All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  Sally went up to the corner and bought some hamburger and some d-CON, and mixed the two together, then made little balls, which she put into the freezer until they were firm enough to throw into the yard next door. And when they were just right, she stood on the back porch, just a concrete stoop with a wrought iron railing, and threw one into the yard where Blackie spent his days. She started with just one.

  In the morning, though, Blackie was still there, looking a little less than chipper, but still growling at the mailman who came by the cracked sidewalk and reached over the farthest radius of Blackie’s operation and stuck into Citron’s mailbox the bills for water and electricity and the catalogues for plastic surgery, mousse, and conditioner, the promotional cans of spray and advertisements for scissors that came “direct from Paris, France.”

  When she came home from work, stiff and sweaty, she didn’t take a shower. She removed three balls of half-frozen hamburger from the refrigerator and tossed them into the yard, and then she took a shower with the water as hot as she could stand it, angry, at the end, when it ran out.

  The next night she added another ball of hamburger and then another, all of them gone in the morning, and so she guessed that she could try five at one time and that Blackie would eat them all before the effect of the d-CON made him uneasy enough to stop. She changed the dressing on her dog’s wound as she looked out the window. She didn’t care what happened, according to her diary, and that all she wanted was justice, a fair percentage for the take at Citron’s salon (although Citron, obviously trying to cut a deal, asked for a smaller bite of her tips), just as she hoped that truth would find a way to adjust the outrages it revealed.

  She mixed the d-CON and the hamburger like a poor woman trying to make a meatloaf out of ground round and oatmeal. She went outside, stood on her small back stoop with the black metal rail, and threw them, one after another, into the yard next door.

  In the morning, a cool fall day with a gray sky and with the trees dark and scratchy against it, Blackie lay on his back, legs stiff, not moving at all. Sally stood at the window and drank her coffee, holding the cup with both hands and put the hot, black liquid to her lips with a delicious tentativeness, almost burning her lips but not quite.

  Citron came out the door and walked across that urine-scented earth. “Hey,” said Citron. “What’s wrong, darling? Did you have a heart attack or something? Did that woman do something to you?” He pushed Blackie with his toe. Then he got down on his hands and knees and put his head to Blackie’s chest, but he didn’t stay long. He went into the house and came out again with a black plastic garbage bag. Citron unfastened Blackie from the chain, put the dog in the bag, pulled the drawstring tight, and dropped it into the trash can with the tight-fitting lid. This, at least, showed what Citron thought about death. It was like hair swept up on the floor.

  Citron’s hair was brushed back and moussed. He wore a gray silk shirt that was open to his stomach where his gold chain hung. He nodded to himself. He hitched up his pants, and yet he still waited, and when he was sure that Sally stood there by the kitchen sink, he made a gesture, a quick flip of his fingers under his chin in her direction. He had seen this in the movies. The women in black nodded: yes. They knew what that meant.

  Sally’s friends at the beauty salons and nail shops were the first to file a missing person’s report, and after a while the police went into her apartment but found nothing, that is, aside from her diary, the tape, her clothes, some old magazines, a couple of books that were overdue at the library, and a couple of letters from the library about these books (and “the potential loss of library privileges”). They got a search warrant and went into Citron’s house, and in the backyard, right at the property line, they turned up a pair of underwear with Sally’s blood on them.

  Another woman, a friend of Sally’s from a high-end wax shop in Boston, said that Citron had said that Sally wasn’t going to be working at the Citron Modèle Beauty and Nail Salon anymore. When this friend had asked where she was, Citron had smiled and said, “I think you better look in L.A. She wanted to be in the movies, you know? Yeah, she wanted her name on the Boulevard, her hand in the cement at Grauman’s. What have you got if you haven’t got dreams?”

