by Norman Green
“…did she want?” Donna was asking him something. “Did she just want to see you?”
He assumed they were still talking about Marisa. “I guess. She wanted to talk.” He swallowed Prior’s name again, and it tasted just as bitter going down the second time. “She wants to go to school, says she wants to be a doctor. She wanted to know about tuition.”
Donna passed a hand across her forehead. “I’ve been afraid to even think about that,” she said, her voice unsteady. “What did you tell her?”
“Told her not to worry. Told her I could pay for it.”
Her eyes were on him then, hard and bright. “You told her you could pay for it.” She emphasized the word you, leaned on it hard, both times. Should have said “we,” he thought. You and I. It was too late, though.
“Yeah.”
“Just how much money do you”—she did it again—“have?”
“We.” He threw it out there, for what it was worth. “We have assets, you and I. Not just the house, either. Not what’s in the bank.”
He could see her anger building. “In the bank?” she said, her voice rising. “There isn’t enough money in the bank for me to even use my ATM card anymore. I had to go get a job, just to try and stay somewhere near current on the bills, for chrissake.”
He was mad enough to take pleasure in that, loved her enough to feel guilty about it. “Don’t you ever look at bank statements?”
“As a matter of fact, I did look,” she said. “The checking account had something like four hundred bucks in it when you left.”
When you threw me out, you mean. “What about the money-market account?”
He had her complete attention. “What money market account?”
“Farther down on the page,” he said, but he didn’t manage to keep all of the sarcasm out of his voice. “You transfer money out of one into the other when you need it. I usually keep about twenty grand in it.”
She was leaning forward, her face red, but then she sat back abruptly and looked away. “Well, I’m an idiot, then,” she said. He could see the muscles working in her jaw. “And where do you get it from? When your twenty grand runs low, where does the money come from to fill it back up?”
He shrugged. “Here and there,” he said. “Tommy and I, and you, have a very complicated financial situation. But we’re doing okay.”
“How okay?”
He shrugged again. “I’d have to talk to Tommy, go over it all. Or you could do it yourself. Go sit down with him, let him tell you everything.”
“You know I love Tommy,” she said, “but he’s your friend. He’d protect you.”
“Tommy wouldn’t lie to you.”
She looked unconvinced. “So Marisa’s tuition isn’t a problem.”
“No.”
“What about the mortgage on the house? Could we…” She threw the word in his face. “Could we afford to pay that off?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but it would be stupid. That mortgage is cheap money. Besides, a mortgage makes us look normal.”
“Is that so.” Her face was dark red again. “I’ve been killing myself to pay that bill every month, did you know that? I’ve been so afraid of losing the house because you, because you…” She swallowed then, and didn’t finish her sentence. “How have you been getting by? Have you been taking money out of your money-market account?”
“No.” This is not going to go over well, he thought. He’d been drawing cash out of one of his safe-deposit boxes, and he couldn’t, in honesty, say “we” again. She was right. They were his.
“Well?”
Try it anyhow, he thought. “We have other resources.”
“Do we now.” She was holding a fork in her right hand, but more like a weapon than an eating utensil. She put it down carefully, next to her plate, and she picked the cloth napkin up off her lap and dumped it on her untouched food. “Fine,” she said. “Maybe I will talk to Tommy after all. And maybe this exercise has been useful for at least one reason.”
He was almost afraid to ask. “Yeah? What?”
“I found out I can make it without you,” she said, and she stood up, knocking her chair over behind her, and she walked away.
“Donna…” He stood up too, but he only watched her. What are you gonna do? he asked himself. Go grab her by the hair and drag her back to the cave? The restaurant was silent, all he could hear was the blood roaring in his ears. The other patrons turned away when he looked at them, out the windows or down at their food. He stood there in the silent room. “Hey,” he said, loud, addressing them all. “That went well, don’t you think?”
NINE
It was a close thing, Benny.” It was not yet light out. Benny had told him, long ago, to call him anytime, day or night, and Stoney was taking him up on it. It had to be something like five in the morning, but Benny sounded like he always did.
“So? What happened?”
“I went to see Donna last night.”
“Yeah? How’d it go?”
“Not good. You were right, I guess. She had some hard things to say, she said them, and then she walked out.”
“What she said, was it true?”
“Yeah. Yeah, Benny, I guess it was.”
“So maybe that’s not entirely bad. Maybe she felt like she had to get it out there, and she did. You make any progress on the money issue?”
“Nah, I don’t think so. She had questions, but I don’t know if I had any answers.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s complicated, Benny. My shit is all tied up with my partner, Fat Tommy. It ain’t like it’s on a spreadsheet somewhere.”
“That don’t sound too smart to me.”
“I trust the guy, Benny. We been friends for a long time.”
“Okay, so you trust the guy. What would you do if he died, God forbid?”
“God forbid.” Stoney thought about it for a minute. “Most of it’s legal, and on paper somewhere. It’s just that I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. Once in a while Tommy comes to me, says, we ought to sell this, buy a piece of that. That’s kind of like his end of things, I let him do it.”
