by Otto Penzler
“And by the time they get around to filing charges, all of the important witnesses will have disappeared and I’ll end up in the Mississippi River.”
He gave me a wicked grin. “Not my problem. I’m retired. Remember?”
I’ve seen movies and read books about ordinary people who are willing to disregard their own safety to testify against the mob or reveal the abuse of power by corrupt public officials or blow the whistle on corporate bosses who deny knowledge of the poisons they peddle. These people are real heroes, capable of putting the good of the whole in front of their own self-interest. I’ve always marveled at their courage and appreciated their sacrifice. But I’m not one of them. No one would describe my life as glamorous, and it’s a long way from what I’d imagined it would be when I was a kid, but I was in no hurry to throw it away. Instead of calling the EPA, I called in a favor from an old friend.
The next afternoon I exited the 240 loop at Summer Avenue. At his Uncle Tony’s request, Little Vinnie Montesi had agreed to spare me half an hour of his time. I’d expected him to choose one of the half-dozen Italian restaurants he frequented or, if I were lucky, the warehouse-sized gentleman’s club he owned on Brooks Road. Instead I’d been summoned to a Waffle House that sat between a run-down motel where half the guests cooked meth in their rooms and a convenience store that seemed to specialize in prepaid cell phones and $3-a-bottle wine.
When I stepped into the restaurant, the hairs tingled on the back of my neck and my pulse roared in my ears. Three broad-shouldered men hunched over coffee cups at the counter. I didn’t need to see their faces to know they were Montesi’s men, but Vinnie himself was nowhere around. A setup? The thought made my mouth dry and my pulse throb in my neck. It struck me that I was putting a lot of faith in the respect Little Vinnie might have for his uncle. Before his health and his age had led him to a condo in Sarasota, Florida, Fat Tony ran the Mafia in Memphis for twenty-five years. He was greedy, power-hungry, ruthless when it came to competition, but he was also a rational man, capable of great loyalty and occasional generosity when it came to his friends.
His nephew wasn’t just Tony’s opposite in physical appearance. Around police stations in Memphis, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, the years since Tony retired and Vinnie took over were referred to as the Cokehead Reign of Terror. Vicious by nature and possessed by an addict’s megalomania, Little Vinnie Montesi had set about renegotiating all of the old understandings. Black drug dealers, redneck meth cookers, and point men for the Mexican drug cartels had been turning up in vacant lots, abandoned warehouses, and torched cars for the last six years. Now, looking at those three broad backs and all those empty booths, I wondered if I hadn’t made the worst mistake of a life that had been full of them.
Then one of the broad-shouldered men swiveled on his stool to face me, and my pulse and my nerves settled a little. Frankie Gee. I wondered what it said about my life and my chosen profession that seeing the guy who’d broken my ribs, stomped my hands, and nearly kicked my testicles into my sinus cavities was a comfort.
“Last booth,” Frankie Gee said.
The seats were empty, but a waffle swimming in blueberry syrup, a half glass of chocolate milk, and a platter of bacon sat on the table. I slid into the side opposite the food and waited. A couple of minutes later, Vinnie Montesi came from the men’s room, patting his face with a paper towel. In the movies people are always kissing the rings of Mafia bosses, but he didn’t even offer to shake my hand. Instead he slid into the booth and gave me a curt nod. I knew he was younger than me by a good seven years, but today he seemed much older. He was ten, maybe fifteen pounds lighter than I remembered, with dark bruises beneath his eyes and fresh patches of gray in his dark brown hair. His movements were wooden and lifeless, a million miles from the jerky, earthquake-beneath-the-skin manner of a coke addict on a binge. He looked as if his grief for his son had scooped out his insides and left a hollow shell.
He picked up the glass of chocolate milk but instead of drinking it sniffed the rim and then set it back down. “You like milk?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, and then shrugged. “Not really. I pretty much stick with coffee and beer.”
