The Dog Killer of Utica

by Frank Lentricchia

  “How much of this are you making up? Because you’re beginning to piss me off.”

  “You teach fiction, I deal in harsh facts on a daily basis”—as he takes another piece. Eats. Requests a napkin. Conte goes to the kitchen. Robinson glances quick and hard at the closed door to the spare room. Touches his upper-left chest.

  Conte returns with an elegant cloth napkin: “When I feel what you’re feeling now, I do what you’re doing.”

  “What’s that, Professor?”

  “Don’t play dumb. We binge eat when we have fear and anxiety. We eat and we divert and we avoid. Today we’re binge-eating brothers. I don’t believe you missed your supper tonight. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Qaeda in East Africa, Al Qaeda in Yemen. And now you come here with a story. Al Qaeda in Utica, New York. Al Qaeda in a small, sad, economically destroyed town fading fast into the sub-cellar of American history. Utica, New York, the looming site of a major terrorist attack. Utica, New York, displaces Manhattan, D.C., Boston, Chicago, and L.A. as the focus of Al Qaeda’s desire to do mass murder to America’s innocent civilians. All GPS devices manufactured from here on out position and measure distances from the new global center: Utica, New York. Where the fuck is Islamabad? Nine thousand miles east southeast of Utica, New York. And my gentle student, whose goal is to teach literature in high school, is a key operative of terror.”

  “Hey! El! Don’t think I didn’t voice skepticism along your lines, which is why I sat out there so long shivering in the car, talking to Mark Martello. Know what he said? He says, Chief, all due respect. The handful of big cities can be defended, maybe, but small town America has no chance. The people in small towns, he says, they think they’re beyond the reach and they’re secretly wishing the worst for the big cities of the immoral liberal elites. Martello says they believe—the small town types, the rural types—that on 9/11 New York got what it fuckin’ deserved and too bad all of Wall Street wasn’t destroyed, where they steal our money on a daily basis. Fuck the elites. Fuck Manhattan. This is what the real America thinks, Martello says. Now real America is about to take it hard up the ass, though because of his erotic persuasion Mark doesn’t quite put it that way. You forget, El, that Muhammad Atta was a gentle-appearing little guy, a possible faggot, just like your Mirko? An intellectual, just like your little Mirko?”

  “You’ve taken care of four pieces in no time and you want more, don’t you?”

  “I do, El.”

  “What happened in Troy this morning—this is the source of your binge.”

  Robinson points to the closed door of the spare room: “I’ve been coming here weekly since you moved back, twenty years ago. Know what I notice tonight that I never once saw in twenty years? I notice that that son of a bitchin’ door, which has never been closed when I visit, is closed for the first time in twenty years. This is my fuckin’ observation.”

  “Forget the spare room.”

  “Mirko Ivanovic in there?”

  “Anything is possible.”

  “Catherine?”

  “Anything is possible.”

  Robinson undoes the top two buttons of his coat. Conte’s right hand slips between the cushion he’s sitting on and the cushion beneath which he’s hidden his .357 Magnum.

  Conte says, “It’s possible that the real Osama bin Laden is hiding in there, his double having been killed, and it’s possible that you and I will do something foolish. You with what you’re packing under your coat and I with what I have under here, with the safe off—the safe is off, Robby, and I can get it out well before you get yours. I advise you to take your coat off. Carefully. Now.”

  Robinson complies, revealing what Conte had suspected was there from the beginning. Conte says, “Good,” and pulls out the .357 Magnum. Lays it on the cushion. Conte says, “Is the fear which we have for one another tonight well grounded? That’s the only question.”

  Conte stands. He says, “I’m going to the kitchen to bring out the entire box from Napoli’s, so that we can both feed our anxiety. I’ll leave my revolver there on the couch while I go to the kitchen. I’ll be turning my back on you. Either we are who we’ve been for each other for fifty years or we’re done. I’m gone and your life is worthless and you’ll eat your gun sooner or later with your brains on the wall.” In the spare room, .38 at the ready, Catherine Cruz peers in vain between the door’s edge and the doorjamb. Conte turns his back.

