Read Online North River by Pete Hamill - Free Book Online

Delaney outside the bedrooms to the upstairs bathroom. The cheese box was already in place. “I gotta paint that,” she said. “A real good yellow. You know, like the sun.” Towels were draped neatly on the rods of the holders, soap lay in a glass dish. Then they paused outside Molly’s room.
    “Rose, this room is locked,” Delaney said in a soft, polite voice. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s just —”
    “This was your wife’s room, right?” she said.
    “Right,” he said, thinking, Women know everything important. She glanced at Delaney with a dark gaze, tinged with pity.
    “You want some food? I got soup in a pot, some good bread.”
    “I’ll help myself.”
    “I can do it. Then I gotta go someplace and pick up clothes.”
    They went down the stairs together, Rose now holding the boy. The odor of kerosene got stronger. There were two more patients waiting on the bench, both women.
    “Take care of them,” Rose said. “I get the soup ready.”
    She put Carlito down and went through to the kitchen, the boy holding her skirt. Delaney saw the women patients: a heavy cold with a hacking cough, a twisted ankle. When they were gone, he walked back to the kitchen, and Rose ladled out some soup and laid the Italian loaf and a slab of butter on the table. He thanked her and she went out. The soup was tasty, the bread fresh, with a crisp seeded crust. The boy watched him eat.
    “She’s a nice woman, Rose is,” he said to the boy. “You make sure you do what she says, because she will be very good to you.”
    The boy wore a serious face as Delaney spoke. Soon he would be fluent in English, and Italian too. Or Sicilian. How does the brain wire words? Why do the Swiss manage three languages, while most Americans have trouble with one? The telephone rang once, and then Monique poked her head in.
    “Jackie Norris on the phone,” she said. “He says you know what it’s about.”
    He got up to go to his office. “Talk to this young man, will you?”
    All cops had the same voice, clipped and laconic, and Jackie Norris had been a cop since he came back from the war. They exchanged hellos and Jackie then got right to it.
    “Doc, your daughter, Grace, left New Year’s Day on a Spanish freighter out of Hoboken. Bound for Barcelona, Spain. It arrives in, oh, ten days. Depending on the ocean. She had a U.S. passport, under her own name, and two pieces of luggage. She didn’t use the married name you gave me.”
    “Is there any way I can send her a cable?”
    “Of course. I mean there must be. Let me find out the details.”
    “No, Jackie. You have things to do.”
    “I’ll find out.”
    “By the way,” Delaney said, “how’s the knee?”
    “This weather, it kills me. Hard to sleep. Fucking Heinies . . .”
    “Come by. I’ll take a look.”
    “I can’t for a while. We got a double homicide on Morton Street. They drafted me ’cause I know the neighborhood. A man and a woman, dead in his bed, and her husband on the lam. The usual shit.”
    “Anybody we know?”
    “Nah. The dead guy’s from Brooklyn, lived two months on Morton Street, a furnished room. The couple’s Irish. Might be just off the boat. Love is wonderful.”
    “Well, stay off the ice, Jackie. And thanks.”
    In the kitchen, Carlos was gnawing on a crust of bread. He was sitting now on a plush red cushion, taken from the upstairs living room. He pointed to the snow in the yard.
    “O,” he said.
    “Okay, lad. Let’s finish eating first.”
    They played in the garden for a while, but it was hard to make snowballs from the iron crusts of old snow. Delaney could see the boarded-over back windows of the Logan house, right next door to the west, number 97 Horatio. Taller by a floor than his own. Brownstone, not brick, like a vagrant visiting from Gramercy Park. The windows on the street side were sealed too. Even the hard kids and the rummies avoided the place. They all believed that ghosts lurked within. Perhaps they did. Above all,