The Lonely Witness

by William Boyle

  “I got drunk and missed my plane,” Alessandra says.

  “Really?” Amy says.

  “I’m sorry I left that way. I didn’t want to. I was so pissed at myself, I started drinking as soon as I got to the airport. I had a couple of hours before my flight. This guy was buying my drinks, and I must’ve had about six mimosas. After I left the bar, my head was spinning. I sat down at the wrong gate and passed out. Woke up about an hour after my flight had taken off.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Still at LaGuardia.”

  “Can I call you back in a bit?”

  “Sure.”

  Amy closes the phone. “Can’t you just give me a sec here?” she says to Dom.

  “Who was that?”

  “Just my friend, okay?”

  “You told her about me?”

  “I didn’t tell her anything.”

  Dom peeks back into the kitchen at Mrs. Epifanio to make sure she can’t hear. “What are we doing here? How long’s this gonna take?” He pauses and gives her a sly grin. “I’m doing good, right? I told you I’m good with the old ladies.”

  “I just don’t want to unnerve her.”

  “Where’s my stuff? In the bedroom?”

  “I think so. He was in the bedroom doing something when he was here. I went in there, but I didn’t see anything.”

  “I can be patient. Let’s continue to finesse the situation. I’m enjoying being your boyfriend for the afternoon. Maybe we can get her to take a rest. They love to take rests, these old ladies. Put on the TV, they’re out like a light in five minutes.”

  Amy, hugging her backpack, returns to the table. Mrs. Epifanio is eating more crumb cake. Dom lingers in the living room, looking into the adjoining bedroom, but then he comes back out.

  “Everything okay?” Mrs. Epifanio says.

  “Fine,” Amy says. “Just a friend. I told her I’d call her back.”

  “You know what I was thinking? I’d like to go to Diane’s son’s wake. Pay my respects. For Diane. I feel bad for her. Something must’ve been off in his brain. I think it’s this afternoon. Four to six, Immacula said.”

  “You think that’s a good idea, Mrs. E?” Amy asks.

  “This guy—Vincent, his name was?—sounds like he really upset you,” Dom says. “Maybe it’s best just to let it be.”

  “Maybe,” Mrs. Epifanio says. “I get sick of being in the house, you know? Wake’s a social occasion. I thought with you two here, maybe we could all go together.” She pauses, considering it. “Forget it. Not going’s for the best. I’ll send a Mass card.”

  “I can’t go anyway,” Amy says, thinking of Alessandra kicking around LaGuardia, drinking coffee, buying a little packet of Tylenol to push back against the champagne, wearing her dark aviator sunglasses. “I have to be somewhere around then.”

  “For the best. I don’t want to see Diane like that, anyway. I’m sure she’s a wreck. You haven’t seen her, have you, Amy?”

  Amy knows that eventually the role she played the day Diane got the news about Vincent will be public knowledge, but she’s guessing Mrs. Epifanio doesn’t know yet. If Immacula didn’t know about it, Mrs. Epifanio can’t know. “I haven’t. She was sick, too, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s what Vincent said. The flu. Terrible. What a world. You get the flu, and then your son winds up dead. At least he didn’t kill her, like we thought at first.”

  “There’s a silver lining right there,” Dom says, smiling.

  “Mrs. E, you want to go into the living room and watch a little TV?” Amy says.

  “You two don’t want to waste your afternoon just sitting around watching TV with an old bag like me,” Mrs. Epifanio says.

  “We want to visit,” Amy says. “I know you like to sit down around now and watch a movie.”

  “I love the old movies,” Dom says.

  “Oh, me too,” Mrs. Epifanio says. “Channel two-fifty-six.”

  “What’s that, Turner Classic?”

  “That’s it. Last night, I watched one with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. A Place in the Sun. I hadn’t seen it in, I forget, probably sixty-five years.”

  “Elizabeth Taylor. What a lady.”

  “Let’s go see what’s on,” Amy says, maybe pushing a little too hard. “We can bring our coffees.”

  They sit in the living room, Mrs. Epifanio slumped in her leather recliner, Amy and Dom next to each other on the plastic-covered orange velvet sofa. Decorative brass plates hang on the walls. Amy nudges her sugar skull flats into the green shag. Amy and Dom sip coffee as Mrs. Epifanio studies an extra-large remote control, trying to figure out which buttons do what, as if it’s all brand-new to her.

