Chapter Eight
Sunday morning, Florent Diner, regret and coffee. “More.”
Jamie looks at Nomi sideways as he pours. “This is your third.”
After a restless attempt to sleep last night, Nomi took another half pill, which was definitely a mistake. Her newly pierced ear is pulsing in time with her heart.
She waves a hand. “More.”
Jamie tops off the cup. “I’m just saying, I’ve got a joint in my purse. You could come out back and share it with me, might help take the edge off.”
“This’ll be fine.” Nomi slumps back, squints behind her sunglasses. The music playing in the diner is some kind of 1940s piano-tinkling tune with a soulful female voice. “Jamie, there’s a little too much chrome and red vinyl in the decor here for this time of the morning.”
“Honey, it’s ten thirty in the a.m.” He rolls his eyes as he walks away with the coffeepot.
She manages to get three cups of black coffee and a bowl of onion soup into her stomach before she has to go to her first appointment.
Back on the street, Nomi discovers that the weather is shockingly gorgeous: full sun, sparse wisps of high cloud.
But she’s itchy and grumpy and not in the mood to appreciate it.
Her outfit is purposefully out of character: pale acid-washed jeans, a white button-down shirt, a black bolo tie, a houndstooth blazer, a plain tote.
She’s pulled her hair into a braid that disguises her side cut, and she’s wearing a short-brimmed black felt hat.
The ensemble is designed to make her look unlike herself.
Combined with the comedown, she also feels unlike herself, an impostor: a mangy black wolf in sheep’s clothing, walking up Ninth Avenue.
But it’s a suitable facade for visiting St. Bernard’s Church, where Father Anthony Staggs is tidying up hymnals left on the pews after mass. She’s hoping that he’ll be able to help her dig into the question of who was running missionary fieldwork in southern Mexico and Guatemala five years ago.
He scratches his cheek. “’81 to ’83? It was probably us Catholics. Maybe the Baptists. But if you’re talking Central America, more likely us.”
“Would the archdiocese have records?” Nomi flips her notepad closed, clicks her pen, drops them both back into her tote.
“Probably. When do you need the information?”
“I can come by in a couple days. Say Wednesday?”
“Wednesday’s fine. Or I can give you a call if I get something sooner.” Father Tony has walked her to the main exit. “You doing okay? I don’t see you around much anymore.”
“I’m doing good.” Feeling guilty for lying to a priest, she slides on her sunglasses as he opens the door for her. “Yeah, I’m doing fine.”
“Glad to hear it.” He glances out into the street, then back to her, sheepish. “I still sometimes get the urge to call you Officer Pace, you know.”
She tries not to bristle. “It’s been a long time now, Father—I’m out of it for good. Okay, see you in a couple days.”
Walking back along the rows of apartment blocks, Nomi scans the street.
But nobody’s out of place; no one is watching her pass.
She descends the steps to the subway and catches the C train, braces herself for Irma’s not being at the meeting spot.
It happens sometimes: The votive candle gets moved or burned, or Irma forgets to check, or she misses evening mass because of work.
You roll the dice and take your chances. But she really needs to talk to Irma.
In Hell’s Kitchen, near the beauty school and a giant billboard for Donnie’s Softening Lotion, Nomi turns off West Fiftieth.
Kitty-corner is a big vacant lot that kids are using as a basketball court.
There are a whole lot of four-story brown row houses with rusting air conditioners half falling out of windows.
A bunch of yellow cabs go by, a few delivery vans.
She’s still tracking people and movement on the street, because anywhere between Chelsea and Hudson Yards is officially enemy territory, but it’s very mixed trade: men on the stoop reading the newspaper, pedestrians heading for public transport, workers unloading goods out of trucks, women in their church clothes.
Lots of Black and brown faces. Some folks are just outside getting some sun.
Plenty of loiterers, but nobody setting off Nomi’s alarm bells.
Past a liquor store and a Magic Cue Billiards place, there’s a bodega on the corner of West Forty-Ninth—Nomi steps inside.
At the counter, she orders a pastrami on rye with Swiss cheese and mustard.
It’s one o’clock. Benito has the radio going in the store—Robbie Nevil crooning “C’est la Vie” through the speakers.
Nomi turns the steel barbell in her ear; the lobe is hot to the touch.
She dawdles among the shelves as Benni makes her sandwich, watching as other customers come and go, waiting for the bell above the door to ring for the right person.
Just as she’s starting to think that this trip has been for nothing, Irma walks in and up to the counter.
