by Norman Green
Dylan was on the telephone, and he looked up, irritated. “Hold on,” he said to the telephone, then put his hand over the mouthpiece. “I know you? You from the limo service? You know I got nothing for you guys this early in the day….” He craned his neck, peering past Stoney through the open door. “Carlo? Goddammit, Carlo…”
Stoney walked up to the petitioner’s side of the desk, stuck a finger down on the phone cradle, and ended Dylan’s call. “I hear,” he said, “I wanna fuck a cheerleader, you’re the guy to talk to. That right?”
“Oh, buddy,” Dylan said, putting the phone down, leaning back in the chair, hands out, shaking his head. “Buddy, you don’t know how much shit you’re in. You ain’t just dealing with me, you understand? I’m not the guy you gotta worry about, I don’t own this place, I just run the show. You know the name Rocco Parisi? Because you’re gonna, my friend…”
Stoney had never heard of Parisi. “Yeah,” Stoney said. “And he knows me, and believe me, he’s not gonna take me on over a fat piece of shit like you. You think he wants to see his name in the paper? ‘Parisi now catering to babyfuckers.’ He’ll chop your fat ass into little pieces first. Now answer my question. I wanna fuck a high-school girl, you hear me?” He could feel it building up inside, and his voice began to rise. “I bet you got pictures, right? Show me some pictures. You know the kind I want. Show me some schoolgirls, Dylan.”
Dylan’s eyes gave him away, because he glanced at the desk drawer before he went for it. Guy was quick, though, he got the drawer open and his hand inside just as Stoney turned the desk over on him. The big silver automatic came flying out of the drawer, Stoney watched the black hole at the end of the barrel spin past as Dylan lost his balance and went over backward. The desk tipped over, and the edge of it landed on Dylan’s ankle just as the back of the fat man’s head hit the floor.
“Aaaaagh!” The pistol landed a few feet away. Stoney vaulted the upended desk and landed on Dylan’s stomach with both knees. Dylan rolled to one side, further wrenching his ankle, and began throwing up convulsively, burying his pistol with vomit. Stoney knelt down next to him, waited until he stopped squalling, and then whispered in his ear.
“I wanna fuck a little girl, Dylan. C’mon, you help me out, okay? Hmm? When Parisi finds out you been running underage girls outta here, you know what he’s gonna do to you? You fucking piece of shit…”
Dylan’s eyes were squeezed shut. “What are you gonna do?”
“Me? Nothing. But your past has come back to bite you in the ass, Dylan….”
FOURTEEN
Stoney parked his car in front of the house where he’d lived with Donna for so many years, got out, walked up to the front door, rang the bell. It was supposed to go bing-bong, but it didn’t, it only went bing. It had been that way for a decade, but he’d never gotten around to fixing it. He waited about ten seconds, then started banging on the door with a fist.
Donna opened it, stared at him. “What are you going to do?”
“She here?”
“Yes, she’s upstairs. I told you, I grounded her.”
“Where’s Dennis?”
“Hockey practice.” Stoney walked past her, into the house. Donna, white-faced, stood back to let him by, then closed the door behind him.
“Get her down here,” he said.
She brushed past him, went to stand between Stoney and the stairs to the second floor. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Get her down here,” he said.
Donna stared at him, making up her mind. Finally, she turned and shouted up the stairs. “Marisa! I need you downstairs. Right now, please.” Stoney stood silent, unmoving, listening to the sounds of someone stirring on the floor above. “Today, please, Marisa,” Donna said, and then she took one step to the side.
Marisa came down the stairs, stopped halfway when she saw her father standing there. “What…”
Stoney stared at her, wishing he knew her well enough to read her face and her body language. She came the rest of the way down, but slowly, stood on the bottom step with one hand on the baluster. “Hi, Daddy.”
“Why did you lie to me?”
Her face cracked, she glanced at her mother, then down at her feet.
He had been afraid that he would lose control, afraid of what his temper would make him say or do, but now that the moment had arrived he felt overwhelmed with sorrow. Marisa looked small, standing in front of him, insubstantial, impossibly young, too frail to even look his way. If you had been around, he told himself, maybe none of this would have happened…. “Why did you lie to me?” She stood there, quaking, silent. “I still can’t believe you put me through it. That was a really rotten thing to do.”
She didn’t take it the way he thought she would. She exhaled, sat down on the steps. “I was in trouble.” Her voice was a plaintive squeak. She stared down at the bottom step her feet were resting on. “I needed your help, but…” She glanced over at Donna again, but her mother gave her no sign. “I thought if I told you the truth, you’d kill me.”
“So you let me think this guy Prior was sleeping with your mother, so that I’d kill him instead.”
“What?” Donna said, going pale. “What? Who’s Prior?”
Marisa nodded her head, but she still didn’t look at him. “I didn’t know what else to do.” The tears started down her face. “Dad, Mom, I’m sorry….”
“Sorry don’t cut it.” Am I really being too tough on her, he wondered, or not tough enough? He had no idea. Am I getting to her or is she just one damned fine actress?
Donna sounded like she was having trouble breathing. She stared at Marisa. “You told him I was sleeping with someone else?”
