by Joey Slinger
If you didn’t have a bunch of different drinking glasses all made of the very choicest crystal, even if you had to look through brides’ magazines to find out which one the juice went in, your friends who were also participating in the same lifestyle talked behind your back. They said things like it was extremely fortunate that you weren’t an astronaut because you couldn’t get liftoff with a Saturn VI, which was a martini with two Viagras instead of olives, meaning it was fine with all concerned for anybody to get it on with your boyfriend whenever you weren’t guarding him with your fangs bared. Then there was the china, one set for fine dining, a whole different set for when you invited people for brunch in the sunroom, and none of which was ever brought out for everyday. Then there was the silver.
He was just had a smallish two-storey house on a dead-end street near a park, but he compensated. For instance, he’d spent five thousand dollars on silk cushions for the furniture on the deck. Toole had let this drop one recent Sunday afternoon and was delighted to hear his friends sniff as he sidled on to pour Chablis for his other friends, “What will he do if there’s a cloudburst, shit a brick?” “I think he must already, gold ones.” “Well, I mean, how else does he manage to …”
It had to be done. If he hadn’t thrown out a figure for the cushions, they would have made one up, and it would have been below what they sold the crap for at Total Discount. Nothing beat the gay lifestyle when it came to being cut-throat.
Scarcely two weeks later, it was another party — you couldn’t afford to let much time pass, or one of your friends would run your death notice in the paper. This particular night, Robbie Toole had all his very best stuff on display, not least — he was pleased to point out — Carlo. The dinner marked two months since they’d met. And on a major occasion like that, no one who was invited expected all the guests would be participants in the gay lifestyle, but despite that, almost all the guests were astonished to find the police chief there. And his wife. And Mayor Gladly Bradley. Nonetheless, the real standouts for a lot of the guests were four friends Carlo invited who Toole thought looked as if they made their living cruising men’s washrooms at convention hotels. If they did, it must have paid well, to judge by the quality of the leather they wore. Toole thought the cheesiest thing about them was how stressed they looked, as if they were having trouble keeping up the pace, and one day soon would be switching from cocaine to crack. And two of them were carrying knives. Just because Toole was crooked didn’t mean he wasn’t a good cop.
The police chief was there because, as a devoted Christian, he’d made a point of reaching out to the various kinds of people who somehow or other had managed to survive the internal battles to keep them off the force by reason of race, disability, and all the other things the police department was obliged by law to ignore in its hiring practices. Toole’s rise to the rank of sergeant was a sure sign that things had changed, and this, his most recent chief, depended on him so much for counsel and as an in-house ambassador, that Robbie boasted of being able to work him like one of those toy cars you went vroom-vroom on the floor with and then let go and watched it speed off wherever you’d aimed it. The chief’s Christianity was so intense that when he got home that night, he believed he’d lost his wallet. It never crossed his mind that it had been lifted by one of Carlo’s little friends, as Toole had taken to calling them. It also never occurred to him how much shrieking laughter its contents would provoke when bouncers demanded proof of age and the chief’s driver’s licence started getting flashed all over town. They ran off thousands of them, laminated and everything.
“Gladly” was the nickname pretty well everybody used for the mayor, because when he’d first gotten into politics it became well known that he was glad to do absolutely anything for anybody as long as there was something in it for him. Close observers also admired his gift for smelling dirty money anywhere inside the city limits. It was what had led him, years before, to befriend Robbie Toole when Toole had started politicking to rise from the lowest ranks despite his sexual preference. Gladly had the feeling Toole had the same capable nose where money was concerned and, since he was a police officer, was often in a good position to do something more than just sniff it. Eventually they’d become each other’s biggest political investment, and so this dinner was a very important event with a lot of things going on, quite apart from a number of the guests discreetly snorting the odd substance and caressing the odd well-filled crotch.
When they got a moment together, they had what might have sounded like kind of a strange conversation. The strange thing about it was they both spoke at the same time. But they had no trouble keeping track, because they’d had many conversations like this before. For one thing it saved time. Even better, it made life difficult for eavesdroppers.
The mayor said, “My finance chairman tells me that there’s a little bundolo unaccounted for in SuEz. From a bank job that went funny a couple of weeks back. Two, three million. Not huge, but it’s amazing nobody’s tracked it down yet.” He gave Toole a surprised look. “I expect somebody will soon, though,” he continued. “I know I’ve said it before, but you can’t just campaign when an election’s on. You have to keep reminding voters every day in between that they can’t live without you. It’s good to know we could do what we could to keep your new friend from getting sent back to where was it, Guatemala? And it’s always good to get a chance to talk to the chief in an informal setting. Jesus, he’s a boring fuck, but you have to keep the wheels turning. Anyway, listen, I got to run.”
While Robbie Toole said, “I saw you got a chance to talk to Carlo. He’s very grateful and was looking forward to meeting you. His English isn’t really all that bad, is it? He’s been taking classes. Did he tell you about his new job? Clearing tables at Farina’s was such a dead end.” Toole shook his head sadly. “But once you spoke to the feds about his little immigration problem, he turned out to be the perfect person for a shop a friend of mine owns that does a wonderful business in CDs and DVDs, and he’s enjoying the experience tremendously. And that street has picked up like crazy lately, so I’m sure he’ll have a lot of opportunities to mention your name to all sorts of potential voters. No, it was Colombia. And wasn’t it wonderful of the chief and his wife to come? I know he’ll be pleased he had a chance to chat informally with you.” He raised his index finger and wagged it a little bit. “I gather the actual amount is 1.18 million.”
