“Hang by your thumbs,” he suggested.
We nodded to each other, and I started the car and drove away, headed home.
Home, for me, is a four-room apartment on Bleecker Street, the full second floor over Casale’s Grocery. I have no neighbors to speak of, which is exactly the way I like it. The building is on the corner, with a garage-and-loft next door on the other side. There’s no third floor, the grocery closes at eleven, and the Casales live across the street. It’s a great place for wild parties, so maybe I’ll have a wild party there some day.
Now, I left the Ford in my parking space behind the building and went around front and into the grocery. Joey, the patriarch of the huge Casale family, was on duty alone, sitting on a backless kitchen chair behind the counter and reading the comics in the newspaper.
Joey Casale had arrived in the States in the classic manner, that is, with no money, no command of the English language at all, and a card with his name on it tied to a buttonhole. He’d spent his adolescence in Brooklyn, with an aunt and uncle, learned English, fought with the uncle, got married, and moved upstate to Winston. He started the grocery store and a family. The grocery store hadn’t grown much, but the family had gone wild. He had four sons, each of whom had at least four kids of his own, and some of those kids were now having kids. There were Casales all over town, most of them in one kind of small business or another, from Mike Casale’s trucking company to Ben Casale’s laundromat.
Old Joey, at seventy-three, was still the iron-fisted patriarch. The family revolved around him, a cohesive and clannish unit. He was a short, wiry, dehydrated old man, with sharp unblinking black eyes in the middle of a lined and weathered face. I’d known him since I was a kid, and his oldest boy Mike and I were baseball buddies. He was a second father to a lot of kids of my generation, and when, after the war, I came home and, my father having died in ’43, started looking around for a place to live, I was glad for a chance to rent the apartment over Casale’s Grocery.
Joey put the paper down when he saw me come in, smiled, and got to his feet. “A six-pack of beer,” he said, “and what else?”
“Nothing to buy this time, Joey,” I told him. “I’d like you to do me a favor, if you would.”
He spread his hands in an is-there-any-doubt movement, and said, “Of course I would. What do you think?”
“I’ve got a couple of tomato-soup cartons out in the car,” I told him. “They’ve got stuff in them I want to stash away for a while.”
“Well, sure,” he said. “Don’t be silly, bring them in.”
“Thanks, Joey.”
“Where’s the car, around back?”
“Uh huh.”
“Okay, I unlock the back door.”
“Fine.”
While he went off to remove the bolt and wiring and padlock from the back door, I went out the front way and around to the car. I looked up and down the street, but didn’t see anybody, and then the back door creaked open, and I carried the two cartons in, one at a time.
Joey scuttled ahead of me, off to a far corner of the storeroom, and said, “Here. Put them back here.” I did so, and he looked at the result clinically. “Looks good,” he decided. “Looks all right. Two tomato-soup cartons in a grocery store, what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I answered. “It looks natural.”
“Sure,” he said.
“If Ron Lascow ever should come looking for this stuff,” I said, “give it to him. But nobody else.”
“Ron Lascow,” he said, and added a few more lines to his face by frowning. “That young lawyer kid? With the dark rims on his glasses?”
“They all look like that,” I told him. “But you’ve got the right one.”
“Okay,” he said. “Him or you. Anybody else, I don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“Fine. And I guess I’ll get a six-pack after all.”
I got the six-pack, and went on upstairs. Joey Casale owned the building, and my apartment had originally come furnished, with the kind of stuff you always find in furnished apartments, but over the years I’ve replaced it all with my own things, piece by piece. Every once in a while, I’d call Joey to have a couple of his kids move something out. The only things left that I don’t own are the refrigerator and the stove.
The apartment, now that I’ve got it the way I want, is a pretty good one. From the street, you go in the door to the right of the grocery windows, up the stairs, and into what was originally supposed to be the dining room. I use that as my living room, with the usual sofa and armchairs and lamps and tables, and the walls rubber-base painted a light green. The rug is gray and wall-to-wall.
I added double doors to separate this dining room from the old living room, which I now use as a kind of den, library and office-away-from-office. There’s an old desk in there, and some glass-doored bookcases, and a filing cabinet containing stuff less important than the files I’d just removed from downtown.
In the other direction from the living room, a hall leads back to the kitchen, with the bedroom on the right and the bath on the left. There used to be a back staircase, but I didn’t want it much, and when Joey’s kids made his storeroom larger downstairs, they’d ripped that staircase out and made the second-floor space a huge storage closet.
I went into the kitchen, opened a beer, put the rest in the refrigerator, washed hands made dusty by the soup cartons, and changed my limp shirt for a fresh one. I finished the beer, and looked at my watch. It was four-twenty, time to go.
I wanted to talk to Hal Ganz. He was the detective Harcum had put on the Tarker killing, and he was good at his job, in a limited way. He wasn’t very bright, but he was strictly honest, the plodding, patient type. And he had the facilities of the Police Department to help him.
I knew Hal went off duty at four o’clock, so he’d be on his way home now, out to Hillview. I’d go out and have a talk with him, suggest a merger. Since he was a cop, there were things he could do that I couldn’t. Since he was scrupulously honest, there were things I could do that he couldn’t. We ought to make a great team.
Eleven
The Second World War caused quite a population boom in Winston, and with a population boom there comes a housing boom. The last couple of decades have seen the flowering in Winston of the ranch-style development. We have a number of them already, with another one going up every once in a while, and Hillview, where Hal Ganz lived, was the first of them.
Hillview was thrown together in ’47, in time to catch the veterans and the defense workers while they still had cash in their pockets, and while the veterans in particular were all getting married and starting families and looking for a place to live. Built on a filled-in swamp just to the west of town, Hillview is as flat as a pool table, though it is possible, on very clear days, to see the hills and mountains way over on the other side of town.
The builder of Hillview was a Winston man, now living in Florida on his profits, and he scrupulously followed the ideas of every other development builder in the country. The streets were blacktop and curving and named after flowers. The houses were two- and three-bedroom brick ranch-styles, most of them without cellars or attics. There’s a shopping center in the middle of it all, a school off in one corner, and a firehouse down the road toward town.
In ’47, it all looked pretty fine. Nice new houses, kind of shoe-boxy but sparkling and clean, with attached garages and curving flagstone walks leading to the front doors. The people living there were mostly young, either childless or with maybe one kid of preschool age. It was a pretty good place to live.