They borrowed big time from Marine Midland for those two rooms. Then they wanted to remodel some more. I mean, you and I may not like our kitchens to look like a warehouse from the 1930s, but to each his own. They wanted to borrow 50K more, but Marine Midland was wising up to them, and the loan officer told them to talk to the hand. So they looked for other, more . . . creative, shall we say, options.
Long story short, those informal solutions got mad when the repayments weren't happening on schedule. They turned to their own informal solutions, things got ugly, and the conundrum finally made its way down the food chain to Manny.
Manny Antonio was what Sergeant Joe Friday would have called "a small-time hood turned contract killer," a Portuguese thug who was a bad seed from the get-go. When he was a kid, at a neighbor's sixth birthday party, he popped all the balloons with a paring knife and pulled both claws off the birthday boy's pet crawfish. Blame the parents, if you must—divorced, addled by pills, dogged by anger-management issues before those words were ever invented—but if you ask me, Manny Antonio was born bad.
And even in that, he kind of sucked. I once had a basketball coach who said the wisest words a thirteen-year-old can hear: "If you're going to do something, be good at it. If you're going to chase pussy for a living, that's a choice—but be good at it." Manny wasn't even good at being bad. The best you could say about him was that he was very average at being very average.
Which was why he was a forgettable thug, the kind of scrub who gets the job done eventually, without any great panache. He inspired no emotion in anyone whatsoever. Remember Duffy Dyer, that second-string catcher from the early 1970s? What he was to the Mets in those days, Manny Antonio was to the people in the tri-state area who needed some thumping and killing done.
That points us back to Conrad and Josephine. She was the kind of woman who, when you see her berating the Acme cashier about the price of Shedd's Spread or complaining about the pepperoncini in the endless salad at the Olive Garden, you're glad she isn't your next-door neighbor. So when the informal loan outfit starts getting increasingly persistent in recovering its investment, she makes the tactical error, in an unfortunately aggressive phone call, of telling its duly appointed agents to take a hike.
Predictably, the duly appointed agents are not thrilled with this turn of events. They are particularly agitated about the part where Josephine implies that if the pressure does not abate, the involvement of local law enforcement might ensue. Namely the detectives of the Ho-Ho-Kus Police Department. "And don't think I won't do it. We have rights!" Josephine Spencer yells over the phone.
So the duly appointed agents, realizing the potential calamities associated with imminent police intervention, decide to schedule a visit to offer more personal customer service.
As you may be aware from the movies, these kinds of duly appointed agents rarely choose to undertake such visits on their own behalves. So they duly appoint their own agent. That is Manny.
I will pause at this point to say that the unfortunate breakage of an $8,500 original Eames Lounge Chair was not intentional on Manny's part. Though I will say also that Manny has no idea what an Eames Lounge Chair is as he breaks Josephine Spencer's neck across its armrest. He does, in passing, note the comfort of the vintage piece a few minutes later when he reclines in it briefly while using his boot-clad right foot to kick the supine Conrad Spencer's Men's Wearhouse-panted ballsack.
I doubt any other of Charles and Ray Eames's creations have witnessed such an assortment of unpleasantness—particularly to the soundtrack of a small-time hood humming Alan O'Day's forgotten 1977 pop anthem "Undercover Angel" while occasionally interrupting himself to growl at his victims, "Fuck you, you fucking fuck."
But I digress.
With the Spencers appropriately lifeless, Manny sets to getting their bodies into the Impala he has rented the night before, under an assumed name, from the Avis in Weehawken. It is past ten p.m. on a Wednesday night, so he is able to roll them up in two throw rugs (certainly not from the midcentury modern den; that is, of course, hardwood flooring) and, with some exertion, get them into the car without, he thinks, anyone getting a glimpse of his activities. He then sets out for his favorite dumping ground.
That is where the trouble that ended Manny really begins.
II. FRESH KILLS
I knew Manny pretty well. I was there at the beginning, and I was there at the end. I made the effort to get what he was about, even when it was clear there was not much there to be got. So here's how I think it went from his point of view at this juncture.
