by Robb T White
Smiling, sensing victory, Dan moved in, boxer style. Charley covered up from the flurry of punches thrown at his head and torso, nothing connecting solidly. He’d let Dan punch himself out if it would end this redneck melodrama. Finally, Dan’s punches lost power. Wöissell planned to go to the ground when the timing was right and before the entire campground was formed in a ring around them.
Dan was beginning to suck air and his fists dropped at the ends of his arms.
‘C’mon, Burger Boy, fight!’
Dan’s punches rolled off his arms and shoulders with ease. Charley was afraid he was making Dan look foolish.
Wöissell noticed Reggie standing in her doorway. It was time for Dan’s Big Punch. He took a quick look at the ground to see where he planned to dive. He knew Dan’s weaknesses as a fighter on every level by now; it was just a matter of letting him pick his moment and make it look good.
‘Kill him, baby,’ she said.
Dan put his lead foot between Wöissell’s legs for the knockout, but Reggie’s words stung. He blocked the punch as easily as swatting a nuisance fly. Charley countered with an overhand right from a rock-hard fist that barely traveled a foot in space before it landed under Dan’s jaw with a solid crack. He was knocked out on his feet and dropped right where he stood.
The gasp from the crowd was enough to make Wöissell’s eyes squeeze shut in self-contempt. Bad move, bad move, badmovebadmovebadmove … He had pulled the punch at the last instant before it shattered every metacarpal bone in his hand. Stupid, stupid …
‘You bastard! Look what you done!’
Reggie screamed an alto soprano wail of grief Sumi Jo might have appreciated.
She bolted straight to Dan, glared at Charley, while falling to her knees. She lifted Dan’s head from the dirt and called him baby over and over.
Wöissell wondered how best to adjust the situation in his favor. He held his hand and made moaning sounds—a little play-acting for the mob.
Too late. The siren howl from the nearby interstate was on its way to the campground entrance. Two cruisers in tandem with their LED strobe lights ablaze headed toward them.
Wöissell waited calmly as the two officers exited their vehicles and slowly took in the crowd of spectators seeking out the troublemakers in the center of the circle. He had to be sharp. It was all about damage control now. Nobody in Cheektowaga was going to die because of him. He was about to step into the light and answer police questions. For the first time in his life on the road, he had no idea how this was going to end.
Pride, lust. From classical antiquity through medieval lore to modern times, these Deadly Sins were many a man’s downfall. Charley put a vapid grin on his face while he rubbed his sore hand.
You must be harmless, his inner voice said. He was good at that. He could be silent like a hungry python shimmying up a tree. Slowly, slowly, catchee monkee …
Only now he was the monkey.
Chapter 21
‘MY GOD, HOW MANY white Chevy lunch trucks are there in this country?’
Jade’s cry from her borrowed cubicle raised a few snickers but no response from the agents working around her. Shaughnessy, out of pity, came by to rub her shoulders and give her some words of encouragement. Today was her last day. Tomorrow her report was due on Gilker’s desk and, as of right now, if she herself were supervising agent, she couldn’t justify more time spent on the case. She felt the way many a veteran homicide detective had felt at that moment: it’s the next crime scene where she would have to pick up the killer’s trail. Somebody, maybe more than one, was going to have to die to breathe new life into the investigation.
She went online to book a flight to Fayetteville the next morning. She was leaving Pittsburgh in defeat. There wasn’t anything left to do. Nolan wasn’t taking her calls.
‘Where did you go today?’ Shaughnessy asked her.
‘I went to see a shrink,’ Jade said.
‘Hunh?’
‘Not quite,’ Jade said. ‘A Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon. She’s a professor in the psychology department doing research in the way the brain processes sounds. See those discs?’
‘Which pile? Your desk is littered with them, Jade.’
‘These,’ she said, pointing. ‘She let me borrow them from the auditory lab. They’re from a sound events database. She’s working on a fascinating hypothesis that involves spectral shaping.’
‘English, please,’ Shaughnessy said.
