Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?: A Novel

by Stephen Dobyns

  “That’s what his wife said.”

  “Yeah, it was the general consensus. He was too fuckin’ easy to spot.”

  Sal, we can say, had his weaknesses, and a big one was vanity. He loved his rockabilly pompadour, but if he’d lopped it off in favor of a crew cut, he might be alive today. And the gold chains, rings, bracelet, gold Rolex, and Montegrappa St. Moritz Limited Edition Woods eighteen-karat-gold rollerball pen drew attention. Sal saw this as part of his fundamental self; his very essence was mixed in with his pompadour and bling like hair gel.

  “I told him he should be more subtle,” says Fat Bob. “But he thought I wanted his stuff—his Rolex and gold chains and stuff. He thought I was threatening him.”

  “And were you?”

  “Just a little.”

  “His wife said his jewelry only amounted to about five thousand.”

  “You kidding? The Rolex alone’s worth over fifty. I could sell it for twenty-five in a heartbeat. Anyway, she wasn’t his wife.”

  Connor sipped his beer. “Why would he want to kill you? Did you try to get money out of him?”

  Fat Bob put a hand over his eyes. “Did Angelina tell you that? I might have tried to touch him for a little loan, I can’t remember. But for fuck’s sake, I’d never threaten him. Anyway, he didn’t give me a dime.”

  Connor doesn’t believe this, but he won’t challenge it. “You know Chucky?”

  Startled, Fat Bob slops a little beer on his shirt. “Jesus, I’d never borrow money from Chucky! He’d shoot me in the foot if I was no more than a day late in paying him back. And that’d be just the start. You met Chucky?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Don’t go near him. He likes scaring people. Fuck, he scares me all the time.”

  “What’s he have against you?” Connor considers what might have happened if Chucky had caught him with Céline the previous evening. Ruefully, he recalls her nakedness beneath the nearly severed nightgown. He’d less than a half inch left of needle lace to cut when Chucky had started pounding on the door.

  “Nothin’, nothin’! Well, he knows I’d seen Dante in Detroit. He knows I knew Dante and Sal were the same guy, so he might think I figured he’d whacked him. But I’d never be that dumb. As far as Chucky is concerned, I keep my mind blank.”

  “So Chucky shot Sal?”

  “No way, it was an outside job. At most Chucky was a kind of facilitator.”

  “Did you tell Chucky you’d seen Dante in New London?” This is Connor’s big hope: that he can blame Fat Bob for spreading the news that Dante Barbarella was hiding in New London. It would let Connor off the hook about outing Sal to his brother, meaning Sal had already been outed. What a colossal relief it would be!

  Fat Bob chokes, coughs, and spits up a bit of burger. “Fuck no! I never go near him. You go near Chucky, then some way or other he takes a piece of you. He likes to own people.”

  Perhaps Fat Bob is not entirely truthful. After all, two guys in a Denali came looking for him at Otto’s place near Ledyard. Maybe they only wanted to chat, but as we know, when Otto showed them his shotgun, one of them pulled a pistol and winged him in the arm. It suggests that Chucky may have a fatal agenda as far as Fat Bob is concerned. But Connor isn’t privy to this information.

  “Chucky and Marco had some deal going,” says Fat Bob, talking and chewing at the same time. “I don’t know what it was, but I saw Chucky up in Marco’s office. Whatever it was, it scared Marco, but Marco was more scared of Chucky than he was of what Chucky was scheming. At first I thought Chucky’d killed Marco, but I was wrong. I mean, it was an accident Marco got killed, no matter what others say. And it was Sal that did it, not Chucky.”

  “D’you know Céline?”

  Fat Bob shakes his head. “Who’s that?”

  “She was living here with Sal and pretending to be his wife.”

  “Oh, yeah, Shirley—hot, hot, hot! I didn’t see her here, but I saw her in Detroit. Wants to be a torch singer but can’t carry a tune. Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

  Connor’s inner voice shouts, Shirley, Shirley, Shirley! His outer voice asks, “Is she involved with Chucky?”

  “Nobody wants to be involved with Chucky. If she’s mixed up with him, it’s because he’s got some hold over her.”

