Headstone City Part 8

"But you're not?"

"No, I was stupid, I thought he was a good director. He was moving up to more lavish mansions even though, I found out later, his last three movies lost money. We were only married eight months when he was arrested. The lawyers start showing me this paperwork, all his tax shelters, his write-offs, the production company receipts. On paper he was in debt up to his eyes, but he's buying me four-carat chandelier necklaces and sable coats."

"You can't be too mad at him then."

"I was stupid."

Dane didn't know why, but he believed her. She probably wasn't quite as unaware as she made out, but diamonds and cash had a way of fouling your vision. He said, "How long's it been?"

"Since they got him? Almost five months. They weren't satisfied just bringing him down and about twenty of his a.s.sociates, from Beverly Hills to Bolivia. They think he was connected over here on the East Coast and they want to shake up the New York movie industry the way they did LA. They don't realize there's hardly any connection at all, it's two totally different worlds. Now they've got my apartment bugged." She was getting more nervous, keeping her eyes on his in the rearview mirror. He could feel how urgently she wanted him to believe her. "They were a couple of fun years, and eight good months of marriage, but all in all I would've been better off if I'd never gone to Hollywood."

"And kept on dancing?" The words were out of his mouth before he realized it. He really hadn't learned much about keeping his d.a.m.n mouth shut when it counted.

"How do you know about that?"

"My boss again. He said you've got a dance scene in one of your movies that you couldn't have faked."

"He's got a good eye for talent, that guy."

"He knows what he likes."

"You see the film? Under Heaven's Canopy. I do the dance because I have to keep the terrorists amused while this supersoldier killer saves the planet from nuclear war."

"I swear," Dane said, "I'm gonna rent it tonight."

"You said your boss was a fan, but not you?"

"I haven't had much opportunity for watching movies, the last couple of years."

She picked up on what he was saying. "Oh, I see."

"But back to the feds," he said. "You're giving them too much credit. They must've built a solid case against your husband in order to take him down, ferret out the laundering fronts. It's been months, you say, so if they haven't brought you into it by now, why do you think they'd keep coming after you?"

"Because I'm an actress. They think it's fun, rubbing elbows with movie people while they're trying to crack some international drug cartel. They want to bust me because it ties the film industry in with importing. Like they never realized before that where there's money, there's drugs."

"They realize it. They just have to pretend they don't, or they'd have no jobs."

"So that's why they're clinging to me."

Dane didn't buy it, but she seemed committed to her reasoning. "If they've already got your man, I don't see why they'd keep after you, even if it is fun for them. Rousting producers and all that. Feds walking into Silver Cup Studios and getting sitcom stars' autographs. Even that would get old quick. They would've either busted you with your husband or right afterward."

"That's not what my lawyers say."

"They're stringing you on so you keep paying them."

"Everybody who's supposed to help clear up the situation just keeps perpetuating it so they get paid?"

"Exactly."

She thought about it for a minute, doing the math, counting up all the cost for unnecessary hours. "You might be right. But what if you're not?"

"I don't think asking every person you meet if he's a cop is going to do you much good in the world. Be patient. Stay out of the action for a while, go back to LA and make your movies. Under Heaven's Canopy Part 2. Kick the s.h.i.t out of a few more terrorists on screen. Get in a few snappy one-liners."

"I don't fight them. I just dance for them, you know, seduce and sort of beguile them. Except for at the end, I get to shoot a rocket launcher into the main bad guy, blow him off a bridge."

"Yeah?"

"Uh-huh. My cool action hero line is, 'I'm gonna rock your world, baby!' Then I blast him."

"You do a commentary track on this movie?"

"A special extended edition is due out next year, but with my husband in the joint, I don't think they'll be asking me to partic.i.p.ate for a while. Too much bad publicity right now. Later, who knows?"

She'd taken off her shades and Dane could see a mischievous glint in her gaze, maybe because he was talking to her without judgment. Maybe something else they'd eventually get around to. She seemed pleased with herself, playing up to him.

The tabloids and newspapers must be putting her through the wringer, printing her nude pictures with little black x's over the nipples, showing how degenerate she was. "If it's not cost-effective for them, the feds will have to pack up their s.h.i.t and go on to the next case. If they're even watching you at all."

"Feds never give up," she said, like she knew it for a fact. "I've learned that much. All they've got is time. I saw that when they kept coming after my husband, going through every piece of sc.r.a.p paper, reel of film, interviewing hundreds of members on his film crews."

"If you're really clean, they'll eventually veer off."

