Epitaph Read online

  So now, his hangover dulled, it was his shoulder that began to act up. A sign, his shoulder was, a warning, a dear but annoying friend tap, tap, tapping him there to get him to look at himself and remember. Before he got too riled up and maybe started to believe things he shouldn't. And so he did remember. After all, he had the picture filed right under S for shooting, and right after R for Rachel. There.

  There's William reading the Daily News. William sipping his coffee from Micky D's. William dozing off on his suddenly comfortable bridge chair like old guys are prone to do, guys who pull night shifts and dream about their wife doing their business partner every way to Sunday on a motel vibromatic off Utopia Parkway. Guys like that. Even as a Chevy Impala with one broken headlight circles Weissman's Auto Parts like someone lost; once, twice, three times around the block till it finally pulls over and lets two black men out onto the pavement. Three black men really-counting the one still sitting in the car-seven empty cans of Colt 45, a stolen sawed- off shotgun, and a spanking-new jigaboo special-.22 caliber to the uninitiated-check the police manifest for further corroboration.

  William still dozing, somewhere between Brooklyn and Pimlico by now, although what's this? Clank, bink, boom. Someone being rude enough to ruin his beauty sleep- that's what it is. William opening his eyes and actually hearing someone trying to jimmy open the front door. Imagine that. They hired you as a security guard, didn't they, and suddenly that's what you're being asked to do. Guard. Not sleep, not sample the coffee and donuts from every diner on Utica Avenue, not analyze the box scores and handicap the ponies and do two words of the crossword puzzle. Guard. Used fan belts, four-horsepower transmissions, and radiators of dubious lineage, but they're all yours.

  There's William with his hand already sneaking down to his.45, trying to remember if he's ever really shot it, even once, ever even taken it out and sighted it and pretended to shoot it, and knowing that the answer is no- not on your life, but taking it out anyway. Sidling up to the door in a kind of bent three-quarter shuffle, then stopping just in front of it-the door starting to quiver from the pressure of whatever they're using to jimmy it open or maybe just from the knocking of his knees.

  I have a gun. That's what he says. Because it's true- he does, and who knows-maybe they don't, and the simple fact of him having one might make them reconsider their options here.

  I have a gun he says again.

  But they do too. They have a gun-or actually guns. A sawed-off shotgun, a spanking-new.22-check the manifest for corroboration.

  Suddenly the door splinters open and there they are- the three of them, caught in an awkward moment Emily Post just can't help you with. William with his gun out, pointed in the general direction of black groin-though he can swear the safety's still on-and the two of them, one with the shotgun raised past William's shoulder.

  No one says boo.

  So the gun speaks for them. William's gun actually- the safety wasn't on after all-deciding to fire a shot into the black man's kneecap, the kick of the gun tending to lower aim by as much as a foot. The gun just deciding to do it-what William told the police later on his way into the ambulance. Because William has no recollection of pulling the trigger, none. There they were staring at each other and the gun didn't like what it saw. Bang.

  There's one black man going down-Vernon M. Maxwell, by the way, five foot eight, one hundred eighty pounds, BedStuy by way of Rahway-two stints for breaking and entering and a dismissal on rape. And there's the other black man running back across the street and starting to fire as he goes.

  William? He's wondering why his gun went off like that and considering if he should bring it up on charges. He's staring at Vernon M. Maxwell's right kneecap, which doesn't resemble a kneecap now as much as the ground beef in Pirelli's Italian Deli. He's ducking too-because the other man is firing at him and William can hear the bullets ricocheting off the tin walls of the warehouse.

  Now the other man is back at the Impala where he's multiplying before William's shocked eyes. That is, he's becoming two men again-the driver has joined him of course, which means William is again outnumbered and possibly outgunned.

  Now turn your attention to the left, ladies and gentlemen. It is a Sunday morning in spring. The kind of morning that makes Sunday mornings in winter bearable. The kind of morning that makes you think of possibilities instead of realities. The kind of morning a five-year-old girl puts on her Sunday best and decides to skip rope before church.

