I Woke Next to the Corpse by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Page 66

Elsa Genovanoria Bargnesi Anasthesia was finally giving a party of her own. It was at her Jersey City waterfront triplex, purchased in her name only through Vito Genovanoria’s favorite real estate agent, Nunzio (Bag Man) D’Allesandro, who specialized in handling cash transactions. Elsa’s husband, Albert Anasthesia got the air again and was not RSVP’d. “Secret”

rumor which came in like a blustering hurricane proliferated in gossip circles, that Elsa was not the least bit happy with Albert’s lack of advancement within the Genovanoria organization; his membership there having been accomplished only

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through his marriage to her, and what he had added to that was nothing if not a detraction. Albert really didn’t care about her infidelities, other than their having been made public knowledge, him often saying; “You’re making me look bad,”

thereby registering his predilection for appearances over realities.

Elsa was thirty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. The few times I had seen her, she wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a Jake tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slate gray, and had almost no expression when they didn’t look at me.

At the time I cynically figured that this whole thing was just some sort of pain-in-the-ass obligation Tony (Toro) Calabrese had incurred through having been made by Genovanoria while under the Anasthesia umbrella. For him it would have been best for Anasthesia be out of the way, so that he might step right into his place, though he’d rather of not been too obvious about it.

The party itself couldn’t have been reet important to Tony (Toro) Calabrese, other than being an opportunity to semi-cordially say no to Elsa, who was rumored to be vying for the

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jobs of semi-independent Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Gottinito and her husband. Had it been any other case Tony (Toro) Calabrese would have sent someone with whom people were familiar with as being a player in his mob circle, and I was known only to a few select mob thugs as one who had a few times been the distribution beneficiary of things which had fallen off the back of the truck.

Like the repetitious regurgitation of a replaced relic genre, my interest in Toro’s intrigues had become less and less serious after the Pirozi affair. Surely, the feeling would have been mutual had Toro not been inflicted with a lifelong case of undiagnosed serial solipsism posing as some sort of benevolent virtue.

I didn’t have squat to do anyway, so I “opted” to take the easiest route, and do what was expected. I again asked him if he had any interest in a discount mass card, which only resulted in a brief but daggered stare.

I Woke Next to the Corpse