Fresh Kills

by Bill Loehfelm

  “More or less,” I said.

  I yanked the carafe out of the coffeemaker and sat my mug under the spout, staring into the black stream pouring down. I debated the wisdom of trying to convince her I was capable of killing my father.

  “You want honesty?” I said. “Fine. I’m not indifferent, I’m glad. It’s about time. He had it coming. You know what he was like. Shit, you spent two years of your life listening to me rant about him. How do I feel about it? I don’t know if I’m grateful to the guy who did it, or if I’m jealous because he did it first.”

  “You should hear yourself,” Molly said. “You sound just like you did when we were seventeen.” She walked over to me. “Half a minute ago he meant nothing to you. Now you’re spitting poison all over the counter.” She put her hand on my chest, looked me in the eyes. “I think you’re in for a bad time, John. Be careful. If you need me, I can be around.”

  I sipped my coffee, backing harder against the counter.

  “Yeah, we fuck every now and then,” she whispered to me, “but we’re old friends, too.”

  I wouldn’t look at her. “Tell David I said hey.”

  Molly turned on her heel and walked out, slamming the door behind her. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard her call me an asshole on her way out.

  TWO

  AFTER I WATCHED MOLLY DRIVE AWAY, I STUFFED SOME CLOTHES in a bag, hopped in my Galaxie and sped south across the malformed, mutant offspring of Brooklyn known as Staten Island. The forgotten fifth borough. The Cultural Void. Home of the world-famous ferry, the world’s largest garbage dump, and the world’s largest collection of identical people.

  I was worried about how my sister was taking all this; she has a tendency to overreact to things. Julia wasn’t wild about the old man, either, but she’d tried hanging on to him. She worked even harder at it after Mom died. Julia and Mom were more like sisters than mother and daughter. They even looked alike. Straight, blond hair that they both wore long, deep green eyes, pale, burn-ready skin. Thin but hippy, with long legs. When Julia hit her late teens, in the last couple of years before Mom died, they swapped clothes all the time. From a distance, it was difficult to tell them apart. They were best friends.

  To me, their closeness was all the more reason for Julia to hate the old man, considering how he treated our mother. But Julia isn’t the hating kind. I asked her once why she even bothered with him.

  “He’s my father,” she’d say. “And he’s alone now. And Mom loved him.” That’s Julia. She’s quite a pistol, my sister. Of course, it was easier for her to be more forgiving. She hadn’t had quite the hands-on experience with the old man that I’d had.

  Mom did love him; how I don’t know. I never felt any obligation to him whatsoever. I’d told him so a few years ago, and as I bobbed and weaved through traffic on the Staten Island Expressway, the stink of the Fresh Kills Dump filling the car as I passed it, I felt glad we’d had that conversation before he died.

  WHEN I PULLED THE CAR into my parents’ driveway, Purvis was waiting on the front porch.

  “Took you long enough,” he said.

  “Whatever. Where’s Waters?”

  “Around back,” Purvis answered. “He didn’t want to attract the neighbors’ attention.” He gestured toward the front door. “You wanna open it up for us?”

  “I don’t have a key,” I said. “Haven’t for years.”

  Purvis led me around the side of the house to the backyard.

  Standing on the patio, studying his shoes, was Detective Nathaniel Waters, a hulking, balding man in his mid-fifties, all loose, pale skin and wet, yellow eyes.

  “Fat Nat,” my father had called him. They’d grown up together on Katan Avenue, alternating between being inseparable and brawling on sight. Sometimes, after a glass or two of wine, my mother told me stories about them. They played varsity football at Farrell together. My father started at left defensive end. Waters was his backup. Their weight room rivalry was the stuff of legend.

  Their senior year, at my father’s encouragement, Waters switched to linebacker and broke his leg in the first quarter of his first start. Done. My father went to Wagner College on a scholarship and met my mother. He found a new rival in a guy named Stanski. Waters failed his army physical and went into the police academy. The first time my father got arrested for bar fighting, it was Waters who busted him.

  Though raised in the same neighborhood, Dad and Mom only got to know each other at Wagner. She was his tutor, assigned the challenge of preventing my father from failing off the football team. My mother was smitten, she told me, by the fact that such a powerful, handsome man needed her help. It had never happened to her before, she said.

  They’d met only once before, when she was Waters’s date for the senior prom. As soon as she and my father started going steady, Waters decided he was in love with her, too. He had to. He and my father were those weird type of guys who hated each other so much they couldn’t stay out of each other’s lives. They drank in the same bars all their lives, preferring for decades to trade insults and glare at each other over their light beers rather than cede territory. Waters only gave up on my mother when she got pregnant with me. I guess even Fat Nat had standards.

