“What’s what?”
He tugged a crumpled slip of paper from the wad of bills. I took it from him and smoothed it on the tattered armrest. It was the bank’s withdrawal slip and above the scrawled signature was the neatly printed name and address: Joseph Cannetti, Jr., 318 Elm Street, Fort Lee, New Jersey.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“What?”
“Take a look.”
We traded, withdrawal slip for envelope of cash, and he stared at the wrinkled paper for several seconds. “Well, goddamn,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“Maybe it’s another Cannetti,” he said.
“Some other Cannetti? Some other Joseph Cannetti Junior? In Fort Lee, New Jersey?”
He had no answer. I shoved the envelope of bills back into my pocket. Outside the window of the cab I could see a Korean grocer misting his lettuce.
The Cannettis were the second biggest mob family in New Jersey—the biggest until they ran afoul of a crusading attorney general. The father, Big Joey, was rumored to have been the one who buried Jimmy Hoffa somewhere out in the wetlands. I didn’t know a whole lot about him, other than that he had three sons, one who was supposed to be a genius, one who was supposed to be vicious, and one who was supposed to be the world’s biggest fuckup.
“How could you not recognize him?” I said. “Jesus Christ.”
“How was I supposed to recognize him?” Barry said. “It’s not like they put out a yearbook with all the mobsters’ pictures in it.”
“You’re the one who’s supposed to size these people up! That’s your job!” I caught the taxi driver shooting us a look in the rearview mirror. “You trying to tell me you were drinking with the guy for an hour and you had no clue?”
“Twenty minutes!” Barry said. “I was drinking with the guy for twenty minutes!” I waved a hand at him, disgusted. “So what do we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think we should try to give it back?”
“How are we going to give it back?”
“I’m going to have to think about that,” he said.
“You do that,” I said. “You think about it.”
The cab shimmied its way up Broadway. If I’d been in a foul mood before, it was positively nasty now. This was serious shit. If this Cannetti wasn’t smart enough to figure out who’d ripped him off, he had uncles and brothers and nephews who were.
The taxi dropped us off at our hotel on Ninety-fifth Street. Back in our room, we divided the money. I tossed the Golden Gopher tie and changed into regular shoes and my wrinkled old blazer. It was still midafternoon, so we went out for a coffee and took a walk in Riverside Park. We were still plenty pissed at one another. I kept walking him on his crummy knee, just to punish him a little, while we tried to sort things out. It felt as if the temperature was still rising, the sky yellow as a bruise, but there were still a good number of people out—runners and mothers with strollers, a Dominican family having a cookout, a black kid trying to dribble a worn basketball behind his back.
I finally relented and we found a bench where Barry could rest his bad leg. He was limping worse than ever. He started lecturing me about how we needed to upgrade our act. The way it was now, we were throwbacks, dinosaurs. The world had changed and we needed to change with it or we were doomed, like the dodo bird.
He’d been boning up. There was a new scam where you send out a flood of emails, claiming to be a Nigerian prince whose hundred million dollars’ worth of assets have been tied up by the corrupt military government. What you say you’re looking for is an upstanding American who would allow this fortune to be transferred into his U.S. account. In exchange for this favor, the upstanding American would be promised a substantial cut. Once you had the sucker’s bank account number and a few other key bits of information, you could totally clean the guy out.
“If you think I’m going to pose as a Nigerian prince, you’re crazy.”
“Did I say you were going to have to pose as anybody? That’s the beauty of it. It’s all done on the computer. It’s totally risk-free.”
“I’m not wearing any goddamned robes.”
“Who said anything about robes? Jesus Christ, Frankie!” He shifted his bum leg to a more comfortable position.
I stared out at a tugboat churning up the Hudson. I knew what I needed to do. The only question was whether or not I had the guts to do it. Con men are not a sentimental lot. We steal from widows, retired school crossing guards, medical missionaries, no problem. But ditching your partner after forty years was a major deal.
