Authors: Tom Piccirilli
She noticed the seams and creases. “And I thought I was obsessive. These are originals?”
“You are obsessive, and yes, they’re originals.”
“You must’ve spent a fortune.”
“Yeah, but they’ve only gotten more rare. I could sell them for twice what I paid. They’re about the only things I ever really cared about. I let my ex have everything else.”
“Don’t you think at your age you should care about more than movies and fast cars?”
“It’s only one fast car, and I’m predisposed to noir.”
“How do you mean?”
“My old man got me hooked when I was six or seven. I was imprinted with a passion for them. I watch lots of DVDs but I prefer seeing them on the big screen. The Paradigm and a couple other theaters in Greenwich Village have revivals all the time.”
“I’d love to go with you sometime,” she said, as if responding to a question he’d never asked.
“Sure.”
She moved off and looked out the window facing the parking lot. “And that imprinting, your predisposition, your passion…it’s the same thing for your brother Danny’s car.”
He never wanted to see it that way, but it might be true. “I suppose so.”
“You sound almost resentful.”
“Do I?”
They sat on the couch together. He had nothing to offer. He kept no liquor in the apartment, and he didn’t think he even had any soda. Asking if she wanted a drink of water was just too damn silly. It only served to remind him that he’d never been social and had only gotten worse with age.
Marianne used to climb out of bed at two in the morning, after they’d finished making love, and stand there watching him for a moment. He’d watch the shimmer of sweat drying on her belly, a light salt drift fading to the right, thinking, What’d I do now? She’d run her hands through her hair and shake her curls out of her eyes, the fire building in them until she’d say, “I want to go out.” He’d look at the clock and she’d go, “Not now, just once in a while.” He always promised he’d take her somewhere nice, whenever she wanted, but the only time she ever seemed to care was at 2
A.M.
when she was pissed off at him. It got so he’d get a little tentative about touching her in bed, knowing beforehand how things were bound to end.
“You’re my unique story,” Jessie Gray said. “The one I need to tell.”
Her expression seemed carefully conceived. It hit the right amount of self-confidence and dedication. She turned her face and gave him the entire good side. She was trying to work him from both angles—she could tell his story better than anyone, and he should allow her to do so because she was cute. Flynn realized he wasn’t social for a pretty good reason.
“Actually, it’s my story,” Flynn said. “And I don’t want it told yet.”
“But why not? You’ve read my work, you know I’m capable of presenting you in an honest, positive light.”
“You already know the reason,” he said.
She leaned back and cocked her head, maybe reappraising him. He got a very real sense that she wanted to be a broadcaster one day and was practicing all her moves in front of the camera she imagined was always trained on her. “Because it’s not finished?”
“Because a woman is dead,” he said. His voice came down harder than he expected, sounding very much like the voice of his father. The voice of Danny when he got upset. He wanted to add,
There’s more murder to come.
“Don’t you understand? That’s what makes it so
fascinating.”
“Not to me. I find it infuriating.”
“Just as I find you, Mr. Flynn!” She’d stepped outside of the lithe, silky facade. He saw the real Jessie Gray there for a second. Miffed but with a hint of respect. Like everybody, she liked the ones she couldn’t run roughshod over. She was interested in the men who gave her a hard time.
She gave a little-girl huff and tried again. “What’s your personal journey been?”
His lips framed the words but it took a while before he repeated them. “Personal journey?”
“Yes,” she said. She waited. They both waited. It was the kind of impasse that could keep warring nations at bay for decades. He didn’t want to wait that long. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“How have you changed?”
“Since when?”
“Since the incident.”
“You’ll have to be more specific than that. My life is made up of incidents. So’s yours, by the way. So’s everyone’s.”
“I believe you know what I’m talking about.”
He really didn’t. She could mean the crash and the comeback or Angela Soto’s blood in his face or getting Harry Arnold to cough up the truth about why Grace Brooks died. The world had grown more compact with episodes.
“Remember what I said about precision,” he told her.
He stared at her. She was the kind of woman who always had guys sniffing around her but very few who ever made it onto her radar. He knew he wasn’t actually there yet. The story was, but he wasn’t. He could see why she’d had two bad marriages and why the husbands had both bailed in less than a year. He was already getting fed up with her, which was maybe why he was starting to get interested too. It was easy finding the wrong women when you went looking for them.
“Tell me about your brother.”
“I’d rather not,” he said, but he could feel the memories already surging forward. His mind buzzed with trying to put them in the correct order. Jessie Gray had opened the slit and now he wouldn’t be able to hold everything inside. It was another weakness. The need to always think and talk about his dead brother.
She watched him, her features conveying a kind of incidental sadness. She was giving him the look that his mother used to give him every time his brother’s name came up. It was encouraging and embarrassing. It put a stitch in his side.
“Tell me about Patricia Lee Waltz.”
It had been so long since he’d heard the name spoken aloud that at first it didn’t register. It took a couple of seconds to hit him. She was saying another name now but he couldn’t quite hear. He knew she’d repeat it enough times that he’d eventually get it. He thought maybe he should get into therapy, he still had a lot of shit hiding out in his darkest spots. And that wasn’t even counting the dead talking dog.
The other name was Emma. Emma Waltz. The girl flashed in his mind and he almost let out a yelp. Sometimes she came through right in his face, like she was about four inches from him. When she paid him a visit, she got way the fuck up close.
He said, “Why do you want to know about Patricia?”
“Your family went through a lot back then.”
“Families go through a lot all the time.”
“But—”
She finally noted the look on his face. He was glad she was starting to take things seriously. She tried another tack and continued. “Do you see that what you’re doing for the CPS is in some way paying for his sins?”
