Sick Like That

by Norman Green

  She stood in the middle of the entry hallway, careful not to touch anything, and she stared at the super until he grumbled, closed the door behind her, and went away. You gotta get a handle on yourself, she thought, you can’t go around bitching out every guy who pisses you off. This is all TJ’s fault, she thought. Whyn’t you go yell at him instead of at all these other morons?

  When she was satisfied the super was gone she pulled on a thin pair of latex gloves and got started.

  Frank liked microwave popcorn, Coors beer, and frozen pizza.

  He liked DVDs of Japanese prostitutes.

  He didn’t have a computer.

  He had a speed-dial feature on his telephone, but he’d never bothered to enter any numbers into it.

  He had two sets of car keys on his spare key ring, together with a bunch of other keys that looked like hardware store copies.

  He had a 52-inch flat-screen TV and a surround-sound system that was not yet hooked up.

  He had dishes in the sink, dirty laundry on the floor, food in the fridge, Juggs magazines under his bed.

  A man in his castle, Al thought. She took her time, but she couldn’t find anything related to what it was Frank did for a living or what may have happened to him at Costello’s. She pocketed his extra keys and all the paper from his last month’s phone bills, credit cards, and bank statements. And she took the last thing she found, a sheet of yellow paper that was taped to the bottom of his desktop. It had a series of numbers written on it. Next to the two top numbers were ATM and BERGLAR ALARM. The others were not identified.

  Al went looking for the super when she was done.

  “You said very quick,” he said sourly.

  Al pulled another hundred from her pocket and held it out. “Waters have a car?” she asked him.

  He glared at her, but he reached for the money. “Have two,” he told her. “One is Audi A4, piece of crap, six, seven years old. Baby shit brown. Parks on the street. If I vas homeless I vould not sleep in that thing. Other vun is big Chevy, new, black. Beautiful. Parks in back.”

  “Is the Chevy there now?”

  “No. I have not seen, maybe three days.”

  She stared at the guy, wondered what she was missing. “You never saw me,” she finally said. “I was never here.”

  “I know nothing.” He said it without looking at her.

  She wondered if he had gotten that from Sergeant Schultz or if he’d thought it up by himself.

  Al could not remember the address of the warehouse on Staten Island where Frank Waters worked, and when she called the office she got the answering machine. She hung up, looked at her watch. Four in the afternoon . . . She thought about calling Sarah’s cell but decided against it. She might be in the bathroom, she thought, or she might have gone home, even though it was not like Sarah to leave early. She likes working, Al thought, and she’s got a bunch of hotel bars and restaurants to check out. Actual paying customers . . . And she likes doing that more than she likes being home, sitting around wondering where she went wrong. Rather be out screwing up someone else’s life . . .

  She looked at the “berglar” alarm code. No alarm system at that dump he lives in, she thought, this has to be for his job. Useful little item . . . She called information, asked for the address and phone number for Palermo Imports. The computer asked her to wait while it connected her with a human being. A female voice came on the line and Al repeated her request. No such listing, the lady said. Al tried as many variations on the name as she could think of, the closest thing she found was Palermo Machine Tools, and they were in Nassau County, out on Long Island. Doesn’t look like I’ll be testing that alarm code tonight, she thought.

  Besides, she told herself, you’re not a teenager anymore, you’re not looking to kick a back door open and see what you can grab before the cops get there, you’re supposed to be a professional, you’re supposed to do your homework, first. Be nice to have some idea what you’re going to run into.

  You could go see Marty, try to get him settled down . . .

  She recoiled from the idea. Seeing Marty in his current condition was not something you sprang on yourself, it was something you steeled yourself up for after procrastinating for a few days . . .

  But you said you were gonna do it . . . She sighed, stashed the paperwork she’d stolen from Frank Waters’s domicile in her camera bag, looked around for a cab.