  He returns with the box and lays it on the coffee table fronting the couch. Neither will eat. Neither, tonight, will die. Conte ejects the rounds from his .357. Robinson follows suit. The woman in the spare room will feel soon the death of whatever innocence about love she’s retained at age forty-one.

  “You want to know how I knew that the man shot in Troy this morning is your pal, as I said on the phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because the sexy Detective Cruz casually mentioned you two go down there to have dinner with her ex-partner, whose name we already had when Catherine transferred up here. Obviously. Which proves nothing about my guilt or innocence. Obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  “If I’m playing a game, El, I don’t tell you, as I tell you now, that I knew about Rintrona and your connection with him for a year—ever since that Saturday we went down to Troy for Carmen in hi def, the day you told me your kids on the West Coast had just been murdered. You disappear after the first intermission. I see you back here that night, looking like a wild man, and you tell me you destroyed a telephone booth in Troy in your impotent fuckin’ rage for your children’s death, not to mention the ton of guilt for leaving them as babies thirty years ago. You told me you were arrested for the phone booth. Naturally, curious officer of the law that I am, I check out the arrest data with my opposite number in Troy and your name, Catherine’s, and Rintrona’s show up. Tell me something, you motherfucker, do I sound like I’m trying to hide something? Several days later in the dark I do what I do, which you wanted done, you summoned me there, let’s not bullshit ourselves, you wanted him dead, El, in the company of a third party I never saw before, his face is not that clear in that dark wasteland, but clear enough. Because when I check out the Troy Police website that night on a hunch, bingo! I recognize him. Robert Rintrona. Okay? I’ve known he was a witness for more than a year. And someone else knew about Troy—my ex-assistant chief who reviewed police logs from around the state. He told me with pleasure what I already knew—that the spoiled son of Silvio Conte, so forth and so on. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on. I’m telling you all of it up front and you think I’m behind the attempt on his life? I wait a whole fuckin’ year to eliminate a threat of that magnitude? Use your fuckin’ head, Professor. Use your fuckin’ head because you’re so smart.”

  “You came here armed.”

  “Because I know the levels of rage you can go to. What you did on the train.”

  “You blew that bastard away, Antonio.”

  “Which you wanted. Stop bullshitting yourself. He was abusive to his child on the train, which is how you see yourself in a fucked-up way, as an abusive father. You abandon your babies, when they’re two and three, and eventually they die because you’re not there. I kill the animal you see as your double and you don’t have to kill yourself.”

  Conte feels the urge to leap over the table and strangle. He fires a piece of tomato pie off Robinson’s chest.

  Robinson does not react.

  “You played a key role in my father’s plot. You helped engineer a triple murder.”

  “Did you just say the words ‘my father’? He took me in when I was eight without a father. I just about lived with you and Silvio. He loved me. You know he did.”

  (Pause.)

  “He did. Silvio loved you, Robby. Maybe more than me.”

  “And I agreed to help him take down all that Mafia scum because he gave me life. Where were you? When we did it? When I did the right thing because the Barbones were about to destroy our father? Where the fuck were you, the belove
d biological son?”

  (With averted eyes:)

  “In Austria. Taking in the Salzburg Festival.”

  “You fuckin’ opera queen.”

  “You’re not one too?” (They almost smile.)

  “Austria, on your father’s money. All that boring Mozart. Who bought this house for you when you abandoned the West Coast, broke? Daddy. Who remodels it? Daddy. The son who gives him such a hard time, but thanks to Daddy you live in a small jewel, the only bungalow on Mary Street. Now with the inheritance you’re free to pursue your literary proclivities. The White Whale. The Scarlet Cunt. That faggot in disguise, Homo Hemingway. I did murder so you could be spared our bloody life, is how Silvio and I thought of it. So you could be spared for literature. Literature. The word makes me puke. You think I was behind the attempt on Rintrona today?”

  Conte pauses.

  “Not really.”

