“It’s real, all right. This is as real as it gets.” I point the gun at him. “I am drunk and maudlin so tell me what this is all about.”
It takes him about half a second to think fuck Zeb and then he spills his guts so fast the words are bumping into each other.
“I ain’t no Carmine. I go to acting class with Zeb; when he found out about the 911 call, he asked me to impersonate the guy. Just wait outside the bitch’s place until the lady cop showed, then do my thing.”
I feel such a tool. How could I ever have believed in Carmine’s convenient materialization? The odds against Sofia’s actual husband turning up after twenty years, at the exact moment his abandoned wife is about to be dragged off to prison must be immeasurable. Yet, I swallowed the whole ball of lies without a murmur.
“What about the whole prison bit?”
“That’s all true,” admits non-Carmine. “The secret of acting is to stick as close to the truth as possible.”
“So you were locked up in Texas?”
“Yeah. Punked too. My painful and humiliating honesty sold it to the cop. I exposed myself, metaphorically.”
I groan. This goddamn country. Everyone reads Stanislavski.
“So Zeb offers you . . .”
“A grand.”
“A grand to impersonate Sofia’s husband?”
“That’s it, man. I doctored my release papers and impersonated the shit out of that husband.”
He did. I fell for it, so did Ronnie.
“What about Sofia?”
Non-Carmine smiles proudly and feck me if there isn’t a tear in his eye. “She swallowed it totally. Imagine that. Al Pacino, fuck that guy. They should be giving me his Oscar.”
I shouldn’t hate this fool so much but I do. I guess he’s become Carmine incarnate for me and it’s difficult to see him as anything else.
“So? What did you do? You took advantage of Sofia? Is that it, method man?”
“I didn’t take no advantages,” says the guy, but his rat’s eyes flick up and down like he’s looking for a bolt hole and I know he ain’t spilling the full beans.
“You ever see The Deer Hunter? I bet you did. A method man like you would eat that shit up.”
“Yeah, I seen it,” says non-Carmine, and there are lines of sweat lodged in his forehead.
I cock the revolver. “Then you know what happens next.”
That did it. “I tried to put the pipe to her. She’s pretty fine for an old dame but she kept calling me Dan.”
I figure a lowlife like this could live with being called Dan if it meant lying down with Sofia.
“And?”
“And she said my thing was smaller than she remembered. Got into my head. Undermined my confidence in the whole performance. Also I remembered how Zeb said you’d tear me limb from limb me if I interfered with the old lady and that put me right off.”
Old lady? Sofia was not yet forty. I always have some crazy on tap and I let a little shine out through my eyes then.
“So you left her? Again.”
“Hey, hey, wait a minute, man. I ain’t Carmine. I never left that lady before.”
I consider pulling the trigger a few times to teach this guy a lesson, but for what? All he did was keep Sofia out of prison. So I march him to the fire door and boot him into the alley.
“Hey, what the hell?” he objects and I know I’m on shaky ground morally seeing as this guy did me a solid, but he threw a few shapes at Sofia so I can’t bring myself to actually give him the whole thousand, so I toss him three hundred and eighty, which is what I have in my wallet. Let him harass Zeb for the rest. I’d love to see him method act six hundred and change out of Zeb’s wallet.
It kills me to say it but: “I suppose I should thank you. Your performance was so real, so primal that I can’t stop thinking how I hate you and wish you were dead.”
Non-Carmine looks like he might cry. “Thanks, man. That’s quite a compliment.”
But compliments only get you so far. “So where’s the rest of my fee?”
“Talk to Zeb,” I tell him.” He’ll sort you out.”
I don’t know whether the guy is good with this suggestion or not, because I slam the door on him.
Now I gotta let Zeb back in and he’s gonna be full to the eyeballs with smugness, asking for apologies and canonizing himself for this good turn he’s done me. I hate Zeb in self-satisfied mode. Come to think of it, I haven’t been exactly falling over myself to consort with Zebulon Kronski in any of his humors lately.
I need to find a better class of amigo.
I open the office door and there the little bastard is, all folded arms and raised eyebrows, waiting for his apology.
