Curtains (18 page)

Joey Scattione, he’s big time, don’t got
nothing against you, not nothing personal. If it was up to him,
just a slap on the cheek, you cry and say you’re sorry, we all go
down to Luigi’s and eat pasta together, like in some Mafia movie.
Whaddahell.

But this is business. And business means
keeping your word. And standing up, playing it straight. But you
hadda talk to Feds and the Feds can’t touch Joey, we all know that,
Joey’s golden, but they get a little something on you, you lose
your spine, your tongue starts running before your head turns the
key, and all of a sudden we got a bad situation.

No, a person who would change his name would
probably tell any kind of lie to save his own skin. It’s all about
constitution. Some got it, some ain’t. Don’t feel bad about it.
Better guys than you wilted when the heat came down. Changed your
name and tried to skip town, all part of your constitution.

All perfectly understandable. But that don’t
mean it’s forgivable.

We’ve known each other what—seven years? Why
you got to go and not be Vincent any more? I liked Vincent, for the
most part.

Aw, c’mon. Don’t start with this “Mikey,
Mikey” stuff. Don’t make it worse by begging. You wilted once, but
you got one last chance to go down standing. Don’t look at me that
way, I got no choice, nothing personal, but you gotta die.

See, it’s all about choices. You change your
name, try to become somebody different, but under the skin you’re
still the same.

I mean, the feds and girls and guns, that’s
all business stuff. Taking you out, that’s business. Listening to
you beg, that’s business, too, sort of sad but, hey, you can’t
change what’s under the skin.

It bugs me, you changing your name like that.
Shows a lack of constitution.

Me, I stick with “Mikey.” There’s a billion
Mikeys in Brooklyn, and I’m one of them. No better, no worse.
That’s just part of my constitution.

The least you can do is take your name back.
I’ll make it clean, one through the heart, the head, whatever you
want. But you ought to do things right and go out under the name
you was born with. What about it?

I mean, you don’t want to meet old St. Pete
and tell him your name and he runs his finger down the list and no
Vincent there, all them good deeds for nothing, just ‘cause you
ain’t really Vincent no more. So he shakes his head and you got to
slink away from the Pearly Gates and all because you got no
spine.

So that’s the only thing personal about what
I gotta do. This name business. It’s a lie, and I hate lies.

Whaddaya say?

Vincent. Don’t go with the crying. It ain’t
in character. Not like you at all.

Sorry, Vincent.

Open your eyes.

See, I lied.

This is personal.

And my name’s not really Mikey.

It’s Vincent now. Yeah, your name. I may as
well take it, since you won’t be needin’ it no more, and Joey got a
thing for me, too.

You kind of look a little like me, too, and
by the time your bones float up in the harbor, you’ll be wax and
cottage cheese. With my I.D. in your wallet.

So you don’t like Vincent, you can be Mikey,
and Mikey’s dead, and I skip out as Vincent, and Joey’s none the
wiser.

Everybody lives happy ever after.

Oh.

Except you.

Like I said, it’s nothing personal.

Tell St. Pete Vincent says hello.

WATERMELON

Ricky bought the watermelon on a warm
Saturday afternoon in September.

The early crop had arrived at the local
grocer’s in late June, fresh from California, but the available
specimens were hard and heartless. Ricky had decided to wait for a
Deep South watermelon, and those traditionally arrived many weeks
after the annual Fourth of July slaughter. Besides, that was early
summer. He had yet to read about the murder and his home life with
Maybelle was in a state of uneasy truce.

But now it was the last day of summer, a
definite end of something and the beginning of something else. The
watermelon was beautiful. It was perfectly symmetrical, robust, its
green stripes running in tigerlike rhythms along the curving sides.
A little bit of vine curled from one end like the cute tail of a
pig. He tapped it and elicited a meaty, liquid thump.

