Tony reached for The New York Times on the table. He reeled it in, undid the green elastic, and pushed the newspaper toward me. He didn’t say a word. Nothing. Not even where for me to look inside the paper for a clue. He kept the rubber band. I imagined a hundred perverse uses for it, beyond what the clerks at the nearest Post Office did with them all day long.
Tony Two-Times didn’t have more than an eighth-grade education. I imagined Tony of yesteryear might’ve looped the keepsake around his fingers and fired it like a gun at a classmate until he graduated to using a real one on the streets. He didn’t handle money like some of the soldiers in Mr. B’s crew, so I never pictured him stacking bills, wrapping green around green. I glanced at the elastic band in his hand and then at him. He answered the unasked question. “The wife clips and bands coupons.”
“Coupons?”
“That’s right. I provide like a good husband should, but she’s never gotten over the Depression or the rations during the war.” His knuckles rapped wood. “On that note, I must bid thee farewell because it’s that time of the month.” He raised his hand. “No tampon jokes, please.”
“Didn’t and wouldn’t because you can rely on me, Tony.”
“Good pun there, Cleary, but don’t get too clever on me now.” Tony had caught the joke. Rely was the most popular tampon on the market, and it worked a catchy slogan on television. ‘It even absorbs the worry.’
Tony checked his watch a second time. “Time to make the peace.”
Tony’s Sicilian mother nurtured a grudge against him for marrying a Neapolitan girl. She had wanted him to marry a southern girl, and she considered Naples a northern city. Tony had compounded the offence with interest when he moved out of her double-decker with his new bride. Materfamilias had never forgiven him that transgression either, even though Tony’s house was within driving distance from the homestead. Tony had relocated to a Victorian on Waverly Street, among upscale Jews and Italians. While technically Newton Corner, it wasn’t the Nonantum of his childhood. It wasn’t that the sons and daughters of Abraham or Garibaldi bothered his mother. No. Tony would tell you ma didn’t discriminate. She perceived those few miles and the Mass Turnpike between their homes as No Man’s Land.
Newton was a town of thirteen villages, and Nonantum, or what the locals called The Lake, had its own lingo, and Tony was fluent in all the colorful vocabulary. Once in a while, he’d let a word slip. An attractive girl was a jivel; a cop, a muskah. You didn’t call your friend by his first name. He was a face, a mug, and you said, mush, when you saw him on the street. The local patois was a descendent of carnies who traveled around New England, and the Italians borrowed words and blended them in with their dialect from the Old Country.
As for the peace, once a month, Tony would visit Antoine’s Bakery and buy some pastries for his mother and, because he did this, his wife teased him and called him a mama’s boy, so he had to surrender a different tribute to the spouse. No slice of rum cake for her, no cannoli or tiramisu for his beloved Giulietta. After he asked for sfincia, a soft pastry filled with sweet ricotta and candied fruit at the baker’s counter, he drove to De Pasquale’s for a tall order of meats and sausages to stock the family’s refrigerator for Sunday dinners. He said once that it was there, in the butcher shop’s basement, he learned how to throw craps and front other games of chance.
“Tony?” I tapped the Times in front of me. “What am I looking for?”
He glared at me as if I were the shortest kid without change for the Good Humor truck. “Some detective you are,” he said. “Read and use your smarts. I’ll show myself out.”
Tony could’ve pointed. He could’ve grunted. He could’ve given me a crumb, but he didn’t. He was the smart one because the inevitable questions from me might’ve implicated him. He didn’t want to have to fill me in on all the news that wasn’t fit to print. I had no idea what I was looking for. The byline could use letters tall as skyscrapers so readers could jump to their own conclusions, or it could be something tiny and covert, hidden in the small print of the Want Ads, where mobsters left messages for each other without using the phone.
Newspapers in America were the equivalent of the police blotter, tales of who cried and who died, with a small touch of social commentary, and reading the paper was the closest I touched being a PI these days. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I figured it was like obscenity: I’d know it when I saw it.
After I heard Tony close the front door, I unfolded The Times. The paper was cold to the touch. I could smell the fear on the front page, and thought of William Randolph Hearst who’d said, ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’
And Manhattan was bleeding, from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn, and the ink spelled out the troubles, there and across the river. In the pinelands of New Jersey, gangsters were found buried in shallow graves, the dirt thrown over their corpses as an afterthought. The mob was at war. Factions had formed over whether narcotics were allowed or verboten. They might’ve been Italians, the word, German, but the carnage would’ve made Himmler’s SS blush with admiration. Bodies bloomed everywhere, from inside abandoned cars, tableside at restaurants in the wee hours of the morning, and in ditches next to lonely warehouses on both sides of the East River.
