Toughs. Ed Falco

see anything myself. It's just everybody else is saying it was Vince."

      She held Dominic steady in her gaze. She didn't look convinced.

      "I got to go," Dom said. When he was out of Mrs. Marcello's sight and on the stairs, he slapped himself on the forehead for being stupid. Once back in the apartment, he went directly to the bathroom, where he found Loretto up to his neck in sudsy water, working shampoo into his hair. "Nobody's dead yet," he told Loretto, "but the Vengelli boys and the Bevilacqua baby . . . It don't look so good for them." He sat on the edge of the tub, at Loretto's feet, and repeated everything Mrs. Marcello had told him.

      "Jesus. They think all three might die? Vince'll be Public Enemy Number One."

      "Sure, but that's not our problem right now," Dom said. "Cabo's our problem. He thinks you were Vince's lookout."

      "You think Cabo'll come after me?"

      "Cabo or Irish."

      "Irish?"

      "Irish'll put you on the spot if he thinks you can identify him. It don't matter how long we all been runnin' together. Look what he did to Carmine."

      "That was different. That was business."

      "Yeah? Then what about May? What'd she ever do except see him give it to Carmine?"

      Loretto watched a clump of suds slide down his neck and into the bath water. May was Carmine Alberici's girl. Vince had killed Carmine for siding with Dutch, and he'd killed May because she was a witness.

      "You know Vince liked May," Dom said. "We all liked May. That didn't stop him from blowing half her head off to keep her from talkin'."

      Loretto dropped down under the water and ran his fingers through his hair. He could hear his heart beating, thumping through the water. He remembered sitting on a brownstone stoop with May and Carmine, the two of them chatting and laughing, at ease with the world. When he came up, he said, "So what do you think we should do?"

      "I think we shouldn't stay here." Dom got up and leaned against the door frame. The porcelain rim of the tub was chipped, and the mustard-yellow wallpaper peeled slightly where it reached the ceiling. "How come we live in such a dump?"

      "Because your uncle don't pay us enough."

      "Get dressed." Dom went to a closet in the bedroom and came back with a suit fresh from the cleaners. "I'll drive you over to the Barontis'. You can wait for me there while I go see my uncle. Maybe he can figure something."

      "Cabo won't be scared of Gaspar," Loretto said. "Your uncle ain't that big."

      "I'm not thinking Gaspar," Dom said. "I'm thinking Maranzano. If Don Maranzano tells Cabo to lay off, he'll lay off. He won't want trouble with the Castellammarese."

      "You think Gaspar will talk to Maranzano for us?"

      "Yeah, sure. He's my uncle, isn't he?"

      "And what about Irish?"

      "I don't know about Irish." Dom pulled a towel down off a shelf next to the bathroom door and tossed it to Loretto. "Get dressed," he said. "We'll worry about Irish later."

      Loretto watched Dominic walk through the kitchen and into the living room, the late-evening sun casting a reddish tint throughout the apartment. He started to get out of the bathtub and then slumped down again as if he didn't have the energy. He saw the boy on the street with a bloody gash in his leg where the bullet had gone through, and the little one in the arms of the old woman. He couldn't figure it. Vince and Mike, Tuffy and Patsy, even Frank, the only one he hadn't known from the time they were all kids like the others . . . If he hadn't seen them himself, he wouldn't have believed it.

      The nuns had tried everything, even for a brief period tying him to the bed at night, but he always ran first chance and the chances came easy till he was spending less time in the orphanage than he was on the street with Vince and Pete and Tuffy and Patsy and dozens more kids like them whose parents had given up or were dead or gone and they were living with old people, aunts and distant relatives, who couldn't keep them in school. There were hordes of kids like him and he preferred their company to the nuns. They stole packages off the backs of delivery trucks, they broke into railroad cars, they burglarized empty apartments. They joined gangs. They went to work for bootleggers. They got mixed up in rough stuff. Sure, they did all these things. But something like this. Shooting kids. This he couldn't figure.

      "Hey!" Dom called from the living room. "What are you doing?"

      Loretto shook off his thoughts and stood up dripping in the tub. Through the bathroom window he saw a clothesline stretched between buildings, the thin white rope wrapped in a loop around metal pulleys. Dangling from the rope, pinned with wooden clothespins, were three summery women's dresses, one red, one yellow, the other blue. They were fluttering in a breeze outside his window as if they were alive and watching him as he watched them, mesmerized by their colors, by the way they hovered like bright ghosts against a pale sky.