The Accidental Pallbearer Read online

  “Why the fuck does he pray if he doesn’t have hope, wise guy?”

  “Bobby,” Cruz says, “it was the Verdi Requiem.”

  “Who died?”

  “Doesn’t matter anymore who, Detective. Only the lyric ravishment of the voice matters, the hot flood of sensuous sound lapping us all over, which I agree was deeply in, as you so perfectly put it.”

  “Shall we drop this faggot talk?”

  “Mr. Conte, is there anyone who could verify your presence at the Galaxy?”

  “Yes. Antonio Robinson.”

  “He drove you from Utica, Mr. Conte?”

  “Two guys, Katie, who go together to the opera?”

  “But, Bobby, that’s all you ever play in the car.”

  “Don’t insinuate against my sexuality, Katie. We go over to the Galaxy, that fuckin’ garbage dump, how do we pick this fairy out?”

  “The only black man, aside from the usher. He’s Utica’s chief of police. Six foot three, 230 pounds.”

  “The opera. The chief of police. My ass. Next you’ll tell me your father is Silvio Conte, the biggest bastard of upstate New York, bar none.”

  “He’s my father and also the other thing you said.”

  “Six-three, 230? Huh? This so-called Robinson is you except for the color factor … make a call to Utica, sweetie, and verify the father is the father.”

  When Cruz returns, she takes Rintrona aside, who blanches. Rintrona turns to Conte, “I am a flawed person, God knows very well how flawed. We’ll take you to Albany, all is forgiven both sides.”

  Rintrona sits in the back with Conte to discuss Pavarotti’s guilt, which Rintrona believes to be personal and not an expression of Verdi’s sacred music – “because the man who sings this agony of guilt, Eliot – if I may call you Eliot – he lives the pain, he’ll always live the fuckin’ pain.”

  Conte says, “Yes, Detective.” Then tells Rintrona that Pavarotti left his wife, who was his high school sweetheart, and two daughters in the middle ’90s for another woman.

  “He left his babies?”

  “At the time he was singing the Requiem you saw the other night, they were babies. But when he left his wife the kids were in their thirties.”

  Rintrona, con grande passione: “Man to man, Eliot: He loves his high school sweetheart, and so forth, adores the kids, so forth, but for unknown reasons in 1967 the seed of restlessness stirs in the groinal area, which is also the guilt area. Once those babies achieve their thirties they’re not all that lovable, take it from me. And neither is the high school sweetheart. Forget the high school sweetheart! Then the seed has no choice but to burst out!”

  “But your kids make such a fuss over you, Bobby.”

  “The point, Katie, as if you didn’t know, I make no fuss over them. I desisted years ago. Katie wouldn’t look twice at us, Eliot. What a shame. You married by any chance?”

  “Was.”

  “Intelligent man here, Katie.”

  “Kids?”

  “Formerly.”

  “FORMERLY!” Laughter out of control giving way to a coughing, phlegm-disgorging fit. “This is a man, partner, who can handle the give and take of life. FORMERLY!” Laughing, coughing, hawking up into a handkerchief. “Here we are and here’s my card. Anything I can do, hey! you never know, don’t hesitate. I’d be honored to lend assistance within so-called legal limits.”

  Cruz says, “Who, by the way, was the tenor today who wasn’t in good voice?”

  “Roberto Alagna.”

  “Kind of dreamy, though not in Luciano’s vocal class.”

  Conte thinks she’s kind of dreamy.

  “Eliot,” Rintrona asks, softly, plaintively, “Confirm something for me, will ya?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Is my partner busting my balls as usual, or is the King of the High Cs dead?”

  “Pavarotti is dead.”

  “Since fuckin’ when?”

  “September the 6th, 2004.”

  “WHAT?!”

  “Yes.”

  “Where the fuck have I been?”

  Eliot and Cruz exchange a look and bite their tongues.

  “I don’t like it, Eliot.”

  “Detective, neither do I.”

  CHAPTER 3

  He boards the train in Albany at twilight, in a downpour that will not cease for three days. The milk train, they’d referred to it in his youth, which covers the ninety miles to Utica in three hours and twelve minutes. He contemplates his image in the window’s filthy glass – the rain-matted hair, the rain-styled bangs. Frankenstein’s Monster. Darkness and heavy bags under the eyes. Conte has been an insomniac since his undergraduate days.

