Final Stroke

by Michael Beres

  “No, not black cat.”

  “Something you’d find on a farm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something you can eat?”

  “Yes.”

  “It wouldn’t be a black cow, would it?”

  “No.”

  “Stop me when I hit it.”

  He held her shoulder with his left hand.

  “Pig. Goat. Chicken … No, you said four legs. Calf. Horse … No, I guess not. Lamb …”

  He squeezed her shoulder.

  “Black lamb?”

  “Again.”

  “Sheep? Black sheep?”

  He laughed. “Got it.”

  “Okay,” said Jan. “Let me speculate. We’re driving to a funeral and you’re thinking about black sheep. At a funeral families come to gether and the term black sheep is used to refer to a family member. Is that it?”

  He laughed again. “Wow.”

  Jan smiled a great big smile. “Thank you for the compliment.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She reached over and touched his thigh. “Take your time. I know it’ll be hard trying to get anything across to me at the funeral with all the people and distractions. I’ll keep my eyes open and remem ber about black sheep. Maybe we’ll see one. Keep it all in your head. Then you and I can talk about it afterward when we’re alone.”

  Steve leaned close, put his arm around her, and stared at her gor geous profile while she drove.

  Steve saw the hood at the funeral home as Jan pushed his wheelchair back from the front where they had viewed Marjorie’s body and given their condolences to several men and women who stood at the front. At one point he thought of a wedding reception line and imagined tell ing this to Marjorie in rehab and further imagined Marjorie leaping out of the casket and saying she’s the bride and everyone has to kiss her, especially this guy in the wheelchair. If she could have done this, it would have been like Marjorie to do it because she enjoyed a good laugh. As he bit his lip to keep from laughing, he saw the hood.

  He saw the hood again in church and wondered if the hood would get up and say something when the priest finished his eulogy and asked if anyone else wanted to say something. But the hood did not get up. Two men in their thirties or forties got up and spoke briefly. One, a slight man with very short thinning hair, mentioned “Mom,” and said, “She always knew kindness and understanding, not only to me, but also to those who sometimes did not deserve it. She loved na ture. She always said the right thing, even after her stroke, if one sim ply took time to listen. I … I’ll always love her.” The other man was larger, had thick black hair and mustache, mentioned “Aunt Marge,” and said, “She was the best aunt a kid could have. I’ll miss her a lot because of so many things she did for me that I can’t even count.” The frail-looking son wept and had difficulty finishing his statement. The burly-looking nephew took out a handkerchief with a flourish and wiped at his eyes at the conclusion of his statement.

  He saw the hood again at the cemetery. The hood was one of a group of men there without the accompaniment of women or chil dren, a group of men who seemed to answer to the burly nephew who had spoken in church. Steve could tell by the way they whispered to one another, and the way they stood at overly-dignified attention, and the way they scanned the crowd and formed a barrier around the nephew, that they were there to protect the nephew and perhaps watch those who attended the funeral and report back later.

  The reason Steve recognized the hood was because he had a recol lection of having had this man’s face very close to his, and of him hold ing his semi-automatic nicknamed Attila pointed at this man. Sud denly he was immersed in detail and the memory became vivid …

  The smell of celery. A warehouse with trucks backed in. Stacks of ventilated wooden crates and cardboard boxes. Fresh vegetables. He’s there to ask questions the way Joe Friday would ask questions. He asks a kid hauling crates of lettuce on a two-wheeler about someone. Sud denly the guy he’s looking for appears and lets go with a head of lettuce from behind a waist-high stack of crates. He chases the guy around crates, through the warehouse, and up to a backroom door that slams in his face. When he tries the door it is locked.

  A clattering behind him. He turns. The kid has dropped his two-wheeler, spilling crates of lettuce across the floor. The kid grabs him from behind. A tough kid, bone and muscle, arm around his neck. He tries to spin away but the kid hangs on.

  “Dino?” a voice shouts through the locked door.

  “Go, Pa!” shouts the kid.

  He elbows the kid hard in the gut, feels breath and spit on his neck.

