The Lonely Witness

by William Boyle

  Amy checks her phone.

  She hears a car pull up outside. She opens the door and sees Alessandra getting out of her Uber, hair up in a ponytail, sunglasses on, the driver dragging her bag out of the trunk. Mr. Pezzolanti is standing there between them.

  “I can already feel the neighborhood pressing down on me,” Alessandra says. “You can get away, but you can never really get away.”

  “This your friend?” Mr. Pezzolanti says to Amy.

  “Yes,” Amy says, tucking her wet hair behind her ears.

  “Busy few days around here,” he says.

  “‘Friend,’ wink-wink,” Alessandra says. She thanks the driver and wheels her bag over the wet sidewalk up to the front gate, introducing herself to Mr. Pezzolanti.

  “You’re Zeke Biagini’s kid, aren’t you?” he says. “Back before your mother passed away, I used to play cards with your old man. You know, I don’t even know his real first name. I called him Zeke as a goof. It stuck.”

  “That’s me.”

  “The actress, right? How do you and Amy know each other? She was looking like an actress herself with that hair earlier. Back to normal now, huh, kid?”

  “Why’d you leave the hotel the way you did?” Amy asks Alessandra, ignoring Mr. Pezzolanti.

  “You know me,” Alessandra says, walking through the gate as Mr. Pezzolanti holds it open for her. “I suck at good-byes.”

  “Excuse us, Mr. P,” Amy says.

  “Sure thing,” Mr. Pezzolanti says. “You need any more batteries, just let me know.”

  Alessandra walks past Amy into the apartment. Amy looks out at the street, half expecting to see Dom perched behind the wheel of his Daytona, letting her know that she’s not in the clear yet. But he’s nowhere that she can see. She closes the door on a gawking Mr. Pezzolanti.

  “Hell of a place you got here,” Alessandra says, parking her bag by the table, taking off her sunglasses, and then collapsing on the bed. “You believe what a fuckup I am? Who the fuck gets drunk and misses her flight? Such an Alessandra move.”

  “Al,” Amy says, giving Alessandra serious eyes.

  “What’s going on?”

  “He was here.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy I told you about. The guy I thought was following me. He was here.”

  Alessandra sits up.

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  Amy spends the next twenty minutes filling in Alessandra, telling her everything from Dom’s history with Vincent to her big daydream of making off with the swag in Dom’s car and living from motel to motel across the country. Alessandra’s digesting the information—Amy’s plans, Dom’s threat—with glee.

  “You don’t have to look so happy that I’m in the middle of this crazy situation,” Amy says.

  “I’m here with you,” Alessandra says. “Besides, he would’ve killed you if he was gonna kill you.”

  “Jeez, thanks.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “What about my dad what?”

  “How’s he fit into all this?”

  “He doesn’t.” Amy sits next to Alessandra on the bed. “I really thought for a second there about stealing that jewelry. I can’t believe myself. I can’t believe the last few days. What the hell have I been doing?”

  Alessandra leans on her elbow, plays her fingers through Amy’s stilldamp hair. “You were just dreaming of taking something back. It’s natural, imagining what it’d be like if things were easy.”

  “But that’s just a dream,” Amy says. “All that stolen shit, that’s what Vincent died over. It would only make things hard.”

  “Would it, though?” Alessandra says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Listen. We’ve never had much. Wouldn’t it be nice to have enough money to live without worry for a while? This neighborhood will trap you and murder you slowly, and if you don’t leave now, you’ll end up like all these old people you take care of, miserable and alone.”

  “We’d be looking over our shoulders forever.”

  “Not if this Dom is out of the picture. You said he’s a bad guy.”

  “I said he’s probably lying about everything, and he’s probably a bad guy. And now you’ve got us adding murder to the daydream.”

  “It’s all the champagne. Sorry.”

  Amy laughs. “How would we do it?”

  “I don’t know. From all you’ve told me, the guy sounds like a fucking moron. Maybe we just get him to cross the street in the wrong place and a bus does our dirty work for us.”

