Dead Cat Bounce (4 page)

 

“It ain't like it's a bad job or nothing.” Tuco and Stoney walked down the slate sidewalk, past the brownstones and carriage houses of Brooklyn Heights. Stoney looked thinner than Tuco remembered him, and his face was different, too, but he was still big, still intimidating. Tuco always thought of him as looking like a guy who had a toothache and was pissed off about it. Something is happening to him, he's different now, Tuco thought. He'd known it for sure as soon as Stoney told him he preferred walking to sitting. “I mean, it ain't any work to speak of, especially in the summer. Couple more months, there won't be no boiler to run, half the people in the building will have went off to the Hamptons for the summer. It's really nothing, all I gotta do is take the trash out, mop the hallway once in a while. And for that, I get a free place to live in a nice neighborhood. They even pay me a few bucks. I know I oughta be happy with that.”

“So? You bored?”

“Stoney, I keep thinking like there's something else I'm supposed to be doing, and I don't know what it is.”

“Yeah? What are you doing about it?”

The question surprised him. I suppose, he thought, it is up to me. “Nothing,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I don't know what to do.”

“Well, that's a problem. Don't feel bad, you ain't alone. There's a lot of people walking around, don't know what they wanna be when they grow up. Lotta people die without ever figuring it out.”

“Serious?”

“Yeah. Ain't life a bitch?”

“You been a big help, you know that?”

“Look, what are you, nineteen? You're still just a kid. Lotta directions you could go in. All you gotta do is figure out what it is that you like, okay? Once you find something that winds your clock, then you find out what the process is, how you get from where you're at to where you wanna go. You break that process down into steps, you start taking the steps one at a time. You don't give up and you don't die, sooner or later you'll get there.”

“Yeah, but I got this other problem.”

“What's that?”

“Dyslexia. It makes it hard for me to read. I don't see what everybody else sees when they look at a newspaper.”

Stoney did not look surprised. “So?”

Tuco's stomach was churning. He knew better than to expect sympathy from Stoney, but he had expected compassion. “It makes things more hard. It means there's a lot of stuff I can't do.”

“Look, kid, everybody's got something. Everybody's got some kinda monkey on his back. Look at it this way: this thing you got, at least you know what it is, right? It's got a name, you could look it up in the dictionary.”

“Maybe you could.”

“Whatever. But it's in there, ain't it?”

“So what if it is?”

“Well, if it's in the dictionary already, then you ain't the first motherfucker to get it, are you?”

Tuco blinked. “No,” he said.

“Fine. So somewhere, somebody's working with you assholes that have this thing. You get me? Someone, somewhere, can show you how to work with it. All you gotta do is find the guy.”

“How the hell do I do that?”

“Easy. You ask for help.” He looked over at Tuco's face, saw the doubt there. “Although,” he said, “asking for help used to be the hardest thing in the world for me to do. I had to pick something up, right, I would rather break my back than ask you to help me. I don't know why that is, but I would strain until my dick fell off and my balls ran down my pant leg before I asked somebody to give me a hand. Now, my problems are different from yours, okay, but I wasn't asking anybody for anything. Fuck you, I'm fine, maybe I got blood coming out of every orifice in my body, okay, but I can handle my own shit. That's what I thought. It was just through sheer stupid fucking luck I ran into a guy who had the answer I needed.” They walked on in silence for a half a block, and Tuco began to think Stoney was done, but he wasn't. “I tell you what,” Stoney finally said. “I'll talk to Tommy about it. You know Tommy, if he don't know the right guy, he knows somebody
who does.” He looked over at Tuco. “Once you find the right guy, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he's happy to help you. Sometimes, you even find out he was waiting for you. You get me?”

Tuco wasn't sure what to say to that. What Stoney said might be true, but it ran counter to his experience. In his lifetime, Stoney and Fat Tommy were just about the only guys he could remember who had showed any interest in helping him at all. “All right,” he said, feeling the butterflies in his stomach. “Thanks.”

“You taking care of my car like I asked you?”

“Yeah, 'course. I told you before, it's in a parking garage over on Henry Street.”

“You had it out lately?”

“Couple of weeks ago, I took it for a ride out on the Island.”

“Okay. I guess it ought to start, then. I gotta borrow it for a few days.”

“You get your license back? You want me to drive you?”

“I didn't exactly get it back. What I got is a new one. I found the right guy, he works at a New York State Motor Vehicles place up in the Bronx. He fixed me up. What I gotta do, I got this thing I gotta do over in Jersey.”

“You need a hand?”

Stoney shook his head. “Not right now. There's this guy I gotta check out, but I don't know what I'm gonna do with him yet. It ain't business, anyhow, it's personal.”

“Whatever,” Tuco said. “You need me, you just yell.”

“All right,” Stoney said. “I'll get back to you.”

