Sylvia rarely thinks of this night. She tells herself the memories were scraped away with the brat one of those cocksuckers had put inside of her.
——
Morning light streams through thin curtains, bathing Sylvia’s face. She wipes her eyes and hears footsteps. Rossini enters the bedroom holding two mugs of coffee. He is naked and though he’s bulky, his added pounds are solid and intimidating, and she likes the way his body looks.
He hands her one of the mugs and sits on the edge of the bed beside her.
“So tell me what you’re doing here,” he says, taking her off guard.
She holds the mug in both hands, like a little girl sipping cocoa, and offers Rossini an innocent gaze, which makes him laugh like a mule. His reaction annoys her but she refuses to let the lie fall.
“Look, Syl,” Rossini says once his amusement is under control, “you think I’m a dumb wop fucker, but I’m not that dumb. I saw the way you twisted Louis around your finger. You drove him out of his fucking mind. I never saw anything like it. So while I can play along with some horseshit to get a roll, and maybe even believe you were lonely and needed a bit of hard to make it through the night, the fact you’re still here tells me you want more than my cock.”
“Maybe I like you,” Sylvia says over the lip of her coffee mug.
“And maybe I’ll sprout tits and be the happiest girl in the whole USA,” he says, still exhibiting great amusement at the game. “What do you think? You think I’m going to sprout tits?”
“Fine,” she says. She places her mug on the nightstand and leans back on the headboard. “I want you to help me with a job.”
“That’s more like it,” Rossini says. He drinks from his mug and looks out the window.
“Are you angry?”
“Relieved,” he says. “I like to know where I stand. What’s the job?”
She hesitates because Louis and Mickey had been close. She doesn’t know if the thief retains loyalty to his dead boss, but she cannot drop the subject now. If Rossini declines, she will find a way to convince him as she has convinced other men in the past.
“I want to hit Louis’s house,” she says.
——
The night after the funeral Mary Towne, Louis’s widow, called me to say she was in Miami with her two sons. I was sitting on the sofa with my arm around my wife, and we were watching an animated film about dogs, and when the phone rang I thought it might have been our daughter, who called frequently from her college dorm. To hear Mary Towne’s shrill voice instead of my daughter’s irritated the hell out of me.
“It’s those papers you gave me,” Mary said.
“About the estate?” I asked.
“Well, what other papers did you give me to sign?” Her voice was like a scalpel scraping bone.
Mary had insisted on reading Louis’s will the day after his murder. The fat widow had spent two hours in my office going over the details of Towne’s financial holdings, picking and pecking at the numbers like a starving bird, instead of staying home to comfort her children. At the funeral she’d put on a fine show of grief. Empty. Meaningless. I’d been appalled and wondered how a human being’s moral compass could waver so far from true north.
Not that Towne was a man who deserved authentic mourning from his wife. I’d told him a hundred times I had no interest in his sexual conquests, but Towne was a braggart and insisted I endure his tales of whoring and perversion. I’d always felt sorry for his cheated wife. And then I met her.
“What about the papers, Mary?”
“I signed them the way you said, but we were running late for our flight.”
“So you didn’t have them messengered to my office?”
“I told you, we were late for our flight. I didn’t have time. Just go by the house in the morning and pick them up.”
“Mary, that’s highly irregular.”
“Well, you’d better do something. I don’t want those papers sitting around for two weeks holding everything up. There’s a key in the planter on the back porch and the security code is Louis’s birthday—day and month. You can bill me for your precious time.”
Then she hung up, cutting off the protests climbing up my tongue.
——
Sylvia sits in the passenger seat of a stolen sedan. Rossini finishes a cigarette and grinds it out in the ashtray and turns in the seat to face her.
“He’s got no real security,” the thief says. “Obviously he’s not going to have cameras recording who comes and goes. He’s got a simple contact system that will take all of a minute to kill.”
“He wasn’t very cautious,” Sylvia says.
“He was scary enough that he didn’t have to be. No one was going to fuck Louis over—no one that wanted to stay alive, anyway. The guy was more than connected.”
“What does that mean?”
“You telling me you don’t know about Louis’s hobby?
“You mean his oogedy-boogedy mumbo jumbo?”
“It was a hell of a lot more than that,” Rossini says. “He put the fear of God, or the devil, or whatever he worshiped, into the whole crew. Guys that crossed Louis ended up dog food. You heard about Joe Tocci, right? Last year he disrespected Louis at a meeting and his men found Tocci shredded like barbecue pork in the john of his apartment. They said he wasn’t in there for more than a few minutes, and there was no other way into that crapper but the one door. Louis got to him anyway.”
“Tocci got what he deserved,” Sylvia mutters.
“We all get what we deserve,” Rossini says. “But the thing is, Louis Towne was not a made man. He was never going to be a made man because he didn’t have the blood, but Tocci was a made man. You hit a made man and you’re landfill, but no one retaliated on Tocci’s behalf. No one. Not his crew. Not the organization. They knew Louis did it, but they knew what Louis was capable of, so they let him alone.”
“Until someone put two in his head.”
“Over a year later,” Rossini says. “I’m just saying he didn’t have security because he knew he was scarier than anything that could get in his house.”
——
Sylvia follows the thief into the dining room and through an opulent living room. She feels anger, seeing the statuary and the silk-upholstered sofa and the crystal vases on marble tables. This should have been hers. She should have been sitting on that sofa with a glass of champagne, not prowling the house looking for scraps. She follows Rossini up the stairs and runs a hand along the ornately carved mahogany banister.
“His safe is in his study,” Rossini says.
After his words fade, Sylvia feels uneasy. The air grows thick and envelops her, and she believes she can feel it jostle, hitting her like ripples on the surface of a lake. Even the subtle movements of Rossini on the stairs ahead play over her skin, but there is another body at work, displacing the air. She remembers a similar sensation she had felt whenever Louis entered a room, a heaviness as if his presence curdled the atmosphere.
Uncertain, with her skin alit by anxiety, Sylvia follows the thief to the landing and down a black hallway. The sharp ray of a flashlight momentarily blinds her. Rossini offers a rapid apology and puts the cylinder in his mouth. At the center of the beam is a deadbolt lock. Rossini attacks it with his picks, and in a few moments he has the bolt retracted. Then he sets to work on the cheaper, less complicated lock recessed in the knob.