The Subtle Art of Brutality, page 19
“What’s so important, Dick?” Torreno says. His arrogance fills the car like a bad stink. He’s old now. Older than me. He moves slow. Slower than me. He might be five-foot-eight, one-fifty. His snug wool hat with its slight brim makes him look Irish. He smells like fire and brimstone.
“Did you see the torch jobs on the news?”
“I mighta, yeah.”
“Somebody pass that gig around? Looking for a man to do them?”
“Why would you ask me?”
“You know why.”
“I sold shoes, hats and coats my whole life. Swear on Mother Mary. You know this.”
“I know you set fires. Personally I think that job is past you now. But all three of those jobs were done by one man. And if someone was looking for a pro, you would have heard. So spill it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dick.”
“I told you a long time ago, don’t call me Dick.”
“Sure, sure. Anything else you wanna waste my time with?”
“You came all this way just to blow me off?” I ask.
“Temples got word to me so I came. I like Temples,” Paulie says. “I don’t like you. But like I says, you’re a pussy cat now, Dick. I figure, what’s the hurt?”
“I know the folks in those houses that burnt down. I’m looking for answers.”
“So? Keep looking.”
“I will get answers, Paulie.”
“I’m sure your tough guy shtick will work on somebody. Not me.”
“Maybe if I just told you the MOs you could think about who might’ve been able to pull this off.”
“Sure. I got a couple of more smokes. Tell me about the burn.”
“First house was an invasion. The guy attacked—”
“Nope. No idea. Next one, please,” Paulie says.
“Second house had personal messages written on the un-burnt portion of a wall—”
“Sounds terrible but doesn’t ring a bell,” Paulie says, smiling big and wonderful. “Let me guess, the third house—”
My turn to interrupt. “The third house you don’t know about either, right?”
He snubs his smoke out on the dashboard. “Nope. Sorry, Dick. Tell Temples I said hello.”
Paulie opens the car door to step out and I grab him by the back of the head and bounce his face off the dashboard. The car bounces. Paulie slumps over and I open the door before he can bleed on the upholstery. He slides out like a wet noodle.
I get out, find him limp and face down on the pier. “How many times do I have to tell you, Paulie. Do not call me Dick.” I put my foot just below the base of Paulie’s spine, grab his head firmly and yank it back so hard his neck breaks in two. Drag him to the water and throw him in.
Paulie Torreno, the man the mob used to hire to burn down the homes of their enemies, complete with women and children inside as it lit, floats face down on the incoming current next to the ice sheets and other garbage of the city.
Waste of time. I look around for a little while for anyone who might have come with him. No one stirs. No bullet to my chest. Paulie was old and he had outlasted his usefulness, but I’m sure someone besides Temples knew he was here with me. It might not mean shit, but it becomes just another thing I file away. Another reason to check the shadows.
I wish Paulie would have talked if he knew something but this, this was a long time coming.
This was a long time coming.
48
My place: third floor, the smell of the smokehouse next door filing the air with hickory and applewood throughout the night. It competes with the comforting linger of tobacco.
Wood floors, chewed up. Unimaginative trim and baseboards. Simple lines. Front door opens to the first room, occupied with a couch, TV, lamp and bookshelf. Door to the east leads to the toilet and shower. Door to the west leads to the closet I stuffed my bed into. Little else.
In one corner is a kitchen sink, a set of cabinets and an incompetent refrigerator. Toaster oven takes up most of the counter space. Two stove burners set by the sink. I only need one. No microwave, no oven, no dishwasher, no butcher block island with hooks to hang skillets from.
For a time I had a four-legged barstool to make drinking at home alone seem more casual. A guy by the name of Tony Francis Stalwein stopped by my place one night and I had to break that barstool over his head. Long story. I never replaced it.
Curtains cover the one window in the first room. The shower has a window right in it. I have no idea why.
I come in, toss my coat over the couch arm that serves as a coat hanger. Kick my shoes off next to the floorboard heater. Light a smoke off of the left stove burner. It’s better for lighting cigarettes than the right. Pour a whiskey and dig through the refrigerator. Half a chicken parm sandwich from yesterday. Good enough. A few minutes in the toaster oven and I’m on the couch, swishing bourbon around in my mouth to numb the taste of ash long enough to detect how little basil is in this marinara on the sandwich.
I keep looking at the other door, the third door in the place. The coat closet door.
The memories I have of her are stored inside that space. Every year I have Father Bentley from Saint Erasmus’s come over and bless the coat closet. Not the apartment; just that space.
I finish the sandwich and wish I hadn’t started it. Drain the booze. Smoke two cigarettes just sitting there; snub them out slowly. I twist the last Rum Coast butt in a deliberate manner; the kind of motion that brings contemplation to mind. I want to go in the closet, I want her back. I’ve been shot at, I’ve been shot, people have looked me in the eye before they’ve tried to kill me. I’ve wrecked cars six times as a policeman. A man held a knife to my throat once that still had blood on it from the last person he’d killed. The blood was warm against my skin.
And here I am. The same cannot be said of most of the folks I speak of now.
