Concrete Angel Read online

  For Philip

  ...the love of my life.

  When I was twelve, my mother shot a soda-pop salesman she’d known less than eight hours. She used the gun Daddy had bought a few weeks earlier, telling her it was to keep us safe now that their divorce was final and he’d be living too far away to protect us. He taught Mother how to fire, load, and clean it, taking her to practice shooting at a nearby gun range.

  Daddy was right. There was a dangerous, if imperceptible, current coursing down that suburban street because it was only a few weeks later that the incident occurred. Jerry Santini walked out of our bathroom, saw my mother removing bills from his wallet, and headed for the phone—mumbling something about a “thieving bitch” and “not getting away with it.”

  Mother, adept at identifying potential danger and acting quickly on it, moved toward the drawer where she’d placed the gun, planning only—or so she insisted later—to stop him from making the call.

  Stymied by our blood red telephone, a Swedish import with the dial on the bottom, whimsically called an Ericafone, Jerry’s attempt to reach the police was thwarted. Mother caught him in the chest, the ribs, the thigh; she emptied the entire chamber, in fact. He’d been shooting his mouth off when she started pulling the trigger.

  “He had this idea I was running a scam, luring men up to our apartment with the intention of robbing them,” Mother said. “Can you imagine?”

  Jerry couldn’t have known my mother had run up against the police and their tactics before, that his reference to her being thrown in jail was anathema to her. Or that his words would send her into a fugue state where her actions were unpredictable, centered entirely on self-preservation. And his particular threat of incarceration was more potent than raising his fist or shoving her around. Physical retribution she would’ve accepted as fair payback or tolerable, at least. If he’d only kept still after his first threat, he might’ve survived. But he made the inevitable move toward the phone, persisting in saying what he’d do and seemingly acting on it.

  So however it happened, whatever state Mother was in, and whatever Jerry Santini said, or did, or didn’t do, she shot and killed him, emptying the gun and letting it clatter on the hardwood floor. Or perhaps I only imagine such a clatter. I couldn’t vouch for it having been asleep at the time.

  There wasn’t much Jerry did know after only an hour or two’s acquaintance. Our apartment gave the impression of belonging to a woman who wouldn’t need to rob a man of, at most, forty dollars. Having her child asleep in the next room would also seem to preclude her undertaking a robbery much less a fatal shooting. These were certainly rational thoughts—they just didn’t explain a woman like my mother.

  The things Jerry Santini knew were purely physical ones: the feel of her skin, the taste of her lips, her scent, which still wafted on the air he no longer breathed. Some pricey perfume, purchased with the contents of some other guy’s wallet he might have reasoned if he managed to smell it while looking futilely for that strangely placed dial.

  Mother met Jerry Santini at a shoe-repair shop earlier that day. She was always a sucker for a man who took care of his clothing, and Jerry wore an expensive pair of well-polished, buttery-black wingtips. There were no holes in his socks, an item she examined carefully over the top of the wooden stall. She was disproportionately impressed by appearance, often judging people solely on such things.

  “We were sitting side by side in those little cubicles,” Mother told me later, an untoward strand of merriment in her voice given the day’s outcome. “I wonder why cobblers think nicely stockinged feet need to be hidden. Jimmy—”

  “Jerry,” I corrected her. “His name is—was—Jerry.”

  “Right. Well, Jerry made a joke about that very thing.”

  They kidded around about similar stuff, striking an immediate, although ultimately, deadly rapport.

  “I put these socks on clean this morning—so my feet can’t smell,” he’d said, sticking a foot out as proof. Witty repartee wasn’t in his arsenal.

  Oh, they were jolly at first, or so she made it seem in the story I heard.

  She invited him up to her apartment where she served him stuffed figs, cocktail nuts, dates, and several dry martinis before taking him to bed. She’d given up cooking for men after a nasty episode a few years earlier, but kept prepared foods such as these on hand for potential guests—items looking attractive in a cut-glass bowl. We often made a Sunday dinner of the leftovers if they didn’t disappear on Saturday night.