Barry was the one who’d brought me into the business. We’d had our triumphs. We’d been raking in a quarter of a million a year on the Lake Havasu Estates deal until the state of Arizona closed us down. We would have made ten times that if the Indian casino license had come through, even though me passing myself off as a Mohegan chief had been a killer from the start.
But ever since he’d come back from upstate, Barry had gotten kind of random on me. He didn’t have the old sharpness, the old confidence. And in our business, when a confidence man loses his confidence, he might as well shove himself off on an iceberg and wait for the polar bears to come eat out his liver.
We ate dinner that night at a Cuban restaurant on 104th and when we got back to the hotel Barry rumbled around in the bathroom for a while, downing his vitamin supplements, gargling, brushing his teeth, singing “Danny Boy.” I turned on the TV and flopped down on the bed, hoping to catch some of the late scores. What I got was a somber young newsgirl standing in front of an Italian restaurant with all the usual crime scene trappings behind her—the yellow tape, the police cars, the flashing lights.
“Hey, Barry,” I shouted. “I think you need to take a look at this.” Barry poked his head around the bathroom door, toothpaste still foaming from his mouth. I punched up the sound.
The girl looked like she was just out of college, and one of those thirty-grand-a-year colleges at that. Her voice shook as she spoke. “At approximately ten-fifteen this evening, Joseph Cannetti Junior was gunned down as he left Arturo’s Clam House with a group of friends. Several onlookers reported seeing two men fleeing in a late-model black El Dorado, but thus far no one has come forward with a description of the possible assailants. Mr. Cannetti is the youngest son of Big Joey Cannetti, who for many years was the head of New Jersey’s most powerful crime family.”
The camera cut to the anchorman in the studio. “Tell me, Dina, have the police mentioned any possible motive for the shooting?”
On one half of the divided screen, the newsgirl pressed her finger to her ear, making sure she heard the question. A trio of teenage boys crowded around behind her, waving to the camera. “Not as yet, Robert, but when I spoke to one of the waiters, he said he’d spotted Mr. Cannetti in a heated argument with two men in a coffeehouse late this afternoon. Of course all the rumors on the street are about the long-running feud between the Cannettis and the Delmonico brothers. . .”
“Turn it off,” Barry said.
“What do you mean, turn it off?”
The two anchors weighed in with their opinions while old file footage flashed on the screen behind them—Big Joey Cannetti in handcuffs being led down the courthouse steps, bullet-ridden bodies scattered across a warehouse floor.
Barry snatched the blab-off out of my hands. The television screen blinked, flashed, and went dark.
“Just calm down,” Barry said. “I know what you’re thinking, but this has nothing to do with us.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.” He wiped the last of the toothpaste from the corner of his mouth. “These big-time boys, they need to blast the hell out of one another from time to time. That’s what they do. You and me, we’re nothing. We’re the fleas on the rhino’s ass. Don’t look at me like that, Mr. Worrywart. Sometimes you piss me off, you really do.”
I lay in bed for hours, unable to sleep, but I must have drifted off at some point, because I woke up arou
nd four and had to go to the bathroom to pee. Somewhere outside a bottle smashed, and a few seconds later there were drunken voices in the alleyway.
It’s funny how sometimes you can see things more clearly at night. What was clear was that I needed to get the fuck out. I’d been around New York way too long the way it was. The only question was whether or not I took Barry with me when I left.
There’s this old movie, The Defiant Ones, where Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis escape from a prison road crew and the problem is that they’re still chained together, which makes things pretty rough. But imagine if Tony Curtis had been chained to Barry instead of Sidney Poitier. He wouldn’t have made it to Swamp One.
As I tiptoed back across the room, the reflected light of passing traffic slid along the wall. Barry had his calendar on the nightstand and as the light moved across it I could see the Word for the Day in block letters: conundrum. Maybe it was just me being in an ornery mood, but I tore the page out, crumpled it up, and tossed it in the general direction of the wastebasket. I probably should have checked to see what the word was underneath, but I didn’t.
