Bad Apple Read online

  Tozzi remembered the compacted car in the lot behind the Belfry. “How’d you end up with her ring?”

  She was quiet for a while. “Margie and I were best friends. Ever since fifth grade.” She fingered the ring, her eyes lowered.

  She hadn’t really answered the question, but Tozzi wasn’t going to press her. He could see that this was a sensitive subject. If she wanted to talk about it, she would. “I take it you just found out that Margie died the way she did.”

  She nodded. “Yeah . . . sort of. When she first disappeared at the end of the summer, I knew right away Bells had done something to her. I mean, I didn’t know know, but I knew in my heart.”

  “How?”

  The truck’s engine suddenly rumbled to life, and every other tractor truck in line followed suit. They were about to get rolling. Tozzi watched her face, eager for her to continue. Bells was a suspect in several murders, but they didn’t have enough evidence on any one of them to justify charging him. The FBI didn’t know anything about his wife.

  Gina shrugged, rubbing the ring between her fingers. “Margie and Bells had been having problems.”

  Tozzi waited to see if she’d explain, but she didn’t. “Serious problems?”

  “Yeah. Serious to them. Margie couldn’t get pregnant.”

  Tozzi nodded. “It happens.”

  Gina shook her head. “You don’t understand. It happens to other people, not to Bells. He wanted kids. Badly.”

  “They couldn’t adopt?”

  “Bells? Never. They had to be his kids, his flesh and blood.”

  “I figured.” Tozzi sort of felt the same way about adoption.

  The truck started to roll. The caravan was heading for New York. Tozzi turned his watch toward the streetlights. It was just after midnight.

  Gina had gotten quiet again. “So what happened with Bells and Margie?”

  “Well, Bells’s solution to their problem was more sex. Just increase the odds. But Margie told me it was horrible. Every morning and every night, like a chore. She said she felt like a hooker—wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. She wanted to go see a doctor, find out why she couldn’t get pregnant, but Bells didn’t want to hear about it. See, she’d already made the big mistake of suggesting that maybe it was his sperm that was defective, not her equipment. After that, he started coming home with all kinds of teas and vitamins, all this New Age crap. Half of it made her sick to her stomach. She told me she felt like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. She said she expected him to walk in the door some night with a witch doctor. Crazy.”

  Tozzi just listened, but this reminded him of some of the people in his aikido class. A few of them were big believers in alternative medicines. He looked back toward Hoboken. Testing was over by now. He’d missed his black-belt test again. He’d forgotten all about that for a while. Damn.

  Gina continued the story. “Margie was a real mess. She called me every day at work, crying and complaining. Finally I told her. I said we’re going to a doctor. To hell with Bells. She said no, she couldn’t, Bells would kill her, but I went ahead and found this guy up in Hackensack anyway, a fertility specialist. He checked her out and said yeah, it was her who had the problem. Something about her eggs not coming down the right way, I don’t know. When we came out of his office, I thought Margie was gonna walk out into traffic. She was bawling her eyes out like a little kid. She said she was gonna kill herself. I didn’t realize how much she really wanted to have a kid, too. I thought it was just Bells, but it wasn’t just him. She was all nuts about it, too.”

  “So what happened?”

  Gina shrugged and looked him in the eye. “I did something real stupid.”

  “What?”

  “I promised her she’d have a baby, no matter what. I told her I’d help her.”

  Tozzi’s pulse picked up. “You mean, you—? Artificial insemination? Bells went for that?”

  She shook her head no. “Not me. I found Margie a surrogate. A nice Sicilian girl in her twenties, an illegal alien. The girl said she’d do it for twenty grand. But Bells wouldn’t go for it. He said it wasn’t natural. Margie didn’t care, though. She made a deal with the girl on her own. I don’t know where she got the money. They were crazy, the two of them. Bells kept insisting that he could get Margie pregnant the normal way, so after he’d fall asleep after they had sex, she’d go into the bathroom and suck out his sperm, then save it in the refrigerator. A couple of times she had the girl waiting outside so she’d get it fresh. Threw it out the window in sandwich Baggies. Can you imagine? Crazy.”

