But this was different. I wasn’t anticipating much residual guilt. I tried to suck some chocolate shake through a straw. Different. Except for them both being named Joe, of course.
But this Joe was subhuman. Now, I had two years of college and took a few psychology courses. So I know what the mind does. When you plan to kill somebody, you convince yourself that the guy doesn’t have the right to live because he’s not human; this rationalization allows you to proceed with the murder. But this was different because this guy just really wasn’t human.
There were no other similarities I could recall. Except that, I remembered, I had eaten Whitey one-bites before going to see the whistleblower too. Maybe they were pre-penance. Whatever it was, I was getting too contemplative about the whole thing and had now lost my appetite and was barely able to finish the onion rings.
About an hour later, I parked two blocks away from Joe’s, put on some gloves, and headed over with my satchel. No one was on the street when I entered his yard. I moved quickly to the cracked concrete path that led to the side entrance. I went up the stoop, pressed the door, and it opened. I could hear Sinatra singing about Saturday being the loneliest night of the week from somewhere in the basement. A trail of Joe’s blood led from the broken windowpane and up the stairs to an open door through which I could see the kitchen. I took out my .38. I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to use it—I wanted to use a knife of Joe’s—but I might bump into him at any moment. I walked down the steps and gently pushed open the door which led to the garage. A CD player sat on the hood of Sucrete’s Miami Beach-edition, cranberry-fed Cougar, playing Ol’ Blue Eyes. There was no sign of Joe. There was, however, a taped-up garden hose running from the exhaust pipe to the driver’s window of the vehicle. It never occurred to me that I might have something in common with a piece of shit like Joe, but here we were: neither one of us was planning on him living through the night.
“Peachy,” I said.
I entered the kitchen, listening, and heard a shower running upstairs. I looked around. There was a brown stove and a matching fridge circa 1972. The warped laminate countertops were a faded blue. A toaster oven on the white, chipped dinette table had to have belonged to Alice on The Brady Bunch at some point in time. Scattered around the toaster oven were sheets of balled paper. I unfurled one. It was a suicide note. All it said was Goodbye, bitch. It looked like I wouldn’t have to wait for the CliffsNotes. I returned the note to an orb and bocce-balled it into the others, banking it off the saltshaker.
The living room was dimly lit by a cheap, bulky candle which was burning horribly uneven and a little street light filtering through bent Venetian-blind slats. And strewn everywhere, on the worn sectional sofa, the love seat, the coffee table, and covering all of the tacky burgundy wall-to-wall carpeting, were hundreds of heart-shaped balloons stenciled I LOVE YOU. The only thing not covered with the hearts was a wobbly TV dinner/folding table, upon which the candle, and a few other mementos, stood. There was a piece of paper under the candle. I bent over to look. It was their marriage certificate, covered in dark red wax. The wax had also adhered his marriage band to the document. On the bottom of the certificate was a childish scrawl in black Sharpie: Its All For You, Darling! The only other thing on the table was a bloodied paring knife. Its All For You, Darling! That kind of shit drove me crazy. You’d think the fucker would try to be grammatically correct for the last and most important memo of his life. I found the Sharpie on a nearby end table and added an apostrophe.
The running water was louder from here. I looked at the staircase leading to the second floor, and waded through the balloons.
I found him dangling in the bathroom, naked down to his shorts, a brown extension cord wrapped around his neck and tied to the shower fixture. His left leg was hanging straight down to the drain, but his right had shot over the side of the tub, wedging his foot between porcelain and sink. Though skunk drunk, he must’ve panicked at the moment of truth—his right hand had gone up and worked its way under the cord, three fingers stuck underneath it. The tub was about half full. Some people might’ve seen it as being half empty, but I was seeing no reason for pessimism. I pocketed my gun with a smile and a dimple on my right cheek.
I took it all in.
“Never wear white underwear to your own suicide, Joe.”
At the sound of his name, his body suddenly spazzed. He kicked out violently, wrenching the shower fixture out of the wall, which sent him down into the tub, smashing his head viciously against its side when he landed. Water spewed out of the broken wall fixture. Joe gagged and pulled himself over the tub’s side and collapsed onto the shower mat, motionless. Since he was lying on his side, I saw what he had been doing with the paring knife. On his right shoulder there was a butchered flap of skin hanging loosely from his flesh where her name was tattooed, presumably during happier times. He had done a half-ass job. The story of his life.
“Joe?”
He raised his head, gagged, and spewed vomit over the little bathroom rug—blood and macaroni and cheese, from what I could see.
“Joe?”
He was barely able to lift up his head to look at me, and his eyes were barely open due to the blood and hard water.
“Is it you? Finally?” he grumbled. “Jesus?”
And I said, “Sure.”
Fifteen minutes later we had a pretty solid God/Sinner rapport going on and Joe was giving me the lowdown on his exit strategy. I asked why he hadn’t just gassed himself in the garage. He said he was just turning the engine over when he decided he needed a purifying shower. In the shower, he just went with the hanging, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing.
“She always said I wasn’t spontaneous.”
I almost felt sympathy: they were always saying that.
