by Norman Green
He got back in the car, drove to the on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, looked at the wall of traffic. Ain’t nothing for it, he told himself, go on and get in line. What’s your hurry, anyhow?
It took about an hour and a half to get to Jersey. He felt like he hadn’t been out of the city in ages, he’d almost forgotten what New Jersey looked like. He thought back to when he and Donna had first moved out. All he’d known about the place then was what you saw when you drove out of the Lincoln Tunnel and headed for Newark Airport: it had been an otherworldly landscape, a ruined canyon of polluted marshes, empty warehouses, oil refineries, and power plants, nothing but a stinking industrial desert that could not have looked more devastated if you dropped an atomic bomb on the fucking place. He knew better now, though. Cross the George Washington Bridge, get off the highway and into the little towns, and you felt like you were on another planet, quiet streets, green grass, trees, houses with lawns and hedges all around, whitetail deer eating your wife’s plants. Just like your house, he told himself. Just like the one Donna threw you out of.
It took fifteen minutes, driving through the local streets, before he found the address in the town of Alpine for Charles David Prior. It was an enormous old mansion, set well back in the woods off Route 9W, a two-lane state road that paralleled the Palisades Parkway. There were no other houses in sight, just trees, with an iron perimeter fence up next to the road. The driveway to the place ran between two stone pillars that buttressed an iron gate, back to a two-story carriage house that had room for at least four cars. The house beyond was a stone and timber monstrosity of the kind rich people sometimes erect for themselves, simple materials and a rustic style taken to such heights that the building almost became a parody of itself. This guy isn’t just wealthy, Stoney thought, he’s beyond that. The dude has to be filthy. Forget what the house is worth, Stoney thought, the land alone must be worth millions. This guy is ten minutes from the bridge, but the son of a bitch has as much privacy as if he were living in the middle of a wilderness. There were no cars or people in sight behind the fence, nothing to be gained by sitting there looking. Stoney drove on past.
Past the fence that marked the end of Prior’s property, a tract of undeveloped forest ran for about a half mile before he got to the next sign of human habitation. It was a small development of nearly identical houses, accessed by a short street just off the main road. They were McMansions, two-story stucco fashion statements with two-car garages attached, separated from the street and from one another by smallish, improbably green carpets of manicured grass. Stoney turned in, pulled over in front of one which had a “For Sale” sign in the middle of its front lawn. He got out, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell. There was no answer, the place was empty. It had no curtains in the windows, no furniture inside. The house is probably worth a couple million, he thought, but who the hell would want to live in it? There were houses just like it, springing up all over Jersey. They were built out of sheet metal two-by-fours, fabricated floor trusses instead of wooden beams and rafters, vinyl windows, veneer floors. Even the stucco was phony, it was a plastic compound made to look like the real thing, applied over an exterior of foam insulation. The place might look like a stone castle from the street, but you could probably kick your way through the wall if you wanted to. Nothing about it was real, none of it looked like what it really was.
He looked around the micro-neighborhood. There were no signs of life, no trikes in the driveways, no cars outside, no children’s toys on the lawns, not a human being in sight except for him. They’re all at work, he told himself, they’re paying the price it takes to live in this sterile place. Just what I’m looking for, he thought, a place where nothing has to mean anything, not really, it just has to appear as though it might. He walked back to his car, wrote down the real estate agent’s name and phone number before driving away.
He spent the next hour cruising around the neighborhood, if you could call it that, looking for a road that might run behind Prior’s house. He didn’t find one, though, as close as he could make out, the woods ran down a long hill behind the place. There was a golf course at the bottom of the hill. There wasn’t much else up on the hill, just a few other widely scattered houses, lots of trees, an empty field here and there. There was a plaque by the side of the road, halfway around a blind curve. Curious, Stoney found a place to park and walked back to read it. It told the story of Skunk Hollow, a pre–Civil War community of freed blacks, but it had been obliterated when the parkway was built. Robert Moses, let my people go. The plaque didn’t say anything about what had happened to the denizens of Skunk Hollow when they put the road in.
It was getting dark. Stoney headed down the hill, out of Alpine and into Closter, the neighboring town where Donna and their children still lived. It was nowhere near as plush as Alpine, but it was still solidly upper-class white, populated by prosperous folks who favored Mercedes, Jaguars, hulking SUVs, and, yes, Lexuses. Donna had gotten him the car about a year ago. Stoney had figured that she was embarrassed by the old Pontiac he’d been driving. It hadn’t bothered him, he didn’t much care what his neighbors thought. He knew he had enough money socked away to buy all the Jaguars the local dealer had, so he hadn’t needed one. Donna was different, though, she wanted to fit in. That’s because she’s become a part of all this, he thought. This is her world, this suburban wonderland, this quiet, green, forested place that lay a short commuter’s bus ride from midtown Manhattan. This is what she is. You were never more than a foreigner. You only slept here.