‘It means that environmental sounds can be used as cues to motor priming, so if a tree falls in the forest, it means the brain creates an auditory perception based on the concept of a tree falling in the forest, not merely an object.’
‘Sorry I asked. So you made the poor kid listen to the sound of trees falling.’
‘I let him listen to a variety of sounds that had to do with speech impairment. He identified our guy’s whistling noises as Tourette’s. The kid should be a musician. He’s got an ear for sharps and flats like nobody—’
‘Earth to Jade. How is any of that going to bring you closer to the sandwich man?’
‘People with Tourette’s need certain prescription medicines. People with Tourette’s who drive lunch trucks are even rarer. Cee, I’m getting closer.’
Shaughnessy flashed her the thumbs-up sign.
‘Careful there, colleague. In some cultures, that’s an insult.’
‘How’s this, then?’
Shaughnessy poked her tongue out and gave her the finger.
‘Those are pretty much universal,’ Jade said.
‘Hey, before I go, do you need a ride to the airport tomorrow?’
‘No, thanks,’ Jade said. ‘I’ve got to drop off my rental. I’ll take a taxi from there.’
‘Miss you, kiddo. We girls need to stick together, you know?’
‘You, too,’ she said.
For someone who had loved going to school, done well everywhere, her nightmares were always about being in a classroom unprepared or having to face a class to teach a subject she was completely unfamiliar with.
That night she was back in her dream world, sitting in the back of a packed classroom, when one of her favorite professors strode down the aisle and held out a pink wad of gum in his right hand; the girl next to her jumped up and ran to fetch the gum from the professor’s hand. Soon, every student except her was involved in this crazy game of gum-snatching and marching about the room until someone else took it and resumed the game. As they marched, shoulders touching, the last student in the room wheeled about, took a filleting knife out of his shirt and jammed it to the hilt in her liver. She gasped, turned to see his face but he wore a mask, the insipid, grotesque smiley face but the eyes in the mask were the sandwich man’s.
Dawn. She woke in a sweat. After her shower, she meditated for twenty minutes. Her chi and her chakras, those invisible wheels of energy, were out of sync. It was going to be a rough day.
She spent an hour doing power yoga on the floor. For the finish, she held the lion pose longer than usual until she felt every tendon and ligament stretched out in her back and thighs.
Strong black coffee, a piece of buttered toast and out the door. If she had to face the music back in Fayetteville, she was going to make sure her report covered every possibility and kept every avenue open to make it hard for Gilker to shut her investigation down. The sandwich man wasn’t through with his mayhem, she knew.
And bring your Tourette’s with you this time, she prayed.
Chapter 22
‘AGGRAVATED ASSAULT,’ HIS LAWYER said. ‘Not that big a deal for you, really. You have no priors. Your biggest problem is going to be the tort part if this guy sues you for his shattered jaw and loss of wages. They took photos at the hospital. They had to fit him with this head appliance with jaw straps …’
His court-appointed public defender certainly acted as if it were no big deal and wanted him to plead to it instead of the simple assault Wöissell wanted, which his lawyer said was never going to be on the table bec
ause the damage was too severe. The prosecutor talked five months; he said he could whittle it down to time served. He’d have to wear an ankle bracelet for a few months while he made his lunchtime rounds in the truck.
‘No big deal, right? Are you …all right?’
‘It’s an involuntary noise. I have Tourette’s. My patch was removed when they booked me. What about witnesses? Someone in the campground must have seen I was provoked. They’ll tell you I never struck back until the end,’ Charley said.
‘Yeah, well, that one punch kind of made up for it, Ted,’ his lawyer reminded him.
He stared at Wöissell, unsure what to make of the three versions: his client’s saintly self-defense, the couple’s claim of being attacked; his own instincts told him this was over the woman. Finally, the cop’s summary report, which pretty much said the boyfriend was lying on the ground with his lower jaw semi-detached. Like that Japanese movie his wife made him see—Rashomon, where everybody tells a different version. Something was off about this client, though. What, he couldn’t say. He was indifferent, bored seeming, yet he paced and emitted those yips and whistles. He didn’t feel safe in this small room; the man was so placid about everything he was told. One odd duck.
