Purgatory Gardens

by Peter Lefcourt

  As soon as the door was closed, Didier poured a large mug of coffee, didn’t even bother with the sugar, and waited for the caffeine to hit his brain. It didn’t take long.

  Someone had known that he’d ordered a pizza, called the Pizza Hut and canceled it, and then delivered a poisoned one. And had it not been for Marcy Gray’s timely invitation, he would have been dead instead of the cat.

  Was the pizza meant for Sammy Dee? Did the Acme people somehow cross the two names in their minds and mistake the client for the victim? How could they possibly be so stupid? Or was it someone else? Did someone else want him dead? Did someone have his phone tapped, just waiting for this opportunity to substitute a poisoned pizza?

  Didier spent the next few hours reviewing his catalogue of enemies. There were numbers of people, from Ouagadougou to Nice, who, for one reason or another, conceivably might want him dead. But how would they have found him here, in Paradise Gardens? How would they have tapped his phone and substituted the poisoned pizza?

  No, there was only one person he could think of who knew where he lived, had his phone number, and had a motive for having him eliminated. The same person whom Didier had just finalized a contract to kill the previous day. And, come to think of it, the same person who recently had his patio redone. Was it possible that they were each trying to kill the other? Nom de dieu . . .

  A few days later, he saw Sammy Dee at the Thanksgiving dinner that Marcy Gray had prepared. The Italian was, as usual, overdressed, trying to impress Marcy with his expensive off-the-rack clothes. In Nice, he would have been regarded as a tasteless American tourist.

  As Charlie and Marcy reminisced about making movies, Didier studied the Italian, who sat impassively listening. If he had arranged the pizza murder attempt, he showed no signs of guilt or nervousness. On the contrary, he appeared to be on the verge of falling asleep.

  No one mentioned the poisoned cat, though they had all been present at the homeowners’ association meeting the evening after the cat had been discovered dead in the garbage bin. To stay on Marcy’s good side, Didier had had to volunteer for the community watch. But instead of being assigned to her shift, he got the eight-to-midnight shift with Bert Velum—the eighty-seven-year-old health nut, who claimed he was an insomniac and never slept anyway.

  “I’ve slept enough,” he’d told Didier.

  Didier didn’t show up for his shift the following night.

  But he wasn’t about to miss Thanksgiving dinner, even though Charlie Berns was there to chaperone Marcy and Sammy Dee. After the meal, Charlie and Sammy repaired to the couch to watch a football game while Didier helped Marcy with the dishes.

  “You don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Africa, huh?” she asked.

  “No, we don’t. But there are many other holidays. When I was a boy, in the village, we would celebrate the full moon. Drink palm wine and dance all night.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “A la recherche du temps perdu . . .” And for a moment he felt a pang of far-off nostalgia for the days before the Jesuits got to him.

  “Do you miss Africa?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You ever want to go back? Just to visit?”

  “Africa, Marcee, is a sad place now. There are diseases, civil wars, violence. It is no longer a place of innocence.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Europeans came. And they brought AK-47s, venereal disease, and Jesus with them.”

  His words had come across more bitter and cynical than he had wanted them to be, and he immediately tried to soften them. “I am exaggerating, of course. There are still lovely places there. Perhaps you will visit someday . . .”

  The implication was, of course, with him, but he left it at that. More points. Where could Sammy Dee take her? Hoboken, New Jersey? Sicily?

  “I’d love to take a safari,” she said.

  The biggest game that Didier had ever seen were water buffalos, placidly drinking water in the Niger River, but he decided not to disabuse her of the notion that he was a great—if not white, at least virile—hunter. The truth was that he had never been south or east of Lagos, in Nigeria, where the principal hunting prey these days were innocent old people.

  “We read The Snows of Kilimanjaro in high school,” Marcy said, as she scrubbed turkey fat off the plates.

