Supernatural Noir (26 page)

One night she returns to the apartment Tocci has rented for her to find Joe and six of his friends three sheets to the completely fucked up, and before she can set down her handbag, a scrawny prick with buckteeth and the bumpy skin of a gourd by the name of Toady turns to Joe and says, “Mind if I take a ride?”

To her amusement, Joe replies, “I’d kinda like to see that.”

Sylvia believes her lover is joking, except that he isn’t.

Before she knows what is happening, the men approach her. They grab her arms painfully and hoist her from the floor. Then she is pinned to the dining-room table, men holding her arms and her legs while Toady rips away her clothes. Sylvia screams and Joe Tocci slaps her and tells her to keep her “whore mouth shut.” Toady climbs on her first and as he begins the rape, Sylvia spits in his face. Toady balls up his fist and punches her in the mouth. The violence so thrills him he hits her again and again. Dazed by concussion, Sylvia squeezes her eyes closed. She imagines herself in an ocean, except it is a sea of stones. She is batted this way and that by granite waves that stink of men. Opening her eyes, Sylvia sees a series of faces hovering above her, blurred and monstrous in their lust. One man kneels on the dining-room table and lifts her head by a fistful of hair before forcing his cock in her mouth, and the scents of urine and sweat fill her nose and she thinks she might drown in them. Hot spray lands on her face and thighs and belly, and they turn her over so that her burning cheek is momentarily soothed by the coolness of the polished wood, and then she is afloat again, tossed about like flotsam on fever-hot swells of stone. And later, so much later, as a dozen muffled aches throb across her body, she hears Tocci laughing. He says, “I guess I better get a new one. This one’s broken.”

Sylvia rarely thinks of this night. She tells herself the memories were scraped away with the brat one of those cocksuckers had put inside of her.

——

Morning light streams through thin curtains, bathing Sylvia’s face. She wipes her eyes and hears footsteps. Rossini enters the bedroom holding two mugs of coffee. He is naked and though he’s bulky, his added pounds are solid and intimidating, and she likes the way his body looks.

He hands her one of the mugs and sits on the edge of the bed beside her.

“So tell me what you’re doing here,” he says, taking her off guard.

She holds the mug in both hands, like a little girl sipping cocoa, and offers Rossini an innocent gaze, which makes him laugh like a mule. His reaction annoys her but she refuses to let the lie fall.

“Look, Syl,” Rossini says once his amusement is under control, “you think I’m a dumb wop fucker, but I’m not
that
dumb. I saw the way you twisted Louis around your finger. You drove him out of his fucking mind. I never saw anything like it. So while I can play along with some horseshit to get a roll, and maybe even believe you were lonely and needed a bit of hard to make it through the night, the fact you’re still here tells me you want more than my cock.”

“Maybe I like you,” Sylvia says over the lip of her coffee mug.

“And maybe I’ll sprout tits and be the happiest girl in the whole USA,” he says, still exhibiting great amusement at the game. “What do you think? You think I’m going to sprout tits?”

“Fine,” she says. She places her mug on the nightstand and leans back on the headboard. “I want you to help me with a job.”

“That’s more like it,” Rossini says. He drinks from his mug and looks out the window.

“Are you angry?”

“Relieved,” he says. “I like to know where I stand. What’s the job?”

She hesitates because Louis and Mickey had been close. She doesn’t know if the thief retains loyalty to his dead boss, but she cannot drop the subject now. If Rossini declines, she will find a way to convince him as she has convinced other men in the past.

“I want to hit Louis’s house,” she says.

——

The night after the funeral Mary Towne, Louis’s widow, called me to say she was in Miami with her two sons. I was sitting on the sofa with my arm around my wife, and we were watching an animated film about dogs, and when the phone rang I thought it might have been our daughter, who called frequently from her college dorm. To hear Mary Towne’s shrill voice instead of my daughter’s irritated the hell out of me.

“It’s those papers you gave me,” Mary said.

“About the estate?” I asked.

“Well, what other papers did you give me to sign?” Her voice was like a scalpel scraping bone.

