Four Walls

2

DINA ROSENGAUS HATED THE morning shift.

It wasn't the getting-up-early part. Dina had always been a morning person, both back home in Russia when she was a little girl and since coming to the United States as a teenager. And it wasn't even every morning shift. Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays were fine.

The other four days of the week, though, the morning shift was a nightmare, thanks to some ridiculous concept known as alternate-side-of-the-street parking.

In order to keep the streets clean, the city of New York designated two-and-a-half-hour blocks during the day when one side of the street had to be clear of parked cars so that the street sweepers could come through.

That was the theory, anyhow. Dina couldn't recall ever actually seeing these mythical street sweepers.

Dina worked at Belluso's, an Italian bakery and cafй in the Riverdale section of the Bronx-in fact, it was located on Riverdale Avenue, right in the neighborhood's primary business district. Riverdale was predominantly Jewish-that was why Dina's family had moved there-and Dina had been surprised to find an Italian bakery there, but the place was popular. They served cookies, cannoli, pastries, coffee, tea, bread, and more. You could come in and grab something to go or sit at one of the round tables for as long as you wanted. Salvatore Belluso, the owner and Dina's boss, always said that he wanted people to feel like they were in a cafй in Florence and encouraged customers to stay as long as they pleased. He even had a clock upstairs with the hands removed to symbolize that it didn't matter what time it was.

But it did matter to Dina what time it was when her shift started. Parking in the area was hard enough under the best of circumstances, but on weekday mornings, several spots were unavailable between 7:30 and 8:00, and several more were off-limits between 9:30 and 11:00. That made parking nigh impossible. Sure, all the spots were legal when she arrived at a little before seven to open the bakery, but they wouldn't be for long, and Mr. Belluso didn't like it when you left the counter to do "personal things." Not getting a ticket apparently qualified as personal. One time, she had to park seven blocks away-she might as well have left the car home.

Today, though, she was lucky. Someone was pulling out of a spot on Fieldston Road, a one-way street that ran alongside Riverdale between West 236th and West 238th. (There was no West 237th, at least over here. This made even less sense to Dina than alternate-side-of-the-street parking, but she'd learned to accept it.)

She had begged Mr. Belluso to keep her mornings limited to the weekends-or to Wednesdays. For some reason, there was no alternate-side parking on Wednesdays. But Dina hadn't been there long enough; Maria and Jeanie had Wednesday mornings, and the competition for weekend spots was fierce. Most of the girls who worked there (Mr. Belluso only hired female high school and college students to work the counter) wanted the weekend also, since they didn't have school. To some extent, Dina was a victim of the schedule, as most of her summer-session classes at Manhattan College were in the afternoon.

As she turned the corner onto Riverdale Avenue, a bus pulled up to the stop right in front of the bakery. The back door whooshed open and four people stepped out, one of whom was Jeanie Rodriguez.

Jeanie was an undergraduate student at Lehman College, planning to be a nurse. They made an odd pairing. Jeanie was small and compact, whereas Dina was tall and broad shouldered. Jeanie's hips were modest and sexy; Dina's were wide and ungainly. Back in Russia, she'd have been considered healthy; here in the States, they seemed to want their women to all look like Paris Hilton. Jeanie was better-looking than Paris Hilton, though, in Dina's opinion. She had a bright face; olive skin that looked much better than Dina's pale complexion; and small, long-fingered hands, whereas Dina's were short and stubby.

The only thing that kept Dina from despising this skinny, pretty, perky young woman was the fact that she was also the sweetest, nicest person Dina had ever met. When Dina had started at Belluso's four months earlier, Jeanie had been very patient with Dina, especially since her English still wasn't as good as Dina wanted it to be.

Jeanie was also the most senior of the six girls who worked at Belluso's and had become the unofficial manager of the store. (Making her the official manager would have required that Mr. Belluso pay her more.) That meant she was the one Mr. Belluso trusted with the keys, so Dina was very glad to see her coming off the bus just as Dina arrived. If she hadn't, Dina would've been stuck outside waiting in the heat. It was already unbearably hot this morning, and she knew it was going to get worse as the day went on. The one advantage to being on the morning shift was that she missed what one of the regular customers called the fly-under-the-magnifying-glass effect. Belluso's had a huge picture window that faced west, and in the late afternoon, the sun blared in, raising the temperature in the place higher than the cheap air-conditioning system could handle.

