The Iceman (6 page)

Barbara blinked and touched the bridge of her nose, recalling the third time it was broken. She quickly removed her hand and took a slice of bread out of the bag and started to tear it, fearing that he might figure out what she was thinking.

Over the years she’d tried to forget or at least rationalize the awful things the bad Richard had done to her, but she couldn’t bring herself to live a lie. It was hard to forget scars you saw in the mirror, hard to forget waking up from a sound sleep in the middle of the night with a pillow held over your face, hard to forget coming out of the shower and finding your husband crouched in the bedroom, holding a gun on you. No, she could never forget, and she could never rationalize. But by the same token she’d never bring any of these things up again. She didn’t dare.

It was like asking Richard what he did for a living. She knew he was into currency exchange because calls came into the house at all hours from all over the world. She knew he had business associates here and there because he’d leave the house to go meet with them. But she didn’t know any of the particulars, and she didn’t want to. If Richard got up at three o’clock in the morning, put on his shoes, and went out, she pretended to be asleep. If he told her anything about any of the people he was involved with, fine. But she didn’t ask any questions. She never did. She knew better. She knew her husband was no angel, but he did provide for his family, so she didn’t ask questions. You were just asking for trouble from the bad Richard if you did.

She tossed more bread into the water and sneaked a glance at her husband. He was looking over his shoulder at the pay phone again. He was making sure that no one used it in case someone beeped him and he had to make a call. God only knew what he would do if some poor bastard came along and tried to use
his
phone.

Suddenly Richard’s beeper went off, and the startled ducks at Barbara’s feet darted back into the water. Richard unclipped the beeper from his belt and looked at the readout. This toy was his latest fascination. He’d been unhooking the answering machine at home ever since he’d gotten the beeper, and he never went anywhere without it. He even wore it around the house.

Richard got up from the bench and started for the pay phone.

“Who is it?” she asked. She really didn’t care who it was. She just wanted him to stay with her and feed the ducks, the way they used to.

He looked down at her. “It’s John.” He was wearing his dark glasses.

“Oh.” She nodded, then turned back to the ducks as he went off to make his phone call.

Richard never used to make phone calls from here. The duck pond used to be sacred. It was their time together, the place where
the good Richard could recharge his batteries. At one time they used to come here every day, it seemed. They’d go out to breakfast, then come here, hold hands, feed the ducks, not talk. It was always calm and serene, and Richard was always at his best when he was here, always so polite, so considerate. When the weather turned chilly, he’d put out a blanket for her to sit on, another one for her lap, and a pillow for her back. He did worry about her. He really did. He worried about her too much. That was the whole problem.

Richard was obsessed with her. He wanted to know where she was at every moment. He wanted her home with him. For the past few years she’d worked at Dial-America, a telemarketing company. At first it wasn’t much of a job, but she’d worked her way up to supervisor, and she was really enjoying it. It was the first job she’d had since she was single, and she felt good about herself again. But Richard hated her having that job. He told her to quit, tried to browbeat her into giving notice. He snooped around the building and spied on her through the windows. Then one night, when he picked her up from work, he happened to see one of her co-workers walking out of the building with her. The man meant nothing to her, he was just someone she worked with, but when she got into the car, Richard was wearing his dark glasses. If she didn’t quit the job immediately, he stated flatly, something bad would happen to her “friend.” She knew he meant it, so she gave notice the next Friday. That had happened six weeks ago.

It was hard for her to decide whether this insane jealousy came from the good Richard or the bad Richard. It was probably a little of both, she suspected. He did love her—she had no doubt about that—but it was a warped kind of love.

Richard wanted perfection in everything, and he demanded that his family be the perfect American family. Nothing made him happier than a family outing, everybody getting dressed up and going out to a nice restaurant for a meal together. He was in his glory at times like that. But the kids were older now—Merrick was twenty-one,
Christen was twenty, and Dwayne was a senior in high school—and they had their own lives. They wanted to be with their friends, not with their parents—at least not all the time. But Richard couldn’t understand that, and it genuinely hurt him when one of the girls refused to watch television with him because she had something else to do. He couldn’t understand the children wanting to grow up and go off on their own. Barbara dreaded the day one of them decided to leave the nest. It wouldn’t be an easy parting.

