It doesn’t connect to Sid Meyer, but I’d swear I know it. Morgan… but, something else, too.” He shook his head, amazed. A blank, yet…?
“Levi Stern?”
A shrug. Stern in New York was as useful as Jones in Wales. The shrug also said Sid Meyer had no Levi Stern in his history.
“Lawrence Dunlap.”
The data-bank clicked out a card. “Blue-chip broker, from out west, but Harvard Business School. Financial whiz-kid once. Married into Pennsylvania blue blood-bankers, public service. Local Jersey politics, community boards, trustee, all that. How does he fit with Sid Meyer and your wife-tail?”
“I’m not sure he does. I told you.”
“I haven’t turned him up,” Gazzo admitted. “Who else?”
“John Albano.”
“Albano?” Gazzo sat alert. “You’re sure it’s John? I know a lot of Albanos, best and worst. Youngish? Say, thirty-five?”
“No, say seventy but looks younger. White hair, short with shoulders, worked abroad a lot he says. Lives East Side.”
Gazzo sighed, shook his head wearily. I named the Woods last, uneasy. I watched him, and felt better. He showed no reaction. Diana and Harold Wood didn’t tie in with Sid Meyer, not yet anyway. I gave him a description of yellow-gloves, and of my adventure in the St. Marks Place alley. His eyes snapped.
“Hoods, Dan? Pros, like Sid Meyer’s killers?”
“Sure,” I said, “but what hoods, and why?”
In the dim office I sensed that all at once he had some kind of answer to that question. Or, at least, he had a more direct question to ask. He got up like a man with work to do. Work that didn’t include me.
“Keep in touch, Dan,” he said.
By midafternoon I was back in the lobby of Diana Wood’s building. I waited, and wondered what Gazzo had heard in what I’d told him? I wondered if Sid Meyer’s murder had anything to do with Diana Wood? I wondered about Diana Wood.
I felt sad for Hal Wood. I felt very bad for Wood-and I felt excited. She had two men, why not three? Hal Wood had lost her, and maybe she and I…? I wonder if we’ll ever change, most men? Or maybe it was only me? I waited, feeling dirty but still excited, and a little after 4 P.M. I saw her.
She got out of the big, black car in front of the building, still carrying the flat box. A man came into the lobby with her. They stood in front of the elevators for a moment. She had a look in her eyes few men ever see-big, soft, happy. Then she went up. The man glanced around the lobby once before he went out to his car, got in the back, and the car drove off.
I knew what was familiar about the back of the man in Mia Morgan’s snapshot. I knew the answers to a lot of my questions. I’d seen the man.
I only hoped he hadn’t seen me!
CHAPTER 8
I stopped in the first bar. My hand shook. I slopped the Irish. I swore. Because I couldn’t steady the glass with two hands. Because I’d seen the man-homburg, silk scarf, dark blue suit, dark blue coat, hundred-dollar shoes and all.
Andy Pappas.
I’ve known Pappas all my life. We’re the same age. We grew up together, he knows how I lost my arm. But we don’t move in the same circles, and that’s why his back in the snapshot had been only familiar. I don’t see him much these days. Nobody does.
For the record, Andy Pappas runs a big stevedoring company on the docks. Off the record, he runs something else. Some people say he runs everything else, legal and illegal, in Manhattan and other places, but it’s hard to be sure. What is sure is his true occupation-extortion. Legal or illegal, the base of his business was the same-threat and terror. Fear. A racketeer. Mafia.
I had another Irish. Had Andy seen me? I watched the door, but no one came in. After a third drink I got up the nerve to walk out. (Not as brave as it looked. I’m a privileged character with Andy, a sort of sacred madman, but I’d been tailing a woman of his, and I never knew when the privilege would stop.) No one was outside. In the darkening afternoon I walked across town toward my office.
No wonder I’d been warned, “advised,” and offered money for my client’s name. The name of someone who would hire me to tail Pappas would be worth gold. Who the hell was Mia Morgan? A jealous girl? Andy liked them young. And Sid Meyer? Maybe Gazzo could tell me. I was ready to tell him now. All I knew. But not quite yet. Andy had seen me.
The little man leaned on my office door. About five-feet-two, stocky, with a flat nose, eyes hidden in scar tissue, and an easygoing smile. Relaxed, no weapon in sight. Max Bagnio, Pappas’s number-one aide since Jake Roth was buried unclaimed some years ago in Duluth. I could have run. But Little Max had a weapon somewhere, of course, and he’d find me sooner or later.
“Mr. Pappas wants to buy you some dinner,” Max said.
I said that sounded nice. Little Max grinned, but stayed behind me all the way down to the black car. We rode downtown. I wasn’t too scared. Andy wouldn’t have sent his top soldier in the open unless he wanted to ask some questions-first, anyway. I hoped I could figure out the right answers. Okay, I was scared.
The restaurant was near Washington Square: The Lido. Bagnio walked me in. It was quiet, with small tables and dim light. Bagnio took me to an open alcove at the rear. There were four tables in the alcove. In the main room the patrons ignored us.
Andy was alone at the rear table in the alcove. Two men sat alert at the table near the entrance-soldiers. A short man and a woman ate at the table to Pappas’s right. The man didn’t look up from his dinner. A pair of yellow gloves lay on his table.
“Hello, Danny,” Andy said. “Fetuccini to start, okay?”
I sat down, watched only Andy.
Because Mia Morgan and Captain Levi Stern were at the table to Andy’s left! Max Bagnio joined the girl and Stern.
“I don’t eat with you, Andy,” I said.
The sacred madman, privileged. An old story with Andy and me. He smiled, his eyes cold. They were dead eyes, and it wasn’t brave to defy Andy, but I always had to. I was as afraid of him as anyone else, and any second I might push him too far, but I couldn’t back off. Maybe because he called me his friend, and I had to prove to the world that I wasn’t his friend. (In Chelsea no one will ever understand that. A man who Andy calls his friend should be on top of the world. No one believes my denials, so I get status.)
“Still no old times’ sake, Danny?” Andy said.
Andy had a warm voice, low and even, and he spoke well for a boy who barely got out of a poor high school. I knew that he always had that voice, it fools people. What I didn’t know for sure is why he let me talk to him as I did. Maybe he had to prove that I was his friend-not based on power or fear.
“Still in the same work, Andy?” I said.
He sighed, he didn’t really care about me. He nodded toward Mia Morgan. I’d tried not to look at her since I came in.
“You ever meet my daughter Mia, Dan?” Andy said.
Sometimes an answer is so unexpected, so impossibly simple, that you feel you’ve fallen on your face. The whole dark, devious, complicated maze faded into no more than a private squabble, family! Daddy was cheating. Get a picture and details, accuse him, make him be a good boy! Only Daddy was Andy Pappas, motives could be mistaken even from a daughter, so I fought to show no reaction, to not laugh. And I made a mistake.
“No,” I said. “Dan Fortune, Mrs. Morgan.”
The moment I said it, I heard what I’d done. If I didn’t know her, how did I know her married name? I tried to
