Authors: Bill Loehfelm
Fresh Kills (17 page)
“Probably. Want me to swing back here and get you first? Might do you some good to get out.”
She looked at me over the door.
“I know,” I said, “might do me some good to stay in.” I looked around at the walls. “This house is killing me.”
“I know it’s hard for you being here,” she said. “It’s tough on both of us.” She let the fridge door swing closed. She hadn’t taken anything out of it. “But I appreciate you being here. I’m grateful for the effort.”
“No problem,” I said. “I might be late.”
“I know,” Julia said.
I grabbed my jacket off the arm of the couch.
“Is Waters gonna tell us anything useful?” she asked.
“Doubt it,” I said. “Nothing that’s gonna change the facts.”
EIGHT
WATERS, AWASH IN BLUE NEON AND SMOKING A CIGARETTE, STOOD outside the diner as I turned the corner out of the parking lot.
“Didn’t know you still did that,” I said.
“Every now and again,” he said, “when the night tour bores me silly.” He offered me one. I declined and lit one of my own. He checked his watch. “You’re early. Didn’t know you did that ever.”
“I like to throw the world a curve every now and again,” I said. “When it bores me silly.”
I turned and looked at the fountain out in front of the diner— three leaping metallic silver dolphins, brightly spotlit. It was a horrendous contraption, but it matched the building, which was silver plated and piped with blue neon. The Golden Dove. It made perfect sense, in a Staten Island kind of way. “That new? The fountain?”
“Relatively,” Waters said. “Year or two.” He flicked his cigarette into the street. “I just chased away a gang of kids thieving the change out of it. Their parents yelled at me like I was beating the little punks.”
“Well, they probably couldn’t see your badge,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah, that was it. C’mon, let’s eat.”
I looked through the windows; the place was packed. I could hear the screaming kids from outside. One smeared chocolate pudding on the window. “We can do this out here. I got plenty of smokes. It’s a mess in there.”
“Relax,” Waters said. “Owners’ll give us a quiet booth. My treat.”
That raised my eyebrows. “Generous.”
“Purvis really does not like you,” he said, heading up the stairs in front of me. “You’re probably all right.”
“Where’s the Boy Wonder?” I asked.
“Running errands. I don’t wanna get any on my shoes while you two are pissing on each other. And another thing, I heard about your performance down at the deli. No more of that shit.”
“Yeah, Purvis gave me the message,” I said.
“I want you to hear it from me. Any more bullshit like that and I cut you out of the loop.”
I blew on my coffee. “Whatcha got?”
“We understand each other?”
“All right,” I said.
“Tell me we understand each other,” he said.
“We understand each other. Now, what’ve you got?”
He raised his hands in caution. “Nothing huge, but something. I gotta ask you some questions first. I want answers, real answers, no ‘I hate Daddy’ bullshit.” He stared at me, I guess to prove he was serious. “Be an adult.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can behave.”
“Did your father’s interest in sports extend beyond football?”
He was trying to lead me, but I knew where he was going. I’d taken the same thoughts and basically the same question to Fontana’s doorstep only hours before. Unfortunately, Waters would get as much info from me as I’d gotten from Fontana.
“As far as I know, he never bet on games,” I said. “He watched football religiously. Jets and Giants. Believe me, I know. I had to sit there right beside him every Sunday until I was in high school. Mass in the morning, football all afternoon. One hour for God, six for the NFL. He knew a hell of a lot about the game, like a freakishly large amount, even for an ex-player, but he was just a fan. Why?”
“Maybe too close to home,” Waters said, more to himself than to me. “Was he into anything else? Basketball? Hockey?”
“Basketball, a little bit,” I said. “I can remember the Knicks being on every now and then. Him yelling at the TV. But my mom wasn’t wild about him watching the games. His commentary had, let’s say, racial overtones my mom didn’t like.”
The hockey question made me think. Molly had been a huge hockey fan, and so, naturally, I became one. I remembered, suddenly, that in a brief experiment, I’d tried to win my father over to hockey, thinking there was enough hitting and fighting to satisfy him. And that my interest in that hitting might get him to lay off me a little bit, even if I had come to the sport by way of a girl.
We made it through a few weeks of the season, watching the Rangers on TV. He let me teach him the rules. We might’ve even talked about going to the Garden for a game. He liked the violence and the speed, but ultimately couldn’t take to a sport dominated by Canadians and Europeans. Their names were too difficult to yell at the television. “Hockey had too many foreigners for him,” I told Waters. “Even if they are white.”
“Anything else? College ball? Baseball?”
“Nah. He never watched college anything. My father hated baseball, said it was too slow. That it wasn’t a real sport, I guess because there was no violence in it. Wasn’t manly enough for him. He never understood it, though, that was the problem. The precision, the strategy, the way the possibilities of the game were always shifting.” I stopped, realizing I was drifting. I had fifteen examples to make my case at the ready and caught myself hoping Waters would want me to continue.
“You’re a fan, I take it,” Waters said.
“Big time,” I said.
“That’s nice. Let’s stick to the subject.”
