Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?: A Novel

by Stephen Dobyns

  As Connor talks, his brother’s attention becomes more focused.

  “This is in New London?”

  “Yeah, right downtown. You remember Nicoletti? I’m almost certain that’s not his real name.” Connor feels uneasy. Maybe he shouldn’t have mentioned Nicoletti. He decides not to mention Nicoletti’s office on Bank Street or that he lives nearby. “He lives outside of New London someplace, not in town.”

  As Vasco stares at his brother, he again seems to be counting up numbers. Connor’s afraid his face will show that he’s lying. All the years they spent growing up, he could never lie successfully to Vasco. And what does he know about his brother’s work? He’d only mentioned Nicoletti to get Vasco’s attention. He wishes he’d kept his mouth shut.

  “Don’t know him,” says Vasco. “But yeah, I remember the name Santuzza from high school, a girl. She must’ve been your friend’s older sister. Cute.”

  Connor watches Vasco survey the room. He’s afraid of getting Nicoletti in trouble, but he can’t keep his mouth shut. “Maybe Nicoletti had problems in Detroit. Maybe that’s why he’s here.”

  “Like I say, it rings no bells. You probably saw him in San Diego.”

  They fiddle with their drinks: Connor nurses his beer, Vasco pokes at the lemon in his Coke with a swizzle stick. If Vasco knows anything about Nicoletti, he won’t share it. They wait for their food.

  “You think those skulls are real?” asks Connor, not knowing what else to say.

  Vasco didn’t so much look at him as give him a look, a long one. “Plastic, Connor, they’re plastic. And the antlers are plastic, the long horns are plastic, the marble tabletops are plastic, the silver crosses are plastic, the drinks are watered, the serapes are made in China, and the big-titted go-go girls have implants. Fuck, Connor, smarten up. Nothing’s real in here, not even the people.”

  “What about the rattlesnake?”

  Vasco laughs one of his metallic laughs. “It’s a drone.”

  “How so?” Connor tries to conceal his surprise.

  “Its movements are controlled by an iPad behind the bar. They used to let it out on the floor on crowded nights, but it caused serious panic. So now it slithers back and forth in its box. It’s plastic, too, as well as titanium and other shit.”

  “You joking?” Connor tries to see the snake from where they sit, but people are in the way.

  “You’re doubting me again? Why should I lie to my little brother?” Vasco glances toward the bar, adjusts his black tie, and then turns back. “You know how long you’ll be here? Where’re you staying?”

  “Maybe two weeks or less. Didi says it depends on the ‘pickings.’”

  “He’s a sleazebag. You know that? You can’t trust him.”

  “I like him. He’s odd and sarcastic. I thought you didn’t know him. Anyway, he’s your uncle or something like that. He’s family.”

  The cute waitress shows up with their food. Vasco gets a Mexican Caesar salad with shrimp. Connor has the buffalo burger.

  “When I knew him, his name wasn’t Didi,” says Vasco. “It was Leonor, and people called him Nonô. That’s some years ago. Maybe he isn’t any kind of relative—maybe he isn’t even a tugo. But he’s been around for a while. He’s a con man. He’s lucky not to be in jail. Fuck, I ought to report him.”

  “Don’t do that, I need the money.”

  “You could work here.”

  “I’m done with casinos.”

  Vasco pushes away his barely touched salad and gets up. “I’m late. Call me if you want to have dinner again. We’ll go to a real place next time.”

  Connor hesitates and then asks, “You going to say anything about Nicoletti?”

  “Give me a break. Why should I talk about someone I don’t know?”

  As Vasco turns, a big man in a dark suit approaches. “Hey, Vasco, where you been? I thought you weren’t going to show up.”

  Vasco again offers his metallic laugh. “Not me, Chucky, I was just leaving. I want you to meet my little brother, Zeco. He worked in Detroit for a while.”

  Connor gets to his feet. “It’s Connor. Not Zeco, Connor.”

  Chucky grabs his hand with a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. The sausage fingers show off a few classy rings. Connor expects a strong handshake, but the hand is soft, sticky, and hot. It’s like putting his hand inside a warm pudding.