I climbed back into bed and pulled up my covers. Across the room from me, Barry lay on his side, his head cradled in the crook of his fat arm. He looked so peaceful, it seemed like a crime to wake him.
Chapter Two
I woke up the next morning to the sound of Barry snoring like a lord. I threw on my blazer and went out to get breakfast—eggs sunny-side up and some hash browns that were about as tasty as fried kidney stones.
I must have sat in that diner for close to an hour, turning over everything I wanted to say—how I wasn’t going to soft-soap him, I had too much respect for him for that, but we needed to face up to the fact that things weren’t working and maybe it was time for us to go our separate ways. I’d try to convince him that it would be good for both of us. Some such bullshit.
On my way back to the hotel, some homeless guy was shaking a coffee can on the steps of a Lutheran church. Ordinarily I stiff these guys, but I gave him a couple of dollars, just for good luck. Entering the lobby, I saw that the jerk behind the desk was on the phone, getting his rocks off letting somebody know they couldn’t have their deposit back.
Stepping out of the elevator, I was surprised to find the door to our room ajar. I was sure I’d closed it when I’d left. I pushed it slowly open with my forefinger.
Barry lay facedown in a pool of blood on the floor. He was still in his pj’s, one fleshy arm twisted above his head and entangled in the bedspread. Numbed and disbelieving, I took a step forward, and then another one.
As I bent down to touch his shoulder, I heard a faucet go on and off and then a rattle, like somebody pulling a towel off a towel rack. Before I could make a move, this guy came out of the bathroom, wiping his hands on his trousers. He was huge, a walking advertisement for steroids. His gonads were probably the size of peas, but I hadn’t seen muscles like that since the last time I saw the Mr. Universe contest.
Any sane person would have taken off right then, but I didn’t. I would like to think that I just wanted to fix it in my mind who it was that had done in my buddy. That would have been the brave and manly thing to do, but bravery has never been my forte; I was just too stupefied to move. He leaned over to grab Barry’s wallet off the nightstand and when he straightened up, there we were, eyeballing one another.
He had a meat face. A not very smart face. His mean little eyes glimmered over the top of his cheeks, and he had a buzz cut like he’d just joined the Marines. On his feet he had these Italian crocodile slip-ons, with shitty little tassels. Neither of us breathed for one long moment and then he came at me, stumbling over the corner of the bed.
I slammed the door shut and took off, racing past the ice machine and a maid picking up breakfast trays. I hurdled down the stairs three at a time, down one flight and then another. The jerk at the desk gave a shout as I sprinted past him and threw myself at the revolving doors.
The morning was filled with jackhammers. A mob of kids in red T-shirts piled onto a school bus, their counselors shouting and waving. I ran the half block to Broadway and hopped in the rear of a cab idling in front of a bodega. The young African driver roused himself from a catnap.
“Where to?” he said. It smelled like someone had been holding a marijuana convention in the backseat.
“LaGuardia,” I said. “And step on it.”
As we pulled away from the curb, I looked through the rear window and caught a glimpse of the defective with the buzz cut, wading through the mob of kids arm over arm, like a swimmer struggling out of heavy surf.
The traffic in Harlem was a mess and my driver was not the sort to run lights. He was amiable enough and more than willing to talk. He was from Senegal, his native language was Wolof, he had two brothers and a sister still living in Dakar, and he was taking computer classes at night. I kept checking the mirrors, half expecting a car to come flying up behind us, guns blazing.
Once we got to the Triborough Bridge, things began to open up. I was still too much in shock to be able to focus. All I knew was I needed to get the hell out of town, and fast. The fact that I’d seen the killer’s face and he’d seen mine had definitely complicated matters, and I was in no position to be going to the police. It came back to me, the locker key. Could that have been what they were after? But God knows where that was.
We sailed past miles of cemeteries. Shea Stadium floated past and then the old World’s Fair site. We finally swung up the ramp into LaGuardia. “So which airline?” the cabdriver said.