“Fine,” I said, irked that he cut me off. He was the one who kept asking questions when I’d already answered the important one. So I answered it again. “My father wasn’t a gambler. He had all the normal debts a guy has, and he hated those. No way he’d risk a debt with some bookie, or some loan shark.”
Waters sighed. I could tell from the look on his face that I was telling him things he already knew. But I respected the effort.
“Like you said, he knew a lot about the game,” Waters said. “Don’t forget, I played with him. He’d change the coaches’ plays on the field. Nine times out of ten, he was right.” He paused. “I always thought he’d have made a good coach, if it wasn’t for that temper of his.”
“A lot might be different,” I said, “if not for that temper.”
“Your father never did let go of his football career,” Waters said, his tone apologetic. “I thought maybe he found a way to stay in it. A lot of ex-athletes, they can never let go of that adrenaline and develop some bad habits trying to hang on to it. Your mother’s gone; you and Julia are out of the house. He had a lot of voids to fill. Your grandfather was a gambler.”
I thought of Waters, and his career, maybe a few bad habits developed in the decades he’d spent wearing a uniform and playing defense for the City of New York. He had his own voids to fill. Weird that my father, the selfish bastard, got the family with the nice house, and Waters, who seemed on the whole a pretty all right guy, ended up with nothing. It just seemed to be the way things had always gone with them.
“Sorry,” I said. Waters pushed because he wanted whatever ideas he had to match the facts. Here he was trying hard to prove my father was a degenerate gambler, and all I felt was guilty for disappointing him. I raised my empty hands. “My father was a big-time drunk. That one bad habit took up all his time. He knew what gambling did to his old man.”
“Let’s finish this outside,” Waters said. He threw some money on the table.
I reached for my wallet. He tried to talk me out of it, but I threw a ten on the table anyway. “Toward the tip. Karma.”
We stopped at the counter for coffee to go.
“Give,” I said, when we got back to the street.
“We found a witness. Guy called us today.”
“You got someone there who actually saw it?” I asked.
“Saw a little bit,” Waters said. “Seems there was a line inside the store that morning. This guy was at the end of it as a particularly attractive member of the female persuasion walked by, heading toward the train station. He was leaning back, looking out the door at her when the car pulled up. He got a pretty good look at the car, caught a glimpse of the guy. We got partial descriptions of both.”
“That’s not a whole lot,” I said. “The girl?” She would’ve turned at the shot, had a view of the license plate.
“Disappeared,” Waters said. “But, listen, any particulars help. We got build, race, and clothing on the guy. Last night, we picked up the car.”
That caught my attention. “Where?”
“South Beach parking lot. It was stolen. Couple of kids called in a torch job. There was enough left to give us a pretty solid ID on the vehicle.” He stopped, looked down at his shoes.
“But?”
Waters sighed, rubbed his temples. “But not enough to get us closer to who was driving it.” He looked at me. “Not yet, anyway.”
I took a hard drag on my cigarette, a long drink of coffee. I was pissed, and disappointed. The coffee was awful, and cold. After all that suspense, despite his warning, I really thought Waters had news about an arrest, or at least a warrant. Something solid. I wanted the whole picture and all I kept getting were bits and pieces. Nobody, it seemed, including people who were there and people paid to find out, knew much more about my father’s demise than I did.
“You wanna tell me about the car?” I asked. “The kids who called it in?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’ve got the murder weapon,” I said.
“This ain’t TV,” Waters said. “The gun doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“But it could if you could trace it,” I said. “Learn its history.”
“Stop it, Junior.”
“Tell me about the girl,” I said. “I might have better luck than you digging her up.”
Waters snorted. “Yeah, right. Why don’t I give you a little tin badge and your gun back? That’d work out great. You showed some real skill at the deli.”
“Well, it is my gun,” I said.
“Just stop,” Waters said. “Stay out of it. You said we understood each other.”
“Forget I asked,” I said, waving my free hand in the air. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”
“You’re sure?” Waters asked. “About the gambling?” He laced his fingers together in front of his face. “I know there was no love lost, but blood does funny things.”
“Positive,” I said. “My father didn’t like owing anyone. Learned it from his father. Debt made him crazy. My mother explained it to me often. I had no idea they were even making book out of that place, and I’m sure he didn’t, either.”
“We never thought so,” Waters said. “But we were gonna start looking, if your father had been gambling there.” He shook his head. “I knew it was bullshit. Who does hits in their own front yard?”
Waters glanced over my shoulder. I turned and spotted Purvis’s car idling at a red light a couple of blocks away. I wondered if he’d ever worked up the nerve to tell Waters the whole truth about him and Julia. Maybe I should take care of it myself, I thought. Just to be sure. It was probably best to do it with all three of us together.
“You know, Purvis was at the house this afternoon,” I said. “Preening and posing on the front lawn for Julia, making like there’d been a big break in the case. But he didn’t tell me any of this.” I turned to Waters. “I’m telling you, he’s fucking with the wrong guy. He keeps trying to be a hero for my sister and it’s getting on my nerves.”
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