“You actually know Carlyle?” Merle Orvis said. “I mean, you met her and all?”
“We should get back to Duane,” Teresa said. “It’s Duane we need to find out about. Everything you can tell us. You never know what can be helpful.”
“She told me she’s coming out here to do a book.”
“You talked to Carlyle?” I said.
“To her assistant. Consuela. Carlyle wants me to be an extra, Consuela said. You know, like one of the people Duane knew, she wants all Duane’s friends and stuff. I told Consuela I could be her stand-in, all those famous people have stand-ins, I could be a very good stand-in, or I could do her nails, I always wanted to be a manicurist, maybe she could send me to manicurist college if it works out. I shadowed a manicurist once when I was at the Learning Center in Kiowa trying to get my GED, so I know all about nails and cuticles and that shit.”
Teresa hesitated. I knew she did not wish to deviate from the subject of Duane Lajoie, but on the other hand Merle Orvis seemed to be speaking an idiom she did not understand. It was as if Teresa felt that she needed to get a working grasp of the local dialect before she could proceed. “What do you mean by ‘shadowed’?”
“You shadow people in some job to see what the requirements are,” Merle Orvis said. For her entire life people in authority had been asking Merle Orvis questions, and every response was tinged with an automatic truculence. “Like if I wanted to be a lawyer, I’d shadow you, you know what I mean? Don’t they have shadowing where you’re from?”
“I suppose they do,” Teresa said.
“I suppose they do,” Merle Orvis said, in a passable imitation of Teresa’s tone. Then, staring at her: “I told Consuela I used to date Kile Purdy’s brother Beau, Beau said Kile was so in love with Carlyle—she was Alice then, but just as pretty as she is now. The shit she and Kile did. You ever see Taxicab Confessions on TV, people who aren’t real famous talk to taxi drivers about what they want to be in life, about fucking and stuff, I think I’d be a natural on Taxicab Confessions, I mean, the stuff I know about Duane, and shit.”
“The night that Edgar Parlance was killed . . .”
“Who says they did it?”
“Bryant Gover,” I said.
“They didn’t mean it. It was like a plane crash or a car accident. It just got out of hand. Duane is such a nice person. Most of the time.”
“What time exactly did Duane arrive here that night.”
“That fucking sheriff asked me that same thing. He treated me all snotty like. He’s so hateful. He ain’t going to get my vote next election.”
“One o’clock? Two o’clock?”
“Three. Four. I can’t remember. You sound like that fucking sheriff.”
Boy said, “Titty.”
“Fuck you, Baby. You’re not hungry. You just like fooling around with my boobs. Go see Lester. Lester, turn on the TV, watch it with Baby, do something fucking useful for a change around here. I’m talking to these people going to send me to manicure college.”
“Let’s say it was four a.m.,” Teresa said.
“Closer to three,” Merle Orvis said.
“And what did he say?”
Merle Orvis mouthed the words. “He wanted to fuck.”
“Did you?” I said.
“No fucking way. I had the rag on.”
“So what happened?”
Again Merle mouthed the words. “I gave him a blow job.” And then in her normal resentful voice, “It took like fucking forever. It was like sucking spaghetti, you know what I mean?” She made a slurping noise as if she were drawing spaghetti strands into her mouth.
I wondered if Teresa would nod, but her expression did not change. She waited until Merle finished her slurp, then asked, “Is there anything he wanted you to say?”
“I told that to the sheriff.”
“We are Duane’s attorneys. We have different agendas. We need to hear it from your mouth, not from the sheriff’s.”
“What’s an agenda?”
“It’s what we need to defend Duane.”
“He was brain-damaged at birth, you know that? That cord, the umbilical shit, it was wrapped around his neck, it really fucked him up, is that an agenda?”
“Possibly.”
“He was a real fuck, Duane, you know that?”
“In what way?”
“He didn’t like having Boy around.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s half colored. Duane was into that white-supremacy bullshit. He hated niggers.”
Teresa took a deep breath. “So was there anything specific he wanted you to do?”
“He wanted some Clorox. He washed his fucking hands with Clorox and this fucking wire brush until they bled.”
“Anything else.”
“He wanted me to wash his shirt.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t fucking ask.”
“Did you wash the shirt?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“You ever get tired of asking those fucking questions? Why don’t you get a job with that fucking sheriff?”
“Why?”
Merle Orvis ran her tongue over a canker sore on her lip. She seemed to be weighing the possibility of not speaking. But not replying might jeopardize an opportunity to become an extra in Carlyle’s shoot. “He wanted me to say he’d been here all fucking night,” she finally said. Hostility clashed with calculation. “I said I couldn’t do that, I’d been over at Boobs, some people saw me. Shit, I didn’t know why he wanted me to say that, but I knew he needed like some kind of alibi, like on TV, NYPD Blue and them. And I said fucking no, I’m not going to do it, and he fucking hit me. You don’t love me, he said. Well, he got that fucking right.”
Boy tapped Teresa on her knee. “Titty.”
Teresa smiled and stood up. She reached down tentatively and patted Boy on the head. He began to cry.