  “Dino?”

  He spins and drops, grabbing an ankle, pushing on the knee, tip ping the wiry kid off balance. He has Attila out before the kid can bounce back.

  “Pa!” shouts the kid. “A gun!”

  “Wait!” shouts Steve. “Don’t bring no goddamn gun out here! I only pulled it to calm your boy!”

  He sees several workers looking in from the dock. A couple of the men are old, looking like hit men making ready to come out of retire ment. But no one moves toward him when he raises his semi-automatic so they can see it.

  “Look, Rickie!” shouts Steve toward the closed door. “I’m not a hit man or a cop. I’m a private investigator just doin’ my fuckin’ job! So why not come out or let me in there and we’ll talk and I’ll get the hell out of here? And tell your kid not to move! I hate guns, I really do.”

  No one moves.

  “Rickie, if I was from the mob would I have walked the fuck in here?”

  The door opens wide and Rickie comes out, his hands clearly vis ible, and the door shuts tight behind him. Rickie gives in like he’s done it before, knowing the right moves to show someone whose fin ger is on a trigger.

  Rickie tells his son to go out front and wait, to get rid of the gawkers. Steve puts his gun away and they sit on cool lettuce crates to talk.

  The memory from the loading dock at a vegetable market came to Steve while the priest mumbled prayers and sprinkled holy water over the casket, and while the hood stared at him. The hood was the kid, Dino. He pulled Jan close and whispered to her.

  “Rickie’s son, Dino.”

  “Okay,” she whispered back. “I’ll remember. The guy staring at you?”

  “Yes.”

  As he stared back at the hood, Steve recalled how hard it had been in the beginning, right after his stroke, to say a simple word like yes or no after Jan asked him a question and stared at him, waiting patiently. Yes, one thing he had learned from all this was patience. Finally, after several more seconds of staring at one another, the hood looked away.

  The priest asked for a moment of silent prayer. During this si lence, just above the drone of distant traffic, a dog began barking in a nearby neighborhood. The barking dog caused Steve to again re call the piece Mark Twain had written concerning funeral etiquette. The piece had gone on about not criticizing the person, “… in whose honor the entertainment is given,” and it had warned against com ments about the “equipment” and gave recommendations for displays of sorrow depending on how closely related the guest was. The last recommendation had been, “Do not bring your dog.”

  Laughter bubbled up, threatening to strangle him. The only way he could keep from laughing was to cough repeatedly as if he were choking. Jan stooped beside his wheelchair, held an open handker chief to his mouth and patted his back firmly. It probably looked like she was trying to help him breathe or trying to console him, or both. But he had a feeling she knew the commotion was an effort to con tain laughter, laughter that Jan and Marjorie, but no one else present, would understand.

  After the laughter and tears were wiped away and Steve was able to compose himself with Jan’s help, mourners began filing back to their cars.

  Marjorie’s son thanked mourners as they were leaving. To Jan and Steve he introduced himself as Antonio Junior, saying that’s what his mother called him, but everyone else called him Tony.

  “I’m glad Mom h
ad friends at Saint Mel’s,” he said as he shook Steve’s left hand—a delicate handshake, good eye contact, good dic tion. “The last time I visited she said you were her best friend there. But don’t worry. I know you’re not old enough to have been in the nursing home wing. She said you were from upstairs.”

  Jan answered for him. “Steve still has trouble getting out exactly the right words, especially at times like this. But I know how much he admired your mother. I remember Steve’s first day at Saint Mel’s. Your mom was right there at his side, giving the rookie patient, and the rookie patient’s wife, lots of encouragement. We’ll both miss her.”

  Tony Junior shook Jan’s hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Babe.” Then he smiled, first to Jan, then to Steve. “By the way, I really love your last name. When Mom first told it to me, I wasn’t sure if she was getting it right until she went on about how you’d told her about it being a shortened form of a Hungarian name. Thanks again.”

  Marjorie’s nephew, backed up by his entourage, also thanked mourners as they were leaving. To Jan and Steve he introduced him self as Maximo Lamberti, saying that’s what the tax collector called him, but that everyone else calls him Max.

