"I'm not going to do much fucking operating with a hundred bucks," said Felix, eyeing the sheaf of old twenties that Rashid extended.
"It is for subway and meals," said Rashid. "An occasional taxi. Buy flowers for the young lady. No drugs and no drinking."
"Never touch the stuff," said Felix. Except for speed and downers that was entirely true, but speed and downers weren't really drugs as far as Felix was concerned. They were medication; doctors prescribed them to millions of squares.
In any case, it felt good to be out of the house. Felix thought he could get to like being a terrorist. He walked over to Broadway in Astoria and entered a large hardware store, where he purchased a set of painter's gear- white coveralls, cap, and booties- plus some rubber gloves, an Ace Hardware ball cap, a masonry hammer, a roll of duct tape, and an eight-inch butcher knife. At a CVS nearby he bought a package of condoms, and made a phone call. Then he stopped at a coffee shop, where he had coffee and a Danish, and used the men's room to change into the coveralls and cap. Carrying his clothes and the hardware in the store bag, he walked down to the Steinway Street subway station, a working stiff on his way to a job.
The house was a solid middle-class dwelling in the lower-priced north end of Forest Hills, a two-story red-brick detached, set back from the street behind a small front yard deeply shaded by a maple. Felix went up the front walk and rang the bell, although he was pretty sure no one was home. That was why he had called. There was a neat label below the doorbell that read CHALFONTE.
He walked down the side alley to the back door. He found it locked by a solid dead bolt, but this was no problem because the lady of the house had conveniently left a key under a flowerpot at the edge of the back stoop. He let himself into the kitchen after replacing the key under the flowerpot, but then cursed softly, reversed direction, and retrieved the key. He wiped it off, slipped on rubber gloves, and replaced it again. Leave no trace. Felix had once left a good many traces at a murder he'd committed, which was what had nailed him. But he had been young and foolish then, and not dead. Leave no traces. He had learned a lot in prison.
Felix slipped on the painter's booties, removed the butcher knife from its cardboard sheath, and slipped it into the thin leg pocket of the coveralls. He ripped a number of strips off the roll of duct tape and stuck them on the edge of the kitchen counter. He would use the kitchen. The one small window faced a hedge, and the door led to the heavy foliage of the backyard. He didn't figure that there'd be much noise in any case. He strolled through the house while he waited. Mary had done all right for herself, he concluded. There was a picture over the mantelpiece in the living room, an oil portrait made from a photograph. The new husband looked like a banker, a middle manager- a three-piece suit, bald dome, a little moustache, a pleasant sheeplike benignity in his expression. Mary looked like a church lady standing next to him. There was a teenage boy, probably his, and a little girl, four or five, who had Mary's round face and blue eyes. Theirs. Felix felt a pleasant glow of anticipation.
A car rumbled down the driveway. Felix grabbed his hammer and took up a position behind the door that led to the basement, leaving the door open just a crack. His ex-wife had gained a little weight since he had last seen her, which was not surprising since the last time he had seen her she had been tied hand and foot to a bed, and had not been eating all that well. She was wearing a sleeveless white top and blue Bermudas and was carrying two grocery bags. She'd let her hair go back to its natural color, which was brown. He'd always insisted that she wear it blonde.
He let her place the bags on the kitchen table before he stepped out from behind the door. He said, "Hi, honey, I'm home." She whirled around. He had thought a good deal about this moment, about what the expression on her face was going to be, and he was not disappointed. He didn't even have to grab her or sock her one with the hammer, because she crumpled to the floor in a faint.
It was a quiet neighborhood and no one disturbed Felix for the three hours the business took. The phone rang a couple of times, but he let the answering machine take it. An unexpected bonus was that her little girl came home and let herself in through the back door. The portrait over the mantel must have been done a while ago, because the girl was about nine, just old enough to be interesting. He had Mary in the chair and the girl, Sharon, taped facedown on the table, so Mary could watch the whole thing. He could have kept it going on for a lot longer if he'd wanted to, but he was worried about hubby coming home. He changed out of the painter's stuff, jammed it and the tools in the hardware store bag- it was plastic and wouldn't drip- and went out the back with the ball cap jammed on his head. The tricky part was how long to hold on to the stuff. The farther away he got, the less likely that the cops would find it and associate it with the scene, but the longer he held onto it the more chance there was of some dumb-ass lucky cop spotting him and wondering why a guy in his forties was wandering through a residential neighborhood on a workday, carrying a shopping bag.