  And there she is. Mom still in the apartment somewhere, but Deidre-yes, he knows her name-out there on the pavement with a jump rope. A my name is Alice… B my name is Barbara… C my name is Carol… D my name is dead.

  Not yet though.

  William crouching down behind an old fender just outside the door, with Vernon cradling his shattered kneecap and calling him every name in the book to his left. And now his two bros coming to get him. Both of them advancing across the street like gunfighters do-like Wyatt and Doc at the O.K. Corral maybe, only they were the good guys and these guys here are the desperadoes.

  This is what William can see: A Chevy Impala still idling across the street. Two black men bearing guns- one of them for sure. The five-year-old girl skipping rope-yes, he's seen her by now. And one thing else.

  He's seen this guy, William. You know him, don't you? This guy crying into his blanket, cowering behind an auto part, blubbering into the air. This pathetic security guard positively pleading with the deities not to take him yet. Can you believe this guy-I mean can you?

  The two black men halfway across the street now, one of them with a small pistol aimed at the chicken's head.

  So William raises his.45-the one with its own mind, only this time William taking charge. Even as he sees Deidre putting the rope down and walking curiously out into the street. Even as he sees-yes he does-a police cruiser rounding Utica Avenue just out of the corner of his eye. Still he raises the gun, still he pulls the trigger. Still he closes his eyes-that's right, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you saw it right-he closes his eyes. Why? You'll have to ask him-maybe because he didn't wish to see. And bang. Bang, bang, bang. One of those bangs a bullet he takes in his left shoulder courtesy of one of the black men still walking. One of those bangs a bullet taking out the left front tire of the Chevy Im- pala. One of those bangs a bullet slamming into the front cranial cavity of a five-year-old jump-roper dreaming of summer.

  Last snapshot.

  There they are, strewn before the Brooklyn warehouse like the various pieces of a wreck, blood seeping like oil onto the cracked pavement, onto the willow leaves carried by the spring wind all the way from Van Cortlandt Park, onto the white petticoat of the little girl right next to him, because once he's opened his eyes and the sheer awfulness of what's transpired here has begun to make itself known, he's staggered, crawled, stumbled in her general direction. The little girl in mid-moan, in terrible gut-wrenching, bloodcurdling pain. He tries to tell her to lie still, to keep quiet, that the doctor will be there any minute, tries to tell that to her and her wailing mother too, her mother and the police and the man in the moon, all looking at him as if he's crazy, mad as a hatter, which, of course, he is. For when he tells the little girl to lie still, to be quiet, shh… shh please… please… the whimpering does stop, but not because she's listened to him. She can't listen to him-its technically and medically impossible. Why? Because she has no head. One of his bullets took it right off. The crying, of course, had been his; he'd been comforting a corpse.

  Old men, the warehouse owner said, you send me old men and this is what happens…

  TEN

  It seemed to William, now very much back in the present and staring at that picture again, that it was from that moment on that he truly became old. You need guilt for that, it's an irreplaceable part of the equation. Suddenly it was as if they'd served him his birthday cake with all the candles on it after years of counting by decade. So many candles he'd never be able to blow them all out. So there'd be no wish for him t
hat year, or any other year either; wishes were for people with futures. The ordinary courage it took to open your eyes and start the day was suddenly no longer there.

  Not that the day held much in store for him. It's funny how easy it is to do nothing when you really put your mind to it. How easy it is to sponge off your disability and the various odd job, to pull up a chair and put your feet up and take a nap and never actually wake up. To bet the ponies and clip the coupons and kibitz with Mr. Brickman and quietly settle into a kind of unofficial retirement. To take it day by day, then month by month, then year by year, until you're suddenly sixty-five and you can make it official.

  William made his pact; he signed it in blood and he kept it. He became an official lifer, the kind that takes up basket weaving and finds religion; prison breaks were for younger men.

