When I walk into the backroom, DiGrassi’s waiting alone, which is another good sign. He gives me the evil eye and keeps it fixed on me while I take a chair across from him.
“You fucked up,” he accuses me, his tenor’s voice shaking with anger. “’Cause of you I got a dead business partner and five grand pissed out the window. What the fuck you have to say about that?”
I took the three hundred dollars that I had gotten off the corpse and toss it on the table. “You’re better off without him,” I say. “And this three hundred dollars is more than you were ever going to get willingly from that cocksucker. The other forty-seven hundred I’ll make up on my end, which won’t be all that hard once the other deadbeats out there hear about this.”
I meet his stare. After a minute or so of this, there’s a shift in his expression. A cautiousness. A consideration. He wets his lips, leans back in his chair. “You get off on beating this guy to death?” he asks.
“Hank and Charlie tell you that?”
“They just told me what happened.”
I smile one of my rare smiles. “I didn’t get off on it,” I say. “I knew the guy was dead before they did. Everything I did afterwards was for their benefit.”
DiGrassi’s staring at me intently, maybe even a little concern showing in his eyes. “So how do you feel now?” he asks. “Anything bothering you?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “I was just doing my job.”
Again, with that intense stare as if he’s trying to look into my soul. “You sleeping okay?” he asks.
“No different than usual. Eating okay, too.”
“So this doesn’t bother you at all?”
I shake my head. “Other than I got to kick in forty-seven hundred to make good, no.”
“Nothing troubling your conscience?”
“What fucking conscience is this supposed to be?”
He’s considering this. His eyes darken, almost as if a veil has lowered over them. “You’re right, Lenny,” he says at last. “The guy was a cheap sonofabitch chiseler, and fuck him now that he’s worm food. Forget that forty-seven hundred also. Go out of town for a few weeks, make it a vacation. When you come back, we’ll be changing how we use you.”
I stand up and start towards the door. I have a good idea how he’s going to be using me. At some subconscious level, maybe I’d known all along. I’d spent four years on the fringes for DiGrassi doing collections and other diddly shit, so maybe in a way I was auditioning, trying to show them I was more important than how they were wasting me. It had to’ve been something like that ’cause it made no sense for me to have accidentally killed the guy. I’m not that careless. Before leaving, I nod to DiGrassi.
chapter 6
present
The room was dark when I woke up. I lay blinking for a few seconds, disoriented, then I remembered where I was and how I had to be at work at eight o’clock. I thought about the list I had made earlier of what I needed to buy, and mentally added an alarm clock to it.
I pushed myself off the bed, my body stiff and an awful taste in my mouth. That taste must’ve come from the mattress; at some point I must’ve rolled off my back and had my face pressed against the damn thing. It took a moment or two to straighten my back, then I hobbled in the direction of the bathroom – or at least where I thought it was. I wanted to splash some water on my face and rinse my mouth to get that taste out of it. My eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the darkness and my sense of bearing was all off and it took me several minutes of fumbling around the apartment walls before I found the bathroom door. The light switch for the bathroom was on the wall inside the door. I flipped it, turning on what must’ve been a thirty-watt bulb that had been left in the fixture above the sink. It barely lit the small closet-sized room.
There were no mirrors in the prisons I had been in for obvious reasons – you don’t want inmates getting their hands on broken glass. The last ten years or so I avoided looking at anything where I could’ve caught a reflection of myself, so it was a shock when I looked in the small, cracked mirror above the sink. The dim light provided by the single bulb kept my face mostly buried in shadows, which probably added even more years to my appearance. Logically I knew I had aged a lot over my time in prison, but still, I wasn’t expecting that old man staring back at me. My face had gotten so much thinner, narrower, and my ears and nose so much bigger and looking like something carved out of wood. I’d had my head shaved several months back by the prison barber, and my hair was now growing back white, not even gray. Of everything, though, it was my eyes and cheeks that seemed the most foreign to me – my cheeks hollowed out like those of a corpse, and my eyes sunk deep into the flesh. Fuck, I looked at least fifteen years older than I should’ve, and so much frailer than I imagined myself. I forced myself to look away, and cupped my hand under the faucet so I could rinse out my mouth. The water had a rusty, sour taste, and it didn’t help at all. I splashed some of it on my face which didn’t make me feel any cleaner. Since that was the only working light in the apartment, when I left the bathroom I kept the door open and the light on so I’d have some light in the room. I brought my papers back to the bathroom and squinted hard at each one until I found the form that had my work address, then grabbed my jacket and left the apartment.
It had gotten colder since I’d been out earlier. I found myself shivering as I made my way up several side streets to Moody Street. Once I reached Moody Street, I passed a coffee shop with a clock out front. It was twenty to eight; at least I’d woken up early enough that I’d be able to get to my job on time. I stopped in the coffee shop, bought a few jelly-filled doughnuts and a large coffee, and got directions for the street where I was going to be working. The young Hispanic girl working behind the cash register had a bright, infectious smile, and told me it shouldn’t take more than ten minutes to get there. She was being too polite and cheerful to have recognized me, but I still dropped thirty cents change into her tip jar.
While I walked, I ate my doughnuts and drank my coffee, and no more than ten minutes later, as the girl had promised me, I approached a small three-story brick office building where I was supposed to report to work.
Inside I could see a lone security guard sitting at a desk. I walked up to the glass door and knocked on it. He looked up and gave me an empty stare before pushing himself to his feet and walking slowly to the door so he could get a better look at me. He was no older than thirty. A big awkward-looking kid with a buzz cut and a large round face that made his small dark eyes appear even smaller. He knew who I was. I could tell from how much trouble he was having making eye contact with me. Still, he pretended he didn’t and asked through the intercom who I was and why I was there. I told him and he opened the door for me, mumbling that I should take a seat while he called for the building manager.
I sat in one of the two chairs in the lobby while he got on the phone. Less than a minute later a man about my height but much thicker in the trunk came out of the elevator to meet me. He was in his fifties, hard-looking, with ash-gray hair and a face that showed he had spent time in the ring when he was younger. He carried a clipboard in his left hand, and didn’t bother introducing himself or offering his free hand. Instead he told me I was late, that I was supposed to be there at seven-thirty.
“I was told eight.”
He stared at the clipboard before glancing back at me for as much as two seconds, his eyes darting back to his clipboard. “First day you’re supposed to be here at seven-thirty,” he said, repeating himself. “According to this, you know how to clean bathrooms, empty trash cans, and use a vacuum cleaner. That true?”
In my old days I would’ve answered him differently than I did, but those days were done with and whoever I was back then had been replaced by an old man. I told him it was true.