Fresh Kills (18 page)

Where is he? Where is he? I asked everyone I saw. All the way back up to the main floor, out to the street, past the glass cases where Barbies smiled and modeled ball gowns and astronaut suits, beyond stuffed teddy bears, past model trains, and toy pianos and drum kits and shelves of brightly colored books, electronic games that lit up and made noise, and from somewhere the sound of rap music, and me, running. I ran, sweat running down my sides, until I got to the street. I didn't see Billy there, either, but I could still hear Luda screaming.

It was Thursday, early, a few hours after I got home from the party at the toy store when Vera Gorbachev called, crying and yelling stuff at me in Russian.

“Come. Please,” she said. “Now.”

I told her to call 911 if there was a problem, then hung up. I felt heavy as lead. Didn't get much sleep the previous night. I fumbled for a pack of cigarettes and some matches I'd left on the floor after I got home from the party, half out of my mind about Billy, and found him fast asleep on my couch.

I'd already promised him we'd go fishing. For a while I lay in bed, smoking and trying to clear my head. Taking Billy to the party had been a stupid idea. I'd promised him time with me, fishing, baseball, guy stuff, and then I made him go to a party for little girls.

Luda's screams had scared the shit out of him. He took off after he tried comforting her and she kept on bawling. He'd just wanted out and he had walked away from the store and come back to my loft.

I didn't want to leave him alone again, and anyhow I didn't believe Vera Gorbachev was in any kind of real trouble – she
gave off the scent of a woman who wanted a lot of attention. I didn't like her. The way she also gave off a faint smell of malice, along with her neediness – not malice exactly, but some kind of aggression – she reminded me of Big Tina Farone, Billy's grandmother.

Finally, I got out of bed, got dressed, made coffee and woke Billy up. He told me he was sorry he'd left the toy store without saying anything to me. He'd left a message, though. Two messages.

Wearing blue and white striped pajamas that were too small for him, his wrists and ankles sticking out, Billy sat at the kitchen counter and drank a glass of milk. He kept growing out of his clothes, he said. I made toast. Billy asked for jelly.

After he ate, he told me he could laugh about the toy store business now, and he was kind of chagrined – it was his word – that he had been freaked out. The toys, the little girls, the crazy amount of sugar everyone had been eating, him included, and then baby dolls that felt like real flesh – it just got to him. I said it was fine, just to tell me in person when he was taking off. He looked tired. I felt bad for him.

“It's OK, Artie,” said Billy. “It was probably the craziness of it, and the crowd and, if I'm like honest, some of the video games we got to play downstairs were kind of violent.” He rubbed his fists in his eyes. “I'll be fine,” he said. “So you want me to like tell you the actual truth? You won't be mad?”

“You can tell me anything.”

“So this kid they brought along for me, one of the girls' brothers, he was downstairs and we were playing video games and with the electric scooters and cars and stuff, and this kid had some weed. We smoked a little. I didn't feel so good afterwards. I already ate hot dogs and stuff at the game, and then candy, and I was like in the bathroom puking, and I'm like really sorry.” Billy looked like a little boy. “I'm a jerk.”

“Go get a shower,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“For what?”

“Not yelling at me,” said Billy, heading for the bathroom.

“Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“If you want that old denim jacket of mine that's in the closet, you can have it.”

Turning, he beamed at me. “Honest?”

“Sure.”

“That's like so crazy. Thank you. Can I wear it today?”

Couldn't stop thinking about Sonny Lippert's call, the case he was on, the dead girl in Jersey, no name, no ID, just a small, three-year-old Jane Doe, and her killer somehow connected back to May Luca in Sheepshead Bay. May Luca, who had been friends with Billy.

I wanted to ask him about May Luca, see if he recalled anything that might help Lippert on the little Jane Doe in Jersey, but I figured I'd wait. I heard the shower run.Going to Staten Island to see Vera Gorbachev was about the last thing on earth I wanted to do. By the time Billy and I left the loft, I heard the phone ringing; I didn't bother turning back.

