Chapter 20
I spent the rest of the afternoon hiding in the apartment and thinking things over. My meditations were frequently interrupted by deep groaning and popping noises from the basement where Mr. Clabber's workmen were operating. The routine vibrations that I'd become used to had been replaced by a more disturbing phenomenon, a sort of minor lurching of the entire building, first on one side, then on the other. But I was too freaked out to go down there and see what was going on.
I started with the circumstance that Victor Carogna had given me the gun loaded, and had made sure that it got into the living room. From there I kind of worked backward and forward at the same time. I thought about Arthur, and I thought about Victor Carogna, and I thought about Arthur and Victor Carogna, and I thought about how Arthur had pointed me at Victor Carogna. And I wondered why the guy with the bat had happened to show up when he did. And then I thought about the cop's reaction when Victor Carogna had told him his name, and about my own spotless record as a solid, if boring, citizen. I was still thinking about all that and beginning in my slow way to come to some conclusions when Julia knocked on the door again.
“You must have had quite a party up here this afternoon,” she said, after a brief hello. Raton was with her, of course, looking at me mistrustfully out of the tops of his eyes.
“Just the knitting group,” I replied.
She looked at the silent scream of the destroyed TV with her hands on her hips.
“Commercials,” I said. “One of our members overreacted a little to one of those beer ads. She thinks they're degrading to women.”
“No doubt about that,” said Julia. “But listen, I work from 8 at night to 4 in the morning, which means I'm usually trying to sleep in the afternoon. I'm not mad about it, but I'd like to ask you to try to keep your knitting group meetings a little more sedate.”
“No problem. This is the first one that's really gotten out of hand. Must have been the phase of the moon. Or maybe it was the truffles.”
She showed me the list of Raton-care instructions she'd typed up for me and naturally had to go over it with me in detail, so the ill-tempered little beast wouldn't lack for anything while she was gone. Everything was on the list, from the 60-40 ratio of turkey to veal in his breakfast (proportions reversed for the evening meal) to the schedule and length for his minimum of three walks per day, how much ball-throwing and how much canine socializing he had to have in the park, the names and potentially problematic traits of all the other dogs with whom he had relationships, the best technique for administering his anti-depressant tablet, and which TV shows he expected to watch.
“I know you're a responsible person,” she told me, “but I've never left him alone before, and I'm feeling kind of guilty about it.”
“He'll want to sleep with you, by the way,” she said, adding, when she saw my expression, “He's very clean. I just gave him his bath. And here's the Benadryl.” She gave me a week's supply.
Notwithstanding her attachment to her cranky little dog, I thought Julia was probably the most normal person I'd met in the days since Leilah had collapsed the foundations of my boring existence. I liked her fast way of talking and the laugh lines at the outside corners of her eyes and something about the precise set of her lips; also the fact that she would go to London to take a class in something that I didn't even really know what it was. After she and Raton left, though, I felt that I had to put all that out of my mind and keep turning over the soil that had produced this sudden rich growth of events. It seemed to me that I was beginning to discern a strong pattern of exploitation in the developments since my retirement, which already felt like years ago. The only thing I was unsure of was how far back the trail led.
It seemed pretty clear that once I'd joined the knitting group certain subterranean forces, whose visible outcrops were the kind and seductive April and the ancient reptile Victor Carogna, had been arrayed against me. And it seemed clear that, in a kind of psychological judo, my opponents had used my own atavistic sex drive to throw me. But I had to wonder whether they could really have predicted my responses so confidently and precisely, or if they had simply seized the opportunities I ignorantly provided for them. There was no doubt that April had put some pretty strong moves on me; but surely most antique males would have been too busy fine-tuning their prostate medication to follow that scent, so they wouldn't have been able to count on snagging me that way. On the other hand, if you were trying to build up a new business as a $4,000 a weekend hooker, why would you pick on a retired physics teacher? That argued for some kind of deliberate intent. But then maybe April had just been idly casting her commercial net, and my blundering into it like a barnacled old grouper, but one with handgun skills, had given them ideas. Or had it all been planned from the start? Had Victor Carogna really led me so sure-footedly into the skewed world of gun nuts and taunted me so skillfully that he knew I'd be ready to whack the bat guy when he showed up at the knitting group (prodded into the ambush by Arthur? Or by Victor Carogna himself?). It seemed like too much of a risk for them to take; and yet, I had indeed squeezed off not one but two shots, one of which had at least disabled the attacker. I was developing a grudging admiration for the accuracy of Victor Carogna's psychological perceptions. I wondered if they had really expected me to kill the guy, thus ridding them of an annoying problem. Or were they just trying to scare him off, whoever he was?
