Saving Room for Dessert

by K. C. Constantine

  “Then he’s who we need to talk to. We all stand on his shoes at the same time, he’ll talk. I’m callin’ Failan, you go get Bellotti, tell him this happy horseshit’s gotta stop—huh? Oh hello, darlin’, it’s Valcanas, let me talk to your boss …. no, on his private line, please. Thank you.”

  THEY WERE in Mayor Angelo Bellotti’s office, they being Cone-maugh County District Attorney Howard Failan, City Solicitor Hepburg, Panagios Valcanas, Mrs. Remaley, and the mayor.

  Failan was, as usual, glad-handing everyone, using his most penetrating, most sincere eye-locking gaze, and saving the best for Mrs. Remaley.

  “Anna Mae, can’t tell you how good it is to see you again, we don’t see each other nearly enough, how’ve you been?”

  “Mr. District Attorney, we have some problems—”

  “Just last week, Marlene said to me, Howard, we have to have her over, and I said, well what’s stopping you, Marlene, pick up the phone and call her—whattaya think she’s gonna do, turn down dinner! Not the Anna Mae I know—”

  “Well I’m sure Marlene has better things to do, Howard—”

  “Oh, what’re you talkin’ about, c’mon. I said, my God, Marlene, what’s the problem? Call the woman, she’s one of my favorite people, brings out the best in me, I can’t get away with one little thing with her around, and that’s what I need, Anna Mae. I need people like you to keep me sharp, keep me honest. You know what I miss? Huh? I miss those debates, Anna Mae, I really do. I loved those, goin’ around the county, you and me, all those fire halls? All those buffets? Remember? All that god-awful rigatoni, boy oh boy, I can hardly believe it’s been what, twelve years now? You know what we did, Anna Mae?”

  “Howard, I’m having some real problems here—”

  “We brought the democratic process to the people, that’s what we did. And if you ask me that’s exactly what’s missing in American politics these days. These presidential debates they put on TV, why those people who stage them, they should’ve followed us around back then, we’d have shown them a thing or two about how to take the democratic process deep into the grass roots—”

  “Howard, I was promised that your detectives were going to investigate this shooting.”

  “What? What promise? Why who made that promise? Not me, Anna Mae. I never told you county detectives were going to investigate anything, who said I did? Did somebody say I did?”

  “Leo Harvey did, Howard.”

  “Leo? We talkin’ about the same Leo Harvey here? My first assistant?”

  “Well I certainly am.”

  “Oh, Anna Mae, I think you must be mistaken about that, I don’t think Leo would’ve taken it upon himself to make a promise like that, no, he doesn’t have the authority to make that kind of scheduling commitment. I think somebody’s trying to steer you wrong, stir up something between us. Why don’t we sit down here and talk this over—Angelo? Ho, Angelo, you got any coffee? How about we get some coffee in here, huh? Some Danish maybe? How about some Danish, Anna Mae—say, have you eaten lunch? Why I’ll bet you haven’t even had your lunch yet—Angelo, forget the coffee, call the Courthouse Café, tell ’em send us over lunch for—uh, how many we got here? Five? Six?”

  “Howard, I don’t need lunch, I need to get this thing straightened out—”

  “Anna Mae, you know what Churchill said once? Right in the middle of World War Two? When hell itself looked like it was drop-pin’ out of the sky and fallin’ on London—know what old Winnie said? He said—and I think I’m quoting him correctly here—he said, ’There’s nothing so bad it won’t look better after lunch.’ Now maybe that’s not an exact quote but you certainly get the idea. Whatever problem you have here, you have got to admit it’s not German V-2 rockets fallin’ out of the sky on us, is it? So now what’s the problem?”

  “I’m trying to tell you, Howard—if you’ll let me!”

