by Joe Nelms
“Think I’ll stop by home and tell my wife about it before I go back to work. Give her the good news, if you know what I mean.”
Oh, yes. Brad was feeling it. Carmine wasn’t.
As Brad smiled and congratulated himself on being a handsome devil with a bright future, he noticed something on his left shoe. A scuff of dirt. The one flaw in his perfect day. He knelt down to wipe it off as the elevator dinged to a stop on the fourth floor. Two black shoes stepped into the open doors.
Brad worked on the scuff mark, secretly grateful that someone else was entering the elevator. Maybe they would be interested in Brad’s remarkable interview.
Some of the dirt he had scraped off floated up to Brad’s nostrils. He let loose a tremendous, soul-shaking, eye-watering sneeze. No one said, “Bless you.”
“Yup, I think things are finally looking up for me.”
The scuff mark was a stubborn one and not coming off easily, but Brad wasn’t about to give up. He had been patient, paid some humiliating dues, and kept his secret shame from his wife long enough for everything to work out perfectly. He would be damned if half a square inch of dirt was going to taint this brilliant canvas of a life he had just put the finishing touches on. He was on his way back to the top of the heap. Back to the official New York of Brad Fingerman. His new job now merely a matter of administrative formality that would trigger positive reactive measures across the rest of his existence. Money. Esteem. Confidence. Potence. He might even tell Champ to go fuck himself. Not really, but it felt good to imagine saying stuff like that.
In fact, if the scuff mark had come off easily, Brad would have stood up, turned around, and seen Carmine’s eyes go wide like saucers at what was waiting outside the elevator. Brad would have seen a look of recognition in those saucers. And then he would have seen a wash of realization in them. A look that said something unavoidable and terrible was about to happen. But Brad was busy with his scuff mark, so instead he only heard the last two words of Carmine’s life.
“. . . Holy crap.”
Not understanding the true sentiment behind the statement, Brad naturally assumed it was about his amazing tale of good fortune, that he had cracked his elevator buddy’s cold veneer. “I know. It’s great, right? It’s like my friend Owen told me, if you keep a positive outlook . . .”
FUMP-FUMP-FUMP-FUMP-FUMP. The silenced gun above Brad’s head fired five shots directly into Carmine’s heart.
“. . . sometimes you get lucky.”
The black shoes moved away as Brad finally cleared enough dirt off his shoe leather to be deemed acceptable for his victory walk home. He stood up to continue the conversation with his new friend. Instead he found that Carmine looked decidedly worse now than he did for the first ten floors of their ride.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Carmine continued staring ahead as he slid down the back wall of the elevator, streaking blood behind him. Down the hall, footsteps faded away as a stairwell door slammed shut.
“. . . Whoa.”
The elevator doors began to close when a herd of footsteps swarmed the hallway and a firm hand stopped the elevator.
“FREEZE! FBI!”
Brittany and three other agents stood ready to pounce just outside the elevator, guns drawn. It took about 0.8 seconds for Brittany to understand what had happened.
She had failed.
They were too late. Carmine was dead and Frank was gone. There was no video or audio of the crime. Her father might have referred to her situation as FUBAR.
Brad finally broke the tense silence.
“. . . What the fuck?”
It was an innocent enough question and perfectly justifiable considering Brad had not been privy to Plans A, B, or C. But innocent or not, it sparked a reaction in Brittany that even she didn’t expect. They hadn’t seen Frank on their way up. And she needed to bring someone in, even if it meant thinking up a different name for the mission. Project Innocent Bystander, for example.
She grabbed Brad and slammed him against the elevator wall.
“You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law . . .”
There was more, but it was all lost on Brad. He was reeling as he watched his luck go from a royal flush to snake eyes in the time it took to clean off his shoe.
Tom had waited for the elevator for only a brief moment before deciding to take matters into his own hands. Brittany had said all units go, after all. They might call him a maverick, but he wasn’t waiting for any stinking elevator. He ran to the stairwell on the south side of the hallway and headed down two and three stairs at a time, gun drawn and ready for action.
