Staten Island Noir Read online

  As he gets back onto the West Shore Expressway a few minutes later, he hears sirens in the distance. He diligently uses his turn signal to get back onto I-278.

  Manny is crossing the Goethals for the second time in an hour when he notices that something is caught in the passenger-side windshield wiper of the Impala. He can't quite see what it is, so he turns on the wipers. The only thing that tells him what he's looking at is the Dole sticker. It is an old banana peel, decayed beyond recognition.

  Nervously, Manny starts singing underneath his breath: "Undercover angel . . . midnight fantasy . . . I've never had a dream that made sweet love to me . . ."

  In the trunk, the Spencers do not hear him. They are, after all, dead.

  III. MEANWHILE

  Two days pass.

  No one hears from Manny.

  Multiple police departments are sniffing around.

  The disappearance of the Spencers after what looks like a violent struggle has made the Bergen Record. On the radio, 1010 WINS is calling it a possible home invasion by a stranger and telling people in North Jersey to lock their doors.

  The rent-a-cop's murder has made the Advance, the Daily News, the Post, and even the New York Times.

  The informal loan outfit is not happy. Which means the duly appointed agents are not happy.

  Phone calls are made. Arrangements are set up. Money changes hands.

  Another day passes.

  IV. THE END, MY ONLY FRIEND

  I had always liked Manny despite his shortcomings. But the world has to evolve. Hopey I don't know about, but we definitely have to be changey. The trouble with Manny was that he couldn't change. He got stuck in his own rut and created his own feedback loop.

  So here's how it ended, ten years ago today:

  Three days have passed. The cops in Ho-Ho-Kus have cordoned off the Spencer home and started an investigation. Neighbors are worried. One reports she saw a guy carrying carpets out to the trunk of some Chevy. A Lumina, she thinks it might have been.

  On Staten Island, the rent-a-cop's murder is being investigated as some kind of mob hit. Turns out the kid, who had the job only because someone's uncle's cousin's brother-in-law got him on the books, was linked to some crime family down in Philly. His name was Pascale. He was studying computer science.

  Manny has not called in to the duly appointed agents. The cops find his StarTAC in the parking lot of the Showplace bowling alley, and find it has a lot of calls to numbers that are entirely too close for comfort if you happen to be one of the aforementioned agents.

  In fact, Manny is on hour seventy-five of a full-on, tri-state panic attack. He has driven from Staten Island to Watchung, from Totowa to New Haven, trying to figure out what the fuck to do with the bodies in the Impala's trunk. He considers briefly dumping them in the water in Bridgeport, but the docks are too well patrolled. He even starts heading, via back roads, to Rhode Island, where he thinks he can dump them in the salt marshes on the coast. But, in quick succession:

  He overheats his engine heading east on I-95.

  He (you'll love this one) flags down an AAA truck for help.

  He manages, somehow, to keep the AAA guys out of the trunk. They fix things and go on their way.

  He turns around, heads back toward Jersey, makes it to Secaucus, where he buys a disposable cell phone. Then he thinks: I'll go back to Staten Island. I'll just sneak into the landfill from another direction and dump the bodies. Brilliant.

  He is panicking. He hasn't showered in four days, hasn't eaten in two. He's surviving on Jolt and NoDoz. The ticking clock is haunting him, floating above him in his mind like it used to in those 1950s noir flicks that starred actors like Edmond O'Brien. He actually thinks he can see the clock in the sky as he crosses the Goethals yet again, cursing the Spencers and the duly appointed agents and Goethals himself, whoever the fuck he was.

  Manny approaches Fresh Kills again. It's about one a.m. on Saturday, and nature, as it will forever do, is reasserting itself. Like the garbage that encircles them for acres upon acres, Josephine and Conrad Spencer are starting to putrefy.