  “Oh, Anna Mae, I love it—don’t you just love this woman? You fellas, I’m jealous, I’m tellin’ ya. You’re in there lockin’ horns with this firebrand, boy oh boy, don’t tell me she won’t keep ya sharp. What’re you gonna have, Anna Mae—listen, they make the best chicken salad on sun-dried tomato focaccia you ever tasted—that’s what I’m gonna have, Angelo, tell ’em put at least one of those in the box for me. Anna Mae, their chicken salad’s better than Mar-lene’s—now don’t you tell her I said that, but it is, I’m tellin’ ya.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Angelo, order me one too—”

  “Attaboy, girl,” Failan said, beaming expansively. “Rest of you fellas’ll probably order something positively boring like ham and cheese on rye, but that’s ’cause you don’t know what you’re missing. I swear, Anna Mae, most guys in this town, they’ve got the taste buds of pubescent boys. Stick a pizza or a cheeseburger in front of them, that’s the extent of their culinary curiosity. Course if it wasn’t for Marlene, I’d be just as bad. She’s the one keeps expandin’ my culinary horizons, believe me—”

  “Howard, you think we could talk about what’s bothering me while we’re waiting for the food?”

  “Why, of course, Anna Mae. Let’s get to it. What’s on your mind? But I hope it’s not about me breakin’ a promise I never made, now is it? Tell me it’s not about that, because I promise you right now, right here in front of all these witnesses, I never gave Leo Harvey authority to commit to havin’ our detectives investigate this shooting, that’s just not something I wouldVe done—and I further promise you that Leo would’ve never—”

  “Well somebody did, Howard! Now I don’t want to call you a liar but either it was you or it was somebody who claimed to be speaking for you—”

  “Anna Mae, just slow down now, take a deep breath—”

  “I don’t need to take a deep breath, Howard—”

  “Yes, you do, Anna Mae, yes, you do—”

  “I don’t need instruction on how to breathe, Howard, I’ve been doin’ that for a lot longer than you have—”

  “And that’s what’s got me a little worried here, Anna Mae, your face is starting to get blotchy—”

  “Oh stop pretending you’re worried about my health, Howard, and tell me—no, forget that! You get Leo Harvey down here right now. You get him down here in front of me and everybody else in this room, ’cause I want to hear him tell me to my face he didn’t promise me you authorized two county detectives to investigate this shooting—”

  “Anna Mae, I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to. Harvey’s tryin’ that Stillton kid that shot his mother’s boyfriend, he doesn’t have time to come down here—just listen a minute.”

  “No, I’m not going to listen to anything except him saying he didn’t make that promise to me—”

  “Just listen, will ya? Will ya just listen a minute?”

  Mrs. Remaley folded her arms across her ample bosom and started shaking her head from side to side. “I’m not going to listen to you spin your way out of this, Howard, I won’t be satisfied until I see Harvey telling you, me, and everybody in this room he didn’t make that promise to me, that’s all I’m going to listen to—”

  “So you think I’m down here tryin’ to spin my way out of this, do you?”

  “You’re the best spinner in this county, Howard, why would I think you’d be doing anything else?”

  “Well now lemme tell you something, Anna Mae—”

  “No, let me tell you something first. If this isn’t straightened out, Howard, if you try to give me the spin here, I’m going straight to the Gazette and you know what the publisher thinks of me, Howard—”

  “I know he financed most of your campaign against me, Anna Mae, I know that for sure. But—and I hate to be the one to tell you this so long after the fact—but he backed you not because he was in love with you, Anna Mae, but because he was in serious hate with me. He would’ve backed anybody was runnin’ against me. And if you call the other candidate in that race, I think he’ll tell you that his campaign was financed by the same guy who financed yours.”

 
“Well if that isn’t just like you to try to turn that around—”

  “Well how’s this, Anna Mae—and this has absolutely no spin on it, it’s as straight as I ever throw anything. You just accused me of makin’ a promise I never made and then breakin’ it and then lyin’ about it, and you did that in front of all these fellas here. You tried just as hard as you could to make me look like a fool. Anna Mae, I haven’t been DA of this county for almost four terms because I’m a fool.”

  Failan turned to Bellotti, Valcanas, and Hepburg and said, “Fellas, how ’bout you give us a couple minutes here.”

