The Disappearing Body

by David Grand

  Everlasting love,

  Freddy

  Finished with his letter, Freddy reached under his bed for a Sterling Company hatbox in which he kept the insurance policy he had taken out for Evelyn and the baby a few months earlier. He removed the folded papers from the box, then tucked them inside an envelope, which he addressed to Evelyn on Dunleavy Street. Freddy placed the envelope on his night table, then laid his head onto his pillows. He was drunk, drunk enough to sleep, but he was kept awake, not thinking of Evelyn any longer, but thinking about the woman who lived across the air shaft in the Beekman Hotel for Women.

  He had lied to the police. Freddy had known Janice Gould. He had met her three months ago. He had been standing on the curb outside the Fief Building smoking a cigarette, looking uptown in the direction of the park, where he could still see emanating from the tops of the trees an orange autumn glow that filled the sky just before dusk. From behind, Freddy heard, “Say, honey, would you be a doll and give me a hand with this thing.” It took him a moment to realize he was “honey” and was being spoken to, but then he slowly turned around and found a young woman standing beside a bureau, waving him over. “The doorman just stepped out for his dinner. If I don’t get this thing inside, I’ll be sitting on top of it, directing traffic.” She was just like Freddy described her to the police—young, a full round face, long neck, slim waist, long auburn hair, made-up, beautiful, gorgeous. “You do this for me,” she said, “I got enough on me to take you out for a nice stiff drink. Whatta you say?” Freddy said, “If you put it that way.” “I took you for a drinking man,” she said. When Freddy found his feet had turned heavy at the sight of her, at the prospect of her, she placed a hand on her hip and said, “Whatta you waiting for?” The orange autumn light shrouded the woman’s long auburn hair, making it look like it was about to catch fire. Freddy casually walked over to her and hugged the heavy, cumbersome piece of furniture around its girth and, struggling to keep it upright, followed Janice into the lobby. He set the bureau next to two plaid valises and the painting of a young man with a thin smile and a crooked nose. “Your boyfriend?” Freddy joked. “No, silly, that there’s my father. In his youth.” She looked cross. “I didn’t mean to make light of it.” “My mother, she painted it before she died. What do you think?” “Nice,” Freddy said. “You don’t think much of it, do you?” “I think it’s real fine.” “That’s all right, honey, I know what it is. I just like to keep him around to remind me of my happy homelife, see.” “If you say so.” “You thought I was mad at you for a second, didn’t you? . . . No, don’t answer that. Answer this—where we going for that drink I promised you?”

  The two of them walked around the block to the Hotel Trouville and sat at the bar. “Fancy,” she said, looking over her shoulders, sizing up the place. “You come here often?” “No,” Freddy said. “Never been here before in my life.” “Then what the hell are we doing here?” “Since you were buying, I thought we’d give it a shot.” “One drink and then we’re out of this joint. Then you’re taking me someplace nice and cheap so we can poison ourselves right.” Freddy looked at her as if she was a religion of her own making. “What? You don’t have plans, do you?” “No,” Freddy said. “I didn’t think so.” They each had a highball at the Trouville, then took a cab uptown to Jack’s. “Now, this is more like it,” she said. “This one’s on you, sweetheart.”

  The dour-looking men in Jack’s, Jack included, jealously watched Freddy get drunk with the woman in the back corner of the sipping room. After their fifth round, she was sitting beside him in the booth, nuzzling her reddened nose into his neck. “The thing is,” she said quietly, “is that my husband, he couldn’t take an inch of me. To expect him to take the whole nine hundred miles, forget it.” “So you picked up and left him.” “Four times I left him already. In two years.” She held up four fingers. “Four times he’s sent a flatfoot after me, and four times he’s gotten down on his knees and begged, I mean begged, me to go back to him.” “And you went back four times.” “Four times. But no more, buster, I said to him this time. Nothin’ doin’. You can send out the entire landed army and I ain’t coming back to you this time, I told him. That’s final.” “Good,” Freddy said. “I bet you think it’s good.” “Why do you say that?” “I’ll show you, I’ll show you.”

