I’d been coming around on this philosophy, though. Maybe it was a copout, but by this time it seemed plenty clear that I’d allowed these old friends of mine to ruin my life—by not knowing better than to have taken up with them in the first place, certainly, and also by virtue of the fact that I’d never properly distanced myself from them and their behavior, even at the point—which was admittedly long since past—when it became clear that they were all irredeemable. Hell, by this time they’d ruined several of my lives, every one of them perfectly decent, with all the usual trappings, responsibilities, and satisfactions.
Francis Greer was the most complicated of my old friends. He was easily the most intelligent, the most cunning and untrustworthy. Greer had been in prison when Randy Chung was murdered in my garage. In the intervening years I had married Greer’s sister, which was a complicated story in and of itself. I’d known Janice since we were kids, and had an on-again off-again relationship with her going back almost twenty years. The fact that she was helplessly related to Greer (and felt a genuine affection for him) had already created numerous problems in our relationship. Every time Greer got out of jail or needed something he was certain to show up on Janice’s doorstep. Between his two prison terms and a handful of stints in county jails and workhouses, I had long since lost track of his criminal offenses, which always seemed to be compound infractions that ranged from driving under the influence and all manner of moving violations (improper registration, failure to provide insurance, suspended license, stolen plates) to automobile theft, receiving of stolen property, possession and distribution of narcotics, burglary, and parole violations.
Greer had, by this time, spent nearly a third of his life behind bars and he had apparently always approached prison as the ultimate leisure. I’ve said that he was intelligent, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t come out of prison the first time speaking Latin. Over the years he had read more books than I would ever have the time for, had supposedly translated poetry from Spanish, and had spent so much time in prison weight rooms that it seemed like no matter where I went I was sure to encounter a photograph on the refrigerator of a half-naked Greer flexing his muscles.
Thanks early on to our old friendship and later to my relationship with Janice, Greer had maintained a running correspondence with me in the years that he was away. Once, while I was teaching at a junior college in a suburb of St. Paul, he had tried to scam me into signing off on some non-existent coursework he needed to complete a degree. My refusal to do so had resulted in a serious strain in our friendship, and his letters to me became increasingly hostile and condescending.
Around this same time—I was in my late twenties—I wrote and published a crappy little novel, a formulaic thriller that looks increasingly dated and implausible. An agent who was an old college acquaintance of my father sold the book as a paperback original to a fairly prominent publisher, and I received an advance that was nothing if not modest. I was excited by the prospects and felt certain that I was on my way to a career as a writer. There were several delays in the book’s publication—which I was assured was quite routine—and I had to wait more than two years for its arrival in bookstores, only to have all my confidence instantly transformed to outright shame by the appearance of a blurb—attributed to, of all people, Karl Malden—splashed across the front cover: “I really enjoyed this book!”
As far as I know the book received exactly one review, a brief and entirely dismissive notice in the Minneapolis paper. Greer, from his cloister in prison, somehow managed to get his hands on that review, which he was kind enough to send to me along with a snide critique of his own.
* * *
The Friday afternoon that Greer was released from prison, Janice had driven out to Stillwater to pick him up. That evening we hosted—very much against my wishes—a party at our home in northeast Minneapolis. This was the second time I’d been forced to celebrate in a similar manner Greer’s surely undeserved freedom, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand what there was to celebrate. My wife, unfortunately, had inherited her mother’s denial as surely as Francis had received his no-account criminal disposition from his father.
It was a mercifully small gathering. Slim Chung and Gilbert Borocha were there, as well as Greer’s mother (lurching around the room with a cigarette clenched in her teeth and her oxygen rack gripped in her emaciated fist) and a handful of people who were mostly strangers to me. I had to hand it to Greer. He was a smooth and handsome character, a first-rate actor who could charm the pants off the most chaste woman in any room. He worked the party like he was running for office, and as the rest of the guests became progressively more inebriated, he never seemed to show the effects of the prodigious amounts of alcohol he was consuming.
It had been my understanding that Francis would not be staying at our house the night of the party, but as had so often been the case, my understanding was seriously flawed. After the last of the guests departed, he was still there at my kitchen table regaling Janice with some story, and a short time later my wife was hauling blankets and pillows out into the living room to make up Greer’s bed on the couch.
Disgusted, I went up the stairs to my study. I had papers to correct and my mood was darkening by the hour. It was never good news when Greer showed up on my doorstep, and I thought I had noticed some clearly conspiratorial conversations between Francis, Borocha, and Slim Chung at several points in the evening. When Janice came up to bed I gave her the silent treatment. It was impossible to talk with her about Francis without setting off a prolonged argument.
I later ventured downstairs (I have a difficult time sleeping under the best of circumstances, and having Francis Greer under my roof made me even more restless than usual) and found him sprawled on the couch watching a pay-for-view porn movie on my television.
“That’s going to show up on my records,” I said to him.