I convinced him that the gassing was still a good plan, and with me coaching, he began to crawl back to the basement. We were out of the bathroom and halfway down the dark hall to the stairs that were barely illuminated by the bathroom light at the other end. He stopped and buried his head in the hallway carpeting.
“Help, help me, Jesus. I’ve been … waiting.”
He lay there in his soiled underwear, half pulled down to his butt crack from the crawling. I was pretty sure I was about to pity him when I caught my reflection in a hallway mirror, and even though it was dark, much darker than usual, I also knew it was God’s reflection too, and the one thing I did know about the two of us was that we pitied nobody.
I crouched down.
“Listen, Joe. You know the rules. Jesus only helps those who help themselves. Or God. One of the two. You’ve got to help yourself.”
“Jesus, Jesus, your breath stinks of onions.”
“I had some White Castle on the way over.”
“Don’t you know what that crap does to your body?”
“Hey, Joe, I’m a bachelor. My whole diet consists of takeout. Let’s not get too critical of the Lord, here. What?”
His eyes filled with mistrust. “You … look like Jesus. But you don’t dress like him.”
Great, this is going to blow up now because I’m on Blackstone’s 10 Worst-Dressed Messiahs list. Without even thinking, my left hand went into my jacket and felt the butt of the gun.
But then I said, “Joe, I can’t go around in my normal work clothes—you don’t want to get me crucified again, do you?”
He thought about it, “No, of course not, Jesus. Still…”
I stood up.
“Fine. I’m leaving.” I walked away.
He cried, “Don’t abandon me, Jesus! How can you abandon me?”
“Listen, Joe, if I only help those who help themselves, doesn’t it stand to reason that I abandon those that abandon themselves, their goals, their God-given destinies?”
“This is my destiny?”
“Sure!”
“Okay.” He sighed.
Wet and bloodied, stinking of booze, he crawled again, this time making it to the landing.
He cri
ed, “No, no, no, no,” he sobbed, “I can’t—I can’t go to you, not with her name.”
“Forget her. Remember who you are, Joe, but mostly remember who I am. I am, you know, who am.”
For a moment he was filled with faith. But then—”It’s on my back! Her name! And I can’t get it off! It will always be a part of me unless it’s not!”
I took my name in vain. “Okay, change of plans. Get your ass back into the tub. I’ll get the paring knife.”
That seemed to placate him. He smiled and his eyes welled up.
I went downstairs. He called to me twice while I was collecting the knife from the living room and that relic of a toaster oven from the kitchen, but I decided to go deep into character and not answer. He was in the tub when I got back up.
“Good boy.”
He beamed at me. I plugged the oven into the extension cord and ran it over to the outlet above the medicine cabinet. The water already covered his legs.
“Her name.”
“I’ll help you with that.”
“I thought I had to help myself.”
“Hey.” He was really starting to irk me. “What’s my name?”
He told me and calmed down by reiterating it. I gave him a toothbrush to put between his teeth. I went to work on his back, sucking my own bile back down, and as luck would have it, he shivered, convulsed, and lost consciousness as the blade found the corner of the flap of skin he’d been working on. I could faintly make out the CD player in the basement. It must’ve been on repeat; it kept playing that same Sinatra song over and over. I was feeling even queasier now as I finished flaying off his skin, could feel the burgers getting ready for their second coming. I was pretty sure Sinatra was going to be ruined for me forever too. I finished up, shaking but not vomiting.
I sat down, my back against the tub, and closed my eyes.
“Shit, there was nothing about this in that Real Estate Investing for Dummies book, shit.”
Joe was stirring again.
I got up.
“Now, just stay there, Joe. And close your eyes. Joe? Joe?”
He whispered something. I had to lean in.
“Do you—do, do you think she’ll know? That it’s all for her?”
“I think you’ve made that pretty clear.”
I handed him the toaster oven. I depressed the switch to the on position, and for some unfathomable reason turned the dial to Bagel. I went over to the outlet and picked up the other end of that suicide cord. He raised the toaster over his head.
“I’m ready when you are, Jesus.”
“Well, okay, then.”
His eyes popped open. “Wait!”
“What?”
“I did want her to see me in her car, dead. We had some good memories in that car.”
“We all have to get over the past, Joe. That’s what Dr. Phil says.”
“I like Dr. Phil.”
“It’s good television.”
“Wait!” He lowered the toaster several inches.
“What now?”
“Up there. Who’s to hang with? People … people like me?”
Poor Joe. I knew exactly what he needed to hear right then.
“I only handle the day-to-day down here, Joe. My father—our Father—runs the shop upstairs. You let him worry about sorting out the queers and the wife-beaters. Now buck up and get ready.”
He arched his back, getting ready. There was pounding at the front door, someone screamed Joe’s name. I looked at Joe and he looked at me.
“I called a couple of friends. Earlier. I thought I might do something stupid tonight.”
God, I thought, he wanted someone to stop him.
But that wasn’t me.
I plugged him in.
“I’m the only friend you’ll ever need. In the name of the father, and of the son: dunk.”
He closed his eyes and whispered, “Amen. And here I come!”
He dunked, sparks flew as he fried, and the lights blew out in the entire house.
