Zip drains the last of his Hamm’s, sets the bottle on the bar, and stares at his left hand, the hand Joe Ditto wanted to shake. Blood pulses in his temples and a current of pain traces his right arm, and the thought occurs to Zip that if he ever has a heart attack, he’ll sense it first in his phantom arm.
Whitey calls in the middle of a dream:
Little Julio is supposed to be in his room practicing, but he’s playing his flute in the bedroom doorway. Julio’s mother, Gloria Candido, is wearing a pink see-through nightie, and Joe can’t believe she lets Little Julio see her like that because Little Julio is not that little and he’s just caught Joe circumnavigating Gloria’s nipples with his tongue and Little Julio wants some, too. “He’s playing his nursing song,” Gloria says. The flute amplifies the kid’s breath until it’s as piercing as an alarm. To shut him up, Joe gropes for the phone.
“Joe,” Whitey says. “What’s going on?”
Drugged on dream, Joe wakes to his racing heart. “What?” he says, even though he hates guys who say what? or huh? It’s a response that reveals weakness.
“Whatayou mean what? What the fuck? You know what. What’s with you?”
What day is this? Joe wants to ask, but he knows that’s the wrong thing to say, so he says, “I had a weird night.”
“Joe, are you fucken on drugs?”
“No,” Joe says. He’s coming out of his fog, and it occurs to him that Whitey can’t possibly be calling about Gloria Candido. A confrontation on the phone is not how Whitey would handle something like that. Whitey wouldn’t let on he knew.
“Well, what’s the problem then?” Whitey demands.
It’s Johnny Sovereign that Whitey is calling about, and as soon as Joe realizes that, his heart stops racing. “Ran into a minor complication. I went to see him yesterday and—”
“Maronn’!” Whitey yells. “Joe, we’re on the fucking phone here. I don’t care what the dipshit excuses are, just fucking get it done.”
“Hey, Whitey, suck this,” Joe says and puts the receiver to his crotch. “Who the fuck do you think you’re yelling at, you vain old sack of shit with your wrinkled minchia? Your girlfriend’s slutting around behind your back making a fucking cornuto of you. You don’t like it I’ll cut you, I’ll bleed you like a stuck pig.”
Joe says all that to the dial tone. Telling off the dial tone doesn’t leave him feeling better, just the opposite, and he makes a rule on the spot: never again talk to dial tones after someone’s hung up on you. It’s like talking to mirrors. Mirrors have been making him nervous lately. There’s a dress draped over his bedroom mirror, and Joe gets out of bed and looks through his apartment for the woman to go with it. That would be April. She’s nowhere to be found, and for a moment Joe wonders if she’s taken his clothes and left him her dress. But his clothes are piled on the chair beside the bed where he stripped them off-shoes, trousers with keys and wallet, sport coat with the.22 weighting one pocket. He’s naked except for his mismatched socks. The stiletto is still sheathed in the black-and-pink argyle.
Yesterday was supposed to have been a cleanup day. His plan was to pitch the trash, drop his laundry at the Chink’s, and then stop by Johnny Sovereign’s house on Twenty-fifth Street. The plan depended on Sovereign not being home, so Joe called from a pay phone, and Sovereign’s good-looking young wife answered and said Johnny would be back around four. Okay, things were falling into place. Joe would wait in the gangway behind Sovereign’s house for him to come home, and suggest they go for a drink in order to discuss Johnny setting up gambling nights in the back rooms of some of the local taverns. Once Joe got Sovereign alone in the car, well, he’d improvise from there.
So around three in the afternoon, Joe parked beside the rundown one-car garage behind Sovereign’s house. The busted garage door gaped open, and he saw that Sovereign’s Pontiac Bonneville was gone. Bonnevilles with their 347-cubic-inch engines that could do zero to sixty in 8.1 seconds were the current bad-ass cars — in Little Village, they called them Panchos. Sovereign’s splurging on that car was what made Whitey suspect he was skimming on the numbers. New wheels and already leaking oil, Joe thought, as he looked at the fresh spots on the warped, birdshit-crusted floorboards of the garage. If Sovereign wasn’t careless and all for show, he’d have taken that Pancho to the Indian.
Johnny Sovereign’s back fence was warped, too, and overgrown with morning glories. His wife must have planted them. She’d made an impression on Joe the one time he’d been inside their house. Johnny had invited him, and they’d gone the back way, the entrance Joe figures it was Johnny’s habit to use. Johnny didn’t bother to announce their arrival, and they caught his wife — Vi, that was her name — vacuuming in her slip. When she saw Joe standing there, a blush heated her bare shoulders before she ran into the bedroom. She was wearing a pale yellow slip. Joe had never seen a slip like that before. He would have liked to slide its thin straps down her skinny arms to see if her blush mottled her breasts the way some women flush when they come. Sovereign’s Pontiac was yellow, too, but canary yellow, and Joe wondered if there was some connection between Vi’s slip and the car.
He sat in the Bluebird and lit a cigarette, then unscrewed the top from a pinch bottle of scotch and washed down a couple of painkillers. Sparrows twittered on the wires and pigeons did owl imitations inside Sovereign’s shitty garage. The alley was empty except for a humped, hooded figure of a woman slowly approaching in his rearview mirror — a bag lady in a black winter coat and babushka, stopping to inspect each garbage can. Except for the stink of trash, Joe didn’t mind waiting. He needed time to think through his next moves. From where he’d parked, he could watch the gangway and intercept Sovereign before he entered the house. He’d ask Sovereign to have a drink, and Sovereign would want to know where. “Somewhere private,” Joe would tell him. And then — wham — it came to Joe, as it always did, how he’d work it. He’d tell Sovereign, “Let’s take your wheels. I want to ride in a new yellow Bonneville.” He’d bring the bottle of scotch, a friendly touch, and suggest they kill it on the deserted side street where the dragsters raced, a place where Sovereign could show him what the Pancho could do. He couldn’t think of a way to get the shotgun into Sovereign’s car, so he’d have to forget about that. Joe was scolding himself for not thinking all this through earlier when a woman’s voice startled him.
“Hi, Joe, got an extra smoke?”
“What are you doing here?” Joe asked.
“Trying to bum a Pall Mall off an old lover,” April said. “You still smoke Pall Malls, don’tcha?”
Her hair was bleached corn-silk blond and she wore a dress the shade of morning glories. Joe wondered how she’d come down the alley without his seeing her. The scooped neckline exposed enough cleavage so that he could see a wing tip from the blue seagull tattooed on her left breast. She looked more beautiful than he’d remembered.
“I thought you went to Vegas,” he said. “I heard you got married to some dealer at Caesar’s.” He didn’t add that he’d also heard she’d OD’d.
“Married? Me?” She showed him her left hand: nails silvery pink, a cat’s-eye on her index finger going from gray to green the way her eyes did. Joe leaned to kiss the pale band of flesh where a wedding ring would have been, but he paused when sunlight hit her hand in a way that made it momentarily appear freckled and old with dirty, broken nails. She lifted her hand the rest of the way and sighed when it met his lips.