Bad Blood

by Anthony Bruno

  Gibbons chewed his upper lip and squinted at her. He was getting heartburn. “You sure you don’t want to go to a movie?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  Come on, maybe Jaws is playing somewhere.

  Looking down at the cobblestone alley from the fire escape, Mashiro could see his ancestor’s body, a giant warrior lying in state, noble in death. He bowed his head in reverence, then mounted the next step of the iron stairs, treading carefully. He stared up at the lighted windows three floors above and thought about the young tiger who challenged him at Toyota, remembering the tingle along the edge of his hand as he watched the young man sprawled out on the bathroom floor in that bar. He thought about his promise to his lord Nagai, then proceeded toward his mission.

  “I never thought you had such a limited imagination,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m really disappointed in you. You insist on the most mundane plausibilities. Maybe this killer is a psychopath. A psychopath who thinks he’s a . . .” —her eye caught the book on the coffee table— “a Roman centurion, let’s say. You would never consider that, would you?”

  “You’re all wet. Psycho killers are a whole different ballgame.”

  “No, no, just listen to me for a minute. Here’s this individual, well-read in the history of ancient Rome, someone who gets a real charge out of wearing a short sword and a breast plate. But then one day he snaps, and because he’s so entrenched in the lore of the Roman campaigns, he starts to believe that he’s a centurion. But the thing about the centurions is that they lived only for the army, they were born to take orders. So what does our killer need to complete his reincarnation as a true centurion? A Caesar, right? Now let’s suppose some villain enters his life, someone who sees that he can use this poor demented soul for his own evil ends if he just plays along and tells the guy he’s his general. Think about it.”

  “I’m thinking about having you committed. Can we change the subject now?” He started to put his arm around her.

  “No.” She pushed his arm away. “You’re not listening to me. That’s your whole goddamn problem. You don’t consider anyone else’s point of view. How can you ever solve a crime if you can’t acknowledge someone else’s reality? Maybe you could before, but you can’t now. Face it, you can’t do it.” She grabbed her mug and gulped tea with her eyes closed. She was trying not to cry.

  That awful, gut-wrenching silence stuffed the room then. He felt like a real turd. His going back to work upset her a lot more than he thought. He really was a shit-head sometimes. “I know you’re pissed as hell at me,” he finally said. “I’m sorry. We should’ve talked about it first, I guess.”

  She slammed down the mug on the coffeetable and splashed tea. “Saying ‘I’m sorry’ isn’t an eraser. It doesn’t make it all disappear.”

  “I’m apologizing. What else can I—”

  “It’s not enough. It doesn’t make up for the past. You always do this to me. You shut me out all the time. You never think in terms of us.”

  He let out a long sigh. “I hate these conversations. What am I supposed to do here? Cry? Sorry, I don’t cry. You want me to say something, but I don’t know what it is. If I thought my going back to work was going to get you all bent out of shape like this—”

  “It’s not that you went back to the Bureau. It’s the fact that you didn’t tell me what you intended to do.”

  “Well, what the hell did you think I intended to do? After thirty years with the FBI, what am I going to do? Become a florist?”

  She laughed through her tears and shook her head. “You’ll never change, will you?”

  He hooked his hand around her neck and drew her closer. He felt awful seeing her cry over him. “Look, I don’t know what to say to you. I love you, but—”

  “Okay, shut up. That’s all I wanted to hear. Just make me one promise and I’ll be happy.”

  “What?”

  “Be more careful from now on. No more derring-do. My heart can’t take it. You’re not invincible, no one is. Cut the risks. Stick with Michael when it gets dangerous. Promise me that. I don’t want to get old alone.”

  Gibbons swallowed hard. “Okay . . . I promise. I’ll be more careful.”

  She hugged him close, pressing her lips to his, smothering a sob. She ground her mouth against his and reached into his shirt, rubbing the hair on his chest. He held her tight. He didn’t want to let go. She might see a teary eye if he did. She started to unbuckle his belt then.

  He turned his head to disengage for a moment. “Hey, you sure you don’t want to see a movie now?”

  She sniffed and laughed, a real laugh. “Just lie back and relax, Gibbons.”

