“No, I’m a lawyer.”
“Like a defense attorney, that kind?”
“Sort of.” Not exactly that kind, but then, he’s not really an actor either, if you want to be truthful.
“D’you know Isabella for a long time?”
Longer than you, I thought to myself.
“About three years.
I gave her some help back then, when she was starring in Probable Cause. We became friendly after that.“
Johnny and I reminisced for a while over our drinks, and by the time Vie brought him his second Ketel One martini, Joey was ready to take our dinner order.
“No menus here. You gotta tell Joey what you want.”
“Yes, I know.” Rao’s had the best roasted peppers I had ever eaten, so I chose them for an appetizer, while Johnny got both Ls the baked clams and the seafood salad for himself. Joey Ier suggested the shells with cabbage and sausage, and the lemon chicken. Johnny added another pasta and some salad, as if he had been pumping iron without eating for five days.
“So did Iz talk about me a lot?”
“She told me a lot about you, yes.”
“Good things, mostly?” he said jokingly.
“We had some good times together, her and me.”
The English major in me winced. He may have been great in bed, but his syntax was as atrocious as his manners. He was shoving the bread in his mouth each time he came up for air, rinsing it down with the vodka.
“Did Isabella tell you how we met and everything? We was a hot ticket for a while.”
Enough about me, now let’s talk about what Iz thought about me. This was going to be a long evening.
Garelli wanted to make sure I knew all about his career.
The appetizers came and he inhaled his clams without missing a beat, taking me through his days in the Marine Corps. Stallone was his role model; he’d discovered Garelli when he got out of the service and cast him as a soldier of fortune in one of those blockbuster summer movies that I would have paid dearly never to have to see in my life.
“He was good to me, man, still is. Semper Fi.”
“Did you have to learn all that technical business about guns for the movie?” I asked, realizing as soon as I did that it was not the most subtle approach for the nature of the investigation.
His head was apparently thicker than his deltoids ‘cause he didn’t seem to get the connection at all.
“Are you kidding?
Didn’t Isabella tell you how I taught her to shoot when we were in Central America making that Clancy movie? Man, I grew up on that stuff, from G.I. Joe right to the Marines.“
“No, she just talked about your romance.” That had been nearly enough to make me question her sanity. I suppose I hadn’t asked too many more details.
“We used to sit around at night, drinking and making love. There wasn’t much else to do down there. I tried to teach her how to shoot. We’d set up the empty vodka bottles on a tree stump in the jungle and blast them to pieces.
Some day what do you call those guys archaeologists?
Someday, one of ‘em will come along and do a dig right on that movie set. Iz used to say they’d think the Aztecs had invented Absolut, there’d be nothing but fragments of glass buried there.
“Then I could really make her laugh when I could nail one of them snakes, you know, like when they were moving?
Man, she hated those snakes. Green mambos. Those jungles were full of ‘em. She used to say she never wanted to see another snakeskin shoe or pocketbook in her life. I could spot those suckers as soon as they came out in the daylight to sun themselves and I could blast ’em in half while they tried to slither back into their holes. It used to be quite a game. Iz had a nice reward for me every time I killed her a green mambo.“ He winked at me, so I was sure to know that Isabella was taking good care of Johnny’s snake whenever he played sharpshooter.
To me it seemed like quite a skill. Not one that I wanted to master, much as I hated snakes. But Garelli had to be pretty good with a gun to hit that kind of skinny moving target. ey Plates were exchanged for other plates, Maureen continued to ply the jukebox with dollar bills so that fine music constantly flowed out of it, and Johnny sluggedvodka as if it were the last time he would ever have rer anything to drink. he “Why do you think the police want to talk to you?” I asked naively.
“Do you know anything about Isabella’s murderer ”Clueless, Alice, I am really clueless.“
I didn’t correct him on my name. He was pretty drunk, and I guess his mind was on the dancer he was due to meet in another hour.
“They ran me through every conversation I had with her lately, wanted to know about the man she was with all week, wanted to know which of her lovers she’d fought with. I guess they’ll do the same with you,” I suggested to him.
“Well, they’ll get shit from me excuse my language, sweetheart. She and me didn’t see each other for weeks.
We talked on the phone, she was some kinda tease, but if these motherfuckers think they’re gonna dredge up my past and try to knock me outta the box, they got another thought coming.“
“You got a lawyer?”
“No way, man. I mean I got a lawyer back home, I got plenty of lawyers. But you walk into a police station with a lawyer, those cops know you did something wrong. I can go in by myself, tell ‘em what they wanna know, and take the Fifth when I feel like it. I’m not payin’ some sleazebag to tell me, ”You don’t have to answer that, Johnny.“ I been around the block a few times. No problem.”
Garelli was working the tortoni now, for dessert, and Rick had brought over a bottle of anisette to place on the table.
The espresso was thick as mud and delicious, but Johnny cut his with the syrupy liquor, as though he needed more fuel. He lit a cheap cigar, leaned forward and eyeballed me.
“They ask you anything about me and Iz?”
“Yeah. They asked me some things, and I know they’ve been talking to a lot of other people about you, too.”
“They tell you what they know about me, I mean, besides me being like in the movies?”
“They haven’t told me everything. I know they talked about your bad temper, your fights with Isabella-‘ ”Shit, that’s nothing to talk about. That is zero, nada. You know these cops. They any good? Or are they complete fuck- ups, like the ones in L.A.?“
“I don’t really know them. There’s some jerk from the FBI who thinks he’s running the show.”
“Yeah, Luther Waldo or something like that. Did they find out anything about you they didn’t already know?”
Boy, am I the wrong one to ask.
“Yeah, actually, they did.”
“Something bad?”
“Very bad.” Put Tina on again, Maureen. Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?
Now Johnny was puzzled. He had been convinced the meeting with the cops was going to be a complete cake-walk when he agreed to do it.
“D’you have something to hide?”
“I didn’t know it at the time, Johnny, but it turns out that I did. Why, is there something you don’t want them to know.”
I had started to confide in him, and he leaned further into my face to return the favor by trying to trust me with his secrets.
“I didn’t have anything to do with killing Isabella and, man, you know she coulda driven me to it but I;y got things I don’t want nobody to know about. We all do,, don’t we?” “You bet.”,s “They’re gonna wanna know where I
