Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?: A Novel

by Stephen Dobyns

“I’ll go behind in case you take a tumble—ha, ha, ha,” says Manny.

  The temperature has continued to drop, and the wind has increased. A few snowflakes make their appearance.

  Vikström puts a foot on the bottom rung. Time passes. I’m a fraud, he tells himself. He considers turning to the men on the street and confessing his phobia. He’ll shout it out, and then, when the laughter stops, he’ll hand in his badge and move to Florida. These are the thoughts his fear triggers. He takes another step, and now both feet are on the ladder. The metal handrails are cold against his hands. Maybe thirty rungs rise above him before he gets to the top.

  Manny thinks Vikström moves as slowly as a fast-growing plant. He bangs a hand against the ladder. “Get cracking, Benny. Life’s going by. You need a push?”

  “I’m moving, I’m moving, I’ve never been on one of these things before. There’s no other way to get to the roof?”

  “Only the fire escape.”

  The truck’s engine idles and creates a vibration, which Vikström doesn’t like. It should be said that Vikström is a brave man. He’s had people shoot at him and he’s shot back; he’s fended off rabid dogs; he’s run into burning buildings; he jumped into the Thames last November to save a toddler who fell in the water. That stuff meant nothing to him. It’s heights he doesn’t like. He also hates exposing himself to these other guys, to have them think he’s cowardly. He loves their praise, hates their criticism. That’s not unusual, is it? Lastly, he’s ninety percent sure that Manny knows the truth about his phobia and is tormenting him on purpose.

  “You don’t start moving faster,” shouts Manny, “I’ll jab your ass with a pin!”

  Vikström has climbed five rungs. He hears guys down below laughing. Of course he thinks they’re laughing at him, but perhaps one has just told a joke about a parrot. Vikström shuts his left eye; the right’s open only a crack. He doesn’t go “La, la, la”—it seems too small, too picayune, for such a climb. Instead he picks a rousing marching song to distract him from imminent death. Very faintly he sings, “‘Over hill, over dale, we will hit the dusty trail, / As the caissons go rolling along.’” Manny appears not to notice. This, however, doesn’t last. By the time Vikström’s climbed ten more rungs, he’s singing loud enough for the others to hear. By the time he’s climbed fifteen, he’s gone operatic. But no, we exaggerate. At most Vikström’s singing is an operatic mutter. Manny hears it, though, and several cops down below, rascals that they are, join in.

  It’s a pity that Uncle Didi Lobato isn’t here to enjoy the fun, because it would be one more example of the tradiculous: singing cops below, severed head above, one miserable musical guy in between. Surely the god of capriciousness and whimsy looks down from a cloud and rubs its paws. Such gods feed on humiliation. But probably every cop has a phobia that could lead to a collapse. For one it’s spiders, for another it’s snakes, for a third it’s going into the attic. Of course their exteriors look tough. There’s nothing they can’t handle. But deep in their guts is a small square of Jell-O.

  It takes Vikström several minutes to get to the top. A fireman on the roof reaches over to help him up. Vikström staggers a few feet to catch his breath. Then, abruptly, he asks the fireman, “How’d you get up here?”

  The fireman points to a little building that looks like an outhouse but is actually the top of the stairs. “I busted the lock,” he says.

  Vikström spins around, meaning to hurl Manny from the roof, but his partner has joined the group surrounding the head. He knows it’s dangerous to dawdle. Vikström bends over with his hands on his knees until he breathes normally and his wish to murder his partner has temporarily passed.

  Five lights illuminate the mess on the surface of the roof. The cops look like Boy Scouts around a bonfire. The head is squarish, with short black hair, a black mustache, and a trimmed beard, at least on one side of his face. The other side is mostly gone. One ear has been torn off, but the other sports two gold earrings. Teeth are broken. The neck is a savage slash. No one wants to look, and each keeps turning away, but then each turns back again, unable not to. “Didn’t some witnesses say he was wearing a cap?” asks a cop. “I wonder what happened to it.”

  “Someone probably swiped it,” says another.

  “You can get in trouble for that,” says a third. “Swiping shit from a crime scene, that’s a felony.”

  Vikström turns to his partner. “It’s Santuzza.”

