Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?: A Novel

by Stephen Dobyns

  But now a man in a hooded sweatshirt opens a back door of the Denali, crosses the street, and vanishes somewhere beneath the doctor, who can only bend his head so much before drawing the notice of his patient, who continues with his monotonous drone.

  Then, a few minutes later, a man in a gray fedora climbs from the Yukon Denali, looks both ways, and slowly approaches Sal’s building. Later, when asked to describe the man, Dr. Goodenough can recall only the fedora; as for the rest, it was “pretty usual,” though the doctor also vaguely recalls dark clothing and sunglasses. In any case, the man’s walk was relaxed and purposeful, as if he were on his way to a relatively unexciting appointment, for instance to a dentist for his annual checkup. One might ask if the man with the gold and the man in the fedora are business associates, or at least Dr. Goodenough asks this. Perhaps they are even friends. He thinks about it, while half listening to his patient. Same old, same old, he tells himself bitterly, as the man in the fedora disappears up the stairs.

  The patient’s name is equally unimportant. We shouldn’t have to bother with it. But for those whose pens are raised, his name is George Ledbetter, though he’s no relation to the blues singer Leadbelly, has never heard of the blues singer, and isn’t African-American. Mr. Ledbetter has been seeing Dr. Goodenough three days a week for three years, and each appointment is a double appointment lasting one hundred minutes. The doctor has only six other patients, and so Mr. Ledbetter is a major source of income at five hundred dollars a pop.

  At the start Dr. Goodenough was so fascinated with Mr. Ledbetter’s complaint that he was happy to spend three hundred minutes a week with him, month after month, year after year. But now it’s torture, and he has come to consider himself a prostitute forced to accept the dark confusion of Mr. Ledbetter’s affliction just to pay the bills. And he wouldn’t be one of those glamorous and high-priced prostitutes. Oh, no. He’s the one who taps on your car window when you pause at a stoplight.

  Hardly five minutes pass when the man in the fedora emerges from the building and hurries to the Denali. He no longer appears calm and quickly turns this way and that, even spinning around to see if anyone is behind him before jumping into the SUV and slamming the door. Then tires squeal, and the SUV drives off faster than Dr. Goodenough thinks safe. He sighs and turns back to his patient. “But you again avoided arrest,” he says, stifling a yawn.

  Mr. Ledbetter is a squeezer. His compulsion is to visit the bakery aisles of supermarkets to squeeze the loaves of white bread. And sometimes he pleasures himself, sometimes he moans, and sometimes he attracts the attention of customers who may complain. Indeed, Mr. Ledbetter makes no secret of his complaint as he pleasures himself with one white loaf after another, leaving behind a mutilated trail of loaves no longer in neat rectangular blocks but as various as the shapes in a geometry textbook, because Mr. Ledbetter likes to squeeze the loaves until their plastic pops, and then he pulls up his shirt and rubs the remnants against his white belly.

  But now Dr. Goodenough has turned again to the window to focus on a thin, ragged fellow in a baseball cap and a filthy raincoat hurrying along the sidewalk. Hardly a minute has passed since the man in the fedora was driven away. The doctor has seen this ragged man often, and observing him has provided hours of relief from Mr. Ledbetter as the man solicits spare change from pedestrians and slaps at an invisible appendage extending from his backside. The man, of course, is Fidget, though the doctor doesn’t know his name, and Fidget zigzags up the sidewalk because it’s been years since Fidget has walked in a straight line. His destination is the street door leading to the upstairs offices. Fidget grabs the handle, looks slyly in both directions, passes through the doorway, and disappears.

  Dr. Goodenough finds this of potential interest, because he knows that the only person in residence upstairs this Wednesday is the man with the gold and the eelskin cowboy boots, but he doubts that Fidget and the man are friends.

  Of course, Dr. Goodenough often tells Mr. Ledbetter he can squeeze his loaves of white bread in the privacy of his home, but Mr. Ledbetter likes the variety found in supermarkets. He likes to choose and exercise his free will. He likes to be seen by others and enjoys their startled looks. But Mr. Ledbetter has grown unpopular in his first-choice markets, so his selections have grown farther afield as he seeks out a market that is virginal.

