Bust

by Ken Bruen

  Then came his moment, the grand slam, the slamdunk. He approached the grave, letting a slight tremor rack his body, then produced one white rose. He’d planned to let it flutter into the hole as he gave a perfect moan but, fuck, he missed and the flower landed on the side. He had to bend down, dirtying his new suit, then muttered, Fucksake, and threw the goddamned thing in.

  The shiva sitting was at Max’s house. During the next few days, people dropped by the townhouse, bringing food, and sharing stories about Deirdre. As much as Max had enjoyed the mourning bit at first, it was getting old. Besides, it made his jaw hurt, having to wear that hangdog expression day after fucking day.

  Paul and Karen stayed until Tuesday night and then drove back to Albany. On Wednesday, a condolence card arrived from the office, along with a bouquet of flowers. Although the card was signed by almost everyone, Max didn’t read anyone’s note except Angela’s. It read: With My Deepest Sympathy, Angela

  Gra go mor

  What the fuck was with that, Greek or something?

  Seeing her handwriting made Max suddenly desperate to see her in person. Again, he wanted to call her – just to hear her voice, that accent he loved, and hang up – but he knew that would be stupidest thing he could do. But he was becoming restless. He couldn’t wait to go back to work, to get back into the swing of things.

  On Thursday, Berna, Max’s West Indian maid, came and scrubbed the wall and the floor in the downstairs hallway. A repairman came to fill in the bullet holes and now it was impossible to tell that anything had happened. Kamal had come back from India and on Thursday he came by to prepare Max’s macrobiotic meals for the next several days. He hadn’t heard anything about the murders. When Max told him he broke down crying.

  Max hadn’t realized how close Kamal and Deirdre had become. Max had hired Kamal a couple of months ago, after he had been referred by the massage therapist at his health club. Kamal had often come to the house while Max was at work.

  When Kamal was composed enough to speak he invited Max to come with him sometime to an ashram on the West Side to meditate. Max said he’d think about it, although he couldn’t imagine himself sitting in a lotus position and chanting like some hippie.

  “Remember, people don’t die, because they aren’t born,” Kamal said. “Birth and death are merely illusions. All people and objects exist now and forever in the universal unconscious.”

  Max stared at him, thinking, What a crock.

  Max liked Kamal’s cooking and he thought he was a nice guy, but he decided that if kept forcing this religious crap on him the guy would be history.

  On Friday, Max couldn’t stand being cooped up any longer. He took a cab to his gym in the Claridge House on Eighty-seventh and Third. He swam his usual forty laps, then sat in the steam room, reading The Wall Street Journal. After he showered, he weighed himself and was thrilled to see that he’d lost four pounds.

  He had a relaxing weekend at home – eating Kamal’s food, taking short walks around the neighborhood. On Saturday – a gorgeous seventy-degree day – he walked to Central Park and sat for most of the afternoon on a bench in the shade, reading networking magazines, trying to keep up on new developments in the industry. There’d been nothing about the murder or the police investigation in the newspapers or on TV. Max remembered how Detective Simmons had promised to “be in touch soon” and now more than a week had gone by since the murder. While Max was glad that the story seemed to be fading, he didn’t like the way Detective Simmons was staying away from him. As he walked home from the park, Max had a funny feeling he was being watched.

  Ten

  Better not to begin. Once you begin, better to finish it.

  BUDDHIST SAYING

  Bobby was watching the girl with the blond hair and the big rack check into her room at the reception desk of the Hotel Pennsylvania. The way she kept looking around, twirling her hair with her index finger, Bobby could tell she was uptight about something. She was wearing lowslung jeans and a tight tube top and high heels. Bobby tried to imagine what she looked like naked and, man, he liked the picture that popped into his head. He wished he could whip his camera out right there. She had a slutty look to her, but there was something innocent about her, too, like she was afraid of something. She didn’t look like a hooker, but she definitely looked like a girl who was someplace she wasn’t supposed to be.

  As she walked past the table with the big arrangement of red flowers, Bobby wheeled across the lobby to the Bell Captain’s desk and said to Victor, “The girl near the elevator. Find out if she’s expecting anybody.”

  Victor looked beyond the flow of people and said, “You mean the skinny chick with the knockers and the big hair? I never seen her before in my life.”

