Hipster Death Rattle

by Richie Narvaez

  Bobbert’s wedding anniversary was coming up. August 20. It was circled in red on the calendar. He had planned to get Joanne something nice.

  “The only person who could have told them was you—because there’s nothing private in this office. You can hear everything that goes on in the next room and vice versa.”

  “Good. That’s very good,” Bobbert said.

  “Then your eyes lit up when Gabby said she had them with her at the hospital, and you really wanted to hold on to them for me.”

  “I knew I went too far with that. I was an idiot.”

  “I have to know,” Tony said, “how involved are you?”

  Bobbert finally looked at Tony. He hadn’t gone home the night before, had stayed in the office and slept on the floor. He’d done it before, but he knew he must have looked horrible, unshaven. He didn’t remember the last time he had eaten.

  “It’s complicated. It’s…it’s like this. We’re a very small paper. We’re always on the edge of closing. Remember when we spent all the money we put into our website, hoping to turn out a web version. And then no one went there.”

  “Yeah. Three or four years ago.”

  “Right. That was my own money. What little savings I had. We were living on borrowed time since then. And then Patrick came to me with a story idea. The woman next door to him was being harassed. Someone was sneaking in and putting in vermin. We could record it, Patrick said. We could put it on the website and expose them. Make the big time, you know?”

  “Okay.”

  “I had another idea, what I thought was a better idea. It was a cinch the video would expose Litvinchouk and Tomasello for some wrongdoing. They owned the building, and they’d had a reputation for harassment in the past. But, here’s the thing: they also happen to be one of our biggest advertisers. They advertise under their own names, and a couple of other real estate offices they own. Ninety percent of our classified ads, that’s them. If we exposed them, we’d be dead. I would be dead.”

  Tony took out his notebook, then thought better of it and began to put it away.

  “No, go ahead. Can’t help yourself now, huh?” Bobbert said. “I thought you hated being a reporter. Or pretending to be a reporter.”

  Tony ignored him and kept on. “What did you decide to do?”

  “Well, one night, Patrick and his girlfriend and I were here, and we were talking, had a few beers, you know. Well, they drank, not me. So really I had no excuse. But the idea came up that we could just go directly to Litvinchouk and Tomasello for the money. I don’t think any of us used the word ‘blackmail,’ but that’s what it was. That’s what it was.”

  “This is incredible, Bobbert. Why the risk?”

  “The money, Tony, the money. The messed up things is it worked. They did the legwork, and I got a little bit from Patrick each month. They got the bigger share, of course. That was only right. And he and Kirsten made sure to keep my name out of it. Litvinchouk and Tomasello didn’t know I was involved at all.”

  “Funny about Patrick and Kirsten. I never would have thought they were the type for crime. Certainly not you either.”

  “Hah. Types. They don’t mean anything. Anyone can come to a point where they lie or steal or kill. Anyone.”

  Tony leaned closer to him. “Bobbert, I have to know: Did you have anything to do with Rosa Irizarry’s disappearance?”

  Bobbert leaned back. He shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. No. I have no idea what happened there. I swear to god.”

  “What about Patrick then? When he got slashed to death, do you think that Litvinchouk or the Tomasellos could somehow be responsible? Maybe they got tired of the blackmail.”

  “Wow, that’s quite a theory. But I can see it maybe would explain, but no, that’s not Litvinchouk’s or the Tomasellos’ style, I don’t think. I mean, Jackie is a big mouth, and Frank Jr. is a brute, but slashing someone in the street, no, that was just ‘Wrong street, wrong time.’ Patrick’s bad luck. Supremely bad luck.”

  “It would have to be.” Tony got up. “I’m going to have to talk to Kirsten. I need to get her side of the story. What are you going to do?”

  “I wish I could print the story you’re going to write. You got your big story finally, the one that can get you back in, the one you couldn’t even admit to yourself you wanted.”

  Bobbert watched Tony look down at his sneakers. Bobbert had never been so direct with him, but the time for subtlety was gone.