By the time he got to the second floor he was exhausted and still hadn’t quite figured out exactly where all units were supposed to go. He paused to catch his breath. It was then that the yelling from a floor or two above echoed down the cement stairwell. He turned to start back up when a man in a great hurry whipped around the corner and headed down toward him. Tom thought fast.
“Hey Buddy, have you seen a bunch of FBI agents around here?”
“Uh, no, sorry.”
As Frank Fortunato tried to push past the charged-up agent, something clicked in Tom’s government-trained mind.
“Sayyyy. You’re Frank Fortunato.”
“I get that a lot. Excuse me.”
On a less excitement-filled day, Frank could have probably convinced Tom that he was his own distant cousin and walked away. But this particular time, Tom wasn’t having it. Better to play it safe and arrest the wrong man. He’d let the government’s attorneys worry about the legal ramifications. That’s how they did it on TV.
Tom pointed his gun at Frank.
“I need you to come with me, sir.”
Brad Gets Debriefed
It would have been difficult to determine who was more relieved in the lobby two minutes later. Was it Brad finding out that he was no longer a suspect in a front page murder case he had nothing to do with? Or was it Brittany discovering her mission had been snatched from the jaws of bureaucratic death by the buffoonish police work of her least-favorite agent? Suffice it to say that each verged on ruining their underpants only moments before they found out the good news.
Tom dragged a handcuffed Frank out of the south stairwell door at the same time Brittany and her hangdog crew were schlubbing their way out of the north stairwell door. Both sides froze at the sight of each other.
“Tom? Did you catch Frank Fortunato?”
Tom beamed like he had found the afikoman.
“This is him for sure? I knew it!”
Tom fist pumped the air. Yes!
“Wow. Gold star, Tom.”
Brittany took a moment to make sure she had all the details of her amazing luck straight. Yes, Carmine had died, but he was a lowlife who was going to meet a similar end regardless of what Brittany did. The press would forgive that uncomfortable detail. But this. A mob boss caught fleeing the scene of the crime by her ace in the hole, Tom. It wasn’t an open and closed case, but it was a damn good one.
Especially since she had an eyewitness.
She turned to Brad and snapped at her crew. “Get those cuffs off him. And give him a Kleenex for God’s sake.”
The agents scrambled to see who could get their keys out first, and then Brad was free.
“Sorry for the misunderstanding, Mr. . . .”
“Fingerman, Brad Fingerman.”
“Mr. Fingerman. I hope you understand we were just being careful. Now if you wouldn’t mind, we’d like to give you a ride to headquarters and get a statement from you.”
It took a second for Brad to readjust his point of view from pre-life-sentence-convict back to free-as-a-bird confused guy. This new perspective snapped into focus right about the time Frank launched a world-class scowl from across the room as Tom escorted him out of the building. Maybe it was directed at Brad. Maybe it was a more general reaction to getting caught. Could have ju
st been that the handcuffs were a little too tight. Either way, it was hard to ignore.
And then he realized what Brittany was asking him.
“But, I didn’t see anything.”
An hour later, Brittany handed a still-shaking Brad a cold can of soda, one of the few amenities her tiny office could provide witnesses on short notice. It was a Pepsi. Not his regular drink. Brad was more of a Coke man. He held it between his legs. At least it was something to stare at besides his fingernails.
“Can I get you anything else?”
“No. I’m fine. Really. Can I go now?”
“Well, actually we have a few more questions for you.”
“Look, I told you everything I know. I got in the elevator. I bent down to clean off my shoe and then pow, this guy is dead.”
“You must have seen something, heard something, smelled something. Anything.”
“I’m sorry.”
