Greenwich Read Free Page A

gonna find, maybe easy, maybe two hours’ work.” He was a large, burly man in a stained T-shirt, and Sally would shudder a bit with the thought of anyone going to bed with that huge mass of bone and muscle.
    â€œBut you are here, thank God,” Sally said.
    â€œWhere is it?”
    â€œThe powder room. That’s why I was so disturbed. My powder room. We have six guests coming to dinner tonight, and my powder room is an obscenity. I’m almost ashamed to show it to you.”
    Manelli hefted his bag of tools, stepped over to his truck, and reached in for a plunger. Then he followed Sally Castle to the front door and into the house. The entry was broad and spacious, the powder-room door to the left as one entered; a trickle of water coming through under the door.
    â€œJosie, Josie,” Sally wailed.
    Josie, a wan young black woman in a maid’s uniform, came running to her call.
    â€œGet some towels, please, Josie, and stop that dreadful stuff before it reaches the rug.” And to Manelli, “Can you just go in without me, Frank. I can’t stand the smell. It’s the toilet. I tell them not to use the powder room, but they do.”
    Manelli nodded, but waited a moment until Josie returned with an armful of towels. He took one from her and entered the powder room, closing the door behind him. His guess had been correct; the toilet had overflowed, and there were soft feces on the floor. He sighed, drove the plunger into the toilet several times, heard the suction break, and watched the water run down. He flushed the toilet, using the plunger as the water ran into the bowl. Then he used the towel to gather the mess. He flushed the toilet again to make certain that it was working properly. Then he stood in the powder room for a long moment, regarding his face in the mirror.
    â€œShit,” he said softly. “Shit and more shit.”
    Josie was still mopping the floor when he emerged from the powder room, plunger in hand.
    â€œDid you fix it?” Sally pleaded.
    No, he thought, no, she didn’t do this to fuck you out of your mind. She’s got to be thirty-five or more, and she don’t know how a fuckin’ toilet works.
    â€œI fixed it,” he said. “Someone dropped a sanitary napkin or a paper diaper into the toilet. You can’t do that with this toilet.”
    â€œBut, Frank, we have no infants here.”
    He shrugged and held up the plunger. “You know what this is?”
    She shook her head.
    â€œOK. I’ll show Josie how to use it. I’ll leave it in the kitchen. I’ll bring this towel in there.”
    She nodded. “Thank you, Frank, You saved my life.”
    He knew where the kitchen was. He knew everything in the house that had water running through it. What he didn’t expect to find in the kitchen was Abel Hunt, working at the huge eight-burner stove.
    â€œFired?” he asked Abel. “Or did you switch to cooking for the rich?”
    â€œI always cook for the rich. The poor can’t afford decent food, much less cooks.”
    â€œI’m covered with shit,” Frank said sourly. “Where can I wash?”
    â€œTry that sink over there,” he said, pointing. “The club is having a ‘Japanese Night’ with a special chef doing the honors, so I pick up a few bucks off the books here and there.”
    Abel Hunt was a big man, six foot two inches and weighing in at two hundred and fifty pounds, a black man, dark as coal. The Hunts lived four houses away from the Manellis, in a section of Greenwich township called Chickahominy, a neighborhood that would have rated as decently lower middle anywhere else but in Greenwich, and where in the lunatic real-estate market of the nineties, a house could still be purchased for less than half a million dollars, and a black family or two could be found.
    Hunt had been born in South Carolina, which in his opinion, gastronomically speaking, was the first