But he got to the subway station all right and here he caught a break. A crew was just emptying the station trashcans. He knotted the top of his bag and thrust it into one that had not been emptied yet. The stuff would be on a barge by the end of the day. He took it as an omen of good fortune. He felt ready for anything now. All he needed was a little notebook. He liked to write stuff down in a notebook, and today would make a terrific entry. People started looking at him in the subway going from Queens to the city because he was grinning. He switched to a scowl and changed cars.
***
A jailbird was her first thought when he came down the line, not a homeless. The overdeveloped arms and neck said prison, as did the new suntan. They were always in a rush to lose the prison pallor so they stayed out in the sun too long, or under the lamp, leaving tell-tale redness along the rims of the ears. Clean clothes that looked new; he might have a place to stay. A halfway house? Probably. A number of guys from St. Dismas took their meals here at Holy Redeemer. She ladled out his stew and he smiled at her. She smiled back, a formal one, because she couldn't see his eyes behind his dark glasses, and she felt uncomfortable about smiling without meeting the eyes of the person. That's what the social work ladies did, the professional smile. No one looked these guys in the eye from one week to the next, except her. Guys had told her this, that they felt invisible on the streets.
She had a real smile for the next man in line, a smelly bundle of rags with no front teeth. "How's it going, Ramon?"
"Doin' g'ate, Rucy, g'ate."
"Your ship come in yet, man?"
"Not ret, but I got a numbu doday. You p'ay for my numbu, huh, Rucy?"
"Sure thing, Ramon."
Dollop of thick stew, slice of homemade bread. Same smile for the next one and the next, the same kind of chatter. Now one of her favorites, Hey Hey, born Jeffrey Elman. Despite the heat, Hey Hey was wearing a red doorman's coat with gold braid over a T-shirt with the planet depicted on it and bearing the legend "Love Your Mother." On his head he wore what must have once been a fedora, but which was now a vast tangle of monofilament line, tinfoil, brown plastic packing tape, fish hooks, and electronic components. Hey Hey said the rig was necessary to keep his thoughts from escaping his head.
"Hey, hey, hey, hey, Lu, hey, hey, Lu, hey, Lucy," said Hey Hey.
"Good afternoon, Jeffrey," said Lucy, with the big smile. She thought that the peaceful kind of schizophrenic was in many ways preferable to the majority of the sane.
"How's it going today?"
"Oh, hey, hey, you know, hey, okay. Hey, hey, I got hey, something to hey, show you after lunch, hey?"
She smiled her agreement, and turned to the next one. They didn't just come for the chow, according to the Catholic Workers who ran the place, but for the civility. There were paper table-cloths on the tables and flowers in vases, and real crockery and cutlery and napkins. Men would carefully tuck napkins in at their waists to protect clothing that had not been washed in years.
Felix took a table in the rear of the
church hall, back to the wall, ignored his stew and bread, and watched the girl. The pictures told the truth: a skinny little bitch, no tits, a big nose, hair cut short like a boy's. Probably a lesbo, probably because she was shit-ugly and never had a real man. Getting close to her ought to be a cinch, she'd probably come in her pants the first time he hit on her. He was not interested in eating charity soup with fucking piss bums. Besides, it reminded him of prison, although there were a bunch of women here, too. He checked them out: none of them were worth looking at, old bags mostly, and niggers. That might be one reason the bitch worked here, she was a dog but at least she had a set of teeth. It probably gave her a charge to be the best-looking piece in a room for once.
The diners finished their meal and drifted out. Felix hung out by the door and watched Lucy Karp and a couple of old cunts in aprons and headscarves strip the tablecloths and the few abandoned utensils from the tables and wash the tables down. Lucy and one of the women began to sweep the floor. Felix removed his sunglasses, strolled over to the girl, and said, "You need a hand with that?" He put his smile on maximum charm.