Then he squeezed the mayor’s arm. “It was really sweet of you to drop by.”
“Always good to see you, Robbie,” the mayor said, putting an arm around Toole’s shoulder and giving him a bracing hug. And he was through the crowd, out the door, into his limo, and gone by the time Toole could say “Dinner,” just loud enough to catch everybody’s attention and signal the caterer, “I believe is served.” He thought it was more than just the tiniest bit interesting that the mayor’s office had phoned at four thirty that afternoon to say the important meeting that was scheduled for that evening had been cancelled at the last minute, and Mayor Bradley was going to be able to make it to the party after all. Interesting, but not all that much of a mystery now. “Better get your ass in gear, old love,” Toole said to himself. “Who’d have thought so many vultures have nothing better to do than circle such a pissy little pile of money?”
He’d had a good week and had been looking forward to a chance to celebrate ever since he figured out why he’d had the weird feeling that he knew her from someplace — the little round lady who’d been that asshole Carson’s sister. It turned out she’d had a couple of starring roles in the Toons. Okay, one was just a cameo, but it was a killer cameo when you started to see how everything fit together. Toole loved the Toons. Young cops had urged him to smoke a joint before watching, because when they did they laughed so hard their asses fell off. But he got all the pleasure he needed out of them without assistance. Besides, he never smoked dope when he was on duty. What could be stupider than getting tripped up by chickenshit regulations when you were doing some
serious lawbreaking?
The Toons were selected video clips from closed circuit security cameras that got put together every week or so on the department’s in-house website. A cop might forget there was a camera in his cruiser, and everybody got to see him get out and take a leak in full colour. People who got arrested and put in the back seat sometimes did amazing things with parts of their bodies — stretching and waggling them around. The cops always said that if real movies had stuff in them like they saw in the Toons, it would make them more true to life, such as when the closed circuit caught a guy shooting another guy outside an apartment building. But if you ran the tape back further, you could see the gunman, while he’s waiting for the other guy to show up, picking his nose and looking at what he picked really very closely. It’s like he was thinking, Whoa! I never saw anything like this before in my life! The techies edited it so this ran over and over — picks nose, shoots guy, picks nose, shoots guy — until everybody was laughing so hard they were almost sick to their stomachs.
Most times, though, they were just peculiar things, and even the compilers weren’t sure why they’d included them. The famous bank security tape of Nina with her forehead on the counter in front of the teller, rocking from side to side, wasn’t famous because it had showed up on YouTube and everybody was talking about it everywhere, or even because a lot of people saw it on the Toons and said it should be in the annual highlight reel. It was famous because one person remembered it a few weeks after seeing it. As a result, something in his mind was triggered when he first set eyes on her. A couple of days later, he thought, Hey! and started going back through the Toons for the last while. When the techies dug out all the bank’s videos for that day, he got to see her outside minutes after the scene at the counter. She looked as if she was having an argument with some of his uniformed brothers and sisters from the holdup squad. Whatever was happening there on the sidewalk, though, there was no mention of it in the reports. According to the squad’s daily log, that call to the bank had been due to a false alarm.
Toole got the techies to do a computer search of other days around that time, and they discovered another performance by the same woman. Another performance at the same bank. This time another little round lady was with Carson’s sister. They were both dressed in crummy T-shirts and sweats that made him think of panhandlers on the stairs in the subways. The tape showed the women coming in the front door. Then they stopped, facing each other. Then the other woman puked on the Carson woman’s shoes. Then they ran out. It was like a bit of surreal slapstick from some old silent movie, beautiful and perfect. Toole watched that clip a dozen times. It made him laugh so hard his ass fell off.
Twenty-Two
The next time he dropped by, it was Monday morning, and she was still asleep when he banged on the door. Not even the sun was up. To get the conversation going, he’d decided on a breezy approach: “Where’s that ice cream truck today?” he began. Like, had he shown them or what? As if the only reason he’d turned up on her porch was to prove that when he chased something off the street, it stayed chased off. But then, as she stood half-asleep in the doorway, not saying a word, he started outlining the real reason. How on two different days she’d shown up in videos at a downtown bank acting in a way that suggested she intended to rob it. Both times she got cold feet. Actually, and he sounded pleased to take such care with the fact, her feet hadn’t so much gotten cold the first time as vomited on. And he sounded far more pleased to tell her that nothing she’d done was a crime. Intending to rob a bank wasn’t, and neither was chickening out.
She still didn’t say anything. She hadn’t said anything much the last time, but this time it felt different, as if she wasn’t saying anything because she’d gone deaf. It was when this occurred to him that he glanced past her and realized the wall really was gone from the back of the house. Even more of it than the last time, when he thought he was seeing things. And even though he had a sweetheart of a line ready that went “So you had this flurry of robbery interruptus,” jacking around felt just too weird in the circumstances. Instead, he walked her carefully, step-by-step, through the case he was putting together.
