He actually put his fingers on Robin’s neck to feel for a pulse. Then he started to sob. He staggered to his feet, like a drunk trying to get back his dignity, and then he looked at his dead wife as if he’d just come upon her in an alley. It hit him all at once.
“Oh my God, I shot my wife!”
He put his hands over his face, still holding the gun. I suddenly realized that the water was still running. It was a loud shower, the floor all hollow and tinny. It seemed important to do something about that, so I shut the water off.
The sudden silence was jarring. Billy took his hands away from his face. Snot bubbled from his nose. He wiped it with the back of his gun hand and managed an awkward smile.
“Know what I regret, Mick? I regret that you never did sing ‘Sweet Days’ for her. Her birthday is next week, and I was gonna ask you to serenade her. That woulda been a hell of a birthday present, don’t you think?”
I was shaking with fear. My knees were literally knocking together.
“I’d have done it,” I said softly.
Billy smiled at me. “I know you would have. You’re a nice guy.”
“I could sing it now, if you want.”
I couldn’t believe I said that. The words just jumped out of me. It was a survival instinct. I wanted Billy to put the gun down, and I knew my song had been a seminal thing in his life, and I guess I thought the sound of it coming from me, standing naked over his dead wife, would drain him of further homicidal impulses.
A faint smile came to his face. He looked down at Robin, back at me.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Sing.”
I cleared my throat. I wasn’t even sure I knew all the words anymore. “Sweet days…feel like a haze…”
I was rusty. I was out of tune. I was petrified. After the first few words Billy put up his bare hand, made a face as if he’d just gotten a bad clam.
“Never mind, Mick. Don’t bother. I’d rather remember it the way it was.”
I shut my mouth. He raised his gun and pointed it at my face. I heard a watery sound. I looked down. I’d lost control of my bladder and was pissing on Robin’s body.
Billy raised the gun again, pointed it at my face. Then he sighed, lowered the gun.
“I got a better idea,” he said, more to himself than to me.
He stuck the barrel under his chin and blew his brains all over the ceiling.
The air went red-misty with blood and brain matter, which gave off a metallic smell I knew came from the iron in the red blood cells. I remembered this from my high school chemistry class, one of the last courses I took before dropping out and pursuing this crazy life that had brought me here, to the blood-soaked bathroom of a corrupt L.A. cop and his crazy wife, both now quite dead.
I don’t know how long I stood there. I became aware of a stickiness on my face and hair, and knew it had to be Billy’s brain matter. With Robin at my feet I lathered and rinsed myself twice, dried off, stepped out of the shower and over Billy’s body and went on autopilot, doing the things that had to be done.
I went to my room and put on fresh clothes. I packed up all my stuff and returned to the bathroom for a last look at my two dead friends, the people who had taken care of me in my most desperate time of need.
Their eyes were open, the two of them. They’d be found with their eyes open, unless I closed them. Which I didn’t. That would have involved getting close to them, and since I’d stepped out of the shower, the floor around Billy’s head had flooded with an astonishing amount of blood, and I knew it was important not to leave footprints anywhere.
And now the big question was obvious—who, if anyone, knew that I’d come into their lives? Who had they told?
They were isolated people. I hadn’t been introduced to any of their neighbors. Robin had her yoga classes, but it wasn’t likely she’d told any of her students about me, or was it?
And what about Billy? Might he have told any of his fellow cops that he was sheltering Mickey DeFalco, the legendary one hit wonder? It would be a pretty tough secret for an ordinary man to hold, but Billy was not ordinary. Robin was right about him. He was a control freak, and control freaks are cagey about information.
It was possible, very possible that I could walk away clean from this ungodly mess.
I was jolted by the sound of a human voice. They were the words of an irritated black man, coming from the walkie-talkie on Billy’s hip:
“Hey, O’Brien, where you at? You comin’ on this raid with us, or what? Please respond….”
It was one of his fellow cops. They were waiting for Billy, and when he didn’t show, I knew they would come looking for him.
I had to move fast. I went from room to room, checking to make sure I’d left nothing behind.
A surge of fear—what about my fingerprints? They were all over the house, and all over the outside of the house, and all over the painting equipment!
But I’d never committed a crime, never been arrested, never been fingerprinted. So what if my prints were all over the place? They might not even look for a third person. The evidence was clear-cut—for whatever reason, Officer O’Brien had killed his wife in the shower before turning the gun on himself. Cops flip out all the time. A damn shame, but it happens.
Then, for the first and only time in my life, I broke the law. I went to the cupboard and grabbed the Maxwell House coffee can.
The money couldn’t do Billy and Robin any good, and they had no children, and what would happen if I left it behind? Maybe nobody would find it, and it would be chucked out with the rest of the groceries in a big careless cleanup. Or maybe some other crooked cop would take it.
“I’ll make it right,” I vowed to myself, zipping the can into my bag.
The parakeets were restless in their cage, fluttering from perch to perch. Robin normally fed the birds and the turtles at this time of night, and I was going to do it, but the wail of a distant siren changed my mind. It was time to go. The cops who’d soon be swarming the place could feed the animals.
