“You know that man?”
There is a picture of the curly-headed little judge, Dean Villay, in the top corner of the page.
“Long time ago,” I say.
“Friend?”
“Enemy.”
“Good,” Bert says, his face softening a bit, but his voice still bitter. He goes to the refrigerator and returns with a bottle of beer for me.
“If I ever get the chance,” he says, flopping down in a worn-down La-Z-Boy recliner, “I’m gonna kill that man, judge or no judge.”
Bert tells me the story about his younger brother who lived and worked in Watertown and a trip the two of them took one weekend to visit some friends at the Onondaga Nation so they could watch the ABA bowling championships in Syracuse. They were at a South Side bar after the finals when his brother got into a scuffle with some locals. After the fight, the two of them decided to head north instead of spending the night with their friends on the reservation. They were back at his brother’s apartment in Watertown when his brother realized that somehow during the fight he had lost his knife, a nickel-plated switchblade.
The next day, the police showed up at the door to arrest his brother for the murder of the man he got into the fight with. Villay was prosecuting his brother on the theory that after the fight, he ambushed the dead man while he walked home, stabbing him fifteen times with the nickel-plated switchblade that was left at the scene.
Bert was his brother’s only alibi and chance to prove his innocence. At the trial, Villay had torn Bert to pieces, but the jury never did get to issue a verdict. The night after Bert’s testimony, his brother hanged himself in the Public Safety Building.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get that chance,” Bert says, getting up for two more bottles of beer, “but if I do…”
Bonaparte isn’t the chief, but he runs things: the casino, the big-stakes bingo parlors, and a smuggling operation that brings mostly cigarettes across the river from Canada, where the taxes are low enough to make the whole venture extremely profitable. Bonaparte also runs some marijuana to supply the Adirondacks, but it’s not a big market and I think he and his men smoke most of the profits.
I get paid every Friday in cash. We drive up to Bonaparte’s big white contemporary home overlooking the river, and he laughs as he pays me with hundred-dollar bills that he says might be real, but might not, since I don’t know the difference. Most of the men eat, drink, smoke, and gamble away their pay, but they don’t seem to resent me for saving my money and spending most of my free time reading under the bare bulb that hangs down over Bert’s couch. My name has evolved from Running Deer to Bonaparte’s Quick Buck to the men’s version of Quick Book.
There is an Akwesasne named Andre who is one of Bonaparte’s lieutenants, and after a while Bert and I are the ones who get sent with him to collect drug money. I’m not crazy about these runs since they take us off the reservation, but this isn’t a democracy and I don’t get a vote.
Andre is a young man, only twenty-five. He is smooth-skinned and handsome, with big round eyes, a straight narrow nose, and shiny black hair cut blunt just above his collar. He’s a half-breed like me, and with dark hair on his arms and legs, he looks more like a Caucasian than an Indian, but no one ever talks about it. Andre plays the guitar and his passion is his band, but it’s his viciousness that pays the bills. He’s the one Bonaparte sends out to collect from the white man.
The rumor is that Andre beat up his own father with a tire iron. It is fact that he’s done it to plenty of other white men, and it doesn’t take me long to realize that Andre likes his job, that he goes into a place eager for trouble.
One night, we catch up with a pot dealer in his cabin outside of Lake Placid. The guy has this high school cheerleader on his couch stripped down and ready to go when we bust in. He coughs up the cash he owes real fast, but Andre bops him on the head with the butt of his gun anyway and grabs the girl by the wrist and starts dragging her screaming into the bedroom.
I put my hand on Andre’s shoulder.
“Come on,” I say, and before I can blink, his Colt.45 is cocked and in my face.
“You don’t touch me, you fucking bookworm,” he says. “Not ever.”
“Then come on,” I say, not letting go.
The girl wrestles free and scampers into the bedroom, where she slams the door shut. Andre gives me a twisted smile.
“You just get your ass outside and wait for me to finish up in here,” he says, “or Bert’s gonna be cleaning your brains up off that wall with a paper towel.”
My eyes don’t waver and I say, “Go ahead. You’ll be saving me and a lot of other people a whole hell of a lot of trouble. We got what we came for.”
“Bang!” Andre yells, jerking the gun.
I just stare, and he begins to laugh and pats me on the back. To Bert he says, “You got a real loon here, you know that? I hope you lock loon-man in his room at night.”
We leave together with the money and Andre’s arm around my shoulder. After that, Bonaparte starts sending Bert and me out alone. Andre seems to behave himself whenever we’re together, but I still don’t trust him and I can’t help the feeling that one day, when my guard is down, he’s going to do me some harm.
29
THE SUN HAD ALREADY GONE DOWN. Outside, the muffled sound of taxi horns and truck brakes moved along Park Avenue. Lexis stood in the darkness. Only the vaguest shapes of the painting in front of her could be discerned now. When she first went into her trance there was enough light to see. She heard her name being shouted from somewhere deep inside their apartment. She set her brush down on the palette and placed both on the small table where she kept her paints.
She finished off the half-empty glass of chardonnay before shedding her smock and brushing off the front of her sweater. In the front hall, Frank was waiting, holding open her three-quarter-length mink coat.
“Frank,” she said. “It’s a football game.”
“Will you hurry up?” he said, shaking the coat.
He smelled strongly of Cool Water cologne, and the milky soft black leather of his coat matched the color of his belt and shoes. His silk shirt and wool slacks were also black. On his wrist was a big gold Rolex studded with diamonds. On his pinky was a three-karat gold diamond ring.
“Where’s your wedding band?” Frank said with a scowl, lifting her hand as she pushed it through the fur sleeve.
“Here,” she said, spreading her fingers so he could see the thin platinum band.
“Go get your good one,” he said, pointing his finger. The heavy slabs of his cheeks were turning red. She could see the top of his head as he looked down at her feet, and a small bald spot beneath that curly black-and-white hair.
“Frank,” she said. “It’s a football game.”
“It’s our championship game and people will be there, goddamn it,” he said, still looking down, his lips pressed tight after the words were out. “I don’t buy you that stuff to sit in a drawer.”
Lexis turned and hurried down the long hallway. She walked through the broad double doors and into her closet. At the far end was her jewelry drawer. She found the ring quickly, and without bothering to lock the drawer, she hurried out of the bedroom and back down the hall, stopping in the kitchen for a quick glass of wine.
“Got it,” she said, splaying her fingers for Frank as she walked into the rotunda entryway of their apartment.
Frank only huffed and opened the door for her. The white-gloved elevator man was waiting. Outside, their long black limo was idling at the curb. Frank wedged his massive frame into the backseat and the doorman handed Lexis in after him. The glass partition was up. That’s the way Frank liked it, and he picked up the phone to tell Duvall to hurry up because Lexis had made them late.