by Norman Green
She pursed her lips, then, and nodded her head.
“Now you do understand, I ain’t saying you gotta run right out and start beating the fucking bushes looking for the son of a bitch….” She got up out of her seat, climbed halfway across the center console, and wrapped herself around him. He could smell the faint scent of the perfume that she wore. It seemed like forever before she spoke, but it was probably just a minute or so.
“Do you know,” she said, her voice muffled by his shirt, “that’s the most words you’ve ever said to me at one time? Without yelling, anyhow.”
He wanted to capture that feeling of her draped across his shoulders, the texture of her hair on his face, the smell of the shampoo she used, the sensation of her hands clamped around his arms, hold it somewhere up in his head where he could take it out, once in a while, when he was feeling low. “Did seem like a lot.”
She let go of him, bussed him on the cheek, subsided back into her seat, and wiped her face. “What do we do now?”
He looked out the window. He thought briefly about all the things he had done wrong at her age, but there was no profit in that. “Events have been put in motion,” he told her. “Things are happening. What we do in the meantime is keep you safe. You’re gonna have to stay out sick for a few days. Basically, I want you where I can see you, or at least know where you’re at.” He looked over at her. “That means you’re gonna have to see some things. And you’re gonna have to put up with some shit. You’re gonna have to sit quiet, be bored, not make trouble. Can you handle that?”
“Whatever you say.”
He just stared at her.
“Really,” she said.
“All right. You getting along with Tuco okay?”
“Fine,” she said. “Why do you call him that? His name is Eddie.”
He put his foot on the brake, started the car, stuck it in reverse.
“Dad?”
“What.”
“Can you put your seat belt on?”
“I fucking hate seat belts.”
“Do it for me,” she said. “Please.”
“All right, all right.” He jammed the gearshift back into park and yanked on the seat belt. Women, he thought. They’re never happy unless they’re running your life.
SIXTEEN
If it hadn’t been for Tommy’s newspapers, Marisa would have gone crazy. Tommy always read the News and the Times, and they kept her busy for the first couple of hours.
The house was huge. It was one of seven houses, each uglier and more pretentious than the next, a microdevelopment built around the perimeter of a hole in the woods up on the hill in Alpine, off in the middle of nowhere. It looked like it was the brainchild of some half-mad Arab potentate who was trying to house all of his wives, somewhere isolated, but where he wouldn’t have to drive too far when he was going from one to the other. She got up and walked through the house again, wandering the empty rooms, lying down for a nap on the carpet in one of the upstairs bedrooms, rising at the sound of a car to see what the sultan’s mistress drove.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Fat Tommy and her father were rehearsing some kid, and she half listened to the sounds of their voices. The kid was a tall, twentyish Chinese dude, basic computer nerd. They were apparently trying to teach him how to act like an asshole, but he was having a hard time with it.
Hard to believe.
He kept apologizing, for one thing, and he had this annoying bray, a sort of nervous laugh. She was sorry they hadn’t introduced her. Imagine a guy, you have to coach him on how to act like a jerk, for God’s sake, and he doesn’t get it. That was a switch. Most of the males in her life, man and boy, seemed to have an absolute gift for being dickheads.
There was no television in the house. Actually, there was nothing at all, no furniture, not even a chair. They hadn’t needed to tell her why they were using the place: it was right down the road from Prior’s house. She shivered at the thought of him so close. She wondered if he’d call today. Her father hadn’t yet said anything other than ‘Don’t talk to him until I tell you to.’ If he decided he wanted her to talk to Prior today, he had plenty of time to tell her what to say, Prior usually didn’t call until around four. His number showed up on her caller ID almost every afternoon. Sometimes he left a message, sometimes he didn’t, but it didn’t matter, she knew what he wanted. He’d already promised her the world, trying to get it. She looked at her watch, immediately sorry she’d done so, it wasn’t even eleven in the morning yet, but it seemed like she’d been stuck in the empty house for an absolute eternity.
