PART 2: THE SONG
I didn’t sleep that night.
I sent Maria and Sofia home in my own car, with Eddie driving and orders to park outside their apartment in Mount Kisco until morning. Maria didn’t argue. That told me more than anything she’d said.
Then I sat at my desk with the flash drive.
I plugged it into an old laptop I keep off the network. A gray box popped up on the screen.
Password required.
Under the box, Vincent had typed a hint.
The thing that made us both sick.
I tried “Cyclone.” Wrong. “Coney Island.” Wrong. “Nathan’s,” for the hot dogs we ate before the ride. Wrong. I tried the year, 1987, every way I could think to write it.
After ten tries, the screen locked me out for an hour.
I sat there in the dark with my hands flat on the desk.
The person he was trying to warn you about is still in your house every single week.
Six people fit that description. I went through them one by one, the way my father taught me. Who had access. Who had motive. Who had money they couldn’t explain.
One name kept coming back.
Tommy Kearns.
Tommy had been my driver for nine years. He drove Vincent the night of the raid; I’d always known that. He said he dropped Vincent at the Port Authority bus terminal at 11:30 p.m. and never saw him again.
And last spring, Tommy bought a twenty-six-foot fishing boat and docked it in Sheepshead Bay. On a driver’s salary.
I’d noticed. I’d filed it away.
Then there was the burner phone itself. Vincent’s Honda had turned up in long-term parking at Newark Airport two days after the raid. Frank had driven out there personally, before the Port Authority police even ran the plates. He’d come back with the phone in a Ziploc bag and the look of a man delivering bad news to a son.
I’d thanked him for it.
At 7:00 a.m., I called Tommy into my study.
He was fifty-one, built like a fire hydrant, and he had never once been nervous around me.
He was nervous that morning.
“Sit down,” I said.
He sat.
“The night of Red Hook. You drove Vincent.”
“Yeah, Boss. You know that. Port Authority, eleven-thirty.”
“Tell me again. Everything. What he said, what he carried, what he looked like.”
Tommy rubbed the back of his neck.
“He was jumpy. Kept looking out the back window. Had a duffel bag and a baby bag, which I thought was weird, but you don’t ask.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I dropped him off.”
“Tommy.” I leaned forward. “Where’d you get the money for the boat?”
The color drained from his face so fast I thought he might pass out.
“Boss, I swear on my mother—”
“Where.”
“My brother-in-law! Kevin! He won eighty grand on a scratch-off at a Stewart’s in Albany. He fronted me half. I got the paperwork. I got the lottery commission letter with his name on it. I’ll bring it today.”
I watched his face. I’ve watched a lot of men lie to me. Tommy wasn’t lying. He was terrified, but he wasn’t lying.
I leaned back.
“Okay,” I said. “Bring the paperwork anyway.”
He nodded fast and stood. He was nearly at the door when he stopped with his hand on the knob.
“Boss… there’s one thing. I never said nothing because I figured it didn’t matter. Once you knew what Vinnie did.”
“Say it.”
“When I dropped him off, he gave me an envelope. Sealed. Said, ‘Give this to Danny. Nobody else. Swear to me, Tommy.’ And I swore.”
The clock in the corner ticked.
“I never got an envelope,” I said quietly.
Tommy turned around slowly.
“I know. Because the next morning, Mr. Castellano was waiting at the garage when I came in. He said you’d told him to collect anything that had to do with Vincent. He said you didn’t want to see Vinnie’s name on anything, ever again. So I gave it to him.”
“I never told Frank that.”
Tommy’s mouth opened. Closed.
“He said it came from you, Boss. He said it exactly like you’d say it.”
I sat very still.
Frank Castellano was sixty-eight years old. He’d worked for my father before he worked for me. He’d stood behind me at my mother’s funeral. He taught me to drive in a Buick LeSabre in the parking lot of Our Lady of Guadalupe. When my father died, Frank was the one who sat with me in the hospital hallway until 4:00 a.m.
Frank was the one who found the burner phone in Vincent’s car.
Frank was the one who’d said, six weeks ago, when he saw Maria for the first time, “I don’t like her, Danny. Get rid of her.”
I’d asked him why.
He’d said, “Just a feeling.”
Frank had never once in my life acted on “just a feeling.”
“Tommy,” I said, “who else knows about the envelope?”
“Nobody, Boss. I swear.”
“Keep it that way.”
After he left, I walked to the window. Down in the driveway, a silver Lincoln was rolling in through the gate.
Frank’s car.
It was Friday. Frank always came on Friday mornings to go over the week’s numbers. Thirty years, and he’d never missed one.
He got out, buttoned his coat, and looked up at the house.
Then he did something he had never done before.
Instead of coming to the front door, he walked around the side of the house. Toward the kitchen.
Toward the back door Maria used every morning.
I checked my watch. 7:42.
Maria started at seven.
And on Fridays, her babysitter always canceled.
