Killer (4 page)

The place had a dank, unhealthy smell to it. Given the old-style industrial tiles used in the flooring, it was clear that the basement had never been intended for habitation and must have been meant for storage and converted later to apartments. I knew from experience that the tiles were made with asbestos, and I noticed a few of them were crumbling which made them health hazards. It would probably cost a small fortune to dig them all out so they had chosen to ignore it. Later when I had time I’d buy some cheap carpeting to cover them and hope that that would save me from lung cancer. Yeah, I know, wishful thinking.

I stood still for a moment, taking in what five hundred and sixty dollars a month bought these days. A dirty, musty, pest-infested space of maybe four hundred square feet, which made it both spacious and luxurious compared to where I was coming from. I’d make do. First thing I’d have to do was clean the place and get a few items – a lamp, a radio, and a card table and folding chair so I’d have someplace to eat. That would have to be later, though. It was three o’clock and I had to report at eight for work, and the bone weariness I’d been feeling earlier was now more as if my bone marrow had been replaced with lead. Christ, I couldn’t remember being this worn out. I moved over to the cot. The mattress had a brownish-yellowish stain running over it. I flipped it over and the other side wasn’t much better. Fuck it. I took off my jacket and lay on my back on the mattress. The damn thing smelled heavily of perspiration and body odor, maybe even worse than what I’d had in prison, but I was out within seconds.

chapter 5

1969

I know he’s dead. I think it happened when I cracked his head against the door. It wasn’t that hard a blow, but he must’ve had something already wrong with him. Shit, this wasn’t supposed to happen. I sneak a quick peek over at Charlie and Hank. They haven’t caught on yet, so I keep up the act pretending the fucker’s still breathing. This was only supposed to be a shakedown, and I don’t want to let on yet that I’ve fucked up. My first kill, and it’s a damn accident.

“You miserable cocksucking prick,” I say, lifting the dead fucker by his collar, his head lolling limply to the side, “where the fuck’s our money?” While holding him up with my left hand, I start hitting his dead face with my right fist.

Hank and Charlie are swapping jokes. They stop. The only sound is me punching that dead face. It doesn’t sound much different than if I’d been pounding a cold slab of beef. Charlie tells me to relax, that there’s no reason to work up such a sweat. I sense Hank moving closer so he can get a better look.

“Shit, Lenny, I think he’s dead,” Hank says.

“Fucker’s just playing possum,” I say. I’m breathing hard now from my exertion. I reach back to throw one last punch, but Hank grabs my arm and stops me.

“He’s not playing. He’s dead.”

I make a face as if I still don’t believe it. “In that case, I better fucking make sure, huh?” I pull my arm free from Hank’s grip, grab a lead sap that I keep under my waistband, and hit the dead man hard enough in the skull to leave a three inch dent. I let go of the body and it drops with a thud to the floor.

“Fucking vicious sonofabitch,” Charlie says, but he’s laughing softly, maybe even with a little admiration. The two of them are taking it better than I would’ve thought.

Because it was only supposed to be a shakedown, none of us bothered wearing gloves. Hank and Charlie have been in the game longer than me, and they start walking around the room wiping off fingerprints. I bend down over the dead man, wipe my sap clean using his shirt, and pull out his wallet. There’s three hundred dollars in it. He was on the books for five grand, but at least this is something. I tell Hank and Charlie about the money. “I knew the cocksucker was holding out on us,” I say. I kick the body a couple of times in the chest, hard enough to have killed him if he wasn’t already dead. I’d rather have Hank and Charlie think I’m a psycho then give them any hint about me worrying how Vincent DiGrassi is going to take this. And I am worried.

Hank and Charlie have worked their way to a back entrance. Hank tilts his head to one side, signaling for me to join them. I kick the dead body once last time and, as nonchalantly as I can, leave with them.

We walk quickly down an alley, then once we’re a block away, at a more normal pace to a side street where we left the car. It’s late, the streets are empty. Charlie’s laughing softly, puts an arm around my shoulder and comments how I’ve got antifreeze running in my veins. Hank looks deep in thought. After Charlie pulls away, Hank moves close to me and tells me softly enough so only I can hear that DiGrassi isn’t going to be happy. As if he’s telling me something I don’t know.

We still have some time before last call. I’m driving so I stop off at the Broken Drum. Since I’m the one who fucked up, I buy us each a half a dozen rounds, beating last call by minutes. The bartender’s not happy pouring out so many rounds that late knowing how much longer he’s going to have to keep the bar open, but he knows who we work for so he doesn’t say anything. While we’re drinking I notice for the first time how swollen and cut up my knuckles are. None of us talk much, it’s almost as if we’re at a wake. It’s not as if the fucker didn’t deserve a beating, but I don’t think he’s what any of us are thinking about – at least he’s not who I’m thinking about. When we’re done with our drinks, I drive Charlie and Hank back to Revere where we hooked up earlier, then I drive across the bridge to Chelsea and to my apartment.