“I bet you don’t even know how much money you got, you dumb fuck. How do you get paid?”
“I got a good idea how much there is, more or less.” Stoney could hear the defensive tone in his own voice. “Tommy and I pay ourselves a salary, you know, the IRS gets their vig and the whole bit. But it ain’t like I work for a regular corporation or anything.”
Benny was chuckling. “No wonder your wife don’t believe you. Here’s what I would do, I was you. I would set up a meeting between Donna and your partner. I assume he’s a little sharper than you when it comes to finance.”
“Yeah.”
“So let her find out from him what she needs to know. Are you okay with that, or are you afraid she’ll do something stupid?”
“I guess it doesn’t matter, if she does or if she doesn’t. Money ain’t the issue, not on my end.”
“Well, there you go, then.” Benny was silent for a minute. “What did you mean, exactly, when you said it was a close thing? You weren’t talking about your wife.”
“No. The restaurant we were in last night had a bar attached. Nice place, Benny, quiet, dark…After Donna walked out, I was gonna go for it, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I do. So?”
“Well, I went to the men’s room first. I don’t know if I was gonna try to talk myself out of it, or into it. I’m telling you, Benny, everything inside of me was saying, fuck it, man, half a dozen single malts and I’ll forget all about the bitch. So anyhow, I’m splashing water on my face, right, and one of the Spanish kids they got working in the kitchen comes out of a stall and starts washing his hands. He’s got the AA logo tattooed on the back of his left hand, so I asked him about it. He knew a little English, and I knew a little Spanish, so I kinda told him what was up.”
“So what’d he say?”
“I don’t know. Called
me a lot of names. I think he was saying, you know, drink tomorrow if you still want to, just not now. Not tonight. He got me out of there, took me out the back door so I wouldn’t have to pass the bar. Got me into my car. Once I was rolling, you know, I focused on getting home, I guess I was all right. But it’s funny, ain’t it, how there’s always a cliff handy when you got the urge to jump.”
“Yeah. You gonna be all right, or you want to meet for breakfast or something?”
“Nah, I’m here now, I’m okay.” He was silent for a minute, worked on formulating his question. Such a stupid thing to ask, how would Benny know, anyway, and how to ask him without sounding like a little kid? “What the fuck do I do now? What’s gonna happen, Benny?”
“I can’t tell you that. All I can tell you is what happened to me, and what I’ve seen in the past.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” It took him a minute to come around to it. “Look, if the two of you, you and Donna, I mean, if you two really are friends, you know, beneath it all, you’ll probably come out of this all right. If you’re not, if this thing between you and Donna is really dead, you’ll be able to give it a decent burial. The thing is, right now, there’s nothing you can do about it either way. The only thing you can do is take care of your own side of the street. Did you actually consider drinking over this?”
“Consider? I didn’t think about it, Benny, but for about twenty minutes, I was right fucking there. You know what I mean? I was ready to blow everything just for a couple hours’ worth of oblivion.”
“No guarantee you’d get a couple of hours. You gonna make a meeting tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Call me later, maybe I’ll meet you there.”
“All right.”
Tina Finbury was cautious, she borrowed a conference room at the corporate headquarters of one of her bigger customers, an insurance company, and insisted on meeting him there. The place was surrounded by a tall iron fence, you had to go through security to get in, and the guard ran a metal detector over Stoney, then patted him down. Stoney stood there, his arms out and his legs spread as the guy checked him for weapons. “You can’t be too careful these days,” he said, but the guard didn’t react, he just finished what he was doing, then gave Stoney a brief mechanical smile.
“Thank you, sir,” the man said. “Wait right there, your escort will be here shortly.”
He was taken to a small room, generic corporation chic, tasteful conference table, comfortable chairs, fluorescent lighting. She was waiting for him there. “Sorry for the rigmarole,” she said. “I asked them to make sure you weren’t armed. I hope you don’t mind. You must be Stoney.”
“Tina,” he said. “Nice to meet you. I guess I’d wonder about you if you didn’t take some precautions.”
She didn’t look anything at all like what Stoney had expected. Hearing her voice on the phone, knowing what she did for a living, his imagination had assembled a variety of images, and had even ranked them in order, from most to least likely. He’d bet on a Jewish Kathleen Turner, mostly because of the voice, but he lost. She stood up and held her hand out.
Her hand was warm and dry. “Nice to meet you,” she said. She had Suburban Jersey Matron written all over her. She had short gray hair, a round face, and she looked at him over half-glasses. “You look surprised.”
“I guess I pictured you…”
“Hah,” she said. “Some shrew, you thought you were gonna find. Sam Spade in drag. You know something? One of the things that makes me good at what I do is that I look just like a million other old broads from New Jersey. You saw my face in a crowd, would you remember me? I don’t think so.”
“Maybe not. Listen, like I started to tell you on the phone, I got your name from your boss….”
“Boss? I got no bosses, honey.”
“Well, then, this guy you were working for.”
“With.”
“Okay, with. He was doing a couple of things for me, but he got scared off. But he did say…” Jesus, how could he give voice to this? “He told me he used you to watch my wife.”
