Resolved (6 page)

She had a real smile for the next man in line, a smelly bundle of rags with no front teeth. “How's it going, Ramon?”

“Doin' g'ate, Rucy, g'ate.”

“Your ship come in yet, man?”

“Not ret, but I got a numbu doday. You p'ay for my numbu, huh, Rucy?”

“Sure thing, Ramon.”

Dollop of thick stew, slice of homemade bread. Same smile for the next one and the next, the same kind of chatter. Now one of her favorites, Hey Hey, born Jeffrey Elman. Despite the heat, Hey Hey was wearing a red doorman's coat with gold braid over a T-shirt with the planet depicted on it and bearing the legend “Love Your Mother.” On his head he wore what must have once been a fedora, but which was now a vast tangle of monofilament line, tinfoil, brown plastic packing tape, fish hooks, and electronic components. Hey Hey said the rig was necessary to keep his thoughts from escaping his head.

“Hey, hey, hey, hey, Lu, hey, hey, Lu, hey, Lucy,” said Hey Hey.

“Good afternoon, Jeffrey,” said Lucy, with the big smile. She thought that the peaceful kind of schizophrenic was in many ways preferable to the majority of the sane.

“How's it going today?”

“Oh, hey, hey, you know, hey, okay. Hey, hey, I got hey, something to hey, show you after lunch, hey?”

She smiled her agreement, and turned to the next one. They didn't just come for the chow, according to the Catholic Workers who ran the place, but for the civility. There were paper table-cloths on the tables and flowers in vases, and real crockery and cutlery and napkins. Men would carefully tuck napkins in at their waists to protect clothing that had not been washed in years.

Felix took a table in the rear of the church hall, back to the wall, ignored his stew and bread, and watched the girl. The pictures told the truth: a skinny little bitch, no tits, a big nose, hair cut short like a boy's. Probably a lesbo, probably because she was shit-ugly and never had a real man. Getting close to her ought to be a cinch, she'd probably come in her pants the first time he hit on her. He was not interested in eating charity soup with fucking piss bums. Besides, it reminded him of prison, although there were a bunch of women here, too. He checked them out: none of them were worth looking at, old bags mostly, and niggers. That might be one reason the bitch worked here, she was a dog but at least she had a set of teeth. It probably gave her a charge to be the best-looking piece in a room for once.

The diners finished their meal and drifted out. Felix hung out by the door and watched Lucy Karp and a couple of old cunts in aprons and headscarves strip the tablecloths and the few abandoned utensils from the tables and wash the tables down. Lucy and one of the women began to sweep the floor. Felix removed his sunglasses, strolled over to the girl, and said, “You need a hand with that?” He put his smile on maximum charm.

She looked at him, their eyes met. He saw that hers were pale brown, almost the color of cigarette tobacco, with gold flecks, and he also saw that her face was not, as he had previously thought, simply that of an ugly girl. It did not have the beaten look of the unbeautiful, but instead challenged his previous concepts of what beautiful was. But beyond the discomfort this caused (for Felix did not like having any of his concepts challenged) was his sense that the girl could see into him, past his array of masks, down to a place he had nearly forgotten himself. He felt fear, and for an instant he thought it was because she recognized him, that something had gone wrong with the plan, that the cops were wise. He stood there like a dummy, the smile congealing on his face, until she broke the spell by saying, “Yeah, thanks, you can hold the dust pan.”

He held the dust pan. In the next few minutes he told himself a plausible story that explained in a way more suitable to his self-image the feeling he had just had. She had confused him with someone else, some other guy she knew. He was spooked a little, this was dangerous, this bitch was the daughter of a big prosecutor, who knows what she really knew? It was incredibly brave of Felix to expose himself like this, like something you could see in the movies, heroic.

They swept the floor together. When they were done, she held out her hand. “I'm Lucy Karp.” He took it, and shook it like he would a man's hand, which being a dyke she probably liked. Some deep protective instinct told him that hitting on this one would not be a good idea. Another scam, then, not sex.