  Across the aisle from him, a Caucasian male, his wife, his child – fifteen months old. Younger than Conte’s when he left them. In the row in front of the little family, a black man, ancient and feigning deep sleep, daydreaming of striking out Willie Mays with the bases loaded. The ancient black man won’t stir for three hours and twelve minutes. Several rows beyond, a Muslim woman, veiled, motionless. She’ll remain motionless throughout what will ensue. At the other end of the car, a smiling teenage girl, eyes closed, in a Yankees cap, swaying in her seat and aurally shielded from what will ensue by a headset blasting misogynistic rap into her brain. Across from the teenager, a Mexican immigrant who, in about an hour, will beg the Virgin to protect the innocent, that they may come unto her. There are no other witnesses. There are no witnesses. “This car Utica only, folks. Utica only.”

  The baby begins to cry, full-throated, with piercing tone, as the train pulls out of Albany. The man (the husband, the father) slaps the baby across the face. His wife offers the baby her spectacular breast, but the baby will not suck – it prefers to cry – and when the woman is slow to cover herself the man slaps her, hard on the ear. The baby cries. The daddy slaps twice. Pinches and twists as he pinches the baby’s chubby thigh. The baby cries.

  Conte, in flight, recalls a televised interview with Pavarotti in which the tenor says that proper breathing technique can be learned by any singer who can execute, while singing, what he does daily, pushing down in a bowel movement. In a lightning-quick non sequitor, the sexy, thirty-something interviewer asks Pavarotti what he does mid-aria if he needs to clear his throat. I do nothing. Nothing? I do nothing because I do not sing from the throat. Like a baby produces the voice, I sing. Are you understanding? Even when the baby cries for ten hours without stopping, no soreness of the throat. Perché? Because the baby produces the voice from here, darling, supported from here, below, where the true voice is born. He puts his hand on the interviewer’s diaphragm in illustration. It slips lower. (She suppresses the urge, she’ll wait until after the interview, to ask him if her true voice is born in her vagina.) When we grow we lose nature. We talk and sing dangerous, from the throat. Pavarotti places his huge hand on her warm throat, his pinky drifting down and finding her breast. I have career like atomic bomb. Perché? Because Luciano big baby. Luciano is nature. Capisci, mia figa stretta?!

  The daddy slaps the baby very hard, three times, on the face. Conte, unable to escape, glances over at the man, who catches his glance and responds with a glare and the middle finger. Conte is afraid. Conte is a timid man. He gives the man the thumbs-up sign and says, “I don’t blame you, not in the least.”

  The rumble of the train in motion and the crying and slapping fill the car like white noise and Conte is seized by the moment that had earned him his expulsion from UCLA, when he’d felt taken over, when he’d become a vessel for rage, when he’d dangled the provost, all five feet four of him, by the ankles out of the provost’s fifth-floor office window. “By the heels, like Mussolini in Milan,” he’d whispered over and over again. (“That wasn’t me, Robby.” “Who was it, pal?”)

  Conte feels himself stand and loom over the man. Feels an enormous belch rising. Leans over the man and lets it all out, all odiferous of salami, onions, mustard, provolone, and red wine. The baby stops crying. The man is startl
ed by the hulk before him, by the stench. The man quickly recovers the balls, which for the moment are still brass, and says, as the provost had said thirty years before, in response to a perfectly reasonable request, “You’re a joke.”

  Conte hears his voice say, “Your son is the next Pavarotti.”

  “It’s a girl. Scram, you ugly fuck.”

  His voice says, softly, “Are you contradicting me?”

  “It’s a girl, asshole. This is a fuckin’ girl.”

  His voice says, “Do you know the movie, Throw Papa from the Train?”

  Conte notices welts on the baby’s face, black-and-blue marks on its arms and legs.

  The man says, “Get lost.”

  The man is being lifted out of his seat by the throat. The man is kicking wildly – one kick catches his wife on the side of her head. He’s being choked. Choked screams fading. The Caucasian male is dying. Conte releases him. The man drops down into his seat. Conte hears a voice say, “Encourage your son to nurture his vocal technique. Bobby Rintrona will pay dearly to hear him sing. Do you know Bobby?” The Caucasian male loses control of his sphincter muscle.