Most of the way to Staten Island, Billy was quiet. My old denim jacket was big on him, but he seemed pretty pleased to have it. In his lap was the book about fly-fishing we got at Dubi Petrovsky's shop, and he read while I drove.

When we got to the Verrazano Bridge, Billy looked up from the book and said, “I like your Lily. I think I met her before when I was real little, didn't I? I remember a woman with red hair.”

“She's not mine,” I said. I had been thinking about Lily a lot since the night before.

“Oh, sorry, yeah.”

“Where did you go last night after you left the toy store?”

“Nowhere,” said Billy. “I went to your loft and fell asleep.”

“I tried your phone.”

“I probably forgot to charge it. There's not that many people I can call, so sometimes I forget. But you like Lily, right?”

“I'm married to Maxine. You OK, Billy? I'm not so good with you smoking dope, I'm not.”

“Me either,” he said. “They might send me back or something. Also I felt so horrible, you don't have to worry.”

“I'm not.”

“What I'm like worried about is Luda. I tried to talk to her but she just kept crying. I like her. She's a really cute kid.”

“Yeah, she is.”

“But I like Val better,” he said, awkwardly.

I tried to keep from smiling.

“Luda will be fine,” I said. “Val and Tolya will take her out to Long Island and she'll be fine. Hey, you feel like talking to me about Florida at all?”

“Not really. Is that OK?” He reached for the radio.

“Is the school any good?”

“It's OK, it's fine, honest,” said Billy, settling on a station playing some crap by Eminem. He picked up his fishing book.

“But you don't want to talk about it?”

“Not right now.”

“Is there anything that scares you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know. Being away from home, stuff like that? Being with those other kids?”

“The thing I get scared of is hurricanes,” Billy said. “Last year, you know there were all those storms in Florida and once they evacuated us, and we had to go in buses on the road and there were millions of people in cars, bumper to bumper. No one told us exactly where we were going. I didn't think they really knew, either, it was just like let's go. People were
getting crazy. So, yeah, hurricanes scare me a whole lot. Who are we going to see on Staten Island?”

“A Russian woman. It won't take long. I just have to talk to her.”

“Is there a map?”

“Glove compartment,” I said. “Why?”

Billy got the Staten Island map and spread the stiff paper on his knees. “I like maps,” he said. “I like thinking about places I could go some day.”

“Like where?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere. Maybe Russia some time. Hey, you don't have to worry about me, Artie. I'm having a great time. I know sometimes I get like a little strange, but I'm just sort of not used to, I don't know, a lot of stuff, I mean just being able to decide what I want to eat. I probably missed out on some stuff normal kids know about while I was away. You want gum?” He pulled some Juicy Fruit from his bag and offered me a stick. “Florida's OK because I have a lot of time to read.”

“You want to talk about what you've been reading?”

“Nah, not right now. I don't want to end up like a geek, you know?” Billy said. “So I listen to the kind of music other kids like. Between us, I think rap is so boring. I like classical, and your kind of jazz, but if I told people my age they'd think I was beyond geeky.”

I looked in the rear-view mirror before I put the gum in my mouth.

“You checking to see if that car's there again?” Billy said.

“Just checking on traffic,” I said and folded up the gum.

We chewed and the sugary yellow smell of the gum stank up the car. There wasn't much traffic, Billy fell asleep, and I pressed a button on the radio and got a station playing an old Erroll Garner tune and felt content for a minute.

*

A young cop in uniform was leaning against a patrol car on Vera Gorbachev's block, and when I parked in front of her house he sauntered over. I showed him my badge. He was there, he said, to keep an eye on things.

“Nobody was here yesterday,” I said.

“I don't know about yesterday, all I know is I got the word this morning, keep an eye on the house, the block, that's what they told me, so here I am.” He went back to his car where he picked up a comic book off the hood where he'd left it.

Now there was a cop on the Gorbachev's block, I could probably get away a lot faster. I told Billy, who had been waiting in my car, I'd be back fast

“Am I allowed to take a walk or something?” he said.