But he had never hurt them, at least not physically. Verbally, psychologically—that was something else. Whenever report cards came home, he would never praise them for the A’s. He’d berate them for the B’s. But that was Richard’s whole philosophy of life: The glass was always half empty, and no matter what, things were never good enough. Not for him.

That’s why money was so important to him. “It’s the green that counts, babe,” he would always tell her. Money was the only thing that made him happy—money and what it could buy. He loved to shop, loved to buy things for her and the kids. Christian Dior suits for her, spur-of-the-moment vacations, diamonds and gold jewelry for the girls, ridiculous toys for Dwayne—like the hunting bow that was never used. You could kill a bear with that thing, but it just ended up hanging on the wall over the window in Dwayne’s room, collecting dust. But that was Richard. He thought nothing of spending four, five, six hundred dollars on a single meal. When it came to his family, price was no object.

Every six months they had new cars, and Richard was crazy about cars. He’d bought Dwayne the blue Camaro they had now. The thing was so souped up Dwayne had to call home from a pay phone the first time he took it out. He couldn’t control the thing, it was so powerful. Richard had to go pick him up and drive the car back. Now Richard was telling Dwayne he was going to buy him a Lamborghini Excalibur, asking him what the priests at school would say if they saw him driving up in one of those.

Barbara just shook her head. There was no reasoning with Richard when it came to possessions. If he decided they had to have something, they had to have it. Case closed.

It was money and the things money bought that made him feel like he was someone. When he was a poor kid in Jersey City, he felt that he was a nobody. Now he had money, and that made him a somebody. She knew that was the way he saw it. You were worthless unless you had a roll of bills in your pocket, unless you drove a Cadillac, unless you could buy whatever you wanted whenever you wanted it. That was what made you a somebody in Richard’s estimation.

Money. That was the problem. It was the trigger that brought out the bad Richard. Whenever the money started running low, the bad Richard started coming out. And even though she’d never dream of asking, she knew the money must be running low now. She could smell it.

Where the money came from, she didn’t want to know. Some of it came from Richard’s currency exchange business, the Sunset Company, named after the street in Dumont where they lived. Richard traded foreign currencies, and his business often took him to England and Switzerland. As far as she knew, that was all legitimate because Richard filed tax returns and declared that income. In June he’d gone to Zurich to conclude a deal to sell a large sum of Nigerian currency. He’d had high hopes for this deal because he was talking about buying a house in ultrarich Saddle River that he’d become fixated with, a million-dollar home right around the corner from former President Nixon. But when he came back from Switzerland, he was in a foul mood. The deal had fallen through at the last minute. They’d screwed him, he kept muttering. The house in Saddle River wasn’t mentioned anymore after that.

But currency exchange wasn’t his only source of income. There was other money, money that was off the books. There
had
to be, considering the way they lived. But Barbara didn’t ask.

She tore off another piece of bread and dropped it in front of her
feet, enticing the ducks to come closer. She remembered times when they’d had to borrow food from the neighbors, they were so broke, and it wasn’t that long ago. From borrowed cans of Campbell’s soup to extravagant meals at fancy French restaurants—that was their life. To call it a roller coaster would be an understatement. There were ups and downs, and the thrills could be very thrilling; but unlike an amusement park ride, the scary parts were for real.

She glanced over her shoulder at Richard on the phone and sighed. He was talking to John Sposato. A year ago Richard had had high hopes for John Sposato. They were going to make a lot of money together, he’d told her. At what he didn’t say, but from what she’d gathered, that big payoff hadn’t happened yet.

