SEVENTEEN
CALABASH WAS UP early, sitting in my Morris chair, loading guns, examining chambers, peering into barrels. Jellyroll lay across his feet. Every now and then Calabash would raise one foot playfully, then the other, causing Jellyroll’s body to rollercoaster. He wagged his tail after each trip and growled for the next. Ignore the munitions and this would have seemed a sweet domestic moment. I pretended not to notice when, as we left to walk Jellyroll, Calabash stuck a gun into his waistband and covered it with rain gear.
The rain had slowed the city. Pedestrians had given up. That head-down urban gait had devolved to a primitive, melancholy plod. Even the Jersey car commuters had lost all hope, sitting in five-mile lines, indifference and lassitude painted on their faces. Riverside Park at a glance could pass for a rice paddy in Laos. Jellyroll loves to wade.
Calabash clutched my forearm and I froze. “Look at dat!”
A decapitated chicken, wings unfolded, lay at our feet in the mud. A penny had been placed on its breast, and the carcass was surrounded by candle nubs. Propitiatory rites. I had seen this before.
“Dey got dat here?”
“Everything.” My bodyguard had gone rigid on me. “You’re, uh, familiar with Santeria?”
“It runs in de family.”
Rivulets of rainwater had separated the feathers on the chicken’s breast, leaving channels of pink flesh, and Calabash seemed to be sinking into a private funk.
A wan, emaciated wino sat in the rain on a nearby bench. His clothes were saturated. He held the bare metal skeleton of an umbrella over his head, and in a chilling squawk he sang, “No, no, they can’t take that away from me.”
On the way home, I bought a Post from Akmed’s newsstand on Broadway: ARSON, in filthy two-inch type. Calabash and I hunkered under the awning to read while Akmed crouched to cuddle Jellyroll. This was a daily ritual, Jellyroll licking Akmed’s face, whining with affection, while Akmed mutters sweet nothings in an ancient language. Too bad he had no English; Akmed would be a natural for Stockman B.’s spot. “Two gas cans were discovered on the scene, typical in cases of arson by amateurs,” said an FDNY heavy. But there was no mention of poor Freddy. At least a day of cooling, I proclaimed to Calabash, would be needed before they could search the debris. “How do you know dat?” he asked reasonably. But, clearly, if they’d found him, the headlines would have been different, FRIED FROZEN...A CORPSE IN THE CRISPER. The Post would have had a field day. On the way home, Jellyroll did a second round of business in the gutter, and I picked it up with the Post, a perfect mating of tool to task.
Calabash sat in my Morris chair like Queequeg, brooding on the implications of that sacrificial chicken. When with distracted strokes he began to clean his guns, I went into the bedroom to call Sybel. No answer.
I tried to listen. I chose Ben Webster and Art Tatum for their sumptuous, lucid tones. That’s what I needed, lucidity. Any bit of sumptuousness would be a bonus. Jellyroll sighed, stretched, and flopped across Calabash’s feet. I heard “All the Things You Are” and “Where or When,” but I couldn’t concentrate.
The air reeked of gun oil, but that’s not what blocked concentration. It was Billie, haunting me. I saw her in that sweet organdy dress at the foot of the stairs as her infant brother bounced down them. “Like Dolly’s neck.” The stairs had a red runner, and the banister was white. There was a wood-framed mirror on the wall at the first landing where Billie stood and where Gordon died, and a half-round table beneath the mirror. The image was clear and sharp, but the setting was incongruous for a desert airbase cabin, too frilly, too suburban colonial. Then I realized that out of my own youth I had called up the set from Dad’s Home!, Stockman Billingsly’s paean to domesticity. Billie, young Billie, in that setting, her brother dead at her feet, made me feel like breaking something. I phoned Buzz at the Big Eighth.
They hadn’t found Harry Pine’s file despite their top-to-bottom search. Bessie, however, had remembered one thing: Harry Pine’s last address. Moxie, Florida. “Bessie only remembered,” said Buzz, “because the name’s odd. Moxie.” I looked it up in the atlas. Moxie was a couple of bean fields on Route 441, running east-west between West Palm Beach and Belle Glade on the shore of Lake Okeechobee. Near Lion Safari Land. Then I tried Sybel again. No answer.
