by James Ellroy
I shifted my focus from the road edged by flowering hedges and eucalyptus over to Penny, and back again, suddenly wanting to tell her everything, pour my heart out to her. I wanted to tell her how I had read somewhere that in some cultures people refuse to have their photographs taken, believing the camera steals their souls. Wanted to tell her that when Tom demolished my collection of adoring images of her, not only did he seal his own fate, but engendered hers. I wished I could tell her how, struggling with him in waves speckled with swirling photographs, I was reminded of a snow globe. And I did want to answer her question, to say that the flakes seemed to me like captive souls floating around hopelessly in their little glass cages, circling some frivolous god, but I would never admit such nonsense. Instead, I told her she must have misunderstood and, glancing at her face bathed in stormy light, knew in my heart that later this afternoon, maybe during the night, I would be compelled to finish the destructive work my foolish brother had begun.
MISSING THE MORNING BUS
2007: Lorenzo Carcaterra
LORENZO CARCATERRA (1954–) was born in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. He began his career as a journalist for the New York Daily News in 1976, first as a copy boy, finally as entertainment reporter, before moving to Time, Inc. as a writer for TV-Cable Week and People, moving on to write for numerous other magazines both as a staff writer and a freelancer, including Family Circle, the New York Times Magazine, and Twilight Zone.
In 1988 he became creative consultant for the TV series Cop Talk: Behind the Shield, leading to a managing editor position for the CBS-TV series Top Cop, which ran for four years. Among much other television work, he has written several unproduced pilots, and in 2003 and 2004 was a writer and producer on Law and Order.
After his first book, A Safe Place: The True Story of a Father, a Son, a Murder (1993), which has sold some 200,000 copies, he wrote the highly controversial Sleepers (1995), a semiautobiographical work about child abuse in a state juvenile facility. With nearly 1.5 million copies sold, the number one bestseller was filmed in 1996 with Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Bacon, and Minnie Driver. Carcaterra was the coproducer of the Barry Levinson–directed film, which has seen worldwide earnings of $500 million. His subsequent novels have regularly made the bestseller list, including Apaches (1998), Gangster (2001), Street Boys (2002), Paradise City (2004), and Chasers (2007).
"Missing the Morning Bus" was first published in the anthology Dead Mans Hand: Crime Fiction at the Poker Table (New York: Harcourt, 2007).
***
I LIFTED THE LID on my hold cards and smiled. I leaned back against three shaky slats of an old worn chair, wood legs mangled by the gnawing of a tired collie now asleep in a corner of the stuffy room, and stared over at the six faces huddled around the long dining-room table, thick mahogany wood shining under the glare of an overhead chandelier, each player studying his hand, deciding on his play, mentally considering his odds of success, in what was now the fifth year of a weekly Thursday-night ritual. I stared at the face of each of the men I had known for the better part of a decade and paused to wonder which of these friends would be the one. I was curious as to which of the six I would be forced to confront before this night, unlike any other, would come to its end.
I wanted so desperately to know who it was sitting around that table responsible for the death of the woman I loved. And I would want that answer before the last draw of the evening was called.
I tried to read their faces much the same as they would the cards in their hand. There was Jerry McReynolds, wide smile as always plastered across his face, a forty-year-old straight and single man free of the weight of day-to-day worries, a millionaire many times over due to a $5,000 investment in a small computer start-up outfit working out of a city he had never heard of, let alone visited. Jerry never missed a Thursday-night game, boasting of his streak as if he were a ballplayer about to make a move on Cal Ripken Jr.'s long-standing record of consecutive games played. He came outfitted in the same casual manner in which he approached the cards dealt his way, catalog-ordered shirts and jeans, nothing fancy, nothing wild. I could count on him to come in with two high-end bottles of Italian reds and quickly ease into the steady flow of cards and chatter that filled our weekly five-hour sessions. Jerry was the guardian of the chips and kept a small pad and a pen by his side, starting off the game with a $50 feed and dispensing out whites and blues to any player running low or chasing empty. Jerry kept his cards close, doing a quick fold if he felt his hand weak, playing the table as he did his life, on the up and up and without a hint of bluff. In five years of play, I could never recall a time when Jerry left the room with less in his pockets than he had at the start.