  SEVEN

  Connor Raposo has had a bad night, rolling around on the Winnebago’s thin mattress. He thinks of how Vasco had grown alert when he’d described Sal Nicoletti, then how Vasco had gone blank and denied knowing Nicoletti in any way, shape, or form. Vasco is an operator, a fixer, a jive artist who knows a lot of people and hangs out with bad guys. He isn’t a bad guy per se, or so Connor tells himself, but in the world of operators, information about someone like Nicoletti might be salable. Why had Connor mentioned him? Only to get his brother’s attention, to impress him.

  Vaughn sleeps nearby on the foldout love seat. He, too, on that night is a restless sleeper. Every so often he shouts out a word, like “connubial” or “walrus.” When these nocturnal outcries occurred on their first night after leaving San Diego, Connor leaped from bed, thoroughly unnerved. “Despair!” “Heartbreak!” But the words had no clear applicability or context, and soon Connor grew if not used to them at least tolerant. But tonight Vaughn shouts more often and with greater force: “Bucket!” “Boyfriend!”

  The wind has been building all night, and around three in the morning the snow begins to come down hard. Connor hears ice crystals clicking against the glass. Fleetingly, he feels the excitement he felt as a child from hearing the season’s first snow against the window in his bedroom. Jumping from bed, he’d look out toward the streetlight to see the big flakes swirling down. School might be closed, and there were sledding possibilities.

  He’s woken at seven by Vaughn shouting, “Wow, wow, wow!” as he looks out the window at the snow. It comes down hard enough to obscure anything more than fifteen feet away, making the Winnebago an island in an ocean of white. Vaughn’s a Southern California kid, and to him this is a big deal. Soon Eartha emerges from the bedroom tying the cord of a yellow silk robe. She joins Vaughn at the window. “Neat,” she says. Then she begins cracking eggs for breakfast: twelve eggs in one big omelet with onions, mushrooms, and cheese.

  Didi wanders out of the bedroom in a matching yellow silk robe. His silver-gray hair is disheveled, the silver wings droop, and he’s out of sorts. “Fuckin’ snow, I sure hope we don’t get stuck here.”

  Connor hasn’t seen Didi since he returned the previous evening from the casino. “Is it true you used to be called Nonô?”

  Didi pauses in midstep. “I take it you’ve been talking to your brother. I’ve had a number of names, but now I’m definitely Didi.”

  “I like Nonô,” says Eartha. “It’s cute.”

  And Vaughn says, “No, no, no, no, no!”

  Again Didi swears as he enters the tiny bathroom and then adds, “Didi, Didi, Didi!” Vaughn is pulling on his jeans and boots. Before Connor can even think of getting out of bed, Vaughn is out the door, which he leaves open. Eartha pushes it shut.

  “Has your name always been Connor?” asks Eartha.

  Connor begins to say no and then pauses. “My aunt in Lisbon calls me Zeco, which is short for Juan Carlos. My brother calls me Zeco as well. After high school I changed it to Connor.”

  “So we all have phony names?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. It says ‘Connor’ on my driver’s license and tax forms, so that’s who I am. It’s an Irish name, and my mother’s part Irish.”

  “Zeco,” says Eartha. “I like Zeco. It’s different.” She repeats it to herself as she moves to the stove.

  After Connor gets dressed, he goes to the window. Onions are sizzling in a frying pan. Didi’s on the phone, complaining to somebody. Connor sees Vaughn running down the beach through the fal
ling snow with his arms outstretched and his tongue poking out to catch the snowflakes. Then he runs back. Marco Santuzza’s black leather motorcycle cap bounces on his head with sympathetic exuberance.

  The day’s business starts after breakfast. Didi hands out lists of names and phone numbers retrieved from local veterinarians for Free Beagles from Nicotine Addiction, Inc. He also has the phone numbers of Catholics who may be interested in the Holy Sisters of the Blessed Little Feet, which has been a steady moneymaker for seventy-five years. Some charities are less specific, like Mittens for Mothers; some are very specific, like Homeopathic Bras for Big-Breasted Homeless Women; some are surely impossible, like Orphans from Outer Space. But today they concentrate on the beagles.

