Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?: A Novel

by Stephen Dobyns

  Lisowski grimaces. “I’ve known him a bunch of years, but we weren’t close. Not that I wanted him dead or anything. How’d it happen?”

  So Vikström describes the accident. “A truck backed out of an alley… .” He keeps it short, not wanting it to inflate the event, but even the simplest description held its drama. “There wasn’t much left to identify.”

  Lisowski keeps grimacing as if each word had a sharp point. “Bobby rented time here like the others. I got his wife’s address someplace. They’re split up.” He searches through the papers on his desk. “He was just here this morning. You can die quick—I guess that’s no surprise. I can’t get my head around it. Bam, you’re gone!”

  “When was he here this morning?” asks Manny.

  “He was waiting when I got here. Then he left around nine-thirty with another guy. Both were riding Fat Bobs. I think Bob was trying to sell him one.”

  “Fat Bob selling Fat Bobs. What’s the other guy’s name?”

  “Marco Santuzza. He’s also an accountant.”

  Vikström leans against a file cabinet. “They were friends?”

  “They work on old bikes together. Or worked on bikes, make them look like new and sell them. So yeah, you could say they were friends with a business connection. Marco had a ’54 Harley Model KHK they put back together and sold for a chunk of change. I don’t know how much, at least fifty thousand. Beautiful bike. An art piece. But, you know, they all are if you spend the time.”

  “What’s this Santuzza look like?”

  “Mid-forties, heavy, and he’s got a full beard he keeps trim. And earrings, he wears a coupla earrings. Gold ones.”

  “Give us his address as well if you have it,” says Manny. “Okay?”

  —

  Clouds moved in late that afternoon. Soon the bits of the dead biker would be washed from the surfaces of Bank Street. Detective Manny Streeter thought that was a good thing. He had come back again to seek out the clerks, store managers, office workers, even janitors employed in the buildings near the scene, which was still blocked off by yellow tape. Earlier he had talked to people out on the street; now he’d talk to the people in the buildings. This wasn’t something that Streeter had decided to do on his own—Benny Vikström had decided it for him.

  Manny still felt it had been an accident. No way had Pappalardo meant to run down the biker, identified as Fat Bob Rossi. To prove Vikström wrong, Manny intended to interview everyone he could find, and once he had his proof, he’d put it into his computer, print it out, and toss it on Vikström’s desk. But Manny wouldn’t shout, he’d only look disappointed. As for why he thought it was an accident, the main reason was that Vikström didn’t. He liked it when Vikström was wrong.

  Disappointment tending toward cynicism was a major emotion in Manny’s life, at least out of the house, and one of his larger disappointments was Vikström. But it hadn’t been always that way. When Manny had begun to work with Vikström ten months earlier, he’d been prepared to be friendly, or friendly for Manny—that is, less disappointed. He’d admired Vikström when watching him in the Detective Bureau and earlier as a patrolman. Vikström was stubborn and hardworking, and although he put too much value on hunches, at times the hunches paid off.

  Then came the big disappointment. It wasn’t that Manny stopped admiring Vikström, though the admiration had changed to grudging admiration, even bitter admiration. It wasn’t that Vikström outranked him due to the length of time he’d spent as a detective. It wasn’t that he went to a different church or ate sushi or voted Republican or was thin. No, it was more personal than that.

  You see, Manny loves karaoke—not as much as his wife, Yvonne, does, but close; and the previous summer he’d gone so far as to build a karaoke box in the spare bedroom. After all, the kids had grown up and the bedroom was just wasted space. Some karaoke-loving friends helped him—they weren’t cops—and in total it took a month to finish.

  The karaoke box had a small stage with a karaoke system that included a lyric screen, a record option, and five thousand songs. It also had a stand-up mike, two handheld mikes, four Bose speakers, and Disco DJ stage lighting with strobes that made the rhinestones on the gold-stucco ceiling jump. Then, to create the right atmosphere, he’d added a fog maker and a bubble machine. There were four round tables and eight chairs as well as a bar and refrigerator. He even had a popcorn maker with flashing neon lights. The walls were padded, the windows covered. Yvonne was happy, as were Manny’s friends, and mostly they liked the older singers: Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page, and occasionally a young guy like Tony Bennett.

