I couldn’t say if the stench was finally getting to me or what, but I suddenly felt the need to get out of there. I wasn’t stupid about it. I didn’t want my fingerprints all over the place, so I used my sleeve and wiped down every surface I’d touched: the doors, the light switch, the fridge, the milk carton … What was really weird was how the farther away from the body I moved, the more intense my nausea got. I could feel the vomit in my throat, taste it in my mouth. My head was pounding and I was sweating through my clothes. I made it down to the second floor landing before I could no longer hold back. I puked my guts out on the floor, some of it splashing onto the black steel door. OR ELSE indeed.
When I collected what was left of me, I wobbled to the ground floor on very shaky legs. My first lungful of the brutal outside air made me sick again and if I’d had anything left to give, I would have given it up right there on the street. Instead, I dry-retched some and staggered through the sparse traffic until I made it to the safety of Aaron’s Tempest. It was strange how much that stupid car seat felt like home. I was in too much shock to drive away, never mind make sense of any of what I’d just been through. My life lessons were now no longer restricted to the stickball court or the sand beneath the boardwalk.
CHAPTER TEN
I don’t know how long it took me to get to Burgundy House. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten there, what streets I’d taken, or if I’d bothered stopping at red lights. The drive over wasn’t just a blur; it wasn’t even a memory. I was there, then I was here. In that time, however much time it was, I don’t believe I’d had one clear thought pass through my brain. It was so bizarre because when I was standing there in front of the body, I’d been pretty calm. Then, in the next second, my calm had begun to unravel. Now, I was a total mess.
In the darkened front seat of the car, I couldn’t get warm. I was cold from the marrow out, and the Tempest’s heater was as useless to me as corners to a bowling ball. I took my hands off the steering wheel and watched them shake. I was helpless to do anything about it. The harder I tried willing them to stop, the harder they shook. Compared to what was going on inside me, my shaking hands were the least of it. Nevertheless, shock and shaking hands weren’t going to stand up in court as reasons for not calling the cops. Sure, the only things I knew about police work I’d learned from Mannix and The Mod Squad — which I watched because I thought Peggy Lipton was hot — but you didn’t have to be J. Edgar Hoover to understand that I was obstructing justice by not telling the cops I’d found a corpse, one that had met a pretty violent end. And that when I’d wiped away my fingerprints, I’d probably wiped away others as well.
To distract myself, I listened to Cousin Brucie on the radio. When I was a little kid, I loved his goofiness. Lately, he drove me nuts. In all fairness, it wasn’t only his endless talking over the music that made me crazy. I mean, I liked the Monkees as much as the next guy, but how many times can you stand to listen to “I’m a Believer” in the course of a day before sticking needles in your eyes? I found myself daydreaming about a radio station where DJs talked in human voices, played songs from your favorite albums that weren’t hits, and spun long songs that didn’t get butchered down to three minutes. Yeah, like that was ever going to happen. I might as well have hoped for wireless telephones or good-tasting American beer. Dream on. After a few minutes, I noticed my hands were no longer shaking and that I could actually put two reasonable thoughts together about something other than AM radio together without freaking out.
That’s when it hit me: What the fuck had Bobby been doing at 1055 Coney Island Avenue to begin with, and why did he have keys to the place? I’d been so caught up in what was happening that the illogic of his presence hadn’t registered. There was a split second, I think, when I first spotted Bobby’s car that I wondered about what he was doing there, but then what followed overwhelmed the question. I guess dead bodies have that effect on me.
Okay, I was pretty confident that Bobby, no matter what he was doing there, hadn’t killed the guy. For one thing, Bobby wasn’t up there long enough to have struggled with him. Besides, the bedroom window faced Coney Island Avenue, and as I was watching the upstairs windows from across the street, I would have seen a struggle. And though the apartment was pretty much a mess, there were no signs of a struggle: no broken furniture, no cracked plaster, nothing like that. And the body was ripe. My lack of a medical education notwithstanding, even I knew it would take at least a few days for the body to get that way. Still, none of that explained away Bobby’s being there and having keys to the place.
Then, a sick, niggling thought wormed its way into my brain: What if Bobby wasn’t just going there, but going back there? I only had one connection, Lids, and he’d found someone to supply the address to me in less than twenty-four hours. Bobby had a million connections, and he always had money. So it was easy to see that if he wanted an address, Bobby would get it. If he got the address and found the guy who’d attacked Mindy hiding out there … Now, you’ve got to understand this about Bobby: he had the potential for violence. Although he was generally a gentle, happy soul, he wasn’t a weak one. He was a tough bastard, thick through his chest and arms. His union-organizer dad wasn’t big on hugging his son, but he had taught him all the tricks of the trade. Bobby was a sight to behold when peace demonstrations turned unpeaceful. I’d seen him knock more than one cop and a few construction workers flat on their asses.
So yeah, Bobby had violence in him. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine him talking his way into the apartment and then taking a piece of pipe to Mindy’s attacker. But why come back? Maybe to see if he had actually killed the guy, or to make sure he hadn’t left any evidence behind. Bobby was tough, not stupid. Then there was another possibility, one I really didn’t want to think about. What if Bobby was sheltering the man who’d attacked Mindy, and was going there to check on him? The keys — in some ways, it was all about the keys. Maybe Bobby’d taken them from the guy after killing him. If not, that meant Bobby already had keys to the place. And if he did, I was back to square one: What was he doing there, and why did he have keys? Were they Bobby’s or the dead man’s?
There was only one way to find out.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I drove back to the fix-it shop, but made sure to park blocks away and out of sight of anyone who might know me or my brother’s car. As I walked, I tried very hard to focus on the cold, on the passing traffic, or just about anything I could other than what I had in mind to do. Did the idea of going back into that apartment and patting down a corpse scare the shit out of me? Yeah, it did, but the thought that Mindy might never wake up scared me more. It scared me more to think that my best friend might’ve murdered someone. And what scared me most of all was the opposite, that rather than killing the man who had nearly beaten my girlfriend to death, Bobby had a connection to him or had tried to save him.