Fresh Kills (25 page)
Authors: Bill Loehfelm
“How ya doin’, Vito?” I put a twenty down.
“Fine,” he said, not looking at me. “A buck fifty. For the coffee.”
“Throw in a
Daily News.
” I leaned forward on the counter. I laid down another twenty and shoved the forty toward him. “You talk to your father?”
Daily News.
” I leaned forward on the counter. I laid down another twenty and shoved the forty toward him. “You talk to your father?”
He stared at the money, but he didn’t reach for it. His hands didn’t move from his sides. “No. Haven’t had a chance,” he said. “Two and a quarter.”
“Throw in two packs of Camel Filters.” Two more twenties went down. “You heard him talking about it? Anything at all that might help me out?” I put down the last twenty I had with me. “You remember who worked that day?”
“Look,” he finally said, “the cops told me not to talk about it to anyone. I don’t want any trouble with them.” He looked down at the money, pinched his forefinger and thumb at his lips. “I can’t afford it. Feel me?”
“I feel you.” I took the top off my coffee and sipped it. It was so hot I gagged. My eyes watered. I crushed the plastic top in my fist. I tried to smile at Vito. “But what the cops don’t know can’t hurt either of us. Right?”
“Sorry,” Vito said, snatching up a twenty and ringing me up in a hurry. “I can’t help.”
“Correction,” I said, leaning close to him, speaking quietly. “You won’t help. There’s a difference.” My palms had started to sweat. I wiped them dry on my jeans. I picked up the rest of the money. He hadn’t gotten me my cigarettes. I looked around the store. There was no one in sight. “Can I have my fucking smokes at least? Can you do that for me?”
“Yeah, sure. Anything to make you happy.” He was talking like a smart-ass now, but his hand shook as he reached over his head for the cigarettes.
I lunged at him, grabbing Vito’s arm and yanking him hard against the counter. Hot coffee splashed all over both of us. I snatched his throat in my other hand. Gagging, Vito grabbed my wrist with one hand. His other hand darted under the counter, searching for the bat or pipe or whatever weapon he kept there. I pulled him closer to me.
“I fucking told you I’d be back,” I said. “But you did nothing for me. You useless piece of shit. Where’s your sense of civic responsibility?”
Vito’s answer couldn’t make it through my fingers at his throat. Both our heads snapped around when a tiny lady in a black coat screamed, her hands flapping in the air, her fresh cold cuts at her feet. I released my hold on Vito. He grabbed a baseball bat from under the counter and held it out in front of him, shaking it at me. Angela appeared at the end of the soda aisle as Big Sal came rumbling up the aisle. “What? What? What?” he shouted.
“Pop!” Vito yelled. “This is the psycho I was telling you about. The one all crazy about the dead guy.”
Big Sal looked at me. The panic disappeared from his face. Sadness replaced it. “Junior, I had a feeling my son was talking about you the other day,” he said. “Put the bat down, Vito.”
Vito shook the bat at his father, then back at me, then at his father again. “Pop, this guy is dangerous.”
Big Sal frowned at his son. “Dangerous? I known this kid since he was a little nothing.” He looked back at me. “Upset maybe, but dangerous? I don’t think so. Right?”
I nodded, looking helplessly at the spilled coffee then back at Big Sal.
“Let me finish up something in the back,” Big Sal said. “Vito, clean up that coffee. Junior, you wait right there for me. Don’t do nothin’, don’t say nothin’, just wait.” He looked at his daughter. “Angie, sweetheart, you keep an eye on these two knuckleheads and make sure they do what I told ’em.”
Everybody did what Big Sal told them. None of us said a word.
