God's Pocket - Pete Dexter Page 7

  "Right, right. I was just thinkin'. Anyway, what I was callin' you about Mick, I don't know if it's the appropriate time, but it's Turned Leaf. They got her in a $15,000 claimer Wednesday at Keystone. I'm scarin' up everything I got out, and I figured you'd want to know."

  Mickey looked at Joanie. "Right," he said, "thanks. I'll tell Jeanie what you said .... " He hung up and smiled at her. "I got to take care of the arrangements," he said.

  * * *

  The first place Mickey had seen Turned Leaf was New York, at Aqueduct. She'd run six furlongs in l:09.2, and he'd seen her gather herself at the top of the stretch and then run down two of the best three-year-old fillies in the country, and win by two. He'd looked at the board, and she'd run the last quarter in 23.5, and he knew somewhere, sometime, she was going to make him some money.

  And three months later, here she was running a claiming race at Keystone. He'd seen her name in the entries again at Aqueduct, and he and Bird had driven up to bet her. She'd broke on top, stayed on top all the way around, and then, with a furlong to go, she'd quit. Quit so bad that for a minute he thought she'd broke down.

  He'd turned to Bird, who was flipping fifty-dollar win tickets into a line of empty plastic beer cups in front of his seat, and said, "There's somethin' wrong with that horse."

  "Whatever it is, it ain't enough," he'd said. Bird was a fair handicapper, but he got too personally involved with the animals. He got the idea that some of them owed him money. An honest horse, Bird could forgive. But when he saw one quit in the stretch, the way turned Leaf had, he never forgave and he never forgot.

  "I'm tellin' you," Mickey had said, "there's somethin' wrong. I seen it a lot down in Florida, where it's hotter. Some beautiful little filly would hit the stretch and just back up. It would turn out they'd sucked air. You know, vaginally."

  "Are you tryin' to tell me," Bird had said, "that this horse's got somethin' wrong with her pussy, makes her quit three hundred yards from the finish?” They'd been sitting in the restaurant at the clubhouse, and a few people began to turn around. "That's beautiful," he'd said. .

  "It happens all the time. Her vagina opens up while she runs"—people began moving away now—"and a couple gallons of air gets trapped in there. It cramps them all up, and they can't run."

  Bird said, "Like runnin' while you're tryin' to take a shit," and they had that part of the restaurant to themselves. He'd sat there with Mickey five minutes, then he'd gotten up and gone into the trainers' room. Technically, Bird was a trainer. He'd paid for a license in New York the day after a horse name Pete's Delight went off at three to two, with a couple grand of Bird's money on him, and then broke last and stayed last all the way around, behind a field that had to improve to suck. Bird had intended to claim Pete's Delight the next time he ran and shoot him. To do that he had to be a trainer. That, of course, was before he had money problems.

  Mickey walked from the house to Twenty-seventh Street, thinking about turned Leaf and Bird. He could always lose himself in the ponies. They told you enough, if you paid attention, to get close to what they would do. Of course, you could never get all the way back to the magic. Sometimes you thought you could, though, when you could do your handicapping and then just look at the horse and feel something going on inside it. The trouble was, you couldn't be sure if you felt it, or you just wanted to feel it.

  Mickey'd had a streak once, back at Hialeah, that ran fifteen days. At the end he was $40,000 to the good, more money than he'd ever made in a year. It was still more money than he'd ever made in a year, and it was damn sure more money than he'd ever lost in nine days, which is what he'd done with it.

  Smilin' Jack's was on the corner. He had a green neon sign in the window, written in script. Moran's Funeral Home. There were half a dozen stands in the street that said NO PARKING FUNERAL. Jack had moved two of them to park his pickup, which he always claimed belonged to his cousin. He'd told Mickey once that when people know an undertaker's got a truck, they start wondering what he does with it.

  Jack Moran was born to his job. His father, Digger, had the only funeral home in the Pocket, and when he'd seen it was time to retire—the little mistakes can kill you in the funeral business—he handed the whole operation over to Jack, his only son. The old man had married late, and was fifty the year Jack was born. He was eighty-eight now, and nobody but Jack and their housekeeper had seen him since the stroke six years ago. He just sat up there on the third floor refusing to die. You had to wonder what he knew.

