Staten Island Noir (10 page)

"You asshole!" I yell, spitting in what's left of his face. "Couldn't you have just this once listened to me? Couldn't you have just fucking said yes?"

No one hears me. I have just killed my brother. I feel . . . nothing. I feel absolutely nothing.

I black out. When I wake up, it is thirty-five minutes later. It is still dark in the landfill. It still smells. My brother is still dead, lying next to me.

I climb to my feet, reach into Manny's pocket and take out the key to the rental car. I shamble over and open the trunk of Manny's Impala. Josephine and Conrad Spencer stare up at me with unknowing eyes, supine, the lump of the spare tire under rough felt between them. The smell is almost unbearable.

I lift up Manny's body, carry it to the trunk, and place it between the two people he killed. I do so gingerly; he is, after all, my brother.

 

* * *

 

Turns out I was Manny's moment of clarity, and he chose the hand and the lotion. Offered the grand buffet, he went with the chicken and broccoli. Maybe it was gonna be this way no matter what. Maybe my parents just did him too much damage. Maybe it's true what they say: garbage in, garbage out.

I, however, am still alive. And I need to get out of the country's biggest dump and deal with the mess that my brother made and that I have to clean up.

That I can do. I know what Manny does not—that when it comes to dumping bodies, Suffolk County is the new black. In the new millennium, everyone who's anyone is getting rid of their dead people there.

How could Manny have known? He was too phobic to take the tunnels into Manhattan and Long Island, too stupid to even consider there might be a new frontier beyond the ones he spent his life haunting. The closed-minded fuck couldn't even consider there might be another way to do things. Just like Dad. "Oh, I couldn't possibly stop taking the pills. There's no other way, boy." Assholes.

I park the Citation where it won't be seen and wipe the steering wheel and driver's area free of any prints. I get into the Impala and make my way to Richmond Avenue, then I-278 East and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge beyond. I am careful to use my turn signal and not speed; no sense getting nailed on something stupid at this point in the game. Dawn is starting to break. I love the Verrazano and the chance to see lower Manhattan at dawn. The Twin Towers are always so beautiful just before the sun starts to rise.

I pass through Brooklyn, pass through Queens. I get on the Utopia Parkway and hit the gas on Manny's rented Impala, humming "Undercover Angel" as I drive east toward Suffolk County. Maybe I'll stop in and see my big sister in Yaphank while I'm out here. She and I have always been close.

 

V. ME, HAPPILY EVER AFTER

I can't believe my brother is dead ten years. Seems like yesterday. I have lots of fond memories when I think of him, ones that predate the day I pocketed the money that finished him off. Family's like that, though. No matter what, in the end you still feel connected. Nothing feels better than blood on blood.

These days, I run a legit business—data processing for corporations that need to outsource it. It's pretty good—I have twenty-three employees who call me boss—yet I sometimes miss the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-dirty flavor of my former job. But being a thug for hire is, I suppose, a game for the young.

Funny thing, though: the money I got from getting Manny out of the way started me down this path. After that I got better at killing, more nimble, and I really started to rake in the cash. I innovated. Within months, I was the first in the business to use a GPS to plot the distance between burial sites, the first to use tasers for more efficient and cleaner torture, the first to understand how the Internet can be used to mine data and make contract killing more efficient. Change is everywhere these days, and people who don't adapt will die. Figuratively speaking.

 

* * *

 

I got out in 2004 when I met the woman who would become my bride. She has no idea what I used to do for a living. Today we live on Staten Island, on a little hill where you can see the bottom of Manhattan. The Towers are gone from the view, of course, but still—I can't imagine being anywhere else. It's right in the middle of things, but it's remote too. We have two boys, six and two, the same age difference as me and Manny. They're good kids, but sometimes they fight. I hate when brothers fight.

I do think this park they're building where the landfill once stood will be cool. I'll probably even take my kids there. History is history, even when you can't talk about it. Even when it involves fratricide. I like to think that I did Manny a favor, got him out of an unresolvable situation—and a life—that he simply couldn't handle. This is rationalization, I know. But that's what killers do. We rationalize. It allows us to pretend we're regular members of society. I've just managed to do it longer than most.