  “You’re probably right, that I wished for it, and I kept that to myself. To tell you the truth, at this moment, I don’t know if that’s what I want anymore.”

  “Are you going to write about me?”

  “No.” Then after a pause he amended that, like a typical reporter. “Not if I don’t need to.”

  Bobbert played with his goatee. It was something his wife said he did when he was nervous. “You know what I’m thinking? I have my house, right? It was my father’s. Did you know that? Yeah, I took over the property. But I got an over-large mortgage during the housing crisis. It’s been killing me. I’ve been foreclosed. Everything’s falling apart at once. That’s what I’m thinking about. But more than that: What will happen to my family? Where will they go?”

  “Tell Joanne I’m sorry.”

  “She knows. She knows.”

  After Tony left, the office went quiet. Bobbert went back to staring at the screen. He kept wondering what to write after “My sweetest Joanne…”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Tony walked up to Kirsten’s apartment building just as someone was coming out. Tony held the door, then went in, hopping up the stairs. The stairwell smelled like a millennium’s worth of meatloaf. He knocked. He heard a shower running. He knocked louder and the shower stopped. Footsteps and then the click of the peephole.

  Long pause. The door was pulled open slowly.

  “Tony! Hey!” Kirsten said. Her smile was all sunbeams and rainbows. “Nice to see you.”

  Her hair was in a towel. She wore an oversized terrycloth robe and, Tony quickly realized, nothing on underneath. He tried not to stare. Her sleeves were rolled up partially, showing her still-wet arms and her tattoos—on the right forearm Johnny Cash sticking up his middle finger, and on the left, the entire text of something. A poem. Tony could just make out the title. “Invictus.” She walked away from the half-open door.

  “I need to ask you some questions,” Tony said, pushing the door completely open. The apartment smelled of stale cigarette smoke and mango shampoo. The walls were lined with photographs of one woman praying after another. On one side of the room were two racks holding a collection of flashy looking guitars. On the other side, a door was open, revealing an unoccupied, unmade bed.

  “But I have to ask about those first,” said Tony, pointing to the beards.

  “Gunnar can’t grow facial hair, so.”

  “Oh.”

  “So what do you really want to ask me about?” Kirsten said, hands crossed over her chest.

  “I need to talk to you about your old neighbor, Rosa Irizarry,” he said, taking out his old tape recorder. “I need to know what happened to her.”

  “Come into the kitchen,” she said. “I don’t like to smoke in the living room.” His instinct told him not to go deeper into the apartment, but she was moving and he had to follow her.

  “Maybe I should wait for you to get dressed, and we can meet outside,” he said.

  “Why do that, silly man? It’s nice and quiet in here.”

  She went into a small, eat-in kitchen. A super-sized blender sat on the counter, as well as a juice machine that looked new and unused, as most juice machines do. She sat behind a kitchen table that almost filled up the kitchen. The table looked new, as did the four elegant, high-backed chairs squeezed into the space around it. She faced him, with the window behind her. Tony molded himself into the chair across from her. There wasn’t much room between the chair and the wall behind him. He put his messenger bag on the floor—his spare set of péta
nque balls in it clacked against the tile. He put his mini-cassette recorder on the table and switched it on.

  “Oh c’mon, Tony, what is this?” she said. She had a coy, flirtatious smile on her face. “God, how old is that thing?”

  “My other one got…broken. This is one I still had at home. Kirsten, listen, I’ve already talked to Bobbert.”

  She stopped smiling then. “I’m not talking into that,” she said, lighting up a cigarette.

  “Fine.” Tony switched it off. He was trying to get a sense of what she was thinking. Her bulgy eyes gave away nothing.

  “All right. I’ll tell you from the start,” she said, moving her gaze from his face to some area above his head. She inhaled deeply then exhaled. Then she waved the smoke away from Tony’s face. “Sorry,” she said. “From the start. So.