He followed the streets automatically, his mind seemingly on autopilot. What will you do if she sees you? he wondered. She would recognize the car, she’s the one who bought it, after all. She’d know it was you from a mile away. Will you stop to talk to her, will you look at her, or will you pretend not to see her and drive away? He still hadn’t come up with an answer when he turned down his street. There was no one outside, though. Most of the houses had lights on inside, including the one he had once lived in with Donna, but you couldn’t see any of the occupants from the street. He wanted to stop but he did not, he continued on past, berating himself for his lack of courage. What are you afraid of, he wondered, what do you think she’s gonna do to you? But she had more power to hurt him than anyone alive, she could stick a knife through his heart with just a look. He got to the end of the block, pulled a U-turn, went back on past. Donna, he thought, Donna…God, he missed her. It made him despise himself all the more for what he was going to do. You wouldn’t, if you really loved her, he told himself. You’d go sit down with her, ask her what she really wanted. And if her answer really is this guy Prior, you should turn your back and walk away, leave her to him.
Still, the primitive in him was strong enough to know that they had better not ever let him see the two of them together. And Donna would know that, too.
The guy was waiting right where Fat Tommy said he would be, in a chrome-and-glass diner in Westwood, New Jersey. It was one of those places that never close. The P.I. was just a kid, tall, skinny, zits on his face. His skin was pasty white, like he never went out in the daylight, and he had large gnarly hands with fingernails chewed all the way down. If he found it strange to meet Stoney at this place on such short notice, he did not show it. They took a table in the back room. The waiter left a pair of menus on the table. Stoney paged through it while the kid opposite fidgeted. They had everything, at least in theory, steak and lobster, Greek and Italian, burgers and a salad bar, breakfast all day and all night. When the waiter came back, Stoney handed him a ten. “Two coffees,” he said. The waiter nodded, took the menus, and departed.
Stoney looked over at the kid, watched him for a minute. “Friend of mine told me you’re good,” he finally said. “Says you do good work and you know how to keep your mouth shut.” The kid nodded nervously and said nothing. It’s no wonder he’s afraid, Stoney thought. He knew that he had been unable to keep the pain and rage off his face. The waiter came back with the coffees.
“What can I do for you?” the kid said, after the waiter left.
“Two things,” Stoney said. “One, this guy Charles David Prior, lives up on the hill in Alpine. I wanna know who he is, what he does, where he came from.”
“Sure, okay,” the kid said. “Gimme a day, two at the most. What’s the other thing?”
Stoney looked at the cup in front of him. He didn’t want to taste what was in it, he was already filled with acid. He didn’t even want to smell it. “I want you to follow my wife.” He hated himself for saying it. He could feel the tension building inside, he felt like ripping the table off the wall and flinging it across the room.
“All right.” The kid spoke in a soft voice, looked away, out through the open doorway into the main part of the diner. “Do you want the full treatment?”
“What’s that?”
“Well, it starts with round-the-clock surveillance. I can drop some spyware on your computer if you want, it’ll record every keystroke anyone makes on it, e-mail, Web surfing, the works. I can tap your phones, too. If your name’s on the deed, it’s legal but probably not admissible in court.”
Stoney’s breath felt like it was burning his nose as he exhaled. “We’re not going to fucking court,” he said. “All right. Do the phone and the computer. You don’t need to stay on her all night, she’s generally had it by ten-thirty. She gets going early, though.”
“All right. Do you need pictures? I mean, if I find something. You said you weren’t going to court, but…”
There’s no clean way to do this, Stoney thought, you drop something in the toilet, you can’t get it back without getting slimed. What a fucking life. “Yeah,” he said. “Just so there’s no questions. Time-stamped, I guess.” He felt like he needed to take a shower.
The kid looked away again. “All right,” he said.
“Just make fucking sure,” Stoney said, staring straight at him. “You understand me?”
“Yes, sir.” He cleared his throat. “You got a name? I mean, the guy you think is, ahh…”
“Yeah, I got a fucking name, but I don’t want to give it to you. You just tell me what you find.”
The kid shrugged. “Okay by me.”
“You need a key?”
“Huh?” He looked at Stoney blankly.
“To my house.”
“What? Oh, for the phone and all. No, sir, I don’t need to go anywhere near your house.”
“You’re kidding me. How do you do it?”
“At the phone-company switching station. I’ll just call in like a regular phone-company lineman would. You just need to know the nomenclature.”
“I see. Well, that’s it, then.”
“Ah, yeah, except, um, you gotta pay me a retainer, and you gotta tell me how long, you know…”
Stoney nodded. “Gimme a week,” he said. They worked out the finances. Stoney paid the kid in cash, and the kid folded the bills up in his big hand and stuck them in his pocket.
FIVE
Benny was a short guy, he had to take two steps for every one of Stoney’s just to keep up. He never looked as though he minded, though, because Benny was one of those guys who seemed to have more energy than everyone else. His eyes were never still, he seemed to devour the landscape as he walked through it, he was like a man who’d been in prison for a long time, with nothing to look at but concrete walls. Stoney had the feeling that it wasn’t the walking Benny loved, it was the spectacle and the splendor of ordinary life as it played out on the Manhattan sidewalks. “How’d it go?” Benny said. “How’d it go with your daughter?”