“Yeah, Richie, I’m sure those records are of a great deal of interest to many people,” Greer said. “Someone’s probably scrutinizing them as we speak.”
“You’ve been away, Francis,” I said. “Things have changed. That sort of information is widely and irresponsibly disseminated these days. The real issue here is that I don’t recall you asking my permission to dick around with my cable. You do understand that I’ll be billed for that?”
“Relax, Rich. I’ll go out first thing in the morning and sell some plasma so I can repay you your seven bucks. Would that make you happy?”
“What would make me very happy,” I said, “was if you would go out first thing in the morning and find someplace else to stay. You must have friends here. Janice has mentioned that you were corresponding with a number of women while you were in prison.”
“Those were old women, Richie. Christians.”
“I’m sure old Christian women have homes and spare bedrooms,” I said.
“Fuck you, Rich,” Greer said. “You’ve really been getting on my nerves.”
“I’d like nothing better than to get on your nerves, Francis,” I told him. “You’ve already brought more than enough trouble into my life. So fuck you, too, and goodnight. And I’m absolutely serious: I want you out of here first thing in the morning.”
The next morning Janice came up to tell me that Francis was gone. She was alarmed and wanted to know if I had any idea of where he might be. I told her, of course, that I had no clue, which was certainly the truth. I had no intention of recounting the conversation I’d had with Greer before I went up to bed. Janice was visibly upset and a short time later she left in a sulk for her part-time job at Target.
As I sat down to drink my morning coffee and read the newspaper it occurred to me that this was the day we were to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoatat the State Theater downtown. We had planned to have dinner somewhere beforehand. I went over to the bulletin board in the kitchen, where the tickets had been pinned next to the calendar. My intention was simply to confirm the date, but I discovered that the tickets were gone.
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At this point Francis Greer couldn’t have been further from my mind. There were any number of things in my home that I might have suspected Greer of stealing, but tickets to a Broadway show were not among them. I called Janice on her cell phone.
“Do you have the tickets to that Donny Osmond show?” I asked her.
“Oh shit, that’s tonight, isn’t it?” she said. “They’re on the bulletin board in the kitchen.”
“They’re not there. And what’s with this ‘oh shit’ business? I thought you wanted to see that fucking show.”
“I did,” Janice said. “But look, Richard, I just heard from Francis. He told me that you kicked him out of the house in the middle of the night. He’s very hurt.”
“Jesus, Janice, I did no such thing. Francis is a pathological liar.”
“Francis might be a lot of things, Richard, but one thing he’s not is a liar.”
“That just goes to show you how good of a liar he is,” I said. “If you honestly believe I kicked him out of the house in the middle of the night, you’re out of your mind. I simply asked him what his plans were.”
“Last night wasn’t the time for that, Richard. Francis hadn’t even been out of jail for twenty-four hours.”
“Prison, Janice,” I said. “Francis was in prison. There’s a difference there I think you should be aware of.”
“Oh fuck, Richard. I don’t have time for this.”
“Where the hell are those tickets?” I asked.
“I have absolutely no idea,” Janice said. “I just told you. They were on the bulletin board.”
“They’re not there. Are you sure you didn’t put them in your purse or something?”
“I’m positive. I never touched those tickets, and I don’t feel like going to the damn thing now, anyway. I told Francis I would meet up with him later.”
“Jesus, Janice,” I said. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
She hung up the phone.
I spent the morning fuming, and tried with little success to get through the pile of freshmen composition papers on my desk. By late morning I was sitting in the living room with the blinds drawn, drinking beer and watching women’s beach volleyball. The phone rang at one point and when I answered I heard only silence on the other line, and then whoever was calling hung up on me. I checked the number on the caller-ID and saw that it was from a pay phone in Columbia Heights.
I showered, dressed, and drove out to the Heights. As I’ve said, I was just killing time. When my mother wasn’t home I cruised through Hilltop to see if by chance Greer was staying at Slim Chung’s, but got no answer when I knocked at the door of his trailer.
I was restless and ended up at this place on Central Avenue where I liked to play ping-pong. I’ve always found the back-and-forth, gnip-gnop nature of the game relaxing. It involved a concentrated engagement with a sort of reality that didn’t involve actually feeling anything. The place attracted a crowd of blank obsessives, and I seldom communicated with any of my partners beyond the rudiments of keeping score.
That afternoon I played several games with a pigeon-toed old priest I often saw there. The guy played a very aggressive game with a lot of topspin. I’ve never been much of a player, and the priest kicked my ass every game. When I arrived he had been slapping ferocious returns at one of the weird little ping-pong robots this place had installed in a corner.
After I left, I headed downtown and spent a couple hours drinking and watching a baseball game in Runyon’s. I honestly had no clear idea what I was up to, other than acting on a hunch I had no reason to trust. At a quarter to 7:00 I left the bar and walked down Hennepin Avenue, where I took up a surveillance position in a bus shelter across the street from the State Theater. Donny Osmond’s name was stretched across the marquee. I waited probably ten or fifteen minutes before people started showing up in front of the theater.
