Feelers (27 page)

Anyway, other than the fact that my father was from La Paz, it was clear to me that Genealogy Consultants LLC were idiots,
and I had wasted my money. They somehow missed the entire conquistador part of my family history.

The only good news I heard that week was that Dexter had regained consciousness and was expected to live. I could only imagine what he would have to go through to rehabilitate, and what he would look like. Could they reconstruct his face? Now he would be a clubfoot and facially disfigured. I truly felt sorry for him and wondered if dying might have been easier.

So I watched TV for a few days and groaned. I did muster the energy to go to Octavio on Saturday night, where I filled that mousy girl from Tangles, Silvia, with daiquiris. Not so many that she puked on my floor mats, but enough that we went back to her place and mated on her couch.

That gave me enough energy to go to the library on Monday and look at my e-mail.

The real estate people in La Paz had sent me a JPEG file. I clicked on the attachment and had to wait for it to open. This would be of the fountain. This would be the Martinez family crest emblazoned in bronze.

But it was not. The fountain was only embossed with curlicues and leaves and such.

I told them I wanted the place anyway and wired the down payment.

I will be brutally honest: Danny Kessel had taught me that you cannot wait forever to make your dreams come true. Sometimes, if you wait too long, it is too late. Then you end up burned alive by an oxygen truck in Storage Hut.

The down payment I could do, and some of the rest, but I did not have enough to live on the rest of my life. How would I make a living in La Paz? I had no idea. I just knew it was now or never, as they say.

Then, believe it or not, I got a call from a real estate agent to clean out an apartment. This agent used to work closely with Frog, because it was Frog who used to specialize in cleaning out apartments. Now this agent needed somebody new to replace Frog. Of course, we were also short another local feeler because Pete the Prick’s putrefied body was in a stainless steel drawer at the morgue.

To tell you the truth, I had completely lost any interest in being a feeler, but the agent basically begged me. I had two weeks to kill before my passport arrived, and I had to admit to myself that the cash would prove useful for my four-thousand-mile drive to Baja. Also, if I watched any more television I think I would have gone insane. Have you watched daytime television, Father? It’s all about complaining people.

So I accepted the job and arranged for a container.

On the clean-out day, I grabbed three day laborers, making sure one could speak at least some English.

We went to the building. I recognized it.

“No,” I told myself. “It cannot be.”

But it was.

I had been hired to clean out Frog’s apartment.

The hand of fate can be a dirty dealer, let me tell you.

No, there were no tight ones under the couch. There was no hidden money. I knew there would not be; I felt it as soon as I entered.

The laborers were carrying the couch down the stairs to the Dumpster, and I was watching the front door to make sure the idiots did not damage the vestibule in a way that would make the landlord angry.

A delivery truck squeaked to a stop at the curb, and a Pakistani man in shorts, T-shirt, and lifting belt approached the
front door. The couch was just coming out, and he had to wait. After the careful exit of the sofa, the grunting laborers weaved down across the sidewalk with it toward the Dumpster.

“I’m looking for Franco,” the Pakistani said to me. I think he thought I was the landlord.

I looked at the delivery van, and a sign on the cab door read
AIR FREIGHT EXPRESS SERVICES
.

You know how I have told you, Father, that I have a feeling when there is money in a house? Even though there was no money in Frog’s apartment, I suddenly got that feeling.

I smiled at the deliveryman and said, “I am Franco.”

“We got a return.”

“A return?”

“You paid for guaranteed delivery or return.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Sorry, but it wasn’t picked up at the Zurich depot, point of delivery. Sign here.”

I signed and followed him back to the van, where another Pakistani man had lined up four wooden crates, each big enough to hold a television. The five crates had customs stickers on them.

Swiss and U.S. customs stickers.

You are not an idiot, Father Gomez. You know what was in those crates, buried under used paperbacks.