“Jesus!” a man’s voice screamed from outside.
I could hear him kicking at the front door. I put my hand out to the walls and started to make my way out into the hallway.
“The lights, Trini, the lights! Oh, Jesus!” the voice cried again.
“All right, that’s the name,” I whispered. “Don’t wear it out.”
It was almost as if the Holy Spirit, who hadn’t gotten any billing yet, spoke to me: I took my hand away from the wall and put it out to the darkness, and I found my way downstairs without a trip or stumble.
“The side door’s open, Manny!” another voice screamed.
I quickly blew out the candle on the little table.
I sat down in the darkness. It seemed very familiar.
My right hand rested on a heart next to me on the sofa, my left on the gun in my lap.
The man and the woman crashed through the kitchen and then into the living room, bumping into things, cursing.
I sat perfectly still. The woman was crying. Joe had someone who cared—amazing.
“Oh, Manny!”
“I hear water running. Upstairs! Stay here!”
“Manny!”
“Stay here!”
Manny went upstairs. I could hear her stepping closer to me, and suddenly she tripped over something and landed on the sectional, mere feet from me. The gun, pointed roughly at the sound of her breathing, became a part of my extended arm; both were rigid and cold now, my finger on the trigger. Somewhere in some separate part of me I thought: I won’t ever even know what color her eyes were.
She sat for a moment, still, then whispered, “Something’s here. Dios mio.”
A scream of “Ahhh Gawd!!!” came from upstairs, and Trini bolted away from me and the sofa, stumbling up the stairs, screaming Manny’s name.
Still holding a heart, I put the gun away, threw my bag over my shoulder, unlatched the front door, and slipped out of the house. A couple of lights in nearby houses were on now—we only ever once get the full darkness we ask for—and I moved quickly to the sidewalk and away.
At the van, I took off the latex gloves.
“Jesus needs a smoke,” I sighed.
I went to a Cuban deli and bought us each a pack.
I went by Denny’s Brooklyn office on Monday. The Red Hook area was showing slow signs of gentrification. It had once been labeled the “crack capital of America,” but now they had an Ikea. For most of the residents, I imagine the reality was somewhere in the middle: you can buy your nice red Ektorp sofa, but you might get raped on it by the time you got it home.
Denny was on the loading platform yelling at a bunch of laborers, some Pakistanis whose names he didn’t even know. His back stiffened when he laid eyes on me; he put on his most superficial, full-of-shit Denny smile, and raised a finger in the air indicating he’d be with me in one minute. He turned his attention back to his workers, making sure the three men secured some scaffolding equipment properly to the roof of one of his vans. He looked at a knot and shook his head.
“That’s gonna roll off on the BQE and decapitate somebody. Look, Charlie…”
“My name is not Charlie, sir,” the man told him.
“You work for me, right? Then you’re Charlie One, he’s Charlie Two, and he’s Charlie Three. Understand?”
He came over to me and shook my hand. “You shaved off the beard.”
“I had an epiphany.”
“What was that?”
“It was itchy.”
He looked around his warehouse.
“I ought to get a new place. This one is falling apart. I got to go take a look at the chimney. Somebody’s complaining it’s about to fall down to the street. Come on.”
We took a staircase to the roof. A couple of Puerto Ricans, who were fast at work on the chimney, got barked at; I made my way to the edge and looked at the Manhattan cityscape, all those tall buildings except for those two that were still missing. It was windy, and when I put my bag down, I made s
ure it was tight between my ankles.
Denny came over to the edge with me.
“Hey, you know that thing that I mentioned to you? It actually resolved itself.”
“Did it?”
“Yeah. She’ll be safe now. Turns out he was really only a threat to himself. And what a threat. I mean, you should have heard the details.”
“The devil’s in them.”
“All for the best. No outside, you know, intervention.”
“You know, Denny, some people need a helping hand. In life. And death.”
His brow furrowed. “What are you saying?”
“I’m not religious, but maybe when people pray for help, sometimes it just shows up at their door. In Queens even.”
“I don’t stay in business by paying people for work they haven’t done, Brian.”
“I would think, just on the basis of our long friendship, you’d grant me the courtesy of believing in such divine interventions.”
“But this wasn’t about friendship. Or courtesy. It was a business contract, for—” he glanced over to his employees at the chimney, but they barely spoke English anyway, and he took out his finger quotes—”for ‘facade restoration.’ And there’s no proof you performed any of the contracted work. Are you really asking me to believe”—his voice went lower—”what … He didn’t kill himself?”
“Oh, he committed suicide. Let’s not take that away from him.”
He looked at his watch. And offered to take me to lunch later. “I’m more than willing to fairly compensate for whatever time you spent … estimating.”
“I have a flight to catch. You know, people who really believe, they don’t need proof. But maybe it helps to alleviate doubt.”
He was barely listening.
“Well, I got to go and see Sucrete anyways. She’s pretty upset. I mean, she wanted him out of her life, but she’s not without a … What’s in the bag?”
“It’s Valentine’s Day, Denny.”
“I know that, Brian.”
“And Joe wanted her to have a final gift from him. Go ahead and open it. I can rewrap.”
Harlan Coben Page 43