She thought about Eddie, wondered what he was doing. God, the guy was so buff! Usually she wasn’t attracted to the jocks, but Eddie had an intensity the rest of them all seemed to lack. They were so dim, next to him, and so dull. They don’t call them “ironheads” for nothing, she told herself. But Eddie was different, she felt it, she sensed a depth in him, a dark and unexplored dominion that even he didn’t know of, and she wondered if he would ever let her get close, or, if having once seen her at the Jupiter, he would always see her there.
She wandered back downstairs to look at Tommy’s newspapers again. There would be nothing new in either of them, of course, and she’d already done the crossword in the Times, but one of the puzzles in the News had stumped her about halfway through.
She paused in the kitchen doorway. The acting troupe was taking a break. Her father was on his phone, and the kid was apologizing to Fat Tommy again. “Maybe I’m not right for this, Tommy,” he was saying. “Maybe I’m just no good at this. Maybe I don’t have the performer’s gene. That’s probably why I work all by myself every day, in front of a computer screen. I’m really sorry—”
“No, Georgie,” Tommy said. “Don’ give up, you gonna do fine, you wait and see.” He saw Marisa standing there and he brightened. “Marisa, come in, meet Georgie Cho. Nice’a boy, very smart. Georgie, Marisa, Stoney’s daughter.” She stepped forward to shake his hand. Her father turned and looked at her as she did, his face a total blank.
Georgie dweebed.
“I, ahh, nice to, umm, hi. Nice to meet you.” His face reddened.
“We try to teach Georgie the alpha-male voice,” Tommy said. “He’sa don’ get it yet, because he’sa nice boy, but he gonna do fine. Don’ worry, Georgie.”
“You’re doing it wrong,” Marisa said.
Tommy looked down at the counter where the pages of dialogue they’d written up for Georgie were lying. “What?” Her father ended his call and turned to watch. “Whatta we do wrong?” Tommy asked.
She shook her head. “You’re doing everything wrong,” she said. “Besides, it’s not in his voice, anyhow. Are you guys, like, on coffee break?”
Tommy shrugged. “I guess.”
She held her hand out to Cho. “Come with me,” she said. “There’s a swing out on the back porch. It’s the only place to sit down in this whole freakin’ house. Come on.”
Georgie looked uncertainly at Tommy. “We’ll, ahh, we’ll be right, I mean, I’ll be right back.” She led him toward the back of the house as her father and Fat Tommy stared, first at her, then at each other.
Georgie choked on his tongue for a couple minutes, but then he calmed down. “They’re trying to teach me to be aggressive and stuff,” he said. “I’m not good at it, though. I sound phony, even to myself. Because I’ve never been like that, you know what I mean? No one in my family was ever, like, a shouter or anything.”
“You’re doing fine, George,” she said. “I was listening. But those two are not helping you. Did you happen to catch that thing on Nova a couple of nights ago? About baboons.”
He blinked. “Baboons? Oh, that was ‘Apes of Gibraltar,’ or something like that.”
“Yeah.”
“I missed it, but it was a repeat. I’ve seen it before.”
“It was a repeat,” she agreed. “I’ve seen it before, too. One of the things they showed was the way the baboons compete for the females. Did you catch that?”<
br />
He didn’t look at her. “They, um, they fight? For dominance, I mean.”
She was shaking her head. “It looks like that’s what they’re doing,” she said, “but they’re not. The theory goes, if the big males fought each other every time they were going to, you know, get some, pretty soon they all would have killed each other off, and then the little guys would be the ones passing on their genes, and that would weaken the tribe. Do you buy that?”
He nodded. “Makes sense,” he said, “from an evolutionary point of view.”
“I was very disappointed,” she said. “I wanted the females to choose. You know what I mean? Like, pick the one with the cutest hair, or something.”
Georgie smiled. “Maybe that’s why they’re so ugly.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I have to learn to look at these things from an evolutionary point of view. Anyhow, the way the male baboons compete for dominance is by throwing temper tantrums.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Well, that’s what it looks like to me. One of them loses his temper, or he pretends to, and he just starts screaming. He starts throwing things around, pounding his fists on the ground, and breaking things, and shaking the trees, and screaming, and he keeps it up until all of the other males go away, and then…” She wiggled her eyebrows at him. “He’s the winner.”