  Didier, whose reading at the Lycée was confined to Pascal, Montaigne, and Thomas Aquinas, nodded noncommittally, hopefully giving the impression that he, too, had read it. It was at times like this that he realized how narrowly focused his education had been and vowed to do something about it. But he never did. And, he had to admit, probably never would. Some time ago, he had decided he was as good as he was ever going to be, and he would leave it at that. Except, of course, in pursuit of Marcy Gray. In that endeavor, he would do whatever it took. If he had to read Ernest Hemingway, he would manage that.

  Didier waited out Sammy Dee, as usual, after Charlie Berns had left. The two of them didn’t budge until they were dismissed by their hostess, and they slunk off, with heavy stomachs, alone to their condos.

  He lay down on his couch, digesting the turkey with the thick gravy and the abominable mix of tasteless starch they called stuffing, and thought about what he had been thinking about compulsively for the last few days. Who the hell had ordered that pizza with his name on it?

  Were his Indians, who had become increasingly aggressive in their demands for a larger cut of the African antiquity racket, sending him a message? But what kind of message kills the recipient? Who was going to sell their handicrafts if he wasn’t around?

  Had one of the colonels from Ouagadougou survived his term in the Saharan prison and gone out to find him and seek revenge? Some sort of freelance African commando with a long memory? He remembered an African proverb: Do not anger a hyena. You cannot outrun him.

  The more Didier turned it over in his mind, however, the more he came back to the same place. There was only one person with motive and opportunity, and it was someone he had just shared Thanksgiving dinner with.

  What he didn’t know was whether the Italian had arranged the whole thing himself, or did he, like Didier, contract the job to a specialist? Were there several contract killers doing business in the Palm Springs area, besides Acme Exterminating and Patio Decks? Or had Sammy Dee decided to check out the guys that Charlie Berns told him about? Was Sammy’s getting his patio deck redone a few weeks ago more than a coincidence?

  Were Walt and Biff planning to get rid of Sammy and him? Pocket both fees, as well as the completion money from the one they hit last?

  No unhappy customers. No witnesses. No traces. Pas mal . . .

  Didier let this theory stew in his mind for a while, believing it and discounting it at the same time. It seemed both preposterous and plausible.

  And then Sammy Dee’s car was blown up in the Vons parking lot. Unfortunately, the Italian wasn’t in it.

  VII

  SAMMY

  By the time the screaming died down and the sound of police sirens could be heard in the distance, Sammy Dee was standing outside the supermarket looking at the carcass of his Lexus. All that was left were the chassis, with the steering wheel sticking up like a submarine periscope, and one axle. Everything else was scattered—some pieces, the police would later tell him, a quarter mile away. A man sitting outside Der Wienerschnitzel eating a chili dog was injured by a piece of shrapnel that turned out to be a part of the side view mirror.

  When his heartbeat slowed down, Sammy considered whether he should disown his car. Just walk away and hope that the job was thorough enough that there would be no way to identify the owner. Within minutes they would throw up a crime scene tape, and no one would be permitted to leave.

  But Sammy had watched enough episodes of CSI to know that these guys could make you from an eyelash. And if he were seen leaving the scene of the crime, it would make matters worse.

  After the uniforms herded everyone back into the supermarket and th
e paramedics went through checking for injuries, Detectives Melendez and Guthrie arrived, like a couple of gauchos late for the rodeo. They walked with exaggerated slowness, slower even than Marshal Dillon, if that were possible, and conferred with the uniforms. Then they addressed the small group of shoppers and store personnel.

  “I’m Detective Melendez, and this is Detective Guthrie, from the PSPD. We’ll do our best to get you out of here and home as soon as possible, but first we need everyone’s names, contact, and any information you can give us.”

  People started talking all at once, claiming that they had to leave, that they had groceries melting, that their children had to go to the bathroom. Melendez quieted them with a loud whistle.

  “The more cooperative you are, the faster it will go. Now, before we start taking names, we need to know two things. One, did anyone observe any suspicious activity in the parking lot, before entering or leaving the supermarket?”

