(2004) Citizen Vince (20 page)

No, it’s not over. Vince watches a produce truck back up to the basement door of a restaurant, the owner using his hands to indicate two feet, then one foot. It’s as if the owner is signaling Vince—his proximity to danger.

The whole thing reminds Vince of the way he wakes up just before his alarm goes off—the knowing burst of anxiety he feels just before a hand lands on his shoulder. He turns around and sees the smiling round face of Ange, in his tan jumpsuit. “Hey, Donuts! Good news. John axed me to drive you to the airport.”

“Drive me?” Vince asks.
Going for a ride?
“You…uh…you know what, Ange? That’s really okay. I can make it.”

“Aw, I have to insist.” Ange sticks out his bottom lip. “John wants to make sure you get there safe. And he wants me to have a little talk with you. Okay?”

“Sure.” Vince’s mouth goes dry. Of course. They can’t just let you go. You can’t snitch and then go. The whole system breaks down if they just let some rat waltz in and apologize for breaking the only rule these assholes have.

Ange holds up a roll of bills. “John axed me to buy your airplane ticket, too. Since he took all your money.”

“That’s really not necessary,” Vince says. “I can borrow the money.”

Ange waves him off. “John insists. Look, he’s really not a bad guy.” Then he leans toward Vince. “But you do have to get out of town. Between you and me, Donuts, I don’t think John likes having you around.”

Vince nods. Of course John doesn’t want him around. And yet Vince is somewhat glad that it’s Ange; of all the guys at the poker game, he’s the one Vince liked the best, the one who seemed to understand the appeal of getting to be someone else for a while, of getting to be Vince Camden. No, if someone is going to push the button…Ange will at least make it quick. Painless. And maybe Vince can even talk him out of it.

“Come on, Donuts. Let’s go.”

They walk to Ange’s car, a red Dodge Diplomat. Vince could try to run, but even if he got away from Ange…if they could find him in Spokane, Washington, they could find him anywhere. His mind is racing, trying to think of a way out, when something else occurs to him. “You think we could make one stop first?”

Angelo considers. “The boss wants you gone.”

“There’s this girl…I’d like to see her once before…”

Ange looks back over his shoulder and then nods. “Yeah. Okay.”

“And then it’ll go quick—right, Ange?”

“Don’t worry about it, Donuts. You’ll be home in no time.”

DUPREE SITS IN
the hospital waiting room, eating a donut and drinking a cup of black water. He’s staring at an empty nurses’ station, when Mike, Charlie’s union rep, edges down the hall, unsure what awaits him. Dupree stands up and forces a smile. “Hey, Mike!” he says, as if they’ve been friends for years. “Thanks for coming down. It’ll mean a lot to Charlie.”

The PBA rep—thin, gray hair, drawn face—comes on him expectantly, as if thinking, This had better be good. An announcement goes over the hospital PA for a doctor and Mike looks over his shoulder for just a moment.

“He’s fine,” Dupree says. “Don’t worry. I guess they’re gonna have to operate on his jaw, though. It’s gonna be wired shut for a while. He’s not gonna be able to talk. Which might not be such a bad thing, huh?”

“The nurse said he got jumped?” Mike says.

“He was helping me on my case. We were interviewing some people in—what is it, Alphabet City? And someone just stepped out of the shadows, jumped him, and hit him with a tire iron. Twice…I think.”

“Someone…” Mike says.

“Yeah,” says Dupree. “Someone.”

They stare at each other for a long time, and then Dupree shrugs, smiles, and looks away. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help him. I’m no good in situations like that.”

“That right? You don’t like to fight?”

“No. Not much.” Dupree checks his watch. “Look, I gotta take off. But I thought it’d be a good idea to have someone with him when he comes out of surgery. He’s gonna be pretty confused. Be good to have someone calm him down, tell him to lay low.”

“Lay low?”

“Yeah.” He looks carefully at Mike. “Tell him I appreciate his help. Tell him as far as I’m concerned, we’re done.”

Mike gives a quick nod; he can’t promise anything, but he seems to understand the terms of the truce. “Look, I don’t know how much you know about Charlie…what happened to him…”

“More than I want to know.”

Mike shrugs. “He was a good cop…”

Dupree just stares.

Mike can see that it doesn’t matter and he shrugs. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do. You need anything else?”