It’s not until three days later that I meet with Vincent DiGrassi again. It’s in the backroom of a club in Revere. I feel some relief over where we’re meeting. If he’d been planning to make an example of me and have me taken out in a bag, we would’ve been meeting someplace else, someplace more private, like that house in Winthrop where I’d had my initiation.

When I walk into the backroom, DiGrassi’s waiting alone, which is another good sign. He gives me the evil eye and keeps it fixed on me while I take a chair across from him.

“You fucked up,” he accuses me, his tenor’s voice shaking with anger. “’Cause of you I got a dead business partner and five grand pissed out the window. What the fuck you have to say about that?”

I took the three hundred dollars that I had gotten off the corpse and toss it on the table. “You’re better off without him,” I say. “And this three hundred dollars is more than you were ever going to get willingly from that cocksucker. The other forty-seven hundred I’ll make up on my end, which won’t be all that hard once the other deadbeats out there hear about this.”

I meet his stare. After a minute or so of this, there’s a shift in his expression. A cautiousness. A consideration. He wets his lips, leans back in his chair. “You get off on beating this guy to death?” he asks.

“Hank and Charlie tell you that?”

“They just told me what happened.”

I smile one of my rare smiles. “I didn’t get off on it,” I say. “I knew the guy was dead before they did. Everything I did afterwards was for their benefit.”

DiGrassi’s staring at me intently, maybe even a little concern showing in his eyes. “So how do you feel now?” he asks. “Anything bothering you?”

“I’m fine,” I say. “I was just doing my job.”

Again, with that intense stare as if he’s trying to look into my soul. “You sleeping okay?” he asks.

“No different than usual. Eating okay, too.”

“So this doesn’t bother you at all?”

I shake my head. “Other than I got to kick in forty-seven hundred to make good, no.”

“Nothing troubling your conscience?”

“What fucking conscience is this supposed to be?”

He’s considering this. His eyes darken, almost as if a veil has lowered over them. “You’re right, Lenny,” he says at last. “The guy was a cheap sonofabitch chiseler, and fuck him now that he’s worm food. Forget that forty-seven hundred also. Go out of town for a few weeks, make it a vacation. When you come back, we’ll be changing how we use you.”

I stand up and start towards the door. I have a good idea how he’s going to be using me. At some subconscious level, maybe I’d known all along. I’d spent four years on the fringes for DiGrassi doing collections and other diddly shit, so maybe in a way I was auditioning, trying to show them I was more important than how they were wasting me. It had to’ve been something like that ’cause it made no sense for me to have accidentally killed the guy. I’m not that careless. Before leaving, I nod to DiGrassi.

chapter 6

present

The room was dark when I woke up. I lay blinking for a few seconds, disoriented, then I remembered where I was and how I had to be at work at eight o’clock. I thought about the list I had made earlier of what I needed to buy, and mentally added an alarm clock to it.

I pushed myself off the bed, my body stiff and an awful taste in my mouth. That taste must’ve come from the mattress; at some point I must’ve rolled off my back and had my face pressed against the damn thing. It took a moment or two to straighten my back, then I hobbled in the direction of the bathroom – or at least where I thought it was. I wanted to splash some water on my face and rinse my mouth to get that taste out of it. My eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the darkness and my sense of bearing was all off and it took me several minutes of fumbling around the apartment walls before I found the bathroom door. The light switch for the bathroom was on the wall inside the door. I flipped it, turning on what must’ve been a thirty-watt bulb that had been left in the fixture above the sink. It barely lit the small closet-sized room.

There were no mirrors in the prisons I had been in for obvious reasons – you don’t want inmates getting their hands on broken glass. The last ten years or so I avoided looking at anything where I could’ve caught a reflection of myself, so it was a shock when I looked in the small, cracked mirror above the sink. The dim light provided by the single bulb kept my face mostly buried in shadows, which probably added even more years to my appearance. Logically I knew I had aged a lot over my time in prison, but still, I wasn’t expecting that old man staring back at me. My face had gotten so much thinner, narrower, and my ears and nose so much bigger and looking like something carved out of wood. I’d had my head shaved several months back by the prison barber, and my hair was now growing back white, not even gray. Of everything, though, it was my eyes and cheeks that seemed the most foreign to me – my cheeks hollowed out like those of a corpse, and my eyes sunk deep into the flesh. Fuck, I looked at least fifteen years older than I should’ve, and so much frailer than I imagined myself. I forced myself to look away, and cupped my hand under the faucet so I could rinse out my mouth. The water had a rusty, sour taste, and it didn’t help at all. I splashed some of it on my face which didn’t make me feel any cleaner. Since that was the only working light in the apartment, when I left the bathroom I kept the door open and the light on so I’d have some light in the room. I brought my papers back to the bathroom and squinted hard at each one until I found the form that had my work address, then grabbed my jacket and left the apartment.