  Not long after my parents’ wedding, he met a girl of his own, married her. Less than a year later, they had twin sons. Two years later, Waters came home from a twelve-hour shift on foot patrol in the Bronx to an empty house on Staten Island. His wife, who my father came to refer to as “the Disappearing Blonde,” vanished with their sons into her huge Italian family. She had relatives scattered all over the Eastern seaboard. Some still lived in Italy. Waters tried, but he never found her. A hard case for an aspiring detective to leave unsolved.

  Waters went on to a thirty-year career as a New York City cop, never working anything but homicide after he made detective. He made a record number of busts, but he was too honest to make the right friends, on the job or in the city government. So like a lot of other cops who did good work but who nobody liked very much, as soon as he lost a step, Waters got sentenced to a police precinct on Staten Island, running in circles for the last ten years after Mafia sycophants and chasing teenage vandals, teenage car thieves, and teenage drug dealers. I’m sure it burned his ass something serious, being put out to pasture when he felt he still had good races left in him. He never heard from his wife again. Never took off his wedding ring.

  My mother’s voice glowed with admiration for my younger father as she told the stories, but it always softened with embarrassment when she spoke of Waters. Who that twinge of shame was for, her or him, I never knew.

  I’d last run into Waters three years ago, during the big St. Pat-rick’s Day parade on Forest Avenue, not long after my mother’s funeral. My father burst hollering and stumbling into the pub where I worked. I eighty-sixed him, waving for the bouncers as soon as he got to the bar. He launched the empty beer bottle he’d carried in at my head.

  I went over the bar after him like I’d been sprung from a cage, teeth clenched, adrenaline surging, a half-full bottle of Bushmills in my hand, but my foot slipped on the beer-soaked bar and I crashed down into the suddenly empty bar stools. The whiskey bottle shattered and shredded my hand. Waters pinned me to the floor before I could right myself. My father kicked at the both of us. It took three bouncers to haul my father outside. Waters bolted for the door, cuffs swinging in his fingers, leaving me cradling my bloody hand in my lap, tears of rage streaming down my face. He came back with empty cuffs. My father had disappearedinto the crowd. Laughing, I was sure, at Waters and me all the way to the next bar.

  Now, as my father lay dead on a slab, Waters stood in his yard, waiting on me. As I approached him, Waters frowned at me like I was a dog that had shit on the rug. A dog that knew better, but did it anyway. I’m sure I looked like the long-lost son he was glad he never had. Black boots, dirty Levi’s, black T-shirt, leather jacket. Silver hoops in each ear. My father’s eyes.

  “Speak of the devil,”
he said, “and the devil appears.”

  Goddamn if his white T-shirt didn’t, as always, show through the buttons of his dress shirt, right above the belt buckle.

  Purvis extended his hand. “Again, sorry for your loss, John.”

  Carlo Purvis. Jesus, what a mess. Slicked-back hair, stubby legs, big beak of a nose, huge head. He went through Farrell with me. The football team used to kick his ass twice a semester. Detective by thirty-one? He must’ve learned to give one hell of a blow job. He wasn’t sorry and neither was I and neither was Waters and we all knew exactly how each other felt.

  I stared at Purvis’s hand until he pulled it back. “Let’s not have any bullshit here, fellas,” I said. “Not among men. The only regret among the three of us is that we didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “You sure about that, Junior?” Purvis asked.

  “Positive,” I said.

  “And you were where this morning?” Waters asked.

  “I was at work until five. You can check my time card. After we closed down, an old friend and I went out for breakfast and then back to my place.” I looked at Purvis hard. “She was next to, above, or below me until I left to come here.” I turned back to Waters. “Where were you this morning, Detective?”

  “We’re going to continue on as if you never asked that ridiculousquestion,” Waters said. “This intimate friend of yours, Junior, she have a name?”

  Purvis flipped open his notepad.

  “I’d rather she didn’t,” I said.

  Waters raised his eyebrows.

  “Her involvement with me might complicate other situations for her,” I said.

  “Like a marital situation?” Waters asked.

  “Not exactly, but close.”

  “We’ll be discreet,” Waters said. “Your story checks out, we forget about her.”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about,” I said.

  “Detective Purvis understands the importance of professional conduct,” Waters said. He reached over and closed Purvis’s notebook in his fist. “Right, Detective?”

  Purvis nodded.

  “Molly Francis,” I said.

  “You’re sleeping with Molly?” Purvis blurted. “Still?”

  Waters sighed. “You know Ms. Francis?”