“As a matter of fact…” Dupree pulls out a pad and writes down the name Martin Hagen. “He was supposed to get me a file on this guy. Can you help me with that?”

Mike says he’ll try.

Dupree starts to leave, but Mike calls after him. “How long are you here?”

“As long as it takes to find this guy.”

“Well,” Mike says, “if I was you, I’d hurry.”

IT’S LIKE A
vision there in front of you—a memory you haven’t actually had but could describe completely. Eight o’clock Saturday morning, cool and overcast, and right there, across the street, Tina comes out on her small porch to get the paper. Barefoot, wearing a short terry-cloth robe that stops right in the middle of her muscled thigh. Her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. A glimpse of white silk inside the robe. Everything Vince once believed he could ever want in life is contained in this picture: a woman, a house, the morning paper. And for a moment he feels some bitterness about the smallness of his dreams—it’s not as if he wants to be president,
and yet he couldn’t be further away from even this simple life, this thing that other people fall into without even trying, that other men rebel against, abandon on their way to bus depots and train stations and taverns. Vince stands across the street, against the hood of Ange’s car. Inside the car, Ange is leaning on the wheel, pointing and smiling, and his thick lips mouth the words:
Is that her?

She stands stock-still, reading the paper, flipping the pages, and he wants to go over, he really does, wants to stand next to her, to feel her breath on his chest, to feel the tiny blond hairs on her thigh, just below the robe’s edge.

A car drives by between them and Vince is shaken from his thoughts. But Tina doesn’t look up from the paper. Inside his car, Ange holds up his hands and raises his eyebrows. His thick face shows alarm and he mouths again,
Talk to her!
But before Vince can decide, Tina turns with the paper toward the house. She opens the screen door and steps back inside. The door closes behind her. And Vince stands there, across the street, leaning on the car.

Ange climbs out and leans on his doorframe. “Hey, wasn’t that her, Donuts?”

“Yeah. It was her.”

“Then what the fuck? You make me drive all the way out here and you ain’t gonna talk to her? I thought you was gonna talk to her.”

“I don’t think I can,” Vince says. “I don’t know what to say.”

Ange looks at the house and then back at Vince. “She’s pretty.”

“Thanks, Ange.”

Vince considers the house—narrow and clapboard, just like the two houses wedged on either side, painted white and yellow, with window flower boxes and an American flag. It’s just the kind of life Vince would’ve wanted to give her, and what she insisted she didn’t need—at least when they were together, back when Vince was incapable of this kind of life.

Ange stays leaning on the car door. Scratches his black hair. “So
you’re telling me we drove all this way and you ain’t even gonna fuckin’ talk to her?”

“I guess I just wanted to see her.”

“How long has it been?”

“Three years,” Vince says.

“You never called her? Or wrote her a letter?”

“No.”

“How come?”

Vince watches the windows, for any sign of her. “I promised her brother I’d leave her alone. He didn’t want her to get hurt.”

“Huh.” Ange nods. “That’s kind of…Jesus, that’s sad.”

Vince shrugs. He starts back for the car, opens his door, starts to climb in, and then stops. “Look. I know what’s goin’ on.”

Ange’s eyes narrow. “Yeah?”

Vince nods. “John would never just let me go, would he?”

“Donuts…” Ange shrugs. “Look, it’s complicated. You gotta understand about John. He’s got a lot of responsibility. There are rules. It’s a whole system of precedents and ways of doing things. Everything has value. Everything costs. You can’t just let someone walk away. Not without getting some”—Ange searches for the right words—“compensation. This thing is bigger than you or me. Or even John. This thing goes back generations. This thing is bigger than all the people involved. That’s why it works.”

“But we don’t have to go along. You and I…we can just step outside of it.”

Ange smiles. “What would I be, I step outside this life? I’m gonna make donuts? Come on.” Shrugs his big round shoulders. “Get in the car.”

Vince looks once more at the windows of Tina McGrath’s house, but they’re as cold and flat as Johnny Boy’s eyes. He climbs in the car.

“Cheer up, Donuts. You done the right thing. From here on out, it’s the easy part.” Ange starts the car. “You ready?”

Vince leans back in his seat and closes his eyes.

