The Sugar House

chapter 31

IT WAS SPIKE WHO CONVINCED NICOLA DESANTI TO MEET at this tavern, the Point, by persuading her that its West Baltimore location was quieter, less likely to draw scrutiny than Domenick’s. She arrived with only Pete and Repete. The terms were no weapons, but Tess doubted the DeSanti clan had honored this request.

After all, she hadn’t.

“You know why we’re here,” Spike said, after everyone had taken their places at a long table in the middle of the bar, the one used for large parties, for birthdays and anniversaries. Sometimes for wakes. “We have to work something out, so everybody’s happy, so nobody bothers nobody anymore. I don’t see why that should be so hard.”

“Who’s the little guy behind the bar?” Nicola said, pointing with her chin.

“My assistant,” Spike said. “He needs lifts just to get out of bed in the morning, you don’t need to worry about him. I’ll vouch for him.”

This earned Spike a sour look, which he ignored.

Nicola DeSanti settled in with a sigh, fishing a package of cigarettes from her bright red pocketbook, sending Pete to fetch an ashtray from one of the other tables. With her teased brown hair and polyester pantsuit, she might have been settling in for a hot night of bingo at the local parish.

“You know, Spike, I came here because we know the same people, we have mutual friends who’d like everybody to get along, because it’s better for them if people aren’t feuding,” she said. “Baltimore is a small town. But you don’t run anything, you don’t have any clout. I’m here out of respect to them, not to you.”

“Yeah,” Spike said. “I also know that all you really wanna do is run your business without anyone coming down on you. Gene Fulton’s dead, Nickie, and Kenny Dahlgren’s headed to Congress. Pretty soon, Tess’s father is gonna be the closest thing you got to any grease on the liquor board.”

“Who you kiddin’? He’s out of there, too. All that old shit is going to come up the surface, and there’s not a thing you or I can do about it. I’m gonna ride it out, and get along without Gene, rest his soul.”

Spike nodded, as if to commiserate: Such bad luck to have your politically connected stooge killed while he was trying to burn down an enemy’s house.

“Maybe your boys here should have thought about that before they killed him.”

“Don’t talk shit, Spike. These boys didn’t have nothing to do with that. They weren’t even there that night.”

“Really? Someone was. The investigators found three gasoline canisters. A source tells me they got a print hit this week.”

“No way,” Pete said. “There aren’t any prints on those cans.” Repete nodded. “No prints.”

“How could you be so sure?” Tess asked. “Unless you wore gloves, of course.” The fact was, she and Spike had made up the part about the prints. They weren’t even sure Pete and Repete had fingerprints on file, but it had seemed like a safe bet.

The look-alike uncle and nephew rolled their eyes at Nicola, as if they had been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. “He slipped, Gee-gee, honest. We couldn’t save him, so we just got outta there.”

“People are always slipping around you,” Tess said. “You go to fetch Gwen Schiller, to make sure she’s not talking to anybody about Meyer Hammersmith, and she falls and cracks her head open. You go to Philadelphia and you kill the woman you find in the apartment, then try to kill Devon Whittaker.”

“That was Gene,” Pete said quickly. “Gene was running things. We just helped him out sometimes.”

“I checked Gene Fulton’s schedule and he visited five different bars that day, all over Baltimore,” Tess said. “He couldn’t have been in Philadelphia.”

“But-” Pete began.

Nicola leaned across the table and smacked him, then Repete. It was a short, matter-of-fact slap, just hard enough to get her point across.

“Shut up. You’re not supposed to be talking here. I didn’t even know why they wanted you here, but now I guess I do.” She turned back to Spike. “You want I guarantee these two will be good from now on? I can do that. Right, boys? I can make them be good.”

Pete and Repete rubbed their reddening cheeks and nodded ruefully. “No you can’t, Mrs. DeSanti,” Tess said. “They’re out of control. They’re responsible for the deaths of at least three people. Gwen’s death may well have been an accident, but it seems to have given them a taste for it. Hilde, Gene-people keep dying around them. It’s only a matter of time before they do something you won’t be able to cover up.”

Nicola studied Pete and Repete. Tess could see her innate loyalty warring with her instinctive shrewdness. Shrewdness won.

“What do you want?”

“Gwen Schiller’s dead, there’s no bringing her back, and no reason to try them for her death. Make them confess to Gene Fulton’s murder, and the arson. Even if Fulton did fall, the autopsy shows he died from smoke inhalation. When they left him in the house, they were guilty of manslaughter. Gene was a good employee, Mrs. DeSanti, he did whatever you asked him to do, he gave good value for your dollar. He didn’t deserve to die while doing your work.”