  “Shit, Vasco, I didn’t know you had a kid brother.” Chucky’s over six feet and bloated rather than fat. His small teeth seem made for nibbling rather than biting. He wears several gold chains and looks like a former bouncer who saved his pennies and bought the bar where he once worked. His grin is a salesman’s grin—half affable and half hungry, but his small, dark eyes give no sign of humor.

  “He just showed up from San Diego.”

  “That’s great. Give him some vouchers. You should’ve said you’d be late.”

  “Zeco saw that accident in downtown New London this morning. He says the dead guy’s somebody called Santuzza, not Robert Rossi.”

  Chucky turns his small eyes toward Connor without turning his head. After a moment he says, “Nah, the bike belonged to Rossi. The cops say the dead guy’s Rossi. Zeco’s wrong, that’s all.”

  Connor wants to describe finding the dead man’s biker cap with the name Marco Santuzza written inside. Instead he asks, “Who’s this Rossi?”

  “A gambler,” says Vasco. “A bad one.”

  Chucky again shakes Connor’s hand, and again it disappears into the warm pudding. “We got people waiting. You know how it is. Come back tomorrow and we’ll get acquainted, have a few drinks.”

  Vasco shakes his brother’s hand. “Duty calls.”

  Vasco and Chucky head for the exit.

  Connor strokes the hairless area of his upper lip. He decides that Chucky is his brother’s boss. This shouldn’t be strange, but Vasco hasn’t mentioned working for anyone. And he was deferential to Chucky. More significantly, he was cautious. Connor realizes he’s been left with the check.

  —

  A fireman sprinkles a smoking Fat Bob with a booster line from the pumper while two other firemen stand on the sidewalk playing rock-paper-scissors as they wait for the first fireman to finish. There’s a smell of burned rubber. The time is seven-fifteen, and it’s dark, but the scene is lit by the lights from the fire truck and from four New London police cars drawn up at different angles in front of a medium-size house with a bay window. A dozen onlookers stand outside a ring of police tape talking with one another. Not much has happened, despite earlier excitement, and they get ready to go home. A light rain is falling; soon it will snow.

  “Looks like we’re late for whatever’s going on,” says Manny as he pulls his Subaru Forester up to the curb by the red pumper.

  “Maybe someone’s told Mrs. Rossi her husband’s dead,” says Vikström, getting out of the car.

  “Yeah, and she got so pissed she ran out here and blew up his motorcycle.”

  Vikström stops ten feet from the bike. “Are those bullet holes in the fender?”

  Manny can’t tell, so he only grunts.

  The detectives pick up their pace and join the fireman holding the booster line, who has just shut off the water. Manny asks what’s going on.

  “Someone took some shots at the Harley,” says the fireman, “put a few holes in the gas tank. It blew up. Detectives are inside.”

  “You’ve any idea who?” asks Vikström.

  “You’ll have to ask your buddies about that.”

  As they continue to the house, Manny says, “They’re sure to have told Fat Bob’s wife that her husband’s dead.”

  “Let’s hope so,” says Vikström.

  Three cops are on the walk, and there’s a fourth at the door. Vikström nods to them. These are men he’s known for years.

  Inside, they hear a woman shouting, “They want to kill him, they can kill him! I’m sick to death of him!”

  Manny and Vikström pause at the edge of the living room. Who’
s she talking about? The voice comes from the kitchen, and they make their way toward it.

  Angelina Rossi sits at a kitchen table. Standing across from her are two New London detectives, Herta Spiegel and Moss Jackson. They give Vikström and Manny stoical looks. Herta is about forty and stocky. Moss is the squad’s one African-American. He’d been a light-heavyweight boxer at UConn ten years earlier, but now he’s mostly known for being gloomy.

  Fat Bob’s ex-wife eyes Herta and Moss Jackson as a Sunday school teacher might eye a group of snot-flicking ten-year-olds. She wears a blue blouse and jeans. Vikström thinks she is beautiful in a dark, southern Italian way, thin, with dark hair on her bare arms. She is perhaps forty-five and has very white teeth. Manny feels she has too many teeth. He finds them too aggressive, or what he likes to call proactive. And he can’t get past her mustache. It scares him. Women like that throw things.