  In the driver's seat, with the air-conditioning on, Manny can't really smell them. But the moment he gets out of the Impala, the odor that envelops it is almost intolerable. This makes him very paranoid at red lights. What's worse, the remnants of Josephine's Dior Poison, freshly applied to the nape of her neck only ninety minutes before Manny cracked it over the Eames armrest, is still a potent ingredient in the olfactory mix. It's as if hell were slow-roasting a pork shoulder one evening and trying to cover up the scent with some demonic Glade Solid.

  Manny has nowhere to go, no place left to turn. So he does what he's always done in these dead-end situations, where there are no more options: he calls me.

  "I'm fucked," he says. "I need help. This job's gone way bad."

  He knows I'll come. I always do. I'm his big brother, after all.

  I'm the reason he's so mediocre, or so he likes to tell me. I'm the educated one, the one who (according to Manny) got spoiled and sent to college or (according to me) did the work that pushed me forward. I'm the one our parents had the foresight to send away to my aunt's when they started fighting and having the drug problems. They kept him with them in North Jersey as they fell deeper into their slow slide, through the Nixon and Ford administrations and well into Carter. Talk about general malaise.

  I was, of course, expecting his call. See, there's something Manny doesn't know about the whole situation, and it's the key bit of information: Yes, I'm going to help him out if at all possible. But I'm also probably going to end up killing him too.

  The informal loan outfit, it seems, has given up on the duly appointed agents. One of the "loan officers" is an old crew buddy of mine and knows that I, like my brother, supplement my legit income with occasional freelance dirty work. He knows that the guy his outfit is trying to track down is my brother. He also knows, and I won't get into why here, that at heart I'm an amoral prick who would do anything for money. He's mostly right.

  "Make your brother disappear," my crew buddy tells me. "I don't care how, I don't care where. I don't care if he's dead or living on an estate in the Falkland Islands. Just. Get. Him. Out. Of. Our. Hair."

  For that he offers me $11,000. I accept.

  That's where my head is when I pull up to a remote corner of the Fresh Kills Landfill, not far from the South Mound, at 2:46 a.m. on Saturday, April 7, 2001. I am going to tell my brother that he has to leave the United States of America for the rest of his life, and that I will give him $8,000 with which to do so, and that we will never see each other again. And that if he comes back to this country and I find out about it, I will kill him.

  You may notice that $3,000 of my fee is unaccounted for in my plan. Hey, every job has expenses.

  I see Manny lurking in the dark, right where he said he'd be when he called from the pay phone on Forest Avenue. I pop in two sticks of Doublemint and get out of my car. I am driving a gray 1983 Chevy Citation, which I got for $700 from some guy named Honest Achmed in Yonkers. It's the perfect kind of car for this line of work: just old and cheap enough to be ignored, not old enough to be considered classic yet. And easily disposable.

  "Thanks for coming." Manny is wired. His voice is pulled taut.

  "No problem. Tell me about the last three days." Frantically, kinetically, he recounts the saga from his point of view, leaving nothing out. I am amazed that he can still think coherently, but his tale makes sense. And, from what I know from my employers, it's all true.

  I look at him, trying to keep a poker face. "So what are we going to do about this situation?" I am calm, and he sees it. That makes him more tense. He always hated that I knew how to keep my cool when he didn't.

  "Do you think I fucking know? Why the fuck do you think I called you?"

  "Manny—"

  "Don't Manny me, dickhead. Just help me." He is trying to be menacing, which he knows doesn't work with me. He just sounds pathetic.

  I lay
it out for him. Leave the United States, go somewhere, don't come back. Or choose what's behind Door Number 2, which will only end badly.

  "Wait. What?" The realization is dawning for my dimbulb brother. "You're working for the fucks who are coming after me?"

  "Yeah, Manny, and if it were anyone else working for those fucks you'd be lying on the ground already with a bullet in your brain."

  "Fuck you."

  "Fuck you. You want a chance to get out of this alive?"

  "Lemme get this straight," Manny says. "They hired you to kill me? You took a job to kill your own brother?"

  "It doesn't have to be this way. Just say yes. Just walk away. This is the moment where you get to change things. You can do anything you want. You just can't stay here. Don't be a dumbshit. Just this once, don't be the dumbshit you've always been."

