Screwed (33 page)

Carmine tries to sneer but his wobbling moustache gives him away. “There ain’t no such place as ‘Nam.’”

Surely he can’t be for real. Then again some people do think Nam was invented for the movies—that it isn’t a real country and the war never happened. In fact surveys have shown that more people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five believe in Narnia than Vietnam.

“It’s real, all right. This is as real as it gets.” I point the gun at him. “I am drunk and maudlin so tell me what this is all about.”

It takes him about half a second to think fuck Zeb and then he spills his guts so fast the words are bumping into each other.

“I ain’t no Carmine. I go to acting class with Zeb; when he found out about the 911 call, he asked me to impersonate the guy. Just wait outside the bitch’s place until the lady cop showed, then do my thing.”

I feel such a tool. How could I ever have believed in Carmine’s convenient materialization? The odds against Sofia’s actual husband turning up after twenty years, at the exact moment his abandoned wife is about to be dragged off to prison must be immeasurable. Yet, I swallowed the whole ball of lies without a murmur.

“What about the whole prison bit?”

“That’s all true,” admits non-Carmine. “The secret of acting is to stick as close to the truth as possible.”

“So you were locked up in Texas?”

“Yeah. Punked too. My painful and humiliating honesty sold it to the cop. I exposed myself, metaphorically.”

I groan. This goddamn country. Everyone reads Stanislavski.

“So Zeb offers you . . .”

“A grand.”

“A grand to impersonate Sofia’s husband?”

“That’s it, man. I doctored my release papers and impersonated the shit out of that husband.”

He did. I fell for it, so did Ronnie.

“What about Sofia?”

Non-Carmine smiles proudly and feck me if there isn’t a tear in his eye. “She swallowed it totally. Imagine that. Al Pacino, fuck that guy. They should be giving me his Oscar.”

I shouldn’t hate this fool so much but I do. I guess he’s become Carmine incarnate for me and it’s difficult to see him as anything else.

“So? What did you do? You took advantage of Sofia? Is that it, method man?”

“I didn’t take no advantages,” says the guy, but his rat’s eyes flick up and down like he’s looking for a bolt hole and I know he ain’t spilling the full beans.

“You ever see The Deer Hunter? I bet you did. A method man like you would eat that shit up.”

“Yeah, I seen it,” says non-Carmine, and there are lines of sweat lodged in his forehead.

I cock the revolver. “Then you know what happens next.”

That did it. “I tried to put the pipe to her. She’s pretty fine for an old dame but she kept calling me Dan.”

I figure a lowlife like this could live with being called Dan if it meant lying down with Sofia.

“And?”

“And she said my thing was smaller than she remembered. Got into my head. Undermined my confidence in the whole performance. Also I remembered how Zeb said you’d tear me limb from limb me if I interfered with the old lady and that put me right off.”

Old lady? Sofia was not yet forty. I always have some crazy on tap and I let a little shine out through my eyes then.

“So you left her? Again.”

“Hey, hey, wait a minute, man. I ain’t Carmine. I never left that lady before.”

I consider pulling the trigger a few times to teach this guy a lesson, but for what? All he did was keep Sofia out of prison. So I march him to the fire door and boot him into the alley.

“Hey, what the hell?” he objects and I know I’m on shaky ground morally seeing as this guy did me a solid, but he threw a few shapes at Sofia so I can’t bring myself to actually give him the whole thousand, so I toss him three hundred and eighty, which is what I have in my wallet. Let him harass Zeb for the rest. I’d love to see him method act six hundred and change out of Zeb’s wallet.

It kills me to say it but: “I suppose I should thank you. Your performance was so real, so primal that I can’t stop thinking how I hate you and wish you were dead.”

Non-Carmine looks like he might cry. “Thanks, man. That’s quite a compliment.”

But compliments only get you so far. “So where’s the rest of my fee?”

“Talk to Zeb,” I tell him.” He’ll sort you out.”

I don’t know whether the guy is good with this suggestion or not, because I slam the door on him.

Now I gotta let Zeb back in and he’s gonna be full to the eyeballs with smugness, asking for apologies and canonizing himself for this good turn he’s done me. I hate Zeb in self-satisfied mode. Come to think of it, I haven’t been exactly falling over myself to consort with Zebulon Kronski in any of his humors lately.