“I can’t stand the stuff,” he said. “Milk, I mean. Chocolate or white, either one. The taste makes me vomit, has since I was a kid.” He picked up the glass again, and his smile was crooked and damned. “Before he got sick, Michael drank it by the gallon. He loved this place. Waffles, bacon, sausage, fried eggs. My wife, she’s a health-food addict, always worrying about nitrates and sodium and on and on, but as long as Mikey was up to it, I’d bring him every Sunday.” He shut his eyes for a second. “I thought I’d never want to step foot in this place again, but now . . . now it’s where I come to feel peaceful. My wife, she goes to church. I come to this dump and order a bunch of food that makes me sick to my stomach.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, hating the hollow empty sound of the words as I spoke them.
He waved away my condolences. “My uncle likes you,” he said. “The way he ran things . . . well, they aren’t exactly my way, but that don’t mean I don’t appreciate him. Out of respect for him, I’ll listen, but I’m not making promises.”
When I finished telling him what I knew and what I suspected, he nodded to himself. Then he spent a couple of minutes staring at a point on the ceiling.
“I’ve heard what you got to say.”
“And?”
“Paul Cardo’s a businessman, so am I. The way we do things is, he deals with his problems and I deal with mine.”
“You’re saying you don’t know what goes on at West Parrish Industrial Park?”
“Don’t know and don’t care.”
“As long as you get your cut.”
His tongue darted over his upper lip. “I have a piece of advice for you, Charlie, and I’m giving it because of your friendship with my uncle. This thing you told me today? You don’t want to be telling it to anyone else, especially not anyone connected to the federal government. A thing like that . . .” He shrugged and gave me a rattlesnake’s grin. “Well, my affection for my uncle only goes so far.”
I took a deep breath, glanced at the untouched waffle and the half-empty glass of chocolate milk. “What did your son die of? It was cancer, right?”
“Leukemia,” he said, his voice as cold as wind blowing over an iceberg. “Don’t push me, Raines.”
“I was in the Med the other day,” I said. “The emergency room . . .”
“I heard about that, too.”
“When they finished with the X-rays and the bandages, I had a little extra time, so I visited a few people, most of them from South Memphis.”
“We’re done here,” he said.
I shook my head. “Take a ride with me.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Take a ride with me.”
He grimaced. “To the Med?”
“One hour. That’s all I’m asking. Then I go away and keep my mouth shut. You don’t have to worry about offending your Uncle Tony . . .”
“I’m not that worried.”
“Then it’ll save you the trouble of having me killed.”
My heart hammered and a little voice in the back of my head shouted that the only thing I was going to accomplish here was to get myself murdered, but I held my gaze as steady as I could. Then he caught me off-guard.
“Tony says you lost a child.”
Even though all that was over twenty years ago, I felt as if he’d sucker-punched me in the center of my chest. “A daughter. Stillborn,” I said. “It’s not the same.”
He nodded more to himself than me. “You ride with us and I’ll give you an hour.” Then he grabbed my wrist and leaned across the booth so that a passerby might have thought he was about to kiss me. “And if you ever try to use my son’s memory to jerk me around again, I won’t bother having someone kill you. I swear to God, I’ll do it myself.”
It didn’t take an hour. After twenty minute
s on the pediatrics wing of the Regional Medical Center, he grabbed my arm and stared at me with the wild, trapped eyes of a rabbit caught in a snare.
“I got to get out of here,” he said. “I can’t breathe. I just can’t get any air.”
Frankie Gee and another, younger soldier who’d come up with us turned to me as Vinnie bolted past them, his head down, his hand clamped over his mouth. When I tried to follow him to the elevator, Frankie blocked my path.
“Why’d you bring him here?” Frankie asked, his dark eyes glassy beads set in fat. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“Trying to save my life,” I said.
Frankie’s expression made it clear that he no longer thought of me as a friend. “Yeah, well, good luck with that,” he said, but he stepped out of my way.
Vinnie Montesi sat on a brick wall just outside the entrance. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and he was frantically rummaging through his coat pockets.
“Lost my damn lighter again,” he said. “Did I have it at the Waffle House?”
I shook my head and handed him my Zippo. “You all right?”