Almost surely, I thought, if in fact Greer had taken the tickets it had been merely to spite me, but I also felt there was a possibility—Greer being a notorious philanderer, and now fancying himself something of a man of culture—that he would actually use the damn things to impress some woman. It was a long shot, I realized, but I figured he would have noticed the stiff price on the tickets and he was nothing if not an opportunist.
About a half hour before the scheduled performance, I saw Greer coming down the sidewalk toward the theater. He had a new haircut and the rolling swagger of an ex-con. He was wearing a pressed pair of slacks, a dress shirt open at the neck, and a suit jacket that I recognized as one of my own. I watched as Greer approached a group of people milling around under the marquee. He had his back toward me, but several members of the group bent their heads toward him and a conversation ensued. One of the men talking with Greer turned and waved a woman over. The man and woman conferred briefly and then the man fished some cash from his pocket, counted out some bills, and handed them over to Greer, who in turn gave the woman my tickets. He completed this transaction with a wide smile and an absolutely phony attempt at a courtly bow.
After handing over the tickets, Greer headed north back down the sidewalk. I gave him a half-block head start before following, from the other side of the avenue, at what I felt was a safe distance. He was walking at a brisk clip, and the sidewalks along Block E were crowded. When I saw Greer turn down 6th Street I had to make a dash through traffic to avoid losing him. I pulled up short in the middle of the block on the Hennepin Avenue side and watched him cross at the light to the other side of the street. There was a moment when I turned the corner that I was walking almost parallel with him, but I was stopped in my tracks when I saw him raise his arm and let out a shout. I looked east and spied Janice coming up the sidewalk from the opposite direction. I ducked into the exit of a parking ramp and watched as they embraced. Christ, I thought, anybody else would take them for lovers. Janice even took Greer’s hand as they continued down the street and ducked into Murray’s, the steak place where Janice and I had celebrated our engagement.
At this point things got very dark and confused. I’ve never been a violent man, and I don’t even have much in the way of a temper. The rush of almost blinding rage that I felt building behind my eyes was startling to me. I broke out in an uncharacteristic sweat, and experienced what I felt sure was a panic attack.
I paced back and forth on the sidewalk opposite Murray’s, infuriated by my inability to simply barge in and confront Janice and Greer with their deception. I’ve always despised public scenes. That, at any rate, was my dim and cowardly rationale at the time.
I tried to think my way through the situation, but I couldn’t get my head around it. Greer, I felt certain, did not have transportation, unless he’d somehow borrowed a car from one of his criminal acquaintances, or—and this was certainly a possibility—stolen one. Janice would have driven her own car downtown, and must have parked in one of the ramps near Murray’s. I crossed the street and spent half an hour wandering the levels of the garage nearest the steakhouse, but I didn’t stumble across Janice’s Honda.
My car was parked over on Washington Avenue, and I thought of moving it someplace nearer, but there was no metered parking anywhere around Murray’s. I figured I had perhaps an hour to hatch some plan of confrontation. A short time later, feeling increasingly desperate, I headed back down Hennepin to get my car. I have no idea how long I spent circling blocks on the maddening system of one-way streets that comprises downtown Minneapolis, but it felt like I trolled past Murray’s at least twenty-five times.
Finally, just as I was turning down 6th Street one more time, I saw Janice and Greer emerge from the restaurant. I immediately pulled my car to the curb and illegally parked. I didn’t have to wait long. They exchanged a few more words, Janice fished in her purse and handed Greer what was almost certainly cash, and then they embraced one more time and parted. Janice headed east along the sidewalk and Greer strolled west toward the heart of downtown. Sixth was a one-way going in the opposite direction, so I had to circle bac
k around again onto Hennepin. At the intersection of 6th I saw Greer on the next block, and I drove up to 5th and wound my way back around to First Avenue. As I turned the corner I encountered Greer, perhaps fifty yards away, getting into a beat-to-shit blue Impala. I stopped and waited for him to exit his parking space, and then I followed him east through downtown and onto 35 south.
There was almost no traffic on the interstate at that hour—it must have been around 10:30—and Greer was driving at a surprisingly modest speed. I was trying to stay back at least several hundred yards, but I had to resist the growing urge to overtake him and drive him off the road. At the Crosstown Highway he turned off 35 and headed east again, toward the airport.
Holy shit, I thought. That fucker was going to climb on a plane and skip town, probably with money he’d received from my wife. Greer continued right past the exits to the airport, though, and steered the Impala south onto highway 52. I was in familiar territory—I’d once taught at a junior college out that way—but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Greer might have been headed in that direction. There was nothing much out there but drowsy suburban development, the grimy industrial sprawl beyond the airport, and a giant oil refinery, the gleaming spectacle of which was already visible in the distance.
Twin Cities Noir Page 10
