Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?: A Novel

by Stephen Dobyns

  Manny and Vikström have heard nothing about the 911 call. Manny says, “I was just getting to that. We came personally to make sure you were safe.”

  “They called me and called my ex, and we’ve both got unlisted phones. A woman called about giving money to Prom Queens Anonymous. I Googled the name and couldn’t find it. And the guy who called today had a voice like a famous singer.”

  “Vaughn Monroe,” says Manny.

  Vikström’s surprised. “How’d you know?”

  Manny chooses not to say. “I’ve had my eye on him. Were you told to send the money to a post office box in New London?”

  Angelina nods. She finds Manny a reliable sort of fellow, unlike the other one.

  Vikström feels unsteady on his legs. “How d’you know this stuff?”

  Manny shrugs. “Elementary multitasking.”

  “The guy who came to the house, I told him to stop by later for my check. That’s why I called 911, so you could catch him.”

  “Good thinking, but I doubt he’ll show. We’ll stake out the post office.”

  Vikström keeps his mouth shut. Manny and Angelina have exchanged a look, which is not sexual but has marked them as platonic soul mates.

  “Can you describe the guy?” asks Manny.

  “He was young, tall, and he had a tan—”

  “Ah,” interrupts Manny. “We know him—Connor Raposo. Very dangerous. Do you feel safe? We could put you up in a hotel with a guard.”

  Manny shows no surprise that once again they’ve come across the young man with the tan, but Vikström is stunned. He’s torn between being impressed and disgusted by his partner. No way could Manny get permission to put Angelina in even a cheap motel. He begins to speak, but he sees that Manny and Angelina are communicating in a nonverbal region somewhere high above him, one from which he’s excluded. Maybe it’s not a bad thing, Vikström decides.

  “I’m okay here.” Angelina opens the door to the hall closet and stands on her tiptoes, reaching into the top shelf. Her tight jeans creak. “I have a weapon.” She pulls down a vicious-looking long stiletto. The detectives feel little surges of adrenaline.

  “It’s a Chinese folding spike bayonet. Daddy brought it back from Korea. He was a marine. He said I could use it against scumbags.” The bayonet is fifteen inches long and looks like a fat needle.

  “That should do the trick,” says Manny.

  “I should’ve grabbed it when that guy came to the door,” says Angelina, “but I didn’t want to turn my back on him. I could’ve stuck him.”

  Manny and Angelina again look fondly at one another, but again it’s platonic. It’s a beagle owner’s kind of fondness.

  Vikström, on the other hand, feels a burst of sympathy for Connor. Maybe he can’t picture Connor stuck with a Chinese bayonet and bleeding all over his black Bruno Magli slip-ons, but we picture it well enough.

  “So where can we find your ex-husband?” says Vikström, feeling impatient.

  Turning in unison, Manny and Angelina give Vikström identical looks of annoyance; when they turn back to one another, their features soften.

  “Tell me,” says Manny, “what are your feelings about karaoke?”

  “No!” shouts Vikström. “What about Fat Bob and the guy with the tan?!”

  Angelina ignores him. “Really, I’ve never tried it, but I’ve always thought it looked wonderful. My ex, the fuck, didn’t like music.”

  “What a pity,” says Manny. “My partner doesn’t like music either.” Angelina and Manny assume identical frowns.

  “These partnerships look so good at the beginning,” says Angelina.

  “Say, you know what?” asks Manny, as if he’s just discovered antimatter. “They got karaoke apps on smartphones. I got one right here.” Manny digs an iPhone out of his back pocket. “We could try a song. It would get you started!”

  “Oh, I’d be too embarrassed.” Angelina blushes. It’s probably her first blush since junior high school.

  Vikström stands in the entryway. He’s appalled.

  Manny jabs buttons on his phone. “It’ll just take a second. You say you like Vaughn Monroe?”

  Angelina doesn’t deny it.

  “The words’ll scroll past on the screen. Sorry the speaker’s so shitty.” Manny holds the phone in front of Angelina’s nose. “See? Here it is. We’ll sing together.”

  Angelina leans forward. Though shy, she doesn’t want to miss this chance. The music starts; the words appear. Manny and Angelina stand so close that Manny’s right ear vanishes within her tangles of black hair.