“You’ve been very helpful,” Teresa said.
“You going to see Duane?” Merle Orvis said.
Teresa nodded.
“Tell him I still love him.”
Another nod.
“You know that Jamaal Jefferson? He was at the funeral. Put up the reward money.” She shouted toward Lester Ray, who was slumped in a torn and sagging fake leather chair with its springs sticking out watching Jeopardy! on a small black-and-white TV set. “Lester, what is he? Six-ten, two-fifty?” Lester did not move. “I am fucking talking to you, Lester, you hear me?”
Lester Ray continued staring catatonically at Alex Trebek on Jeopardy!
“Fuck you, Lester.” To Teresa: “Jamaal going to be at the trial?”
“I don’t know,” Teresa said.
“I read in People he prefers white girls,” Merle Orvis said.
“Pee-pee,” Boy said.
Teresa lit another cigarette. It was the last in the pack. She crumpled it slowly and searched in her bag for another. No luck. After three or four quick puffs, she threw the cigarette out the car window, and the crumpled pack after it. In the rearview mirror I could see the ash spark as it hit the highway. I did not tell her that it was a violation of the South Midland penal code to throw a cigarette out a car window. It could start a blaze in fire season that could take down six thousand acres overnight. “I generally only smoke on the street now,” she had said when she asked if I minded her smoking in the car. “When I was a little girl, my mother said that only a certain kind of woman did it. What kind of woman? I would always ask. Just to see how far I could push her. Don’t be bold, she’d tell me. ‘Bold’ was my mother’s all-purpose word for any behavior she disapproved of. If she ever knew how bold I really was, I think she would’ve crawled up Golgotha on her hands and knees.”
It was nearly midnight.
We had been on the go since dawn. I would not count the day as a success. We could not even get rooms for the trial at the Lovat Hotel across from the courthouse. The press had taken up all the available space, and the jury would also b
e billeted there. We finally got three rooms at a place called Motel DeLuxor on the outskirts of town, one room for each of us, and a third we would set up as an office. The owner had a droopy eyelid, which perhaps accounted for the unshaved patches of beard on his face. He seemed to think DeLuxor was a fancier name than DeLuxe. In every room he had placed a pamphlet that said, THE WAY OF SALVATION:“Before God Saves a Man, He convicts him of his sinnership. His blood can wash the foulest clean. Turn over to Him regulation of your life. Obey Him with all your might and He will conduct you to heaven.”
Do you believe? he had asked.
Absolutely, Teresa said quickly. I think she was afraid I might say something smartass that would cost us the rooms.
We talk to the Lord every evening, the owner said, his eyelid flickering. We set up tables out by the food center.
The food center was the collection of vending machines. Chips, candy, cookies, soft drinks, and pre-packaged roast beef sandwiches, the meat a little green. Not even the ice was free. Fifty cents a bucket.
We’ll definitely try to come, I said. I’m into the Lord.
A warning glance from Teresa.
Still. It was better than staying at the ranch Carlyle had rented. It’s quite a spread, we were told. It looked a movie set. I thought it would be perfect for Carlyle, at least as Teresa had described her. Her whole life sounded like a location shoot. I’m sure she imagined herself going over the next day’s legal strategy with us every night in the bunkhouse. Or was it around the campfire? With that photographer of hers snapping away in the background.
Even then I had a bad vibe.
Teresa hadn’t spoken since the last cigarette. Nor had I seen another car for miles. It was as if we were on an abandoned highway. Then from out of the night the terrifying screech of an air horn and a tractor-trailer right on my tailpipe. It was like an early Spielberg movie I had once seen after sex with a stranger. Duel, I think it was called, paying more attention to it than to the prissy young civil litigator wearing a wedding ring and Jockey shorts. Chicago, as I remember. A conference on white-collar crime when I was with the A.G. Was it his room or mine? Mine, probably. If his, I would have been out of there. Watching the movie so avidly was an implicit invitation for him to leave. To get out. Go. There was a paper name tag pasted to the lapel of his suit jacket, which was hanging from the knob of the bathroom door. Hello, I’m Chuck Something. From Des Moines or Des Plaines. Maybe De Kalb.
As the trailer passed, air horn blasting, the airflow nearly knocked me off the road.
Teresa gave no indication that she noticed.
“You know, right after I got out of law school,” she said suddenly, “I was studying for the bar, and my father defended someone named Rocco Campobosso. One of these people.” She pushed her nose to one side of her face. “He was a collector for the Cuccinello crew. From one of the New York families. Which meant it was a full-ticket case. Large dollars. They ran a construction and carting company. A front, of course. Executive Red Ball. Exterior demo. Interior dismantling. That was Rocco Campobosso’s line. Dismantling. People. Who couldn’t or wouldn’t make the vig.” Her head rested against the window. She seemed to be in some other place. “He threw someone off the George Washington Bridge once. The Jersey side.” Then briskly, “But that was a private thing. Daddy said he was doing a favor for someone. Hudson County couldn’t make the case.”
A private thing. A favor. I felt like an innocent.