  [ CHAPTER NINE ]

  WHEN YOU COME unglued, you are the last person to know it. But emotional explosions have their own revelations, which aren’t so obvious when you are flying through the air in the power of the first blast, but the implications are more obvious on the way down, when those details of your life have gone just as far as gravity will allow and now, in the moment of exquisite weightlessness, as in a dream, they turn and fall. In this concussive moment, at the top of the arc, all the tricks I had used, all the devious methods of hiding what I really thought, revealed themselves as the innocent frauds they were.

  Of course, as a prosecutor I resisted blowing my top. I had tried to contain what I felt when I held the bloody rags (so conveniently stored in a clear plastic sack) that were brought in from a woman found in an empty lot, or after I had handled, in that same plastic, pieces of bone picked up in the ashes of a wood furnace, or after confronting a man killed over a boom box, a woman stabbed in a drunken argument over what kind of pizza to order, a child dropped out of a window because a boyfriend was angry with a teenaged mother who had bought the wrong kind of microwave enchilada.

  I tried to feel nothing. And saved it, just as my grandfather had done, for the late nights when I read Herodotus, Tacitus, Marcus Aurelius, and Thucydides’s The History of the Peloponnesian War. Those old outrages and vicious events, which were so distant, made it safe to have my feelings about them. I could be appalled by Roman soldiers who had their way with a town that had betrayed them by going over to Carthage. The town thought that when Carthage was winning the war, it was a good idea to make an alliance, but then Carthage lost the war and the Romans appeared. At the sight of the Roman army, the women in the town stood on the walls and watched a battle in front of it, and when it was clear that their men had lost, they threw their children over and then jumped themselves. This reading was an antidote to my remoteness.

  Also, in Thucydides I read this:

  The Thracians, bursting into Mycalessus, sacked the houses and temples, and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither youth nor age, but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and women, and even beasts of burden . . . and in particular they attacked a boys’ school, the largest that there was in the place, into which the children had just gone, and massacred them all. In short, the disaster falling on the whole town was unsurpassed in magnitude, and unapproached by any in suddenness and in horror.

  . . . Mycalessus thus experienced a calamity, for its extent, as lamentable as any that happened in the war.

  After thousands of years, Thucydides’s grief and horror was still palpable: he was simply appalled, so much so that he was left only with a sadness and fury that descended like a fog.

  When I read this, after Sally Sunshine, my own resistance to the horror of the banal, the idiotic smallness for which people died (a TV dinner, a boom box, a slight insult, or hardly an insult at all) simply vanished, and for an instant I was compelled to feel it, as though the ancient historian and I were in perfect communication. And while I had thought that was it, a moment at three in the morning when I was having a slug of single malt scotch before going to bed, I was wrong.

  The next day the hand-shaking fury still existed when I played the tape made by the cab driver. I sat at Sally’s table with a view of the urine-scented yard. My trick had blown up. I had persisted by reading those old books, but now the feelings I had gotten this way were perfectly combined with a case I couldn’t resist.

  Something else reverberated back through those thousands of years: she had just wanted what was fair and what was right. The most basic of all desires. Her insistence, with such bravery, left me trembling with self-loathing. I had been cutting deals with people over deaths so tawdry as to seem impossible, and in
doing so I had pushed aside Sally’s desire: what was right rather than what was expedient, and in this constant bargaining, I had become numb to the possibility of fairness that a woman from Lodi, New Jersey, had insisted on as a basic fact of life.

  Where did that leave me? A cynic? A cog in a machine I disliked? Screw it, I thought. That’s it.

  I sat in my office at home. In the street a garbage truck made a sound like a machine from the underworld that was grinding bones. I should have remembered a line that has come down through the ages, garbled, repeated, attributed wrongly to Euripides, but certainly could have been from him: “The gods first make mad those whom they are about to destroy.” But even if I had remembered, I would have thought that the gods had got themselves in for more than they had bargained for.

