Night Passage (4 page)

Jo Jo let the cable go slack on the lat pull machine and mopped his face with a hand towel, waiting for the lactic acid to drain from his muscles.

“So he needs to get the dough into banks so that he can transfer it around, maybe overseas.”

“Like to a numbered Swiss bank account,” Jo Jo said.

“Sure,” Fusco said, “like that. Anyway what you do is go around with a sack full of cash and buy cashier’s checks or money orders for amounts small enough so they don’t get reported.”

“What happens then?”

“You give them to me.”

“What do you do with them?”

“None of your business.”

“Aw, Fusco, come off it. You know I’m all right or you wouldn’t have told me this much. What happens to the checks and money orders, they get sent to a Swiss bank?”

Fusco grinned. “You really like them Switzers, don’t you,” he said. “Usually it’s the branch of some South American bank in Florida.”

“So don’t they get reported?”

“No. It’s not a cash deal. CTRs are required only for cash.”

“CTR?”

Jo Jo had begun a second set, holding his upper body still, isolating the muscles. His voice showed no sign of strain.

“Cash Transaction Report.”

“So you change the cash into something else and you don’t have to report it,” Jo Jo said.

“Bada bing,” Fusco said, shooting at Jo Jo with his forefinger. “You want some?”

“How much?”

“Half a percent,” Fusco said. “Everything you smurf. Plus expenses.”

Jo Jo pulled the bar toward him and moved a huge stack of iron plates up by means of a cable-and-pulley arrangement. He held the bar tight against his stomach, then very slowly let it down. Fusco watched him with admiration.

“You gotta focus on the muscle,” Jo Jo said. “You got to be thinking about it when you work it. On this one it’s the lats, nothing else, just think about the lats, Fusco.”

“Half a percent,” Fusco said again. “You interested?”

“Sure,” Jo Jo said.

In Tucumcari Jesse stopped at a Holiday Inn just off the interstate on old Route 66. There was a gas station across the street, and a field where horses and one mule grazed, and nothing else. He had a club sandwich in the motel restaurant and got some ice and went to his room where he sat with the door open and sipped scotch and watched the few people still using the pool in the courtyard. There was a couple with two children using the pool. The children were unpleasant—unkind to each other, demanding of their parents. The father looked awkward in his ill-fitting bathing suit, white-bodied, hairy, and soft. The mother was bottom-heavy and knew it, wearing a bathing suit with a tiny skirt in a useless attempt to conceal her disproportion. Her parents were with them. The grandmother was a thin old woman in matching beige pants and blouse. Her hair was evenly gray and curled tightly to her head. Whenever the mother spoke sharply to one of her children, the grandmother would intervene. The grandfather looked like he might once have done heavy labor. His forearms were still thick and there was a hint of muscle pack in his sloped shoulders. But his stomach was big and his white legs in their pink polyester shorts were blue-veined and rickety-looking. The grandfather had a grim look, as if the family trip had not been his idea. Jesse imagined the man’s dismay at his family. Still it was family, three generations of it. Jesse felt remote as he sat, as if he were viewing himself from far away, a tiny figure, diminished by distance, dwindling as he sat…. In the morning he was on the interstate before seven and crossed into the Texas panhandle before eight. There were signs for Big John’s Steak House in Amarillo. A seventy-two-ounce steak. Eat it in an hour and get it free. By ten he was in Amarillo. Big John was not alone. The highway was suddenly beset by motels and fast food, car dealers and steak houses and gas stations. Then he was out of Amarillo and back onto the plains. The Big John’s signs faced the other way now, luring the westbound travelers. On each side of the highway the open range reappeared, dotted occasionally with cattle grazing on the unappetizing brown grass. Once in a while there would be a gate, usually made of iron piping, with a sign indicating a cattle baronage. But he never saw any houses, or any cowboys, mostly just brown grassland beyond the wire fencing that lined the highway, and now and then a water cistern. The grass did not look nourishing. He had the cruise control on seventy, but the distances were so great and the sky so high and the horizon so distant that the car seemed in the ulteriority of his imagination a beetle scuttling without measurable progress beneath a limitless sky across an uncomprehending plain … They’d been married a month when they had dinner at a table in the rear at Spago with Elliott Krueger. He had been across the street from Spago once, at 2:35 in the morning, on the crime-scene team, when a Chicano coke dealer named Street Duck had been killed by somebody who shot him five times in the stomach at close range with a nine-millimeter pistol. No one had seen the shooting. Elliott was about fifty. His thick black hair was touched with gray, his short careful beard was touched with more. He was medium height, medium build. He didn’t look like he exercised. He had on an unconstructed linen jacket with the sleeves pushed up over his forearms. He wore a Rolex watch. It had been Jesse’s experience that people who really had a lot of money didn’t waste it on Rolex watches. In the bad neighborhoods, on the other hand, a Rolex watch on a kid meant he was so tough that no one dared to take it away from him. Elliott had a girlfriend with him. Her name was Taffy. She seemed about sixteen, but she might have been twenty. Wearing a flowered dress with a very short ruffled skirt, she sat silently beside Elliott like an obedient spaniel waiting for a command.