“Usually he’d start off easy.” She was back on Rocco whatever-his-name-was. “With a message. He’d send a hearse to your house. From a funeral home. A long black Cadillac. Usually from Pellugio Funeral Services. Two guys in black suits and black fedoras would ring the door-bell. ‘We’re here to pick up the stiff,’ they’d say. It usually did the trick and payment was forthcoming. But then there were those who didn’t get the message. Or who maybe thought Pellugio’s made a mistake, got the wrong house.” She stared so long out into the night that I thought she had lost whatever thread she was trying to knit into the narrative. Then: “He had a way of dealing with those people. You could almost call it unique.” She paused. “He’d pour dry-cleaning fluid down their throats. They’d find the money. Oh, yes. They always found the money. It was not an experience you’d want to go through twice.”
I jammed on the brakes.
A deer had bolted from the side of the road and stood frozen in the glare of the headlights. As the car skidded to a stop, the buck turned and bolted across the highway, disappearing into the blackness.
Again Teresa seemed not to have noticed.
While I wondered if anyone in the Cuccinello crew had ever seen a deer, let alone had any concept of the damage a twelve-point buck jacked in the headlights could do even to a sensible Volvo SUV like mine that happened to crash into it at seventy-five miles an hour. But then again I think I’d rather take my chances with the buck than with someone who might throw you off the George Washington Bridge. On the Hudson County side.
“However,” Teresa said. She seemed to be talking less to me than to herself. “This one delinquent. He choked on the cleaning fluid and went into cardiac arrest. Suffered permanent brain damage. My father worked out a deal. Everyone knew everyone. The prosecutor had been a student of his at St. John’s. He’d worked with the judge at the Queens D.A.’s. So. Aggravated assault. Rocco Campobosso would do a touch in Attica. That’s what they called it. A touch. They treated it like summer camp. Three years. Five. I can’t remember.”
I concentrated on the road. In the distance I could see the lights of the two newest real estate developments south of Cap City. Rancho Rhino and Strong Valley. The second named after Dr. John Strong, who owned major parcels of the land on which Strong Valley was developed. Each parcel a gift from grateful Rhino boosters.
“You know what Rocco Campobosso’s doing now since he got out of Attica?”
At last we seemed to be getting to the point. “No.”
“He’s a consultant. On wise-guy movies. TV. What color blue suit does a Mob guy buy?” She did a gangster imitation, deep and rich with phlegm. “ ‘Electric-blue mohair, don’t you know nothing?’ Does he have a razor cut or not have a razor cut? Do you say you capped somebody or you whacked him out? Do you wear the pinky ring on the little finger of the right hand or the little finger on the left hand? ‘The left hand, of course, don’t you know nothing? Because you use the right hand to hit somebody with, you wear the ring on the right-hand pinky, it might take out someone’s eye, then some pain-in-the-ass A.D.A.’s going to load a charge of assault with a deadly weapon onto the indictment.’ I think he actually makes all the stuff up, but you get the lowdown from Rocco Campobosso from the Cuccinello crew, it’s got to be gospel, right? He’s a made man, he’s made his bones, everyone knows all the lingo.”
Another long pause. I knew she was going someplace. I just did not know where. Finally: “I ran into him in the street in New York a year or so ago. On Park Avenue. There’s a BMW dealership on Park, and as I was walking by, I heard this voice. ‘Hey, Brendan Kean’s daughter, it’s Rocco.’ And it was. It’s not a voice you forget. It’s a voice used to scaring people. ‘I’ll suck your fucking lungs out.’ And his face. It was like nine miles of dirt road in Calabria. And he starts hugging me. ‘Your father, God rest his soul, saved my life,’ he said. I’m lost in his overcoat, it must be five thousand dollars’ worth of vicuña, I can’t move, I can’t speak, all I can do is listen. ‘The touch he worked out was just what I needed, I coulda done it standing on my head, but I thought I’ll make use of my time, I’ll rethink my life. In Attica. I’m driving a BMW now, just brought it in for servicing, on Park Avenue, you notice, not out in Ozone Park, I’m making more than I ever made collecting for Cooch, I got a summer place in Point Pleasant, I never ratted anybody out, life is good.’ The dry-cleaning fluid was from another place, another time. Now he’s got something to sell.”
I thought I finally had made the connection. “Unlike Merle Orvis.”
“She’s like a paper boat. No rudder. Just floats through life any which way. That child. Boy. Baby. Maybe we should get child welfare involved.”
“Getting Boy into foster care is not what you’re getting paid five hundred thousand dollars for.”
Teresa stared out the window. As I focused on the highway, it struck me that Rocco Campobosso or the more unsavory members of the Cuccinello family were probably more comprehensible to her at that moment than Duane Lajoie or any of his satellites.
But then again.
Her voice came out of some other part of the night. “Max, who actually knew Edgar Parlance?”
In other words, she had her own internal circuitry. She just got to places more indirectly than I was used to.
“If you believe what we heard today, Teresa,” I said carefully, “he was the best friend of everyone in Regent. Couldn’t have a birthday party or a barbecue without old Gar. Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree.”
The turnoff to Cap City loomed ahead.
“Tell me why you stole that candle from his room.”
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