“My old girlfriend. Something’s wrong with her body, and she can’t have kids, and when she told me about it…well, I guess I didn’t react very well.”
“This is the one you wrote the song about.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you’re asking my advice on how you can make things right with her.”
When she put it that way, it did sound pretty outrageous. I swallowed, nodded.
“Jesus Christ, Mickey.” She stared at me for what seemed like weeks. “What did you do when she broke the news to you?”
I shrugged. “I told her…I was sad.”
Roz rolled her eyes and shook her head.
“God Almighty, you really are a child, do you know that?”
“A child?”
“Yeah. It’s all about how it affects you.”
She slapped my face with a sweaty hand. “For God’s sake, Mickey, grow the fuck up, already!”
Heads turned to stare at me, the only male in the place. Even the personal trainers were all women, muscular mamas with whistles around their necks and fury in their eyes. I stood as still as a statue, not wanting to give anyone an excuse to pounce. I let the sting recede from my cheek before speaking.
“You think I’m not a grown-up?”
“You’re not. You’re spoiled. You got too used to getting things. Like me. I was just a toy to you.”
“Wasn’t I a toy to you?”
“Well, I tried to change that on our last date, and look what happened.”
“You’re right, you’re right.”
Her anger was spent. She couldn’t fight if I didn’t fight back. She reached out, patted the cheek she’d just slapped.
“Look, I’m a little tense, okay? I’m doing some mental housecleaning. Just broke up with David. Realized he couldn’t really mean much to me if I was carrying on the way I did with you.”
She wiped her face with the towel again. “I let myself go crazy with you. I’m the girl you screwed in the sky. How could you take me seriously?”
Roz reset some buttons on the exercise bike’s console. She was ready to resume her workout.
“You really care about this girl, don’t you, Mickey?”
“Yeah.”
“Then love her like a man, not a boy. Get out of your own skin and think about how she must feel.”
“I don’t even know what happened to her!”
“Find out, shithead. Find out! Be aggressive. Be willing to be humiliated. Lose your damn pride. Don’t just let things happen. Make it work.”
It was the kind of bullshit bootstrap advice you hear from grinning idiot psychologists trying to sell their latest self-help books on morning TV shows.
But it was also right on the money.
I sighed. “She doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.”
“It’s really pretty simple, superstar. If you deserve her, you’ll find a way to her heart. If you don’t, you won’t. I’ve got to start up again before my legs stiffen.”
She began pedaling. I was dismissed. I started to leave the gym, but before I got to the door Roz called me back.
“This special woman of yours. It wasn’t that fat waitress on Hollywood Howl tonight, was it?”
“No. She’s just somebody I screwed once.”
“Oh. Kind of like me, huh?”
“We screwed twice, Roz. On the plane, and on mouse night. Don’t you remember? How could you not remember? That really hurts. I’m not just a piece of meat, you know.”
I ventured a smile. She didn’t want to smile back, but she couldn’t help it.
“Believe it or not, DeFalco, there are things about you that I’m going to miss.”
She lowered her head, clenched her teeth, shut her eyes, and began pedaling as if she meant to take off and fly to the moon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was madness the next day at work. Flynn had watched Hollywood Howl and announced that he’d never seen such a crock of horseshit in his life. Drivers beeped their horns and shouted my name as they drove past the lawns we were cutting. A female customer actually asked for my autograph on the back of a Con Ed bill. I gave it to her, and then she asked me to please pull the dandelions growing along her back path.
I was a star again, or the shell of a star, which is maybe the same thing. If anybody was looking for me, they were going to find me.
It didn’t take long.
I was walking home from work when suddenly a man jumped out of a black sedan parked in front of our house. He walked toward me as if I owed him money.
“Mickey DeFalco?”
“Yes…”
He looked to be in his early fifties, lean and serious inside a baggy blue suit. He flapped open a billfold with identification I didn’t even look at. “I’ve come from Los Angeles to see you on a matter of some importance.”