I phoned Jellyroll’s agent. “What a dog, what a dog,” Shelly exclaimed before I stated my business. “I told them straight out, there will be a delay. Canine immunization. You know what they said? They said, ‘You take all precautions with our star.’ What a dog! I told them ten days. How’s that? Ten. You’ll definitely be ready in ten days, right, Artie?”
“Right, Shelly.” I was certain he had heard about last night’s fracas. News travels fast around the small world that cared, at least enough to gossip, that the R-r-ruff Dog’s owner was cracking up, and I wondered how Shelly would handle it. Discreetly, apparently. We chatted for a few minutes about Samoa. “Lotta fine twat in the tropical regions” was Shelly’s view. Shelly was frightened for his livelihood.
“I’d like you to do me a personal favor, Shelly.”
“You just name it, Artie boy.”
“Do you know Stockman Billingsly?”
“The famous lush? Sure.”
“I’d like you to help him out if you can.”
“Stockman Billingsly,” he said, pretending to write it down. “Check.”
“Thanks, Shelly.”
“No prob. Let me just say two words to you, Artie: ten days.”
“Right, Shelly.” In ten days I could be awaiting trial. Or burial.
I tried Sybel again. No answer.
Then, before noon, I asked Calabash if he had ever seen the Mets play.
“I’ll bring de heat,” he said packing up. “She’s gettin’ to dose reefy shores, don’t you tink?”
Gary Carter swung in his distinctive fashion from inside the BP cage and drove two ropes over second base, then another deep to the opposite field, catchable, two strides in from the wall. I reminded myself that I wasn’t there to study baseball. Before Carter’s next swing, at a cue I didn’t see given, the Mets jogged off the field, and the ground crew rolled out the tarp. Sheltering from the rain in the runway entrance to the third-base-line box seats, I scanned the spectators through binoculars. There weren’t many. I saw no one I recognized, except Leon. Calabash jumped when a 747 from La Guardia cranked on full boost over left field. That goddam voodoo chicken!
Leon Palomino sat alone ten rows above the dugout. He was eating a hot dog. I pointed him out to Calabash, who found him with the binocs, then went to take a seat twenty rows behind him. It was too early and too wet for the ushers to care where we sat. Then I scanned the nearby seats in search of someone who seemed to be watching Leon, but I saw nothing suspect. Leon and I were probably the only suspects in Shea Stadium that day.
“Well, if it ain’t Arthur Deemer, Mafia dog walker.” He wore a big grin. Leon had no eyebrows, only singed follicles where eyebrows had been. His knife hand was heavily bandaged. He wore the same fatigue jacket as in the park and a green watch cap pulled down to where his eyebrows should have been.
“Artie,” I said.
“You got it.”
“How did you get my name?”
“I looked you up in Who’s Who in the Mob. Sit down, check these seats, huh, have a frank.”
“No franks. Aren’t you a little nervous sitting here in the open today after burning down a half a city block yesterday?”
“Naw.”
“Why did you do it?”
“The next night after Billie got greased, I sat in a parked car on Eleventh, waited to see what I’d see. You know what I saw? Jones and Ricardo. They wheeled this covered object about yea big”—he formed a half-refrigerator-sized square with his arms— “out of Billie’s studio building and across the street and into the Antiques. Next day I see you and you tell me you saw Freddy’s body in that little icebox. What would you of thought about that?”
“That they killed Freddy.”
“But I couldn’t find either one, so I took out their building.”
I opened my umbrella and put half of it over Leon.
“It’s okay. I don’t give a shit.” That was abundantly clear.
I saw a big black automatic in a holster duct taped to the inside of his jacket and the butt of another gun stuck down his waistband. “They greased Freddy, and so far I only got their building. We ain’t near even yet.” He wore combat boots and his frayed fatigue jacket, dressed for action.
