The Accidental Pallbearer (3 page)

Conte feels himself stand and loom over the man. Feels an enormous belch rising. Leans over the man and lets it all out, all odiferous of salami, onions, mustard, provolone, and red wine. The baby stops crying. The man is startled by the hulk before him, by the stench. The man quickly recovers the balls, which for the moment are still brass, and says, as the provost had said thirty years before, in response to a perfectly reasonable request, “You’re a joke.”

Conte hears his voice say, “Your son is the next Pavarotti.”

“It’s a girl. Scram, you ugly fuck.”

His voice says, softly, “Are you contradicting me?”

“It’s a girl, asshole. This is a fuckin’ girl.”

His voice says, “Do you know the movie,
Throw Papa from the Train
?”

Conte notices welts on the baby’s face, black-and-blue marks on its arms and legs.

The man says, “Get lost.”

The man is being lifted out of his seat by the throat. The man is kicking wildly – one kick catches his wife on the side of her head. He’s being choked. Choked screams fading. The Caucasian male is dying. Conte releases him. The man drops down into his seat. Conte hears a voice say, “Encourage your son to nurture his vocal technique. Bobby Rintrona will pay dearly to hear him sing. Do you know Bobby?” The Caucasian male loses control of his sphincter muscle.

Conte returns to his seat. The baby wails. The woman bleeds from the ear. Conte dozes. In Utica, he follows the man to his car, a late-model BMW. Jots down the license plate number and, standing in the pouring rain, drenched again to the bone, says, “What is your son’s name?”

As he walks away, Conte finds in his hand a ham sandwich that he’d purchased at the Albany station. Tosses it on a sewer cover, where it’s promptly swarmed by three large rats.

He boards the bus he still thinks of as the Dago Special – rides it along Bleecker deep into the formerly 95-percent-Italian-American East Side, gets off at Wetmore and walks a block up the rise, in the rain, toward 1318 Mary and the sole bungalow – “the bung hole,” according to Robinson – Conte’s house on a street of well-maintained two- and three-family structures. Many old Italians of the third generation remain, but it’s a new East Side of immigrants from Bosnia and Mexico and a sprinkling of deluded adventurers from Utica’s black neighborhoods, who are suffered not. The lights are on.
E. CONTE
, says the sign on the front door,
PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR/PRIVATE AFFAIRS
.

He opens the door to find Robinson, who’s had a key for twenty years, sitting at the desk in the front room with a copy of
Moby-Dick
in his lap. Robinson grins and says, “Call me Antonio.” Conte stares, says nothing. The office is lined with books – city telephone books and directories, going back twenty years, a few pertaining to the criminal code, 2,000 pertaining to American literature and scholarly commentaries thereupon. The house, beautifully re-done, was purchased for him, mortgage-free, by his father when he
returned from the West Coast, broke. Top to bottom, in and out, renovated by city workers on weekends at no cost to Eliot or, of course, to his father – the high-end kitchen a gift from local merchants.

“You look like shit,” Robinson says. “Not to mention nuts.”

“Thank you. I need a hot shower. Then I need seven drinks. In the meanwhile, run this plate for me.”

Twenty minutes later, he returns in sweat pants and sweatshirt, hair slicked back, with a big bowl of ice and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.

“Where does he live, Robby?”

“You know where Michael C lives. We’ve been to his parties, how many times? You harbored love for his wife, think I don’t know? Still hot for Denise, Eliot?”

“The license you ran. Where does he live?”

“Something happen on the train?”

Conte says nothing.

“You’re pretty riled up.”

“Where does he live?”

“Close by. Fifteen-minute walk. Next to the florist at Rutger and Culver. His name is Jed Kinter.”

“Why is the name familiar?”

“Reports on minor sports. Utica Curling Club. Skeet Shooters of Oneida County. Little League. A glorified gofer at age thirty-five. What’s the story?”

When Conte is finished telling him, Robinson says, “Yet another Eliot specialty. Some bastard does despicable things who the law has little chance of stopping until it’s too late. So Eliot the Good steps up, a defender of the weak and innocent.
Listen: This Michael C thing takes precedence. Concentrate on
that
and forget Kinter. I strongly urge you.”

Conte dumps his ice, pours four fingers of the Johnnie Walker, chugs it, pours another and chugs half, stares hard at Robinson, then says, “Remember after you cut and slashed through the defense for five touchdowns in the championship game, in the cold rain and mud? What were we? Sixteen years old? Silvio cheered until he was hoarse.”

After a long pause, Robinson replies, softly, looking away, “I remember the clock ran out and they lifted me up on their shoulders.”

“They lifted you high, Robby. They really did.”

“The coach took us out for shakes and burgers.”

“Silvio took me home. (Long pause.) I say in the car, stupidly, Dad, you never cheer me. How come? He says, You’re not a boy for sports. You’re a boy for the books. What do you want from me, son? Want me to watch you read
Moby-Dick
? At what point do I cheer? We get home, he asks if I want a cup of hot chocolate. I refuse. He makes it anyway as he hums ‘April in Paris.’ Pours it in my favorite cup, still humming, smiling to himself. No doubt thinking of your heroics on the field. He puts the cup on the table. I pick it up and pour it down the toilet. We didn’t talk for days.”

“Man, you know I –”

“It’s all in the past.” Conte knocks back his drink.