  Manny and Yvonne have a beagle named Schultzie, who’s like a child to them, a replacement for the adult children who live out west. Whenever Manny gets up on the stage and sings Eddie Fisher’s “Oh! My Pa-Pa,” Schultzie howls his little heart out. This brings tears to Yvonne’s eyes, which indicates the emotional intensity available in a karaoke box.

  By the time the karaoke box was finished, Streeter and Vikström had been partners a few months. They worked okay together. If their wives had packed sandwiches, they’d often share them, each taking half a tuna fish and half a ham and cheese. They weren’t friends, but Manny thought the karaoke box might bring them closer. So he invited Vikström to the opening.

  He sprang it on Vikström one Monday night in fall in their unmarked car, a dark blue Impala 9C3, over by the high-rises. Vikström was driving.

  “You busy next weekend? I got a treat.”

  “What’s on your mind?” Vikström had an eye on the sidewalk, looking for drug deals.

  “It’s for you and the wife. You both gotta come.”

  Vikström glanced at Manny. “So? What is it?”

  “You’ll be impressed, I promise you. You’ll love it.”

  “Okay, okay, so what is it?”

  “A karaoke box.”

  “Say what?”

  So Manny explained what it was: the lights, the music, the singing, the fog, the bubbles, the little refrigerator, and so on. Halfway through his description, Vikström drove the Impala over the curb, blowing out a front tire. A parking meter knocked off the driver’s-side mirror.

  Manny thought Vikström was suffering a sudden attack, which in a way was true, because Vikström was laughing deep, uncontrollable belly laughs, laughing so hard he had to wipe away his tears with his handkerchief as he hit the wheel with a fist. “Oh, that’s good!” he kept saying. “Bubbles? That’s really good!”

  Manny rubbed his chin and looked out the window. “You don’t like music?”

  “No, no, I love music. You really get up on a little stage in your spare bedroom?” Again he laughed.

  Manny wished he could put a bullet through Vikström’s skull, and the fingers of his right hand toyed with the butt of his Glock. Instead he remained silent as they waited for the police tow truck to arrive and fix the front wheel. Vikström was silent as well, though every few minutes he’d chuckle. Then he’d say, “Sorry, sorry, I can’t help it,” then he’d chuckle some more.

  The next day Manny asked the supervisor of the Detective Bureau, Detective Sergeant Masters, if he could be transferred. She said it was impossible, unless he wanted the Mountain Bike Patrol. Manny didn’t think so.

  “Whatever your problems with Vikström,” Masters said, “get used to them.”

  But the laughter was like broken glass in his gut. No way could he get used to it. Anyway, he stopped complaining. “I’ve internalized the problem,” he told Yvonne.

  When disappointment becomes central to your life, it’s like a religion. It takes up all your spiritual space. Are you Baptist? Are you Methodist? No, I’m Disappointed. That’s how it happened with Manny.

  So the disappointment provoked by Vikström left its mark, just as other disappointments had left their mark. It was a disappointment he’d lost his hair. It was a disappointment he was forty-five instead of twenty, a disappointment he was overweight, a disappointment he hadn’t made detective sergea
nt, a disappointment that his kids had moved to California—the two sons to L.A., a daughter to Bakersfield—a disappointment that his cat, Flutie, had run away. It made a long list; and if Manny was sitting in the car—on a stakeout, for instance—he’d tot them up once again and find more. And looking in the mirror, he saw that each disappointment had carved a new wrinkle on his face until the wrinkles formed a portrait of his disappointment, which in itself was disappointing. So this was how it was with Manny: the sun-drenched, rolling hills of karaoke on one side, an alp of disappointments on the other.

  “He walks like he’s got a tombstone on his back,” Vikström told another detective.

  Late in the afternoon, Manny talks to twenty people in stores and offices near the alley that opens onto Bank Street, and as he makes his way from one to the next, he has a quiet talk with himself in the area of lexical semantics. Is it disappointment that obsesses him or is it grievance? Both identify loss, but grievance also suggests resentment, holding someone accountable. So perhaps his disappointments are in fact grievances. On the other hand, he might have disappointments and grievances at the same time. He’s disappointed with Vikström, but he also has grievances against him. Manny’s burdens seem to double. He staggers, and an elderly woman across the street shakes her head over evidence of intemperance in an otherwise respectable-looking gentleman.