  Jack was short and famous for his temper, and since the day he had taken over, he had tried to separate his job from his personal life. He'd told everybody in the Pocket about the arguments with his father. "You don't gotta stay in all night because you work for the city,” he'd said. "You don't gotta stay out of clubs even if you're a teacher. What you do with your own time, that's your own business, and it ain't got nothin' to do with work. It's in the Constitution."

  His father's argument was that Jack ought to go out of the neighborhood to drink. Everybody agreed the old man must of gone senile. Nobody went out of the neighborhood to drink, except for a month every year at North Wildwood. Everybody in the Pocket who went to the shore had places in the same part of North Wildwood.

  Mostly, Jack would go to the Uptown or the Hollywood three or four times a week, sit around and argue about the Eagles or the Flyers or the niggers, and once a month he'd get into a fight. It was a queer thing how all the arguments were over the things everybody agreed on.

  Jack had been the way he was since he was a kid, because he was always small. Every time a nun lined up the class according to height, that was somebody who got sucker-punched twenty years later. And even though Jack Moran wasn't much of a fighter, he was dangerous in a light. It was nothing for him to pick up a beer bottle.

  Mickey walked through the little white gate Jack had put up and into the front room of the funeral parlor. It was dark and quiet, and you could just see the neon sign through the curtain. Someplace in back a buzzer went off.

  Smilin' Jack came through a pair of green velvet curtains, wearing a dark suit. His hair was slick and close to his head, and he took Mickey's hand in both of his. "We are so sorry to hear about Leon," he said. "You wonder sometimes about God's plan .... "

  Jack had a black eye, which he'd almost covered with makeup, and he'd dropped his voice about six feet. "I was thinkin' of something that would make Jeanie feel better," Mickey said.

  Jack nodded and smiled the exact smile he smiled before he sucker-punched Mole Ferrell at the Hollywood last February. Mickey had seen that. He wondered if the smile had started with sucker-punching or with grieving relatives, and how Jack had put it together that it worked both ways. Maybe for smiles it was all he had. Jack said, "Let me show you what we got, Mick."

  He held the curtain for Mickey and then led him past the viewing room, through a door to a room of caskets. They were all open, linings like the sport coats at Jacob Reed. It looked like a room full of traps. Jack closed the door behind them. The prices were printed on folded cards, sitting on top of each unit. That's what Jack called them, units.

  The figures were broken down into total funeral services, and then a price for only the box, in case you just wanted to have one around. Jack put his hand on a dark mahogany unit. It had a real serious look. "Of course, you know Jeanie best," he said, "but you know, she ain't going to want some piece of junk. You know, she likes things to look good."

  The price for the mahogany casket, by itself was $2,700. If you wanted a funeral with it, and an embalmed body and a vault, it was $5,995. Mickey felt the wood, which was smooth, and looked at his reflection in it. It distorted his face, the way the toaster did. "Of course," Jack said—he didn't say "of course" much at the Hollywood—"there are some people who prefer bronze. The sealing's better, and it's airtight." Mickey looked up and Jack had moved to the bronze casket, which was $5,995 all by itself. Mickey noticed how graceful Jack was around caskets.

  “It's all up
to the family, of course,” he said.

  Mickey thought of the box they'd buried his father in. It wasn't what he had in mind for Jeanie to be looking at Saturday morning, but it was what he could afford. Smilin' Jack assumed he had money that he didn't have. Everybody in the Pocket did. They assumed he was connected too. There was nobody but Bird that knew anything about it, and that included Jeanie.

  With Jeanie, it was always kind of an expectation of what he was, and he saw right away that's as close as she wanted it. If all he did was deliver hot meat in ten- and twenty-pound packages—if he was no better than the rest of the Pocket—she didn't want to know. She kept her accounts and he kept his, and it seemed like a funny way to be married, but she kept a distance from everything. He guessed it was her way of seeing things. "I tell you what,” Mickey said, "I got to think this over, maybe talk to Jeanie. I don't want to do nothin' that she ain't gonna like .... "

  Smilin' Jack smiled the smile that sucker-punched Mole Ferrell. "There's no hurry," he said. "The important thing is to be sure."