He fired the tip of his cigarette, took a drag, and exhaled toward the gray clouds that drifted from across the river. “I spent two eternities in these frigging places. Michael was in Baptist Memorial,” he said. “But they’re all the same. They feel the same. Like hopelessness and loss and bad memories. When Mikey died, he held my hand. He was too weak to squeeze it or anything, but he held on as long as he could.”
“I didn’t . . .”
He flicked his hand to tell me to shut up. Then when Frankie Gee and the other guy stomped toward us, ready to break the rest of my ribs, he flicked his hand again.
“Those kids up there. We gave them cancer, didn’t we? The stuff we dumped at the park.”
“Not all of them,” I said.
“That’s why God did it,” he said. “Right? That’s why Mikey got leukemia. We dumped that crap and made a lot of people sick, so Mikey got cancer.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Never mind that Paul Cardo’s been running this scam since the seventies or that my Uncle Tony raked in his share of the profits. I took my cut for six years so God killed my kid.” He exhaled smoke at the sky. “But what are you going to do? He’s God, right? The boss of bosses. You eat his crap and pretend you’re thankful.”
“I didn’t bring you here to hurt you,” I said, and wondered if my feeling sympathy for Vincent Montesi meant I’d gone crazy or the world had turned upside down.
“You know what I think? I don’t think God waits until the afterlife to punish you. I think he does it right here.” He flicked his cigarette away. “Way I see it? Screw eternity. Right here, right now is hell.”
“Maybe not,” I said, seizing what might have been the only opportunity I had to keep myself out of that cold, dark river. “Maybe every day is purgatory,” I said, grabbing at the shadow of a rope. “Maybe it’s your chance to put right what you did the day before.”
It was pretty lame, I guess. Something I might have heard on a late-night drunk or read on a men’s room wall. But it was all I had, and I was betting my life on it.
“Yeah?” he said, frowning, wanting to believe it. “Your chance to do what? Some kind of penance?”
I knew he’d taken the bait. “Maybe.”
A smile flittered around his lips and then died. “So maybe you can set things right, get to heaven where you can see . . .” He let the thought fade and buried it alongside the smile. “Shutting down a business like that would cause problems. Paulie wouldn’t be happy. I’d have to deal with it.” He closed his eyes, nodded to himself. “But you know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Three weeks,” he said. “That’s what I need to make sure there’s nothing that could cause me or Tony any trouble. Three weeks. Then you can call the feds, let them start getting that garbage out of there. That’s the only deal I’m going to offer.”
The people in South Memphis had been poisoned for over thirty years, so I figured three weeks wouldn’t matter that much one way or the other. If saving my life—and Demond and Bop-Bop and Don Ellis’s, I told myself to feel a little better—meant that some of the guilty would go free? Well, they always do, don’t they?
“All right,” I said.
He stood then, motioned for Frankie and the other guy to head to the parking garage. There was no question about it. I wasn’t invited.
“You really believe that?” he asked. “That every day is one more chance to do penance, settle old debts?”
“I want to,” I said.
He turned away and left me alone. But that was okay. I knew what I’d just done and that people were going to die because of it, and alone seemed like the right place for me to be.
How would you want it to end? If it could turn out any way you wanted, what would be different? I wasted a lot of time asking myself those questions. In the end, this is what happened.
Paulie Cardo and his mistress were found dead in her condo. According to Nate Randolph, the girl had been shot twice in the chest and hadn’t suffered. They kept Paul Cardo alive for a while. After a couple of beers, I can tell myself that I’m not responsible, but I know better. When you suggest the idea of penance to a violent man, there’s no reason to expect that his version of penance would be anything but violent.
In a perfect world, Demond and Bop-Bop would have realized the error of their ways. But of course that didn’t happen. Six weeks ago Bop-Bop was arrested for slitting Demond’s throat in a South Memphis pool hall. Most likely it was over an argument about the profits from their thriving drug business, but in perverse moments I wonder if Bop-Bop didn’t finally get tired of Demond’s vocabulary lessons and decide to silence him forever.