  Conte returns to his seat. The baby wails. The woman bleeds from the ear. Conte dozes. In Utica, he follows the man to his car, a late-model BMW. Jots down the license plate number and, standing in the pouring rain, drenched again to the bone, says, “What is your son’s name?”

  As he walks away, Conte finds in his hand a ham sandwich that he’d purchased at the Albany station. Tosses it on a sewer cover, where it’s promptly swarmed by three large rats.

  CHAPTER 4

  He boards the bus he still thinks of as the Dago Special – rides it along Bleecker deep into the formerly 95-percent-Italian-American East Side, gets off at Wetmore and walks a block up the rise, in the rain, toward 1318 Mary and the sole bungalow – “the bung hole,” according to Robinson – Conte’s house on a street of well-maintained two- and three-family structures. Many old Italians of the third generation remain, but it’s a new East Side of immigrants from Bosnia and Mexico and a sprinkling of deluded adventurers from Utica’s black neighborhoods, who are suffered not. The lights are on. E. CONTE, says the sign on the front door, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR/PRIVATE AFFAIRS.

  He opens the door to find Robinson, who’s had a key for twenty years, sitting at the desk in the front room with a copy of Moby-Dick in his lap. Robinson grins and says, “Call me Antonio.” Conte stares, says nothing. The office is lined with books – city telephone books and directories, going back twenty years, a few pertaining to the criminal code, 2,000 pertaining to American literature and scholarly commentaries thereupon. The house, beautifully re-done, was purchased for him, mortgage-free, by his father when he returned from the West Coast, broke. Top to bottom, in and out, renovated by city workers on weekends at no cost to Eliot or, of course, to his father – the high-end kitchen a gift from local merchants.

  “You look like shit,” Robinson says. “Not to mention nuts.”

  “Thank you. I need a hot shower. Then I need seven drinks. In the meanwhile, run this plate for me.”

  Twenty minutes later, he returns in sweat pants and sweatshirt, hair slicked back, with a big bowl of ice and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.

  “Where does he live, Robby?”

  “You know where Michael C lives. We’ve been to his parties, how many times? You harbored love for his wife, think I don’t know? Still hot for Denise, Eliot?”

  “The license you ran. Where does he live?”

  “Something happen on the train?”

  Conte says nothing.

  “You’re pretty riled up.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Close by. Fifteen-minute walk. Next to the florist at Rutger and Culver. His name is Jed Kinter.”

  “Why is the name familiar?”

  “Reports on minor sports. Utica Curling Club. Skeet Shooters of Oneida County. Little League. A glorified gofer at age thirty-five. What’s the story?”

  When Conte is finished telling him, Robinson says, “Yet another Eliot specialty. Some bastard does despicable things who the law has little chance of stopping until it’s too late. So Eliot the Good steps up, a defender of the weak and innocent. Listen: This Michael C thing takes precedence. Concentrate on that and forget Kinter. I strongly urge you.”

  Conte dumps his ice, pours four fingers of the Johnnie Walker, chugs it, pours another and chugs half, stares hard at Robinson, then says, “Remember after you cut and slashed through the defense for five touchdowns in the championship game, in the cold rain and mud? What were we? Sixteen years old? Silvio cheered until he was hoarse.”

  After a long pause, Robinson replies, softly, looking away, “I remember the clock ran out and they lifted me up on their shoulders.”

  “They lifted you high, Robby. They really did.”

  “The coach took us out for shakes and burgers.”

  “Silvio took me home. (Long pause.) I say in the car, stupidly, Dad, you never cheer me. How come? He says, You’re not a boy for sports. You’re a boy for the books. What do you want from me, son? Want me to watch you read Moby-Dick? At what point do I cheer? We get home, he asks if I want a cup of hot chocolate. I refuse. He makes it anyway as he hums ‘April in Paris.’ Pours it in my favorite cup, still humming, smiling to himself. No doubt thinking of your heroics on the field. He puts the cup on the table. I pick it up and pour it down the toilet. We didn’t talk for days.”

  “Man, you know I –”

  “It’s all in the past.” Conte knocks back his drink.

