Last Call

by Matthew Nunes

  He nodded. He was munching happily on a blueberry muffin, after sipping some coffee. How did she make it, he asked.

  “My Mamacita taught me,” she answered, smiling, and started to rattle it off to him. I thought it was nice having a guest. It would be better with more guests, and I started a list in my mind. Would this place be more of a home if I started to treat it like one?

  “Your dad and I need to talk privately for a few minutes,” he said to her after waiting for her to finish. “I hate to take up your time together, but it’s important.” She and Mrs. Pina left and sat down in the living room, while I smelled baking cod and simmering chowder.

  “Paul, I have a couple of things for you. First of all, you can’t be wandering around illegally carrying a firearm. Here.” He handed me a card with my picture and an endorsement to carry a concealed pistol. It sure as hell looked like my signature, too.

  “I know a guy who did some time for forging checks,” he answered, before I got the question out. “If you got rid of the piece, you can legally buy and wear another.”

  “It’s coming up in a bus shipment.”

  “We really do have to do something about them. It’s way too easy to move all kinds of stuff by bus. I had to pull some strings, but it may help.” He handed me another laminated card that showed I was licensed as a private investigator and bail bondsman recovery agent. That would have been even tougher with the gap in my records that the Navy insisted on maintaining. The gap that kept me from practicing law should have prevented me from getting that license.

  “I have something for you, too.” I went to my room and got my report out of my briefcase and handed it to him. “Sorry about my handwriting, but it should be pretty comprehensive.”

  “Not to mention, interesting.” He leafed through it quickly. “What’s next?”

  “After a shower and a change of clothes, and dinner, and some time with my daughter you mean?”

  “Yes, after all of that.”

  “After that, and some rest, I have to visit some old acquaintances about some of theirs.”

  He handed me a file. “Coroner’s protocol, M.E’s report, including toxicology. You never got this stuff from me, okay?”

  “What stuff is that?”

  “Stuff?” he answered, and smiled. The smile faded.

  “Petersen,” he said.

  I waited him out.

  “He’s off of the investigation, and doing robbery and stuff like that.”

  “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “You should have heard him on the radio when you lost him, by the way. He sounded like he’d wet his pants. He knew he had to tell, but he hated to do it. I have to admit I enjoyed it.”

  After DaSilva called his wife to tell her he was having dinner with us, we sat down to eat. Seafood, corn on the cob, and a flaky sweet pastry for dessert. As an act of kindness, Mrs. Pina made regular coffee, telling Marisol to “sit and enjoy your papa.”

  DaSilva left, explaining that he’d get Dana, calling her “Agent Kilroy,” a copy of all that I’d given him. Marisol said goodnight to him, and kissed him on the cheek. He was delighted, and laughed all the way out when she waved to him and said, “Surf’s up!”

  We sat in the living room, after we did the dishes, watching T.V. and talking about a trip to Washington to be tourists. Mrs. Pina said goodnight and headed upstairs. Marisol and I sat on the couch together holding hands. She went to bed, with only a small argument, when she found that I’d be home all day the next day.

  I dialed Dana’s home number, got her machine, and left her a message. I had a moment of jealousy, wondering where she was and with whom. She was a federal agent, I reminded myself; they didn’t work nine to five. I felt young and unsure of myself. I felt stupid, too. I was suddenly tired and sore. I took a painkiller, staggered to my room and undressed. I barely made it under the covers before sleep took over, and I was dreaming.

  It was one of those dreams that take you into your past, with incidents that happened, and incidents that couldn’t. People I knew drifted in and out of it, along with people who were faceless. The face that kept coming up was a familiar one, and I woke with a start, as if falling in my sleep. I pulled out my legal pad and wrote the name that went with the face. I fell back to sleep and didn’t dream again.

  Chapter 13

  When I woke, I looked at my legal pad. I’d scribbled “Dennis Pereira.” It was a real name. He came from my past. In the present, we remained friends even though we probably shouldn’t. I had visited him in prison, sent him Christmas cards and stayed in contact.

