Rubbed Out

by Barbara Block

  I caught up with him. “Where are you going?” I asked. “We have to wait for the police.”

  He gestured at the crowd. “You see anyone paying attention to us?”

  No one was. They were all either staring at the bus or talking among themselves.

  “You wait for the cops if you want to and explain what happened to them. I’m getting out of here.”

  “But . . .”

  “But what? I’m out of here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. But don’t worry. When I figure it out, I’ll be sure and let you not know.”

  “You do that.”

  I watched Paul get back in his car. Somehow or other he managed to maneuver it through the traffic. A minute or so later he was gone from view. Maybe I should have stayed, but the more I thought about the situation, the more I decided Paul was right. This was not a time for explanations; it was a time for leaving. Nothing I said was going to help Janet Wilcox. She was beyond that now. What I needed to do was get my jacket, get my car, and get out of the city.

  I headed across town, caught the Number Six train uptown, got off, and walked over to Belmont Avenue. A bitter wind swept down through the streets. By the time I got to Janet Wilcox’s apartment I was numb with cold. The first thing I did when I got inside was go straight to the heat register in the kitchen and stand over it until I could feel my toes and fingers again.

  As I waited for my blood to start flowing, I stared at Janet Wilcox’s groceries. What was the line about undone tasks? I had to resist the urge to finish putting them away. Instead I did a quick search of the place on the off chance that the money was here, which it wasn’t. Then I grabbed my jacket and took off. I didn’t want to stay any longer, because I was nervous that the people living in the apartment downstairs would come back and I’d have to explain my presence.

  As I drove out of the Bronx, I turned on the radio and tried not to think about what had just happened. About my gullibility. About my responsibility for what had just occurred. If I hadn’t gone looking for Janet Wilcox, she’d be alive today. Or maybe not. She’d pretty much signed her death warrant, not to mention her husband’s, when she’d stolen that money. I’d just executed it.

  I started fiddling with the radio, but I couldn’t find anything I wanted to listen to. I kept trying, but finally conceded defeat and turned the radio off right after I got on the New York State Thruway.

  My grandmother would have said there was no use crying over spilt milk. But I hadn’t believed that when I was eight years old and I’d left the top of the chameleon cage off and Tito had gotten out and died, and I sure as hell didn’t believe it now.

  I was thinking about how I’d looked all over the apartment for him when I glanced down and realized two things: One, I was going over eighty-five miles an hour, and two, my gas tank was almost empty. Ten minutes later I was lucky enough to come up to a rest stop. I pulled in and parked. There probably weren’t more than twenty cars in a lot that could have taken two hundred. They looked lonely, huddled together against the night.

  I went in, bought two large cups of coffee and a pack of cigarettes and went back to the car. I peeled off the cellophane on the cigarettes in the car and broke open the seal and the foil wrap. The sharp smell of tobacco drifted through the car. After I smoked my cigarette, I filled up the tank and called Manuel and told him I was on my way home.

  He said that was good, because one of the aquariums in the store had sprung a leak and he’d had to transfer all the fish to the other tanks. And oh, yes, by the way, Zsa Zsa had actually caught and eaten a mouse and as a result had had diarrhea all over the place. I don’t know what she was thinking of. Like me, she did better with highly processed food.

  She greeted me when I walked in the house. I petted her for a little while, chatted with Manuel, then went straight upstairs and lay down on my bed.

  Manuel came up and stood in the doorway. “Bethany and I are thinking of moving in together.”

  “So she’s submitting her petition to Family Court?”

  Manuel shook his head. “She decided not to.”

  “Why?”

  “Her mother asked her not to.”

  “That must have made Bethany feel good.”

  “It did.”

  “You know if you move in together her father can have you arrested for statutory rape.”

  “No. She has to press charges. Anyway her mother said it was okay with her.”

  “It’s still a bad idea.”

  “Why?”

  “I just told you.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  I closed my eyes. I could feel a headache coming on. I hoped it wasn’t a migraine. I hadn’t had one of those in a while. “Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” Manuel said. “But we’re serious.”

  “I know.”

  I didn’t say anything else. I could feel Manuel hovering in the doorway, waiting for me to open my eyes again. When I didn’t, he left. A few seconds later I heard Zsa Zsa coming up the stairs. She jumped on the bed and put her head right next to mine on the pillow. I curled myself around her.

  “I’m sorry for leaving you,” I said.

  She licked my chin. One thing about dogs. They forgive you.

  I fell asleep to her belching in my ear. Considering what I’d just been through, the sound was oddly soothing.

  I kept expecting dire repercussions, but there weren’t any. At least not right away. No one—not the police, not Paul’s “friends”—came around to talk to me. Which made me more nervous than if they had.

  The local paper ran a story in the metro section about the deaths of Walter and Janet Wilcox. And while there were speculations about the relationship between the two fatalities, the story didn’t follow up on that angle, confining itself to talking about the tricks that fate plays. I wondered if the police felt the same way or not, but I wasn’t in a position to ask them. Except for George, Paul was my only other lead in, and obviously I wasn’t going to be asking him for anything.

