Sick Like That

by Norman Green

  “So she’s happy, for the moment?”

  “Seems so,” Sarah said. “But if you and I can grab an afternoon to drive up to Woodstock to see Jake, maybe we can put this thing to bed and send Mrs. West a bill.”

  “Okay. As soon as we get a line on Frank, we’ll do it.”

  “Did you, um, you know, what was—”

  “I found Frank’s apartment,” Al told her. “The super let me in. Cost me two hundred bucks.”

  “Okay.” Sarah reached for a pen. “I’ll write you a check out of penny cash.”

  “It’s all right,” Al told her. She told Sarah she had taken the two hundred out of the twelve and change she’d lifted from her subway assailants.

  Sarah’s eyes went wide. “You never told me you got attacked on the train!”

  “Wasn’t a big deal,” Al said.

  “Maybe not to you,” Sarah told her, “but when I go see Marty, I’m taking a cab. I’m still writing you a check from penny cash.”

  “Why?”

  “Al, we gotta do business the way it’s supposed to be done, it was a legitimate expense, we got enough money for that, and whatever you make assaulting muggers on the subway is personal income. What did you find at Frank’s place?”

  “He’s not an overly fastidious individual.”

  “I coulda told you that for free,” Sarah said.

  “And I grabbed all his bills for the past couple months, including his phone records.” She plopped her chair to the floor, dug the papers out of her camera bag, and handed them to Sarah.

  “Good,” Sarah said, riffling through the pages. “I’ll see if there’s anything I can dig out of this.”

  “Okay. That yellow sheet is a list Frank kept, I’m guessing they’re all his passwords.”

  Sarah found the yellow sheet. “The man has a head like a sieve,” she said. “Let me keep the original, I’ll copy out the numbers for you. I’ll even spell ‘burglar’ right.” She looked at Al. “He’s not as dumb as this makes him look. You can’t measure every kind of smarts there is with an IQ test.”

  Al kept her opinion to herself. “Okay.”

  Sarah breathed out a defeated sigh. Frank’s reputation, it seemed, was not worth the time it would take her to defend it. “We got a check from Lamborghini of America,” she said. “That’s from a job you did before I got here. How do you want to handle it?”

  “Same as all the others, just like we agreed,” Al told her, “except we have to pay a fifteen percent vig to Pete’s Towing Service.”

  “Okay. By the way, Lamborghini is asking for a certificate of insurance.”

  “What?”

  “Liability insurance,” Sarah said, nodding.

  “Oh shit, I never even thought of that,” Al said.

  “That’s what I figured,” Sarah told her. “I went through Marty’s records, he’s got a policy that’s good for another four months. It’s under the old company name, so I don’t know . . .” She shook her head. “As far as real coverage goes, I’m sure it’s useless, because it’s you and I now, not just Marty. I mean, I can probably get them to send us a certificate, but you know insurance companies, if they can find an excuse not to pay, they ain’t paying.”

  “Christ,” Al said. “So what’s this gonna cost us? And will anyone even sell us a policy? I mean, considering—”

  Sarah held up a hand. “Leave it to me,” she said.

  “Are you sure? How—”

  “Do I tell you how to beat up muggers on the subway?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then.”

  “You really gonna go see Marty?”

  Sarah nodded. “I know he’s probably not your favorite guy in the world, but he did hire me. We can’t just, you know, abandon him.”

  “He was talking suicide yesterday.”

  “My God! Are you serious? Did you talk to a doctor? Because if he’s talking about it, chances are he’s thinking about it pretty hard—”

  “I talked to the nurse on his floor. I don’t know what anyone can do, other than keeping him so high that he can’t move.” Liar, she told herself, you know what you could have done . . . If you knew it would bring him around, would you do it? Would it be wrong to hold back? Wouldn’t that be like withholding CPR from someone because they were ugly and you didn’t want to put your mouth on theirs?

  “What?” Sarah said, staring at her.

  Gotta work on your poker face, Al told herself. “Nothing. Listen, if you’re up to it, go on and see him. Maybe you’ll do better than me.”

