The next morning
When a story comes in to newspaper guys, they got their questions. Coppers, and wives do too: whoses and whats and whys and how comes come peppering down like so much confetti. At the end of the day, I’m just trying to pay the rent, and so me, I just got one for my clients: what do you want me to do. Most of the time, it’s a simple who wound up where, not much more. I don’t ask how come, and I don’t try to find it out, neither.
This past Wednesday morning, I got two such inquiries. A man, looking for a woman. A woman, looking for a man. Nothing unusual there. The strange part came to me in bits and pieces: a man, looking for a red-headed woman he once met in New Orleans. A woman with a red-dye job, from New Orleans, looking for a man in New York. Not a man from New York, not my mobster, no, that would be too easy ... she was looking for her fiance. The only trouble is that, by the bye, my mobster found him first.
A knock came at the back door. “Come in.” My client opened the door and slid in. If he’d been jumpy before, he was all but leaping out of his skin this morning. I welcomed him in, but decided not to offer my visitor coffee. I accepted his envelope, and slid it into my pocket. He stared nervously at the floor. My blushing groom still didn’t pick up that I knew his face from around town. I wasn’t born yesterday, I’d seen him at the haunts fellas like him are supposed to go, and do. I also knew his name: Roberto Marizzano. My Romeo, though he was loath to admit it to a dick like me, was a second cousin into the Marizzano ring. Just so happens he was also the one assigned to exchange with the kid from New Orleans, and to take care of him when he started acting up. The kid was young, brash, headstrong — stupid about a girl back home, and it turned out he needed some taking care of — to the tune of two shots to the chest. When Roberto sent him on his long swim home, there was no way he could have known it was anything more than a business transaction. But it turned out business came with pleasure, and they’d both found that pleasure with the same red-headed girl.
I looked at my watch, and decided it would be best to clear the papers off my desk. On second thought, I slipped the leather blotter into a drawer, too. She’d be showing up any minute now, this time ready to share a piece of her mind.
There was a knock on the front door, and I looked up to see her silhouette in the frosted window. I stood first, with Roberto a hotstep behind. I waved him back, and he gave me space enough to pull the door open an inch. In the slit of it, I greeted my caller, and accepted her envelope into my breast pocket. I pulled my hat and coat off the rack, and opened the door. Ruby-haired Sarah, wearing her sister’s too-big tweed jacket and her two-week-old brown roots, pushed past me and into the room. Roberto surged forward, his arms open to embrace his beloved Ruby.
Two envelopes in my pocket, I slipped past Sarah and into the hall. I pulled the door closed behind me and heard two clicks: I knew one was the latch of the lock, and the second was the end of Roberto Marizzano.