  “This channel changer gives me such heartache,” she says.

  “You need some help?” Amy says.

  “I’ve got it. Here we go.” She narrates her discoveries as she makes them. “Power. Input. Two. Five. Six.”

  Turner Classic Movies clicks on. A Western.

  “Here we go with the bang-bang shoot-’em-up,” Mrs. Epifanio says. “I can’t stand these pictures.”

  “You don’t like Westerns?” Dom says.

  “I like a love story.” But she doesn’t change the channel. She didn’t bring her coffee along. She leans back in the recliner and kicks up her feet.

  “Can I get you anything, Mrs. E?” Amy says. “A pillow? A blanket?”

  “I’m great,” Mrs. Epifanio says. “It’s so nice having company.”

  Amy and Dom watch the movie.

  “This is special,” Dom says.

  “Fuck you,” Amy says under her breath.

  When Mrs. Epifanio nods off, five minutes into the movie being on, they slink into the bedroom. Dom takes it in. “You look around at all?” he asks.

  “Not really,” Amy says. “It looked undisturbed. But Mrs. E said Vincent was back here a bunch, so I think this has gotta be where your stuff is. I wasn’t thinking he’d hid something. I was thinking he was maybe stealing from her, if anything.”

  Dom nods. He yanks out the top left dresser drawer and sifts through a pile of silky underwear and bras. He takes a pair of underwear out. “Jesus. These must be fifty years old. You want them?”

  “I’m good,” Amy says.

  He sniffs the crotch. “Just the faintest whiff of a young Mrs. E.”

  “Stop talking.”

  “Trouble in paradise. The lovers are on the ropes.”

  “Find your stuff, okay? Find it fast.”

  “I’ll find my stuff after you sniff the underwear.” He comes over and presses the underwear against her face.

  She swats his arm away. “Fuck off.”

  “Come on, that’s small potatoes. I’m just having fun.” Dom goes back to digging through dresser drawers. He finds handkerchiefs that belonged to Mr. Epifanio. Pajama bottoms, too. Old bedsheets and pillowcases. Mrs. Epifanio hasn’t gotten rid of much.

  Amy helps. She looks under the bed and behind the sewing machine.

  After going through all the drawers, Dom pulls the dresser away from the wall. “Bingo,” he says, reaching back behind the dresser. “There’s one.” He comes out with a basic knockoff designer purse, maroon, the kind that hangs from the racks in the little shops on Eighty-Sixth Street. He feels around in the bag. He takes out a Ziploc bag full of diamond necklaces and shows it to her.

  “How many more?” Amy says.

  “How many more what?”

  “Purses.”

  “Should be another.” He pushes the dresser back into place.

  Amy helps him shut the drawers.

  “Where are we not looking?” he says, getting down on his knees and sniffing around by the sewing machine table. He stands and peels the chenille spread off the bed, hurls the pillows to the floor. The sheets are wispy. There’s nothing under them.

  Mrs. Epifanio stirs in the living room. She chokes on a snore. Amy goes in and lowers the TV volume.

  Back in the bedroom, Dom is lifting th
e mattress. It’s soft and misshapen, difficult to hold up easily. Amy grabs one end.

  There, between the mattress and the ancient box spring, the rest of the jewelry is laid out. No sign of the purse. Some of the smallest pieces are in sandwich bags. The rest is simply spread there like something that’s been dug up or discovered. They push the mattress off to the side.

  “More brains than I ever gave him credit for, that Vincent,” Dom says. “Pretty solid spot.”

  He starts scooping up the pieces and dropping them into the first purse. They won’t all fit. He zips it, then swipes the rest of the jewelry into his arms and piles it on top of the dresser. He asks Amy to make the bed the way it was. She should be the one, after all, who cares that things look right.

  She does it, getting the mattress back on the box spring, straightening the sheets. She smooths down the chenille spread and puts the pillows back in place.

  Dom opens the drawer with the extra sheets. He pulls out a yellow pillowcase and fills it with the rest of the jewelry. “I can tell you’re looking at me,” he says to Amy. “You got a better idea?”