  “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,

  A-plowin’ through the ragged skies and up a cloudy draw… .”

  Vikström backs against the front door. He’s afraid he’ll shoot them both out of psychotic aggravation. We know what happens with temporary lunacy. People get weird. Angelina’s voice is a high soprano. It’s not bad, but it’s untaught. When she strains for the high notes, her face looks like a bruised fist.

  Manny turns toward his partner and winks. Vikström is confused. Then he realizes that what seemed Manny’s madness is in fact strategy. He’s concocted the whole charade, standing arm in arm with Angelina, caterwauling. He’s softening her up and driving Vikström nuts at the same time.

  But Vikström wants no part of it. He buttons his coat. “Finish this quick. I’ll wait in the car.”

  Sitting in the shotgun seat of the Subaru, Vikström rests his head against the headrest and puts on his dark glasses—a cheap pair with heavy tortoiseshell frames whose lenses distort the world as completely as an antique pane of glass. The afternoon sun gives a little vibrancy to his thinning blond hair, but, like much else, it’s an illusion.

  Vikström digs out his cell phone and calls his fellow detectives, Herta Spiegel and Moss Jackson, who are supposed to be looking for Fidget. But Herta doesn’t pick up, and Moss has called in sick. He’s got a bad case of psychosomatic flu.

  That Manny was trying to drive him nuts is, for Vikström, no surprise. In fact, if a day passed without Manny’s trying to drive him nuts, that would be—Vikström pauses at the brink of metaphor—something to write home about. But it’s only a surprise if Vikström thinks of Manny as a police detective. His conduct is surprising for a cop. But is it surprising for a karaokean, a practitioner of the art of karaoke?

  Such is Vikström’s idle thought. The sun through the windshield is warm, and Vikström has reached one of life’s little forks in the road: nap on one side, cogitation on the other. So if Manny’s behavior is unsurprising for a karaokean, it suggests his behavior is personality-driven rather than his personality being behavior-driven. If personality is the cause and not the effect, then this is a whole new understanding. And what seems clear—and this is the target of Vikström’s thought—is that personalities are flexible. One can pick and choose. One can be a cop one day and a phony songster the next. At any moment one may have a number of personalities vying for one’s attention.

  Is this schizophrenia? Vikström thinks not. If a person has no control over these shifts, it might be a bad sign, diagnostically. But if one could choose, then the shift would be hardly more significant than the daily changing of a necktie. Of course, people might be afraid of these shifts; they might cling to what they think is their true personality out of fear of being booted into the unknown. But Vikström doubts that the shifts would be sudden. In Manny’s case, he gradually became drawn to karaoke, and, also gradually, a karaoke self joined his cop self. And Manny has other, lesser personalities, such as being a jokester and being fixated on beagle pups, which have nothing to do with singing and arresting bad guys.

  Moreover, to be a karaokean can mean taking on another man’s personality—someone like Frank Sinatra, Vaughn Monroe, or Prince. So Manny can first shift to his karaoke personality and then shift to his Elvis
Presley personality or whoever. Manny’s erratic behavior, Vikström decides, is simply a result of shifting to other levels of personality: Manny/cop/beagle lover/karaokean/Elvis. No wonder it’s so difficult to catch the bad guys. Psychologically speaking, they have many places to hide.

  Likewise, Angelina’s disagreeableness and threats of physical violence don’t come from being a New London housewife, far from it. They come from being an unfulfilled prom queen. And for Angelina to be a prom queen once in her life means to be a prom queen forever, which means being frustrated forever. Yet, to counter this behavior, she’s also a beagle lover, which calls up a third personality: one that’s sweet, generous, and loving.

  These thoughts, which began as idle speculations for Vikström, now seem a pathway through life’s byzantine corridors. Never mind that he’s banging on the back doors of behaviorism. He’s never heard of John B. Watson or B. F. Skinner; his ignorance in these areas remains as virginal as an uncut birthday cake. And the identity shifts that Vikström has diagnosed are not brought about by bed-wetting or sexual abuse. Rather, they’re personality-driven choices intended to satisfy deficiencies we see as limiting our lives; they’re reactions to those limitations. As for the rat that hits the little bar and gets a treat and then hits it again and gets another treat … well, the third time he might scamper to the back of his cage and think, I’m fuckin’ tired of being nickeled and dimed! That’s personality.

