The Art of Disposal (27 page)

“One hell of a stray cat,” Carlino said.

Carlino and Bullfrog were an unlikely pair, but they'd become tighter than Beaver Cleaver and Larry Mondello. They were bringing in good cocaine from a guy down in Miami. Not enough to get noticed, but enough to make some decent dough. I'd watch Carlino count out Eddie's cut of the drug money, hand it over gladly, pat Eddie on the back, and even sit there and smoke a cigar with him.

But could I really trust Carlino to side with me, when the time came? Maybe I was just a pawn in his chess game. Expendable. And even more ominous, Dante Delgado was frequenting the Totsy, playing bar dice with Lucky and the other losers; and it always felt like he was looking at me over the top of his drink. I spent a lot of nights tossing and turning, wondering if I was on that list of guys who were going away and never coming back.

I asked Carlino why Frank was letting me in on the plan. When bosses clean house, they usually sweep the whole floor.

“That thing with Ricky,” Carlino said. “And the hit on G-Mack.”

The hit on G-Mack was, to me, a minor thing. But I guess it meant something to Frank. G-Mack was a dealer in New York who'd stolen three pounds of heroin from one of Conese's boys. And since Conese “isn't in the drug business” he had to call on me, an outsider, to make things right without the Corporation finding out. I recovered two of the three pounds of dope, all of G-Mack's petty cash (nineteen thousand dollars), and I brought back both of his little fingers, as requested.

But the days kept moving along, and none of the people in passing cars or crossing in crosswalks gave a hoot; none of the birds in the trees, none of the fish in my fishtanks, none of the kids splashing through sprinklers—none of them knew or cared one damn bit that something big was going to happen in my slice of the universe. The whole world just kept moving right along. I even saw a story on the local news about a bread truck going over a guard rail. The driver died, but the aerial helicopter footage showed great swarms of blackbirds swooping in and pecking away at the strewn slices of white bread. That's the way it is, I thought. A truck is on fire, a man is dead, but there's perfectly good bread to be eaten—and the universe will eat it.

One day I got a call from Frank Conese asking me how I'd like to make a quick twenty grand.

“Who wouldn't?” I said.

“Good. Pack your bags.”

“Where am I going?”

“Sedona,” he said.

I'd been there once before, when I was a twenty-something hitchhiker. Cute little Arizona hippie town, right out of a motion picture. Red hills and spires and Gila monsters.

“I'm overnighting the details,” Frank said. “Make sure you're around tomorrow.”

Next day the FedEx guy rapped on the door, and soon enough I was sitting at my kitchen table, sorting through an envelope with scraps of info about a poor chump who didn't know he would soon be dead.

His name was Mark Mason. Back in 1993, he was a minor player in the Conese Family: a friend of an associate. A real nobody, really. There was a current photo of Mark Mason, and a newspaper clipping about a guy named Abe Mendelberg who'd bought some paintings by an artist named Mike Masonfield.

Why was Frank sending me so far away to do a job? Maybe he was going to make his move on Eddie while I was out of town. I tapped the cardboard mailer on the table. I got up and put a Bill Evans Trio album on the turntable, and I sprayed the record with cleaning fluid, and held the felt brush snug against it, angled, and watched the record go round and round and round. Then I dropped the needle, and I lay down on my couch and closed my eyes and drifted around in the misty waterfalls of shimmering piano keys and crackling brushed snare drums. Then I snapped up, turned off the record, and grabbed my phone. I called up Dan the Man. Dotty answered.

“How you holding up?” I said.

“I've been better.”

“I bet.”

“I'll get him,” she said. The phone was silent for a while, and then it rattled around and I heard a cough and a gasp.

“Ronnie,” Dan the Man said, sounding like he was already a ghost.

“She keeping you in shape?”

“She's an angel.”

“Any broad marries you has got to be an angel.”

“No doubt.”

“I got some business questions.”

“Ain't you gonna ask how I'm doing?”

“How you doing?” I said.

“I'm thinking of going sky-diving. Without a parachute.”

I laughed. So did he.

“I'm off to Arizona,” I said, “to void a warranty. Some chump who messed up back in the early nineties. Mark Mason. Ring a bell?”

“Loud bell,” Dan said. “Like one-a them church bells.”

“How's about an Abe Mendelberg?”

