The Accidental Pallbearer

by Frank Lentricchia

  CHAPTER 7

  Robinson shuts the door – Conte goes to his desk to make notes on the serial rapist story and sees immediately that it hangs on the credibility of a single point – that one of the victims actually spoke to the wife of the chief of police, in spite of Coca’s threat, and that Coca, in the act, in cold passion, told this woman in so many words that he was victimizing other wives of police officers. Conte considers three theories. The so-called victim who spoke with Millicent Robinson is Coca’s cast-aside secret lover, eager for revenge. Or Robinson has made it up because he wants Conte for some reason to inject such fear into Coca that he, Michael C, will be rendered harmless. The first theory required Conte to believe that Coca was stepping out on his wife, when all public sightings suggested that after many years of marriage Coca was still (unfortunately) besotted with Denise. The second theory required Conte to believe that Coca posed a life-altering threat to Robinson. Conte wanted to believe the first, hell hath no fuckin’ fury like a woman scorned, because it might give him a chance with Denise, were she lost in an unhappy marriage. But he could not believe it. The third theory: There’s a hidden darkness in Michael Coca and Conte’s best friend has not lied to him.

  Antonio Robinson will be at Saint Anthony for another hour and then repair to the rectory with Silvio Conte for their Sunday coffee with Father Gustavo. Eliot can count on perhaps two hours alone with Millicent Robinson. If the second theory is correct, she would need to sustain under indirect probings a believable lie.

  The Robinsons live in a freshly painted ranch-style house of the 1960s – clapboards in white, shutters in high-gloss black – on Deerfield Hill in north Utica. A hint of the Adirondacks beyond. It’s an area of well-kept and not-so-well-kept single-family dwellings, where the neighbors allow their dogs to run and shit freely; where actual deer devour gardens and shrubs and the nice people keep on planting them; where raccoons pry open tightly closed garbage bins, take up residence, and have cute families in a number of vulnerable attics in the not-so-well-maintained houses, whose clapboards at the roof line are rotted; where the Robinsons are regarded as the neighborhood’s great good fortune, a black bulwark against creeping lower-class black and Hispanic crime and falling home values because he’s the big-shot head cop and he paints his house every two years, doesn’t he? Where everyone – the comfortable and those clinging to the bottom edge of the middle class – have sweeping views of the wicked city spread out below.

  Millicent Robinson greets him at the door. Slim, lovely, with dramatic cheekbones, small breasts (big enough to fill one’s mouth) and a smile that would melt the heart of the most hardened racist. She says (but where is it, that shattering smile?), “Hello, stranger. Tony told me you’d be coming to see me today at this time.”

  Conte is tongue-tied, red-faced.

  She says, “I’ve made sandwiches in anticipation. Coffee? Tea? Or me?” She laughs the laugh of a person with a much bigger body. Deep, room-filling. “How are things down on Mary Street? The minorities having their day at last?”

  Conte replies with a hug and “Hi, Millicent. Thanks. I’ll take a sandwich and herbal tea if you have it.” He hasn’t seen her in a while. Follows her into the dining room where two places have already been set and a bag of ginger-twist tea – his favorite – already sits in an empty cup against which leans a three-by-five index card printed upon in big block letters: ELIOT. He thinks, Am I already in over my head? Am I already drowning?

  She puts on his plate a tuna salad sandwich in the Italian style – olive oil, onions, capers, spicy Sicilian olives – and pours boiling water into his cup. A half sandwich, a glass of red wine for herself. She says, “For Tony, I had to learn to cook Italian 24/7 or he wouldn’t have married me. My husband is ethnically confused. Or is the word ‘deluded’? Periodically I remind him he married a coal-black woman.” She raises her glass: “Salute! Paesan!”

  Seeing no point in small talk, he says, “Robby” – she’s never called her husband that – “told me a shocking story this morning and I wanted to get your take as I move forward.”

  “How long ago was it Tony secured that retainer for you at Hotel Utica? Eight years is it? When he became deputy chief? My, how time flies. They still send you a monthly check for your unique services?”

  “They do.”

  “You run background on their employees?”

  “I do.”

  “Nail employee thieves, that sort of thing, Eliot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tony swears by you.”

  “As I swear by him.”

  “I believe he swears by you more than he swears by me.”

  Conte croons softly and low:

  “And here’s to you Mrs. Robinson!

  Jesus loves you more than you will know,

  Wo! Wo! Wo!”

  “Why, Eliot Conte, you have a nice voice. Less white, I’d say, than those boys who made that song. I’d say that over the years you and Tony cross-colorized each other. By the way, do they alert you at the hotel when the cheating spouses of the upper crust meet their lovers there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that how you put the photographic screws to Judge Carmore? Whose wife, thanks to you, put major screws into the judge in the divorce settlement, which he quickly agreed to lest your dirty pictures hit the internet?”

  No response.

  “Then she committed suicide anyway with those dirty pictures no doubt in her mind of the judge giving head to her sister?”

  No response.

  “How you get pictures like that is beyond me. Shall we eat these wonderful sandwiches? You don’t look well, Eliot.”

