Feelers (2 page)

I took the bag down the cracked brick steps along the overgrown lawn to my car. It was an old beater, a white Camaro with rusty patches and
MARTINEZ HOUSE CLEANING
printed on the doors in black stick-on letters that were almost completely straight. It was parked behind the truck-sized Dumpster. With the bag in the passenger seat, I drove carefully home to my apartment. You don’t want to get pulled over with a lot of cash. The cops can smell money. Whether they want some, or just to break your balls, you know they’re going to ask questions. Yes, the money was legally mine. But I would just as soon not have
the police involved in anything I do. Most people are this way, I think.

I mentioned the Brooklyn yellow pages before because Brooklyn is where I lived and had always lived. Nobody has any control over where they grow up, and East Brooklyn is not too bad. The neighborhood is bordered on the east by Rockaway Bay, the west by a slanting parkway, the north by a canal, and the south by a shopping center. There is a boulevard and an avenue that cross, and each is commercial. The avenue is shopping centers and one-story brick businesses like car washes, diners, auto repair, and convenience stores. The boulevard is more villages-like with two-to four-story brick buildings in a variety of styles and colors. The first floors are commercial, and the upper floors are residential, so it is where people who live in East Brooklyn go to shop for daily life. Side streets are tree-lined, with runs of unremarkable brick two- and three-story buildings set just far enough apart to park an unremarkable car. Midblock, there are often alleys, which are very old and historical with names of the original settlers. Yes, our neighborhood goes way back, but the past has been paved over and all that is left are the street names. These alleys cut through blocks at slants for two or three blocks and then stop. They tell me these alleys sometimes slant because it is how cows and pigs used to move with the contour of the land. I cannot tell you if this is true. Contours of the land are now roads and buildings.

In fact, I drove through an alley on my way home and parked on the street near the front of my four-story redbrick building. Bag over my shoulder, I keyed my way into the foyer and almost didn’t check my mail. You would think with a bag bulging with tight ones over my shoulder, I would let the mail wait, but I had been expecting an important envelope. And there it was! Crammed
into the little box was a big white envelope from Genealogy Consultants LLC. This was turning into quite a day.

I climbed the steps to my apartment in what seemed only a few strides. I live on the fourth floor of a postwar redbrick twelve-unit building on the avenue. My apartment is nothing special. Just a place to lay my bones at night after a run to the dump. In fact, it’s so plain, I once walked into my neighbor’s place while he was taking a shower and watched the first period of a basketball game before I realized the remote had the mute button in the wrong place. I just don’t care about where I live—now. I have my dreams, though, my destiny. I’ve been saving the tight ones. Just not under the sofa.

Two hours after arriving home I was looking at eight hundred thousand and forty dollars in mostly Grants in stacks of ten thousand—ten rows by eight—on my living room floor. (I put the extra forty in my pocket—everybody likes a round number.) They had been curled so long that I needed eighty weights to hold them flat. I don’t keep that many weights around my place; nobody expects to find that many tight ones. So I used anything I could put my hands on. My collection of Spanish history books, shoes, boots, a flashlight—my shelves and cupboards were bare by the time I was done.

Hands on my hips, I surveyed the money with the amazed wonder of a conquistador before an Incan treasure. I glanced at the white envelope from Genealogy Consultants LLC on the table next to the front door. I hadn’t opened it, but I didn’t need to now. What lay before me was proof positive. The blood of Spanish explorers burned in my chest. Could the name Cortés or Pizarro be in the white envelope? I am not an idiot. I know, I hunt money in old houses, and do not conquer foreign lands for
treasure, but the compulsion to look, to look every day, it must be the same as dropping anchor at an uncharted land.

Where had this wondrous pile of greenbacks come from? Is it possible old Mr. Trux had hoarded so much? Had he stolen it?

Of course, there was no way to tell where it all came from originally, so I stopped asking myself this ridiculous question. The important thing was to get it to a safe place where nobody could take it away. I knew I couldn’t keep it on my floor, but I needed to flatten out the bills, you know? Got to store it flat.