“I didn’t say it,” Marisa told her, staring at the floor. “But I let him think it. I thought he would go and scare Prior away, and then, you know, I could get out of it, and get back to my real life, without—”
“All right,” Stoney said. “I’m gonna ask you some questions. I want straight answers, you hear me? And if I find out you’re bullshitting me again, you will not enjoy the consequences, I promise you. Are we clear on this?”
“Daddy, I’m so sorry….”
He closed his eyes, held up a hand to stop her, asked his question again, three words, each one separate and distinct. “Are. We. Clear.” He could hear her sniffing, pulling herself together. Or staying in character.
“Yes,” she said.
“How did this shit get started?”
“It was about six months ago,” she said. There was still no spirit in her voice, just resignation. “I had just broken up with my boyfriend, you were gone, Mom was all worried about losing the house, and I was broke. My girlfriend Jeannette had danced at the Jupiter Club once when they had an amateur night and she said she’d made some nice money, and she wanted to do it again. You know, for laughs. She said she loved it, she got a real rush from all the guys sitting there with their tongues hanging out. She said it was a fun way to make a few bucks. At first I said no, but you know, after a while I started to think about it. I went with her once to watch, and it didn’t seem like that big a deal. I mean, she never, like, showed anything for real, you see more skin at the beach—”
“Oh, yeah?”
She looked up at him for a few seconds. She’s wondering how much I know, Stoney thought. Let’s see if she turns on the tears again.
She didn’t, though. “Well, almost. She wore this bikini, and she, like, held it open a little bit, but that’s as far as it went.”
“How old is Jeannette?”
“She’s almost seventeen.”
“Great. All right, so then you started doing it.”
“Yes.” She was almost inaudible.
“And?”
She sighed. “Then Jeannette met this guy, Dylan, he said we were settling for pocket change. He said he could help us make a lot more money, doing the same thing we were doing in the bar, just like, you know, in private, for rich guys who didn’t want to go
to those places.” She sighed again. “I was never in love with the bar. You know, some of the guys really wanted you, but some of them got drunk and yelled things. So I thought, doing this for one person is probably better than doing it for a whole crowd.”
“How many times did you work for Dylan?”
“Three,” she said. He noticed that she wasn’t looking over at her mother anymore. “The first time, Jeannette and I went together, and after that, I went by myself.”
“How many times did you do Prior?”
She took her time answering. “The last two,” she finally said. “He got weird. He was calling Dylan every day, offering him all kinds of money if I would, you know, do this or that. Then he got my cell number. I got it changed once, but he got the new number the very next day. He still won’t leave me alone.”
“What did you do for Prior?”
She didn’t answer, so he asked again, louder. “What did you do for—”
“I stripped for him, okay?” Her voice finally rose above the subdued mumble she’d used from the beginning. “All right? Are you happy now?” She was staring at him, angry. Maybe at last we’re getting to something real, Stoney thought.
“Yeah, I’m thrilled.” Stop now, he told himself, you already know what you need to know. He couldn’t do it, though. “So this guy Prior never touched you.”
“No.” He wondered if she was lying, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Bullshit.” He let that lie there for a minute. “Do you really want out of this or not? You want to go back to what you were before all this?”
“I don’t know what I want.”
Probably the second true thing she’s said, he thought. “Did you fuck this guy?”
“No!” She shouted it, outraged.
“You blow him?”
“No!” She looked like she’d been slapped in the face.
“What, then? Why don’t you just tell me the truth? Because I’m gonna get it out of Prior, I guarantee it.”
The air went out of her. “It doesn’t matter what I tell you anymore.” She sounded resigned again, like she had given up pretending. Either that, or she was taking it to the next level. “You’ll never believe me, no matter what I say.”
Great job, Dad, he told himself. And maybe it doesn’t really matter now, whether she touched the guy or not. Knowing one way or the other wouldn’t change much.
“What are you going to do?”
“What do you think I should do? You want me to kill this guy, just to get him out of your hair?”
“I don’t know….”
It was his turn to get quiet. She looked up at him, her face wet. “All right,” he finally said. “Here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna set him up for me. Tommy and I are gonna bleed him, and at the end of it, Prior will have two choices: he can come after you, or he can run. And if he runs, we’re gonna let him go. If he comes after you, then what happens next is on him. Either way, when it’s over, he won’t bother you again.”
“What do I have to do?”
“You’re gonna have to talk to him on the phone. When Prior calls you, does he always call from the same number?”
She cried for a minute or two before she answered him. “He usually calls from the phone in his house. Once in a while he uses his cell phone.”
“Any particular time of day?”
“Usually around four…in the afternoon.”
“Do you talk to him when he calls?”
She nodded. “Sometimes.”
“All right. Don’t talk to him again until I tell you to, and then, you only say what I tell you to say, no more. From now on, write down how many times he calls, and what time.”
“Okay.”
