Shoot the Moonlight Out, page 3
Max’s office is on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Eighty-Fourth Street. St. Anselm Church is only a couple of blocks down, and Jack remembers going there in the mid-seventies for the wedding of a high school friend, Gary Colkin, who was a hell of a three-point shooter. Gary married a girl called Ruby. Jack wonders whatever happened to them. So many people have drifted through his life and now they’re just floating faces in his mind. Gary used to do a killer Richard Nixon impression.
It’s hard to park on Eighty-Fourth Street, so Jack finds a spot near St. Anselm and walks back over to Max’s office. Just as he’s about to knock, he realizes that he left the gun in the glove compartment and goes back for it. He reaches around behind his back and tucks it into his waistline under his shirt on the sly, careful that no one is watching him. Last thing he needs is some priest spying on him from a secret window and calling the cops. He goes back to Max’s and knocks hard. A forceful knock meant to deliver a message: This is not good news.
Jack knows from Mary that Max also went to Our Lady of the Narrows, but he’s only in his mid-thirties, so he must’ve started right after Jack graduated. He’s never seen Max in person that he knows of, and he’d never heard of him until Mary. She showed him a newspaper clipping from some Republican fundraiser where Max was holding a plate full of pigs in a blanket while chatting up some white-haired Jack Kemp wannabe. The black-and-white image was fuzzed out, but Jack got his general vibe: slovenly conservative money guy. It amazes him that Max is able to operate so openly, running what’s clearly a Ponzi scheme and just getting away with it, that people keep it on the hush-hush because they really believe they’re going to get rich. Jack wonders who Max is paying off or if someone’s bankrolling the operation. The mob maybe. There has to be more to the story.
Max opens up. He’s tall and goofy and pale, wearing a yellow short-sleeved dress shirt with a pocket protector stuffed full of pens. The buttons on the shirt aren’t buttoned properly—somewhere he missed a hole. He has deep, dark, summer pit stains blooming under his arms. His shirt isn’t tucked into his knockoff Dockers pants. His shoes are flimsy, the laces undone. His glasses have cheap rectangle frames. He has a little red carton of whole milk in his hand, the kind kids get at school for lunch. He’s been drinking it. There’s a white ring on his upper lip. His hair is poofy, uncombed, dotted with dandruff. This does not look like a rich man, does not even look like a man who’s doing particularly well. If he’s stealing from people like Mary Mucci, he must be funneling the money out elsewhere. Either that or he’s sitting on it. Could just be about the game. That’s one form greed takes.
“Can I help you?” Max asks.
“We need to talk,” Jack says. “Let me in.”
“Who are you?”
“Mary Mucci sent me.”
“Oh, come on, sir. I told Mary ninety-five times that I’ll have her money soon. The wheels are in motion. She thinks I don’t want to get her dough to her? What’s that do to my reputation? I have many clients. Everyone’s in the same boat right now. They think I’m a cash machine, but it’s a complicated system I’ve got going.”
“Let’s talk inside.”
“Right here’s okay with me.” Max takes a swig of milk.
Jack muscles past Max into the office. It’s a real dive. Stacks and stacks of file folders on top of old filing cabinets trimmed with rust. A desk with a computer and phone that’s otherwise covered in bills, statements, and manuals. Instead of some fancy ergonomic office chair, there’s a folding chair, the kind they have in church basements. A wastepaper basket full of empty little milk cartons is right next to the desk. The carpet is thin, worn through to the wood below in several spots. Dust speckles the air, caught in the shafts of light coming through the broken blinds on the window. There’s no art on the walls. Just framed certificates. A boxy black safe, about the size of a small dorm fridge, sits in the corner on top of a sagging table. Towers of CDs line the walls. The office smells like a bachelor pad, vaguely moldy and rotten. It’s only one room in what’s ostensibly a much bigger space. As far as Jack can tell, Max owns the whole corner building. A battered door—a pin up calendar from the 1970s hung crookedly at its center, around eye level—must lead to the next room, but it’s closed.
“You own the whole building, huh?” Jack says.
“Yes.” Max stays on the threshold of the front door, clutching his milk with nervous force, looking like he’s thinking seriously about skittering outside for help.