  We grew up together in Fall River. He was the only absolutely fearless man that I knew. Dennis never refused a dare, never backed down. We used to say that he had more balls than brains. That wasn’t true. Had he given school the effort that he put into everything else, he would have graduated near the top of our class. He wasn’t lazy and worked for a landscaper to save money for the car he wanted. He got it two days after he got his license. At sixteen and a-half, he was driving a two-year-old muscle car that he owned outright.

  He bootlegged tapes, hustled pool, made outrageous bets and almost always won them.

  After high school, he’d embarked on several extralegal enterprises. He wasn’t caught until after I was at the Academy. When I was home on liberty, I visited him at the penitentiary in Bridgewater. The undercover cop that bought the truckload of hijacked cigarettes couldn’t help liking Dennis. Not many people escaped his rakish charm. When he got out, he did well enough to buy a condo in the new high-rise near Battleship Cove. I visited him there and found him hosting a party. Among the guests was a girl I’d been madly in love with in high school, newly married. She was flirting outrageously with Dennis, who laughed it off, handing her back to her husband.

  In the present, I found him living in Taunton, up in Massachusetts. At that hour, he’d probably be asleep, if not in his apartment, then at some woman’s place.

  After Marisol went to school, I gassed up the Saab and headed north. Dennis had a phone, but I probably still had a tap on mine.

  Taunton had been a prosperous town, forty or fifty years ago. It was ninety percent dead now, with all of the ills of a city and few of the good parts. I used my road atlas to find Dennis’ address and walked up to the second floor of a three-story building. My cell phone remained at home on the charger. Just in case, I couldn’t bring the law to him. I’d worked at a bar around the corner not long before. Not a nice neighborhood, and certainly nothing like the condo he’d owned in Fall River.

  When he opened his door, he hadn’t changed much. Still built like a brick standing on end, with massive arms and a goatee. Brown eyes, dark curly hair and a daring grin with startling white teeth offset bowed legs when women met him. The smile got broader when he saw me.

  Dennis was wearing a pair of basketball shorts that came below his knees and a tank top. Muscles bunched and slackened as he walked. When he turned and led me into his apartment, I could see part of a scar from a prison fight. He headed straight into the kitchen. The place was clean, if worn. In the kitchen he reached up to the top of the refrigerator, needing a stepstool, and brought down a cookie jar shaped like a cupcake. “My girlfriend made it in ceramics class,” he said.

  “So how much do you need?” lifting off the lid, where I saw lots of money. I didn’t bother to ask where it had come from.

  “Jesus, Dennis, I didn’t come to tap you for money.”

  “You’d do it for me.”

  “What I need, you might not be able to help with. I need a name.” He looked at me from under his eyebrows.

  “You still some kind of cop?”

  I sat down at the kitchen table. “Let me tell you a story. Got coffee?”

  He put the ceramic cupcake down in front of me and started a pot of coffee. We were comfortably silent while we waited. He drank his extra light, with lots of sugar. He had to get all of that energy from someplace.

  “First of all, I’m not a cop any
more.”

  He nodded.

  “I need a name, someone I can trust and talk to, off the record.”

  “What kind of name?”

  “I need a professional killer, the best you can find.”

  “You can kill anybody you want yourself. Hell, if you’re in trouble, the two of us can do it.”

  “No, thanks. I need to know how to do something. I need to know how something was done, I think.” I realized how stupid I must have sounded.

  So I told him.

  “The kind of guy you’re talking about, they’re the best of the best of the best, you know? They don’t wind up in jail. They wind up in the south of France, on a white beach, screwing rich, tan women. Sure as shit not going to find one in Walpole.”

  “Probably not, but you always have favors going on, right?”

  He nodded, with that wild man grin of his. “True enough.”

  “Okay, so somebody knows somebody else, right?”

  “I get it. I’ll try, but it’s gonna take some time.”

  “Careful on the phone, Dennis, it has extra ears.”

  “Always careful on the phone. Ever since a tap got me three to six at Walpole.”

