Rubbed Out (18 page)

I
t's odd what your mind holds on to in moments like this.

I remember feeling a rush of cold air and turning and seeing the empty space where Janet had been sitting.

I remember seeing the door on her side swinging shut and thinking,
It's not latched,
at the same time I was thinking,
That's funny. Where the hell has she gone?

I never saw her actually step out into the street.

I must have screamed Janet's name because Paul glanced over. He looked almost comical with his mouth hanging wide open. Then he swore and slammed on the brakes.

“I don't fuckin' believe her,” he cried as I pitched into the dashboard.

We came to a dead stop.

Even though we hadn't been going very fast, probably under ten miles an hour, we'd still been moving. I don't know what Janet expected to happen. Maybe she'd been watching too many movies, but in real life when you step out of a moving vehicle you fall.

I watched her stumble and go down on her hands and knees.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, lady?” a bicyclist screamed at her, missing her by probably not more than a quarter of an inch.

She picked herself up and studied her skinned knees. Then she turned her hands over and studied her palms. As if she had all the time in the world. I don't know how she could have missed the bus lumbering toward her. She had to have seen it. Or heard it. Not that it would have made much difference if she had. It was too late. She couldn't have gotten out of the way.

The words, “Watch out!” flew out of my mouth.

I think she heard me because she half turned in my direction. By now the bus was almost on top of her. The bus driver's eyes widened as he realized what was about to happen.

His brakes screeched as he tried to stop. But he couldn't. At least not in time.

There was a
thwack
as the bus hit Janet. She slid down and her body disappeared under the bus. Like in a cartoon. The bus kept going, dragging her along. It seemed to take forever before it stopped, although it probably wasn't more than thirty seconds. When it did, the doors opened and the bus driver ran out, followed by a swarm of passengers.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” Paul's face was red. He slammed the wheel with the flat of his hand. “I can't believe she did that. What the hell was she thinking?”

“That she didn't want to get beaten up by you?”

He blinked. “If she had just done what I asked her to, none of this would have happened.”

“Is that the way you see this?”

Instead of answering, Paul pointed to where Janet had been sitting. “Give me her pocketbook. Maybe there's something in there we can use.”

I held it up to him and he snatched it out of my hands and pawed through it, looking for his salvation. But it wasn't there. Janet Wilcox had to have had the neatest pocketbook of any woman I'd ever seen. The only things in it were a lipstick, a compact, and a comb. Paul threw it down in disgust.

“I should have cuffed you two together,” he said. “I just never thought . . .” His voice trailed off. He shook his head. His skin had gone from red to sheet white. He rubbed the side of his nose with the joint of his right thumb.

“I didn't think she'd be that friggin' dumb. Stupid bitch.” Paul stared straight ahead as if he was contemplating his future and it didn't look very good. “She's killed all of us.”

“Let's not exaggerate.”

“You're right,” he replied although he didn't sound convinced.

“Maybe she's still alive.”

Santini shook his head. “No way. Not with what happened to her.”

I raised my hands. “How about uncuffing me so I can go see.”

He sighed. “What the hell. Why not? Everything's gone to shit anyway.” And he reached over and unlocked the bracelets.

I rubbed my wrists. “Are you coming?”

“Yeah. Sure. This will be the perfect end to the perfect day.”

I got out of the car and threaded my way through the crowd that was gathering. Paul followed. It was chaos. People were honking their horns. Pedestrians were screaming at each other. People still in their cars were leaning their heads out of their windows demanding to know what had happened.

The bus driver was on his knees with his shoulders and head under the bus; so was another man. They both reemerged a moment later. The bus driver shook his head.

“I don't believe this,” the driver was saying to the people around him. The back of his shirt had worked itself free and was hanging below his jacket. “I just don't believe this. Seventeen years without so much as a dented fender. I have three years to go until retirement and now this. She just stepped out. One second I was thinking about getting coffee, and the next second she was there. She came out of nowhere. Nowhere.” He turned to one of the passengers. “You saw. You saw what happened, didn't you?”

The passenger, a Sikh, nodded while he nervously plucked at his eyebrows.

An Asian woman standing behind him had whipped out her cell and was talking to someone in Chinese.

A little farther away, a white twenty-something female in a fur jacket, gold chains, and black leather pants had her cell out as well. “I'm going to be late,” she was saying. “Don't freak, Mom. The bus driver ran over someone. No. I'm not lying.”

“I'm going to see her face forever,” the driver wailed to the assembled crowd. “Why would she do something like that?” His hand went to his chest. His face got pale. “I feel sick.”

“You may be having a heart attack,” a middle-aged man said. “Come sit over here.” And he led the driver back to the bus.

“Jeez, now something's wrong with the driver,” the twenty-year-old was saying. She started tapping her nails against her thigh. “No,
Mother,
I am not making this up. Of course I want to come to the family dinner.”

I knelt down where the bus driver had been and looked under the bus. Santini had been right. Janet Wilcox was no longer among the living. There was no doubt about that at all. Well, I suppose if you have to go, better to go this way than the way her husband had. In the background I could hear the sound of sirens. Someone must have called the police. They'd be here soon.

I got off my knees and melted back into the crowd. Paul materialized beside me.

“You were right,” I told him. “She's dead.”

“No way she couldn't be.” He bit his lip. “What the hell was she thinking?” Paul asked me again. “All she had to do was give me the money.”

He seemed sincerely bewildered. He thought he had everything factored in, and it turned out he hadn't. Even though it was freezing out, Paul's forehead was beaded with sweat. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

“She always hated to part with a buck. You know she gave Walter an allowance? He'd give her his paycheck, and she'd give him fifty bucks a week for expense money. Fifty bucks.”