“What’s in the rest of the place?”
“Not that I need to give you an answer, but it’s storage. Mostly CDs. I run a CDs-through-the-mail business on the side. Like BMG. You want some CDs? I can hook you up.”
Jack looks around, examining some of the certificates on the wall. Max’s degree from St. John’s. An accounting license. A notary public certification.
“What can I call you?” Max asks, taking in Jack’s work boots, jeans, and his old Brooklyn Battlers softball shirt with blue sleeves that he wore for six seasons back in his mid-twenties when playing on hot concrete in a beer league was a fun thing to do on weekends. The shirt’s tight now. “You don’t dress for summer. How about Mr. Blue Sleeves? That’s what I’ll call you, okay?”
“Shut the door and come take a seat.”
“I don’t play rough games, Mr. Blue Sleeves. You give me a sec, I’ll call my friend Charlie French and get him over here. He likes rough games.”
Jack vaguely remembers the name Charlie French from the papers. A regular Bay Ridge shitbird. A nobody who’d built up some kind of air of importance around him. He’d inherited a bunch of dough from his wife; there was speculation he murdered her. Figures that Max is pals with him.
Max continues: “Charlie’s headed down to Florida in a few weeks. Business venture. But he’s still around right now, and he’d love to meet you, I’m sure.”
“All that money you steal from single working moms and little old ladies, does it go to Charlie? Or you in bed with the Brancaccios?” Jack motions around the office. “Because you obviously aren’t spending it here. Or on fine clothes.”
“I’m an honest guy,” Max says.
“Shut the door. I just want to talk.”
Max huffs and finally closes the door. He storms over to his desk, dropping his milk container in the wastepaper basket, and sitting dramatically on the rinky-dink folding chair. He puts his elbows up on the edge of the desk, touching the dusty keyboard for his computer. His glasses fogged from all the exertion. “Okay, talk,” he says. “I’ll give you five minutes.”
“You’ll give me however long I want,” Jack says.
Max clasps his hands together and sighs. He looks like an exhausted principal of a decaying middle school sitting there like that. “Fine.”
Jack reaches around for the gun. He pulls it and shows it to Max. “It’s not much, but it’ll get the job done.”
“You’re threatening my life in my own office?” Max says.
“I’m telling you you’re gonna get Mary her money. I know you’ve probably fucked over hundreds of people, maybe thousands, but Mary’s my concern right now.”
“That’s not the way this operation works.”
“I know how Ponzi schemes work, and you’re gonna take the hit if you have to. Personally, I mean. You can take that money out of your own pocket. You can borrow it from your folks or some other relative. I don’t give a shit.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I guess I don’t. All that dough, where’s it go? It’s numbers on paper for you, but where’s the physical money?”
Max sighs again. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “I’ve got people I’ve gotta give it to,” he says.
“So, you’re a front for something?”
“I’m not a front. I started this as a legit thing. Look at me, I’m not making out. It just got out of control.”
Jack’s starting to understand. Max got in trouble—not unlike the trouble he’s in right now—and he asked the wrong people for help. Now he’s permanently in bed with them. That’s Jack’s guess anyway. He doesn’t need the whole story.
“Look,” Jack says, “you’re a guy—a smart guy—who’s done some dumb shit. Maybe it was out of greed. Maybe you honestly thought you could make it work. Whatever the case, you got in over your head, and it’s collapsing all around you. I know you’re not the lowest of the low because I’ve seen the lowest of the low. You don’t deserve to die like a dog, but that’s how you’re gonna wind up. I’m not saying me. I’m saying somebody. I’m sure there are plenty of somebodies out there fed up with you.”
Max is on the verge of tears. “Are you gonna hurt me? Please don’t hurt me, okay? I live with my parents. I’m all they’ve got. I’ve got to give my mom her medicine tonight. High blood pressure. I bring my old man a Twinkie one special night a week too. Tonight’s Twinkie Night. If I don’t bring it, what’s he gonna do?”
“ ‘Twinkie Night,’ huh?”
“Right.” Max lets loose and starts bawling.