“Why do you want to tell me anything at all?” I asked.
“I’m leaving tonight. I want somebody to know what I saw. Hell, maybe they’ll get me before I go. But they ain’t ever gonna find poor Freddy, and I don’t like it to end like that, Freddy bouncin’ on the bottom of the sea with Jimmy Hoffa.
Look, I’ll start at the beginning, okay?”
“Okay.”
“They sent us, me and Freddy way the hell and gone into Dutchess County for a pickup.”
“Who did?”
“Phone call at home from somebody, says he works for Harry Pine. We get out where he said to go, end of a dirt road, wild forests, and I’m gettin’ nervous. It just didn’t feel kosher. I look over at Freddy, the fucking guy’s driving like we got a load of nitroglycerin in the truck. Pine owns this psycho assistant who always wears a cowboy suit. Cute guy.”
“Chucky?” I said.
“Yeah, right. Artie, it ain’t at all clear what you know and what you don’t.”
“Chucky tried to intimidate my bodyguard.”
“You got a bodyguard?”
“A big one.”
“What’d your bodyguard do?”
“Beat Chucky senseless.”
“Nice. Your bodyguard around now?”
“Yes.”
“Armed?”
“Heavily.”
“Good.”
The stadium organist began to play “Singin’ in the Rain.”
“So Chucky’s waitin’ for us out there in front of this beat-to-shit cabin in the forest, and he’s got four other psychos sittin’ on the porch for show. Chucky, that phony smile, says we should have a beer, relax. So one psycho throws a Bud in the air, this other psycho whips out his Bulldog and blasts the Bud in half before it hits the ground. Two things: Me and Freddy, we’re impressed, one, and, two, we’re also relieved. If these psychos meant to pop us, they wouldn’t a treated us to a marksmanship demonstration. Then cowpoke Chucky tells us what he got us out there to hear. Somebody’s blackmailing Harry Pine’s friends, and it better not be us. Well, it wasn’t us, but we both knew who it might have been.”
“Billie.”
“Yep.”
“Because you had told her something about the Antiques?”
“You name it, we told her. But, see, I thought it was just me told her. Freddy thought it was just him, so neither of us said anything. We got back to Queens, we start makin’ excuses to each other, things to do, get the trucks lubed. Christ. We both make a beeline for Billie’s and show up on the stoop at the same time. She’d been porking us both, and we’d both been singin’ about what big-shot wiseguys we were. We about came to blows right there, Freddy and me. Big shots. That’s all we ever wanted to be, but we fucked up again, just like school.”
“Exactly what had you told Billie?”
“About Harry Pine, about how we’re his right and left nut, respectively.”
“But what specifically?”
“About his airlines.”
“His what?”
“You don’t know about that?”
“No.”
“You don’t make much sense to me, Artie.”
“Me either.”
“Yeah, well, I know that feeling.”
The organist began to play “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” and Leon listened.
“What a stupid fucking song.”
“What kind of airlines?”
“It sure ain’t Delta.”
“It’s illegal?”
“Yeah. Illegal.”
“Hoods?”
“Sicilian International.”
“Drugs?”
“Mostly more specialized shit. Money, lot of the time.”
“Money?”
“Say you got six million in twenties, you know, from all the pizza slices you sold. Harry Pine flies it to their bank in the Cayman Islands. People, too.”
“What people?”
“Hotshot fugitives, crooked international heavies. I heard about this crazy spic dictator, killed thousands. He’s into the wiseguys for a couple mil, or the CIA owns him, I don’t know. So they get Pine to fly him out right under the noses of the Commie insurgents. Rumor has it they shot a hole in his favorite airplane, so he turns around and strafes the shit outta their positions while the dictator’s screamin’ at him, fucker can’t believe he went back. That could be bullshit. Anyway, if it’s big-time and you need some flyin’ done, you call Harry Pine. You know what I told Billie? I told her I was his trusted copilot. The trucking business, that was just a front for my true life. Captain Leon Fucking Midnight at your service, ma’am.”
“How do you know so much about Pine?”