Manny crosses the Goethals, which he hasn't done in a while. He hates the Goethals. He hates all bridges. What if you stall on a bridge? What if you get a flat? You're a sitting duck, and if there's a body in the trunk, much less two, you're totally and completely fucked. Mister State Trooper, please don't stop me.
What's more, the Goethals is vertigo-inducing, and Manny has vertigo bad. Don't even talk to him about crossing the Verrazano or the GW. They're much longer and higher, and that would just be too much. He's also claustrophobic, so no Lincoln or Holland. Good thing he never needs to get to Long Island.
Fresh Kills is his go-to dumping ground. It's huge—things can get lost there with very little effort—and it's actually hard to get caught disposing of a body as long as you stay near the edges. If you get into the belly, you either get lost or get accosted. So far, unbelievably, neither has ever happened to Manny. At age thirty-seven, he's dumped about two bodies in Fresh Kills for each year of his life.
It's not as if he has any other choice. Manny used to go inland for his body-disposal needs, but inland New Jersey was the purview of the Chinese syndicate down in Metuchen. Nobody dared get anywhere near the Meadowlands; that had belonged to the Italians since Eisenhower. And the Pine Barrens has become entirely Eastern European territory; if the Russians don't cut off your balls for using it for corpse disposal, the Serbs or the Ukranians will. All of them know Manny for trying to litter his hits in their territory. All despise him with that dull, unmotivated disdain that means he can probably stay alive as long as he doesn't actually get in their way too much.
Those nuances haven't really mattered much lately, though. Business has been slow for Manny, as it often is for mediocre people who do things mediocrely, particularly contract killing. He hasn't even been to Staten Island for eighteen months, not since that date with the Vietnamese chick who worked at the nail salon on Richmond Avenue. Like most of his dates, that one hadn't gone well for Manny. He was hoping the evening would end with her on her back saying, "Fuck me." Instead, it ended with her on her high horse saying, "Fuck you."
"Fuck you too," Manny replied. He hasn't had a date since.
Manny makes it off the Goethals and eventually exits onto 440 South, careful to put the Impala's turn signal on at exactly the appropriate points. No sense in getting stopped for a stupid traffic violation.
For the next few minutes, he takes a series of narrow back roads to the edge of the landfill, to an access road that leads to a stone hut, inside of which is Manny's guy. By that I mean the watchman Manny pays to look the other way while he goes into the landfill to get rid of what he needs to get rid of, no questions asked.
Imagine a landscape brimming to the horizon with garbage. You saw that Pixar movie WALL·E, with the robot scampering around in a future America that has been turned into a giant garbage dump? That's sort of what it used to look like in big chunks of—well, big chunks of New York City, frankly.
These days it's difficult to imagine what it used to be like around here. You drive around now and see mostly rolling hills of green with roads gently snaking through them, and they're turning the whole thing into reclaimed wetlands and a giant park. Hard to believe that the detritus of our parents and grandparents lurks underneath, entombed for generations. Probably until the end of the planet itself. If the aliens ever land, they'll be able to learn a lot from the Clorox bottles of the Beat Generation, I'm sure.
Tha
t night, though, it had been just a few weeks since something game-changing had happened, something Manny—moron that he was—had no idea about. Fifty-three years after Robert Moses created it, the Fresh Kills Landfill had closed for business. Giuliani and Pataki had been on hand that day to watch the last barge, with a huge sign on it that said, LAST BARGE, chug to the dock. All that meant one thing: Manny was about to be royally screwed.
He thinks it's business as usual, though, as he pulls up and climbs through a hole in the razor-wired fence to get to the door of the hut. It is dark, but that's not odd. His guy is often asleep at the switch.
"Yo. Rodrigo." Manny dry heaves a couple times. The humidity is ugly for early April, and the place stinks to high heaven.
Nothing.