"I'm not that clean," she said.

It almost made him laugh. "No one is. You've just got to be less dirty than the guy next to you."

"I was, but they're still on me."

"Maybe."

All that talk and she'd never once mentioned her husband's name.

Dane settled back and she did the same, and the mood grew comfortable, kind of friendly. He double-checked his map and the address on the sheet as he pulled into the village, then drove around the traffic circle and up to Montauk Manor.

A ritzy old-fashioned hotel built a century ago, where some investors owned suites and rented them out like time-shares. Middle of October, with the hint of winter rolling in off the ocean, the place looked pretty empty. He wondered who she was meeting and felt an unexpected pang of jealousy.

He got out and opened the limo door for her. She fumbled for her purse and he said, "It's already taken care of."

"You deserve a tip."

They'd shared a little too much and he couldn't take her money, not like a chauffeur, which is really only what he was. Hour to hour, Dane kept forgetting.

Glory Bishop took a few steps toward the fancy front doors of the hotel, then turned and gestured for him to walk closer. He came around the car and she said, "I've got a friend's premiere to go to Sat.u.r.day night. You want to come?"

"I thought movie premieres were in Hollywood. Where they talk about your dress the next day, say who looked like s.h.i.t on the red carpet."

"No, this is an independent feature done mostly in the city."

He looked at her, trying to decide if she was asking him on a date or whether she was being nice and just wanted to hand out free tickets. Maybe so he could bring Pepe, her number one fan, and she could watch him squirm when she made eyes at him.

It took her a second to let out an authentic smile, not the shining artificial kind celebrities gave the media. Dane liked it, but still said nothing.

She told him, "You'll like the movie. It's got a lesbian scene in it. Two hot chicks making out in a hot tub."

"Are you one of them?" he asked. There went his mouth again.

Tongue flicking over her top lip, trying to see how easy it might be to get him agitated and start him down the road to infatuation. "Come watch the movie and find out."

TEN.

Back from a weekend pa.s.s, with the moonlight flowing over him and pooling, silver and bone white, into his cupped hands, Dane would lie in his bunk with the rest of the squad smelling like beer and the cheap perfume of town wh.o.r.es. He'd shut his eyes tightly against the thrust of his own memories.

They weren't particularly bad ones. Not like he was always thinking of his father with his head laid open like an oyster, or the couple of times he'd seen violent s.h.i.t in the street when he was a kid. Black guys clubbed to death for walking into the neighborhood. A bag lady frozen in an empty lot one winter, after the dogs had gotten at her.

He'd had warmth and occasional laughter, but somehow the past became the province of wreckage and remains. He had no control over it. Start fantasizing about Maria Monticelli's hair pouring over his chest, and the next thing he's thinking about his mother choking in the back room, or the girl who didn't dance with him in the ninth grade, the rage as harsh and alive inside him as it had been the day she turned him down.

He drank too much but never managed to get drunk. It made him a little stupid, and he wound up doing things like stealing jeeps and driving over to the target range. He'd wait out there until they'd start shooting. Rifles, grenade launchers, or 20mm chainguns. While he waited under the jeep, on his belly in the dirt while the explosions heaved fire around him, he'd think to himself, I'm not suicidal. I'm not really sure what this is all about.

Now he was sitting on his grandmother's couch, those same webs of memory tugging too much into his head at one time. He sort of just awoke from time to time, staring at the television and drinking 151 rum, hating the taste but still hoping it might quell his noisy mind.

Grandma walked in, smiling, her pocketbook swinging on her arm, jingling a plastic container full of pennies. It was bingo night and she must've hit on one of the round-robins, the way she was grinning.

Her fingertips were stained red from the dye she used to blot numbers. She'd been playing for maybe fifty years, and still, every time, she got her hands covered like she'd found some guy in an alley with his throat cut and tried to staunch his arterial spray.

See, like that. You think about your grandmother playing bingo and now JoJo Tormino is dying in front of you again, and the boy with the sick brain whose skull sutures are tearing apart. You feel the hot wind of another memory coming in fast. Ma in the kitchen putting icing on your birthday cake. Six years old, you got the little pointy hat on, the rubber band holding it tight to your head and cutting into your chin. Ma using a rubber spatula to finish covering up a chocolate angel food cake. The phone rings and she turns to answer it, the smile seared onto her face, the fear always there that the caller will tell her Dad is dead. That same hideous smile every time the f.u.c.king phone rang.

He threw back his drink and let the ice rest against his teeth for a second. Since he'd gotten back to the neighborhood he'd been moving fast without any focus. He had to work on that too.