  If we could eavesdrop at a convention of supermarket employees, we would find that someone like Mr. Ledbetter is a hot topic. Speaker after speaker would take the stage to describe how Mr. Ledbetter first clutches the middle of the loaf until his fingers touch, then he grasps both ends and twists, and as his excitement grows and his eyes roll to the ceiling in a manner suggestive of rapture, he gently pushes each end of the loaf inward, then pulls outward, then pushes inward again, as if the loaf were an edible concertina. It is here the moaning begins as the plastic pops and Mr. Ledbetter buffs his belly with the bread bits bursting from the bag.

  Dr. Goodenough has heard this often, and he no longer offers advice or asks how it makes Mr. Ledbetter feel or if he had an unhappy childhood. Mr. Ledbetter, it’s clear, has no interest in getting over his obsession; he wants only to share it with an intelligent person who won’t talk. So the doctor’s role is simply to endure.

  But luckily the doctor has his window, and soon he sees Fidget burst from the street door and fall to the sidewalk. A passerby attempts to help him to his feet, and Fidget shoves him away. His face, as we often read in novels, is a mask of terror. He drops something. It might be a yellow necklace. He grabs it and then performs a zigzag sprint down the street until he disappears from view.

  Dr. Goodenough doesn’t recall that specific necklace, but he knows where Fidget got it. He’s also sure it wasn’t a gift, because why should Fidget run and show such terror? No, he must have swiped it, and Dr. Goodenough waits for the man in the eelskin boots to rush through the door in pursuit. But no way will that happen.

  As for Mr. Ledbetter, one shouldn’t think he never offers up some variation of topic. No, every session has its wrinkle, and today Mr. Ledbetter expresses a concern about his age and weight, both of which are advanced. The trouble with white bread, he tells the doctor, is that the bran and wheat germ have been removed from the flour, thus increasing the carbohydrates and lessening the number of vitamins and nutrients. In addition, to make the bread whiter, various flour-bleaching agents are added, like chlorine dioxide gas and potassium bromate. Mr. Ledbetter wonders if this is healthy. It might even hurt him. Should he stop? Otherwise he might collapse or fall down dead on the street.

  The chance of Mr. Ledbetter’s falling down dead fills the doctor with such pleasure that he utters a sigh. Then he sees another man at the street door to the upstairs offices, and it’s the man who helped Fidget to his feet. This is someone the doctor doesn’t recognize, but he’s young, tanned, and dark-haired. He wears a gray suit, and the doctor even identifies his Bruno Magli shoes, because he has often yearned for a pair. This, of course, is Connor Raposo, who has learned the location of Sal Nicoletti’s office and intends to confess to Sal that he has inadvertently blown his cover. It has taken Connor great courage to reach this point. It’s a pity he’s too late.

  “Multigrain and sprouted wheat!” shouts Mr. Ledbetter, because he’s noticed Dr. Goodenough looking out the window. “I need twelve-grain loaves: sourdough and pumpernickel and German dinkelbrot. But I don’t like them.” He says the multigrain loaves are tougher than white bread, and the crumbs get into his undershorts and itch. “They’ve no give, no surrender.” Squeezing a multigrain loaf would be like squeezing a skinny old lady. “They lack the youthful zest. They’re born stale!”

  Dr. Goodenough’s indifference is as weighty as a dead gorilla. Even if Mr. Ledbetter said he’d eaten toads, the doctor would only yawn. It’s as if Mr. Ledbetter were no longer human, hardly mammal, and although the doctor is mildly shocked by his own lack of concern, he also feels a sense of release. Mr. Ledbetter could burst into flames and the doctor would
only feel sympathy for the chair. Mr. Ledbetter stares at him, eagerly waiting for a response. Dr. Goodenough turns to the window.

  He’s in time to see Connor slam open the downstairs door, stumble, and nearly fall. Though his face doesn’t express terror, it definitely expresses shock. He catches himself on a handicapped-parking sign, pushes his hands though his hair in unstudied frenzy, and runs down the street toward the train station.

  “You’re not paying attention to me, Doctor,” says Mr. Ledbetter sharply.

  Dr. Goodenough looks back and raises one cautioning finger. “Please shut up.” He reaches for the phone. “I believe I must call 911.”

