The Art of Disposal (34 page)

Then I saw him, a silhouette against the purple sky. He walked with that modern tough-guy gangbanger limp.

He stopped walking, moved off of the trail and positioned himself right under one of the few street lamps, and lit a cigarette. I had a strong urge to walk up the grassy hill to my right and get off of the trail immediately. But if this kid was a hired gun, he'd come after me anyway.

I kept my face forward, but let my eyes drift left to watch his every move as I walked past the street lamp.

I'm in the business of snap judgments, because I like to stay alive. Political correctness only works in the kitchen of your upper middle class home. Hit the streets for a while. Pretty soon you're putting people into boxes and doing a damn fine job of it, and they're boxing you up too. If a guy is dressed like a gangbanger, I go ahead and assume that he's not selling caramel popcorn for the local boy scout troop.

Right away I thought of the Zetas, Dante's old crew, whose vast empire stretches all the way down to street-level hoods who would tweeze out your Grandma's eyes for a thousand bucks; and I could feel it, like electricity running through me—danger, danger, danger—as I rubbed my fingers on my thumb and got ready to pull the Walther.

“Nice night,” he said as I passed by.

“It is,” I said. I stopped, turned and looked at him, then turned and kept on walking. I picked up my pace. I didn't like the fact that he was behind me now. I turned and looked again, and now he was walking along at a safe distance behind me, whistling. He'd put a red bandana over his mouth and nose, and tied it tight like he was about to rob a train in an old western movie.

I walked faster. So did he. I heard Doc Brillman's voice saying,
Pfft. Walking? You should be running…

This kid was after my money or my life, and I didn't feel like giving up either. The sound of his footfalls behind me was enough to keep me going, and I swerved a little to the left and a little to the right, in case he got the urge to take a few shots at me.

I reached my block, turned right and headed toward my car. But before I got there, I dipped off of the road and tucked myself into a pool of absolute darkness, crouched down and waited, gun aimed straight ahead of me, until the kid was in sight. He fretted. Stopped walking. Looked back over his shoulder. Then he peered right into the dark where I was hiding, and he reached into the back of his baggy pants and pulled out a gun.

I fired two shots and the kid dropped to the ground. The silenced gun had made only the dullest of sounds. I pulled the corpse back into the darkness, feeling like some horror-film ghoul, and then I got into my car.

I drove toward Eddie's cream-colored house, and I felt like a dumb bee flying into one of those hanging jar traps. With each spin of the steering wheel, with each flick of the turn signal, I kept telling myself to turn around, to go back, to forget about Eddie Sesto.

I rolled into Eddie's neighborhood and parked a good quarter-mile away. It was cool and eerie, and the road was wet the way it is sometimes at night, when a fog you can't even see has wrung itself out and gently covered the ground.

A black Lexus was parked near Eddie's house, and it made my neck itch. I'd never seen that car before. It sat like a spider, waiting.

I crept to the back of the house and stood flat against the wall. I could hear soft music inside, an oldies pop song, but I couldn't quite make it out. The back door was ajar. I went into Eddie's house, gun drawn. The strawberry artwork, plates, and antique signs waited like a gang in the cool blue darkness; each plump berry staring me down with a hundred seedy eyes.

I flipped the kitchen light switch. Three of the Thomas Kinkade collector plates lay shattered on the linoleum floor.

There's always something to be thankful for, even in the worst of situations.

I stepped around the cracked fragments and pushed through the dark of the living room, tickling the wall until I found a light switch and lit up the room.

The mysterious Jack Lomand, dead on the living room floor.

Irene Sesto, dead in her recliner near the television, next to a wooden pedestal stand of African violets. A green plastic bowl of popcorn in her lap; her right hand reaching into it. But she'd never had a bite. She'd been shot once in the head.

I heard the soft music clearly now. Jangly acoustic guitars and tasty harmonies. The Everly Brothers:
When Will I Be Loved?

Eddie's not much of an audiophile. He has a silver boombox with a top loading CD tray, and a cassette deck on the front. He takes it with him down to the river and runs it on D batteries. The song was winding down, but before the very end, it skipped and started over.