  Tozzi was only half-listening. This girl from Sicily sounded like a story. Maybe Gina was the girl from Sicily. Maybe the real story was that Gina had offered to be her best friend’s surrogate. But could Gina really be pregnant with Bells’s child? Maybe that was why he’d called her at home, to see how she was doing. Why else would he be so obsessed with her? Tozzi felt sick. “So did it work?”

  Gina frowned and shrugged. “I don’t think so. Anyway, you can’t get pregnant that way. I read all kinds of pregnancy books for Margie. Except she never listened.”

  But Tozzi was thinking about turkey basters now. Gina would never do something like that, would she? The thought of her putting Bells’s sperm up her, even if Bells’s dick wasn’t attached, made him nauseous.

  The truck shuddered as it crawled forward in its lowest gear. The beach-blanket dinos shook like trees. Tozzi lifted his head and saw the caravan of garish floats waiting in line behind them, fifty engines rumbling in unison.

  Gina shook her head. “The weird thing about him is that he wants girls. Don’t men always want sons? Not Bells. He wants girls. At least three. Isn’t that sick?”

  Tozzi shrugged. He’d heard that girls were easier to raise and that they gravitated more toward their fathers than their mothers. As in Daddy’s girl, he guessed. But what the hell did he know about kids?

  The truck slowed down and started to buck as it passed through the toll booths. The prehistoric party animals started to do the Jerk.

  “Where do they park these things for the night?” he asked. “Do you know?”

  “Somewhere on the Upper West Side. That’s where the parade begins.”

  “Okay. When we get there, we’ll flag down a police car and have them take us to the closest precinct so we can get the cuffs off. Okay?”

  “Why don’t we go to your office?”

  “The police’ll have the right kind of tools for getting us out of these.” He lifted their handcuffed wrists. “We don’t have stuff like that down at our office.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Her eyes were moist, her face soft. He tried to remember if she’d looked this nice the afternoon they’d made love at her place. Or was it just a wham, bam, thank you . . .

  As they rolled down toward the mouth of the tunnel, he spoke fast, as if they were about to go underwater. “When we get inside the tunnel, breathe through the sleeve of the coat. You know, carbon monoxide.”

  She shrugged. “Okay. But I thought they pumped air into the tunnels.”

  “Not enough for me.”

  The vaulted tile ceiling of the tunnel swallowed them. He breathed into his sport jacket sleeve and watched to make sure that she did the same. Her eyes glimmered behind her glasses, the satiny blue sleeve of his inside-out coat covering the lower half of her face.

  Tozzi lay back and looked up at the surfing Tyrannosaurus. The artificial lights inside the tunnel cast evil shadows across the toothy face. With those sunglasses, he looked like Jack Nicholson now. Tozzi frowned and looked at something else. He was trying to stop thinking about turkey basters.

  “You take it easy, Mr. Bellavita.”

  “Yeah, you too, Rick.”

  The cop saluted with two fingers as he rolled up his window and drove off.

  Bells smiled and saluted back. He watched the police cruiser disappear down the street before he turned and started walking up the steep incline of the sidewalk along the viaduct that led out of Hoboken. Officer R
ick had been sent out to find “some FBI guy” who’d called in complaining that Bells was after him. Bells had lent Officer Rick’s father the money for his sister’s wedding last spring, which he was still paying off. When the good officer found Bells at the Macy’s warehouse but couldn’t find the FBI agent, he decided to give Bells a “Pasadena” and gave him a lift to the edge of town, advising him to make himself scarce for a while. Bells grinned to himself. It always helped to have friends on the force.

  When he got to the crest of the viaduct, Bells stopped and stared out at the line of floats waiting to go through the tunnel. Gina and Mikey-boy were on one of these things. He’d seen them trying to sneak out of the warehouse, jumping on the float with the cool dinosaurs. He could’ve caught up with them, but there were too many people around by then—workers, truck drivers, people out in the street. He couldn’t have done anything. But that’s okay, he thought. This’ll be better.

