Fresh Kills (2 page)
Authors: Bill Loehfelm
of the bed, the bedclothes kicked down to her ankles, her knees drawn up to her chest, her black cherry hair loose over her shoulders. She glowed in the afternoon sun shining through the window behind her. She blinked at me, apprehension on her face.
“Did I just hear Purvis call you an asshole?” she asked.
I crossed my arms and leaned in the doorway. “That you did. Neither the first nor the last time that’ll happen.”
She rolled her eyes, kicked her feet free, and slid to the edge of the bed, reaching down for her clothes. She knew my history with Purvis, found the enduring antagonism rather pathetic. She knew it had started with her. “What was he doing here? I thought you two fell out years ago.”
“We did,” I said. “It was business.” I hesitated, unsure of how to tell her the news, unsure if I wanted to. “Police business.” She stopped dressing and stared at me, waiting. I couldn’t leave it there; she’d make all the wrong assumptions if I did. Hell, I figured, it’s not like she won’t find out anyway. “My father’s been killed. Somebody shot him this morning.”
Molly stood up straight, her eyes wide, mouth hanging open, her jeans pulled only halfway up her thighs. “Jesus.” She crossed her arms over her bare chest, fingers splayed open over her collarbone,as if hearing the news half-naked shamed her. “Good Lord, John, that’s awful.” She pulled her jeans up to her hips and sat back down on the bed.
“I guess so,” I said. I pulled a Camel from the pack on the dresser. I cupped my hand around the end and lit it, tossing the lighter on the bed. Molly grabbed it and lit one from her pack on the nightstand.
“Jesus,” she said, perching her face on her palm, elbow resting on her knee. She didn’t ask any questions, didn’t get up to hug me, didn’t wave me over to the bed. She just sat, staring at the wall, smoking, saying nothing.
After she’d finished half her smoke, she set it in the ashtray and stood to finish getting dressed. I watched, sorry she was wrapping up that long, fluid body she’d shared with me through the sunrise hours. Still, I was anxious for her to go. I needed to get to my sister. And I knew Molly wanted out of my apartment. She checked the clock three times as she dressed. I figured I’d make it easier on her.
“I hate to rush you out the door,” I said, “but I’ve got to get to the house and see my sister. The cops are waiting there for me, too.”
She strapped on her watch, staring at it for a long time. Calculating, I knew, her schedule, her excuses, and the right thing to say about the news I’d shared.
“I should’ve been out of here hours ago,” she said. “I’m supposed to be grading papers. David’s picking me up for an early dinner.”
“Tell him I said hey.”
She raised an admonishing finger at me. “Leave him out of this.” She frowned at the bed. “This has got nothing to do with him.”
She slipped past me through the doorway, careful to avoid contact.I fought the urge to grab her wrist and drag her back into bed. Fuck Purvis and Waters, fuck David, fuck my father. I didn’t want any of them anywhere near my afternoon. But all I did was hold out my hand, letting Molly’s hair run through my fingers as she went by.
She stopped in the living room, halfway to the front door, searching through her purse for her keys. “Don’t do that, either. That’s the rule. When it’s time for me to go, you let me get from the bed to the door without touching me.”
I smiled. Molly with all her rules. Don’t pick on David, don’t ask about work, don’t ask about her brother or her folks. Don’t call her, she’ll find me. I guess it kept our thing under control for her, let her keep me out on the edge of her life, where she could reach me, but I couldn’t touch anything but her. It worked for me. I had no interest in the things she didn’t want me touching. I lived with them, these rules about the people in her life. In exchange, she gave me free reign over her body, put no limits on what I could touch there. Seemed like a fair trade to me.
She stopped again at the door, turning to me. “Are you gonna be okay? I guess I could call David and cancel.” She looked up at the ceiling. “If I could think of some excuse.”
“A friend’s dead father doesn’t cut it?”
“Stop,” she said. “You know he doesn’t know we’re even in touch again, never mind . . . doing what we’re doing.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Go see your boyfriend. Do I look like I’m about to break down? I don’t need anything from you.” I shrugged. “We’re old friends, we fuck every now and then, nothing more, nothing less. I’m not asking you for anything.”
She stared at me a long time. “You’ve never been one to mince words, John. Sometimes it stings.”
“C’mon, Molly,” I said. “I can see the relief in your face. You’re off the hook. You know you want it that way. Don’t bullshit either of us.” I crossed the room to her. Stood close enough to smell us on her skin. “That’s what makes this work between us, bare, stone-cold naked honesty.” I backed off, turned away, and walked into the kitchen. She followed.
“You know the old man died to me years ago,” I said, pouring ground coffee into a filter. “This morning is a technicality. I’d have nothing to do with it if it wasn’t for my sister, cops or no cops.” I filled the coffeepot with water and turned it on. I leaned back against the counter. “If you hadn’t been with me all night, you’d be wondering the same thing as Purvis, whether or not I capped him myself.”
“I’d never think that,” she said. “And I’m sure Purvis doesn’t, either.”
“Why not? You think I wouldn’t do it?”
“Never, in a million years,” she said. “I don’t care how many fistfights the two of you have had. Be serious. You? Kill your own father? Even Purvis knows that’s ridiculous. Bare-knuckled honesty. Isn’t that what you were just talking about?”
“More or less,” I said.
I yanked the carafe out of the coffeemaker and sat my mug under the spout, staring into the black stream pouring down. I debated the wisdom of trying to convince her I was capable of killing my father.