  But okay, yesterday had shown him there were definite chinks in the wall, rot in the bars. Break them the day had shouted at him… break them down. Maybe that's what yesterday had really been all about. His run-in with the Puerto Rican-or rather the kid's run-in with him, his ringing up that woman, his staggering journey home, agonized and affronted by the specter of Jean. Break them down. For what had really bothered him wasn't that Jean died, let's face it. It was that he might have died living.

  There.

  So now his theory, his perfectly reasonable and entirely logical accounting of Jean's last stand, all about rich runaways and big payoffs, could be seen for what it was. A story, a bedtime story, the kind you tell yourself to help you sleep. Why? Because even though he hadn't known Jean well, he'd known Jean well enough.

  Sure he had.

  First off: A good payoff wouldn't have meant anything to Jean. Jean had always been paid and paid well for what he did, but that was never why he did it. With Jean, it was strictly an affair of the heart; a wronged one, a smashed-to-smithereens one. Santini had once said that every case for Jean was the same case, and that the case was his own. And Santini, for once, had been right; every red file had as much to do with Jean as it did with his criminal of the week. If he was obsessed, and okay, maybe he was, it wasn't with money.

  So maybe Jean was trying to impress her, to prick her interest a little so she'd maybe see beyond his eighty- year-old body, just another bit of playacting. Fine. Only impressing people had never been very important to Jean either, had always, you might say, been of zero importance to him. So why change now? And why start saying too much when he'd always said too little?

  So okay. Maybe the only people who really knew Jean were the ones in that picture he carried around with him, but William knew this: If Jean said he'd been given the biggest case of his life, it'd be smart to believe him.

  There. Almost eighty and almost dead, but some way, somehow, he may just have gotten hold of a live one.

  While William had been weaving baskets, Jean was out there weaving cases, and had found one case bigger than anything that had ever come his way before.

  And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have it.

  And now that he had it, William could forget about it. After all, he had things to do. Sure he did. If he just gave himself a minute or two he could think of something he had to do today.

  Of course.

  All those horses just waiting to take his money. That huge pile of losing tickets just itching for a few additions from yours truly. If he didn't lose to OTB, who would? They absolutely depended on him. Of course they did.

  ***

  Okay, this was the problem. It was the horses' names. That was one thing. There he was, giving the racing form the benefit of his practiced eye, and what do you think he saw there?

  First race: Prince Jean. Swear to God, right there listed fourth-Prince Jean.

  And in the second race: Moses. No, he wasn't kidding-there it was in black and white. Some Israeli owner named Yehudi. An Orthodox jockey maybe? Moses-son of Esther, who must have instilled a lot of guilt in her son about ever finishing second. After all, his track record was strictly first-rate. Moses-listed two-to-one in the second at Belmont.

  So now he was really starting to get spooked. Starting to think that maybe there was a message there. Those horses' names-that was one thing.

  And his fellow horse-players-that was the other.

  Maybe it's the way they looked. Like him. As if they'd given some real thought to things they had to do today and all they'd managed to come up with was this. Like him. Even Jilly-he looked like him too-and Augie, back on his favorite stool with the racing form supporting his elbows like a place mat.

  Funny how that had never bothered him before. Odd how it did now. There was this absolute lethargy in the middle of the OTB office that was positively draining. Okay, it was disrupted periodically by the actual races, when the crowd would suddenly and halfheartedly spring to life for about two minutes or so. Then right back to sleep. Think of an old married couple giving it the once for old times' sake. Not that he was an expert on old married couples-he'd had to get old all by his lonesome.

  There'd never been a Rachel Two of course-that's a fact. There was very briefly a Catherine Anne, who hadn't lasted long enough to understand why he didn't care to talk about Rachel One. Catherine, a soon-to-be-divorcee, who'd hired him to find out if her husband was cheating on her-yes, he was-and if so, with whom-a fellow schoolteacher at Public School 171, home room and Romance languages. Name of Harold.

