The Lonely Witness

by William Boyle

  One day, she followed him as he bounced from the garage where he worked to the bar where he drank to the house of the woman he was seeing. She searched the newspapers for a sign that someone was missing—a husband, a son. Nothing. She never knew the identity of the man Bob Tully strangled. She started to consider she’d imagined it. And she continued to follow Bob Tully. She got to where she looked forward to following him. She wondered if he knew she was following him. Catholic school was boring. The nuns were boring. Her grandparents were boring. Smoking was boring. She wasn’t sure if she watched Bob Tully in the hope that he’d do something else terrible, or that he’d be caught, or that someone would come to avenge the murder of the man he’d killed.

  When Amy was nineteen, done with high school and working at a bakery in the neighborhood and thinking about how to get out of Queens, Bob Tully got drunk and drove his car head-on into a fruit truck. She wasn’t there to see it, but she heard the story. Bananas and apples everywhere in the street, and Bob Tully ejected through the windshield, splattered on the sidewalk outside a barbershop.

  He couldn’t have looked as much like Vincent as Amy thought he did.

  2

  Vincent’s still standing across the street when she goes back to check forty-five minutes later. Amy can only figure that he’s waiting to confront her about something, or maybe he’s just dumb enough to think that she won’t see him when she leaves. She sees less of Bob Tully in him now that she’s studying his awkward posture.

  She wishes she had someone she could call as backup. Her life in the neighborhood is pretty small. It says a lot that the only people she can even think of to call are Monsignor Ricciardi, Connie Giacchino, and her landlord, Mr. Pezzolanti.

  Back at the table, Amy reports that Vincent is still out there.

  “Real creep, I told you,” Mrs. Epifanio says.

  “Who can I call? Maybe Elaine?”

  “Don’t bother Elaine.”

  “Mrs. E, I’m a little worried here. I leave, he’s got the key, and he can waltz right in. I have to leave at some point.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m going to go out and talk to him.”

  “Be careful.”

  Amy leaves her bag behind and walks outside. It’s hard to go from the bottled-up feeling of the house to the bright world outside. It feels a little warmer than when she headed over. Unusually warm. Very little winter weather this winter. She’s surprised to find that Vincent is gone. She looks all around and doesn’t see him.

  Mrs. Epifanio’s block, Bay Thirty-Seventh, is like many of the blocks in the neighborhood: newish condos next to her old, green frame house on both sides, the apartment building across the street, lots of other three-family houses. New trees have been planted by the city, with their sad little white tags and mounds of mulch. On a February morning like this, the kids in school, Amy can hear buses on Bath Avenue and the traffic lights clicking. She walks to the front gate. Vincent has left it open, pointed out to the sidewalk. She pulls it closed and latches it and takes another good look around for Vincent.

  She goes back in and tells Mrs. Epifanio he’s gone.

  “That’s good,” she says.

  “But I’m still not sure he’s gone-gone. I’ll probably leave in a little while, but I’m going to write down my number.” She takes out her old Samsung flip phone. She’s about the only person she knows of who doesn’t have a smartphone. It’s hard to even get these anymore, but they keep them on the market for senior citizens and technology-averse people like Amy. “You can call me whenever, day or night. If he comes back, let me know. I only live a few blocks away.”

  “That’s so kind.”

  Amy finds a scratch pad and a black Sharpie and writes her name and number in big, blocky letters. “Do you want me to leave it here on the table, or should I post it on the fridge?”

  “Table’s fine.”

  “Okay. Do you feel a little better?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did Vincent touch anything in your bedroom?”

  “Nothing I noticed.”

  “You checked the drawers?”

  “I didn’t see anything missing.”

  Amy goes back into the bedroom. It’s dark. She feels around on the wall just inside the door and finds a knob to twist. Three lights in the brass chandelier overhead flicker on. Everything is out of time. A bed with a chenille spread from the fifties. Swag flowers. Fringes. Penny-flat pillows. She looks up. Popcorn ceiling. A simple gold cross on the wall next to her. Under that, an antique Singer sewing machine with its original desk and bench. She runs her fingers over the scuffs on the desk. A clay-colored French provincial dresser with nine drawers runs along the far wall. Propped on top of it is a framed picture of Mr. and Mrs. Epifanio on their wedding day. She can’t imagine what Vincent was doing in here. It doesn’t look like anyone has so much as sat on the bed in ages. She knows that Mrs. Epifanio, like many of the old people she visits, sleeps in her recliner in the living room with the television on.