Vinnie Montesi has put on a few pounds and looks healthier, but I’d given him a balm for his conscience, not the key to a change of life. If you buy smack or coke or rent a prostitute anywhere from Dyersburg to Biloxi, odds are you’re still lining Vinnie’s pockets. Don Ellis committed suicide when the papers broke the story about chemical dumping in South Memphis. Maybe he did it because of the guilt or because he wanted to save his sons and his ex-wife from Vinnie Montesi’s brand of penance. Whatever the reason, I like to think that in the end, Don Ellis found his courage.
For the next two weeks, people who were connected to the industrial park or Mid-South Transport turned up in the unlikeliest of places—burning wrecks on the interstate, sandbars in the Mississippi, abandoned warehouses downtown. It was an actuary’s nightmare. I’d sentenced those people to death when I accepted Vinnie Montesi’s offer to give him three weeks to tie up loose ends. To help myself sleep at night, I pretended that what happened to them was justice.
Eventually the FBI and the EPA gave up their investigations. The mob members who seemed to be involved ended up just as dead as the potential witnesses who might have testified against them. The corporate bosses and hospital administrators and paid-for politicians who made all this possible were never named in an indictment. Any chance that the people who profited from the dumping could have been found went away when I cut my deal with Vinnie Montesi.
I’m just like everyone else. I find it hard to live with the cowardly, self-serving parts of myself. I told myself that if only I’d had Terrell Cheatham’s dossier, things would have been different, that I would have taken it to the papers or turned it over to the EPA and more of the guilty would have been identified. But thinking about the folder only brought more questions. What had happened to it? How had Cardo known where to find Terrell Cheatham but been clueless about Demond and Bop-Bop? That’s when I started thinking about what Frances Cheatham had said.
When I paid my third visit to her apartment, spring had finally come to Memphis. Dogwoods were blooming. The sun was bright gold, and the entire world, even the toxic wasteland part of it, was cloaked with green. But inside Frances Cheatham’s apartment, the shades were drawn and everything se
emed to be coated with a layer of gray.
“He was a good boy,” she said, tapping a photo album with her index finger. “Smart, too. I should have listened.”
“He showed you his file. His dossier,” I said.
“Just like he showed me the roses or the rainbows he drew in school when he was a little child.” She picked up a glass and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. “He loved his granddaddy, that’s why he wanted to stop it. But he brought it to me. He told me what it was, what them men had done. He wanted to take it to somebody at the paper. I told him to take it to Mr. Lewinski instead. He was the white man who was head of security at the park. They were holding back on Marcus’s pension.”
“His pension?”
“Nine hundred and thirteen dollars a month. He had that coming, Marcus did. He worked hard and it killed him. So when Terrell showed me all that, I told him to take it to Mr. Lewinski, to tell him to give us the money my husband earned or we’d make it public. Terrell didn’t want to. He kept saying it was wrong, that we had to do something, but I told him, ‘Son, the only person that ever does something for you is yourself.’ He loved me, so he let me talk him down. But you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“I told myself I was doing it for him, so he could have the money to go to college and get out of this neighborhood. But I was doing it for myself, too, because I was scared of ending up sleeping under an overpass and eating garbage. But I knew as soon as they sent him away and told him they’d call us that they meant to kill him. That’s why I was so glad to see you. I figured he’d be safe in jail.”
There was no point in telling her that half the cons and a third of the jailers were bought and paid for by men like Montesi and Cardo. Instead I said that she’d done the best she could. It didn’t matter anyway. Lewinski was one of the corpses who’d turned up in the river.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but the words just hung there.
On my way out the door, I stopped and looked back at her. She was tracing the photo album with the tip of her finger, cocooned in the guilt that would follow her to her grave. Then I thought about Vinnie Montesi drinking chocolate milk and staring at a syrup-covered waffle to hold on to the memory of his son and Demond Jones telling me that his little sister had begged him to make the pain go away. I thought about Don Ellis looking at his face in the mirror, wondering what had happened to the life he’d once known.