  “I’m starved.”

  “Tony tells me the hotel sets aside a few remote rooms which you’ve already technically primed for your pornography. They send the adulterers to those rooms? That a fact?”

  “Yes.”

  “Forgive me, Eliot. Seems like I’ve forgotten that it’s you who’s supposed to be asking the questions.”

  They eat in silence, she nibbling, he wolfing, and when they’re finished she brings out a fresh teabag for him, takes a second glass of the vino and says, “I’m so pleased that you want to help Tony and these poor violated women. Tony tells me you don’t have a girlfriend yet. Going through life that way –”

  “I met someone in Troy yesterday.”

  “I’m so happy for you.”

  “I’m working up the courage to call her. Her name is Catherine Cruz.”

  “Let’s cut the bullshit, shall we, sweetheart?”

  “I’m here to gather information, Milly. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t call me Milly. That’s what Tony calls me when he thinks it’s about time, finally, to play hide the big salami. That’s how you Italian people talk, I believe. Hide the big salami.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re a big fella yourself.” (There’s that smile!) “Fire away.”

  “When did this woman talk to you?”

  “Day before you and Tony went to the opera. Friday.”

  “Morning? Afternoon? Evening?”

  “Ten in the morning, exactly, Detective Conte. My, you are detailed!”

  “You remember the time exactly, Mrs. Robinson?”

  Sparring. Round one.

  “I was leaving for a 10:45 appointment with my hairstylist when she rang the bell.”

  “No point in asking you her name.”

  “None.”

  “It would help.”

  “Justice done to Coca without mercy would help.”

  “What precisely did she say that indicated to you that she was one of a series of rape victims?”

  “If I were white you’d see me blush. He told her she had the tightest one so far on the force. There have been others and there will be others, I’d guess he hopes with even tighter ones. He’s looking forward to the future.”

  “Tightest which?”

  “Please, Eliot.”

  “How old is she?”

>   “Young. Early thirties, I’d say. Three little ones.”

  “Three kids? How tight can it be?”

  “You’d be surprised, sweetie. I’ve had five. They stitch you up tighter than it was when you were inexperienced. Made Tony happy. Back in the day. These days only his work makes him happy.”

  “Where did it occur, the alleged rape?”

  “Try not to talk like a son of a bitch, Eliot. Alleged. There were vaginal abrasions. Visible.”

  “You saw them?”

  “Do you suddenly not understand ‘visible’?”

  “It occurred where?”

  “At home.”

  “Where were the children?”

  “In school, I presume, except for the four-year-old, who pounded the whole time on the bedroom door.”

  “And the newborn?”

  “She never said anything about a newborn. Where’d you get that thought?”

  “Seems that’s what Robby told me. Who I presume heard it from you.”

  “I told him no such thing. I don’t like your assumptions, Eliot. As if I had some hidden agenda in all of this. Trying to trip me up as if I were some kind of –”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “About what?”

  “The skeptical impression I’m giving you. It’s just what I do.”

  “Take everyone as concealing?”

  “Most everyone.”

  “She said she was humiliated by him.”

  “Did she spell it out?”

  “No.”

  “He has anal proclivities, you know, Millicent.”

  “How would I know? Or you, for that matter?”

  “That’s why we called Michael Coca ever since the eighth grade Michael Caca. As we grew older we grew merciful and called him Michael C. He understood the reference.”

  “He is shit.”

  “Do you know Denise?”

  “Very well.”

  “Did she ever indicate anything of an unusual sort, girl to girl, concerning his proclivities?”

  “No, and what the devil does this –”

  “Did he rape her anally?”

  She looks away, pained.

  “You have beautiful hair, Millicent.”

  “Why thank you, handsome.”

  “I bet Ann Iacovella does your hair. They say there’s no one in Ann’s class in this town.”

  “I don’t have white hair, Detective. You come here to talk about my hair?”

  “Sorry. I’d rather talk about your lovely appearance than rape. Can you blame me?”

  “You know how to talk to a girl, Eliot. Give my husband some pointers.”

  “Why do you suppose she came to you? I mean, given the threat against her husband?”

  “I have to tell you, hon’, she danced with the bastard at the Labor Day Ball. That comes out, a lawyer will insinuate from that. Tear her apart. I wouldn’t be surprised if he danced with all his victims.”

  “He dance with you?”

  “He did, but he didn’t fuck me.”

  “He came to her house in broad daylight?”

  “And in uniform.”

  “Shrewd. If he’s spotted, it’s official business in a neighbor’s mind. What do you and Robby want me to do, Millicent?”

  “Stop him.”

  “How?”

  “I heard from Tony that you have a way with bastards.”

  “He exaggerates.”

  “How did you get that pederastic minister to leave the state?”

  “Showed him a picture.”

  “Tony said you made David Del’Altro leave Utica. The teenage bully, wasn’t he, who kept on bullying into his late forties when, thanks to you, he moved to Akron? According to what they say. You have stature, Eliot. I can’t imagine Akron.”