  “I can do that. Besides, he’s a lot closer to where I live, I’ll look in on him. What’s next with Frank?”

  “I wanna go check out the import company where he works,” Al said. “Maybe they know something.”

  “All right, but be careful,” Sarah said. “I’ll spend a few hours digging through Frank’s bills, then I gotta go bag some more crooked bartenders.”

  “Jeez, I’m glad one of us is bringing in some money. How are we making it?”

  “You find Frank for me,” Sarah said, “and I’ll handle those restaurant and hotel accounts until the end of time. And I don’t know if we’re making it or not, to tell you the truth. Another month, I’ll have a handle on what we’re doing from the regulars and I’ll know our overhead. Once we get that to a real number, we’ll know what we’ve gotta pull down every month to keep the door open without going into the hole and writing rubber checks and all that.”

  “God, I hope we make it,” Al said.

  “We’ll make it.” Al could hear the certainty in Sarah’s voice, but she still had her doubts.

  Port Richmond reminded Alessandra of a program she had seen on the Discovery Channel about a Mayan city lost in the jungles of Central America. The buildings were still there, some of the roofs were gone, but otherwise the place was in pretty decent shape, aside from being empty and overgrown with weeds. There was no one left to tell you what the pyramid was for or what function any of the other buildings served. This blighted Staten Island neighborhood had a similar feeling, except there were a few lost souls wandering through the ruins of whatever the place had once been, and the stunted weeds were not doing that great in the poisoned soil. They were clinging to life, just like everything else.

  Al had borrowed her uncle’s van for the occasion. Al supposed his estate owned the battered Chevy Astro, but in practical terms the thing was hers, her uncle’s partner, Anthony, had no interest in it and Al had decided that she would burn it before she let Bobby’s sister Magdalena anywhere near it.

  Not that it was a treasure . . .

  Its first lifetime had been spent in the service of the phone company. Tio Bobby had picked it up at auction and customized it in his own uninhibited fashion: it looked plain enough on the outside, but inside it was lined with purple shag carpeting and it came complete with a couch, television, DVD player, and an ice box. Al was somewhat embarrassed by the thing, but she had to admit that it was more comfortable and certainly better furnished than most of the places where she had lived. Plus, if you stuck your foot on it, the sucker could haul ass.

  The van was parked on a hill overlooking Palermo Imports. The place looked like it might once have been a repair facility for trucks or buses, but now it was a forlorn single-story brick structure surrounded by a parking lot, which was itself enclosed by a fence fashioned out of corrugated metal sheets painted a rusty pale gray. A single container sat in the parking lot in front of the building, the container was about half the size of the kind normally hauled by a semi. The container doors were open, but the open end of the container pointed at the building, so Al could not see what was inside.

  Two of the three men inside the fence were of a type: dark hair, rather short, on the thin side. Immigrants, Al thought, the kind of guys you see all over the city, and the suburbs, too, men desperate for any sort of labor, men whose impoverished and malnourished childhoods showed clearly in their small stature and on their pinched faces. The third guy was a
bit larger, and there was something about him that the others lacked. He seemed disinterested, for one thing. Whatever he was getting paid for, unloading containers was not it.

  One of the smaller guys sat on a forklift truck. Al was too far away to hear anything, but she assumed the guy was yelling, if for no other purpose than to prevent his relatively constant arm-waving to go without accompaniment. Whatever they were trying to do, it seemed beyond their collective abilities, and apart from the shouting, gesticulating, and an occasional halfhearted head slap, nothing much was going on.

  A guy came out of the building, he was older than any of the others, he carried himself with more authority and he was better dressed. The others deferred to him, when he walked over near the open doors of the container they gathered around him in a little knot. Even the presumptive forklift driver descended from his perch and joined in. Immediately the other short guy attempted a coup. More shouting and gesticulating ensued. The older guy said something to the bigger one, who went over and dragged the interloper from his perch.