  “I didn’t ask you if you’ve seen her before. I said find out if she’s expecting anybody.”

  Victor went to the reception desk. A minute or two later he came back to Bobby and said, “She’s meeting her husband up there, they’re staying the night.”

  “I’m going up,” Bobby said.

  “You hear what I said? The girl’s married.”

  “Married my gimp ass. She wasn’t wearing a rock – she had some other weird fucking ring on her finger.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’s not married.”

  “I’m telling you, there’s something going on with her.”

  “Look, let’s just wait for a real escort to come along.”

  Bobby, looking at Victor in that dorky bellhop uniform, wondering if something had really happened to the guy’s balls, if they fell off in the chemo or something, said, “Just get me the key to that girl’s room.”

  “Come on,” Victor said. “I really don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “Look, if this is gonna work you’re gonna have to trust me. You know I wouldn’t do anything stupid, right?”

  “Hey, I’m not calling anybody stupid, but you said we were gonna go after pros.”

  “I’m telling you, I have a hunch about this girl. She looked scared, the way she kept playing with her hair. If she’s not a pro, I bet she’s cheating on her old man or the guy’s cheating on his old lady. We could make a mint with one good picture. I know when something’s off and this smells to hog heaven, they’re cheating, on someone.”

  “Whatever,” Victor said. “But I’m telling you – I think you’re making a big mistake.”

  When Victor came back with a maid’s plastic keycard Bobby said, “So what name did they register under?”

  “Brown,” Victor said.

  “See? Now tell me that isn’t a bullshit name. I’m telling you, stick with me and you’re gonna go places.”

  Bobby got off the elevator on the eighteenth floor. He wheeled himself one direction, took a few towels from a maid’s cart, then went back the other way to room 1812. He could hear Mr. Brown’s moaning from two doors away. Fuck, you could of heard him in Queens. After making sure the coast was clear, he slipped the keycard Victor had given him into the lock and slowly pushed the door open.

  Room 1812 was long and narrow, with the bed against the wall at the far end. The light on the night table was on so Bobby had a clear view of the action, which was good because the light from the hallway didn’t make it too far into the room. Bobby went about halfway over the threshold and gently let the door rest against his chair. Then he raised his camera with a towel over it, the lens peeking out underneath.

  Mr. and Mrs. Brown were going at it, but all the noise was coming from Mr. Brown – Mrs. Brown wasn’t making a peep. As Bobby snapped a few quick shots, he had a feeling that he knew Mr. Brown from somewhere. Then he remembered seeing him pass by in the lobby earlier in the night. But downstairs the guy had had curly blond hair and now he was nearly bald. He almost muttered, The fuck happened to you?

  Mr. Brown must’ve heard the snapping camera or seen Bobby out of the corner of his eye because he looked up and after staring at Bobby for a couple of seconds said, “Hey, what the hell?”

  Bobb
y let the corner of the towel drop over the camera’s lens.

  “Jeez, I’m sorry, mister,” he said. “I’m really, really sorry. I just came to bring you your towels-”

  “Get the fuck out of here!” Mr. Brown shouted.

  Wheeling toward the bathroom, Bobby said, “It’ll only take a minute, mister. I gotta put fresh towels in every room two times a day or they get really mad at me-”

  “Just get the hell outta here!”

  “You don’t want your towels?”

  “Get out, you fucking moron!”

  “What about your soap?”

  “Leave!”

  “Please, Mister,” Bobby said, wheeling back toward the door. “Don’t get me fired. I need this job. I need it real bad.” He took a last look at the blonde, who’d pulled the sheet up around her tits and turned her back to him. “I’m real sorry about bustin’ in on you, I didn’t see nothing…” He scooted out the door and let it shut behind him.

  Riding the elevator down, camera tucked in his bag, Bobby was smiling, proud of his performance. He was better than fuckin’ Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Maybe he should’ve listened to Isabella, gone on some auditions. Maybe it wasn’t too late. There had to be roles for guys in wheelchairs, right?

  Nah, he decided, acting was too fucking boring. He needed the buzz, the action. Crime was where it was at.

  As he wheeled out into the lobby, he started thinking about Mrs. Brown.

