Killer (8 page)

Later, I tried the phone store again, and my salesman still wasn’t there. I spent the rest of the morning at the library searching through old newspapers. Eventually I found Jenny’s obituary. It talked about her being a loving mother and sister, but nothing about being a loving wife. I was left out of it. I wished my kids had included a picture of Jenny with the notice. The only small bit of consolation I pulled out of it was I now knew where Jenny was buried.

I thought about why my kids had left her picture out of the obituary, and decided they had done it intentionally thinking that someday I’d be out of prison and I’d be looking for it. The day I found out about Jenny dying, I left messages with both Michael and Allison, asking if they could send me a picture of their mother since the ones I had brought to prison years earlier had disappeared from my cell. If my kids heard my messages, they didn’t bother responding to them and I never received any pictures in the mail. To make matters even more pointless, the cemetery Jenny was buried in was in Revere and right in the middle of Lombard’s territory. I wouldn’t put it past them having someone watching Jenny’s gravesite. Maybe when I know my time has run out, I’ll make the trip. For now it wouldn’t be safe for me to go there, and I wasn’t about to commit suicide – at least not yet, and especially not by proxy.

That night I couldn’t help feeling a heaviness in my chest as I cleaned the office building. I tried listening to music, but my mind kept wandering too much, and I ended up tuning into a talk show. More scandals had broken since I’d been released from prison. The big one that they talked about that night was the recent shooting involving a ball player at a local club. The ball player, who was unhurt, had supposedly been the target for the shooting but a bystander was the one who took a bullet in the neck and was now in critical condition and on life support. The people calling into the talk show were speculating that the ball player had fired shots also, maybe even the one which wounded the bystander. I was quickly fading into yesterday’s news.

When I walked home later, I tried to stay alert. The streets were empty and I didn’t see any cars. No one was out there looking for me. I pretty much convinced myself that I must’ve been seeing things the other night.

It was twenty past two by the time I got back to my apartment. I almost called my son, Michael. I wanted to. I had the cell phone out and had keyed in his phone number, but in the end I flipped the phone shut. If I had made the call at that hour all I’d be doing would be giving him and his wife more ammunition to use against me. At least I had enough sense to realize that, and that was mostly why I didn’t make the call, but I guess it was also partly that I hadn’t worked up the nerve yet to do it.

chapter 13

1978

I’m stocking bottles of gin and vodka when a face from the past walks into the store. Joey Lando. It’s been years since I’ve seen him, not since that day when we worked Ernie Arlosi over for fourteen hundred bucks and Joey ended up ratting me out to DiGrassi. I almost don’t recognize him with how much fleshier he’s gotten and the thick white scar running from his eye to his chin. The scar makes his flesh look uneven, almost as if he’s wearing a piece of leather over part of his face. When he spots me a wide grin stretches his lips and there’s no mistaking him.

He eyes me up and down, smirking, then walks over. It’s a fluke that he catches me while I’m actually doing work. Every once in a while, I get restless and stock merchandise or handle the cash register or some other menial task. Mostly when I’m there I hang out in the backroom reading racing forms or magazines. It’s lucky Joey walks in when he does; it helps convince him I’m just a blue-collar working stiff.

“I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes,” he says, still grinning his half-smirk. “Fuck, I thought they were just bullshit rumors. Lenny March working an honest job. Don’t tell me it’s true about you having a wife and kids also?”

“Yeah, it’s true.” I look past him to make sure no one’s standing nearby. “I never thought I’d see your face again. Not after you ratting me out to Vincent DiGrassi.”

“His boys give you a good beating, huh?”

“Yeah, I’d say so.”

Joey points to the small circle of red puckered skin on my cheek. “You get that from him?”

I nod. “It was part of a test to see if I was a rat. I passed, I guess you and Steve didn’t.”

Joey’s eyes dull a bit. He’s still grinning but it’s forced now. “I always regretted that,” he says. “But you don’t know what they were doing to us to make us talk.” He runs a thumb over the full length of his scar. “And besides, you got off easy compared to Steve and me.”

I soften as I look at him and remember the old days when we ran together. It’s a shame that he and Steve fell apart the way they did when DiGrassi put them to the test, but I guess they just didn’t have what it took.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“How about buying you a beer or two.”