  “Nothing doing,” she said. “Anything you can say to me in private you can say in front of them, I don’t have any secrets.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay. Fine. You want ’em to hear what I’ve got to say, that’s fine with me. Fact is, Anna Mae, you don’t have any secrets. You’ve never had a thought you kept to yourself, not in your entire life. If you thought it, you found some way to get it said. Well, I have to admit, there are some people that find that utterly charming. Hell, I heard one of your campaign groupies say one time that one quality was enough to make you positively charismatic. And I thought, well, yes, your so-called inability to tell anything but the truth does appeal to some people—the monomaniacs, the ones who think the world’s all this or all that, whatever their particular flavor.

  “And when you decided to run against me, well, I remember thinkin’, say what you want about this woman, she’s got ’em. Big as basketballs and solid brass. You’d have to. I mean, Jesus, to run for district attorney and not be one? I’ve asked everybody I know and I’ve researched it every way I can, but, Anna Mae, as far as I can determine, you are the only person in twentieth-century Pennsylvania to run for the office of district attorney without bein’ an attorney.”

  “This is what you’re going to talk about, Howard? My campaign against you?”

  “Yes, Anna Mae, that’s exactly what I’m gonna talk about.”

  “That was more than twelve years ago, Howard. Water under the bridge—”

  “No no, Anna Mae, it’s not water under the bridge, it’s why you’re here now, it’s why you tried to make a fool out of me in front of these fellas, it’s ’cause you didn’t get it then, and it’s ’cause you still don’t get it now. When you ran against me and you said that all the office required was administrative abilities, that anybody who knew the basics of office management could do the job, I mean, you got me off my butt and into action. I loved it, I loved havin’ the chance to get out there and explain why this job wasn’t just any office manager’s job. I loved goin’ around the county explainin’ what I did and what it required and why everybody oughta be concerned about who the DA was and what he was about.”

  “Howard, for God’s sake get to the point, will you please?”

  “My point is, Anna Mae, you didn’t have the first idea what’s involved in the job. And every time you started ranting about how plea bargaining was the plague that was going to grind American justice to a halt, I loved explainin’ why, without plea bargaining, American justice would grind to a halt. And every time I did, you sat there, in all your smug theoretical righteousness, and never heard one word I said.”

  “Wrong, Howard, as usual. I heard every word you said—”

  “May’ve heard them, Anna Mae, but didn’t understand a goddamn one.“

  “Don’t use that language with me—”

  “Horseshit!”

  Mrs. Remaley covered her ears and turned away, but Failan grabbed her hands, pulled them away from her ears, and slid around in front of her.

  “Just great, Anna Mae, you can call me a liar when I wasn’t, you can accuse me of breakin’ promises I didn’t make, but I have to watch how I talk to you?! Horseshit! Double horseshit! Listen up, lady! I know what you’re pissed off about and it isn’t any promise about my guys doin’ your work for ya. You’re pissed because as soon as that guy, whatever the hell his name is, Buczek or Buski—”

  “Buczyk,” Hepburg said.

  “Thank you. Him. Yes. You’re pissed because the second our office agreed to plead him into ARD, your grand inquisition here went poof! And you can lecture everybody till their ears turn black and fall off about how you don’t like plea bargaining, but without that kind of arrangement in this instance, Anna Mae, a good cop who did a clean shooting—if it were up to you—that good cop would lose his job. Now you can spin this thing down to the Gazette office if you want to, but you’re not gonna change the fact we got corroborating testimony from the only witness—”

  “The only witness who had a whole lot to gain—”

  “Exactly! Of course he had something to gain. What the hell’s so wrong about that?”

  “And just happens to tell the same story as the cop—”

  “No he doesn’t—”

  “Which tells me they rehearsed the whole thing—”

  “Oh rehearsed my ass. I’ve read both their statements, Anna Mae, I’ve listened to the tapes of the interviews—not that I don’t have a whole lot of other things to do—”

  “Why take such an interest then, Howard, tell me that?”

  “Because of you, Anna Mae. Because you were on your high horse again.”

  “Me? You got interested just because of me?!”

