Part 1 (2/2)
”Is this the right house?”
”Yep.”
”Well, I don't know how to break this to you... but there's no body here.”
”It's laying in the living room,” Lula said. ”You can't miss it. It's a naked body with a big hole in its head.”
Carl rocked back on his heels, thumbs stuck in his utility belt. ”I went all through the house, and there's no body.”
Two hours later, Lula and I were eating french fries and sucking milkshakes in the McDonald's lot just outside center-city.
”I know what I saw, and I saw a dead guy,” Lula said. ”That Squirrel was dead, dead, dead. Someone came and s.n.a.t.c.hed that body. And it wasn't the polite thing to do either, because that was our body. We found it, and it was ours.” She crammed some fries into her mouth. ”This whole thing is creeping me out.”
I was creeped out, too. But more than that I was slack-jawed and bug-eyed with dumbfounded curiosity. What the h.e.l.l happened to Squirrel? We'd been gone thirty minutes tops. Why would someone dump a body and then remove it?
”I had plans for my share of the recovery fee,” Lula said. ”I don't suppose Vinnie's gonna give us the money now that some loser came and took our body.”
It seemed unlikely since we hadn't recovered anything.
”You know Squirrel?” Lula asked.
”I went to school with him. He was four years older than me. Stayed back a couple times and finally dropped out in junior high. I've only seen him in pa.s.sing lately.”
”He used to talk to me sometimes when I was on the corner doing my previous profession. Used to ride up on that rickety red bike of his. Bet that bike was a hundred years old.”
I'd forgotten about the bike. Most street people never ventured farther than a couple blocks. Because Squirrel had a bike he was able to live in an abandoned house and range far and wide for recreational peeping.
”Do you remember seeing the bike at the house?” asked Lula.
”Nope. That bike wasn't there. And we walked all over with the cops. We looked in the back and the front, and we looked all through the house.”
We both thought about that for a moment.
”Squirrel wasn't a bad person,” Lula said, serious voiced. ”Was just that his train stopped a few feet from the station. He liked to watch people. Liked to look in bedroom windows at night. And then one thing would lead to another, and pretty soon Squirrel wouldn't have no clothes on, and sometimes he'd get caught and get his bony white a.s.s hauled off to jail.”
Lula was right about Squirrel not being a bad person. He could be d.a.m.n annoying. And seeing his nose pressed against your window at one in the morning could be scary as h.e.l.l. But Squirrel wasn't mean. and he wasn't violent. And I didn't like that someone had killed him. And, I also didn't like that I'd lost the body. What were the police going to tell Squirrel's mother? Someone said they saw your son with a bullet hole in his head, but we can't find him. Sorry.
”This has gotten ugly,” I said to Lula.
”d.a.m.n skippy. I'm feeling downright cranky about the whole thing. In fact, the more I think about it, the crankier I'm getting.
I finished my milkshake and stuffed the straw under the lid. ”We need to find Sam.”
”Not me,” Lula said. ”I'm not looking for no dead guy. I don't like dead guys.”
”I thought you had plans for the recovery money.”
”Well, now that I think about it I guess dead guys aren't so bad. At least they don't shoot at you.”
Usually, I relied on the bond agreement to provide some leads. In this case it wasn't much help. Squirrel's brother, Bruce, had put up the bond to get Squirrel out of jail. Bruce worked at the pork roll factory and was an okay guy, but I didn't think he knew much more than we did about Squirrel. Squirrel was a brother who lived on the fringe. He was a thirty-four-year-old man with faulty wiring. A man who related to people through panes of gla.s.s. A man who lived in an abandoned house, filled with treasures gleaned from the city's trash cans. A man who kept no calendar to remind him of holiday dinners. Squirrel and Bruce could have lived on different planets for all the interaction they'd had in the last ten years.
Myra Smulinski had filed the indecent exposure charge. I knew Myra, and I knew Squirrel must have made a royal nuisance of himself for Myra to call the police. Myra lives on Roosevelt, in the heart of the burg. And mostly Squirrel is tolerated in the burg. After all, that's where he was born and that's where his family still lives.
The burg is a tight Trenton neighborhood of second- and third-generation Italians, Hungarians and Germans. It's roughly shaped like a piece of pie, and it exists only in the minds of its residents. Windows are kept clean. Numbers runners never miss ma.s.s. And at an early age, men learn to change their own oil in the alleys and single car detached garages that hunker at the back of their lots.
Like Squirrel, I was born in the burg and lived there most of my life. Four years ago, at age twenty-six, I moved into an apartment beyond burg boundaries. Physically I'm at the corner of St. James and Dunworth. Mentally, I suspect I'll always be anch.o.r.ed in the burg. This is an admission that caused my sphincter muscle to tighten in terror that someday I'll turn into my mother.
I shoved the last french fry into my mouth and cranked the engine over. ”I think we should visit my grandma Mazur,” I told Lula. ”If there's anything going through the burg rumor mill about Sam Franco, Grandma Mazur will know.”
Grandma Mazur moved in with my parents two years ago when my grandpa went to his final lard-enriched, all-you-can-eat breakfast bar in the sky. Grandma is part of a chain of burg women who make the internet look like chump change when it comes to the information highway.
My mother opened the door to Lula and me. She'd never met Lula, and she was making a good effort not to look dazed at seeing a huge blond-haired black woman wearing brilliant azure eye shadow speckled with silver sparkles, shocking pink spandex shorts and a poison green spandex tank top, standing on her porch. Grandma was jockeying for position beside my mother and wasn't nearly so circ.u.mspect.
”Are you a Negro?” Grandma asked Lula. ”I didn't know Negroes could have yellow hair.”
”Honey, we can have any color hair we d.a.m.n well want to have. I've got yellow hair because blondes have more fun.”
”Hmm,” Grandma said, ”maybe I need to make my hair blond. I could use some fun.”
My father was in the living room with his nose pressed to the sports section. He mumbled a few words about my grandmother having fun on the moon and sunk lower in his chair.
”I've got a couple big thick steaks for supper,” my mother said. ”And I made a cake.”
”We can't stay,” I told my mother. ”I just stopped around to see if you'd heard anything about Sammy Franco.”
”What about him?” Grandma wanted to know. ”Are you looking for him? Is this a case you're on?”
”He got arrested for indecent exposure again and didn't show up for his hearing.”
”I knew he got arrested,” Grandma said. ”Poor Myra didn't have no other choice. She said he was always in her backyard. Said he trampled her marigolds into the ground.”
”And that's it? That's all you've heard?”
”Is there more?”
”Sammy's been shot. Someone killed him.”
Grandma sucked in air. ”No! How terrible!”
My mother made the sign of the cross. My father went very still in his chair.
I told them the whole thing.
”I saw a TV show once on body s.n.a.t.c.hers,” Grandma said. ”The reason they wanted the bodies was so they could eat their brains.”
<script>