Is Fat Bob Dead Yet? (30 page)

They've just reached the balcony when they hear the rear door bang open. Perhaps Jasper Lincoln means to join them after all. Heavy footsteps cross the stage, and a booming voice calls out, “Zeco, I'm going to break your face!”

Connor is almost surprised by how unsurprised he feels.

“Who's Zeco?” whispers Linda.

“I'm Zeco,” says Connor.

“I thought your name was Connor.”

“It
is
Connor, but it's a long story.”

“So you have
two
names?”

“Get down, get down!”

A bright light sweeps across the auditorium. Connor crouches behind the balcony railing and pulls Linda after him.

“The floor's filthy,” she says. She starts getting up. “Who's down there?”

“His name's Chucky. Please, don't let him see you.”

“Zeco, I'm going to hunt you down like a rabbit. I'm going to hurt you! If it weren't for your brother, you'd be dead.”

“Does he always talk like that?” asks Linda, speaking with a tone of scientific curiosity. “He sounds like the Big Bad Wolf.”

“Get down! He's serious.”

Linda crouches behind the railing. “I like the name Zeco. It's exotic.”

“Please,” says Connor. “It'll be awful if he finds us.” He sees Linda fussing with her phone. “What are you doing?”

“I'm calling 911. And this doesn't look a bit like Egypt!”

Connor is appalled. “You can't do this. He'll kill us!”

But Linda is already talking into the phone.

The balcony railing consists of iron scrollwork panels with open areas that brighten and darken as Chucky's light passes across them.

“The police are coming,” whispers Linda.

“You shouldn't have done that. They'll arrest me.”

“Why should they arrest you again?”

“It's a long story.”

Linda makes an exasperated noise. “Why's everything with you a long story?”

Chucky's light stops swinging back and forth, and its beam throws shadows of the scrollwork across Connor and Linda. “I see you, Zeco, you and your girlfriend. I'm looking forward to this.”

Connor tries to make himself smaller as he hears Chucky's heavy boots plod heavily across the floor. Then he sees Linda has jumped to her feet. “Get down, get down,” he whispers. What a nuisance that the innocent lack a guilty conscience. It robs them of their susceptibility to terror and trades it for indignation.

Linda ignores him. “All right, Mr. Chucky!” she calls out. “I've just called 911. The police will be here in two minutes. I've told them about you!”

We must pause to consider Chucky's response. He had imagined Linda to be curled up in a terrified puddle on the floor. It never occurred to him she might call the police. It seems somehow underhanded. Mostly when Chucky menaces people, they collapse and weep. It would be silly to say he thinks Linda is not playing by the rules; nevertheless, he finds her response unfitting. Bullies expect their victims to feel bullied. Linda has let him down. Of course his response isn't rational, but it's not rationality that has brought Chucky to where he is today.

“Do you hear the sirens, Mr. Chucky? Here they come!”

Chucky's light abruptly shifts from the balcony railing, and his big boots clomp away toward the back.

“D'you realize how furious he's going to be?” says Connor, impressed.

But Linda isn't paying attention and seems to be listening for something far away. “He's left the door open,” she says. “I'm afraid it's time to go.”

—

A
s Vikström jogs across the parking lot to the back door of the Capitol Theatre with Manny a few steps behind him, he wonders if he should preserve his resistance to the possibility of singing. Although dismayed by the idea of standing on a stage and caterwauling “Riders in the Sky,” he thinks it might, in the long run, make life easier. The sniping could disappear, friction would be reduced. It's not that he wishes to make Manny a friend; rather, he desires the comfortable neutrality that Vikström believes to be the foundation of any good partnership. Isn't that worth the mortifying self-abasement of singing about a lone cowpoke?

Up ahead Vikström sees two uniformed officers standing on either side of a smaller person by the back door of the theater. The smaller person is Linda, and both detectives find her familiar. Actually, they'd seen her in the post office earlier in the day when they handcuffed Connor and marched him from the building. But they won't remember this. Instead, when Linda explains that she works at the travel agency, they'll assume they saw her there or near there or perhaps through the window. Even though this is perfectly reasonable, it doesn't happen to be true. Perhaps it's of no consequence, but if they recalled seeing Linda at the post office, they might also recall that she'd given Connor a small wave.

Vikström and Manny are normally very good at traveling up or down the chains of causality required by police work, and conceivably, by concentrating on Linda, they might move step-by-step back to the moment when they saw her in the post office, et cetera. Instead they are sidetracked by one of the uniformed policemen describing a vehicle that moments before exited the parking lot at high speed.

“It was a dark Yukon Denali, maybe black, maybe dark blue. We didn't see the plate number.”

“Chucky,” says Vikström.

“Ahh,” says Manny.

And so the detectives don't inquire about Connor, who is crouched down just inside the theater, waiting for the police to leave.

One policeman has put in a call to the station about the Denali, and most likely other police cars are attempting to find it, but in this they won't succeed. The Denali is already crossing the I-95 bridge heading north, while Chucky is in the backseat shouting, “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” This is how he calms himself.

As for Linda, she's told the uniformed policemen that when she was passing through the parking lot and noticed that the back door of the theater was open, she decided to investigate. After all, she has the little flashlight on her cell phone.

She repeats this to Manny and Vikström, and perhaps she flirts a bit and appears mildly girlish to suggest the innocence of her curiosity. But then, she says, to her horror, a man followed her into the theater and the door slammed shut.

Vikström thinks the young woman is pretty and believes her; Manny thinks she's shrewd and has his doubts.

“What happened next?” asks Vikström.

Linda looks up at the two detectives and wrinkles her brow as her portrayal of breezy audacity shifts to enact female vulnerability and distress. “He laughed,” she says, lowering her voice.

“Laughed?” Manny and Vikström say this more or less together.

“A loud, deep laugh. He said I was his little rabbit and he was going to catch me. That's when I called 911. I was frightened.”

Vikström assures Linda that she did the right thing. Manny remains silent; he feels there's more here than meets the eye. But both detectives believe they have no reason to hold her.

Traffic is noisy on Bank Street, and perhaps there's another train. Or perhaps the hearing of the two detectives isn't as keen as it once was. Whatever the case, they don't catch the single ring of Connor's phone just inside the door of the theater. Connor smothers it against his jacket as he answers it.

“You're messing up again, little brother. Get out here now.”

“Where do I meet you?” It wouldn't occur to Connor to refuse.

“I'll call you again when you're on your way.”

C
onnor once more sits in a leather banquette in the Scorpion Bar: the tequila, skulls, barn board, and glitter. It's nine-thirty, and the bar is getting full. Scantily clad Scorpion girls prowl the catwalk, while a tall blonde on the mini-stage flings and thrusts her body to recorded music made up of explosive chords, drums, and a tenor seeking erotic eruption by screaming, “Yeah! Yeah!” There's no sign of Vasco.

Then Connor realizes he knows the blonde, though the last time they met she had black hair. But the endless legs are tip-offs. Wrapped in a tiny black halter top emblazoned with the image of a scorpion, her breasts seem ready to explode through the fabric as she flicks her hair in circles and kicks up one leg after the other. Her fur boots prance as if crushing an army of fire ants. Connor finds nothing sexual about her dance; it's like the serious labor in a YMCA exercise class, and beads of sweat fly from her forehead. Still, he's instantly on his feet and moves toward her.

What he means to do is unclear, and perhaps we'll never know, because abruptly someone grabs his arm. It's Vasco.

“Hold up, Zeco. You're wasting your breath.”

Connor continues to pull. “I need to talk to her.”

“There's no point. Céline has gone back to being Shirley, an unwed mother with a pimply thirteen-year-old who divides his time between jacking off and smoking reefer. Forget about her.”

Part of Connor wants to push toward the stage. Another part wants to give it up. Renunciation wins, and Connor relaxes. Vasco leads him back to the banquette.

“You that crazy about her, little brother?” Vasco raises his voice to be heard over the music. He sits down on the banquette with his legs stretched in front of him. Connor sits at the small table on Vasco's left.

“I really don't like her. It's some kind of hypnosis. In fact, I met a woman in New London I like better.” Connor had driven Linda to her apartment on Cedar Grove after the police had gone. She'd invited him in for coffee, but Connor had to get to the casino to meet his brother. He had conflicted feelings about this.

Vasco shows his teeth. It might be a smile; it's hard to tell. “Stick with the sane ones. They last longer.” He again wears a gray-on-gray pin-striped suit with a vest and a black silk shirt, but his silk tie is bright scarlet.

A cute waitress sets a glass and a bottle of Pellegrino in front of Vasco. “Here you are, Mr. Raposo.” She gives Vasco a wink and drifts away.

Vasco squeezes a bit of lemon into his glass. As pretty young women walk past, he follows them with his eyes without moving his head. “Chucky called me just before I called you. He wants you dead.”

Connor wants to ask what for, but it's a pointless question.

“Possibly I talked him out of it by saying you still might find the homeless guy with Sal's gold. You think it might happen?”

“I haven't had any luck so far.” Connor considers the fact that someone he hardly knows wants him dead; presumably he wants Fidget dead as well.

“Chucky found out the homeless guy made a bunch of purchases at a package store on the south side: vodka and snack food. So he must be holed up somewhere.”