“No problem. The cooler’s back against the wall. These days I’m drinking Michelob. You want to break up a six-pack, go for it.”

He laughs. “Not here, Lenny. Someplace quiet where we can sit down and talk. How about it?”

“Where do you have in mind?”

“Connolly’s Pub. One block down. What do you say?”

For years I had thought about looking him and Steve up and kicking the shit out of them. Those feelings have passed. Now I’m curious what he wants to talk about. Of course, I could leave with him now – no one here has me on a clock, but I want to keep up the pretense of working a real job. I tell him I get off at six and I’ll meet him then. He tells me he’ll be there. After he leaves, I go back to stacking bottles. When I’m done, I head to the backroom and pick up the day’s racing form. I was given a “can’t miss” tip for later that night at Suffolk Downs, and figure I might as well play the rest of the ponies while I’m there.

I walk into Connolly’s Pub at quarter past six and Joey’s waiting at the bar, trying to look casual about it. He orders a couple of beers and we take them to a table in back.

“I still can’t believe you’re working a nine-to-five job,” he says, shaking his head.

“Eight to six,” I say, correcting him.

He takes a long pull on his Bud, wipes a hand across his mouth. “We ran together long enough back in the day. I know you, Lenny, I know what you’re made of, and I don’t buy that you can be happy living this bullshit life.”

“People change.”

“Not you.” He’s shaking his head angrily, takes another long pull at his Bud, emptying it. “Fuck, I saw first hand the things you used to do, and the look in your eyes when you did them. No one was a badder muthafucka in the day. And the guy I’m looking at now is the same fucking person. So don’t feed me any bullshit about people changing.”

He brings the Bud to his lips, realizes the bottle’s empty and leaves the table. When he returns he has a couple of fresh beers; the Michelob he hands to me. His demeanor is calmer, more relaxed. He leans forward and asks me if I want to hear what he has to say. I nod. He edges even closer, his eyelids drop a quarter of an inch. He’s got his back to the room while I’m facing it, but he knows I’ll warn him if anyone comes nearby.

“The two of us, we can each make thirty grand next week,” he says, his voice low enough that I have to strain to hear him.

“I told you before I’m out of the game.”

“Sure you are.” A thin smile creeps over his lips. He edges even closer so he’s leaning halfway across the table. “You know those bank machines popping up all over the place? I’ve got someone on the inside giving me a schedule of when a certain bank refills theirs. When it’s done, it’s with twenties, about ten grand worth. Next week I’m going to hit ten banks, all within a three-hour span. By the time the bank realizes what’s going on it will be too late for them to do anything about adding security.”

“Why do you need me?”

“It’s a two-man job.” Joey’s lids drop even further, the little I can see of his eyes is hard stone as they stare at me. “You got one guard in the armored truck, another reloading the machine. It’s mostly a smash and grab, but you need someone keeping the guard in the truck occupied.”

“What about your inside man?”

Joey makes a face. “It’s a she, and no, she’s not the one to do this with me.”

“Problem is, neither am I. I’ve got a wife, kids, and a steady job. Sorry, Joey.”

He smiles at me as if I’m kidding him. Slowly it wears off once he realizes I’m not, and what’s left behind is the hard look of a stone-cold killer.

“You’re full of shit,” he tells me.

I shrug. “It’s the way it is now.”

“You’re only kidding yourself. A fucking blind man can see that.”

I don’t say anything.

I can see the decision being made in his eyes on what he’s going to do next. “Are you going to rat me out?” he asks.

“If I didn’t back then to DiGrassi, I’m sure as fuck not going to do it now. Besides, I wouldn’t want my wife knowing I used to hang out with people like you.”

He accepts that. Without a word he gets up and walks out of the bar. I sit and finish my beer.

chapter 14

present

It had been a long time since I remembered dreaming. I knew I had dreams as a kid, but couldn’t remember any since then, at least none since I was out of elementary school. That night I woke up from a doozy of one. More than that, the dream jolted me awake, and left me sweating through my underwear and sitting up fast in bed with my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my temples.