I sat back, rubbed the stiffness from the nape of my neck, and tried to recall how I came to know Jerry in the first place and couldn't quite place it, my cloudy memory confining it to one of the holiday receptions my wife used to host on a semiregular basis back in the days when our marriage still had the scent of salvation. God, how I hated every one of those parties, forced to make small talk in a room packed mostly with her friends since the few I had were seldom invited or welcomed into her cloistered world. I took a long gulp from a glass of scotch and looked back on those long and tedious nights and did a quick flash of Jerry being dragged by the hand in my direction, a glass of white wine in one hand, my wife's in the other. "You two will be good friends in no time at all," she said as she made a quick U-turn back into party traffic, her short and tight black skirt giving strong hints of the curvy body that rested beneath, long red hair hanging just off the edge of her shoulders. She was about forty-two then, give or take, and looked at least ten years younger, the quick smile and easy laugh a sweet antidote to the onslaught of age. I wasn't quite sure how Dottie and Jerry came to know one another and I never did bother to ask, but there was always more to their friendship than they were willing to let on. There was that look between them. You know the kind I mean? As if someone was in front of them telling a joke and they were the only two in on the punch line.
"Five-card draw, jacks or better to open," Steve said, giving the deck one more shuffle before the deal, waiting for us all to ante.
"I need a refill." I tossed my one-dollar chip into the center of the table, pushing my chair back and walking over to a crowded countertop, filled with half-empty bottles of scotch, bourbon, gin, and wine. I spun open the top of a Dewar's bottle and stared over at Steve as he doled out the cards meticulously, eyebrows thick as awnings shading his eyes. I had known Steve since forever started, both of us only children raised in the same Bronx neighborhood and going to the same Catholic schools straight through till college. And even then, while he froze his ass off studying economics and law at Michigan and I was smoking and doping my way through four years of English, a language I already had a leg up on, at Williams, we never drifted very far apart. We saw each other during breaks and vacations, hustling over to the same parties and looking to score with the same girls. I guess if I had to pick one, I'd point to Little Stevie Giraldo as my best friend, the fast-talker with a good line of shit and an innate ability to talk the unwilling to tag along on any outing he thought was worth the time and money. As he got older and life started dealing him a tougher hand of cards, Steve's youthful edge took a sharp nosedive and by the time he hit his forties, he was a man adrift, moving from one mid-tier job to the next, in debt to credit cards and street lenders, a decade into a loser's marriage and with two kids who cost him ten for every five he earned. I was the only one in the room who knew he tried to do a final checkout about eighteen months back, but even there his bad luck stayed that way. He chugged enough pills and booze to knock off Walter Hudson—that guy who was so fat they had to bury his ass inside a piano — and all it got him was a long night at a crowded hospital, his stomach pumping out everything he had managed to shove in. I was the one who waited for him, rushing over from a nearby bar where I was nursing a few, soon as I got the word from Mackey, a mutua
l pal working the wood that night.
Dottie came by at sunup, driving the old Nissan she would never let me sell, and took us both back to our place, where she made some coffee and let him sleep the rest of the OD off in the back bedroom. She didn't say all that much about it, and I said even less. But I couldn't help but catch the look of concern on her face, odd since she never much cared for Stevie one way or the other. Made me wonder what kind of look I would have earned if it was me instead of him lying in that bed, one pill removed from the long nap.
"Are you in or not, Ike?" Joe asked. "I mean, you going to pony and play or you just looking to mix drinks all night?"