I forced myself to be calm as I stood at the front door. I took a final deep breath before stepping outside and walking, not running, toward the sidewalk.
At the sidewalk I turned right and continued walking, my duffel bag high on my shoulder. I had no idea of where I was going, but I was on my way. Each stride I took was a step farther from the pit of hell. I gobbled up the long suburban blocks—five, six, seven of them before a police car passed me, going in the opposite direction. I forced myself not to hurry, not to give those cops any reason at all to pull me aside and shine a light in my face.
A plane soared overhead, low and loud. I wasn’t far from LAX. Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. That crazy lie I’d told Billy about going to visit my parents was morphing into the truth. This was an excellent time to put three thousand miles of distance between myself and the horrible thing that had just happened.
Believe it or not, I happened to come upon a bus stop just as a bus bound for the airport pulled up. When I got there I went straight to United Airlines and bought a one-way ticket for their next flight to JFK for $268, paying for it with fourteen twenty-dollar bills from the coffee-can cash. The friendly woman at the counter informed me that a round-trip ticket would cost just $328, but I told her I wasn’t sure when I’d be coming back.
Which was an outright lie. I knew that I would never again be setting foot in the City of Angels.
The plane lifted off just twenty minutes later, less than two hours after Police Officer William O’Brien had taken the life of his wife before turning the gun on himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
She knew it all. She knew everything. Lynn’s face was pale as she put a hand to my damp cheek, gave it a gentle pat.
“Jesus, Mickey. You got mixed up with some crazy people.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“So it just went down in the record books as a murder-suicide?”
“I really don’t know. I don’t want to know. I ra
n away and never looked back. But every time I see a cop car, I shit my pants.”
She stroked my hair. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Mickey.”
“Yeah? Why didn’t I get out of that shower faster? If I’d run out as soon as she came in, he’d never have caught us.”
“You were in shock. You were paralyzed.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Give yourself a break, Mickey. You tried to be decent.”
“The point is, if I hadn’t come into their lives, they’d both still be alive, you know?”
Lynn’s eyes welled with tears. “No, Mickey. The point is, if I hadn’t come into your life, they’d both be alive. If I hadn’t run away, you wouldn’t have written the song, you’d never have gone to Los Angeles…see what I’m saying?”
She put a hand to her chest. “It all connects to me.”
What a Catholic. I was an amateur by comparison. Lynn fell sobbing into my arms.
“I’m sorry, Mickey. I’m so sorry!”
“Lynn, come on! It’s not your fault!”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” I said, realizing that I meant every word of what I’d just said. I pulled back from her, looked into her shining eyes. An idea leapt into my mind, and a heartbeat later I was voicing it.
“What do you say we both decide to believe that it was nobody’s fault, and that we’re both decent people, and that we deserve a freaking break here?”
She nodded, wiped her nose. “Think that’ll work?”
“I’ll give it a shot if you will.”
“All right, Mick.”
She was helping me. I was helping her. We could make each other well again. It was amazing. It was like magic, but it was better than magic. It was the healing power of love, like the love that I’d sung about without fully understanding, but I certainly understood it now.
Lynn managed a crooked grin, sighed, and said, “Not to bring up a touchy subject, but where’s all that cash you took? I know it’s not in the bank.”
“I stashed it in my closet. There’s this high spot over the door my mother can’t reach.”
“The broken bricks, where you used to hide Playboy magazines?”
I felt my face turn red. “Jesus, did I tell you about that?”
“You used to tell me everything, Mickey.”
“Well, anyway, that’s where it’s been since I got home. I know I can’t keep it, but I don’t know what to do with it.”
“I do.”
“You do?”
“Sure.” She took my hand the way a faith healer might reach for a nonbeliever. “We’ll take it to the city and give it away.”
“Who are we giving it to?”
“Whoever needs it. Come on, let’s get moving.”
“Now?”
“Yeah, Mickey, now. I think it will be better if we do this thing first.”
It. We both knew what “it” was. And she was right. I wanted to come to her clean, as clean as I could be.
“Go get that money,” she said. “Meet me at my house in half an hour.”
I did as I was told. Luckily for me, nobody was home, so I got the coffee can and slipped out without being seen. When I picked Lynn up she’d showered and changed into jeans and a T-shirt, pretty much the same outfit I was wearing. On our way down the steps of her front stoop we saw that several slats of the wooden ramp had collapsed to the ground.
“I’ve got to get rid of that thing,” Lynn murmured.
“I can do that for you.” I hesitated. “You know, I pushed him up that ramp once.”
“You?”
I told her about my rainy birthday, all those years ago, and how I’d hoped that she’d come back to see me, and how the Captain wasn’t able to get himself up the ramp without my help.
“Did you talk to him?”
“Not much.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted to know if I’d heard from you. He wanted me to tell you to come home, that all was forgiven.”
Her eyes widened, then softened with sadness. “Forgiven,” she echoed. “Well. That’s nice to know.”
“He was pretty drunk, Lynn.”