  “Glad you could come,” Max said as he reached past an extended left hand and grabbed Steve’s right hand from his lap and shook it—a rough handshake, not looking at Steve, but leering at Jan. “Last time I was there, Aunt Marge said you tell good jokes. Not enough good jokes in this world. She’s probably upstairs laughing like hell at all us jokers runnin’ around down here.”

  Max dropped Steve’s limp and burning right hand back into his lap and grabbed Jan’s hand, holding onto it rather than shaking it. After repeating his name to her, Max said, “It’s good to meet such a healthy woman as you, Mrs. Babe. So far the weather’s cooperated.” He winked. “Probably ‘cause I slipped a big envelope in the donation box at church.”

  While he spoke, Max stared at Jan. And as he stared, Steve re called Jan telling him about another rough-talking guy, about some other guy long ago who stared at her as if he owned her. It was not something Jan had recently told him, but something from before his stroke. A guy who got her a job somewhere, then wanted something for his efforts. The words somewhere and something lay there in his head as if on a blank sheet of paper.

  When Max finally let go of Jan’s hand and moved on to the next set of mourners in line, Steve looked behind Max and could see the young hood named Dino staring at him between the big shoulders of two older hoods.

  While he and Jan waited in the car for the exchanges of thanks and condolences to conclude so the single file of cars on the one-lane cemetery road could leave, Steve noticed a man in a wheelchair who had been hidden behind Max’s entourage. The man was big, a brutish guy completely bald except for curls of hair around his ears. The guy was dressed in a black suit coat on top, but was covered with a plaid blanket from his waist down. The blanket reached down a little below the wheelchair seat and the footplate extenders had been removed. There were no feet to put on footplates, and no legs visible beneath the blanket. The guy’s arms were so huge, the sleeves of the suit coat were stretched.

  While the socializing continued, the legless man in the wheelchair turned and wheeled himself across the lawn toward the cars parked at the head of the procession. When he passed Jan’s Audi, the guy glanced over, smiling. His face was disfigured by a diagonal scar that gave him a disjointed look like a Picasso painting. It was obvious as the guy passed by and looked back toward them that he was staring at Jan.

  “Howdy, handsome,” whispered Jan, covering her mouth with her hand.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” Steve managed to get out.

  “Sorry.”

  One of the hoods who had been behind Max followed the legless man and when they got to one of the limos in line, opened the back door. Instead of helping the legless man do his transfer to the back seat of the limo, the hood stood back and watched as the legless man’s hands grabbed door and doorframe and his massive arms vaulted his bulk inside. The hood pulled the chair back slightly, apparently to put it in the trunk of the limo, but the legless man had hold of it. After a brief tug of war, the legless man folded the chair and pulled it inside with him all in one motion.

  Steve no longer felt like laughing. The strength of the brute with out legs made him feel weak and helpless. Jan, as she often did, sensed his feelings, reaching over and gently rubbing the back of his neck. When she did this he closed his eyes and, as he had done before when alone with Jan in the car, imagined he had not had a stroke and was in the driver’s seat and Jan was rubbing his neck as he drove.

  When he heard cars in the procession begin starting up, Steve felt an automatic urge to reach out with his right hand toward the ignition, and his hand did move some, knocking against the door handle.

  He opened his eyes when Jan took her hand from the back of his neck. Reaching out to start the Audi, Jan smiled a sad smile as if she knew what he’d been thinking.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  Steve wanted to go somewhere to talk. “Not Hell,” he said. “Make me whole somewhere.” And so, because she knew Steve needed a place with as little distraction as possible, Jan drove them to Ilonka Szabo’s restaurant. When Jan told Ilonka they’d come for a quiet lunch, Ilonka wiped her hands in her apron, kissed Steve on his cheek, said something in Hungarian as she wheeled Steve to a table, told Jan there was no need to order and that she would bring some thing light, and left them alone to talk.