“I'd never turn Fidget over to him. Chucky would kill him.”

Vasco shrugs. “That's your choice.” He goes back to watching the girls walk by, an activity he calls “appraising the talent.”

Connor studies his brother's black and betasseled alligator loafers with a bit of envy. He's tempted to tell Vasco that the hand-me-down Bruno Maglis gave him blisters, but he sees the complaint for what it is: a childish shot at grievance already doomed to failure. When Connor entered first grade, Vasco was entering seventh; when Connor entered seventh, Vasco was entering college. Always, it seemed, Connor was scrambling to catch up. That, too, was doomed to failure. Once, when Connor was ten, he asked his sixteen-year-old brother for assistance in thrashing a bully who'd bloodied his nose. “Can't help you, little brother,” Vasco had said. “Try hitting him with a brick.” So Connor tried the brick method, missed, and wound up in the principal's office. Still, the bully never bothered him again.

“Why did Chucky set up that game at the theater?” asked Connor. “What was the point of it?”

Vasco tilted his head back and laughed. Then he straightened his tie. “It's Chucky's version of role-playing. He likes violent games. He only wanted to scare you and maybe break some bones. But having your girlfriend call the cops pissed him off. So, personally, I think you'd better leave town. I already called Didi and told him the same thing. Chucky doesn't like refusals. He's been mad at you ever since you showed up with the news that Marco had been killed.”

“But I'd nothing to do with that.”

“You were the messenger. For Chucky it's not an excusable offense. He thought taking the Rolex and stuff from Sal's corpse would be easy. Then Marco gets killed and Chucky keeps running into you and you make it all more complicated. He knows you're aware of his involvement with Sal's death, and he blames you for dragging in the New London police. He also thinks you've been talking to the FBI, telling them he was the one who hired the shooter.”

Connor feels a chill. “You know that's not true!”

Vasco glances at his watch, a different Rolex from the one he had earlier in the week, a more economical Submariner, no jewels, no gold, no color, and made in China. But to Connor it looks like the real thing. “Guys like Chucky are paranoid,” says Vasco. “It helps keep them out of prison. Chucky doesn't like how you're hanging around. He doesn't like how you seemed friendly with Sal. Then you were stalking Céline. . . .”

“Stalking?”

“That's what he called it. So he told Céline to make you find the homeless guy, and you fucked that up as well.”

Connor's chill increases. “I couldn't find him!”

“Maybe, but Chucky's got a whole story worked out about how you want Sal's jewelry for yourself. That's why you'd turn him in to the cops—you want the bling.”

“Good grief, how much of it
is
there?”

“Enough to kill for. Isn't that the point? Right now all Chucky wants is to get the jewelry, grab Céline, and get out of town.”

Connor experiences a pinprick of disappointment. “Are they lovers?”

“Chucky's not the loving type. It's a physical thing.”

Connor feels another pinprick. He turns toward the mini-stage, trying to see Céline, but she's gone. A cover band has begun to play “Proud Mary,” and Connor has to raise his voice. “Did you know about Sal when I talked to you last week?”

“Sure I did. The shooter had already been booked.”

“Then why were you surprised when I told you about him?”

“That's not how it went. I was surprised about Marco Santuzza, not Sal. I thought the dead guy was Fat Bob, not Marco. And I knew that Marco being dead would mess up Chucky's plans.”

The great weight pressing down on Connor's head all week is suddenly lifted, and he feels minimally buoyant. He hadn't outed Sal after all. “Why didn't you say this when I accused you of telling somebody about Sal? You know how guilty I felt?”

Vasco sips his Pellegrino. “It could complicate my relationship with Chucky, and I figured you could deal with it.”

A typical and exasperating answer, Connor thinks. “When did Chucky learn about Sal?”

“A week ago more or less. Céline tried to sell the information to Chucky, who she'd known in Detroit. She said Sal slapped her for trying on a bracelet and chain. She didn't like getting slapped.”

“And Chucky paid her?”

“I doubt it. But they must have come to an arrangement, because he's now fucking her. Maybe he just scared her. He's good at that.” More women are passing their table, and Vasco returns to appraising the talent.

“So you work for Chucky?”

Vasco gives his brother a look of token contempt. “I'd never work for Chucky. It's not safe, and I don't want to get too close. Let's say I'm a consultant.”

“But you knew that Sal would be killed. You could have told the police.”

“That's true. And the police would tell the FBI, and the FBI would move him to another dumb town, and after a bit Chucky would learn I was the one who went to the police. Chucky's good at finding out stuff like that. No thanks.”

Vasco's actual position was still unclear to Connor. “Isn't it dangerous for you to talk to me?”