  The last float in line was waiting at the bottom of the hill. There was a guy standing guard down there. Bells stared at him. The guy wasn’t big and he wasn’t small. Bells kept his arms folded, fingers under his armpits, his breath forming clouds on the cold night, like the headless horseman’s horse. He wasn’t wearing a coat, but he wished he were. Big Dom’s big automatic didn’t fit in the pocket of his suit coat, and he didn’t like the feel of that big hunk of metal in his belt at the center of his back. He looked down at the guy standing guard and thought about throwing the goddamn thing away. Too friggin’ noisy. But then he thought about Buddha and his entourage and decided he’d better hang on to it.

  Up ahead, closer to the tunnel entrance, the line of floats was crawling like a fiesta-colored caterpillar, real big but real slow. The last dozen floats hadn’t even started to move yet. When the caterpillar got where it was going on the New York side, the head would be asleep before the tail even got started. That’s what his old man used to say when they used to come up here to see the floats off when he was a kid. It was a ritual with his father. He never saw a whole lot of his old man back then, basically because his father was a nighttime kind of a guy. But coming to see the floats on the night before Thanksgiving was perfect for him. It was a family thing he could do with his son late at night. Bells always used to look forward to it.

  Every year his father would say the same thing about the floats looking like a big friggin’ caterpillar. After the first few years, it got to be like a game, Bells waiting for when he’d say it. Bells always figured when he’d have kids, he’d take them here the night before Turkey Day and tell them the same thing. The big friggin’ caterpillar with the head asleep and the tail awake. Yup, that’s what he’d tell them. His three girls. That’s what he wanted. He hadn’t given up hope yet. He’d never give up hope.

  Three girls. He’d always seen it that way, him with his girls. Like that old Jackie Gleason movie where he’s got this daughter, and he spoils her rotten, but the kid’s real sharp, doesn’t miss a trick. That’s why he wanted girls. Girls had it all over boys. Especially if you brought ’em up right.

  Bells started walking down the hump of the viaduct toward the last float, Santa’s float. A sleigh and eight tiny reindeer. Except these babies weren’t tiny. He never cared much for the Santa Claus float when he was a kid. It was always pretty much the same thing every year. But his daughters? He knew they would get a big kick out of Santa because Bells would make sure Santa brought them everything they could ever want. Even ponies, if that’s what they wanted.

  He could never figure out why men got so nuts about having to have sons. Sure, there’s the carrying-on-the-name thing, but if you look at it objectively, boys are real pains in the ass. They’re rough, they break things, they have more problems growing up, they’re prone to more diseases and defects. Then they just grow up stupid. Like dogs. You show a guy a piece of meat, he goes right for it. No subtlety. By and large, men don’t think beyond what’s in front of them. That’s why he never wanted a crew. Dealing with Stanley was enough. Ten Stanleys would drive him nuts.

  The difference between boys and girls was so obvious, he couldn’t believe everyone didn’t think the way he did. For example, you watch your average guy play pool. He’ll never even think about using bank shots or combination shots unless there’s absolutely nothing left he can do. With most guys, everything’s gotta be direct. Now, girls aren’t like that. They’re subtle. They’re cool. They can learn how to play the game. See, winning a game is different from mastering a game, and guys just play to win. Girls don’t do that. They want to do things the right way. You bring a girl up right, she can really be something. That’s why he wanted girls.

  His wife Margie hadn’t been brought up right. She was brought up on the moon. She couldn’t have babies, she was useless. Just as well, though. She would’ve brought ’em up all wrong. They would’ve tried to do things behind his back. Just like she did.

  Now, Gina DeFresco was sharp, but she hadn’t been brought up right either. Not really. She was stubborn, like a guy. Hardheaded. She also lived in a dreamland. She wanted people to think she was tough, but she wasn’t. Back when they were in school together, she was always reading stuff about the past, drawing these fantasyland pictures of castles and unicorns and shit in her notebooks, wanting to live somewhere else, in some other time, looking for something better, looking for magic. She wasn’t brought up right. You make your own magic happen, now, in the present. That’s what he was going to teach his girls. He wasn’t gonna let them get polluted with all that stupid someday-my-prince-will-come crap.

  Gina was like most girls, though. Always wishing and a-hoping for Prince Charming to come down the pike. Just brought up wrong, that’s all there was to it. She was probably in fantasyland right now, thinking she was safe. Just jump on a float and fly away, escape from reality. Dumb, Gina. Very dumb. But that’s the way she is. She’s looking all over the place for magic when she should’ve learned how to make her own magic. She’s very unrealistic. Still, she isn’t totally worthless.