IT TOOK ME TWO DAYS
to take care of business, tie up loose ends, and pack up the Camaro with a few essential belongings. One thing you learn as a feeler: People have way too much crap. As you know, I did not have much, and most of that I did not care about. I had bought four suitcases to hold the valuable belongings. You’ll find it funny to learn, Father, that the four suitcases I bought were the cheapest I could find, plaid ones, like the one with the eight hundred thousand. Fate and irony share the same bed.

I cleaned out my own apartment in two hours with three laborers.

One final visit to the monster toad under the stairs was necessary. I needed to give him the keys; he needed to give me my deposit.

I did not even knock on his door—the landlord was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.

“You never did learn to sort your recyclables, Martinez.”

He stepped aside as I approached, a garment bag over my shoulder. “Here is your key. The deposit?”

As though trying to think of some last-minute reason not to
give it to me, the landlord pulled a wad of bills reluctantly from his pocket. “That the only key? What about that Jersey girl, or that other one, the stomper?”

I dropped the key in his hand and turned mine over for the cash. “No copies.”

Instead of putting the money in my hand, he made me take it from his. I laughed at the last idiotic gesture. Done with his games, my mind was somewhere on an interstate headed west.

“Lemme guess,” he said to my back. “You’re movin’ to Jersey.”

As the vestibule door closed, I gave him a thumbs-up, a smile, and a final remark.

“Bayonne is the new Brooklyn.”

I knew that would upset him for days, perhaps even weeks. A parting gift from me to the monster toad.

Happy to be leaving, I was also nervous. Yes, the prospect of a new life in a strange place was one reason. The other was that I was anticipating something going wrong. Fanny and Speedy could be in the car behind me, or perhaps Hugo had escaped and was closing in, or even just some crazy tractor trailer would plow into my car and stop my trip at the start.

Or was I was sensing something else?

From the very beginning of this story, Father, I have more than once mentioned fate, and what a strange thing it can be. If I had to ascribe meaning to my tale? One often hears the phrase “tempting fate.” But you see, I do not believe we as humans have much sway with that old bastard fate. He can no more be tempted than he can be avoided or dissuaded. What I wonder is when does fate let you go and destiny take you in hand? Was I at just such a juncture? I drove toward the traffic light at the avenue.

Left turn: the Belt Parkway, Verrazano Bridge, Staten Island,
the four-thousand-mile expanse of gas stations and shopping malls and my birthright.

Right turn: deepest, darkest Brooklyn, my homeland.

Of course, I am not sure what you feel about fate, Father. Since you spend a lot of time praying and talking to God, I guess you must believe there is a way of influencing how things turn out. Like many, I wish I felt that were true. Like many, I wanted to try to make it true.

I made a right turn, and in ten minutes I was at East Brooklyn Hospital.

Dexter’s room was filled with flowers from all of Brooklyn’s most notables, various unions, the borough president, and even the mayor of all New York City. It was quite touching, really. How much of it was sentiment directed toward keeping Dexter from any deathbed confessions about dirty business? It would have been interesting to know.

Dexter had a room to himself, one with a view much like the view from his office at the
Brooklyn Gazette.
Through the window I could see the distant Wonder Wheel twinkling in the Coney Island sunshine. In front of that window was a one-eyed mummy, on his back, on a bed. Dexter’s head was completely wrapped in bandages—all except for a slit for his mouth and a hole for the left eye. As I approached, the eye turned my way.

“Dexter . . . hello, I came to see how you are.”

A purple eyelid blinked slowly. The rest of him was completely motionless.

“I guess that was a stupid thing to say. Obviously, you are not well. And in some small way, I feel it is my fault. I never should have come to see you at the
Gazette
that night.”

His left hand rose slowly, and he waved it at a pad of paper and pen on the sheets next to him. I stepped closer.

“You want to write something?”

The left hand gave me a thumbs-up. Gingerly, I put the pen in his hand and held the pad for him to write. He did so, slowly.

“You know, Dexter, this whole mess was like the hand of ill fate was at every turn. But I was glad for your help, and I wanted you to know I appreciated it very much, and that if there’s anything I can do to help you now, that you should tell me, and you can consider it done. We may not be able to control what happens all the time, to influence our own fate, but I am thinking that perhaps we can influence other people’s fate. Does that make some sort of sense?”