"I'm in for a dollar," I said, dropping two cubes into my tumbler and glaring over at Joe, decked out as he always was in a battered New York Yankees baseball cap, Detroit Red Wings sweatshirt, and San Diego Chargers workout pants. A walking billboard of sports franchises. Joe was a trash-talking ballbuster of a work-from-home bond trader who left his Upper West Side apartment only for poker games or sporting events. Other than on those semiregular occasions, he shopped, ordered food, chatted with friends, and read for both leisure and business on his laptop. His two-bedroom condo, bought with the inheritance he scored off the daily-double death of his mother and a great-aunt three days apart in 1995, was a smooth blend of Ikea, sports and movie memorabilia, furniture, and utensils. Dottie disliked Joe with an intensity that bordered on the fanatical, which, if he knew how she felt, he would ironically appreciate, able to compare it to his rabid feelings toward both the Boston Red Sox and the New York Islanders.
I guess I liked him for the same reasons she didn't. Joe was filled with passion and was never shy to let anyone with ears know how he felt about his teams, his favorite movie or TV show. Hell, he would even get into a beef and a brawl over the athleticism of pro wrestling. Funny though, in all the years I've known Joe, and I've been doing his taxes now going on ten years this next April, he's never once asked me what my favorite sport was or which team I liked. For all he knows, I can't stand the sight of any sport, let alone follow one close enough to dip into my savings for season tickets and wear the team colors to my best friend's wedding or wake. But Joe did know that Dottie liked basketball and that she never missed a New York Knicks game on television during the season and, on rare occasions, the playoffs. I know that only because he mentioned it once during a poker game, after the Knicks by some miracle had beaten the Miami Heat the night before, how happy Dottie must have been to see that happen. How the hell could he have any idea that she was a fan or was even at home to watch the game?
I was back at my seat looking down at a pair of tens and a queen high, the fresh drink by my side. I glanced to my left and caught Tony's eye and was given a warm smile as a reward. "Everything good with you?" he asked.
"Good enough," I said, trying to keep the conversation light and not veer it toward the personal, which is the road Tony always seemed to prefer.
It made sense that he would, of course, what with him being a shrink and all. Tony enjoyed doing hit-and-run probes into the lives of the men around the table, treating the entire night as if it were a casual group session with cards, chips, and money added to the mix. He would keep it all very chatty, never giving the impression he was picking and pawing or even the least bit curious about any one of us but always leaving the table owning a lot more information than he had when he first walked in. When he wasn't busy jabbing at our collective scabs as casually as he would a platter of potato salad, Tony regaled us with tales of his sexual conquests, most of them arriving courtesy of his practically all-female practice. It was difficult not to envy any man who in a given week would bed as many as five different women, so you can imagine how well his tales traveled around a poker table filled with either those who had gone without for longer than they would dare to remember or the few who felt strangled by double-decades' worth of marital gloom.
"This is one you won't believe," he said, dropping his cards on the table in a fold and sitting back, wide grin flashed across a face that looked far too young for a man one month shy of his fifty-second birthday. "I have this new patient, right? Drop-dead blonde with stallion legs and a killer smile. Only on her second visit, asks if it's OK for her to call me at home. You know, just to shoot it whenever the urge hits."
"You ever see any ugly patients?" I asked. I really didn't want to believe that every woman who paid to tell Tony sad tales of an unfulfilled life was poster-girl material even though, deep in my heart, it figured probably to be indeed true.
"Only on referrals," Tony said. "Anyway, I'm supposed to say no to such a request, I suppose. I mean if I'm going to do a line-by-line with the rulebook."
"But you never have before," I said. "No sense finding religion now, especially when it's a different promised land you're looking to find."
"So, I give her my home number and go about the rest of my day," Tony said. "I had no doubt she would make use of it down the road a bit, maybe get a few more sessions under her garters before she made the move."
"Let me take a stab at a guess here," Joe said. "She dialed your private line right about the start of the second period of the Rangers game. Right or not?"