“So what’s so urgent about your boorish assistant chief,” Conte says, “that you need to drag me in?”

Robinson calculates. The time is not yet right. He’ll crouch awhile in the weeds.

“Let’s knock back some more of this fine Johnnie Walker,
El. By the way, that tenor you walked out on got warmed up after intermission. Alagna, man, the fucker can sing. The two of them made me forget the world. I think I came twice. Fuckin’ world, am I right, brother?”

Robinson laughs. He smells blood in the water.

“This is what I’m telling you, El. Kill the guy up on Rutger, kill the ex, kill Michael C and a lot of innocent people are avenged.”

Conte suddenly looks alive: “Alagna after intermission was hot?”

“Listen, Eliot, sooner or later, just once, you need to ice someone, to get it out of your system. Rid the world of some toxic waste. Do the worst thing possible, Thou shalt not kill, do the very worst and liberate yourself from all the ways all these years you’ve been pretending to be someone you’re not, and just like that” – snaps his fingers – “all the false Eliots disappear. You feel lighter. You float down the street in your expensive loafers. A clotheshorse like you finally gets to enjoy his clothes, and you never again have to ask yourself who you really are, because you know. Definitively. Guess who’s singing in the
Bohème
next week? Alvarez! Can we possibly wait?”

They’ve had this conversation a million times. Since they were kids. They’re both having a good time now.

“You won’t kill a mosquito perched on your arm, Robby. Kill her, kill him – annihilate the cunt! You’re absurd.”

“I never said annihilate the c-word.”

“If not you, who?”

“That word I don’t use. It was you, Eliot. In your mind you said it to yourself concerning the bitch on the West Coast. Nancy is the c-word.”

Robinson winks.

They toast each other, friend to dear friend, taking alternate lines:

“In their thirties, your kids are living at home with the ex?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Think about it, Robby.”

They’re on their third scotch on empty stomachs, in the re-modeled kitchen – the most expensive appliances, granite counters, a floor of earthy-beautiful Spanish tiles, Eliot making Italian omelettes and bacon, but no coffee.

“We have four more blasts each of the Johnnie,” Eliot says, “who needs coffee?”

“Three is my limit.”

“So you don’t use the c-word, Robby. So you won’t join me on Johnnie four through seven. You’re giving me a headache. You’re always – you know what it is? You’re always:
Listen, Eliot
. For as long as I’ve known you:
Listen, Eliot
. Me. Not you.
I
have to ice somebody. Jesus, I’m dizzy … Remember that time? Pour me another, handsome. What were we? Twelve? How you cried nonstop, abjectly, when that mangy feral cat killed and ate the baby robin? Eliot! Kill the fuckin’ cat! You! The kid everyone feared at school, though
you never lifted a finger against anyone. Not even against Del’Altro, Utica’s bully-in-chief, who you could’ve taken out in two seconds and he knew it, two seconds, but he knew you wouldn’t because you’re a pussy. He taunts and he taunts and you walk away when everyone wanted you to clean Del’Altro’s clock. When was that? Junior year at Proctor? By the way, it’s not Alvarez in the
Bohème
. Why can’t you keep these singers straight?”

“Who is it, El?”

“Probably not Pavarotti.”

Conte laughs. Table-pounding hilarity.

“What’s so funny? I’m still in mourning. You’re drunk, man.”

“Somebody new. Young. Glorious tone. Outrageously attractive guy who refers to himself in the third person as Vittorio Grigolo. But the gestures! The guy has gestures – totally ridiculous. Redefines over the top.”

“So why drive all that way to witness this embarrassment?”

“Next week, here, Robby, we do what we always do when we listen to the radio broadcast. We cook, but we don’t listen to the radio. We play Luciano’s recording with Freni and eat
Ossobuco alla Milanese
with a side of
Risotto alla Toscana
and cannoli from Ricky Castellano.”

Silence while they contemplate multiple pleasures.

“You have vocal illusions, Eliot?”

“Don’t you?”

“With your bass voice, you’d sound like a rapist on the prowl. Speaking of which –” he breaks off. The time is not yet right. Linger longer in the weeds.

“Who cares, Robby? Because I love my illusions.”

In the midst of the meal, enough bacon to induce a massive heart attack, and Eliot on Johnnie Walker number six, when Robinson says, “Consider this.”

“You’re supposed to say:
Listen, Eliot
.”

“Kiss my – the man on the train? Mr. Do-Good? Have you considered that you maybe made it worse for the baby and the wife? Have you thought of that?”

“Shut up, Robby.”

Long silence. Conte is wondering how a glorified gofer affords a late-model BMW.

“Right now what’s going on in the guy’s home? His fuckin’
castle
? Have you thought of that? Maybe the humiliation leads to a catastrophic spike in rage. Is the baby still alive? Or alive but now in addition to the welts and the black-and-blue marks, a broken arm and cigarette burns on the as-yet-uneviscerated torso? And the big busted wife, what is he doing with her body? Has it crossed your advanced mind?”

“Write an opera. You have the talent.”

“I’ve seen everything, my years on the force.”

Conte smashes his glass against the tiled floor, then passes out, head on plate in the half-eaten omelette. The phone is ringing. Not the one in the kitchen, but the business phone. Robinson goes into the office, sits at the desk, and listens as the answering machine clicks on: