“Sounds like Vincent. The other guy who was here, you know him?”
“What other guy?”
“The friend. I let him in. Don’t remember his name. Every once in a while, I saw his face around here. Nice guy. Jeweler’s kid. He should’ve been my tenant.”
“You don’t know his name?”
“What I said. You know, I never saw Vincent bring a girl over. Not a young one anyway.” Disdain in her voice. Contempt. “A fruit, I bet, and that’s what did him in.”
Amy pushes past Marie, ignoring her.
“You tell the mother everything needs to be cleaned out by the end of the month, otherwise it all goes to the curb,” Marie calls back over her shoulder, already into the apartment.
Amy hustles away down the block, the suit hanging over her arm. She turns right onto Avenue S and stops in front of a barbershop, leaning up against a black soda machine that has cold drinks painted on its side in blue. She hangs the suit on the machine. Diane’s Post-it note falls to the sidewalk.
She takes out the envelope and withdraws the picture. There’s just the one. It’s from Homestretch. A party, with people hoisting drinks for the camera. Vincent’s there with his arm around a woman. She’s older, in her fifties, wearing a tight black top, sipping from a pint glass of what looks like gin-and-tonic or vodka-and-soda with a striped straw. She’s flush, dreamy-eyed, dark-haired.
Beyond them, standing close to Bernie at the bar, Amy recognizes the man from the bench in his softball shirt. Next to him is a man with a long nose and a square chin. He’s wearing a brooklyn vs. everybody T-shirt. He’s looking at Vincent and the woman. And he’s clearly Vincent’s killer, the one whose knife she has hidden in her freezer. Amy’s a hundred percent sure.
Amy flips the picture over. On the back, written in blue curlicue script, is a note: My love is true. Let’s run away.
She stuffs the picture back in the envelope and places it under her shirt, tucking it into her waistband.
On the walk to Diane’s, she sees a dead dog in the middle of Stillwell Avenue, cars and buses swerving to avoid it. The day eats at her senses. Her skin feels balmy. She smells exhaust, maybe smoke. Maybe there’s a fire somewhere. She sees the dead dog as Vincent. She hears horns and alarms and sirens. Her mouth tastes like the dregs of bad coffee. Her tongue seems cold. Again, she feels a disquieting presence. Or is it an absence?
Back at Diane’s, she hands the suit over, trembling. Diane cries at the sight of it. She’s probably thinking about his lifeless body filling it out. She’s probably remembering the time she saw him in it for someone else’s wake. Amy can imagine that his whole life is playing before her eyes. She knows what death does to you. She remembers seeing a dress that belonged to her mother a week after they buried her and breaking down. Diane hangs the suit in the hallway closet. Amy puts a hand on her shoulder.
“Thank you for going to get it,” Diane says. “It’s nothing,” Amy says. She wonders if she’s being suspicious. It’s nothing.
Is that an appropriate response? She knows she can’t mention the picture. She knows she can’t take it out and point to the killer. Not being quiet has its consequences. Bob Tully trained her early to that way of thinking. It bumps up against her very idealistic notion of being a helper. “What else can I do?”
“Sit. Please. Stay with me a bit longer.”
“Of course.”
They go into the living room. The TV is still on, blasting a talk show. People on couches facing each other. Close-ups. Audience reaction shots. Lots of clapping. Diane has dragged a plastic crate into the center of the room. It’s full of photo albums and shoe boxes. Amy sits on the recliner in the corner, her hands on her thighs. She can feel the envelope bending against her waist, but there’s not much she can do to fix it. She’s terrified that Diane will somehow realize she’s carrying it and wonder what’s going on.
“I’ve been going through some things,” Diane says, dropping to her knees beside the crate. She coughs into her hand.
“You should rest,” Amy says. “Maybe go lay down?”
“I can’t lay down. Look at this.” Diane takes a picture out of one of the shoe boxes. It’s in a frame made of Popsicle sticks. It’s Vincent as a kid in his school uniform, at a desk, pretending to write, smiling. “Vincent in second grade. They did this as a project one day. Made these little frames. Cute, right?”
“So cute.”
“That was his best year of school. He was so happy. He’d come home excited about something every afternoon. He had this teacher he just loved, Miss Krauza. She was a sweetheart. I wish life could be that year over and over again. He didn’t need anything else. He was happy to come home to me after school and watch TV and eat dinner. I’d sing him to sleep. He loved when I sang ‘Que Sera, Sera.’”
“Very cute,” Amy says.
Diane lugs out a clunky black album and brings it over to Amy. She sits on the arm of the recliner, propping the album on her lap. She flips through the pages slowly and shows Amy Vincent’s grade school pictures, pictures from birthday parties with Vincent hunched over Carvel ice-cream cakes, pictures from bowling alleys and circuses and baseball games. “Such a happy kid,” Diane says. “See? I have all this proof.” On the verge of bawling.
“I’m so sorry, Diane,” Amy says. She thinks again of the picture she’s holding under her shirt. Her stomach turns over. She puts her hand over her mouth. “Can I use the bathroom?”
Diane stands up and dumps the album back in the crate. “Oh God, are you feeling sick? I’m so sorry. I hope you don’t have the flu.”
Amy rushes into the bathroom. She latches the door behind her and then slumps in front of the bowl. She sticks two fingers down her throat. Her fingers are sandpapery on her tongue. She can feel them rattling against the roof of her mouth. She forces herself to throw up. When she’s done, she flushes and then sits back against the tiled wall and takes the envelope out of her waistband. It’s all bent up.
Diane knocks on the door. “You okay in there?” she asks.
“I’m fine,” Amy says.
“You don’t sound fine. I involved you in all of this, and now you’re sick.”
Amy puts the picture away. She tucks the envelope into her waistband. She scooches in front of the bowl and tries to throw up again. Nothing this time.
“Poor thing,” Diane says.
Amy stands and unlatches the door. Diane is looking at her with such sad eyes. This woman who just lost her son has sympathy for her. “I’m sorry, Diane,” Amy says. “I should really go.”
“I hope you didn’t catch this from me.”
“I think it’s just anxiety. I know that’s a stupid thing to say. You’re the one, I mean, Vincent’s not my …”
“I understand.”
“I just sometimes get these anxiety attacks. I’m sorry. I wish I could do more for you.”
“You’ve done so much already. I don’t know what would’ve happened if you hadn’t been here.”
Amy goes into the kitchen and writes her number down on a dry-erase board that hangs on the side of the refrigerator. “I have your house number, but I don’t have your cell,” she says. “This is my number. You need anything, please call me. Okay? Anything at all.”
“Thank you,” Diane says, her chin trembling.
Amy tries not to think of her alone with the terrible knowledge of her son’s murder. Alone at the table. Alone as she trudges around the house. Alone in bed. Alone in the shower. A new brutality to her aloneness. “Take care of yourself,” Amy says.
“I will.”
“Call Monsignor Ricciardi. He’ll be happy to help however he can, I’m sure.”
“I will. I hope you feel better.”
“I’m fine. I’m sorry to add to everything.” Amy touches Diane on the shoulder again and then rushes out of the apartment.
10
Back at her apartment, Amy considers the knife. It could’ve been bought anywhere, probably at one of those shops on E
ighty-Sixth Street where they have glass shelves full of windproof lighters and cheapo knives and cigarette cases. She often wonders how those stores even stay in business, now that most people shop online.
She opens the knife and presses the blade against her palm. Taking the knife was the single worst idea she’s ever had. But she couldn’t stop herself. It’s an artifact of her curiosity. But if she’d just left it where Vincent dropped it, the police would have a lead. Maybe they’d have fingerprints. Was the killer wearing gloves? She tries to call up his hands in her memory. In any case, she swiped those fingerprints away into a sad toilet at the Roulette and then doubled down on erasing any trace of them here at her apartment. He must’ve been wearing gloves. He must’ve planned to stab Vincent. Why else leave the knife?
And now she’s got the envelope with the picture, too. It’s as if she’s planting evidence on herself. She takes out the envelope and looks at the picture again, its edges creased now. The woman, the killer, the note. She drops the knife into the envelope and stuffs the envelope into the ice pop box in the freezer compartment.
