Staten Island Noir Read online

  But later, when Al was oh-so-vaguely pressed on the details, he caved and admitted—well, everything. Swilling in his cruiser. Shooting sparks as he hugged the barrier. Getting rammed from behind. And being helped by his pals in blue. Babbling, he even named the pals.

  Of course, he was fired. Even cooled his heels in the slammer for a bit.

  So none of "the guys" he spoke of so lovingly would be inclined to do any favors for good ol' Al. Jo didn't bother reminding him about the circumstances of his ex-ness. He liked playing cop, so she let him.

  He even fucked like one. Like he was alone. Everything he said to Jo—at Jo—was addressed to Al, the ex-cop: "Oh, you're hitting that pussy today, boy." "She's gonna remember this." "She's gon' be calling your name for days."

  Jo had hoped that a body against hers would blur the day, dim the smell of fire. But not this body.

  When he left, her room smelled like his deluded monologue, his miserable spurt. The newspaper sat on the bedside table. The mother did it. Leisa had killed herself and her children. Tell me why, Jo tried to beg her dead friend. But what came out was: Tell me how.

  Maybe the smiling C.J. she'd seen playing with his siblings and lugging home groceries was just another kind of Charlie, one who'd learned to paint his snarling face with light. Maybe Leisa was crazy, out of her mind, her head crammed with the kind of wounding Jo was beginning to know.

  Jo started to cry. She wept from bone, from memory, from loss. She wept for Leisa, for C.J., for the stranger who'd escaped her body and named her Bitch. She wept from lack of love, unleashed wracking sobs that hung wet in the air. She wept for the shadows that were Staten Island, the prison she lived in. She wept past the pushing open of her bedroom door, the brash boy who suddenly stood there.

  "Fuck you cryin' for?"

  Jo's head drooped as Charlie filled the door, swaying, smelling like he'd drank something with blades. "It smells like ass in here," he slurred. "Like your ass mixed with somebody else's ass." He laughed then. "Was the dick that good? It made you cry? Hell, if it wasn't nasty sick, I'd hit that. Make you call my name. Give you some shit to cry about."

  He lumbered off. Jo heard him fall into bed in the other bedroom, still laughing, snorting. Soon he would rock the house with snotty snores. He would sleep deep into the night as poison spilled from his pores. He would wake up hungry, snarling, looking to be fed up in this bitch.

  She pulled the notebook down from its hiding place, found her pen, and wrote another poem for Leisa, the mother, the murderer.

  Where did it seep into you,

  the ghost of the only answer?

  How did you pull it in,

  breathe it in, own it?

  How did you find the teeth

  you needed to take back your

  own body, to build a revolution

  in darkness? And how brave

  of you

  to take all of them

  with you

  There was more she wanted to say, but Jo was afraid that writing more would lead her to a road she couldn't travel. Not the why, but the how. She craved Leisa's strength (the how) not her weakness (the why).

  She went to the kitchen and pulled down a note Charlie had written and taped to the fridge months ago: DAMN GO BY SOME FOOD. Already, she could hear his drunken snoring. She took the note back to her room, sat down, and began her work.

  Going back and forth between her son's scrawled note and a page in her notebook, she worked for hours to get it right. The fat O. The swirl of the S. The strangely elegant Y. She felt Leisa gently guiding her hand as she traced the letters, traced the letters, mirrored the letters.

  Down the hall, Charlie sang razors. But in Jo's room, he was writing an apology for what he was about to do. He was saying, I'm sorry, finishing with that strangely elegant Y.

  This time, the dead boy would sign his name.

  A USER'S GUIDE TO KEEPING YOUR KILLS FRESH

  BY TED ANTHONY

  Fresh Kills

  New York Newsday

  Wednesday, April 11, 2001

  3 Corpses in L.I. Car Trunk

  Authorities Unsure How Long Ago Deaths of Men, Woman Occurred

  By Silvia D. Bruce, Staff Writer

  The bodies of two men and a woman were found yesterday in the trunk of a Chevy Impala in Captree State Park in Suffolk County, and authorities said the deaths may not have been recent. A source said the case may have a connection to Staten Island . . .

