The Art of Disposal

  “What is it today?” he said.

  “Sick as a dog.”

  “Syphilis? Schistosomiasis? Skin Cancer?”

  “Feels like it could be all three.”

  “We all gotta go sometime,” Doc Brillman said with a wink, and I saw a flashing image of Al Da Paolo's stiff hand next to a dead blue fish.

  Doc Brillman wrote me a prescription, and I said goodbye to Marcia and headed back to Eddie's place. But I kept seeing this image of one Fisherman's Friend cough drop lying on the floor near the bedroom door.

  I was in such a hurry when I left. Maybe it was still there. Maybe the cops would trace it back to me. I bought the cough drops right before the crime. Could something so trivial ever get linked together like that? They’d search the place and see that Crazy Al didn’t own any cough drop tin. It must've come from the killer, they’d say. Some detective would jot it down in his little book and he’d be off like a bloodhound.

  You've seen too many Columbo's, I told myself.

  Dan the Man was napping on the sofa like a well-fed dog when I shuffled into the front room of Eddie's Vacuum Sales and Services.

  He yawned and sat up. “It’s done?”

  “Done.”

  “How'd it make you feel?”

  “Like a bad kid,” I said.

  “Eh,” Dan the Man said, and handed me back my Beretta.

  Eddie came out of the back room, his thumbs tucked under his suspenders. For some reason it seemed funny to me—a guy as dangerous as Eddie wearing suspenders.

  He hugged me and patted my back. “You're a real salesman now. I'm proud of you. I won't forget what you done for me.” He tucked the three grand into my hand and shook it furiously.

  “I lied to you earlier,” Eddie said. “I have seen a sick dog before. Freckles. What a sweet girl. Pop let us sit on the bed with her for an hour, and we fed her cold green beans. Then he drove her off to get the final shot.”

  Eddie looked like he might shed a tear.

  “Go get some shut-eye,” he said.

  THE UNEXAMINED LIFE

  Things changed after the Da Paolo job. Eddie put me with Dan the Man on a full-time basis. The idea was to have me learn from a true master of the craft. It sure as hell wasn't material you'd pick up at the Junior College, but it was still an education.

  I never knew how deadly Dan the Man was until Eddie gave me a brief synopsis of all the guys he'd shot, stabbed, and garotted over the years.

  “Dan the Man has sent more guys to hell than a law degree.”

  That's how Eddie summed it up. Maybe he'd always been grooming me up for this line of work. I was a heavyweight now. Al Da Paolo was a test, and I had passed. Sometimes I would lay in my bed and stare at the ceiling, thinking about what would have happened if Crazy Al had gotten away. And I knew that I would have ended up in the trunk of Ricky Cervetti's 1987 Buick Park Avenue, probably right next to Al Da Paolo's smelly corpse.

  I'd been affiliated with the Sesto crew for three years before I whacked Crazy Al, and in all that time I never knew all the ins and outs of the business—I wasn't in deep enough. I knew about the shylocking and the stolen car operation. The numbers racket. The drugs.

  Eddie Sesto is well connected, but he's no top dog. More like a mutt hanging out and picking up scraps from the key players. Dan the Man hit me up with some details when we were out collecting debts. I asked him if Eddie was pissed about not ever being made.

  “Hell no,” Dan the Man said. “Why would he be? He's got it made right now. Sure, he ain't made made, but that's just a formality. Eddie don't care none about it. He's flipped the switch on all them guys.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that he's cleaned up so much of their shit and knows who done what in what pot that he can pull whatever strings he wants. No one'll touch him. He's kinda like J. Edgar Hoover, with those secret files.”

  “Minus the womens' underwear,” I said.

  Dan the Man laughed, and for a brief second I could imagine him as a little kid, maybe looking at a bird or something, full of joy about the world; and just as quick as I imagined it, the laughter ended and his eyes got hollow, like that little bit of soul had flown away, unwelcome in its own body. He cocked his neck and gripped hard on the steering wheel. The creases near his mouth made him look like a pale, dead crocodile.

  We parked and walked up the stairs to my apartment.

