(2004) Citizen Vince

by Jess Walter

  Cross the river, off at Seventy-seventh Street in Brooklyn, Vince walks eight blocks and finds himself in front of Coletti’s building, a clean three-story walk-up, almost in the shadow of the Verrazano. He takes a deep breath and starts for the door. Kids on the stoop part for him and he steps into the foyer, reads the name-plate, and rings 3B. After a minute, an old woman’s voice comes over the intercom, bursting with static. “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for Dominic Coletti.”

  “Who are you?”

  He fights the question’s significance. “An old friend.”

  The door buzzes and Vince goes up a wide staircase, the thick wooden railings carved and tagged with mild graffiti. On the third floor, an old Italian woman waits in a doorway, black wire hair, deep furrows around her eyes and mouth, sprouts of thicker black hair erupting from two big moles on her chin.

  “Mrs. Coletti? I’m…Vince Camden.” Offers his hand.

  She ignores it. “You’re such a friend to my husband, how come I never heard of you? How come I don’t recognize you?”

  “I’ve been out of New York for a few years. My hair was longer.”

  “And you say you used to work with Dom?”

  “Yes.”

  “At the old place in Queens?”

  “Yes.”

  “You a plumber?”

  Vince remembers that Coletti was a plumber by trade, though like all connected tradesmen, he probably never worked a day as a plumber in his life.

  “Because you don’t look like a gangster. You don’t even look Italian.”

  “No,” Vince admits. “I’m not Italian. And I’m not a plumber.”

  She turns in her housecoat and goes into the apartment. Vince follows her. The apartment opens to a small living room, dusted with age. The simple wallpaper is either faded beige or a white that’s gone old and dusty. There are framed pictures of grandchildren on every flat surface in the room—end table, coffee table, TV, sideboard, mantel, and dining-room table. All of the grandchildren, boys and girls, seem to have the same shoulder-length, comb-furrowed, jet-black hair, parted perfectly in the middle.

  “What do you want with Dom?”

  “I just…want to talk to him,” Vince says.

  “Nobody comes to see Dom anymore.” She frowns. “It’s a goddamn crime. He made a lot of money for you people. He was always loyal, and when one of you guys went to jail, Dom took care of his family.” She leans in close. “And how do you reward him? When he was in did you come to see if I needed anything? Or now? Do you young guys come by? You young guys, making all your money with your drugs, going to the Studio 54. I read the papers; I know about the Studio 54. Do you come over and thank my Dominic? Grazia, paisan…famiglia! Do you do this, plumber?”

  “No,” Vince says. “I guess not.”

  She mimics him: “I guess not.” When there is nothing more to add, she turns and goes to a small hallway connecting three doors. Vince follows. She pauses in front of a tabletop shrine—nine votive candles draped with rosary beads and some figurines of Mary and a handful of saints crowded together, looking to Vince like out-of-work foosball men in robes, yellow hair, red lips, and blue eyes painted just slightly off center.

  She crosses herself and opens a door and Vince follows her into a dark room. It smells like decay and shit. In the center of the room is an old hospital bed with a crank at the bottom. Sitting on the bed, naked except for a large plastic diaper, is the last seventy-five pounds of Dominic Cold Blood Coletti. His arms are crooked and his fingers snarled on his bird chest like he’s holding on to a branch. His skin is pale bark. One of his legs is draped off the side of the bed, the toenails long and jagged. But it’s Coletti’s face that gets to Vince. He is in midgrimace, his eyes closed, wrinkled mouth forming over the letter O, white scum around his lips. He breathes in rasps and fits.

  “He had a stroke,” Vince says quietly.

  She nods. “The doctors don’t even know how many. They say he’s having them all the time now. You don’t even see them anymore. But he feels them. I can tell.” She carefully pushes his leg back onto the bed and pulls a blanket from the floor and drapes it across him, from the stomach down. “Dom. This young man is here to see you.”

  Coletti’s right eye flutters open and he takes Vince in. That eye is noncommittal, but after a moment, knowing.

  “Do you want to talk to him, Dom?”

  Vince watches the old man’s face but sees nothing except a couple of blinks.

  “Okay, then,” she says. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

  “Can he understand me?”

