The Accidental Pallbearer by Frank Lentricchia Read Free Book Online Page A

oreo bitch never set her ass in my shop.”
    The third responds, “Let me check my book. Oh yeah, she comes here, but she had no appointment at 10:45 on Friday. She had her hair done two weeks ago on a Monday at 4:30.”
    “Do me a favor?”
    “I don’t cut white hair. That’s beyond me.”
    “Keep the gift certificate a secret until her birthday, which is in three weeks.”
    “My lips are sealed. Be sure to put that check in the mail now – real soon, dear.”

CHAPTER 8
    Conte’s arm feels like a 500-pound boulder as he places the phone back into its cradle. Goes to the kitchen, pours a very large Johnnie Walker on the rocks and carries it to the front window where he stares, glass in hand, at the rain that has thickened again – wind-driven now in a mean slant against the house. The Robinsons had lied. He hasn’t touched his drink when he abruptly returns to the kitchen – pours the Johnnie Walker into the sink – leans over low and inhales the rising odor of expensive scotch.
    He’d always known Millicent Robinson as a woman of subtle indirection, but she’d made it almost crudely clear. After all my Italophilic husband has done for you, whether you believe our story or not, you owe us and let’s not ever pretend you ride a white horse. Add Coca to the filth you swim in. Do it for Tony, if you love him.
    Michael C is not a rapist, he’s convinced, but then what exactly has he done to make himself so threatening to the Robinsons that Antonio wouldn’t reveal it to his brother-in-all-but-blood, whom he’d asked to take Coca “out of play”? Whatever that means. How had he put it before going off to High Mass? Ram the fear of Our fuckin’ Lord hard up hisass. Whatever that means. Should he confront Antonio? Or play along?
    For Eliot Conte, time seems never to pass or (greatest of all blessings) disappear, except at the opera. (Sex too, formerly.) His practice consists mainly of repetitively sordid cases of adultery. Of background checks that rarely turn up anything surprising. Of runaway kids he sometimes locates and retrieves, but mostly doesn’t. Of hours of butt-numbing surveillance, sitting in his car, pissing in an empty coffee cup, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and, if he’s lucky, at the end of it all, snapping a compromising picture with a telephoto lens. So much for doing good for Utica.
    He’ll play along, why not, and maybe become the lead character, the tragically flawed but essentially decent guy, as he fancies himself, in a story whose end lay hidden, like those time-killing Scandinavian detective thrillers he’d been reading lately one after another as fast as he could. The very sorts of novels that the author of a UCLA Master’s thesis on Melville and Faulkner used to scorn – well-wrought pulp, elegant trash, and altogether mind-blowing (like the opera always, like sex once was) and a total cure while the books lasted. The treacherous hard stuff that he abuses, usually alone on Saturday nights, in order to obliterate time and thought, only hurls him deeper into depression and the dead time of boredom that seems never to pass.
    They would play him for a fool. Okay. He’ll play the fool. Meanwhile, on yet another lonely, time-crawling Sunday afternoon, Jed Kinter awaits his attention.
    He’s leaning low over the sink – hoping futilely for a buzz in the brain.

    Castellano’s Artistic Flowers, at the corner of Rutger and Culver, has a front entrance on Rutger and a side entrance on Culver. The two-family house where Castellano occupies the first floor and the Kinters the second is just around the corner on Culver. Conte calls ahead and tells Castellano that he’d like to meet him at the shop.
    Castellano says, “It’s Sunday, for God sakes. Come to the house.”
    Conte responds, “Do me the favor of meeting me at the shop.”
    Castellano says, “I’ll see you at the side entrance.”
    Conte responds, “Indulge me, Tom. I need to come to the front