Hildy began shaking from head to toe, partly from fear, and mostly from being so mad she felt as if she were going to explode. ‘‘Well, we’ll just see about that. This Jimmy the Bug has no idea who he’s dealing with.’’
Tony G. gave the girl credit. She had a lot of guts, but the way she was trembling, her words had to be more bravado than anything else. But he hid his observations and gave Hildy an unreadable look. ‘‘I’m guessing he doesn’t,’’ he said.
Chapter 9
At about the time the genie’s appearance transformed Hildy’s life in ways she could not as yet begin to imagine, Hildy herself had caused a profound alteration in the lives of two other men, each in a radically different way.
Since he had run into Hildy earlier in this extraordinary day, Mike Amante had become a clock-watcher, a fidget, a man caught on the horns of a dilemma—and left with the uneasy feeling he was about to be gored.
‘‘Mike, what is your problem?’’ Kiki’s voice had lost its public silkiness and become irritatingly high-pitched. ‘‘You have been sitting in front of the television and changing channels for over an hour. You’re not even watching anything. When are you going to get dressed? We’re meeting my friend Odelia and her boyfriend for dinner and then we have tickets to see the Foo Fighters concert.’’
He groaned. Visions of a hot, jam-packed venue full of the Foo Fighters’ screaming fans appeared in his imagination. He’d rather get a root canal. Sitting on the sofa in their posh suite at Trump Plaza, comped by the hotel for Kiki of course, he kept staring at the television, manically punching the buttons on the remote control, scrolling through the stations.
Two hundred damned stations and
nothing worth watching,
he thought. At the same time, he answered Kiki without looking in her direction. ‘‘My stomach’s upset. I think I got food poisoning at that luncheon this afternoon.’’
‘‘Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody else got sick.’’ Kiki walked over and stood between Mike and the television screen to get his attention. She was wearing only her bra and thong panties.
He averted his eyes, not at all interested in her near-nakedness, and threw the remote control on the coffee table. ‘‘I’m not feeling well. I’m not up to going out tonight.’’
‘‘What!’’ The veins on Kiki’s neck knotted up like twisted blue yarn. ‘‘You can’t be serious! We have reservations. We can’t just stand Odelia up. Michael, stop this nonsense right now. You have to go!’’
Mike had never noticed before how harsh and irritating her voice was. Its sharpness cut into his brain like a buzz saw. He wanted to shout back at her,
I don’t care about Odelia. I don’t care about the Foo Fighters. I don’t care—about you!
Instead, he replied in a calm and reasonable voice, knowing that diplomacy was the wiser tack to take with Kiki, whose temper was legendary. ‘‘Of course you can’t stand up your friends. That’s why
you
need to go. Really. I want you to go without me. I can’t eat anything anyway. Plus, I feel so rotten, I’d spoil your evening.’’
Kiki took a long hard look at him. ‘‘You do look pale. If you’re feeling that sick, maybe you do have food poisoning. I should call Odelia and cancel. I don’t want to leave you here alone.’’
‘‘No, no! I insist. You go ahead. I’m totally beat, that’s all. I’m heading directly to bed. Why let this screw up your night out? I’d feel even worse knowing that you’re sitting around here when you should be having a good time.’’
‘‘Are you sure?’’ She was already moving toward the bedroom to finish dressing.
‘‘Positive,’’ he called after her.
Mike really didn’t feel good. His neck had stiffened up. His back ached a little. His nerves felt as if little cartoon mice were doing a tap dance on them. But he had lied about his stomach being queasy. He actually felt hungry. He thought about ordering a pizza or something once Kiki left. Then his thoughts went back to what he had been mulling over for hours: how to reach Hildy.
He had called his mother earlier today. She didn’t have Hildy’s cell phone number. She had looked in the church member directory for St. Paul’s in Lehman and reported that only Hildy’s home phone was listed. She suggested that Mike leave a message for Hildy and when she got it— she must be checking her messages, his mother reassured him—she would call him back. And wasn’t it lovely that he had run into Hildy again after all these years?
Then she fell silent. ‘‘And how’s Kiki?’’ she asked at last.
His mother had tried to like Kiki, Mike knew that. They just didn’t click. His mother never complained when they didn’t come out to Lehman for her birthday, or even when they missed Christmas. They had invited her to go skiing at Aspen with them during the holidays last year, but his mother had said no, it was nice of them to think of her, but she always sang with the choir on Christmas Eve. She liked to be home. She’d go over to Aunt Letty’s instead of cooking since Mike wasn’t going to be there.