One column conveyed the minutes of the mafia abroad. Two families in Palermo were feuding. The journalist italicized a word, mattanza, which he noted was used among Calabrian fishermen to denote a cruel method of killing tuna, but here it meant a slaughter from which there was no escape. This foreign correspondent wrote that what distinguished the crimson tide of violence in Sicily from the one in the New York and the Garden State was that the mafia over there targeted judges, politicians, and prosecutors. Nothing was off limits, whereas the domestic strain of organized crime attacked its own and kept civilian casualties to a minimum, when and wherever possible.
I read another block of text from the Foreign News. Thirteen people died. The fire department had found charred human remains in the backroom of a tavern, the entrance to the room blocked by a jukebox. Among the dead was one woman, probably because she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, the reporter conjectured. All of the men, except for one, asphyxiated in the smoke.
It was a locked-room mystery until it wasn’t. I thought of this dead woman and what Tony had said about Vanessa as collateral damage. Dead was dead, and I never considered contract killers creative, but three details added up to a masterpiece of distraction.
First, the man who had not choked to death had died from a single shot in the back of the head, according to the Medical Examiner, and he was from New York. Second, the use of another exotic word, also italicized, informed me that the deceased was an alleged member of the ’Ndrangheta, who controlled the drug trade in Canada. This odd word, the journalist explained, alluded to the criminal element indigenous to Calabria, the southwestern region of Italy, on the toe of the boot. The third and final fact, the one that connected the dots for me, like a game of Connect Four, between Mr. B and his nephew Sal and narcotics, was that this massacre had taken place in Montreal.
I set aside the Times and retrieved The Boston Globe in the hallway.
I wanted to thumb through the pages to locate Richard Connolly’s daily feature. He was no PI, but he was as tenacious as Chandler’s Marlowe, and he could turn a phrase, too. I trusted Dick’s read of any situation he covered, and he did cover everything, including Mr. B’s enterprises.
I would’ve turned to my favorite newshound, if it weren’t for a headline that sucker-punched me first. GENTLEMAN JIM DEAD.
Jim Hoban had been found frozen as a Gorton’s fish stick on Boston Common, yards away from the State House, where he’d received a Recognition Award from Mayor White before Christmas. The newsman theorized that Hoban had suffered a ‘break with reality.’ The ME said the tentative cause of death was hypothermia. Not only was Hoban a veteran of the war everybody loved to hate, Vietnam, he advocated for the welfare and the better treatment of his fellow vets, for the mentally ill, and most recently, the homeless.
The paper recycled a photo of the man.
There was a thumbnail biography, which mentioned his Silver Star in Vietnam.
I kept reading. My brain didn’t want to believe my eyes. Nothing made sense. He’d survived Nam, a battle with the bottle, and he had charmed his way into the champagne circle of high society, where friends with deep pockets wrote hefty checks for his causes.
In addition to the army, we shared something else in common. We were brothers of the glove. We’d sparred a few times. He fought fair and hard. He was what boxers called a Knockout Artist, a real artisan of the feet and hands. His feet moved like Willie Pep’s, and he possessed a right that would subtract years off your life. I remembered him as a true citizen of the canvas, the ropes, and spit bucket. Writers on the sports beat had christened him Gentleman Jim, after James Corbett, who bore the distinction of being the only man who defeated John L. Sullivan.
I heard the clatter of toenails on the floor, and then the tinkle of a small bell. Delilah made her appearance. A drop of water hung from a whisker. Delilah ignored it to stare at me. She was fine with me living with Bonnie, but not okay with losing her side of the bed.
Our eyes locked in a contest of who would blink first. Delilah and I have a system, a means of communication that we worked out between us about whether I’d take a case or not. She’d blink once for Yes, twice for No. It was rudimentary and binary.
I attempted small talk. “You missed your old friend Tony Two-Times.”
Nothing. The eyes remained vertical slits.
“You remember Sal, don’t you? Tony asked me to find him.”
I appreciated the irony of the word ‘asked’ instead of ‘told.’
“Guess what, Dee? No secrets this time. Bonnie knows about Tony.”
If eyes were the camera of the soul, the aperture was closed.
I tapped the copy of the Boston Globe. “Gentleman Jim Hoban is dead, Dee, and I want to know what happened to him, so which mystery do I tackle first, the case of the missing don’s nephew or the case of the dead pugilist?”
Delilah stared.
“I think I should have a look at the Common. What do you say?”
Her eyes changed, from lines to two dark circles. Her mouth opened to unleash a yawn that bared fangs, pink gums, and an extended tongue before she scurried away, her tail curled like a defiant question mark.
“Was that a yes?” I yelled.