“It’s my business to know this sort of thing,” Elliott said to Jesse. “And your wife here has the goods.”

Jesse nodded.

“Oh, Elliott,” Jennifer said. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

“My right hand to God,” Elliott said, and put his right hand in the air. “I see twenty girls a day. All of them are good-looking. Everybody out here is good-looking, you know? But none of them come alive through the lens like you do, Jennifer.”

Jesse sipped the tall scotch and soda he’d ordered.

“What are you working on now, Elliott?” Jennifer said.

“Got a thing in development at Universal,” Elliott said. “Absolutely amazing story about a plastic surgeon, got an Oedipal deal going with his mother. Women come to him for a makeover and he does a surgical reconstruction so that they look like his mother, then he kills them. Great vehicle for Tommy Cruise.”

“I love the concept,” Jennifer said. “Do you love it, Jesse?”

“Love it,” Jesse said. Tommy Cruise.

“Maybe I can bring you aboard, Jesse, you know, you being a cop and all, could use a little professional consult on this. You ever dealt with psychopathic killers?”

“Not my job to decide if they’re psychopaths,” Jesse said.

“Oh, Jesse,” Jennifer said, “you know what he means.”

“Well, you murder somebody,” Jesse said, “probably something wrong with you.”

“Well, I may give you a ringo, soon as I teach this idiot writer I’m working with how to write a screenplay.”

“He’s never written one?” Jennifer said.

“No, he’s a damn novelist, you know?”

“The worst.”

“You got that right,” Elliott said. “Can’t tell them shit.”

He sighed thoughtfully for a moment, looking around the room, then he patted his chest over his shirt pocket, and frowned, and took a twenty-dollar bill out of his pants pocket and handed it to his girlfriend.

“Taffy,” he said, “go get me some cigarettes.”

Taffy took the money and headed for the bar near the waiting area out front.

“I like it back here,” Elliott said. “Lotta people like it out front where everyone can see them. Real Hollywood, right? I’m not into that.”

“Don’t blame you,” Jesse said. He knew Jennifer liked him to talk around industry people.

“I’m a blue-collar guy, you know, Jesse. I make pictures.”

Jesse had never heard of any picture that Elliott had made. But he didn’t pay much attention to movies. He thought they were boring, except for westerns. Of which there weren’t many new ones. Taffy came back with the cigarettes. The waitress brought them another round of drinks.

Elliott said, “Lemme tell you a little more about this picture, Jenn.”

Jesse took a long pull on his scotch and soda, feeling the cold thrust of it down his throat, waiting for the good feeling to follow…. In Oklahoma City he turned northeast, toward St. Louis. He was in the central time zone now. He could remember listening to Vin Scully broadcasting the games from St. Louis, right at suppertime. It was as if he knew St. Louis, the ballpark glowing in the close summer night, the Mississippi running past. Bob Gibson, past his prime but still ferocious. Bake McBride, Ted Simmons. It was how he knew much of the country: Scully’s effortless voice from Wrigley Field and Three Rivers and Shea and Fulton County Stadium, a kind of panoramic linkage under the dark skies of the Republic. He’d listened to Vin Scully all his life. Vin Scully was authority, containment, certainty. Vin Scully was home. He reached St. Louis in the late afternoon with the rush-hour traffic clogging the interstate. He crossed the Mississippi and pulled off the interstate and found Busch Stadium, near the river. In front, a statue of Stan Musial. Jesse sat in the car for a moment and stared at the statue.

“Stan Musial,” he said.

Jennifer would never have understood. Maybe no one could who had not played. The feel of it. The smell of the field, the way the skin of the infield felt under your spikes. The way your hands and arms and upper body felt when you hit the ball square, on the fat part of the bat. Maybe you had to have played to hear the oral poetry of chatter and heckling, the jock humor that lingered at the poles of arrogance and self-effacement, the things umpires said every time they defended a call, the things the first baseman said every time, out of the corner of his mouth, while he watched the pitcher, if you reached first on a lucky blooper. They didn’t know that when you were in the field waiting for the pitcher to throw, or that when you were at bat trying to pick up the spin of a curve ball, you didn’t hear the crowd or the coaches or anyone else. They didn’t know that you were in a place of silence that seemed unregulated by time. Though they were men and they often spent time in the company of men, Jennifer’s friends didn’t have any feel for men in groups. Many of them seemed more at ease with women … after a cocktail party in the interests of Jennifer’s career they had a fight about it.

“Why were they so boring?” Jennifer said.

“They don’t know anything that matters,” he said.

“They are successful people in the business,” Jennifer said.

“Nobody in the business knows what matters,” Jesse had said.

“For Christ’s sake, they talked with you about baseball all night.”

“They don’t know anything about baseball,” Jesse said. “They just knew the names of a bunch of players.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Jennifer said.