  “Can you understand him?” she asks her husband. He blinks twice rapidly and Mrs. Coletti turns to Vince. “Two blinks means yes. Three means no.”

  “What does one blink mean?”

  She scowls at him. “It means his goddamn eye is dry. If he needs something he’ll just blink and blink and blink. Then come and get me.”

  She leaves and Vince looks around the dark room for a chair. There is a folding chair in the corner and he drags it over, squeaking across the floor. He sits, and leans forward on his knees. He speaks quietly. “Do you know who I am?”

  Coletti blinks twice.

  “Look, I’m sorry for the way everything turned out.”

  The eye just stares at him.

  “I’m sorry about Crapo and Bailey, too. I didn’t know it would be so hard for them. I was in trouble and I didn’t have the money and it seemed like the only way—”

  The old man blinks three times and then closes his eye. A chalky blue vein runs across the lid. No more excuses.

  “Okay,” Vince says.

  The old man opens his eye again. Waits.

  “Look…I have to ask you—do you still have paper on me?”

  Coletti blinks three times. No. His breath is heavy and stale.

  “There isn’t some old friend of yours who might still want to take me out?”

  Three blinks. The eye stares.

  “Someone is after me.”

  The eye just stares.

  “It isn’t you?”

  Three blinks.

  “You don’t have any idea who it might be?”

  Three blinks.

  “Okay.” In the dark now, he can make out the room. On one wall are pictures of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge under construction, its ribs exposed. On another wall, photos of thorough-bred horses. He remembers Dom used to love the horses. “Okay,” Vince says again. “Thank you.” He reaches in his duffel bag and pulls out the envelope of money. He counts out four thousand in fifties—eighty bills—and sets the thick stack on the bed next to Coletti. The old man raises his eye to the top of its lid and then down to his chest. Vince picks up the money and slides it into Coletti’s clawed hand—his skin cold and hard. The old man blinks twice, emphatically. Yes.

  “It’s only four thousand,” Vince says. “Less than a third of what I borrowed. I don’t know if I can pay off the points, but I’ll send the rest of the principal as soon as I get back home. Okay?”

  The eye just stares.

  “And if you’re…gone, I’ll send it to your wife. Is that okay? Will we be straight if I do that?”

  A pause. Two blinks.

  “Thank you.” Vince pats the old man’s chest, and then stands. The eye follows him. “Can I ask you something?” Vince says.

  The eye stares.

  “Did you always like it, the life?”

  The old man just stares.

  “What if someone offered to let you start over? New name. New city. Everything. Just walk away. Do you think you could you have done that?”

  The eye looks past Vince. Blinks twice.

  Then the old man closes his eye. Vince waits for a second and then goes out. The air outside the room is clean and Vince breathes heavily. Mrs. Colleti comes into the hallway, walks past Vince and into the bedroom.

  Vince walks through the living room and is at the door when he hears Mrs. Coletti’s voice at his back.

  �
��You left that money for Dom?”

  He half turns. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I owed it to him.”

  She stares for a minute and then her eyes narrow. “Marty Hagen.” She says his name like a slap. “That’s who you are, isn’t it?”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Goddamn. Do you know that Dom never even blamed you? Never said a cross word about you. He actually liked you. Do you know he would’ve eaten that money you owed him. Eaten it. That’s the kind of man you ruined, you worthless—”

  Vince looks at the ground.

  “My Dom, he knew Profaci. The Gallo brothers. I fed Joey Colombo right here at this table. In forty years, Dom never crossed the wrong people, never did more than a weekend in jail. He was a pro. Didn’t work in his own neighborhood, didn’t sell drugs. Raised six kids so they wouldn’t have to do what he did, got them into trades and good jobs. Our oldest, Paul, is an accountant. Our youngest, Maria, is a pharmacist in Orange. And then, when his work is done, when my Dominic should be relaxing and playing with his grandchildren, he gets taken down by some stupid thief who can’t pay off a debt! For what? A few thousand dollars? Bah!”

  Vince looks at his shoes.

  “It was like watching a tiger get taken down by a mosquito.”

  “How much time did he do?”

  She waves her hand like it’s no big deal. “He pulled a year. They thought they could turn him, get him to wear a wire, but he wouldn’t budge. Not Dom. Not for a year, not for eighty. He had character, which you wouldn’t know from your ass. But it ruined him. He got out and his hand didn’t work right, and then the right side of his face went—” She looks to the old man’s door. “Why did you bring that money? What do you want?”

