Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?: A Novel

by Stephen Dobyns

  “I don’t recall his shoes. I expect they were dark. Dark shoes, dark pants, dark sweatshirt.”

  “By dark do you mean black?” asks Vikström.

  “Not black, I’m sure of that. Perhaps dark blue or charcoal gray. I really don’t remember. I’m sorry.”

  Vikström notices white crumbs on the rug, lots of them; the more he looks, the more he sees. He’s surprised the doctor is so messy.

  “Could he have come back across the street and gone upstairs?” asks Manny. “And you maybe didn’t see him?”

  Dr. Goodenough changes his position, leans back, and stares up at the ceiling. But don’t let him fool you. He’s still thinking about beef Stroganoff and chicken Kiev, except now he’s also added the possibility of cabbage rolls with mushroom sauce.

  “Absolutely it’s possible. I’d turned away to dial 911, and then my patient accused me of not listening to what he was saying. I reassured him I’d heard quite well. So he asked what he’d said. I said he’d been speaking of squeezing loaves of white bread, because that’s what he always talks about. But this time I was in error. He’d been talking about English muffins. Quickie squeezes, he called them. So it was ten minutes before I looked out the window again, and that was when the police arrived. An elephant could have crossed the street and gone upstairs in that length of time.”

  Five minutes later, as the detectives are descending the stairs, Manny says, “This Chucky guy’s getting important. He’s probably the one in the hoodie who got out of the Denali and crossed the street.”

  Vikström can’t disagree. “So what do you suggest we do?”

  “I got bad news for you. We’ve got to go to Groton. We’ve got to cross the bridge. We’ve got to talk to Caroline Santuzza.”

  Vikström, as they drive toward I-95, offers reasons why a trip to Groton is a bad idea. For instance, it’s cruel to interrupt Caroline’s healing process, and again comes the claim they’re trespassing on the Groton police department’s acreage. Maybe they can just call a Groton detective and ask him to have a chat with Caroline.

  Manny shoots down Vikström’s arguments like popping balloons at a kiddie birthday party. “Just a few questions, Benny. We’ll only be there ten minutes.”

  Vikström doesn’t respond. He knows they need to talk to Caroline Santuzza, but he doesn’t plan to admit to Manny that he’s right. It would bring about unending contention, with Manny saying, Well, I was right about that other thing, so I must be right about this thing. It’s happened often, and Vikström’s sick of it.

  “Have you ever thought …” says Manny. Here he pauses to give Vikström time to flinch and intensify his sense of dread. “Have you ever thought,” Manny repeats, “that instead of hiding your head and going la, la, la as we cross the bridge … have you ever thought it might be more effective to name all the women you’ve fucked? You could say, ‘Well, first there was Alice, and then there was Harriet, and then there was Giselle.’ And with each name you could raise a finger to give the act of fucking that person more authority. Have you ever thought of doing that?”

  Vikström explodes. “You son of a bitch, if you weren’t driving, I’d throw you out of the car!” Actually, Vikström and Maud were married at nineteen and twenty. Before that, Vikström had sex with only one other woman, and it was a disaster.

  “What, what?” says Manny pulling onto I-95. “I give useful advice and you threaten me? Don’t you see I got your best interests at heart, that I’m forgiving you for months of abuse?”

  “Shut up,” says Vikström. “Don’t say another word.” They’re now on the bridge, and Vikström glances at the flimsy black iron railing dividing him from the abyss. He shuts his eyes. Manny begins to whistle. It’s a Vaughn Monroe song called “There! I’ve Said It Again,” but Vikström doesn’t know this. Manny begins to sing quietly, “‘I love you, there’s nothing to hide. It’s better than burning inside. I love you, no use to pretend. / There, I’ve said it again.’”

  “Give me your honest opinion,” says Manny. “Whose version of this song do you like best? Vaughn Monroe, Bobby Vinton, or Sam Cooke?”

  Vikström imagines breaking Manny’s fingers one by one.

  “Ha,” says Manny. “We’re over the bridge. I distracted you. You didn’t even notice we were crossing the bridge. Believe me, Benny, I’m looking out for you. I’m in your corner.”

  —

  Only one car is in the driveway when they reach Caroline Santuzza’s house on Godfrey Street: a dark Chrysler PT Cruiser that must be a dozen years old. In front of the Chrysler is a red scooter.

