By the end of two months, she’d pitched all her old clothes, not just the maternity duds. Some bad habits got the heave-ho as welclass="underline" the trashy attitude, slutty speech, negative turns of mind. Nor would the apartment do anymore — too dark, too small, too blah. The little one deserves better, she told herself, as does her mother. Besides, maybe someone had noticed all the in-and-out, the visitors night and day. Half paranoia, half healthy faith in who she’d become, she upscaled to a three-bedroom out on Boulder Highway, furnished it in suede, added ferns. She bought two cats.
Nick Perino sat alone in an interview room in the Stewart Avenue tower — dull yellow walls, scuffed black linoleum, humming fluorescent light — tapping his thumbs together and cracking his neck as he waited. Finally the door opened, and he tried to muster some advantage, assert control, by challenging the man who entered, blurting out, “I don’t know you.”
The newcomer ignored him, tossing a manila folder onto the table as he drew back his chair to sit. He was in his thirties, shaggy hair, wiry build, dressed in a Runnin’ Rebels T-shirt and faded jeans. Something about him said one-time jock. Something else said unmitigated prick. Looking bored, he opened the file, began leafing through the pages, sipping from a paper cup of steaming black coffee so vile Nick could smell it across the table.
Nick said, “I’m used to dealing with Detective Naughton.”
The guy sniffed, chuckling at something he read, suntanned laugh lines fanning out at his eyes. “Yeah, well, he’s been rotated out to Traffic. You witness a nasty accident, Mike’s your man. But that’s not why you’re here, is it, Mr. Perry?”
“Perino.”
The cop glanced up finally. His eyes were scary blue and so bloodshot they looked on fire. Another sniff. “Right. Forgive me.”
“Some kind of cold you got there. Must be the air-conditioning.”
“It’s allergies, actually.”
Nick chuckled. Allergic to sleep, maybe. “Speaking of names, you got one?”
“Thornton.” He whipped back another page. “Chief calls me James, friends call me Jimmy. You can call me sir.”
Nick stood up. He wasn’t going to take this, not from some slacker narc half in the bag. “I came here to do you guys a favor.”
Still picking through the file, Jimmy Thornton said, “Sit back down, Mr. Perry.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I said — sit down.”
“You think you’re talking to some fart-fuck, asshole?”
Finally, the cop closed the file. Removing a ballpoint pen from his hip pocket, he began thumbing the plunger manically. “I know who I’m talking to. Mike paints a pretty vivid picture.” He nudged the folder across the table. “Want a peek?”
Despite himself, Nick recoiled a little. “Yeah. Maybe I’ll do that.”
Leaning back in his chair, still clicking the pen, Jimmy Thornton said: “You first blew into town, when was it, ’74? Nick Perry, Chiller Theater, Saturday midnight. Weasled your way into the job, touting all this ‘network experience’ back east.”
Nick shrugged. “Everybody lies on his résumé.”
“Not everybody.”
“My grandfather came over from Sicily, Perino was the family name. Ellis Island, he changed it to Perry. I just changed it back.”
“Yeah, but not till you went to work for Johnny T.”
Nick could feel the blood drain from his face. “What are you getting at?”
The cop’s smile turned poisonous. “Know what Johnny said about you? You’re the only guy in Vegas ever added a vowel to the end of his name. Him and his brother saw you coming at the San Gennaro Feast, they couldn’t run the other way fast enough, even when you worked for them. Worst case of wannabe-wiseguy they’d ever seen.”
Finally, Nick sat back down. “You heard this how? Johnny doesn’t, like—”
“Know you were the snitch? Can’t answer that. I mean, he probably suspects.”
Nick had been a CI in a state case against the Tintoretto brothers for prostitution and drugs, all run through their massage parlor out on Flamingo. Nick remained unidentified during trial, the case made on wiretaps. It seemed a wise play at the time — get down first, tell the story his way, cut a deal before the roof caved in. He was working as the manager there, only job he could find in town after getting canned at the station — a nigger joke, pussy in the punch line, didn’t know he was on the air.
“All the employees got a pass,” Nick said, “not just me. Johnny couldn’t know for sure unless you guys told him.”
“Relax.” Another punctuating sniff. “Nobody around here told him squat. We keep our promises, Mr. Perry.”
Nick snorted. “Not from where I sit.”
“Excuse me?” The guy leaned in. “Mike bent over backwards for you, pal. Set you up, perfect location, right downtown. Felons aren’t supposed to be locksmiths.”
“Most of that stuff on my sheet was out of state. And it got expunged.”
A chuckle: “Now there’s a word.”
“Vacated, sealed, whatever.”
“Because Mike took care of it. And how do you repay him?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Every time business gets slow, you send that fat freak you call a nephew out to the apartments off Maryland Parkway — middle of the night, spray can of Superglue, gum up a couple hundred locks. You can bank on at least a third of the calls, given your location — think we don’t know this?”
“Who you talking to, Mike Lally over at All-Night Lock’n’Key? You wanna hammer a crook, there’s your guy, not me.”
“Doesn’t have thirty-two grand in liens from the Tax Commission on his business, though, does he?”
Nick blanched. They already knew. They knew everything. “I got screwed by my bookkeeper. Look, I came here with information. You wanna hear it or not?”
“In exchange for getting the Tax Commission off your neck.”
“Before they shut me down, yeah. That asking so much?”
Jimmy Thornton opened the manila folder to the last page, clicked his pen one final time, and prepared to write. “That depends.”
Sam sat in the shade at the playground two blocks from her apartment, listening to Nick go on. He’d just put in new locks at her apartment — she changed them every few weeks now, just being careful — and, stopping here to drop off the new keys, he’d sat down on the bench beside her, launching in, some character named Jimmy.
“He’s a stand-up guy,” Nick said. “Looker, too. You’ll like him.”
“You pitching him as a customer, or a date?”
Nick raised his hands, a coy smile, “All things are possible,” inflecting the words with that paisano thing he fell into sometimes.
Natalie slept in her stroller, exhausted from an hour on the swings, the slide, the merry-go-round. Sam wondered about that, whether it was really good for kids to indulge that giddy instinct for dizziness. Where did it lead?
“Tell me again how you met this guy.”
“He wanted a wall safe, I installed it for him.”
She squinted in the sun, shaded her eyes. “What’s he need a wall safe for?”
“That’s not a question I ask. You want, I provide. That’s business, as you well know.”
She suffered him a thin smile. With the gradual expansion of her clientele — no one but referrals, but even so her base had almost doubled — she’d watched herself pulling back from people, even old friends, a protective, judicious remove. And that was lonely-making. Worse, she’d gotten used to it, and that seemed a kind of living death. The only grace was Natalie, but even there, the oneness she’d felt those first incredible months, that had changed as well. She still adored the girl, loved her to pieces, that wasn’t the issue. Little girls grow up, their mothers get lonely, where’s the mystery? She just hadn’t expected it to start so soon.