  “Then we swoop in and pick up the bags,” Amy adds. “Nothing to see here. He’s probably on his way to Borough Park to sell the stuff right now. And then he’s going to go down to the Caribbean to live like a king. I bet he gets away with it.”

  “How long’s that last? A few months, maybe? He’ll either blow all the money or someone’ll take it. I had this line in a script I read for once, a Miami crime thing. Part was a prostitute, of course. The line was something like, ‘There’s people, that’s their whole job, to watch for guys like him advertising a big score.’ Applies here, right?”

  Amy goes for her bag on the floor. “I got you something,” she says. “I almost forgot.”

  “A present?” Alessandra says, scuttling to the edge of the bed on her elbows.

  Amy digs around in her bag and unfurls the cardigan she just changed out of. She reaches into one of the pockets and finds the Joan of Arc medal she took from Mrs. Epifanio’s bedroom. She lets the chain dangle from her hand.

  Alessandra takes it and holds it close to her face.

  “Because of the painting you love,” Amy says.

  “It’s really pretty,” Alessandra says.

  “I found it in Mrs. Epifanio’s bedroom when we were looking for the jewelry.”

  “You stole it?”

  “It’s not stealing.”

  “It is stealing. And it’s romantic as hell.”

  They sit at the table over steaming cups of black tea, the water slowing from a boil in Amy’s electric kettle. The Joan of Arc medal is in front of Alessandra. She fiddles with the chain. “When I went back to LA after I left you,” Alessandra says, “I took up with this woman named Sadie. She dealt drugs, mostly to rich kids. Business was booming. She had a garbage bag full of cash in her closet. We’d only been dating a couple of months, and she didn’t care that I knew about it. She was really confident. She was also pretty nasty. I stayed with her because I didn’t have any options at the time.”

  “You had options,” Amy says.

  “You know I couldn’t stay in the neighborhood. You know what this place does to me.”

  “You’re here now.”

  Alessandra, smiling, does a little Michael Corleone: “‘Just when I thought I was out …’”

  “Go on,” Amy says. “Tell me about Sadie. What she smelled like. Looked like.”

  “There’s a moral to the story. This isn’t just a memory lane thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “But, now that you mention it, she always smelled like she just came from a campfire. She had dreadlocks and a little triangle tattoo on her chin. She called herself a ‘script consultant.’ She had six cats. I still remember their names.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Edgar, Rifle, Rye, Bessie, Mr. Turner, and Neil Young. Bessie was a little bitch. She scratched me on the thigh once. I thought it was gonna scar. Anyhow, Sadie not only dealt drugs, she was pretty heavy into them. Mainly heroin. Every night just about, I’d lose her. She’d be shooting up. In the bathtub. On the toilet. In bed. I got to thinking she was gonna OD and I could just let it happen. Don’t call the cops. Just get that garbage bag full of cash, leave some food for the cats, and walk out.”

  “What happened?”

  “She never overdosed. I just kind of took off one day. She was pretty boring, actually.”

  “So? What’s the moral of the story?”

  “The moral of the story is, I
should’ve stolen some of that fucking cash.

  She probably just blew it or lost it or whatever. You think you’re a good person, and you go around thinking you’re a good person, and you miss all these opportunities. That cash, even some of it, could’ve changed my life.”

  “But that’s not you. You’re not a thief.”

  “Why’s it not me? It could be anybody. The thing that separates successful people from unsuccessful people is that unsuccessful people are suckers. They don’t pounce. They float the fuck away from opportunity.”

  “Al. Come on.”

  “I’m serious, dude. Before you know it, we’re gonna be forty. No money in the bank, no house, no family left. Just a fucking graveyard of missed opportunities behind us.”

  Amy leans close. “What are you saying?”

  “Okay. Forget the Dom guy for now. Let him go. He sells the jewelry, escapes to the Bahamas or wherever, and he gets away with killing this nobody. Who the fuck cares? Not our problem. But what you said to me was that he said his old man had more jewelry in that attic closet. And you said this guy, the father, didn’t really seem like the guy that Dom described.”

  “And?”

  “Well, maybe we’ve got a pushover with a closet full of jewelry he doesn’t give a shit about.”

