Long Island Noir (30 page)

“You talking about Jimmy?”

“So?”

“The one you broke his nose?”

“That’s a long time ago.”

“The one I held his arms for you.”

“Hey,” Lonnie said, sitting forward, “the son of a bitch deserved it, number one.”

“Number two, he hates my guts. You don’t tell him shit about what happened.”

“I didn’t say
tell
, I said find out, all right?”

“What are you gonna tell?”

“Hey, Bob, let me handle this, all right? You do the garbage and the dog walking, yeah? And let me handle the cops and the skins,
capiche
?”

“The guy’s an asshole,” Bob Foote said.

“So he’s an asshole. Who isn’t? Now come on, finish your beer. Then we get a pint and a six-pack and go to the dirty movie festival.”

Bob Foote shot him a look.

“These broads today, Bob,” Lonnie said. “You heard of Nikki Charm?”

“What is she?” Bob Foote said. “Eleven?”

“They’re all legal, Bob. Strictly professional.”

“That’s part of the problem.”

“Yeah, well, spare me the sermon.”

Bob Foote said, “Spare this.”

Lonnie sat back. He looked at the storm. They hadn’t called it this big, this intense. All this snow, blankets of it, coming down thick and sticking. Plows banging down the Turnpike, sanders scattering sand like fertilizer on a lawn. If he left for the theater now, he’d miss only the first nut, maybe a facial, depending on how well the plows were working out east. Looking at his watch, he said, “We better roll.”

“
Adios
,” Bob Foote said, standing.

“But Bob, we okay here?”

“Sure.”

“I talk to Jimmy, give you a shout at home, yeah?”

Bob Foote said, “After the dirty movie?”

Lonigan shrugged. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

“Don’t make a mess.”

Lonigan got the tab, and they walked out together.

“How’s Jackie?” Lonnie asked.

Bob Foote said, “How’s Jackie? Her bedroom is pink and she scrapes the cheese off pizza, that’s
how’s Jackie
.”

Lonnie shook his head. “How’d two guys like us marry two broads like them, you ever wonder that?”

Bob Foote took his friend’s hand. “Not too much anymore.”

Lonnie said, “I hear you.” He watched his friend scrape an inch of snow from his windshield. He watched the Monte Carlo recede into the slow traffic on Jericho, then he went back inside to the phone by the men’s room. He was feeling a little guilty, but he was starting to get the beginnings of something that felt like an idea.

“Yeah, meet me at the mall,” he said into the receiver.

“The mall?” his brother-in-law replied.

“The mall,” Lonnie said. “The fucking mall, over by Macy’s. Half an hour.”

He hated talking to his brother-in-law like that, but what could he do? Bob Foote was right: the guy was an asshole. An asshole who hated Bob Foote.

In the men’s room he took a leak, one palm flat on the wall. You shake it more than three times, you’re jerking off. He heard that when he was, what, twelve? Thirteen? Right around the time he met his wife. And Jackie Capello. He shook it more than three times. “I’ll show him a putz,” he muttered.

The ride home, Bob Foote kept the wipers and defrost on high, and still the windshield looked like it had been smeared with unguentine. He felt as blind as his poodle. Plows and sanders—modified garbage trucks—pounding all over the place. Snow covered the sand a minute after it spread. Every ten yards an accident. Even four-wheel-drive pickups abandoned. Some of them already snowed under. He wondered if the woman’s body was snowed under as well. He wondered if he should have waited with her, should have called the cops … But this was manslaughter, plain and simple, no matter how you looked at it. He hadn’t intended to kill her, but he had intended to deceive, to expose, to embarrass, and the chain of events his garbage instigated led directly to the woman’s body splayed out in the snow. He wondered if anyone had found her. Someone would have to have found her. But what if they didn’t? What if she got plowed? Bob Foote shuddered. He almost wanted to puke.

The radio was no help—just news about the storm and a lot of the bullshit songs that were hits after Sinatra and before the Beatles. The only songs for him were Jerry Vale—there was a singer. The rest of these clowns …

Clowns made him think about Lonigan, wasting his retirement in the dirty movies, not that Bob Foote had the answer. He slept past noon, walked dogs, and gift-wrapped garbage. Not exactly a retirement lifestyle breakthrough. But at least it was something, a worldview. Lonigan, day after day, with his beer or his whiskey and his dumb Danish broads with the New Jersey accents. Once, he passed out in his seat. The manager threatened to call an EMS.

