King Suckerman
- Автор: Пелеканос Джордж
- Серия: D.C. Quartet #2
- Год: 1997
- Язык: английский
- Год: Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN: 978-0-316-69590-9
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «King Suckerman». Краткое содержание книги:
Anyway, the whole thing was in motion, Cooper knew. They had been too careless, made too many mistakes. Even with the fire, which had covered some of their tracks, at least, the Baltimore cops or whoever would find and run the remaining Marriottsville evidence — shells, shot patterns, prints, tire impressions, all that — with the Feds, who’d match at least one item up with the Carolina shotgun kill. Somebody’d seen the Challenger leaving the drive-in that night, somebody’d seen Bobby Roy gettin’ in the car. And Cooper’s prints — Ronald Thomas’s prints, for that matter — they were on the national network. Cooper figured it would be best if he and Bobby Roy moved over to the Thomas cousin’s crib in Northeast, switched cars, maybe, though Cooper hated to give up his ride. Move around a little, buy some time.
The Clagget kid and the Thomas brothers, they didn’t have to know none of that. He’d just go on ahead and keep it to himself.
B. R. Clagget came from the bathroom wearing only his briefs.
“Wilton?”
“Yeah.”
“What we doin’?”
“Gonna go see Eddie Spaghetti.”
“Now?”
“Little later on. In the meantime, come on over here and drop them drawers.” Cooper stabbed out his cigarette. “Gonna give you something good, little brother, on account of how proud you made me today.”
Dimitri Karras bought some yellow daisies at Boukas Florists on upper Connecticut, then drove west into AU Park. He stopped the Karmann Ghia in the shade of a large elm on 45th and Davenport. He had parked all his cars, from his first Bug to his ’66 Nova to the Ghia, in the same oil-stained rectangle of street beneath that tree.
Karras was familiar with most of the old trees on the block. He knew the best climbing trees and those that bore fruit, and could tell you, even in the winter, which dogwoods would blossom pink and which would blossom white, and in whose yard grew the most interesting birch or the magnolia with the loveliest blooms. Beneath a weeping willow in old Mr. Montemorano’s backyard, he had shown little Katie O’Donnell his thing and she had shown him hers; ten years later, at the age of fourteen, he had dry-humped his first girl behind the curtain of that very willow’s branches. At eight he fell out of an oak in front of Ricky Young’s house and broke his arm; at seventeen, sick from drink and unable to make it the half block to his mother’s house, he had vomited spaghetti against the same tree. There was a history to the trees in the neighborhood where a guy grew up.
Eleni Karras stood behind the storm door, watched her son walk toward the Cape Cod where he had been raised. He needed a haircut, not that she’d bother bringing the subject up. And he always wore those same blue jeans, turned up once at the cuff. A twenty-seven-year-old man, wearing blue jeans all the time. If he had a good job, maybe he’d have to get some nicer clothes, start spending money, get into a little healthy debt, make him have to work harder... Who was she kidding? She didn’t even know what he did to pay the bills. “Little bit of this and that, Ma,” he’d always say, then give her the millionaire’s smile. Well, he always did have a nice smile. Admittedly, Dimitri had no visible means of support and little in the way of prospects, but with his kind of looks it still surprised her that no girl — a Greek girl would have been very nice — had scooped him up yet. Eleni knew a few koritsakis from good families he could talk to at Saint Sophia. That is, if he ever stepped foot in church.
Look at him, thought Eleni: He still walks with that happy bounce, like he did when he was a kid.
“Hey, Ma,” said Dimitri, opening the door and giving his mother a kiss. He handed her the daisies, wrapped in sheer green paper.
“Dimi, mou,” said Eleni. “Pos eise, pethi mou?”
“I’m okay. How’s my girl?”
“Etsi ke etsi.” Eleni made a flip of her hand. “I’m doin’ all right.”
Karras followed his mother to the kitchen. Walking behind her, he saw that she had put on a few more pounds. She had always had thick ankles, and over the years the rest of her had come up to speed.
They passed a photograph of his father, Peter Karras, and a frame filled with war medals hung in the hall. As a little boy, Karras used to study the photograph of the man he never knew, his father in his Marine Corps dress uniform, square-jawed and handsome, nearly blond, with a prominent mole beside his mouth. Sometimes, when his mother was off at work, Dimitri would take the photograph down from the wall, go to the bathroom mirror, hold the picture up next to his own face, try to find the resemblance between him and his old man. But there was no resemblance there. Dimitri Karras always favored his mother’s side, and as time passed he got to where he liked the way he looked, and found that women liked it, too.
In the kitchen, Eleni put the flowers in a vase and set the vase in the center of the gray Formica-topped table. Karras took his usual seat.
“Thanks for the daisies, honey.”
“It’s okay.”
“Thelis ligo rice pudding?”
“What, you made a pot?”
“This morning. You said you were coming by!”
“Sure.”
Eleni served it to him in a glass dessert bowl. The pudding was still warm from the stove and thick with raisins. His mother had sprinkled some cinnamon on top as well.
“Mmm.”
“Entaxi, eine?”
“It’s better than entaxi, Ma. It’s great!”
She poured him a cup of coffee and a cup for herself. Karras could stand a cup of coffee on a July afternoon on account of his mother kept the house so damned cold. What it was, she was addicted to the AC from working reception in a doctor’s office for twenty-odd years. Old Doc Steinberg, he wanted it like ice in the place. Eleni got to like it after a while, though her coworker, Ida Mae Clay, could never take it and ended up wearing sweaters in to work year-round. Karras almost smiled, thinking of Marcus’s mother, standing there behind the sliding glass window, her fists balled on her hips — that was the way she stood when she was all fired up — bitching about the cold in the office for half her working life.
“How’s Marcus doin’?” said Eleni.
“He’s okay.”
“His business good?”
“He’s makin’ it.”
“You should go into some kind of business yourself.”
“I’ll get right on it, Ma.”
“Sure, sure.”
“Anyway... what else is on your mind?”
“Eh?”
“When you called you said someone from church wanted to talk with me about something.”
“Oh, yeah. You remember Nick Stefanos?”
“The guy Pop worked for after the war, right? He had a grill down on Fourteenth Street—”
“He still has it. Fourteenth and R.”
“So?”
“I’m not sure what he wants, exactly. Said something about a problem with his grandson. You know, Nick raised the boy himself.”
“That’s nice. But what’s it got to do with me?”
“I don’t know. I told Nick you’d go down to the grill and see him today—”
“Ma!”
“What, you too busy?”
“Me and Marcus have a game over at the library later on.”
“Game, huh? Twenty-seven years old, you’re playin’ games.” Eleni shook a thick finger at Karras. “Look, you don’t have any idea what Nick Stefanos did for your father and me after the war. We were living in this little apartment in Chinatown — the three of us, you were just a baby still — and we were gettin’ close to being evicted. Your dad had gotten this... he had gotten this limp, see. Back then they didn’t have these programs they got now, and nobody wanted to hire a cripple—”