“Stop crying,” Jack says.
But Max keeps right on. He’s like an Italian grandmother at a funeral, the kind who throws herself on the casket, who revels in making a scene. Here he is, this weaselly, milk-drinking Irishman going for the goddamn Academy Award. He has snot hanging from his nose, his lips flecked with spit. “My work’s everything,” Max says.
Jack walks toward him, turning the gun over in his hand. He’s not going to shoot the guy, but he’s got to at least give him a little something to let him know he’s serious. If he just lets him off the hook, what’s Max take away from this? Crying gets him everywhere, that’s what.
Max backs up in his chair, or he tries to anyway. It’s proving tough to move in reverse on the cheapo folding chair, its legs sunk in the carpet. “Come on, Mr. Blue Sleeves,” Max says.
Just as Max is about to say more, to plead for a reprieve, Jack clocks him in the face with the butt of the gun. He makes good contact, smashing him right in the nose. Max lets out a whine. His left hand goes to his face instinctively, like a kid in school sitting at his desk and tending to an unexpected bloody nose. There’s blood everywhere, dripping from his chin onto his yellow shirt and into his pocket protector, splattered across the bills and statements and manuals on his desk. Jack can also see that he’s busted Max’s glasses. He must’ve caught him on the bridge. One lens has popped out, and the other is cracked. The whining continues.
“You’re gonna straighten things out with Mary, right?” Jack says, backing away.
With his free hand, Max reaches for the handle of a desk drawer just to the right of him and thrusts it open.
At first, Jack figures he’s going for tissues, but then it occurs to him that Max might have a piece stashed there. Jack flips the gun around in his hand.
Max does come out holding a piece. It’s not much, but it’s enough. One of those little jobs. Kind of a purse gun. Max aims it at Jack, though he’s clearly having a hard time seeing through his broken glasses, his other hand covering half his face, the blood flowing. His hand is shaky, the gun panning from Jack to the window to the wall and back again. Jack wonders if Max has even held the thing before, let alone fired it. “You think you can just walk in here and threaten me?” Max says, his tone gone from desperate to angry.
“Take it easy,” Jack says. He steps slowly toward Max, the gun out in front of him. “Put the gun down.”
“You put yours down.”
Jack moves in quickly. With his free hand, he wrestles the little gun from Max. He steps away, looks at the piece, and checks to see if it’s loaded. It’s not. He tosses it on the desk. It lands with a light thunk like a plastic cowboy gun from a dollar store. “Now you’re really on my bad side here,” Jack says.
“I’m sorry,” Max says. “I’m so stupid.”
“Fix things for Mary,” Jack says. He reaches around and tucks the gun under his shirt and then heads out of the office, leaving Max bleeding at his desk. He hears more elaborate moaning from inside as he turns the corner. He pictures Max wadding some of the bills up against his face. He looks across the street at a woman with a shopping cart collecting bottles from a garbage can. It feels especially bright out after being in that dingy office.
Back at his car, Jack opens the door and settles behind the wheel. The oldies station is playing Dion’s “(I Was) Born to Cry.” He puts his gun back in the glove compartment and sits there listening. Turning the music up until it rattles the windows. He likes the Johnny Thunders cover of this too. Somewhere he has that record. Johnny Thunders and Patti Palladin, Copy Cats. Probably up in the attic. He must’ve bought it at Zig Zag Records. He’s always gone there if there was some new Lou Reed or Johnny Thunders to get. That stopped when Janey got sick. Music seemed so much less important. He’s getting back to feeling some comfort from it now, able to sit here and listen.
When the song’s over and WCBS goes to commercial, he drives away up the block. A couple of lefts and he’s back on Fourth Avenue and soon enough he’s cruising on the Belt Parkway, headed home, windows down. He’s not sure what he’s going to do. Maybe go to the Wrong Number for a beer. Maybe go up to the attic and dig through some of his old records. He wonders if the turntable even works anymore—it’s buried under a big cloth in the basement. Probably needs a new needle at least. There might be a few on his old man’s workbench. For a brief spell in the seventies, he repaired turntables on the side. At some point tomorrow, Jack guesses, he’ll pay Mary Mucci a visit and tell her Max is going to make good.