  Now and then, there are moments in a man's life that offer up complete clarity. They're rare, and rarer still is the ability to recognize them. It is only the truly intelligent, self-aware man who finds himself in a moment of clarity and actually sees it for what it is—and moves forward in a productive way.

  Manny Antonio was not that kind of man.

  If complete clarity sidled up to Manny in a tube top and fishnets and offered him a freebie, no strings attached, he would bitch-slap it and choose the company of his right hand and some Jergens instead. If complete clarity were an all-you-can-eat buffet of Chinese food, Manny would ask for the menu and order the chicken and broccoli. That's just Manny.

  Or, I should say, that was Manny. Because all of Manoel Antonio's verbs got turned into the past tense on Staten Island exactly ten years ago today. It was ugly, it was messy, and it was—what are the exact right words here?—fucking hilarious. And it was precisely because Manny didn't know the moment of clarity when it came rushing toward him like a steroid-addled fullback.

  I. MANNY'S PROBLEM

  That would be Josephine and Conrad Spencer, late of Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey (what's with those dashes, anyway?). They weren't a bad sort, really. Their problem was that they loved to redecorate. Obsessively. Couldn't stop, in fact. Did up the living room in a South Pacific tiki theme for thirty grand, then redid the den in midcentury modern. Eames chairs and clean lines. That was another forty-five grand.

  They borrowed big time from Marine Midland for those two rooms. Then they wanted to remodel some more. I mean, you and I may not like our kitchens to look like a warehouse from the 1930s, but to each his own. They wanted to borrow 50K more, but Marine Midland was wising up to them, and the loan officer told them to talk to the hand. So they looked for other, more . . . creative, shall we say, options.

  Long story short, those informal solutions got mad when the repayments weren't happening on schedule. They turned to their own informal solutions, things got ugly, and the conundrum finally made its way down the food chain to Manny.

  Manny Antonio was what Sergeant Joe Friday would have called "a small-time hood turned contract killer," a Portuguese thug who was a bad seed from the get-go. When he was a kid, at a neighbor's sixth birthday party, he popped all the balloons with a paring knife and pulled both claws off the birthday boy's pet crawfish. Blame the parents, if you must—divorced, addled by pills, dogged by anger-management issues before those words were ever invented—but if you ask me, Manny Antonio was born bad.

  And even in that, he kind of sucked. I once had a basketball coach who said the wisest words a thirteen-year-old can hear: "If you're going to do something, be good at it. If you're going to chase pussy for a living, that's a choice—but be good at it." Manny wasn't even good at being bad. The best you could say about him was that he was very average at being very average.

  Which was why he was a forgettable thug, the kind of scrub who gets the job done eventually, without any great panache. He inspired no emotion in anyone whatsoever. Remember Duffy Dyer, that second-string catcher from the early 1970s? What he was to the Mets in those days, Manny Antonio was to the people in the tri-state area who needed some thumping and killing done.

  That points us back to Conrad and Josephine. She was the kind of woman who, when you see her berating the Acme cashier about the price of Shedd's Spread or complaining about the pepperoncini in the endless salad at the Olive Garden, you're glad she isn't your next-door neighbor. So when the informal loan outfit starts getting increasingly persistent in reco
vering its investment, she makes the tactical error, in an unfortunately aggressive phone call, of telling its duly appointed agents to take a hike.

  Predictably, the duly appointed agents are not thrilled with this turn of events. They are particularly agitated about the part where Josephine implies that if the pressure does not abate, the involvement of local law enforcement might ensue. Namely the detectives of the Ho-Ho-Kus Police Department. "And don't think I won't do it. We have rights!" Josephine Spencer yells over the phone.

  So the duly appointed agents, realizing the potential calamities associated with imminent police intervention, decide to schedule a visit to offer more personal customer service.

  As you may be aware from the movies, these kinds of duly appointed agents rarely choose to undertake such visits on their own behalves. So they duly appoint their own agent. That is Manny.