“Hey, Benito, how you doing. You wanna make me a chopped cheese on a kaiser roll?” Irma spots Nomi and smiles. “Benni, me and my friend here are going out the back, okay? Jesus, Nomes, what the fuck is going on with that hat.”
Irma Rosado is short and tough faced, dark circles around darker eyes, light-brown skin and a crown of springy black hair. She’s dressed in civvies—a T-shirt and tight jeans and knee boots, a quilted vest, her ever-present gold hoop earrings—and she’s fifteen years Nomi’s senior.
Nomi’s glad as hell to see her. “It’s my cover, dummkopf. Holy shit, look at you—it’s been too long. Give me a hug.”
They embrace; then Irma grabs a soda from the refrigerator and hustles Nomi toward a door plastered in grocery advertisements that looks like the entry to a walk-in pantry.
It is a pantry, but past another door at the back, there’s the world’s tiniest outdoor area: flagstone pavers surrounded by corrugated iron fencing.
Beneath a short washing line flapping with dish towels, one of those ugly cast-aluminum patio tables.
Irma grabs one of the side-ended apple crates that Benni’s using as chairs, pulls it up to the table, lights a Winston with the Bic she had tucked in her bra. “Okay, look, I would love for this to be a fun reunion, but everyone’s stressed about more West Side mob action.”
“Yeah, I know.” Nomi shakes her head at Irma’s offer of a cigarette as she finds her own crate. “I was at Cevolatti’s place. I called it in.”
“You called it in?” Irma’s thin, overplucked eyebrows dance; smoke wreathes her face and soaks into the dish towels above them. “They said it was a guy’s voice on the recording.”
“I got someone to call it in,” Nomi clarifies. “Cevolatti had been like that awhile when I got there. It’s part of this Lamonte case.”
“Sure it’s the Lamonte case.” Irma ashes her cigarette with a flick. “He’s all over it, and eventually he’ll leave traces somewhere, for some other crime, and we’ll nail him for good. But right now, we’re not interested in a soldier like Lamonte. We need his boss, Galetti.”
Nomi feels cold ripple into her stomach at the mention of the old mob capo’s name. “Galetti runs Lamonte?”
“My next envelope through Enrique, I was gonna tell you.” Irma stands to pop the cap off her soda with the wall-mounted bottle opener near the pantry door, reclaims her seat.
“We’ve been looking into it—Galetti’s extending his reach north of Leroy Street, and he’s bought out the leases on Lamonte’s club properties.
Lamonte has kissed the ring, but there’s been some shuffling for position.
I mean, maybe this Cevolatti thing is Lamonte getting pissed that Ricki was trying to muscle in somehow? ”
Nomi considers telling Irma about her theory, that Cevolatti blabbed something important.
But she has nothing concrete on that yet except her own gut feeling and Simon Noone’s speculation.
“I don’t think so. Ricki was just a grunt, and word is he was loyal to Lamonte.
Could be he screwed up somehow, which put Lamonte in a tight spot. ”
“Makes sense.” Irma sips her soda. “But Lamonte must’ve been pretty pissed off. That murder scene seemed personal. If you’re mob, and you’re small, you don’t need that kind of mess—you don’t usually bring your friendly neighborhood finger remover along, for instance.”
That sounds like solid confirmation of Noone’s crime scene deductions. Nomi shrugs. “Well, the Italians love drama.”
“Almost as much as us Puerto Ricans.” Irma grins. “Anyway, now you know what you’re dealing with, yeah?”
That could mean So you know this is serious, or it could mean So you know how dangerous this is, or it could mean So you know the NYPD has its eyes trained in the same direction. Any of these meanings stand as a warning.
The dish towels flap; higher above them, a cloud drifts through a rhombus of sunny sky. Nomi sighs at the new complication. “Galetti, huh?”
“Yeah.” Her former NYPD partner makes a face. “We’re getting reports higher up the chain about kickbacks, extortion, intimidation tactics. Bigger ripples—that’s what Balter and the other boys are talking about down at the station. How the big fish create ripples in the pond.”
“Shit.” That puts Solange Jackson between a rock and a hard place. “So the problem I have is that my client is working for Malcolm Forest, who’s set her up with an exclusive VIP, some guy called Jeremy. She’s not thrilled about the arrangement.”
“And Lamonte runs Forest. Right.” Irma frowns, takes another sip from her bottle. “Your client should maybe get off that train.”
“She would, but Lamonte’s got her daughter. Which is why she hired me.”
“Oh, that’s a problem.”
“Tell me about it.” Nomi gestures to get a drag off Irma’s cigarette. “So you and me are dealing with the same issue.”