“I can’t let my babies go to prison,” she said.

“You should,” Tess said. “I wouldn’t sleep at night, knowing those monsters were coming and going under my roof. One day, they’ll get bored and kill you, too, because they think they know better than you how to run your business. They’re already dealing behind your back. And using. Which makes them big security risks for you. Stupid and on drugs is no way to go through life.”

The boys shook their heads vehemently, almost convincing in their outraged innocence. “We never would do such a thing, Gee-gee,” said Pete, and Repete lived up to his nickname, parroting his uncle’s promises. “We know you don’t want anyone around you to get mixed up in that.”

“No, Nicola prefers clean scams, like prostitution and video poker,” Spike said. “You still do that thing where you let women who are behind on their bills raffle off blow jobs at your bar? I always liked that one.”

Nicola glared at Spike. “Who are you to talk? You’re a two-bit bookie.”

“Never took a bet on a dog race,” Spike said placidly. It was an important distinction to him, for reasons Tess couldn’t fathom.

“We don’t sell drugs, and we don’t do them,” Pete repeated. “Never, never, never,” Repete said.

Tess walked over to the bar, and picked up an envelope of black-and-white photographs. “The quality is a bit off, but I think you’ll recognize the two young men on Forest Park Avenue, not even a half mile from here. I guess they thought if they got out of the neighborhood, you wouldn’t catch them. As consumers, they prefer crack. When they sell, they tend toward amphetamines. They’ve been dealing out of your bar for a while now. My guess is that Gene Fulton found out and told them to stop. Maybe that’s why he’s dead. Maybe that’s why he ‘slipped.’”

Nicola studied the top photograph in the stack, which showed her “babies” grabbing a few glass vials of crack. Adam Moss had given Tess this idea when he mentioned Nicola’s antipathy toward drugs, how she fired girls who used. Tess had remembered the crazed stink coming off Pete and Repete, and Crow had been more than happy to verify her hunch, following them for the better part of a day, then chatting up the local Sowebo girls about who hooked them up. But Tess had been deliberate in choosing to show Nicola her babies were consumers as well as dealers. Selling drugs-she might have reconciled herself to that. But not using, not crack.

“It’s what niggers do,” she said, her voice flat. “You’re down on the corner with the niggers, buying their drugs. I didn’t raise you this way.”

“We didn’t-” Pete began.

“We were buying it for a friend,” Repete said.

“You got no friends,” Nicola said. “You never did. Now I know why. Because you’re scum, you can’t be trusted. You did all this, didn’t you, just like this girl said. If you hadn’t fucked up the first time, you realize none of this would have happened? Gene asked you to find a girl, bring her in to talk. Not kill her. Philadelphia, the same. No one asked you to kill anybody. You were just supposed to go up there, see who this girl was that the dead girl tried to call. Bump into her casual like, get her story.”

Nicola pushed the photos back toward Tess. “I didn’t know nothing about the house fire-I told Gene to make you stop nosing around, and he said he had a surefire way. Surefire, get it?”

“Yeah, Gene was the Noel Coward of the city liquor board,” Tess said.

“Well, his death is the one they’ll cop to. Not the dead girl because, like you said, what’s the point? And not Philadelphia, because I don’t want my babies in some Pennsylvania prison, where I can’t take care of them. But they’ll tell the cops they did Gene.”

Tess wasn’t finished, not quite. She had one more question to ask, if only to satisfy her own curiosity-and Ruthie’s. “Did you arrange for Henry Dembrow to be killed in prison?”

Nicola sighed. “I had to protect my boys. Henry was restless, he was going to start talking about their part in it if we couldn’t get him out. They were innocent, to hear them tell it.” She looked at them. “To hear them tell it. I believed them then. Now I don’t know.”

The boys looked incredulous. “You can’t make us do this, Gee-gee,” said Pete. “She’s got no proof.”

“You’ll do it,” Nicola said. “We’ll get Arnie Vasso to represent you, and he’ll cut a deal. You’ll still be young men when you get out. Besides, prison will get you clean.”

It was, Tess realized, the same rationalization Ruthie Dembrow had used when she watched Henry go off to Hagerstown.

“You can’t make us do anything, you can’t make us confess when they got nothin’ on us-” Pete began, but Nicola silenced him with a look.

“Go ahead, try to deny everything,” Tess said. “Spike’s assistant, the guy behind the bar? It’s homicide detective Martin Tull, and he had permission from the state’s attorney to tape this meeting. The whole place is bugged.”