I
t was a strange sensation, driving again after all the months of walking. The only cars he had been in for ages had been taxicabs, and they were usually beat. Plus, it's different, being the driver instead of the passenger. A thought struck him, and he pulled the Lexus over to the side of the road and got out, reached down underneath the driver's seat and felt around. It seemed like a previous life, but not that long ago he had kept a pint bottle of scotch under there. It was gone, though, along with the accumulation of trash that had been in the back, last time he saw the car. Tuco, in his intensely serious way, must have cleaned it all out. The car looked clean, too, and Stoney could not remember ever washing the thing. The kid probably changed the oil, too, Stoney thought. And paid for the garage. Be just like him. I'll have to remember to ask what I owe him.

He got back in the car, drove to the on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, looked at the wall of traffic. Ain't nothing for it, he told himself, go on and get in line. What's your hurry, anyhow?

It took about an hour and a half to get to Jersey. He felt like he hadn't been out of the city in ages, he'd almost forgotten what New Jersey looked like. He thought back to when he and Donna had first moved out. All he'd known about the
place then was what you saw when you drove out of the Lincoln Tunnel and headed for Newark Airport: it had been an otherworldly landscape, a ruined canyon of polluted marshes, empty warehouses, oil refineries, and power plants, nothing but a stinking industrial desert that could not have looked more devastated if you dropped an atomic bomb on the fucking place. He knew better now, though. Cross the George Washington Bridge, get off the highway and into the little towns, and you felt like you were on another planet, quiet streets, green grass, trees, houses with lawns and hedges all around, whitetail deer eating your wife's plants. Just like your house, he told himself. Just like the one Donna threw you out of.

It took fifteen minutes, driving through the local streets, before he found the address in the town of Alpine for Charles David Prior. It was an enormous old mansion, set well back in the woods off Route 9W, a two-lane state road that paralleled the Palisades Parkway. There were no other houses in sight, just trees, with an iron perimeter fence up next to the road. The driveway to the place ran between two stone pillars that buttressed an iron gate, back to a two-story carriage house that had room for at least four cars. The house beyond was a stone and timber monstrosity of the kind rich people sometimes erect for themselves, simple materials and a rustic style taken to such heights that the building almost became a parody of itself. This guy isn't just wealthy, Stoney thought, he's beyond that. The dude has to be filthy. Forget what the house is worth, Stoney thought, the land alone must be worth millions. This guy is ten minutes from the bridge, but the son of a bitch has as much privacy as if he were living in the middle of a wilderness. There were no cars or people in sight behind the fence, nothing to be gained by sitting there looking. Stoney drove on past.

Past the fence that marked the end of Prior's property, a tract of undeveloped forest ran for about a half mile before he got to the next sign of human habitation. It was a small development of nearly identical houses, accessed by a short street just off the main road. They were McMansions, two-story stucco fashion statements with two-car garages attached, separated from the street and from one another by smallish, improbably green carpets of manicured grass. Stoney turned in, pulled over in front of one which had a “For Sale” sign in the middle of its front lawn. He got out, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell. There was no answer, the place was empty. It had no curtains in the windows, no furniture inside. The house is probably worth a couple million, he thought, but who the hell would want to live in it? There were houses just like it, springing up all over Jersey. They were built out of sheet metal two-by-fours, fabricated floor trusses instead of wooden beams and rafters, vinyl windows, veneer floors. Even the stucco was phony, it was a plastic compound made to look like the real thing, applied over an exterior of foam insulation. The place might look like a stone castle from the street, but you could probably kick your way through the wall if you wanted to. Nothing about it was real, none of it looked like what it really was.

He looked around the micro-neighborhood. There were no signs of life, no trikes in the driveways, no cars outside, no children's toys on the lawns, not a human being in sight except for him. They're all at work, he told himself, they're paying the price it takes to live in this sterile place. Just what I'm looking for, he thought, a place where nothing has to mean anything, not really, it just has to appear as though it might. He walked back to his car, wrote down the real estate agent's name and phone number before driving away.

He spent the next hour cruising around the neighborhood, if you could call it that, looking for a road that might run behind Prior's house. He didn't find one, though, as close as he could make out, the woods ran down a long hill behind the place. There was a golf course at the bottom of the hill. There wasn't much else up on the hill, just a few other widely scattered houses, lots of trees, an empty field here and there. There was a plaque by the side of the road, halfway around a blind curve. Curious, Stoney found a place to park and walked back to read it. It told the story of Skunk Hollow, a pre–Civil War community of freed blacks, but it had been obliterated when the parkway was built. Robert Moses, let my people go. The plaque didn't say anything about what had happened to the denizens of Skunk Hollow when they put the road in.

It was getting dark. Stoney headed down the hill, out of Alpine and into Closter, the neighboring town where Donna and their children still lived. It was nowhere near as plush as Alpine, but it was still solidly upper-class white, populated by prosperous folks who favored Mercedes, Jaguars, hulking SUVs, and, yes, Lexuses. Donna had gotten him the car about a year ago. Stoney had figured that she was embarrassed by the old Pontiac he'd been driving. It hadn't bothered him, he didn't much care what his neighbors thought. He knew he had enough money socked away to buy all the Jaguars the local dealer had, so he hadn't needed one. Donna was different, though, she wanted to fit in. That's because she's become a part of all this, he thought. This is her world, this suburban wonderland, this quiet, green, forested place that lay a short commuter's bus ride from midtown Manhattan. This is what she is. You were never more than a foreigner. You only slept here.