Georgie looked troubled. “You mean, all I have to, I mean, if I want…But…Don’t women want to be with a nice guy? I mean…”
“Hey, George, this is baboons we’re talking, here.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop saying that. But a lady baboon, she has to feel like this guy is gonna stand up for her, and keep all of the other baboons off of her and shit. Still being around tomorrow is important, too, and the next day, and not losing her telephone number, and not talking bad about her to the other baboons, but those things are not at the top of the list. So if you want to be an alpha male—”
“I always tried to be a nice guy. You know, civilized. That’s what you guys always say you want.”
“You can’t believe everything you read, George. I’m not saying that being a nice guy is a bad thing. I’m just saying it won’t work. Not in the pursuit of certain objectives.”
“But we’re, you know, we’re not monkeys. We’re, um, Homo sapiens. Shouldn’t we be more…”
She was shaking her head. “Something like ninety-eight and a half percent of the DNA is identical,” she said. “According to the guy on Nova, anyhow. Do you want to know the reason I remembered all of this?”
He nodded.
“The next night, they had this show, it was on E!, I think. A camera crew was following Ted Turner around, right? Would you like to take a stab at how he acted when he didn’t get what he wanted?”
“No. Really?”
She nodded. “Pitched a fit. Screamed, threw things at people, broke stuff. At first I thought he was acting like a six-year-old, but I was wrong. He wasn’t.”
“Baboon, um, baboon behavior.”
“Dominant-male baboon behavior. He might have been a bit better-looking, but he was doing all of the same stuff. And it was working.”
George sat there on the swing, considering. “You know,” he said finally, “you’re putting a different spin on it. I guess if I want to be successful in, um, life—”
“And in love,” she interrupted.
“Yeah. That, too.” He sat quiet a moment longer, and then he stood up. “Thanks, Marisa,” he said. “I’m gonna go back, um, I have to go try again.”
“Have fun,” she told him. She sat there for a while, and presently they started in rehearsing again. She listened to the noise of Georgie’s voice over the sounds of slamming doors. The place is empty, she thought. Not much to throw. She got up and walked back inside, just in time to hear her father interrupt Cho. “But I thought—”
“Who the fuck asked you?” Georgie yelled, his voice cracking. “Do you get paid for thinking? I don’t fucking think so.”
She paused in the kitchen doorway. Georgie winked at her.
“Much better,” Tommy said. “Beautiful.”
Her father came out looking for her a short time later. “I don’t know what you did to Georgie,” he said, “but it worked. Good job.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“I gotta go out for a little while,” he said. “You gonna be okay here?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“All right. Listen, you gotta promise me you’ll turn Georgie back into himself again, after this is all over. We can’t have him walking around like this.”
“No problem,” she said. “I’ll just wave my magic wand.”
Westwood, New Jersey, had a small noisy downtown scattered carelessly across a dozen small streets surrounding a central green. An old woman stood on the sidewalk and watched Stoney park his Lexus behind a Porsche Cayenne. She wore a shapeless pair of pink sweatpants, running shoes, and a long brown mink coat, buttoned up to her chin. Looking slightly dazed, she watched him as he got out of his car and fed the meter. You ought to ask her if she’s okay, he told himself. She looks lost. She doddered off unsteadily, pausing to peer into the store windows as she passed. Stoney walked in the opposite direction, but he stopped when he got to the corner and looked back. The old woman was still going, her sails seemed to have filled, and she was tacking off down the sidewalk, picking up speed. As he stood there, a middle-aged guy with permed orange hair came out of one of the buildings, got into the Porsche, fired it up, and roared away. I should get one of those, Stoney thought. Maybe that sound would satisfy me, maybe then I could stop all this crazy shit. Find out what a normal life feels like.