  Uncle Paolo, Al thought. Got to be. But wherever Uncle Paolo’s talents lie, the ability to unload whatever was in the container did not seem to be among his gifts. They all moved closer, out of Al’s sight. They are probably missing Frank Waters right about now, she thought. Frank, a former longshoreman, would surely know how to solve whatever problems these guys were having getting their stuff out, and he had the size and strength to bully the rest of these budding neurosurgeons into line.

  A half an hour later, no visible progress had been made. Al heard the truck before she saw it, it was a big diesel rig and it was pulling a flatbed trailer upon which roosted a container identical in most respects to the one in the parking lot at Palermo Imports. The truck rattled past her, down the hill, and rolled up to the gate of Palermo Imports.

  Immediately the focus shifted. The two short guys ran to open the gate. Then the two short guys attempted to tell the driver where to park. Each of them had a plan to get the container off the flatbed . . .

  Al watched for the remainder of the afternoon. The container got offloaded onto the parking lot, mostly because the driver, who seemed to know what he was doing, ignored all the shouted instructions and did things his own way, but it was almost four before he pulled out dragging his empty trailer. Al waited for the circus to start back up again, but Paolo seemed to give up on the idea of unloading the containers and he sent his crew back inside the building. Al was disappointed, she had enjoyed the show. She had never had the sort of job where one must cooperate with one’s compatriots, she had generally functioned more or less on her own. They need Frank, she thought, the whole bunch of them are probably standing inside yelling at each other right now, with each man trying to grab the steering wheel out of his buddy’s hands.

  At four thirty the doors opened and the crew exited, began to straggle up the hill, presumably in search of transport. Al took off before they reached her.

  It was ten thirty at night and there had to be forty or fifty people lined up at the entrance to Club Dredd, the joint where TJ’s new band, Indio, was playing. There was no velvet rope, no doorman, just one locked door under a short red awning. Al didn’t want to wait in the line so she waited across the street, sipped a glass of wine at a window table in a café. She wasn’t afraid of being recognized, she had been instructed in the fine art of disguise by Marty Stiles. “No offense, sweetheart,” she remembered him saying, “but none of these guys are gonna be looking at your face, so don’t go nuts.” And she hadn’t, the blond wig, fur coat, and oversized sunglasses that she’d taken out of Marty’s office closet was a getup that had worked fine for her in the past.

  White Zinfandel, she thought, making a face. Sounds a hell of a lot better than it tastes. Horrible stuff, fit strictly for potheads and winos.

  When the door finally opened, the line collapsed, everyone crowded around the entrance trying to be first. It seemed like it took forever for them all to get inside. Al left her wine on the table, took a couple of mints from the bowl next to the register, mostly to kill the taste. She crossed the street, yanked the club door open. No wonder, she thought. The door opened to a steep, narrow set of stairs that led down into a basement. This place catches on fire, she thought, we’re all toast . . . She paid her cover charge, found a dark corner, and settled in to wait.

  The first act started about twenty minutes later. A tall, somewhat unsteady guy in a shiny green suit looked like he’d gotten it from the Starvation Army stepped up to a mike, asked for a big hand, a real Club Dredd welcome for . . . He was immediately drowned out by a wall of noise. The band was opening for Indio, and Al thought she could distinguish the sound of drums, a bass, and a human voice coming from someone who may have been having his toes bitten off one at a time. Hard to be sure, though. Half the people in the joint got to their feet and cheered noisily at each break.

  Relatives, Al thought. Who else would pay to listen to this crap? But the kids in the band seemed like they were having a good time. After a while, though, Al was considering wads of paper cocktail napkin for her ears. Finally, mercifully, they were done. The people who’d been standing applauded wildly, and then some of them began to filter out. During the break, the waitstaff worked the crowd hard, and Al ordered a Cutty that she didn’t really want. More people made their way down the narrow stairs, and by the time the lights went down again the place was packed. The guy in the green suit stepped back up to the mike. “People,” he said, holding his hands up for quiet. “People! I give you . . . Indio!”

