by D Keith Mano
poor, throttled thing that she was. How anxious she must’ve
been—to have screamed that way (or, worse, tried to scream
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and couldn’t). Her face was screaming—lips pulled back over
those long teeth. Had her gums rotted off? (She seemed to have
no gums in my memory last night.) And she was only 20 years
old.
The cops were (they still are) totally dicked off at me. They
had this God-awful corpse and an irrelevant crime scene in the
middle of suburbia. They went through the motions for a while,
roping the area off—but after about 30 minutes they gave it
up. Murray Street wasn’t about to tell them anything. On top of
that, I had covered just about every relevant surface with my
fingerprints. .
At first they weren’t so bad: at first the cops thought I was
their perpetrator—or at least an accomplice. But, as time passed,
and it became apparent that I was innocent, that I ’d probably
been in Nebraska when Rita was killed, well, they got abusive.
I wasn’t a murderer, I was just an asshole.
One cop—in his thirties, thin-haired, lit-fused, Daniels his
name is, looks like Peter Boyle, but smaller—Daniels kept saying,
“ I don’t believe it. He drove the car. He got into a c a r -
missing four weeks, this car is—he got onto the car and drove
it off. Like it was the most normal thing in the world—a stolen
car delivering itself to his front door. Didn’t you think? Didn’t
you think at all, There may be something wrong with this car?”
“ W ait,” I said. The taste of vomit on my mouth roof was
like rancid Crisco. “ Wait now. It’s my brother’s car. It’s got a
parking ticket already. I ’m gonna take it home and call the police. What can you hope t’leam from the pavement on Northern Boulevard where it was parked?”
“ The fingerprints—” Daniels said again.
“ I know. I made a m istake.”
“ Stand back,” his partner said, “ he’s throwing up again.”
His partner was a man named Colavecchia: bronze skin, mustache, nose big enough to be a vacuum cleaner attachment.
Older, maybe 50. The nice1 half of this manic-depressive pair.
We drove out to Malba. Colavecchia was decent enough to let
me go in alone and tell Ethel—over Daniels’s protest. What I
had found in the trunk did not suggest that Tony was headed
home any time soon.
She was in the kitchen. As soon as she saw me, Ethel glanced
out the window to her driveway. She put a dishtowel down, after
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73
folding it neatly. Then, as I guess she does when there is trouble,
Ethel picked up Ellen and let her suckle.
“ Ethel—”
“ You took too long getting here. I thought, What’s wrong?
Tell m e.”
“ I opened the trunk. On Tony’s Lincoln. There was the
corpse—the decomposed corpse—of a woman in it.”
“ Shit,” she said.
“ It was awful, I—”
“ Who? Who was she?”
“ No one knows yet.”
“ Shit,” Ethel said again.
And she turned away from me. I thought she had done that
to hide some powerful emotion, one she was too proud to show—
fear for Tony, grief, something. So I, awkwardly enough, I embraced her from behind. Not a cool move. Not the right bedside manner. She elbowed me in the ribs—Ethel turned so suddenly
and angrily. And she said,
“ What’re you huggin’ me for? I don’t need huggin’—”
“ Ah,” I said.
“ Oh, I see. You think Tony’s dead, you think maybe Tony’s
a murderer. But he isn’t dead and he’s not going t’do time. Your
brother is a very special man. No one can touch him. And he
doesn’t involve himself with the kinda slut that ends up dead in
the trunk of a car. Don’t give me no look of pity, Mike. I know
better than you. Tony’s coming back. ”
At that moment Daniels knocked at the kitchen door. My five
minutes were up.
“ U h,” I said, going to the door, “ These’re two homicide
detectives on the case. They’d like t’ask you some questions.”
“ Mrs. Wilson, I ’m Detective Vince Cola—” And that was
as far as he got.
“ O h,” said Ethel. “ Oh, I see. All of a sudden you’re interested—now you think my husband killed someone, you’re interested. When he was a missing person, leaving four kids with no father, all I got were winks and cheap innuendos. Now you
maybe got a collar coming t’boost your pathetic careers, now
you want to ask questions. Well, it’s too late. Go talk t’the smart
ass jerk-offs in the missing persons department. I told them
everything I know.” As Ethel left—Ellen hadn’t missed a drop
of milk through all of this—she said over one shoulder, “ My
husband didn’t kill anyone.”
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D. Keith Mano
* * *
I felt the need to be near water—because I thought (I still do)
that my brother was dead. I took a bus to Flushing and then the
number 7 train to Times Square, and from there I walked to the
Circle Line pier. It was a beautiful day—but in all that blue sky,
I saw only irony and misplaced effort. And underneath the summer afternoon lay a blackened skin and long teeth.
From a pay phone on the pier I called The Car. Leonard
picked up. I know I ’m sensitized—I ’m looking for suspicious
inflections and forced language—but his voice had, well, a studied sound. “ Strangled?” he said. “ O f all the fuckin’ misery, now we’ll have fuckin’ cops coming out’ve our fuckin’ ears.”
