Raffaello leaned forward in his seat and smiled as sweetly as he could with a face such as his. “Victor. If we had taken a shot at you, you wouldn’t be around to ask such a question.”
35
ENRICO RAFFAELLO WAS almost right about his cannoli, it was heavy and crisp and I ate it slowly, letting the white custard slide down my throat like sweet, perfumed oysters. It wasn’t quite as good as sex, but after an evening with Veronica it was all I could have asked for. I sat in my car and ate the cannoli and let the cinnamon tickle my nose and bite after bite my spirits fell because, along with giving me that superb cannoli, Mr. Raffaello had opened a door I’d rather have remained shut. On the other side were danger and loss, but there it was, open wide and waiting for me. I didn’t have much choice. I ducked my head and stepped through and found myself the very next morning at the Sporting Club.
The Sporting Club was swank, which wasn’t exactly what I wanted in a gym. Gyms should be sweaty, smelly places, where muscle-bound lugs grunt as they move around great discs of metal and the rubbery thwack thwack thwack of a basketball echoes from the court. That wasn’t the Sporting Club. The Sporting Club was swank.
“I’m interested in joining,” I said. “And I wondered if I could look around for a bit.”
“Of course,” said the woman in the membership office. She wore white, her top stretched by a very fit pair of breasts, worked out, I was sure, on a Nautilus breast machine until they were every bit as taut as her thighs. “Why don’t you fill out this form first.”
They wanted to know my name, my address, my credit card, they wanted to know what I did for a living, who I worked for, my estimated yearly income. It was almost like the way potential dating partners sniff each other out at a party or a bar. Out of pride, I lied to make myself sound like a better candidate for their club, even though I had no intention of joining.
“Well, Mr. Carl,” she said, “let me give you a little tour.”
“How about if I look around myself, get a feel for the place, would that be all right?”
“Of course,” she said. “Take this pass and go right through there. The men’s locker room is on the left and there are signs to the various rooms.” Her gaze drifted down to where my chest would have been had I had one. “Be sure to check out our free weight room.”
I smiled back anyway and left the office, waving the pass casually at the beefy man in white guarding the entrance.
It wasn’t very crowded at seven in the morning, a few haggard souls trying to sneak their workout in before they were awake enough to realize how crazy it was to take an elevator seven floors just to bound up an endless flight of mechanical stairs. In the men’s locker room I grabbed a couple of towels and found a locker and stripped. I couldn’t help but look at myself in the mirrors that surrounded the room. What I saw was pathetic. I would need to join a gym someday, but not this one, not one so swank.
With a towel around my waist, I followed signs to the men’s sauna and steam rooms. The sauna was empty but in the steam room, lying on one of the tiled tiers, was a hard mound of flesh with a towel around its waist and over its face. I sat on a lower tier where it was still possible to breathe and waited for a moment as the steam floated about me and the sweat started sucking from my body.
When sweat dripped from my nose to my knees I said finally, “Enrico Raffaello didn’t kill Bissonette.”
“Good morning, Victor,” said Jimmy Moore, without lifting the towel off his face.
Concannon had told me that Moore worked out at the Sporting Club every morning, primarily by sweating out the alcohol from the night before in the sauna or steam room, depending on his mood. It was directly to the councilman that the door Raffaello opened had led, it was Moore whose answers to the big questions I needed to hear.
“Where did you gather your startling bit of information?” he asked.
“From Raffaello himself.”
“So you had an audience with the pope and the pope told you he’s innocent.”
“And I believe him,” I said. “No reason for him to lie, his hands are already crimson. Which raises the question I have raised before and to which I still don’t have an answer. Who killed Bissonette? Did you?”
He grabbed the towel off his face, sat up, and let out a long grunt that was like the baying of a great wounded mammal.
“If you want, councilman,” I said, “you can have your attorney present when we have this conversation.”
He pushed himself off his tier and stepped down, loosening the towel from his waist and letting it drop into the puddled steam slipping across the tiled floor to the drain. Beside the door was a cold-water shower and he turned it on. His muscles were turning slack and what was once a formidable chest was dropping, but what I noticed most clearly was the size of his prick, which was big, huge, like a bull elephant’s, it flopped down and hung there and the size of it was sickening. I wrapped the towel more tightly around my waist.
“I think I can handle this without Prescott’s help,” he said from inside the shower, water streaming down his face and body. “So you want to know if I killed the ballplayer. If I am a murderer. Because the way you figure it, it was me who beat him to death with a baseball bat.”
“You’ve lied to Chester and me about who did it and you’re setting up Chester for a fall. It doesn’t make sense unless you killed him.”
“Get dressed,” he said, wiping his face with a towel and opening the steam room door. A blast of frigid air swirled in. “We have time for a morning drive before court.”
“Do you know how I was first elected to City Council, Victor?” asked Jimmy Moore. We were inside the limousine now, driving north on Broad Street. Henry and the car had been waiting in the alley next to the old Bellevue Stratford, where the Sporting Club was situated. Inside the limousine was a tray of danish and a steel thermos, out of which Jimmy poured us each a cup of coffee. “Cream?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“I ran on an anti-busing platform,” he said. “I opposed integration. I promised to keep our neighborhoods crimefree, which is political shorthand for white. You don’t have to use Klan language to grab the racist vote. Talk about maintaining the integrity of the neighborhoods, talk about the scourge of crime, talk about protecting the American dream of home ownership and maintaining real estate values, talk about busing and the electorate understands. I even got into a fistfight in the Council chamber over a Gay Pride Day. I was opposed to it, of course. In my district the politics of hate were good politics and all I wanted was my city post, my city car, the power to make deals, so they were my politics too. The papers hated me, I was a joke, except that I carried my district with seventy-three percent of the vote.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Drugs were the other people’s problem,” he said, ignoring my question. “You know much about the gospels? No, of course not. Saul, an agent of the Jews and the scourge of Christianity, on his way to Damascus has a vision, hears a voice. ‘Saul, Saul, why persecuteth thou me?’ It is the voice of Jesus. At that moment he becomes a new man, he changes his name to Paul, he becomes Jesus’s messenger on earth. Well, I didn’t hear any voice. What I heard was a silence. My own daughter’s silence. But it spoke to me just as clearly. ‘Daddy. Daddy. Why forsaketh thou me?’ And I didn’t have an answer for her. Not a one.”
He took a sip from his coffee and another, looking out the side window into the desolation of North Philadelphia.
“Now I do,” he said.
“One of our most important programs here at the Nadine Moore Youth House,” said Mrs. Diaz as she led Jimmy Moore and me through a tour of the facility, “is our community outreach program. Actually, it was at the councilman’s insistence that we began the program and it has become the cornerstone of our effort. So often the only place children in trouble can receive help is through the criminal justice system and by then it is often too late. Through our education and outreach programs we can get hold of these children and deal with their problems before they enter the criminal system. That makes all the difference, we’ve found.”