When Mr. Pezzolanti knocks on her door, it’s to tell her that Connie Giacchino and Monsignor Ricciardi had come around about twenty minutes earlier to see if she was okay. Amy asks whether her father has been back. Mr. Pezzolanti says he hasn’t seen any sign of him. He asks if she’s heard about the stabbing, and she’s struck dumb for a moment. She realizes that soon everyone will know she was with Diane, because that’s how word travels in the neighborhood. She’s sure that Diane has already made calls to people from church, letting them know how lucky she was to have Amy there when she received the news and to accompany her to the morgue. In fact, she’s betting that’s why Monsignor Ricciardi and Connie came around in the first place.
Amy spills about going to pay Diane a visit, saying that Mrs. Epifanio was worried sick about her. Now it’s occurring to her what a tangled web this is. If anyone talks to Mrs. Epifanio, they’ll know about the Vincent situation. And then they’ll be able to connect Amy and Vincent directly. She feels light-headed. She keeps telling herself she hasn’t done anything wrong, and yet she knows she’s done so much wrong. She’s thankful, at least, that Mrs. Epifanio doesn’t leave the house and doesn’t have many visitors. She just has to be sure that she’s the one to bring communion next week as usual, not Immacula. She has to be back to her normal routine by then. She wonders if Mr. Pezzolanti can see her sweating.
“Just terrible about that kid,” Mr. Pezzolanti says, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Young guy, whole life ahead of him. Who knows what it was about? My guess is he got involved with some bad people. Drugs, probably. Johnny Zap’s son says this Vincent hung around that dive Homestretch a lot. That’s what you would’ve called a TB joint in my day. You know what that means? You get tuberculosis drinking from the dirty glasses. Who knows what kind of lowlifes he got tied up with there? You look around—here, anywhere—on a nice day, you think there’s no bad people. Well, all you’ve got to do is scratch the surface. Nice lady like Diane, she winds up with a son like that. But you, you’re such a sweetheart, Amy. A time like that, you go and help Diane out.”
“I just happened to be there,” Amy says.
“Sure. But you stayed. You didn’t run away. You comforted her. You don’t mind me saying, you look worn-out. Why don’t you try to get some rest?”
“Thanks, Mr. P. I’m going to try to do that.”
“You need anything, let me know. I’ve gotta go move my car. It’s been parked around the corner all week. Figured I’d run some errands. I’m running down to BJ’s later.” He pauses and rubs his temples. “Guy offered me three grand for the Caprice the other day; you believe that? I should’ve taken him up on it. It’s nothing but a headache at this point.”
When he leaves, she goes inside and sits on the bed. She expects Fred to knock on the door and listens for sounds from outside. She thinks about Vincent’s apartment. She gets up and checks every corner to make sure that nothing’s been disturbed, that no one has been inside rummaging around.
She pulls down her egg crate full of old stuff from the closet. She takes out an outfit she hasn’t worn in years, gray swing trousers and a blue Catalina cardigan with a cherry motif. Both from the forties. Both smelling of mothballs now. She also has some cute All Hope Abandoned sugar skull flats that she’s tucked away in the crate. And a red bandanna for her hair. She lays it all out on the bed. It’s as if a former version of herself is there suddenly, sprawled on the bed like a ghost.
“Fuck it,” she says.
She changes into her old favorite clothes and ties the bandanna in her hair and puts her makeup on in the bathroom. This version of her former self is there in front of her in the mirror now. Except for the hair color, she’s pretty much the same. Maybe a little thinner. A little stiffer. Being dressed like this gives her a good feeling, one that allows her to shed some of the worry and fear that’s haunted her the last day.
She stands there. She puts on her flats. She paces. She thinks about what she would’ve done when she was twenty-five or twenty-eight. She would’ve gone out. She would’ve headed straight to the bar. Shots. Beer. Music. She wouldn’t have felt intimidated or regretful. High school had taught her that, and everything with Bob Tully. No way was it wrong to chase a feeling, to be unhinged, to act out of fear and fascination. How did she lose that knowledge? Whatever she’d gained had led to so much lost.
“Fuck it,” she says again.
She leaves her apartment as someone else. Or someone she used to be.