I knew it would happen. It was almost a relief.
“I know what you want,” I said.
He seemed surprised. “You do?”
“Yeah, I won’t give you any trouble. Look, do you mind if we go to the diner around the corner? I don’t want my mother to hear this.”
I also didn’t want her to look out the window and see her only begotten son being handcuffed, in case that was on the agenda. That would have finished her off.
The man managed a smile. “That’d be fine with me, Mr. DeFalco.”
“Mickey, please. Call me Mickey.” I led the way to the Scobee Grill diner, wondering if he kept his gun in a shoulder holster or an ankle holster, wondering if he’d put a bullet between my shoulders if I broke into a run.
I didn’t want to run. At that moment, all I wanted was coffee.
The man’s name was Belachek. He had that intense, birdlike look across the eyes that all determined people seem to have. We got a booth and ordered coffee.
He could tell I was not a flight risk. The way things were going, I didn’t much care about whatever happened to me next. The worst thing of all would be the follow-up story on Hollywood Howl. They’d have footage of me being remanded to Los Angeles, standing in a courtroom in an orange prison jumpsuit as some court-appointed lawyer entered a “Not Guilty” plea on my behalf. Joel Schmitter would gloat about being the one who’d tracked me down, helped the cops bring me to justice for my part in the deaths of Officer William O’Brien and his wife, Robin. He’d probably get a raise.
Schmitter’s raise bugged me more than anything. That’s how fucked up I was.
Maybe Belachek would believe me when I told him I hadn’t done anything wrong, except for swiping that coffee can full of money. Maybe he’d be impressed that I’d given it away to the needy.
Or maybe he didn’t give a shit either way. Belachek had worked long and hard to find me, and the fact that he’d been beaten by a tabloid TV show certainly must have galled him.
He sipped his coffee and his eyes scrunched up. “Jesus, that’s strong.”
“That’s how the Greeks like it.”
“Is this place run by Greeks?”
“Is there a diner in New York that isn’t?”
Belachek chuckled. “I may need a muffin to absorb the caffeine.”
He ordered a corn muffin and bit into it plain, no butter, no jelly. No wonder he was thin.
“So am I under arrest, or what?”
Belachek was stunned. He shook his head, sipped coffee to help get the muffin down.
“I’m not a cop, Mr. DeFalco.”
“You’re not?”
“I’m a private investigator. Why would anyone want to arrest you?”
“You’ve come all the way from Los Angeles to see me, so the news can’t be good.”
He forced a smile. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. It’s all in how you look at it.”
“For God’s sake, man, what the fuck do you want?”
He clapped his hands clean of crumbs before reaching into his inside jacket pocket, removing a snapshot and passing it to me. It was a publicity photo of the Barca D’Amore
.
What the fuck was this all about?
“Do you recognize this ship?”
“Sure I do. It sank a few weeks ago.”
“Yes, it did. You were once employed aboard this ship, were you not? And your employers were less than delighted with your services, weren’t they?”
Where was this going? Was I a suspect in the still-unsolved sinking of the Barca D’Amore?
“Whoa, whoa, Mr. Belachek, I happen to have an alibi. I was here in Little Neck with my parents when it happened. We watched it on the news, and then we had dinner. Chicken pot pie, as I recall, but I could be wrong about that.”
He ignored my smart-ass attitude and passed me another snapshot.
“Do you recognize this woman?”
I stared into the eyes of the woman in the photo, big and sad and smoky. I didn’t have to tell Belachek that I recognized Sharon Sherman. He could tell from the shift in my breathing.
“Met her on the ship,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. DeFalco, that’s right. You met her on the ship. I’m glad you remember that. I’m glad you acknowledge that.”
“Acknowledge” is a bad word in a situation like this. It implies a confession. Belachek creamed and sugared his coffee and took another sip. “Ahh, that’s better. Takes the voltage out of the coffee, doesn’t it?”
