Lisa put her hand on top of hers. “You bet your ass I do. You didn’t wait for this guy seven years just to push him off the roof. It don’t make no sense at all.”
“That’s what we have to prove in court,” Vinny said. He picked up his pencil. “So, tell me absolutely everything you can think of, Theresa. Everything.”
Chapter Thirty: What the Hell Am I Eating?
“So, what do you think?” Vinny asked. They had just gotten off the expressway after leaving the prison and were cruising down the avenue on their way home.
“You mean, do I think she did it?”
“Yeah. That.”
“No fuckin’ way. She’s being set up.”
“Who? Who’s setting her up?”
“How should I know, Vinny? I just know she didn’t do it. I can see it in her eyes. She’s hurt and she’s grieving. That’s a hell of a thank you for being loyal to a convicted felon for so long. If you ask me, the woman is as good as gold. What possible reason could she have for killing him? Like I said, it don’t make sense.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. Only the prosecutor has got to have something big up his sleeve, something we’ve got no idea about. It has to be, because otherwise his case is too weak.”
“What could he know?”
“I don’t know yet. Parikh said they got the victim’s blood at the scene, Theresa’s footprints on the roof, and a witness. That ain’t a hell of a lot.”
They stopped for a traffic light. “Hey, Lisa, you ever notice that place over there before?”
“The Chinese restaurant on the corner?”
“Yeah. The one with the piano in the window?”
“Uh-huh. Yeah. I’ve seen it.”
“I wonder what kind of music they play.”
They turned to each other, shrugging for a moment before both arriving at the same conclusion, “Chopsticks?”
***
Lisa looked around from just inside the entrance, marveling at the glittering gold statues of Buddha and the other traditional forms of Chinese art. “This place is really pretty.”
“Forget the décor,” he said sniffing the air. “It smells great in here and I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
“Oh look,” she said pointing at rows of steam tables. “It’s a buffet—all you can eat. You okay with that?”
“Lisa, I just spent two months eating broasted chicken, hog jowls, and chicken-fried everything. If eating all that stuff didn’t kill me, one simple little buffet dinner certainly ain’t gonna put me in my grave.”
“You’re not worried that you’ll eat too much? You won’t be able to fit into that nice new suit you bought.”
“Lisa, I’m hungry. Can I eat a good meal now and worry about fitting into my new suit in the morning? Okay? Can we do that?”
“Whatever. It’s your waistline.” She pulled out her pink camera and snapped a few pictures of the décor. “I hope the food is good. My girlfriends would love it here.”
“Who?” he jibed. “Your friends Dopey, Doc, and Bashful?”
“Hey! That ain’t nice. They don’t call you no insulting names.”
“I’m just having some fun. Lighten up.”
As they waited, an immensely oversized man sat down at the piano and began to sing, “On the Street Where You Live.”
He’d barely begun when Vinny commented on his performance. “Listen to him, Lisa, he sounds just like friggin’ Vic Damone.”
“Oh yeah? He looks more like the guy who ate Vic Damone.”
“Very nice,” he bantered. “Making fun of someone because of his weight.”
“I ain’t making fun of him. I’d weigh that much too if I worked at an all-you-can-eat buffet.” She patted his tummy. “You’ll be halfway there by the time you finish loading up on appetizers.”
Vinny scowled at her.
“Two?” The hostess asked.
Vinny looked around. “You see anyone here besides us?”
“Right this way,” the hostess said with a forced smile. But as she turned and walked away she mumbled, “Asshole.”
***
Vinny studied some of the items on his plate, pointing to one of them. “You think this is real crab?”
“Real crab? No. At nine dollars and ninety-nine cents for an entire dinner? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s one of those surimi fish sticks.”
“I don’t want to sound like a know it all or nothin’ but don’t you mean sashimi?”
She scolded him lightheartedly. “Don’t you know nothing? Sashimi is a sliver of expertly sliced raw fish and it’s very expensive. Surimi is manmade. They take little bits of fish, blend them together into a giant fish milkshake, remove the liquid, and mold the fish paste into sticks. It costs about a dollar ninety-nine a pound at the supermarket.”
He wrinkled his nose. “So what I’m eating here is some kind of fish milkshake?”
“Uh-huh. That’s right.”
“That sounds disgusting. What kind of fish do they use?”
“Mostly pollock, whiting, and cod—the kind of stuff they can catch by the ton. They throw out a giant net and whatever gets caught goes into the milkshake.”
“What about the shrimp in the shrimp and lobster sauce?”
“I think I saw a few real shrimp in there but most of it is imitation, also made from surimi.”
He pushed his plate away. “What the hell are the noodles made of?”
She laughed. “Noodles, you dope. Not everything here is made of surimi. The chicken is real chicken, and the chewy beef is real chewy beef. It’s just the expensive seafood they screw around with to cut costs.”
“I guess you must be some kind of fish expert.”
“No, Vinny, I don’t have to be. I can tell what’s real and what’s not just by biting into it. Real food has a unique consistency that can never be duplicated in a factory. You can just tell it was once a real living thing. It’s not a uniform blob like the phony crab sticks on your plate. It’s got integrity.”
