friend Joe Pike says you want to know some things about your classic, all-American-style mafia.' He dragged out mafia into three long syllables. Street black.

'The DeLuca family.'

'Figured it might be the Gambinos, you being the guy who burned Rudy when he was out on the coast.' Nobody in the rest of the world refers to Los Angeles as 'the coast.' Only New Yorkers.

'A woman named Ellen Lang did him. I was just along for the ride.'

'They after you?'

'No. This is something else.'

'Whatever you want, it's yours, you know that'

'Sure.'

'Whatever I've got, whatever I can get for you or for Joe, it's yours.'

'I'm coming in tomorrow morning. From Chelam, Connecticut.'

'Come in after the traffic, say about ten. Take you an hour. I'll meet you downstairs in front of the building at eleven-thirty.'

'All right.'

He gave me the address and we hung up.

The next morning I retraced the route I had driven before, this time turning off the West Side Highway on Twelfth and picking up Bleecker at Abingdon Square and following it down through the Village to Barrow.

Two black men and a very old Boston terrier were standing in front of a redbrick building at the east end of Barrow by Fourth Street. One of the men was younger and tall and muscular in a plain navy suit with a white button-collared shirt. The other was in his early sixties in a dark brown leather trench coat and had maybe looked like the younger guy a couple of lifetimes ago, before twenty-two years with the NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau and two 9mm high-velocity parabellums in the liver had taken it away from him. Roland George. The little black and white Boston terrier sat at his feet, rear legs stuck out at odd angles, its pushed-in, once-black face white with gray, staring at nothing through eyes heavy with cataracts. Its tongue was purple and didn't fit in its mouth. It drooled. Roland's dog, Maxie.

Eleven years ago, Roland George and his wife, Liana, had been driving up the Rahway Turnpike from a weekend at the Jersey shore when a dark brown Mercury had pulled up alongside them and two Puerto Rican hitters had cut loose with a couple of Sig automatics, payback from a Colombian dope dealer whom Roland had busted. Roland survived the bullets and the subsequent crash, but Liana did not. Maxie had been left in the care of a neighbor. They had had no children. Roland George took a forced medical retirement, drank heavily for a year, then sobered up to write thick, violent novels about New York cops tracking down psychopathic killers. The first two didn't sell, but the last three had ridden the New York Times bestseller list to a couple of penthouse apartments, a twenty-eight-room home on a lake in Vermont, and substantial contributions to political candidates favoring the death penalty. Fourteen weeks after Liana George died, the two Puerto Rican hitters held up a Taco Bell in Culver City, California, and were shot to death by a uniformed police officer named Joe Pike. That's how Joe and I knew Roland George. Roland still wore the wedding ring.

I pulled to the curb, got out, and Roland shook my hand. His grip was hard and firm, but bony. 'You hungry?'

'I could eat.'

'Let Thomas here put your car in the parking garage across the street. There's an Italian place we can walk to not far from here.'

'Sure.' I gave the younger man my keys, then leaned down and patted Maxie on his little square head. It was like petting a fire hydrant. 'How ya doing, old boy?'

Maxie broke wind.

Roland shook his head and looked concerned. 'He's not doing so well.'

'No?'

'He's gone deaf. He's got the arthritis, he's blind as a bat, and now he can't hear. I think he sees things.'

'Growing old is hell.'

'I bear witness to that.'

Thomas said, 'Shall I pick you up at the restaurant, Mr. George?'

'That's all right, Thomas, I think we'll walk back. Be good for old Max.'

'Very good, sir.'

Thomas climbed into the Taurus and pulled away. I said, 'I never heard anyone say 'very good, sir' in real life before.'

'I keep trying to break him of it, but, you know, he's working his way through Columbia Law.'

Roland and I turned off Barrow onto Fourth. To get Maxie going, Roland had to lift him to his feet, then give little tugs on the leash to point him in the right direction. Maxie's tongue stuck out and a ribbon of drool trailed along the sidewalk and his back legs lurched along with a mind of their own. The arthritis.

As we walked, Roland's eyes flicked over faces and storefronts on both sides of the street, sometimes lingering, mostly not. Still a cop. He said, 'Sal DeLuca is your old-line dago. Came up as a hitter through the Luchesi mob back in the forties, and by the time that broke up, he had a big enough crew and enough power to form his own family. Sal the Rock, they call him. These dagos are big on the names.'

'What are they into?'

'Gambling and loan-sharking and the labor rackets here in lower Manhattan. We're in DeLuca family territory right now.'

I looked around for shadows lurking in doorways or people with tommy guns, but I didn't see any. 'How can you tell?'

'Over in OCCB they got a territory map hung on the wall with New York carved up so it looks like its own little United States, here to here the DeLucas, here to here the Gambozas, here to here the Carlinos, like that. A bunch of guys called capos each have their own crew of soldiers and run their own businesses, but the capos all answer to the capo de tutti capo, the boss of the bosses.'

'The godfather.'

'That's it. In the DeLuca family, that's Sal. Charlie's got his own crew, and his own business, but he's still got to answer to Sal. Most of the time, the capo de tutti capo retires, he passes it on to his kid. He's lined things up so that the kid has the biggest crew, the most money, like that. Sal bought Charlie a meat-packing plant'

'I've been there.'

Rollie made his hand like a gun and touched his temple. 'He's a nut case. Absolutely out of control. They call him Charlie the Tuna. You see, with the names? They call him the tuna because he's put so many guys in the ocean.'