  We might think Didi would have more success with more familiar charities, like those helping flood victims and cancer patients, but that’s not the point. He wants “to push the envelope,” he wants to see what he can get away with. Some days he talks of it as an art piece, other days he describes the book he plans to write about gullibility. Although when he suggests Halfway Houses for Homosexual Horses and Toilets for the Indigent Left-Handed, Connor and Eartha vote him down. But Didi knows the name doesn’t matter. What matters is the spiel, the patter, and he once raised a thousand dollars with his pitch for Victims of Roadkill Gastronomy. Even Orphans from Outer Space has brought in several hundred.

  Absurd, we say? Yes, but that’s the point: How absurd a story can someone swallow? Didi lives for that moment when the potential donor is balanced between yes and no as if on a knife blade. He or she leans first one way and then the other. Didi gives another nudge, and the potential donor topples toward the yes. When he received his first contribution for Orphans from Outer Space, he bought a jeroboam of champagne. Sure, it’s far-fetched, but think: nearly half the population believes the earth is less than ten thousand years old, and right now we can probably find one hundred galoots praying to a potato that loosely resembles the Virgin Mary. Consequently, Orphans from Outer Space stands a chance.

  When Connor calls his uncle cynical, Didi laughs it off. How is it cynical to identify folks ready to send checks to Orphans from Outer Space? They’re grateful he’s put his finger on a problem that’s been troubling them. He’s doing them a favor.

  “Solemnity’s a kind of fear,” he tells Connor. “It’s walking rigidity. Have you ever seen a laughing general? No? That’s why we have wars. Flexibility demands the possibility of the comic. If we knew that nobody, absolutely nobody, would ever again slip on a banana peel, life wouldn’t be worth living.”

  “So is Bounty, Inc. meant to raise money?” asks Connor. “Or is it meant to prove your peculiar philosophy?”

  “A bit of both, actually. But I’m not cynical. You want cynical, go talk to your brother Vasco. Me, I’m full of hope.”

  So by eight o’clock the calls begin. Eartha has a list of older beagle owners, and she starts at the top. “Hi, Mandy? Mandy Adams? Do you want little Spikey to cough his lungs out in an awful death?” Eartha uses her best mix of purr and growl.

  A pause follows as Mandy Adams thinks, Don’t I know that voice from someplace? Then, nervously, “Who is this?”

  “Coercive nicotine addiction kills thirty thousand beagles a year.”

  Hushed voice: “Have we met before?”

  “Most were snatched off the street by nomadic bands of canine thieves. I hope you keep little Spikey under lock and key.”

  Another nervous pause, then, “He’s here on my lap, safe and sound. I know your voice, I’m sure I do.”

  “Think of me as an old friend,” Eartha purrs. “Think of me as loving little Spikey as much as you do. Beagles that smoke develop yellow lips.”

  Didi claims that if you can get a customer this far into the conversation, he or she is certain to contribute. “It’s just plain science,” he says. “They take a bite, then another bite, and then the sandwich grabs them.”

  So Vaughn and Eartha work their Walmart cell phones, and Didi prepares the envelopes and forms to be mailed to the good citizens who have pledged various sums of money.

  But Connor, what’s he doing? Standing at the window, he stares at the snow swirling onto the beach and thinks about his brother. He tries to explain to himself all the ways he might be mistaken about Vasco’s ill intentions. It’s a short list. He also tries to calculate the possibility that his brother is telling the truth and he’s never heard of Sal Nicoletti. But the chances are low. And Connor knows that he wants his brother to be telling the truth, and that by itself is a reason to distrust him.

  Connor goes to the bedroom to telephone in private a guy he’d worked with in Detroit, a blackjack dealer called Roy, although his real name is Franklin. The golden satin sheets are bunched into a ball, and the overheated room smells of sex and sweat. Connor tries not to let this bother him. Ripped condom packs dot the rug. Some are scarlet, some are cobalt blue. Connor turns to face the wall.

  Roy’s been asleep. “Yeah?”

  Connor identifies himself and asks a few general questions like “How’ve you been? What’s the weather like?” Roy interrupts him. “You fuckin’ wake me up out of a sound sleep at nine o’clock in the morning to ask how I’ve been? I got home at five, and I’m tired, that’s how I am. So screw you and—”

  “Don’t hang up! This is important. I need to find out about a guy who I think used to work at the casino. Right now he calls himself Sal Nicoletti.”