"Rodrigo! Manny! Manny Antonio! Got some transacting to do! I need the digger!" Manny bangs on the door of the hut. Silence. Another minute passes. Finally, Manny leans in and shines his pocket Maglite on the window part of the door and sees the sign:
FRESH KILLS LANDFILL
CLOSED PERMANENTLY 3/22/01
CONTACT DEPT OF SANITATION
NO TRESPASSING
"Fuck," Manny says to no one in particular. "Goddamnfuckingshitcocksuckerfuckfuckfuck." Manny's command of English, not exactly Wordsworth even on the best of days, falls apart completely when he's stressed.
Manny pulls a map of Staten Island from his back pocket and is gazing at it with the flashlight in his mouth when he sees a light in the distance. A car approaches. There's a flashing light. It's a cop—no, wait. It's some sanitation patrol truck. It pulls up, sees a human being in its headlights, and screeches to a halt, kicking up the dust of a billion spent Marlboro butts and empty dishwashing liquid bottles and discarded maxipads.
"Sir, can I help you? What are you doing here? You're not authorized to be here." The guy is about twenty-three, scarfing fast food and dripping melty drive-thru cheese onto a uniform that, if it weren't khaki, would look like a mall cop's. He seems utterly bewildered that Manny is standing in front of him.
"Don't worry," Manny says. "Just tying up some loose ends." He puts on his best I'm-in-control voice.
The rent-a-cop sighs, puts down his Arby's, and starts to get out of the car. "I'm going to need to see some—"
At that moment Manny does the last rational thing he will do on the final night of his life. With his Maglite still chomped in his teeth like a panatela, he pulls his Kel-Tec P-11 out of his waistband and shoots the guy between the eyes. The report rings out, echoing across the trash-saturated emptiness. Inertia keeps the guy standing up for a second, dead on his feet. Then a dark stain starts to spread around his khaki crotch. His ears twitch and he collapses with a dull thump.
"GodDAMNit!" Manny has no idea what to do.
He stands there for what feels to him like hours but is probably more like five minutes, wondering if rent-a-cop reinforcements are on the way. He searches the body and the car; no sign of a walkie-talkie. Maybe the guy wasn't in communication with base, or whatever.
So what does he do next, the dumbshit? Well, he says to himself, I gotta get rid of this body, and I might as well get rid of the van too, so—and this is the logic of a lifelong dullard—he sets the van on fire with the rent-a-cop's body in it. It promptly catches the gas tank and, as Manny hurries off, the whole thing explodes, taking the hut and a pile of garbage with it. A huge plume of smoke and orange flame claws into the air.
Manny floors the Impala, banking off a pile of old kitchen appliances and skidding along the dark dirt road as he tries to regain control of the wheel. Behind him, everything is fire and thick soot.
As he gets back onto the West Shore Expressway a few minutes later, he hears sirens in the distance. He diligently uses his turn signal to get back onto I-278.
Manny is crossing the Goethals for the second time in an hour when he notices that something is caught in the passenger-side windshield wiper of the Impala. He can't quite see what it is, so he turns on the wipers. The only thing that tells him what he's looking at is the Dole sticker. It is an old banana peel, decayed beyond recognition.
Nervously, Manny starts singing underneath his breath: "Undercover angel . . . midnight fantasy . . . I've never had a dream that made sweet love to me . . ."
In the trunk, the Spencers do not hear him. They are, after all, dead.
III. MEANWHILE
Two days pass.
No one hears from Manny.
Multiple police departments are sniffing around.
The disappearance of the Spencers after what looks like a violent struggle has made the Bergen Record. On the radio, 1010 WINS is calling it a possible home invasion by a stranger and telling people in North Jersey to lock their doors.
The rent-a-cop's murder has made the Advance, the Daily News, the Post, and even the New York Times.
The informal loan outfit is not happy. Which means the duly appointed agents are not happy.
Phone calls are made. Arrangements are set up. Money changes hands.
Another day passes.
IV. THE END, MY ONLY FRIEND
I had always liked Manny despite his shortcomings. But the world has to evolve. Hopey I don't know about, but we definitely have to be changey. The trouble with Manny was that he couldn't change. He got stuck in his own rut and created his own feedback loop.
