by C I Dennis
“Help me out here,” I said to Chan. I decided that we would to go back to my mother’s house. I had him on a lead, but instead of following me, he sat on the sidewalk, not budging. “What?” I stopped, and he looked up at me.
Cold.
I turned in the direction of Carmela Tomaselli’s apartment. It was less than a block away. Getting warmer, he said.
*
Donna Tomaselli intercepted me in the driveway of Carmela’s house. She had just come out the front door, dressed in an all-black outfit except for a huge grey shawl that looked like something I might have made in my knitting days when I didn’t know how to stop. Baby blankets had become throws, throws had expanded into afghans, and afghans had ended up as bed covers for a California king. My physical therapist had encouraged the hobby to develop my dexterity, but I didn’t really have the knack for it, and everything came out super-sized.
“She’s as drunk as a poet on payday,” Mrs. T said. “I wouldn’t bother going in.”
“You spoke with her?”
“I dropped off a casserole,” she said. “She’s about five minutes away from passing out.”
“What happened to the lady cop?”
“She left right after I came. She didn’t learn anything from Carmela. Oh, Vinny, I’m so worried. This isn’t good for Grace, is it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That makes me even more worried,” she said.
“Do you think that Matty—”
“Was the suicide type? You never know, do you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t like him much. Not a shred of manners. But he loved Carmela, and he was nice to Grace. He was the one who went to the college to pick up the dog.”
“I’m going inside,” I said. “I won’t be long. I can walk you home afterward.”
“No, I’ll just run along, don’t you worry, Vinny. Maybe she’ll level with you now.”
“What do you mean?”
“My daughter knows more about things than she says. She’s been that way since she was a little girl. Ask her about Grace. I’ll bet she knows where she is.”
*
“You want a bite of this?” Carmela asked me. Mrs. T was right—her daughter was already slurring her words at 12:30 in the afternoon. “American Chop Suey. Tastes like candle wax. My mom never could cook for shit.”
“No thanks,” I said. I had shown myself to a chair at a kitchen table that was littered with unwashed breakfast dishes, bills, a scattering of mini-vodka nips, an open bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream, and a coffee mug that smelled more like liquor than caffeine.
“Drink?” she asked. “I’m way ahead of you.”
“I’m sorry about Matty,” I said.
“Only the good die young, right Vin?” she said. “Us old fucks, we live forever. ‘Cept maybe you, since you got yourself shot.”
“Carmela, do you know where Grace is? It’s important.”
“Why? Why is Grace so goddamn important?” She was standing across the kitchen from me, wearing white jeans with a loose purple top. She shifted from foot to foot, like an elm swaying in the wind. “Why can’t you find her? You’re the big detective.”
“I did,” I said. “She was at the house of a man named Clement Goody. He’s one of those TV preachers. He’s rich, and he has a place up in Johnson.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Grace spent two weeks at his house. Somebody was threatening her life.”
“So?”
I eyed the Bailey’s bottle and decided that I could use a small drink. Chan was curled up outside on the front step, it was a Sunday, and I hadn’t had five minutes to relax since I’d touched down at the airport.
“Pour me a sip of that,” I said.
Carmela picked up the bottle, got a fresh mug from an overhead cabinet, and filled it to the top with the booze. “You want some coffee in it?”
“Too late.”
She put the cup down in front of me and sat down. “So you found her, but you don’t know where she is?”
“She took off again. She may have left the country.”
Her expression changed like she’d been slapped. “Fucking weasel.”
“What?”
“He took his passport with him,” she said. She refilled her own mug, spilling some because her hand was shaking. She drank half of it. “Yesterday morning. Him and I were supposed to go up to Williston to shop. But Matty said no, he had to go check out a car that he wanted to buy. He said he’d be gone all day, back late, and then I saw him get his passport out of the drawer. I didn’t ask why. Oh shit, Vinny, I’m such a goddamned fool—”
She broke down, looking all of her years and then some. I tried to put an arm around her, but she shrugged it off. She sobbed into a paper napkin while I stared into my mug, filled with the sweet, creamy drink that I no longer wanted.