  Her instinct is to go through the dresser. She stops herself. She wouldn’t even know what might be missing. She hopes that Mrs. Epifanio doesn’t have envelopes of cash stuffed in the drawers—another thing these old folks tend to do—that she doesn’t remember putting there. One woman, Mrs. DiPaola, once asked Amy to go down to the basement and put her laundry on the line after communion. What Amy saw down there was an open cigar box on the table next to the washing machine, so much money inside. At least ten thousand dollars. She closed the lid of the box, hung the clothes on the line, went upstairs, and told Mrs. DiPaola it was a bad idea to leave so much money sitting out like that.

  She sits on the bed. Something reminds her of her father—the ceiling. The apartment her father lived in after he’d left her and her mother had ceilings like this. Amy was only there twice before he stopped coming around to pick her up on weekends. She was twelve. Her mother died the next year. That was when she moved in with her grandparents, next door to Bob Tully. She never heard from her father again. He left Queens and moved to Poughkeepsie, and then her grandmother found out he was on the skids in Kingston and Hudson and all over upstate. But Amy remembered ceilings just like this in his apartment in Pomonok. She remembered staring up at those ceilings while he went out to the bar.

  She stands and smooths the wrinkles out of the bedspread.

  Back out in the kitchen, Mrs. Epifanio has opened a large-print sudoku book and is struggling with a puzzle.

  “Didn’t see anything unusual,” Amy says, returning to her seat at the table. “Maybe I’ll try Diane one more time.” Address book in hand, she dials Diane’s number on her cell phone, since it’s out already and she doesn’t feel like dealing with the rotary again. After six rings, she’s about to drop the call, but then someone picks up and doesn’t say anything. “Diane?”

  “Diane’s sick,” a man says. Vincent.

  Amy pushes the end button with her thumb and folds the phone shut.

  She’s immediately sorry that she called from her own number. “It was Vincent,” she says to Mrs. Epifanio.

  Mrs. Epifanio shakes her head and looks down at the table. “I sure hope he didn’t kill his mother. Happens all the time. Guys like him, they come home to rob their mothers. Mother’s got nothing to rob and ends up with her throat cut. Poor Diane.”

  “Jeez, Mrs. E. You don’t really think that, do you?”

  “Who knows anymore? This day and age.”

  “Where’s Diane live?”

  “Second floor of the little brick two-family across from that house with the lions out front.”

  “I know that house.”

  “Giorgio Gianfortune. He owns the fish market. Thinks he’s a big shot.”

  “I’m going to walk over there.”

  “That a good idea?”

  “I just want to see if there’s anything unusual.”

  Amy packs her bag and tells Mrs. Epifanio to close and put the slide lock on the kitchen door. Because there�
�s a vacant apartment upstairs—Mrs. Epifanio stopped renting it after Mr. Epifanio died—the kitchen door has its own lock. Amy is thankful it’s there. Mrs. Epifanio says she’ll lock it. Amy points to her phone number again and tells Mrs. Epifanio to call for any reason. Really. But she also says that if Vincent comes back and starts knocking on the door or anything, Mrs. E should absolutely call the police. It’s not okay for anyone to enter her house without asking, no matter his intentions.

  Amy walks into the hallway and waits for Mrs. Epifanio to close and lock the kitchen door. Mrs. Epifanio struggles over to the door and shoulders it closed. The sound of the slide lock being engaged on the other side follows.

  “Okay?” Mrs. Epifanio says.

  “Good. I’ll call you after to check in.”

  The house with the gaudy cement lion statues at the driveway entrance is only a few blocks away, Bay Thirty-Fourth between Bath and Benson. There could be other houses with lion statues, but she knows this is the one Mrs. Epifanio is talking about.