As he left St. Louis it began to rain, spitting at first, and then more of a steady mist. He stayed the night in a motel in Zanesville, Ohio, and when he came out to the car in the morning it was still dark after sunrise and the rain was coming steadily. He pulled into the Exxon station next to the motel, a half block from the interstate ramp. Most people weren’t up yet in Zanesville. The empty roadways gleamed in the rain reflecting the bright lights of the gas station. He pumped his own gas and when he went in to pay bought himself coffee and two plain donuts in the convenience section. The man behind the counter had a shiny bald head and a neat beard. He wore a crisp white shirt with the cuffs turned back and there was a small tattoo on his right forearm that said “Duke” in ornate blue script.

“Early start,” the man said.

“Long way to go,” Jesse said.

“Where you heading?”

The man made change automatically, as if his hands did the counting.

“Massachusetts.”

“Long way is right,” the man said. “Never been there myself.”

Jesse pocketed his change and took his coffee and donuts.

“Safe trip,” the man said.

There were places like this all across the country, dependent on the interstate, open early, bright, smelling of coffee, not unfriendly. The interstate was an entity of its own, a kind of transcontinental neighborhood, filled with single people, who hung out in the neighborhood places. He swung up onto Interstate 70 and drove east into the rain, drinking his coffee…. He still didn’t know exactly when she started sleeping with Elliott Krueger. He knew she was out more and later. He would stand sometimes at the window, looking out at North Genesee Street and thinking maybe the next car will be her. He was embarrassed with himself about that, but it seemed as if he had to do it. Sometimes when they were having dutiful sex, a voice in his head, which seemed not even his, would say, This isn’t the first time today she’s done this. The voice was not uncertain. The voice knew. He knew. But then he didn’t know. Despite the passion of their courtship, she had become perfunctory about sex. He couldn’t imagine her being so consumed by desire that she would cheat on him. And he couldn’t imagine that she would even if she were. She wouldn’t do that to me, his own voice would say in his head. She wouldn’t do that to me. As he drove through the wet gray morning toward West Virginia he smiled at himself. It wasn’t about me. It was about her, about what she needed, about being an actress. She needed to be an actress more than she needed to be a cop’s wife. He wondered sometimes what he needed from her. A kind of richness, maybe. The palpability of her, the odd combination of intellect and ditz that she balanced so beautifully. Maybe it made no sense to try to figure. Could anyone list the reasons they loved someone? Probably not. He crossed the Ohio River at Wheeling, the rain dimpling the iron-colored surface of the wide water below the bridge. He liked rivers. They always hinted to him of possibility. The interstate was uphill now in West Virginia, and it curved around the slopes. The big trailer trucks roared through it, sending up a sheet of water as they passed him on the down slopes. On the next hill they would slow, and he would either have to slow to their speed or pass them, only to have them roar past him again as they made up the time on the downgrade. Time was money to truckers. He sympathized with that. But, especially in bad weather, trucks were a pain in the ass. It was part of his own problem, he thought, that he understood Jennifer’s behavior only in terms of himself. She wouldn’t do that to me. But it was human. He didn’t condemn himself, though his one-wayness, too, embarrassed him sometimes when he thought of it. He’d been a cop too long not to understand the limits on human empathy. I thought she didn’t like sex anymore, when in fact, she didn’t like sex anymore with me. Even the sex she liked, as he thought about it, had, maybe, been about getting what she wanted, which, at one time, had been him. Maybe she never really liked sex as much as she seemed to. Maybe once she had used it to catch what she was fishing for, she didn’t enjoy it anymore. Because she liked fishing didn’t mean she had to like fish. The rain came now so thickly that it nearly overwhelmed the wipers. He shifted the Explorer into four-wheel drive as the gleaming interstate wound slickly through the hills. She denied Elliott when she left him, saying she had to get away and wasn’t leaving him for anyone. It was probably meant as a kindness. It probably was a kindness at the time, and by the time she dropped the other shoe and talked about Elliott, he had already begun the process of shoring up his self and could hear it. The night she left and he was alone in the house he looked at his service pistol and picked it up and thought about where to shoot himself. A lot of cops shot themselves. They had the means at hand, and they knew how. Put them ahead of the general populace, he thought, in suicide efficiency. Probably putting the muzzle in his mouth and shooting up and back would be the way most likely to take him out instantly. Cops called it eating your gun. He sat on the bed and hefted the gun and felt comforted by it. If he couldn’t stand her leaving, if she didn’t come back, it was always there. It was a comfort to know it was there. Like booze. If it got bad enough he could always drink. He put the gun back in the drawer by his bed and went and looked out the window…. The rain was a constant. Sometimes it intensified as he drove through the north spur of West Virginia. It was never gentle and sometimes it was intense, and Jesse drove mostly by focusing on the taillights of the car ahead. He had a momentary fantasy of a ten-mile-long line of cars, each driver following the taillights ahead of him going one by one over a cliff as the first driver in the long line missed the turn…. After she had left and he decided to at least postpone shooting himself, he found that it was bad enough to drink. At first nobody noticed much. Then his partner, a fifty-two-year-old guy named Ben Romero, talked to him about it. Jesse listened and shrugged and went about his drinking. After an incident at night when Jesse couldn’t seem to get the handcuffs on a perp, Romero asked for a new partner.