  We shouldn’t think Connor dislikes the name Shirley. He can rattle off the names of many famous Shirleys: Shirley Temple, Shirley MacLaine, Dame Shirley Bassey, and Shirley the Girly, a drag queen he knew in San Diego. But once he’d wrapped his heart around the name Céline, other names were only barking noises.

  The bartender reappears and taps the bar to get Fat Bob’s attention. “Bob, hey, Bob, you wanted me to keep an eye peeled for Giovanni. He’s out front.”

  Fat Bob jumps off his stool. “Shit, I hate to leave food on my plate,” he tells Connor. “You finish it if you want.”

  Connor looks toward the front door and then turns to ask Fat Bob the identity of Giovanni, but Bob’s running down the back stairs that lead to Water Street. A moment later Jack Sprat darts into the Exchange, and right after that, Fat Bob’s noisy Fat Bob starts up down below.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Mailboxes—it’s an indication of Connor’s growing reluctance to be part of Bounty, Inc. that he’s dragged his feet in getting to the New London post office, but after all, the new windshield for the Mini-Cooper won’t be ready until four and at the moment we write, it’s only two. But the growing reluctance needs another look. Maybe it began on Monday with his shock at Marco’s death, though we should call it murder, even if Connor didn’t know it at the time. Or it could have begun later when he saw Céline in her T-shirt and white shorts: a definite body blow. Or maybe it was when Connor told Vasco that he’d spotted Sal near the scene of the accident and recalled seeing him in Detroit. But it wasn’t just the recklessness of telling Vasco that mattered, it was Vasco’s response: a sudden attentiveness.

  To simplify, ever since Didi Lobato parked the Winnebago on the Hannaquit Breachway outside Brewster, events have raised Connor’s reluctance to be part of Bounty, Inc., and caused his sense of security and sense of self-worth to receive ever harder knocks on their metaphoric heads: the very reverse of the stultifying boredom he’d felt in his last months as a slot attendant at the Viejas Casino, thirty-five miles east of San Diego. But Connor has begun to feel fragile. It’s not just big events like Sal’s murder that cause him to question what he’s doing—even small events make him nervous, as when Angelina invited him into her kitchen to partake of a plate of brownies. Maybe the brownie was just a brownie, but Connor was glad to escape in one piece.

  Then, this morning, when he made his way from the RV to the damaged Mini-Cooper, Vaughn came running after him. Connor hesitated—more of a flinch than a pause.

  “You know who I really am?” called Vaughn. The sunlight seemed entangled in his golden blond hair; his freckles twinkled.

  “You’re Vaughn.” Connor was in no mood to fool around.

  “Yes, that’s a reasonable preposition, but I don’t unkind what I’m called.”

  “You mean ‘mean.’”

  “Left.”

  “Right,” corrected Connor. “So who are you?”

  Vaughn glanced behind him, then ducked down to look under the Winnebago. Getting up, he lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’m an orphan from outer space.”

  Connor wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly; then he was sure he had. He opened his mouth to speak but thought better of it. Vaughn smiled brightly, and his lips seemed pinker than usual. Connor nodded and hurried to the Mini-Cooper. Some subjects, he thought, were better left untouched.

  Connor’s brief exchange with Vaughn produced another upward tick in his disinclination to continue with Bounty, Inc. He’d be hard-pressed to define it, but he worries, and perhaps maturation is no more than the accumulation of worry. This in itself is important. Though Connor is twenty-six, he begins to feel old. (Contrarily, that’s why Fidget in his tub, as his worries are
soothed away, begins to look younger.)

  After lunch, as Connor enters the post office, he again recollects Vaughn’s claim and thinks, I need to drop everything and get the hell out of here. Connor can’t explain why, but it’s another bump upward in reluctance. Of course he doesn’t believe that Vaughn is actually an orphan from outer space, but neither is he one hundred percent positive that Vaughn isn’t. This in itself is worrisome.

  As he nears the post office box, Connor spots Detective Manny Streeter leaning against the wall and studying the ceiling. Connor turns, meaning to escape, but Benny Vikström stands in the doorway. Possibly, if Connor hadn’t been brooding about Vaughn, he’d have seen the detectives earlier and right now he’d be running down the block. Instead he veers toward the phony box, not the one with the money but the one with Didi’s postcards. The detectives veer after him and wait.