She shrugged. “Yes,” she said. “There really isn’t much to say. I know where she works, where she sleeps, who she talks to on the phone, and none of it is very interesting, if you get what I mean. So it’s good news, am I right? At least, so far it is.”
“Maybe. And maybe it’s just my paranoia, but…”
She stared at him for a few seconds. “Listen, if your nose tells you there’s something wrong inside your house, you’re probably right, but I was only supposed to follow your wife. Usually in these situations I listen to my intuition. In your case, I would think about casting my net a little wider.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to milk this job, but you don’t look like you’re starving to death. Why don’t you let me off the leash? I won’t lie to you, it’ll cost you more than a simple surveillance job, but whatever’s going on, I’ll find it.”
He thought about that. “Yeah,” he said. “Whatever you wanna do. Listen, I, ahh…” He sighed. “I just wanna be sure. You know what I mean?”
“I can handle that for you,” she said. “Tell me, first, what was it that caused all of this fuss? People hiding, leaving messages on my phone, ‘ooh, you better watch out,’ and all like that? What’s that all about?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with my wife. At least, I don’t think it does. Your, ahh, associate was checking into something else for me, and it got sticky.”
“Something else? Something else like what? If I’m going to work for you, I need to know what’s going on, so I can watch where I put my feet.”
“A guy. I asked him to check into a guy for me. It turns out, the man values his privacy. His name is Charles David Prior, and he lives up on the hill in Alpine. Do us both a favor, okay? Stay away from him.”
“All right,” she said, and she handed him her card. “I’ll call you in a day or so.”
They met at the Greek restaurant on Montague Street, about six blocks away from Tuco’s building in Brooklyn. It was early in the afternoon, too late for the lunch crowd and before the evening rush. The place served old-country peasant food, pungent with garlic. Tuco dug in with relish while Stoney toyed with his own lunch.
“So,” Tuco said, between bites. “What’s up?”
Stoney gritted his teeth. He hated having to lean on anybody. “I need your help.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t just say ‘okay,’” Stoney said. “Listen to what I got to say, first.”
Tuco looked at him and shrugged. “Okay.”
Stoney stared at him and shook his head. “All right, listen. I need you to do something for me, but I don’t want to answer a lot of fucking questions about how come I want you doing it. You get me?”
Tuco shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
“I need someone to keep an eye on my daughter, and I can’t do it, I got too many other things to do.”
“All right.” Tuco put his fork down. “I know you don’t wanna talk about why, but, like, what am I looking for?”
Stoney shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you to do it, instead of hiring somebody I don’t know. I know you can use your fucking head for something besides holding your hat up off your neck.”
“I ain’t even got a hat.”
“This is probably just paranoia, okay? But I want to know where she goes and what she does in between the time school lets out and whenever she gets home at night. You up for that?”
Tuco nodded. “Yeah. Sure. She walk home from school?”
“No, she rides home with her girlfriend. Girlfriend drives a green Toyota. I got a picture of my daughter here.” He handed it across the table. “Her name is Marisa.”
Tuco looked at the image on the picture, than pocketed it. “You gotta give me something more than this,” he said. “You know what I mean? You gotta give me a hint.”
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“Just look for whatever it is that’s got the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. There’s one other thing. This might turn out to be a lot more dangerous than following somebody around.” Stoney told Tuco what he knew about Charles David Prior.
“I’ll watch for him,” Tuco said.
“All right. You should know that Marisa might not be thrilled to have you around.”
“She don’t want no babysitter, huh?”
Stoney stabbed at a piece of meat with his fork, held it up and examined it. “She’s, ahh…” He put the fork back down on his plate. “I know you’re a good kid, and it ain’t like I don’t trust you, but I gotta say this anyhow. She’s only seventeen.”
“Yassuh, boss. Keep my dick-skinners off’n her. I got it.”
“Listen, I appreciate this.”
Tuco waved him off. “Ain’t nothing to it.”
“Okay. One last thing. There’s this female, looks like a little old yenta from Forest Hills. She’s, ahh, she’s watching the house. You might see her around, just pretend you belong there.”
“Gotcha.”
Jack Harman lay on the hotel bed holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder. He was five foot ten, blond and blue, California tan and a gymnast’s overbuilt shoulders and arms. “Mrs. Martinelli? Hi, this is Jim Carson, Midtown Branch. I wonder if you could help me out. I’m new here, this is only my second day on the job, and my workstation keeps freezing up. Yes, I know, and I’m sure they’d do their best, but they were here all day yesterday, and they’re very busy, besides. Hey, you know what, I’m just trying not to look like a total dweeb in my first week at the bank. Thanks. Yes, well, what I’d like to know is if you have a contact in I.T. who’s a bit sharper than average…. Oh, wow, that’s really great. Does she have a direct line? I’d look it up, but you know what? My workstation’s frozen up…. That’s great, Mrs. Martinelli, I appreciate that. No, I won’t tell her it was you.” He snapped the phone shut, ending the call, and looked at the telephone in his hand. “Where did you get this thing, Tommy?”