  Vikström moves forward. “Excuse me, who’re you talking about?”

  Herta looks at Vikström as if he’s slow in the head. “Her ex showed up to get something.”

  “Fat Bob’s alive?” Vikström regrets the question as soon as he asks. The woman at the table and the two detectives give him What a dummy looks, while Manny moves back a few steps to separate himself from his partner. He stares at his fingernails to show that his thoughts are elsewhere.

  “I thought he was killed downtown. He crashed his bike into a truck.”

  The What a dummy looks intensify. “It wasn’t Robert Rossi on the bike,” says Herta. “But the bike belonged to him all right.”

  “Rossi busted in here thirty minutes ago,” says Moss Jackson. He speaks so slowly that he could turn a vivid description of the Crucifixion into a series of yawns. “He’s not supposed to come within thirty feet of the house, so his ex called the cops. Before they got here, some guys in a green Ford shot up the Harley. Rossi ran out the back door. The Ford took off when they heard us coming. Neighbors heard more gunshots, but we haven’t found any bodies.”

  Angelina Rossi gives Vikström a cool look. “Bob’s got money hidden in the house. That’s what he’s after. Technically it’s mine, for all the shit I been through. He owes me. If he’s dead, I inherit. I’ll go straight to Vegas.”

  Vikström finds Angelina’s remarks too complicated for an intelligent answer. He turns to Moss Jackson. “So who was killed downtown?”

  “Don’t know,” says Jackson.

  “Do you have any idea?” Vikström asks Angelina.

  She cocks her head at him. “Some asshole.”

  “Anyone go after the Ford?” asks Manny.

  Herta and Moss look at each other and shrug. “Not really,” says Herta. “It was gone when the patrol car got here, and it took the officers a few minutes to hear about it because of the fire. Then they called it in.”

  Manny laughs. “Now they’ll pull over every green Ford in the county.”

  “Where do you think your husband’s gone?” asks Vikström.

  “To hell, I hope.” The tendons in the woman’s neck form a distinctive V, vanishing into the darkness of her blouse. Her hands are long and thin, and the nails are painted bright red with little white designs: maybe A’s for Angelina.

  “That’s not a constructive answer,” says Manny.

  Angelina stares at him until he looks away. Manny thinks that women like her put curses on perfectly respectable people, like police detectives. He thinks that underneath her blouse and jeans she’s covered with black fur, or just thick black hair. The image scares him.

  “Do you have a picture we can borrow?” asks Vikström politely.

  “I burned every picture the day the divorce went through,” says Angelina, pushing back her dark hair. “Burned his postcards and birthday cards. A whole lot of stuff: shirts, magazines. Did it in the backyard.”

  “What about a list of his friends?” asks Vikström.

  “He has no friends.”

  “Oh, come on,” says Manny, “everyone has friends.”

  Again she stares at him until he looks away.

  “What about close acquaintances, business associates?” asks Vikström.

  Angelina turns in her chair, giving them her back.

  Herta takes her notepad, rips out a clean sheet of paper, and puts it on the table in front of Angelina along with a yellow No. 2 pencil, almost new. “You don’t want to answer these questions downtown. Start writing some names.”

  Angelina picks up the pencil, snaps it in half, and tosses the pieces to the floor. Then she begins tearing the sheet of paper into thin strips. The detectives think it will take a straitjacket and a lot of rope to get her out of the room.

  “Can’t you see we’re trying to help you?” There’s a whine in Vikström’s voice.

  Angelina doesn’t turn. The detectives wear their professional faces—serious, menacing, and impatient—but they’re thinking about if the dog has been walked and if there’s time to watch any TV tonight.

  Manny’s cell phone rings, a rising and descending trill. Putting it to his ear, he says, “Uh-hunh, Uh-hunh, Un-hunh, Oh-oh,” and cuts the connection. He waves at Vikström. “We gotta tear ourselves away.”

  “We done here?” Vikström feels like a dog freed from the pound. He nods to Herta. “Take Angelina downtown. Use a straitjacket if you have to.”

  He and Manny hurry toward the front door, ignoring the shouts that come from the kitchen. Out on the porch, Vikström asks, “What’s going on?”