I could hear Eddie talking about his favorite old bands, and how nobody could harmonize as well as Don and Phil Everly…

“Nowadays, any good looking kid with a decent haircut and some computer studio shit can be a pop star—and hell: they can't even sing Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Irene wouldn't play The Everly Brothers. She only listened to talk radio. It gave me hope. Made me think that Eddie had put that CD on; that he was still alive somewhere.

I walked over and pulled the plug, and the music stopped.

The Faberge egg that Dan the Man had made fun of was lying on the floor; one of the lamps had been knocked over and the stained-glass shade had shattered in the struggle.

I pushed open doors, flipped on lights, and peeked under beds. Eddie Sesto wasn't in the house. I went back to Irene and took that bowl of popcorn from her desperate grasp, and I covered her up with one of those prize-winning quilts that she'd spun in life. Then I walked back to the kitchen and stepped around the fragments of Thomas Kinkade plates, and I saw for the first time the bottle of Glenlivet scotch sitting open on the counter. A single tumbler was next to it. I picked up the tumbler and swirled around the watery leftovers, and I sniffed at the edge of the glass; and it told a story of intense and manic stress, followed by wanton surrender. I could see shadows fighting in the melted ice, and on the oily thumbprints that decorated the sides of the glass, like the drinker had spun the tumbler around and around with a loose hand and a conflicted heart.

I dug into a cabinet and got a clean glass. Then I poured out a big dollop of scotch and tossed it down, and I did it a second time, and a third; and it burned my belly so very sweetly, like I'd eaten the soul of a lit candle.

I grabbed a dishcloth and wiped off the bottle, and I rinsed out the glass with hot water and left it upside down on the counter next to the thumbprinted one, which was rightside up. I turned around and leaned against the counter, and stared into the living room at Jack Lomand's potato-faced corpse.

I went over to the body. Got down on one knee. No bullet holes, just a pool of blood soaking into the carpet from the right side of his head. I grabbed a handful of hair and lifted the greasy head, but it was hard to tell what had sent the mysterious Jack Lomand into the land of no return. Someone had jammed a sharp tool into his head. An icepick, maybe.

I closed my eyes and painted some scenes. Maybe Jack had killed Irene and gotten comfy, waiting for Eddie to get home; but Eddie proved tougher than Jack imagined. I saw Eddie scrubbing his bloody hands in the sink, popping in his Everly Brothers CD, crying over Irene, going out to the kitchen, reaching into the cabinet and pouring a drink—the first he'd had in ten or twelve years—and tossing it back with an angry relish; wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

Jack Lomand's phone rang. I dug it out of his pocket and read the screen.

CONESE.

It rang and rang. Then it stopped. A minute later, more of the same. I wanted to flip it open and say, “Didn't go quite like you planned, huh
boss
?”

But instead I took my Uncle Carl's advice: if you're not sure what to do, it's best to do nothing at all. So I put the phone down on the coffee table and watched it light up and die, with the word CONESE, CONESE, CONESE, showing up like some paid advertisement.

I took out my own phone and called up Carlino, and I gave him the who's and what's and where's. He said he'd be over to Eddie's house in forty-five minutes, and to wait right there and not to go anywhere at all. I'd find out soon enough whose side he was on—and if it wasn't mine, well, he'd be joining Max Finn over those hot coals in hell.

I flopped into the chair next to Irene, and I turned on the television. PBS had some old footage of Glenn Gould playing Bach, and I watched his fingers dance over the keys as the music filled my head. Irene lay there dead, covered in squares of blue and gold. I stared at her to see if she might suddenly move. But they never do. And in your expectation of preternatural movement, the stillness of death becomes real.

Half an hour later, I turned off the television and unlocked the front door.

I tightened the suppressor on the Walther PPK, and I tapped the brass-catcher twice for good luck; and then I killed all the lights in the house and took a seat on the floor near the sofa, under the overhead light switch, with my back against the wall. I waited, looking at the sliver of moon through the living room window, between a gap in the gauzy white curtains.

I thought about Dan the Man, stuck in that black casket under some new strips of sod, the skin getting tighter and tighter on his face. I could hear him saying, “don't let 'em put me in one of them sardine cans. Burn me up.”

“Sorry, Dan,” I said aloud. “Dotty needed it.”

