“Sign it, Ms. Barnum. Even the most inept assistant D.A. wouldn’t have problems establishing motive, means and opportunity. Sign it!” Larry shoved a Mont Blanc in her face.
She signed it and threw Larry’s pen out the window.
The lawyer took the paper from her, checked it and though it killed him to do it, he said: “Thank you. I can now notarize the document. A copy and your check will be delivered to you this evening. And, Ms. Barnum,” Larry said, sticking his head back through the door as he was leaving, “if you are contemplating some sort of end run, I’d advise against it. Guns have a nasty habit of disappearing and then reappearing. Also, some of the people I work for are simply nasty. Capisce?”
We didn’t speak. What was there to say? Both of us began to form words, but only silence came out. We had both done dirty things to one another. I would not take pride in any of them and she could not, not if she had a soul left. If she had, maybe someday it would rise again and she could celebrate her little Easter.
“Here’s those pills for you, Mr. Klein,” a smiling black nurse barged in, carrying a plastic shot cup. “Sorry,” she said, noticing the tears on Barnum’s cheeks.
“That’s okay,” I assured her, “the lady was just leaving.”
Minute Waltz
Summer was not yet official, but it was that time, late in spring, when the advance troops of the seasonal invaders were beginning to arrive. Harbor traffic had already picked up, as had the prices at the gas station and deli. The Little League parade had since gone by the wayside and the Olde Whaling Fair was just a week up the road. If you’ve ever wanted a styrofoam harpoon, foam rubber humpback or a membership in Greenpeace, then the fair’s the place for you. Sound Hill even dresses up the high school theatre group in period costumes and pays them to roam the village streets reciting passages from Moby Dick. During my five year tenure, I’d been asked by several high school seniors to call them Ishmael.
A few months had passed now since that bloody night on Staten Island. And like small pebbles stirred into a glass of water, life had settled down with the passage of time. Settled down, certainly, but never the same.
Just after getting out of the hospital, I went to pick up my motorcycle jacket from Detective Mickelson. We spent a few minutes doing the small talk thing and eventually started discussing books we had read. He said he didn’t see the value in dragging any peripheral characters into the case as long as I would testify that Robby “the Boot” had admitted killing Azrael. I said I would. And while I was at it, I suggested the late don might also have been responsible for Officer O’Toole’s demise. I couldn’t be certain, of course. Detective Mickelson didn’t like that suggestion so well. Too tidy. Too neat. But he felt it likely that he’d end up closing the enquiry into O’Toole’s departure with a similar conclusion. His superiors, it seemed, rather liked neatness. Mickelson’s parting words were words of warning.
“Next time I catch you impersonating an officer or withholding evidence, we’ll be discussing books from opposite sides of a cell door. Now get out of here.”
Since I was in collection mode, I stopped off at the Whaler on my way home from Mickelson’s. When I walked into Ben Vandermeer’s office, an expression ripe with mixed messages crossed his face like a tidal wave. He stood up, shook my hand and sent his small staff out on urgent errands that could have waited until the next lunar eclipse. As the front door clicked closed, he pressed the safe deposit box key into my palm.
“She’s gone, you know.”
“No, Ben, I didn’t.”
“Friend a mine runs a little local rag outside Phoenix. He took her on as a favor to me.”
I smiled at the irony of her job location. We both knew she would never last.
“I made a fool of myself, Dylan,” fine tears peeked at me from the corners of his dull eyes.
“If you’re gonna make a fool of yourself, Ben, love’s as good a reason as any. She got to me, too, in her way,” I admitted for the first and last time.
“She’s probably laughing herself silly over what an old fool I am.”
“I don’t think she’s laughing at anything, Ben.”
I left on that note. I liked that Vandermeer hadn’t made excuses nor had he asked me to excuse him.
With MacClough’s permission and the assistance of Mickelson and Feld, I got the state to turn Azrael’s remains over to me. The next day, John ducked out of the hospital for the burial. I’d like to say it was a beautiful ceremony, but I’d be lying. The weather conditions were fine if you enjoyed gusts out of the northeast and freezing rain. Due to the rushed nature of things, I was forced to scrounge up the rabbi who’d presided over my bar mitzvah. He was a sanctimonious prick then and after a quarter of a century he was still a prick, only an older and more expensive one. As I paid him a flat fee, Rabbi Stern completed the service in less time than it takes to soft boil an egg. But given the atmospheric conditions and Johnny’s poor health, the rabbi’s minute waltz best served the living.
On the road back to the hospital, I asked MacClough if he had reconsidered his decision about Azrael’s daughter. He said he hadn’t. I dropped the subject and started making mental plans of how I’d get her Dante Gandolfo’s money and her mother’s diamond heart. After some time had elapsed, I asked MacClough why he’d taken so long to act.
“I never for one minute thought it was the son,” Johnny mumbled into the sleeve of his gray suit jacket. “I knew he’d loved Azrael and though I couldn’t be sure, I suspected he must’ve known about the baby. Azrael would have gotten a message to him somehow. She was just like that. But,” the ex-detective now looked away from his sleeve and to me, “if it wasn’t Dante, then who?”
“How’d you-”
“The hundred grand,” MacClough cut me off. “Sicilians are tighter with money than Scrooge. If it had been anyone else in the organization, Dante Gandolfo would have pushed a button on him like that.” Johnny snapped his fingers. “But when the son was willing to risk that much bread to put up a smoke screen, I knew it had to be the old man. Instead of confusing things, it was like painting a bull’s-eye on the old man’s back.
“Unconsciously,” I played Freud, “maybe that’s exactly what he wanted to do.”
“You worry about his unconscious. I’m too tired to worry.”
I hired Bob Baum, a lawyer I’d done insurance work for. We came up with an inheritance story to facilitate passing the tenth of a million over to Azrael’s daughter. Bob thought it was a cute idea, but said we could have told her anything. “Large sums of cash,” he said, “tend to make instant believers out of the recipients.” I could see that. But I thought the inheritance routine was a nice touch and it made turning over Azrael’s heart special. I made certain that Leyna would only receive one-third of the cash up front and that she would have to petition Baum, actually me, for the second third. None of us knew her and I didn’t think it was MacClough’s intention to finance binges in Atlantic City. The remainder of the money was put into a trust fund for the son.
I had considered using Larry Feld to handle what I’d hired Baum for, but I still didn’t trust his rebirth as a considerate human being. Familiar with his previous allegiance to self-interest and the Gandolfos, I couldn’t risk his getting bopped on the head and rediscovering his lean and hungry self. I did however ask Larry to make sure Leyna Brimmer’s husband didn’t harass her. He didn’t bother asking me how he was supposed to do that.
My short story about the Japanese visitors got finished somewhere in between the settling pebbles. East End Monthly had accepted it for publication and was scheduled to run the story in July. They paid pretty well, and I was fairly pleased that my relatives would finally be able to read a bit of my work in a publication somewhat more available than Pravda. I even had the gall to start calling myself a writer, though I wasn’t at the point of having cards printed attesting to that fact.