She looked at him, their eyes met. He saw that hers were pale brown, almost the color of cigarette tobacco, with gold flecks, and he also saw that her face was not, as he had previously thought, simply that of an ugly girl. It did not have the beaten look of the unbeautiful, but instead challenged his previous concepts of what beautiful was. But beyond the discomfort this caused (for Felix did not like having any of his concepts challenged) was his sense that the girl could see into him, past his array of masks, down to a place he had nearly forgotten himself. He felt fear, and for an instant he thought it was because she recognized him, that something had gone wrong with the plan, that the cops were wise. He stood there like a dummy, the smile congealing on his face, until she broke the spell by saying, "Yeah, thanks, you can hold the dust pan."
He held the dust pan. In the next few minutes he told himself a plausible story that explained in a way more suitable to his self-image the feeling he had just had. She had confused him with someone else, some other guy she knew. He was spooked a little, this was dangerous, this bitch was the daughter of a big prosecutor, who knows what she really knew? It was incredibly brave of Felix to expose himself like this, like something you could see in the movies, heroic.
They swept the floor together. When they were done, she held out her hand. "I'm Lucy Karp." He took it, and shook it like he would a man's hand, which being a dyke she probably liked. Some deep protective instinct told him that hitting on this one would not be a good idea. Another scam, then, not sex.
"And you are…?"
She wanted his name. "Fel… Fellini," he stammered. "Joe Fellini." He felt a flush and sweat broke across his brow. He'd forgotten the name on his new ID. Uncool, but nothing major. He'd recover.
"Italian?" She gave him the real smile now, which, had he still been capable of human feeling, would have flooded his heart with gladness. "I'm half Italian myself. You from the city?"
"No, Buffalo. I'm here trying to get my kid back. I'm a little short, so I figured I'd save on lunch." He smiled in self-deprecation. Good, the story was flowing into his head. It would work; women were suckers for kids.
"When did you get out of the can?" she asked.
Always tell a little truth to cover a big lie. Some con had told him that and it was good advice. He hung his head. "You can tell, huh?"
"A guy's got weight-bench arms, no color on his neck, a fresh sunburn, and he sits in the back of the hall, too nervous to eat and watching everyone who walks in, I figure he's just out."
"Well, yeah, okay, what can I say? I did a three-year jolt in Elmira, out this past Thursday. A guy paid me five hundred to pick up a package at one of those private mailboxes. They had the place staked out. It was full of dope."
"What did you think was in the five hundred-dollar package, Joe? Stuffed bunnies?"
He shrugged, easing into the part- a working stiff nailed for a stupid mistake. "Yeah, it was dumb, but it was Christmas, I got laid off just before Thanksgiving, and I wanted to, you know, for my little girl…"
"It happens. What's her name?"
"Who?"
"Your little girl."
"Oh," a laugh, "it's Sharon. She's nine. She's with a foster family in the Bronx, nice people and all, but we really want to get back together."
"Her mother isn't…?"
"Oh, man, that's a long, long story and I got a job interview to go to. Listen, would it be okay if I got a meal here once in a while? I'm not really homeless and I don't want to like deprive…"
"No, it's fine- whenever you want. We get some really high-class people in here, because the food's so delicious."
"You're kidding."
"Our motto- Nothing's too good for the poor."
Felix felt a laugh was called for, so he laughed. "I'll see you around then."
"No doubt," she said, and watched him walk away down the street.
Lucy went back into the church hall. Sister Mac was mopping the floor. Lucy got another mop and joined her. Sister Mac was in her late sixties, with jaw and hair of iron, and a grudge against His Holiness the Pope. She'd spent twenty-three years in the Republic of the Congo and was working fourteen hours a day for the Catholic Workers as a form of rest cure.
"Who's the boyfriend?" she asked over the bucket.
"Just another con."
"Which kind?"
"Oh, definitely the behind the bars kind. Maybe the other kind, too. He's got a kid. A plausible villain, if a villain."
"Nice bod, in any case," said Sister Mac.