“My grandmother would have said she was frugal.”

Paul snorted. “I'll tell you one thing. I'm sorry I ever met Walter. I'm sorry I let him talk me into getting involved in this mess.” And he started walking toward his car.

I caught up with him. “Where are you going?” I asked. “We have to wait for the police.”

He gestured at the crowd. “You see anyone paying attention to us?”

No one was. They were all either staring at the bus or talking among themselves.

“You wait for the cops if you want to and explain what happened to them. I'm getting out of here.”

“But . . .”

“But what? I'm out of here.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don't know. But don't worry. When I figure it out, I'll be sure and let you not know.”

“You do that.”

I watched Paul get back in his car. Somehow or other he managed to maneuver it through the traffic. A minute or so later he was gone from view. Maybe I should have stayed, but the more I thought about the situation, the more I decided Paul was right. This was not a time for explanations; it was a time for leaving. Nothing I said was going to help Janet Wilcox. She was beyond that now. What I needed to do was get my jacket, get my car, and get out of the city.

I headed across town, caught the Number Six train uptown, got off, and walked over to Belmont Avenue. A bitter wind swept down through the streets. By the time I got to Janet Wilcox's apartment I was numb with cold. The first thing I did when I got inside was go straight to the heat register in the kitchen and stand over it until I could feel my toes and fingers again.

As I waited for my blood to start flowing, I stared at Janet Wilcox's groceries. What was the line about undone tasks? I had to resist the urge to finish putting them away. Instead I did a quick search of the place on the off chance that the money was here, which it wasn't. Then I grabbed my jacket and took off. I didn't want to stay any longer, because I was nervous that the people living in the apartment downstairs would come back and I'd have to explain my presence.

As I drove out of the Bronx, I turned on the radio and tried not to think about what had just happened. About my gullibility. About my responsibility for what had just occurred. If I hadn't gone looking for Janet Wilcox, she'd be alive today. Or maybe not. She'd pretty much signed her death warrant, not to mention her husband's, when she'd stolen that money. I'd just executed it.

I started fiddling with the radio, but I couldn't find anything I wanted to listen to. I kept trying, but finally conceded defeat and turned the radio off right after I got on the New York State Thruway.

My grandmother would have said there was no use crying over spilt milk. But I hadn't believed that when I was eight years old and I'd left the top of the chameleon cage off and Tito had gotten out and died, and I sure as hell didn't believe it now.

I was thinking about how I'd looked all over the apartment for him when I glanced down and realized two things: One, I was going over eighty-five miles an hour, and two, my gas tank was almost empty. Ten minutes later I was lucky enough to come up to a rest stop. I pulled in and parked. There probably weren't more than twenty cars in a lot that could have taken two hundred. They looked lonely, huddled together against the night.

I went in, bought two large cups of coffee and a pack of cigarettes and went back to the car. I peeled off the cellophane on the cigarettes in the car and broke open the seal and the foil wrap. The sharp smell of tobacco drifted through the car. After I smoked my cigarette, I filled up the tank and called Manuel and told him I was on my way home.

He said that was good, because one of the aquariums in the store had sprung a leak and he'd had to transfer all the fish to the other tanks. And oh, yes, by the way, Zsa Zsa had actually caught and eaten a mouse and as a result had had diarrhea all over the place. I don't know what she was thinking of. Like me, she did better with highly processed food.

She greeted me when I walked in the house. I petted her for a little while, chatted with Manuel, then went straight upstairs and lay down on my bed.

Manuel came up and stood in the doorway. “Bethany and I are thinking of moving in together.”

“So she's submitting her petition to Family Court?”

Manuel shook his head. “She decided not to.”

“Why?”

“Her mother asked her not to.”

“That must have made Bethany feel good.”

“It did.”

“You know if you move in together her father can have you arrested for statutory rape.”

“No. She has to press charges. Anyway her mother said it was okay with her.”

“It's still a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“I just told you.”

“No, you didn't.”

I closed my eyes. I could feel a headache coming on. I hoped it wasn't a migraine. I hadn't had one of those in a while. “Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Manuel said. “But we're serious.”

“I know.”

I didn't say anything else. I could feel Manuel hovering in the doorway, waiting for me to open my eyes again. When I didn't, he left. A few seconds later I heard Zsa Zsa coming up the stairs. She jumped on the bed and put her head right next to mine on the pillow. I curled myself around her.

“I'm sorry for leaving you,” I said.

She licked my chin. One thing about dogs. They forgive you.

I fell asleep to her belching in my ear. Considering what I'd just been through, the sound was oddly soothing.

I kept expecting dire repercussions, but there weren't any. At least not right away. No one—not the police, not Paul's “friends”—came around to talk to me. Which made me more nervous than if they had.

The local paper ran a story in the metro section about the deaths of Walter and Janet Wilcox. And while there were speculations about the relationship between the two fatalities, the story didn't follow up on that angle, confining itself to talking about the tricks that fate plays. I wondered if the police felt the same way or not, but I wasn't in a position to ask them. Except for George, Paul was my only other lead in, and obviously I wasn't going to be asking him for anything.

That afternoon I went looking for Santini.

I was pretty sure the sonofabitch wasn't going to show up back here, but I wanted to make certain. There were a couple of things I wanted to clear up. I tried his office and his house. His office door was locked, and his car wasn't in his garage.

Two of the neighbor's kids making snowballs in the yard next door volunteered the information that Mr. Santini had asked them to shovel out his driveway. He'd told them he'd be gone for at least two weeks, maybe more, and given them twenty dollars in advance.