  Nice girl, he supposed, but without a Chinaman's chance against her. He'd given Rachel the Ford Fairlane, half the profit from the sale of their Elmont home-not much, considering most of it was owed-and a more than generous piece of his still bleeding heart. The absence of her was simply greater than the presence of Catherine Anne. That's all.

  Okay… maybe that wasn't all. Rachel had left him carless and homeless (throw in nearly penniless too), but worse yet, she'd left him with the kind of suspicious nature that finally and at last suited his life's work. William's new credo: a cuckold behind every vow, a cheater behind every shade-his included, especially his. This kind of outlook not particularly conducive to trusting long- term relationships. Catherine Anne-a good Irish Catholic who toiled somewhere in the bowels of the Garment Center and no stranger to betrayal herself, soon tired of being asked five times why she hadn't bothered to answer the phone the other night. Or where exactly she'd gone on her day off. Not because it was his right to know, or even really his desire to know (it wasn't like he was in love with her)-but simply because it was now his nature to know. What the scorpion said to the frog after fatally stinging him while being piggybacked across the pond-why the frog asking, why both of them caterwauling to the bottom. And the scorpion's response: Because it's my nature bub, because it's my nature.

  And then, he'd known Rachel forever and a day-the kind of history that's pretty much impossible to surmount, especially the day part. His first image of Rachel being a thin blond girl throwing her head back in unabashed laughter on the corner at Martin Van Buren High School. His last image of Rachel being the woman he loved with her legs wrapped around someone else. And in between, more or less, his life.

  Catherine Anne, any woman who might be unlucky enough to meet him, deserved better. He deserved worse. William had had to grow old and defeated all alone.

  Now, losing his money didn't seem like such a hoot anymore. Now he started thinking again about other things he had to do today. And the only thing he could come up with, swear to God, was you know what.

  So there he was again, ruminating about that old geriatric gumshoe Jean. About that tattoo. About the photo of the three of them. Which suddenly, just like that, became a bunch of other photos.

  Well, what do you know?

  So now, what he had to do today was suddenly clear as day. And while the pain in William's shoulder was still there, still warning him back, the pain in his gut was urging him forward. Break them… break them… whispering insidiously to him and getting him all riled up.

  Look at it this way, he said to himself.

  At least, it's
somewhere to go.

  ELEVEN

  Rodriguez was on the roof. A boy had answered Rodriguez's door and told William where he could find him. On the roof. Catching some rays in a white beach chair, beer cooler to his right, radio to his left, oiled from top to bottom with Bain de Soleil; William saw the plastic bottle discarded on the rooftop. A pair of mirrored sunglasses reflected half sky and half tar. He was singing along to something catchy and sophisticated. Do it doggie… "Rodriguez!" William called out to him. No answer; Rodriguez hadn't heard him. William had to take a walk on tar beach, sinking a half inch into the roof with each step, then tap him on the shoulder before Rodriguez knew he had company. Rodriguez stared at him. William's sweat-soaked face stared back, two very tired, very old-looking sweat-soaked faces, one to a lens. "Sorry," Rodriguez said. "I already sold them." "Them…?" "The drapes. You said you didn't want them." "That's okay. I don't." "Fine." Rodriguez turned back toward the sun. Doggie style makes me smile… "Rodriguez," William said again. "Yeah?" "What didn't you give me." "Huh…?" "Was there something you didn't give me?" "Yeah. The license." "Besides the license?" "The drapes."

  "Not the drapes. Something else?" "I'm not following you, Cochise." "Was there anything else? Anything you didn't give me?"

  "Like what?"

  "Like pictures maybe?"

  "Huh?" Doggie… doggie… doggie style… "Pictures," William repeated. "I gave you a picture."

  "Sure. Maybe there were other pictures you didn't give me."

  "Maybe I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. You want the license?" "No."

  "Right. You don't want the license."

  "I was thinking about pictures."

  "Pictures?" Rodriguez shook his head. "What kind of pictures?"

  "Personal pictures."