Music’s back on now. Bill Withers, “Lean on Me.” One of those songs that—no matter how many times he hears it—doesn’t lose any of its luster. If anything, it gets better and better. It means more to him now than it could have ever meant to him back when he first heard it.
Sailing along turns into light congestion and then that, suddenly, becomes dead-stop traffic. He regrets not taking the streets. He’s stuck now between the Fourteenth Avenue exit and the Bay Parkway exit—probably less than a mile, but it could take forever. He could get out of his car and walk home faster. Those are the goddamn breaks.
He lowers the radio and tries to see what’s going on up ahead. It’s not rush hour yet, so it must be an accident.
A sudden burst of sirens tells him he’s right. Probably some dope was doing ninety and flipped. A regular thing on the Belt. You get these cugines in their souped-up shitboxes, thinking they’re on a racetrack, and that’s what happens.
It takes a while, but he inches closer and closer to the Bay Parkway exit. He sees now that whatever’s happened has happened at the off-ramp. The cops are diverting traffic into one tight little lane, forcing cars to make a left on Bay Parkway. They’ve blocked off the right lane to try to create some kind of order. One cop is out in the street, controlling traffic, looking frazzled. The accident itself is obscured by a fire truck and ambulance, but it’s pretty clear that two cars crashed right under the traffic lights at the intersection of Bay Parkway and Shore Parkway. Probably whoever was getting off the exit tried to beat a yellow, blew through a red, and slammed into an oncoming car. Or something like that.
Jack blesses himself. A habit he picked up from his mother. Every time they drove past an accident, even if it was just a fender bender, she’d bless herself. “Let’s just pray everyone’s okay,” she’d say.
As he gets closer yet, squeezed into the narrow left lane now, he gets a look between the fire truck and ambulance. He sees two cars, both totaled. It takes him a second, but he recognizes one as Amelia’s car. It’s upside down, half on the sidewalk in front of Wendy’s.
His heart jumps into his throat. He throws the gear stick into park, the car jolting forward, undoes his belt, and hops out of the car. The guy behind him leans on his horn, screams out his window, “Buddy, what the fuck you doing?”
Jack races over to the accident. A cop, who practically clotheslines him, stops him. “That’s my daughter’s car,” Jack says.
More beeping from the guy stuck behind Jack’s car. And then, suddenly, the whole line of cars behind that guy start beeping wildly. Burping and blaring horns. A steady stream of nightmarish wailing. So much terrible noise.
“You gotta move your car, chief,” the cop says over the din.
Jack pushes past him. A couple of firefighters are just getting Amelia out of the car.
“That’s my daughter,” he says again, seemingly to no one.
The world buzzes hot, bright, and loud all around him. The firefighters put Amelia down on the blacktop. A couple of EMS workers take over. Jack falls to his knees next to them. Amelia’s face is a mask of blood. He barely recognizes her. Her eyes are closed. Her body broken, bent unnaturally. That pink streak in her hair is something electric he hangs onto for a second. She’s gone, he can tell. They’re trying to coax her back to life, performing CPR, trying hard to get a spark, just a little spark. But she’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone. Jack’s world stops.
JUNE 2001
PART 1
CHARLIE
Charlie French has Greg Brancaccio pinned down on his living room floor. Greg’s the black sheep of the Brancaccio crew, a sketchy low-level punk. He’s brought shame to his whole family. First, it was the junk. Then the massage parlor incident made headlines. Stacks really didn’t like that. His youngest son tied up with Times Square hustlers and strippers. The Daily News and the Post had a field day: A SAD DAY FOR MOB BOY and JUNKY GREG’S TIMES SQUARE DEBACLE. Strangers shouted at him from open car widows: “How’s your boyfriend?”
Charlie has one hand on the kid’s shoulder and one on his neck. Greg’s maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight but he looks like he’s in his forties. Dark smudges under his eyes. A week or two of black scruff on his face. Eyebrows that are way too big for his little mousey face. Snot-welded hairs protruding from his nostrils like fucking stalactites. He’s sweating hard. Dying for a fix.