  We finished our coffee. “You hear that Kathy Sousa is divorced?”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  He gave me a wicked smirk, “She’d love to hear from her very first knight in shining armor.” He handed me a slip of paper with her phone number on it. “Maybe you need to have a little fun, too.”

  I left that whole conversation alone.

  ”Hey,” he said, now serious, “A man’s business is his own—”

  “Yeah?”

  “But can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re in the clear, even the papers are starting to say so. Papers get it right eventually, right?”

  I nodded.

  “So why the fuck are you chasing it? There’s nothing in it for you but trouble, more than likely. You have a kid, and you have a life you should be getting on with. You should be tending bar like a fish should be riding a motorcycle. You could be doing lots of other jobs. You’re after this thing like it matters to you. Why?”

  I started to tell him it wasn’t his business. Then I remembered him going to his money without hesitation. I remembered flashes of thousands of moments from childhood to manhood.

  “Dennis,” I started to say, but stopped.

  He waited.

  “This killing may fix a few people’s lives, and may fuck up a few others. It’s definitely screwed my family over. That’s not really it. It’s as if I’ve been waiting to do something that matters, but being afraid of it at the same time. I’m pissed.”

  “You bastard,” he said, smiling again, and leveling a forefinger at me like the barrel of a six-shooter, “You don’t even know why, yourself. You’re full of shit, you know; you’re doing it because you fucking well feel like it, right? Admit it, Paul. You’re doing it because you want to. Nothing wrong with that, you know. Sometimes you should do something for the hell of it. Sometimes you think too hard. Always did.”

  I started to answer, but he interrupted, “When your wife died, and you visited me in prison, you weren’t really there. You weren’t anywhere, man. Just going through the motions. Look, somebody beat the piss out of you, but you’re up, you’re moving, and you are one intense son of a bitch right now. You want to run around righting wrongs, that’s cool. I’ll do what I can.”

  As I drove towards home, I tore the phone number into pieces and scattered it into the car’s slipstream.

  Chapter 14

  I got home before ‘Sol was due, so I called Dana at the office. I had to leave another message on her voicemail. I was starting to feel frustrated. I missed her voice and her laugh. I missed the cinnamon scent of her cologne. I missed her.

  I picked up the phone, and started calling some of the other bad boys I knew, putting out the word that I needed help and asking for call backs. Finally, I made one more call.

  Debbie Fugazzi was the smartest person I knew. I met her in kindergarten, and went all the way through high school with her. Her homeliness had gotten her some ugly remarks and bad treatment, and I’d exacted some revenge for her sake a time or two. It never seemed to bother her, and she was nice about tutoring her fellow students. She was particularly nice to a guy who wanted to go to the Naval Academy, and nursed him through chemistry with a decent grade. She was a much better teacher than the guy who got paid for it. She was valedictorian of our class, and went on to become a doctor. I never went to her as a patient. The thought of her probing my nether regions was chilling.

  It took a couple of tries to break through her receptionist’s screening, but finally, I got her on the phone. “Paul Costa, now there’s a blast from the past,” she said. “You’re my brush with fame right now, or is it notoriety?”

  “Can you explain the difference between a covalent and an ionic bond?”

  I heard the smile in her voice at the memory, “Sure, but you still won’t get it. Long time.”

  “I could use some help.”

  “I’ll bet you could, but I’m not sure what I can do.”

  “Have you got a few minutes?”

  “Try me.”

  “What do you know about heart attacks, ‘myocardial infarctions,’ if I said that right.”

  “You said it just fine. And before I answer, I need two honest answers from you.”

  “Fair enough, I guess, Deb, shoot.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know that I had a major crush on you, from seventh grade until after we graduated?”

  I was startled, then thought about some of the time we’d spent together. “I didn’t at the time, but I guess I should have. I just thought you were nice and trying to help me out.”

  She sighed. “My mother thought you were a hoodlum. You stood up for me. Not much kindness to be found at that age, and you were kind to me.”

