Death Will Help You Leave Him (28 page)

“If he’d asked me for the money,” Jimmy said, “he might still be alive. Kevin knew who Vinnie was, but Vinnie wouldn’t have given him a thought if Kevin hadn’t made contact.”

“Nonsense,” Barbara said. She hugged him to show she meant it nicely. “You’d never have given him drug money.”

“You’re right,” Jimmy said, “but I almost wish he’d lied to me about what he needed money for. If only he’d gone to the police and told them he’d seen Vinnie with Frankie the night he died.”

“ ‘If only’ gets you nowhere,” Barbara said.

“I know, I know.”

“Can we get back on the main track?” I asked. “Vinnie was Frankie’s best friend. Why did he kill him?”

“Love,” Jimmy said. “Frankie was cheating on his sister.”

“Let’s visit Carola in the hospital,” Barbara said.

“Who, me?” I said.

“You know I won’t get Jimmy out to Brooklyn again so soon.”

“The Web is lovely, dark and deep, and I have promises to keep,” Jimmy said.

So that afternoon, Barbara and I made our way to Brooklyn one more time.

Carola lay propped up on the bed with several parts of her in traction. The blue-green shadows under her eyes matched the hand-woven throw flung over the hospital sheet.

“Pull up a chair,” she greeted us. “And hand me that Styrofoam cup, the one with the flex straw sticking out of it.”

Barbara handed. I pulled. Barbara sat. Carola sipped. I lounged against the radiator, enjoying the warmth against my buns.

“Please don’t take it personally,” Carola said as she set the cup down, “if I say I wish I’d never met you.”

“I can understand it,” I assured her.

“Me too,” Barbara said. “On the other hand, we didn’t even come into it until Frankie was dead.”

“Frankie was asking for it. But Vince! Finding out my brother is a murderer is an experience I wouldn’t wish on anybody.”

“You mentioned your brother Vince when we visited you,” Barbara said. “We might have put two and two together.”

“Why?” Carola said. “Not everybody in Brooklyn is related.” She flashed a wan grin. “Not even everybody Italian. It only seems that way. And at home, we never called him Vinnie.”

“Do you mind talking about it?” Barbara said. “It would help if we could understand why.” She didn’t specify who it would help. Barbara’s inner T-shirt says, “Inquiring minds want to know.” To my relief, Carola insisted she was glad to have us to talk to. The family, she admitted, was driving her crazy.

“Do you think Vinnie saw himself as an avenger?” Barbara asked. “You know, killing the guy who did his sister wrong?”

“We aren’t quite so medieval in Bensonhurst,” Carola said. “But the code still exists, even though most of us know it’s crap. I
told
my brothers to butt out. I thought they had.”

“Men!” Barbara said. “You can’t tell them anything.” Female bonding. There’s nothing like it.

“It wasn’t all about me,” Carola said. “Vince was in love with Netta. His whole life.”

“We never heard a word about that.”

“Nobody talked about it,” Carola said, “because everybody knew it. Netta dangled him. She gave him nothing, but she liked having him around.”

Like a spider with a fly wrapped up in the pantry. Like Laura and me.

“Poor Vince didn’t get it,” Carola said. “She liked things just the way they were.”

“He thought she’d turn to him,” Barbara said, “once Frankie was gone. It happens in books all the time. Faithful Dobbin gets the girl on page 850 or so.”

I didn’t think Vinnie had ever read
Vanity Fair
. I supposed most people wouldn’t think I had either. In our predrinking days, when Jimmy and I played hooky, he had always made a beeline for the library. Two choices: read or die of boredom.

“It’s not enough,” I said. “Faithful Dobbin didn’t kill to get the girl. Vinnie and Frankie were friends. Maybe best friends. Something had to shatter that.”

“It did.” Carola shifted under the sheet. The hand-woven throw slid halfway off the bed. She strained to reach behind her.

“Can I help?”

“Under the pillow.”

Barbara slid her hand past Carola’s back.

“This?” She held up a small leather picture frame, the kind that hinges.

Carola took it from her hand. She snapped it open and held it up.

“Look.”

The frame held two photos. One was a studio portrait of Carola’s little boy. The other was a snapshot. Taken outdoors, it appeared to be a scrimmage. I peered closer. Several kids, all too young for football, tumbled like puppies on and around a figure on the ground: Vinnie. I recognized Edmund and the boy and girl, Frankie’s kids, from the funeral. All of them were laughing. Vinnie too.