You could argue that people never change. I would disagree. Because the day I killed Manny changed my life. I didn't know it then, but I know it now. It was a horrible thing that taught me how to improve myself. These days, I almost never feel like a killer anymore. I owe that all to Manny.

Now and then, there are moments in a man's life that offer up complete clarity. They're rare, and rarer still is the ability to recognize them. It is only the truly intelligent, self-aware man who finds himself in a moment of clarity and actually sees it for what it is—and moves forward in a productive way.

I am that kind of man. My brother, as I stated earlier, was not.

DARK WAS THE NIGHT, COLD WAS THE GROUND

BY
S
HAY
Y
OUNGBLOOD

South Beach

The sound was soft at first, a scratching that seemed to be part of the hip-hop song blasting from the open windows of the vintage bronze Mercedes as it pulled up next to the white Lincoln I was sitting in.

An unnaturally tan, pear-shaped man, wearing a plaid golf hat and sunglasses, stepped gingerly onto the gas station's oil-stained concrete in a pair of shiny penny loafers. He wheezed as if he had asthma and tucked the tail of a pink, buttoned-down shirt into the waistband of a pair of gray sweatpants, which were stained at the knees. I saw that the muffler of the wide four-door model car was almost touching the ground.

The man grunted and stretched his arms out as if he'd been driving for a long time. He turned in my direction and sniffed the air with a grimace. The wind had shifted and the aroma from the nearby Fresh Kills Landfill, also known as "the dump," wafted over the top of a long line of leafy green trees, cleverly planted to camouflage the rolling hills of garbage facing the Staten Island Mall. The man slammed his car door shut, turned on his heels with a military twist, and marched into the store. Although there was a driving boom box beat thumping out of the windows, I was sure now of a dissonant muffled tapping coming from the sagging trunk of the Mercedes.

It was club night and my new friend Francesca "Frankie" Dacosta had stopped at the gas station near her house on the western shore of Staten Island to buy a six-pack of peach wine coolers and a bag of ice. I had met Frankie a few days before, at the grocery store on Forest Avenue. I was standing in the produce aisle holding a large bunch of collard greens. My fingers felt the leaves as if they were braille, as if some message decoded along the thick stems and fine veins could explain why Raymond, my husband of forty-two years, was gone. It was so unfair. He had been hammering a nail into the wall so we could hang the framed photo of our last trip to the Grand Canyon when he fell to the floor. The doctor said a blood vessel had burst in his head. Six months and one day after we both retired from thirty-seven years of teaching in the New York City public school system, we thought our lives were just beginning.

I sat up night after night for two weeks listening to Blind Willie Johnson's sorrowful blues, a moan accompanied by bottleneck guitar, raw emotion that echoed my grief,
Dark was the night, cold was the ground
. . . I didn't want to die, but living without my Raymond took the sweet out of everything.

Frankie turned a corner in the supermarket and saw me standing in the produce section holding the collard greens like a wedding bouquet. Silent tears poured down my face onto the front of a red silk blouse that had been my husband's favorite.

"I wanted to take a picture, but my good sense took over and I gave you a pack of tissues and took you home with me," Frankie told me later.

 

* * *

 

I opened the passenger door of the Lincoln and was about to get closer to the sound when Frankie came flying from the store like she was being chased by demons out of hell. The loose black shift she wore was hiked up above her pale knees and she pressed the sack of wine coolers to her chest. She tossed the bag of ice onto the backseat, barely missing my head.

"Get in! Lock the doors!" She barked commands and I followed orders. Frankie jumped in the car and hit the power lock three times. She pressed another button and the windows rolled up at lightning speed.

"You're sweating. What's going on?"

"There's a really creepy guy in there. He's trying to get the attendant to give him half a gallon of gas in a mayonnaise jar, thirteen matches, and six yards of silver masking tape."

"Sounds like he's making a recipe or something."

"Or something." Frankie wiped sweat off her upper lip with a handkerchief.

"I think there's a body in the trunk." I rolled the window down a few inches. "Listen."

"That's crappy music." She waved the handkerchief in front of her face.

"Listen," I shushed her. We both heard a loud thump.