  “What does ‘not really’ mean? What do you mean by ‘really’? That the jury in your head is still out?”

  “No. The jury is not out.”

  “Why not?”

  Conte pauses.

  “You never killed anybody. Until that night. For once in your life—for once you went against yourself to do violence—on behalf of our father. Our father.”

  “El, this is getting too hard for me.”

  “If not you, Robbie—”

  “If?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Do I, El?”

  At the door, Robinson says, “Everything I told you about Homeland Security?”

  “Total bullshit, I gather?”

  “Every word—totally true.”

  “Including your speculations?”

  “Don’t go to the mosque on Sunday, El. Uh, El, may I take a slice of the tomato pie with me?”

  Conte nods with a small smile. Robinson leaves. Conte collapses on the couch. An ashen Catherine Cruz emerges from the spare room. She stands before him in cold fury:

  “Eliot. Do you know who I am? Don’t respond. I’ll tell you when you may. I am an officer of the law who you just made a witness to my chief’s confession to several murders. You were an active accomplice. You summoned Antonio Robinson to do murder. Now I either go to the D.A. or I swim in this sewer with you. You wanted me here to hear it all. Why? Do not respond. I’m not finished. Not because you believed you needed an armed guard in case Antonio went off the deep end. The gentlest man you’ve ever known, you always say. Who nevertheless did murder. A pussy, you said. Who did murder. He’s sweet, we both said. For what possible reason did you want me here? To make me an accessory after the fact? I’m finished.”

  Conte rises to embrace her. She backs away. She says, “Answer me.”

  (Very long pause.)

  “So you could know exactly who you were living with.”

  She says nothing.

  “Are you leaving me, Catherine?”

  She says nothing.

  “Catherine. Have you stopped loving me?”

  Looking the saddest he’s ever seen her look, she says, “How could I ever do that?”

  “Will you go to the D.A.? I think you have to.”

  “How could I ever do that? Explain to me, Eliot, how I could ever do that.”

  He moves to her. She steps back.

  “I owe you the truth, Catherine. Antonio was wrong about my motive for bringing the hit man to his execution.”

  “You mean Antonio’s hot air that you needed to have the abusive father–hit man killed because he was your so-called double? You deliver him to his death and somehow lose your guilt for leaving your babies?”

  “Yes. Bullshit.”

  “But in your mind your kids would be alive today if only—”

  “Yes.”

  “We both failed our kids, Eliot. You’ll never escape the thought that if you only had stayed.”

  “You write big checks for Miranda.”

  “I do.”

  “Guilt checks?”

  “Of course, Eliot.”

  “It helps?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Nothing to be done, Catherine?”

  “Try to live now.”

  “Are we?”

  “Barely. Barely. I’m committed to you no matter what you did. Level with me.”

  “I did it for Antonio.”

  “Who meant more to you than even your own father.”

  “The hitter knew of Antonio’s role in the triple hit.”

  “Which is why you wanted him dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Loyalty to Antonio trumped thou shalt not kill.”

  “Yes.”

  “Loyalty trumps everything? Your only moral principle?”

  “Definitely.”

  “You have a Mafia mentality, Eliot.”

  “You just told me, didn’t you, you wouldn’t go to the D.A. in spite of what you know? You, an officer of the law, no less.”

  “Want me to say I also have a Mafia mentality?”

  “I want you to say we’re in this together.”

  “Eliot, we’re in the pitch dark together.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Face to face, still, in the front room.

  Conte moves to embrace her. She again backs away.

  He says, “Where are we, really?”

  No response.

  “I need to talk with Mirko’s father.”

  No response.

  “I need to go now.”

  She turns her back—walks to the window—stares out at the storm. By morning, no vehicles will move for three days, the employees of the supermarkets will stay home, and the few remaining Mom-and-Pop corner grocery stores will do booming business for the first time in a long time, and likely for the last.