Big Sal
had
known me since I was a little kid, since my father used to walk me down to his store so I could rifle through comic books and packs of baseball cards while he shot the shit with Big Sal and his brothers. It was the highlight of my weekend, hanging around the corner store with big, smoking, swearing, laughing men. Sal would always pat me on the head when I jumped in the conversation. My father would put his hands on my shoulders and redirect me back to the comic books. It seemed like a fine time, and I felt lucky to be part of it.
had
known me since I was a little kid, since my father used to walk me down to his store so I could rifle through comic books and packs of baseball cards while he shot the shit with Big Sal and his brothers. It was the highlight of my weekend, hanging around the corner store with big, smoking, swearing, laughing men. Sal would always pat me on the head when I jumped in the conversation. My father would put his hands on my shoulders and redirect me back to the comic books. It seemed like a fine time, and I felt lucky to be part of it.
God, I hadn’t thought about that in years. Those trips to the store had ended twenty years ago, long before my father took up with Fontana. Both of Sal’s older brothers were dead.
To my surprise, there was still a black wire rack full of comics at the end of the counter. I could see my younger self straining to reach the top, could hear the squeak of the rack as I turned it while trying to eavesdrop on my father and the Costanza brothers. I remembered staring at the packs of baseball cards, trying to guess which one hid the Dave Kingman card I coveted, terrified of making the wrong choice. I remembered the brothers’ sudden silences when my father snapped at me to make up my goddamn mind already.
It was always either-or with my father. No matter how hard I argued, or bargained, he would never buy me both comics and cards, though each cost less than a dollar. As I watched Vito, muttering to Angela as he cleaned up and she rang up the terrified old lady, I recalled my father talking about life lessons, about being forced to make hard choices. I never learned that lesson. I insisted on what I wanted, forgetting or ignoring that I’d never gotten it in the past.
Usually, I left Sal’s store empty-handed and impossibly frustrated, unable to make up my mind. My father would drag me home by the arm, alternately laughing and swearing at me, promising to never bring me back, though the next weekend, he always did and I was always glad for it.
Finally, during one walk home he made his threat and I surprised both of us by telling him that would be fine with me. I told him that one day I would have my own money and I would get things for myself. I fully expected to get belted. But he didn’t hit me. He just squeezed my shoulder hard enough to hurt, and told me I was finally learning something. I had no idea what he meant.
Big Sal made his way back up front. He poured two cups of coffee, dropped ice cubes into each one to cool them off. “Let’s go outside,” he said. I followed him through the door and around the side of the building. Sal lit his cigar stub before he spoke.
“Normally, I wouldn’t let someone behave like that in my store,” he said. “Never mind toward my children.” He puffed. “It’s not something I’ll overlook again.”
“I understand.”
He looked at me through his cigar smoke.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to offend or disrespect you. I was just trying to—”
“I know what you were trying to do,” he said. “I know it was your father that got killed out there. I feel for you, kid. I really do. I knew the man for over twenty years. It happened in front of my store. How do you think that makes me feel? And I know what it looks like, with the way he died. That shit has never, ever gone on in my store.”
I just stared at him. He’d tell me that whether it was true or not.
“This vendetta shit won’t work,” Big Sal said. “I can tell from the state of you that it’s not making you feel any better.”
“I’m not after some vendetta,” I said. “And I don’t care how I look. I’ve got everything under control. I’m not the problem. Nobody’ll tell me a damn thing about what happened. That’s the problem with this situation.”
“You blame ’em?” Sal said. “The way you been acting?”
“I refuse to accept this, Sal,” I said. “It was broad fucking daylight.”
“This is New York City,” Sal said. “You know how much shit happens in broad daylight that no one has an explanation for? Where’s your head, kid? Why should you be special?”
“Because it was my father.” The words were out before I realized how foolish they sounded.
“I know, I know,” Sal said. “I feel for you. I do.”
“So what do I do?” I asked. “Shit happens? That’s what you’re telling me?”
“I know it ain’t that simple,” Sal said. “Gimme some credit.”
“If it was you that got shot like that,” I said, “what would you want Vito to do? Just let it go? Or would you want some kind of justice?”