  She showed him. Freddy woke up the following morning with Janice Gould’s soft mane of auburn hair swept across his chest. He could hardly move his legs, they were so wrenched out of shape. “One thing I learned from my poor deceased mother,” she said with her cheek burrowed into Freddy’s chest hair, “is that no heartache’s worth going to the grave for, boyo.” “Your mother, she had a bad heart?” “No, honey, she had a first-rate heart. Her heart was so first-rate, she pined away for one galoot for so long, it was like she was beatin’ it for both of them. And when she was done with the whole wrestling match, she managed to cut her life right in half like a thin piece of paper.” Freddy gave her a sad grin as she lifted herself off him. “Don’t you worry, kid,” she said with some determination when she saw Freddy’s face, “I don’t got my mother’s heart. Mine don’t beat for no one but me.”

  For the next several weeks, Freddy woke up in the mornings, worn out and hungover, with his arm lying across the soft pouch of Janice’s belly, his face pressing against her tangerine-sized breasts, and he would listen to her talk. How she liked to talk. “What do you think, Freddy, you think my tits are too small for me to make the burlesque houses? They gotta cry out for them! Cry, I tell you.” “You got me crying for them, don’t you?” “Yeah, but you, you’re a pushover. I’m saying, if you was to have seen me for the first time on the stage with this chest, would it take your breath away?” “Like I said . . .” “I know what you said, but, think, I gotta take their breath right out of their lungs so they can feel it right here,” she said, taking hold of her naked groin as she stood up from the bed in front of Freddy. “Don’t you get it, bub, I want to knock them right in their seats and have ’em scream for me like none of ’em can live without me.” “They’re good enough,” Freddy urged as Janice turned them away from him. “They’re the best I can recall.” “No joke?” “No joke.” “Oh, Freddy,” she cooed, looking back at him, her waist in a half twist, “I didn’t think you had it in you.” “What’s that?” “You can lie real good.” “I’m not lying.” “That’s what makes it so good.” Freddy looked at her a little stupefied. “It’s going to be the legs they’ll be screaming for. I got knockout legs,” she said slapping herself on the behind and running her hand down the back of her thigh, her ass presenting itself to Freddy like a split peach. Freddy crawled to the edge of the bed on all fours and rested his nose in the crack of Janice’s ass. “Thank God,” he said. “What’s that, honey?” “I said, ‘Thank God.’ ” “That’s exactly what I want them to say.”

  After a few weeks of auditions, Janice Gould told Freddy that she had settled for a job as a hatcheck girl downtown at the Triple Mark, hoping she would be able to work her way into the burlesque shows. The Triple Mark was well known for its burlesque, for its knife juggler and dancing Pekinese, for Verushka, the buxom baton twirler, who, to a lengthy drumroll, could simultaneously balance jugs full of red table wine between her scantily covered breasts. “You know what goes on in there, don’t you?” Freddy said to Janice timidly when she told him about the job. “You getting protective over me, Freddy?” “I’m not sure I’d know how.” “Who are you kidding, Tarzan? You got enough ape in you to uproot a banana plantation. You’re a regular beast. . . . Jesus Christ, come give Janey some smooch.” As much as the Triple Mark was known for its burlesque it was equally known for pleasuring its clientele in its upstairs rooms: gangsters, cops, politicians, businessmen, and then, of course, regular John Q. Citizens, overmarried, and eager and drunk enough to blow a week’s wages on a showgirl. Freddy had done just that on more than a few occasions while still married to Evelyn.

  It was when Janice took the job that she started to sl
ip away a little. She worked late into the night, stopped sleeping at Freddy’s, and started staying in her room at the Beekman. From across the air shaft, in the late mornings, Freddy would find Janice standing in her open robe, half naked in front of her window, staring at Freddy in his suit, working his job, and Freddy would stare back at her, wishing at times he were that young again.

  It was a Thursday night at Jack’s that Freddy met Feldman for the first time. Feldman worked for Mann and Roth at the Triple Mark. He had come in Janice’s place. “She wanted me to come down and tell you myself, so that you shouldn’t worry.” “Worry about what?” “The thing with the husband. You know about the thing with the husband, right?” “Sure I do.” “Well, Janice, she spotted a familiar face outside the Beekman earlier, some shamus.” “Is she all right?” “She’s just fine. Johnny Mann himself is looking after her. And when he’s not looking after her, I’ll be looking after her.” “She and Johnny Mann . . . ?” “He’s just looking out for the kid,” Feldman said. “He’s taken a shine to her. He thinks she’s got talent, not to mention some real balls. Turns out he knew her mother.” “Where from?” “I think she did a little work for him a long time ago.” “You don’t say.” “That’s what I heard.”