Still, Lonigan wasn’t always a clown. He was crazy brave, and crazy strong. They almost had to issue him a new chest for all his medals in Korea. He was loyal, and he was a goer. He’d fly at a man twice his size, Bob Foote had seen him do it. And it didn’t take much to make him fly. One cross look, one dumb remark. He’d been in four fights just since retirement, and he lost only one, to his ex-wife. He’d missed a support payment, and she found him at the dirty movies. She hit him with her wedding ring right in the orbital bone. Hairline fracture blackened his eye damn near two weeks. Looked like he was wearing a hockey puck for a monocle. He had to squint to see the skins.

Jackie Foote sat in the kitchen reading editorials in
Suffolk Life
.

“You got a call from someone,” she said. She slid a note on the table his way.

“Who?”

“Your friend from the mall, he said.”

“My friend from the mall?”

“That’s what he said.”

“I don’t have any friend from the mall,” Bob Foote said. “What mall?”

He punched in the number he didn’t recognize.

“Hello, asshole,” a man’s voice said.

“Who’s this?”

“No,” the voice said. “Who are you?”

Bob Foote pulled the phone from his ear. He looked at the receiver. Something about the voice was … peculiar. “If this is a joke,” he said, “I’m not laughing.”

“No one’s laughing on this end either, motherfucker.”

“Hey, there’s a woman in this room, you son of a bitch. If I knew who you were I’d smack you in your goddamn mouth.”

“You want to know who this is?” the voice said. “This is the guy whose wife picked up what you dropped at the mall.”

“The mall?”

“Ah, we’re gonna play games now, asshole? The mall, where the blood is still wet in the snow.”

“You must have—”

“Okay, so we play games,” the voice said, and the line went dead.

Slowly, Bob Foote set the phone back in the cradle. He stared at the side of the refrigerator with the calendar. For months every day was blank. The kitchen was yellow. The refrigerator was yellow. You open the fridge, the Saran wrap is yellow. He fought for his country so his wife could match the Saran wrap to the wallpaper. So his kids could become punks.

“Who was that?” his wife asked, not looking up from her paper.

Bob Foote said, “Wrong number.”

“Wrong number?”

He grabbed the leashes hanging off the front door knob and his dogs jumped up.

Every car that passed him on his walk to the Wading River Beach scared him shitless. With the snow, it was like they were driving on cotton—he couldn’t hear them until they were right at his back. And how could they see him? He could hardly see the dogs at the end of the leash. Any one of the cars, he thought, could be the caller. And any one could strike him, run his fat ass over, and who could ever accuse the driver of negligence?

It made perfect sense, when he thought about it. He always expected a bum deal. In this life, you don’t get even laughs free. And if you live honestly—a simple life full of sacrifice, climbing poles all winter with your fingers numb so your wife can drive a Volvo and your sons can study poetry in college—you deserve what you get. He had nothing but disgust for his life, and resigned dread for his future. He was almost better off back at work. At least there he had guys he could talk to about how there was nothing to talk about.

At the beach, he unleashed the dogs and they charged down to the shoreline. How did they even know the way? He started walking blind, and every now and then one of them raced by, the wind lifting the dog’s fur. He should have helped the hurt woman. Lonnie was right—what was he afraid of? But it was the whole horror of it—the utter nonsense of the fight over a booby prize, and then the sound, the dull thunk of her skull catching the Buick’s rear bumper, like a softball pinging off a backstop pole. How in the hell, he kept wondering, did someone know it was him? Was it the woman in the car? Did she make his plates? If she made his plates, how did she track them?

When he’d had enough of the cold and the wind and the paranoia, he turned back toward the parking lot. His eyes were half frozen. He whistled for the dogs. Only the schnauzer appeared. He called and whistled after the other. But she’d done this before. She was getting old, she was less enthused about challenging walks in the weather. More than once she’d turned around, slipped past him, found her way back home alone.

His wife’s car was gone, the garage empty. He thought, I don’t even get dinner in a snowstorm.