“Yeah? What else is new? Come on, let’s move, let’s do this thing.”
We caught a train to Penn Station and after the conductor took our tickets and moved away, we were the only ones left in the car.
“Let me see it, Mick.”
I handed her the coffee can. She peeled off the lid and looked inside. She handled money all day at the bank, so the sight of all those bills did not startle her.
“How much?”
“Almost six thousand…. How are we going to do this?”
“We’ll just give it to the homeless.”
“How?”
“We hand it to them.”
“Just like that?”
“Why not?”
“How much per person?”
She shrugged. “A hundred, two hundred. Whatever you like.”
“Lynn, let’s say we give them a hundred apiece. That’s almost sixty people. Think we can do that in one day?”
She grinned, kissed my cheek. “Piece o’ cake.”
It was a crazy, nutty, wonderful plan, and I knew she was doing it to save my soul. This was my penance, a more useful penance than I’d ever been granted by any priest. My ears popped as the train rolled into the tunnel beneath the East River. Next stop, Penn Station.
“Think this’ll get us into heaven, Lynn?”
She shrugged, even managed a laugh. “I don’t know about getting into heaven. I’m just hoping to stay out of hell.”
In Penn Station a thin, bearded man was squatting with his back against a tiled wall, a grimy paper coffee cup clutched in his hand. He was too weary to shake it, too tired to bother getting a musical sound out of the few coins in his cup.
I pointed at the guy. “Him?”
“Why not?”
I took five twenties from the can, folded them in half, breezed toward the guy, dumped the bills in his cup and kept moving. By the time his grimy fingers reached for the bills I was back at Lynn’s side. She took me by the elbow and led me away.
“We can’t hang around for thanks or small talk,” she said. “We’ll try to find beggars with cups. That way we just drop the money and go.”
“Have you done this before?”
“No, but I handle money all day long, and I know how it can make people crazy.”
As we made our way up to the street we heard a cry of astonishment behind us.
“Don’t look back,” Lynn said. “He might want more.”
It went a lot faster than I might have imagined. We walked the city streets with no destination, seeking out the homeless. They were everywhere, stooped and round-shouldered in the midst of all those square-shouldered assholes bellowing into their cell phones for all the world to hear.
Lynn gave a hundred to a young man with a greasy ponytail who sat with a sad-looking mutt in front of a cardboard sign that said HUNGRY, HOMELESS. His mouth fell open at the sight of the bills but he did not make a sound.
I was suspicious of that one. “He could be a faker,” I said. “He looked well nourished, and he has a pet.”
“What the hell, Mickey, even if he’s a faker, the dog is for real.”
We made our way north and east, giving out hundreds all the way, jogging away from the people who got the cash as if we’d just left burning firecrackers in their grimy paper cups.
It was great. It was unbelievable. I felt like a hot-air balloonist dropping sandbags, soaring higher with each drop. Lynn was right. This mission wasn’t going to take long at all.
We entered Grand Central Terminal, and the glory of the place hit me just as hard as it hit me when I was a kid seeing it for the first time, all that marble and all those windows, and shiny brass clocks from a time gone by….
We were both hungry. We got big salty pretzels and Cokes and sat on the hard-po
lished floor, eating and drinking and watching the mobs crisscross the floor. I checked the coffee can and saw that more than half the money was gone.
Then I saw him.
He looked as if he might have played professional football, an enormous black man in a torn overcoat, ridiculously loud plaid pants, and laceless, greasy sneakers that looked to be a few sizes too small and may have accounted for the pained look on his face. Atop his head was a big, puffy, graying Afro that tilted like a condemned building.
He took long, regal strides across the wide floor, obviously caught up in the bum’s dilemma—no place to go, and no place to rest without being harassed by a cop.
I didn’t dare step in front of him—he’d have knocked me down like the night train. So I fell into stride beside him, nearly jogging to keep up. He was a head taller than me. It was like looking up at a statue.
He was ignoring me, or maybe his peripheral vision was no good. I held five twenties in front of his face.
“Here, sir. That’s for you.”
He stopped walking, took the bills and studied them as if he’d never seen currency before. With his other hand he grabbed me by the shoulder with a strength that was astonishing. My collarbone felt as if it might snap. I opened my mouth to cry out but my vocal cords seemed paralyzed.
The giant was staring into my eyes. His eyes were oddly serene, though reddened by who knows how many restless nights, or years. I couldn’t break free of his grasp and I couldn’t find my voice to call for help, though in truth the last thing I needed now was a cop.
What if a warrant for my arrest had been issued from coast to coast? That would have been the ultimate irony—getting nabbed for the L.A. thing while giving dirty money away to the homeless in New York!
The giant licked dry lips and attempted a grin. “Now listen, little man, and tell me—why did you give me this money?”
His voice was as deep as a kettle drum. I waited for its rumble to die down before replying, “I’m trying to be a good guy.”
What a lame-ass thing to say! He maintained his grip on my shoulder, looked at the bills, looked at me. He shook his head as if he’d been handed pieces to a puzzle that didn’t fit.
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