I need to find a better class of amigo.

I open the office door and there the little bastard is, all folded arms and raised eyebrows, waiting for his apology.

“You got something to say to me, Dan?”

I might as well get it over with. “Okay. I’m sorry, all right?”

“Really? What are you sorry for?”

He’s like a Jewish Catholic priest, determined to prolong my act of contrition.

“I’m sorry for manhandling your divine person when all you did was look out for Sofia.”

Zeb reads my body language and rightly interprets the tremors in my shoulders as repressed violence.

“I accept your apology,” he says and takes the seat nearest the booze. “I assume you ejected Rafe?”

Rafe? Fuck me.

I nod and help myself to one of Zeb’s cocktails.

“And you paid him, right?”

“Of course. A thousand in fifties. Money well spent.”

Zeb squints suspiciously at me but I distract him by stealing another one of his drinks.

“Hey, hands off, Daniel. Get your own. Just call Marco and have him send in a tray.”

I switch the subject again, moving Zeb two topics away from Rafe’s pay packet.

“How did you know about the 911?”

“Are you kidding me? I shoot up both the switchboard girls and three of the patrolmen. I got ears all over that department.”

This is information I will not be passing on Ronelle. It’s always good to have an inside track in Police Plaza.

“And you couldn’t just tell me?”

Zeb smiles sadly at how little I know him. “Straightforward-like, that’s not how the Zeb-man rolls.”

There are at least three things in that sentence that make me want to punch the Zeb-man in his smiling face.

The music from outside jumps a few notches and I realize I might have to rethink my living quarters. Eventually this beat beat beat crap would get to me. Whatever happened to melody? Or singers who don’t name-check themselves every four bars?

Jason barges in, his face flushed, left hand pumping the air in time to the music.

Zeb shoots him with two finger guns.

“Who’s a goddam fairy genius?” he asks.

Jason points two index fingers at his own head. “This guy, right here.”

I have to give it to him. “You did it, J. This place is buzzing.”

“And you ain’t angry?”

I go for blasé. “Nah. Why would I be angry?”

“Lotta gays out there. Not just gays, super-gays.”

“That’s a niche market,” I say, regurgitating Zeb’s lecture. “A gold mine if you can get in there.”

Jason rushes around the desk and hugs me. “I knew you’d be cool, partner. Some people freak out, but not you. Danny boy. My man.”

“I am totally cool,” I say, feeling Jason’s bicep flatten my right ear. “But those guys know I’m straight, right?”

Jason releases my head and punches my shoulder, genuinely of the opinion that I’m kidding. “Oh, I think they know you’re straight, Mr. Banana Republic. And anyways, it’s a casino not the prison showers. Though we might do that for theme night.”

“Theme night?”

“I got a million ideas, Dan. People are gonna cross the river for this place. We’re gonna have a line around the block.”

It’s good I suppose. Being the boss of a thriving business. Making bank. But I can’t help feeling a little nostalgic for the time when I was just a bouncer living underneath a crazy woman. I guess it is in my nature to never be satisfied. To seek out the flaws in every situation.

Maybe Sofia did put a full magazine into Carmine.

See what I mean?

The blood drains from my face and I feel like I have somehow phase-shifted into a dream state. I thought I was winding down, and my girl’s a murderess. Again.

“So, you gonna come out and listen to my speech, partner?” Jason asks, shifting on his feet, eager to get back out on the floor.

“’Course I am. Wouldn’t miss it for the world. I just need a little Dutch courage.”

I’m gonna have one more drink, then maybe sing a song. One song and then I’ll call Sofia, if I can remember the code.

Zeb magnanimously sweeps a hand over his collection of cocktails, offering me my pick, which is very unlike him. I bet it has just occurred to the Zeb-man that he could do worse than be made a partner in my new super-gay club.

I choose a Ball Buster, complete with floating pickled onion testicle.

Seems appropriate.

EPILOGUE

I
T’S A WEEK SINCE
THE RONELLE TRIED TO ARREST SOFIA
AND
my life has gone back to quasi-normal, in that I am nominally seeing my alleged girlfriend for what approximates cozy evenings watching foreign fiction on TV.