The dream had me at a funeral home, stuck inside a room filled with coffins one stacked on top of the next. There was an unfamiliar man keeping me company. He looked almost like a cadaver himself with red rouge painted on his cheeks and sparse thin hair slicked back with grease. He was dressed in a black suit that was too small on him; it made his sleeves and pants legs pull up showing inches of his bony arms above his wrists and his white socks stretched high above his ankles. He stayed mute, refusing to say anything to me. I couldn’t place ever seeing him before, but he acted as if he knew me.

“What am I doing here?” I asked him.

He smiled showing tiny baby teeth, and gestured that I should look inside the coffins. I wanted to flee the room, I certainly didn’t want to open up any of those coffins, but it was as if I had no choice. Almost like I was a marionette being controlled by strings. I struggled to unstack the coffins. It was hard work, back-breaking work, especially since I didn’t want them falling and breaking open, but eventually I lowered them on to the floor and took the lids off. Inside were badly decomposed bodies. The stench was horrific. There wasn’t much left of any of the corpses, only ragged skin covering their skulls and parts of their bodies, but somehow there was enough left of their faces so I could recognize them as the people I had killed.

There was one coffin that stood out from the others. This one was nailed shut. I counted the coffins I had looked in, and there were twenty-eight of them. I asked the man with me about the twenty-ninth coffin. Instead of answering me he just smiled, his skin stretching tight against his face and looking as thin as if it were paper.

“Am I supposed to be in that last coffin?” I asked him.

He shook his head sadly at me, as if I were supposed to know the answer. Still, though, his smile stretched tighter.

“Jenny?”

His smile stretched still tighter. The skin covering his cheeks began to rip exposing parts of his jaw through the opening. And still, he kept smiling.

I woke up then.

Christ, what a dream. If that’s what they were like, I was grateful that was the first one I could remember in over fifty years. For a good ten minutes I sat silently before I trusted myself to move. Only after the pounding in my chest subsided did I pull myself off the bed and shuffle off to the bathroom to splash cold water over my face and dry the sweat off. I made sure not to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I didn’t want to risk seeing those same hollowed cheeks and dead sunken eyes that that man in my dream had.

It wasn’t even three-thirty in the morning yet. I’d only been sleeping an hour. I was tired and needed more than that hour, but I didn’t go back to bed. I didn’t want to lie there thinking about what that dream meant, and I certainly didn’t want to find myself slipping back into it. Instead I sat in my recliner and picked up a book that I’d been reading earlier in the day. At some point I dozed off. When I opened my eyes again sunlight was flooding the room. According to my alarm clock it was six o’clock. I had this vague image of lights being turned on and horns being blasted – almost as if I were back in prison, and for a few seconds I could smell that prison stench coming off me in waves. It was stronger than I had smelt it in days. I stumbled to the bathroom to try to scrub it off. I ended up standing in the shower for a half hour, and afterwards I slapped on enough cologne to hide any smell of prison that might’ve lingered.

That morning the diner was busy when I got there and I had to take a table near the front window. Lucinda was too busy running from table to table to do much more than give me a wink. Like every other morning, no one bothered looking at me. As far as the other customers were concerned I was just some invisible old man not worth paying any attention. That was what I liked most about the place, that, and Lucinda.

I was halfway through my French toast and bacon when a man sat down at my table facing me. It took me by surprise, and at first I thought it was the same wannabe writer from the day before. He looked similar; forties, heavy-set, balding. But he wasn’t the same man. This one was glaring at me with a white-hot intensity. A thick ugly vein bulged from his forehead. Nothing but hatred in his face.

“You rotten piece of shit,” he swore, his voice loud enough so that everyone in the room could hear him. The din from the room faded fast after that. I could sense all eyes turned our way. I didn’t want to look, but a glimpse showed Lucinda staring intently at us.

“Why don’t we talk in private?” I offered.

“I don’t think so,” he said, his voice maybe even an octave louder and echoing through the now quiet diner. He smiled as he noticed how uncomfortable I was, then turned sideways to address the rest of the room.

“You’ve got a celebrity with you,” he said. “Lenny March, mass murderer extraordinaire. The piece of shit they’ve been talking about in the news who killed twenty-eight people for the mob. The same one who murdered my dad.”

When he first started his speech I felt a hotness flushing my face. That was gone now, replaced by something cold. Everything had gotten very still. The rest of the room seemed to dissolve as I stared back at this man, my voice odd and unnatural to me when I asked him who his pop was.