  We might suspect a certain whimsy in Vikström’s speculations, but the more he reflects, the more serious grow his thoughts, until he sits up so quickly that his cheap sunglasses slide down his nose. And who am I? he asks. Surely he’s not the same person at home as he is at work. And he might have other personalities. If his fear of heights comes neither from his cop self nor from his domestic self, then perhaps he has a third self deep within him, a timid self who is too timid to confess his timidity and is a famous Swedish detective who hates heights.

  This is as far as Vikström gets this afternoon. Having reached a scary place, he steps back from speculative thought for the day. Gratefully, he sees his partner leaving Angelina’s house. Manny pauses in the doorway to clasp Angelina’s hand: the karaokean and the prom queen. She leans forward to kiss his cheek. Vikström thinks he might vomit.

  But let’s continue our digression for a few moments more. If Didi Lobato were in the backseat of the Subaru, he’d tap Vikström’s shoulder and explain about the tradiculous. It’s not funny that Vikström has the subpersonality of a Swedish detective with a fear of heights. It’s tradiculous.

  So Didi would tell Vikström to relax. This business of shifting identities is as common as bunions. Look at Eartha and her implants, Vasco and his rented Rolex. Where’s the harm? Didi might ask. But does Didi know who he is anymore? Might he think his identity is more authentic than Fidget’s? That perhaps is the most tradiculous thing of all: Didi is convinced he’s been spared this plague of shifting identities, as do others we’ve mentioned. But they’re mistaken.

  Even so, there are exceptions. This is why our own Vaughn Monroe is so worrisome to Connor, Didi, and Eartha. When asked who he is, Vaughn might say, “I used to be past-tense when I was nervous, but that was when necessity became the mother of convention and I let the gift horse sleep in the house. So I was forced to wrestle the toothy allegories, and today I’m a suppository of knowledge. No more soiled gold rings, I say! Illiterate the enemy!”

  Vaughn’s speech carries a patina of sense, which is more worrisome than actually making sense. And as Vaughn’s words, those great communicators, turn to Jell-O, Connor might fear he’s losing another degree of existential clarity. “Is it me?” he’d ask. “Am I the only one who can’t understand him?”

  So Vaughn is always Vaughn, and his apparent suprapersonality of Vaughn Monroe is merely glitter. Vaughn claims to be everyone and no one, to be all names and none. “After all,” he’d say, “the plausibilities are endless in a doggy-dog world.”

  But Vaughn isn’t the only person with a single personality. There’s also Chucky, the oversize offensive-tackle type we’ve seen at the casino and who is Vasco’s boss. In fact, he’s boss of a bunch of people. This has nothing to do with seniority or rank. He’s simply “Boss”—it’s his job title, and if you disagree, he’ll hurt you. Call him Mr. Pain. It’s who he is when he wakes in the morning till he goes to sleep at night. He is a freelance pain distributor. So there’s always a lot of space around Chucky, and people avoid eye contact.

  We haven’t seen much of Chucky, but he’s out there. He’s been strolling around and making his arrangements about Sal and Céline, maybe even about Fat Bob and Marco Santuzza. He’s a worker, and he leaves a big footprint. So even if we haven’t seen him, he’s been busy. But he has a weakness. He loves gold. And when he ran up the stairs to Sal’s office and found Sal’s sprawled corpse with the plastic flower stuck in his forehead, he was seriously pissed that the gold was gone.

  —

  But we’ve left Manny Streeter on Angelina’s front steps as she’s kissing him on the cheek, a platonic kiss. Before he turns away, they squinch their eyes at one another as a sign of nonphysical intimacy. Now Manny hurries to the Subaru, throws open the driver’s door, jumps in, inserts the key, and fastens his seat belt.

  This is when Vikström asks, “Have you ever thought that nobody’s really what they seem?”

  Manny freezes. “Run through that again?”

  “I mean, you know, a person seems like one person and then seems like a second person and then seems like a third person and then—”

  Manny half turns. “You calling me a hypocrite?” The Subaru’s 2.0-liter turbo screams to indicate his outrage. In such a way is man linked to machine.