  Her bag would be a better idea, but she’s not going to give it to him.

  He knots the end of the pillowcase. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Amy smooths down the remaining sheets and pillowcases. Just as she’s about to shut the drawer, she notices a sterling silver chain coiled in the corner under bunched-up floral-print sheets. She pinches it between her thumb and index finger and draws it out, dropping it into her other palm. A small silver medal is latched to the end of the chain, its blank back looking up at her. She flips it over: Joan of Arc. A simple, plain, beautiful medal. She wonders if Mrs. Epifanio’s first name is Joan. She has no idea. She remembers that Alessandra’s favorite painting is the one of Joan of Arc at the Met. She can’t remember the painter’s name, but it’s a wildly gorgeous painting. They went to see it together several times. The medal is not worth much, she bets, but she really likes it. She’d like to give it to Alessandra. She thinks Alessandra would appreciate it, because it’s beautiful and because Joan of Arc is the patron saint of strong women, even though Alessandra isn’t into things like patron saints. She drops the medal into the pocket of her cardigan and closes the drawer as quietly as she can. Dom winks at her.

  15

  Amy feels terrible about leaving Mrs. Epifanio like that. She was in pretty good shape—alert, not confused, genuinely happy to see Amy and to meet Dom—and Amy wonders if she’ll wake up disoriented, trying to figure out if it was all dream. But then she’ll see the coffee mugs in the dish drain and know it really happened. She’ll probably think how strange it is that they left the house without waking her to say good-bye. She wonders what Mrs. Epifanio’s reaction would’ve been if she’d introduced her to Alessandra instead of Dom.

  They’re sitting in Dom’s car. She’s itching to call Alessandra back.

  “See,” Dom says, tossing the purse and the pillowcase on the back seat. “Easy-peasy. I knew you were a good egg.”

  Amy’s thinking about the Joan of Arc medal in her pocket. She’s wondering what Alessandra would do. Alessandra’s belief is that sometimes you’ve got to burn the fucker down, do what’s best for yourself, scratch an itch until it bleeds. Maybe she hadn’t listened to Alessandra enough during their time together. Alessandra has guts. She can be cold and detached, but she always seems in control.

  “Let me drop you somewhere,” Dom says. He turns to look at her. “Or you could come with me. We could go over to my guy in Borough Park and sell all this shit and then get on a plane to the Caribbean. I’m thinking the Bahamas or Saint Croix. I’d like to see you in a bathing suit.”

  “You disappear down there, won’t people start to suspect it was you who killed Vincent?”

  “Why? They’ll just think I ripped off my old man, that’s all.”

  “You’ve known Vincent for years. You don’t go to his wake and then you just up and leave the country?”

  “No one’s surprised about Vincent. He’s been marked for this kind of end for a long time.”

  “That’s not the impression I get from Diane.”

  “Diane? Come on. What’s she gonna say?”

  Amy knows she should’ve walked away and gotten on the train with her five grand and called Alessandra. But she followed Dom to the car. She can feel heat from the bags of jewelry. Amy’s realizing that she hasn’t transformed back into old Amy but into a totally new one. She’s got a romantic notion in mind: Alessandra’s hungover and stuck at the airport. How great would it be if she showed up at the airport to pick her up in Dom’s car with all this stolen jewelry? “Hop in, Al,” she’d say, the car rumbling at the curb behind a taxi, Alessandra rubbing the champagne buzz from her temples. Then they could hit the road, drive all the way to Los Angeles, staying in motels and kissing on sad beds with the heater humming and the TV playing movies they’ve never heard of. Roadside motels with kidney-shaped pools, the kinds of places people take pictures of because they have beautiful old signs and seem like they’re from another time. They could probably sell the jewelry in Los Angeles. Seems like the kind of place you can sell stolen jewelry without too much effort.

  But this is the new Amy thinking. And it’s dumb. There’d be so many practical obstacles in the way of her winding up with the jewelry. Dom, for one. If she ever managed to get away with it—the jewelry being the thing that he fucking killed Vincent over—she’d have to live her life looking over her shoulder. Her only advantage would be that he wouldn’t know where to look.

  “What are you thinking about?” Dom says.

  “What?”

