But he needed the ring, to give to Marissa when the time was right. Then when she was dead, like her parents, he could pawn it off and make his thousand bucks. Not that a thousand bucks would mean anything to him then.
Yeah, it would’ve been nice if Adam Bloom had come home on time and Johnny had killed him like he’d planned to, but everything else had gone so well since then that he couldn’t exactly complain. After he left the house on Monday evening, he dumped the stolen car in a supermarket parking lot way out in Flushing and got rid of the backpack and the sweatshirt that had gotten blood on it. Then he washed up in the bathroom of a gas station and hailed a livery cab and had the driver drop him off around the corner from the movie theater on Fifty- ninth at about eight o’clock. He was only about a half hour late, and he told Marissa the subways were running slow and he couldn’t call her from underground. She wasn’t upset, because she’d been running late, too, and had just gotten there. The movie was about to start, so they decided to go in and get something to eat afterward. Not that she seemed interested in actually watching the movie. While they were in the back of the movie theater, making out, he was replaying the murder in his head. Were there any loose ends? He couldn’t think of any. He’d gotten rid of all the evidence, and the cops had probably already arrested Tony. Hopefully Tony would go to jail for the rest of his life or get the death penalty. If Tony had an alibi, the cops might try to pin the murder on Adam. That would work out really well for Johnny, too. Johnny needed to get rid of Adam for the rest of his plan to work, and it didn’t really matter if Adam was rotting in a jail cell or six feet underground as long as he was gone for good.
After the movie, Johnny took a leak, and when he met Marissa back in the lobby and saw her looking so upset, talking to somebody on her cell, he knew she’d heard the news. Johnny lived for moments like these. He got to play a role, be another person and, even better, be this great guy everybody loved.
Johnny knew that Marissa needed him to take charge, and he handled it beautifully, putting her in the cab, telling her all the right things. At the house, Adam was totally buying into his shit, too, and Johnny played it just right, hugging him, literally giving him a shoulder to cry on about three hours after killing his wife. Seriously, did it get any better than that?
While Adam and Marissa were hugging and slobbering like babies, Johnny was listening in on a conversation between a gray- haired detective- later he’d find out his name was Clements- and some other cop. Although Johnny was only catching bits and pieces, it sounded like they weren’t sold on the idea that Tony had killed Dana Bloom. Johnny didn’t know why this was, but he didn’t waste a second and started working on his backup plan. See, this was what set Johnny apart from the two- bit criminals who were crammed into jails all over the country- he never got complacent; his mind was always working, thinking ahead.
Naturally Marissa asked him to sit next to her while Clements was questioning her. She needed him so badly now, she couldn’t bear to be without him for even a few minutes. Johnny loved it when Clements asked Adam if he could “wait in the other room;” the look on his face was priceless, like he already knew what was about to go down and how screwed he was and how there was nothing he could do to stop it. Then Clements asked Marissa about Adam, if she’d ever seen him threaten Dana, and it was beautiful how Marissa mentioned Adam had pushed Dana that one time and knocked her down. Now Clements was really starting to believe that Adam was his man.
When Johnny finally got alone with Marissa in her room, and she was telling him how lucky she was to have him and saying she wanted to feel him inside her, Johnny knew she was officially his. He’d hooked her so good, there was no way she was getting away now. He made love to her, slowly and passionately, the way only Johnny Long could, and then he picked up where Clements had left off, trying to get her to believe that her father had killed her mother. He knew he had to handle this carefully, not come on too strong, blaming her father. He had to let her think that it was her idea, that she’d come up with it on her own. It worked, and it was incredible- he felt like he was in total control of this girl, like he could get her to do or think anything he wanted her to. And with Adam’s own daughter believing he was guilty, who would he have to defend him?