  Vince flinches. “I wanted to do the right thing.”

  She refuses to look away, or to allow him to look away. “Well, you’re too late to do it here.”

  WHEN YOU’RE TAILING someone, it is best to be like a shadow at three o’clock, not behind the subject but parallel with him—a lane over, or even better, on side streets and alleys, two steps over and one behind. That way the target looks over his shoulder, straight back, and sees nothing. This method requires concentration and anticipation, but it sharpens the senses and eventually you know where he’s going before he does. At least that’s Alan Dupree’s new theory. He walks blindly through the terminal at LaGuardia, feeling more like a tourist than a cop, his first time in New York, looking for a tough guy whose name may or may not be Vince Camden. Needle, I’d like you to meet Haystack. In fact he wonders if that’s why Phelps let him make the trip when they got it approved, because he realized it was such a long shot. Let the rook waste his time.

  Dupree grips the smooth handle of his suitcase and is walking toward the front of the airport when he feels a strong hand clasp his shoulder.

  “Hey, slow down, motherfucker. You Officer Dookie?”

  Dupree smells booze. He turns to see a big, thick, bald plainclothes in skintight slacks and dress shirt, jacket with shoulder holster, hooded eyelids, and cuffs on his belt. Dupree offers his hand. “I’m Alan Dupree.”

  The cop ignores the hand and takes Dupree’s suitcase. “Fuckin’ bosses, eh? Send you ’cross the fuckin’ country ’cause some mope gets on a fuckin’ plane. I tell you, Dookie—fuckin’ bosses. Lazy cunts. Is what they are.” An afterthought: “I’m Donnie Charles. Everyone mostly call me Detective Charlie. Or Det-Charlie. But usually just fuckin’ Charlie.” Every word bursts out of this detective’s mouth except fuckin’, which Charles stretches out like a gospel refrain, like a whale surfacing. He takes huge strides through the airport, swinging the suitcase. Dupree throws in a running step every few minutes to keep up. “Me, I’m mindin’ my own business, my fuckin’ lieutenant calls and says he’s got some fuckin’ needle dick from Seattle needs driving around on some kind-a-homicide whatnot and I think, What the fuck, I need the OT.”

  Detective Charles rushes through the luggage area and outside, to an unmarked parked at the curb. Covering the backseat of the car is a mound of about twenty shoeboxes. One of the boxes is open to reveal a new pair of Adidas running shoes. A young Hispanic man is leaning on the hood of the car and he straightens up when he sees Charles, who unlocks the car, opens the back door, and hands a pair of shoes to the young man, who nods as he backs away. Then Charles pops the trunk and unceremoniously dumps Dupree’s suitcase in. “Fuckin’ monkeys. Gotta grease ’em to watch your fuckin’ car. You got that in Seattle? Puerto fuckin’ Ricans will steal the fuckin’ aerial. You got a lot of them PRs in Seattle, Dookie? What are you, about a size ten? Take some shoes.”

  And they’re driving.

  Dupree feels the need to swim against the current of Det-Charlie’s rant, and to give the illusion that he knows what he’s doing. He pulls out the file to brief his liaison, the way he imagines this is done. “We appreciate your help on this.” He opens a file. “Our guy’s name is Vince Camden. We first contacted him at the scene of a homicide about thirty-six hours ago. He said he didn’t know the victim, but later we found his name in the dead guy’s Rolodex.”

  “Uh-huh,” Charles says, his head pecking through traffic.

  “He came in on his own for questioning and admitted knowing the victim, but he had an alibi, so we let him go.”

  “Yeah. Uh-huh.” Both hurrying and not listening.

  “After the initial interview I drove him home and told him not to leave town. Then we found some stolen credit card numbers with his name on them in the victim’s belongings, so I went back to ask him a few more questions and saw that he’d run. The house was trashed. Suitcase gone. We got a warrant, searched his house, and found traces of marijuana and more credit-card numbers.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So I went to the restaurant where this Camden said he was going earlier, and the owner remembered him, said he made some phone calls and took some notes about something. So I went through the garbage—”

  For the first time Charles turns, a half smile on his face. “You went through the fuckin’ garbage?”