Tull put down the bar rag long enough to show his badge and his 9 mm.

Nicola looked at Spike, disappointment keen in her face. “You lied to me.”

“I vouched he was helping me out, and he was. I never seen the place so clean. I wish I could get him to work here full time.”

She shook her head. “That ain’t right, Spike. That goes against all the rules. Our mutual friends are going to make it very hard for you to do business.”

“I’m out of business,” Spike said complacently. “I sold this place to Tess’s father and aunt this morning. They’re gonna do a complete rehab, sell those five-dollar beers that taste like piss, serve finger foods. Ferns and live music on Franklintown Road. Never thought I’d see that day, but they gave me a good price, and I’m ready to retire. You oughta think about doing the same, Nickie. We’re old, to be in this game.”

Flashing red and blue lights shone through the windows.

“Gentlemen,” Tull said to Pete and Repete, “your ride is here. Let’s go.”

“I won’t.” It was Repete, who so seldom said anything first. “I’m not gonna take the rap for anything, or plead out, or let Arnie Vasso serve me up on a fuckin’ platter. We deserve to be rewarded for what we done, not punished. ’Specially me. I’m the one who had to get cozy with the fat chick.”

The last two words hung in the air. Tess turned to look at Repete. Even in his fury, he had a smirk for her.

“You’re”-she dug for the name-“Paul. Sukey’s boyfriend.”

“Paul’s my given name, but I wasn’t her boyfriend. I hung around, got her to tell me all about her boring life, which included what you’d been doing in Locust Point, who you’d been talking to. She couldn’t wait to tell me how you were playing with the phones the very day you were there.”

“But how did you know about Sukey?” Even as she asked the question, Tess knew the answer, saw herself before the television, bragging about how she had identified Gwen Schiller, dropping the girl’s name.

“Yeah, you all but told us how to find her. And you were the one who said you’d been to Philadelphia, so Gene zeroed in on that number when it came up on the phone logs. But man, that was hard work, pretending to be interested in old fatty. Pete here had it easy, compared to what I had to do. He just had to put a bullet in the big foreign lady.”

“Shut up,” Pete said. “You’re making it worse.”

“Sukey’s only fifteen,” Tess said.

“He didn’t really do her,” Pete said. “He just fooled around a little. Nothing major.”

Repete-Paul-shrugged off his uncle’s defense.

“I’ve had younger,” he said. “Prettier, for sure. She had big tits, I’ll give her that much. But you know what they say-big tits don’t count on a fat chick.”

Later, Spike and Tull told Tess what happened, as if it were a movie and she had ducked out for popcorn during a crucial scene. But she was there for every minute of it. She simply didn’t remember walking around the table and yanking Paul’s chair backward, so he landed on his back, hitting his head hard on the wooden floor.

“Hey, you could break someone’s spine that way,” Pete said. Paul didn’t have the breath to object as Tess grabbed him by the hair and dragged him halfway across the barroom floor.

She had a vague memory of straddling him so his arms were pinned. Leverage, she was thinking, everything is leverage. She could pound his head on the floor, until it cracked as Gwen Schiller’s skull had. She could wrap her hands around his throat, squeeze until all the air was out of him, tie a bow around his neck in an imitation of the sick joke he had played on Gwen’s body, tying Henry’s tube around her neck to ensure the cops fingered him. So many possibilities.

Something hard pressed into her left leg, and she reached into his jacket pocket, extracted the knife he had pressed into her back. She thought of Gwen, of Sukey, of Devon, of monkey-face Sarah, of all the girls who had to live in a world where such men existed. Men who reduced them to their parts, men who used and discarded them, men who failed to love them, when that was all they ever wanted.

“Tess-” it was Tull’s voice, gentle but insistent. He put a hand on her shoulder, but he didn’t pull her away.

She looked into Paul’s face. Fear was there, but something else as well-something evil and ecstatic. It was almost as if he was welcoming her to his world, grinning and nodding, saying “Come on in.” Maybe it was simply that he’d rather die than go to prison. Nicola’s assurances notwithstanding, he was going to be a very old man before he got out. Tess could kill him now, even with Tull standing there, and there was a certain power in that.

But there was a greater power in letting him live. She stood up and walked over to the bar, where she put down Repete’s knife and poured herself a Rolling Rock from the tap. The officers came through the door, guns drawn, handcuffs ready. Tull told them to leave the old woman alone, it was just the boys who were going to Central lockup.

“How’d the one on the floor get that goose egg on his head?” one officer asked.

“Fell out of his chair,” Tull said.