Stop now, he told himself again, stop before you make this worse…. Again, he couldn’t hold back. “Listen to me. This other asshole, Dylan, you ever see him again, you ever talk to him, you even look at him, I’ll give you his fucking skull, you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“You go back to that strip joint again, and I’ll burn it to the ground, and I’ll bury whoever—”
“Look,” she said, her voice rising slightly, “you can’t call me any names that Eddie, your pet bulldog, didn’t already use on me.” She looked back down at the floor, and her voice went back to that quiet, defeated tone. “I’m not going back. I promised Mom, and I promised Eddie, too. It’s over.”
You promised Eddie? Oh yeah, Tuco. My pet bulldog. He wondered what the kid had said to her. You might as well say it, he thought. You’ve gone this far. “If you do, you better find a new place to sleep first.”
She was crying silently, looking exactly like a broken little girl. He shook his head. How can you ever know for sure, when they’re telling you the truth and when they’re playing you? He stared at her. “Also, from now on, you stay with Tuco. He’ll pick you up in the morning, he’ll go where you go, he’ll bring you home at night. You don’t leave this house without him, is that clear?”
She nodded.
“This is important, Marisa. This guy Prior already put one man in the ground over this. I don’t want you to be next.” He watched her face, but he couldn’t tell if he had gotten to her or not.
“All right.” She let a few seconds pass. “Daddy?”
“Yeah.”
“I really didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I’m sorry.”
He hoped it was the truth, but how could he know? “So am I.” And now what? he wondered. “Marisa?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“You don’t have to let this ruin everything. Do you understand that?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need me for this, he thought, I’m not even the period on the end of the sentence. She was beaten before I even stepped foot in this place. It probably doesn’t matter what I do or say here, at all. He felt smaller than he had in a while. He wondered what Tuco had said to her, what he had done, but he decided he wasn’t at all sure he really wanted to know. “Where’s Tuco now?”
Donna started to answer, but Marisa beat her to it. “He’s asleep on your couch in the back room,” she said, and for the first time she sounded like someone he knew. “You’ve had the poor guy up for days. He was so tired, I had to drive us most of the way back from Brooklyn.”
Brooklyn? Stoney’s mouth opened, but Donna put her hand on his shoulder, and he closed it without speaking. “Thank you, Marisa,” Donna said. The two of them watched as Marisa stood up and trudged back to the second floor. Donna waited until her daughter was out of sight. She stood there looking at the empty staircase. “Did you believe her? Did you really think I was sleeping around?”
I’m walking in a minefield, here, Stoney thought. I better tread carefully. “She played me like a fiddle,” he said. “I didn’t know what to think.”
Donna shook her head. “I can’t believe how much you held out on me. Why didn’t you just come to me after she told you all this? Why couldn’t you just talk to me?”
The truth came out before he could clean it up. “I was afraid.”
The tears in his wife’s eyes were almost more than he could bear to look at. “We’re never gonna make it,” she told him, “not if we can’t even talk to each other. That investigator you hired. He was watching me, wasn’t he? To see what I did.”
“Her, not him.” You weren’t even straight with her about that. “I didn’t tell her what to look for,” he said. “I just told her to look.”
Donna chewed on that for a minute. “Well,” she finally said, “you should probably go. Go and do what you need to do.”
Do we still have a chance? He wanted to ask her, but she looked like she was teetering on the brink, and he was afraid anything he said would just push her over.
He had Benny on the telephone before he got to the end of the block.
There was a midnight meeting at a church out in Queens. Stoney and Benny sat in the Lexus in the parking lot. It had gotten too complicated for Stoney to keep it all separated, so he wou
nd up copping to everything. “My God,” Benny kept saying. “My God.” Stoney ignored that and told his story. “Christ Almighty,” Benny said, after Stoney finished. “Well, this guy, Dylan, did you kill him? Is he all right?”
“I didn’t kill him,” Stoney said. “I guess he’s okay. A little sore, maybe. The guy is a shitbag, Benny, he deserves more than what I gave him. Motherfucker had handcuffs, rope, leather harnesses, all kinds of weird shit in that place.”
“Well, what did you do?” Benny said. “Exactly.”
“I think I broke his ankle, but that was kind of an accident. He’s laying on the floor moaning, right, this kid shows up, Tiffany’s friend Jason. Jason has this dude with him. I guess the guy is his business manager or something. Anyhow, Dylan owed them some money for something he hired Jason to do, right, I didn’t want to know what it was, but Dylan didn’t pay up. So Jason and his buddy hoist the fat bastard up, okay, Jason bends him over the desk, which is kind of like, on its side, Dylan’s half out of it, but he wakes up when Jason starts stripping the guy’s pants off him. ‘Hold him, hold him,’ Jason says to his guy, and all of a sudden, I don’t wanna be in the room anymore. Dylan is howling, last thing I saw was Jason stuffing the man’s own boxer shorts into his mouth to keep him quiet. Jesus, I hope they were clean this morning…. Anyway, they didn’t help a whole lot, I could still hear the guy right through the boxers, all the way out in the other room.”
“Christ Almighty,” Benny said, horrified. “Are you saying they corn-holed the poor bastard? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Well, I can’t say, Benny, I was in Philadelphia at the time. What can I tell you? They gave him some of his own medicine.”
“Why didn’t you just call the police on him? If he was doing what you say, you could have had him put in jail!”