So I went to the closet and found a suitcase, an old thing I never use because I never go anywhere. It was cloth and plastic and had a blue-and-green plaid design on the side like it was Scottish, probably because it was cheap like a Scotsman. I had not used it since my honeymoon. Marta was long gone, and good riddance, so being rid of this reminder of her was a good thing, too.

One by one I pushed the stacks of bills in, and though they kept curling, the weight of the money itself started to hold the rest down. When I finally zipped it closed, the suitcase was bulging like a pregnant bagpiper, and it was heavy, perhaps twenty or thirty pounds.

So I ask you—where would you put a large sum of cash like that? Everywhere you turn, you imagine what could go wrong. There wasn’t much time, either. How long before word trickled through the day laborers and got around?

The closet? What if the house burns down? What if my place is robbed?

The car? What if I have an accident? What if some junkie pries open the trunk?

I don’t have an office; I work out of my car. I don’t have a basement, or an attic. A safe deposit box isn’t big enough.

I snapped my fingers: self-storage. There’s a place off the boulevard.

I looked out my front window to make sure there was nothing suspicious on the street, and then looked out my peephole. I opened the door a crack. I looked both ways. Hey, you can’t be too careful. I wouldn’t put it past Pete to send some guys around to take it away.

With the Genealogy Consultants LLC envelope under my arm, I left and locked the apartment, the floor still covered with most of my belongings. I took my time down the four flights of stairs, looking over the banister, listening. When I made it to the ground floor, I was almost to the building foyer.

“Where you going?” The voice—like that of a chain-smoking three-hundred-pound toad—was behind me. I recognized it and felt the hair on my arms stand up. It was the voice no person wants to hear when you have a lot of cash, or usually any other time. It is the voice of one of Brooklyn’s most reviled inhabitants, one without a soul, conscience, or scruples. Nobody likes them; most fear them.

Turning slowly, I heard the sandals flip-flop toward me. I beheld those black, untrusting eyes, the scowl, the brown gnashing teeth of . . . my landlord.

“Going on a trip, Morty?” It was like he knew something, like he suspected, like he could smell the cash, the greedy man-beast.

I tried not to show fear, standing taller, and as I did so, so did he. I am taller than he, six foot, and he was too fat to go to his toes, so I was looking down on him when I smiled my big white teeth, like the smile I make for the girls. I gestured to the bag with a wave of my hand and said, “Ah. Because I have a suitcase, you think I am traveling?”

This landlord, he only squints and says nothing, as though what I had said was stupid. I continued.

“Shirts. I am taking shirts to the cleaner.”

“In a suitcase?” he snarled.

“But of course, and why not, yes? This way they don’t get as wrinkled.”

“But they’re going to press the shirts anyway,
yes
?”

“If they are less wrinkled, my cleaner charges me less.”

Now the landlord monster toad is looking more curious. “What cleaner you take them to?”

“What cleaner?”

“Chinks down the block?”

If I say yes, he will check. Why does he care? Why would he do this? Because he is a landlord, and they live to snoop.

“Nnnno. I take them to . . . New Jersey.” Even he wouldn’t go all the way to New Jersey to check on a cleaner to see if I was charged less for shirts that were wrinkled less.

His eyes went wide. “Well, that would explain it.” For many Brooklynites, New Jersey is the object of suspicion and general disdain, like it was one large insane asylum. It doesn’t help that the state is host to towns with names like Weehawken and Hoboken and Piscataway—could they be towns where elves live? Anyway, as a rule of thumb, anybody who lived outside of Brooklyn, much less New York City, was clearly out of their mind and capable of anything, even charging to clean shirts by how many wrinkles they have.

“You go all the way to . . . why d’you go all the way . . .”

“My girlfriend—she lives there.”

“What the hell is wrong with you, Morty? We got girls here in Brooklyn you can fuck. Lotta spic girls, too. You don’t need to go to . . .” he couldn’t even bring himself to say the state’s name, just jerked a thumb westward.

I began moving to the front door, having thwarted my landlord
like the conniving troll that he was. He was now thinking about the girl and not the suitcase.