  She unzipped his pants and went for him, squeezing tight until he was even harder than he already had been. He unbuttoned her blouse and fumbled with the bra hook in the front. Impatient, she unhooked it herself and quickly threw off the blouse and bra in one motion. He caressed one soft breast in his thick, callused hand as she twisted to kick off her slacks. His other hand smoothed the panties over her ass and outlined the seam around the edge of her pubic hair. She smiled through a kiss and tasted his tongue. Hers was delicious.

  Suddenly she pulled away and arched her head back. “I just thought of something.”

  “What’d I do now?”

  “Not about you. About the killer.”

  “Oh, shit . . .”

  “Maybe he’s not a centurion. Maybe he’s a Russian cossack. Those guys were really sword crazy.” She grinned down at him slyly.

  “Give it a rest, Bernstein.”

  “You’ve got to consider the possibilities. Otherwise you get stale.” She was laughing softly as she leaned down and started nibbling his earlobe while he feather-stroked the crease where her thigh met her crotch. He grinned and groaned low like a horny bear.

  Outside the living room window, the stout dark figure peered in at them. Mashiro glanced down through the iron grid under his feet at the moonlit cobblestones and frowned. Very dishonorable to attack a man making love to his woman. He turned and headed down the fire escape as silently as he came, trying to ignore the sounds of pleasure coming from inside.

  TWELVE

  THE DUSTY SMELLS of lawn fertilizer and weed control brought back memories—not entirely pleasant memories. When he was a teenager, Tozzi worked summers with a gardener from his neighborhood, busting his hump mowing lawns six days a week from seven till sundown, pushing those goddamn mowers back and forth, up terraces, down ravines, across lawns as big as outfields, his fingers itching with the constant vibration, going deaf from the noise of the motor, sweating buckets in the noonday sun. He could remember how much he hated those big expensive houses in Short Hills, Milburn, South Orange, West Orange, Livingston. You rarely saw any people living in them. The only signs of life were the rumbling central air-conditioning units, which he always took as a snub. Haha, you’re hot, we’re not. He still had something of an automatic prejudice against rich people. Sure, he realized now that if those rich people hadn’t hired their gardeners, kids like him wouldn’t have had summer jobs. Still, when you’re pushing a lawnmower back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and it’s ninety-six degrees, humid as hell, and you know there are people somewhere in those air-conditioned houses because the Caddy’s in the drive, you tend to think in terms of plantations, white-suited Kentucky colonels, and chain gangs.

  He stared though the hot-house windows in the front of the nursery and watched a green dump truck backing up to the loading dock. As soon as the truck stopped, the gardener jumped out of the cab and started yelling at his men to hurry up and load bags of fertilizer onto the truck. He was a foxy-looking guy with a thick Italian accent who spoke with the kind of operatic expansiveness that made everything he said sound like bullshit. Freeman, the owner of this nursery, eyeballed him skeptically through black horn-rimmed, Coke-bottle glasses, shifting his big cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. He filled out the gardener’s receipt on a clipboard that rested on his big
belly. He was about six-five, at least 280 pounds. The skinny Italian jabbered away at the big man, gesturing with his arms, grabbing his crotch and laughing. Tozzi wasn’t sure, but it seemed like the gardener was telling Freeman a dirty joke. Freeman wasn’t laughing, though. He reminded Tozzi of the dim-witted Cyclops in an old Jason and the Argonauts movie he remembered watching as a kid on “The Million Dollar Movie.” He imagined the gardener intentionally distracting Freeman as his men got a pointy log ready to stick in the giant’s eye.

  Tozzi took a second look at the gardener’s two helpers then. He went closer to the window to get a better look. They were both Asian, most likely Koreans, which surprised him. These Italian-immigrant gardeners usually hired other Italians or Hispanics. Tozzi had worked with a Bolivian and a couple of Uruguayans in his time, but he’d never seen any Asian help. He always thought the Koreans were too clannish to work for anyone else. Of course, it seemed like they had cornered the market on produce stands in the New York area. Maybe gardening was just a logical extension of their thing with plants.