  We’ve already mentioned the box with the postcards sent by Didi, but what we haven’t said is that the postcards are addressed to Connor. Since Connor was the person most likely to open the box, it made sense to Didi to use Connor’s name. But he should have told Connor about his intentions.

  As Connor removes a fat wad of postcards, a hand reaches over his shoulder and seizes them. “I’d like to take a look at those, young fellow,” says Manny. Connor spins away and promptly bumps into Vikström, standing on the other side of him.

  Stentor, the Greek herald in the Trojan War, is said to have had a voice as loud as fifty men. When Manny reads the first postcard, his voice isn’t as loud as that, but it’s stentorian nonetheless. “‘Dear Connor: The baby has your eyes. He’s yours, I know he’s yours. Send money, we have nothing. Your devoted Brenda.’”

  Manny gives Connor a push. “You’re a real scumbag, aren’t you?” He reads another card. People nearby stop to listen. “‘Dear Connie: Dad and me think your sex-change plans are a bad idea. We like you best as a girl. Love, Mom.’”

  Manny and Vikström give Connor a long look. “At least they did a fair job of it,” says Manny. He reads a third. “‘Connor: Did you remember to let the dog out of the house when you left California?’

  “What kind of dog?” asks Manny.

  Connor shakes his head. “I don’t have a dog.”

  Manny’s indignant. “You mean it went and died on you?”

  “No, no, I haven’t had a dog since junior high school.”

  Then, among the ten or so people who are listening, Connor sees Linda. She stares at him inquiringly, as if thinking new evidence has been revealed, though not evidence of a positive nature. Connor wants to signal it’s all a mistake, whatever “it” may be, but he’s afraid Manny and Vikström will ask her questions.

  Manny reads another postcard. “‘Dear Connor: You too are an orphan from outer space. Best wishes, Vaughn.’”

  Connor doesn’t scream—he’s too mature to scream. But the thought crosses his mind.

  “You’ve no right to read my mail,” he says.

  “These’re postcards,” says Manny. “Anyone can read them free of charge.”

  And Vikström thinks, I wonder if that’s really true. He takes the postcards from Manny and studies them. “They all have the same handwriting.”

  Manny takes them back. “Without a specialist it’s hard to say.” Then, to Connor, “I bet you wrote them yourself. You’re some kind of weirdo. Don’t you have any regular friends?”

  Various semi-witty remarks flit across Connor’s cerebral cortex, but he only shrugs. Any explanation would take a week to recount.

  “You were seen coming out of Sal Nicoletti’s office the other morning,” says Vikström. “You want to tell us why you shot him?”

  “He was already dead when I got there.” Connor’s voice is a pathetic squeak. He snatches another glance at Linda, who gives him the same curious stare.

  “Then why didn’t you report it?” says Manny.

  “I was scared. I just wanted to leave.” Connor, in fact, had never considered calling the police.

  Manny and Vikström know perfectly well that Connor didn’t shoot Sal, and they know he didn’t steal Sal’s bling. What they don’t understand is how Connor fits into “the big picture,” as Manny likes to say, and the comic postcards don’t help.

  “Where’s the other post office box?” asks Vikström. “The one with the checks.”

  “What’re you talking about? This’s the only box I’ve been renting.”

  As has been said often, Connor is a terrible liar. His eyes get all strange and whirly. They’re doing it now. Manny and Vikström are impressed by the display of ocular pinwheels, but not for long.

  “Okay,” says Manny, taking out his handcuffs, “we’re going for a trip.”

  Connor presses his back against the wall of boxes. “But what have I done?” Linda is still watching him.

  “That’s what you’re going to tell us,” says Manny.

  Connor is spun around before he can protest. He wants to tell the detectives to wait. He wants to say, Can’t you just hang on and let me tell that pretty woman it’s all a mistake? As he’s bundled out the door like a parcel with feet, he snatches a final glimpse of Linda. She gives him a little wave.

  —

  Manny and Vikström are arguing. They’re in the detectives’ office, and Connor’s in a small interview room, waiting. It’s an hour later.

  “The fuck you say,” says Manny. “He could be the killer for all we know.”