“They say you cannot pick your woman.
She picks you
.”

“TED!”

This was the voice—not a voice, because like a banshee, she never spoke—the choleric shriek of the landlord’s wife. It came from the gloom beyond his open apartment door. She was even more horrible than he, and he feared her like we fear landlords. She was so large she could not even leave their grotto. The woman’s howl made him cringe, and he eyed me sadly as he turned to retreat to his cave, as if to say, “You got that right, buster.”

Olé!
I was out the door with my money, and an hour later the eight hundred thousand in the Scottish suitcase was safely sealed in a storage locker. As you can imagine, I was flying. I’d scored the money free and clear.

I could write my own ticket. I could accelerate my plans for the future, to reclaim my birthright.

But like Pizarro with the wealth of Peru at his feet, I would be lucky to escape with my skin. He did not.

I AM NOT A FORTUNE-TELLER
, but if I were a gypsy, I might have foreseen what was happening thirty miles up the Hudson River at a state correctional facility. The date and facts are a matter of record, and as we know records make a dull story, and sometimes no story at all, really just a list of dates and times. I can only imagine the full series of events based on the facts as I know them now. But I will be brutally honest, Father Gomez: This is what happened in my life, my explanation, my confession, so I will paint you the full picture of Danny Kessel. Of what happened. Of how it all started.

Danny was a model prisoner. In fact, they called him Mr. Manners. When the guards opened his cell for him to go in or out, he said thank you. When they served him slop in the dining facility, he said thank you. When he slid a shiv into the neck of a fellow prisoner who stole his cigarettes, he said sorry. A man has to do unspeakable things to survive in prison, to position himself so that he is not abused. Danny proved to be talented with a shiv—you know, a slim homemade dagger—and he became a hired killer. He had a reputation for being quick,
decisive, unpredictable, and precise. And, of course, deceptively polite.

Yes, they have hit men in prison, too. Sometimes a prisoner is being tormented by another and wishes to wreak vengeance. Sometimes a gang leader is sent to solitary and needs someone outside the gang to punish the prisoner who sent him there.

Yet Danny did not start out as what people think of as a hardened criminal. He was the driver for an armored car heist. He and four others knocked over an Atlas Security truck collecting cash from supermarkets in Queens. They got away, too, but of course made mistakes and the cops came and shot them all up in a gun battle on the Coney Island boardwalk.

All except Mr. Manners.

They sent him away for fifteen years, and he was smart enough to claim he didn’t know where the money was. I say “smart” because he did know where the money was, and the others who did were all dead. No sense in losing fifteen years of your life for nothing, is there?

Even as I was driving the Scottish suitcase full of money to the storage locker, this darkly handsome man was being led through the drab institutional hallways to the place where they process parolees. See, they did not know the bad but polite things he had done so expertly with his shiv. Only the other prisoners knew. Of course, Danny knew, and if you looked closely you could see it in his cold blue eyes. The same eyes that from the prison bus windows scanned all the strange SUVs on the highway, the billboards for Web sites, ads for cell phones, and fast food chains he had never heard of. You would not have known he was just a little bit afraid to be out. You would not have known when he stepped from the bus and entered the subway
that he was confused by the fare card machine—he still had some tokens that were now worthless. He just walked right back out of the subway and began walking, eyeing police cars as though they might screech up alongside, throw him in the back, and take him back to Sing Sing. They would have, had they known what he was thinking.

His first stop was probably a hardware or home store, perhaps some little mom-and-pop place on Queens Boulevard.

“Can I help you?”

Danny would smile at the store owner. A smile like that of a child, really. You know the kind—like everything was new and pleasant. Probably because it was. Nobody knew he had just gotten out of prison. Nobody knew he was a killer. Nobody was treating him like scum.

Why would the owner suspect? Danny was wearing the suit and turtleneck he wore in court fifteen years ago. Never mind that the suit was a little tight around the shoulders, the lapels long, the belt bunching the pants around his waist.

“Thank you, I could use some help. Could you tell me where you have the kitchen stuff?”