  Amy pauses on Mrs. Epifanio’s front stoop and then walks slowly to the front gate, keeping an eye out for Vincent. She exits through the gate, closing it carefully behind her, and then crosses the street and turns right onto Bath Avenue. She stops at Augie’s Deli to get a coffee. She wonders if Vincent stopped here on his way home.

  Bath Avenue is quiet this time of the morning. She passes the recently sold lot where Flash Auto once was. When she and Alessandra briefly had a car, they took it there for repairs. Having a car turned out to be nothing but a pain—parking, winters, maintenance. Alessandra was a terrible driver. Amy wasn’t great either. She preferred walking and taking the bus or subway when she needed to go into the city, anyway. She would walk for hours, if she could. She often took long walks to Bay Ridge and Sunset Park, to Coney Island and Brighton Beach, listening to music. She’d sold all her records, but she’d held on to her childhood Walkman and some tapes she’d made in high school. Liz Phair, Tori Amos, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Hole, Sonic Youth, L7, the Breeders. The stuff she listened to as she smoked out her window. She could’ve gotten an iPod touch or something like that pretty cheap, she guesses, but she likes her old Sony Walkman, which fits so neatly in her palm. The battery cover kept in place with duct tape, the headphones stiff. It’s a tank. She likes the act of flipping the tape, too. She likes to measure time by the sides of a tape.

  She wishes she had it now. Instead, she’s carrying her communion set, wanting so badly to ditch it back at the church, anxious because she’s about to do surveillance on Diane’s apartment. A hundred what-ifs run through her mind. What if she bumps into Vincent going up the block? What if he walks out of the house and sees her? What if he leans out the window while he’s vaping and yells down to her? What if he calls the cops on her? Officer, there’s this girl outside being awfully suspicious. What if she sees something that leads her to believe that Diane’s been killed?

  By the time she turns onto Bay Thirty-Fourth Street, her heart is racing. An old woman pushes a shopping cart along on the cracked sidewalk just ahead of her, its wheels clattering. The woman is out collecting bottles and cans. She stops in each yard and goes through recycling bins. She’s wearing rubber gloves. Amy says hi as she passes.

  She stops in front of the house with the lion statues, turning to look across at the brick two-family house Mrs. Epifanio identified. Second floor, she said. It’s a small, boxy house, with three windows on the second floor facing the street, shades drawn, and a bay window on the first floor. Plants on the sill. A white cat sitting there. Only one door, which must be the entrance for both apartments. A small garden out front with a statue of St. Francis of Assisi and a line of withered tomato plants. The fence is painted red, a beware of dog sign hanging crookedly from the gate with a twist of wire.

  She’s ambivalent about just standing where she is. She walks up and down the block a few times. Nothing changes. She gets tired and leans against the chain-link fence of a house a little farther up the street, putting her communion set down on the sidewalk, keeping one eye on Diane’s place.

  When Vincent emerges a few minutes later, dragging on his vape pen, he doesn’t notice her because she’s behind a parked car. He walks past her on the other side of the street, headed for Benson Avenue. She’s torn about what to do. Go to the house and ring the second-floor buzzer and see if Diane answers? Or follow Vincent? He could be going back to Mrs. Epifanio’s, though he doesn’t seem to be headed in that direction.

  She makes a snap decision to follow him, that old Bob Tully thrill coming back.

  It becomes clear to her—as Vincent makes a left on Eighty-Sixth Street under the El—that he’s not returning to Mrs. Epifanio’s house. Amy continues to follow him anyway, staying half a block behind. She followed Bob Tully from this same distance, ducking behind telephone poles and trees.

  Vincent rushes across Eighty-Sixth Street at a green light, holding on to whatever’s in the pockets of his trench coat so it doesn’t fall out. He’s still got the vape pen in his hand. He stops in front of the HSBC on the corner of Twenty-Third Avenue and takes a drag. Amy crosses over once he starts moving again. She looks over at the liquor store where she used to go with Alessandra to buy wine and gin. Nothing special as far as liquor stores go. She hasn’t been back in since Alessandra split town. She’s mostly given up drinking.