  “Except you know he isn’t.” Vikström knows their argument has become not so much about Connor’s criminality but has morphed into another chapter in Manny’s attempts to make Vikström appear mistaken and foolish. As for Connor, they have an address in San Diego, a California driver’s license, an ID card from Viejas Casino, and no evidence of a criminal record. When they asked where he’d been staying, Connor said, “With friends,” and mentioned his brother. He told the detectives he’d met Sal Nicoletti at the time of the accident and they’d talked several times. He described going to Nicoletti’s house that morning to speak to Céline but learned she’d moved out and the rental company was taking away the furniture. This is news to Manny and Vikström.

  “He obviously scared her, and she got the fuck outta town,” says Manny. “No telling what dirty thing he tried to make her do. Too bad she gave up the shotgun.”

  “You’ve no proof of that.”

  “Maybe not, but it fits the patterns. Look how he was trying to weasel money from Angelina. Good thing she kept him out of her house. No telling what crimes a sex fiend like him would have committed.”

  “Sex fiend?”

  “You can tell by his eyes that he’s a degenerate. No telling what his secret sex history might be, but it’s bound to be perverse.”

  Vikström wants to say, If you say “no telling” one more time, I’ll … Instead he says, “He claims he never went to Angelina’s.”

  “Look at his eyes! I thought they’d pop from their sockets. He’s a congenital bad liar, like what he said about Céline and Fidget. Why should a beauty like Céline be interested in a scumbag like Fidget?”

  “She knows he took Sal’s jewelry.”

  “You’re right: the fuckin’ bling. That’s the fuckin’ elephant in the room. We got to find Fidget before he gets whacked. Shit, he might be whacked already.”

  Manny also asked Connor about his “friendship with Fat Bob.” Connor, regrettably, answered by saying, “Friendship? I hardly know him!” It’s the word “hardly” that was regrettable.

  They’d been sitting in the interview room: gray table, gray plastic chairs, gray walls, and a pane of two-way glass. On a scale of one to ten, its charm level was subzero. The only artwork was a No Smoking sign. It wasn’t by Andy Warhol.

  “So you knew him,” said Vikström.

  “I don’t know him,” said Connor. “I ran into him at a bar.”

  “That’s knowing,” said Manny.

  “It was coincidental. We were having lunch. He sat on the next stool.”
/>   Manny shook his head. “That’s not good enough. You could have moved.”

  “Don’t I get to ask for a lawyer?” Connor’s grasp of legal subtleties comes entirely from TV’s Law & Order.

  “This is a friendly chat,” said Vikström. “You only get to ask for a lawyer when it’s unfriendly.”

  “Of course,” said Manny thoughtfully, “lots can happen between the asking and whenever the lawyer shows up.”

  “Lots of unpleasant stuff,” added Vikström, lowering his voice a little.

  “Let’s hear about Fat Bob and Sal,” said Manny. “They were buddies, right?”

  So Connor told them that Fat Bob had seen Sal in Detroit once or twice and knew about the court case. “But they weren’t friends,” Connor insisted. “He only recognized him one day when he was visiting Marco at his office.”

  “You mean he tried to blackmail him,” said Manny.

  “I don’t know that.” Once again facial evidence showed Connor impeded by a challenged communication skill—that is, Manny and Vikström perceive the lie.

  “And now he’s hiding from the police because of the blackmail,” said Manny, who knew this was one of the smallest of Fat Bob’s complicated motivations.

  “I know nothing about that either. He says people want to kill him.”

  “Like who?” asked Vikström.

  “Giovanni somebody, for one.”

  “Jack Sprat,” said Manny. “Who else?”

  Well, it took a few more questions, but eventually Connor mentioned Chucky, though even mentioning Chucky’s name scared him.

  “Who’s Chucky?” asked Vikström.

  That was an important moment. Neither detective had heard about Chucky before. Know-how is knowing what questions to ask, and Vikström had asked a big one. But he didn’t know it yet.

  “He’s a big guy who hangs out at the casino. He scares people.”

  “How big?” asked Manny.

  “Broad shoulders, tall, big arms. He looks like an offensive tackle.”

  “And Fat Bob owes him money?” asked Manny.

  Connor shook his head. “He says he’d be too scared to owe Chucky money.”