  “Ah,” says Manny, “Giovanni Lambertenghi is in residence.”

  Vikström knocks on the front door; after a moment he rings the bell. A woman’s voice from inside shouts, “Hold on to your horses, will you?”

  Manny and Vikström wait on the small porch as Caroline Santuzza unlocks the door. They can see her through the glass with a red towel around her head.

  “Don’t let the cats out!” she shouts.

  A large black tomcat bullies its way through the opening door and darts between Manny’s legs. He stumbles and grabs Vikström’s shoulder, then lets go as if the shoulder were hot. No way does he want to feel obliged to Vikström for keeping him from falling.

  “Jake, Jake!” shouts Caroline. She turns angrily to the detectives. “You let him out, so you go find him!”

  Manny says, “We have a few more questions to ask. It won’t take more than a minute. Sorry about the cat. Can we come in?”

  Caroline Santuzza crossly stands aside to let them enter. She’s a big woman wearing a pink Mother Hubbard, and the detectives have to brush against her as they pass. Manny thinks it’s like brushing against a giant marshmallow.

  “Marco’s funeral’s tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.” She follows the detectives into the living room. “I don’t want you guys to be there, no way.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” says Manny. “Did you solve the head problem?”

  Caroline glares. “It’s in the box. They couldn’t attach it, but it’s between the feet, so I got a shorter casket. It was cheaper.”

  “Good thinking,” says Manny.

  Looking around the living room, Vikström counts eight cats, three more than last time. The couch and two armchairs are ripped to shreds, so it’s difficult to determine their color.

  “I wonder if you can tell us more about the man who visited your husband,” asks Vikström. “You said he was wearing a hoodie.”

  “I didn’t like him,” says Caroline. “He made Marco tell me to go into the kitchen. Marco was afraid of him.”

  “What did he look like?” asks Manny.

  “He was wearing a hoodie, like I said. I didn’t see much more than that. And he was big.” She nods at Vikström. “Taller than you. He had great big fat hands.”

  “Did you hear his name?” asks Manny.

  “Marco didn’t introduce us.”

  “Could it have been Chucky?”

  “Like I said, we weren’t introduced.”

  “What did he want?” asks Vikström.

  “He was paying Marco to do something. I don’t know what. Marco didn’t want to do it, but it was a lot of money. I asked him about it afterward, but he wouldn’t say anything. He was scared.”

  “Anything else?” asks Vikström.

  Caroline shakes her head. “Maybe Giovanni knows more. Marco talked to him a little. Should I call him? He’s upstairs in his room.”

  Caroline goes to the foot of the stairs. “Johnnie, some guys want to talk to you! Get down here, will you?” She turns to Vikström, slightly embarrassed. “He’s been playing Killzone 3 all day. Yesterday it was Mortal Kombat. Some days he never comes downstairs. You should hear the noise!”

  “He should try karaoke,” says Vikström. He hears Manny growl behind him.

  Jack Sprat is as they saw him before: red hair, red-freckled face, and a red shirt. He also wears blue jeans, but if they came in red, he’d prefer the
m.

  “Hunh?” he says. His red eyes are perhaps a result of all that video gaming.

  Manny asks about Marco. Jack Sprat stands on the first step of the staircase, which makes him as tall as Vikström, who thinks that Jack Sprat looks like a force of nature rather than a thinker, one of those forces of nature that rips through towns in the Midwest without apology.

  “Marco called him Chucky, but they weren’t friends,” says Jack Sprat. He looks at the two detectives with dislike. “He was paying Marco to do something. I don’t know what, but it was something in Marco’s building downtown.”

  This is about all the detectives get. Jack Sprat says Chucky’s hoodie was dark blue and he wore black motorcycle boots. He also mentions Chucky’s big hands.

  More out of curiosity than to rile him up, Manny asks if Jack Sprat still thinks Fat Bob was responsible for Marco’s death.

  Jack Sprat sputters with anger. “Fat Bob made Marco take the bike. Marco didn’t want it, didn’t want to ride it. Fat Bob knew the guy was downtown waiting to signal Pappalardo to back up. Marco and Pappalardo were buddies. It drove him nuts to think he’d killed Marco instead of Fat Bob. So that’s murder. Fat Bob murdered him.”