“So they were lovers?”
Carmela’s eyes were glazed over, but they still had some fire. “Bitch.”
“Why would Matty kill himself?”
Carmela stood up from the table. She raised her hand in the air with one finger extended like she was about to make an important point. Instead, she collapsed on the floor. I gathered her up and carried her to the nearest bedroom. She was lighter than I thought she might be.
“Didn’t,” she said, slurring the word as we proceeded down the hall. “Cops got it wrong.”
“Did he bow hunt?”
“Fucking cops,” she said. I lay her down on a blue polyester duvet that covered the mattress of a cast iron bed. “Asked me the same thing. You’re all the same.”
“Did he hunt?”
“Matty took the spiders outside,” she said. Her head lolled back on a pillow, and she gave me a drunken grin. “Wouldn’t even squash a daddy longlegs.”
I was going to ask her more questions, but she grabbed my neck as I tried to release her, and she wouldn’t let go.
“Vince,” she said, momentarily regaining her focus. Our eyes were inches apart, close enough for the scent of the liquor to be overpowering. “I loved him, you know? I loved Matty, and he loved me back. All of this is my fault. Me. I did this.”
“How?”
“Because I sold her,” she said, and she passed out cold.
*
Sold her? What the hell did that mean? This was the 21st century, and you didn’t sell women, especially not a feisty drama major who packed a .44 magnum. Carmela must have confused things in her alcoholic stupor. I would have considered staying around until she sobered up, but I doubted that she would explain anything further unless she got drunk again, and once was enough for today.
Carmela’s boozy breath and foul mouth made me want to go back to my mother’s and take another shower. The four blocks between our houses wasn’t enough distance for me to process what I had heard, so I continued walking Chan through the streets of my old neighborhood. I showed him some of the highlights, like Marie Rocchio’s second-floor walk-up, where she and I would frolic on Saturday afternoons while her parents worked and her brothers were away at hockey games. I had turned sixteen that winter and played hockey too, but I’d lost interest in team sports after Marie had introduced me to the joys of one-on-one competition. She even let me win sometimes.
The house across the street from hers belonged to Gary Petrullo, a mean-tempered, overweight kid who had reached puberty before the rest of us and could beat up anyone in our grade. He’d bloodied my nose out behind the school, and the nuns had disciplined us both—me because I wouldn’t rat him out, fearing certain death if I did, and Gary, because in parochial school the kids like him were presumed guilty not innocent. I’d ultimately had my revenge when I had busted him twice for DUI during my year as a Barre cop. He sat on the stoop of his house, fatter than ever, dressed in a yellow-and-black striped rugby shirt that made him look like a morbidly obese honeybee.
“Yo, Vinny,” he said, surprising me, as we hadn’t spoken in three decades. “Ya seen her?”<
br />
“Seen who?” I wasn’t about to be drawn into a conversation with Petrullo. Carmela was a social drinker compared to him.
“The girl,” he said. “Carmela’s girl. Word is you’re lookin’ for her.”
“That’s right.”
“I seen her,” he said. “And hey, I’d fuck her.”
“That’s helpful to know, Gary.”
“You would too, right?”
“I stick with my own age group.”
“You got about as much chance as me, Vin,” he said. “She’s a limousine girl. Probably doesn’t go for us big and tall guys anyway.”
“What do you mean by limousine girl?”
“They pick her up at her mother’s,” Petrullo said. “Late at night, when nobody’s outside except me. I can’t sleep no more. I walk around until I get tired.”
“Guilty conscience?”
“Vaffanculo, Tanzi,” he said, spreading his palms. When you cuss somebody out in Italian American slang you have to use your hands or it doesn’t count.
“Who picks her up?”
