He sat in a giant easy chair and set the pizza on the coffee table. I sat on the couch against the wall. Everything around me made me feel tiny. Val, his plush throne, the massive flat-screen TV at the end of the couch. The big, black Doberman that curled up next to the chair, its head resting on its paws. The huge silver semiautomatic that sat next to the pizza box. Val took a bite of pizza, tearing off half the slice.
“What’s up wit you?” he said, chewing.
“I got some issues,” I said.
“No shit,” he said after a swig of Gatorade. “Nigga, you look like the walking dead. Palest white boy I ever seen, even for a Irish like you.” He pointed at the pizza with his Gatorade bottle. “Eat a damn slice before you fall the fuck over.”
“In a minute,” I said. “I need some help.”
“Pills is Theo’s shit. I don’t carry.” He stuffed the rest of the slice in his mouth and reached for another. “Eat, motherfucker.”
I picked up a slice and took a bite. I remembered Val well enough to know he didn’t like telling anybody anything twice. Despite his hospitality, I knew this would be a short-lived audience. “Where’s Theo?”
“Elsewhere.”
“Where? I need to ask him an important question.”
Val raised an eyebrow at me.
“Does Theo still move metal?” I asked.
“All these questions, bro. It ain’t like you,” Val said. He set his slice down and leaned forward. “I don’t have to ask you to take that fine shirt off, do I? I’m gettin’ less and less happy to see you.”
I glanced down at the gun. “It’s not like that, Val, I swear. Look, here’s the story. I’m looking for a thirty-eight.”
“Maybe I can help with that,” Val said. He picked up his own gun, turning it in front of his face and admiring it. “Thirty-eight’s a little old school for what’s around these days, but maybe.”
“I don’t need to buy one. I’m trying to find out where one came from.”
“Lemme see it,” Val said.
“I don’t have it. Someone else is holding it for me.”
“I do business, not mysteries. Get to the fucking point. This gun that you need to know about, but don’t have—what exactly did it do?”
“It killed my father.”
Val put his gun down on the coffee table and sat back in his chair. “No shit.” The way he looked at me, I thought he might cry. And then shoot me for seeing it. “That shit in Eltingville? That was your Pops? Nigga, I’m sorry.”
“It was him. I wanna find the guy who did it. For my sister. For my mother.” I couldn’t believe it, but I was begging. “Every lead I had has gone dry. This is the last one I got.”
“Bad idea, bro. Bad, bad idea,” he said. “Once you start this shit, it never stops. Believe me, I know. You think Skinny and Kenny are out there ’cause they love the hallway?”
“I gotta follow through on this,” I said. “I gotta get this done. I can’t breathe.”
“I know the feeling.” Val just looked at his hands. “The cops have the gun, don’t they?”
I swallowed hard. “Yeah, they do.”
“You got to go, bro,” he said, standing. He wrapped a slice in wax paper and handed it to me. “I can’t do nothin’ for you.”
“Can’t you call Theo?” I stood as well. “If I could just get a description of the guy who bought it, I can take it from there. No one’ll ever know you guys were involved.”
“Nigga, please, you’ve already been seen here.” Val shook his head. “And even if Theo did sell that gun, which I doubt, highly, he can’t ever give up a client.”
“Ain’t this bigger than business?”
“No doubt,” Val said. “Protecting clients is about more than business, ya heard me? Now you gotta go.” He put his hand on my shoulder and turned me toward the door. He followed me to it.
I stood there in the hallway, holding my pizza, staring up at Val’s face. It told me the subject was more than closed. There’d be consequences for staying on it. Even if I gambled with Val’s patience, there was no way I’d reach Theo before he did. The last door had been slammed shut on me. I was done pursuing the murder weapon. At the end of the day, it really was all about business. I should’ve known better.
“You still got that classy whip?” Val asked.
“Yeah, I do.”
“Drive her home,” he said. “And give both of you a rest.”
He closed the door in my face. I stood there listening to the locks tumble into place. Neither Skinny nor Kenny said anything to me as I walked down the stairs. I had to chase the kids out front off the hood of my car. Their sneaker prints were all over the hood, and the windshield, and the roof. I gave a little girl in pink barrettes my slice. There was no sign of the cat.
AT PRECISELY THREE, VIRGINIA materialized on the paved jogging trail that circled the lake. It was the sound of her heels on the pavement, echoing in the trees and over the lake that caught my attention. She’d always walked like a soldier, her steps falling hard and sure. I watched her sweep around a heavy woman pushing a double stroller. If not for her gait, and my utter, complete familiarity with the shape of her body, I might not have recognized her, and it wasn’t just the huge dark sunglasses.