  “Yeah,” Dupree says tentatively. He holds up a plastic baggie with a crumpled piece of notebook paper inside it. He reads: “‘Partner. Bay Ridge. Married. Jerry. Tina McGrath. Long Island.’”

  Charles laughs. “Well, that solves it.”

  But Dupree likes telling the story, even if it’s only to himself. “So today I called the airlines and checked their flights to New York and bang! Pan Am had this Vince Camden flying from Spokane to Chicago and Chicago into LaGuardia this morning. I’d just missed him. So we booked a flight and called to see if you fellas could help us. And…here I am.”

  Charles seems to have tuned him out. “What’s the guy’s name?”

  “Vince Camden—”

  “Camden? Like New Jersey?”

  “We think it’s an alias.”

  Detective Charles looks pissed. “Well, what the fuck? Is it his name or ain’t it his name? Don’t fuck around with me here, Seattle, I’m in no fuckin’ mood.”

  Dupree doesn’t know what to say.

  Charles hits him in the chest. It hurts. “Aw, I’m just fuckin’ with you, man. Don’t take nothin’ I say serious. That’s the thing. You ask any motherfucker, they’ll tell you the same thing: don’t take nothing ol’ Det-Charlie says serious. Unless he gets this look on his face.” He scrunches up his mouth and nose, looks like a bulldog. Dupree recognizes the glassy eyes: He’s stoned. The guy is stoned. “Memorize this face, Dookie. You ever see this face, you crawl under the nearest fuckin’ table.”

  Charles whips his Crown Vic through traffic, in and out, eating up space between cars. “Get out my fuckin’ way!” Flies up on drivers’ tails and slaps at his siren. “Get off my fuckin’ road!” When he crosses into oncoming traffic to pass a bus, Dupree grabs the dashboard. The car veers back into its lane and Charles flips the siren. “Where these people goin’ that’s so fuckin’ important? Any of you fuckers chasing
a murderer? No? Then get off my fuckin’ street!”

  Dupree opens his mouth to remind Charles that as of right now Vince Camden—or whatever his name is—is simply a material witness, but he thinks better of it.

  “We gotta reach out to my PBA rep,” Charles says, “and then we’ll scratch one of my regulars, see if he knows your guy. You like Italian?”

  “Actually, there’s this girl I thought we could start with.” Dupree reaches in his file for the letter that he found in Vince Camden’s house. For some reason the name and address were cut off the envelope and the top of the letter, but the woman who sent the letter signed it Tina. It was the reason Phelps agreed to send him: the letter and the sheet of crumpled paper he found in the garbage. “See. A letter from Tina and this name on the paper. Tina McGrath. We think it’s the same Tina.”

  Charles ignores him.

  “There was a Jerry and Tina McGrath in Information. And guess where they live?”

  Nothing.

  “Long Island. I have her address right here. And see. On the paper I found in the garbage: ‘Long Island.’ See?”

  “You want a girl, Dookie? Why didn’t you just say so? You come to the big city, you think old Det-Charlie ain’t gonna take care of you in that manner? We don’t gotta go to Long Island. Fuck that negative shit, Seattle! Think positive.”

  Dupree opens his mouth to correct Charles, who reaches next to his seat, pulls out a pint of Jack Daniel’s and takes a long pull, holds it out for Dupree, then waves it at a car in front of him: “Get off my fuckin’ road!”

  TWO HOURS TO kill before he meets Benny. Vince takes the train back to Manhattan. Goes to midtown and walks Fifth Avenue, a river of bobbing heads. It’s disconcerting, all those eyes, those faces. He keeps imagining that he sees Ray Sticks in the crowds and between buildings. How long before Ray realizes Vince isn’t in Spokane anymore and tracks him back here? He stares at the marquee of a movie theater. One of the three movies is Altered States, a novel he started reading a couple of months ago when he was first trying to impress Kelly. It was about a young scientist who puts himself through experiments in a sensory-deprivation tank. Vince remembers the exact point he quit the book, not even thirty pages in, when one of the characters said, “We’re born screaming in doubt, we die screaming in doubt, and human life consists of continually convincing ourselves we’re alive.” But he wouldn’t mind seeing how the story ends, so he ducks into the theater.