I received a gift, a divine application. It just seems like I can’t be broken. But when she died, when I collected her things and still to this day with each touch, with each whiff of her lingering perfume, with each sight of an item she may only have had fleeting contact with, I am...
Destroyed.
But I stand up anyways. Deliberation is over. Just a moment tonight. I miss her. Warm in the gut from whiskey, feeling that chicken parm roiling in my stomach minutes after choking it down, the last of my tobacco smoke floating out from my lips and nostrils. I walk to the closet. I open the door with a reverence she deserves.
Inside are my deceased wife’s belongings that I could not part from. Her folks had come over not too long afterward. After she passed. I let them take of hers what they wanted. They’d had her longer than I did. Her mother cried as she delicately lifted every article of clothing out of its drawer. My mother-in-law pressed her face into every shirt and sobbed harder. My father-in-law took the earrings he got her for her sweet sixteen. The ballerina shoes she had since she was six and kept to her death. I almost hid those shoes before they came over because I knew he would take them and I wanted them for myself. But she was still his little girl. Her sister came and asked for the clothes. Her best friend asked for the half a locket my wife had that they shared. People who were, in reality, mourning the loss of their angel became to me, mere vultures.
By the end I had two cardboard boxes to fill and a fury at God that would not abate. He had given me so little, but He gave me her. And then He snatched her right back. The cardboard boxes found a place for their belongings inside this shrine hidden within my apartment. The fury at God, well, it has found a place hidden within me.
I refinished the wood inside here. The light is sunlight quality. Pictures adorn the walls. Her wedding dress. A shelf chest high with a scattering of the elephant trinkets and miniatures she collected. Here is a detailed miniature of an African elephant cast in resin and hand-painted. Here is a wooden elephant painted in bright colors and abstract designs. Here is one wearing a tunic from the circus. All with their trunks up; a sign of good luck.
Here is a bedside lamp she had as a child with Tinkerbell on the shade. Two pencil sketches she drew in high school. One of a toddler playing with a beach ball, the surf breaking in the background and the other of me sitting in tenth grade science class. I was reading and didn’t know she was feverishly copying my image. Ignoring our assignment due by the end of class. She didn’t finish the class work, but she was so proud of the drawing. I can smell her perfume. Gardenias. The scent enters me and I can smell her hair, her breath, her skin. My fingertips can trace ghost images of the palm of her hand, the texture of her knuckles, the angle of her jaw. I back out and shut the door before I fall to my knees.
Under my bed I have a suitcase. Inside it I have two changes of clothes, ammo, a carton of cigarettes and almost a quarter million dollars. The threads, bullets and smokes are mine. The cash came off a mob currier I bumped into one night and made dead. If this whole fucking block caught on fire, I’d take that suitcase and dump it out on the bed just so I could fill it with my wife’s things.
Father Bentley blesses this shrine. He knows if I ever get caught with my pants down and get the hard goodbye, she needs to be cared for. He has a shelf in the rectory set aside with enough space for two cardboard boxes of some other man’s wife’s possessions.
I grab the bottle, put my back to the coat closet door, slide down the floor and wake up with whiskey still in my mouth the next day.
Darla Boothe again.
Even through her wrinkles, her dark features inherited by Delilah are pretty. Smoking has aged her the same way it has me. But my tattoos cover up my wrinkles. Weariness and uncompromising sadness have aged in her in a way I haven’t known since the war.
“Ms. Boothe—”
“Please call me Darla. That last name is diseased.”
“Sure.”
She stares off, drags from her smoke. She brought her own this time. Then: “I don’t know how long since he walked out the door that I’ve wanted to get rid of that terrible name and just never did.”
“You were busy raising a family.”
“Yes. That’s true.”
We’re at a diner. I like this place; the pot roast is cut thick and the beer is ice cold. The scent of bacon is always in the air no matter what meal they are cooking. There’s nothing special about the place, which makes it special.
Since Delilah’s one horrible phone call and the arsons, Darla’s doctor has prescribed her pills to keep her calm. Darla then: fraying at the seams, nervous wreck, almost incoherent. Darla now: mellow. High mellow. Contemplative.
“Tell me about Ben.”
“What about him?”
“Was he always a rapist?”
“Ben was...oh God, how can I say this without looking dirty or perverted myself?” Darla studies her coffee like it could provide an answer.
“I don’t lump you two together,” I say, drag on my cigarette. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Well...” she looks away, embarrassed. “Ben was insatiable. And impulsive. As much as I don’t want to compare my sweet baby girl to her dad the date rapist she’s kind of the same way.”
“Okay.”
“It was natural for him to stray from the marriage. Nothing was ever enough. Guys like him could be sleeping with their wives at all hours of the day and night and after a little while it’ll just get old.” She crushes her smoke out, hard. Like it were Ben instead.
“I got old.” Bitter. Rightfully so. The betrayal and hostility in those three words speak volumes. The small corner of her soul she has allowed to rot because of her ex-husband has just come out, spoke those words and receded back into the darkness.