None of the witnesses to the fight wanted to get involved and say what they saw. It was Wöissell’s word against the word of Ms. Reggie Lambert and her boyfriend Daniel Bryant as to who started it. It wasn’t jail that worried him; it was being printed, photographed, and entered into a database. He was confident his Ted Wassermann identity would stand up. His source in Providence was a tough-talking but non-violent hood under the cops’ radar.
None of that concerned him now. What gave him two sleepless nights in county and bouts of diarrhea was the fear he was going to be connected to Pittsburgh or Fayetteville. Before Fayetteville—well, there was a lot before Fayetteville—but he felt reasonably safe given the time passed. He had never been to jail, never been fingerprinted, or had a buccal swab taken. Now he was in the system regardless of the judicial outcome. It was sordid to be tripped up by that pair.
‘Can you bond me out?’ Wöissell asked him.
‘Your bail hearing is tomorrow. Here’s what we need to go over …’
Wöissell increased his fee by $5,000 to get him to do it, but in the end, he agreed.
‘This is highly unorthodox,’ the lawyer insisted. ‘I could be in trouble with the state’s ethics review board for this.’
Wöissell listened patiently and let him talk himself into it. Lyle Frisbee was barely out of law school; his polka-dot bow tie belied a serious expression. Wöissell used to wonder why trial lawyers would lie for their clients or at the very least deceive themselves so obviously. Nothing is so difficult, Wittgenstein wrote, as not deceiving yourself. When his lawyer was finished convincing himself, Wöissell returned his gaze. He told him where the money was hidden in the truck.
‘You can just get it yourself after you bail out,’ Lyle said.
‘I can’t get the key because my belongings, including my truck keys, are being held in custody in your fine Cheektowaga jail. To get them, I would have to be out on bail. You need to get my money to pay the bail and then I can get my keys.’
‘Why not ask a friend, a family member, to do it?’
‘I told you, Mr. Frisbee. I’m a stranger in town. My parents died in a car crash when I was young. My only sibling died of pancreatic cancer years ago. I have no one else to ask, and I can’t ask a bail bondsman to break into my truck to fetch my money. You I can trust.’
‘We agree on the increase—that’s OK with you?’
‘I would not have said it if I didn’t mean it,’ he said.
‘Then I’ll meet you tomorrow morning for the arraignment,’ his lawyer said and left.
‘I’ll be there,’ Wöissell said. Frisbee grimaced at his deadpan humor. Charley breathed easier. No one had tumbled to his real identity and so far, it looked as though they wouldn’t for all their computers and databases.
His lawyer left with Charley’s directions to the campground and instructions to find the coffee cans stuffed with emergency cash.
Wöissell barely slept that night. Most of the other prisoners were drug criminals, parole violators, African-American males in their twenties. The murderers were kept in a separate pod from the ‘misdemeanor felonies,’ as the majority were jokingly referred to. He stayed aloof at chow time and no one bothered him. One grizzled, older white man in for drunk and disorderly tried to borrow money from him. He watched his fellow prisoners clamor for phone time and argue over dominoes or TV programming. They fretted in here the way they behaved out there.
In the morning, he cleaned up at the sink, washed his underwear, and washed his hair.
His lawyer met him in the holding room pending prisoner arraignments and bail hearings that morning.
‘It’s gone, Ted. The money’s gone.’
‘What?’
‘Your truck is trashed. Everything’s emptied out and spilled on the floor. I nearly killed myself slipping on an inch of fry grease. Flour thrown all over the place. Everything’s spilled and ripped up. It’s an unholy mess. I found three empty coffee cans. Every other one had been dumped on the floor.’
Wöissell heard Freddie’s scornful laugh in his head.
‘Here’s the thing,’ the lawyer said. ‘Your back door was broken into. I found the handle on the ground. Crowbar marks, it was jimmied.’