It had gotten colder since I’d been out earlier. I found myself shivering as I made my way up several side streets to Moody Street. Once I reached Moody Street, I passed a coffee shop with a clock out front. It was twenty to eight; at least I’d woken up early enough that I’d be able to get to my job on time. I stopped in the coffee shop, bought a few jelly-filled doughnuts and a large coffee, and got directions for the street where I was going to be working. The young Hispanic girl working behind the cash register had a bright, infectious smile, and told me it shouldn’t take more than ten minutes to get there. She was being too polite and cheerful to have recognized me, but I still dropped thirty cents change into her tip jar.

While I walked, I ate my doughnuts and drank my coffee, and no more than ten minutes later, as the girl had promised me, I approached a small three-story brick office building where I was supposed to report to work.

Inside I could see a lone security guard sitting at a desk. I walked up to the glass door and knocked on it. He looked up and gave me an empty stare before pushing himself to his feet and walking slowly to the door so he could get a better look at me. He was no older than thirty. A big awkward-looking kid with a buzz cut and a large round face that made his small dark eyes appear even smaller. He knew who I was. I could tell from how much trouble he was having making eye contact with me. Still, he pretended he didn’t and asked through the intercom who I was and why I was there. I told him and he opened the door for me, mumbling that I should take a seat while he called for the building manager.

I sat in one of the two chairs in the lobby while he got on the phone. Less than a minute later a man about my height but much thicker in the trunk came out of the elevator to meet me. He was in his fifties, hard-looking, with ash-gray hair and a face that showed he had spent time in the ring when he was younger. He carried a clipboard in his left hand, and didn’t bother introducing himself or offering his free hand. Instead he told me I was late, that I was supposed to be there at seven-thirty.

“I was told eight.”

He stared at the clipboard before glancing back at me for as much as two seconds, his eyes darting back to his clipboard. “First day you’re supposed to be here at seven-thirty,” he said, repeating himself. “According to this, you know how to clean bathrooms, empty trash cans, and use a vacuum cleaner. That true?”

In my old days I would’ve answered him differently than I did, but those days were done with and whoever I was back then had been replaced by an old man. I told him it was true.

“Here’s the deal,” he said, his eyes fixed on his clipboard, almost as if he were afraid of catching another glimpse of me. “First three months you’re on probation. You miss work, you’re late or don’t do a good enough job, you’ll be fired, no notice, no nothing. Understand?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded, more to himself than to me. “I got paperwork for you to fill out. Afterwards I’ll show you where the supplies are kept and what you need to do. Okay?”

“Sure.” I hesitated for a moment, then asked him if he knew who I was. That caught him by surprise. He nodded, muttered uncomfortably that he did.

“Then why d’you hire me?”

Again, he was caught off guard. He showed a befuddled look while stumbling about for a moment, then asked me if I was planning to kill any more people.

“No.”

“Then if you can do the job, why shouldn’t I hire you?” He seemed relieved to have come up with that answer and he looked at me for a brief second, a thin smile having cracked his face. “I live by the rule that people deserve a second chance,” he muttered under his breath as if he were embarrassed by expressing these sentiments. With that, he turned from me expecting me to follow him, which I did. Instead of using the elevator, this time he took the stairs. I guess he figured he didn’t want to be confined in a small elevator with me.

After filling out the paperwork that he gave me, I followed him on a quick ten-minute tour of the building where he showed me the supply closet, the dumpster out behind the building, and each of the nine offices I’d be cleaning, as well as the shared bathrooms on each floor. At no time did he bother offering me his name, nor did I bother asking him for it. He seemed too uncomfortable with me for me to engage him in any conversation, and was clearly trying to rush things along and be done with an especially unpleasant task. When he was finished with the tour he told me that the tenants were usually out of their offices by six each evening so there was little chance I’d run into any of them.

“If they’re still working when you show up, skip their office and try again later,” he added gruffly. He handed me a set of keys, each one marked to indicate which door it was for. “When you’re done each night, check the keys in with the night guard. When you report to work pick up the keys from him also.”

He hesitated for a moment before telling me that he usually left by seven each night so I probably wouldn’t be seeing him again, at least not unless he needed to fire me. His stare drifted past me, as if he were looking for an escape route. He asked if I had any additional questions in a way which indicated that he hoped I didn’t, so I told him I didn’t, and he wasted no time in leaving. I gave him a head start so it wouldn’t look like I was following him, then I headed back to the first floor and the supply closet located there.

