Where There’s Smoke

4

Henry was wearing blue coveralls with yellow stitching over the right-hand flap pocket, GTV for Garavelli Television. I shook his hand with a curious feeling of paternal pride. I’d known him for more than five years now, having first made his acquaintance when he was eighteen and a member of a street gang euphemistically named The Cardinals, S.A.C., the “S.A.C.” standing for “Social and Athletic Club.” Most of the gang’s socializing had been done on tenement rooftops with willing teenage “debs,” and most of the athletics required breaking heads with tire chains, slashing faces with ripped-off car aerials, and stabbing with switchblades or shooting with Saturday-night specials the members of “spic clubs,” this being a time when the emergence of Puerto Ricans as something more than second-class citizens was causing all sorts of nationalistic fervor to rise in the breasts of fourth-generation Italians eager to protect their turf. I thought I’d seen the last of the street gangs in the late forties and early fifties, but in 1969, when I met Henry for the first time, the resurgence was beginning. By the time I quit the force, it had again become a full-blown plague upon the city.

Henry was now twenty-three years old, and he had served three and a half years in prison because I sent him there after I caught him holding up a grocery store. Henry was nineteen at the time, having graduated from his bopping street gang to shooting heroin into his arms, thirty dollars’ worth a day, which came to two hundred and ten dollars a week — a long habit to support unless you are burglarizing, mugging, and otherwise supplementing your nonexistent income by holding up markets, tailor shops, liquor stores, and the like. Henry never admitted to anything but the grocery-store stickup, but that was enough to gross him a ten-year sentence for a first offense, reduced to three and a half by the Parole Board after he proved to be an ideal prisoner.

As an ex-cop, I know that most prisons are medieval ratholes, criminal and homosexual training grounds, and dehumanizing, brutalizing conclaves in the midst of a society that claims to be humane, idealistic, and aspiring to greatness. The miracle of Henry Garavelli was that he’d not only survived the prison system, he had benefited from it as well. To begin with, he’d kicked the habit, no small feat in a correctional institution where drugs were as easily, if not more readily, available than they were on the street. He had not learned a trade (unless you want to believe that working in the prison laundry prepared him for gainful occupation in the world outside), but he had completed his high school education through a correspondence course, and upon his release in the early part of 1973, had immediately enrolled in a television-repair school.

There are skeptics who believe that television repairmen are even bigger thieves than armed robbers, but the fact remains that Henry Garavelli started his own business after he got out of school, and had been earning a good and honest living for the past sixteen months. The peculiar thing about it all was that he was grateful to me for having busted him. He considered the bust fortuitous, perhaps because too many of his “luckier” friends, those who’d never been arrested, were still at the same old stand — mugging, stealing, and begging to support habits as long as the subway system. I’d busted him only because he’d held up a grocery store; I was a cop doing my job. On the other hand, Henry considered himself in my debt, and would go miles out of his way — as he’d done only last year, when I was searching for a lead to the countess’s missing baubles — to bring me information or to perform legwork that would help in an investigation. He’d enjoyed himself enormously on that single case he’d worked with me, had felt, in fact, somewhat like a free-lance, super-secret agent without whose assistance the countess would have gone back to Munich minus her treasures.

The age difference between us was twenty years and more, but I doubt if it contributed anything toward understanding the father-son nature of our relationship. I’m a bachelor, of course, without children of my own, so perhaps that explains part of it. Henry’s own father was killed in a bar fight when Henry was eight, and perhaps that explains yet another part of it. Maybe Henry, grateful to me, was only emulating me when he helped me recover those jewels, and maybe I was only teaching Henry the tricks of the trade — passing on the tradition, so to speak. A Freudian might also discover significance in the fact that Henry had helped a former cop, even though cops in general had made his life miserable when he was a kid, even though a cop had finally sent him to prison, where cops disguised as screws had made his life even more miserable. Who knows? We liked each other. We trusted each other. That was enough.

Blue-eyed like a Milanese, short and dark, with the curly black hair of a Neapolitan, and a nose any Roman would have been proud to call his own, Henry got to the point as directly as a Sicilian.

“How come you ain’t been around?” he said.

“I’ve been away,” I said. “Vacation.”

“So you’re back, ain’t you? So whyn’t you give me a ring, I’ll lend you my assistance on a case or two.”

“What’s the matter? Business slow?”

“Terrible. Money’s tight. Used to be a guy had a little something wrong with the set, he’d rush to have it fixed. Nowadays, thanks to that jerk in the White House, nobody gets his television fixed unless there’s no picture at all on the tube. I’m thinking of going back to sticking up grocery stores,” he said, and grinned.

“Good idea,” I said. “Unless you’d prefer going on the earie for me again.”

“Ah?” he said, and raised his eyebrows expectantly.

“A body was stolen from Abner Boone’s mortuary on Hennessy Street at around three A.M. I don’t know who ripped it off or why. Can you listen around? Maybe it’s unusual enough to have caused a rumble.”

“A dead body, you mean?” Henry said.

“Mm. Man named Anthony Gibson, died in an automobile accident last night. His son thinks he was murdered, but I’m not sure about that yet — even though he owed twelve thousand bucks to some hoods who were putting the arm on him.”

“Anybody I know?”

“All I’ve got is a loose description, Henry. One of them is supposed to look something like me, about my height and weight, scar on his face. The other one is short and dark.”

“You think they might be the ones who snatched the body?”

“It’s a possibility. Gibson owed them twelve thousand dollars. They couldn’t get it from him when he was alive, so maybe they plan on getting it from the family now that he’s dead.”

“Like a kidnapping, huh? Only the victim is a stiff.”

“Exactly.”

“In which case, they’ll pretty soon be asking for twelve grand in ransom.”

“If they’re the ones who did the job.”

“I like it,” Henry said. “When did Gibson write that marker?”

“Sometime in July. At a poker game.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“How soon you need this?”

“Right away.”

Henry looked at his watch. “It’s only a quarter past eleven,” he said. “Half the hoods I know are still asleep. Where can I reach you later?”

“You can leave a message at my apartment. Have you still got the number?”

“Tattooed on my brain,” Henry said, and grinned again.