Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?: A Novel

by Stephen Dobyns

  Connor wishes he could make her smile, but this is not the day. He decides if she and Sal are in a witness-protection program, then it makes sense for them to be suspicious. It’s not personal.

  “When’s Sal getting home?”

  The woman half turns. “Around six.”

  “So he’ll be home this evening?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can I call him? What’s the phone number?”

  The woman doesn’t answer. Connor is about to give up, but then she says, “Give me your phone number instead.”

  Maybe this is a step forward, maybe it’s nothing. He recites his cell phone number. “Can you remember it, or should I write it down?”

  “I’ll remember it.” She keeps shoveling.

  “Don’t forget to tell him Connor stopped by, okay?”

  He doesn’t hear her answer, but maybe there was no answer. He’s irritated with himself because he wants the woman to like him, though he has no intentions as far as she’s concerned, and hardly any hopes. It’s all just fantasy stuff. He puts the car in gear and drives off. He doesn’t wave good-bye.

  —

  Fidget leans against a wall on Bank Street. He’s cold. The snow covers his Red Sox cap, raincoat, and jeans. His sneakers are buried in it. Around his neck is a thick, blue, and very expensive scarf, which is also snow-covered. What’s a homeless guy doing with a pricey scarf? Fidget’s long, reptilian tail makes mild moves of protest. It’s half frozen, but Fidget doesn’t care. “Fuck you, tail!” Let it suffer. Blanketed with snow and being so thin, Fidget looks like a permanent fixture, a snow-encased version of the parking meter to which he was compared earlier. His mind, too, is frozen, and his thoughts are slow. He’s been standing here an hour waiting for the man whose office is on the second floor across the street to exit the building: his meal ticket, his bag of gold, his savior. Fidget has something to say to him.

  Of course, Fidget can cross the street, climb the stairs to his office, and give a speech about helping the poor or else. But he worries the man won’t be happy with this, that he’ll become violent, even murderous. Hasn’t he been murderous before? So Fidget decides it’s best to talk in some public place, like the middle of the street.

  Fidget has learned the guy on the Harley wasn’t Fat Bob but Marco Santuzza. He has also learned, from overhearing two cops, that Santuzza’s wallet is missing. It was attached to his belt by a chain, and the chain snapped in the accident. The cops thought the wallet had been thrown into the air, just like the head, and that it’s now buried under snow someplace nearby. Fidget has looked a few places, along the curbs and behind trash cans, but the snow makes it difficult. So now he waits for the snow to melt. Fidget, being a street person, believes that all articles lost on the street belong to him. This makes the street, to his way of thinking, his personal backyard.

  But first things first, thinks Fidget, which is why he concentrates on the man in the upstairs office. Why’d he want to kill Fat Bob? That’s the question. Fidget has spent hours looking for Fat Bob, maybe to warn him, if Fat Bob gives something back in return. He had walked to his office at Burns Insurance, but the place was locked up. He walked to his ex-wife’s place on Brainard, not knowing there was an ex-wife, and got yelled at by a cop sitting outside in a cruiser. He walked all the way to Fat Bob’s new house, but he wasn’t there either. Worse, the house had been broken into, and Fat Bob’s stuff was scattered on the floor. Fidget took half a fried chicken from the refrigerator, two bottles of Bud Light, and an unopened box of crackers he’d found under a table. He would have taken more, but he got scared. Oh, yes, he also took from a closet this beautiful blue scarf that’s keeping his neck as warm as toast. Then he walked back to Bank Street to wait for the guy with the black pompadour.

  —

  Vikström and Manny Streeter cross the I-95 bridge around nine that Tuesday morning on their way to Brewster, Rhode Island, at about the same time that Connor Raposo crosses the bridge, going in the other direction to New London. Manny might be thinking, That’s a cute little blue car over there, but we have no information about that. Vikström has his eyes shut and is going, “La-la-la-la.”

  Manny swerves back and forth on the snow to see if he can get the Subaru to skid. Nope. The four-wheel drive keeps a tenacious grip.

  Once off the bridge, Vikström bursts out, “Why do you treat me like this? We’re supposed to be partners!”