Leonard is profane. But just maybe I heard just one “ fuck” too
many. A “ fuck” of phony insouciance. Like I say, I ’m sensitized—still, I ’d better keep an eye on Leonard.
So I went around Manhattan twice—into the night. Mostly I
stared at the prow-thrown water. Flames and moving water settle me—they’re images of the holy spirit because they can envelop. There is no shape, no matter how odd or recalcitrant, that they cannot lap around. I couldn’t frame a proper prayer
then: the formulas I ’ve learned seemed trivial, and my spontaneous thoughts were fearful gibberish.
But I do pray now for one thing: to get the smell of Rita out
of my head. The molecules of her death scent have burrowed
into my nasal lining. Even on the water a whiff would come
back and, with it, the entire event. It’s our ambergris, that smell.
It is the smell that includes all other smells. It is our damned,
lingering essence.
Mostly, as I am now, I was afraid to sleep. I didn’t want to
be alone. I didn’t want to be with people I knew. But that’s the
service New York best supplies—a kind of noncommittal companionship. A peopled loneliness. We are well connected here.
I walked until the morning joggers came out. Then I bought
the papers. Thank God there was no mention of me by name in
Newsday. And the Post, somehow, had misheard—they called
me “ Mark W ilson.” “ A relative of the missing owner, Mark
Wilson, 28, discovered the body while . . . ”
While trying to hide the fact that he’s a priest who runs a
topless bar.
Then I walked across the 59th Street Bridge and back to
Queens.
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75
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29
Daniels and Colavecchia were waiting, with Jako, inside The
Car.
They had bought coffee and two French crullers for me—a
gesture, I guess, of conciliation that didn’t sit comfortably on
Daniels’s stomach. But they were glad to see me—in part because I could send Jako away. Jako loves to volunteer information, but it tends to be the same information he volunteered yesterday. Jako lives in the present: he has no use for calendars.
I set him to work in the men’s room.
“ He thinks you’re Tony Wilson,” Colavecchia said.
“ Yes,” I said. “ He can be very convincing, too. But Tony
Wilson is a better man than I am. ’ ’
“ You look like shit,” said Daniels. “ You didn’t go home last
night.”
“ I walked. You guys may be useta that kind of thing. Dead
people in car trunks. I ’m not. It shook m e.”
“ It’s shitty,” said Colavecchia. “ You never get accustomed
to it. Listen, we checked with American Airlines—you did come
in from Omaha on June 22nd. We haven’t pinned down time of
death yet—but it looks like you’re in the clear. And, frankly, we
need your help.”
44Whatever I can do. ”
-“ A list, with phone and address, of the girls who’ve worked
here. Anyone who might have known Rita Madera.”
“ Rita?” (The papers hadn’t given her name.)
“ Yes. You knew the woman?”
“ U h -n o .”
“ According to Ms. Nancy Cortez, the deceased’s roommate,
Rita Madera was Having an affair with your brother.”
“ Are you sure? Tony had four kids—”
“ Stranger things’ve happened, Mr. Wilson,” said Daniels.
“ Fatherhood doesn’t make us saints. There are temptations in
a place like this. You hire the girls here?” I nodded. “ Beats
being a detective.”
“ Tell us about your brother, Mr. Wilson,” said Colavecchia.
“ You’re close, you two?”
“ Well, we were. Tony’s been great to me. He was six years
older. Our parents were killed when I was 8 and Tony was 14.
Uncle Cecil—he died last year—moved in with us. We lived in
Whitestone. Tony and I both went to Flushing High. Uncle Cecil
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D. Keith Mono
was a drinker—not a bad guy—but Tony really brought me up.
He put me through college.”
• “ W hen’d you see him last?”
“ I went to—to teach in Nebraska. And before that I was in
college. I called. He called. We kept in touch. But it’s four, five
years since I ’ve seen him .” (I lied. Tony had come to my ordination.) ‘‘But before that—before that—it was at his wedding to Ethel I saw him last. ’ ’
‘‘So, in fact, you know nothing about your brother.”
‘ ‘No. I didn’t even know he owned this place, b u t . . . let me
tell you this, I know his heart. He could never’ve killed that
girl.”
“ D ’you know anyone who might’ve wanted Tony Wilson removed from the scene?”
“ N o.”
“ Were you aware that Rita Madera—” Daniels checked his
notes, “ —that Rita Madera had been the girlfriend o f . . . Leonard Krause?”
I wasn’t aware of it. And I had to wonder why Daniels had
favored me with such a stimulating piece of gossip. As a provocation? The thought of Leonard Krause in bed with anyone—
let alone a pretty, young anyone—was enough to lower my white
blood cell count. It seemed to refute evolution. But I had known
from Day One that Leonard did not hold Tony in reverence.
And that irreverence had been passed on to me, as next-of-blood
kin. In Rita I could locate a reason for it.