She wore a black suit, skirt below the knees, a midnight blue blouse buttoned to the neck. I leaned back against the stone bridge and crossed my arms, awed more than stunned. I’d never seen her in a suit before, nothing even close. She’d been a leather pants and sleeveless T-shirt girl when we were together. That was part of the attraction for me. Between the leather and the tats and the jewelry, it’d been like dating a rock star. She turned heads like one everywhere we went. She kept me in a constant state of arousal, especially after I learned what happened when the leather pants came off. Her looks had also aroused more than a little envy in me.
I wasn’t ugly. I knew I was nearly as handsome as my father. But I wasn’t the type to blow people off their bar stools; she was. And I’d always hoped some of her force-of-nature vibe would rub off on me. It should’ve been enough of an ego boost that she voluntarily slept with me, sober, often, and enthusiastically, but it never was. Seeing her look that good in a suit brought the envy back in force, and a lot of other things.
I reminded myself, while watching her bear down on me, that Virginia had punished me for months before finally breaking my heart, bending it back and forth in her hands like a bad credit card until it cracked. I knew this. In time with her steps, I ticked off the list of offenses, of half-truths, and baits and switches, and lies of omission, but when she got within ten feet of me, the humming under my skin drowned out everything else. All that stuff was in the past, and for now she was right in front of me.
Our time together hadn’t always been like it was at the end. We lasted three years. We must’ve satisfied something in each other. Then I thought of what Jimmy had said about David, about someone becoming a habit. Had it been that shallow and she just woke up and kicked it before I did? I hoped it wasn’t that simple. It didn’t do enough to explain why her leaving me had hurt so badly.
There had been more to it, though I don’t know if it was any less shallow. I realized Virginia made me feel like I’d caught up to Jimmy. She and I did the same things he and Rose did, we shared one bed and one kitchen. We paid the rent together. And not only did we do the normal things, we did better and more exciting things. We knew all the coolest dives in Manhattan, where we bought drinks all night for actors and models. At the night’s end, we crashed at artists’ lofts in the Village or on sailboats down by Battery Park, riding the ferry home in the morning, watching the rest of the island heading in the opposite direction on their way to work. For a while at least, Virginia seemed to be just like me. She sought out the edges, the fringe. She seemed to enjoy having me as her partner in crime. And then she didn’t, and I never knew why. She got closer to the bridge, smiled at me, and I got the feeling I was about to find out.
I steeled myself for that
conversation, trying to anticipate what she’d say. Then I noticed her hair. It was gone, most of it anyway. The change unnerved me.
From the first night I met her at the bar, until the moment she’d walked out the front door of my apartment, she’d sported long, flaming red hair that reached her tailbone. It announced her arrival in a room like angels’ trumpets or a brimstone cloud. Just the other day in the Mall, it had been that red hair that caught my eye.
She stopped in front of me and stuck out her hand. I reached for her head. “Your hair,” I said. Brilliant.
She backed away, raised her sunglasses into her hair. It was cut short and straight, barely reaching her jawline. She’d colored it a modest brown, dark, pretty, but unremarkable considering what it replaced. She put out her hand again, I took it.
“Good to see you,” she said.
“Good to see you, too.” I turned her wrist. The flaming nostrils of a dragon peeked out from beneath the cuff of her silk sleeve.
“You look well,” she said. “Black always suited you. Though you’ve lost some weight. You never had much to spare.”
“I’m surviving.”
I noticed her nose ring was gone, though the tiny hole where it had once been remained. I wondered if those holes ever closed. I figured she’d done away with the tongue ring, but I couldn’t be sure without staring at her mouth, which, I figured, was a bad idea. Her jacket was buttoned, leaving me to speculate about other things, as well. “Let’s walk,” I said. That way I don’t have to look right at you.
We walked around the lake, my slower pace throwing off her determined stride.
She asked a lot of questions about my job and the people she knew there. She asked about my sister. I played along. I knew this drill; it was the necessary prelude to serious conversation. These test questions told her how to approach me, how obscure a path to take to the heart of the matter. I kept my answers short and quiet. I did my best to appear calm, and cool. She moved on to the subject of my father, and I made her lean in a couple times to hear me.
“I take it,” she said, “nothing changed between you and him since I last saw you.”
“Not at all.”
“It must be hard,” Virginia said, “letting him go with so much unfinished.”
“It’s been a tough couple of days. But things between him and me were finished a long time ago. All this stuff, the wake, the funeral, it’s all formality. I’m just going through the motions.”
