Old School Bones (17 page)

THE bowling alley smells of stale pizza and foot powder. He can’t believe Awasha’s stuck on the Cape. Can’t believe the stateys have taken down her brother on narco charges. Can’t believe he’s actually rolling a line of candlepins after all these years. Or that he’s having yet another
falso
date with a seventeen-year-old. Ninja Girl. As Tio Tommy says at times like this,
Welcome to Wonderland, asshole.

“Your roll, Michael.” Gracie is working a china doll look today, hair in pigtails, bright red lipstick, face glitter, baggy black cardigan, plaid thrift-shop pajamas pants. Red bowling shoes.

“When’s this kid going to show up?”

“Don’t look now, but he just came in the door.”

“So do I roll, or do we stop?”

“Come on. You got a spare, and it’s the last frame. Forget Kevin. Play the role, Michael. He thinks you’re a bad-ass detective. Like don’t fuck with the Jesus.”

“What?”

She says it’s a line from
The Big Lebowski.
The bowling movie, you know? Coen brothers?

No.

“Man, you need to get a life. Where have you been for the last eight years?”

Ah … law school, public defending, getting engaged, getting dumped, fishing …

“Just roll, dude.”

The ball kisses the two and four pins just as Kevin Singleton drops onto the seat next to Gracie at the scoring table. He’s wearing his usual: gray polar fleece over a blue waffle-weave undershirt. Baggy jeans. Hiking boots. His lanky body looks seven feet long as he slouches on the bench seat, faking nonchalance.

“How come he’s here?” Kevin nods toward Michael.

“Maybe a girl needs a bodyguard around you Red Tooth types.”

“Give me a break.”

“No,” says Michael, sitting down next to the pair, “give US a break, Kevin.”

The boy runs his fingers through his curly brown hair, closes his blue eyes. “Look, man, I just came here to get something back that she took from my brother, OK?”

“Nope. Not OK. Gracie, your roll. Finish the frame for me. Kevin and I need to talk.”

“Come on.”

Michael tries to put on his best Lou-Votolatto-fuck-this-shit face. “Pay attention, Kevin. Did you forget you’re still a suspect in the death of Liberty Baker? Did you forget the police have reason to believe her death has something to do with these secret societies at your school?”

“Are you going to start with more of your cheap-ass intimidation?”

“Did you forget that your brother told Ms. Liu that you and he and your father and the head of your school are all members of one of these secret societies? Do you remember that Miss Liu has evidence of this? That you told Ms. Liu last night that you were willing to answer her questions about these secret societies?”

“Yeah, man. I remember. Gracie, help me out, OK? Can you get this guy to just back off?”

Gracie takes her last roll, the ball wobbles down the lane, strikes, leaves four pins standing. “What, Kevin?”

She comes back to the scoring desk, enters the score, starts totaling the game.

The boy shifts his blue eyes. “Gracie. I thought you were my friend. I thought …”

She puts her hand on his knee. “I am your friend, Kevin. I know you didn’t have anything to do with Liberty’s death. I know you loved her.”

“What do I have to do to get Clyfe’s key back?”

“I want to know more about the Club Tropical.”

“I already told you. Clyfe said he heard they had a secret room in Hibernia House.”

She says she needs more. Somebody in Red Tooth knows more. This is really important.

He takes a deep breath. “Does this guy have to be here?”

She shoots Michael a wink. “Can you give us a minute … please?”

She finds him in the parking lot outside the lanes, sitting in his Jeep, listening to a Portuguese radio station. He’s submerged in
fado
music, remembering how his Vóvó Chocolate loved these songs.

“Hey, bad cop.” She pops in beside him.

He turns down the music. “Hey, Ninja Girl … What’d he say?”

“There are stories.”

“Whose stories?”

“Red Tooth stories. Kind of society lore or something.”

“Yeah?”

One of these stories is about a rebellion. Some kind of rift in the society. Back in the 1970s, some guy who was like a big deal in Red Tooth got pissed off with the brotherhood. Quit and started his own society with a bunch of friends. Kind of anti-establishment. The new society was the Club Tropical.

“The old boys thought it was a threat?”

“According to Kevin. The societies became arch enemies at Tolchie. Sounds pretty juvenile doesn’t it?”