So here's how it ended, ten years ago today:
Three days have passed. The cops in Ho-Ho-Kus have cordoned off the Spencer home and started an investigation. Neighbors are worried. One reports she saw a guy carrying carpets out to the trunk of some Chevy. A Lumina, she thinks it might have been.
On Staten Island, the rent-a-cop's murder is being investigated as some kind of mob hit. Turns out the kid, who had the job only because someone's uncle's cousin's brother-in-law got him on the books, was linked to some crime family down in Philly. His name was Pascale. He was studying computer science.
Manny has not called in to the duly appointed agents. The cops find his StarTAC in the parking lot of the Showplace bowling alley, and find it has a lot of calls to numbers that are entirely too close for comfort if you happen to be one of the aforementioned agents.
In fact, Manny is on hour seventy-five of a full-on, tri-state panic attack. He has driven from Staten Island to Watchung, from Totowa to New Haven, trying to figure out what the fuck to do with the bodies in the Impala's trunk. He considers briefly dumping them in the water in Bridgeport, but the docks are too well patrolled. He even starts heading, via back roads, to Rhode Island, where he thinks he can dump them in the salt marshes on the coast. But, in quick succession:
He overheats his engine heading east on I-95.
He (you'll love this one) flags down an AAA truck for help.
He manages, somehow, to keep the AAA guys out of the trunk. They fix things and go on their way.
He turns around, heads back toward Jersey, makes it to Secaucus, where he buys a disposable cell phone. Then he thinks: I'll go back to Staten Island. I'll just sneak into the landfill from another direction and dump the bodies. Brilliant.
He is panicking. He hasn't showered in four days, hasn't eaten in two. He's surviving on Jolt and NoDoz. The ticking clock is haunting him, floating above him in his mind like it used to in those 1950s noir flicks that starred actors like Edmond O'Brien. He actually thinks he can see the clock in the sky as he crosses the Goethals yet again, cursing the Spencers and the duly appointed agents and Goethals himself, whoever the fuck he was.
Manny approaches Fresh Kills again. It's about one a.m. on Saturday, and nature, as it will forever do, is reasserting itself. Like the garbage that encircles them for acres upon acres, Josephine and Conrad Spencer are starting to putrefy.
In the driver's seat, with the air-conditioning on, Manny can't really smell them. But the moment he gets out of the Impala, the odor that envelops it is almost intolerable. This makes him very paranoid at red lights. What's worse, the remnants of Josephine's Dior Poison, freshly applied to the nape
of her neck only ninety minutes before Manny cracked it over the Eames armrest, is still a potent ingredient in the olfactory mix. It's as if hell were slow-roasting a pork shoulder one evening and trying to cover up the scent with some demonic Glade Solid.
Manny has nowhere to go, no place left to turn. So he does what he's always done in these dead-end situations, where there are no more options: he calls me.
"I'm fucked," he says. "I need help. This job's gone way bad."
He knows I'll come. I always do. I'm his big brother, after all.
I'm the reason he's so mediocre, or so he likes to tell me. I'm the educated one, the one who (according to Manny) got spoiled and sent to college or (according to me) did the work that pushed me forward. I'm the one our parents had the foresight to send away to my aunt's when they started fighting and having the drug problems. They kept him with them in North Jersey as they fell deeper into their slow slide, through the Nixon and Ford administrations and well into Carter. Talk about general malaise.
I was, of course, expecting his call. See, there's something Manny doesn't know about the whole situation, and it's the key bit of information: Yes, I'm going to help him out if at all possible. But I'm also probably going to end up killing him too.
The informal loan outfit, it seems, has given up on the duly appointed agents. One of the "loan officers" is an old crew buddy of mine and knows that I, like my brother, supplement my legit income with occasional freelance dirty work. He knows that the guy his outfit is trying to track down is my brother. He also knows, and I won't get into why here, that at heart I'm an amoral prick who would do anything for money. He's mostly right.
"Make your brother disappear," my crew buddy tells me. "I don't care how, I don't care where. I don't care if he's dead or living on an estate in the Falkland Islands. Just. Get. Him. Out. Of. Our. Hair."
New York City Noir Page 117