He followed the streets automatically, his mind seemingly
on autopilot. What will you do if she sees you? he wondered. She would recognize the car, she's the one who bought it, after all. She'd know it was you from a mile away. Will you stop to talk to her, will you look at her, or will you pretend not to see her and drive away? He still hadn't come up with an answer when he turned down his street. There was no one outside, though. Most of the houses had lights on inside, including the one he had once lived in with Donna, but you couldn't see any of the occupants from the street. He wanted to stop but he did not, he continued on past, berating himself for his lack of courage. What are you afraid of, he wondered, what do you think she's gonna do to you? But she had more power to hurt him than anyone alive, she could stick a knife through his heart with just a look. He got to the end of the block, pulled a U-turn, went back on past. Donna, he thought, Donna…God, he missed her. It made him despise himself all the more for what he was going to do. You wouldn't, if you really loved her, he told himself. You'd go sit down with her, ask her what she really wanted. And if her answer really is this guy Prior, you should turn your back and walk away, leave her to him.

Still, the primitive in him was strong enough to know that they had better not ever let him see the two of them together. And Donna would know that, too.

 

The guy was waiting right where Fat Tommy said he would be, in a chrome-and-glass diner in Westwood, New Jersey. It was one of those places that never close. The P.I. was just a kid, tall, skinny, zits on his face. His skin was pasty white, like he never went out in the daylight, and he had large gnarly hands with fingernails chewed all the way down. If he found it strange to meet Stoney at this place on such short notice, he did not
show it. They took a table in the back room. The waiter left a pair of menus on the table. Stoney paged through it while the kid opposite fidgeted. They had everything, at least in theory, steak and lobster, Greek and Italian, burgers and a salad bar, breakfast all day and all night. When the waiter came back, Stoney handed him a ten. “Two coffees,” he said. The waiter nodded, took the menus, and departed.

Stoney looked over at the kid, watched him for a minute. “Friend of mine told me you're good,” he finally said. “Says you do good work and you know how to keep your mouth shut.” The kid nodded nervously and said nothing. It's no wonder he's afraid, Stoney thought. He knew that he had been unable to keep the pain and rage off his face. The waiter came back with the coffees.

“What can I do for you?” the kid said, after the waiter left.

“Two things,” Stoney said. “One, this guy Charles David Prior, lives up on the hill in Alpine. I wanna know who he is, what he does, where he came from.”

“Sure, okay,” the kid said. “Gimme a day, two at the most. What's the other thing?”

Stoney looked at the cup in front of him. He didn't want to taste what was in it, he was already filled with acid. He didn't even want to smell it. “I want you to follow my wife.” He hated himself for saying it. He could feel the tension building inside, he felt like ripping the table off the wall and flinging it across the room.

“All right.” The kid spoke in a soft voice, looked away, out through the open doorway into the main part of the diner. “Do you want the full treatment?”

“What's that?”

“Well, it starts with round-the-clock surveillance. I can
drop some spyware on your computer if you want, it'll record every keystroke anyone makes on it, e-mail, Web surfing, the works. I can tap your phones, too. If your name's on the deed, it's legal but probably not admissible in court.”

Stoney's breath felt like it was burning his nose as he exhaled. “We're not going to fucking court,” he said. “All right. Do the phone and the computer. You don't need to stay on her all night, she's generally had it by ten-thirty. She gets going early, though.”

“All right. Do you need pictures? I mean, if I find something. You said you weren't going to court, but…”

There's no clean way to do this, Stoney thought, you drop something in the toilet, you can't get it back without getting slimed. What a fucking life. “Yeah,” he said. “Just so there's no questions. Time-stamped, I guess.” He felt like he needed to take a shower.

The kid looked away again. “All right,” he said.

“Just make fucking sure,” Stoney said, staring straight at him. “You understand me?”

“Yes, sir.” He cleared his throat. “You got a name? I mean, the guy you think is, ahh…”

“Yeah, I got a fucking name, but I don't want to give it to you. You just tell me what you find.”

The kid shrugged. “Okay by me.”

“You need a key?”

“Huh?” He looked at Stoney blankly.

“To my house.”

“What? Oh, for the phone and all. No, sir, I don't need to go anywhere near your house.”

“You're kidding me. How do you do it?”

“At the phone-company switching station. I'll just call in
like a regular phone-company lineman would. You just need to know the nomenclature.”

“I see. Well, that's it, then.”

“Ah, yeah, except, um, you gotta pay me a retainer, and you gotta tell me how long, you know…”

Stoney nodded. “Gimme a week,” he said. They worked out the finances. Stoney paid the kid in cash, and the kid folded the bills up in his big hand and stuck them in his pocket.