“Hey, you think Nunzio uses this fish paste in his shrimp parm? I mean it’s covered with sauce and gobs and gobs of cheese. How would anyone know?”
“Believe me, if Nunzio ever used fake shrimp in his restaurant he’d have to shut the doors so fast it would make his head spin. Are you kidding?” She snickered. “With the clientele in our neighborhood…the wise guys would run him out of town on a rail. They’d dump him in the river next to Luca Brasi. Forget about cooking the fish—he’d be sleeping with ’em.”
Vinny seemed pensive. “So, what you’re saying is that there’s something about all living things that make them different from imitation. They’ve got integrity.”
“Correct. You can’t just take things at surface value. You’ve got to look deeper.”
“What about my client, the one who’s on trial for murder? She got any integrity?”
“Theresa? Yeah, she’s got tons of it.”
“You really think so, huh?”
“Vinny this girl is all alone. Okay, she dances naked for a living so she ain’t exactly a nun, but she says she doesn’t turn tricks and I believe her. Think about it, a hot little number like that? She could walk into a strip joint in any state in the country and get a job in two seconds flat, but she didn’t. She stayed put, alone, and with no family to support her in New York because she was devoted to her man. He was a three-time loser and probably didn’t deserve her but that didn’t matter. She dug her heels in and stayed. And I respect that.”
“You know, that was a very convincing argument you just made. Maybe you ought to think about going to law school.”
She wrinkled her forehead. “What? And become an attorney? Screw that. I hate those sons of bitches. Present company excluded, of course.”
Vinny stared at his plate disapprovingly. “Maybe we should’ve gone to The Great World. At least there, the fish is real fish.”
“Ain’t that the place you and Joe used to go with your folks when you were kids?”
> “Yeah.”
“But your mom doesn’t eat Chinese food no more. Did she have a bad experience there or something?”
“Yeah. Only it had nothing to do with the food.” He continued to eye his dinner plate suspiciously without commenting further about his mother.”
“Well?” she asked. “What already?”
“Oh, I get it. You want to know what ended my mother’s Chinese food-eating career.”
“No, I’m Sherlock-friggin’-Holmes and I want to figure it out on my own.”
Vinny used his hands to add flair to his telling of the story. “Well, when I was…about nine or ten I think, this new kid shows up at school. What do they call it? Oh yeah, a transfer student. Anyway, this kid…Eddie, he was kind of wise in the ways of the world so to speak and he kind of…he sort of took me under his wing if you know what I mean?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Come on, Lisa. Use your imagination. What do all young boys talk about? What do they think about all day long?”
“I don’t know. Baseball cards? Peashooters? Picking their nose? I was never a little boy. Clue me in.”
“Sex, Lisa. What else is there? You weren’t a kid once?”
“Yeah. I was a kid. I just didn’t have a penis.”
He laughed before continuing. “Now most of my friends, we were pretty naïve—I mean we didn’t know nothing about girls. But this kid Eddie, he was seriously knowledgeable, and well, one day he takes me aside and tells me every freakin’ thing there was to know about girls and sex.”
“What’s that got to do with Chinese food?”
“Just hold on and I’ll tell you. Eddie taught me so much stuff in just one afternoon that my head was literally exploding with sex terms, names of anatomical parts and reproductive functions. I mean he told me so much I couldn’t keep any of it straight.”
“So what’d you do?”
“What any young kid in my situation would do. I asked my big brother.”
“Joe?” she snickered. “You asked Joe?”
“Yeah, Joe. Let me finish. I tried to explain all this new stuff to Joe and he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. And then, well, my parents decided it was time for our monthly trip to The Great World for dinner.”
Lisa blew the hair out of her eyes. “Vinny, my food is gettin’ cold. We anywhere close to the end of this?”
“Yeah. Well back in the day, Chinese was the only kind of restaurant my folks could afford to take the whole family to dinner. Back then a family of four could eat like kings for maybe twelve bucks and still take home leftovers.”
“I don’t get it. It sounds to me like your mother was still eating Chinese food.”
“Yeah. She was, but like he always does, my father ordered all kinds of stuff because it’s so cheap. I mean he ordered chicken chow mein, shrimps in lobster sauce, spare ribs, eggrolls, wonton soup. There was so much food left over at the end of the meal that we needed a gigantic doggie bag to fit it all into, only I had all that sex stuff floating around in my head, right? So when the waiter asked if we was finished I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll take the rest of it to go. Put it all in a scumbag.’”
Lisa burst out laughing. She laughed so loudly that the waitresses and nearby customers all turned around to stare at her.
“Funny, right?” Vinny asked. “My mother was so mortified she never went back to The Great World or any other Chinese restaurant ever again…ever! It’s like she was permanently traumatized.”
Lisa was still doubled-over with laughter, clutching her gut, barely able to breath.
“Take it easy. I know it was funny but you’re turning red.”
She laughed even harder.
“Lisa, stop it already. Everyone in here is looking at us.”
“Ah. Ha, ha, ha.” She was gasping for air, doubling over.
“Lisa,” he demanded. “That’s enough. Stop it already. Stop!”
“I can’t,” she said laughing so hard she could barely get the words out.
