“It’s the life of a gypsy,” Paulo said, “a vagabond. And it’s dishonest. Those magazines that make her look like a tramp, they give people the idea it’s a glamorous, sexy world they’ll be excluded from if they don’t buy the junk advertised inside. What bullshit.” He was trying to get Leo on his team. “Do you know how many girls are being sent home right now?”
Or, like Whitney, to Daytona. The brother was dead right on that one. This was a very stressful time for the girls, the end of the season. But Leo couldn’t feel too sorry for them. The ones going back to Eugene, or Akron, or Wichita, they’d be back for another crack next year, or they wouldn’t. Whose problem was that? Anyway, his question didn’t apply to Valentina. There were big things ahead for her.
Chi-Chi said something to Paulo, but he wasn’t about to let the subject change.
“Will you please?” Valentina said. “You’re embarrassing me.”
Paulo took a poke at his sister in Italian, and she fired right back, prompting a comment from Chi-Chi, and then nobody was listening and everybody was jabbering at once.
“Hello?” Gregory said. “Family Feud? This is not why we came here.”
“Paulo can’t get over the fact I’m determined to live my own life,” Valentina said, getting in the last word.
Chi-Chi did her best to re-set the tone, getting quiet and tucking into her pasta. “Eat,” she said to Gregory in English, “eat,” like somebody’s grandma.
If there was one thing Leo couldn’t deal with while he was getting his groove on, it was conflict. Gregory and Valentina stared at their plates, and Paulo, his chin jutting, beamed his glare across the table. High tension. Leo didn’t dig it.
Sometimes he wished he could play the Mister Wizard game he used to play when he was a kid. Mister Wizard was a cartoon named after some wise old creature of the forest that had the power to grant wishes. His steadiest customer was a turtle, whose name Leo forgot, an ambitious turtle with big dreams that Mister Wizard would fulfill on a weekly basis.
One time the turtle wanted to be a baseball player, a pitcher just like Leo. So Mister Wizard transported him to some cartoon league where he was facing a team called the Giants, who turn out to be real giants, smacking overmatched turtle ass all over the diamond. It was like Giants 72, Turtle nothing, before the turtle decided he had enough.
At the end of the story, the turtle would go, “Help, Mister Wizard, I don’t wanna be a baseball player” — or astronaut, or private eye or whatever he’d wanted to be that week — “anymore.” And Mister Wizard would rescue him with the incantation, “Drizzle drazzle, drozzle, drome/ Time for this one to come home,” and bring him back to the forest.
What Leo used to do, he was his own Mister Wizard. He would just say to himself, Help, Mister Wizard, I don’t wanna be in the principal’s office — or church, or at Aunt Helen’s — and then, working his own magic, bang, he wasn’t there anymore. He would travel so deep into himself that everything around him became non-existent. He did this right up till the time he was eleven or twelve and told Duane Measler about his game and Duane Measler said Leo was weird. He quit it after that.
A real-deal Mister Wizard situation, this. He was an afterthought, a fifth wheel at the table of the breathtaking Valentina, whose jealous brother was on the verge of undoing a season’s worth of hard work. With a frizzhaired frump who couldn’t hold up her end of the conversation, if there even was a conversation to hold up. And Gregory. Gregory wasn’t even that bad, as far as these guys went. But Leo kept anticipating he’d come up with something witty or even stupid to say to break up the glacier creeping over this scene, and Gregory stayed mute, twirling linguine on his fork.
“I must have a bladder the size of a peanut,” Leo announced. “When you spot that waiter, could you order me another margarita? I’ll be right back.”
He went straight into that stall and snorted two big blasts up both nostrils. There.
Stopping for another quick pop at the bar was a strong temptation, only Paulo was at the bar waiting for him. He said, “Having a good time?”
Leo said, “Uh, yeah?” He wasn’t sure which way he was supposed to answer.
“I’m sorry you had to sit through that. My sister is very beautiful, but she is not very mature. I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. I was out of line, and I apologize.”
“That’s nothing,” Leo said. “Let’s go back and sit down.”
“All the same, I wouldn’t want you to get any ideas about her.”
Leo said, “Ideas?”
“Come on, Leo. We’re men. We both know why you’re here. You weren’t expecting Chi-Chi and you weren’t expecting me. You might’ve been braced for the queer, but you’re not interested in him. You’re a lot of cheap things, but you aren’t homosexual.”
“Hey, wait a minute.” Leo’s nose dripped cocaine runoff. He sucked it in and wiped what escaped on the back of his hand. Wow, did he need a drink. What happened to that bartender, the short one in the little red vest?
“Valentina is a rare jewel. If you think my parents raised her to be trifled with by a third-rate, cocainesniffing hoodlum, you’re dead wrong, my friend. I suspect you realize she’s out of your class, but I’m here to reinforce your fears.”
Did this guinea have any idea who Leo was? That he’d straight-up wasted a psycho killer? He started to say, “You don’t know me at all.”
“You’re wrong there, too.” Paulo turned up the wattage on a bright, sinister smile Leo didn’t care for the looks of, not one bit. “You don’t think I know you, but I know you. And I’m warning you. I’m threatening you. Stay away from my sister.”
Paulo turned and walked back to the table, slow, cocky, chest out, just about daring Leo to follow him.
Leo wasn’t biting. After he found the bartender, he hammered down a double, and, feeling more together, took his time with the return trip outside. He left a twenty under the plate he didn’t touch, and said goodnight, giving them three lies where one would’ve been plenty. In the future, a point of form: Never tell three consecutive lies.
Valentina shot her brother a dead eyed-look. Standing to shake Leo’s hand, Paulo pumped that smile for all the malevolence it was worth.
Leo walked the length of Lincoln Road. Turning left on Lennox, then right on 15th to Alton, he covered the last couple blocks to Kilkenny’s, where he should’ve gone in the first place. Leo was grateful, though not at all surprised, to find Jo Ann wearing a pleated mini-skirt and red suede boxing shoes, carrying three Bud Longnecks high on a tray.
Leo had one eye open on a vicious hangover that started at his temples and wrapped around his head like a turban. His lungs ached up through his chest. His nostrils were crusted shut. Opening his other eye, he felt twice as bad. The few clothes Jo Ann had been wearing were in a heap on the floor, and it hurt to look at her red suede boots.
Right. Jo Ann. Jo Ann was snoring directly into his ear, and no matter how long he planned on playing dead, who ever was ringing the doorbell was not going to stop. The sunlight honking in through the staircase window seemed to have a sound to it, all mixed up with blasts on the bell, and now, some extra-rude knocks.
Leo opened the door on a pretty, athletic brunette wearing a beige suit and shades. There were braces on her teeth and she was holding a badge. It took him a few seconds to register this, shirtless, shoeless, the top button on his Levi’s unfastened. This cute brunette, who was on the young side, but way too old for trips to the orthodontist, was a fucking cop, and she was at his house. The cops were at his house.
They must have identified JP Beaumond’s body. Though Leo had his JP story all together, and though he’d been waiting for this since the afternoon Stuart A. Homes- Leighton mentioned they’d carted Beaumond’s corpse out of the Glades, a knot of acid churned in his gut.