The Art of Disposal (2 page)

There were too many fish in there. One sketched-out tiger barb searched for some of his own kind. Tiger barbs have to be kept in a group or else they go mad. Al Da Paolo didn’t know a goddamn thing about aquariums, and that's the way it is with most people. They buy a basic ten-gallon for their office, or for a snot-nosed kid, and end up killing every poor soul they dump inside. Now I didn't feel so bad about Eddie drawing that black line through Al Da Paolo's name.

I got to thinking about friendship and what it really means. It’s not about time. Some people get the foolish idea that the people you know from way back when should somehow mean more to you. But I’ve never seen it that way. Sometimes you grow up and don't have anything in common with a guy you ran with when you were a teenager, so do you really owe him anything?

Then I thought about Marcia at Doc Brillman’s office, and I could almost smell the apricots when she leaned over her clipboard to write down whatever it was she wrote down about me. Here I was, sicker than a dog, stuffed up nose and sore throat, eating cough drop after cough drop, waiting on Al Da Paolo to get home and if he didn’t hurry up I might just miss my appointment. A real wave of sickness rushed over me.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and laid the revolver in my lap, and I watched the haphazard gang of fish dart back and forth in the ten gallon tank. A blue gourami looked as big as a sea monster as it nipped at the helmet of the plastic diver.

“Ronnie?” a voice said. I looked over, terrified. Al Da Paolo stood in the doorway of the bedroom. He wasn't supposed to be home for another forty minutes.

Then I heard Eddie’s four chilling words echo inside of my mind.

“
Don’t

mess

this

up
.”

I was messing it up all right. My hands started shaking, and I gripped the gun and realized how ridiculous that shampoo-bottle silencer looked. Pantene. Thick and lustrous. Rinse and repeat if desired.

“Eddie sent you?”

You could hear the comprehension of deep betrayal in his wavering voice.

“I’ll pay you double to say you did the job. Then I’ll disappear.”

I froze.

“You ain’t got it in you,” he said, and stormed into the bedroom. I fired one shot that hit the right side of his neck.

His eyes did get bigger, just like I’d imagined; but instead of cool sadness they were all rage and terror, and he knocked the Rossi across the floor before I could fire again. My cough drops flew out of my shirt pocket and scattered across the carpet like precious rubies. Next thing I knew he had his thick arms all over me and we were running into the walls. Soon we were out in the hallway.

He threw me into the picture of the sad old lady. The glass cracked and fell all over me. Blood pumped rhythmically from the bullet wound in his neck. I punched him right on the wound and he cried out like a half dead cat. His mouth opened and closed, searching for any good snatch of air. I pushed him back into the bedroom.

The fish tank was right there next to us. I knocked off the lid. I forced Al Da Paolo's head under the green water and held him firm while he pushed on the stand with the last of his dying strength. There were a thousand bubbles and a muffled underwater scream, and the aquarium churned like a pot of stew that someone had left on HIGH and forgotten about. I could almost feel him giving up the ghost.

And then the ghost was gone. The weight of death pulled the corpse from my grip and the aquarium went over with it. Two hundred some pounds of dead flesh and ten gallons of water hit the bedroom floor. The miniature diver emerged from the floodwater standing upright in a mass of shiny black gravel, but his treasure chest had disappeared. The blue gourami did death flops around the crooked fingers of Crazy Al's right hand.

I went to the bathroom and cleaned up. Then I crawled around the bedroom floor, trying to find every last cough drop amid the wreckage.

I was only five minutes late for my appointment at Doc Brillman's. Not bad, considering that I had to walk home, change clothes, comb my hair, and put on deodorant.

Marcia smelled as good as ever, and she wrapped that thing around my arm and pumped it up. Told me that my heart-rate was high and asked if I’d been doing anything strenuous.

“Rough day at work,” I said.

“What is it you do… I mean, besides aquariums?”

“Import export.”

“Sounds cool.”

“It’s not all fun and games,” I said, and imagined that I really did have a respectable job involving chests of aged tea and silk scarves from other countries.

