'Til Death (87th Precinct) - By Ed McBain Page 0,9

parole now, huh? Went back to California with a firm job offer.”

“No, Steve. I didn’t say that.”

“Then where is he?”

“Right here. The job offer came from this city.”

By one-thirty that bright Sunday afternoon, Antonio Carella was ready to shoot his wife, strangle his son, disown his daughter, and call off the whole damn wedding.

To begin with, Tony was paying for the wedding. This was the first time—and the last time, thank God—a daughter of his was getting married. When Steve married Teddy, it was her parents who had paid for the festivities. Not so this time. This time, Tony was shelling out, and he was discovering that the wedding would cost, at a conservative estimate, just about half what he earned in an entire year at his bakery.

The biggest of the thieves, and he had half a mind to ask Steve to arrest the crooks, were the men who called themselves Weddings-Fetes, Incorporated. They had arrived at the Charles Avenue address at 9:00 A.M. that morning (after Tony had stayed up all night in the bakery getting his Sunday morning breads baked) and proceeded to turn the Carella backyard into a shambles. The Carella house in Riverhead was a small one, but the land on which it rested was possibly the largest plot on the street, stretching back from the house in a long rectangle that almost reached the next block. Tony was very proud of his land. His back yard boasted a grape arbor that rivaled any to be found in his home town of Marsala. He had planted fig trees, too, nourished them with loving care, pruned them in the summer, wrapped them with protective tarpaulin in the winter. And now these crooks, these brigandi, were trampling over his lawn with their tables and their ridiculous flags and flower canopies and…

“Louisa!” he had screamed to his wife. “Why inna hell we can’t hire a hall? Why inna hell we have to have a outdoor wedding! A hall was good enough for me, an’ good enough for you, an’ good enough for my son, but Angela has to have a outdoor wedding! So those crooks can tear up my lawn an’ ruin my grapes an’ my figs! Pazzo! E proprio pazzo!”

“Shut up,” Louisa Carella said kindly. “You’ll wake up the whole house.”

“The whole house is wake up already!” Tony said. “Besides, there’s nobody in the whole house but me, you, an’ Angela, an’ she’s getting married today an’ she’s not sleeping, anyway!”

“The caterers will hear you,” Louisa said.

“For what I’m paying them, they’re entitled to hear,” Tony replied, and grumblingly he had got out of bed and gone down to the back yard to supervise the setting of the tables and the construction of the bridal arbors and bandstand and dance floor. The caterers, he discovered, were very fancy people. Not only were they turning his back yard into a Hollywood set for Father of the Bride (starring me, Antonio Carella, he thought sourly) but they were also building a twelve-foot mermaid, the length of the young fish-woman’s body to be sculpted from ice, a similarly sculpted ice tub to rest beneath her and contain bottles of champagne for any thirsty guests. Tony prayed to God the sun would not get too strong. He visualized the fish-woman melting into the tub, the champagne beginning to taste like lukewarm ginger ale.

At one o’clock, his son and daughter-in-law arrived. Now Steve was a boy Tony could usually count on. Before Steve had gone into the Army, he used to work nights at the bakery, even though he was going to college during the day. Steve was a boy who could be trusted. He was a boy a father could count on. So today—San Giacinto di California!—even Steve had turned on him. Today, of all days, with those thieving Weddings-Fetes, Incorporated, tearing up the lawn, with Angela running around like a chicken senza capo, with the world of Antonio Carella slowly collapsing around him, his own true son Steve had arrived at the house with three additional guests! Not that Tony minded the extra expense. No, that didn’t matter to him at all. So he would work an additional four months in the bakery to make up the money. But it was having to explain to these Incorporateds that there would be three more people and that they would have to arrange them at different tables. Steve was insistent on that. No, he did not want to sit with his friends. He