He went out back and called for the poodle. Nothing. A hedgerow of hemlocks trimmed the backyard. He slipped through a pair that had been chewed away by the red spider, and kicked several yards into the woods. He called for her again, but the heavy snowfall threw a blanket over his voice.

Inside on the stove, a can of Campbell’s Chunky—beef and country vegetables—sat inside a small pot with dark burn marks across its bottom. On the top of the can was a Post-it.
Don’t forget to add water. The boys are out with friends. Your friend called again.

He threw the note, the can, and the pot in the garbage. He crumpled two slices of Kraft’s individually wrapped American cheese together in each fist and dropped them in the dogs’ bowls.

“Don’t eat your sister’s,” he told the schnauzer.

The schnauzer ignored him. She went straight to the poodle’s bowl and cleaned it out, then she cleaned out her own.

Bob Foote slid out the side door.

At Bernie’s on Sound Avenue, a pair of young couples hugged each end of the shuffleboard table. The guys and the gals wore flannel shirts and jeans. Bob Foote was glad he wasn’t a young man now. The way they dressed, how did they know who was who, which was which? And when they figured it out, what would it matter.

He ordered a boilermaker, threw back the whiskey and sipped the beer. Then he ordered another.
The boys are out with friends
, she wrote. So what? What did he care? What did they care? It was another phony Christmas, just like all the other ones. Once, they gave him a bathrobe—it had the hotel’s name on the pocket. A pair of punks. Did they think he was that stupid?

The news was on. During his second beer, the incident at the mall appeared—a woman in the parking lot, found dead from injuries sustained from a fall. Anyone with information could call this number. Bob Foote took change from the bar and entered the phone booth.

He dialed Lonigan while watching one of the flannelshirted gals lean over the shuffleboard, her ass like twin halfs of a large cantaloupe. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad time to be a young man after all.

Lonigan picked up on the second ring. “You watching the news?”

“I thought you was at the dirty movie,” Bob Foote said.

“I went to the mall. See what I could see. A buddy of mine’s in trouble.”

Bob Foote said, “Semper fi.”

Lonigan said, “You got that right.”

“So what did you see?”

“Cops eating donuts behind yellow tape.”

“You know ’em?”

“I know all the cops.”

“And?”

“And nothing. They think the broad slipped by accident. The bumper she hit was her own. They scraped some hair and skin and blood off it, but no one suspects shit.”

Bob Foote said, “Not no one.” He told Lonigan about the call his wife took, about the conversation he’d had with the caller, about the new note.

Lonigan went bat shit. The kind of this-is-what-we-foughtfor obscenity-laced rant he threw when things got grim. In the background, he could hear Lonigan throwing things, breaking things, stomping on their broken pieces.

“For Christ’s sake, Lonnie, stop. You wreck anybody’s house, make it the caller’s.”

“You know what you do?” Lonigan said when he’d calmed. “You set up a meet.”

“A meet?”

“Call his ass back, ask what he wants, and where.”

“And then what?”

“Then I show up and break his goddamn nose.”

“What if—” Bob Foote said, but his friend was already off the line.

He bought a round for the girl with the cantaloupe ass and her friends and took his change. The back roads hadn’t been plowed for hours. He crawled the five miles home to Wading River in second gear.

His low beams swept along the front yard. Scattered across the snow were the contents of the package he’d left at the mall. He idled the Monte Carlo and kept the headlights on the mess. Sinking to his knees in the snow, he grabbed at the debris. There it all was again, the paper and wrappers and pie tins. He carried it with both arms to the garage where he dumped it into a large refuse bag.

That’s when he saw the poodle, on its back, four paws in the air, rigid. Its head had been twisted completely around. The schnauzer crept over to Bob Foote’s boots and nuzzled. He picked her up and lightly scratched her belly while staring at his dead dog.

Somehow it all made sense, he always knew he’d get a bum deal.

He stuffed the dead dog into a grocery bag and hid her body behind a row of hemlocks in the backyard. He’d bury her when the ground thawed. Then he called his friend from the mall.

“Hey, we missed you, big guy.”

“You won’t miss me again,” Bob Foote said.

“Ooo,” the man said. “That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh.”

“What do you need me to bring, asshole?”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” the man sang again.