“The police know anything?”
“Not really,” I said.
The conversation, such as it was, died for a while and we walked on in silence. I wanted her to ask real questions, personal questions. I hadn’t talked to her since we split. I wanted her to ask if I slept at night. Was I angry? Was there anyone consoling me in my time of need? I wanted her to need to know what was going on inside me, like she used to. I wanted her to feel a void, to feel left out. But I had a feeling she didn’t want in to begin with. We passed the bridge again.
“So, you seeing anyone?” she asked.
I didn’t answer right away. I’d been looking for ways to work Molly into the conversation, let Virginia know there was someone more than happy to fill her empty space in my bed, and perhaps elsewhere—at considerable risk to herself.
“Adding them up?” Virginia asked, when I still hadn’t answered.
I looked at her, gazing back at me with a decent impression of cautious anticipation on her face. I considered how much of Molly and me to reveal, whether to play it up and dig the needle in deeper, or play it down and let Virginia’s own imagination do my dirty work for me. Then I noticed that old sparkle in her eye, the false bemusement that hid the killer instinct. I knew her asking about my love life was only baiting the snare. She was hoping I’d say yes. She was counting on it.
She’d tell me how happy she was for me, how healthy it was, how glad she was that someone was helping me through this difficult time. She’d ask all kinds of questions about this mystery woman that she had no interest in knowing about. There’d be the fake jealousy questions: Is she prettier than me, smarter than me. Loyalty-testing questions where she’d tell herself yes was a lie and no assuaged any twinge she felt in her ego.
But then, and this was what it was really all about, this meeting, this stupid fucking conversation, she’d tell me about the fabulous new man she was with. And her questions would give her license to tell me all about him, all kinds of things she knew I wouldn’t want to know, all the things she knew would hurt the most. She’d watch me like a hawk for any revealing flinch or any flare of temper that would tell her she’d hit the mark. She didn’t want to get me back; she just wanted to make sure she could. She just wanted now what she’d wanted when we compared scars and tattoos. The same thing she wanted when she went down on me to get me hard for the third time at four in the morning. She wanted what she thought she’d lost when she couldn’t endure the brutal collision of ecstasy and agony our life together had become. She just wanted to show she was tougher than me.
She was, but I wouldn’t give it up easy.
“No,” I said. “I’m actually enjoying being single.”
She set her jaw. “That’s good. I feel better about this knowing we’re both moving on.”
“Better about what?” I asked, though I knew the question should’ve been “better about who?” I steeled myself.
“I’m leaving town,” she said, and my spine turned to water. I knew she’d seen it happen and I hated myself for letting it show. My face went hot; I felt like a complete fool.
“Manhattan?” I asked.
“West,” she said.
I drew away from her, horrified. “Jersey?”
She rolled her eyes. “Texas. Austin.”
I stopped walking. We stood at a bend in the trail, at the end of the lake. Across the water, I could see the bridge. A couple jogged by with their dog, huffing at us for being in their way. I wanted to run them down and break their legs. It wasn’t a big dog, I could take it. I took a deep breath, figured I might as well go right for the heart of it.
“Who with?” I asked.
“Sandra. She’s been there six months already, getting things ready.”
“Sandra Castronova?” I asked. “From the tattoo shop?”
“The very one.”
I should’ve fucking known. They always were touchy with each other. I’d seen more than a few mysterious glances cross the room between them. Well, and there was that time Sandra was spending the night at the apartment and we invited her into the bedroom . . . Well, it was best not to think about that now. I’d always felt I was more in the way that night than anything else.
“You two should be very happy together,” I said.
“God, will you ever grow up? Sandra’s down there with her fiancée. They’ve been apartment hunting for me for two weeks.”
“Well, fuck, what for? I mean, fucking Texas? What the fuck is there in Texas?”
“A coffee shop. It’s—”
“Coffee? Whadda you know about coffee?” I looked at the cup in my hand, threw it into the lake. “You’re moving halfway across the country to serve fucking coffee?”
I was furious, absolutely enraged, that there wasn’t another man in this somewhere. That she was moving half a country away from me over coffee. It wasn’t a good enough reason. I had no fucking clue why I cared about the reason at all.
“If you’d let me finish talking,” she said. She waited for another outburst, but I didn’t have one ready just yet. “It’s our coffee shop. Mine and Sandra’s and Devin’s. I’m part owner and I’m going to be handling the books, just like in the City. Sandra’s been planning this for a year. She knows plenty about coffee, and about owning a business. And she’s going to teach me.”
Fresh Kills Page 23