“And you are…?”

She wanted his name. “Fel…Fellini,” he stammered. “Joe Fellini.” He felt a flush and sweat broke across his brow. He'd forgotten the name on his new ID. Uncool, but nothing major. He'd recover.

“Italian?” She gave him the real smile now, which, had he still been capable of human feeling, would have flooded his heart with gladness. “I'm half Italian myself. You from the city?”

“No, Buffalo. I'm here trying to get my kid back. I'm a little short, so I figured I'd save on lunch.” He smiled in self-deprecation. Good, the story was flowing into his head. It would work; women were suckers for kids.

“When did you get out of the can?” she asked.

Always tell a little truth to cover a big lie. Some con had told him that and it was good advice. He hung his head. “You can tell, huh?”

“A guy's got weight-bench arms, no color on his neck, a fresh sunburn, and he sits in the back of the hall, too nervous to eat and watching everyone who walks in, I figure he's just out.”

“Well, yeah, okay, what can I say? I did a three-year jolt in Elmira, out this past Thursday. A guy paid me five hundred to pick up a package at one of those private mailboxes. They had the place staked out. It was full of dope.”

“What did you think was in the five hundred-dollar package, Joe? Stuffed bunnies?”

He shrugged, easing into the part—a working stiff nailed for a stupid mistake. “Yeah, it was dumb, but it was Christmas, I got laid off just before Thanksgiving, and I wanted to, you know, for my little girl…”

“It happens. What's her name?”

“Who?”

“Your little girl.”

“Oh,” a laugh, “it's Sharon. She's nine. She's with a foster family in the Bronx, nice people and all, but we really want to get back together.”

“Her mother isn't…?”

“Oh, man, that's a long, long story and I got a job interview to go to. Listen, would it be okay if I got a meal here once in a while? I'm not really homeless and I don't want to like deprive…”

“No, it's fine—whenever you want. We get some really high-class people in here, because the food's so delicious.”

“You're kidding.”

“Our motto—Nothing's too good for the poor.”

Felix felt a laugh was called for, so he laughed. “I'll see you around then.”

“No doubt,” she said, and watched him walk away down the street.

Lucy went back into the church hall. Sister Mac was mopping the floor. Lucy got another mop and joined her. Sister Mac was in her late sixties, with jaw and hair of iron, and a grudge against His Holiness the Pope. She'd spent twenty-three years in the Republic of the Congo and was working fourteen hours a day for the Catholic Workers as a form of rest cure.

“Who's the boyfriend?” she asked over the bucket.

“Just another con.”

“Which kind?”

“Oh, definitely the behind the bars kind. Maybe the other kind, too. He's got a kid. A plausible villain, if a villain.”

“Nice bod, in any case,” said Sister Mac.

“I didn't notice,” said Lucy airily. “Unlike you nuns, I only focus on the spiritual elements of men.”

“Uh-huh. How's the real boyfriend? Daniel.”

“Went back to Boston. He wouldn't focus exclusively on the spiritual elements.”

“You give that boy a hard time.”

“He gives
me
a hard time. He won't take no.”

“He wants to marry you.”

“No, the opposite. We're twenty and twenty-one. We're still in college. We're too young to get married. But he'd like a down payment on nuptial bliss while we wait.”

“My sister Kate was married at eighteen. Five kids and married to Jim for twenty-nine years. Happy as clams, according to her.”

“Try to tell him that, though. People don't get married young anymore, by which he means professional people with careers. I honestly don't see why he stays with me, unless he's like one of those 1890s guys who just wants to deflower virgins, me being the only one in the Boswash region not actually in a religious order. Maybe I should just, I don't know,
do
it, like everyone else and then he'd be happy and leave me alone. We could be normal cohabiting lustbuckets, for God's sake.”

“Would that make you happy?”

“Oh, don't try to be therapeutic, Mac,” Lucy snapped. “I'm not in the mood.”