“Why are you here, Mr. Belachek? Why would anyone give a shit about a stupid cruise I worked on…what was it, two years ago?”
“Eighteen months, actually.”
“Whatever. But who gives a shit?”
“Look, I’ve come a good long way to find you, Mr. DeFalco.” He tapped the snapshot with a bony finger. “Could we just please talk about the cruise, and your relationship with this woman?”
I couldn’t imagine why this man should be giving me the third degree about that cruise. But if I gave him a hard time, he could chase me with subpoenas and whatever other paperwork he could think to fling at me, and he probably had friends in the Los Angeles Police Department he could bring into it, and that I definitely did not need.
So I sat back, sipped my coffee and began telling him all about the cruise, and about the way we sabotaged the stupid shuffleboard tournament by chucking all the equipment overboard, and how we capped off this act of rebellion by having sex on the rail overlooking the ship’s prow.
Belachek took it all in without seeming surprised. He and I had each downed three cups of coffee by the end of my tale.
“So,” he said. “You never got caught for the shuffleboard thing, huh?”
“No. We got away with it, unless that’s what you’re here for. What happened? The shuffleboard sticks washed ashore? My prints were on them? The cruise ship company wants me to make good for them?”
Belachek chuckled. “That’s funny. That’s really funny.”
“Well, if that’s not it, then what? Who sent you to find me, Sharon Sherman?”
Belachek’s face darkened. “Sharon didn’t send me, Mr. DeFalco. Sharon is dead.”
I swallowed. My stomach dropped. It’s an eerie thing to learn that someone you’ve been with has died, no matter how fleeting a union it might have been.
“Jesus, that’s awful…. When?”
“Two weeks ago. A cerebral hemorrhage. Fell sick and died on the same day. She was forty-four. Never sick a day in her life, until the last day.”
We were both quiet for a moment. I was thinking about how fragile everything is, and at the same time thinking that Sharon’s death hadn’t been so bad, as deaths go. Splendid health, and then sudden death. No middle ground. It sounded good to me.
But what the fuck was going on? Had Sharon put me in her will? Why else would Belachek have been looking for me?
The waitress came by with the coffeepot. We both shielded our cups with our hands.
“Not to pry here or anything, Mr. Belachek, but who sent you to find me, and why?”
He sighed, sat back in the booth. “Sharon’s lawyer sent me, actually.”
“Her lawyer?”
He nodded, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out another photograph. He looked at it before passing it to me gently, as if it were a loaded gun on a hair trigger. It was a shot of a beautiful green-eyed baby with jet-black hair.
“This is Sharon’s son, Aaron,” Belachek informed me. “And according to Sharon’s will, you are his father.”
The air in the diner suddenly went warm, and seemed to contain no oxygen. I took deep breaths, but that didn’t help. My hands were actually damp with sweat. I didn’t want to damage the photograph, so I set it down on the Formica tabletop, locked my hands behind my back and leaned forward to study the picture as if it were a priceless museum piece. I needed a moment to take it all in. I’d just been informed that I was a father, by a private eye in a booth in a Greek diner.
“My son?”
“According to Sharon’s will, yes.”
Was there a resemblance to me? Nothing I could detect. Also, the kid seemed happy, and that didn’t seem like the kind of kid I’d be likely to sire.
I looked up at Belachek, felt a drop of sweat roll to the bottom of my chin. He passed me a napkin. I wiped my chin.
“Stunning thing to come out of the blue, huh, kid? Sorry about that. No easy way to break it to you.”
Me and my “always use a condom” rule. This was the exception that proved the rule.
“She told me she was on the pill.”
“Nothing’s a hundred percent, kid.”
“Do you think he looks like me?”
“I didn’t travel three thousand miles to give an opinion. I came here to find you.”