Just then the driver of the Mercedes strolled out of the store cursing the gas attendant's mother. I rolled up the window and looked over at Frankie. Then my head snapped back toward the Mercedes when I heard a crash. The man had thrown the empty mayonnaise jar against the side of the building before getting back in his car. The Mercedes took off, leaving behind a trail of smoke, the smell of burning rubber, and the echo of screeching tires.

"He's headed toward the dump. Should we . . ."

Frankie pressed her lips together and shook her head. "Marie, honey, this is Staten Island. We should be blind, deaf, and dumb." She brought two fingers to her lips, closed her eyes, and pressed her other hand to her ear.

"Maybe it was a big dog," I said, sure it wasn't.

"Yeah, and maybe it won't snow this December," Frankie countered, pulling into Friday evening traffic on Richmond Avenue.

"What if it's somebody you know?"

"I don't know the kind of people who'd be locked up in the trunk of a car, do you?"

"He was acting so crazy. I just know he's going off to do something bad."

"He's a bad man. What do you want to do about it, Marie?"

"We didn't do it already, so I guess we leave it alone."

"Thank you. Enough already about that bum."

We stopped talking about the guy, but I couldn't stop thinking about him.

We took the long way to Frankie's house. She liked driving through Todt Hill where the wealthy lived. Frankie said Paul Castellano of the Gambino crime family had lived in a house that was an exact replica of the White House, down to the flagpole flying both the American and Italian flags. I read somewhere that Todt was a Dutch word for
dead
. There was a large cemetery nearby and I also took note that there were no sidewalks or public transportation in the neighborhood.

On the day we met, Frankie invited me to her South Beach home and a meeting of the Staten Island Ward Widows of America. After her husband Ignacio died, Frankie had painted every room in her house bright yellow—with the exception of the bedroom, which she painted red velvet. Frankie had a sweet tooth, and sleeping alone for seven years hadn't made her any less lonely for companionship, or desserts. Although the widows took turns making dessert, Frankie had a great recipe for cannoli, which was to die for.

"Marie," she said, "for you, I'm making cannoli. I want to bring some sweetness back into your life."

She worked real hard to make me smile again.

Making the cannoli was an all-day affair. The recipe had been given to her by her mother-in-law, along with the responsibility to pass it on to the women in the family. When Ignacio died of a heart attack on his job as an electrician for the city, Frankie had been inconsolable for months. She read an article in the
New York Times
about a group of widows who met every month for dinner and companionship. Those were the things she missed most, and so for the past seven years she and her friends had been meeting monthly in each other's homes to eat together and put some sweetness in their lives.

Frankie, Olympia, Celia, Theresa, and Angelina were well into their sixties, and all but Angelina were either widowed or divorced. At first the women eyed me a little suspiciously. It was rare to see a black woman in this part of Staten Island—especially in this famously clannish Italian stretch of Hickory Boulevard—although I had recently learned that in the seventeenth century early settlers on the island had been French Huguenots and freed slaves. I didn't say much at that first meeting, and after brief introductions the conversations started in as if I weren't even there.

 

* * *

 

Today the women arrived at the front door of Frankie's home within minutes of each other. Celia was the first. Frankie had invited her after months of listening to her complaints about being a jailhouse widow. Although Celia's husband wasn't dead, she was hoping he'd die in prison where he had been for the past three years serving time for bigamy. His wife in Ireland showed up on their doorstep one day demanding back–child support for a teenager he claimed to know nothing about.

"Excuse my French, ladies, but that Irish fucker ruined my retirement. I'm supposed to be lounging on a beach in the Bahamas with a cold cocktail in my hand."

Angelina, still as thin and girlish as she was in high school, had a bum for a husband. Tito had terrorized her from the moment she met him in high school, bullying her into marriage at sixteen and getting her pregnant every ten months for the next six years. She finally had her tubes tied after saying a few dozen Hail Marys. She wasn't a widow, but she dreamed about it. She was an honorary member of the club and a portion of every meeting was dedicated to exploring ways to kill Tito. They had poisoned him, hired someone else to kill him, put a spell on him, and each month looked forward to concocting the most creative murder so that Angelina would be eligible for his pension. Tito had left the family years ago, so in a way Angelina was living like a widow, but without the pension. She earned income as a wedding seamstress and had a team of well-behaved children who helped make her home business a success.