  “You think you’re gonna steal all this shit, don’t you?” He laughs. “You just got that big idea in your mind, didn’t you? You’re seeing dollar signs, just like Vincent.”

  “I’m not a thief.”

  “I know you’re no thief, but you’re feeling temptation. Temptation’s all it takes.”

  “I’m leaving.” Amy goes for the door handle.

  Dom stops her. “No, wait.” He reaches across her and opens the glove compartment. “Here, I’ll give you a chance.” He takes out the gun and hands it to her. “Point it at me. Tell me what you want.”

  She holds it in her lap. It’s a little heavier than it looks.

  “Aim it at me,” Dom says. “Let’s see what you’re made of.”

  “It’s loaded?” Amy says.

  “Should be.”

  Her hand is shaking. She can’t even lift the gun. She’s looking at it in her lap. She doesn’t know anything about Dom, not really, other than the fact that he killed Vincent, and she wonders what else he’s used this gun for. She’s never even held a gun before, but she can feel that this one’s got a history.

  “Aim it at me,” Dom says. “Come on!”

  Amy looks around. Mrs. Epifanio’s not peeking out from behind her blinds. No one’s walking by. The cars that are parked around them seem like they’ve been parked there for days and that they’ll never leave. Amy tries to imagine herself as the kind of person who could lift a gun and point it at another person, even out of fear or in jest or in some kind of threatening way.

  “You don’t have it in you,” Dom says. “Fucking shame.” He snatches the gun back from her, reaches across, and yanks the door handle, pushing open the door and shouldering her out onto the sidewalk.

  Amy lands curled over her backpack.

  “Stay quiet, stay alive,” Dom says, leaning out of the car on the passenger side and then pulling the door shut. He gets back under the wheel, revs the engine, and busts away from the curb, his tires smoking.

  The day is now eerily still. Pigeons. The breeze. A bus off in the distance. Amy crawls over and sits against Mrs. Epifanio’s fence, the sidewalk cold and gritty against her bottom. She takes out her phone and dials Alessandra. She’s not sure what she’s going to say. I have five thousand dollars, and I’ll meet you at LaGuardia. Can I come to Los Angeles and live with you?

 
Alessandra picks up. “I’m headed to you right now,” she says. “My new flight’s not until tomorrow. I got an Uber. You said you’re on the same block as St. Mary’s, right?”

  “What?” Amy says. “You hate it in the neighborhood. Don’t come here.”

  “Too late. I’m headed there. What’s your address?”

  “We can meet somewhere else.”

  “You okay?”

  “Things have been pretty crazy.”

  Alessandra drifts away from the phone, talking to her driver, telling him something he shouldn’t be doing. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Alessandra says.

  “Okay,” Amy says.

  Mr. Pezzolanti is waiting at the gate when she gets back to her apartment. She wasn’t expecting to see him again, and that casts a new sort of melancholy over their encounter. “Those batteries work out okay?” he says.

  “Great, Mr. P,” she says.

  “I just walked over to the dollar store and bought another pack. You need more, I’m your man.”

  She smiles and rushes into the apartment. She hurriedly unpacks some fresh clothes—blue denim capris, a Sourpuss Beki polka-dot top—and lays them out on the bed. She takes off the wig and the cap and plucks out the bobby pins. She gets undressed. There’s a faint smell of kush oil on her wrists still. She goes into the bathroom and turns on the shower. She imagines Dom squeezed in there. Her shower is hot and fast and feels good. She needed soap. She needed to feel clean. When she’s done, she towels off, finds a half-empty bottle of Listerine, and swishes some around in her mouth. She gets dressed and repacks her bag, making sure to stuff Alessandra’s Dodgers shirt and boy briefs in there, as well as the wig, wig cap, and bobby pins. She puts on a little makeup. Nothing fancy.

  Stacked on top of the clothes in the backpack is the Priority Mail envelope. She thumbs through the five thousand dollars, as if to make sure it’s absolutely real. A payoff, that’s what it is. Now she’s got real blood on her hands. She wonders if she should’ve asked for more. She waits for Alessandra, her body racked with anxiety.

  Fifteen minutes was what she said. It’s already been more than twenty. Maybe they hit traffic on the BQE or Belt.