  Manny runs down the steps. “They found the head, but they’re not sure who it belongs to. I mean, they know it belongs to the dead guy, but they’re not sure of the dead guy’s name.”

  —

  It comes as no surprise that many men and women are filled with phobias. This one’s sure he’s about to be sucked up into the sky; that one must snap his fingers three times whenever he sees a white dog. Indeed, we’re fortunate to have only two or three, since they can be a physical handicap like any other—like the man who has to hop fifteen times to get to the bus stop.

  One of Benny Vikström’s greatest embarrassments is his fear of heights. He’s seen shrinks, he’s taken antianxiety pills, he’s been hypnotized. Nothing works. All he needs is to climb onto a three-step stepladder and his body becomes someone else’s. His knees shake, his belly flips over, his hands tremble, black spots flutter before his eyes. He might even get teary.

  It’s remarkable that he’s kept this phobia hidden during his years as a cop, but his deception has taken hundreds of little lies. For instance, if an assignment requires him to drive across the I-95 bridge over the Thames River between New London and Groton, he’ll get someone else to drive while he sits hunched in the passenger seat with his eyes shut, whispering, in a musical way, “La-la-la-la-la.”

  “What’re you singing?” Manny Streeter might ask.

  “An old Beach Boys song from high school. I can’t get it out of my head.”

  “Too modern. The old tunes are the best tunes, as far as I’m concerned. How come you hum it every time we drive over the bridge?”

  “I guess the water sets me off. Do you know ‘Surfin’ Safari’?”

  “No,” Manny might say, “I really don’t.”

  Manny is perhaps the only cop who knows Vikström is terrified of heights, but he keeps it to himself so not even Vikström knows he knows. This seeming ignorance offers Manny a wide range of subtle chastisements to increase the frustrations in Vikström’s life, which in turn decreases Manny’s level of general disappointment. Seeing Vikström terrified cheers him up.

  The issue of Vikström’s phobia once more declares itself when they reach Bank Street, where the head has been found. A hook and ladder from the fire marshal’s headquarters up the street is parked in front of a three-story building. On the first floor is a used-clothing store called Never Say Die. A ladder extends from the fire apparatus to the top of the roof. Four cops and firemen stare thoughtfully upward, while three firemen on the roof stare thoughtfully down. Manny decides the
y are sharing a philosophical moment and that finding a severed head, which has been thrown one hundred feet onto a rooftop, is more than enough to make one thoughtful. It’s raining slightly, and misty auras wreathe the streetlamps.

  Manny and Vikström approach the truck. It’s their job to look at the head before forensics removes it. They make their greetings and exchange handshakes. The fire department has been searching the roofs for the head for several hours, and now, a fire captain tells Manny, they’ve hit pay dirt.

  Manny’s disappointment, which has become one of our leitmotifs, is like a nagging sore throat: sometimes better, sometimes worse. As Manny realizes the pleasures that lie ahead, the sore throat fades entirely. He pauses to speak to a fire lieutenant and then hurries after Vikström.

  “Guess we have to go to the top,” he says. “Like, it’s part of the crime scene.”

  “We take the stairs?”

  “Nah-unh, it’d mean busting into the building, and the fire marshal doesn’t want to do that. We’ll take the ladder.”

  Vikström stares at the ladder, which to his subjective vision extends into the dark for half a mile. His belly begins to flip-flop. “Why don’t you go up, and I’ll stay down here and keep an eye on the car.”

  “That’s no problem.” Manny calls to a patrolman. “Hey, Wiggins, keep an eye on the car while Benny and I climb up to the roof.”

  “Sure thing, Detective.”

  “Okay, Benny, let’s get a move on. I’d like to be home before midnight.”

  We’ll skip over Vikström’s excuses—for example, sore ankle, upset stomach, useless duplication of effort—because Manny shoots them down one by one like he was shooting hippos in a kiddie pool. Soon Vikström stands on the truck at the base of the ladder staring upward as if into a grinning human skull. The only good thing about the climb, or rather the least bad thing, is that the ladder has handrails, so Vikström can climb with his eyes shut while hanging on to the rails.