  That afternoon I went looking for Santini.

  I was pretty sure the sonofabitch wasn’t going to show up back here, but I wanted to make certain. There were a couple of things I wanted to clear up. I tried his office and his house. His office door was locked, and his car wasn’t in his garage.

  Two of the neighbor’s kids making snowballs in the yard next door volunteered the information that Mr. Santini had asked them to shovel out his driveway. He’d told them he’d be gone for at least two weeks, maybe more, and given them twenty dollars in advance.

  “What about his mail?” I asked. “Are you supposed to collect it?”

  “He didn’t say anything about that,” one of the kids answered.

  “He just said to shovel his driveway,” the other one added.

  Which meant the post office was probably holding it. Which meant he’d been planning on clearing out when he’d sent me down to New York City.

  I’d been his stalking horse. For sure. The knowledge did not put me in a good mood.

  I checked at his favorite bars, but no one had seen him there either. One of the bartenders I spoke to said that Paul had told him he was going to be doing a job and would be away for a while.

  On a hunch I checked at Le Bijou, the strip club Alima worked at. It seemed like the type of place Paul would go. Now that I thought about it, I wondered if Paul had introduced Wilcox to this place, because it didn’t seem like the kind of activity a man like Walter would engage in without a push.

  The same guy who had thrown me out the first time came around the bar to meet me. He looked as big now as he had then.

  “What is it with you?” he said when I asked him if he’d seen Paul Santini. “Does this place look like Information Central?”

  I made a show of looking around. “You mean it’s not?”

  The place reeked of loneliness. I’d seen more connections happening at shoe sales than I did between the wom
an dancing on the stage and the two men watching her. At least lust is something. There was nothing there at all.

  The guy pointed to the door. “I told you once, and I’m telling you again, get out of here. And this time stay out.”

  I didn’t argue. What was the point? There was nothing I could do to make him talk if he didn’t want to.

  I like to think that intelligence, guile, and cunning triumph over strength, but some days I wish I was six-five and three hundred and fifty pounds. It would make my life a hell of a lot easier.

  The third day, the deadline Paul had told me we had, came and went without anything happening. I began to relax a little. Who knows, maybe he’d made the whole thing up.

  It was possible, I started thinking, that maybe the whole Russian mob thing was just a scam to make me find Janet Wilcox for him. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.

  I spent the next couple of days making it up to Zsa Zsa and Manuel. I took Zsa Zsa for a couple of long walks, shared a beer with her at a bar down in Armory Square, got her a couple of new dog toys and a new collar. This one was covered with seed pearls. I could tell she thought it was pretty nifty by the way she pranced around. The mouse incident was pretty much put behind us.

  As for Manuel, I gave him a two-hundred-dollar bonus, took him and Bethany out to dinner at Ruby Tuesday’s, and bought him a DVD player. After all, I was spending Paul’s expense money. I really didn’t care.

  Actually, I wanted to get rid of it. It felt like blood money to me. In the end, I donated what was left over to one of the no-kill animal shelters. At least that way it would do some good.

  Zsa Zsa, Manuel, and I settled back into our routine.

  I’d begun thinking everything was going to be all right when the call came.

  Of course.

  Isn’t that the way things always go?

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It was one of those bleak mid-winter, midweek days, the kind where the sky is an expanse of gray and it seems as if it will snow forever and you wonder what the hell you’re doing living in a place like this.

  I was killing time watching another sputter of flakes falling outside the store window. It wasn’t a lot. Just enough so I’d have to clean off the car again when I went outside. Not that I was complaining. Up north, they’d gotten a foot or so dumped on them. Zsa Zsa and I had eaten lunch half an hour ago. One Big Mac for me, one for her, and we’d split a large order of fries.

  The day was going slowly. I’d done the New York Times crossword puzzle and gotten my taxes ready for my accountant, not to mention cleaned, watered and fed the animals and washed the floor. I kept looking at the clock expecting it to be five. But it wasn’t. I had six more hours before I could go home. I’d just taken ten dollars from a customer, given him fifty cents’ worth of change and bagged the new ferret toys he was buying when the phone rang. I picked up as the customer walked out the door.

  “Noah’s Ark,” I said.

  “Is this Robin Light?” someone with a heavy Russian accent asked.

  I took a deep breath. It looked as if I’d been wrong. It looked as if Paul hadn’t made up the story about the Russian mobsters after all. Too bad for me. I was hoping he had. I snugged the phone between my ear and my shoulder and reached for my cigarettes.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Joe.”

  I lit up and inhaled. A kitten we were keeping for someone jumped up on the counter, knocked my matches over the edge, and watched them fall.

  “I hear Joe is a well-known name in Russian. So is Mike.”

  The voice chuckled. “I was told you had a good sense of humor.”

  “Who told you?”

  “I will let you guess.”

  “What if I don’t like guessing games?”

  The kitty jumped off and began batting the matches around.

  “Then you shouldn’t play them.”

  “Fair enough. So what can I do for you?” As if I didn’t know.

  “A friend of yours has something of ours. We would like it back.”