  “Robby exaggerates.”

  “Among those who know these things, you are regarded with awe. Other people say other things. People, you know, trying to get at the questionable father by calumniating the good son. In my opinion.”

  No response.

  “Tony said you did something, but you wouldn’t tell him what. You just giggled. Give Milly the details, sweetheart.”

  “True, Del’Altro beat up kids in grade school, high school, even at Utica College and on into his thirties and forties he’d physically intimidate co-workers at the post office. This is well known. In a small town, everything is well-known. Nothing actionable, you understand. Can you arrest or sue someone who shoves an elbow into your ribs in close quarters? Or spits on your pants? When he hurt the small father of a small boy, I made a plan.”

  “What did he do to the small father?”

  “Broke his jaw. No witnesses.”

  “What did the father do to incite Del’Altro?”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  “Can it be?”

  “I know Del’Altro. I’ve known him since grade school, when he hurt little girls. I know what I know.”

  “How did you find out about the incident?”

  “The small boy tells his friends who tell their parents et cetera. I went to the father to verify the grape vine. In front of the son, it was done, the broken jaw.”

  “Then springs the noble Eliot into action!”

  “The first thing I … He doesn’t have a garage. Just a carport. In the middle of the night, I affix a personalized plate over the front bumper. The way the car is parked, he’d get into it the next morning without passing the front. Personalized. You’ve seen them. His said, I, FAGGOT. He drives around for a couple of days, so I gather, in ignorance. Passing vehicles blow their horns. Teenage boys yell out, ‘SUCK ON THIS!’ Then, at the post office, one of his fellow clerks, much meaner than Del’Altro, much bigger, says to him, ‘You decided it was time to advertise it? You finally coming out of the closet?’ Del’Altro says, ‘What?!’ The guy says ‘Keep one thing in mind, Dave. I will not, no matter how much you need it, I will never fuck you in the ass.’ Del’Altro takes a swing at him, the guy knocks six teeth out of Del’Altro’s head. Made him look like a carved-up Halloween pumpkin. Two days after this incident, middle of the night, I screw a long screw into one of his tires, tight, then reverse a couple of turns. Slow leak. The next day he leaves work to find a flat tire. I repeat the procedure three times, a different tire each time, over the next ten days. Del’Altro becomes increasingly hostile at work to the customers. Tells one, who complained about the price of first-class postage, a woman in her late eighties, to go fuck herself. To her credit, it is said that she replied, “Would that I could, because you could never satisfy a real woman like me.” He’s suspended without pay for a week. One morning during the suspension period he walks out of his house in heavy fog and steps down into a substantial mound of human feces. I let a month go by. The middle of the night, I pour a two-gallon container of bleach into his gas tank. You’ve heard the stories of sugar in the fuel line? Pure urban myth. Bleach is the real deal, Milly. The next day, three quarters of the way to Rochester, the car simply stops. Sixty-five miles per hour then nothing. The engine is destroyed beyond repair on his new Buick. Takes the bus back to Utica. Two weeks later he’s driving a two-year-old Ford Fiesta. I bleach again and tell an investigator friend of mine for his insurance company that Del’Altro is a well-known scammer from way back. He goes to Del’Altro’s house – this got into the Observer-Dispatch – he questions the claim and Del’Altro, now nearing insanity, decks him. Del’Altro is arrested, gets six months in the county jail. Upon release he moves to Akron.”

  “Bravo, Detective Conte!”

  “Milly, had Robby done a number on him when we were at Proctor High, Del’Altro – he may have turned out a decent citizen and even, who knows, a good man.”

  “Violence can be a cure?”

  “Sometimes we reach that point.”

  “What do you have in mind for Michael Coca? Akron, too?”

  “Milly, I’m going to send him to the bottom of hell.”

  Back home, Conte immediately contacts the owners of
Utica’s three African-American beauty salons and tells each that he’d like to buy a $200 gift certificate for their most well-known customer.

  The first one says, “Who would that be, darlin’?”

  “Millicent Robinson, who had an appointment with you day before yesterday. Friday at 10:45.”

  “Never heard of any Millicent whatever.”

  The second responds, “That stuck-up oreo bitch never set her ass in my shop.”

  The third responds, “Let me check my book. Oh yeah, she comes here, but she had no appointment at 10:45 on Friday. She had her hair done two weeks ago on a Monday at 4:30.”

  “Do me a favor?”

  “I don’t cut white hair. That’s beyond me.”

  “Keep the gift certificate a secret until her birthday, which is in three weeks.”

  “My lips are sealed. Be sure to put that check in the mail now – real soon, dear.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Conte’s arm feels like a 500-pound boulder as he places the phone back into its cradle. Goes to the kitchen, pours a very large Johnnie Walker on the rocks and carries it to the front window where he stares, glass in hand, at the rain that has thickened again – wind-driven now in a mean slant against the house. The Robinsons had lied. He hasn’t touched his drink when he abruptly returns to the kitchen – pours the Johnnie Walker into the sink – leans over low and inhales the rising odor of expensive scotch.