  “Ask Leo, Anna Mae, about the bet I made with him. Ten bucks against a dime—which he owes me—’cause I bet him the day after the shooting you’d be bustin’ Figulli’s hump to get appointed to the board of inquiry. That’s why I took an interest, my God, you think I wouldn’t? With all your cockamamie theories?”

  “Is it a cockamamie theory that private citizens should just shut their eyes when one of them gets shot by a cop?”

  “Oh Christ, Anna Mae, come on, if you’re gonna go to bat for a cause, at least pick a case that warrants an inquiry. This doesn’t even come close—”

  “Two witnesses practically tell an identical story, one of them is the shooter and the other one’s getting a slap on the wrist in return for his testimony—”

  “You forget the forensics, Anna Mae, and you also forget that the victim’s statement is flatly contradicted by the forensics. The man said he was standing on the grass between the houses when he was shot—on the other side of the sidewalk opposite the street. Blood splatter doesn’t lie, Anna Mae. Hornyak’s blood was found on the curb, indicating clearly that where he took the bullet is not where he says he took it. And the shell casings ejected from the cop’s service pistol were found to be exactly where they should’ve been found if he was standing where he said he was when he fired. Now if anybody’s makin’ up a story here, it isn’t the cop and it isn’t Bu, uh, Bu-whatever.”

  “And what you’re forgetting, Howard, is who found all this forensic evidence. This case, this shooting by a city policeman, was investigated by a city detective! A Carlotti somebody, who conveniently can’t be found to appear before my board—”

  “Anna Mae, you’re wonderful, you really are—”

  “Don’t you dare start that smarmy crap with me, Howard, I’m—”

  “Smarmy crap? If you think what I’m gonna say is smarmy crap, you better suspend judgment for a couple minutes here, Anna Mae, because what I was about to say is that, even though nobody made a promise to you to have our detectives do your work for ya, that’s exactly who did it anyway.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Anna Mae, you’re the perfect example of the ideologues who never let facts get in the way of their propaganda. Don’t you know that the city of Rocksburg has no crime scene investigators?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It doesn’t, Anna Mae. There are only two crime scene investigating teams in this area. One of them is based at Troop A Barracks of the state police and the other—ta-ta! It’s based in my office. And do you wanna venture a guess which of those teams did the forensics on this shooting?”

  It took a long moment for the implication of what Failan said to sink in. “You are
insufferable, Howard. You are despicable.”

  “Oh I’m probably a lot worse than that, Anna Mae. ’Cause even though nobody made any promise to you that my guys would do any of the work, you got my guys anyway. ’Cause the city detective—and his name’s Carlucci by the way, not Carlotti—as soon as he finished doing what he could do, he immediately called my guys.”

  Mrs. Remaley’s face was pinched with anger. “You knew this and you just let me go ahead anyway?”

  “Oh no, Anna Mae, this isn’t mine, this is all yours. That forensics report, my guys not only signed it, they typed their names and identified themselves just as fully as they have to do every time they submit a report, no matter which department requests their services. I knew you wouldn’t bother to read those names. You have no interest in details, Anna Mae. Never did. You’re all theory, through and through.”

  “And you’re rotten through and through. You could’ve saved me all this.”

  “Oh no doubt of that, I could have indeed. But you know how people say it’s bad for your health to carry a grudge, how they say it’s way harder on you than it is on the person you’ve got the grudge against? Believe me when I say I agree with them. It is way harder to carry a grudge. Anna Mae, I tell you with every molecule in my body, you have no idea how deeply I felt the grudge I’ve been carryin’ against you. You have no idea how hard I looked to find a suitable way to even up with you, for what an insult it was, not only to me, but to my office, and to every district attorney in this commonwealth, I don’t give a damn what party they represent. When you took out that ad in the Gazette and announced your candidacy and said you didn’t have to be an attorney to hold the office, that was one thing. But when you said all it took was the skills of an office manager, that just pissed me off to my bones. I vowed to myself that one day I’d even up with you for that. And I’m very relieved—finally—to say I think I just did.”