“Sure, you're allowed. Just don't go far.”

He didn't answer.

“So humor me,” I said. “I want you close by, I want to talk to this woman, and then I want to have breakfast with you and go fishing and forget everything else. Deal?”

“You said it!”

Slumped on her leather sofa, hands holding the sides of her head, Vera Gorbachev was still in the same blue spandex pants as yesterday; shredded Kleenex covered her lap. Even when she talked, mumbling in Russian, she kept crying. Hard to understand. Hard to believe this was the same woman who had come on to me the day before.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

Through the window I saw Billy; he was leaning against my car, smoking a cigarette. He saw me, made a face; I smiled back.

“Please, try to stop crying,” I said to Vera. “I can't understand what you're saying.”

Dragging one of her hands across her eyes, she left a black smear of mascara. “They threaten me,” she said.

“Who threatens you?”

“Who, I don't know. They make my husband disappear and then last night calls start,” said Vera. “They tell me to shut up about everything or they come for me too, and I don't know who they are.”

“Who? Look, I can't help you if you don't tell me, or try to tell me.” I tried to figure out a way to make her stop blubbing. “Could I get a cup of coffee?”

“You think this is Starbucks?” she asked.

“In that case, I'll take a vanilla caramel grande latte cappuccino with a cherry on top,” I said because I couldn't think of anything else. It made her laugh some.

Vera stood up. “I'll make tea.”

“Then make tea.”

In the kitchen, she put water on to boil. I sat at the table. Again she told me how she had been awakened one night a few weeks earlier, how her husband heard the noise, went down and found a burglar, ran after him, then nothing. Repeated the story exactly as if someone had coached her. Footprints near a swampy area about a mile from the house had been found, said Vera, but kids used the place at night to drink and smoke in crappy boats tied up to a landing there.

“What else?”

The water boiled, Vera made tea. From the fridge she took a plate with a chocolate cake on it.

“No cake,” I said. “Thank you.”

Ignoring me, she began slicing up the cake, got plates, put everything on the table, waited while I drank some tea.

“Tell me,” she said. “How does he run, tell me this?”

“What?” I ate a piece of cake. “Who?”

“One of feet missing. Hard for him to run, even with good fake foot and shoes.”

“Who?”

“My husband. Al.”

“You mean one of his shoes is missing?”

“Feet.”

“They cut off his feet?” I said.

Eating cake, Vera began to cry again.

The husband had a couple missing toes was all, but it took me a while to work it out. Turned out that Al Laporello lost them from frostbite during a visit to Russia when he was a young American guy on an exchange program. Apparently Laporello was a space nut and somehow he managed a visit to Yuri Gagarin's house. It was the dead of winter when Al visited the town of Gagarin, and he stayed out so long, he got frostbite. His missing toes had nothing to do with the little girl in Jersey whose feet were cut off, just coincidence; it didn't mean anything.

Yuri Gagarin, hero of Soviet space, was the thing that had made us superior to the Americans. In school, teachers talked about Gagarin and his face was everywhere, on posters, on plastic bags. He was what passed for a rock star. His face, the space suit, the helmet were imprinted on my brain forever.

Stuff like that stayed tucked in a crease in your mind, the kind of useless information that silted up your brain and filled your hard drive until it crashed and then you were old, and crazy, overrun by some kind of dementia.

I had never been to Gagarin, but Vera Gorbachev's husband, Al Laporello, an Italian American from Staten Island, had gone.

“On the phone, did you recognize any of the voices?” I asked Vera.

“I'm not sure they are really Russian, these guys have accents.”

“Guys?”

“Yes,” she said.

“More than one?”

“I don't know.”

“How many calls?”

“Six in last two days.”

“Why didn't you mention it yesterday?”

The tears ran down her face again. “I forgot.”

“What kind of voice?”

“Not so old,” Vera said. “Middle-aged is possible. Young is possible. Also like someone who learns Russian. Accent.”