“You want honesty?” I said. “Fine. I’m not indifferent, I’m glad. It’s about time. He had it coming. You know what he was like. Shit, you spent two years of your life listening to me rant about him. How do I feel about it? I don’t know if I’m grateful to the guy who did it, or if I’m jealous because he did it first.”
“You should hear yourself,” Molly said. “You sound just like you did when we were seventeen.” She walked over to me. “Half a minute ago he meant nothing to you. Now you’re spitting poison all over the counter.” She put her hand on my chest, looked me in the eyes. “I think you’re in for a bad time, John. Be careful. If you need me, I can be around.”
I sipped my coffee, backing harder against the counter.
“Yeah, we fuck every now and then,” she whispered to me, “but we’re old friends, too.”
I wouldn’t look at her. “Tell David I said hey.”
Molly turned on her heel and walked out, slamming the door behind her. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard her call me an asshole on her way out.
TWO
AFTER I WATCHED MOLLY DRIVE AWAY, I STUFFED SOME CLOTHES in a bag, hopped in my Galaxie and sped south across the malformed, mutant offspring of Brooklyn known as Staten Island. The forgotten fifth borough. The Cultural Void. Home of the world-famous ferry, the world’s largest garbage dump, and the world’s largest collection of identical people.
I was worried about how my sister was taking all this; she has a tendency to overreact to things. Julia wasn’t wild about the old man, either, but she’d tried hanging on to him. She worked even harder at it after Mom died. Julia and Mom were more like sisters than mother and daughter. They even looked alike. Straight, blond hair that they both wore long, deep green eyes, pale, burn-ready skin. Thin but hippy, with long legs. When Julia hit her late teens, in the last couple of years before Mom died, they swapped clothes all the time. From a distance, it was difficult to tell them apart. They were best friends.
To me, their closeness was all the more reason for Julia to hate the old man, considering how he treated our mother. But Julia isn’t the hating kind. I asked her once why she even bothered with him.
“He’s my father,” she’d say. “And he’s alone now. And Mom loved him.” That’s Julia. She’s quite a pistol, my sister. Of course, it was easier for her to be more forgiving. She hadn’t had quite the hands-on experience with the old man that I’d had.
Mom did love him; how I don’t know. I never felt any obligation to him whatsoever. I’d told him so a few years ago, and as I bobbed and weaved through traffic on the Staten Island Expressway, the stink of the Fresh Kills Dump filling the car as I passed it, I felt glad we’d had that conversation before he died.
into my parents’ driveway, Purvis was waiting on the front porch.
“Took you long enough,” he said.
“Whatever. Where’s Waters?”
“Around back,” Purvis answered. “He didn’t want to attract the neighbors’ attention.” He gestured toward the front door. “You wanna open it up for us?”
“I don’t have a key,” I said. “Haven’t for years.”
Purvis led me around the side of the house to the backyard.
Standing on the patio, studying his shoes, was Detective Nathaniel Waters, a hulking, balding man in his mid-fifties, all loose, pale skin and wet, yellow eyes.
“Fat Nat,” my father had called him. They’d grown up together on Katan Avenue, alternating between being inseparable and brawling on sight. Sometimes, after a glass or two of wine, my mother told me stories about them. They played varsity football at Farrell together. My father started at left defensive end. Waters was his backup. Their weight room rivalry was the stuff of legend.
Their senior year, at my father’s encouragement, Waters switched to linebacker and broke his leg in the first quarter of his first start. Done. My father went to Wagner College on a scholarship and met my mother. He found a new rival in a guy named Stanski. Waters failed his army physical and went into the police academy. The first time my father got arrested for bar fighting, it was Waters who busted him.
Though raised in the same neighborhood, Dad and Mom only got to know each other at Wagner. She was his tutor, assigned the challenge of preventing my father from failing off the football team. My mother was smitten, she told me, by the fact that such a powerful, handsome man needed her help. It had never happened to her before, she said.
They’d met only once before, when she was Waters’s date for the senior prom. As soon as she and my father started going steady, Waters decided he was in love with her, too. He had to. He and my father were those weird type of guys who hated each other so much they couldn’t stay out of each other’s lives. They drank in the same bars all their lives, preferring for decades to trade insults and glare at each other over their light beers rather than cede territory. Waters only gave up on my mother when she got pregnant with me. I guess even Fat Nat had standards.
Not long after my parents’ wedding, he met a girl of his own, married her. Less than a year later, they had twin sons. Two years later, Waters came home from a twelve-hour shift on foot patrol in the Bronx to an empty house on Staten Island. His wife, who my father came to refer to as “the Disappearing Blonde,” vanished with their sons into her huge Italian family. She had relatives scattered all over the Eastern seaboard. Some still lived in Italy. Waters tried, but he never found her. A hard case for an aspiring detective to leave unsolved.
Waters went on to a thirty-year career as a New York City cop, never working anything but homicide after he made detective. He made a record number of busts, but he was too honest to make the right friends, on the job or in the city government. So like a lot of other cops who did good work but who nobody liked very much, as soon as he lost a step, Waters got sentenced to a police precinct on Staten Island, running in circles for the last ten years after Mafia sycophants and chasing teenage vandals, teenage car thieves, and teenage drug dealers. I’m sure it burned his ass something serious, being put out to pasture when he felt he still had good races left in him. He never heard from his wife again. Never took off his wedding ring.
My mother’s voice glowed with admiration for my younger father as she told the stories, but it always softened with embarrassment when she spoke of Waters. Who that twinge of shame was for, her or him, I never knew.
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