“Vince was crazy about kids,” Carola said. “Especially mine and Netta’s kids.”

“How about Frankie?”

“Not like Vince.” She tapped Edmund’s picture. “If I’d had an abortion, Vince would have gone ballistic.” She caught her breath. “Sorry. I still can’t take it in. You don’t expect your brother to become a killer.”

“Of course not.” Barbara’s voice warmed and soothed. “Frankie wanted you to get an abortion.”

“He offered to pay.” She and Barbara exchanged another of those “Men!” looks. I squirmed.

“You told Vinnie?” I asked.

“Of course not. But I made the mistake of telling my sister-in-law. Patti could never keep her mouth shut.”

“You were pregnant by a married man,” Barbara said. “You needed to talk to someone.”

“Something like that,” Carola said. “It kind of knocked the halo off Frankie for Vince. The fact that Frankie played around didn’t bother him so much. He didn’t like it that the girlfriend was his sister, but none of us were fourteen any more.”

“He made Netta have an abortion, didn’t he?” Barbara asked. “Not this time, obviously, but maybe a year or so back?”

Carola nodded. “How did you know? He was heavy into drugs, and he didn’t want to think about another twenty years of shoes and bicycles and orthodontia. Vince was furious about him not wanting Edmund. But to do that to Netta? It tipped him over the edge.”

“Did you talk with Vince about it?” Barbara spoke softly. She sat back in her chair beside the bed, not leaning forward as if to press for the answer. Her intent face was still. Her hands, usually in motion when she talked, lay relaxed along the wooden arms of the chair. She must look like this when she did counseling.

“I did. Netta told him— trying to make trouble, if you ask me. And he came to me. He wanted me to talk to Netta. She’d already done it, I don’t know how he thought I could help— maybe just show some solidarity. He kept saying, ‘He shouldn’t have killed the baby’.”

I could imagine Vinnie saying it.
He shouldn’a killed the baby.

“I underestimated how far he’d go.” Carola snapped the photo frame shut and dropped back against the pillows.

“You’re tired,” Barbara said. “We’ve stayed too long. We’d better leave and let you get some rest.”

“No, no.” Her eyes drooped. “Well, maybe. Funny how tiring lying in bed can be. Or maybe it’s getting hit by a car that’s so exhausting— worse than welding. I did some monumental sculpture a few years back. But I wanted to tell you what happened that day, before I ran out there.”

I did want to hear about that.

“And then we really will go,” Barbara said.

“I never meant that woman to get hurt,” Carola said. “I wouldn’t have called her if I’d known what Vince had in mind. It never occurred to me he’d lie to me like that.”

“What did he lie about?”

“He told me he had a crush on her. Luz. He’d never let on he knew about her— that far he still felt loyal to Frankie. But once Frankie was dead, he thought I’d grieve less if I knew what a two-timing bastard he was.”

“Three-timing,” I put in. “Sorry, go on.”

“He told me he’d met her a lot of times. At first he felt sorry for her, but then he realized he’d been attracted all along. At least—”

“Lies,” Barbara said.

“You know, I think he did feel sorry for her.”

I agreed. Luz had told me how Vinnie had tried to get her to back off. Stop looking for Frankie’s killer. Leave the family alone. Get the hell out of Brooklyn. Still, if he had succeeded in killing her, his being apologetic about it would not have helped. Dead was dead.

“He planned to kill her because she wouldn’t stop looking,” I said.

“It should have been us,” Barbara said. “He didn’t know Luz would never have gone sleuthing on her own.”

“No point feeling guilty,” Carola said.

You haven’t murdered anyone lately, have you?
my sponsor had asked me once.
Most guilt feelings are bullshit. Resentment is the killer.

“Easier said than done,” Barbara said.

Carola nodded.

“I feel guilty myself,” she said. “Vince used me to set up an alibi. I’ve already told the cops. It makes what he did premeditated. He meant to kill her.”

“What was the alibi?”

“First he got me to make the call. He told me he wanted to ask her out, but he was afraid she’d say no. He thought— he said he thought she was afraid of him. So he told me to invite her over and he’d drop in, maybe offer to drive her home.”

“That puts him right on the scene, though,” I said. “How did that make an alibi?”

“He never meant her to come inside,” she said. “It was Saturday— do you know what day it was?”

“Almost Halloween?”

“Daylight saving time!” Barbara exclaimed. “I mean, no more daylight saving time. The day we put the clocks back.”

I hadn’t done mine yet. I’d better. I still didn’t care what time it was, but the law firms I temped at did.