  “Treat you like what?” Manny’s voice is as innocent as a politician’s caught with his pants down.

  “Like you’re trying to drive me nuts!” Vikström wonders if he can get sick pay for a nervous breakdown. The thought of two weeks without Manny makes him sigh.

  Manny thinks of the old joke: Drive you nuts? It’s only a short putt. “I don’t appreciate your attitude, Benny. Why should I drive you nuts?” Deep in his brain, Manny is laughing and clapping his hands.

  “Screw you,” says Vikström. He turns to stare out the side window.

  Manny is silent for a minute. Then he begins to sing just loud enough for Vikström to hear: “‘An old cowpoke went ridin’ out one dark and windy day. Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way. When all at once a mighty herd of red-eyed cows he saw / Come rushin’ through the ragged skies and up a cloudy draw.’”

  Yes, thinks Vikström, a nervous breakdown was possible, but would he get dizzy first or see black spots or pull out his hair? Would he bolt screaming down the street or strip naked in front of the police chief? Oh, madness has many symptoms he might soon discover.

  But let’s return to the bigger picture. Sometimes intimate details are just a distraction, mere tale-telling, and everyone has a right to his own secrets.

  Vikström and Manny have decided to track down Leon Pappalardo. He, as we know, had been driving the green truck. If in fact he’d received a signal to stomp on the gas and rocket back across Bank Street, then the police would like a few words with him, as a prologue to arresting his ass.

  But Pappalardo lives in Brewster, Rhode Island, which is off-limits to New London cops. It means they have no clout, which is offensive to those for whom clout is a raison d’être. Pappalardo in the safety of his living room can’t be arrested; he can’t even be bullied. He’d have to be extradited to Connecticut, which requires paperwork. Such a nuisance. But at least the Brewster chief might let them visit Pappalardo so they can extract the words to slap his ass in jail, even if that jail is in Rhode Island.

  The Brewster police chief, Brendan Gazzola, is fairly new to his job, having replaced the realtor who preceded him: a realtor, for Pete’s sake. Vikström and Manny haven’t met Gazzola and know nothing about him, except that he is said to be an improvement. When Manny turns off of Route 1 toward Brewster, Vikström gives Gazzola a call. Common courtesy might suggest they should have called earlier; now Manny and Vikström are barely five minutes away. But the detectives justify the abruptness of their visit by saying that if Gazzola has a problem with their wish to question Pappalardo, they’ll be right in his face in no time. It should come as no surprise that many city cops don’t take small-town cops seriously, and if Chief Gazzola ever had a major crime, like a murder, he’d call the staties, as has happened in the past.

  So Vikström calls, and it takes a minute for the chief’s secretary to track down her boss. “He was outside smoking a cigarette. What else is new, right?”

  Vikström can’t comment about this.

  Gazzola comes on the line. He has the raspy, gurgling voice of a broken sewer pipe. Introductions and explanations are made. As for Leon Pappalardo, Vikström says he only wants to talk to him, but perhaps someone from the Brewster police department should come along in case of difficulties.

  Chief Gazzola keeps it short. “No problem. Glad to help. See you soon.”

  Vikström cuts the connection. “We’re all set.”

  Chief Gazzola waits for the New London detectives on the front steps of the police station. He’s smoking. Manny parks, and the detecti
ves get out. A warm southern wind has begun to nibble the snow.

  “Hey, I’m over here!” shouts Gazzola. In fact, he’s the only other person in sight. He drops the cigarette and grinds it with his heel. Heaps of snow flank the steps, but the steps themselves have been nicely shoveled.

  Greetings are exchanged. Gazzola is a tall, cadaverous man in his fifties. His fingers are stained dark yellow from tobacco, and his skin is as gray as cardboard. He begins to cough a series of phlegm-packed, liquid coughs that turn his face pink. Then he twists around to spit a yellow dollop into the snow.

  “I do a lot of work out here,” says Gazzola, looking around the steps. “I can smoke, and inside I have to chew Nicorettes. So I end up saving money.”

  “Very sensible,” says Manny.

  Gazzola gives him a look to gauge his tone but reaches no conclusions. “No reason to go inside. You know how it is: people always want something. We can drive to Pappalardo’s right now. His wife works at a hospital in Providence, but I expect he’s home.”