  I will pause at this point to say that the unfortunate breakage of an $8,500 original Eames Lounge Chair was not intentional on Manny's part. Though I will say also that Manny has no idea what an Eames Lounge Chair is as he breaks Josephine Spencer's neck across its armrest. He does, in passing, note the comfort of the vintage piece a few minutes later when he reclines in it briefly while using his boot-clad right foot to kick the supine Conrad Spencer's Men's Wearhouse-panted ballsack.

  I doubt any other of Charles and Ray Eames's creations have witnessed such an assortment of unpleasantness—particularly to the soundtrack of a small-time hood humming Alan O'Day's forgotten 1977 pop anthem "Undercover Angel" while occasionally interrupting himself to growl at his victims, "Fuck you, you fucking fuck."

  But I digress.

  With the Spencers appropriately lifeless, Manny sets to getting their bodies into the Impala he has rented the night before, under an assumed name, from the Avis in Weehawken. It is past ten p.m. on a Wednesday night, so he is able to roll them up in two throw rugs (certainly not from the midcentury modern den; that is, of course, hardwood flooring) and, with some exertion, get them into the car without, he thinks, anyone getting a glimpse of his activities. He then sets out for his favorite dumping ground.

  That is where the trouble that ended Manny really begins.

  II. FRESH KILLS

  I knew Manny pretty well. I was there at the beginning, and I was there at the end. I made the effort to get what he was about, even when it was clear there was not much there to be got. So here's how I think it went from his point of view at this juncture.

  Manny crosses the Goethals, which he hasn't done in a while. He hates the Goethals. He hates all bridges. What if you stall on a bridge? What if you get a flat? You're a sitting duck, and if there's a body in the trunk, much less two, you're totally and completely fucked. Mister State Trooper, please don't stop me.

  What's more, the Goethals is vertigo-inducing, and Manny has vertigo bad. Don't even talk to him about crossing the Verrazano or the GW. They're much longer and higher, and that would just be too much. He's also claustrophobic, so no Lincoln or Holland. Good thing he never needs to get to Long Island.

  Fresh Kills is his go-to dumping ground. It's huge—things can get lost there with very little effort—and it's actually hard to get caught disposing of a body as long as you stay near the edges. If you get into the belly, you either get lost or get accosted. So far, unbelievably, neither has ever happened to Manny. At age thirty-seven, he's dumped about two bodies in Fresh Kills for each year of his life.

  It's not as if he has any other choice. Manny used to go inland for his body-disposal needs, but inland New Jersey was the purview of the Chinese syndicate down in Metuchen. Nobody dared get anywhere near the Meadowlands; that had belonged to the Italians since Eisenhower. And the Pine Barrens has become entirely Eastern European territory; if the Russians don't cut off your balls for using it for corpse disposal, the Serbs or the Ukranians will. All of them know Manny for trying to litter his hits in their territory. All despise him with that dull, unmotivated disdain that means he can probably stay alive as long as he doesn't actually get in their way too much.

  Those nuances haven't really mattered much lately, though. Business has been slow for Manny, as it often is for mediocre people who do things mediocrely, particularly contract killing. He hasn't even been to Staten Island for eighteen months, not since that date with the Vietnamese chick who worked at the nail salon on Richmond Avenue. Like most of his dates, that one hadn't gone well for Manny. He was hoping the evening would end with her on her back saying, "Fuck me." Instead, it ended with her on her high horse saying, "Fuck you."

  "Fuck you too," Manny replied. He hasn't had a date since.

  Manny makes it off the Goethals and eventually exits onto 440 South, careful to put the Impala's turn signal on at exactly the appropriate points. No sense in getting stopped for a stupid traffic violation.

  For the next few minutes, he takes a series of narrow back roads to the edge of the landfill, to an access road that leads to a stone hut, inside of which is Manny's guy. By that I mean the watchman Manny pays to look the other way while he goes into the landfill to get rid of what he needs to get rid of, no questions asked.

  Imagine a landscape brimming to the horizon with garbage. You saw that Pixar movie WALL·E, with the robot scampering around in a future America that has been turned into a giant garbage dump? That's sort of what it used to look like in big chunks of—well, big chunks of New York City, frankly.