  Vincent passes in front of St. Peter Catholic Academy, once called St. Mary’s. The church—still St. Mary, Mother of Jesus, as it has been for more than 125 years—is right up the block. Amy’s apartment is a few doors down from the church. She’s tempted to give up and just go home. She could drop the communion set back at the church and have the rest of the day to herself. Go get lunch at Liu’s Shanghai. Talk to Xiùlán. Read. Listen to her Walkman. Whatever.

  Amy feels like she’s doing something she can’t come back from. Maybe it’s a bad decision to resume this behavior. A stupid decision. Say she follows Vincent into a scary situation. But that old thrill pushes her on. After Bob Tully died and she got her own apartment in Queens and started working in the city, she’d chased the feeling of purpose she’d had following him. She dated a dominatrix who liked Amy to watch her sessions with doughy businessmen. She dated a trapeze artist who felt alive only in the air and once got drunk and scaled the Brooklyn Bridge for kicks while Amy shook nervously on the walkway below. Vincent’s a creep, wearing that trench coat on this nice warm day, rummaging around in Mrs. Epifanio’s bedroom. Those eyes. She wants to understand him. She wants to see what his life is like.

  Twenty-Third Avenue to Stillwell to Kings Highway. Vincent never once looks over his shoulder. The routine comes back. It’s easy to keep him in sight, to linger just far enough behind that nothing looks unusual. Bob Tully lumbered along with his head down, but Vincent is a dramatic walker. He throws his arms back and forth a lot. He dances over cracks in the sidewalks. He takes out an iPhone and almost trips looking down at it. He stops to take a picture of some graffiti on a telephone pole.

  On Kings Highway, between West Ninth and West Tenth but closer to the corner of West Tenth, Vincent ducks into a bar called Homestretch. Amy’s been there twice, both times with Alessandra. From what she remembers, it’s a divey little sports pub with Quick Draw and darts and a horse-racing mural. There was a ravioli buffet one Saturday night they were in there. Lots of old, grizzled regulars. From outside, it’s the kind of place tourists to the neighborhood take pictures of. Hand-painted sign: homestretch in meticulous white script over a background of red, bar & grill in neat black lettering over white. A black awning runs overhead, with HOMESTRETCH BAR printed in white paint, off-center, and a series of harness-racer reliefs on a white strip under that. There’s a Budweiser sign in the window and blue-and-orange flags advertising Quick Draw hang from the awning. A lonely bench sits out front. Delis on both sides, shab-by-looking apartments upstairs with battered window air conditioner units.

  Amy crosses Kings Highway and Quentin Road
and stands on the corner of West Tenth, outside 3 Stars Laundromat.

  There aren’t many bars left in the neighborhood. She doesn’t go to bars anymore, though she and Alessandra spent many nights looking for something to do that wasn’t just pizza or Chinese food. Alessandra talked about the Wrong Number, but it was closed by the time Amy moved here. There were a couple of others that had come and gone, but she can’t remember the names. On Eighty-Sixth Street and Bay Thirty-Second, there’s a new Georgian bakery she really likes; she’s pretty sure there used to be a bar in that spot. Once she stopped working at and going to bars, she mostly stopped thinking about them.

  She’s not going in after Vincent, that’s for sure. She checks her phone for the time and can’t believe it’s only just noon. She wonders if Vincent will spend all day in Homestretch. When she worked at Seven Bar, there were regulars who would come in around noon and stay until they closed at four in the morning. Some would stay past close, if she let them. A few nights, Amy was drunk enough that she locked the door and whoever was in there kept the party going with shots and pool and everyone just wound up sleeping in the booths. She’d actually met Merrill on a night like that.

  She feels silly standing there. Every car that passes, she thinks the passengers are looking at her, accusing her of something. The family that comes out of the Laundromat, hauling bags of clean clothes, they give her a once-over. A bearded guy with untied shoelaces and a steaming deli coffee passes and winks at her and says, “How much?” She looks away. He laughs. In the old days, she would’ve gotten in his face, said something like, “Who the fuck you think you’re talking to?” In the old days. There’s no peace in that. The guy’s inconsequential.

  How long to stand there? That’s the question. With Bob Tully, there had been a sense that something might happen at any moment, but Vincent seems more and more like a neighborhood weirdo with nothing better to do than make an old lady uncomfortable. And she’s so different now. Too old to be guided by mere curiosity.