  “Let's have a look at her,” he said when we were inside.

  I walked him to my bedroom window. You could hear her out there, squawking and shouting at her kids the way she always did. I'd thought of moving out, just because of her. She weighed about as much as a small car, and she spent the days and nights sitting in a creaky lawn-chair on her front patio, smoking cigarettes and yelling and cursing with that God-awful voice of hers. It carried. Man, did it ever carry. It was a throaty hillbilly holler, and she exercised that thing more than Pavarotti. It made my blood boil.

  “I ever tell you about my first?” Dan said.

  I told him he hadn't.

  “I was on a hike. My backpack was sticking to my shirt, and I was always taking my hat off to wipe my head.”

  “How old were you?” I said.

  “Twenty-three,” Dan said. “About a mile out, a pretty young girl walks by with a golden retriever. I guess I have an old-fashioned streak. I ain't never voided a woman's warranty: don't matter if someone wants to pay me twenty grand. Anyway, I kept on walking. I'd almost given up on crossing paths with anyone else, so I tucked my knife away.”

  “What kind was it?”

  “USMC. The kind from World War Two. And what do you know, here comes a guy just asking for it. He's all alone, walking down the steep hill. Got a walking stick and a floppy hat. I think, yeah, I can do this. I can do this.”

  Dan the Man's stony voice gets a sing-songiness to it if he talks for any length of time. An excited, frantic kind of rhythm.

  “So the nerd tips his hat and says hello, and I say, excuse me, is it this way out to Silver Needle Falls? And I fumble around with the map I brung along, and I know damn well that Silver Needle Falls is off a whole other trail system, but I say it just to get him talking.

  “Next thing I know I have the knife out of its sheath, and the whole length of the blade is sunk deep into his gut. I'm holding the knife and he's holding onto my hands and looking right into my eyes. I'll never forget them eyes, saying why, why, why?

  “My heart was pounding, and I was sure that with my luck, someone else would come right along that very minute. So I worked him over to the edge of the trail and I pushed him off of the knife, and watched him roll down into the woods. And when he thumped down there on the ground, he made some wet gurgles, and he let out a low moan like an injured hound dog. And that was it. The woods was more quiet and calm than they ever was, and a bird started singing right away, chirping out the happiest tune. So that tells you something.”

  “What does it tell you?” I said.

  “That there ain't no God. If there was, the bird would've sung a sad song, or not sung nothing at all.”

  “Did you feel bad about it?”

  “I killed him quick. He would've died someday anyway. In this line of work, there ain't no room for feelings. You're either born without 'em, or you learn to get rid of 'em.”

  I sat for a moment, remembering something I'd read a long time ago. Then I said:

  “Socrates says 'the unexamined life is not worth living.'”

  “The examined life is even worse,” Dan the Man said. Then he asked me if I felt bad about doing Crazy Al, and that if I did I should let him know right that second, because it meant I was far too soft for wet-work and that maybe I'd be better use to Eddie doing laundry and sweeping floors.

  I told him to put a sock in it, that I didn't feel a damn thing about Crazy Al except I was glad he was gone if that was how Eddie wanted it. A guy has to lie to get through life. I'm sure Dan the Man sometimes sees all those glassy begging eyes when his head hi
ts the pillow.

  We sat there at my back window, watching that fat hillbilly broad yell at her kids and smoke cigarettes.

  “Yeah, she'll do,” Dan the Man said.

  “What about it though? How close she lives?”

  “Ehh. No sweat,” he said. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked around the room. “I'll learn you something valuable.”

  “What's that?” I said.

  “The art of disposal.”

  I nearly gagged just imagining that big dead mama in her birthday suit, laid out in my bathtub, and me standing over her with a shiny new hacksaw from Home Depot.

  “They'll be asking questions,” I said. “The cops'll be all over me.”

  “Not if he did it,” Dan the Man said, holding back the curtain and staring like he was at a public aquarium.

  I heard that foul-mouthed husband right away, cursing and giving the backhand to his doomed hillbilly kid the way he always did when he wandered outside. The broad had called out her skinny old man to teach the kid some manners. This is what's wrong with the world. The nitwit, deadbeat losers are the ones who never wear rubbers.