It was heavy, maybe ten pounds, and Ricky
brought it from the bin as carefully as if it were an infant. His
wife had given him a neatly penned list of thirteen items, most of
them for her personal use. But his arms were full, and he didn’t
care to trudge through the health-and-beauty section, and he had no
appetite for Hostess cupcakes and frozen waffles. Sheryl Crowe was
singing a bright ditty of sun and optimism over the loudspeakers,
music designed to lobotomize potential consumers. Ricky made a
straight path to the checkout counter and placed the watermelon
gently on the conveyor belt.

Now that his hands were free, he could pick
up one of the regional dailies. The front page confined the woman’s
picture to a small square on the left. Her killer, the man who had
sworn to love and honor until death did them part, merited a
feature photograph three columns wide, obviously the star of the
show and the most interesting part of the story.

“That’s sickening, isn’t it?” came a voice
behind him.

Ricky laid the newspaper on the belt so the
cashier could ring it up. He turned to the person who had spoken, a
short man with sad eyes and a sparse mustache, a man who had never
considered violence of any kind toward his own wife.

“They say he was perfectly normal,” Ricky
said. He wasn’t the kind for small talk with strangers, but the
topic interested him. “The kind of man who coached Little League
and attended church regularly. The kind the neighbors said they
never would have suspected.”

“A creep is what he is. I hope they fry him
and send him to hell to fry some more.”

“North Carolina uses lethal injection.”

“Fry him anyway.”

“I wonder what she was like.” Since the
murder last week, Ricky had been studying the woman’s photograph,
trying to divine the character traits that had driven a man to
murder. Had she been unfailingly kind and considerate, and had thus
driven her husband into a blinding red madness?

“A saint,” the short man said. “She
volunteered at the animal shelter.”

“That’s what I heard,” Ricky said. The
cashier told him the total and he thumbed a credit card from his
wallet. People always took kindness toward animals as a sign of
divine benevolence. Let children starve in Africa but don’t kick a
dog in the ribs. For all this man knew, she volunteered because she
liked to help with the euthanizing.

“At least they caught the bastard,” the man
said.

“He turned himself in.” Obviously the man had
been settling for the six-o’clock-news sound bites instead of
digging into the real story. Murder was rare here, and a sordid
case drew a lot of attention. But most of the people Ricky talked
with about the murder had only a passing knowledge of the facts and
seemed quite content in their ignorance and casual
condemnation.

Ricky took the watermelon to the car, rolled
it into the passenger seat, and sat behind the wheel reading the
paper. The first days of coverage had focused on quotes from
neighbors and relatives and terse statements by the detectives, but
now the shock had worn off. In true small-town fashion, the police
had not allowed any crime scene photos, and the early art had
consisted of somber police officers standing around strips of
yellow tape. A mug shot of the husband had been taken from public
record files, showing mussed hair, stubble, and the eyes of a
trapped animal. The District Attorney had no doubt kept him up all
night for a long round of questioning, to ensure that the arrest
photo would show the perpetrator in the worst possible light. No
matter how carefully the jurors were selected, that first
impression often lingered in the minds of those who would pass
judgment.

A week later, the coverage had made the easy
shift into back story, digging into the couple’s history, finding
cracks in the marriage. The only way to keep the story on the front
page was for reporters to turn up personal tidbits, make
suggestions about affairs and insurance, and build a psychological
profile for a man who was so perfectly average that only hindsight
revealed the slightest flaw.

Ricky drove home with the images playing in
his mind, a reel of fantasy film he’d painted from the police
reports. The husband comes home, finds dinner on the table as
always, green peas and potatoes, thinly sliced roast beef with
gravy, a cheesecake that the wife must have spent hours making.
They eat, watch an episode of “Law & Order,” then she takes a
shower and goes to bed. Somewhere between the hours on either side
of midnight, the husband makes his nightly trek to share the warmth
and comfort of the marital bed. Only, this time, he carries with
him a seven-inch companion of sharp, stainless steel.

