carotid to her chin and back and then again, and this time he pressed harder and her face bunched
up.
Too hard...
Too late. His thumbs suddenly seemed to spasm, digging deep into both sides of her Adam‟s apple.
Her eyes bulged, her tongue shot out, quivering obscenely.
He pressed deeper. Something cracked. She gagged, fought, tried to scratch.
He stopped suddenly, straightened up, struck her sharply with two fingers in the temple, and her life
blinked out.
He rolled her over in the bed, arranged her as if sleeping, killed the light, and went to the window.
Ten minutes. Two black limousines pulled up. Four men jumped out of the first limo, perused the
street. Two of them entered the apartment house while the other two waited at the door.
Footsteps on the stairs, some muffled talk. He moved silently across the room and entered the closet.
One of the men inside opened the front door of the apartment house and nodded to the two outside
and one of them ran to the second car and opened the rear door. A till, chunky man, whose face
indicated that he had once been thinner, got out and hustled into the apartment. One of the goons
checked the second floor hallway and waved him in. He was nattily dressed in a dark blue blazer, tan
gabardine pants, a pale blue shirt, and a dark striped tie. He climbed the stairs, nodded to the man by
the door of the apartment, who went back down. The chunky man took out his key and let himself in.
The four men gathered just inside the front door of the apartment and started pitching silver dollars
against the wall in the carpeted hallway.
The chunky man stood inside the doorway, looking at the woman on the bed, sleeping on her side, the
bed a mess. He started getting hard, thinking about it. What a wanton bitch she was. He smiled and
walked to the end of the bed and began to shake it very easily.
The closet door opened without a sound. The chunky man never heard anything until the whirrr of the
rope as it whipped around his throat, then the sudden, awful vise around his neck. He reacted almost
instantly.
Almost.
A leg wrapped around both his legs anal he lost his balance and fell forward on the bed. He was
thrashing, trying to break loose, but the vise tightened.
He began to jerk...
And jerk...
And jerk...
Downstairs in the hall, the boys pitching dollars could hear the bedsprings squeaking.
That Tony, he didn‟t waste no time.
Fuckin‟ bull. Go on, Ricky, pitch.
The silver dollar twinkled as it soared down the hall and hit the carpet and bounced against the wall
And the winner sang:
“Yuh kin t‟row a silver dollar, across the floor,
It‟ll roo-ool, „cause it‟s ro-ound,
Woman never knows what a good man she‟s got,
Until she lets him down.”
27
BUSINESS AS USUAL
After I got out of the tub and dried off, I went in and lay clown naked on the bed to cool off. I stared
at the ceiling fan for a long time. Objectivity is a painful enterprise at best, and I had avoided it for
twenty years. Now, as it grew dark outside, shadows stretched across the room like accusing fingers
pointing at me. In the loneliness of the dark, romance wore off and reality took over. Other memories
started coming back to me. The past began to materialize again, unfettered by candlelight and daisies.
One face emerged from the harsh shadows and began to taunt me. It was Stonewall Titan.
I remembered Titan the night of the party, a little man, a shade under five five, who chose not to wear
a tux, opting instead for his usual dark, three-piece winter suit, and arriving just minutes before Doe
made her entrance.
More than once during the evening I caught him staring across the room at rue with those agate eyes
glittering in the candlelight. I didn‟t pay any attention to it at the time; it didn‟t seem important. Mr.
Stoney never smiled much anyway; he was a quiet man, constantly introspective or contemplative or
both, not an uncommon demeanor for short people. But now, reflecting on it, it strikes me that it was a
hard look, almost angry, as if 1 had offended him in some way.
After Doe came over and officially welcomed Teddy and me to her party, after she had taken my hand
and almost squeezed my fingers off and then drifted off to greet the rest of the guests, I worked my
way across the room and greeted the taut little man. He stared up at me and said, “You really stick to
it, don‟t you, boy? Been waiting a long time for tonight.”
“What do you mean?” I asked with a smile.
“Just don‟t count your chickens,” he said, and moved away.
That was the end of it. A caustic remark which he never repeated again during the summer I spent
with the Findleys. I had forgotten it. Looking back on the moment, it occurred to me that the little
man probably thought me unworthy of the Findley dowry. And since that night seemed to be the end
of my probation period, he apparently had been overruled. After that, I was treated more like family
than ever before. But Stonewall Titan never warmed up to me, I presume because I had offended him
by going the distance.
Was I really being tested during those years or was it just my paranoia, an excuse to back away from
another emotional commitment, to remain disconnected, as Stick called it? None of this had occurred
to me at the time. When you‟re nineteen or twenty years old and it‟s all going your way, you don‟t
think about such things.
But now in the darkness of the room, my suspicions were stirred.
Was that it? Was it all part of the Findley test? Were Doe and Teddy part of that three-year probation
during which they sized me up and checked me out for longevity_ consistency, durability, loyalty, all
the important things? Perhaps I had never passed the test at all. Perhaps they had seen in me some fatal
flaw that I myself did not perceive, something more ominous than bad ankles, something that did not
prevent Teddy from accepting me as his best friend, but precluded my becoming one of the Findley
inheritors. Perhaps my blood had never been blue enough.
Wake up, Kilmer.
Lying there, I began to feel like a piece of flux caught between two magnets. One drew me toward
Doe and Chief and the sweet life that might still be there. The other, toward the Taglianis of the
world, which was, ironically, a much safer place to be. In a funny way, I trusted the Taglianis
precisely because I knew I couldn‟t trust them and there was safety in that knowledge.
A lot of raw ends were showing. It scared me. It clouded my judgment. Dunetown was dangerous for
me. It was opening me up. My Achilles‟ heel was showing.