Checking her out I don’t think she would get old. But I also hear the word “no” to mean “no,” so it’s difficult to put myself in Ben Boothe’s shoes. I wonder if it were Darla’s literal age or if he had explored her until he became bored. I don’t ask for clarification.
“Dozens of things pushed him out of our house, I’m sure. None the least of which was the way I would not tolerate him looking at our daughters.”
Hold the phone.
“Do you think he molested them?” I ask.
A long pause. The world around us revolves through a century before she draws breath to speak. Then: “I think that to Ben...female genitalia are separate entities from anything else in the world. When he walks around viewing God’s green earth I think he sees everything we do, but in place of women’s faces and personalities and clothes and relation to him he just sees...something to have sex with.”
“You mean like women aren’t real or they’re just objects...”
“I guess so. There’s a total disconnect. In the same way I suppose a serial killer will not connect that other people are living entities just like him, I think Ben cannot make the connection that when it comes to having sex there are certain rules to abide by. Morals.”
“So you’re saying that even if he did molest your girls to him it was simply fulfilling a need.”
“Yes.”
“Family relation, age, nothing mattered.”
“Yes. Any detail, any detail would be irrelevant.”
“Just sex?”
“Yes.”
“He’s still a damn child molester,” I say. “Did either girl ever tell you he touched them?”
“No. Neither girl likes to talk about him. We just moved on.”
“Do you think it’s plausible that Delilah went to see her dad?”
“For what?”
“For anything.”
“Like what?”
“Some people can just up and leave. It happens. They re-establish themselves somewhere else as somebody else. They have transferrable skills, they have cash on hand, they have some defining moment where they eradicate who and what they are. Look up the Flitcraft Parable from the book The Maltese Falcon. But Delilah is not going to disappear without help. Not from how she’s been described. I’ve called anywhere her college degree would take her. No one has a Delilah Boothe working for them. I checked other names, like Delilah White. I checked for her under your maiden name. Nothing.
“Scared people either run for their life or they orbit their familiar locations. Look for the all-clear. So she’s programming computers in Fishkill, New York or she’s here. In Saint Ansgar. Somewhere.”
“But where?”
“That’s it. If she’s employed I would have found the address her taxes go to. Or the bank account that gets her paycheck. Let’s assume she’s not. She’s getting money from somewhere. She had none herself. She’s either found a new cash source—and it’s not the government; I checked—or she’s stealing. Or bumming.”
I have not told Darla about the drug deal that Dobbins arranged. No sense in it really.
“So?”
“So would Ben give her money? A place to crash?”
“He could do anything,” Darla says, getting worked up. “I never thought he was a rapist until he was one.”
“What about Belinda?”
“No. She wouldn’t give her money without telling me everything. She’s as worried as I am.”
“Have you spoken to her?”
“Yes. She’s in the Navy, you know. An officer. Her boat is in a port in Australia right now.”
“You can reach her?”
“Yes.”
“Give me the number.”
49
Belinda Boothe: voice mail. Jeremiah Cross: car keys. Ben Boothe: I’m at his front door.
50
“I’m looking for Delilah. She around?”
Standing at the door, half a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Middle-aged, weary from a lifetime of hard living.
Ben Boothe: wiry guy. It’s not so much that he is muscular but rather he has absolutely no body fat. The minimum required muscle it takes to operate the human body is accentuated on him because there is nothing between it and the sandpapered skin stretched taut over it. That illusion makes him appear ripped. Every vein running across him is thick and revealed.
His black hair is heavily salted with an unflattering tone of dirty white. Even at his age his stubble is patchy and thin, but long enough to look scummy. The whites of his eyes are yellow. Small scars from things that look like knife tips are stippled across his body. His nails belong on a rodent. I can see where, back in his early twenties, he might have been handsome. But those years have been pillaged by a lifetime of unbridled self-destruction.
Ben Boothe: human weasel.
He stares right back at me. You can always tell a person who has been hardened by prison. There are lots of things that will harden anyone but prison has its own feel. It chisels with its own style. It makes all the features sharper, detached. Cold the way a serpent is. Somewhere in there are fangs.
I used to ask myself if the fangs were there before the individual went to prison. If they were the reason the individual went to stir, or if they appeared after. On the inside. Chicken or egg.
I never found a suitable answer. Not one. Now I don’t care. Haven’t for a long time.
“No,” Ben Boothe says back to me. “She ain’t anywheres to be found.”
“May I come inside for a moment?”
“No.”
“Well, then...” I look around for a moment. It’s fucking freezing outside here. But oh well. We do it here then. “When was the last time you’d seen her?” I light a smoke.
“Go ask that twat cop who came sniffin’ around here.” Rudd’s been by.
“I’m asking different questions than she did,” I say. “The answers she has won’t help me.”
“All pork speak the same language. Ask the same shit. It’s all you know.”
“These are mistakes, friend,” I say. Heat is rising. Not so cold anymore.
“Who the fuck are you, pretty boy?” he asks, standing taller.
“Pretty boy? Do I look like the cover of a magazine to you? Or is that the pen coming out?”