  “That’s stretching. The dad still seemed like someone, you know? We’re not talking about a scaredy-cat here.”

  “You know where they live?”

  “He said right near that Magen David High School.”

  “Easy to find out where, exactly.”

  “And we’re gonna, what? Break into this house and steal some jewelry? You want to go to Eighty-Sixth Street and get ski masks and water guns?”

  Alessandra laughs. “Maybe.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Doesn’t it just seem so easy? You’ve already got the five grand. You’ve gone that far. We could buy a car for a few hundred bucks at Flash Auto. Those guys loved my dad. They’d give us a deal. And then we could live out that daydream you were talking about—motels, the open road.”

  “You’re crazy. It doesn’t seem easy at all. Plus, Flash Auto’s gone.”

  “I just keep seeing this closet full of jewelry nobody gives a shit about. Guy’s got so much, he won’t even notice it’s missing.”

  “I have this five thousand. I was thinking I could come to Los Angeles with you, anyway.” Amy pauses, nervously glances away from Alessandra. “Either that, or I could try Williamsburg with Gwen.”

  “Sure. You should come back with me, if you want. But five grand’s not much. It’ll be gone in a couple of months. We could have more.” Alessandra smiles.

  Amy thinks it through. She wants to do what will make Alessandra happy. She likes seeing that smile again. “I don’t know. It sounds like a bad idea.”

  They get up and walk to Eighty-Sixth Street. They leave Alessandra’s suitcase at Amy’s apartment, but Amy carries her backpack. Alessandra stops in front of a dollar store and considers a mechanical kitten that dances in place. Amy pulls up next to her. She suddenly feels naked, out in the world without the wig. A train rumbles by overhead.

  After it passes, Alessandra says, “Hear me out, okay? You think it’s a coincidence that your old man showed up at the same time that all of this is going on, and that I’m here, and now you’ve had this change of heart?”

  “I don’t know,” Amy says. “It’s, what, meant to be?”

  “Exactly,” Alessandra says, plopping the mechanical kitten on its side so it dances off the edge of the gold tray it’s on. “Meant to be. This opportunity.”

  “We can’t do this. We’re not cut out for it.”

  Alessandra nods. Bites her lower lip. “But we don’t have to do it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We get your father to do it.”

  “Fred? No way.”

  “Why not Fred? He owes you.”

  They walk up Bay Parkway to Avenue P and sit on a bench on the far edge of Seth Low Playground. Amy’s aware that they’ve passed Magen David Yeshivah, the Mescolotto house right nearby, somewhere on Seventy-Eighth Street. She’s sure Alessandra knows that, but she doesn’t say anything about it yet. She throws an arm around Amy. Her idea is to make Fred the fall guy. This is a man, Alessandra insists, who let Amy down majestically. Amy was a kid, her mom had died, she was drowning in the world, and he had walked the fuck away. If he’d been around and managed to stick it out as a dad, she wouldn’t have ever encountered Bob Tully. Doesn’t a man like this, no matter what and who he’s become, deserve her scorn? And doesn’t Amy, maybe, deserve some revenge—and a reward?

  Sounds pretty righteous, when Alessandra puts it that way.

  “I bet he’ll do anything for you,” Alessandra says to Amy.

  “I don’t know,” Amy says.

  “I know. I fucking know. To hell with this guy. Let’s use him to take advantage of this opportunity. You know how to find him?”

  Amy thinks of Monsignor Ricciardi. She can’t imagine going to him and asking if he knows where to find Fred. Not with this deceitful purpose in mind. The way Dom read her intentions, she’s sure Monsignor Ricciardi would be able to read her intentions, too.

  “Maybe,” Amy says.

  “You think it’s a good idea, I can tell.”

  “I think it makes us bad people. But maybe we’re already bad people.”

  “We’re not bad people. We’re just trying to find the best way to make it through. Me and you in Los Angeles will be great. For once, we’ll get some breathing room.”

  Amy shrugs, the shrug saying yes more than I don’t know. Alessandra means far more to her than her father ever has or ever will.