I took the cart out and loaded it with a bucket, mop and cleaners, figuring I’d do the bathrooms first while I still had the energy for it. I had a second wind after conking out earlier, but there was no telling how long that would last, especially given all the recent changes in the routine that I’d settled into over the last fourteen years.

I worked methodically; first cleaning the sinks, then toilets, then mopping the floors. While I did this I couldn’t help noticing how quiet it was. In prison I’d kept to myself and seldom talked with anyone, but there was always a buzz around me, always other inmates nearby, and I always had to be conscious of the threat that they posed. In a way that was good – it kept my mind occupied. It was only during those early morning hours when I’d be stuck alone with my thoughts. Early on when I had my reading light I could escape those hours with books, and later after I had to sell my light there’d still be enough noises coming from the cellblock to distract me – an inmate crying out in his sleep, threats being made, other sounds caused by God knows what. This was different. The only two people in the building were me and the kid playing security guard by the front door. The only noise breaking the quiet was what I made while I worked. I was going to have to buy a radio or portable compact disc player or something, because otherwise I didn’t think I’d be able to bear the quiet.

I needed to distract myself from the memories that were pushing through the silence, and I forced myself instead to think of my pop, to remember what he was like and how he would react if he were alive now to see me cleaning bathrooms. It had been a long time since I’d thought of him, but I knew he’d be happy to see me at a real job and I knew what he’d tell me: “Nothing wrong with an honest day’s work, son.”

My pop was only forty-three when he died of a heart attack. I was fifteen at the time. From what I could remember he was a gentle, soft-spoken man, and later my mom and others would tell me how he’d worked hard every day of his life. Honest work, too. Him and my Uncle Lou built houses all up and down Blue Hill Avenue. Neither of them ever made much money from it, several times getting ripped off enough by contractors to keep them buried in a financial hole, but I couldn’t remember either of them ever complaining about it. My Uncle Lou died young also. I think he was only forty-six when he bought it, and it was only a couple of years after my pop. Something about his lungs.

The last couple of years of my pop’s life there would be such an overwhelming sadness in his eyes when he’d look at me. By the time I was thirteen I was all he and my mom had left with my brother Tony being killed in Vietnam and my brother Jim dying only a few months afterwards in a stupid accident during a summer job – being pushed out a window while moving furniture. I knew I was a disappointment to him with the little interest I showed in school and all the fights I kept getting into and the petty thefts and other little crimes. As far as the fights went, what the fuck did he expect? We were living in a blue-collar Catholic neighborhood, and my mom was Jewish, which as far as the other neighborhood kids were concerned meant I was Jewish, even if I was going to church every Sunday. Ever since I was five I was having kids lining up to challenge me to fights, claiming that I killed our Lord. I wasn’t going to take that shit.

I don’t know how Tony and Jim ignored that crap when they were kids, but I sure as fuck wasn’t going to. Although I was small for my age, I was ruthless when I fought and went at it like a tornado being released. By the time I was fourteen I had enough strength where I could do some serious damage, as Tommy McClaughlin found out. It was brutal what I did to him – knocked unconscious, his jaw, cheekbones and skull all fractured, his face not much better than raw hamburger meat. I almost went into the juvenile system for that, probably would’ve except Tommy McClaughlin’s old man refused to press charges. He wanted his kid to be able to have another go at me when he recovered. After all, it was embarrassing for him with his kid forty pounds heavier than me, and me being practically a Jew. We never did have that rematch. When Tommy healed up, he kept away from me. He knew what I was capable of, as did the other kids in the neighborhood. The last few months my pop was still alive I rarely got into fights, and when I did it was only with kids outside the neighborhood who didn’t know any better, and none of them ever fared much better than Tommy did. By this time I was more careful to make sure there weren’t any witnesses. I didn’t want to see that horror in my pop’s eyes again like I did that time when he was brought to the police station after Tommy.

I remember it was a week before he died when my pop took me out to dinner alone at a fancy steak house. He wanted to have a heart-to-heart with me, to impress on me the importance of an education and living a clean, honest life. I never much saw the point of being a wise ass, and tried to act as if I was buying what he was telling me. Maybe I convinced him, but more likely he knew it was going in one ear and out the other. After all, he and my Uncle Lou turned out to be examples of what you got from that type of hard work and honest lifestyle – you were taken advantage of your whole life and then you dropped dead before fifty. And it wasn’t just them – my pop’s father also died young, as did all my pop’s uncles. I don’t think any of them made it into their fifties, but they all worked hard each day of their life as laborers up until the moment they died. Fuck, my brothers who followed the rules and tried to live cleanly didn’t even make it into their twenties.

In a lot of ways it didn’t make sense for me to give up Salvatore Lombard. With my family history I never expected to make it to forty-eight let alone sixty-two, so why make that deal?