  It’s too bad that Dr. Goodenough has turned from the window, because he misses seeing the man with the hooded sweatshirt run across the street and enter Sal’s building. However, it’s unlikely the man does more than take a quick look, because a minute later he emerges from the building and disappears.

  —

  Manny Streeter and Benny Vikström stand in front of Sal Nicoletti’s desk and stare down at his corpse with the red plastic rose protruding from the middle of his forehead. How disgusting, thinks Manny. How odd, thinks Vikström.

  “Is that supposed to be funny?” says Manny. “I don’t find it funny.”

  “Maybe it’s a kind of signature,” says Vikström.

  “Yeah, well, I still don’t find it funny.”

  “Maybe it’s not meant to be funny,” says Vikström.

  If Didi were here, he’d say the rose protruding from the bullet hole in the forehead is comic. And, if pushed, he’d add that comic is to funny what beautiful is to cute. One is not obliged to laugh at the comic. Living, Mickey Mouse is funny; dead, he’s comic. In fact, Didi would say the rose in the bullet hole is tradiculous while still belonging to the middle range of event. No, no, we might argue: the manner of Sal’s murder lies outside any middle range, as does murder plain and simple. But Didi says we reduce the width of the middle range to make life tolerable. We shrink it to exclude criminal behavior, perversion, cruelty, even poverty. We say those things belong to the extremes and so don’t belong to us. Didi, however, is a militant generalist. He says that Orphans from Outer Space, Inc. and Toilets for the Indigent Left-Handed, Inc. are also part of the middle range and deserve our attention. After all, that expanded middle keeps him in business, just as it keeps Manny and Vikström in business.

  Perhaps Vikström is correct and the rose is a signature. No doubt that it is the focal point of the entire room. It even seems to take precedence over Sal Nicoletti’s dead body, and it is difficult for the detectives not to stare at it. Manny and Vikström don’t know Sal, nor have they heard of Dante Barbarella. But they recognize Sal from the day of the accident, and he was someone they wanted to talk to. After all, he was suspected of giving the all-systems-go sign to Pappalardo to tromp on the gas and send his truck into the path of the onrushing Fat Bob motorcycle, ridden by Marco Santuzza. So he was more than a person of interest. But they have yet to instigate a serious search. They hadn’t gotten around to it. Busy days can be like that.

  Manny remembers something else about Sal from when he’d noticed him at the accident. He’d been wearing a number of gold chains.

  “Where’s the bling?” he asks.

  Vikström wears rubber gloves, actually cheap plastic. He moves forward and steadies the corpse with a hand on his shoulder. Then he checks Sal’s pockets.

  After another moment he straightens up. “Where’s the wallet?”

  Dr. Goodenough has given the detectives a full description of what he’d seen: first it was Sal Nicoletti, then a man wearing a hooded sweatshirt had gotten out of the SUV and walked away, then came the man with the fedora, next came Fidget, and lastly came Connor Raposo. Sal Nicoletti had never emerged. The others had run from the building “like their tails were on fire,” the doctor said. He also said that when Fidget fell, he’d seen a flash of color in one of his hands like a yellow chain.

  “Fuck me,” Manny says, “Fidget’s got the bling.”

  We said earlier that this Wednesday was for Fidget “the best of days and the worst of days, the luckiest of days and the least fortunate of days.” The moment before Manny said, “Fuck me, Fidget’s got the bling” was the highest point of Fidget’s good fortune. Now it descends.

  “And the other guy,” says Vikström, “the one with the tan and wearing the gray suit. The one with expensive shoes. He’s the guy who was talking to Nicoletti after the accident.”

  The detectives are pleased to make such quick progress. As for the fellow with the fedora, for the time being they don’t wish to think about him. The trouble with wearing a fedora and heavy black Ray-Bans is that they will be all a witness remembers, which was probably the point of wearing them.

  Lost in this excitement is the man who got out of the Denali and walked away. Dr. Goodenough said the man had crossed the street and disappeared somewhere beneath him. But perhaps he didn’t walk away.