“What’s it, Halloween?” a fortyish guy in a sauce-stained white uniform says to Amy as she enters Homestretch. He looks like he’s just gotten off a shift at a pizza joint. Dark hair, olive skin, flour under his fingernails. He’s standing at the bar, a Bud Light in his fist. “Who you supposed to be? Rosie the Riveter or some shit? Rosie, how about you let me buy you a drink?”
Bernie is behind the bar. He doesn’t recognize her from her last visit. “What can I get you, doll?” he says, as she settles at the bar.
Her instinct is to say club soda again, but beer seems to come more naturally now. “Bud draft,” she says.
Bernie goes to the taps with a mug. She can feel eyes on her. The guy in the sauce-stained whites. The others around the bar, too. Three big-bellied dudes in Rangers jerseys who seem pretty wasted. An old woman in the corner eating peanuts out of a Styrofoam cup and slurping vodka on the rocks. Amy looks around and gives them all a half smile. She’d gotten lots of attention on the walk over, too. Boys howling, Russian women stopping to stare, someone asking if she was an actress and what they were filming in the neighborhood.
“Don’t mind them,” Bernie says, bringing back her beer and sloshing it on the bar. “They just never seen such a pretty gal in here. You’re really classing the joint up.”
She goes to pay, but Sauce Stains clears his throat and raises his hand. “That’s on me, Bernie,” he says.
“Thanks,” she says, taking a drink. It’s the first beer she’s had in a while. It tastes terrible.
Sauce Stains sidles up next to her, swigging from his beer. “I’m Lou,” he says. “And me buying you that drink means you owe me at least four minutes of conversation.”
“That’s the way it works?” she says.
“Tell me about this little outfit.”
“Tell me about your little outfit.”
He steps back and does a runway-model walk toward the bathroom, turning drunkenly on his heels, and then zooming back to her. The dudes in the Rangers jerseys bust up laughing. “This old thing?” Lou says, motioning to his uniform. “Armani. Soak it in.”
Amy almost laughs, the guy’s so ridiculous.
“You want to dance with me?” Lou says.
“There’s no music.”
He starts singing “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover,” dancing up close to Amy, grinding against her leg.
“Lay off,” she says.
“Lou, leave the f
ucking girl alone,” Bernie says.
Lou settles down and steps back. “You know that song? Sophie B. Hawkins. Big fucking hit in ’92. That’s the year I started working at Bad Boys. You know the place? I was a senior in high school. Twenty-four fucking years I been slinging pies. That year, ’92, I was finger-banging Bishop Kearney girls in my old man’s Chevy Nova. I thought working at a pizza joint with my uncle was the be-all and end-all. I was on top of the world.”
“Nobody gives a shit about your story,” Bernie says. “You ain’t learned that yet? You got regrets? Get in line. You think I wanted to spend thirty years bartending at this fucking dive?”
“Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.”
“Lou, Lou, Lou.”
“Let’s get back to our new friend’s outfit, huh?” Lou says. “Where’s the party? What’s the party? Can I come? I’d like to know the origins of such glamour.”
The door to the bar opens. The man who walks in has a long nose and a square chin. It’s the killer, the guy from Vincent’s picture. He’s wearing the same Timberland boots and drooping jeans and sweatshirt from the night before. His hood is down. She’s shaken out of performing the role of her former self.
“Oh!” Lou says. “Look who’s here! I saw where your buddy Vincent got himself stabbed, Dom. He always was a dumb piece of shit, wasn’t he?”
“Indeed,” Dom says.
Dom. Probably short for Dominic. The killer has a name, and it’s so simple. The way Lou says it is like a threatening sound in a subway station at three in the morning. If Dom knew the Other Her as a witness, he doesn’t seem to know the version of her sitting there. He gazes at her, but only in the typical horrible-guy way, his eyes drifting from her ass on the stool up to her chest. Amy looks into her beer and leans on the bar, crossing her arms under her chin. She should go outside and call the police, that’s what she should do.
Dom sits a few stools down from her and orders a Jack and Coke.
Bernie mixes the drink for him. “You get the scoop?” he asks.
The Lonely Witness Page 9