  Freddy liked Feldman. He was awkward, the way big fat men are awkward; self-deprecating, the way fat men are self-deprecating. What’s more, for a while Freddy sort of liked the idea of spending time with one of Mann and Roth’s men. “If I weren’t so big and tubby,” Feldman said to Freddy when Freddy asked Feldman how he had fallen in with Mann and Roth, “I’m not sure I would have ever fallen in with them at all. I’m sort of a conversation piece, like I’m some monument to the organization, their very own Taj Mahal.” The right corner of Feldman’s mouth slowly rose until his cheek was pinched into a nice round pink ball of flesh. “They took one look at me and started laughing. They keep me around for laughs. Send over the heavy, they say about me. The heavy’ll get the job done. Let’s see what their heavy can do with our heavy. We got the heavy of all heavies. Feldman, he’s the heaviest in the business. Got a problem with one of the girls? Send in the heavy to talk some girl-talk. The girls feel comfortable with the heavy talking girl-talk. . . . They got a million lines for me. What can I say? My mother, she fed me well. And I like to eat. I like to eat a lot.”

  Over the next couple of weeks, Feldman, who said he liked Freddy’s company, started to drop by Jack’s and sit with Freddy in the back booths of the sipping room. They got around to talking about Freddy’s life, the little that there was of it, and eventually they got onto the subject of Freddy’s line of work, about the kind of munitions he dispatched for Fief, about how the paperwork went in, who checked it over, how the calls were made to the factory, who oversaw the shipments at the docks in Long Meadow. Then one night, Feldman had news about a new nightclub Johnny Mann and Jerzy Roth were going to open in Tangiers. “They got some hoity-toity resort there or some such thing. Lots of money rolling in. And people with lots of money, hell, they don’t know what fun is until people like Johnny and Jerzy teach them a little something about fun. I mean, a for instance, look at this Eliopoulos character, the Baron, he calls himself, he comes up to the Triple Mark five nights a week with the cream of the crop on his arm; he got himself a private room upstairs; he got himself his own table. These high society types, they get tears of boredom running out their eyes. In the circles they circle around in? Who could blame them? Johnny and Jerzy, they figure, why not have a monopoly on that boredom, export a little excitement. All that’s left to be done is greasing the right palms over there with the right currency and we’re in.”

  “I’m going with Johnny to Tangiers,” Janice told Freddy the next time they were together in Freddy’s bed. “He says he’ll let me make a go of it as a dancer if I go with him. I told him straight, I wasn’t gonna be his moll. Either you let me dance or I’ll grab me some royal heinie, I told him. He got the message. You happy for me, Freddy?” “I’m happy for you,” Freddy said with disappointment in his voice. “That’s all right, hon, I’ll miss you too. But I won’t miss that private dick trailing after me. I’m just hoping I can skip town before that husband of mine catches up with me.”

  It was right around that time that Feldman appeared at Jack’s after Freddy got off work and told Freddy that he had been talking to Johnny and Jerzy about him. “They sounded very inspired,” Feldman said. “I got a job fit for a numbskull, Feldman. What could be so inspiring?” “To be honest, Freddy, they were more inspired by the possibility of what you could do for them.” That’s when Feldman revealed himself. “It’s like this, see. Johnny and Jerzy, they want to do business over in Tangiers, but like I said, they got some politicians getting in their way, and well . . .” Freddy could see it coming like a meteor about to fall from the sky. “You get us what we want and you have no more financial worries for the rest of your days, my friend.”

  Freddy didn’t know what to say, but he liked the idea of it. He liked the idea of not having to work, of spending more of his days sitting in Jack’s, mulling over his life, drinking, having enough money and time to drink himself to death if he liked. He liked the idea an awful lot, but said he would need to think it over. Feldman told him to take his time, but not too much time, because they didn’t have time. Feldman gave him a day.

  At the end of that day, Freddy found Janice Gould on his doorstep, her lip bloodied and her clothes half torn apart. Freddy took her in and sat her down. “Who did that to you?” “He came out of nowhere,” she said angrily, shaking her head violently. “Can you believe it? He jumped me from behind, that lousy no-good coward. He jumped from behind, ’cause he knew I’d give him a fight.” She started to cry. Freddy went into the bathroom and brought back a damp washcloth. “Right down the subway steps he pushed me,” she said as Freddy delicately dabbed the wet cloth to her face. “I bet he would have killed me right then and there if someone hadn’t held him back.” “What happened to him?” “He broke loose and ran off.”