Marcia left, and it felt like I was in that little waiting room for an eternity. I got to thinking that maybe I was in purgatory, the newest sinner of the lot, and Lucifer would come through the door at any minute to tell me he was sorry but the bad things I'd done over the years outweighed the good ones by a fair margin, and I would have to follow him down a long flight of hot stairs. But when the door finally opened it was only Doc Brillman.

“What is it today?” he said.

“Sick as a dog.”

“Syphilis? Schistosomiasis? Skin Cancer?”

“Feels like it could be all three.”

“We all gotta go sometime,” Doc Brillman said with a wink, and I saw a flashing image of Al Da Paolo's stiff hand next to a dead blue fish.

Doc Brillman wrote me a prescription, and I said goodbye to Marcia and headed back to Eddie's place. But I kept seeing this image of one Fisherman's Friend cough drop lying on the floor near the bedroom door.

I was in such a hurry when I left. Maybe it was still there. Maybe the cops would trace it back to me. I bought the cough drops right before the crime. Could something so trivial ever get linked together like that? They’d search the place and see that Crazy Al didn’t own any cough drop tin. It must've come from the killer, they’d say. Some detective would jot it down in his little book and he’d be off like a bloodhound.

You've seen too many Columbo's, I told myself.

Dan the Man was napping on the sofa like a well-fed dog when I shuffled into the front room of Eddie's Vacuum Sales and Services.

He yawned and sat up. “It’s done?”

“Done.”

“How'd it make you feel?”

“Like a bad kid,” I said.

“Eh,” Dan the Man said, and handed me back my Beretta.

Eddie came out of the back room, his thumbs tucked under his suspenders. For some reason it seemed funny to me—a guy as dangerous as Eddie wearing suspenders.

He hugged me and patted my back. “You're a real salesman now. I'm proud of you. I won't forget what you done for me.” He tucked the three grand into my hand and shook it furiously.

“I lied to you earlier,” Eddie said. “I
have
seen a sick dog before. Freckles. What a sweet girl. Pop let us sit on the bed with her for an hour, and we fed her cold green beans. Then he drove her off to get the final shot.”

Eddie looked like he might shed a tear.

“Go get some shut-eye,” he said.

Things changed after the Da Paolo job. Eddie put me with Dan the Man on a full-time basis. The idea was to have me learn from a true master of the craft. It sure as hell wasn't material you'd pick up at the Junior College, but it was still an education.

I never knew how deadly Dan the Man was until Eddie gave me a brief synopsis of all the guys he'd shot, stabbed, and garotted over the years.

“Dan the Man has sent more guys to hell than a law degree.”

That's how Eddie summed it up. Maybe he'd always been grooming me up for this line of work. I was a heavyweight now. Al Da Paolo was a test, and I had passed. Sometimes I would lay in my bed and stare at the ceiling, thinking about what would have happened if Crazy Al had gotten away. And I knew that I would have ended up in the trunk of Ricky Cervetti's 1987 Buick Park Avenue, probably right next to Al Da Paolo's smelly corpse.

I'd been affiliated with the Sesto crew for three years before I whacked Crazy Al, and in all that time I never knew all the ins and outs of the business—I wasn't in deep enough. I knew about the shylocking and the stolen car operation. The numbers racket. The drugs.

Eddie Sesto is well connected, but he's no top dog. More like a mutt hanging out and picking up scraps from the key players. Dan the Man hit me up with some details when we were out collecting debts. I asked him if Eddie was pissed about not ever being made.

“Hell no,” Dan the Man said. “Why would he be? He's got it made right now. Sure, he ain't
made
made, but that's just a formality. Eddie don't care none about it. He's flipped the switch on all them guys.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that he's cleaned up so much of their shit and knows who done what in what pot that he can pull whatever strings he wants. No one'll touch him. He's kinda like J. Edgar Hoover, with those secret files.”

“Minus the womens' underwear,” I said.

Dan the Man laughed, and for a brief second I could imagine him as a little kid, maybe looking at a bird or something, full of joy about the world; and just as quick as I imagined it, the laughter ended and his eyes got hollow, like that little bit of soul had flown away, unwelcome in its own body. He cocked his neck and gripped hard on the steering wheel. The creases near his mouth made him look like a pale, dead crocodile.

We parked and walked up the stairs to my apartment.

“Let's have a look at her,” he said when we were inside.