  A single spot lit up a tall black kid who began hammering a three-chord progression on a guitar. Ten seconds later a drummer cracked in, and then the rest of the band jumped in and the singer stepped up to the mike. It was her, it was the white girl Al had seen with TJ, man, she looked like a Creamsicle on a hot summer day, every guy in the place came up on point when she ripped into the vocal.

  They were doing an old blues standard, but it was set to a grunge arrangement. None of the musicians seemed that gifted, but collectively the band was spare and tight, they were getting everything there was to get out of what they had.

  Typical TJ Conrad treatment, Al thought. You had Conrad, you didn’t need any virtuosos, he could make almost any bunch of musicians sound like they had it going on.

  But God, the singer was hot. She sang in the smoky rasp of someone much older than herself, and she worked the crowd, she growled, cajoled, tempted, pleaded . . . This kid doesn’t do if for you, Al thought, you probably need some kind of therapy. The men up near the stage looked mesmerized, the women looked stunned. Al thought sure she knew what they were feeling, because she was pretty certain she couldn’t compete, either.

  TJ Conrad was playing keyboard.

  Not his best instrument, that’s what he’d told her, but you couldn’t tell, not on this particular night.

  Alessandra felt too tired to hate anyone. The girl was just a kid anyhow, she didn’t know anything, she couldn’t. And TJ was just being TJ. Besides, she told herself, you’ve still got nothing, not in the way of proof anyhow, and all the show had taught her was that God had given the kid a set of pipes to go along with her other assets. Still, it was growing stronger by the minute, this idea that the thing Al and TJ had together was dead. And if that’s true, she told herself, then you ought to dig a hole and bury it because pretty soon it’s gonna start to stink.

  The next time the lights went down Al got up and made her way out.

  Ten

  “And what was it that you did for Best Foods?” The man behind the desk at Palermo Imports had introduced himself as Paolo Torrente. Up close he was far more handsome than he had appeared from a distance yesterday, he had café au lait skin, a nice smile which he employed often, softly graying hair, a mellow voice, and sad brown eyes. His hands, though, despite the manicured nails, were gnarled and twisted.

  Al’s head pounded. “I was a warehouse foreman at their facility in Bayonne, over in Jersey.” She had a differ
ent disguise today, she wore black jeans, construction boots, a Mets T-shirt, and she had her hair in a ponytail. Unfortunately for her, the white Zinfandel and the Cutty Sark seemed to have reacted badly with the Beefeater’s gin she’d swilled at the bar downstairs from her apartment the night before. She felt like someone was pounding tenpenny nails into her forehead. Most of her carefully constructed cover story was lost in the fog and pain and she was winging it.

  “Ah,” said Uncle Paolo. Al made a mental note, for what it was worth, not to call him that. “So much responsibility for one so young and beautiful, no? Did you not find it difficult to convince mortal men that they should listen to you instead of merely drinking in the sight of one so, so . . .” He waved his twisted hands. “Stunning?”

  Only an Italian, Al thought, especially one as suave as Uncle Paolo, could make you feel good about questions like that. “Not really,” she said. “The guys I know generally fall out of love with me after a little while.”

  “But how could that be?” he said. “What on earth could dissuade them?”

  “Humiliation works great,” she told him, trying not to look at his mitts. “Particularly in front of their friends.”

  “Ah,” he said, laughing softly. He held up a hand. “I should like to explain,” he said, “how I got these.”

  “No, no,” Al told him. “I was trying not to stare. And it’s none of my business.”

  He grinned broadly. “But they would always come between us, and that must never be. You are human, like me, and we must understand each other. Truly.”

  This guy should give lessons, she thought, and she nodded.

  “Some years ago,” he told her, “when I was young and stupid, I worked for the Italian government. They send me to Libya. I try to do the job they give me to do, but before I could get home, the colonel wasa make me his guest.” His smile had gone. “The colonel could be very persuasive.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “Well, I survived,” he said. “I wasa pay for my ideals, but after some time Italia wasa trade some smuggler for me. My injuries get me out of the government and into the family business. So how could I be unhappy, buying and selling wine? Wine is a gift from God.”