  The chief drives a spotless black Lincoln Town Car with super suspension. It has a soothing, aquatic motion. Closing his eyes in the backseat, Vikström imagines he’s on a raft at sea. He conjures up sailboats and dolphins. Mermaids flit by.

  “They let you smoke in this car?” asks Manny.

  “The city council’s putting it to a vote. So everything’s up in the air till then, meaning no smoking. They were supposed to give me a driver, too, but no dice.”

  “It must be lonely at the top,” says Manny in a way that makes Vikström snap open his eyes.

  “It’s not bad. They give me a lunch allowance.”

  Pappalardo and his wife live on Newport Street, a few blocks from Morgan Memorial Hospital. It’s a gray Craftsman bungalow with two junipers in the front yard, which, in the snow, rouse Manny’s memories of youth. No footprints mar the snow’s smooth surface.

  “I love the snow, don’t you?” says Manny.

  No one answers. Vikström thinks he’s lying.

  Chief Gazzola pulls in to the driveway. The men get out and wade through the snow to the front porch. Gazzola lights a cigarette.

  “I hate to disturb the snow’s pristine surface,” says Manny.

  Vikström thinks, Give me a fuckin’ break. His shoes and socks are still wet from their visit to Fat Bob’s. If he catches a cold, he’ll instantly put in for sick leave.

  Gazzola climbs the wooden steps and pushes the bell. They can hear it ringing inside the house. Nothing happens. Gazzola pushes it again and knocks on the door. Time passes.

  “He must of left early,” says Gazzola.

  The covered front porch runs the width of the house, with a large window on either side of the door. Manny goes to the window on the left. Vikström goes to the right. They peer in.

  “You goin’ to head back to New London, or you want to get lunch? My treat,” says Gazzola. “I can pick up Pappalardo once he gets home.”

  Vikström cups his hands around his eyes so he can see more clearly into the living room. At first he sees nothing; then that changes. “There’s something over here you should look at, Chief.”

  Chief Gazzola isn’t a reader and brags about it. “Books make you dumb,” he’s fond of saying. But if he read mysteries, he’d feel a chill when Vikström says, “There’s something over here you should look at, Chief.” It’s a sentence we find in hundreds of crime novels. Manny recognizes it and joins Vikström. The three men peer through the window, bending forward and cupping their hands around their eyes. A brick fireplace faces the window, with an easy chair on either side. An archway on the right leads to a dining room. By the window is a dark library table.

  “What’s to see?” says Gazzola.

  Manny draws a sudden breath. “Keep looking.”

  It takes Gazzola about three more seconds. “Are those feet? Bare feet?”

  “This is a bad sign,” says Manny.

  “Don’t start,” says Vikström.

  “You think he’s napping?” asks Gazzola hopefully.

  Manny goes to the front door. It’s locked. Rearing back, he slams his boot against it just above the knob. With a cracking sound, the door springs open and hits a wall.

  “Hey, you can’t do that!” shouts Gazzola. “This is private property!”

  But Manny is already inside, followed quickly by Vikström.

  “You need a search warrant!” shouts Gazzola.

  Leon Pappalardo lies on his back with his bare feet sticking into the living room and the rest of him in the dining room. The feet are huge and pink. They look like inflatables. He wears baby blue pajamas with gold stars. It would be wrong to say that he lies in a pool of blood. It’s a lake.

  Manny and Vikström feel surges of pleasure that the body is in Rhode Island and not New London. Pappalardo has been shot in the chest, probably with a shotgun. A streak of blood and tissue is spread across the dining room table.

  Gazzola stands back by the front door. “Is he dead?”

  Neither detective answers. Vikström thinks that Pappalardo won’t have to worry about his weight anymore, won’t have to dye his hair. These are two of death’s small consolations.

  Gazzola joins them and fumbles for a cigarette. “Jesus, this is too big for me, way too big. I got to get the staties on the horn this very second!”