  She was a good-looking girl all right. She had to be a pro – why else would a girl like that spread her legs for some middle-aged bald guy looked like that?

  In the lobby, Bobby met Victor near the Thirty-second Street exit, said, “So far, so good.”

  “Yeah, sure” Victor said, all panicked, like he didn’t believe it for a second. “What the fuck happened?”

  “Stop shitting your pants, will ya?” Bobby said. “I got some good pics. Now we just gotta get the payola.”

  Bobby took the Eighth Avenue bus uptown. When he got back to his apartment, he developed the film as fast as he could. Two of the shots had come out blurry and one had the towel in the way, but two were clear as fucking day. In the one he was going to use, you could see Mr. Brown with his mouth open, staring at the camera, while Mrs. Brown was just starting to cover those big knockers of hers. Bobby thought for a moment, trying to come up with a good name, then on the back of the picture he wrote a note telling Mr. Brown to leave ten thousand dollars at the hotel’s front desk for “Tommy Lee.” He stuck the photo inside a manila envelope and sealed it.

  When he arrived back at the hotel, Victor said, “I got some bad news for you. The guy and the girl – they both took off.”

  “Fuck, when?”

  “Half hour after you left. Why don’t you keep your fuckin’ phone on? Goddamn phones – everybody’s got ’em, but nobody’s got ’em turned on.”

  “I thought you said they were staying the night?”

  “That’s what they told the girl at the desk, but that doesn’t mean they’re gonna do it. It’s not like they’re obligated to.”

  “Shit.”

  “And that’s not all – the cops were here.”

  “The cops?”

  “There an echo in here?”

  Wanting to smack Victor, Bobby said, “What the hell’d the cops want?”

  “Got me. When I first found out I thought, That’s it – I’m fired. F ‘n’ F. Fired and fucked.”

  Now Bobby remembered seeing a big black guy in a gray suit in the lobby earlier in the night, thinking the guy had a cop look to him. Bobby had always had great cop-dar.

  “Was he asking about us?” Bobby asked.

  “No, that’s just it,” Victor said. “It was the couple. He was asking all kinds of questions about them. Who are they, have they been here before, what’s the girl’s name – shit like that.”

  “The girl? Not the guy?”

  “That’s all I know,” Victor said. “Then when the girl left the cop followed her. Look, Bobby. I mean I like working with you again and everything, but we can’t do this shit no more. Now with the cops coming down here, this is getting crazy. I can’t lose this job, Bobby. It has nothing to do with you – I just can’t lose this fucking job, I’ve too much riding on my paycheck.”

  Bobby, starting to wheel away, said, “The whole thing was a dumb idea anyway. Forget about it.”

  “Hey, come on,” Victor said. “Don’t be like that. Wait up a second.”

  During the bus ride home, Bobby was thinking about the cop, wondering why he was asking questions about the girl. He also wondered why Mr. Brown arrived at the hotel wearing that blond wig. Then he thought, What the fuck difference did it make? Even if the guy had paid the money it wouldn’t’ve changed anything. Right now Bobby had enough money. He owned his apartment outright and had some savings safe with loan sharks. What would an extra ten grand do for him? It wouldn’t get him outta the goddamn chair, wouldn’t let him get up and walk to the deli or whatever. He wasn’t doing this for the money. The money was, like, a bonus. Just to show he wasn’t completely fucking useless.

  A few months after he was paralyzed a vocational counselor at Mount Sinai Hospital asked Bobby if he was planning to return to work and Bobby said, “Hell yeah.”

  The woman went on about the different services available to him, how he could learn how to use a computer and maybe get some bullshit office job, and Bobby said, “I don’t wanna do that kind of work – I wanna do my work. Can you guys help me do that?”

  “And what kind of work do you do, Mr. Rosa?” she’d asked.

  Bobby had mumbled something like, Never mind, and hightailed it the fuck out of there.

  Bobby was lost in thought and suddenly realized that the bus was passing the Eighty-ninth Street stop. He started screaming at the driver, “Hey, what the hell’s wrong with you, asshole! Didn’t you hear me ring the goddamn bell? Jesus Christ, what the fuck does a guy gotta do to get off a fucking bus these days?” If he’d been packing, he might have shot the fuck.