  I wasn't watching, but I'd seen it all before, so I could tell what was happening just from the sound of it. F this and F that. Even the guys I work with don't use that kind of language around kids.

  Dan the Man swallowed hard. A single drop of sweat blossomed on his forehead and zig-zagged its way down to an eyebrow. His eyes got narrow and there was an eerie electricity in the room, almost the way it feels before a lightning storm. He let the curtain drop.

  “Yeah, that's our guy. A tasty murder-suicide. No questions.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  Dan puffed his cheeks and shook his head. “Boy are you dumb. A pro don't bother making things look like an accident. Who cares if it looks like a hit? You walk up to the guy and put two in the back of his head. Or you strangle him if you need it quiet. But you never, ever whack someone just because. Boy are you ever dumb.”

  Dan the Man sat there and swilled some beer around in his mouth. When he swallowed, it looked like it took some effort; like it caused a minor pain. A cool breeze was making the curtain sway like the white gown of a dancing lady.

  I felt like a chump. All this time he'd just been teasing me. I'd asked about getting rid of that noisy broad—she was driving me nuts—and to him it was a big joke.

  “Tell me why she's off limits,” he said, sounding like a college professor.

  “She's lives too close. It's personal.”

  “Did Eddie or Frank give you a contract on her?”

  “Nope,” I said and looked away.

  “We don't kill willy-nilly,” Dan said.

  “Was he with Joey Bones?”

  “Who?” Dan said.

  “Willy Nilly.”

  “Get outta here,” Dan said, but he laughed.

  I stood up and grabbed two more cold ones from the fridge. Dan the Man took one of the bottles and gave me a crisp nod.

  “Let me tell you somethin' else,” Dan said. “What I done back on that hike: that ain't right. That's what punks do, killing for kicks. I was different back then. You done it the right way. Crazy Al was a job. You got paid for it.”

  Dan the Man got his briefcase off of my sofa and set it on the table. He took a long swig of beer, and then he popped the briefcase clasps and the lid sprung open. He handed me a knife, and as I unbuttoned the leather sheath and pulled it out, I knew what it was and the hairs on my neck prickled.

  “That's the one,” he said.

  I turned the blade around and tried to admire it.

  “My old man told me how it felt to push a Jap off the blade of that very knife you're holding. That story just whetted my appetite, I guess. But I had to learn there ain't nothing cool about murder. It don't turn you into superman or nothing. You're just some guy killed another guy. That's all. You asked if I felt bad about it. Sometimes I do. But only that first one. Because he didn't deserve it, it wasn't business, it was a rat-bastard thing to do.”

  Dan the Man let out one of those short, harsh burps that always seem to echo. I studied him, thinking how he wasn't quite as dumb as he played it. Maybe inside of his mind there was a much smarter guy pulling the strings. A person can divvy themselves up like that. Play one character for a wife and another for a mistress. It's weird how there are all of these people we know, but never really know.

  “Eddie says you're all right. I won't be around forever. I've been at it for a long time. There's money to be made. The thing is to keep it business. Business.”

  He pulled out his smokes and struck a match.

  Outside, my fat neighbor was yapping away. She had no idea how two strangers had plotted her demise—even if it was never really gonna happen. It makes you wonder what people are saying about you when you're out of earshot.

  “I still wanna do her,” I said.

  “She's a winner,” he said, pulling on his cigarette.

  Dan the Man seemed even more weighed down than usual. He'd laugh and grin, but there were always black stones behind his eyes, and that sunken mouth with deep creases on each side of it.

  He talked a lot about Frank Conese—the Frank Conese who heads up the Corporation. I never knew too much about Conese, and I sure as hell never met the guy. I was barely an associate. But Dan the Man told me how that would all change as soon as I did some meaningful work. Crazy Al was just a bum, and none of the top guys would even care who did him or why.

  “You do some work for Frank, and you'll be having coffee with him sometime soon. I guarantee it. But watch out.”

