Chapter Seven #2
She sets her beer down, walks out of her office to dig Cevolatti’s wallet out of her abandoned jacket, returns to her desk, upends the wallet onto her blotter.
Receipt, receipt, receipt, receipt . . .
Just a shit ton of receipts. At least a dozen business cards.
Two or three old sticky notes, folded up.
A stub of what looks like a bookie’s slip.
Cevolatti was a pack rat; if this is the state of his wallet, she’d hate to see the glove compartment of his car.
Nomi digs out the rest: a few lost quarters, a New York driver’s license, a credit card in his name, a subway token.
A small key, maybe for a post office box.
Cevolatti would have had a letter box at the bottom of his apartment building stairs—so why would he need a post box?
Something to check out. Forty-three dollars in bills, which she pockets: Cevolatti sure won’t be spending it.
She sets aside the post box key, the business cards, the sticky notes, the bookie’s slip, and goes through the receipts.
Throws out anything marked McDonald’s, A the subway token and quarters she sweeps into her top drawer.
Now it’s dark beyond her office window. Faintly, from upstairs, the crisp, poignant lilt of violins.
Nomi sits on the corner of the desk with her feet on the chair, finishing the dregs of her Schlitz as she watches the lights of the street outside.
Yesterday she told Simon Noone that Solange’s case was challenging; now she’s got a mutilated body on her hands.
This whole thing is shaping up worse and worse.
Lamonte was Ricki’s boss—but did Lamonte kill Ricki?
The connection makes it seem like an obvious jump, but it’s an assumption.
Could it have been someone else? So far as she knows, Ricki wasn’t involved in anything that would put him in another set of crosshairs.
He was Lamonte’s man. Maybe Ricki was killed by one of Lamonte’s enemies?
Lamonte would have plenty of enemies. But being Lamonte’s man would also afford you a certain level of respect and protection, and there’s been no word on the street about internecine squabbles or planned retaliatory action.
So it comes back to Simon’s idea, that Lamonte killed his own guy, which makes more sense than any other theory.
Reputationally, Lamonte is a man of volcanic anger, and Nomi knows he’s killed people personally before—in fact, today’s crime scene bears a distinct resemblance to a homicide near Chachi’s two years ago that Lamonte was implicated in.
She heard that the detectives from Sixth Precinct were never able to pin it on him, but the similarities are there: the victim tied to a chair, stab wounds from a stiletto knife . . .
Question is, why would Lamonte kill his own guy?
It’s usually a matter of disloyalty: someone working for another boss on the side, someone with their hand in the till, someone screwing up bad or talking out of school.
From what she heard at the Riverview last night, Ricki Cevolatti was strictly small beer: too content in his position to become a dog with two masters, and the kind of guy unlikely to steal from his boss.
If she had to wager real money on motive, she’d put it on Ricki talking to someone he shouldn’t—or talking about something he shouldn’t.
It’s not what he knew, it’s who he told. Again, Simon’s probably right. So what did Ricki know, or who did he tell, that got Eric Lamonte riled up enough to go crazy with the knife?
Nomi tries to step it out in her mind. Small-time Ricki is asked by Lamonte to carry out some mundane shitkicker job, because that is the function of small-time Rickis the world over.
In the course of this job, Ricki discovers information he’s supposed to keep a lid on.
But, being the type of guy he is—sloppy, from the looks of both his wallet and his apartment—or maybe under the influence of a few drinks or whatever, he spills the beans.
Word gets back to Lamonte that Ricki talked.
Shortly after that, Lamonte and his efficient associate with the bolt cutters pay Ricki a visit . . .
It has to be something to do with Brittany Jackson’s abduction.
Has to be. Eric Lamonte runs three clubs in the district, and so far as Nomi’s aware, there’s nothing going down in any of them that’s worth killing for.
But the job that Malcolm’s got Solange working—the level of secrecy around it—is weird and excessive, and Lamonte set it up.
The only way Nomi’s going to get Brittany back to her mom is if she follows that trail of secrecy to its source.
All these men—Lamonte, Ricki, Malcolm—and at the center of their web is a seven-year-old girl being used as collateral.