And what about Leilah? That was the thought that really nagged at me. Could Victor Carogna really. . . No. Now I was just being paranoid, I was sure of that. Next I'd start imagining that Bill Beresford had been Victor Carogna's rogue cop partner and hard-drinking buddy before he reformed and became a bird man. That was going too far; the story was getting way too complicated, and the more I tried to sew all the pieces together, the more it looked like a turtleneck sweater for a giraffe. On the other hand, I had to admit it was the Victor Carogna/Leilah connection that had really put me over the top.
I began to entertain the silly wish that everything would just go back to the way it had been before, pre-Beresford, pre-Carogna, pre-April, pre-Arthur. I'd had enough of movement, momentum, tides in the affairs of men. Put me back on my couch and make my shattered TV whole again. Leilah would still be here with me, along with all the yarn and the rest of her mess. At this point I was thinking I'd even let her have Beresford on the side, if she wanted, during bird trips anyway. As it was, there was no Leilah, and the enjoyable part of the April adventure was history, leaving only the scary piper upstairs still to be paid. Despite having at least temporarily gotten the monkey off Arthur and Victor Carogna's backs, I was still under threat of getting my own frame bent like my bike's. Any foolish dreams I might have had of intimidating Victor Carogna had been trumped by the bat guy's performance. How could I possibly follow that act, which had barely made Victor Carogna blink? In any case, the cops now had the gun. And plus they were cocking a suspicious eye at me because I'd used it (like a puppet on a string!) to shoot a human being. What if he died? What if he didn’t die? Jesus Christ! I couldn't see any way out of the mess. And I was deeply concerned about the effect of all this on the dynamic of the knitting group, my only social framework.
It was a busy afternoon. Victor Carogna called from the hospital a couple of hours after Julia left. They'd finished setting his arm, and he wanted me to get his car, pick him up at the hospital, and drive him to Cupertino. Notwithstanding my many grievances against him, it seemed a request I couldn't decently refuse a crippled man.
As per his instructions, I found his keys in the Soldier of Fortune tote bag and the car parked next to the dog groomer's shop. I had to leave the windows open to air out the stench of stale cigarette smoke as I drove to SF General. Victor Carogna was waiting outside the main entrance, with his windbreaker draped over his shoulders and an L-shaped cast the size of Louisiana on his left arm. We drove south in the darkness. I wanted answers to all the mysteries I'd been contempla
ting since he and the bat guy had left for the body shop, but since I had only suspicions and no evidence, I wasn't sure how to ease into the conversation. I asked him about the arm.
“I won't be using it to whack my roger for a while,” he told me. The bat had snapped his upper arm, necessitating the big cast to keep everything immobilized. His attacker, he informed me rather casually, had expired a couple of hours earlier; the little .22 slug had apparently found some important organ or other. So his dreams for me had come true: he had trained a killer.
As of now, I can't really say how that information affected me. Not as much as Jonnie Lucero's sparrow, I can tell you that. It didn't feel like something I had really done. It felt like the shooting had been performed not by me but by a character in a movie written by Arthur and his business partner Victor Carogna. And I obviously hadn't known the guy, but from my brief experience with him I doubted that anyone would miss him very much. I pegged him for one of the people who leave those little black spots on the sidewalk that depress me so much. On the other hand, he had been doing – admittedly in a much more blue-collar manner – no more than what Arthur had been doing to me, and presumably for similar base financial motives. I wasn't sure I'd shot the right person.
“He seemed to know you,” I suggested.
“He knew he wanted to use that bat on somebody,” Victor Carogna growled. “I happened to answer the door.” I recalled, however, that he’d practically leaped for the door when the knock came.
“So you think he was a random crazy?”