I have arrived at the decision that even if Sofia did shoot Carmine, he probably deserved it and I am in no position to judge after all the shenanigans I been neck-deep in for the past while.

Our relationship has shifted because now I realize that it’s me who needs Sofia and not the other way around.

As Simon said: Perhaps you like the fact that she doesn’t know the real you, as your low self-esteem issues would have you believe that the real you isn’t worthy of affection.

Or as Zeb put it: Sometimes the pit bull don’t wanna screw the poodle. He just wants to make sure nobody else does.

Both valid points, I think.

So, I’m kinda calming down a little. Enjoying the club doing so well, trying to sit with Sofia as much as possible but keeping alert for Mike, ’cause you know that potato-eating gangster won’t stay outta my picture forever. That video of his mom will be eating away at him like a ball of acid in his stomach. Not stomach acid obviously, a stronger kind.

Ronnie has called me a couple of times to make sure I’m behaving myself. I think her current attitude toward me is one of bemusement. It’s like she knows I’m going down eventually and every day I spend above ground and outta the joint makes her smile and shake her head.

So I strapped my muzzle back on, good and tight. My hands feel empty without a gun in them but tough shit, hands, you’re gonna have to get by without Sharpie for a while.

But there are a coupla things.

Two loose ends I can’t live with.

So I ask Jason if he can locate someone for me, and it turns out one of our new regulars more or less invented internet search engines. I can’t say which regular because he’s currently involved in over a hundred lawsuits, but it takes this guy about fifteen minutes on his new prototype phone to run down my cyber friend Citizen Pain. The guy who paid a hundred grand to see me tortured to death.

Turns out Citizen Pain is from Connecticut and I was all set to take a bus over there and maybe bring a black dildo with me to administer some poetic justice.

I think it was Benny Hill who said: Revenge is a dish best served cold, but mine was gonna be laid out piping hot, and I could relive it coolly later on.

It was a best-of-both-worlds kinda plan.

I might be wrong about that quote, sounds a bit vicious for Benny Hill. But you never know, a lot of funny men have a dark side.

Anyways, like I say I was all set to take a drive to Citizen Pain’s place of employment and expose him for the asshole he is, until Jason’s guy texts me the rest of the particulars. Turns out Citizen Pain is not a crooked senator or a sex pest with a record as I had imagined in my mental scenarios. Turns out Citizen Pain is a lady in her fifties, and she is the director of the Connecticut office of a major third-world charity. This woman does the TV campaign for Christ’s sake; you know the one where the camera catches her weeping? You’ve seen that one, right?

So, if I go barging in there this whole charity’s going down the toilet and I can’t have that on my conscience. The last thing I need is nightmares featuring Sudanese kids pointing the fingers of blame in my direction. So I turn the evidence over to Ronelle and she agrees to handle it quietly, which is tough for her so I appreciate it.

The second loose end is Evelyn.

I am having a hard time believing that she would just dump me like that. We were real close once upon a time.

Tight.

She taught me about boobs.

My mom and her stood together against the grim might of Paddy Costello.

Could booze have changed her that much?

The straight answer to this is yes. Booze can mess people up. The first thing an addict looses is motor functions and the second to go is morals. I have seen guys renting their kids to strangers for the price of a carton of wine. So Evelyn could have flipped on me for a never-ending supply of penthouse-quality brandy, but she’s had a few days now to acclimatize and perhaps regret selling her nephew out like that.

There is also the possibility that Edit blackmailed her with the threat of my death: sign-the-forms-or-Dan-gets-it kinda thing, she’s certainly devious enough. It’s not much of an incentive, I know, but maybe Ev loves me even more than I thought.

I gotta know. She looks like my mom for Christ’s sake and there are not so many good people in my life that I can afford to summarily write one off.

So for the past few days, I’ve been calling the Costello penthouse and hanging up if Edit answered.

I know. Pretty childish plan but I didn’t know what else to do.

Yesterday I got lucky, and a maid or cleaner picked up who hadn’t been briefed about me.

“Miss Evelyn?” she said. “I give her the phone but she pretty hammered, so make allowances okay?”