  As he walked closer to Santa’s float, the guy standing guard finally noticed him and froze where he stood. Bells exhaled a laugh through his nose. See? So obvious. The guy’s tense, stiff, instantly belligerent. Typical male. He reminded Bells of Mikey-boy.

  Mikey-boy the FBI agent. Mr. Gallant. Prince Charming. In his mind, maybe. Hopelessly predictable. And teamed up with Gina, even worse. She was gonna tell him they could escape on this magic carpet in her mind, the big fuzzy caterpillar, and he was gonna listen to her, the jerk. That was the other problem with guys: they listen to women. Any guy who listens to a broad doesn’t see the bank shots, the combinations, the angles. He’s too direct. The lady complains—bang—he tries to please her. Action, reaction. Call and response. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the people in this world just weren’t brought up right. They don’t think; they just react. They’re no better than snails.

  Bells strolled over to Santa’s float and checked out the reindeer. The guy standing guard had that high-testosterone look, the bug-eyed frown—it’s mine, and you can’t have it. The guy followed Bells around the side of the float as Bells gazed up at the sleigh-tower where Santa would be riding tomorrow.

  When Bells moved closer and touched the shredded white paper that was supposed to be snow, the guy barked: “Hey! Whatta’ya doin’ over there?”

  Bells grinned. “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.”

  “Well, go dream someplace else.”

  Bells left his hand on the paper snow for a moment, then put it in his pocket. He didn’t move away from the float, though. Just looked at the guy as the guy glared at him.

  “Is there something you want, pal?”

  Bells shrugged and shook his head.

  “Then move away from the float . . . please.”

  Bells smiled. The please told him a lot. He had the guy thinking twice about him. Good.

  The truck’s engine rumbled, and the paper snow shivered. Bells waited.

  The guy took a ste
p closer. “Hey, mister, I don’t want any trouble here.”

  That meant he did, but he didn’t. He wanted trouble only if he knew for certain that he could kick the intruder’s ass. Bells stroked the paper snow and looked at him, waiting for him to make up his mind.

  “Hey, pal, I’m not playing games here. You understand what I’m saying?” He moved in a little closer, testing the distance to see if Bells would react. A typical predator, a coward with big teeth. Won’t attack until he’s sure there won’t be any retaliation.

  Bells just looked at him, dragging his fingers across the paper shreds.

  “Get your hand off that. You’re gonna damage the float.”

  Bells smiled when he heard the guy say “damage.” Official language. High-test males love jargon. It sets them apart, makes them special. Just like cops.

  “I’m telling you for the last time, pal. Get away from the float.”

  Bells did nothing. The truck engine revved, and the float started to move. Bells closed his fist on a handful of paper snow and let the movement of the float uproot it. He looked at it in his hand, then let it go. White shreds floated to his feet, a few strands sticking to his pants.

  The guy charged like a bull. Bells had caused “damage,” so now the man had a reason to act, reasonable cause. Guys always need defensible reasons. He rushed up to Bells and reached for his lapel. “Hey! I told you—”

  Bells brushed the guy’s hand aside and in one fluid motion spun the poor bastard around and pulled the guy’s back to his chest.

  “Hey! Whatta’ya doin’?”

  Bells had his wrists crossed on the guy’s chest, gripping both of his lapels. Bells pulled, using the guy’s jacket collar to cut off the blood supply passing through the large arteries along the sides of his neck. Bells could never remember the right name for those arteries. A Green Beret he knew a long time ago told him, but he forgot. The Green Beret showed him this move, told him that you could make a person black out in ten seconds doing this, but that you had to be careful because one person in a hundred will die when you do this to them. He even let Bells try it on him, telling Bells not to worry, he wasn’t one of those people because he’d had it done to him plenty of times before. Bells never found out if that was true or not because he shot the jerk through the eye before he came to. He owed Buddha money, and there was no way he could ever pay up. He might have been a Green Beret in the army, but he was a bum out on the street. He should’ve stayed in the army.