Mary had insisted on reading Louis’s will the day after his murder. The fat widow had spent two hours in my office going over the details of Towne’s financial holdings, picking and pecking at the numbers like a starving bird, instead of staying home to comfort her children. At the funeral she’d put on a fine show of grief. Empty. Meaningless. I’d been appalled and wondered how a human being’s moral compass could waver so far from true north.

Not that Towne was a man who deserved authentic mourning from his wife. I’d told him a hundred times I had no interest in his sexual conquests, but Towne was a braggart and insisted I endure his tales of whoring and perversion. I’d always felt sorry for his cheated wife. And then I met her.

“What about the papers, Mary?”

“I signed them the way you said, but we were running late for our flight.”

“So you didn’t have them messengered to my office?”

“I
told
you, we were late for our flight. I didn’t have time. Just go by the house in the morning and pick them up.”

“Mary, that’s highly irregular.”

“Well, you’d better do something. I don’t want those papers sitting around for two weeks holding everything up. There’s a key in the planter on the back porch and the security code is Louis’s birthday—day and month. You can bill me for your precious time.”

Then she hung up, cutting off the protests climbing up my tongue.

——

Sylvia sits in the passenger seat of a stolen sedan. Rossini finishes a cigarette and grinds it out in the ashtray and turns in the seat to face her.

“He’s got no real security,” the thief says. “Obviously he’s not going to have cameras recording who comes and goes. He’s got a simple contact system that will take all of a minute to kill.”

“He wasn’t very cautious,” Sylvia says.

“He was scary enough that he didn’t have to be. No one was going to fuck Louis over—no one that wanted to stay alive, anyway. The guy was more than connected.”

“What does that mean?”

“You telling me you don’t know about Louis’s hobby?

“You mean his oogedy-boogedy mumbo jumbo?”

“It was a hell of a lot more than that,” Rossini says. “He put the fear of God, or the devil, or whatever he worshiped, into the whole crew. Guys that crossed Louis ended up dog food. You heard about Joe Tocci, right? Last year he disrespected Louis at a meeting and his men found Tocci shredded like barbecue pork in the john of his apartment. They said he wasn’t in there for more than a few minutes, and there was no other way into that crapper but the one door. Louis got to him anyway.”

“Tocci got what he deserved,” Sylvia mutters.

“We all get what we deserve,” Rossini says. “But the thing is, Louis Towne was not a made man. He was never going to be a made man because he didn’t have the blood, but Tocci
was
a made man. You hit a made man and you’re landfill, but no one retaliated on Tocci’s behalf. No one. Not his crew. Not the organization. They knew Louis did it, but they knew what Louis was capable of, so they let him alone.”

“Until someone put two in his head.”

“Over a year later,” Rossini says. “I’m just saying he didn’t have security because he knew he was scarier than anything that could get in his house.”

——

Sylvia follows the thief into the dining room and through an opulent living room. She feels anger, seeing the statuary and the silk-upholstered sofa and the crystal vases on marble tables. This should have been hers. She should have been sitting on that sofa with a glass of champagne, not prowling the house looking for scraps. She follows Rossini up the stairs and runs a hand along the ornately carved mahogany banister.

“His safe is in his study,” Rossini says.

After his words fade, Sylvia feels uneasy. The air grows thick and envelops her, and she believes she can feel it jostle, hitting her like ripples on the surface of a lake. Even the subtle movements of Rossini on the stairs ahead play over her skin, but there is another body at work, displacing the air. She remembers a similar sensation she had felt whenever Louis entered a room, a heaviness as if his presence curdled the atmosphere.

Uncertain, with her skin alit by anxiety, Sylvia follows the thief to the landing and down a black hallway. The sharp ray of a flashlight momentarily blinds her. Rossini offers a rapid apology and puts the cylinder in his mouth. At the center of the beam is a deadbolt lock. Rossini attacks it with his picks, and in a few moments he has the bolt retracted. Then he sets to work on the cheaper, less complicated lock recessed in the knob.

After opening the door, Rossini leaves Sylvia on the threshold and starts across the room, his silhouette playing against the bobbing disc of light from his lantern. She watches him open a closet door and is surprised to see a shining metal panel beyond, a panel with a combination dial and a three-pronged handle. Louis’s safe takes up an entire closet. Sylvia’s trepidation turns to excitement as she anticipates the sheer volume of wealth such a vault could hold.