‘Was there a camper next to mine?’
‘No,’ his lawyer said. ‘Empty spaces on either side of your truck.’
Fifteen thousand dollars in cash—gone like smoke.
One expensive blowjob, you dumb fuck, his inner Freddie chortled.
‘How much did you have in there?’
‘Enough for the bail bond and your fee,’ Wöissell said flatly.
He didn’t have a choice now. He had to call home, raise the money, get out of here. Phone calls were recorded in prisons. He’d have to get Lyle to make the call for him. The longer he stayed inside, the more risk his fake identity would collapse around his ankles. He didn’t know what he didn’t know.
‘Goin’ out on a chain,’ sang out one con, a slender black man in his thirties in for check kiting; he was a self-proclaimed veteran of jailhouse procedures.
‘The van for the court house is here,’ his lawyer said. ‘Meet you over there.’
He said to him, ‘You can use your legal skills for a phone call, can’t you?’
Chapter 23
HIS LAWYER DIDN’T MENTION the graffiti or the obscenities spray-painted on his truck. Giant phalluses were aimed at the open mouth of a stick figure with a balloon head, Dan’s artwork. The words faggot and cocksucker were scrawled across the truck body. Maybe Lyle didn’t see them as his legal B & E job had occurred after dusk. The interior was all that he had described, maybe worse now because of the swarms of insects—ants and flies had discovered the treasure trove of decomposing food. He watched a wavy line of black sugar ants with crystals of sugar like natives on a safari in an old Tarzan movie, head to butt stretching to the back door.
Wöissell had enough money in his wallet to buy cleaning supplies and the taxi fare to and from the storage facility. His stepmother took Frisbee’s call and asked a thousand questions but by late afternoon, she had wired $6,000 from Western Union. By nightfall he’d be in another state. Frisbee asked him why he’d denied having a family. He said it was to spare them embarrassment.
The manager’s son drove up on his four-wheeler and skidded to a halt in front of him. He handed Wöissell a paper signed by his father ordering him to remove his truck in forty-eight hours or it would be towed at his expense.
‘When do these dumpsters get emptied?’ Wöissell asked. He looked up from the paper after balling it in his fist.
‘You need to get that piece-of-shit truck off our property,’ the teenager said.
He wore a white tee-shirt with male and female silhouettes having sex doggie style. One arrow poi
nted to the copulating male with the caption Me; the arrow to the woman figure said Your Mom.
He squeezed the wad of paper in his fist and shrunk it to the size of a walnut; he bounced it off the kid’s forehead. Charley was breaking a lot of rules. This place was cursed.
‘I asked you, when does the garbage get picked up?’
‘Wednesday,’ the boy said. He raised a hand to touch the welt on his forehead.
‘Get out of my way,’ Wöissell said without raising his voice.
The boy throttled back, popped a wheelie, then braked hard just inches from Charley’s foot but he got no reaction. He roared off with blue smoke pouring from the exhaust.
Wöissell went to work on the truck’s exterior. The sun felt good on his back and shoulders. Two hours later, only the shadows of the words and the graffiti remained. He went inside and swept everything into garbage bags, cleaned the floor with an industrial degreaser, and hauled everything outside to be dragged to the dumpster outside the laundromat. By then, he had worked up a good sweat and an appetite. Soon, he’d make Ted Wassermann a ghost, just another one of his phony holograms who served his purpose and was discarded like dead skin. He’d put New York in his rearview mirror fast.
He noticed people staring at him from their lawn chairs and windows as he made his trips back and forth to the dumpster. He’d taken his shirt off to keep it dry. Now he realized he was exposing a physique that might not go with the stereotype of a canteen truck operator. Let them look, he thought. They can’t think beyond what they can see: a shirtless man hauling bags to a dumpster. If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. Wittgenstein knew a thing or two about people’s blindness.
I make the sightless see when I take an eye, he told himself, and whistled a tune on his way. It was Camus, not Wittgenstein, however, who came to mind just then. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn …
