Strangled - Brian McGrory [99]
Vinny asked Jack (the waiter, not the handsome but momentarily frustrated scribe), “Do you have an unoaked Chardonnay muscular enough to withstand shellfish?”
Somehow, Jack the waiter understood. As Mongillo dressed an oyster, I said, “Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“How is it that you know so much about DeSalvo, Vasco, and the Boston stranglings? You weren’t even old enough to talk then.”
A pretty good thought, by the way: Mongillo unable to speak.
He sucked down the oyster. Jack the waiter arrived with the wine and the two of them went into their whole overdone uncorking and tasting routine. Finally, that over, Mongillo said to me, “When I was eight, nine, ten, even older, all the kids in the neighborhood, my own brothers, used to go down to the park at the end of the street and play baseball. They’d play for hours, until it got so dark that you couldn’t see the ball, and then they’d come to our house or one of the others and eat Popsicles and talk about how they just played.”
He sipped his wine appreciatively.
“I’d go down to the park and they’d make fun of me. ‘Fat Vinny.’ ‘Tubby.’ ‘Lard ass.’ And a whole lot worse. They wouldn’t let me play. So after a while, why bother trying. The kids were all out playing baseball or kick the can or whatever else, I was inside reading everything I could get my hands on about old Boston crimes. Ask me anything about the Brinks robbery or Sacco and Vanzetti. The Boston Strangler, it’s like I needed to know as much as I could about that one.”
By now, Mongillo’s plates had been cleared without him ever so much as offering me a leaf of romaine lettuce. The entrées arrived and it looked like he had ordered his food by the pound.
I told him about the steam-room incident of a couple of hours before. He immediately snapped up his cell phone and relayed the information to Edgar Sullivan.
When he hung up he said, “You should drink a lot more beer to rehydrate.”
It was touching, this concern, but I said, “It doesn’t work that way.” He didn’t seem to hear.
Idle conversation now. I told him about Maggie Kane and me not calling her back.
“That thing was never meant to be,” he said.
I told him about running into Elizabeth Riggs in the San Francisco Airport.
“Now, there’s a woman who loved you more than anyone you’ll ever meet.”
I paused mid-chew and stared at him. He looked at me defensively, shrugged, and said, “What do you want me to say? She did.”
I asked, “How do you know that?”
“Fair Hair, how do I know anything? Intuition. My own personal radar. She didn’t make it too tough, either, the way she looked at you, the way she talked to you, about you. A good woman. And good-looking, to say the least. That weird to see her?”
Suddenly, my swordfish didn’t have a whole lot of taste and the cottage fries seemed limp, though maybe that was just me.
I mumbled, “Yeah, it was pretty strange.”
Vinny chewed on his steak, took a sip from a glass of ruby-red wine that Jack had brought over, and said, “Yeah, I bet it was bizarre, huh? She still look great? Those big eyes? That flat stomach? God, that hair that frames both sides of her face?”
“All right, never mind. Forget I brought her up.” I pushed my dinner plate a couple of inches away from me, almost reflexively.
Mongillo said, “Oh-oh. Someone’s got a little case of the regrets. Or maybe they’ve come down with love sickness.”
I wanted to tell him she was pregnant. I wanted to tell someone, anyone. But then I didn’t want to have the inane conversation that would inevitably follow, so I said sharply, “Drop it, Vin, okay? Not the time.”
For a moment, he actually looked hurt. That moment passed quickly when Jack returned with dessert menus. He said, offhandedly, “Well, go get her all over again, and this time don’t be such a fuckup.”
Ah, if life really was that easy: me being able to get her all over again, me not being such a fuckup.
28
I left