He stopped writing and lowered the pen. I turned the pad toward me. Scrawled on the pad were the words:

TRUX ATLAS

I did not understand.

“You mean Mr. Trux. I cleaned his house. It was the house next door to the Trux house, the one Frog cleaned, that had the Atlas armored car heist money in it.”

He waved the pen impatiently and scrawled once more. I turned the pad, and it was one word, underlined:

DRIVER

“Driver? I don’t understand.” I was an idiot, and once more he waved his pen and scribbled impatiently:

TRUX INSIDE MAN

I blinked at the words, then looked at the mummy’s bloodshot, watery eye.

“Trux was the Atlas armored car driver?”

Dexter gave me a thumbs-up and let his exhausted hand drop.

“The money I found, in the tight ones under the couch, that was the inside man’s money?” That was why Dexter wanted to
meet me at the Trux house on Vanderhoosen, to explain that. “The armored car driver was Trux.”

His thumb flicked yes.

“Ah, so that explains it.” It also explained why Fanny was so sure the money was there. She knew the old fart was holding out on her, that he was in on the heist, and she was just waiting to swoop in once he died and grab it at the first opportunity. Only her timing was off. “And . . . do the police know this?”

His thumb flicked.

“Ah. Well, I guess you warned me that you might have to spill the beans. But they have not come to see me.”

The first and middle finger of Dexter’s left hand mimicked legs running across his sheets. The mummy’s watery eye beheld me, unblinking.

I HURRIED DOWN TO THE
car and revved her up. I was glad to have stopped in and said my piece and expressed my regrets on Dexter’s unfortunate incident with Danny, but the mummy was right. This was no time to sit still. I had containers stuffed with cash waiting for me. Better to get a move on before the cops or anybody else found me and tried to take my destiny away.

I made a left on the avenue and then a right on the parkway, angling away from my former residence and toward the highway.

I stopped at a light.

An orange car pulled up on the left, and I shivered.

Thankfully, it was not Fanny and Speedy but a Rastafarian.

My breathing was uneven, and my grip on the steering wheel sweaty. Something bad was going to happen, one more shot across the bow of my galleon from fate.

At the next light, the orange car was again on my left, the music from its stereo system so loud that my whole car vibrated. That is when he suddenly turned the music way down. That is when I noticed a police car pull up on my right.

The officer was looking at me. A small two-finger salute and a fragile smile was my response to his stare. The light turned green, and the orange car and I moved forward at exactly the same speed, not wanting to excite the police. The Rasta and I exchanged a glance. Then I checked my rearview mirror. The cop was following, slowly.

Morty, you are being paranoid. The entrance to the Belt Parkway is five blocks ahead. You can even see the big green highway sign from here. From the ramp to the Verrazano is maybe ten minutes, and in a half hour you’ll be in New Jersey. Four or five days after that we’ll be on the veranda of your new home.

I could hardly wait to walk through the gate of the new house, into the area enclosed by stone walls overflowing with bougainvillea. The front door’s iron knob cold in my hand, I would twist it, feel the heavy old latch lift, and the giant oaken door would slowly swing open. Sun would be spilling in the windows at the far side of the room, the air cool, dark, and smelling of old leather and stone. Softly, in the distance, would be the strum of a street musician’s guitar. Turning to my right I would see the large array of French doors leading to the veranda. Halfway to those doors, I would stop and turn slowly to see the courtyard. And the fountain.

The big green sign sailed overhead. My blinker was on for the ramp.

The ramp was blocked.

By a police car.

The Rasta was still next to me, his eyes wide, and he continued straight past the ramp, unhindered. I signaled left to follow the Rasta, but another police car was suddenly on my left.

The officer was pointing for me to pull over.

I brought the Camaro to a stop, my heart bucking. Was entering
my new home all some fantasy? It felt so real that it must be something that would happen.