  “So what’s so urgent about your boorish assistant chief,” Conte says, “that you need to drag me in?”

  Robinson calculates. The time is not yet right. He’ll crouch awhile in the weeds.

  “Let’s knock back some more of this fine Johnnie Walker, El. By the way, that tenor you walked out on got warmed up after intermission. Alagna, man, the fucker can sing. The two of them made me forget the world. I think I came twice. Fuckin’ world, am I right, brother?”

  Robinson laughs. He smells blood in the water.

  “This is what I’m telling you, El. Kill the guy up on Rutger, kill the ex, kill Michael C and a lot of innocent people are avenged.”

  Conte suddenly looks alive: “Alagna after intermission was hot?”

  “Listen, Eliot, sooner or later, just once, you need to ice someone, to get it out of your system. Rid the world of some toxic waste. Do the worst thing possible, Thou shalt not kill, do the very worst and liberate yourself from all the ways all these years you’ve been pretending to be someone you’re not, and just like that” – snaps his fingers – “all the false Eliots disappear. You feel lighter. You float down the street in your expensive loafers. A clotheshorse like you finally gets to enjoy his clothes, and you never again have to ask yourself who you really are, because you know. Definitively. Guess who’s singing in the Bohème next week? Alvarez! Can we possibly wait?”

  They’ve had this conversation a million times. Since they were kids. They’re both having a good time now.

  “You won’t kill a mosquito perched on your arm, Robby. Kill her, kill him – annihilate the cunt! You’re absurd.”

  “I never said annihilate the c-word.”

  “If not you, who?”

  “That word I don’t use. It was you, Eliot. In your mind you said it to yourself concerning the bitch on the West Coast. Nancy is the c-word.”

  Robinson winks.

  They toast each other, friend to dear friend, taking alternate lines:

  Acqua fresca

  Vino puro,

  Figa stretta,

  Cazzo duro!

  “In their thirties, your kids are living at home with the ex?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Think about it, Robby.”

  They’re on their third scotch on empty stomachs, in the re-modeled kitchen – the most expensive appliances, granite counters, a floor of earthy-beautiful Spanish tiles,
Eliot making Italian omelettes and bacon, but no coffee.

  “We have four more blasts each of the Johnnie,” Eliot says, “who needs coffee?”

  “Three is my limit.”

  “So you don’t use the c-word, Robby. So you won’t join me on Johnnie four through seven. You’re giving me a headache. You’re always – you know what it is? You’re always: Listen, Eliot. For as long as I’ve known you: Listen, Eliot. Me. Not you. I have to ice somebody. Jesus, I’m dizzy … Remember that time? Pour me another, handsome. What were we? Twelve? How you cried nonstop, abjectly, when that mangy feral cat killed and ate the baby robin? Eliot! Kill the fuckin’ cat! You! The kid everyone feared at school, though you never lifted a finger against anyone. Not even against Del’Altro, Utica’s bully-in-chief, who you could’ve taken out in two seconds and he knew it, two seconds, but he knew you wouldn’t because you’re a pussy. He taunts and he taunts and you walk away when everyone wanted you to clean Del’Altro’s clock. When was that? Junior year at Proctor? By the way, it’s not Alvarez in the Bohème. Why can’t you keep these singers straight?”

  “Who is it, El?”

  “Probably not Pavarotti.”

  Conte laughs. Table-pounding hilarity.

  “What’s so funny? I’m still in mourning. You’re drunk, man.”

  “Somebody new. Young. Glorious tone. Outrageously attractive guy who refers to himself in the third person as Vittorio Grigolo. But the gestures! The guy has gestures – totally ridiculous. Redefines over the top.”

  “So why drive all that way to witness this embarrassment?”

  “Next week, here, Robby, we do what we always do when we listen to the radio broadcast. We cook, but we don’t listen to the radio. We play Luciano’s recording with Freni and eat Ossobuco alla Milanese with a side of Risotto alla Toscana and cannoli from Ricky Castellano.”

  Silence while they contemplate multiple pleasures.

  “You have vocal illusions, Eliot?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “With your bass voice, you’d sound like a rapist on the prowl. Speaking of which –” he breaks off. The time is not yet right. Linger longer in the weeds.