  “Well, we dated in high school,” Purvis said. “For a while. Not long.”

  “Until she met me,” I said. “And it’s not still, it’s more like again. We haven’t been doing it all this time. Just the past three months.”

  “What about David? Shit, they were together almost six years. When’d they break up?”

  “Who says they did?” I said.

  Waters sniffed loudly. “Maybe you two can take this trip down memory lane another time?” He pulled a business card from his wallet. “You can ask Ms. Francis to contact me?”

  I took the card and nodded. Molly would never see that card.

  Purvis flipped his notebook back open. “We should have results from ballistics in a few days.”

  Waters cocked an eyebrow. “Ballistics?”

  “Well, John here had a gun on him when I went to the apartment,” Purvis said. “I confiscated it.” Waters just stared and Purvis blushed. “He and his father have a violent history.” Waters said nothing. “I mean, Mr. Sanders was shot.” Purvis dropped his eyes to his shoes.

  “What kind of gun was it that Junior had?” Waters asked.

  “Nine-millimeter,” Purvis answered, not looking up.

  “Mr. Sanders was killed with a thirty-eight,” Waters said. “You know that. You recovered the weapon at the scene.” He stared at Purvis. It was outstanding. I was glad I’d bought the gun just for the way Waters stared at Purvis, like he’d just caught him jerking off. Nobody spoke for a good thirty seconds.

  “You seen my sister?” I finally asked.

  “Her flight from Boston should be landing as we speak,” answered Purvis.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked. “Where’d you get her number?”

  “Detective work,” Purvis said. “I’ve been in touch with her all day. No need to worry about a cab, I sent a car to pick her up at the airport.”

  “That’s just fucking fantastic,” I said. “She’ll love that, being picked up by cops at the airport.” I looked at Waters, who rubbed his temples with his forefinger and thumb. I figured he did that a lot, working with Purvis. “You approved this?”

  “I asked Detective Purvis to arrange her arrival, yes,” he said. “I should’ve given more specific instructions.”

  “Her father was just murdered,” I said. “Maybe she’d want her brother to pick her up? Just a thought.”

  “Her brother was nowhere to be found,” Purvis snapped. “Or more specifically, we couldn’t get him out of bed.”

  “Hey, fuck you, Purvis.”

  “Boys, boys,” Waters said. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, rocked back on his heels. “Detective Purvis, go wait for me in the car.”

  Purvis looked up, his mouth agape, and I thought for a moment he’d protest with an “aw, Daaaaaaaaad,” but he stalked off silently.

  Waters turned to me. “It’s probably best if I hang on to that gun for a while, anyway.”

  “Look, Detective,” I said, “I wanna pin a medal on the guy who did this, not shoot him.”

  Waters grimaced. “You won’t feel that way for long. Trust me.”

  “Have it your way.” If I wanted another gun, I could have it by sunrise.

  “Is there a will, anything like that?” Waters asked.

  “Not that I know of. I doubt it,” I said. “The old man hated lawyers. Anyway, I haven’t talked to him in over three years.”

  “Bank accounts?” he asked. “Insurance, maybe through work?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Help Julia find these things out. And you’ll have to arrange for a funeral home to receive the body,” Waters said. “Discuss these things with her. Gently.”

  “Far as I’m concerned, we can stuff him in my trunk and take him to the Dump.”

  “Keep that to yourself, Junior,” Waters said. “And show some respect. I got friends out at Fresh Kills.”

  I spat on the patio. “Keep Purvis away from my sister.”

  “I’ll discuss it with him.” Waters turned to walk away.

  “Wait,” I said. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t want him to go. “What about the body? Do I need to do the ID? I don’t want Julia having to do it.”

  “Me neither,” Waters said. “So I did it. Also, depending on how the investigation goes, we may need to go through your father’s things. Don’t throw anything away just yet. Don’t touch anything at all.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “That’s fine about the ID. Thanks.”

  We stood there, staring at each other, despite the fact that Waters looked desperate to get away. I felt like I should be asking more questions, but they were hard to come by. I dug my hands into my jacket pockets. No matter where I tried to settle my eyes—my mother’s long-dead forsythias, a cigar butt in the spotty lawn, the empty bird feeder on the back fence—they wouldn’t stay.

  “Okay then,” Waters said. “You two need anything, call me.”

  “When you saw him in the morgue,” I said suddenly, “what did he look like?”

  Waters wiped his mouth with his hands. His eyes, which had held steady on me all through our conversation, darted around, as busy as mine. He puffed out his cheeks then blew out his breath. “I guess you’re gonna find out anyway,” he said. But he still didn’t tell me anything.