“Justice? Junior, you’re smarter than this. What’s justice got to do with real life? I know how your father treated you. I tried talking to him about it all the time but he wouldn’t listen. Where’s the justice in that?” He plucked his cigar from his mouth, picked some tobacco off his lip. “Listen, who was that pretty Irish girl you used to bring around here in high school? Meagan?”
“Molly,” I said.
Sal clapped his hands. “Molly. Right. Molly Francis. She was a looker. Listen, you think Molly doesn’t want justice for her brother? You think she’s ever gonna get it? You think she doesn’t wonder, that we all don’t wonder, how that coulda happened?”
“How should I know?” I said.
“You asked me what I’d want Vito to do,” Sal said. “It’s hard to even think about; I wouldn’t wish the hurt you’re feeling on my worst enemy. But I’d want Vito to do what a man is supposed to do. I’d want him to take care of his family.”
“You think Julia doesn’t want to know who did this?”
“I’m sure she does,” Sal said. “But I bet she wants her brother more. When I had my bypass, I missed my brothers like hell.”
“All due respect,” I said, “but your brothers weren’t murdered.”
“They weren’t. They died a little young, but they went fat and happy. But they’re still gone, and I’d give anything to have them around, the fat bastards.”
A coughing, filthy delivery truck pulled up beside us. The driver tossed his McDonald’s bag out the window.
“That’s my fish,” Sal said, waving away the acrid exhaust. “I gotta send Angie to the bank and there’s no way Vito doesn’t fuck this up if I leave him with it. I gotta go back in. I’m gonna send Angie over to the house with some things. Some sausage, a good red gravy, some fresh bread. You like fish?”
I was going to protest. I wasn’t going to be there long enough to eat the stuff and who knew what Julia’d do with it, but I figured there was no point in arguing. I felt utterly defeated. I’d come down to the store hunting a killer and I was walking away with flounder and some red gravy. Pathetic. I’d turned out to be a complete dud.
“I’m telling you this as advice, not as an insult,” Sal said, tossing his dead cigar into the gutter. “Stop being so fucking selfish. It’s your choice as much as hers how you and Julia get through this.”
I wiped my lips with my fingers. “Thanks, Sal.” What else was there to say?
“You’re welcome,” he said. “You need anything else, call or stop by. I’ll tell Vito I got your word about no more trouble.”
“All right.”
“I do have your word on that, right? You won’t make me a liar to my son?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “You got my word.” It was an easy promise to make. The deli was another dead end for me and I knew it.
Big Sal left me standing there on the street, the delivery driver keeping a close eye on me as he unlocked the back of his truck. I never had gotten my smokes, or my change. Without either, I walked back to my car. I had more people to see before the day was out.
The sheer enormity of the school, its multiple, multistoried brick buildings with only a few, dark windows, made me nervous. I wondered if I could even get inside. I guess they called it a campus, but as I crossed from asphalt to concrete, “compound” struck me as a better word. Seaview dwarfed the private school I’d attended, and looking up at the buildings, I had serious fears about getting lost, even if I did get in. I stopped at the foot of the main entrance steps, trying to plot a course of action.
Maybe I’d be better off ducking in a side entrance. I could surprise Molly in her classroom. If I walked through the front door, someone might make me check in at the office. They would call her down to see me, probably over the intercom. I’d have to give my name, and maybe she wouldn’t come. There’d be questions about who I was. But I had answers for that. I was just an old friend. I’d come to tell her about the wake and the funeral, though, I suddenly remembered, she hadn’t asked. I was in the neighborhood, figured I’d just stop by. Then again, what did it matter what I told some secretary? I’d felt no special obligation to the truth when I was attending school. Why feel one now, when I was only visiting?
I told myself I looked respectable, if not professional. Last night’s liquor was off my breath by now. Besides, Molly had said I could call her at school. What was the difference, really, between a call and a quick visit? They’re pretty much the same. Besides, I had honest intentions. There was no reason at all for me to sneak in the back door. I crushed out my cigarette at the foot of the stairs, hoping, as I trotted up, that no one had seen me do it.
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