“Exactly,” Carola said. “I always forget. Ever since I got my first alarm clock, I’ve counted on Vince to remember and do it for me. He didn’t make a big deal of it, either. Most times I didn’t even notice, just expected the clock to be right. I only have one clock, anyway. I don’t have one in the baby’s room. I never wanted the ticking to disturb him. I don’t like digitals. And I don’t wear a watch.”

She was an artist. No day job, and she worked with her hands.

“I remember your clock,” I said. “Brass and enamel. Old. Hard to wind.”

“You must have some kind of schedule with Edmund,” Barbara said.

“Sure,” Carola said, “but it didn’t matter, because Vince’s setup started
before
he changed the clock. I always put Edmund down for his nap at the same time. Vince knew that. While I was in the other room, he put it back the hour.”

“What if Edmund only napped for an hour?” Barbara asked. “Wouldn’t you have noticed if it was the same time when he woke up as when you’d put him down?”

Carola smiled.

“Edmund’s a good napper. Vince knew that too. If he slept two hours, I’d just think he’d slept only one.”

“So he made an invisible hour,” I said.

Carola’s smile reversed into an unhappy droop.

“He walked in while I was putting Edmund down and said, ‘Didn’t she come?’ He already had— he’d already—”

He already had her stashed in the trunk. We took our leave without making her finish the sentence.

Barbara, who worked in a hospital herself, predicted the elevator would be slow. The crowd that accumulated by the time it came could have fielded a football team, though some of them didn’t look fit enough for dodge ball. The doors slid open at a majestic pace. We all squeezed in. Several people pressed the button for the ground floor. The elevator went up.

Visitors, hospital workers, and the occasional patient got on and off. We all shrank back into the corners to make room for a gurney twice as big as the shriveled, pasty-faced old person who lay on it. I had begun to wonder if we had enough air to reach the lobby when Barbara said loudly, “Oh, shit!”

Everyone looked at her, even the moribund patient on the gurney.

“What?”

“Later,” she told me. Our companions looked disappointed.

Five minutes later, we revolved through the hospital doors. We shared a section roomy enough for a wheelchair. In its illusory privacy, Barbara began to talk.

“I forgot to ask her about the gynecologist.”

“What gynecologist?”

We emerged into air at least thirty-five degrees cooler. It would have been more except for the thick fog of smoke. The huddled cigarette addicts included patients still hooked to their IVs as well as doctors, some of them no doubt oncologists. I would have stopped to light up, but Barbara, one hand clapped over her mouth and nose, hurried me along. I couldn’t understand her muffled answer.

“Say again?”

She shook her head without removing the hand. With the other hand, she grabbed a fistful of my coat and tugged me along. Fifty yards from the hospital she stopped, let go, and drew in a double lungful of relatively untainted air.

“When Netta and her friends came to the lingerie shop, Luz overheard them talking about Netta’s abortion. That’s how I knew. They didn’t say the A word, but they mentioned Dr. Feingold. Luz had given his name to Frankie, not knowing that was why he wanted it. I’ve been encouraging her to switch to my gynecologist, but Luz says she has a horror of a woman touching her ‘down there’.”

“Thanks for sharing. I can’t tell you how glad I am you didn’t say this in the elevator.”

“Don’t be silly. Anyway, I’m trained. When you work in a hospital, it’s a big confidentiality no-no to talk about a patient in the elevator, so you learn discretion.”

“If that’s your idea of discretion,” I said. “Oh, never mind.”

I threw an arm out to keep her from starting across the street just as the light turned red.

“Whoa! I’ve had enough hit-and-run karma to last a lifetime in the past few weeks. Dr. Feingold, huh?”

“That’s what she said. Why?”

“I think he was Laura’s gynecologist. It doesn’t matter now.”

We started down the subway stairs. As we fished out our Metrocards, we heard the rumble of an approaching train. Grateful for the distraction, I jammed the card into the slot and tugged it through. The digital readout gave me a hard time.
Please Swipe Again.
Damn. I missed the old days when I used to jump the turnstile. But nobody had to tell me getting arrested would be bad for my sobriety.

Barbara held out a hand as I burst through on the third try, and we ran for it. We just made it into the most crowded car and had to stand. Barbara tried to shout at me over the racket of the train. I pointed to my ear and shook my head. Swaying practically on tiptoes as she hung from a metal strap a bit too high for her, she took my earlobe between the thumb and fingers of her free hand and pulled my head down close enough to speak into my ear. Her breath tickled.