Fresh Kills (6 page)

At the next table, a foursome was talking loud French. I half listened. It was business talk.

Sonny turned to look. “You understand them, man?”

“Yeah pretty much.”

“How come?”

“You know I can talk French, Sonny. What do you need from me?”

“Your mother, she's who made you learn, right? Isn't that it? I fucking hate the language, also they talk so frigging loud, you know?” Sonny said. “Their food's OK, they write great. You want to know why I hate the language? Not because of the shrub – you know President George Bush. You like that, shrub for Bush Jr?”

“I heard it before.”

“I hate their superiority and their anti-Semitism and most of all their language because I didn't learn it right. I should have done languages, like you, and then I could have read the good stuff in the original. Balzac. Victor Hugo. Flaubert. Shit.”

“Sonny, I have to go.”

“I had this French teacher at my high school and I was the smallest kid in the class, and he liked to pick on me. Mr Driscoll was his name and he'd say, ‘Sonny,
comment allez vous
?' And I'd freeze. I knew the right answer, but I'd fucking freeze, man, and if I didn't know the right answer, Driscoll would turn to the other boys in the class – it was an all boys' school – and he'd say in this weird sinister drawl, ‘Give him the treatment boys. Give him the treatment.' So all the boys would beat the shit out of me. I ever tell you about him? Or about the shower teacher, Mr Castro, the one who taught us
how to soap ourselves? Jesus. I could have read Zola, in the original, you know, if it wasn't for that pig Driscoll. Man, I could have even read Proust, though not my thing, not all that fancy society stuff, not really, too many fucking countesses and tea cookies, man, but the writing! I could have really read it all, except for Driscoll. Give him the treatment boys. I got to go to the bathroom, Artie.”

Lippert got up. He reached in his pocket and tossed a Polaroid onto the table, turned and headed for the men's room. I knew he wanted to leave me hanging, make me wonder what the big-deal case was. I wasn't going to budge. I looked at my watch and figured it was time to get back to Billy. Then I picked up the photograph. It was a picture of a baby doll. One of its feet was missing.

“What the hell is this?” I said to Sonny, when he came back to the table. “What's this fucking picture?”

“It's a doll,” he said. “With its foot cut off.”

“I can see that, Sonny.”

“Listen to me, you remember those cold cases, the kid on Long Island, the other one out in Rockaway where they found the bodies with limbs cut off? Years back.”

“I remember. Yeah.”

“In the hospital, when I was sick, I did some reading, and afterwards, at home, I had some time. There were more. One possible upstate. Now I got a fresh one. Jersey. Near Bayonne. Same kind of deal, Artie. Little girl, man. They chopped off her feet.”

I didn't say anything.

“What's it mean, man? So she couldn't run away? So why kill her?”

“I don't know.” I still had the photograph in my hand and Sonny snatched it away.

“This is her doll, man. No ID. Just Jane Doe, her and her
doll. She had her dolly with her, Artie, man.” He knocked back what was left of his wine. “Who does these things to kids, man?”

I'd heard him say it before, over and over: Who does this to kids? Lippert had been obsessed a long time; even after he retired, he worked as a consultant with a unit he set up to look at child crime. I felt for him, but I couldn't help him, not now, not with Billy in town.

“I have to go, Sonny.”

“You want to see a picture of the girl?” Sonny said. “She was raped, too, the one in Jersey was raped.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Look, I'm not asking you to come on this with me,” he said. “I'm just asking a favor for something where I don't have time now. Just free me up to pay attention to Jersey. It's for Rhonda, OK?”

Rhonda Fisher, who had been Lippert's assistant for about thirty years, and was always in love with him since way back, finally got her chance when he had the heart attack and she went to the hospital and was there every day. He didn't marry her or let her move in permanent, but she cooked for him and once in a while he took her somewhere nice for dinner.

If Sonny still talked like a 50s hipster, or tried to, and if he was still wound up tight, he was a lot lighter of spirit since he'd been with Rhonda. She listened to the music he liked with him. She took care of him. Since he let her through his door, he drank less and ate better.

Instead of picking on a sandwich – tongue and Swiss, usually – or just drinking dinner when he was out, now he seemed to like food. I watched him cut another piece of steak. It was the first time I'd seen him eat like he actually cared what was on his plate.