Grandma Lucia spent ten minutes washing her hands but couldn't get them entirely clean. She sat beside him, sniffed, made a face, and said, "Che puzz! Rum. It'll make you sick."

"I'm okay."

"You drunk? If you get sick, don't throw up on my nice rugs."

The rugs might be nice, but they were mostly covered by plastic runners. He didn't think he could hit the carpet if he tried. "I'm just trying to wind down."

"There's licorice in the candy dish. Have some. It's good for you."

"All right."

"You're like your grandfather, you should stick to wine. You drink wine and maybe you chuckle every now and again, remembering something funny. Maybe sing some opera. You drink anything else, and you start thinking too much about your troubles. Just like your grandpa, he'd sit around the house with a bottle of amaretto and mope and fume. He'd shine his shoes until they shone so bright they'd blind him. Liquor doesn't do for you what it does for everybody else. It closes you up even more inside."

"That's what I'm hoping for."

"It shouldn't be. You can never get so closed up that you don't hear your own thoughts. What's'a'matter for you? Try more wine. You might laugh a little."

The two of them stared at the shelves of photographs hanging over the television. Different kinds, going back to the late 1800s. Old Italians who had been dead for Christ knew how long, with names he couldn't p.r.o.nounce. Black-and-whites of his parents in the sixties, his father looking hep cat cool, hair greased into a DA when it was already out of style. Dad had held on to something long gone, the same way Dane now did. It gave them more common ground.

Looking at the pictures used to calm him, even get him mellow sometimes. But if he kept at it too long, the a.s.sault of the past shoving at him too hard, it made him even more edgy. He turned and saw the muscles in Grandma's jaws clenched tightly and thought maybe the same thing happened to her.

"I've been dreaming about that JoJo Tormino," she told him, organizing her pocketbook, taking out her bingo chips, the blotters, the used-up sheets and boards. "Always dressed so nice, with a fresh flower in his lapel. Never went by without saying h.e.l.lo. You didn't tell me you were there when he got clipped."

Why hadn't he said anything about that? He'd walked into the house and she'd yelled about the biscotti, and he'd turned around and walked out and gone to another bakery to get them, the pignoli cookies, sfogliatelle, and cannoli. He came back and they had dinner and he never mentioned talking to JoJo while the man died in front of him.

"He's still got a heavy heart that won't let him rest," Grandma said, patting his wrist, telling him something more in her touch. That Dane shouldn't go out the same way, or he'd just hover around the neighborhood forever, like so many of them. If he could lighten his load any before the curtain, he would.

"He had some unfinished business," Dane said.

"That JoJo," she said. "I always liked him. He didn't go out alone, did he?"

"No."

"How many did he take down?"

"All three shooters."

"Dio!" Grandma giving a smile, showing her admiration for that. Dying with a gun in your hand, a b.l.o.o.d.y carnation on your chest.

Dane figured he'd keep the rest of the story to himself, about the ring and swearing an oath to tell Maria Monticelli that JoJo had always loved her. If Grandma dreamed about it, then fine, but he didn't have to let her know every G.o.dd.a.m.n thing.

She said, "The .38, it's still under your pillow. I think you should start carrying it. Now that you're walking in on hits, it'll be safer for you. And I shouldn't have to say these things to you. You should know them already, if you want to stay alive."

"You're right. I will."

"I told you already, have some of the licorice. Your breath."

Grandma picked up his empty gla.s.s, started for the kitchen, and stopped short. She looked at the video box on top of the television, turned it over in her hands.

She hit the play b.u.t.ton on the machine and the movie started from where he'd left off twenty minutes ago, right at the end of the pole-dancing scene. Glory Bishop panting, her hair a wild wet tangle, jugs dripping sweat.

"Madonna!" Grandma Lucia shouted, throwing a hand over her eyes. "What's this you got? A p.o.r.no movie?"

"It's an action flick with a racy scene in it. I drove her out to Long Island, that actress, yesterday."

"This putana? This is the clientele you're picking up now? Escorts? You're gonna get arrested again."

"She's a real actress."

"Yeah, I'm sure the Academy Award committee is gonna shortlist her." Walking out of the room, crossing herself, and talking over her shoulder. "You think she'll do that dance at the Oscars?"

He stared at Glory Bishop on the screen, watched her doing her thing again, and thought, Oh, Holy Jesus Christ. It got him going, imagining her in a hot tub with another woman. He rewound the scene and watched it again, and once more.