Right then a pair of headlights turned distant tree limbs into monsters that ran and stretched across the living room walls, and I heard the engine of a car; it parked and kept running for a long while. Then it was just the silence of the night, and that sharp white moon. I aimed my gun. Carlino knocked. I waited. The front door eased open. I reached up and flipped the light switch above me. Carlino froze like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“Easy, Sam.”

“Get in here,” I said, “and drop your gun.”

“Sure. Okay,” he said.

He dropped his gun on the carpet. I told him to lock the door.

“I swear on my mother's grave.”

“Keep talking,” I said.

“What happened?” he said, looking at Irene's quilt-wrapped corpse.

“People died.”

“Eddie?”

“No sign of him.”

“Frank's big on follow through,” he said, lighting a smoke. “You should've done the job.”

Carlino crouched and slowly picked up his gun, and he tucked it away under his coat, and raised his eyebrows and hands as if to say,
see there… I'm on your side
.

He walked over and had a good look at Irene Sesto, lying in that recliner like a napping woman who'd fallen asleep with her head under the blanket. Carlino pulled it back, made a sour face, and covered her up again. Then he went and had a look at Jack Lomand. He put his hands in his pockets and lowered his chin, like a cop who'd just arrived at a crime scene.

“This is a big mess,” he said. He took out his phone.

“Who you calling?”

“Pete Bruen,” he said.

As soon as it started ringing, Carlino handed me the phone. I gave him a look—but I took the phone anyway. “You know him better,” Carlino said. “Get him over here.”

Greedy Pete sounded like he'd had a few too many down at Ace's Card Room. I told him to step to it, to get over to Eddie's house, something big had happened and we needed his help.

“What's in it for me?” he said, yawning.

“A warm fuzzy feeling,” I said, and hung up the phone.

“It's high time to get rid of Dirty Pete,” Carlino said.

“
Greedy
Pete,” I said.

“Dead Pete,” Carlino said. “That guy's a snake.”

“Well don't do it here,” I said.

“Right,” Carlino said and snorted. “We don't want to mess the place up or anything.”

We rolled Irene up in her quilt, and we wrapped Jack Lomand up in a bedsheet from the linen closet; and then we laid them side by side like we were organizing materials for an important landscaping project. I asked Carlino about Jack Lomand, but all he knew about him was that he was bad news.

Greedy Pete showed up like a regular Joe, in jeans and a wrinkled t-shirt. But he did have his gun. Pete never went anywhere without his Ruger SR9.

We told him we needed the place so clean that, at best, the fuzz would think that Eddie and Irene had voluntarily disappeared; at worst, that the New York side of the family had simply wiped Eddie out, and there wasn't much point digging into the matter.

“Sure would help to have a body,” Pete said.

“We got two,” Carlino said.

“
Eddie's
body.”

“Oh,” Carlino said.

Greedy Pete walked around, turned on a side table lamp, picked up a poker from the fireplace and used it to pull the quilt off of Irene's face.

“This Eddie's wife?” he said. “She ain't much to look at.”

“Well, she is
dead
,” Carlino said.

“Still…” Pete said.

“So what do we do?” I said.

“Where's Eddie?” Pete said.

“We don't know,” I said.

“You mean you don't know, or you
don't know
?”

“We don't know,” Carlino said.

“Well good luck with that,” Pete said. He flipped the quilt back over Irene's face and leaned the poker back in the corner of the fireplace hearth. “Of course they're gonna look into Eddie. Wife dead in a chair. Dead guy on the floor. Missing husband. Duh.”

Carlino raised his arms. “We didn't invite you here to play gin rummy.”

“The ship's already hit the iceberg,” Greedy Pete said. He walked around the room, checking out the knick-knacks, looking into picture frames. He put a stick of gum in his mouth and carefully balled up the paper and stuck it into his pocket. “Can't stage the scene. Too much blood.”

“What about that Gloominall stuff?” Carlino said.

“Luminol,” Pete said, chomping his gum. “That's for our guys, after the fact. Shows where there's blood—or cleaned-up blood—and you got plenty of it here. We'd have to rip out the carpet.” He walked over and looked at the dark red-wine blood stain under Jack Lomand's head. “Yeah, you can't fix this scene.”