“Can’t right now, honey. I’m right in the middle of a passage and these paints dry so fast...” She was a thin woman with tight black hair and a silver ring on one side of her nose; she was wrapped in a canvas apron.
She freaked her friends out—other housewives bought paint sets and canvases and made bad pictures of their cats and pots of geraniums that wound up in boxes somewhere. Belinda painted Florida and South Jersey landscapes that sold for thirty to fifty thousand dollars each, out of galleries in Miami and Manhattan. They couldn’t get enough of them.
“Okay. Well, I’m gonna go walk around,” Cattaneo said.
“Why don’t you go over to the deli and get a salad?” she asked. “Don’t eat any of those fishy things, they make you burp.”
She meant fart, but he left it at that. “I’ll see you in an hour,” he said. “Why don’t you call the McKinleys and see if they want to go out to the Cat’s Cradle for dinner. I’ll buy.”
“If you’re buying, they’ll go,” she said.
Cattaneo went backto the bedroom for his sunglasses, straw hat, and burner phone. He took the elevator down and walked out of the condo onto Collins Avenue, found a piece of shade next to a parked U-Haul truck, and poked in a number.
The phone was picked up on the second ring. “Yeah?”
“This is me. I need to talk to the guy.”
“Hang on.”
There was a moment of silence, then “Hey.”
“Hey. You know those two guys we were talking about? They got in touch with my barber and they were asking about the rest of the girls.”
“Goddamnit! Where’d you hear this?”
“Barber called,” Cattaneo said.
“They’re bringing pressure. They’ve been all over town, the way we hear it,” the guy said.
“They’re something new, and they’re asking about Patty Pittman,” Cattaneo said.
Down the sidewalk, a disheveled street woman had been pushing a shopping cart along, and now she stepped next to a hedge, pulled down her pants, and took a dump. A half block from his condo, for Christ’s sakes. Neighborhood was going to shit, literally; maybe they should sell the place.
“That’s... not good, but I don’t think we have any exposure there, not after this long. I’ll figure something out,” said the guy on the phone. “Have a nice day.”
Cattaneo clicked off, put his cell phone in his pocket, walked down the street to the woman, who’d finished and pulled up her pants. He could smell what she’d left behind, and he said to her, “You ever do that again, I’ll break your fuckin’ arm.”
“Kiss my ass, shitbag,” she said. She was radically thin, her face seemed to be mostly nose and cheekbones, and gray with dirt.
Cattaneo grabbed her by the arm with one hand—she seemed no heavier than a bird—and with the other, balled into a fist, hit her hard under the armpit and felt the ribs crack. The womangasped and whimpered and he pushed her behind the hedge where she fell on her back, crying, and he walked away.
Fuckin’ trash, he thought. Where were the cops when you needed one?
Cattaneo continued onto the deli, where he had a corned beef sandwich with a ton of mustard and red onions, and a small salad, so that he would, he hoped, smell like a fuckin’ lettuce leaf when he got back home. He was licking his fingers when the burner rang and the guy asked, “You at home?”
“Down at Brill’s.”
“Good. You need to come on over here.”
“Give me fifteen minutes? I’m walking.”
“See ya.”
The caller’s name, God bless him, was Michael Behan, as Irish American as ever was, because if one thing was true about the new Mafia, Jersey version, they might be assholes, but they weren’t bigots; well, except when it came to black guys.
Cattaneo put on his sunglasses and hat and ambled back out on the sidewalk, looked both ways, as if he were undecided where to go next, then turned left and took his time walking eight blocks down A1A. Halfway to Behan’s, he stopped at an ice cream stand next to a hotel walkway to the ocean and bought a double-dip strawberry cone.
Behan lived in a two-million-dollar condo that he’d bought when the buying was good, back in 2009. The condo had two floors, the top being a living room, an entertainment area with a wet bar and a wall-sized television, and a kitchen.