  —

  The detectives remain in Sal’s office or out on the street until the body is removed. One of the forensics guys takes the rose from Sal’s forehead, and he is criticized for this, but of course there are pictures. Much time is spent seeking out fingerprints. This, basically, is a waste of time, because none will belong to the man in the fedora. The wall behind Sal’s chair is a wide splatter of blood and tissue, which leads Manny to say that the killer used a hollow-point bullet. He then digs it out of the wall with a penknife and shows Vikström how it has mushroomed. The bullet is a metal dollop. The shell isn’t found.

  In the file cabinet are phone books, empty manila folders, and receipts that may show how Sal was spending his time. The computer is taken to police headquarters. In the belly drawer of the desk is a small pile of porn magazines, a box of tissues, a deck of cards, a pack of peppermint-flavored sugarless gum, and a few bills from Sal’s landlord and the phone company (Verizon). Manny calls the landlord, telling him to come to the office. The other drawers contain only dust.

  Manny and Vikström, with other police officers, talk to clerks and store owners up and down the street. A number of people saw the Yukon Denali, but they didn’t pay attention to the license plate. One said it was from Massachusetts, another said from New York, another from Rhode Island, others from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Kansas. People also saw the man with the fedora and dark glasses—or rather, they recalled the fedora and nothing else except that the man was “average-sized” and perhaps wore dark glasses. One claimed it was a woman.

  Many recalled Sal, who’d eaten in the restaurants and cafés or just walked around as if he had nothing to do, which, given the contents of his office, was probably the case. But no one talked to him—or at least did more than exchange brief remarks. Sal made it clear he didn’t want to chat. In fact, he was unpleasant. But some also recalled the gold chains and the bracelet and rings. “Showing off on Bank Street,” says a man. “What a jerk.” No one saw him signal to Leon Pappalardo to drive backward, other than the lawyer who told Manny about it on Monday.

  Many also knew Fidget, and five or six say they’d seen him on the street that day. One disagreeable man says it would be good for everybody if Fidget were put in jail. The panhandling lowered the tone of the street. “And what tone is that?” Manny asked. But the man had no answer. Police are on the lookout for Fidget and patrol cars are actively searching.

  No one recalled the young man with the tan, but that changes when Vikström reaches the shoe-repair shop, where the cobbler recollects the Bruno Maglis. As for their owner, he was young, moderately handsome, and had a tan. He was also driving a small blue car, which had been blocked from leaving after the accident. Oh, yes, he had a claim ticket for the shoes: Connor Raposo, but no address or phone number. The cobbler also recollects that it was a rush job and the shoes were only brought in the previous Saturday. The man was from out of town and would be leaving again soon. “How far out of town?” asks Vikström. Maybe from California, says the cobbl
er. Maybe San Diego.

  Reporters and TV people start arriving, and the crowd near the ambulance increases. Manny sees a red-and-black mackinaw, but not the face of the person wearing it. Does he guess that it’s Jack Sprat? Maybe. The detectives stay quiet about the red plastic rose planted in Sal’s skull. The information would create too much excitement, which makes for an atmosphere the detectives dislike.

  FOURTEEN

  In the afternoon Manny and Vikström drive over to Sal Nicoletti’s house. They have gotten the address from Sal’s landlord for the office. They need to tell Céline that her husband is dead. The passing on of such information is a job they never look forward to, and recently with Mrs. Santuzza’s hysteria and Fat Bob’s ex-wife’s venom they’ve had enough of that business to last a while.

  They arrive at the brick ranch house on Glenwood Place around four o’clock and trudge up to the door. Each waits for the other to knock, then they reach out together, then Manny pulls back and Vikström knocks. They wait. Then Manny knocks. The street is quiet except for a barking dog.

  When the door opens, Manny grins at Vikström as if the knocking had been a competition and Manny has won. But then they focus on Céline, who stands before them in short shorts and a black T-shirt. Her jet-black hair hangs loosely over her shoulders. She doesn’t speak or make any expression. She just waits.

  Manny and Vikström show her their ID. “I’m afraid we need to talk to you,” says Vikström.

  Still without speaking, Céline turns, and the two detectives follow her into the living room. It’s not as if Manny and Vikström need to stare at her ass and legs; rather, there seems to be no other place to look, and looking feels both energizing and restful. Tarty, thinks Manny. Stunning, thinks Vikström. In both there arises a sense of melancholy, as if Céline’s backside gave witness to what they have missed in life.