“Art dealer. Friend of the family.”

“I got some paperwork here, some warranty forms,” I said. “But it bothers me.”

“How's come?”

“Frank. Eddie. It would be real convenient for him, you know, to—”

“—No way,” Dan said. “Frank ain't gonna touch nobody till I'm gone. That wop's got manners.”

“What did this Mason guy do?”

Dan the Man choked and coughed and wheezed. “Frank asked
me
to void that warranty, but I couldn't track down the customer. Guy disappeared.”

“Looks like they found him.”

“Twenty years in Arizona? Poor bastard suffered enough already.”

“Says here he robbed a bank.”

“Gino Nazario hatched that dumb plan. Tomato gravy name, all the way. Gino runs the plan by Frank. Tells him how he's got a guy on the inside, it's foolproof, blah blah blah. Walk right in, walk right out with two hundred grand. Frank tells him no. Don't do it. But Gino knows what's best. Huh. Mark Mason was just the driver. The alarm goes off. He spooks. Drives away. Gino runs out of the bank and there's nowheres to go. Mind you, this is a smalltown bank they hit. Middle of the night. Gino runs off down the road, across a strip mall parking lot and into the woods, but the local cops pick him up.”

“How long was his stretch?”

“Stretch nothing,” Dan the Man said. “Gino had a little
slip and fall
in the county jail hallway. Broke his neck and died. Real shame. Once Gino was retired, Frank went after Mason. But by then, the guy was MIA. Not even his own mother knowed what happened to him.” Dan got a little excited. “He don't want you to void the Mendelberg warranty too?”

“Nothing about that,” I said.

“Good. I like Mendelberg.”

“Got a picture of Mendelberg with a rising art star—a Mike Masonfield. Looks just like an older version of Mark Mason. Hmm.”

Dan the Man wheezed and laughed. “Guess he should've stayed away from painting.”

“Or not been so good at it.”

“You know who's good?” Dan said. “That Happy Little Tree guy, what's his name, white guy with a fro?”

“Bob Ross,” I said.

“Yeah, Bob Ross. Maybe, if there is some kind of heaven, you get your own little cabin by a lake, with a mountain in the background, and pine trees all around you.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Wish me luck.”

“Don't be dying till I get back in town.”

“Okay.”

“Get some rest,” I said.

“Uh-uh. Pretty soon rest is all I'll be getting. I'm gonna watch me some good movies. Maybe some old Clint Eastwood Westerns.”

“Hang 'em High.”

“Yeah,” Dan the Man said. I said goodbye and he said goodbye, and we hung up, and I pictured him sitting on the couch with his oxygen tank and mask, watching an old Western where the bad guys are always bad, and the good guys are always good.

I wrote down the names and addresses, and then I ran all of the paperwork on Mark Mason through my shredder. I went online and bought a red-eye flight to Phoenix, Arizona. I hate red-eyes, but I bought the ticket anyway. It was two hundred bucks cheaper, and I told myself that I would sleep on the plane. I've never slept on a plane. Not with any real success, anyway. I packed a bag, and then I stopped by Bullfrog's and borrowed his last Nikon D4.

Any time I travel on business, I go under the name of George Chapman. Way back, after I hit Al Da Paolo, Eddie set me up with a guy who dealt in papers. The best of the best. An old Frenchman who worked out of an antique shop. Eddie had known him for years, and he drove me into the city and walked me down narrow alleyways until we reached the shop. Eddie handed the old Frenchman an envelope stuffed thick with five thousand dollars.

The old man struggled up a painfully steep staircase. Me and Eddie looked around the dusty shop for a few minutes. There was a sink and fridge right in the main room, where the old Frenchman served himself whiskey and sodas (and never offered them to anyone else). There were cases with old police badges. Binoculars that hadn't touched eyes in fifty years. There were Asian dolls. There were hopeless pocket watches, rusty knives, military medals, and brass opera glasses. Everything looked worn down, like a hundred different hands had gripped onto each one for dear life, only to slip away into the nothingness without their treasures.

The Frenchman returned with a manila envelope containing a Passport, a State ID, two identical Driver's Licenses, and two identical birth certificates.

“Where were you born?” Eddie said as I thumbed through the stuff.

“Andover, Kansas.”