“What?” I said.

A friend of a cousin, or maybe a cousin of a cousin, but someone related to Rhonda anyway, was in trouble, he said. Russians, probably low class. “They need help. Think of it as a good deed, man, help keep you from coming back a cockroach.”

“Rhonda's Russian?”

“Her grandparents. Both sides,” Sonny said. “Russian Jews.”

“They're on Staten Island?”

“Dead. They're dead. But there's some cousins came over in the 80s, and listen, it won't take long. A couple hours is absolutely all I'm asking.”

“I don't know anything about Staten Island.”

“I'm asking you because of Rhonda. The woman called and asked Rhonda if her boyfriend, meaning me, I guess, had someone who could talk Russian. Look, she sounds like a nice woman. She wakes up one night, the way Rhonda heard it, there's a burglar, and the husband runs downstairs after the creep and disappears. He doesn't come back.”

“Maybe he didn't like her.”

“Just go talk to the woman is all I ask.”

“Who did you say she was?”

“Jesus, man, I told you, some kind of relative of Rhonda's who Rhonda feels like she never did anything for and now she's alone, and no one understands what the hell she's saying. She said, OK, maybe I know someone.” Sonny ate some more of his steak. “This is good.”

“Who said?”

“Rhonda.”

“How did the woman know you could get someone?”

“Rhonda's always talking about me, man, you know that.” Sonny grinned faintly, a lugubrious, defensive, diffident grin I had never seen before and I realized he really loved Rhonda.

“The woman knew about me?”

“How the hell should I know? Yes. Probably. Not by name
maybe. What difference does it make? Maybe Rhonda brags about you, too,” he said. “No kidding. She's your number one fan. I mean, just give it a couple hours, right?”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“I'm off this week and I'm busy.”

“With the boy? You want to talk about that?”

I didn't want to talk about Billy. I kept my mouth shut. Sonny waited.

“Yeah, OK,” I said finally. “I'll go.”

“Tomorrow would be good,” said Sonny.

“No. When I can.”

“I'm not asking you to change your life, man. I'm just asking you to take a run over to Staten Island.”

“I said I'd go. For Rhonda, I'll do it. I'll take a run out there,” I said to shut him up. “I'll go talk to the woman once, if you want, when I get some time, OK? I'll do that if you want me to. What's her name?”

From his jacket pocket, Lippert took a piece of paper with a name and address.

“Here's the deal over there on Staten island,” Sonny said. “You ever been over there? People in Staten Island are strange, like they barely live in New York, man. I mean there's boroughs and boroughs, you know? I get Brooklyn, the Bronx, even fucking Queens. But Staten Island, I mean it's like some parallel universe, like you're already in New Jersey.”

“How come you know so much about it?”

“I taught a course at the college out there once, a million years ago, I got a part-time job, I was shacked up with some girl. It was wild. Borough president, name of Albert Manascalo,” he said, beginning to sink into his past. “Al to his friends. He had so much power he could make a Jew an honorary Italian if he wanted. The place was full of rage and religion, man, you hear me? Redemption if you got lucky.
Dark stuff. You ever really get into Dostoevsky? It's like all there.”

“Staten Island is like Dostoevsky?” I said. “You're losing me.”

“Pretty much, man. Her name, the lady you got to go see, get this, man, is Gorbachev.”

“You're fucking with me.”

“Yeah, like Gorby. No relation. Or maybe there is, maybe there's a branch of them over on Staten Island. First name Vera.”

“I'll take a piece of steak,” I said.

Little kids rode skateboards in the dark up and down the Brooklyn streets, weaving in and out, like bumper cars in an amusement park. Streetlights picked them up as they darted out from behind buildings, swerved onto the sidewalk, smashed into the street, chasing cars, daring cars, hanging on to a rear bumper for a ride, before they swooped away into dark shadows behind buildings.

I was on my way across Brooklyn after seeing Sonny and I'd probably had more to drink than I should have, and I was driving too fast when the kids got in my way. This part of Brooklyn a few miles from the ocean was low-lying, ram-shackle and poor. Immigrants – Pakistanis, some Chinese, some Jews – shared the space uneasily with local gangs.