Seventeen times, according to the medical
examiner. One of the rookie reporters had tried to develop a
numerology angle and assign a mystical significance to the number
of stab wounds, but police suspected the man had simply lost count
during the frenzy of blood lust. The first blow must have done the
trick, and if the man had only meant to solve a problem, that
surely would have sufficed. But he was in search of something, an
experience that could only be found amid the silver thrusts, the
squeaking of bedsprings, the soft moans, and the wet dripping of a
final passion.

By the time Ricky pulled into his driveway,
he was moist with sweat. He found himself comparing his and
Maybelle’s house with that of the murderer’s, as shown in the Day
Two coverage. The murderer’s house was in the next county, but it
would have been right at home in Ricky’s neighborhood. Two stories,
white Colonial style, a stable line of shrubbery surrounding the
porch. Shutters framing windows framing curtains that hid the lives
inside. Both houses were ordinary, upper middle class, with no
discernible differences except that one had harbored an
extraordinary secret that festered and then exploded.

Ricky fanned his face dry with the newspaper,
then slipped it under the seat. He wrestled the watermelon out and
carried it up the front steps. He could have driven into the
garage, but his car had leaked a few drops of oil and Maybelle had
complained. He nearly dropped the watermelon as he reached to open
the door. He pictured it lying burst open on the porch, its
shattered skin and pink meat glistening in the afternoon sun.

But he managed to prop it against his knee
and turn the handle, then push his way inside.

Her voice came from the living room.
“Ricky?”

“Who else?” he said in a whisper. As if a
random attacker would walk through the door, as if her ordered life
was capable of attracting an invader. As if she deserved any type
of victimhood.

“What’s that, honey?”

He raised his voice. “Yes, dear. It’s
me.”

“Did you get everything? You know how
forgetful you are.”

Which is why she gave him the lists. But even
with a list, he had a habit of always forgetting at least one item.
She said it was a deliberate act of passive aggression, that nobody
could be that forgetful. But he was convinced it was an unconscious
lapse, because he did it even when he wrote out the list
himself.

“I had to—” He didn’t know what to tell her.
A lie came to mind, some elaborate story of helping someone change
a flat tire beside the road, and how the person had given him a
watermelon in gratitude, and Ricky wanted to put the watermelon in
the refrigerator before shopping. But Maybelle would see through
the story. He wondered if the murdering husband had told such white
lies.

“I had to come back and take my medicine,” he
said, heading down the hall to the kitchen. “You know how I
get.”

Maybelle must have been sitting in her chair,
the one that dominated the living room and was within reach of the
bookcase, the telephone, and the remote control. Her perfect world.
White walls. Knickknacks neatly dusted, potted plants that never
dared shed so much as a leaf. Photographs of her relatives lining
the walls, but not a single member of Ricky’s family.

“You and your medicine,” she said. “You were
gone an hour.”

He pretended he hadn’t heard her. He put the
watermelon on the counter and opened the refrigerator. He thought
of hiding it in one of the large bottom bins but he wasn’t sure it
would fit. Besides, this was his refrigerator, too. He’d paid for
it, even though Maybelle’s snack foods took up the top two shelves.
In a moment of rebellion, he shoved some of his odd condiments
aside, the horseradish, brown mustard, and marinade sauces that
occupied the bottom shelf. He slid the watermelon into place,
though its girth caused the wire rack above it to tilt slightly and
tumble a few Tupperware containers. He slammed the refrigerator
closed with an air of satisfaction.

He turned and there was Maybelle, filling the
entryway that divided the kitchen and dining room. Her arms were
folded across her chest, wearing the serene smile of one who held
an even temper in the face of endless trials. Ricky found himself
wondering if the murdered wife had possessed such stolid and
insufferable equanimity.

“What was that?” Maybelle asked.

Ricky backed against the refrigerator. There
was really no reason to lie, and, besides, it’s not like she
wouldn’t notice the first time she went rummaging for a yogurt.
But, for one hot and blind moment, he resented her ownership of the
refrigerator. Why couldn’t he have a watermelon if he wanted?

“A watermelon,” he said.

“A watermelon? Why didn’t you get one back in
the middle of summer, like everybody else?”