  “But you can’t prove it,” says Vikström.

  Jack Sprat sputters some more. “I knows what I knows.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Consider a king-size lazy Susan thirty-six inches across. It’s turned by an electric motor, though not too fast. We don’t want anybody to fall off. The man standing on it is naked, but to avoid giving offense we place a flashing swirl of light over his genitals, something like the visual distortion superimposed over the faces of the innocent on TV news shows. The effect of the flashing swirl is to draw attention to the genitals at the same time it conceals them.

  The man has flat feet and pink, tuberous toes resembling fingerling potatoes of the sort called Russian bananas. The nails need trimming. The ankles are swollen; perhaps the man spends too much time walking around. The calves are muscular and darkened with leg hair extending from the metatarsus to the knees, which are puffy and bear a resemblance to twin Winston Churchills, minus the nose. The thighs are as thick as the waist of a ballerina. Here the dark hair evident on the calves is more abundant, giving the thighs a chimpish aspect. The buttocks are brawny, while the circumference of the hips, belly, and hairy chest are equally round, making the entire torso resemble a fifty-five-gallon drum. The extra-large scapula and clavicle extend from the chest, letting the arms hang down like fat kielbasas ending in soft, seemingly bloated hands, the backs of which are shaved to accentuate their whiteness.

  The man’s neck is short, meaty, and nearly nonexistent: a pedestal on which a basketball-shaped head seems insecurely balanced. A small chin protrudes like a carbuncle. The mouth is thin-lipped, with many small teeth, more than seems normal. Fat cheeks and a nose like an oversize thumb, once broken and badly reset. Swollen and seemingly boneless cheeks with old acne scars; dark, hooded eyes that may or may not be looking at you—surely it’s the massiveness of the head that makes the eyes seem small—dark eyebrows and a large rectangular forehead like a car bumper. The thin, dark hair shows an almost touching vanity, with tufts of it stuck down as if glued upon the vulnerable, denuded areas. The oddly delicate and parchment-colored ears resemble midnight moonflowers.

  This is Chucky.

  We’ve said before that he has a single personality, while others we’ve met have multiple personalities and shifting identities. Robert Rossi versus Fat Bob, Eartha versus Beatriz, Céline versus Shirley, Connor versus Zeco. We could go on. But Chucky is only Chucky, an enforcer, a facilitator, and a bully. His ambition to be a bully began in his crib when he pushed his stuffed animals around; in kindergarten he broke the heads off his toy soldiers; then, through his school years, he refined his skills. He fed on the defenseless as a whale feeds on plankton. He bulked up. He became monosyllabic. He didn’t graduate.

  We’ve also spoken of people having a dominant emotion: disappointment for Manny, resentment for Angelina, revenge for Jack Sprat, while Connor’s dominant emotion is confusion, if indeed confusion is an emotion, which he often articulates with the phrase “Just who am I?”

  Chucky’s dominant emotion is a lust for power. He’d never ask, as Connor asks, “Just who am I?” He feels he knows exactly who he is, and he’d be glad to explain it to you either verbally or physically, preferably the latter. But Chucky was not born Chucky. As with others we’ve met, he changed the name his parents gave him, which was Holcombe. But in third grade he decided that Holcombe wasn’t a credible name for a bully, and so he became Chucky. He’s never regretted the decision.

  Along with his dominant emotion, Chucky has a fatal flaw. He loves gold; he loves it as a dragon loves gold, as something to sit upon rather than spend. It was Céline who told Chucky that Sal Nicoletti was Dante Barbarella. She sold him the information after Sal slapped her. Céline also told Chucky about Sal’s gold: the rings and necklaces, the cuff links and bracelets, but especially the Rolex Oyster Perpetual GMT-Master II with an eighteen-karat yellow-gold case and an eighteen-karat yellow-gold bracelet, plus a sprinkling of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. She also told him about the Montegrappa St. Moritz Limited Edition Woods eighteen-karat-gold rollerball pen, though Chucky can barely write his own name. But having heard about them, he wanted them all.