  NINE

  Yvonne Streeter is a woman of few doubts and many opinions, which she feels obliged to share with others. She lives in a twilight area between the assertive and pushy, and her opinions—or truths, as she calls them—exist for the benefit of her neighbors near and far. She likes being a policeman’s wife—a detective, no less—and she feels that some of Manny’s authority as a guardian of the people is borne on her shoulders as well. We might think its weight would become a burden, but Yvonne is a full-figured woman, size eighteen, and she looks upon women beneath size twelve with scorn.

  Such qualities give Yvonne a high-minded heft, and she takes care never to act in ways she sees as undignified, by which she means silliness, girlishness, giggling, blushing, nervousness, and tears. She walks as a queen walks, with her full weight upon her heels, and imagines herself an offensive lineman on morality’s football team. She does not brag, nor does she need to brag; she is amply defined by her measured words and movements.

  In her own house, she relaxes a little, which doesn’t mean she’s relaxed; rather, she loosens her moral corset a notch or two. Her kids are in California, and she enjoys her vocation of helping her husband with his police work by giving him advice. And she loves karaoke. When she’s up on the little stage of their karaoke box with the microphone gripped in her hands, she feels released from the day’s troubles, released from the necessity of being right, released from her size-eighteen authority; she imagines herself a butterfly broken free of its restricting cocoon.

  At times during the day, she takes a break from her housework or her volunteer hospital work, where she cheers up the terminally ill with recitations of life’s hard truths, and slips into the dimly lit karaoke box, steps onto the stage, and, without recorded music or the lyrics unrolling before her on the computer monitor, she sings from a place deep in her gut, sings in the way she felt born to sing, and her little beagle, Schultzie, will jump up beside her and howl his heart out, howls that swirl around her forceful singing like a figure skater on ice. You’d have to be sitting at one of the small tables to feel the glory of the moment.

  At times Yvonne loves Schultzie more than she loves karaoke, and at times she loves karaoke more than Schultzie, but mostly they run neck and neck through the allocation center of her desires. Schultzie is a two-year-old tricolor beagle with a jet-black saddle and light brown areas in the shapes of European countries. Although Schultzie cannot talk, he can howl meaningfully, while his mobile features form an exhaustive projection of idea and emotion.

  At noon the day after Marco Santuzza’s death, Yvonne’s telephone rings. It’s the landline, which is surprising because Yvonne an
d Manny rarely use the landline—they prefer their cells—and their number is unlisted. Yvonne stands in the hall in her tiger-striped bathrobe and eyes the phone suspiciously. After four rings she lifts the receiver. “Yes?”

  “Madam, do you want little Schultzie to cough his heart out in the throes of nicotine addiction?”

  The deep baritone voice carries within it the sound of galloping horses touched with distant thunder. It is a voice caressed by the melody of water swirling within an otherwise empty fifty-five-gallon metal drum. The faint vibrato creates for Yvonne images of dark shadows of rippling silk across a sunlit wall. And she fears that her heart might stop, so violently is it beating.

  “Do you want little Schultzie snatched from the street by roving bands of beagle thieves and spirited away to midnight laboratories where he’ll be forced to consume one coffin nail after another?”

  Yvonne is so stunned that she sits down on the rug next to the telephone table, torn as she is between the medium and the message. She’s caught within the rippling baritone, and the house around her vibrates as vigorously as a belly dancer’s abdomen at the crescendo of her display.

  “Vaughn?” she whispers. “Vaughn? Is it really you?”

  “It’s in your power to save Schultzie from a death as terrible as those faced by Christian martyrs. The needles and knives of medical research are a horrible fate for so sweet a hound.”

  Of course this isn’t the real Vaughn Monroe, “Old Leather Lungs,” but our own Vaughn who sits at the dinette table of the Winnebago parked in Brewster. He has made six calls, and Yvonne’s is the seventh name on the list. He has instructions and a script written by Didi with promptings of what he might say. Squeezing the phone between his ear and shoulder, he carefully paints his nails with clear polish.

  “Tell me,” whispers Yvonne, “is this the real Vaughn Monroe? Will you sing me ‘Racing with the Moon’? Please, please?”

  Yvonne’s response is like other responses Vaughn has received, though a bit stronger. The need, at this point, is not to let the woman get too excited. Otherwise she won’t hear his pitch.