“Do you remember exactly what he said? Exactly?”
He closed his eyes, nipping through the cellular file in his skull. The lids snapped open and he recited, in a monotone,
“The whole fucking bunch is as bad as I am. The whole fucking barrel is rotten. Superwasp Choate Haven, that cock-sucker Goreman, fuck Culligan, Scott and Shaw …” He blinked and paused. “I’m not sure that last trio is right, but I think it is. They’re all at Choate, Winkler, Higgiston, etcetera, I think.”
“Yeah, they are,” I said.
“You know what it is that’s a real pity,” he said, swallowing more of the Irish. “Today’s cursing is of a very low order. It’s all simple fucking and cocksucking. Back when I was a lad they would have said Choate Haven, that smug and superior son of Satan, sittin’ and sniggerin’ in his super clubs, is a low-life, lickspittle scum of an informer who would sell his own dear mother to the Black and Tans for the price of a used roll of asswipe. The decline of the language, even if it is English, is a sad and piteous thing:”
“When,” I asked, “did you get so Irish?”
“I think maybe I’m trying to escape the reality; it’s wearing on me, truly it is.”
“What else did Wood actually say?”
“To business. To the point,” he complained. “But without the asides, this life would be a desperately dreary thing … Let’s see now, did he mention any other names … No. But there were two or three fellows there from Over & East. Klughorn was one. I remember because he testified. And … Silly? Sally? Diller, it was. Wood pointed at them and said, ‘You fucks are going down with the ship. You won’t fuck me up the ass and get away with it.’”
“How did they react?”
“All very ‘tsk, tsk,’ and proper they were. As if Edgar should have taken it like a man. It never does surprise me when they break down. It always surprises me when they don’t. Anyway, it used to surprise me.”
“Did you have any reaction at the time? Did Wood say anything that sounded like he had something special on someone? Did anyone react to his threats like they were scared?”
“At the time … I thought it could turn into quite the event. Scandal of the year. Particularly with that bunch from Choate, etcetera. Such a bastion of respectability they are, so lily-pure and snowy-white. What a shame, I thought at the time, that it probably wasn’t the lawyers he would tell his tales on, but the corporation. I wasn’t so much looking forward to that. You expect scandalous doings from a thing like Over & East. That makes less of a scandal, do you see?”
“That doesn’t give me a whole lot to go on,” I sighed.
“The lad wants a lead.”
“Frankly, Stewart, it is going to be very difficult to investigate them without one. The only thing to do is look for paper, and they’ve had legions, with warrants, doing that for years. If the IRS with unlimited everything, including desire, can’t nail them, how can I?”
“Tony, boyo, I’ll say something that will make it even worse. It occurred to me at the time of the trial that if our Mr. Wood really had anything so tremendously hot, he would have used it long before it got so far as sentencing. He would have bought himself a deal with the D.A.”
“Shit,” I said.
“You know what your problem is?”
“Your Honor, as much as I like and respect you, and you’re the only judge in New York I would trust with subway fare, I am sick and tired of people telling me what my problem is.”
“You get to taking it personal.” He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “And it’s not, of course. If you want to find out who did the deed, that’s your business, but it’s not your life.”
“I saw that movie. ‘It’s not personal, it’s just business.’”
“The thing of it is, boyo, that it is. You don’t understand that. It’s what made you a good cop, and it’s what ruined you as a cop. Hell, my boy, I would imagine that you probably fall in love every time you get laid. That is a woman’s thinking.”
“What is it about me, Your Honor, that makes everyone feel so astute?”
17
PASTA FAZOOL
ONCE UPON A TIME my father’s older brother, Vincent, was my favorite uncle. The one who always drove the new car and came with big presents.
I don’t entirely know what happened. My father was a construction worker. Before the war he had been a union organizer; after, a union official. In the fifties the government and the racketeers joined forces to purge the union of leftists. They let my father keep his card, they let him work, but they eliminated him from union politics. More to take up time and save himself from bitterness than to make extra money, my father became a part-time contractor.