  “So. We were all great neighbors with Rosa at first. I mean, she could be very snippy sometimes when we had a party and the music was too loud or because we left the garbage in the hallway. Things like that. Anyway. Patrick said she reminded him of his grandmother. Because they were both old and they were both women, I guess. I never met his grandmother. Anyway. We were all good friends on the third floor.

  “Then she came to us one night, asking us if we cleaned our house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said. If we cleaned our house. If we were clean. Well, this pissed me off to no end, and it looked like we were going to fight again, but then she started crying, saying there were roaches in her house and that she never had roaches. We consoled her, but she swore someone had put them there. And then there were the mice. Two or three little brown things. The super, by the way, was a drunk bastard. You couldn’t ask him to unclog a toilet or fix a fucking lock. He did nothing. So she asked Patrick to kill the mice, but he was a chicken.

  “But I grew up in a house in PA that was practically a barn. So I was used to taking care of them and I knew what to do. I hooked up a bucket of water and some peanut butter, a tin can, and some rope. You thread the rope through the can, like a telephone, right? Then little Mickey comes running up for his snack, his weight makes the can jingle, which knocks the mouse off the rope and into the pool. Next morning, you have mice tea.”

  Tony winced, but Kirsten looked very proud of her technique. “And then the next day she got three more mice. So we knew something was up. Patrick and I thought this definitely looked suspicious. So he went to Bobbert with the story idea for your paper. He was into it, so with a little cash we got some mini-webcams and set them up in her apartment and, you know, we saw what we saw.” She blew smoke out of the side of her mouth.

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, we had the super doing dirty work, and we had that setting the fire with one of the Tomasellos, the chubby one—”

  “Frank Jr.”

  “Yeah. That’s him. I don’t know who suggested it first, but one of us said no one would care about a story in the shitty little Sentinel, but we could threaten to take the recordings to someone, and with that threat, maybe it could work out in a good way for all of us: me, Patrick, and Bobbert. Tell me, Tony, what are you going to do with this information? So, we got a little money from the real estate bastards, so what. These people make millions. We weren’t asking for much.”

  “To be honest, I don’t care about the blackmail. Developers deserve whatever they get,” Tony said. “I know the stuff you wanted from Patrick’s apartment was the flash drives. Maybe you wanted them all for yourself, so you could go on blackmailing them. Like I said, I don’t care. What I want to know is what happened to Rosa. I think you know. Tell me what happened. Tell me how she disappeared.”

  Kirsten reached for another cigarette. Her phone dinged and she quickly tapped it off. “Yeah, sure. I guess it’s full confession time, right? ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned?’”

  She laughed, a low, throaty laugh. Tony nodded. Instead of looking over his head, Kirsten kept her eyes right on him.

  “It was late August and hot as hell, I remember. Our AC wasn’t working and we were practically naked in the apartment, getting on each other’s nerves with the heat. We hear this knock on the door, and it’s Rosa, complaining that her AC wasn’t working right, and this wasn’t harassment, the old lady just didn’t know how to use her AC right. We were tired and cranky, and in no mood to go over to her place, it still stank like smoke and was even hotter than ours, so we started arguing on the landing like we did sometimes. And I guess—I guess Patrick snapped…”

  “Patrick? What did he do?”

  “Oh, Tony, it was horrible.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He went and hit her, right in the face. Not a punch, more like a slap, I guess.”

  “And she didn’t do anything to provoke this?”

  “What? No.”

  “Did she do anything after?”

  “No, he hit her and she was right near the stairs at that point, and she fell down and—that was it, her neck was broken. I was horrified.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “Well, she had toppled down to the bottom of the stairs,” she said. “We were lucky no one came out. Downstairs there was a classical musician who was in his own world, and next to her was some Spanish lady I never saw much of.”

  “What did you do then—with Rosa?”

  She said, “Sorry. This is ugly.” But when she said it she didn’t seem disgusted. She could have been talking about wallpaper. “We took her to my car and then drove to the little area of water above Greenpoint, you know, between Greenpoint and Queens.”

  “Newtown Creek.”