I surveyed the names on the metal poles along the guardrail and picked one.
“Continental.”
We eased to the curb. I handed him two twenties, told him to keep the change, and hustled off to the terminal. The airport was still undergoing renovation and echoed with the whine of saws and the shouts of workmen. According to the overhead monitors, the first flight out was to Austin, Texas, departing in twenty minutes. The whole idea of Texas has always scared the hell out of me, but I was in no position to be choosy.
There are moments when having five cards with five different names comes in handy. I charged the ticket on one of my phony Visas and sprinted through the airport, dodging beeping golf carts.
At the gate they were nearly finished boarding. I got in line behind about a dozen people and did a quick check of my ticket. It looked as if I would be in Austin by midafternoon. Not that it mattered. I didn’t have anywhere to go for the rest of my life.
I scrutinized my fellow passengers. God knows what I thought Texans were supposed to look like, but these people all seemed civilized enough. About half of them were businessmen, and there were some students and a mother with a pair of bratty kids.
The only one in line to catch my eye was this character a few places ahead of me. The first thing I noticed was how much he looked like me. We weren’t exactly spitting images of one another, but it was close—dark-haired, fiftyish, sharp-featured, a little on the shifty side. He was better dressed than I was—he had a certain trust-fund kayaker aura about him, which was not my style at all.
The other thing I noticed about him was how jumpy he was. He was almost worse than me. He kept fidgeting, crossing his arms, uncrossing them, making little sighs, poking at the bridge of his dark glasses, leaning to one side to see what the hang-up was.
The line was definitely not moving as fast as it should have been. I tried to stay cool, but I wasn’t doing so great. It kept coming back to me, Barry lying facedown in a pool of blood, the gorilla coming out of the bathroom, wiping his hands on his trousers. For a second I thought I was going to faint. I said a little prayer. Please, Lord, just let me get on that plane, just let that door close behind me, I’ll never ask for anything again. Incomprehensible announcements echoed over the PA system.
A middle-aged woman in a yellow jacket came up to the man who looked like me. She had a big smile on her face like she recognized him. When she spoke to him, he acted like he hadn’t he
ard her, but she didn’t give up. The guy started shaking his head no, trying to ignore her.
I strained to hear what they were saying, but I was a little too far back. I wasn’t the only one who was curious. Some of the others were trying to listen in too, pretending to read their newspapers. One of the students leaned over and whispered something to his buddy. The man who looked like me was getting more and more agitated.
An airline clerk waved us on, trying to hurry us up, and the line started shuffling forward. The woman in the yellow jacket rummaged in her purse and pulled out a pen. When she offered it to the man who looked like me, he gave it a whack, sending it clattering across the floor, and strode off. The woman stared, openmouthed, but the man was not coming back. He tore up his boarding pass, dropped it in a trash can, and headed up the ramp toward the main terminal.
By the time I got on the plane, my nerves were shot. My hands were shaking so bad it took a half dozen stabs to get my seat belt buckled. All around me people were settling in, businessmen powering up laptops, the young mother pulling out coloring books for the two brats, the stewardesses slamming shut the overhead compartments.
I pulled a copy of the SkyMall catalog out of the seat pocket in front of me. I flipped through it, staring at the pictures of golf bags, business card cases, orthopedic couches for dogs.
When the magazine slipped from my fingers, I bent to retrieve it. A half dozen dark spots speckled my trousers leg. It wasn’t until I tried to flick them off with my thumb that I realized they were dried spatters of Barry’s blood.
Getting off the plane in Texas was like landing on the moon. Heat rose off the tarmac in rippled sheets and the grass looked deader than the Sudan; according to the pilot it was a hundred and five degrees on the ground.
In the terminal businessmen with good haircuts strode past me, flipping through their appointment books. A stuffed longhorn stared balefully from a bookstore window and a couple toothless old codgers with big silver belt buckles gummed their brisket at a barbeque stand.
Famous Writers I Have Known Page 2