  “So,” she said, more briskly, “How can I help you?”

  “A guy’s having a heart attack, what happens and what does he do?”

  “Depends. Usually, he gets a lot of pressure, pain in his left arm, maybe wrist, sometimes both arms or wrists. The pressure might be in his chest, maybe not. If he’s having his first heart attack, he might find the pressure so unfamiliar that he thinks it’s something else.”

  “Would he head for the men’s room, like for water, or something?”

  “Funny you should ask; that’s what I was going to mention. There’s so much pressure, and a sense of dread and denial that comes over them, that they misread what it is, and think that they have to move their bowels. He might think it’s urgent and head for the john. It sounds like a bad joke, but we find lots of heart attack victims sitting on toilets with their pants down.”

  “So it wouldn’t surprise you to find a guy having a heart attack running for the toilet and keeling over in the stall?”

  “Is that what your lawyer is going to say?”

  “Lawyer?”

  “I read the papers.”

  “Debbie, I didn’t kill anybody, and they think that he had a heart attack.”

  “So who stabbed him with your knife?”

  “When this is all over, Debbie—”

  “Yes?”

  “You and your husband are going to have to come over for dinner, and I’ll tell you about it. Bring the kids, maybe a picnic or something.”

  “I’ll hold you to that, Paul. I’d love to see you again, and see that you got all fat and bald, and I wasted those nights pining for you.”

  “Debbie!”

  “So, I’ll go home with the man I love, instead. Still, it would be nice if you’d grown a wart, or something, you know? Kind of a friendly gesture?”

  She giggled. “It would be nice to get together.”

  “Thanks for your help, Debbie. I think I have some ideas from what you told me. I appreciate it.”
<
br />   “Don’t forget dinner. Take care.”

  “I won’t forget. I’ll see you soon.”

  I hung up softly and scribbled some notes on my legal pad. I made coffee, and started to arrange my notes. On my time line, I figured that the Congressman started feeling the effects of a heart attack and headed for the nearest men’s room, the one in the bar. He got in while my attention was elsewhere. Sarah, the waitress, could have missed him. The customers might have seen him without noticing. A man headed for the men’s room wouldn’t draw any attention.

  I checked my email. Nothing. No email from somebody telling me how to cause a heart attack. The CIA gentleman had seemed unlikely to forget, and I had no way to reach him. I had to wait, if he decided to keep me waiting. He had already admitted that there was a way. If that had to be all I got from him, I could live with it. Maybe he was a fraud, working for the Department of Labor, but I didn’t think so.

  When the phone rang, I was startled enough to leap for it. My heart rate was still up when I answered. “Hello?”

  “Paul?” It was Dana, finally. “I’m sorry about the phone tag. It’s been crazy. Not just the Congressman, but a couple of other cases, and I really wanted to talk to you, and to see you, but I’ve been running around, and it’s—”

  “I’m just really glad to hear your voice.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yeah. I’d like to see you,” I said, with adolescent nerves.

  “Good. I can’t leave Boston, though. Can you meet me up here?”

  “I’d meet you in Anchorage.”

  She named a Japanese restaurant on the South Shore, shortening my drive as much as she could. I told her I’d meet her there at eight and we hung up.

  Then I sat down with the medical stuff and tried to decipher it. I saw the Myocardial Infarction, and even saw the probability that the knife wound was barely ante mortem, or probably postmortem. There was a whole lot about toxicology and mass spectrographic analysis.

  I knew a doctor. I called Debbie’s office and left a message. Ten minutes later, her receptionist called and asked me to fax the report to the office. I hadn’t seen a fax machine in years. I didn’t have one, so I saddled up and drove to a print shop, where they sent the fax for me, with a short note. I told her about the phone tap, so the notification wouldn’t surprise her It cost me a buck a page, and I had to use my debit card. I didn’t like the state of my finances, but I had unjustifiably great expectations. I was home in time to meet Marisol. We had the last of the blueberry muffins, and she ran to get her homework done, so we could get to the library to do the research for her special project.