  The truck pulled away from the loading dock and Freeman lumbered back inside. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he growled.

  “No problem,” Tozzi said, walking back to the counter.

  “That guy’s a real pain in my ass. Always in a big fucking hurry. Treats his men like shit, too. Never thought I’d ever feel sorry for slopes.” He scratched the stubble on top of his crew-cut head and rolled the cigar to the other side of his mouth where he had several teeth missing on the bottom. The cigar rested nicely in that space. “Now, you said you’re from the FBI? A real FBI agent, huh?”

  Tozzi nodded and smiled patiently. He’d seen this reaction before.

  “Damn. Never thought I’d ever meet a damn FBI agent. So what can I do for you?”

  “Well—”

  Freeman’s face suddenly turned uglier. His magnified eyes bugged out under his glasses. “You’re not investigating me, are you?”

  “No sir. I think I mentioned before we were interrupted that you are not the target of this investigation.”

  “Is it my wife?” The cigar rolled around in his mouth, then went back to its space.

  “No sir. Not your wife either.”

  “Too bad. I wish somebody’d put her away for ten, twenty years. Do me a favor.”

  Tozzi smiled obligingly, but he had a feeling this wasn’t a joke. “Marital problems?”

  “Fuck no. Business problems. I shoulda never agreed to let her come in here and do her thing. House plants and all that shit.” He pulled out the cigar and spit on the floor. “Plants belong outside, goddammit. And those frickin’ bonsai trees. Ridiculous, spending all that time and trouble to keep a tree small like that. It’s unnatural. Look at this place. I used to have a nice dirty place here. Now it looks like some kind of boutique, these rich bitches trooping in and out of here all the time. If the old lady wasn’t making so much goddamn money on those stupid little things, I’d boot her and those damn weeds of hers the hell out of here.”

  “Ah-hah.” Tozzi nodded. “Well, I came because your ad in the yellow pages said you specialized in bonsai trees. Maybe I should talk to your wife.”

  Freeman rubbed his nose with the back of his index finger and glared at him. It was clear that the big man was reforming his opinion of the FBI agent now that he knew Tozzi was here for goddamn bonsai trees. “She ain’t here today. She’s at some bonsai tree convention in New York.”

  Tozzi opened a manila envelope and pulled out the eight-by-ten photo of the shears that were found on the female victim. He laid it on the counter. “What can you tell me about these?”

  “What do you want to know?” The Cyclops was getting belligerent.

  “These are the kind of shears they use to prune bonsai trees, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you sell shears like this?”

  The Cyclops scowled down at the photo as if Tozzi had just put dogshit there. “Yeah, she sells these things.”

  “These were made in Japan. See the inscription on the blade? The ones you sell, are they made in Japan?”

  “They better not be, goddamn it. Too damn expensive. We’d be stuck with ’em. Order the cheap ones from Taiwan, I told her. Her lady friends won’t know the difference. I told her, you order those Jap ones and I’ll stick your head in the chipper, goddamn it. For once, she listened to me.” The cigar bobbed up and down in its resting place.

  Tozzi nodded, wondering how serious he was about putting his wife’s head into a wood chipper. It wouldn’t be a first. Not that long ago some guy out in the boonies in upstate New York killed his wife with an ax, then put her in the chipper to get rid of the body. He might’ve pulled it off, except that her pelvis kept jamming up the machine. He kept trying it and eventually she stripped the gears. At his trial, he referred to her the same way, both alive and dead, as “that goddamn cunt.”

  “You know of anyone around here who does sell the Japanese ones?” Tozzi asked.

  “Nope. Ask the wife, though. She’d know. She’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Tell her I’ll give her a call. Thanks for your help.”

  He garbled something Tozzi couldn’t understand. As Tozzi headed for the door, an obviously well-to-do suburban matron came in. She was a real sketch. Henna red hair, jade-green eye shadow, killer nails in mauve, white fur jacket. Tozzi glanced back at Cyclops behind the counter and wondered if he kept the chipper out back.