  We gave the grand jury the testimony of Sally’s friends, the fact that Citron had trouble explaining where he had been the night when, as nearly as we could tell, Sally had disappeared. We had testimony from Sally’s friends at the Braintree Beauty College, and we had her diary, in which her fury was obvious. We had the tape recording. We had witnesses from the beauty salon who had heard, on a Saturday night, a fight over the split of the take and Sally’s threat to open a place of her own.

  We didn’t have a body and we had no physical evidence, aside from the pair of underwear, which were found on the property line between Citron’s house and hers.

  All of this, the beginning of my trouble, took place about eighteen months before my father died. So he knew about this part, the trial with such a shaky case, the kind of thing that only an innocent or a man flirting with his own demons would consider. In fact, in the morning before the first day of the trial, I got up and shaved as carefully as on the day of my wedding to Alexandra, who was already dressed and waiting for me in the kitchen, where she had fluffed up some milk for our coffee and where she sat with a posture of understanding, her eyes never meeting mine, since it was unnecessary, although she had said, when I had not only decided that we were going to go ahead with this case but that I was going to try it myself, “You know, Frank, you wouldn’t have done this even a couple of years ago. What’s eating at you anyway?”

  Before I left the house the phone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” I said to Alexandra. “It’ll be my father.”

  “Hey, Frank, how’s the hangover?”

  “You think I have one?” I said.

  “By god, I would,” he said. “You’d be amazed how a good, hard-hitting hangover lets you see what your circumstances really are. When you are on your hands and knees and your voice echoes in the toilet bowl as it begs for mercy.”

  “Not this morning,” I said.

  “It’s not too late,” he said.

  “To start drinking?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “To cut a deal. Do it right out in the hall. None of that in camera bullshit.”

  “I’m going to try the case,” I said.

  He breathed into the phone. Sucked a tooth. Thought it over. “You know, Frank,” he said. “When I got shot down I was coming in low. They can’t hear you coming when you come in low. But before I could do anything, I was hit by ground fire. Oil burning in the engine. Smelled like a cheap cremation. Control surfaces hard to move, but I got the plane going straight up, you know, trading speed for altitude so I could jump. You’d be amazed how clear things are when you’re up there and when you get out on the wing and jump and you’re still going up, boots first, when the parachute opens. It’s all clear then, Frank, with the parachute between you and the ground. And down below you see a mess of Italians kneeling and then you realize they’re trying to shoot your ass off. See? That’s when it’s clear what your position is. Blown up, at the top of arc, and these guys want to kill you. See what I’m saying? You need to be smart and you need luck. And the messed-up thing, Frank, is that you are shooting at yourself.”

  “This isn’t the desert,” I said.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Frank. It uses different landscapes, different people, but it’s always there. Always.”

  “I’m not going to stop now,” I said.

  “Well, that’s too bad. A crying shame. Well, come on over when you’re done. I’ll give you a Negroni.”

  I wore a gray suit and a blue tie. Shined my shoes.

  The cheapness of the business of the Citron Modèle Beauty and Nail Salon, the proxy fight with the dog (and of course I should have seen the danger of this), ran back to those old outrages from thousands of years ago, which, for me, was a perfect reservoir of every bit of suppressed fury I had ever felt about stupidity and cruelty.

  I had picked as an assistant a young attorney, Carol Perkins, a smart lawyer if there ever was one, editor of the law review at school, and who could have had her pick of law firms that paid what can only be called real money. But for all her intelligence, she was nevertheless interested in justice. I loved her for it. She was in her late twenties, had red hair, freckles, and green eyes, and everything about her, the way she walked and held her head, the gray suits she liked and wore with such subdued effect, her scent (like baby powder), but most of all her expression of barely contained fury, made her an ideal lawyer to have with me. She was tough with details and contradictions and knew the law.

  Citron sat in court with his hair in a ponytail, drawn back and held with a rubber band. He wore a black suit with a tee shirt, although his attorney, Martin Pullagia, had talked him out of the gold chain, but it was obvious that Citron missed it and from time to time reached up to his neck but found only his cold skin. Pullagia had gone to the Sussex Law School at night, represented gangsters, and was involved in things that would get him in the end. Later, he was charged and convicted in a money-laundering scheme. Before he was sentenced, he testified against the men he so frequently defended and finally ended up in the trunk of a car at Logan Airport.