“A limo, like I said. So Vinny, what’s with the limp? You walk like a cripple. And you know what? I could still whip your ass.”
“Maybe you could,” I said, “but you’ll still be ugly.”
Gary Petrullo laughed. Here we were, hurling schoolyard insults at each other, and the absurdity of it must have struck him. “Not as ugly as Fish,” he said. “That guy’s fuckin’ ugly. What do the kids call it now? Fugly.”
“Fish Falzarano?”
“He drives the limousine, you dumb shit,” Petrullo said. “Are you listening to me?”
Yes, I was listening. And I had been thinking about taking a swing at my former playground nemesis, but not anymore, because he had just handed me a big fat gift: according to the neighborhood insomniac, Grace Hebert had been getting late-night rides in a limo driven by Fish Falzarano. Grace, who had been “sold” by her mother. I was never that good at geometry, but I can draw a triangle: Sex, Money, and Trouble.
My plans for the afternoon began to fall into place. I would return to my mother’s and call the airline, and Barbara, because I was getting the feeling that this was going somewhere. After that I would make an appearance at the Driscoll residence out on Shelburne Point. Perhaps somebody there could explain why a twenty-one-year-old woman was being squired around in the wee hours by Angus Driscoll’s chauffeur.
*
“Stay as long you need,” Barbara said. “You’re doing the right thing. It’s your nature.”
“You’re being passive aggressive,” I said. “It’s your nature.”
The phone went quiet, and I wondered if the call had been dropped, or if I’d been hung up on. The five-second silence was more than enough time for me to realize what a lousy thing that was to say.
“Barbara? Are you still there?”
“I’m still here,” she said.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes you did,” she said. “I know you’re still angry.”
Damn. How had I so easily slipped into the post-break-up blame game? Didn’t being divorced mean that you no longer had to dissect everything under a microscope?
Chan looked up from his position at the foot of my father’s lounge chair: Dig yourself out of that one.
“I’m not angry, Barbara,” I said. “Really. I wish you well. All the best.”
“Vince. You sound like a Hallmark card.”
“You and my dog,” I said. “I’m outnumbered.”
“Your dog?”
“I—have a dog now.”
“Really? Oh my god, Royal will love this!”
“I may not be able to keep him,” I said. “He belongs to the girl I’m looking for. Everything is kind of in flux.”
“Oh, please bring him home,” Barbara said. “Please. We need a dog.”
“We?”
Another conversational hole opened, and you could have driven a truck through it.
“I want a second chance,” she said.
“You’ve already had several.”
“I know,” she said. “I want another one.”
“What about your—other relationship?”
“A huge mistake. I know I’ve hurt you. But I miss our family. I can barely manage this alone.”
There were things that I missed about it too, but this was dangerous ground. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Royal wants to say hello.” I heard her talking to our son in the background. She put the phone to his mouth, and he immediately began to howl. “He’s tired,” she said. “Sorry.”
“Thank you for taking care of him,” I said. “I feel bad about not being there.”
“Mrs. Tomaselli called me last night. She explained what you’re doing for her. Don’t worry about anything here, OK? You do what you need to do.”
“It’s going to be a while.”
“You relax, sweetie. Take care of yourself. We’ll talk about this when you’re home.”
Home? Barbara and I had been living apart for over a year. Her home was hers, and mine was mine. I had spent a lot of time drawing the boundaries, respecting them, not overstepping, and even though I didn’t have a new relationship of my own, I was reaping the benefits of my newfound privacy. Our marriage had foundered on the rocks of some very bad decisions on both our parts. A second chance sounded like doubling down on a losing bet.
“OK,” I said. A one-word answer. The less said the better.