  Mickey said, "There's a lot ridin' on this," and Jack led him past the viewing room to the front door, and gave him another one of those handshakes like he was making a snowball. "Maybe I'll drop over tomorrow morning," Jack said. "It might be easier for her to talk about it in familiar surroundings."

  Mickey started down the street and Jack stopped him, not quite yelling. "Yo, Mick," he said, "was the body messed up?" Mickey shook his head. "No, the body's all right. It's just the back of his head."

  "That's no problem at all," Jack said. "The back of the head takes care of itself.”

  Mickey walked back toward his house, and for the second time that afternoon he didn't know where to go. He didn't think he ought to get drunk, the sisters were guarding Jeanie. It felt like everything was moving but him. He had eight hundred dollars and the truck, and he couldn't sell the truck. He thought of asking Bird for the seven hundred again, but if he'd had it, he'd of given it to him.

  In Jeanie's mind, he'd fucked it up with Leon. She'd expected something—he didn't know what—and the kid was dead. She would expect something now too. She would expect him to make things different than they was.

  Mickey got into the Monte Carlo and drove into Center City. They were showing a double feature at the Budco. Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He put the car in a lot, bought himself a ticket, and went to sleep in a seat three rows from the front and all the way to the wall. Away from the damn marijuana.

  He went to sleep and dreamed of Turned Leaf.

  * * *

  Monday afternoon, Shellburn went to court.

  "And then me and the defendant went into the office where he was and, you know, capped him .... "

  The prosecutor said, "What exactly did you do when you capped him, Charlie?"

  Charlie Piscoli was nineteen or twenty years old, a nightshift waiter at Bookbinders Restaurant. "Well, me and Eddie—the defendant—we went in there, and I talked to him, said, you know, that he'd been takin' a quarter off the top, everything he was supposed to be cuttin', and he says, 'The fuck I have, you think I'm crazy?' And while I'm talkin' to him, Eddie caps him."

  The prosecutor looked back over to the table where a man a few years older than Charlie Piscoli was sitting in a suit that did not fit him, considering his fingernails. Eddie Allen sold souvenir Liberty Bells on the street, across from Independence Hall.

  "Eddie being Edward Allen," the prosecutor said.

  "Yessir, the defendant."

  "And exactly how did he cap him?"

  "Well, first he shot him in the head, but it didn't seem to do nothing. I mean he stood up and started sayin' something .... "

  "What did he say?"

  "Uh, I believe he called us motherfuckers.”

  "All right, go ahead."

  "Well, like I said, the bullet didn't seem to do nothin', so Eddie shot him again, in the side I think, and he grabbed himself there, and tries to get the gun. That's when he got his finger shot off. By then I see it's trouble, because his old lady's comin' down the stairs. You know, the office was in the house.”

  Richard Shellburn was sitting at the end of the bench reserved for the press. He was fifty-three years old and he'd never been in as much as a fistfight in his life. He leaned forward to hear Charlie Piscoli tell the rest of the story, how the wife had come down the stairs and started screaming, “You're killing him!" By then Charlie was holding him from behind and Eddie was sticking him in the eyes with a screwdriver, and the victim—a fifty-year-old hood named Pirate John Bonalini—was still calling them motherfuckers.

  "And what did you do then?” the prosecutor asked.

  Charlie Piscoli shrugged. "I told the lady we was tryin' our best,?' he said. Shellburn heard some of the people on Eddie Allen's side of the courtroom laugh. Up on the bench, Judge Kalquist pounded for quiet, issued the familiar warnings. Shellburn watched as the judge and the witness looked at each other. He wondered what things had come to, that the people who ran things had taken to using lowlifes like Charlie Piscoli and Eddie Allen to do their killing.

  Screwdrivers, fingers on the coffee table, wives running down the stairs.