  Citron should never have said a word, but Pullagia let him testify. He told a story of such vagueness, of such lack of detail compounded by an inability to remember as to be a gold standard of slippery obscurity.

  Citron’s voice seemed to have the pitch of a hair dryer. Then I leaned close to Carol, into that scent of innocent outrage, and said, in a voice that was louder than I had intended and which could have been heard by the jury, “That asshole is a lying son of a bitch. And we both know it.”

  Carol flinched. Pullagia objected, demanded a mistrial. The judge looked at me for a long time. Then he considered the jury, who sat there as though watching an infomercial about something they had absolutely no interest in. He let the trial continue.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Carol whispered in my ear, the heat of her breath showing that she knew I was right. “Will you be careful? Talk to me afterward about stuff like that. You want this to be reversed on appeal?”

  The women in black testified, too. They knew what was going on in the neighborhood, and they sat in the witness chair, right on the edge, all of them, one after another, only taking up about as much room as the width of a two-by-four. They had all made their peace with the fact that they no longer were opposed to Sally and to anything that she had done, no matter what her shaving had been, and were now infuriated. They wore their black skirts and blouses, their wrinkled faces and black eyes furious as they pointed at Citron and said, “Him, him!” and with their clawed hands and arthritic fingers they mourned all outrages of history, starting in ancient Greece, where their antecedents had worn black and had intrigued and mourned and disapproved from the Peloponnesian War onward. They hissed. They glared. They accused.

  The only physical evidence we had was the underwear, and Pullagia argued that it had been in Sally’s trash, that the blood on it came from her period, and that it was outside, on the hard earth, because after Blackie had been killed other neighborhood dogs had come into the yard and had gotten into the garbage cans. It was obvious, or so I said, that this blood came from the night that Citron had killed her. He stared straight ahead, although once he looked at me an
d made a gesture, slow and languid and with every conceivable aspect of malice, his fingers flicked from under his chin in my direction.

  He was convicted.

  “Well, that’s great, Frank,” said my father. “But do you think that’s going to hold up?”

  And, for a while, everything calmed down.

  I went back to my usual work. Pride surely does go before a fall, as everyone with an ounce of sense knows. Pullagia was better than I thought, or at least a lot faster than I had anticipated. In the fall after the trial, Carol Perkins handed me a copy of the Boston Herald which said “Citron Modèle appeal wins, prosecutor’s prejudicial remarks sets beauty operator free.” Citron was released, and when I talked about retrying the case, Carol rolled her eyes and other members of the staff and even the mayor called to tell me to realize I had made a mistake.

  Sally’s house had a new tenant, a man who drove a dump truck for the city. The place appeared the same, though, the cheap shingles on the roof glittering in the fall sunlight, a blush of green in the hard-packed yard, the old women revolving around the street as though looking for the next error that would cause trouble if you just waited long enough.

  I sat in my car, a pint of scotch in my hand, which shook a little as I had one drink and then another, and finally, when the bottle was half-empty, I pushed the button of the tape recorder and the cab driver cleared his throat.

  [ CHAPTER TEN ]

  PIA, MY DAUGHTER, was in her last year at Yale, but she didn’t have much course work and was doing a thesis titled “Law and the Protection of the Mentally Disadvantaged.” She came home for weekends in her yellow VW, music loud, probably smoking a joint. She had gotten the highest score possible on the law boards, had perfect grades, and had applied to law school in Cambridge. We were waiting to hear about her acceptance.

  Pia’s hair is dark, almost black, which sets off her skin, a pale white that is so luminescent as to suggest the moon, or talc powder. Her eyes are blue, although one has a small section of brown, a quarter of one iris. An example, she said, of heterochromia.