  “Is that what it’s called? Yeah, there. We dropped her in.”

  “But how did you carry her outside without anyone seeing?”

  “Oh. Well, we waited until really late at night. And we had her in Patrick’s suitcase.”

  “Suitcase?”

  “Yeah, a gift from his parents. Was supposed to be an early honeymoon present. Like that was going to happen.”

  “Kirsten. Why not just tell the cops it was an accident?”

  “We didn’t think, I guess. You know, this is why we broke up. I was scared of him after that. I knew what he was capable of. I couldn’t love him anymore. So I had to ditch. He kept calling me and coming around my new place and posting stuff on Facebook. Finally, I blocked him. And I—I hooked up with Gunnar because I was afraid. I needed protection.”

  “You know, Patrick was writing a story—or at least he said he was. He was asking about Rosa last month.”

  “That’s guilt. Straight-up guilt. He never got over it. I suppose he could have been trying to see if the police knew anything, but I think he just wanted to seem like he was doing something—for himself, you know, to pretend he was a good person.”

  “But you had these videos and you did what you did and you still were blackmailing the Tomasellos?”

  “Oh yeah, we had them by the balls. You know, we also bugged the super’s apartment. It was easy to get in there because he was drunk all the time on the stoop or in the cellar and he left his door open. We heard him talking about the fire with that big, super-tanned lady.”

  “Jackie Tomasello.”

  “Yeah, her. That was the real clincher.”

  “I’ve seen the videos but I haven’t heard the audio recording.”

  “I have it. That was the deal when Patrick and I broke up. Insurance. He kept some parts and I kept the others. It was something we were always going to share between us, like a bond.” She crushed out a cigarette and instantly took out and lit another one. “Hey, listen, did you want a beer? It’s happy hour somewhere in the world.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I think I’m going to have one, if you don’t mind?”

  When she got up, Tony could see the sun blazing off the windows of the buildings across the street. Kirsten went to the fridge, got a beer, popped it open, and sat back down.

  “This happened on Saturday night,” Tony sa
id. “The next day Rosa got some phone calls.”

  “Yeah. A few. Patrick had her phone. He texted back. We got rid of the phone, too.”

  They sat there in silence as she drank. It was cool in the apartment, and the hum of the AC covered the silence between them.

  Finally, Kirsten said, “So, are you going to tell the cops what I told you?”

  “I have to. They have to search for Rosa.”

  “Oh, her body’s long gone.” Her pale face was flushed. Her voice was getting louder for some reason. “Out into the Atlantic. And I mean, what’s done is done. And Patrick—well, in a way he’s paid for what he did. Somebody did him in. It’s karma, don’t you think?”

  “I wanted to ask about that, too,” Tony said. Kirsten was looking behind him. He turned—and a huge machete was headed straight for his head.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  It was Gunnar, the bouncing boyfriend. He must have been in the shower, too. He was naked from the waist up, still wet. And his face was as smooth as a baby’s.

  Tony would have kicked himself in the ass, but he was too busy folding himself forward and to the left. The big knife narrowly missed his head, although the meaty fist holding it cuffed him in the ear. With his legs, he shifted his chair back and pushed the table forward—both screeched on the kitchen tiles. He rolled to the floor.

  “Get him!” Kirsten was saying. “Get that fucker.”

  When Tony had pushed the table forward, he’d squeezed Kirsten against the window in the tight space.

  Gunnar tried to reach him but caught himself on the high chair back. He swung but with his reach the machete caught in the fine new kitchen table and got stuck. Tony had an opening. He grabbed his bag and pushed past Gunnar. The bouncer tried to grab his shirt, but only succeeded in ripping a sleeve.

  In the living room, Tony grabbed one of the flashy guitars and, spinning, tried to whack Gunnar. And failed. Gunnar ducked back—but slipped to the floor. Wet feet. Tony wound up again and aimed for the beard mannequins, knocking them all off the shelves and onto the floor. Trying to get up, Gunnar yelled in pain, and not from his second stumble, “Noooo!”