  “I know,” I said. Everyone in the Sesto crew knew about the bad blood between Eddie and Frank Conese. Back when I was still in diapers, the Corporation split the crew to keep the peace, and Dan and Eddie had to leave New York.

  Then Dan the Man went off on your average Joe.

  “They think it's all Eye-talians.” He pulverized the cigarette butt into the ashtray. “You ain't Eye-talian. Me neither.”

  The way he said “Eye-talian” reminded me of my Grandpa Jim.

  “Sure, we got Eye-talians, but so what? There's other guys too. The Chinese Mob? Hell, they won't even let a white guy so much as touch a broom for 'em. And a spook? Forget it. At least Eddie has associates of all races. He's got more genuine diversity than a college campus.”

  “Eddie runs a good crew,” I said. I'd heard Dan the Man say it a million times. I figured it was my turn to say it.

  “He's not too greedy,” he said. “Don't care about image. Look at Crazy Al. Back before he got sent up, he was always gunning for something more. More money, more girls. Had that greed in his eye. Look at him now. Greed does you in, I don't care what line of work you're in.”

  Dan the Man hit his beer bottle on the table.

  “Eddie's the best boss you'll ever have. He pays good, and he ain't ambitious. It's smooth with Eddie at the wheel.”

  Then he asked if he could feed my fish before he left, and I said yes even though it wasn't their proper dinner time. Sometimes you have to bend a little.

  He crumbled the flakes above the water. He watched the tiger barbs push and shove to get a piece of the action until all of the food was gone. Then he put on his cap, buttoned his coat, grabbed his briefcase, and walked out the door.

  “Hey,” I said before he'd gone down the first flight of stairs. “What should I do, for real, about that noisy broad?”

  He drew his fingers along his chin like he was smoothing out a rope.

  “Ask her to keep it down,” he said.

  THIS LITTLE PIGGY

  Gideon Cash works out at Love's Auto-Mall off of 95 East. Behind the dealership, there's a junkyard stacked high with the flattened carcasses of Fords and Chevys. Dan the Man and Ricky Cervetti have told me some gruesome stories about that car crusher out behind the Auto-Mall. Stuff that went down way before I was ever hooked up with the Sesto crew, during an all out war between the Conese and De Luca families.

>   Back when Eddie was my age, he hired a kid to watch Jake "Sneakers" Amico—boss of the De Luca family—and learn his normal jogging route. Once he knew it, he picked the most isolated spot out by Metzer's Pond and he waited there. Eddie could have hired the same kid to do the dirty work, but he wanted Frank Conese to know that he was the one who got it done.

  The VIN is the vehicle identification number on the dashboard of a car. Each car that gets scrapped and smashed has a perfectly good VIN inside of it. Gideon takes them off for us and we pay him handsomely.

  Then you send some guys out to steal a car of a similar make, and you swap out the dirty VIN with the clean VIN from a car that doesn't exist anymore. Then you drive the Frankensteined cars out of state and sell them to some sucker who doesn't ask for a lot of paperwork.

  But Gideon was coming up short on the VIN's. Do you think he played it straight and told us to hold off on the envelopes with his money? No way. He liked the taste of those envelopes. He promised Eddie that he would get us the thirty or forty numbers he owed, but he was stalling us hard.

  Eddie gave him a chance, said he'd be square if he just gave back the money. But do you think a guy like Gideon Cash is going to save a few clams for a rainy day? He was in pretty deep, too. Owed us five large, but with the vig (that's interest), that five large was getting bigger than a Texas housewife.

  Eddie gives them all the details up front. Doesn't hide a thing. And then when it comes time to square up, they want to act like the money was just a gift or something. Like since they shook hands with Eddie one night at the Hotsy Totsy, he might just give them a pass because he likes them so damn much. But let me tell you something: you don't make as much dough as Eddie Sesto by feeling bad for suckers who dig their own graves.

  Dan the Man stopped slapping Gideon around, drew a few fast breaths, wiped his sleeve across his wet face, and turned to me.

  “You got anything to add?” he said.

  “Pay the man,” I said to Gideon.

  “I don't got it.”

  “He doesn't have it,” I said.