FORTY-SIX

Since I was in tying-up-loose-ends mode, I decided to stop in at the Roussis Family Restaurants, Incorporated, corporate offices in Downtown Brooklyn. I wanted to thank Nicky for his help and to say that we should keep in touch. He was a good guy, Nicky, and if I came out the other end of my treatment, I’d need some friends. Truth be told, going back to an empty apartment with only my thoughts for company wasn’t exactly ideal, given my state of mind.

Sarah’s wedding was only a week or so away. Three days after the wedding Sarah and Paul would be strolling through the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and my surgeon would be slicing through my kishkas. Yeah, somehow, I didn’t want to go home and contemplate those stark realities. It’s one thing to ponder your own mortality as an eighteen-year-old who’s just smoked a bowlful of Thai-stick and quite another to do it as a sick old man. So it took little effort for me to turn off Ashford Street and aim my car down along Atlantic Avenue.

In the lobby of the building, I had trouble finding the number of the offices. I guess it was pretty foolish—or desperate—of me to think that Nicky and his family had kept their offices in the same place all this time. It had been nearly fifteen years, after all, since Carmella and I had worked the case for them. New York commercial real estate was like an expensive game of musical chairs. Companies moved all the time to get better deals after their leases ran out. A security guard, a real old-timer, noticed me staring at the board.

“Can I help you, son?”

Son! I liked that. No one had called me that in a long while. “I was looking for the Roussis Family Restaurant offices, but I guess they moved, huh?”

“Not moved exactly,” he said.

“I’m not following you.”

“Money troubles,” he whispered. “About three years back, they were … er … shown the door.”

“Really?”

“Shame too. Killed the old man.”

“Spiros?”

“Kind man. Generous man. Always with a warm greeting. Always with a nice gift on the holidays. Never forgot to ask about the wife and kids. Even gave me a savings bond for each of my grandkids. You knew ’em?”

“I was on the job with Nicky back in the day and I did some work for the family when I went private.”

“Nicky, a good man like his dad. It was that other son, that Gus that was the bad seed.”

“How so?”

“Can’t say, really, but you know how you can just tell sometimes? I just know it.”

“Thanks.” I shook his hand.

“Need anything else, let me know.”

“There is something. Is Spiegelman, Abbott, Bobalik and Cohen still—”

He smiled. “Moved to bigger offices. They take up the whole eighth floor these days.”

I rode up to eight and the elevator opened into the reception area. The receptionist smiled a practiced smile at me and asked if she could be of assistance. I wondered if Steve Schwartz was around. She buzzed him and he told her to send me down.

“Corner office. I’m impressed.”

“Don’t be,” he said, his eyes on a monitor, his hands at a keyboard. “I look out onto Atlantic Avenue, not Park Avenue. Okay, done.” Steve, a slender man a few years my senior, stood to greet me. “Moe Prager. What are you doing here?”

“A farewell tour,” I said only half-kiddingly.

Never a barrel of laughs to begin with, Steve looked at his watch to indicate his patience was already wearing thin.

“Roussis,” I said.

He understood immediately and shrugged his shoulders. Spiegelman, Abbott did corporate and commercial real estate law. They had represented the Roussis family business when Carm and I worked the case in ’95.

“You know I can’t give specifics although we don’t represent them any longer,” he said.

“Not asking for any. I’m just surprised. I’ve reconnected with Nicky lately and he didn’t mention the troubles.”

“Nick’s a proud man.”

“But …”

“Gus,” he said as if his name explained it all. Maybe it did. At least Steve and the old-timer were on the same wavelength. “The kid was a fuck-up. They gave him a position he wasn’t ready for and he ran the ship aground. But they got a big influx of cash somewhere and seem to have rebounded. More than that, I can’t say.”

I thanked him and left. In the elevator on the way downstairs I went over it in my head again and again, that first conversation I had with Nick when I ran into him at the Gelato Grotto. He’d definitely said that he went into the office a few times a week. I couldn’t figure out why Nicky would’ve said that. Maybe Steve had already answered that question for me. Nick, he had said, was a proud man. I could see that, but it still bugged me a little. Funny how a man like me, a skillful and practiced liar, could be so bothered by what was clearly an innocent, self-protective lie. Or maybe it was that I needed to focus on something other than my impending surgery.

Detective Fuqua couldn’t have known the favor he was doing me when he called.