  Freddy put her into a hot bath. “I don’t want to go back out there alone, Freddy,” she said to Freddy, who sat beside her on the toilet lid. “You’ll stay here tonight.” “No offense, Freddy, you lift a heavy piece of furniture like a pro, but I think I’d feel more comfortable if you gave Feldman a call.” “You’ll be safe here, Janice.” “Lesson one in etiquette, Freddy,” she said, aggravated, “when your girlfriend gets thrown down a flight of stairs by her husband, you don’t argue with nothing that she has to say, understood?” Twenty minutes later, Feldman was sitting inside Freddy’s apartment, and together, Freddy and Feldman drank while Janice lounged on a love seat and cried every now and then.

  It was at that moment, when the two of them were in Freddy’s apartment together, that Freddy realized for the first time that there was something wrong with the whole setup. “I want to shake him once and for all,” Janice said. “I’ll do anything to get him out of my life, anything short of killing him. . . . No, I take that back. I’d kill him. I’d have him killed.” “If that’s what you want, Janice . . .” Feldman said. It was the way Feldman said those six words that got Freddy to see what he needed to see. Feldman was suddenly acting. He was saying these words and the words that followed as if he had recently rehearsed them. It was the way he unconsciously looked over to Janice for reassurance. Freddy realized Janice had made him rehearse. He could see the two of them rehearsing. Or was it that they didn’t have time to rehearse? And then he wondered if it wasn’t Feldman who was carrying Janice through this routine. Freddy started recalling how it was he’d met Janice, how easily she’d become part of his life, how seamlessly Feldman had found his way into his confidence, and then he knew that they were both there to ask something more of him.

  Feldman brought up the idea. “I got an idea,” he said convincingly. “What is it, Feldman?” Janice said flatly. “Instead of getting rid of your husband, why don’t we just get rid of you.” “Real cute, big guy.” “Not for good, not for real, n
o, no, we fake it. So the shamus buys it. What do you care, kid, you take on a stage name after that. You make up the whole thing from top to bottom, a part of the act.” “Say,” Janice said, clunking through her lines, “that—ain’t—such—a—bad—idea,—Feldman.” “After we make the report, we send you ahead to Tangiers.” Janice turned to Freddy. “What do you think, Freddy?” Freddy couldn’t believe how bad this was being executed before him, and he wanted to say so, but Feldman outweighed him by about two hundred pounds and he was carrying a gun. All he could think of to say was, “If that’s how you want it, sweetheart.” Janice took hold of the idea like it was the best thing she’d heard since she was born. “In fact,” Feldman said, “we can do it the same day Freddy makes out that order for Johnny.” “What—a—great—idea,—Feldman. What—a—great—i-de-a.”

  Chapter 18

  When Freddy finally drifted off to sleep, behind locked doors, in almost complete darkness, a few dozen men, using flashlights, were crating up the American Allied Pharmaceutical plant on the Southside Docks. Benny Rudolph was upstairs inside Elias Eliopoulos’s office. He sat behind Eliopoulos’s Louis XIV period desk, smoking one of his cigars and drinking brandy from one of his snifters. Through a crack in a venetian blind, he looked out onto the loading docks where Eliopoulos, with the help of a jade-capped cane, clumsily climbed into the backseat of his limousine. His chauffeur shut him in, got behind the wheel, and drove the car off in the direction of the Crown Cracker plant. As Benny watched the car drive away toward the opposite end of the docks, the phone on Eliopoulos’s desk started ringing. Benny swiveled around in his chair and picked up the receiver.

  “Yeah?” he said in his broken voice.

  Uptown in the basement of the Triple Mark nightclub, the two grizzled men were standing over Johnny Mann and Jerzy Roth. Both Mann and Roth were knocked out, tightly bound to chairs, gagged, and blindfolded. Standing with the two grizzled men was Feldman, who was leaking sweat down his forehead and from around his collar, under his arms. He alone had carried Johnny and Jerzy from Johnny’s office on the second floor down the back stairs to the basement. The grizzled man with the sunnier disposition was the one calling. He said to Benny, “They’re out cold. But they should be opening their eyes any minute now.”