“No one can pay for someone else’s sins,” he said. “We’re responsible for our own. I do what I can to help because it’s what I do. Not because I’m trying to make up for my brother’s mistakes.”
“He killed a young woman.”
Flynn nearly argued the point, so strong was his love for Danny. The reality seeped into him second by second, growing larger until the truth of it nearly crushed the breath from him. Emma Waltz’s nose was almost touching his own. Her eyes were locked on his.
“He got her killed,” Flynn said, his voice hoarse, as if he hadn’t spoken for weeks, “yes, he did.”
EIGHT
He would never escape the smile of his brother. Danny drew him in. Danny would always draw him into the mysterious harbors of his own history.
Flynn struggled to contain his thoughts and keep them restricted to the safest memories. His mind would tentatively reach out along the avenues of pain, inching along, picking up speed, until he was racing toward them again.
Flynn awoke that morning to find his mother seated on the side of his bed, her hands resting lightly on her legs, shoulders slumped and her chin up. It was the position she often took when Danny called to say he’d been nabbed by the cops again. She’d hang up and sit on the bed and let loose a sigh that filled the house like a hurricane. For some reason, it always made Flynn smile.
Danny worked freelance delivery, finding jobs mostly out of the Pennysaver. So long as it would fit in the Charger, he’d haul it out as far as Atlantic City. He carried car parts, cases of sunglasses, vitamins, printing materials, birthday balloons, paintings and even shipments of live bait. Crates of nightcrawlers that he’d bring up to City Island in the Bronx for the fishing tournament every summer.
Most of the jobs were sucker runs and hardly paid enough to cover gas, but it gave him something to put down on his taxes. At night, he’d race up and down Ocean Parkway, Deer Park Avenue, Sunrise Highway, dragging down at the beaches and out at Airport Road.
Danny must’ve been as gut-hooked by the past as Flynn was. What tied Flynn to his brother also tied Danny to their father. It was a part of their genetic makeup, this need to skip backwards a few decades. Flynn remembered their old man pretty well. A couple of images stayed with him all the time. A smiling guy always with a cigarette in his mouth, propping Flynn on his lap to watch black-and-white movies on the late show. Memories came at him sideways. He’d be at the Paradigm watching Edward G. Robinson on the screen, and his old man would be right there with him.
His father worked the graveyard shift at the L.I.R.R. train yard. He slept all day and got up as the sun was setting. The only time he had to share with Flynn was after nightfall. Something about the dark theaters brought his father close.
The old man had a call in his blood that turned him around to stare behind him. He had photo albums of his own father off the boat from Ireland. Pictures of a cop walking a beat in Brooklyn, posing in front of apple stands and playfully chasing kids through open fire hydrants. Danny had inherited that blood. After the old man went to the yard, Danny would page through the albums looking at photos of their father decked out in his fifties leather jacket, black boots, tight jeans and T-shirt, with a greased up D.A. and a cigarette hanging from his lip. A different girl slung across him on every page. Posing in front of a souped ’58 Comet.
Anytime Danny talked about dying, he said it would be behind the wheel. The idea ramped him up, let him embrace death and stave it off at the same time. Too cool to go out of the game any other way but with the engine roaring.
He knew his doom was waiting for him in the Charger. Flynn knew his own death would be in it as well. He realized it even back then when he was ten. In school they’d ask what he wanted to be when he grew up and he’d answer that he didn’t care so long as he could drive. In art class the teacher gave an assignment to draw something outside the window: the flagpole, the football field, a plane in the sky. Flynn would use up all the orange and yellow crayons drawing cars exploding into fireballs. The school counselor got into it. There was talk of taking him to a child psychologist. Flynn’s mother sighed.
Common urges ruled the home. Danny would invite his straight-haired girlfriends back to the house while the old man was snoring and their mother was at work. Sometimes the girls were supposed to be babysitting their little brothers or sisters, and Flynn would have to entertain the kids. They’d watch television or play Wiffle Ball in the backyard. Flynn would feed them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. If he really liked the kids, he’d let them read his comic books. Danny and the girl would come out of his bedroom and the old man’s snoring would rattle the paintings on the wall. The girl would have pink cheeks and look proud of herself. Danny would look a trifle bored and expectant. They’d grab the little brother or sister and move out the front door like a family of prospective home buyers. Danny would give Flynn a wink that made Flynn’s heart swell although he didn’t know why.
Their father would wake up with a grunting cough that grew until he was spasming on the bed. Nobody knew, except maybe him, that he was already dying of lung cancer. He’d never spend a minute in a doctor’s office.
Danny never got along with the old man, but at least there was no real tension. Just a mild indifference that every so often became barbed with a sneer or a sarcastic comment. Most of it went over Flynn’s head. He knew discouraging words were being exchanged but since no one ever seemed to get upset he didn’t know what was expected of him. Only his mother showed small signs of dismay. She’d ladle soup hard. She’d bang the dishes. She’d stare out the kitchen window into the backyard and call on saints Flynn had never heard of. She held a lot in her gut.
Danny brought a date to the old man’s funeral.
He was decked in a black suit, thin black tie, white shirt with the cuffs shot, and she was in a mandarin red paisley dress. They were going out someplace afterward. She wore broad sunglasses that hid most of her face even though it was a cloudy day. She was black and had a pretty big fro. She held Danny’s hand and frequently kissed his neck. There was a murmur among the elderly Irish. The priest didn’t look happy. Their mother acted like she’d expected something like this. Flynn cried a lot and tried to understand all the mystifying rituals. He failed and it was a failure that would continue to rear inside him whenever he passed a cemetery. Danny and the girl dogged out the minute they threw their flowers in the grave. Flynn never saw her again.