Chapter 7: Neighbors

I didn't tell him.

I stood on the sidewalk with the whole avenue watching, and I kept my mouth shut.

Whatever that lock remembered, it couldn't change what he'd said in the study.

"Go home, Cesare," I said.

I walked back into the shop and pulled the door shut.

The bell rang over my head.

Through the glass I watched him stand there with the envelope in his coat.

Then he got into the car and drove away himself.

The midnight list had six names by the end of October.

I don't know how it spread.

Connie said women talk in laundromats and nail salons, only faster.

Number two was a nurse from the hospital where Connie trained, at one in the morning.

Number three was a grandmother whose grandson had been stealing her pension checks.

Number four was a cop.

She came in plain clothes at two a.m., embarrassed.

"I can't do it through the department," she said. "He's a sergeant. Everybody knows him."

I changed her deadbolt and her mailbox lock.

She tried to pay me twice.

Number five cried the whole time.

Number six made me a cake.

In the daytime the shop got busy.

It started with the old men.

They came in from the social club on 18th Avenue one by one, the same old men who used to sit with Nonno.

They brought me their keys.

"For the Bruno girl," one of them said, and slapped a ring of twenty keys on the counter. "Your grandfather cut these. You do them now."

"Did you go somewhere else for four years?"

"A place on 86th. They were fine." He shrugged. "They weren't Bruno."

By the second week I had a line on Saturdays.

Connie studied pharmacology at the end of the counter and rang people up.

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