Mike’s mother didn’t get mad or complain, but Mike felt guilty. He told Kiki that they should go to Pennsylvania for Christmas Day and leave for Aspen the day after or even that night. Kiki had given him that look, the one that said he was an imbecile.
‘‘Don’t you ever listen? I told you a half dozen times.’’ She was exasperated with him, obviously. ‘‘I’m shooting photos for
People
magazine’s big feature, ‘Brad Pitt’s Christmas in Aspen.’ We have to be there early on the twenty-fourth.’’
As it turned out, Mike spent most of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day alone while Kiki was busy ‘‘with Brad.’’ He did some solitary skiing to pass the time and then drank martinis at a bar along with the other lonely people. Mike pushed the memory away and thought about Hildy again.
This afternoon, after talking to his mother, Mike had reached his old friend George Ide at his auto repair shop in Trucksville. Over the clanging of metal and loud banging of an air compressor, George yelled out that he didn’t know who might have Hildy’s cell phone number, but maybe one of her girlfriends did. He thought she was still friendly with Susan. Mike remembered Susan, the cheerleader, didn’t he? She used to be Susan Jeremiah before she got married. He’d try to get her number for Mike, he said, and no, as far as he knew, Hildy wasn’t seeing anybody. Why did Mike want to know?
Mike said he was just curious, that was all, and why didn’t George mind his own business.
George laughed at him. ‘‘You still have something going for her, don’t you, Mike?’’
Mike told him to shut up. Didn’t George remember he was engaged?
‘‘Maybe you’re the one who needs to remember, Big Mike,’’ George said, laughed again, and hung up.
Afterward Mike called Hildy’s home number and left a message on the machine, asking her to call him. Hell, he had swallowed his pride and pleaded with her to call him. But he was sure she wouldn’t, not after meeting Kiki this afternoon. Mike lay down on the couch and put a throw pillow over his face. He felt miserable.
Then he heard Kiki’s voice. ‘‘Michael? Oh, are you asleep already?’’
He didn’t answer. He smelled the heavy floral scent of her perfume as she walked over to the sofa. She stood there a minute. He didn’t move. He made his breathing soft and regular. He added a snore or two to be even more convincing. Then he heard her walk away and go out the door.
The minute he heard the door click shut, Mike sat up and tossed the pillow onto a nearby chair. He had a brilliant idea. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it earlier. He’d drive up to Ship Bottom and find Hildy, to apologize to her. It was the right thing to do.
Hildy had told him she lived on Twenty-fifth Street, the first house from the boulevard. A gray house, she said, with whales on it. If he left right now, he’d be there in an hour. Maybe she hadn’t eaten yet, and she’d go have a pizza with him. Kiki didn’t eat pizza. She said it had too many calories.
Before he walked out the door five minutes later, he had brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and splashed on some cologne. He checked what money he had in his wallet, grabbed his car keys, left the suite, and headed for the hotel’s parking lot.
Whatever had been wrong with him must have passed, he thought. He felt great.
Just eight miles south of Trump Plaza in the Victorian town of Ocean City, another man was also obsessing about Hildy Caldwell. Jimmy the Bug had spent most of his day trying to track her down too.
His hunt had started off well. It had been easy to find out who had hit the jackpot on that Slingo machine, the one where he had left the bottle. The casino cashier wouldn’t give up the winner’s name or address, but for fifty bucks Jimmy had gotten a good enough description to spot the girl coming off the beach at Michigan Avenue: same clothes, same oversized tote bag with SAVE THE WOLVES on it, same blond hair. He knew right away it was the right chick.
He couldn’t catch up with her, but he managed to get her license plate number. Even though it was a Pennsylvania plate, he figured he had it made. He’d have the genie back in no time. He got in his white Cadillac CTS and drove back to his summer-house in Ocean City. Once there, it took him a few phone calls, but he got a state cop, the nephew of one of his guys, to run the plates. By late afternoon, he had her name and her address.
It turned out this Hildy Caldwell lived out in the sticks somewhere between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, about three, three and a half hours from Atlantic City. Jimmy the Bug made a few more calls, and a friend of a friend from Scranton agreed to send one of his guys to her house. The guy was supposed to wait for this girl to get back from Atlantic City if she wasn’t there already, grab her as soon as she got out of her car, and take the bottle. End of story. Only it didn’t turn out that way.