  Fifteen minutes later, they’re at the rectory. Amy sidesteps inside, opening and closing the door with a gentle touch, Alessandra right behind her. Connie Giacchino’s there at the main desk, pray bigger mug clutched in her hand, tinted glasses low on her nose. She says Amy’s name a couple of times, as if she’s not sure she’s really just walked in.

  “I was hoping to speak to Monsignor Ricciardi,” Amy says.

  “Is that Alessandra Biagini?” Connie says, straightening her glasses.

  “Sure is,” Alessandra says.

  “My Sonny says he saw you in a movie on his Amazon Prime.”

  “Oh yeah, which one?”

  “Alien Carwash Something. You were in it for maybe a minute. Got killed.”

  “We don’t talk about that movie.” Alessandra smiles.

  “The monsignor is in his office,” Connie says to Amy.

  They go back to his office. Monsignor Ricciardi is sitting at his desk with his legs up, watching Columbo on his computer. He taps the mouse to pause it when he notices Amy and Alessandra. “Alessandra, good to see you,” he says. “You’re back visiting? How do you know Amy?”

  “We’ve known each other a long time,” Alessandra says.

  “I had no idea,” Monsignor Ricciardi says.

  “Do you know how I can get in touch with my father?” Amy says to him.

  “You’ve given what I said a second thought?”

  “Yes.”

  “I talked to her, too,” Alessandra says. “I convinced her that he deserves a shot.”

  “Excellent,” Monsignor Ricciardi says, tapping his fingers on the desktop. He takes a retractable pen out of the top drawer and clicks it a few times. He says the word excellent three more times.

  “You know where he is?” Amy says.

  “As a matter of fact, I do. He wanted to stay around, didn’t want to give up on you. The possibility of reconnecting with you, of making amends, has given him new purpose. He asked me if I knew anyone renting out rooms. I pointed him to Oggie Agostino on Eighty-Third Street. Between Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fourth. Oggie takes in lodgers, like people used to. He’s got about six rooms he rents out for a hundred dollars a week. Fred took one in the basement.”

  Amy’s unnerved to hear this, that Monsignor Ricciar
di essentially okayed Fred’s decision to stalk her, despite her wishes that he get the hell out of the neighborhood. Given Alessandra’s plan, though, it’s good news. He’s just a couple of blocks away. He’s ready to be used. He wants a new purpose? They’ll give him one.

  But Amy’s suddenly convinced there’s no way he’ll go along with it. He’s clean, after all. He did plenty of bad stuff in his drinking days that he’s got to atone for, and he’s probably not interested in adding to the list.

  Monsignor Ricciardi finds a pad of Post-its and writes down the address. He hands the top Post-it to Amy. She feels the stickiness against her fingers. “Thanks,” she says.

  “Good luck,” Monsignor Ricciardi says. “I mean that. I hope everything works out. You’re a good daughter for doing this.”

  “What I said to you before,” Amy says, “about not wanting advice, I’m sorry about that.”

  He grins like a card dealer to whom she’s apologized for losing so badly. “Amy, we all have our moments. I understand. Believe me.”

  “Monsignor,” Alessandra says, saluting him as if he’s military.

  Amy’s heard of Oggie Agostino, but she’s never been to his rooming house. What she’s heard is that a lot of sketchy people pass through the place. Ex-addicts. Ex-cons. Gamblers off the rails. Guys who live with their parents until their parents can’t take it anymore and throw them out, and then they need to find somewhere on the quick. It’s a couple of short blocks from the rectory. Alessandra’s got a little skip in her step.

  “What if he just flat out says no?” Amy asks.

  “I guess our backup plan will have to go into effect,” Alessandra says.

  “What’s our backup plan?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll figure one out.”

  When they arrive at the address, Fred is sitting out on the stoop. The house is dumpy. Crumbling porch. Tattered siding. A roof that needs fixing. The garden is a tangle of weeds and some kind of stringy wire. Fred’s wearing a plain black sweatshirt and thrift store jeans. He digs into a big red bag of SunChips, seeming pretty confused.

  “You’re looking for me?” he says to Amy.

  “I am,” Amy says.