  "No," he says. "Fuckfuckfuckfuck. They send my own big brother to kill me." He is flop-sweating, almost crying. I notice that he is wearing a Members Only jacket. I thought those disappeared around the time the first George Bush was elected president.

  "Look, Manny. You're a cocksucker. You've always been a cocksucker. I can't say I love you, but we have a lot of history and a lot of blood. You're my brother. Let's at least try—"

  That's when things go south. Something changes. Manny stands up straighter. I know this moment. It's the one where people realize the end is racing toward them, so they have nothing to lose. This is the about-to-die version of beer muscles.

  Manny reaches into his waistband and pulls out his gun. "I'm not going anywhere, motherfucker. But you are." He aims the Kel-Tec at me. "Later," he says, and fires.

  Fuck, I think to myself. I'm smarter than this. I can't believe it.

  His shot misses. To this day, I have no idea how.

  I move quickly, instinctively. I leap at Manny, punch him in the throat even as I bring my steel-toed boot down on his left ankle. The gun bounces away. He goes down instantly, gasping. I marvel at how much his face looks like my own, but without the intelligence. It's like he's a clay dummy molded and sculpted and fired in the kiln to resemble me, but without any of the life. I think of when I was nine and he was five and we slept in the woods behind the house one night. I tried to protect him by beating a rabid squirrel dead with a tree branch. He asked me, eyes shining, if we could find another squirrel and do it again.

  I head butt him. His eyes, decidedly not shining, loll and sink back into his head. I kick him in the nuts. I hear a sound like a beach ball deflating. He waves his arms, lashing out in semiconsciousness, and connects with my left ear. I go down and see stars, my mouth open against the ground. Stuff goes into it, and I taste the garbage of New Yorkers in my mouth. I spit frantically, crawl to my knees, and go right back at him.

  Fuck you, you fucking spoiled brat, I think to myself. I've been putting up with this for too damn long. I lean down, head butt him again, and then bite off his right ear. I spit it out in his face. I realize I am crying.

  I also realize, through my haze of anger and tears, that the Rubicon has been crossed. There is no going back.

  My baby brother is still gurgling when I take a decaying single-serving milk carton off the ground, crumple it up in my hand, and shove it into his mouth. I grab his chin and ram it upward into his skull repeatedly, which has the odd effect of making him look like some Warner Bros. cartoon character chewing a particularly recalcitrant piece of beef jerky. I can hear his jawbone squeaking. Inside his mouth, lit by the moon, I can see the words 2% milkfat.

  Manny strains to breathe. I am picturing, in my mind, Joe Pesci's final scene in Casino, when he is buried alive in the desert. Manny and I watched that movie on video the last time we hung out a few months back.

  I spit out my wad of Doublemint, pull it into two pieces, and shove one up each of his nostrils. That does the trick. Airflow is now nonexistent. As he pushes to clear the airway and take in oxygen, his face turns red, then purple. His left eye blows out and goes dim, taking on the look of a built-in eye patch. Arrrrrr, I think to myself, making the pirate noise in my head.

  Like I said: fucking hilarious.

  I spot the Kel-Tec on the ground a yard or two away. I grab it, anchor my heel, and fire down at him. His head explodes at my feet. Brain on my boots. The shot has knocked the gum out of his nose, and he makes one final, inadvertent exhale.

  "You asshole!" I yell, spitting in what's left of his face. "Couldn't you have just this once listened to me? Couldn't you have just fucking said yes?"

  No one hears me. I have just killed my brother. I feel . . . nothing. I feel absolutely nothing.

  I black out. When I wake up, it is thirty-five minutes later. It is still dark in the landfill. It still smells. My brother is still dead, lying next to me.

  I climb to my feet, reach into Manny's pocket and take out the key to the rental car. I shamble over and open the trunk of Manny's Impala. Josephine and Conrad Spencer stare up at me with unknowing eyes, supine, the lump of the spare tire under rough felt between them. The smell is almost unbearable.