“You got something to say to me, Dan?”
I might as well get it over with. “Okay. I’m sorry, all right?”
“Really? What are you sorry for?”
He’s like a Jewish Catholic priest, determined to prolong my act of contrition.
“I’m sorry for manhandling your divine person when all you did was look out for Sofia.”
Zeb reads my body language and rightly interprets the tremors in my shoulders as repressed violence.
“I accept your apology,” he says and takes the seat nearest the booze. “I assume you ejected Rafe?”
Rafe? Fuck me.
I nod and help myself to one of Zeb’s cocktails.
“And you paid him, right?”
“Of course. A thousand in fifties. Money well spent.”
Zeb squints suspiciously at me but I distract him by stealing another one of his drinks.
“Hey, hands off, Daniel. Get your own. Just call Marco and have him send in a tray.”
I switch the subject again, moving Zeb two topics away from Rafe’s pay packet.
“How did you know about the 911?”
“Are you kidding me? I shoot up both the switchboard girls and three of the patrolmen. I got ears all over that department.”
This is information I will not be passing on Ronelle. It’s always good to have an inside track in Police Plaza.
“And you couldn’t just tell me?”
Zeb smiles sadly at how little I know him. “Straightforward-like, that’s not how the Zeb-man rolls.”
There are at least three things in that sentence that make me want to punch the Zeb-man in his smiling face.
The music from outside jumps a few notches and I realize I might have to rethink my living quarters. Eventually this beat beat beat crap would get to me. Whatever happened to melody? Or singers who don’t name-check themselves every four bars?
Jason barges in, his face flushed, left hand pumping the air in time to the music.
Zeb shoots him with two finger guns.
“Who’s a goddam fairy genius?” he asks.
Jason points two index fingers at his own head. “This guy, right here.”
I have to give it to him. “You did it, J. This place is buzzing.”
“And you ain’t angry?”
&n
bsp; I go for blasé. “Nah. Why would I be angry?”
“Lotta gays out there. Not just gays, super-gays.”
“That’s a niche market,” I say, regurgitating Zeb’s lecture. “A gold mine if you can get in there.”
Jason rushes around the desk and hugs me. “I knew you’d be cool, partner. Some people freak out, but not you. Danny boy. My man.”
“I am totally cool,” I say, feeling Jason’s bicep flatten my right ear. “But those guys know I’m straight, right?”
Jason releases my head and punches my shoulder, genuinely of the opinion that I’m kidding. “Oh, I think they know you’re straight, Mr. Banana Republic. And anyways, it’s a casino not the prison showers. Though we might do that for theme night.”
“Theme night?”
“I got a million ideas, Dan. People are gonna cross the river for this place. We’re gonna have a line around the block.”
It’s good I suppose. Being the boss of a thriving business. Making bank. But I can’t help feeling a little nostalgic for the time when I was just a bouncer living underneath a crazy woman. I guess it is in my nature to never be satisfied. To seek out the flaws in every situation.
Maybe Sofia did put a full magazine into Carmine.
See what I mean?
The blood drains from my face and I feel like I have somehow phase-shifted into a dream state. I thought I was winding down, and my girl’s a murderess. Again.
“So, you gonna come out and listen to my speech, partner?” Jason asks, shifting on his feet, eager to get back out on the floor.
“’Course I am. Wouldn’t miss it for the world. I just need a little Dutch courage.”
I’m gonna have one more drink, then maybe sing a song. One song and then I’ll call Sofia, if I can remember the code.
Zeb magnanimously sweeps a hand over his collection of cocktails, offering me my pick, which is very unlike him. I bet it has just occurred to the Zeb-man that he could do worse than be made a partner in my new super-gay club.
I choose a Ball Buster, complete with floating pickled onion testicle.
Seems appropriate.
EPILOGUE
IT’S A WEEK SINCE THE RONELLE TRIED TO ARREST SOFIA AND my life has gone back to quasi-normal, in that I am nominally seeing my alleged girlfriend for what approximates cozy evenings watching foreign fiction on TV.