“I'm just mopping the floor,” said the nun cheerfully. “I'm not a spiritual advisor.” This was said in a tone that implied that certain people perhaps needed to check in with
their
spiritual advisors, instead of mooning, and complaining, and biting other people's heads off. They mopped: Lucy morosely, the nun with the same efficient cheerfulness with which she addressed the tasks that came her way, from making soup to assembling the remains of murdered children. In fact, Lucy had not seen her spiritual advisor in some time. She was avoiding him because she knew he would ask her about her mother, and she didn't want to talk about her mother to anyone, although she knew very well that this was the reason she drove her boyfriend away and snarled at nuns. Although she was perfectly at ease with thugs like Fellini, or whatever his real name was. The bad boys were no problem; in this she was also her mother's daughter.

Outside the church, she saw that Hey Hey was waiting. He beckoned and moved off in his dancing way, his hat pulled low to protect his thoughts, his red coat swirling. She followed, sighing. She did not want to follow a lunatic halfway across the city just now. She wanted to go home and shower the grease smell and the summer sweat off her body. But the man had once led her in this way to a pile of rags that turned out to be a man dying of hepatitis, and a life had been saved. So she followed.

Hey Hey always took the indirect route to anywhere he was going, sometimes risking his life in traffic, to avoid dangerous nodes where his thoughts had been sucked out, despite all his precautions. They ended up in an alley behind a pizza joint, where Hey Hey showed her a cat that had just had kittens.

Felix watched her emerge from the alley with the wacko. Why did she follow him in there? Sex? Dope? He couldn't figure any other reason, and the inability made him irritable. Still, he thought the first approach had gone pretty well. The dumb bitch had bought the story, and being a do-gooder like she was, she was obviously inclined to be sympathetic. He didn't like the way she had made him as a con, but that couldn't be helped—probably just luck, a lucky guess. And the thing with the name, which didn't matter that much. He thought it was pretty cool the way he had recovered with the little girl story, and how he had come up with her name. Sharon. That was the name his ex-wife had been yelling while he was working on her brat. Sharon! Mommy! Sharon! Mommy! It was a sketch, before it got on his nerves and he'd taped their mouths shut. When the time came to do Lucy Karp, he hoped it would be in a place where he could let her yell a little. He thought about this off and on, all the way back to Queens.

 

“What kind of sick fuck…?” asked Detective Lieutenant James Raney of the room at large, the room being the kitchen of the Chalfonte home, but received no answer. The people in the room—detectives and crime scene technicians and a woman from the medical examiner's office—were naturally dying to know exactly what kind of sick fuck, and his name and address, but just now they could only look at the unbearable scene in silence. They'd seen everything, they had thought, but they hadn't seen many like this one. Detective lieutenants do not ordinarily visit crime scenes, but Raney had come because Rick Chalfonte had been a cop, a detective. He had been retired on a disability for some years now, and Raney wasn't exactly a friend, but they had friends in common, they'd had drinks together, and in the NYPD it was expected that a little extra would be forthcoming when a cop had this kind of trouble.

Raney made himself look at the bodies. This was also part of his job. He felt the bile rise in his throat. He coughed to hide this discomfort and turned to Detective Second Grade Rafael Beale, who had caught this case. Beale's cordovan-colored skin looked muddy, almost greenish, like a shoe left for a long time in a lake.

“We got anything yet?”

“Not much. ME says they died around midday, maybe a little earlier. It's hot, so they didn't cool much. No obvious prints; he probably wore gloves and some kind of wrapping around his feet. You can see where he stood, there”—he indicated smear marks in the pools of stiffened blood on the kitchen floor—“and there, probably when he was doing the girl. Both of them were penetrated vaginally and anally by an object, we don't know what yet. Maybe raped, too, but the autopsy will show it either way. Tore them up pretty bad internally, especially the girl. He left, um, produce in the orifices, bananas in the girl, carrot and celery in Mrs. Chalfonte.”