His lips curled as if he wanted to spit at me. What he spat out was the name, “Frank Mackey”.

I nodded, remembering Mackey. “Your old man was quite a piece of work,” I told him. “He used to do truck hijackings, but that wasn’t why Lombard ordered the hit. Mackey grabbed a sixteen-year-old girl off the street, and held her for three days in the basement of an abandoned warehouse where he repeatedly fucked every body orifice this poor girl had. Her family wanted justice, but they also didn’t want this girl humiliated any further by the police or the courts, so they appealed to Lombard.”

What I said stunned him. “You’re lying.”

“Sorry, I’m not. Your old man was one of the few hits that I would’ve gladly done for free. Lombard wanted it to be more than just a hit. He wanted me to make sure there would have to be a closed casket, and more, he wanted your old man to suffer. And I did a hell of a job with it. Kept him alive for hours while I whittled away pieces of him. Now get the fuck away from my table. I’m eating.”

His skin color had dropped to a milk-white. Any fury that had been raging in his eyes fizzled. He was unsure of himself, wondering how much of what I told him was true, although at some level probably realizing all of it was. I picked up my fork and continued eating my French toast. He sat across from me for another minute and made a few idle threats about how this wasn’t over, but the steam had been taken out of him. There was too much doubt, or maybe not enough.

The room remained deathly quiet after he left. I could sense people staring at me, but I just kept methodically cutting my food and chewing it slowly. Minutes later when I looked up Lucinda was standing by my table, her face hard and inscrutable, her eyes small black ice chunks.

Her voice brittle, she said, “I liked you better when you were just an old coot.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do me a favor and find some other place to eat breakfast. I’d just as soon never see you again.”

“Lucinda, that was all a long time ago, I was a different person back then...”

My voice faded on me. The look on her face showed what I said didn’t matter. “Okay, sure, if that’s what you want.” My voice again sounded distant and foreign to me. “As soon as I’m done here you won’t see me again.”

I turned away from her, fixed my attention back on my food and continued eating my breakfast. I would’ve liked a refill on my coffee, but I wasn’t going to ask Lucinda for one, and instead planned on getting a cup at a convenience store. As I ate I looked up and met all of their stares until they looked away. I didn’t care any more whether people recognized me. In a way this was good, it hardened me to the prospect. It also woke me up about the way I was spending money. I was living as if I only had another month or two left, but I’d already been out over a week without any sign of Lombard’s boys, and the only relative of any of my victims who bothered looking me up turned out to be a gutless wonder who just wanted to spout off in front of an audience. It was possible that I was going to fade into the background, and that I’d be around a lot longer than I’d thought. I needed to quit eating out as much as I did, maybe buy a few pots and pans and start cooking more for myself.

The place was still as quiet as a tomb when I finished eating. I hesitated for a moment before dropping a twenty dollar bill to cover the food and tip, then left without looking back.

That afternoon I tried calling both Michael and Allison, and left them messages. I didn’t expect them to return my calls, but maybe I’d wear them down over time. After that I went to the library, and a reference librarian helped me try to track down Paul’s address and phone number on a computer. We came up empty. It was at best a wild goose chase. For all I knew he could’ve changed his last name, or be living overseas somewhere. He could even be dead for all I knew.

That same night while I was working I heard voices drifting in from the lobby. I was vacuuming a third-floor office when that happened. When I later asked the kid working security about it, he tried to look through me as if I didn’t exist, then finally admitted that he had been talking to his girlfriend on the phone.

“Some sort of law against that?” he demanded.

“You better lose the attitude,” I warned him, and left to finish my cleaning.

I thought about those voices I heard. It had sounded as if there was more than one person talking, but it was hard to tell with the noise the vacuum made, and by the time I’d realized what was happening and turned it off the conversation had ended. I guess it was possible the kid working security had his girlfriend on speakerphone, but that seemed far-fetched. More likely he was doing some business on the side, probably drugs, and had one or more customers over. If I was my old self I would’ve gotten the answer out of him quick enough, but I was no longer my old self. Besides, it was no concern of mine whether he was lying to me to cover some illegal activity. I had no interest in trying to push my way in on it, so it didn’t really matter one way or the other.

I had more important things on my mind.