“I told you. I wanted to be a big shot. Big shots know. Course only dumb fucks tell.” He stopped and looked out across the covered field. “That’s why Billie was such a big thing. Me with a woman like that. Educated, well-spoken, hell, an artist. Not to mention gorgeous. And she loved me. Wrong again.” There was no anger in his voice when he spoke of Billie, only sadness.
“But why the store? Why did a man like him fool with the wholesale business?”
“To launder his own money. After a flight somebody buys his whole stock, and now he’s got legit bread.”
The organist: “A Rainy Night in Georgia.”
“So you confronted Billie?”
“Confronted? Yeah, that’s what we did. Like we’re joined at the hip. She laughed in our faces. Laughed. Like we’re a couple of clowns. Which we were. She ever do that to you? Laugh in your face?”
“No.”
“Well, you’re lucky. Then she says: ‘I’ve got Harry Pine right where I want him.’ You believe that? We told her she must be hallucinating. You don’t blackmail guys like that or anybody they know. You don’t even think about it. But Billie says she has these photographs. She says if anything happens to her, these photographs will ruin Harry Pine. Ruin Harry Pine. You don’t happen to have the photographs in question, right?”
“Right.”
“I hope that geek don’t play any more rain songs.”
“So you and Freddy went to Billie’s studio, drilled the lock, and ransacked the place.”
“Yep, and we didn’t find a thing but bums. We sat down in there and talked about doin’ Billie. Borrow our friend’s Mako and take her fishin’, she’s bait, but we were just jackin’ off. Christ, I still love her a little. Freddy probably died lovin’ her a little, even though she as good as greased him. So we decide to bounce her around some, throw a scare into her. We flip a coin to determine who’s gonna do it. The other’s gonna wait in the studio in case the bouncer learns where the pictures are hid, phone it back. I won the toss. I went to her place, but I couldn’t beat her around. I was gonna fucking plead with her.” He stopped abruptly.
“Well, what happened?”
“Nothing. She never answered her door. Maybe she was already dead inside.”
“You went back to Acappella?”
“Where? Oh, yeah. But Freddy’s gone. We both know where he was, but I didn’t know then. I started looking for him. I staked out Billie’s apartment all the next day. That’s where I saw you in your Con Ed suit. When I staked out the Antiques, I see you again. I followed Sybel just to see what she was up to. She meets you at the library. That night I saw Jones and Ricardo wheel the refrigerator across Eleventh Street. You know the rest. I greased their building. Here we are.”
I felt excited in a tingling, visceral way, as if it were a sunny day, bottom of the ninth, tied, bases loaded, two out, Darryl Strawberry stepping to the plate. It felt unified, at least this part of it. I understood the when and where and now the why of it. Pine’s psychos threw a scare into Jones, and, just like the Palominos, Jones went straight to Billie. It surprised me to realize I was talking aloud; I thought I was thinking. “Jones and Ricardo tied her up and tried to drown the photos out of her. Billie didn’t tell, so they killed her. Then they went to the studio and found Freddy waiting. They killed him because he made a perfect scapegoat. ‘Here’s the grifter blackmailers, Mr. Pine. They’re dead.’”
“Wait a minute,” said Leon. “How do you know she didn’t tell?”
“What?”
“You said she didn’t tell, so Jones killed her. How do you know she didn’t tell?”
“Oh…well, I just assumed—”
“Yeah, you assumed because you got the photos yourself.”
“You’re right.”
“I don’t care. Those photos don’t mean dick today.”
“I know.”
“So what did they show? Just for curiosity.”
I told him what the photos showed, but I didn’t mention the Family Snaps. They were none of his business.
“Hell, I thought they’d show Harry’s pals makin’ a snuff film or something, wearing Nazi suits.”
“Leon,” I said, “they still have a big problem.”
“Right. Me.”
“No, another one.”
“What?”
A mean, gusty wind whipped the center-field flags, first in one direction, then the opposite, with barely a pause in between. It felt sad to discuss such things in a ballpark, where reality should never intrude. “As of about four o’clock yesterday that refrigerator was inside the Antiques—and Freddy was still inside.”