John had had something to do with the currency deal that fell through in Zurich, and Barbara had a feeling that Richard was just trying to recoup his losses with Sposato now. She remembered the time last summer when she got a call from New Jersey Bell in the middle of the month asking for a down payment on their monthly bill. Why? she asked. Because your charges for the current month are already over seven thousand dollars, the woman from the telephone company said. Barbara nearly fainted. The calls were mostly third-party calls, long distance to Europe, made by Sposato from his place down in south Jersey.

She’d told Richard about it, expecting him to go through the roof, but he didn’t. It was business, he’d said. He had faith in Sposato. John Sposato knew what he was doing, he’d said. Barbara didn’t believe it, and she had a feeling Richard really didn’t either. Richard rarely trusted anyone that much.

Her doubts about Sposato were confirmed when she finally met him. The fact that Richard let her meet him said a lot in itself because he was very strict about keeping his business life separate from his personal life. Even though at the time Richard never said it directly, she knew that he wanted her opinion of this new partner—and
if he wanted her opinion, that meant he had doubts about the man.

She remembered when she first set eyes on Sposato in the parking lot of a truck stop on Route 80 in central Pennsylvania. To call him a big fat slob would be putting it nicely. His hair was long and stringy and looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a month. His last few meals were all over his shirt. He came with his wife and three children, and the toddler screamed and fussed the whole time. The woman gave the poor thing a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal to keep it quiet. They never bothered to feed any of the kids a real meal, and repeated hints that the toddler’s diaper needed to be changed were ignored by both parents.

Richard was thinking about buying into the truck stop with Sposato, and they were here to check out the place. At first Barbara assumed this would be a legitimate investment; then she met Richard’s partner in the flesh. But Richard was high on Sposato in those days, so she didn’t dare spoil it by expressing her gut feelings about him.

The day after they returned from Pennsylvania, Richard made an appointment with a real estate agent to see houses in Saddle River. She was the agent who showed them the house he’d wanted so badly. Barbara watched Richard’s face from the backseat of the agent’s car as they drove through the neighborhood. Richard’s eyes narrowed when he spotted a video camera mounted on a high pole in the driveway of one grand home. There was another camera sticking out of the mailbox. She knew he wouldn’t like this. Richard insisted on privacy.

But when the real estate agent told him that this was where Richard Nixon lived, his face changed. Barbara knew exactly what he was thinking. Living in the same neighborhood as a former president of the United States meant prestige. Richard liked that. From a dirt-poor kid in the Jersey City projects to back-fence neighbors with Tricky Dick. That would really be something for Richard. That night after dinner he kept joking about what it
would be like taking Shaba out for a walk in that neighborhood, running into Nixon out walking his dog.

Barbara closed her eyes and sighed.

“No! Just shut up about that!”
Richard yelled.

The ducks scattered in fright. Barbara glanced over her shoulder and saw Richard scowling into the pay phone as his voice boomed across the pond. The ducks paddled across to the other side.

Richard was jabbing his finger into the air, lecturing the phone as if Sposato were right there in front of him. She couldn’t make out what he was saying now, but his tone was clear, and the anger in his face confirmed it. What little patience Richard had was wearing thin. She wondered whether Sposato realized how close to the edge he was skating. From what Richard had said, Sposato was supposedly a smart guy. For his sake she hoped he was smart enough to stay on Richard’s good side.

Richard banged the phone down, then picked it up again and punched out another number. She strained to hear who he was calling now.

“Hello, Lenny? It’s Rich.” All of a sudden the anger was gone. He was smiling into the phone.

Barbara turned back to the pond. She didn’t want to hear.

On the other side of the water the ducks were cowering in a huddle, their wings pulled in tight. She tore up what was left of the loaf and scattered it on the bank, then folded the plastic bag and got up from the bench. There was no use hanging around any longer. The birds were too scared to come back. The day was starting to get hot anyway. You could feel the humidity rising already. She walked across the grass to go wait in the car. It was going to be another wicked day.