Other agents had been building cases against Frank Fortunato for years. Run of the mill stuff for mob bosses—third-hand hearsay and vaguely relevant circumstances. Low-level wannabe gangsters caught with enough weed to turn over the guys they bought it from, guys who had a relationship with the Maraschino family. Drunks who claimed they saw Frank leave through the back entrance of a restaurant the night its owner had all four limbs broken. But the feds’ efforts were largely pointless and at best annoying to Frank. They had never come up with anything concrete. Not like what was sitting in Brittany’s chair. Not like this FBI goldmine.
“It’s okay to be scared, Brad. I’m sure you’ve seen Frank’s picture in the paper. Probably heard the rumors about him killing witnesses.”
“Wait, what? He kills witnesses? Holy shi—”
“They’re only rumors. Trust me. We can protect you.”
“I’m not scared. I didn’t see anything.”
Brittany sighed. “Look, Brad. What’s it going to take? If you testify I can make sure they never find you. I can get you a new name, a new job, a new life. Maybe somewhere nice, like Idaho or Georgia. You pick it. You can start all over.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Witness Protection Program. You’re an ideal candidate.”
“Can’t someone else testify? Don’t you have other witnesses? What about the slow guy who arrested Fortunato?”
“Yes, we have Special Agent Lewis. But he wasn’t there in the elevator when the murder actually happened. And we have other witnesses, but all they can do is put Frank at the scene of the crime. It’s not enough. This could be the biggest case in twenty years. That means lot of media coverage, which means we can’t make one mistake. We have to be perfect. We need your testimony so we can put Frank Fortunato away for life.”
What was going on here? This wasn’t how the vine system was supposed to work. Tarzan’s vines always took him where he wanted to go. They didn’t take him to maybe somewhere nice like Idaho or Georgia. The logic of the elaborate jungle transit system was such that the vines in question hung at angles that avoided sending the ape man directly into massive tree trunks. That was George of the Jungle territory.
Holy cats. Brad might not be Tarzan. But he couldn’t be George, could he? The premise was untenable. Which meant the vine being jammed into his hand was the wrong vine. No way the Witness Protection Program could lead to anything productive or sexy career-wise. What kind of agencies might they have in Idaho? Definitely not a branch office of Red Light. And that was the point of today, wasn’t it? The rebirth of Brad. He just had a killer interview for his dream job. His confidence was back. He felt taller. The Fingerman renaissance was scheduled to begin any second now. Sitting in the offices of the FBI was simply a post-traumatic stress induced courtesy. Not only did he have no interest in helping the feds, but the process would completely derail his comeback tour. No, no, no!
On top of all that, he still hadn’t returned Gracie’s call. Plus, he’d need to invest in a wardrobe refresh before he started at Red Light. Was his phone ringer on? What if Geoff called right now to tell him to come in tomorrow and pick an office? He had to get ready. Time was a-wasting!
God help him, but clearly Brad’s best course of action here was to be honest.
He looked up from his now warm, unopened Pepsi can.
“I wish I could help. But I swear, I didn’t see anything.”
“All right. Take some time and think about it.”
Brittany handed Brad her card. “Seriously, we really need you.”
Brad put the unopened Pepsi on the table, took her card and put it in his wallet. But honestly, he was only being polite.
Back to Normal
The subway ride home took forever. Or maybe it took a few minutes. Brad couldn’t remember. His head swirled as he relived his drastic change of fortunes and focused on accepting his good luck. He’d had a great interview and beaten a murder rap all in less than three hours. Technically, a great day.
He had revived his plan to pop in and surprise Gracie with his great news (the job, not his release from FBI custody). She was working from home and it had been awhile since she had been impressed with him for anything besides some phony accomplishment he had cooked up for the sake of continuing his façade of employment. Today he had something real for her. Something he could honestly brag about. Perhaps he could add afternoon delight to his banner day before heading back to his minimum wage job handing out fliers in a chicken suit. God, success felt good.
James the doorman gave Brad the same obsequious smile he always gave when residents came through the revolving doors before saying the exact same thing he always said.