  Roy is silent a few seconds. “I don’t recognize the name. Why’s it matter?”

  “I’m ninety percent sure he worked at the MGM Grand, but he denies it. He says he’s never been in Detroit.” Connor describes Nicoletti: his height, his pompadour, his swagger.

  “And where are you calling from?”

  “Rhode Island.”

  “That’s where you’ve seen this Nicoletti?”

  “More or less.”

  Roy appears to be thinking. Connor can hear him sucking his teeth. “Let me get some coffee.” He puts down the phone, and Connor hears him walking away across a wooden floor. Five minutes later he hears him walking back.

  “About eight months ago, the attorney general’s office brought a case against a Detroit casino because of discrepancies between the revenue counted in the soft room and the numbers passed on by the revenue audit manager. He was charged, as were others. Originally, the revenue audit supervisor was also charged, but charges were dropped when he agreed to testify. The supervisor was the main witness, but the trial ended in a hung jury. Jurors may have been compromised—like, threatened. Now I hear the attorney general’s office is in the process of beefing up their case while adding charges of jury tampering.”

  “What about the supervisor?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “Dead?”

  “The feds spirited him away. He’ll testify in the next trial, if there is one. I don’t recall his name, but it wasn’t Nicoletti. I never laid eyes on him, as far as I know, except I heard some guys talking about his hair. The guy you’re describing and this supervisor might be the same guy. On the other hand, he might not be the same guy.”

  “Can you get his name?”

  “Why’re you interested?”

  “I heard Vasco talking about someone,” lies Connor. “It sounded like someone I’d met here in town.”

  “Well, your brother’s the type who’d know. You talking to him about it?”

  “He won’t talk, but he swears he’s never heard of this Nicoletti. I think he’s lying, and it worries me.”

  “That still doesn’t say why you’re interested.”

  “I guess I don’t want Nicoletti to get hurt. He’s got a wife and kids. Don’t mention this to anybody, okay? It could be a nightmare.”

  “I’m just a little guy, and little guys stay safe by keeping their mouths shut. I don’t squawk about good news, I don’t squawk about bad news. So how’d your brother learn about this Nicoletti?”

  “Because I was stupid, really stupid. One
last question: Vasco seems associated with someone named Chucky. You know him?”

  There’s silence from the other end. Connor waits and begins to suspect a dropped call when Roy says, “Let me give you two answers. The first is, I know nothing about him. The second is, stay away from him.” Roy cuts the connection.

  —

  Benny Vikström gets a phone call at seven Tuesday morning. It’s his partner, Manny Streeter, who often tells Vikström that a mentally healthy person, like himself, needs only four hours of sleep per night. Vikström needs eight, and on his days off he likes to get ten.

  “Rise and shine, Detective, ha, ha, ha!”

  Vikström lies on his back in bed with his cell phone pressed to his ear. “What do you want?”

  “There was a breakin last night at Burns Insurance, where Robert Rossi’s a CPA. Fat Bob, remember?”

  “And?” Vikström sits up and stares down at his toes. The nails need cutting.

  “The only thing stolen was Fat Bob’s computer. The thief busted through the back door to the alley. There was nothing subtle about it. There’s an alarm, but the guy was gone by the time the cops arrived. He knew exactly what he wanted. Oh, yes, security cameras. The guy was wearing a big winter hat and a big coat. For that matter, we’re not even sure it was a man. You want to check out the scene? I’ll be at your house in five minutes. I got the four-wheel drive. But make sure you wear your boots. We got snow.”

  “That’s great news,” says Vikström as he gives his cell phone the finger. Looking toward the window, he sees the snow. His wife says, “Remember to button up.” Vikström wonders why she thinks he would forget to button up.

  Vikström is making a cup of instant coffee when Manny arrives. His watch cap, his boots, and the shoulders of his coat are snow-covered and drip onto the kitchen floor. “You don’t have time for that,” says Manny.

  Vikström ignores him and pours the coffee into a travel cup. “Is there any news about Fat Bob?”

  “Not a whisper. Either those guys last night caught up with him or he got away. Like everything—either it happens or it doesn’t.”