  “Good thing you like sardines and chicken liver, kiddo. Dinner will improve when we can split a bottle of wine.”

  I nodded my agreement, pathetically anxious to take on the role of Mother’s confidante rather than her child. Perhaps a glass of wine would seal it.

  “It was the briefest of encounters—Jerry’s and mine,” she told me much later, in a half-humorous, half-disdainful voice.

  I smiled, pretending to understand what her words meant, not knowing yet what shared information or intimacy would come to mean.

  After shooting her date with a degree of marksmanship no one would’ve predicted given her single lesson in firearms, Mother shook me awake, but failed to convince me, even after several attempts, that he’d tried to strangle her.

  “Look at the marks, Christine,” she hissed, as if Jerry Santini might be listening. “Right here.”

  Head cocked, her nails expertly polished a pearly pink, she massaged her throat like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. I tried to see some marks. I badly wanted to see at least an early blossoming of bruises though its importance was not yet clear to me. But her neck was white and blemishless.

  She dropped onto my bed and began to sob, claiming no one ever took her side. It was then she confessed she may have peeked inside this man’s wallet, an action she’d been forced to take given our current position.

  “I thought the odd ten perhaps.”

  When I didn’t immediately fall in with this idea, didn’t know, in fact, what she was talking about, she added, “Your father’s so stingy. How he can expect us to live on...”

  In order to cut-off a comprehensive recitation of how she’d been wronged over the years, I threw myself on top of her, listening to her hammering heart through the thin fabric of her negligee, crying the next minute myself. I did feel responsible for her current unhappiness. If it weren’t for my presence, Mother and Jerry might’ve gone to a nightclub or theater where she wouldn’t have been tempted. Or, she might have been able to steal the odd twenty dollars less conspicuously—blaming its loss on a waitress or busboy. I had a vague memory of an incident like this before. Was it a scam after all?

  Or maybe they would’ve gone to his apartment, where no gun conveniently waited in a drawer. My role in this debacle was growing large. I listened to her heartbeat, the one I’d first heard in the womb. Its ferocity made it impossible to ignore. I was already setting myself up for the upcoming finale. Preparing myself for the role I’d soon play—the one I’d always perform for my mother. The role I wanted to play.

  I hadn’t heard any of the activity in the living room because my mother had turned on Saturday Night Live before Jerry and she made love, and it was still playing. As Mother showed me her throat, sobbing over her ill-treatment by men and me, the Swedish rock group ABBA was singing the eerily appropriate SOS. I’d slept right through the early SNL skits about bumblebees and cheeseburgers, the lovemaking going on in the next room and, more blessedly, the gunfire. Only Mother, screaming in my ear, was loud enough to wake me.

  After our expiating sob fest, we linked hands and tiptoed into the living room—as if we might be disturbing someone—to examine the consequences of Mother’s greatest faux pas, me still clinging to the pale hope her imagination ha
d gotten the best of her. Or, at the very least, that the wound was not a fatal one. She continued to jabber away, pretending we were looking at some ordinary mishap—like a broken vase or a ruined piece of furniture— so the oddness and horror of finding a dead body in my living room didn’t immediately sink in.

  The room had the dreamlike atmosphere of an old crime movie, the ones we liked to watch on late-night TV. But how could the dead body on the floor be genuine when the rest of the room was still the familiar place where I’d watched Mary Tyler Moore and The Bob Newhart Show a few hours earlier? The tableaux seemed to exist on two planes—the everyday and the surreal—as was often the case with my mother.

  “Lying there looking so innocent after what he tried to do,” Mother said. “He seemed like such a nice guy this morning. You never can tell, I guess,” she said, sounding surprised by his sudden change—as if he’d pulled something over on her.

  At that moment, I’d no idea how or where she’d met him, vaguely imagining he’d appeared at the door posing a threat of some kind, perhaps deserving his fate.