MARTIN HAGEN’S POLICE
file is thick but shockingly light: nine arrests, at least four convictions, but not one violent crime. No assaults or armed robberies—nothing more serious than theft and fraud. It’s certainly not the file of a killer. Dupree jots down the name of Hagen’s probation officer and a couple of addresses to check out, but there is precious little in this file of the person Martin Hagen that might lead Dupree to finding Vince Camden. Dupree reads about stolen credit cards and stolen cars and stolen property and stolen checkbooks, but there’s something missing.

The last entry in the file is a brief investigator’s report (
…based on his environment and his seeming lack of remorse, Hagen is a likely threat to re-offend…
) prepared for the prosecutor in the case. Clipped to it is a four-page excerpt from an FBI wiretap in which two unidentified suspects were overheard saying they had to find someone to “take care” of that “Irish rat Hagen” and that he should “dig himself a hole” somewhere. The page is notarized and signed by two FBI agents.

Also written on the report is a phone number for the DA investigator who worked the case—a woman named Janet Kelly.

Even though it’s Saturday, he calls, and apologizes when it turns out to be her home number. She’s pissed, at first, to be called so early on a Saturday. She’s no longer even with the DA’s office. She quit a year ago to take a management job in the corrections department. Dupree apologizes again, this time for calling so early, and asks if she remembers the Martin Hagen case.

At first it doesn’t register, but Dupree reads her report back to her. “Oh yeah,” she says. “A credit-card guy. Charming son of a bitch, if I remember. He’d steal bank cards and buy TVs, washing machines, stereos—then sell the stuff to these two guys who worked for some old Mafia captain. He was into them for some
money, so they were milking him a little. It looked like a big case at first, but it crapped out on us.”

“How?” Dupree asks.

“He had this slick lawyer, went to law school with the deputy prosecutor on the case. Convinced the guy that this Hagen was sitting on a goddamn gold mine of information, that this credit-card case was just the goddamn tip of the iceberg.”

“And?”

“More like the tip of an ice
cube.
”

“Do you think he was holding back on you?”

“No,” she says. “I honestly don’t think he knew anything except his own credit-card deal. I don’t think he was connected at all, just your garden-variety thief. But by the time we realized it, we’d already given the guy full immunity.”

“And put him in witness protection for a credit-card scam?”

“Well, there was also the FBI wiretap. It looked like the guy was gonna get clipped if we didn’t get him in the program.”

Dupree pulls it from the file. “Yeah, I saw that report. But if you’re right and the guy didn’t know anything, why would there be a contract out on him?”

“You’re asking the wrong person. You gotta talk to the FBI about that.”

Dupree stares at the FBI report. Something is off. “You said you remember Marty Hagen. Do you remember what he looked like then?”

“Yeah, sure. Good-looking guy. Looked like trouble.”

“Did he look Irish to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hagen’s a German name.”

“I don’t see what—”

“On the wiretap, these guys say they’re gonna take care of ‘that
Irish
rat Hagen.’” Dupree holds the sheet close to his face and turns it sideways to look down the line of type.

On the other end of the phone, Janet Kelly laughs. “I don’t
know what to tell you. These aren’t the kind of guys to lose sleep over some guy’s ethnicity. Now, if there’s nothing else…”

Dupree just keeps staring at the page. “Yeah, no. That’s it. I’m sorry.” He hangs up the phone and stares at the file. He won’t be able to talk to the FBI until Monday morning. Which means he’s got two days to watch the door and wonder when Detective Charles is going to climb out of his hospital bed, walk to his car, and—

Dupree looks around his hotel room: notes spread on one of the beds, the other disheveled from a few hours of rough sleep. Suddenly he feels so small. Who is
he
to find this guy in New York, to figure out mob politics and the intricacies of New York law enforcement, to make an enemy like Donnie Charles? Amazing that a person could be so alone in a city of seven million people. He stands. There is barely space between the two beds for his legs; he has to turn sideways to wedge his way around the furniture in the room. He can hear sirens outside, and the first morning traffic. He opens his curtains and looks down Seventh Avenue toward Times Square. It’s overcast. He watches the traffic, and wonders what the density and speed of a place like this does to the people over time, wonders if he’d be any different from Charles if he lived here; or maybe place doesn’t have anything to do with it. Eighteen years Charles has been a cop. Maybe eighteen would do that to anyone. Dupree is struck for a moment with something like panic and he wishes he could write a letter to himself and mail it, to be opened in the year 1998.
Dear Alan, Be careful. Don’t be a prick.
He picks up the phone and dials. The ring is harsh.