“What kinds of activities?” I said, starting to get the horrifying idea behind Tony Baloney’s hypothetical.
“You don’t see me chairing any bar association committees, do you, Victor?” he said in a calm, quiet voice. “They don’t take my photograph two-stepping at the Andrew Hamilton Ball with the other high-flying members of our bar. I’m an outcast. And you know why, Victor, don’t you? It’s my clientele. Can you guess now what type of activities this hypothetical second client is involved in? I’ll make it very simple for you.”
He leaned forward, smiled at me, and shouted, “DRUGS!”
I jumped back at the shout.
“You see,” he continued, “we, hypothetically, have one client who has a wide distribution network. When he distributes on credit, and bills aren’t paid, he leaves what he calls his calling card. And that calling card happens to be dead animals. Furry little things generally, with their necks snapped and their bellies slit. And then, funny thing, he generally gets paid what he’s owed. It’s so much more effective than a dunning letter, wouldn’t you say? So in all likelihood, it is not a hypothetical Greek landlord leaving these little calling cards. It is a hypothetical drug dealer and he’s leaving these calling cards for his hypothetical drug addict clients.”
I pulled a chair around and sat down because I had to. “Norvel Goodwin,” I said quietly.
“Hypothetically, of course. I gave you a message for Jimmy and I expected you would pick up on it.”
“I thought it was a threat,” I said.
“Yes, judgment is the first thing to go. I’ve been there before you. ‘How use doth breed a habit in a man.’”
“It’s not what you think,” I said.
“It never is. Clean my desk, Victor. There are supplies in the back closet.”
I didn’t move, didn’t respond. I just sat there staring at him.
“What kind of asshole would come into my office,” he said, “and dump a gutted dog on my desk to advertise that he is a drug addict? What kind of asshole would do that unless he is crying out for help and wants me to report him? And I will tell you, Vic, right now you look like you could use some help, you know. I mean, right now, Vic sweetheart, you look like hell.”
I was sure I did just then. I was blanching. What Tony Baloney had just explained hit me like a short quick blow to the stomach, one of those shots you subconsciously know is coming but takes your breath away just the same.
“So clean up my desk, darling,” he said. “Clean it now.”
I tried to stand, but I couldn’t. I was helpless, in shock, because what I realized just then was that Norvel Goodwin had risen like a specter to once again threaten my life. And what I realized just then was that Veronica, with whom I had fallen in love, was once again hopelessly addicted to drugs. And what I realized just then was that in all our wild and brutal sex this drug addict whom I loved might have given me the plague. And what I realized just then was that it was over with me and her and I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t want it to be over at all. I couldn’t stand just then because I realized all of that, but it wasn’t only all of that. I couldn’t stand just then because at the same time I was realizing all of that I also realized exactly who had murdered Zack Bissonette and all that I would have to give up to prove it.
Part IV. The Defenestration
42
I GREW UP WITH MY FATHER in a Spanish-style bungalow in a suburban enclave of Spanish-style bungalows the developer had enthusiastically titled Hollywood. There was the Hollywood Tavern, where the working men of Hollywood escaped to a cool, red-tinged darkness and twenty-five-cent beers, the Hollywood Drugstore, dusty plate windows with small, hand-lettered signs, and an all-night donut shop that broke the tradition and was not called Hollywood Donuts but instead Donut Towne, the final “e” the only bit of class remaining in the neighborhood. It wasn’t a terrible place to live, this Hollywood, and after the war when it had just been built it had been quite a thing, but it wasn’t much compared to the sprawling five-bedroomed manses with rolling lawns that surrounded it.
There was something about my neighborhood that I had always thought pathetic. Maybe it was the way the houses seemed to have been built rundown, maybe it was the way a scrappy flora had risen through the sidewalk cracks, turning the concrete slabs into rubble, and nobody did a thing about it. Maybe it was the whole idea of there being a Hollywood in the middle of this suburb outside of Philadelphia, as if in that little six-block area of cracked and decaying bungalows there lived John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart and Vera Miles and Yvette Mimieux, making movies and throwing barbecues in their seedy little backyards. I guess if the whole of the school district had been made of places like Hollywood I wouldn’t have minded it so much, but it was a rich school district and my classmates were rich and I wasn’t. Though we had a television and heat and always enough food, I could never shake the feeling that I grew up in a slum.
The Sunday after my meeting with Tony Baloney I drove past Donut Towne and the Hollywood Tavern and into the maw of my childhood. The trees that had been big and sturdy in my youth were now ancient and twisted. Many had fallen, taking the sidewalk with them, and this, along with the surviving trees having just shed their autumn leaves, had the effect of letting fall a cold, hard light so that the neighborhood seemed brighter than I ever remembered it to be. Every time I came back home the neighborhood seemed brighter than I ever remembered it to be. Nome, Alaska, during the six-month darkness of winter would be brighter than I ever remembered my old neighborhood to be. There, in front of that ranch house, there was where Tommy DiNardo used to beat me up after elementary school. Oh and there, over there, was where Debbie Paulsen jumped on top of me and, holding me down, kissed me and licked me and felt up my chest. Was I the only boy in my neighborhood to be raped by Debbie Paulsen, five feet and 180 pounds of frustrated Catholic flesh? And yes, there, right there, in a gap under that porch, fixed now so that you’d never know, but there was where I hid the day my mother left, shouting curses at my father as he snarled silently back at her from our front stoop. Ah, childhood in Hollywood, did ever shit smell sweeter?
I guess I was coming home for perspective. I had a decision to make and I figured here was where I would make it. I had to decide what I wanted, what my obligations were, how to attack my future. I had to decide what I should be when I grew up, and so home I came, to my father. I hadn’t called but I knew he’d be there. The Eagles were on television, which gave him a fine excuse to do that which he did every night after work and all day Saturdays and Sundays: sit in front of the tube, drink beer, cough. I dropped the knocker twice onto the door. There was a button there to press, but it hadn’t worked since I was nine.
“What do you want?” my father said when he opened the door and saw his son standing behind the screen with a sickly smile on his face.
I lifted the six-pack of Rolling Rock beer I had brought. “You watching the game?”
He turned from me without opening the screen door and shambled back to his seat. “No. There’s golf on Channel Six.”
In case you missed it, that was my father’s idea of a joke.
I think to understand my father you had to have understood my mother, all that she wanted, all that she felt she missed out on in her life because of marrying my father, the reasons that she left us for a trailer in Arizona. Unfortunately I had never understood anything about my mother beyond the fact that she was committably crazy and so my father remained something of a mystery too. He was a big man, bristly white hair, thick fingers, a quiet, hardworking, unambitious man with a bitterness cultivated by his ten years with my mother, a bitterness that had now bloomed into an ugly overripe flower he wore pinned to his breast like some beastly corsage. It was this same bitterness, I believed, that had manifested itself as the spots on his lungs that the X-rays were not erasing, just holding in check. The doctors all said he should be dead by now, he told me over and over, and I could never tell if he said it out of pride or disappointment.