“Or a random thief. I don't know what else to think.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the reeking ashtray and lit another one. The cast forced him to strike the match at arm's length. I opened the passenger-side window surreptitiously and closed my own, to draw the smoke in his direction. “Apparently no one in the room knew him,” he went on.
“He asked you for money,” I pointed out.
“Isn't that what thieves do?”
“He asked you,” I said, pointedly. “There are quite a few witnesses to that.” He shook his head dismissively, and I knew he was right. None of those women would rat him out. Victor Carogna could do no wrong in their eyes. He wasn't going to budge, that was obvious.
“How long have you and Arthur been in business,” I asked, trying the flank attack. He didn't even bother to take the cigarette out of his mouth.
“April's. . . manager? I haven't done any business with her, Ducelis. I don't do that kind of business. You do that kind of business, is what I hear.”
I took my eyes off the road to stare at him for a long moment, my head stuffed with a pudding of sarcastic responses: Leilah, Margaret, Arthur, the bat guy, even April – he was probably lying about her, too. I couldn't see his eyes, only the lenses of his glasses, blanked out by the reflected lights of oncoming cars.
I said, “Arthur seems to think there's a connection between you two."
"I've met him once or twice, socially. That's all.” He continued to work on the cigarette, very calmly. The more he denied everything, the more I knew I was right about the way those two sons of bitches had set me up. The shooting lessons, April, the mysterious thug at the door, with the loaded gun conveniently at hand. At my hand. Not to mention Leilah. I'd killed somebody for this guy, and he wasn't even going to give me any masculinity points for it. I was just hired help, as usual. Unpaid hired help, at that. So why, I wondered, glancing again at the opaque panes of his probably bulletproof glasses, given the moral tally here, was I unable to nail his shriveled old pelt to the ethical wall, or even to confront him with what I knew was his perfidy? His ascendancy over me was both inexplicable and total – the drug-dealing, philandering, sarcastic old motherfucker. And most humiliating of all was the realization that he'd known it from the moment he set eyes on me, and on my wife.
I wasn't quite ready to quit, however. “How fortunate that the gun was right there, and loaded,” I mused.
“That was lucky, wasn't it?” He sat staring straight ahead, with his crooked fingers sticking out the end of the cast as though he was waiting for a vulture to land on them.
“What was your plan if I didn't shoot the guy,” I asked him.
“There wasn't any plan, Ducelis,” he snarled. “But I'll tell you, I was getting fucking weary of waiting for you to pop the son of a bitch.” I knew that was as close as he was going to get to admitting that the knitting group meeting had had an agenda beyond the usual needle and natter. I didn't ask him anything else, just kept driving.
Margaret met us at the door in her wheelchair. “Victor Carogna, now what have you been doing!” I was surprised to see that she seemed more annoyed than worried. Victor Carogna didn't say a word. She escorted him gently to the back bedroom, leaving me shuffling my feet and examining the antimacassars, hand-knitted with whimsical scenes from famous massacres. Margaret rolled back out, silently, a few minutes later. “That man,” she said, “is the biggest bullshitter in the world. Do you know what happened?”
I shook my head and gave her the sequence of events, without attempting any explanation. She sighed. “Another one of his drug deals, I suppose. He insists that we need the money, but really he just likes to think he's still got his finger on the pulse of the underworld. He's very bad at it, frankly. He usually loses money. But at least he's never gotten hurt before. I suppose I'm going to have to put a stop to it this time. He'll be so disappointed. But I don't want to start getting calls from the hospital all the time. And thank you for shooting that man. I hope you're not too upset about it.”
“I'm looking at it as a learning experience,” I told her. She gave me a warm smile and offered me tea. Margaret was quite sweet, and I still liked her, a lot better than I liked her husband, in fact. Thinking about Leilah, I wanted to at least stick around and flirt with her a little bit, especially with Victor Carogna out of action in the back bedroom. But I thought better of it.
Once I was out the door, I realized I had no way to get to the train station, since neither Margaret nor her husband was able to drive at that moment. I thought, Fuck it, got back in the car, drove to the train station, parked, and threw the keys as far as I could into the trees on the far side of the tracks. Let Victor Carogna worry about the damn car. I'd send him an email to tell him where it was. But I hoped somebody would steal it.