  “He was okay yesterday.” The Filipino nurse’s dark eyes began to tear up. She really cares about this guy, Al thought, she’s really sweating whether or not Marty gets his shit together. Yeah, she thought, but that’s only because she doesn’t know him, she found out what a prick the guy can be, she’d probably park him in a hallway somewhere and let him starve to death. “After you came, he, he was so animated, he was talking and calling on the phone and pushing himself around . . . But today he’s going back down under.” She yanked a Kleenex out of a box on her desk and dabbed at her eyes. “I even thought about what you did.” She said it without looking at Al. “I thought about, you know, trying to tempt him, or whatever. But I didn’t do it.”

  “You gotta be kidding,” Al said. “If you thought it would work, would you really do it?”

  The woman raised her eyes and stared at Al. “You did.”

  “Yeah,” Al said, surprised at herself. “I guess I did.”

  “Why?”

  Al was surprised at that, too, because she didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know.”

  “It is because you care about him.” Her tone was accusatory.

  “No fucking way. I owe the guy.” Which was not entirely the truth, she thought, and that makes you a bigger idiot than her, because you do know what a prick he can be. But I worked with the guy, that makes it different, she thought, and then she wondered if it was pathological to argue with oneself or merely neurotic. But when you get to know a guy, even if you don’t particularly like him, can you just let him slide under? “Maybe just a little bit,” she said. “Where is he?”

  Marty was parked in his wheelchair on a sunporch that looked south over Ocean Boulevard and Coney Island’s ratty boardwalk. The Cyclone, which had looked so intimidating to Alessandra when she was small, looked now more like the sort of thing construction workers would nail together out of two-by-fours so they could climb up and paint the side of a building.

  Marty stared straight ahead.

  He looked thinner in the face than he had, even just days earlier. He glanced her way once when she came in and perched on the windowsill. There was recognition in that look, and venom, and resentment. But what else? Am I kidding myself, she wondered, or is he glad to see me?

  “S’up, Marty?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Come on, Marty, it’s a long-ass cab ride, I’m not dragging myself all the way down here just to be ignored by you.”

  He turned her way slowly, by degrees, met her gaze. “No dress this time,” he said, as expressionless as a snake watching a mouse.

  “No,” Al said. “No underwear, either.”

  “Really?” His eyebrows raised up, maybe an eighth of an inch. But it’s a sign of life, she thought.

  “You really are a jerk, you know that?” But she was relieved, just a bit. Maybe there was something left in him after all.

  “Maybe so,” he said, and he shifted his gaze, stared back out through the glass. “But at least there’s one thing I can still do.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “I can still piss you off,” he said.

  She didn’t know where to go with that, so she sat and stared at him.

  “This is what I do,” he said after a while.

  “What’s that?”

  “This,” he said. “I sit here. In the sun. Like a yellow jacket stuck behind the storm window. I sit in the sun and I wait.”

  “For what?” she said. “What the hell are you waiting for, Marty?”

  He didn’t look at her, and he didn’t answer her question. “Mickey Caughlan called me,�
� he said, after a minute. “From prison.” He turned and stared at her again. “I didn’t ask him about the money.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “No way he paid you,” he said, sneering. “No way. You were lying to me.”

  “What if I was?”

  “You ever think about suicide?” he said. She saw it again, that look of distaste and anger passed over his features.

  I don’t wanna go down this road, she thought, not with Marty Stiles, you open up to him, you’re just handing him the stick to beat you with . . . “Yeah,” she said, surprising herself again. “Sure.”

  “When.”

  “Early on,” she said. “When I was twelve. And a time or two, since. Not often.” She stared at him, trying to puzzle out what she was seeing. Distaste, maybe even loathing, but he’d never hated her that strongly, he’d always wanted to have sex with her too badly. Easy enough, she thought, easy to hate the woman but want the pussy so desperately you’d cut off your arm to get it . . . But she’d never felt that before, not from Marty.

