Staten Island Noir (9 page)

The rent-a-cop sighs, puts down his Arby's, and starts to get out of the car. "I'm going to need to see some—"

At that moment Manny does the last rational thing he will do on the final night of his life. With his Maglite still chomped in his teeth like a panatela, he pulls his Kel-Tec P-11 out of his waistband and shoots the guy between the eyes. The report rings out, echoing across the trash-saturated emptiness. Inertia keeps the guy standing up for a second, dead on his feet. Then a dark stain starts to spread around his khaki crotch. His ears twitch and he collapses with a dull thump.

"GodDAMNit!" Manny has no idea what to do.

He stands there for what feels to him like hours but is probably more like five minutes, wondering if rent-a-cop reinforcements are on the way. He searches the body and the car; no sign of a walkie-talkie. Maybe the guy wasn't in communication with base, or whatever.

So what does he do next, the dumbshit? Well, he says to himself, I gotta get rid of this body, and I might as well get rid of the van too, so—and this is the logic of a lifelong dullard—he sets the van on fire with the rent-a-cop's body in it. It promptly catches the gas tank and, as Manny hurries off, the whole thing explodes, taking the hut and a pile of garbage with it. A huge plume of smoke and orange flame claws into the air.

Manny floors the Impala, banking off a pile of old kitchen appliances and skidding along the dark dirt road as he tries to regain control of the wheel. Behind him, everything is fire and thick soot.

As he gets back onto the West Shore Expressway a few minutes later, he hears sirens in the distance. He diligently uses his turn signal to get back onto I-278.

Manny is crossing the Goethals for the second time in an hour when he notices that something is caught in the passenger-side windshield wiper of the Impala. He can't quite see what it is, so he turns on the wipers. The only thing that tells him what he's looking at is the Dole sticker. It is an old banana peel, decayed beyond recognition.

Nervously, Manny starts singing underneath his breath:
"Undercover angel . . . midnight fantasy . . . I've never had a dream that made sweet love to me . . ."

In the trunk, the Spencers do not hear him. They are, after all, dead.

 

III. MEANWHILE

Two days pass.

No one hears from Manny.

Multiple police departments are sniffing around.

The disappearance of the Spencers after what looks like a violent struggle has made the
Bergen Record
. On the radio, 1010 WINS is calling it a possible home invasion by a stranger and telling people in North Jersey to lock their doors.

The rent-a-cop's murder has made the
Advance
, the
Daily News
, the
Post
, and even the
New York Times
.

The informal loan outfit is not happy. Which means the duly appointed agents are not happy.

Phone calls are made. Arrangements are set up. Money changes hands.

Another day passes.

 

IV. THE END, MY ONLY FRIEND

I had always liked Manny despite his shortcomings. But the world has to evolve. Hopey I don't know about, but we definitely have to be changey. The trouble with Manny was that he couldn't change. He got stuck in his own rut and created his own feedback loop.

So here's how it ended, ten years ago today:

Three days have passed. The cops in Ho-Ho-Kus have cordoned off the Spencer home and started an investigation. Neighbors are worried. One reports she saw a guy carrying carpets out to the trunk of some Chevy. A Lumina, she thinks it might have been.

On Staten Island, the rent-a-cop's murder is being investigated as some kind of mob hit. Turns out the kid, who had the job only because someone's uncle's cousin's brother-in-law got him on the books, was linked to some crime family down in Philly. His name was Pascale. He was studying computer science.

Manny has not called in to the duly appointed agents. The cops find his StarTAC in the parking lot of the Showplace bowling alley, and find it has a lot of calls to numbers that are entirely too close for comfort if you happen to be one of the aforementioned agents.

In fact, Manny is on hour seventy-five of a full-on, tri-state panic attack. He has driven from Staten Island to Watchung, from Totowa to New Haven, trying to figure out what the fuck to do with the bodies in the Impala's trunk. He considers briefly dumping them in the water in Bridgeport, but the docks are too well patrolled. He even starts heading, via back roads, to Rhode Island, where he thinks he can dump them in the salt marshes on the coast. But, in quick succession:

He overheats his engine heading east on I-95.

He (you'll love this one) flags down an AAA truck for help.