It started with her two failures as a bank robber. Next came her brother getting out of jail. The day after that, her brother showed that at least someone in the family knew which side was up; he walked out of a bank with 1.18 million dollars. Later that day he got murdered. So his current whereabouts could be traced with ease. With the money, it was different. There was no sign of it. More than just no sign, no anything. It had disappeared like magic — poof! And there was something about this she should understand: Toole had been around long enough to know that if the crooks who murdered Frank had gotten hold of the money, it would have been mentioned here and there around town. It would be the same even if an entirely different bunch of crooks got hold of it, like, for instance, the crooks who set Frank up to pull off the robbery, if it turned out they were different than the crooks who murdered him. And let’s face it, some crooks had set him up. How many guys walk out of jail and right away make a score like that? On what happens to be a day the bank has an extra-large supply of cash? The sound of bundles of stolen cash sliding into crooks’ pockets is something people always heard in what Toole called the armed-robbery community. And when somebody heard a sound like that, next thing you knew, everybody in town heard about it.
But what was everybody in town hearing instead? Nothing. That’s right. Nothing at all. And all this nothing everybody was hearing started coming in loud and clear at almost exactly the moment that Nina stopped trying to rob banks, and her brother knocked one over, and the money he’d stolen disappeared, leaving nothing anybody could find but his sorry-assed corpse. And here’s what interested Toole as a police officer: was there some connection? Because while he was not a man of faith, if there was one thing he definitely didn’t believe in, it was magic.
So, there. He’d done it. Gone pointedly and specifically through the case he was assembling. Except there was a problem. He’d only done it in his head. He thought he was saying it to her, thought he was crushing her under the relentless weight of circumstances, but he wasn’t. What he’d been doing instead was staring slack-jawed at the space where the back wall once was, and the only thing he actually said out loud was, “What happened to your fuckin’ house?”
No sooner had he gotten those words out than the ice cream truck came around the corner up toward the towers, chittering and chattering and going tootletly. He looked at it. She leaned her head around the corner and looked at it. And it was because they were both looking at it that they both ended up being eyewitnesses. It was too far away for them to identify anybody, but they could make out a little boy about the size of Fabreece coming out of one of the apartment buildings holding some kind of stick. They could watch as he pointed the stick at the ice cream truck. They could hear BOOM! It was so loud it echoed off the towers — Boom, boom. Everybody around the truck ran away as fast as they could, leaving the little kid on the ground where he’d been knocked over backwards by the recoil. Nina and Toole were certain they could see a wisp of smoke curling out of the truck’s service window. The street was completely silent, but slowly, melting the silence like boiling water dripping on an ice cube, came the computerized announcements. Although it was still too far away for the cop to make the words out, he could get the pattering rhythm. Kids were having their names called and being told to hurry up and buy their ice cream treats or they would be in seriously bad trouble.
“Fuck me,” Toole said. He grabbed under his jacket and was down the steps and running up the street, waving his gun.
“Fuck me,” Nina said, her heart hammering so far up in her throat she could hardly swallow. The girls rushed out and clustered around her, with D.S. clumping behind them. “Fuck me! Did a bomb go off?” he said.
“Shotgun, sounded like,” Lady said.
“What would you know about anything?” Merlina wasn’t about to let whatever was happening keep her
from stomping her sister into place.
“Sounded like a shotgun!” Ed Oataway shouted from across the street.
“More than you fuckin’ do,” Lady said to Merly, and pushed her off the side of the porch.
By the time Sergeant Toole got there, police cars and ambulances were arriving with their sirens going. Over them, JannaRose’s voice rose trembling. “Whoever thought it would lead to shooting and killing? Oh God, oh God.” Nina leaned her head against the doorframe and closed her eyes.
The strange thing was that hardly two hours later Mayor Gladly Bradley arrived. Investigators were still crawling all over the scene, and yellow tape had been put up to keep spectators back. He stood in the empty space in front of the truck, and while reporters and TV cameras crowded around him, he took a bullhorn and spoke to everybody in the neighbourhood, appealing for calm. It was terribly important that they all stay calm. The appeal was a personal one, from him to the residents of SuEz. But he was also speaking on behalf of the whole city. Everyone who lived there — would they please stay calm. Please don’t let their emotions get the better of them. Let patience and reason prevail. And calm. Everybody should please see it in their hearts to do this.
It was strange because everybody wondered what he was talking about. That’s because everybody was already about as calm as it was possible to be. If they were a little more keyed up than they would have been on an average weekday morning, it was because it was a change from what they’d grown used to. Obviously they were all surprised that a little kid had dug his father’s shotgun out of a closet and opened fire. And there was a bit of argument having to do with the kid being so small and the gun so big. Some people swore he’d been aiming at the ice cream truck driver in the serving window, but he couldn’t control where he was pointing and ended up assassinating the right front tire by accident. Others said no, he’d intended to take the tire out from the start and, what with being only seven years old, he’d done a good job. But these conversations never reached a point that could be described as even faintly heated.