Getting together with his brother was a natural. Vincent had the money. He had the contacts. He was doing big business over in Jersey. They went partners in Brooklyn.
Then they quarreled. I don’t know what the quarrel was about. I was only eight at the time. Later on, my father would never be explicit about the details. The next time I saw my uncle was at my father’s funeral, fifteen years later.
Our next meeting was only one week afterward. I came in with an attitude. My father had wanted nothing to do with Vincent. They had not spoken from the time of the quarrel to the day my father died, leaving me to assume that Vincent represented all that my father fought, the things he despised.
Then this stranger—and by then he was a stranger to me— assaulted me with emotion over veal picata as if I were the prodigal son and it was I who was returning. He offered to pay for my education. To introduce me to the people who could help me. To guide me through life, now that I was an orphan and had no father to help me. That lunch was the last time, deliberately, that I saw him.
So when I walked into the restaurant with Glenda and Wayne and saw Vincent sitting beside my mother, I was pissed. I was also trapped.
Uncle Vincent rose graciously for the introductions. Taking my hand he said, for me alone, “I hope this doesn’t embarrass you.”
I shrugged and moved to sit down. He held on.
“I’m getting old, very old, Tony. I wanted to see you.”
“OK,” I said.
“It’s all so long ago. I never meant to quarrel with my brother. You gotta understand that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let’s sit down and get it over with.”
I kissed my mother—she is entitled to her trespasses—and sat on one side of her. Vincent was too quick for me. He held out a chair for Glenda, an offer she couldn’t refuse, which left him sitting beside me.
Wayne whispered to Glenda over the antipasto about how old Vincent looked. Glenda shushed him. That sort of thing affected her sense of propriety the way me sound of a dentist’s drill hits my nervous system.
“That’s OK,” Vincent said. “That’s OK. I am an old, old man. Just like you are a young one. Neither one is something to be ashamed of. Right, Tony?”
“How old?” Wayne naturally asked. Glenda was scandalized.
“I’m eighty-three. Pretty good, huh?”
Wowww! Wayne was impressed. It took him a while to digest a number that awesome. “Were you before TV?”
“Yes. And before lotsa other things.”
“Like what?”
“Video games. Pictures with sound. Computers. Air conditioning. Dishwashers.”
“We don’t have a dishwasher,” Wayne said. “I have to do them.”
“A modest exaggeration,” Glenda said.
“Did they have baseball? Did they have the Brooklyn Dodgers? Tony saw the Brooklyn Dodgers lots of times,” Wayne went on.
“Sure, they had baseball. I remember the very first time I came here, it was 1919; that was the year the World Series was fixed.”
“It was broken?” Wayne asked.
“No,” the old man said seriously. “The gamblers paid the players on the better team to lose.”
“Awhhh, baseball players wouldn’t do that,” Wayne said, faced with a reality even more cynic
al than I usually presented.
“Things was tougher back then, Wayne. A lot tougher. That’s something even Tony doesn’t know, how tough it was. Sports athletes did not make so much money like they do now. Listen to this—you too, Tony, you might learn something. It took me three years, working seven days a week, to get enough money to bring my brother, Tony’s father, from Sicily to over here.”
When we were on dessert, Uncle Vincent leaned over to me and said, “Tony, look, I know you are not gonna take anything from me. I tried before and you said no. So I don’t want to upset you. But I bought a little something for the boy. I would like to give it to him, if I have your permission. Only with your permission.”
If there was a way to say no, I couldn’t think of it. Could he get Wayne less than the most expensive? A custom-strung Head Graphite. The $120 was pocket change for Vincent. So was the dinner, which I found out was prepaid, so I couldn’t even argue about it.
Outside, he grabbed me for a private word again.
“Listen to me, Tony. If there is anything, ever you need, you call me. No strings attached to it, no nothing. You could send me a postcard, you don’ even have to speak to me you don’ want to. You need help, I help.” His hand dug into my shoulder. He kissed me on the cheek. His breath smelled like death sautéed in garlic butter.