  Outside, Tozzi noticed a white Mercedes wagon parked next to his car. There were three people in the backseat: a toddler in a car seat, a little girl who looked about kindergarten age, and a dark-haired woman. Tozzi assumed she was the baby-sitter because she was sitting in the back with the kids, her head bent over a stack of construction paper on her lap. Opening his car door, he noticed that the baby-sitter was making animals out of folded pieces of construction paper. She was just finishing one up, a yellow rhinoceros. The little girl was clapping her hands and making giddy squeals. The toddler was fast asleep. As he turned the ignition key and started his engine, the baby-sitter was suddenly startled. She jerked her head around and stared at Tozzi, a look of terror and anxiety on her face. Tozzi instantly thought of war victims—World War II, Vietnam—noticing for the first time that she was Asian. Another Asian. He forced a smile to calm the girl down as he backed out of his space and left the nursery, wondering whether seeing three Asians in a row was just a coincidence. Maybe it was one of those things like when you buy a new Chevy and all of a sudden all you see are Chevys on the road. Maybe it was just cosmic irony. Who knows? He threw it into drive and pulled out of the parking lot without giving it another thought.

  After leaving Freeman’s Nursery, Tozzi drove into the center of town to grab a sandwich. The only coffee shop in Milburn was one of those Fifth Avenue-type places where rich old ladies pay six bucks for a scoop of cottage cheese and a half a canned peach on lettuce with melba toast on the side. The sight of that much blue hair and mink gave him the creeps, so he got his tuna on rye to go and ate it outside on one of the park benches that were artfully set among the meticulous rock-garden beds that lined this stretch of Milburn Avenue in front of the kind of shops he’d never dream of going into.

  But as he ate his lunch, he began to notice something very peculiar. It wasn’t unusual to see young women pushing baby carriages and strollers through the center of any town, but of the eight he spotted in the course of eating the first half of his sandwich, five of them were Asian. One of them was pushing a baby carriage so he couldn’t see the baby—it could’ve been hers, though she seemed too young and too humble to live in a town like Milburn—but the others were all pushing white kids. They all seemed very young, late teens, early twenties. Same age as the two kids who bought it in the VW. Seemed like more than just a coincidence.

  He dumped the rest of his coffee into the begonias, packed up his trash, and went back into the coffee shop. As he walked to the back, his nose was assaulted by an onslaught
of overpowering perfumes. He breathed through his mouth and made his way back to the pay phone, happy to see that they had a phone book. This kind of place would. He poked around through the yellow pages, looking up “Baby-sitters,” “Nannies,” and “Children.” Under “Child Care,” he found several day-care centers, one employment agency called Domestics Unlimited that provided live-in au pairs as well as cooks, maids, and chauffeurs, and the Eastlake Academy, a school for nannies that specialized in providing “trained nannies in the British tradition for discerning parents.” The school was in Maplewood, the next town over. Tozzi glanced at his watch and grinned to himself. Time to pay a visit on the Eastlake Academy.

  Pip, pip, major.

  As Tozzi dug into his pocket for change for the meter, he looked across the tiny park next to the post office at the old Erie-Lakawanna railroad station where a train was just pulling out. Maplewood Village, as it was called, actually sort of felt like an English village. Quaint but not obnoxious about it. Before he took the depressing rented room he was living in now in Weehawken as a temporary solution, he’d considered getting an apartment here, but ultimately he decided it wasn’t his kind of place, which suddenly reminded him that he better call Mrs. Carlson and cancel that meeting tonight with the landlord who “prefers married tenants.” He’d call her later and make up some excuse. Too bad, he liked that place on Adams Street. It was gritty but clean.

  Maplewood Village was really the perfect place for a nanny school in “the British tradition,” he thought, as he walked past the Christian Science Reading Room and the stationery store to the doorway marked “49.” It was two-story yellow-brick building with stores on the first floor, offices on the second. The Eastlake Academy was in Room 22. Tozzi went upstairs and followed the arrows to Room 22, smiling nostalgically as he suddenly recalled dumpy Miss Frances on “Ding-Dong School.” That’s probably the kind of ladies who come out of the Eastlake Academy. Older, gray, kindly but proper, firm and correct. Miss Frances with an accent.