You couldn’t have said it better,
he thinks.

“How does this connect to Liberty’s death … or Roxy?” she asks.

“I don’t know. But I bet Kevin can find someone to give up the names of Red Tooth’s vanquished rivals … You didn’t give him that key back yet?”

“Are you kidding me?” She puts her hand down the front of her black cardigan, fishes in her bra, pulls out the key ring. “This stays over Ninja Girl’s heart … until we get answers.”

SHE thinks her head is going to split at the ears. No sooner is she off the phone with Michael and Gracie for the fourth time today, heard about their pressure tactics with Kevin Singleton, than Denise Pasteur calls. Bumbledork wants another meeting with her. And Lou Votolatto is in her face again. He’s asking if she’s ready to meet with her brother, whether she can get an attorney before Ronnie’s arraignment.

She almost says Michael Decastro, he’s her lawyer. But then she remembers. He left the law under a cloud of suspicions when his drag queen client in the Provincetown Follies murder case disappeared … before being totally cleared of charges. And … and he dumped the rest of his cases in the laps of other poor slobs in the Public Defender’s Office, went fishing. Dropped off the face of the Earth, really.

So now what?

She says flowers are little gods. But, please excuse. It is not proper in Iraq for single women to invite men into their apartment. Even if it is just to show how she will give these roses a most-honored home in the middle of

her table. And, of course, she must keep to herself since it is the custom that she grieves for her husband for four and a half months.

“I feel so stupid,” he says.
“
I just wanted to see how you were getting along.”

She takes the roses from him with both hands, lets her fingers linger a few fractions of a second across his knuckles before slipping them away. Her eyes blink. Three times. Maybe it is a kind of code.

“You are a good man, Nippe Maske. Bring me roses again sometime. When my grief is not such a heavy shadow over my life … and it is not the hour for midday prayer.”

Ronnie’s wearing an orange prison jumpsuit when two guards walk him into the interview room. His long, black hair falls over his shoulders. Not as long as his sister’s, but with more waves, even some tight curls. Serious plumage now that the cops have taken away the leather thong he used to tie it back in a pony tail. His cheeks are dark with two-day growth, his eyelids drooping from no sleep … and—can she admit it—withdrawal.

Goddamn it, Nippe Maske. You’ve really killed the hen this time,
she wants to tell him. But what she says is, “Are you OK, Ronnie?”

He nods. They sit down, face each other across a metal table. The guards back off to the door.

The wind is up, churning the waves, coating her skin with brine.

Part of her is hoping that Lou Votolatto or Michael will show up here to help now. But maybe that would be a mistake. This is family business. Private. Better just to reach out her hands for his hands. She smells the peppery scent of his fear. Feels Ronnie’s big, rough fingers. The calluses on the heel of his thumb. Damp palms.

“I wish Alice was here.”

He’s afraid to be alone with me too.

“Awasha?”

“Don’t you think we’ve hurt her enough?”

“She would understand. She would know I did not do what they are saying … I never …” The big man cannot finish. His throat choking with sobs.

He tries to wipe tears away, but they keep coming. Her hands take his again, tighten.
Gulls are swooping. Diving on the bait fish. Screeching.
“How did this happen to us, Ronnie?”

He says he had been tending his lobster pots in the bay most of the day with some of the other guys. Later they were drinking at a joint by the inner harbor. Suddenly in rolled the cops. Not Hyannis boys. State and DEA. Told him he was under arrest for possession and transport. Read him his rights. Buttabing, buttabang, buttaboom. Next thing he knew he was in cuffs, riding off to the stockade.

“I know one of the detectives here … and a lawyer. Maybe they can help you. But you have to level with me. Was that your cocaine?”

“Come on, Awasha. You think I’d put that skanky shit in my body?”

She doesn’t say anything, just remembers about three dozen wicked drunks he’s pulled since he got free of the army, all the pot they smoked together in high school. The mescalin they took on Squibnocket Beach when they wanted to see the Great Spirit and the
manitous.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I don’t need this right now, OK, Ronnie? I just can’t deal …”

“This is it, isn’t it? I thought I paid for everything in Leavenworth. I thought I paid again when Alice died. But the payback is just beginning isn’t it?”

She feels a painful screech starting to rise from her lungs. “I don’t know.”