Eddie laughed. “See. That's good work right there. Andover. Some hack would've used Wichita for sure.”

The Frenchman nodded a few times.

“There ain't nobody better,” Eddie said, kind of stroking the Frenchman's ego. But I could tell when Eddie meant something, and he really meant it. “Hell, you could probably get on board Air Force One with that passport. It's just as real as the real thing.”

The Frenchman smiled and sipped his whiskey and soda.

“George Chapman, eh?” Eddie said, looking over my shoulder at the passport. The Frenchman had taken my picture in the backroom of the antique store a few weeks prior. I'd picked my name that day, too. Eddie had told me to be careful about it. Real costly to ever get new stuff made, and there was no one as good as the Frenchman.

“How'd you come up with that one?” he said.

“There was a George Chapman in London… eighteen eighty-eight,” I said. “He poisoned three wives… he was a Jack the Ripper suspect.”

“Sounds like a swell guy,” Eddie said.

“Yeah, well, it was the only thing that came to me,” I said. “So do I look like a George Chapman, or what?”

Eddie touched his chin and leaned back. “More like an Adam Henry.”

“Adam Henry?”

“That's cop-code for a real asshole.”

“Where'd you get that?”

“I know a lot of cops,” Eddie said.

I can still smell that musty antique shop and hear the ticking of the mantelpiece clocks. The old Frenchman died a few months after I met him. Eddie said I was the luckiest guy in the world to get some of his final work.

I took the red-eye to Phoenix. I didn't sleep. But the fat guy next to me snored the whole flight, and even tried to use my shoulder as a pillow.

I drove the two hours and checked into my motel room in Sedona. I tailed Mark Mason the first two days and found an elegant way to dispose of him. He ran every morning, out in the dry desert hills, and he always went to the same remote spot. Frank wanted it to look like an accident. That's not my usual style, but I wasn't going to argue with Frank Conese.

The night before the job, I set myself up with a bucket of ice and some unsweetened iced teas. Somehow it's always more fun watching television in a motel room. I spent that night flipping channels and trying to sketch a self-portrait on the motel stationary. I'm a pretty good artist, but I've never been able to draw myself quite right. A shrink would have a field day with that.

Just when I was about to turn off the television, I flipped the channels one last time and caught the last half of a
Leave It To Beaver
episode: the one where Larry and Beaver smoke coffee grounds out of a Meerschaum pipe. That perked me right up, and I almost forgot that I had to kill a guy at seven in the morning.

I was up on the trail at dawn, with Bullfrog's camera around my neck so it looked like I had a good reason to be there so damn early. A photographer waiting for sunrise. I said hello to Mark Mason as he jogged by. He gave me a quick wave and a friendly nod.

Then I ran up behind him and pushed him off of the ledge.

He cried out. There was the flutter of heavy cloth hitting stones, a quick snap of bones, and then the desert swallowed the sounds.

I walked to the edge and stood there looking down at him for quite a while, watching the morning light crawl over him and cast long shadows out from the twisted body. And the sand beneath him turned a fiery orange, and it felt like the world was some huge dragon waking up to examine this itchy bug that had died in one of its folds. When the light was just right, I aimed the camera down and snapped a few photos, placing the corpse into various corners of the frame according to the rule of thirds.

There are only two temperatures for motel rooms. Hot as hell, or ice cold. Mine was ice cold when I got back from the job. I opened the window and turned off the AC, and I lay down and fell asleep. It was a deep sleep, but I had to spend the bulk of it running away from a lot of angry ghosts. I was in a grocery store. All of the employees were guys I had killed. They gave me dirty looks from the top of their mops, or over their boxes of produce. Ricky Cervetti was putting iced teas into the top of the cooler, and I had to go right up to him and ask if I could grab one. And when I finally made it up to the counter to pay for my items, the clerk was Mark Mason. There was sand in his hair and his face was bruised, and it took him a long time to count out my change with his bent arms and broken fingers.

I flew to New York and met Frank Conese at Calasso's, where the same attractive woman waited on us again; and when I looked around at the other employees, it was nothing but fine women and handsome men. Calasso must've had a strict hiring policy: no ugly slobs allowed.

“She's something,” Frank said as the waitress walked away. He leaned a little closer to me. “But she's a dyke. Not the kind that wears a tool-belt or anything, but she's got a girlfriend.”