  “How many times did you fire the gun?” I asked, looking at the blood. It’d puddled extensively and it was shockingly red. I’d never considered that blood might come in different shades. Our embarrassingly out-of-date black and white TV had shielded me from the true redness of blood. The black blood on TV was somehow less startling—less of a life force, similar to sludge.

  Everything in the room seemed heightened in hue. The color palette had transformed itself into something brilliant: a pale green carpet, two aqua chairs, a chartreuse sofa. And the red, red blood.

  “Well, how many bullets were in the thing?” Mother asked, avoiding the menacing word gun. “Look, I fired until the gun was empty at the shooting range—the one your father took me to,” she explained. “I guess I did the same thing here tonight. I don’t remember much.”

  This seemed reasonable to my twelve-year-old ears. She was probably in shock. I’d often heard such reasoning given on The Rockford Files or McMillan and Wife, my two favorite TV shows.

  “I don’t think he mentioned a last name,” she said, as if he might not have one. She was on her knees between rivulets of blood, rifling his wallet, examining his license.

  Why didn’t I find it strange she didn’t know the full name of the nearly naked man on our floor? Or that she could talk about it so dispassionately only a few minutes after it happened?

  “Santini,” she said triumphantly. “Look, he’s got a Master Charge.” Reluctantly, she slid it back into its slot—wisely forgoing any pleasure stealing it might bring.

  Mother continued to forget Jerry Santini’s name each time she was asked it in the weeks ahead—I never once heard her get it right. More often than not, she called him Joey Spatini, confusing his name with a packaged spaghetti sauce popular then.

  Sprawled on my mother’s fluffy carpeting, an item she’d made my father buy as part of their divorce settlement, Jerry Santini was certainly dead, putting to rest any notion Mother had exaggerated or misunderstood the final outcome of their tête-à-tête. It was almost impossible to stop her from immediately spraying the area with rug shampoo.

  “My God, what sort of blood did he have?” she said, aiming the can she’d retrieved from the kitchen. A line of rust circled the can’s bottom, suggesting its potency was questionable.

  “He seemed normal enough this afternoon,” she repeated.

  Later, when I studied Macbeth in high school, the vision of Mother, poised with her can of stain remover, would run through my head in slow motion, her finger moving inexorably toward the button.

  “Hey, you’re not supposed to touch anything,” I said, quickly clapping my hand over the nozzle. My voice and knees were shaking as I began to fully appreciate our situation. “They can find things out from blood samples. Important things.”

  This was before the science of blood splatter or the discovery of DNA testing, but there was still information to be culled. Blood type, at least. My years of watching TV detective shows hadn’t been wasted. It hadn’t occurred to me yet that the things they would find in the police lab might not be ones Mother wanted discovered.

  She remained motionless with the can pointed at the rug, her still-rouged lips pursed in thought. I wondered if she’d held the gun so steadily fifteen minutes earlier.

  “Blood is blood. What could they possibly learn from his blood?” She turned toward me, the can still hovering over the murder scene. “It was an accident, Christine.” Her voice was whiney, annoyed. “Why must you insist on seeing this… mishap… as a crime? You make it sound like something it’s not. Make sure you use the word accident when they come tonight.”

  “Come?”

  “The police or whoever we eventually call. First impressions last longest, you know.”

  This was the sort of adage my grandmother usually came up with but, in this instance, it was probably on the mark.

  “And look,” Mother continued, “we have to protect ourselves here. They’ll be trying to pin it on me—on us.”

  Mother’s voice trailed off as she stepped back from the body. She’d already linked me with the events although I didn’t notice it then. Or perhaps I saw us as immutably linked long before. It was our apartment, our life. I should have been more vigilant and kept her safe.

  “I’m gonna call Cy. He’ll know what to do.”

  “Not Daddy?” I whispered, as if this verbal betrayal was being recorded. If she’d kept the door locked, as Daddy suggested after his handiwork a few weeks earlier, we wouldn’t be in this mess. And when had my father been stymied by any situation? He may have been away most of the time, may have been at a loss for words with me when he was home, but you could count on him in a crisis. Military training and running a business had prepared him to react with precision in tight circumstances.