“All right.”
All right. Not that Brad had asked how everything was going. Or how tricks were. Or how he was feeling. He smiled hello and James, as usual, offered up an “All right.” Kind of a utility tool for almost any conversation a doorman might have with a tenant.
Hey, James. My toilet’s clogged up again and my buddies are coming for poker night.
All right.
Oh, James, would you mind keeping my spare keys behind the desk down here? You know how forgetful I am.
All right.
James, I’m having a half pound of rock-star hashish delivered by an albino midget who’s on the run from a band of Ugandan warlords.
All right.
Didn’t make the slightest difference. Although, today James did seem to hold his suck-up smile a little longer than normal. And what was with him watching Brad walk the entire length of the lobby? That guy was just plain unsettling.
Maybe he was on alert because of his creepy doorman. Maybe his adrenaline-addled senses were heightened to the levels of a meth head at a fireworks show thanks to his felony arrest and release. Either way, Brad’s ears picked up the pounding by the time he was halfway down the hall of his floor.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. Something was banging against a wall. It sounded like a fight. With rhythm.
Brad walked up to his front door and listened. It was coming from his apartment. And it wasn’t a fight.
As Brad entered his apartment and saw a tool belt that didn’t belong to him on the floor, he got the distinct feeling that James had lied to him. Things were definitely not all right.
He had watched enough Maury to know damn well what was going on, but Brad decided to go see the raw and unforgiving truth anyway. Jesus, this was a weird day. He sighed and trudged down the hall.
And there in the bedroom was Gracie. With the cable guy. And they were having the kudos sex Brad was planning on having with her. The awesome, toe curling, gasping for breath, where-have-you-been-all-my-life sex Brad had felt so confident in anticipating. What could she possibly be congratulating the cable guy for?
Fortunately, both Gracie and the man she was currently involved with were facing away from the doorway Brad was standing in, so there was no need for anyone to say, “Do you mind?” or “Well, this is awkward.”
“Oh God. (THUMP) Oh God. (THUMP) Oh God. (THUMP) This is the (THUMP) best sex
(THUMP) (THUMP) I’ve ever had. (THUMP) (THUMP) So much better (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) than my husband. (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) And the plumber. (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) And the neighbor. (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) And my old boyfriend I saw last week. (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP).”
To be fair, a lot of this was Brad’s interpretation of what Gracie was trying to communicate. Most of the sounds coming from her mouth weren’t actual properly enunciated English words, but rather a series of feral grunts, moans, and slurps. But he was pretty sure he got the gist of it.
Brad stood very still, slack jawed, silently stunned. Never saw it coming. And now he could do nothing but let this tsunami of betrayal wash over him.
“. . . and the florist (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) who I thought was gay (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) but really wasn’t. I mean (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) reeeeally wasn’t (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP).”
Brad’s cell phone started to vibrate. By the third ring it synched up with Gracie’s thumping. Apparently the whole universe was in on the joke.
His right hand hit the answer button and held it next to his face. After a few moments, he moved his mouth enough to speak, although out of courtesy to his wife and the cable guy, he kept it to a whisper.
“. . . Hello? . . . This is he . . . Oh, hi Geoff. What’s—oh . . . Already? I thought you were going to bounce my portfolio across a few desks . . . Who did you hear that from?
“(THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) OH-GOD-OH-GOD-OH-GODDDD”
“. . . It’s trending on Twitter? . . . Yes, I know social media is forever. Is there any chance I could . . . ?”
“(THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) And the grocery delivery guy. (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) And some bartender I met on Craigslist. (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) Oh my God! (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) This is the (THUMP) (THUMP) (THUMP) best sex I’ve (THUMP) had in hours.”
As reality hammered itself into Brad’s consciousness on so many levels, he pulled himself together long enough to whisper to Geoff, “I have to go. I’m a little busy right now. Thanks for calling . . .”