I walked him to my bedroom window. You could hear her out there, squawking and shouting at her kids the way she always did. I'd thought of moving out, just because of her. She weighed about as much as a small car, and she spent the days and nights sitting in a creaky lawn-chair on her front patio, smoking cigarettes and yelling and cursing with that God-awful voice of hers. It carried. Man, did it ever carry. It was a throaty hillbilly holler, and she exercised that thing more than Pavarotti. It made my blood boil.

“I ever tell you about my first?” Dan said.

I told him he hadn't.

“I was on a hike. My backpack was sticking to my shirt, and I was always taking my hat off to wipe my head.”

“How old were you?” I said.

“Twenty-three,” Dan said. “About a mile out, a pretty young girl walks by with a golden retriever. I guess I have an old-fashioned streak. I ain't never voided a woman's warranty: don't matter if someone wants to pay me twenty grand. Anyway, I kept on walking. I'd almost given up on crossing paths with anyone else, so I tucked my knife away.”

“What kind was it?”

“USMC. The kind from World War Two. And what do you know, here comes a guy just asking for it. He's all alone, walking down the steep hill. Got a walking stick and a floppy hat. I think, yeah, I can do this. I can do this.”

Dan the Man's stony voice gets a sing-songiness to it if he talks for any length of time. An excited, frantic kind of rhythm.

“So the nerd tips his hat and says hello, and I say, excuse me, is it this way out to Silver Needle Falls? And I fumble around with the map I brung along, and I know damn well that Silver Needle Falls is off a whole other trail system, but I say it just to get him talking.

“Next thing I know I have the knife out of its sheath, and the whole length of the blade is sunk deep into his gut. I'm holding the knife and he's holding onto my hands and looking right into my eyes. I'll never forget them eyes, saying why, why, why?

“My heart was pounding, and I was sure that with my luck, someone else would come right along that very minute. So I worked him over to the edge of the trail and I pushed him off of the knife, and watched him roll down into the woods. And when he thumped down there on the ground, he made some wet gurgles, and he let out a low moan like an injured hound dog. And that was it. The woods was more quiet and calm than they ever was, and a bird started singing right away, chirping out the happiest tune. So that tells you something.”

“What does it tell you?” I said.

“That there ain't no God. If there was, the bird would've sung a sad song, or not sung nothing at all.”

“Did you feel bad about it?”

“I killed him quick. He would've died someday anyway. In this line of work, there ain't no room for feelings. You're either born without 'em, or you learn to get rid of 'em.”

I sat for a moment, remembering something I'd read a long time ago. Then I said:

“Socrates says 'the unexamined life is not worth living.'”

“The
examined
life is even worse,” Dan the Man said. Then he asked me if I felt bad about doing Crazy Al, and that if I did I should let him know right that second, because it meant I was far too soft for wet-work and that maybe I'd be better use to Eddie doing laundry and sweeping floors.

I told him to put a sock in it, that I didn't feel a damn thing about Crazy Al except I was glad he was gone if that was how Eddie wanted it. A guy has to lie to get through life. I'm sure Dan the Man sometimes sees all those glassy begging eyes when his head hits the pillow.

We sat there at my back window, watching that fat hillbilly broad yell at her kids and smoke cigarettes.

“Yeah, she'll do,” Dan the Man said.

“What about it though? How close she lives?”

“Ehh. No sweat,” he said. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked around the room. “I'll learn you something valuable.”

“What's that?” I said.

“The art of disposal.”

I nearly gagged just imagining that big dead mama in her birthday suit, laid out in my bathtub, and me standing over her with a shiny new hacksaw from Home Depot.

“They'll be asking questions,” I said. “The cops'll be all over me.”

“Not if
he
did it,” Dan the Man said, holding back the curtain and staring like he was at a public aquarium.

I heard that foul-mouthed husband right away, cursing and giving the backhand to his doomed hillbilly kid the way he always did when he wandered outside. The broad had called out her skinny old man to teach the kid some manners. This is what's wrong with the world. The nitwit, deadbeat losers are the ones who never wear rubbers.

I wasn't watching, but I'd seen it all before, so I could tell what was happening just from the sound of it.
F
this and
F
that. Even the guys I work with don't use that kind of language around kids.