His brother laughed his humorless laugh. “It's difficult. I'm trying to protect you from Chucky, but I also have to give Chucky information about you. In fact, he told me to talk to you. As I said, he wants you to leave town. Like immediately. That's what he told me. But what he really wants is to have you killed. He doesn't trust you not to talk to the police. Didn't the police pull you in this afternoon?”

“Yes, but it had to do with Bounty, Inc. It didn't concern Chucky.”

Again came the humorless laugh. “Chucky finds Bounty, Inc. confusing. You see that guy over by the bar? He's one of Chucky's thugs. No, no, more to your right. He's got on a green jacket.”

Connor catches sight of Jasper Lincoln from the New London historical society among the crowd at the bar. But of course Connor no longer thinks he's from the historical society or that his name is Jasper Lincoln. The man with the apple green jacket leans back against the bar and stares at Connor: a gaze that's blank and pitiless as the sun, as it were.

“Jasper Lincoln,” says Connor.

“A nom de guerre. Chucky calls him Jimbo, but I doubt it's his real name.”

“What's he want?” The man is still staring at him, and Connor looks away.

“He's here to keep an eye on you and to keep Chucky informed of your whereabouts. And I suppose he's keeping an eye on me as well. In any case, he saw the cops pull you out of the post office today. Chucky didn't like that.”

“How'd he know I was here?”

“I told him. You see how complicated things can be? Chucky said to get you out here, and then I told Jimbo where I was meeting you. What choice did I have?”

“You could have said something to me.”

“I'm telling you now. I'm also telling you that when you leave here, he'll be following you. Just be cool with it and you won't get hurt, I think.”

“But what have I done?”
The whole business is crazy,
Connor thinks.

“Jesus, Zeco, don't you get it? You've been in the way, that's all. You've been in the way, and now you've got information that could put Chucky in jail.”

“Even if I promise to keep quiet?”

“Chucky'd never believe it. He's not the believing type. So when will you be leaving town?”

“We need to check the post office for mail tomorrow morning.”

Vasco gets to his feet and throws some bills on the table. “Okay, we're done. Just go immediately to that little car of yours and get seriously lost.”

“How'd you know I had a Mini-Cooper?” Connor gets up as well.

“Get real, Zeco. Everybody knows it: Chucky, Céline, Jimbo, all sorts of people. You've never been subtle in your life, and that constitutes a problem. And, believe me, I don't want to be dragged into your problems.”

—

W
e sympathize with Vasco. His business, if it can be called that, is to be unflappable, to supply his patrons with information and keep his eyes open. He's a consultant, a resource, and he doesn't talk: his mouth stays shut. But mostly he must be unflappable and unconcerned about the legality of his clients' conduct.

What Vasco's really like, we don't know. He seems to have no vices except for women, and his composure and self-control appear impenetrable. He has no friends and no home except for hotel rooms, and who he is when he locks his door at night is a mystery. Does he watch television, surf the Internet, or write long letters to his great-aunt in Lisbon? We don't know. In fact, if we were told he stands all night in his closet like a robot, humming and clicking until a radio signal sets him in motion again, we wouldn't be surprised.

But now his brother appears. Vasco never asked Connor to visit Connecticut. He simply called out of the blue and claimed his fraternal rights, meaning he wanted to get together. What's worse, Connor brought Didi, Vaughn, and Eartha. He brought a circus. Vasco's had little contact with Didi over the years, but it's enough for him to ask if Didi is a nutcase, a loose cannon, or both. The difficulty is that Didi's actions can't be predicted, and so Connor's actions can't be predicted either. What's Bounty, Inc. anyway? Instead of a real financial enterprise, it's a toy to keep Didi amused.

It was pure chance Connor visited the Bank Street cobbler just at the time Marco got mushed against a dump truck. And it was pure chance that Connor met Sal as they waited for their cars to be freed. Didi might tell Vasco,
Everything happens for a reason
or
There are no coincidents
, but he didn't say it because he believed it. Rather, he wanted “to destabilize Vasco's inner calm.” Destabilizing inner calm is one of Didi's great pleasures. And this, we realize, would destabilize Chucky's inner calm, which has a high volatility rating. In fact, we might say that Chucky
has
no inner calm. He has only different degrees of suspicion and anger.

If we sat down with Chucky and explained the nature of Bounty, Inc., he wouldn't know how to respond. He'd think we were playing a trick. And if we told him about Orphans from Outer Space, he might have a breakdown. Chucky has precise definitions about the world and those who inhabit it. They may be narrow definitions, but they're exact and don't allow for foolishness. Mistrust and paranoia are the closest Chucky comes to having an imagination. This makes him good at what he does, but it's a niche profession with a problematic future.