“This is going to take some time,” he tells her. “I helped him pick this model, so I know what I’m up against. You might want to keep an eye on the window.”

Sylvia does. She pulls back the drapes and leans against the wall. The landscape beyond the window is carved of shadows. The only light comes from the far end of the drive, beyond the gate, where an arc lamp hangs over the street. Everything between this illumination and Sylvia is gloom. She looks into it and finds nothing. She looks back at Rossini and considers her choice of accomplice.

She decides he can’t be trusted. The thief is too eager. He hadn’t needed a bit of convincing to agree to this job, and as with all things that come too easy, Sylvia looks for an angle.

She slides her hand down the side of her jacket and is reassured when her fingers trace over the outline of the handgun in her pocket.

——

The shrill cry of Rossini’s drill startles her. Sylvia steps away from the window and crosses the den. Nervous, she lights a cigarette and stands by the door. She leans into the hall and is grateful to see the darkened corridor is empty.

Still, she cannot shake the feeling that she and the thief are not alone in the house. The air continues to move like an invisible beast, sidling past her. Drawing deeply on the cigarette, she holds the smoke in her lungs and then blows a cloud into the hall. Amid the whorls of smoke, she pictures Louis’s face and whispers, “Fuck you,” to the dissipating haze. He had lavished a fortune on his wife, had given her every damn thing she had ever whined about, including this house, and what had Sylvia seen for her time and effort?

Finishing the cigarette, she drops it on the carpet. She grinds the butt into the carved Berber and hopes an ember will smolder deep in the pile, causing a fire that levels the Towne mansion about five minutes after she and the thief have driven away with the contents of Louis’s safe.

She leaves the doorway and walks to where Mickey is kneeling. He wears goggles as he guides the barrel of a complicated drill rig. Sparks fly from the safe’s door, showering the carpet. The air around her shifts again, and Sylvia spins on her heels to check the room. Nothing. She hugs herself nervously and returns to the window.

Staring over the dark landscape, she rubs the back of her neck, trying to dislodge the feeling that something rests against it. She tries to convince herself that she’s being paranoid. If anyone else were in the house, they’d have shown themselves by now, or the drive would be thick with police cars, but logic does nothing to alleviate her fear. By the time the drill’s shriek dies, Sylvia is near panic with the certainty that someone prowls the house.

“That’s it,” Mickey says, throwing open the safe. He sets his drill rig on Louis’s desk and returns to the open closet door.

Sylvia races across the room to see the extent of the fortune Louis has locked away from the world and to begin its collection. She presses up against Rossini’s back and peers around him, only to find herself confused by the vault’s contents. She had expected to find stacks of hundred-dollar bills, stock certificates, a jewelry store’s inventory of gems, and though there is some cash—three small stacks on the third shelf of the safe—the bulk of the space is empty. The money sits on one shelf and another is devoted to a bizarre assortment of baubles.

The collection is comprised of six metallic statues. Each is no larger than Sylvia’s pinkie finger, and they are ugly like randomly shaped wads of iron with points and blobs.

“I don’t understand,” Sylvia whispers.

“Amazing,” Rossini replies.

“What is this shit?” Sylvia asks. She reaches around Rossini to retrieve one of the unattractive statues.

His hand shoots out and grabs her wrist painfully. “Don’t touch those,” he says. “You get the cash and the jewelry. That was the deal.”

“The cash? There’s only about ten grand there, and there isn’t any jewelry.”

Rossini squeezes her wrist until she feels the bones grinding. “That was the deal,” he repeats. “The icons are mine.”

A hot mask of rage falls over Sylvia’s face. The thief has played her, though she has yet to understand the extent or the intent of his game.

“Get away from there,” a rasping voice calls from the doorway.

Sylvia turns to the sound, her heart in her throat. A squat shadow stands at the threshold. The face is very pale, visible but ill defined. Mickey turns and knocks Sylvia aside. His flashlight falls squarely on the intruder, and he says, “Son of a bitch.” Sylvia only gets a glimpse of the man in the doorway, and, to her shock, he resembles Louis Towne. She recognizes chipmunk cheeks and small ears, but the view is momentary, and she is stumbling, so she doesn’t trust what she has seen.