Tina Finbury’s office was on the third floor of one of the downtown buildings. “Over a jewelry store,” she’d told him, so he walked down the main street, looking at the buildings. He passed a pet store, one that didn’t sell dogs or cats, just the accoutrements that you apparently needed when you got one, and then an art gallery/framing shop, and a place that only sold chocolates. He was standing in front of a newsstand when he saw the jewelry store. It occupied the ground floor of a large, square, flat-roofed three-story building. The place was a hodgepodge of yellow brick, cinder block, and poured concrete. The upstairs windows were all soot gray, but the ground-floor windows sparkled brightly from the harsh white lights inside that glared down on the shiny bits of polished metal and stone carefully arranged on black velvet. Stoney went over and looked, thinking that he ought to buy Donna something, just so she’d know he thought of her now and then, but then he continued on past.
When you were out on the sidewalk, the gold watches and diamond rings held your attention, but when you went inside, you could feel how tired the place was. Stoney climbed the stairs, the metal tread plates worn shiny in the center, and then he walked down the third-floor hallway, looking for Tina’s office. When he found it, the heavy oak door was slightly ajar. He rapped on it with his knuckles.
“Tina?”
Hearing no response, he pushed the door open wide and stepped inside. Something tickled at the lining of his stomach. Wish I was carrying, he thought, and he came fully awake as he walked carefully through the outer office.
“Tina?” Then, louder, “Hello?” You should turn around and leave now, he told himself, but instead he opened the door marked PRIVATE and stuck his head inside. Tina Finbury was inside, at least what was left of her. Her body was tied to her wooden office chair with lamp cord. Tough old broad, he thought, she must have resisted, she made the guy work for it, whatever it was he wanted, because one of her ears and three of the fingers on her right hand were missing.
“Goddammit, Tina…I told you to be careful.” The guy had finished up by cutting her throat, making her look like she was wearing a red apron. The desk drawers were open, so were the ones in the filing cabinet, but the place wasn’t trashed, nothing broken or strewn around. There was a copy of Hemmings Motor News on the corner of the desk. She never struck me as someone who’d
geek out over old rust buckets, Stoney thought, and he looked closer at the familiar brown paper cover. “March,” he read. “Four years old.” He looked around the room, and seeing nothing else that looked out of place, he backed slowly out of the room. Got to get out of here, he thought. What did I touch, where did I leave prints…?
He heard a noise behind him, and he turned to see a short, broad man dressed in jeans, a work shirt, and construction boots. The guy was trying to peer past Stoney. “Mom?” Stoney kicked the inner door closed before he could think of what to do. “Mom?” The man’s eyes went from the closed door to Stoney’s face. “Who are you? Is she all right? Mom?” He tried to step past Stoney, and Stoney bear-hugged him. “Hey!” Tina’s son, if that was who he was, might have been short, but he was built like a bull and he was enormously strong. It was all Stoney could do to hang on to him, but he did it. The guy was a construction worker, not a fighter, so Stoney easily avoided the guy’s attempted head butts and knees to the groin. Tina’s son, Stoney thought, his head swimming. What kind of trouble was he in now? He waited until the guy quit struggling and shouting. There were more noises out in the hallway. No way I’m walking away from this one, he thought. Jesus. He eased up his grip, looked the guy in the eyes.
“She’s dead,” he said.
“She can’t be. She’s only…Mom? Let me go, man, I have to see her.”
Stoney stood in front of the guy and held him by the shoulders. “Listen to me. There’s nothing anybody can do for her now. Do you hear me? I know this is hard, but she’s gone. And you can’t go in there. She would never want you to see her like this.” There were white faces in the outer doorway, eyes watching the two of them.
“What are you talking about? What happened? Get outta the way, man, I gotta…”
Stoney shook the guy. “Listen to me. You go in there, you’ll never be able to think of her again, not in the right way.” The guy strained to look past Stoney, as though he could penetrate the closed wooden door by force of will. “Look at me. I knew your mother, she was a good woman. You wanna do something for her? Stay the fuck out of there. Call the cops. Here, you can use my phone.”
