Headstone City Read Free Page B

cemetery had been inspired by Central Park landscaping, laid out in the middle of Meadow Slope. It was meant to be a retreat where visitors could ponder death, guilt, and redemption.
    Trunks of stunted oak broke the hilly terrain. Rutted paths channeled through the area, cutting around knolls. The afternoon sun glazed the battered, blunt faces of granite saints and martyrs. Tombstones—rounded, sharp, or opulent—jutted at odd angles. Some less than six inches from each other.
    There were miles of the dead. Sixty thousand supposedly in Wisewood, his mother and father among them, but Christ only knew how many more had been dumped in the ravines and sumps bordering the highway. Or like they did it in Naples, four to a casket when nobody was looking.
    There was a church within three blocks' walk in any direction. The rich and fashionable would wander the paths and picnic, playing charades on the vast lawns while funerals were being held just a few feet away. The cemetery's most prominent feature was its Gothic-style front gates. They stood wide and inviting just down the block from Grandma Lucia's place.
    Dane had been to four wakes before he was nine years old. No one would ever tell him how anybody died, just that they'd had an accident. It scared the hell out of him, thinking that all these people were croaking from falling off ladders, running with scissors, slipping on the stairs.
    It brought him together with strangers in an obscure, shared grief. Funeral processions moved through town every weekend with a fierce and forbidding commitment.
    One night he'd gone out to Wildwood with his first girl and made a mad, quiet love to her on a sheet of marble tomb. When they were finished she had the name of a dead guy pressed into her back and an ugly bruise from a bas-relief cherub.
    Dane stood in the middle of the street, staring off to the north, where the Monticelli mansion could be seen at the top of the rise, the waves in the bay breaking gently in the horizon. The surrounding woodlands of Outlook Park seemed to clutch at the skyline.
    He walked around the corner and down three blocks to Chooch's Lounge. He hung back against a nearby stoop, watching the door.
    Lit a cigarette and thought, by the end of this smoke, I ought to just do it.
    There was a reason why the big mob families were fading fast. They weren't as sharp as they used to be, not as careful anymore. In the old days, the bosses lived in their little houses and watered their tomato gardens and hid their big cash offshore or under their mattresses. Now their grandkids drove Mercedes and flashed black diamonds and didn't even bother to come up with a cover story for where the money was being filtered in from. A twenty-five-year-old in a Jag wearing suede and silk, partying at the fanciest clubs in New York, telling people he bussed tables in his uncle's pizza parlor for a living. No calm, no cool, and no code.
    The Monticellis weren't quite as sloppy as some of the others, but Vinny and Berto had cut their crews too much slack. It used to be if you spent too much out in the open, the capo would take you for a drive and stick a knitting needle in the back of your head. Then go and gather up the wife's mink stole, the Caddy, the $1,200 Italian shoes, and burn it all out in the pine barrens. The families had a quiet class and knew how to keep it under wraps.
    Nowadays, the goombas were mostly fat and slow, but they could still play pretty rough when it came down to it. You had an edge if you moved fast and didn't pick their pockets. So long as money wasn't involved, they all had to sit back, hold meetings, and have discussions on what should be done. The organizations gathering together in drunken cabals down in Atlantic City.
    Then the bosses talking to the capos, and the captains to the crews. Then more dinners and gatherings and councils to figure out who would do whatever had to be done. Maybe the verve had drained out of the process because so much of it was