Everyone Had a Key but Me novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Doorman
Dario drove with one hand and held his phone in the other.
"The landlady's sister cleans for a baker in Bay Ridge," he said. "The baker is the doorman's cousin. That's all I have."
"Why didn't you tell Gabe?"
"Because the Table is still at that long cloth, watching how he behaves with you gone. If the Don walks out after you, they say he's hiding you." He glanced at me. "And because the doorman won't open for me. I'm a Santangelo. To him, I'm the people who ask."
"He'll open for me."
"You don't know that."
"He sent me upstairs without calling for three years," I said. "He'll open."
The bakery sat on a corner under an elevated train, with a line of women out of its door.
The baker's wife looked at Dario's jacket and then at me, and she said nothing as we climbed the back stairs.
On the second floor, a door with a chain opened to a narrow gap.
An old man looked out at me.
He had a grey moustache and a tired cardigan, and I had passed his desk for three years.
"Miss Danner," he said.
"Hello."
"The young man doesn't come in."
"He stays on the stairs," I said, and Dario put his back against the wall without a word.
The chain came off.
The room had a cot, a hot plate and a suitcase open on the floor.
He sat on the cot, and I took the one chair.
His hands were folded very tight.
"I should have called you down," he said. "Every time. I told myself it wasn't my job to say what the Don's house did."
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