HE stares at the text message on the screen of his phone as he sits at the counter of a Nu Bej diner next to his father, cutting into a western omelette. Another morning in fish town.

“Cristo!”

His father grunts through a mouthful of eggs. A questioning noise.

“She actually pulled it off.”

“Who? What?”

“Gracie. The Chinese girl I told you about. She got the names. Look.” He passes his phone to his father. Gracie’s message is a list.

Club Tropical 1974:

Marcus Snyder

Jason Su

Thomas Merriweather

Jean-Claude Rausche

Caesar Decastro digs his fork into another piece of omelette. “Who are these guys?”

“Maybe the killers of Liberty Baker I’ve been looking for.”

“Oh, hell, here we go again!”

“I’m afraid so.”

“How about we go mend some nets first, OK?”

It’s a fresh spring morning, already forty-eight degrees and heating up in the bright sun. The huge green net is partially unrolled on the steel work deck of the
Rosa Lee.
Michael and his father are sitting side-by-side on the net, repairing a fifteen-foot tear with seven-inch-long steel net needles and spools of green twine.

His father stops sewing and knotting for a second, eyes his son. “You ever think you might be on a suicide mission, Mo?”

“Because I want to bring Liberty Baker’s killer to justice?”

“What else?”

“I told you the other day. I’m a mess.”

“You can’t leave these killings alone.”

“No.”

“I don’t get it. What’s in this for you, except maybe a bullet?”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“That’s no kind of answer.”

“I never told you about … Nassau.”

“The Bahamas?”

“There was this girl …”

Caesar Decastro spoons two cups of Folgers instant into a mug. Father and son stand in the fish boat’s galley, the noontime sun casting a bar of light through the companionway.

“This is
saudade
talking. You’re missing this girl. The Bahamian. What’s her name?”

“Cassie … It was more than ten years ago!”

“That’s what I’m saying.
Saudade.
We miss the things and places and people we’ve lost. It’s the Portagee way, Mo. We grieve forever. It’s like me with your mother. I know she’s gone, but she’s never gone.”

“I miss Mom every day.”

“See what I mean?”

“But I only knew Cassie for a few hours …”

“She put her stamp on you. It happens. Like Meng marked me in Vietnam and your mom …”

The fisherman seems to fade away into another world. He fills his coffee mug with tap water, claps the mug in the microwave, sets the timer for ninety seconds, starts the machine. It hums, rattles.

“Dad?” He leans against a bulkhead, drives his hand through his thick dark hair, realizes that it is out of control and oily. Gracie says he looks like a guy called McDreamy on some TV show she watches. More like McGreasy. Or McDamaged.

“I’m thinking …”

“Dad!”

“Well, just give me a minute here, Mo … So … it was spring break? You were just a dumb high school kid. And she came on to you, her a bit baked on gin-and-tonic.”

He can feel her breasts against his chest, her pelvis pressing his hips. Long legs struggling to clutch him to her. Stars raining on her face. Chocolate cheeks tilting toward Venus. And the surf thundering offshore.

The microwave beeps. Coffee ready.

“We had sex on the beach.”

“That’s not the end of the world, pal. Give yourself a break. You’ve just been in a hell of a car wreck, you’re tore up with this Liberty kid’s death. Your mom’s only been gone a year or so. And probably that Indian chick has been chewing on your heart.”

“Dad!”

“Women, man, who the hell knows? You would hardly be the first man to feel blue, a little lost in memories. You know?”

“Aren’t you the guy who told me a hard-on is like a time bomb? Sooner or later it takes you out. Or … did I just imagine that?”

His father snags his coffee mug from the microwave, takes a long sip. “Forget about it, Mo.”

“I feel like shit.”

“Let’s go back uptown and get some lunch and a beer. Then we’ll find Tommy, come back here, finish up this net, huh?”

“Dad. I don’t know.” His voice breaks.

Caesar Decastro sets down his coffee, ever so softly, on the galley counter. Looks ready to wrap his son in a hug when Michael’s phone rings.

He takes the call. There’s a short exchange.

“OK,” he says. Clicks off. Then he cups his face in his hands and takes three deep breaths.

“What?”

“We’ll have to finish this later. I got to go, Dad.”