‘‘Puggy!’’ Jimmy the Bug screamed toward the kitchen from the lanai of his four-thousand-square-foot summer ‘‘cottage’’ with ocean view. As a rule, he didn’t usually conduct business at home—he had an office for that—but this genie problem meant breaking his own rules. ‘‘What did the Scranton guy find out!’’
John Pugiliese, a string bean of a man with a long sallow face, came to the sliding doors with a dish towel in one hand and a ladle in the other. ‘‘Nothing more than I already told you, boss. After he got to her house, it was all closed up. He talked to a neighbor. The girl’s away for the summer. Rented a place for the season down here somewhere. Gone until Labor Day. The neighbor said another neighbor has the address, but is still at work. The Scranton guy is waiting around. I thought we’d hear by now, but he didn’t call back yet.’’
‘‘Sumofabitch.’’ Jimmy the Bug reached for a cigarette and lit it. He was getting very worked up over this whole situation. He had to find out where this girl was staying. ‘‘You know how many goddamn summer rentals are at the Jersey shore?’’
‘‘I don’t know. A million? Two million?’’
‘‘Shut up, Puggy. It was a rhetorical question. Maybe I need to eat something. The ziti done yet?’’
‘‘Just took it off the stove. Be out in a minute. I’ll tell Joey and Sal.’’ He disappeared back into the shadows of the house.
Ten minutes later Jimmy’s lieutenants—twins named Joey and Sal—Puggy, who was both bodyguard and cook, and their boss sat at the artisan-made wrought iron and glass table out in the lanai. From there Jimmy liked to watch the fishermen casting into the surf about three hundred feet away.
Puggy put a big dish of ziti and meatballs on the table in front of Jimmy the Bug. ‘‘Salad?’’ Puggy asked, then held out a bowl of romaine lettuce topped with shaved Parmigiana Romano cheese.
Jimmy the Bug waved it away. ‘‘Pour me some wine,’’ he said. ‘‘You guys, go ahead. Take what you want.’’
Sal and Joey filled their plates with ziti and started eating. They didn’t make small talk, such as
Hey, you see who won the game?
or
Nice day,
huh.
They never did, not around Jimmy the Bug anyway. It was safer to keep your mouth shut. You never knew what was going to set him off.
But despite the lack of conviviality, Jimmy the Bug never ate alone. Some of his crew and at least one bodyguard were always there. He didn’t have a wife anymore: Teresa, God rest her soul, died of a heart attack when he was in Trenton State Prison the last time. It surprised him. He always figured the husband kicked first and the wives turned into tough old
nonnas
dressed in black who lived to be a hundred years old.
Of course, he had a
cumare
, an Italian word the Americans pronounced ‘‘goo-mah.’’ In plain English, he had a girlfriend. He thought about Jennifer and what a pain in the ass she was. Her bra size was bigger than her IQ. Besides, the relationship was all show. He didn’t have the urge to get intimate anymore. And no way was he going to start popping Viagra.
Old guys trying to get a hard-on for a young chick—what a joke,
he thought.
The genie could have fixed that problem too, if Jimmy had wished it. Would have been a waste of a wish, the way he looked at it. He didn’t have time to put up with a woman right now. He had plans, big plans.
Or he did before he lost the goddamn genie.
He cursed himself, he cursed the parole officer, he cursed that stupid girl at the Slingo machine for picking up something that didn’t belong to her. He put a forkful of the ziti in his mouth. He cursed that too.
‘‘Puggy!’’ he screamed, sending a spray of red tomato sauce onto the tablecloth. His eyes bulged even more than usual, and his face went purple. ‘‘I told you, cook the ziti al dente. You know what that means. Firm. Right? You call this al dente?’’
‘‘It said twelve minutes on the box, boss. I set the timer.’’
‘‘It’s mush! That’s what it is. Garbage. You have the balls to serve me this shit?’’ He picked up the dish of pasta and hurled it against the wall. Then he got up, kicked his chair over, and stomped into the house, wanting to shoot somebody just to make himself feel better.
Chapter 10
‘‘Do you know anybody who drives an expensive sports car? I think it’s a Mercedes Roadster,’’ Tony G. asked Hildy, who was at the kitchen counter opening a can of Friskies Mariner’s Catch for Shelley and Keats.