"If that's about eight or so, then yes, you win the stuffed bear," Tony said. "She was very upset, needed to talk, and couldn't make it wait. I offered to do a free phone consult, but she wanted a face-to-face. An hour later we were down a half bottle of red and doing a wild roll on the water bed"
"I didn't think anybody still had a water bed"' Steve said. "Or that they even made them. You don't have a lava lamp, too, do you?"
I brushed Steve's question aside with one of my own: "This woman, was she married or single?"
Tony stared at me for several seconds before he answered. "Would it make a difference either way?" he asked.
"It might," I said, "to her husband."
"She is married"' Tony said with more a sneer than a smile. "Truth be told, most of the women who come to me for help are bound to the ring. If they weren't, then maybe they wouldn't be so damn unhappy and I wouldn't be pulling down seven figures to dole out my pearls of acquired wisdom"
"Does any of that cause you concern?" I asked. "I mean, forget about the doctor-patient mumbo-jumbo crap. I'm talking here as a man. Does it bother you one inch to be taking another man's wife into your bed?"
"It never has." Tony stared right at me as if his measured words were meant for my ears alone. "And it never will."
"Is there any more pie?" Jeffrey asked. "I don't know what it is lately, but I can't seem ever to get enough to eat."
"That may well be because you're celibate," Tony said. "You need something to replace what the body most needs. If you took my advice, which I rarely offer for free, you would switch gears and reach for a warm body instead of a warm plate."
Jeffrey hated to talk about sex or at least that's the impression he wanted to convey. He was a Jesuit priest when I first met him, waiting in line to see Nathan Lane go for laughs in a Neil Simon play—an original, not a revival. It was a cold and rainy Wednesday and the matinee crowd was crammed as it usually was with the bused in and the walk-ins. We both should have been somewhere else, doing what I was paid to do and, in Jeffrey's case, what he was called to do. We made a valiant attempt at small talk as we snaked our way up toward a half-price ticket window and were surprised when we scored adjoining orchestra seats. "Now if the show is only half as funny as the critics claim"' Jeffrey said, "we will have gotten our money's worth."
We stopped by Joe Allen's for drinks after the show and I had just ordered my second shaken-not-stirred martini of the afternoon when I invited Father Jeffrey to join the poker game, eager to fill the void left by Sal Gregorio's spur-of-the-moment move to Chicago to tend to his father's meatpacking plant. Even back then, Jeffrey seemed to me a troubled man, grappling with the type of demons I would never be able to visualize in the worst of my black-dog moments. I came away with the sense that he had reached the top of the well when it came
to his chosen vocation, not sure whether it was the pedophile scandal rocking the church that did it or just the very fact that he was a modern man forced to live a sixteenth-century life. "Do you miss it?" I had asked him that day.
"What, the women?"
"We can start with that," I said, trying my best to make light of what would have to be considered a serious deal-breaker in any contract talks that brought into play a lifetime commitment.
"There are moments," Jeffrey said, "when I don't think about it. It is, by a wide margin, the biggest obstacle a priest must overcome. At least it has been for me. But hidden beneath the cover of misery, a silver cloud often lies."
"What's yours?" I asked, maybe crossing deeper into the holy water than I should.
"That it's young women who draw my eye and not innocent boys," Jeffrey said, the words tinged with anger and not regret.
"Are you one of those rebels in a collar who think Christ and Mary Magdalene were more than just pen pals?" I asked, doing what I could to steer the conversation away from the uncomfortable.
"I am one of those rebels in a collar who think Christ was too much of a man not to be in love with a woman as beautiful and as loyal as Mary was to him"' Jeffrey said.
One year later, just about to the day, Father Jeffrey turned his back on his vows, handed in his collar, and walked out of the church life for good. Yet, in the time from that eventful day to this, he stayed celibate or, at least, so he claimed, though not from a lack of effort but more from a lack of experience. Now, of all the guys in the poker group, he was the only one Dottie liked, the one she didn't roll her eyes or mumble beneath her breath if we ran into on the street or in a local restaurant. She even mentioned once that she had gone to church to see him celebrate mass and listen to one of his sermons.