“What already? What is so fuckin’ funny?”
“You,” she snorted.
“Me? I’m funny?”
“Yeah,” she howled. “I can’t believe it.”
“You can’t believe what?”
“I can’t believe that everything you know about sex, you learned from a ten-year-old boy and your dumb shit halfwit brother Joe.”
Chapter Thirty-One: Fashion Police
It was a mild Saturday morning, one that hinted spring was around the corner. The sun was intense and warmed Lisa’s face through the window. “What do you feel like doing today?” she asked.
“I didn’t sleep so good,” Vinny said with a sour expression on his face.
“Heartburn?”
“Yeah, heartburn,” he said as he clutched his stomach.
“Well what did you expect? Just because it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet doesn’t mean you have to eat until you’re ready to burst. You were popping eggrolls like they were M&Ms.”
He sat down at the kitchen table in a short robe, still wearing his black Banlon socks from the day before. His wife beater peeked through where his belly pushed the robe apart.
“Oh, you are a sight this morning,” she teased and fanned her face with her hand. “I’m getting so hot and bothered. I don’t know how I can keep from tearing your clothes off.”
“Quit it, would ya? I get it. We were supposed to have a romantic night. I’m sorry, Lisa. What do you want me to say?”
“You should know.”
“Here we go again. I should know? What is it I should know?”
“Are you completely clueless about these things?”
“What things?”
“Man and woman things.”
“Is this is all because we didn’t do it last night? I’m sorry if I didn’t feel like getting passionate in between trips to the bathroom.”
She dismissed his reply with a disapproving wave of her hand. “Ah, Vinny, that ain’t the half of it. When are you gonna learn your role in this relationship?”
“I don’t know my role? I think I do. I’m supposed to be putting food on the table. Ain’t that the man’s job?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s your role.”
“So if you agree with me, why are you still looking at me like you want to punch me in the face?”
“You know what? Just forget it. It’s a beautiful day. Let’s take advantage of it and do something nice. It’ll probably be freezing cold again tomorrow.”
“I hate to burst your bubble but I was thinking about going back to the prison.”
“But it’s Saturday,” she said, disappointed. “I was thinking maybe we could go for a nice ride somewhere.”
“I’m sorry, but I’ve got preliminary arguments coming up on Monday morning and I got to get prepared.”
Lisa seemed disheartened as she pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. “Whatcha thinking?”
“I wanna ask Theresa if Sammy ever spoke about any of the other inmates. Maybe one of them had it in for him and you know…either they got out of the joint already or reached out to someone on the outside who could’ve iced Sammy.”
“Yeah, that sounds like a good thought. You ought to follow up on it.”
“Come with me. I won’t be there more than an hour or so. We can jump on the parkway afterwards and head upstate a ways. That sound good to you?”
“Yeah.”
“And you won’t be mad at me no more?”
“No.” She stood and began to pace the kitchen. “Except now I have to figure out how to look halfway attractive in a pair of stretch pants and a fuckin’ training bra. There’s no way in hell I’m gonna wear those prison cootie pants again.” She scratched her thigh. “I’m still skeeved out from having to wear those filthy things. I took a long hot shower and threw away a brand-new pair of pantyhose.”
Vinny stood and put his arms around her, providing the smallest glimmer of hope t
hat he wasn’t completely brain-dead when it came to romance. “Lisa, you are the most beautiful woman I ever laid my eyes on and it don’t matter to me whatsoever what you wear. You’d look good in a burlap bag for Christ’s sake. So stop agonizing about your wardrobe selection. Oh by the way, we got any TUMS?”
She was caught off guard by the request and gave her head a brain-rattling shake. “What is wrong with you? TUMS? Are you freakin’ kidding? You’re telling me how pretty I am and that I look good in everything and then in the same breath, you ask me for TUMS?”
“Yeah, the heartburn is coming back. I think the pork buns must’ve been reheated.”
“Get ’em yourself,” she huffed and bolted out of the kitchen.
Vinny shrugged as he watched her disappear. “Now what did I say?”
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Big House
They were on their way to visit Theresa when Vinny decided to comment on the smooth powerful ride of the Caddy. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Lisa. You did some job on that valve train. She’s purring like a kitten again.
“The old lifters were all gummed up, so I replaced them with high performance hydraulic valve lifters when I swapped the push rods. When GM originally built the engine in 1960, they were pretty lax on their build tolerances. I adjusted all the components to basically a zero tolerance using a Matco valve adjustment tool with a pivoting handle and an inspecting window so that I could see the adjustment screws while I tightened them.”
“Well, it shows. I can’t hardly remember the old Caddy having so much pep.”
“While I was in there I also threw in new springs, rocker arms, stud mounts, and roller tips.”
“I never heard the car run so smooth. You’re the friggin’ Michelangelo of the engine bay.”
Lisa blushed at the compliments—coming from Vinny, it was like being told she was gorgeous. They drove into Queens taking the BQE to Astoria Boulevard and over the Rikers Island Bridge that ran parallel to LaGuardia Airport. Lisa snapped pictures of a plane as it raced down the runway and lifted into the air. “I wonder where that one’s going,” she said.
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