  I could have taken a leaf out of Janet Wilcox’s book and pretended I had no idea what he was talking about, but what was the point in doing that? Look at where it had gotten her.

  “I’m sure you would, but he’s not my friend,” I said. “And I don’t have anything.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Go talk to him.”

  “That will not be possible, I think.”

  A chill went up my spine. I took another puff from my cigarette, then ground it out on the top of the soda can next to the register. I don’t know why, but it was making my throat feel raw.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because . . . because . . .” the man who called himself Joe paused, searching for the correct phrase. “He . . . he has gone on a long trip.”

  “You saw him?”

  “To say good-bye.”

  Somehow I didn’t think we were talking Aruba here. Poor Paul. I wondered where they had gotten him. And how. Knowing Paul, he’d probably gotten drunk and called them up to tell them how I had the money. And they’d said, we understand. Come. Tell us all about it over a drink. And that had been that. Paul had always thought he was smarter and tougher than he was.

  “I see,” I said.

  “I’m glad you do.”

  “We should talk,” I said.

  “Da. We should. That is why I am calling.”

  I remembered my grandmother had always hated the Russians. She’d lived in a little town that sat on the border between Poland and Russia. Sometimes the border had been on one side, sometimes the other. But she’d never thought of herself as Russian or Polish. She thought of herself as Jewish. Now that I thought about it, I’d only heard her speak Yiddish in the house. Never Russian. I wondered if she’d known any.

  There was a Russian Orthodox church five blocks away from our apartment. She always crossed to the other side of the street when we went by it. Once I’d asked her why.

  “Cossacks,” she’d said and spat three times on the sidewalk.

  I’d cringed in embarrassment and pretended I wasn’t with her. I wanted to have a grandmother who didn’t sip her tea through a sugar cube, who was American.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about how hurt she must have felt when I arranged the meeting.

  When I hung up, I called George. I may be many things, but suicidal isn’t one of them. Contrary to what some people think.

  I met Joe’s friends down in Armory Square at a cigar bar called The Impresario. On the weekends the place is always packed, but this was nine-thirty on a snowy Wednesday night in Syracuse, and not too many people were there. The bartender was killing time polishing glasses, talking to a couple of kids who looked as if they should have been home studying, and keeping an eye on the television over the bar, all at the same time. He nodded to me as I went by. George didn’t. He took another sip of his beer and continued watching the television.

  The men I was looking for were sprawled on a sofa in the back. They were smoking cigars and sipping what I assumed to be brandy out of snifters. There were three of them. All three were dressed in black turtleneck sweaters and dark pants. Two looked to be in their early thirties while the third man I put at mid- to late-fifties. Except for a scar that went down the length of his left cheek, the older man had finely drawn features while the other two had noses and mouths that looked as if they had connected with one fist too many. All three had slicked-back, dark hair.

  The older one waved me over.

  “You want to try some brandy?” he asked as I sat down in an armchair facing him.

  “That would be nice.” I took out a cigarette. The man closest to me leaned over and lit it with a gold lighter. I noticed he was wearing a Rolex on his wrist. If it was a counterfeit, it was a good one.

  The older man signaled to the waitress. “In Russia people eat and drink.” He indicated the coffee table in front of us. “There, the whole table would be covered with food.”

/>   She came over and the man ordered a brandy for me.

  “It is more civilized, I think.” He looked at me. His eyes were shrewd. He smelled of money. “Do you know Russian peoples?”

  “My grandmother came from Russia.”

  “You are Jewish, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can tell. It is not the same thing as being Russian.”

  “So she said.”

  He picked a piece of lint off his sweater. “I do not mean this in a disrespectful way.”

  “Then how do you mean it?”

  “As a matter of fact. Jews are different. Like the Ukrainians are different. Or the Turkish people.” He took another puff of his cigar. “I myself am part Jewish. On my father’s side. One generation back. Just as she is Italian,” he said, pointing to the waitress who was putting my brandy on the coffee table in front of me. “Are you?” he asked.

  “Part Italian,” she said and scurried away.

  “See,” he said. “I am always right. I have an eye for these things.” He pointed to his eye, then indicated my drink. “Try it.”

  I took a sip. “It’s good.” And it was. I’d forgotten how complex a good brandy can taste.

  He looked pleased. “Fifty year. Americans think Russians only drink vodka and eat caviar and borscht. They see Doctor Zhivago, and they think they know about Russia. They think they know about the Russian people. They are wrong. They know nothing. How can they know when Hollywood has an Arab playing a Russian?

  “Russians are a serious people. Tough.” He hit his chest with the flat edge of his fist. “Not soft like you Americans. We go through hard times. Always hard times. When the French come to Moscow, the people burn everything—their food, their houses, everything—because they would not let the French have their city. The Russians would see their children starve first.

  “We have lived through the Tsars. We have lived through the Fascists. We have lived through the Communists. Do you know the secret to the Russian peoples?”

  I shook my head.

  “We are not afraid of death. This makes us strong.” He took another sip of his brandy and put the glass down on the coffee table. “You have heard of the Russian Mafia, yes?” he asked.