"Hey, Dina, what's up?" Jeanie said in her perky little voice as she stepped off the bus. She was wearing, as usual, all pink: light-pink Hello Kitty shirt, hot-pink shorts that came up to the top of her thighs (she had the legs for it; Dina was embarrassed to show her own thighs in public and wouldn't go out in shorts that short if you put a gun to her head), and pink flip-flops.

"Okay. I just arrived," Dina said. "How are you?"

"Slept through the alarm. Thank God for Goldie."

Dina smiled. Goldie was Jeanie's dog, a golden retriever. "Your backup alarm?"

Jeanie chuckled as she rummaged through her purse. "Yeah. If I'm not up by quarter after six, he's all over my face with his tongue." She shuddered. "Kinda like my ex-boyfriend."

To that, Dina said nothing. The only ex-boyfriend she had was the boy she left behind in Russia. She still missed Sasha. Of course, she'd been hit on quite a bit since coming here, both in college and at the bakery. The one guy who was there all the time, Jack something, he was an outrageous flirt. Dina had been flattered until she noticed that he flirted with everyone else, too, which took a lot of the fun out of it. Still, his compliments certainly seemed genuine.

But nobody had seriously caught her interest. In fact, most of the ones who hit on her here, including Jack, were a lot older. In Dina's experience, older men never treated younger women with respect.

Jeanie finally excavated the key from her purse and inserted it into the lock, turning it to the right.

The key made a thunking noise and stopped before it could go all the way around. "What the hell?" Jeanie said with a frown. She turned the key back around and pulled it out.

Then she pulled on the door, and Dina was shocked to see it open. The door had never been locked the night before.

Dina looked up. The lights were all out, like they were supposed to be-but the door was open? That didn't make sense.

"Who closed last night?" Jeanie asked.

"How should I know?" Dina asked back.

Jeanie shook her head. "Right, you weren't working yesterday." She closed her eyes. Dina imagined she was visualizing the schedule. "It was-right, Maria and Annie."

That surprised Dina. Both Maria Campagna and Annie Wolfowitz were very conscientious. If it had been Karen Paulsen, Dina would have understood-that girl was what Jeanie called a flake-but not Maria or Annie.

Dina had never liked Maria all that much. She always kept gloating about how well she was treated by her boyfriend and how he bought her so many nice things, like the eighteen-karat-gold necklace she always wore. Sasha couldn't even afford to take Dina out with any regularity, much less buy her presents, expensive or otherwise.

So, perhaps uncharitably, Dina hoped it had been Maria who'd forgotten to lock up.

When they entered the bakery, Dina moved around to the back while Jeanie went to turn on both the lights and the air-conditioning. Dina planned to get the cappuccino maker going, then start taking the cannoli out of the refrigerator in the back.

Flies buzzed all over the place. Dina was looking forward to the AC driving them away.

Oddly, the flies got worse as she came around behind the counter. And something smelled-

She screamed before her conscious mind recognized Maria Campagna lying on the floor, her eyes open, her face pale, flies buzzing around her body.

"What is it?" Jeanie said as she ran around to the other side of the counter. "Dina, what is it?"

"It's-it's-it's Maria!"

Dina had no idea how Jeanie reacted, because she couldn't take her eyes off Maria. Dina had never seen a dead body-Jewish tradition kept caskets closed during funerals. For all her uncle's dire warnings about how dead bodies lined the streets in New York, she'd never seen a corpse before, except on those police shows on television.

Maria's body looked different from what she expected. For one thing, she figured someone who was dead would be paler. And there wasn't any blood that she could see.

But she knew that Maria was dead. For one thing, she wasn't moving at all. Dina had never realized before just how still someone could be.

And she had dead eyes.

Then Dina heard a distant, tinny voice say, "911." Turning, she saw that Jeanie had taken out her cell phone-a razor-thin phone that was the same shade of pink as her shorts.

"I'm at Belluso's Bakery on Riverdale and 236th. There's a dead body here."