“I guess it went all right,” Stoney said. He wondered how much of it he should tell Benny. Benny didn’t have the attention span for long, complicated stories. He decided to omit the stuff about the investigator he’d hired, and about Charles David Prior. “She was a little torqued off at me, at first, but I think we did okay anyhow. She wants me to call up Donna, help her out with some financial shit. Fat Tommy says, instead of calling, I should surprise her, you know, send a limo to pick her up and bring her to a fancy restaurant, you know, dinner, flowers, and like that. Romantic. Put her in a better mood.”
“Set her up, you mean.”
“Yeah. All right, basically, set her up. Play her.”
“She’s not a mark,” Benny said. “Why be so underhanded? I don’t understand what all the subterfuge is gonna get you.”
“Subterfuge is one of my best things,” Stoney told him.
“Yeah? How’s it working so far?”
Stoney shook his head. “I see your point, at least as far as dealing with Donna is concerned. But I’m telling you, Benny, last time I talked to her, she wanted to bite my head off. I don’t wanna do anything to make it worse. Fat Tommy thought…”
“Fat Tommy’s your partner, right?”
“Yeah. He’s known Donna for years. He thought it might be better if I met her in a public place, somewhere she’s gotta dress up to go, you know, fancy. That’s Fat Tommy’s style. Champagne, music, all that shit.”
“Stoney, you can’t scam your way out of this. If Donna is pissed off at you, she’s gonna want to have her say, and all of this bullshit manipulation is just your way of cheating her out of it. You could buy her a diamond ring or something, right, it’s not gonna change what she really feels, and sooner or later you’re gonna have to hear about it anyhow. Why not just get it over with?”
They reached the Greek coffee shop on Twenty-third Street that was their normal meeting place. It took a minute for them to get inside and seated. Stoney waited until the waiter had taken their order and gone away. “So you think I should just call her, right?”
Benny shrugged. “I would. I don’t think it helps to try and weasel your way out of things. Call her, meet her someplace if you want, let her have her say. The best thing you can do here is be a stand-up guy, let her know you’re trying to do the right thing.”
“Jesus, Benny, she’s never gonna believe something like that.” The two of them laughed, and Benny eyed Stoney, shaking his head.
“You are some piece of fucking work,” he said.
Benny had taken him to a meeting up in the Bronx, and it was ten-thirty by the time Stoney got back to his apartment. He went inside and sat on the couch in the dark. Outside on Twelfth Street things were gearing up, the night creatures were coming out. There had been a conflict brewing on the stoop of his building when he’d gotten there, he’d had to shoulder his way past two women who were having a loud disagreement over something. Each of them had the support of a couple of friends, and from the sound of it, the backers were now joining in. Stoney had not understood the mixture of Spanish and English they had been arguing in, and he didn’t care what it was about anyhow. The confrontation on the stoop was escalating, though, growing steadily louder. The problem was, it was an odds-on favorite that at least one asshole in the crowd carried a gun, and pretty soon they were going to use it, Stoney could feel it coming. That would probably mean that the cops would be around for a day or so, asking questions, and who needed that? He got up and fished the trash can out of the broom closet, removed the plastic bag and its contents, and set them to one side. He filled the empty bucket with cold water from the bathtub. About six gallons, he figured. He carried the bucket to the front window, opened it, and dumped the water out into the night air.
They had been hard to miss, hanging on the steps directly below his window, and the noise they had been making was nothing compared to what erupted when the water hit. Stoney closed the window and sat back down, laughing silently, listening to people screaming invective at the front of the building. At least now they had a common opponent. After another fifteen minutes of empty threats and curses, they seemed to tire of it. Five minutes later, they were gone.
He went back to rehearsing what he would say to Donna. He’d been doing it, on and off, ever since he’d had the visit from Marisa. He knew what Benny would say: “Don’t have conversations with people who ain’t in the r
oom with you.” It was a futile exercise anyhow, because who the hell could tell what kind of mood he’d catch her in, she might say anything at all. He’d built it up in his mind, though, knowing, even as he did it, that he was making it harder and harder for himself to make the call.
Coward, he told himself. You’re afraid of her.
“Fuck it,” he said, and he picked up the phone and called his home number. He listened to it ring four times, then five. He breathed a sigh of relief, prepared to hang up. She answered it, though, just as he’d been about to put the phone down.
“Hello?”
She sounded tired. He felt like a teenager, tongue-tied, afraid to ask the girl next door out on a date. “Hello,” he said, and he could hear the fear in his own voice. He hoped that she couldn’t. “Hiyadoin’?”
She exhaled into the phone once, twice. He waited, silent. Then he thought, Maybe she doesn’t recognize you…. “Donna?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Hello, Stoney.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you told me not to call, but I wanted to hear your voice.”
“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “I’m glad you called. I mean, I guess I am. I was pretty nasty, last time.”
“That’s okay—”
“No, it’s not,” she said, cutting him off. “I just get so mad at you sometimes, and then I say things I don’t mean, and I have to go around feeling shitty over it.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, so he kept his mouth shut.