  An old man with a walker said, “There were a couple of gang-bangers hanging around, casing the cars.”

  “Okay, sir, Detective Guthrie will take your statement.” Then he said, “Does the blown-up car belong to anyone here?”

  Sammy sheepishly raised his hand, feeling like a school kid volunteering the correct answer. Melendez looked at him and slowly made the connection. He could see the cop’s eyes register recognition. You again?

  The detectives interviewed him in the store manager’s office. Melendez sat behind a cluttered desk, Guthrie beside him, and went through his routine, as if he were taking an oral examination at the Police Academy.

  “What type of vehicle was it?”

  “Lexus, 450.”

  “Year?”

  It took ten minutes to get through the car shit, during which Guthrie sat with his iPad, running numbers through some computer program, no doubt verifying the information that Sammy was providing, down to the date of the last oil change.

  Finally, Melendez got down to business. “Do you have any enemies who might want to do this to you, Mr. Dee?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I mean, I had a couple of teachers who didn’t like me in high school.”

  The detective flashed him one of his cut-the-shit looks and plowed on.

  “Where were you immediately before entering the parking lot?”

  “Playing golf.”

  “Where?”

  “At Tahquitz Creek.”

  “Who’d you play with?”

  Sammy decided to tell his first lie, or, more aptly, half-truth. They would get the information from the golf starter, if they bothered to check, but he didn’t want his connection with Walt and Biff undergoing unnecessary police scrutiny, so he fudged. “A guy I’d played with before. Walt Something. Don’t know his last name. Big hitter. Seven handicap. And . . . yeah, there was another guy they put us with, some doctor named Ken, or Kyle, I don’t remember.”

  Leaning back in the chair, Melendez tapped his pen a few times, then cut closer to the chase.

  “Mr. Dee, do you think it’s entirely a coincidence that you have been involved in two attempted murder cases within a few weeks of each other?”

  “Jesus, I hope it is,” Sammy said, and meant it.

  “The poisoned pizza could conceivably have been an accident, though we’re still looking into it, but this was clearly attempted murder. Cars don’t get blown from here to Cucamonga by accident.”

  “So you don’t think it was a bad spark plug?”

  “You know something? You need a better attitude.”

  Sammy reined in the sarcasm for the remainder of the interrogation, which went on much longer than Sammy thought necessary, even for a couple of cops barking up the right tree.

  In the cab on the way back to Paradise Gardens, Sammy allowed himself to ask the question that had been flooding his thoughts since the car went up. Who was trying to kill him? And why? And, more importantly, what the fuck was he going to do about it?

  The local six o’clock news led with the story. The teaser was: Terrorist Attack in Palm Springs? The same Asian American anorexic who’d covered the dead cat story did a standup live beside the charred remains of Sammy’s car.

  “A little after ten o’clock this morning, a powerful explosion rocked the 1700 block of Palm Canyon Drive, apparently coming from a bomb set under a car that had been parked in the lot of our local Vons. Stunned shoppers dove under counters, fearful that the supermarket was under attack. Alexandra Flembar of Cathedral City was at the deli counter when the bomb went off.”

  They cut to a close-up of a woman in a charcoal suntan wearing shorts and sunglasses. “It’s very scary. Terrorists right here, in Palm Springs . . . setting bombs off. Where are you safe these days?”

  Next, Tracy Tohito interviewed an old man in a yarmulke. “I’m telling you, this is the work of Al-Qaeda. There’re a lot of Jews in Palm Springs. It’s the Holocaust all over again. I survived the camps for this?”

  Then she spoke to an Iraq war veteran, a tattooed guy standing next to his Harley Road King. “Reminds me of Fallujah. The ’ban were setting off IEDs all over the place . . . blew our APCs into the Persian Gulf.”

  Once again, Detective Sergeant Jorge Melendez had little to say. When Tracy Tohito tried to pin him down about the possibility of the explosion being a terrorist attack, he said, “We’re not ruling anything out at this point.”