  TWENTY

  It shouldn’t be thought that Manny spent all his time with Angelina talking about pups and karaoke. No, he also picked up useful bits having to do with their investigation, though both detectives feel, with a bit of chagrin, that the word “investigation” is an overstatement.

  Backing out of Angelina’s driveway, Manny laughs an unfriendly laugh. “Lisowski’s telling the truth. He’s been balling Angelina. So I say to her, ‘I didn’t see any black-and-blue marks.’ And she says, ‘I only leave marks where they don’t show.’ Poor Lisowski’s a walking contusion. What I got around my black eye, he’s got round half his body. So I says to her, ‘Was it hard to get Lisowski to steal Fat Bob’s computer from Burnsie’s office?’ That surprised her. So I adds, ‘This’s just between friends.’ It’s like fuckin’ Shakespeare. She gives him a choice between ‘the delights of the bed’—her phrase—or get booted out the back door. And she tells him she’d also tell the cops, meaning us, that she saw him taking potshots at Fat Bob’s Fat Bob till it blew up. So I ask her, ‘You been hiding Lisowski’s pistol?’ But she said no, and I believe her. So tell me, Benny, am I a genius or am I a genius?”

  Vikström wants to say, You were lying to her. You were leading her down the yellow brick road. Instead he says, “You’re a genius.” But the words leave a sour taste in his mouth.

  “Another thing,” says Manny. “You know those bikes that been disappearing from Fat Bob’s garage? Lisowski’s been shopping them for Angelina. She’s got the titles, so technically they’re hers, even though she promised Fat Bob she’d keep them safe from the bank. But she says she wants to look like a prom queen again and that takes lots of expensive reconstruction. And this is the part I like: She’s selling them cheap just to piss off Fat Bob even more.”

  Vikström doesn’t call Manny a genius again. He’s distracted by the fact that his partner isn’t driving into town toward the police station but toward I-95.

  “Another thing, Caroline Santuzza called Angelina.”

  It takes Vikström a moment to recall the name, but then he says, “What about?”

  “First she tells Angelina that Giovanni Lambertenghi plans to shoot Fat Bob.”

  “Who the fuck’s Giovanni Lambertenghi?”

  “Jack
Sprat. What’ve you gone soft in the head? He’s been zooming around town on a red scooter. We rousted him right on Bank Street.”

  Vikström is more worried that Manny has pulled onto I-95 and is heading toward the bridge. But he manages to ask why Jack Sprat wants to kill Fat Bob.

  “He thinks that Fat Bob set up Santuzza’s death to get out of paying him the money he owed him. It makes sense, right?”

  It’s rush hour, and traffic is thick. Vikström sees the bridge looming in the near distance, as menacing as Godzilla in a reclining position. “But his bike was destroyed. It had to be worth fifteen grand.”

  “Nah, he’ll get insurance money for the bike. You closing your eyes, Benny?”

  Vikström tightens his stomach muscles to ready himself for an attack of the phantom icy hand that’s about to grip his guts. “No, no, of course not.” He tries to keep his voice calm, as if he were asking, What’s for lunch?

  Manny’s not fooled. He jerks the wheel to make the Subaru swerve. “I sure hope I don’t crash over the side this time. Ha, ha, ha.”

  Vikström’s body is as tight as a miser’s purse. “Was there a second thing?” To his right, way down in the troublesome waters, he sees the Long Island ferry setting out for Orient Point. He shuts his eyes.

  “Yeah, Caroline said Marco had a visit a week ago from a big, bulky guy in a hoodie. She’d never seen him before, and Marco didn’t introduce him. In fact, Marco told her to wait in the kitchen. It could be the same guy in the hooded sweatshirt who Dr. Goodenough saw jump out of the Denali and disappear, the guy who jumped out before the hit man.”

  Vikström hardly pays attention. He’s totally focused on the water down below. “Where the fuck we going?” He hears a pathetic squeak in his voice.

  “Angelina says Fat Bob’s got a biker friend named Otto who lives halfway to the casino on this side of Ledyard. That’s where he’s been staying. We’ll be there in ten minutes. You okay?”