  Bobby continued to curse as the driver lowered him on the wheelchair lift. He heard the driver shout after him, “You’re welcome.”

  Yeah, Bobby would have shot him.

  When he got home, Bobby tried to relax on a tub chair in the shower. Then he flipped around on the TV awhile, but nothing was on. He ate a couple packages of Cup-a-Soup and then hit the sack.

  The next day Bobby took a bus uptown to visit his mother at the Jewish Home for the Aged, a nursing home on 106th Street. He’d moved his mother up there last year, from a nursing home in Brooklyn, because it was only seventeen blocks from his apartment and he wanted to visit her more often.

  For a while, he went every day, bringing her ice cream and Chinese food and getting one of the orderlies to wheel her out to the garden so she could get some fresh air. But then his mother had another stroke, a bad one, and now she just slept most of the time. Bobby still visited her three or four times a week; he would’ve gone more often, but it was too depressing to see her so out of it. He was afraid that when her time came and she died that was how he’d remember her – with her eyes closed and her toothless mouth sagging open.

  As usual, his mother was in bed asleep. Her body had shriveled, especially on her left side. She’d always been short, but under the blanket she looked like she was four feet tall. There were tubes connected to her arms, meaning she probably had another infection. Bobby was gonna raise hell, find out why nobody called to tell him, but he knew this wouldn’t do any good. It would just get him all worked up and his mother would still be lying in bed like a vegetable. Sometimes Bobby thought his mother would be better off dead and he even thought about taking her home and shooting her.

  More and more, he just wanted to shoot somebody, go postal, let them know how goddamn angry he was.

  He might’ve done it too, offed his Mom, except she was Catholic and he knew she wouldn’t want that. She was probably already pissed off at him for putting her in a Jewish nursing
home. But, hey, she was past complaining.

  Bobby shook his mother’s arm until her eyes opened. She couldn’t smile anymore, but Bobby could always tell she was happy to see him. The dribble from the corner of her mouth could be a sign of happiness, he figured. Like she was trying to smile.

  After sitting next to her for a while, Bobby took the elevator down to the cafeteria and bought a little container of ice cream. Then he went back up to his mother’s room and shook her awake. She turned toward him, but this time only one of her eyes opened.

  “Look, Ma, I got your favorite – vanilla.”

  His mother turned away, like she was angry, but Bobby kept the little wooden stick with the glob of ice cream on it in front of her face until she turned back and started eating it. Some ice cream dripped down her chin and Bobby wiped it off with the sleeve of his shirt. He took a lick himself and that shit wasn’t half bad.

  When she finished eating, Bobby stayed with her a while longer, watching her sleep. Then he realized that it was past one o’clock and her soap operas were on. He turned on the TV in front of her bed to channel 7 and cranked the volume. He leaned over the bed, kissed her, and then left the room quietly.

  When Bobby got back to his apartment he realized he had nothing to do. He would’ve gone to Central Park with his camera and scouted for some new prospects, but it was getting cloudy outside and the air felt like rain. Maybe he’d just go out to the video store, check out the new releases, pick up some food at the supermarket, and then come back home and call it a day.

  Bobby came back from the supermarket and cooked himself dinner – baked beans, powdered potatoes, and two cans of Beefaroni. Even Def Leppard couldn’t get him out of his funk. When the Def couldn’t crank you, it was way past time to shoot someone.

  While he ate he stared at the pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, thinking that the guy was starting to look familiar again. He didn’t know if he was imagining it – maybe it was just that he was staring at the pictures for so long, of course the guy was starting to look familiar. But, no, there was more to it than that. Bobby had seen that face before. Then, suddenly, it clicked. He wheeled out to the hallway, to the incinerator room, and when he didn’t find what he was looking for there, he rode the elevator down to his building’s basement. In one corner, the porters stacked the old newspapers they picked up from the recycling bins on every floor. Once a month they’d tie them up and cart them off, but recycling day must have been a couple of weeks off because the pile was pretty big. Bobby fished through the papers until he found the week-old Daily News he was thinking of. But he didn’t really get excited until he turned to page three and saw the big picture of Mr. Brown, and the story of the two women who were murdered on the Upper East Side in this very expensive-looking townhouse. Max Fisher, the article said, was the founder and CEO of NetWorld…