  He leaves in a heavy leather jacket and scarf. No hat. (Conte never wears a hat.) Steps west on Mary, destination 608 Nichols Street—glancing down his driveway with some relief. Good. He’d parked behind her. No way out unless she walks or takes a cab. Where could she possibly go, anyway, whose only social companions were also his? Kyle Torvald and Mark Martello, every two or three weeks for dinner. Antonio and Millicent Robinson, just once in the six months since she’d moved to Utica, as Robinson and Eliot drifted apart.

  Huddled into himself—eyes downcast and shoulders hunched up against the wind and cold—walking west, always west on Mary, he reaches Bacon, first of the three cross streets he must cross—then Milgate, then Jefferson—dropped deep inside himself now as the surging music in his head almost perfectly obliterates matters of murder—it was glorious, the concert in Berlin he and Catherine and Bobby and Maureen Rintrona had taken in, in Troy, in high-definition telecast, a month ago—all that vocal opulence again flooding Conte’s head as he passes the Nichols cross street where he must turn right toward Bleecker—thinking of the gift he’ll spring on her—first-class airline tickets and choice seats at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, where the concert will be reprised. Would she go now? Will she leave him now? She said she wouldn’t, but if she should leave? She said she … but if she does? What then? What does he do about it? The same thing he did about his children’s murders. Nothing. On his gravestone: Eliot the Impotent. Herein lies a man who could not act when it truly mattered.

  Lost in the narrow space of himself and long past Nichols when the illuminated tower of Saint Agnes breaks through his reverie and snaps him back into the physical world—bootless shoes in seven inches of heavy, wet snow—hatless head and shoulders wearing a thick white cape—Conte backtracking quickly now toward Nichols when a darkened figure of substantial size comes running hard straight at him. Conte gives no ground. The man abruptly swerves, almost falling, into the front yard of an ill-maintained two-family house. The man drops his pants. The man squats. The man commences to defecate massively—pants down at his ankles still—squatting still—grunting and moaning and shitting. Conte roars “not in my neighborhood.” And in a sudden burst he’s upon him and flipping him over and mashing the man’s face into th
e steaming heap with his knees ground into the man’s upper back—220 pounds of Conte—Conte whispering, “In my neighborhood?” The man inhaling shit and snow. The man suffocating. Conte rises. The man gagging, coughing, vomiting. Without daring to look up at his assailant, the man says, “Why?” Conte whispers, “This is East Utica.” Pulls off the man’s pants, walks to the sewer at the corner of Mary and Nichols, stuffs them in. The bare-assed man races off bare-assed into the night.

  Two more minutes to the Ivanovic house. He’s on his way—having acted when it truly did not matter.

  608 Nichols: imitation Victorian elegance, common on the East Side of town. Narrow across the front, very deep and high, with a full-windowed attic lending it the aspect of a stately three-storey structure. (Worth about thirty-five grand in a buyer’s market.) Recently painted dead white, Conte sees it shimmer through the screen of the wind-slanted snow like a haunted house in a grade-B Hollywood horror film. All windows are dark except one on the first floor, where Novak Ivanovic has been standing for an hour—peering intently out from behind barely parted heavy drapes, awaiting Conte’s arrival. What he sees ascending the steps, into the pool of uncertain light cast by the flickering porch fixture, is a big man with a reassuring demeanor. (Ivanovic needs reassurance.) The big man slicks off the snow from his head. This big man, thinks Ivanovic, this very picture of professorial composure, who presses the nonfunctional doorbell—this must be Eliot Conte.

  They sit in the parlor, as it is called in East Utica, on chairs of hostile design—no arms, ass-bruising seats. Ivanovic has convinced a reluctant Conte to remove his drenched shoes and socks and to accept a pair of his heavy woolens. Conte’s shoes amaze Ivanovic. (Ivanovic knows shoes.) Never has he seen anything like them in Utica or Syracuse stores. He’s curious where they can be found, but suppresses the urge to ask and feels deeply ashamed to have let such thoughts into his mind in the context of his family crisis. (Beautiful, these Bruno Magli shoes.) Conte accepts a towel for his soaked head. Ivanovic will speak when he’s finished toweling off. Conte drops the towel to the floor. Ivanovic opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.