  Jan knew Steve wanted to go over who he’d seen at the funeral. “Make me whole,” he had said, and she knew this was a phrase he’d gotten from Marjorie. A mob phrase from Marjorie’s late husband. At the funeral Steve had told her to remember, “Dino, Rickie’s son,” and when she reminded him of this, things began falling into place and she worked with him to get it out.

  The restaurant provided a perfect environment for communica tion. The recording of Hungarian violins was turned low. The few other patrons there for late lunch were finished and soon left. When Jan asked Ilonka if she minded that they sit and talk for a while, Ilonka was more than cooperative, saying she’d be closing until dinner time, but they should stay as long as they wished and that she would be in the kitchen preparing the dinner menu. It took time to get it all out, but the atmosphere seemed to instill a greater patience in Steve. In Ilonka’s restaurant, empty except for them, he was able to keep his thoughts from wandering and he told it with relatively little prompt ing from Jan.

  He told her that the man he had pointed out at the funeral was the son of Rickie Deveno, who quit the mob years earlier and changed his name to Rickie Justice. Jan recalled the names, and when Steve began describing the incident at the produce market, she remembered him having told her about it. The incident at the market in which Steve confronted the son named Dino had taken place years earlier, when Dino was a teenager working at the market. And today, this kid from the past named Dino was at the funeral and seemed to have gone back to the life his father had abandoned.

  Marjorie had spoken of the Chicago mob in rehab, not in detail, but enough. Marjorie’s husband had been a kingpin in the mob, and now Steve felt that Marjorie’s nephew played the role of mob kingpin quite well, and the kid named Dino was obviously one of the nephew’s thugs. Mixed in with the description of Marjorie’s husband having been in the mob was something about him having been good to Viet nam veterans. From other things Marjorie had revealed in rehab, it seemed her husband inherited an old hatred of the Kennedys from his mob predecessors and, in later years, became interested in politics himself. Something about “getting out the votes” and “getting rid of Carter,” so perhaps he worked for the Reagan campaign.

  When Steve mentioned the nephew named Max, Jan recalled him vividly. “Maximo Lamberti, but everyone calls me Max,” he had said.

  The way Max looked at her as he held her hand reminded Jan of thugs she’d known in the past. Maybe he was high up in the local mob, but once a thug always a thug. />
  In contrast, Marjorie’s son Antonio, whom they’d also been in troduced to, did not seem to be allied with Max and his thugs. Dur ing the service, Antonio held his hand in front of his face at one point and appeared to speak harshly to his cousin Max. Although Jan had not heard what was said, she felt Antonio had been upset that Max brought his entourage to the funeral.

  Antonio was shorter and much thinner than Max, and was going a little bald. Now that she thought about Antonio’s baldness, she was certain, because of the contrast, Max had worn a hairpiece. Not only was Max’s hair too thick, but the hairline at his forehead was too far forward on this six foot tall man who probably weighed in at well over two hundred.

  When Jan recalled Steve telling her earlier he thought Marjorie’s son Antonio might be gay, she had to admit that at the funeral she’d seen a gentle man, a more fragile man. Especially when she contrasted him to his cousin Max.

  While Steve tried to recall everything Marjorie had ever conveyed to him about her family, he indicated there were certain phrases Mar jorie had used. She had said, “Dead issue” and “Dead seed” and “Fam ily secret” and “Carter smarter” and “Keys to the kingdom” and “Fly in the ointment” and even some kind of litany of road routes. Finally, after wracking his brain for some time, Steve said, “Max the fly.” Yes, Max was the fly in the ointment, the black sheep. She waited before asking a question, and when he was silent for a while she asked Steve what the reference to Carter meant. He said it must have something to do with the son. Something about the father hating Carter and the son not hating Carter.

  But what did any of this have to do with Marjorie’s death? Just because some members of her family were in the mob or were associ ated with the mob, and just because Marjorie might have objected to family members being in the mob, and just because father and son might have had differing political views, why would Steve feel this had anything to do with Marjorie’s death? When Jan asked why he felt this way, Steve shook his head and said, “Maybe … maybe not. Something long time ago … something dug up. One key … many keys. Who knows?”