When Adam was gone, Johnny would ask Marissa to marry him, and, come on, at this point how could she not say yes? She was already dependent on him, and when both her parents were gone she’d be desperate to start a new family. When they were married- and the way things were going, that could only be a few months from now- he’d make sure he was in her will, as her sole beneficiary, because who else would there be? She sure as hell wouldn’t want her father, that murderer, to get anything. Then Marissa would die in some “unfortunate accident”- the poor Blooms, they’d had so much tragedy in their lives- and Johnny would have everything he’d ever wanted.
Marissa was so convinced that her father was guilty, she was afraid to be in the house with him alone. Johnny said he would stay with her for as long she wanted him to-“forever if I have to”- but then her grandmother, Adam’s mother, arrived, and Johnny wanted out. He got a bad vibe from the old lady from the get- go and knew she wouldn’t be as easy to win over as the other Blooms.
“I think she hates me,” Johnny had said to Marissa. “No, that’s just the way she’s been with all my boyfriends,” Marissa said. “It’s because you’re a shagetz.”
“A what?”
“Because you’re not Jewish. My grandmother has always had this stupid thing in her head about me having to marry a Jewish guy someday even though we’re not at all religious.”
“How does she know I’m not Jewish?”
“She knows,” Marissa said, and that was exactly what Johnny was worried about. If the old lady could tell he wasn’t Jewish, what else could she tell? Johnny didn’t want to take any chances, especially when everything was going so well.
With her grandma staying in the guest room next door, Marissa didn’t seem as worried about being in the same house with her father, so Johnny came up with a good excuse to go back to his apartment- he needed to get his suit for the funeral. Marissa wanted to go with him but decided she should probably stay and be with her family.
When Johnny left, the reporters, who’d been camped out there all day, swarmed him, shouting questions. Johnny told them he was just “a friend of the family,” and he didn’t stop to talk to them. At the subway station, he bought the Post and News. Marissa had already told him that Tony had an alibi for the murder and might be off the hook and that Adam was the main suspect now, but even the papers that had come out early this morning were slamming Adam. Each paper had about two or three pages on the story, focusing on how Adam Bloom, the crazed vigilante who had shot and killed an intruder in his house less than two weeks ago, was now a suspect in his wife’s murder. While the articles focused on Tony as a suspect, the Post called the Blooms “the philandering couple” and said that the Blooms’ marriage had been “in crisis” since the break- in and that Adam Bloom might have “snapped again” and killed his wife. And Johnny loved that Clements had called Adam “a person of interest” in the case. Reading this on the subway to Brooklyn, he couldn’t help laughing out loud. For years, Johnny had been running away from the cops, and now, in a weird way, a cop was actually helping him get the biggest score of his life. He almost felt like Clements deserved a cut of the action.
Later on during the subway ride, Johnny spotted the couple with the engagement ring. He wouldn’t need the ring for a while, but he’d learned a long time ago that when an opportunity comes along to get what you want, go for it, because you don’t know when you’ll get that chance again.
At his apartment, he was checking out the ring- it didn’t have any noticeable flaws; maybe it was worth more than he’d thought- when he got a text from Marissa:
I miss you so so much!!
Man, Johnny loved his life. In the morning, Johnny met Marissa outside the funeral home in Forest Hills. She was already a mess- dark circles under her bloodshot eyes, streaks of mascara on her cheeks- so he had to shift right into supportive boyfriend mode. This might’ve been hard to pull off for some guys, but not for Johnny. He even managed to squeeze out some tears.
The funeral seemed to take forever, the rabbi going on about what a wonderful, caring person Dana had been and how much she’d be missed. At one point the rabbi called her “a loving wife.” And Johnny- probably like everybody else in the chapel- was thinking, Yeah, but loving to who?
Everyone was sobbing, especially Marissa and Adam. But Adam was almost crying too much. It seemed to Johnny that a lot of Adam’s crying was for show, not because he was faking it- he was probably actually upset- but because he knew other people, including Marissa and any reporters who’d gotten into the chapel, were watching him to make sure he was crying as much as a grieving husband should be. A couple of times Johnny saw Marissa