  I flashed back to Rear Window, to Raymond Burr removing his wife in a suitcase. Would this be how we rid ourselves of this body? Did we have the necessary tools, a large enough suitcase?

  Mother made a sound of disgust. “How could we possibly call your father, kiddo? Look what’s lying on our rug. Think Hank would want to see that—want to figure a way out of this one?”

  He was naked except for a pair of extremely tight briefs. The bottoms of his feet were pink and plump, like he hadn’t spent much time on them. Good attendance to his feet was fitting given they’d met in a shoe repair shop. I couldn’t see his face, pushed into the rug as it was, but I had the impression he was handsome, misled by the idea Mother was rarely drawn to homely men. He had a nice head of steely black hair and wore it long in the back, which was still the style.

  Cy Granholm, the man Mother went to call, had loomed large in our life of late. In the last three months, he’d handled Mother’s divorce and child custody hearing, gone to court with her on a speeding ticket, and twice filed papers demanding an increase in child support. Mother had begun calling him at home with household predicaments too, questions about financial matters, or advice on how to fix the gurgling toilet. She’d never been much good on her own, and I wasn’t old enough to step in. My grandmother often voiced the opinion Mother’s body slanted leftward—as if it were made to lean heavily on someone else, preferably a man.

  “Cy!” I heard Mother say a few seconds later, using the phone in her bedroom. There was a trace of gaiety in her tone—probably a quality she’d cultivated long ago and couldn’t discard now—though it was unseemly. The treacherous Ericafone, with its oddly placed dial, still lay overturned on the living room floor. If the incident had happened in the bedroom, the easier-to-use baby blue princess phone might have saved Jerry’s life.

  “If it’s not too late, I could use your help, Cy.” Her words were overly precise—like she was reading a script. “No, no, you’ll have to come over here, I’m afraid. Yes, yes, as soon as possible.” She laughed a little, pretending it wasn’t too awful, that nothing was greatly amiss. “I know it’s late but I’d rather not explai
n over the phone.”

  Who could blame her? Although I would’ve liked to have had some warning of what story she’d tell Cy.

  It was past midnight and if Cy refused to come, whom could we call next? We’d run out of saviors. One thing was certain from the look on her face when I suggested it, there’d be no calling Daddy. Nor my grandmother. She’d be too full of “I told you so’s,” for Mother to tolerate. She’d be horrified, maybe having a heart attack, adding to our body count. Our list of possibilities was short, so Cy would have to come.

  In the recent past, my father would have handled the situation, found a way to wipe things clean, made the problem evaporate even if Mother disappeared with it. But now there was only the two of us to clear things up. And Cy. Only a month or two into our newly divorced state and we were already in a fix as Daddy had predicted.

  “You have no idea what the world’s like,” Daddy flung at Mother in the judge’s quarters some weeks before Jerry Santini reached for the Ericafone. “I’ve taken care of you far too well all these years, ushering you straight from your father’s bed to mine. You’re a child still, Eve. An infant.” Daddy knew this was one charge my mother despised.

  “I was about to tell him off right there, but Cy grabbed my hand, nearly crushing it,” Mother said, dabbing her eyes on the night following their divorce. “And this is the worst part.” She blew her nose noisily. “Are you ready for this?” I nodded. “Your father shouted how he could see how things were—suggesting my bed was already waiting for the next guy.” She reached for my hand. “Embarrassing me in front of both the judge and Cy,” she continued shakily. “Have you ever heard of anything so mean? Deserting us without a thought and then blaming me for hiring a decent lawyer to see us through it. Mocking me for accepting help from my own attorney. He’d prefer to see us on the streets begging pennies from strangers.”

  I nodded sympathetically.

  Mother drew herself up. “Cy’s a married man after all.” She smoothed the wrinkle in her skirt, adding somewhat sadly, “And he’s not my type—not by a long shot.”