  I lift up Manny's body, carry it to the trunk, and place it between the two people he killed. I do so gingerly; he is, after all, my brother.

  * * *

  Turns out I was Manny's moment of clarity, and he chose the hand and the lotion. Offered the grand buffet, he went with the chicken and broccoli. Maybe it was gonna be this way no matter what. Maybe my parents just did him too much damage. Maybe it's true what they say: garbage in, garbage out.

  I, however, am still alive. And I need to get out of the country's biggest dump and deal with the mess that my brother made and that I have to clean up.

  That I can do. I know what Manny does not—that when it comes to dumping bodies, Suffolk County is the new black. In the new millennium, everyone who's anyone is getting rid of their dead people there.

  How could Manny have known? He was too phobic to take the tunnels into Manhattan and Long Island, too stupid to even consider there might be a new frontier beyond the ones he spent his life haunting. The closed-minded fuck couldn't even consider there might be another way to do things. Just like Dad. "Oh, I couldn't possibly stop taking the pills. There's no other way, boy." Assholes.

  I park the Citation where it won't be seen and wipe the steering wheel and driver's area free of any prints. I get into the Impala and make my way to Richmond Avenue, then I-278 East and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge beyond. I am careful to use my turn signal and not speed; no sense getting nailed on something stupid at this point in the game. Dawn is starting to break. I love the Verrazano and the chance to see lower Manhattan at dawn. The Twin Towers are always so beautiful just before the sun starts to rise.

  I pass through Brooklyn, pass through Queens. I get on the Utopia Parkway and hit the gas on Manny's rented Impala, humming "Undercover Angel" as I drive east toward Suffolk County. Maybe I'll stop in and see my big sister in Yaphank while I'm out here. She and I have always been close.

  V. ME, HAPPILY EVER AFTER

  I can't believe my brother is dead ten years. Seems like yesterday. I have lots of fond memories when I think of him, ones that predate the day I pocketed the money that finished him off. Family's like that, though. No matter what, in the end you still feel connected. Nothing feels better than blood on blood.

  These days, I run a legit business—data processing for corporations that need to outsource it. It's pretty good—I have twenty-three employees who call me boss—yet I sometimes miss the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-dirty flavor of my former job. But being a thug for hire is, I suppose, a game for the young.

  Funny thing, though: the money I got from getting Manny out of the way started me down this path. After that I got better at killing, more nimble, and I really started to rake in the cash. I innovated. Within months, I was the first in the business to use a GPS to plot the distance between burial sites, the first to use tasers for more efficient and cleaner torture, the first to understand how the Internet can be used to mine data and make contrac
t killing more efficient. Change is everywhere these days, and people who don't adapt will die. Figuratively speaking.

  * * *

  I got out in 2004 when I met the woman who would become my bride. She has no idea what I used to do for a living. Today we live on Staten Island, on a little hill where you can see the bottom of Manhattan. The Towers are gone from the view, of course, but still—I can't imagine being anywhere else. It's right in the middle of things, but it's remote too. We have two boys, six and two, the same age difference as me and Manny. They're good kids, but sometimes they fight. I hate when brothers fight.

  I do think this park they're building where the landfill once stood will be cool. I'll probably even take my kids there. History is history, even when you can't talk about it. Even when it involves fratricide. I like to think that I did Manny a favor, got him out of an unresolvable situation—and a life—that he simply couldn't handle. This is rationalization, I know. But that's what killers do. We rationalize. It allows us to pretend we're regular members of society. I've just managed to do it longer than most.

  You could argue that people never change. I would disagree. Because the day I killed Manny changed my life. I didn't know it then, but I know it now. It was a horrible thing that taught me how to improve myself. These days, I almost never feel like a killer anymore. I owe that all to Manny.

  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.

  I am that kind of man. My brother, as I stated earlier, was not.

  DARK WAS THE NIGHT, COLD WAS THE GROUND

  BY SHAY YOUNGBLOOD