  It’s himself he loathes, she thought, and another brick came down off the wall. “My mother killed herself when I was twelve,” she told him. “They say when someone close to you commits suicide, it becomes more normal for you to consider it.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he said, and he looked away from her. “How’d she do it?”

  Alessandra sucked in a big breath, held it, blew it out. “Gas,” she said. “Head in the oven.”

  “I can’t get into the kitchen,” Marty said after a minute. “Three steps down. And there’s always somebody around.”

  She leaned forward and stared into his eyes. “What the fuck, Marty?”

  His hands gripped the bars of his chair. “I can’t do this,” he said, loud. “I want more than this.”

  “More what?”

  “More life!” He yelled it at her.

  “Well, then go fucking get it!” she yelled back at him.

  He stared at her for a minute, and then the air went out of him. “Easy for you to say,” he said.

  Maybe you should have worn the dress again, she thought. And then what? God, what a horrible thought. But would you do it? Would you give him a charity fuck if you thought it would bring him back?

  “Help me,” he said.

  “What do you want?” she asked him, suddenly frightened of what he was going to ask. “What can I do?”

  “Valiums,” he said, and she didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. “Tens. Forty or fifty ought to do it. And a fifth of Wild Turkey.”

  “Oh for crissake, Marty.”

  “What?” he said. “What are you gonna tell me? Go on, give me the speech. Tell me how great life is.”

  She thought about it, considered what must be the standard pep talk, they’d probably be great at it in a place like this. Lots of practice. “Aren’t you curious?” she asked him.

  “About what.” He didn’t sound curious.

  “About anything.” He didn’t react. “After my mother died, my father was gone, I wound up in a bad place, Marty. You wanna know what kept me going? Curiosity. I had never worn stockings, Marty, and I wanted to know how that felt.”

  One corner of his mouth lifted. “I never wore stockings neither.”

  She ignored that. “I’d never had a boyfriend. Didn’t have pierced ears. I wanted more, too, Marty.”

  “If you won’t get ’em for me, I’ll find someone who will.”

  “There’s a drugstore a couple blocks up on Ocean Boulevard,” she told him, louder again. “Why don’t you just go get ’em yourself? Can’t you think of one goddam thing you still wanna do?”

  He stared at her, his expression unreadable. “I already told you what I want,” he said. “If you won’t help, then get lost. Go away and leave me alone.”

  Sarah finally figured out what it was that made her love her job so much. “Mr. Jarvis?” she said. “Could I speak to you for a minute?” I am an extraordinary liar, Sarah told herself, and for the first time in my life I can do it with a clear conscience, and get paid for it besides.

  Jarvis was just getting out of his car in the parking lot behind the police station in Port Washington, Long Island, New York. He looked like what he was—an aging policeman: gray brush cut, starched white shirt, blue trousers with a sharp crease. Despite the cold he stood there with his jacket draped over one arm. He regarded her with pale blue eyes. “How can I help you?” he said.

  She walked up, shook his hand, introduced herself. “I’m with Houston Investigations,” she told him. She had spent an hour or so thinking about her approach to the man. A regular policeman, she thought, probably would find it easy and maybe justified to look down on any private investigator. She thought she’d found a way to neutralize that. “We specialize,” she told him, “in finding missing children.”

  It worked. She could tell from the changing expression on his face that he had initially dismissed her, then reconsidered it. How could you look down on someone who finds lost kids? “How did you get into that,” he asked her.

  “They originally hired me as a typist,” she told him. “But none of those guys has ever been a mother. I am. I know kids, I know how they think. And they generally trust me.” He nodded. Sarah watched his face as he placed her in the box labeled HARMLESS, MIGHT EVEN DO SOME GOOD.

  “Come inside,” he told her. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Station house coffee,” he said.

  “If it’s warm, I’ll drink it.”

  He sat behind an enormous desk littered with papers. She sat across from him. “This is a bit beyond my comfort zone,” she said.