*
Shelburne Point is some of the most exclusive acreage in the state of Vermont. But it isn’t dotted with pseudo-castles, and the roads aren’t crowded with Teslas and Lamborghinis like you would see in Palm Beach or Naples. Vermont money isn’t about the show. It’s much older money, carefully camouflaged behind flannel shirts, worn-out chinos, unassuming houses, and beater cars like Trish Lussen’s Saab, which was parked in the driveway of Angus Driscoll’s relatively modest, gambrel-roofed house when I pulled in. The place was as perfectly kept as his daughter’s farm, and what it might have lacked in architectural grandeur was made up for by the stunning views across Lake Champlain to the sawtooth profile of the Adirondack Mountains.
The driveway continued beyond where I had parked, toward several other houses: a compound, as I had gathered from the real estate records and satellite maps that I’d researched before the trip up from Barre. I knew that the gambrel was where Driscoll lived, and the nose of his Town Car protruded from an adjacent garage bay, confirming what I had learned.
Fish Falzarano emerged from the front door of the house as I approached, waving his arms back and forth in front of him like I was a runaway train. “You can’t come in here, Tanzi,” he said. “Private property.”
“Nice to see you, Fish,” I said as I got out of the car. “I heard about your military service. Very impressive.”
“No thanks to you.” He wore a black turtleneck that stretched over his muscles. Gary Petrullo might be too fat to whip my ass, but Fish looked like he could do it without breaking a sweat.
“Great gig you have here,” I said. “You probably make three times what I did as a cop.”
“It’s none of your damn business, is it?”
“Plus the benefits,” I said. “Medical, dental, retirement plan? I’m sure Angus sees to all that.”
“Why don’t you get the fuck outta here? I heard about you taking a slug, Tanzi. I don’t want to fuck you up any worse than you already are.” His too-small nose began to twitch like he was going to sneeze.
“And there’s the girl,” I said. “You pick her up in the limo late at night, you pimp her out—unless you wanted some for yourself. All part of the benefits package, right?”
“I have no idea who—”
“Yes you do, Fish.”
“Hey—”
“I want to know where she is, that’s all,” I said, cutting him off. “Not my concern if you were screwing her.”
“No way would I touch her. I never lai
d a hand on her. I’d be…” He stopped mid-sentence, catching himself.
“You’d be what?”
The nose was twitching uncontrollably now, but he wasn’t going to say anything more.
“Where is she?” I said. “I know that you know.”
Fish’s face gave away his next move. He took a roundhouse swing at me, but I sidestepped him and he lurched past. He quickly recovered his balance and I was ready, but both of us froze when Angus Driscoll discharged a shotgun into the air from the porch of his house.
“There’s one more shell in the chamber,” Driscoll said. “On your way, Mr. Tanzi.”
The shotgun was an over-under with a polished walnut stock and lots of silver filigree. A rich man’s sporting weapon. Probably a Purdey, which would cost as much as my house. I got back into the car, turned the ignition key, and drove off.
Chan looked up from the back. That was productive.
“Whose side are you on?”
Grace’s side.
“Me too, goddamn it,” I said. “It’s my style, and it doesn’t always work, OK? But I didn’t come away empty-handed.”
How so?
“Falzarano. He was afraid of saying the wrong thing. He’s not the pimp.”
Then who is?
“Her mother,” I said. “Fish is just transportation. And Angus Driscoll is the john.”
*
Maybe I should have gone to mass. Light a candle for Grace Hebert: drama major, porn model, junkie, mistress, white slave, and now fugitive. If Grace had left the country, I wouldn’t blame her. Everything that I had learned about her pointed to misery.
Instead of going to church, I was on Route 15 passing by the stubbled remains of freshly harvested cornfields on the way to Johnson and thinking about my ex-wife and baby son. Being separated from Barbara was not a problem, but being apart from Royal was like going cold turkey on something that you not only needed and depended on, but that was good for you. When I was inside Royal’s orbit, feeding him, changing his diaper, putting him down for a nap, or just fooling around together on the floor, I felt like a better person. My ailments and worries went away. I missed that feeling, and I couldn’t wait to get back to it.