Then it was my mother’s turn for a last word.
“Listen to me, Tony,” she said. “Vincent, he’s an old man. He is your family. This thing, you don’t talk to him, that’s wrong.”
“Pop was wrong?”
“I don’t say that. I never said that. … Tony, are you angry with me?”
“No, Mom, I love you.” I gave her a hug and a kiss. Vincent gave her a ride home in his Cadillac.
18
REOPEN
DETECTIVE SERGEANT BILL TILLMAN called me the next morning.
“I was just thinking of you,” I said.
“Don’t say things like that, please, now that she’s finally gone back to Nutley.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “How did that story work out?”
“How did the story work out?” Tillman said. “Let me say this about that. I had the story of the psychic and the policeman mounted, covered in clear acrylic and framed. It is now hanging on my wall. Let me quote something for you; the first sentence reads: ‘If you ever want to see a slick con, see the Psychic who promises Pulitzers to reporters, promotions to Police Captains.’ … So, my friend, I owe you one, and it is now my pleasure and privilege to pay. We got a break in the case.”
“I’m on my way.”
“What it is, we busted a busboy from the restaurant where Wood ate his last meal. It turns out that two guys came into the place two nights before Wood was killed, asking about him. Now the other thing I’m trying to work on is that DEA, Colombian thing. That is a bitch. They are both claiming diplomatic immunity.”
“Forget about them. How’s tomorrow?”
“Fine,” he said. I made flight reservations, then called Christina.
I said “hello,” and she said, “I don’t think I want to see you anymore.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s fine for you. You come over and have a nice time, then you go home to your—to Glenda. And I’m alone. I was doing just fine without you.”
The dream of falling, I’m told, is a very common dream. I have it sometimes. I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, or a bridge, or, most often, on the ledge of a roof. Suddenly, what is beneath me is gone. A dream voice tries to scream, but its vocal chords are paralyzed.
“Christina, we are so good together.”
“That’s what’s wrong. You take me up so high. Then I go down so low. If it wasn’t so wonderful, it wouldn’t matter. It’s fine for you, you go home. You belong to someone else, and if I were her, I wouldn’t like it.”
There was no way I was going to tackle all of that on the telephone.
“Listen to me a second,” I said.
“No. I’ve made up my mind.”
“It’s about your father; it’s about the case.”
“What? What is it?”
“I’d rather tell you in person.”
“All right. But don’t expect me to feel any different when I see you.”
Sure I didn’t, and ran from the cab up her stairs. She held herself stiffly, untouchable, unkissable. She led me into the living room and offered me a chair that fit only one. She sat so that the table was between us. The chess game she was playing didn’t matter at all. I was happy just to be in the same room with her.
“The Virginia police,” I explained flatly, “have come across some indication that your father was deliberately murdered. It’s thin, but I’m going down to see if we can make something out of it.”
Her eyes grew moist. She leaned forward. I told her the few details I had.
“Tony, Tony,” she said, and her hands reached out.
I moved around the table and her arms went around me. Her head buried itself in my waist and her tears moistened both of us.
“I hate them. Whoever they are, I hate them. Are they going to get away with it? Are they?”
I looked down on her moist eyes and wet cheeks. “I’m going to find whoever killed him, and I will do what can be done about it.” As I spoke I realized I had made a promise that perhaps I should not have made. Because I would live up to it. Like a kid who takes a dare, I hold the dumbest promises the most sacred. I think that was how I ended up married. I said it. Since I said it, I did it.
Silence framed the promise. Perhaps she understood what I had just done. Perhaps not.
I took her hands in mine and lifted her gently. She came up and into my arms. Our lips touched, her pain and anger became lust and hunger, and the afterburners kicked in.
“You’re back, you’re back,” she cried, as if she had thought me gone forever. Or dead. There was no time to find a bed. We were on the couch and half our clothes still on us. Her legs opened and wrapped around my hips as if that was the only place in the world for me to be. It was. I entered her, desperate and helpless as the search for truth.