He manages, somehow, to keep the AAA guys out of the trunk. They fix things and go on their way.

He turns around, heads back toward Jersey, makes it to Secaucus, where he buys a disposable cell phone. Then he thinks: I'll go back to Staten Island. I'll just sneak into the landfill from another direction and dump the bodies. Brilliant.

He is panicking. He hasn't showered in four days, hasn't eaten in two. He's surviving on Jolt and NoDoz. The ticking clock is haunting him, floating above him in his mind like it used to in those 1950s noir flicks that starred actors like Edmond O'Brien. He actually thinks he can see the clock in the sky as he crosses the Goethals yet again, cursing the Spencers and the duly appointed agents and Goethals himself, whoever the fuck he was.

Manny approaches Fresh Kills again. It's about one a.m. on Saturday, and nature, as it will forever do, is reasserting itself. Like the garbage that encircles them for acres upon acres, Josephine and Conrad Spencer are starting to putrefy.

In the driver's seat, with the air-conditioning on, Manny can't really smell them. But the moment he gets out of the Impala, the odor that envelops it is almost intolerable. This makes him very paranoid at red lights. What's worse, the remnants of Josephine's Dior Poison, freshly applied to the nape of her neck only ninety minutes before Manny cracked it over the Eames armrest, is still a potent ingredient in the olfactory mix. It's as if hell were slow-roasting a pork shoulder one evening and trying to cover up the scent with some demonic Glade Solid.

Manny has nowhere to go, no place left to turn. So he does what he's always done in these dead-end situations, where there are no more options: he calls me.

"I'm fucked," he says. "I need help. This job's gone way bad."

He knows I'll come. I always do. I'm his big brother, after all.

I'm the reason he's so mediocre, or so he likes to tell me. I'm the educated one, the one who (according to Manny) got spoiled and sent to college or (according to me) did the work that pushed me forward. I'm the one our parents had the foresight to send away to my aunt's when they started fighting and having the drug problems. They kept him with them in North Jersey as they fell deeper into their slow slide, through the Nixon and Ford administrations and well into Carter. Talk about general malaise.

I was, of course, expecting his call. See, there's something Manny doesn't know about the whole situation, and it's the key bit of information: Yes, I'm going to help him out if at all possible. But I'm also probably going to end up killing him too.

The informal loan outfit, it seems, has given up on the duly appointed agents. One of the "loan officers" is an old crew buddy of mine and knows that I, like my brother, supplement my legit income with occasional freelance dirty work. He knows that the guy his outfit is trying to track down is my brother. He also knows, and I won't get into why here, that at heart I'm an amoral prick who would do anything for money. He's mostly right.

"Make your brother disappear," my crew buddy tells me. "I don't care how, I don't care where. I don't care if he's dead or living on an estate in the Falkland Islands. Just. Get. Him. Out. Of. Our. Hair."

For that he offers me $11,000. I accept.

That's where my head is when I pull up to a remote corner of the Fresh Kills Landfill, not far from the South Mound, at 2:46 a.m. on Saturday, April 7, 2001. I am going to tell my brother that he has to leave the United States of America for the rest of his life, and that I will give him $8,000 with which to do so, and that we will never see each other again. And that if he comes back to this country and I find out about it, I will kill him.

You may notice that $3,000 of my fee is unaccounted for in my plan. Hey, every job has expenses.

I see Manny lurking in the dark, right where he said he'd be when he called from the pay phone on Forest Avenue. I pop in two sticks of Doublemint and get out of my car. I am driving a gray 1983 Chevy Citation, which I got for $700 from some guy named Honest Achmed in Yonkers. It's the perfect kind of car for this line of work: just old and cheap enough to be ignored, not old enough to be considered classic yet. And easily disposable.

"Thanks for coming." Manny is wired. His voice is pulled taut.

"No problem. Tell me about the last three days." Frantically, kinetically, he recounts the saga from his point of view, leaving nothing out. I am amazed that he can still think coherently, but his tale makes sense. And, from what I know from my employers, it's all true.

I look at him, trying to keep a poker face. "So what are we going to do about this situation?" I am calm, and he sees it. That makes him more tense. He always hated that I knew how to keep my cool when he didn't.