"I didn't notice," said Lucy airily. "Unlike you nuns, I only focus on the spiritual elements of men."
"Uh-huh. How's the real boyfriend? Daniel."
"Went back to Boston. He wouldn't focus exclusively on the spiritual elements."
"You give that boy a hard time."
"He gives me a hard time. He won't take no."
"He wants to marry you."
"No, the opposite. We're twenty and twenty-one. We're still in college. We're too young to get married. But he'd like a down payment on nuptial bliss while we wait."
"My sister Kate was married at eighteen. Five kids and married to Jim for twenty-nine years. Happy as clams, according to her."
"Try to tell him that, though. People don't get married young anymore, by which he means professional people with careers. I honestly don't see why he stays with me, unless he's like one of those 1890s guys who just wants to deflower virgins, me being the only one in the Boswash region not actually in a religious order. Maybe I should just, I don't know, do it, like everyone else and then he'd be happy and leave me alone. We could be normal cohabiting lustbuckets, for God's sake."
"Would that make you happy?"
"Oh, don't try to be therapeutic, Mac," Lucy snapped. "I'm not in the mood."
"I'm just mopping the floor," said the nun cheerfully. "I'm not a spiritual advisor." This was said in a tone that implied that certain people perhaps needed to check in with their spiritual advisors, instead of mooning, and complaining, and biting other people's heads off. They mopped: Lucy morosely, the nun with the same efficient cheerfulness with which she addressed the tasks that came her way, from making soup to assembling the remains of murdered children. In fact, Lucy had not seen her spiritual advisor in some time. She was avoiding him because she knew he would ask her about her mother, and she didn't want to talk about her mother to anyone, although she knew very well that this was the reason she drove her boyfriend away and snarled at nuns. Although she was perfectly at ease with thugs like Fellini, or whatever his real name was. The bad boys were no problem; in this she was also her mother's daughter.
Outside the church, she saw that Hey Hey was waiting. He beckoned and moved off in his dancing way, his hat pulled low to protect his thoughts, his red coat swirling. She followed, sighing. She did not want to follow a lunatic halfway across the city just now. She wanted to go home and shower the grease sm
ell and the summer sweat off her body. But the man had once led her in this way to a pile of rags that turned out to be a man dying of hepatitis, and a life had been saved. So she followed.
Hey Hey always took the indirect route to anywhere he was going, sometimes risking his life in traffic, to avoid dangerous nodes where his thoughts had been sucked out, despite all his precautions. They ended up in an alley behind a pizza joint, where Hey Hey showed her a cat that had just had kittens.
Felix watched her emerge from the alley with the wacko. Why did she follow him in there? Sex? Dope? He couldn't figure any other reason, and the inability made him irritable. Still, he thought the first approach had gone pretty well. The dumb bitch had bought the story, and being a do-gooder like she was, she was obviously inclined to be sympathetic. He didn't like the way she had made him as a con, but that couldn't be helped- probably just luck, a lucky guess. And the thing with the name, which didn't matter that much. He thought it was pretty cool the way he had recovered with the little girl story, and how he had come up with her name. Sharon. That was the name his ex-wife had been yelling while he was working on her brat. Sharon! Mommy! Sharon! Mommy! It was a sketch, before it got on his nerves and he'd taped their mouths shut. When the time came to do Lucy Karp, he hoped it would be in a place where he could let her yell a little. He thought about this off and on, all the way back to Queens.
***
"What kind of sick fuck…?" asked Detective Lieutenant James Raney of the room at large, the room being the kitchen of the Chalfonte home, but received no answer. The people in the room- detectives and crime scene technicians and a woman from the medical examiner's office- were naturally dying to know exactly what kind of sick fuck, and his name and address, but just now they could only look at the unbearable scene in silence. They'd seen everything, they had thought, but they hadn't seen many like this one. Detective lieutenants do not ordinarily visit crime scenes, but Raney had come because Rick Chalfonte had been a cop, a detective. He had been retired on a disability for some years now, and Raney wasn't exactly a friend, but they had friends in common, they'd had drinks together, and in the NYPD it was expected that a little extra would be forthcoming when a cop had this kind of trouble.
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