  “The police are being particularly tight-lipped about the events surrounding the explosion, but Eyewitness News has learned that the investigation is centering on the owner of the car that the bomb was apparently placed under—a retired cement company executive named Samuel Dee, who, as it turns out, was a person of interest in last month’s still-unsolved cat poisoning . . .”

  It didn’t take long for the shit to hit the fan. The news vans started showing up outside the condo complex. Before the reporters began calling, his special WITSEC phone rang.

  “Are you all right?” Marshal Dylan asked him, without apparent interest or sympathy.

  “For a guy whose car was just blown up, I’m not too bad.”

  “First of all, do not—I repeat, do not—talk to anyone.”

  “What about the police?”

  “We will fix that. But do not say anything to reporters, or even to friends and family.”

  “As you know, I don’t have any friends or family.”

  “This is no time for self-pity.”

  “Frankly, I can’t think of a better time.”

  “You need to avoid being photographed.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “You don’t leave your house. And keep your blinds shut.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I’ll come by tomorrow.”

  “How will I know it’s you?”

  “I’ll call you thirty seconds before I ring the doorbell. Keep this phone on.”

  And the marshal switched off. No good-bye, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.

  Before Sammy could close his blinds or take his regular phone off the hook, an Associated Press reporter called. Sammy told him to go fuck himself.

  First, he poured himself a stiff Dewars, something he rarely did in the middle of the day, and then he closed the blinds. The sun was already dipping in its short winter arc. Plopping down on his lumpy couch, he took a couple of healthy hits of the scotch before coming up for air.

  His first thought, even while he had still been in the supermarket, had been of his old friends from The Island. Nick the Tip had dropped the dime, and they’d sent someone out to do him. The guy had followed him to the golf course and then to the Vons lot, where he put the bomb under the car while Sammy was inside buying Drano. The bomb was on a timer that exploded prematurely.

  He doubted it was The Tip himself. They would have contracted with a pro. Phil Finoccio would have set the whole thing up from prison. There were legendary stories inside the family of revenge hits that had taken years to play o
ut. They would say, in Sicilian, We’ll get you in Hell if we have to.

  What if he hadn’t stopped off at Vons? What if he hadn’t struggled with the choice of frozen pizza after he’d grabbed the Drano? What if there had been no line at the checkout counter, and he had already been in the car when it blew up? What if he hadn’t run into Nick the Tip in the CVS parking lot? What if he hadn’t decided to buy rubbers that day, or had gone to get them ten minutes earlier or later? What if he hadn’t met Marcy Gray and decided to revive his sex life?

  What if he had chosen to relocate to Ypsilanti, Tempe, or Jacksonville instead of Palm Springs? What if he hadn’t sung on Phil Finoccio? What if he had decided to make an honest living instead of shaking people down for the Nassau County mob? And on and on . . .

  It was staggering to consider all the crossroads in his life that had led to someone putting a bomb under his car in a Palm Springs supermarket lot. One different turn, at any point, and he wouldn’t be sitting in his condo with the blinds drawn and the phone off the hook.

  Lost in this maze of what-ifs, he almost didn’t hear the knocking on his door. He got up, walked over, and peeked through the tiny hole. Marcy Gray was standing there. With a casserole.

  Opening the door narrowly, he moved her inside quickly and closed the door behind her.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Reporters.”

  “I know. They’re all over the place.”

  “Tell me about it.” Sammy indicated his telephone off the hook.

  “I thought you might be hungry.”

  He wasn’t. But he said he was. “Would you join me?”

  “I can’t. I have dinner plans.”

  Sammy used all his willpower to refrain from asking whom she was dining with.

  “Look, Marcy, the reporters may try to talk to you.”

  “They already have. I told them to get lost. I know what you’re going through, Sammy. Believe me. I went out to dinner once with Jimmy Caan. For a week afterward, they kept calling me and asking about our relationship. I wouldn’t even tell them what Jimmy had for dinner.”