Nomi rubs a hand across her face, trying to unclench her jaw, remembering how Solange had shared a Polaroid of Brittany at her first appointment: The photo showed a sturdy girl maybe a year younger than she is now, her black curls tied up in high pigtail knots, her smooth cheeks tinted bronze as she grinned.
A girl who was happy and thriving because her mom had made a bunch of tough, unpleasant sacrifices to ensure she’s well cared for.
It makes Nomi catch her breath. Maybe it’s not just Brittany herself, but the combination of elements that’s getting to her: the daughter and her mom being victimized.
Because Nomi’s been that girl, she understands those sacrifices, and it burns her to see another mother-daughter pair getting screwed over by a guy like Lamonte, who thinks of women as merchandise and thinks of children—especially little girls—only as useful bargaining chips . . .
If Nomi dwells on it too much, she gets the urge to torch something. But she has to be strategic, not rage-filled. She needs calm.
She’s earned a bath—and a little more.
Nomi gets off the desk and pulls the blind down, dumps her empty in the kitchen, walks on for the bathroom.
Her apartment may have its deficiencies, but the bathroom is nice—compact, the inside walls golden with brown trim, a big claw-foot tub squeezed in.
She pushes aside the trailing ends of a heartleaf philodendron to run the faucets.
While the tub is filling, she strips out of her boots and clothes, avoids looking at the damaged skin of her midriff, wraps a towel around herself.
She wanders back to the kitchen to put a Grace Jones album on the turntable, get a glass of water with ice.
Nomi sets the glass and a washcloth and a lit candle in a jar on the bath caddy, along with the other half Valium from Mischa.
Her bath candle and the votive candles at Our Lady of Guadalupe seem to strike the same note; she pushes the mental comparison aside.
Takes her kit bag out of the mirrored cabinet above the pedestal sink—it’s a small yellow toiletries bag, and she has strict rules around using only the tools from this bag.
Opening the zip, she pushes the new arrowhead tool aside and removes a piercing needle, a tiny bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a small stainless steel barbell earring she’s been keeping, wrapped in paper.
She arranges everything on a hand towel on the lid of the toilet, balances a shaving mirror on the cistern.
The bathwater is high and steaming. Nomi’s mouth is watering.
She sits on the edge of the bathtub, removes the needle from its paper sleeve, swipes her upper left earlobe with the alcohol, swipes the mirror to clear off condensation.
Without too much buildup, she clamps her upper earlobe with her fingers and shoves the needle through.
The pain is bright and cleansing, and endorphins rush through her like lightning: Nomi lets herself rock in place for a moment, lets herself feel it.
Then she removes the needle and slides the barbell in to take its place, screws on the securing ball.
She turns off the main bathroom light and drops her towel, sets one bare foot and then the other into the bath, sinks down into liquid heat.
Warmth inside her as well as on her skin.
Muscles relaxing. Jaw unclenching. She swallows the Valium, which will help her sleep.
The candlelight flickers, hypnotic, as Grace Jones sings.
Behind Jones’s voice, there are still faint violins.
Nomi’s new piercing throbs, quieting her mind.
Last night’s cut near her belly button stings, submerged, but it’s a good sting.
She trails the washcloth through the water, wrings it out and wipes her face, lays her head back on the rim of the bath.
Friday night, Saturday night, those are her only ritual nights.
It’s allowed—allowable. All her anxiety and tension channeled into a small pierced hole, a small shallow slice.
It’s freeing—but she has to exercise control: When she first started at fourteen, she did a lot of damage.
Now she has her rituals, her rules, and things are more manageable.
She considers her reaction to the homicide scene today, reflects again on the incongruity: What she does to herself is fine .
. . What a criminal does to someone else is not.
But it’s an issue of consent. She arranges this; she has very specific guidelines around it; she’s made an agreement with herself about it.
Ricki Cevolatti sure as hell didn’t agree to anything.
Tomorrow, her next step is to find out what Cevolatti said and who he talked to, hopefully before Lamonte catches up with them. But for now, Nomi pushes aside thoughts of Cevolatti, the horrors inflicted on him before his death.
Instead, she closes her eyes and listens to the violins upstairs while thinking about Simon Noone’s feet: white and naked, long as the rest of him, toes faintly dusted with hair.