  So Chucky sold the information about Sal to some gentlemen in Detroit, and they contacted a nameless fellow in Cincinnati who agreed to do the removal work for financial considerations. Chucky was also asked if he’d like to do the removal work, but Chucky isn’t a killer. He might beat a person to a splop of jelly, but at the end the person was usually alive. Indeed, Chucky might beat the same person five or six times, allowing for periods of recuperation between each application.

  As a facilitator, Chucky arranged to pick up the shooter from T. F. Green Airport just south of Providence, drive him to New London, and drop him off on Bank Street outside Sal’s office. Then, when the man finished his work and came back downstairs, he’d be returned to the airport.

  But Chucky’s desire for Sal’s gold led him to a concurrent plan that involved Marco Santuzza. A few perceptive readers may already have deduced this. Marco would wait by the door of his office till the shooter left. Then he’d hurry to Sal’s office, remove Sal’s jewelry, putting it in a small black bag, and run back to his own office. Altogether it might take him two minutes.

  But Marco didn’t want to do this. Maybe he was squeamish about removing the rings from Sal’s dead fingers. Maybe he was afraid of being caught by the police. We’ve never really met Marco, so it’s difficult to understand his reasons. For us he was only a shadow shooting past the window of the shoe-repair store.

  So Chucky offered Marco a thousand dollars. Marco, though tempted, was hesitant. Then Chucky threatened to turn Marco into a splop of jelly. This is Chucky’s threat of choice: “I’ll fuckin’ turn you into a splop of jelly.” So Marco agreed to divest Sal of his jewelry as described. Later in the day, after the police had done their work, Chucky would collect it. This seemed like a fine plan for all concerned, though Marco continued to have doubts. However, he was being paid and his face would remain in one piece.

  Unluckily, two days before Sal was to be shot, Fat Bob lent Marco a Fat Bob to drive to his office, and that was that. Leon Pappalardo backed up his dump truck, and Marco was mushed.

  Chucky was furious, but who could he punish? Certainly he suspected Fat Bob of a hidden agenda, and Chucky meant to engage him in his favored nonverbal communication—biff, bam, boom. But although Fat Bob might have given his bike to Marco for devious reasons, he knew nothing about Chucky’s plan to filch Sal’s bling.

  So what could Chucky do? He employed two thugs, but he trusted neither to remove Sal’s gold. Thus he was forced to fetch it himself. He jumped out of the Denali before the shooter, crossed the street, waited for the shooter to return to the Denali, and then meant to hurry upstairs to remov
e the rings, et cetera. But Fidget went upstairs first, occupied himself for a few minutes, and came rushing back down. Then Connor went upstairs and came rushing back down. And perhaps other people were nearby on the sidewalk who made Chucky hesitate, or perhaps there was traffic. Whatever the case, when Chucky went upstairs, Sal’s jewelry and the Montegrappa rollerball pen had vanished. We expect he roared and shouted, but when he was done, he ran back down to the sidewalk. He looked for Fidget and Connor, but they were gone.

  By then the Denali was on I-95 heading north. Chucky was ready for this and had another car parked a block away, off Golden Street. And Chucky saw himself as being disguised—that is, he was wearing a dark hoodie. But Chucky is a big man, and a gorilla wearing a hoodie still looks like a gorilla. So much for the disguise.

  —

  You ever tried singing?” says Manny. “You know, like, in the privacy of your own shower? Even humming a little tune?”

  Vikström cringes. He’s been filling out overdue reports while Manny plays cat’s cradle with a loop of string. They are in their office, and it’s after seven.

  “Come on, tell me,” says Manny, “you must of sung sometime.”

  Vikström lowers his head and keeps writing.

  “Like, as a kid,” says Manny. “Kids are always singing. Sesame Street, you watch Sesame Street?”

  Vikström turns his chair slightly so he can’t see Manny’s face.

  “You remember their theme song? ‘What Are the Directions to Sesame Street?’ You must have sung that. Sometimes we do it in the box—that’s ‘karaoke box’ to you.” Manny laughs.

  Vikström knows that Manny knows that’s not the real name of the Sesame Street theme song, and he wants to shout it out: “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?” Instead he clenches his teeth until they moan.

  “You sing along with those great characters? Squirt and Bernie, Oswald the Grouch, and Fat Bird?”

  Vikström snaps his ballpoint pen in half. “What’re we going to do about Chucky?” His question emerges as a loud hiss.