“What? How do you know?”
“Sybel saw him.”
“Christ!”
“If they didn’t move him between that time and the time you burned it down, then he’s there right now.”
He slid down in his seat petulantly, almost boyishly. “Fucking typical. I come along and burn up my own brother.”
“If he was still in the icebox, I don’t think he got burned up,...not entirely.”
Leon slowly straightened, looked at me sideways as he did so. A light flickered in his eyes. I continued:
“The arson squad finds a corpse in a refrigerator in the ashes of a suspicious fire. That’s a hard thing for the owners of the property to explain.”
“Yeah...that’s right. That would be their ass!” He grabbed my hand before I understood what he meant to do with it. He meant to shake it, delighted, exactly as if Strawberry had just homered to right to win the game.
“Who knows you torched the store?”
“Just you, pal.”
“I gave Pine your message.”
“You did?”
“If you vanish, I don’t think anyone will come looking for you. So don’t do anything with those guns,” I stressed, but he seemed not to be listening, staring out across the field. “Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“I hear you, Artie. Great seats. Too bad they ain’t gonna play.” He paused for a long time. “You know what Jones and Ricardo do for a hobby? Raise fighting dogs. He was tellin’ me once how you train the dogs to kill. Starve ‘em one week, little puppies, beat shit out of them the next week. Dog gets hurt in the ring, can’t fight no more, you know what he does with him? Ricardo thought this was real intelligent. He ties the hurt dog’s front legs together and lets the healthy dogs tear him apart. Good practice, he said. I’d love to grease that motherfucker.”
“You don’t need to.”
“That don’t make me want to any less.”
“Let me ask you one more question. Why do you think Billie taunted you like that? That doesn’t seem like sound business. If you’re blackmailing someone for money why taunt those involved? Why even mention those photographs to you and Freddy or to Jones?”
“Why? Because she was nuts, that’s why.”
Was she? Was she? If she was nuts when she died, was she nuts when I was with her? If so, why didn’t I notice?
The announcer told us that the game had been officially called. Leon shook his head. “Good luck, Artie.” He got up to leave.
“Good luck, Leon.”
“And good luck, Mets,” he said with a wave at the field. Then, hands in his pockets, head down, he walked up the aisle and away. Shortly afterward I did the same, glad to have Calabash behind me. I walked through the runway and into the corridor, lined with refreshment and souvenir stands leading to the exit ramp.
Calabash wasn’t behind me; he was ahead of me. He stood by the men’s room door, looming over the straggling diehard fans. With the tiniest movement of his head he nodded at the door, then went in. I went in after him.
I chose a urinal with a vacant one beside it. Calabash stepped up. I did not look at him, nor he at me. “You’re bein’ tailed,” he said without moving his lips. I froze. “You go out. He’ll pick you up, unless dey got a team workin’. I gonna walk right behind him so you can view him. If you want the bastard cracked, you itch de crown of your head.” Calabash walked out.
I was so far out there that little bits of reality, when they could reach me, left me reeling. The dirty tiles above the urinal, the spot of crust I had been watching when Calabash said, “If you want de bastard cracked” seemed to swell with meaning. All I had to do was scratch my head. Someone had written “fuck the circus” on the tile above the spot I stared at. I walked out the door, wondering what it meant.
Vendors were packing up their gear. I didn’t look left or right until I’d passed through the turnstiles and onto the patio that fronted the parking lot on one side and the elevated walkway to the E train on the other. Then I stopped. I tried on a couple of Mets caps from a wet vendor who clearly wished I’d leave him alone. Careful not to touch the top of the cap once I put it on, I looked back to where Calabash towered over a short man in his mid-thirties, black hair. He wore a blue anorak. As I paid the vendor, I realized I recognized the man. From where? I looked back again. He had a dark Fu Manchu mustache. I didn’t remember that, so I tried in two brief glances to picture the face without it.
Jay Kiley! A playwright Billie and I met years ago at a party somewhere. I was being tailed by a playwright?