“I love you,” I said, just before the orgasm took me. It was roaring and full of darkness. “I love you, I love you,” I heard her say through the storm.
And when it’s open, when you’ve got it, when it’s all yours,
When nobody else in all the world is where you are,
When your arms have really gone around something,
When your thighs know all the answers to all the questions,
Why is there always one bead of sweat that doesn’t come from either of your faces?
A great well of laughter started deep down below my bowels and came bubbling up as we lay tangled in clothes and limbs. Part of it, sheer joy. I was high as a cocaine kite in love with the woman in my arms, and I had a happy and contented home with a woman as good as any it has been my privilege to know.
It was a conflict so old that the jokes about it precede the written word. Twenty thousand years, from clubs to computers, and the only intelligent commentary that I had ever heard about this situation came from Tommy Moe Raft, a burlesque comic who stood five feet four, with jowls that hung to his chin and basset-hound eyes. “Please, please, puleeeese,” he begged Enid, the blonde he did his routines with. She, six feet one without her heels, Death Valley cleavage and legs that came up almost to his jowls, whined, “What about your wife, Tommy?” Tommy reassured Enid, “We can start without her.”
Then we did it again. She didn’t understand my laughter, but she knew how to touch me clear through.
19
PIGEONS
“WHAT HAVE YOU GOT?”
“Walter LeRoy Johnson,” Bill Tillman said, pulling out the file, “a.k.a. LeRoy Johns, John Walters, John Waterson, Walter LeRoy, Roy Walters and LeRoy Watson, has been married under each of those names. He is prolific, but not imaginative.” He looked up and said, “That’s not in the file, that was a comment,” then continued to read.
“Male, black, sixty-seven, hair black, eyes brown. A record going back over forty years for nonsupport and bigamy. His latest warrant, the one we picked him up on, is from Seminole, Texas, on a complaint from a Mrs. Althea Johns. There are outstanding warrants from Alabama, Arizona and two from next door in West Virginia.”
“Do you see him,” I said to prick at his cool, “as an unfortunate caricature?”
“Yes, I do,” he replied, forever unruffled, “not of the so-called shif’less kneegro, but of the cultural deficiencies of po’ southe’n trash of any color. A vanishing breed as economic and educational standards rise.”
We exchanged bland smiles.
“If I may continue with something pertinent …”
“Please,” I said.
“Apparently,” he said, shuffling through the file, “no, not apparently; in fact, I have a sworn affidavit here to prove it. A Mr. and Mrs. Clayton Delaney of Seminole, the employers of Mrs. Althea Johns, were visiting relations in Casanova, just over the line in Farquier County. They stopped for dinner at Scotch ’n’ Sirloin, Mr. Johnson’s place of employment, and while he was collecting their dishes, recognized him as the man who had run out on their domestic employee, Mrs. Johns. They said nothing to the suspect, but upon returning to their place of residence, they duly informed the said Althea Johns. Mrs. Delaney apparently felt it was her duty.”
He turned a page. “Mrs. Delaney was so sympathetic … that’s not in the report, that’s from a conversation … to the plight of abandoned wives in general that she retained an attorney for the complainant, who sent a subpoena, etc. etc. You can see it if you want.”
“Thanks, I’ve seen them.”
“Well, they called to follow up,” he said, closing the file. “Both the attorney and the employer. So we dug the subpoena out of the bottom of the file, where it was rightly buried below lots more urgent business, and went to pick up Walter Johnson. Of course, once we picked him up, we did an automatic check.
“I don’t know whether you know it, but we’ve recently gone statewide on the computer, with a federal hookup to boot. I got it in an anticrime grant a few years back. Sometimes it works real well. With D’s, M’s, W’s and P’s it works particularly well. On the other hand, if your name starts with F or B your record will never catch up with you. Unfortunately for Walter LeRoy, he used all those W names, and the computer loved that.
No One Rides for Free Page 12
