Freddie looked around Lou over toward Johnny's, as if he didn't believe Lou, and then back at the Neapolitan's door.
"The longer you put this off, the more chance you're taking," Lou said. He gave Freddie's arm a tug in the direction of Lou's Caprice.
It didn't take long for Freddie to realize that he didn't have a choice. He nodded and quickly crossed the street. Lou followed Freddie all the way to the front passenger-side door. Freddie opened it quickly but took one look at the tiny meatballs, tomato slices, and onion rings fanned out on the seat and said, "I'm not sitting in that mess!"
Lou glanced around Freddie to see what he was referring to. "I can understand your reluctance," Lou said. He closed the door and opened the back. He motioned to Freddie to enter, then climbed in after him.
"Make this fast," Freddie commanded, as if he had a say in the matter.
"I'll try," Lou said, ignoring Freddie's bravado. "First up, who's the current local capo for the Vaccarros? I've been out of the loop."
"His name is Louie Barbera, but he's only a temp, because Paulie Cerino's supposedly getting out on parole."
"Really?" Lou commented. He'd not heard the rumor about Cerino.
"What the hell are you bothering me for with that kind of question?" Freddie grumbled. "You could learn that from any number of people."
"How do Vinnie and Louie get along?"
Freddie merely laughed.
"Is it that bad?" Lou asked.
"Vinnie made hay right after Paulie got sent up, especially with drugs. The Vaccarros want their old territory back."
"What about the Asians, Hispanics, and Russians?"
"They are getting to be a pain in the ass for everyone."
"All three groups."
"Mainly the Asians bringing in drugs from the East rather than South America."
"It was rumored there was an apparent hit last night," Lou said, finally getting around to the point. "Do you know anything about it?" He purposefully didn't want to give any of the details.
Freddie's eyes flicked over toward the restaurant door in a nervous fashion, which for Lou was a giveaway. From his years of experience, he guessed skinny Freddie knew something.
"I don't know anything about no hit," Freddie said unconvincingly.
"Come on! Don't make me threaten, and don't make me call Vinnie for old times' sake."
"Okay, I know there was a hit last night, but that's all I know about it."
"Please! Don't drag this out."
"I don't know who it was, honest. All I know, it was some guy who was going to rat."
"What was the victim going to rat about and to whom?"
"Who knows?"
"Are you pulling my chain here or what?"
"Honest, I'm telling you all I know, which is close to zilch. Vinnie's upset about something, but I have no clue. He doesn't talk about such things, except to Franco Ponti."
Lou eyed the hopeless kid-turned-man. In one sense, he felt sorry for him, because Lou was sure he was going to end up in a Dumpster some night. He'd been playing two ends against the middle but wasn't intelligent enough to carry it off over the long haul. In another sense, Lou was angry with him because like all these other misfits, the shithead was abetting a tiny group of people who made all Italian Americans look bad.
"All right," Lou said after a pause. "I want you to find out who this guy was who got whacked. I don't want a war breaking out between the Lucia and Vaccarro factions, which is what I'm worrying about."
"There's no way for me to find out any such thing. Vinnie is tight-mouthed. If I asked him anything, he'd know something was screwy."
"Don't ask him, ask Franco."
"That would be worse than asking Vinnie. You know the guy's crazy."
"Figure out a way," Lou said. He reached across Freddie and opened the door.
7
Laurie's eyes were glazed over as she stared blankly out of the taxi's side window as it raced northward on Second Avenue. She was totally preoccupied with her MRSA series, which had started out as a possible way of convincing Jack to postpone his knee surgery but which had morphed into something else entirely. She still intended to use the issue with Jack, but now she sensed there was a wider significance, and the possibility electrified her. Her conception of the role of the medical examiner was to speak for the dead to help the living. Suddenly, she saw her current series as a means to do just that. If she could figure out why these MRSA deaths were occurring in such a cluster, she could presumably save potential victims.
Thinking in such a vein had a disheartening aspect. Why hadn't the OCME picked up on the problem sooner? Laurie pondered the question for a moment before guessing the reason: a low index of suspicion, which Laurie assumed would have influenced her, too, concerning David Jeffries, had the personal aspect not intervened.
Laurie knew that as many as ten percent of all patients entering the hospital come away with a hospital-acquired infection, meaning about two million patients a year, resulting in nearly ninety thousand deaths in the United States alone. Of these infections, about thirty-five percent were staph, many of which were MRSA. In short, the problem was just too common to cause much of a stir, especially with bacteria on the rise.
A sudden crash jolted Laurie from her reflections. Had she not had her seat belt on, her head would have hit the ceiling.
"Sorry!" the cabbie said, glancing at Laurie in his rearview mirror to see if she was okay. "Potholes from the winter."
Laurie nodded. She appreciated the apology, as unexpected as it was, but not the driving style.
"Maybe you could slow down," she suggested.
"Time is money," the turbaned driver answered.
Knowing the futility of trying to influence the taxi driver's mind-set, Laurie went back to her musing. She was on her way to the Angels Orthopedic Hospital, which was sited on Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side, and surprisingly enough, approximately directly across Central Park from where she and Jack lived. Over the previous two hours she'd been frantically busy, and, despite a mild fear for her life in the cab, she appreciated the forced respite and time to organize her thoughts that the ride offered. She'd finally been able to meet with Arnold Besserman and Kevin Southgate, and had gotten the names of their six cases and four of the six case files and hospital records. Arnold had even given her the personal monograph he'd written on MRSA, which Laurie had quickly read.
Laurie now knew more about the bacterium than she'd ever known, even more than she had just before taking her forensic pathology boards, for which she had crammed in her old collegiate style, with all sorts of esoteric facts, including some about MRSA and other staph organisms. As Agnes had said, staphylococcus aureus was an extraordinary and versatile pathogen.