  When Manny thinks he’s almost done talking to people, he calls Vikström to see what he wants next.

  “Have you checked all the upper-floor offices?”

  “I’m working on it,” says Manny untruthfully.

  “I think it’s a good idea. Don’t you?”

  Over the next half hour, Manny talks to four people who occupied upper-floor offices. They’d all heard the crash and hurried to their windows, but by the time they looked, the accident was over, while its very drama made them incapable of examining the details of its display—that is, they were at a loss for words.

  That changes when Manny talks to a middle-aged woman who works above the music store. She’s a smoker in an office where smoking isn’t allowed and where her boss, a data supervisor, has told her more than once that if she must smoke, she has to do it out on the street. But perhaps it’s raining or she doesn’t care to hunker in a doorway as if selling illegal substances. At those times she rolls her chair to the window, sticks out her head, and unless the wind blows directly in her face, lights up for a few puffs. Across the street is a three-story, flat-roofed building of gray granite blocks. To the right of the building is an alley, and within the alley that Monday morning she’d seen a large green truck with its motor idling.

  The woman—her name doesn’t matter—describes this to Manny at some length, but then she reaches the important part.

  “All at once the truck backed up, and it didn’t do it slowly. It rushed back, and I knew the driver wasn’t looking both ways. It made a roar, and suddenly there was the motorcycle. I pushed my chair back from the window, but I heard the crash. It was terrible. I still hear it.”

  Manny takes her through her story several times, but the important part stays the same. The truck had “rushed” back into the street, and the driver hadn’t looked to see if any traffic was approaching.

  “You see any brake lights on the truck?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “What happened to your cigarette?”

  “I dropped it, I was so frightened. I just hope it didn’t hit anyone.”

  Looking from the window, Manny envisions the scene. The worst part is that it suggests Vikström was correct: the truck driver, Leon Pappalardo, had backed up in order to put the truck in the path of the motorcycle. Manny’s sorry about this. It’s ugly when Vikström turns out to be correct. But how did Pappalardo know when to back up?

  Manny thanks the woman, leaves the building, crosses the street, and finds the stairs to the second floor. A minute later he’s talking to J. Arthur Madison, LL.M.

  “The exhaust was pouring into my office—pure carbon monoxide, as you can imagine. I’m still queasy from it. It went on for about five minutes, and when it became unbearable I went to close the window—such a pity on a beautiful day. Then I saw a man across the street in front of the window of the music store.”

  “And what’d he do?” Manny believes he already knows what the man did.

  “That’s just the thing, I didn’t wonder about it at the time, because the truck made this roar and a frightful cloud of exhaust poured in through my window. Later I put one and one together, and now you’re here as well. The man’s hands were behind his back. Then he took one out, the right one, and made a small flipping gesture.” J. Arthur Madison makes a flipping gesture with his right hand, like a shy child waving his daddy good-bye. “That’s when the truck began to roar, so I didn’t hear the motorcycle at first. The man stepped back into the alcove of the music store. Then I saw the motorcycle. The biker tried to stop, but … well, he couldn’t… .”

  “Can you say what the guy looked like?”

  “He wasn’t a tall guy, that’s for sure, and he had thick, black hair, like Elvis.”

  And Detective Manny Streeter thinks, Damn Vikström anyway.

  FIVE

  So what’s this business Connor Raposo has gotten into? Is it legal? “It’s been a family business for four generations,” says Didi with the self-deprecating laugh of someone hiding pride’s shining light under humility’s handkerchief. During a business lunch at the Asti Ristorante on Fifth Avenue in San Diego in November, Didi told his nephew that the name of the business was Bounty, Inc. This was over their shared antipasto: gamberi e capesante al limone. Then, over the fish, salmone marechiaro, Didi said the name was Step Up, Inc. And twice over grappa and espresso he called it A Shot in the Arm, Inc. Perhaps it was all three; perhaps it was all three and more; perhaps it was something else entirely.