On one street out front of a bodega, I saw two boys, huge kids, who resembled grown men, with cans of beer in their hands. Younger boys begged beers from them and swaggered into the stores with false IDs, trying to buy smokes. No one asked a lot of questions around here.

“Fucking watch it,” yelled a white boy, maybe sixteen and mean-looking – who appeared in front of me out of
nowhere on his skateboard and forced me to slam on my brakes.

The kid danced his skateboard into the middle of the road, rocked on it, danced it up close to my car, reached his hand out and touched the hood of my car, grinning, laughing, taunting me. He had his baseball cap on backwards, pants hanging low on his hips. He was playing to me. In my headlights I could see his face. I felt like ramming the creep. Instead I leaned out of the window and told him to fuck off, but he made a face, gave me the finger and started whistling. A couple of his pals, waiting on the curb, jumped their boards into the street. White boys, maybe Hispanic. I leaned on my horn.

I kept honking. Flashed my brights. In the hard white flashing light, the boys looked like clowns, and one of them wasn't any older than Billy. Then, without warning, all three swerved up to the car window, laughing.

I leaned on the horn some more. Told them to fuck off. Warned them. Rolled up the window, stepped on the gas, forced the boys back. I was pissed off and a little scared and I didn't really care – just for a second – if I hit them. In the rear-view mirror, I saw two of them follow me to the corner, where I turned fast, doing sixty, maybe more.

The side street was almost empty. In the mirror, I saw the maroon car coming up behind me. I was sweating now, and feeling crazy, wondering if the guys on skateboards had forced me into this one-way street on purpose, if it was all a set-up, if the kids were connected with the maroon car somehow. I didn't believe it. It didn't mean anything, never did, not most of the time.

I drove past some Hasidic men in eighteenth-century outfits who were discussing God or the price of diamonds. Kept going towards the ocean, to the beach, past broken streets that were empty, the car still on my tail. I cut across a gas station that was
shut. I could see patches of rust on it and bumper stickers. The driver looked fat, with a big head.

Then I lost him. Like that. It made it worse, him appearing, then just disappearing. It was as if he wanted me unnerved, off balance, more than he wanted to close in. I was probably drunker than I knew. The guy in the car made me feel hunted. I thought I saw him again in the rear-view, and wondered if I was hallucinating, or just scared.

I cut over to Manhattan Beach and the Farone house as fast as I could without crashing into anything.

No one was on the steeet except for a teenage girl on a bike. I recognized her as the chubby kid who had been running earlier at Coney Island where the plane crashed. I parked and got out of my car near the Farones'. For a few seconds I stood on the street, listening for other cars, but all I heard was the whispery sound of the ocean on a calm night.

The door was unlocked. No lights in the house, just the door left open. I knew I should never have left Billy alone.

“Billy?”

Except for a light coming from the second floor, the house was dark. I heard a very faint noise. I couldn't track it. I kept my hand on my gun. Where was he?

“Billy?”

I felt like a dope, my voice bouncing off the walls. Pushing through the dread that I felt thickening around me, I went upstairs to the landing outside Billy's room. I pushed the door cautiously. The smell of turpentine hit me.

There was no one inside. On the walls, paint samples – pink, orange, rose – were streaked in horizontal lines. A drop cloth, stiff with paint, lay on the floor. Rolls of wallpaper were stacked in a corner near a ladder that lay on its side. A rough work table made of a couple of boards held a radio, a couple of paint cans, a box from Dunkin' Donuts, and paint brushes
stuck in a glass Mason jar half full of dirty water. Three blue and white cardboard coffee cups were on the table too, one of them half full; in it floated a cigarette butt.

Billy's things were gone. His bed, books, desk, clothes, posters, computer, all gone. The room where he'd lived since he was a little boy had vanished. Even the shelves were gone. It was as if he'd been cancelled out.

Standing in the room, the conditioning off, it was hot. A single yellow light was on out back and from the window, though it was dark now, I could just see the patio, the blue pool, the striped loungers, the white orchids that were ghostly at night. A bug zapper was on in the yard. The sprinkler sprayed water in irregular patterns across the grass.