I guess Tony, my big bro, was screwing around. Part of me
feels disloyal, thinking this. The other part of me, however,
wants desperately to understand. A 20-year-old Puerto Rican,
no less. Ethel refuses to accept it. I spoke to her at noon. (She
finally granted C. and D. an interview.) Ethel has this enormous, almost mystic-like ability to block any information—no m atter how persuasive—that might threaten her kinda slanted
view of the world. If Ethel concentrated on their refutation, the
principles of Euclidean geometry would cease to hold. The wheel
wouldn’t work. I know enough—even after this short time—not
to contradict her.
But, on the way back from Xeroxing Tony’s notebook for
C. and D ., I met Nancy Cortez. She had a fishbowl in her hand.
It said RITA MADERA BERIAL FUND on it. She was a small,
paunchy woman—not a dancer (or not a prosperous dancer
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77
anyhow)—with a long, graying braid thick as' a ship’s hawser.
Nancy Cortez looked up at me without prejudice—a small courtesy which I have begun to appreciate. All night people were staring at me. I am suddenly a public figure, open to conjecture.
Not to mention skepticism.
(And I feel the inevitability of it—someday soon an Episcopalian, out tom-catting, will recognize Rev. Mike Wilson. Lucky for me Episcopalians have a low sex drive.)
“ Rita don’t got no family here,” Nancy Cortez said. “ Her
mother is in P.R. I send the body back, when the police let me.
But this costs money. Can I put the fishbowl here tonight?”
“ Sure,” I said. “ Let me start things off.” I took $250 out of
the cash register. “ I never met her. I ’m new here.” I was distancing myself from the event.
“ Thank you,” she said. “ Can I also ask for another thing?
The telephones that I can call—of the dancers here. T ’tell them
where t’come help.”
“ You’ll have t’use it here—but be my guest.” I handed her
Tony’s notebook. “ Can I ask you a question?”
“ Yes.”
“ The police tell me you said . . . that Tony Wilson, my
brother, that he was having an affair with Rita.”
“ He was good to her. She was sick—a stomach disease—she
don’t digest good. He paid for tests, a lot of money.”
“ So then maybe he was just helping her. Maybe they weren’t,
uh, making love.” Nancy Cortez looked at me as if perhaps I
had arrived from another culture, which, in some sense, I have.
“ They made love.” She rolled her eyes. “ One night they
broke my bed. Crash-bang. And they didn’t stop.” Nancy Cortez pantomimed love-making at a steep angle.
“ And Leonard Krause,” I said. “ Did Rita go t’bed with
Leonard as well?”
“ Leonard?” Nancy Cortez shrugged. It seemed to me that
she was being evasive. She didn’t look up when she said, “ Well
. . . that was another kind of thing. You can’t blame Rita for
that. It was another kind of filing.”
The night felt, I don’t know, Irish to me. Savage. Sullen.
Rain fell and thunder hit its gong outside. Inside . . . well, inside nude women danced at Rita’s wake. It had the frantic energy of pre-Christian ritual. And in some senses, though certainly
bizarre, it was appropriate. From that display of life—from bare,
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; D. Keith Mano
glistening breasts and jutted pudenda—the dancers meant to
conjure up protection. You can’t kill us, they said, they danced,
We are THIS alive.
The fishbowl was on stage. Nancy Cortez leaned an 8 x 12
glossy of Rita against it. I would rather she hadn’t done that.
Rita turned out to be pretty and petite—so different from the
grotesque image I had glimpsed in the car trunk that it made me
feel unanchored, afloat. We forget what gross stuff flesh is. How
frail and mysterious is the force that keeps us from disintegration. In her photo Rita was trying to ingratiate. Her smile, though bright, had insecurity in it. Women take such photos for men—
casting directors and that sort. The photos say, “ Please like
m e.” But I, in my agitated state, heard Rita saying, “ Please
don’t kill me, please.”
Yet someone did.
And I remembered what Colavecchia had said, “ So, in fact,
you know nothing about your brother.” Nothing. The person I
had once been closest to in the world was now an enigma to me.
And, given my ignorance, I was badly equipped to defend Tony
against the universal assumption—it was everywhere tonight—
that he had strangled Rita. People, mind you, were courteous
enough. But I felt the difference. Those who used to say, “ Boy,
you sure do look like your brother,” were silent. This evening
it wasn’t good to look like Tony Wilson.
Dancers dropped by throughout the night looking schlumpy
and impatient—as dancers tend to look when they’re not on duty.
Many were Hispanic. All were generous: and they gave, so it
seemed to me, in proportion to their beauty (and, hence, their
earning power). Nancy Cortez took home over $2500. At midnight there was a formal moment of silence. Berry, who plays the guitar, sang an effective ballad about dancing topless. Afterward, she came over to me and said,
“ You’ve had a terrible time, huh?”
“ Oh, hell,” I said, “ this is nothing. I haven’t been to t ’sleep
since I found her. I ’m scared t’greet my dream s.”
“ Shit,” she said. She used the word nicely. It didn’t offend
me. Berry put a hand on my arm—I think I saw brunette hair
under a blond wig—and she squeezed. My bicep didn’t ball up.
I guess I ’m comfortable around her.