  Bounty, Inc., by any name, raised money for charities—Didi couldn’t say how many. When it began in the early 1930s, it consisted of Didi’s grandfather Vado, a great-uncle, and several other relatives going door-to-door to solicit funds for organizations such as the Holy Sisters of the Blessed Little Feet, the Dust Bowl Relief Fund and New Homes for Old Horses. Vado, short for Osvaldo, would pick a town—like Topeka—pick a neighborhood—say, around Southwest Twelfth and Southwest Fillmore—and then he and his associates would solicit door-to-door for two days and get the hell out. The next day they would show up in Omaha or Kansas City or Tulsa.

  But it was easier then. First of all they only dealt in small amounts of cash. Next their charm and the apparent need of their cause to elicit sympathy for groups like One-Legged Veterans of the Great War was enough to establish their credibility. Vado would say that deception was to him what singing was to Caruso, and if he couldn’t bring five people to tears on any day of the week, the day was wasted. No mail solicitations, no phones or computers: it was all face-to-face. And there weren’t the legal constraints and licensing complications that exist today, so many mission statements, papers of incorporation, and boards of directors. A few snapshots of one-legged veterans or the decrepit motherhouse of the Holy Sisters of the Blessed Little Feet were enough. As for the groups for which they collected, or groups with vaguely similar names, they always received a money order for fifteen percent of the funds raised. So the Little Sisters and the rest were grateful, even if the amount was only ten dollars.

  For a few years after Vado retired, Bounty, Inc. was inactive. Then his oldest son, Robert, called Betinho, came up with a new plan, and off they went again—half a dozen family members blowing into a midsize city to squeeze a bit of money from the softhearted. They might be villains, but they were public-spirited villains. One or two went to jail, one or two others had warrants served. They never grew rich; it was a modest living, a job like any other. As Betinho said, the game meant as much as the money. And the charities—Childhood Victims of Hoof-and-Mouth Disease, Organ Grinder Monkey Retirement Ranch—received their pittance.

  We doubt i
f Didi hoped to make big money. The notion of putting Bounty, Inc. on the road began when he met the young man he called Vaughn Monroe, allegedly a distant cousin, in a halfway house in Imperial Beach, south of San Diego and across the fence from Tijuana. Didi never revealed his real name, and Vaughn claimed to have forgotten it. What made Vaughn valuable was that Didi’s target group was the silver generation, folks between the ages of fifty and ninety; so Vaughn was Vaughn, and Didi was happy.

  Still, it’s unlikely that Didi would have revived Bounty, Inc. if imitating the voice of Vaughn Monroe were Vaughn’s only skill. At most he might have managed a small career for Vaughn in karaoke bars. What energized Didi’s ambitions was Vaughn’s skill as a computer hacker. It meant getting two skills for the price of one. But when Connor met Vaughn, he had his doubts. Was he reliable? He seemed, as Connor said, weird. Didi gave a self-confident chuckle. “Everyone’s got a little weirdness in them someplace,” he said. And then, more seriously, “Remember, he doesn’t have any parents. We’re all he’s got.”

  “Is he a minor?” Connor had asked.

  “Not technically, nor legally either for that matter. He’s just weird.”

  This was the start of Didi’s master plan. After that he signed up the young woman he called Eartha Kitt, who had formerly been Shaw-nell or Beatriz. She, too, was a distant relative, a Brazilian, and her surname was Barbosa. Didi claimed it gave her a tugo connection, though she hadn’t known it till then.

  Lastly came Connor, who was working as a slot attendant at the Viejas Casino, thirty-five miles east of San Diego, and was sick of the drive, sick of the noise, sick of the gloomy faces. Before coming to San Diego, he’d been a slot attendant at the MGM Grand in Detroit, which was tolerable because his brother Vasco often passed through and seemed to work for MGM Grand. “Seemed” is an essential word when describing Vasco. This was after Connor had taught high school English for two years at Iron Mountain in the Upper Peninsula, until the school system downsized, meaning he was fired. Despite a master’s degree and glowing recommendations, he hadn’t found another job. Schools solved teacher shortages by increasing class sizes. Then, when Vasco called about a casino job in Detroit, Connor gave up on education. His ninth-graders brought in cake and ice cream for a going-away party. So long, kids.