"Do you think I fucking know? Why the fuck do you think I called you?"

"Manny—"

"Don't
Manny
me, dickhead. Just help me." He is trying to be menacing, which he knows doesn't work with me. He just sounds pathetic.

I lay it out for him. Leave the United States, go somewhere, don't come back. Or choose what's behind Door Number 2, which will only end badly.

"Wait. What?" The realization is dawning for my dimbulb brother. "You're working for the fucks who are coming after me?"

"Yeah, Manny, and if it were anyone else working for those fucks you'd be lying on the ground already with a bullet in your brain."

"Fuck you."

"Fuck you. You want a chance to get out of this alive?"

"Lemme get this straight," Manny says. "They hired you to kill me? You took a job to kill your own brother?"

"It doesn't have to be this way. Just say yes. Just walk away. This is the moment where you get to change things. You can do anything you want. You just can't stay here. Don't be a dumbshit. Just this once, don't be the dumbshit you've always been."

"No," he says. "Fuckfuckfuckfuck. They send my own big brother to kill me." He is flop-sweating, almost crying. I notice that he is wearing a Members Only jacket. I thought those disappeared around the time the first George Bush was elected president.

"Look, Manny. You're a cocksucker. You've always been a cocksucker. I can't say I love you, but we have a lot of history and a lot of blood. You're my brother. Let's at least try—"

That's when things go south. Something changes. Manny stands up straighter. I know this moment. It's the one where people realize the end is racing toward them, so they have nothing to lose. This is the about-to-die version of beer muscles.

Manny reaches into his waistband and pulls out his gun. "I'm not going anywhere, motherfucker. But you are." He aims the Kel-Tec at me. "Later," he says, and fires.

Fuck, I think to myself. I'm smarter than this. I can't believe it.

His shot misses. To this day, I have no idea how.

I move quickly, instinctively. I leap at Manny, punch him in the throat even as I bring my steel-toed boot down on his left ankle. The gun bounces away. He goes down instantly, gasping. I marvel at how much his face looks like my own, but without the intelligence. It's like he's a clay dummy molded and sculpted and fired in the kiln to resemble me, but without any of the life. I think of when I was nine and he was five and we slept in the woods behind the house one night. I tried to protect him by beating a rabid squirrel dead with a tree branch. He asked me, eyes shining, if we could find another squirrel and do it again.

I head butt him. His eyes, decidedly not shining, loll and sink back into his head. I kick him in the nuts. I hear a sound like a beach ball deflating. He waves his arms, lashing out in semiconsciousness, and connects with my left ear. I go down and see stars, my mouth open against the ground. Stuff goes into it, and I taste the garbage of New Yorkers in my mouth. I spit frantically, crawl to my knees, and go right back at him.

Fuck you, you fucking spoiled brat, I think to myself. I've been putting up with this for too damn long. I lean down, head butt him again, and then bite off his right ear. I spit it out in his face. I realize I am crying.

I also realize, through my haze of anger and tears, that the Rubicon has been crossed. There is no going back.

My baby brother is still gurgling when I take a decaying single-serving milk carton off the ground, crumple it up in my hand, and shove it into his mouth. I grab his chin and ram it upward into his skull repeatedly, which has the odd effect of making him look like some Warner Bros. cartoon character chewing a particularly recalcitrant piece of beef jerky. I can hear his jawbone squeaking. Inside his mouth, lit by the moon, I can see the words
2% milkfat.

Manny strains to breathe. I am picturing, in my mind, Joe Pesci's final scene in
Casino
, when he is buried alive in the desert. Manny and I watched that movie on video the last time we hung out a few months back.

I spit out my wad of Doublemint, pull it into two pieces, and shove one up each of his nostrils. That does the trick. Airflow is now nonexistent. As he pushes to clear the airway and take in oxygen, his face turns red, then purple. His left eye blows out and goes dim, taking on the look of a built-in eye patch. Arrrrrr, I think to myself, making the pirate noise in my head.

Like I said: fucking hilarious.

I spot the Kel-Tec on the ground a yard or two away. I grab it, anchor my heel, and fire down at him. His head explodes at my feet. Brain on my boots. The shot has knocked the gum out of his nose, and he makes one final, inadvertent exhale.