“What about Sharon’s boyfriend, that Benny guy, the one who dumped her at the dock? Maybe he’s the one. Maybe—”
“Benny is sterile. I have a medical document attesting to that fact. Seems Benny contracted the mumps when he was thirty-two. Wiped out his swimmers for good. I can show you the document, if you like.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” I looked again at the photo of that beautiful, beautiful child. “Who’s taking care of this kid?”
“For the time being, he’s in the hands of Sharon’s only living relative, a cousin in Massachusetts. A small town outside Boston. That’s where Sharon’s from, originally.”
“The cousin wants money,” I ventured.
Belachek shook his head. “She wants you to take the child.”
“Take him?”
“Yes.”
“You mean adopt him?”
“Mr. DeFalco, you cannot adopt your own child. If he’s yours, he’s yours. You simply take him.”
I sat back in the booth, raw and numb. I had expected to be arrested and thrown in jail in connection with a murder/suicide, but instead I was learning that I might be a father.
“How old is this…Aaron?”
“He’s nine months old. Born nine months after the cruise, almost to the day.”
“How’s he…what I mean is, is he…you know…healthy?”
“Perfectly healthy, as far as I know.”
I rubbed my eyes, kept my hands over my face. Life. Fucking life. It just keeps coming at you.
“Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ…”
Belachek reached across the table, gave my shoulder a friendly squeeze. “I know it’s a lot to absorb all at once.”
“Absorb? Who’s absorbing anything? I’m in shock, here!”
“Look, Sharon Sherman never meant for this to be a burden to you. If she’d lived, you never would have known about Aaron. She was perfectly content to raise the child by herself. It’s exactly what she was doing when she dropped dead.”
Belachek held up a finger. “But she was an extremely precise person. Working in life insurance, she knew as well as anyone how suddenly things can happen, and how messy things can get for the living when a loved one dies. She was determined to take care of her son, no matter what happened.”
He pulled out a document in a book report–type binder that turned out to be
Sharon’s will. “Everything she had goes to Aaron. Her estate was worth almost half a million dollars. There’s a trust fund for the child’s education. It’s all hammered down—no ambiguity, no confusion. Until the final lines of her last will and testament.”
Belachek put on his reading glasses and flipped to the last page. “Finally,” he read, “I wish to reveal the identity of my son’s father. He is Mickey DeFalco, the singer. I have never shared this information with anyone. Mickey DeFalco himself is unaware that he is Aaron’s father. I leave it to my surviving family members to either inform Mr. DeFalco, or continue keeping it a secret.”
He took off his glasses, put them in his shirt pocket. “Obviously, Sharon’s cousin didn’t want to keep it a secret. And Sharon, true to form, provided the funds for a private investigator to track you down.” He grinned. “That’d be me.”
I wanted to speak but my mouth was dry. I signaled to the waitress for a glass of water. She brought it over and I downed it in a gulp. It tasted of chlorine and plumbing. It chilled me so deeply that I actually shivered, though maybe I was shivering for other reasons.
“Lucky for you I was on Hollywood Howl,” I said.
Belachek didn’t like hearing that. “I’d have found you without that,” he replied calmly. “It was only a matter of time.”
I nodded. I shouldn’t have been breaking his balls. He was only doing his job.
“What’s next?”
“Well, a DNA test is in order, wouldn’t you say? Would you have a problem with that?”
“No, I…no, of course not.”
“Good. That simplifies things.”
I expected him to offer me a time and a place for the test, but instead he took a small rubber-stoppered lab bottle from his pocket, containing what appeared to be a miniature toothbrush.
“Here,” he said. “Take out the toothbrush and rub it around inside your mouth.”
“Now?”
“You got something better to do? Go on, do it, fill up those bristles with cheek cells.”
I did as I was told. It took about ten seconds. I stuck the toothbrush back inside the bottle, sealed it, and returned it to Belachek, who took out a pen and wrote “DeFalco” on the label. He stuck it in an envelope, sealed the envelope and stashed it in his jacket pocket. Then he sat back to finish his corn muffin, with the relaxed look of a man whose tricky task has been successfully completed.
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