  “I can see why,” he said. “Jacob West is not exactly a child anymore.”

  “Well, it’s not just that,” she said.

  “No. He might be a murderer.”

  “I read the newspaper coverage,” she said. “According to the papers . . .”

  He nodded. “No secret that I thought Isaac and Jacob killed their father,” he said. “And probably Barry Tipton, too.”

  “Do you still think so?”

  “Yes,” he said. “In my experience, these cases are generally much simpler than most folks make them out to be. Follow the money, Miss Waters.”

  “Sarah.”

  “Sarah. It’s an old principle. Isaac and Jacob West each stand to inherit significant trust fund assets when they reach the age of thirty. I had information that Thomas West intended to change the terms of his will to the benefit of Agatha, his second wife. It is my belief that Isaac and Jacob discovered that and murdered Thomas in order to prevent it.”

  “Didn’t he die in a car accident?”

  “He certainly did, Sarah, but accidents can be arranged.”

  “Mess with the brakes or something,” she said, nodding. “But you must have had something more to go on.”

  “I did, initially,” he said. “I had Barry Tipton, up until he disappeared.”

  “You knew Tipton?”

  “We played golf twice a month.”

  “So you don’t think—”

  “That he embezzled funds and disappeared? Not for a second. First of all, Barry was well off in his own right. Second, if you knew Barry . . .” He shook his head. “Barry was a good man. Damn good golfer. Had a big heart. He was a soft touch, Sarah, maybe not the most intellectual guy God ever grew legs on, but he was personable as hell. There is no way, Sarah, no way he could have pulled something like this off on his own. And he certainly could never have kept his mouth shut about it all these years. He would be constitutionally incapable of that kind of restraint.”

  “So you think he’s dead.”

  “I do. I think that he was probably murdered by the same person or persons who killed Thomas West, and for the same reasons.”

  “Jacob and Isaac.”

  “Well, I certainly can’t prove it,” he said. “And Agatha thinks I’m insane. But then, she never liked Barry,
and he didn’t care much for her.”

  “So anyhow, if I do find Jacob for her—”

  “Use extreme caution,” he told her. “Isaac was the brainier of the two, but Jacob . . . There was always something about him that disturbed me. If you do discover his whereabouts, and if you’re asking my opinion, I would tell you not to make contact. I would tell you to keep a safe distance.” He fished a business card out of a little plastic stand on his desk, handed it to her. “I assume you report to Agatha,” he said, “but if you would let me know, if and when you find something, I’d take it as a personal favor. I would truly hate to see anything else happen to her.”

  Sarah took the card, rubbed its raised letters between her fingers. “I’m sorry about your friend Mr. Tipton,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “So am I, believe me.”

  Al watched them from the bus stop at the top of the hill. Got to buy a decent pair of binoculars, she thought, the ones Marty used weighed a ton. Down at the bottom of the hill, the valets worked the cars and the patrons of Costello’s. Gotta be a sweet gig, she thought, particularly if you happened to be undocumented, the restaurant management might throw you a few bucks, but you could count on at least one or two monster tips to make your night. The guy who’d been there the night of the shooting, however, was not in evidence. Scared away, probably. She thought about walking down there and asking after him, but she knew the others would tell her nothing, not even his name.

  Give him a day or two, she told herself. He’s gonna miss the money, a gig like Costello’s would be very hard to walk away from . . .

  Nine

  Sarah Waters sat behind her desk and looked at one of her lists. “Agatha West called.”

  Alessandra was in the client’s chair, she had it leaned way back, she had her feet on the corner of the desk. “Yeah? What’d you tell her?”

  “I put her off,” Sarah said. “I told her all about the places I looked where I didn’t find Jake, and she seemed to think that was progress. And I told her about the guy in her practice, the one who was rude when I called. ‘He’s a problem,’ she told me, and she asked me not to call there anymore, that I should get her on her cell.”