I took the back stairs two at a time.
By the time I reached the kitchen, Frank was standing by the coffee maker with a mug in his hand, smiling.
Maria stood at the sink. Her back was rigid. Sofia sat at the island in her dinosaur backpack, eating Cheerios out of a cup with her fingers.
“Danny,” Frank said warmly. “Your girl here makes a lousy cup of coffee. You should talk to her about that.”
“She’s not my girl. She’s Ms. Torres.”
Frank’s eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch. Then he laughed and patted my shoulder on his way past.
“Office in ten,” he said. “I brought the Newark numbers.”
When he was gone, I looked at Maria.
“What did he say to you?”
She didn’t turn around. Her hands kept moving under the running water, washing a bowl that was already clean.
“He asked how Sofia’s father was doing,” she said quietly. “He asked like he already knew the answer.”
I didn’t go to the office in ten.
I texted Frank that something had come up with the Hoboken lawyers and told him to start without me. Then I took Maria and Sofia into the library, where there are no cameras because I had them removed years ago, and locked the door.
“There’s a password on it,” I told Maria, and set the laptop on the table. “‘The thing that made us both sick.’ I’ve tried everything I can think of.”
Maria shook her head. “He never told me. He said you’d know.”
I didn’t know. That was the problem. I’d gone through every piece of that summer I could remember.
Sofia had climbed into the big leather armchair by the fireplace and was turning the pages of a book about trains that was older than she was.
“Mommy,” she said without looking up, “is that Daddy’s computer thing?”
Maria hesitated. “It’s Daddy’s flash drive, baby.”
“Daddy’s secret word is a song.”
Maria and I both turned.
“What song, sweetheart?” Maria asked.
Sofia sighed, the way four-year-olds do when adults are being slow. Then she sang it, flat and off-key and absolutely certain.
“Take me out to the ball game…”
I felt the floor tilt.
Summer of 1987. Shea Stadium. Vincent’s uncle got us seats in the upper deck for a Mets game. We were eleven. We ate four hot dogs each, and two pretzels, and a frozen lemon ice, and in the seventh inning, when the whole stadium stood up to sing, Vincent threw up on a man from Long Island in a Gary Carter jersey.
I laughed so hard I threw up too.
We never told anybody. Not his mother. Not my father. It was the first secret I ever kept.
I typed seventhinning into the box.
The screen went black for one second. Then a folder opened.
There were forty-one files. Audio recordings. Photos of bank statements. A shipping schedule for Red Hook with handwritten notes in the margins.
And one video, at the top, titled DANNY.
I clicked it.
Vincent’s face filled the screen.
He was thinner than I remembered. Gray stubble. A cheap motel lamp behind him. He looked into the camera as if he were looking right at me, and for a second I was eleven years old again.
“Danny. If you’re watching this, Maria found you, and I’m probably gone. Don’t let her pay for that. She didn’t do nothing but love an idiot.”
He rubbed his face.
“I’ll keep this short, because you never had patience. It’s Frank.”
Maria’s hand closed around my arm.
“Frank’s been selling routes to the Kessler crew in Newark for two years,” Vincent said. “Our routes. Our trucks. He’s been skimming off the top and covering it with the Hoboken books. I found it in September. Took me two months to get proof, because who’s gonna believe me over Frank? Your father’s best friend?”
He held up a folded piece of paper to the camera.
“Then I find out Kessler’s people got pinched by the feds, and Frank cut a deal to keep himself clean. He gave them Red Hook. He gave them Joey and Sal and Marcus. And he’s gonna give them me, too, because he knows I know. He set up some phone with my name on it. I seen it.”
The burner phone. Sitting on my desk three years ago. Frank’s hand sliding it across the wood.
“I tried to tell you, Danny. Three times. Every time I called, Frank picked up, or Frank was in the room, or Frank said you were busy. So I’m writing you a letter, and I’m giving it to Tommy, because Tommy’s the only one I know Frank don’t watch.”
He looked down for a second.
“And if you never got it… well. Then you know who took it.”
His voice cracked a little at the end.
“I got a baby girl, Danny. Sofia. She’s got my eyes, God help her. I wanted you to be her godfather. Remember, at your dad’s funeral, I told you if I ever had a kid, you were it? I meant that. I still mean it.”
He leaned closer to the camera.
“Frank’s gonna come for anything I left behind. If Maria’s sitting there with you, she’s not safe. Not until you deal with him. But Danny—”
The video froze.
The little wheel in the middle of the screen started spinning.
Then the screen went dark.
The lights in the library went out. The hum of the refrigerator down the hall stopped. Outside the window, the little red light on the security camera above the garden door blinked once and died.
The whole house had gone silent.
Somewhere in the dark, the doorknob of the library rattled.
Then I heard Frank’s voice through the door. Calm. Patient. The voice that taught me how to drive.
“Danny,” he said, “open up, son. I think it’s time you and me had a talk.”