  These days it's difficult to imagine what it used to be like around here. You drive around now and see mostly rolling hills of green with roads gently snaking through them, and they're turning the whole thing into reclaimed wetlands and a giant park. Hard to believe that the detritus of our parents and grandparents lurks underneath, entombed for generations. Probably until the end of the planet itself. If the aliens ever land, they'll be able to learn a lot from the Clorox bottles of the Beat Generation, I'm sure.

  That night, though, it had been just a few weeks since something game-changing had happened, something Manny—moron that he was—had no idea about. Fifty-three years after Robert Moses created it, the Fresh Kills Landfill had closed for business. Giuliani and Pataki had been on hand that day to watch the last barge, with a huge sign on it that said, LAST BARGE, chug to the dock. All that meant one thing: Manny was about to be royally screwed.

  He thinks it's business as usual, though, as he pulls up and climbs through a hole in the razor-wired fence to get to the door of the hut. It is dark, but that's not odd. His guy is often asleep at the switch.

  "Yo. Rodrigo." Manny dry heaves a couple times. The humidity is ugly for early April, and the place stinks to high heaven.

  Nothing.

  "Rodrigo! Manny! Manny Antonio! Got some transacting to do! I need the digger!" Manny bangs on the door of the hut. Silence. Another minute passes. Finally, Manny leans in and shines his pocket Maglite on the window part of the door and sees the sign:

  FRESH KILLS LANDFILL

  CLOSED PERMANENTLY 3/22/01

  CONTACT DEPT OF SANITATION

  NO TRESPASSING

  "Fuck," Manny says to no one in particular. "Goddamnfuckingshitcocksuckerfuckfuckfuck." Manny's command of English, not exactly Wordsworth even on the best of days, falls apart completely when he's stressed.

  Manny pulls a map of Staten Island from his back pocket and is gazing at it with the flashlight in his mouth when he sees a light in the distance. A car approaches. There's a flashing light. It's a cop—no, wait. It's some sanitation patrol truck. It pulls up, sees a human being in its headlights, and screeches to a halt, kicking up the dust of a billion spent Marlboro butts and empty dishwashing liquid bottles and discarded maxipads.

  "Sir, can I help you? What are you doing here? You're not authorized to be here." The guy is about twenty-three, scarfing fast food and dripping melty drive-thru cheese onto a uniform that, if it weren't khaki, would look like a mall cop's. He seems utterly bewildered that Manny is standing in front of him.

  "Don't worry," Manny says. "Just tying up some l
oose ends." He puts on his best I'm-in-control voice.

  The rent-a-cop sighs, puts down his Arby's, and starts to get out of the car. "I'm going to need to see some—"

  At that moment Manny does the last rational thing he will do on the final night of his life. With his Maglite still chomped in his teeth like a panatela, he pulls his Kel-Tec P-11 out of his waistband and shoots the guy between the eyes. The report rings out, echoing across the trash-saturated emptiness. Inertia keeps the guy standing up for a second, dead on his feet. Then a dark stain starts to spread around his khaki crotch. His ears twitch and he collapses with a dull thump.

  "GodDAMNit!" Manny has no idea what to do.

  He stands there for what feels to him like hours but is probably more like five minutes, wondering if rent-a-cop reinforcements are on the way. He searches the body and the car; no sign of a walkie-talkie. Maybe the guy wasn't in communication with base, or whatever.

  So what does he do next, the dumbshit? Well, he says to himself, I gotta get rid of this body, and I might as well get rid of the van too, so—and this is the logic of a lifelong dullard—he sets the van on fire with the rent-a-cop's body in it. It promptly catches the gas tank and, as Manny hurries off, the whole thing explodes, taking the hut and a pile of garbage with it. A huge plume of smoke and orange flame claws into the air.

  Manny floors the Impala, banking off a pile of old kitchen appliances and skidding along the dark dirt road as he tries to regain control of the wheel. Behind him, everything is fire and thick soot.