  And of course, the cops caught one of them coming out. Charlie had run into the side of the police car, and he gave them Eddie, and everybody else he knew, and before the district attorney and the federal prosecutor got him a new driver's license and a room somewhere in Phoenix, he would testify against everybody, he'd ever met.

  "Thank you," the kid told the judge.

  Kalquist covered his eyes. The judge was protecting Charlie Piscoli as much as the government was. Four weeks ago, before he declared a mistrial and separated the defendants, Kalquist had lectured the courtroom on the serious nature of the matter being tried, and to end the lecture he had looked down at the bench where Shellburn was sitting and said, "It is not funny, and it is not romantic, except to the most adolescent of minds."

  The day before this lecture, Shellburn had written a column comparing the coming of New Journalism to the coming of the Charlie Piscolis to organized crime, wondering if there were any standards left. He had written about the way newspapers used to be, and the way organized crime in Philadelphia used to be, before somebody put a shotgun in Angelo Bruno's ear and blew away all the order and dignity and discipline organized crime had. That was when the drugs came into it—the old man never allowed that—and the next thing you knew, motorcycle gangs and guys like Charlie Piscoli were doing family business.

  The day Judge Kalquist looked at Shellburn and made his remark about adolescent was the day Shellburn started his investigation of Kalquist. He put his man Billy on it, looking through Kalquist's trial records. Billy had said, "What is it we're looking for again?"

  "Anything," he'd said.

  "How do we know there's anything there?"

  Richard Shellburn had said, "Judges are lawyers, Billy."

  Sitting in the courtroom now, Shellburn knew what Kalquist's house cost, where his daughters went to college, sentences he'd given everybody with money who ever got convicted in his court. That wasn't why Shellburn was there, though. Billy would take care of that. Shellburn wanted to know how it was when Pirate John Bonalini got shot in the head. He was fifty-three years old and had never been in a fistfight in his life, but violence held something for Richard Shellburn.

  "What happened," the prosecutor asked, "when his wife got down the stairs?"

  "By then, the Pirate was gettin' heavier, you know? Like when I grabbed him, he was sort of stunned but he was still standin' up, talkin', but as she come down the stairs he got heavier to hold. He got so heavy that finally I let him go, and he sunk to the floor.”

  "He sunk to the floor," the prosecutor said.

  "Yessir.”

  "And what did his wife do?”

  "She sunk to the floor also," he said. "She was, you know, real upset. And me and Eddie ran out, he went one way up the street, I went the other, and I run into the cop car. Oh, yeah
, Eddie wanted to cap her too, but I just wanted to get out of there .... "

  Shellburn had almost died once, three years ago driving home from a lecture he'd given to a bunch of women for $1,200. First he'd thrown up, and then it grabbed the middle of his chest, like everything there had seized up, and then it shot into his jaw. He'd stopped his car and opened his door, and somebody had found him there, half in and half out, and they'd called an ambulance.

  He woke up in Jefferson Hospital, and the doctor told him he'd almost died. “I remember," he'd said.

  But there was something else too, that he couldn't remember. For a while that night he couldn't breathe, and once he'd stopped lighting, it wasn't so bad. It was like boarding up the windows, the things that happened. The house got dark inside, smaller at first, then bigger, and then he seemed to fill it. And there was something else, the hum of it, that started moving away from him even before he woke up. Away, or back inside.

  And then the doctor was telling him he'd almost died, and then his boss from the paper—T. D. Davis—was standing there, and Shellburn was shaking and couldn't talk. There had been something sad in that humming. "Pull yourself together," T. D. Davis had said.

  Davis didn't know it, of course, but that's what boarding up all the windows had been about.

  Charlie Piscoli said, "No, it wasn't me that capped him. I never capped nobody in my life. The worst I ever done was scare somebody."

  Judge Kalquist looked at his watch, and then at the prosecutor. "Do you anticipate your questioning of this witness is going to take much longer?"

  “Yessir," the prosecutor said. "It could go on for quite a while."

  The judge considered his watch again, blew some air into his cheeks, held it a minute, and then let it go. "It's three-thirty," he said finally, as if that was something none of them had ever run into before, "and I think I'll stop us here, and we'll get a fresh start early in the morning."