Alternate Side(59)
“Oh, my dear God,” she said out loud, and a man at the end of the block turned to look at her.
Back at their house she peered into the stairwell toward their basement door, wondering if the door’s join at the sill was tight enough. She thought of the dryer vent to the backyard with horror. Hadn’t Ricky put chicken wire over it so that nothing could get in? What if he hadn’t? Who would do it now? In the foyer she wondered whether to tell Linda Lessman what she had seen, or Charity.
“I will never go into the basement again,” she said to Homer, who trudged back into his kennel and fell onto his pad with a heavy sigh.
Several buildings have been cited for vermin infestation. These citations are being challenged before the Department of Health. It is imperative that all garbage containers have tight-fitting lids. Only if all buildings conform to these specifications will the citations be quashed. An inspector will be on the block Tuesday morning at 9 A.M. to advise all interested homeowners about how to mitigate the situation.
The health inspector was a man named Dino Forletti. He wore a windbreaker with DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH stenciled on the back, steel-toed boots, and a Mets cap, and carried a laser pointer. Their customary little knot of concerned homeowners had broken down into a string of beads around him. George stood apart from the others with an elderly pug under one arm, perhaps because he thought he was somehow in charge, and Sherry arrived only at the last minute and didn’t join Nora and Linda, who had one of the Rizzoli sons and his wife with them. Nora had been afraid Jack Fisk would show up just to show he could, but he was nowhere in sight. One of the landlords was there, too, and he’d tried to get friendly but no one would bite. It was generally agreed that it was the rental buildings with several tenants and not enough trash cans that were causing the problem.
The inspector made a humming sound in the back of his throat; the group trailed him down the block as if they were fourth graders on a field trip and he their teacher. He said nothing, but sometimes the humming got a little louder or faster and Nora looked around to see if there was a reason for that. She hadn’t wanted to do this in the beginning because she was afraid that somehow the inspector would pull a rat from a hole the way a magician pulled a rabbit from a hat, but Charlie insisted he was too busy at work and he didn’t see the point, that that’s why there were exterminators, and if you lived in New York what could you expect.
The inspector didn’t speak until he had entered the parking lot and walked from the front to the back, stopping to stoop down here and there. They waited for him at the entrance. Nora couldn’t help it; in her mind’s eye, just for a moment, she saw Ricky broken on the ground, clear as anything.
“People park their cars here?” the inspector said, and there was a collective sigh.
“Not anymore,” said Linda Lessman.
“It will be open for parking again soon,” said George. “Very soon.”
“Yeah, they like to go under parked cars,” the inspector said. “You’ve probably seen them come out from under one at the curb at night.”
Nora wasn’t sure she was going to make it through the session. Her stomach was somewhere between morning sickness and roller coaster at the very idea.
“Anyhow, I’ve seen worse,” Dino Forletti said. He turned on the laser pointer and indicated the back of the SRO, with the pints of milk and bags of bananas perched on the windowsills. One of the residents was peering down at them. “The food storage situation there is obviously an issue, especially since it looks as though some things fall into this area.”
“I knew it,” said George. “That building is an eyesore.”
“But it’s not the biggest issue,” the inspector continued. “The building they’re doing the gut renovation on at the end of the facing block is a big part of the uptick. Once they start digging up underground waste lines, excavating the foundation—” He shrugged. “The rodents get displaced.” The laser pointer traced a thin red line along the perimeter of the parking lot to the dull brick of the building on the far side. It ran along what Nora had always thought was a line of dirt. “You got trails here,” said Dino Forletti. “They like to rub along the sides of the walls. I saw one of those light-colored limestone buildings on the East Side once, it was like someone had used a piece of charcoal to draw a stripe.”
“On the East Side?” said the Rizzoli daughter-in-law.
“They are no respecters of class, believe me,” the inspector said solemnly. “I remember we got a call from the mayor’s office because one got into a lobby on—”
Involuntarily Nora made a little flapping motion with her hands, and shivered all up and down her body. “Are you all right?” whispered Linda.
“Aw, you got a thing,” the inspector said to Nora. “It’s okay—lots of people have a thing. My girlfriend has a thing. She tells everybody I’m a homicide detective because she thinks it’s easier for people to deal with. I always tell her, If you got to understand them a little better, they’re actually really interesting, they’ve got a family structure, social habits, they’re really not—” Nora flapped again, her eyes wide. It was an automatic reaction, like a sneeze or hiccups, even though Nora was not a particularly squeamish or timid person. She and Charlie had spent a week at a vineyard in Tuscany for their twentieth anniversary, and Nora had gone running through the forest and encountered a wild boar. She had no idea what you were supposed to do when faced with a wild boar: Keep running? Stand still? Climb a tree? Yell loudly? For an instant she thought she remembered she should rap it on the nose if it came close, then realized that that was what she had always heard you should do if a shark approached, which was absurd. Who would have the wherewithal to hit a shark? Or a boar, for that matter.