Every Dead Thing

“Willie, I need my car. The taxi drivers are treating me like an old friend. Some of them have even stopped trying to rip me off. I’ve considered hiring a rental car to save myself embarrassment. In fact, the only reason I haven’t hit you for a car is that you said the repairs would take a day or two at most.”

Willie slouched over to the car and nudged a cylindrical piece of metal with the toe of his boot.

“ Arno, what’s the deal on Bird’s Mustang?”

“It’s shit,” said Arno. “Tell him we’ll give him five hundred dollars to scrap it.”

“ Arno says to give you five hundred to scrap it.”

“I heard him. Tell Arno I’ll burn his house down if he doesn’t fix my car.”

“Day after tomorrow,” came a voice from under the hood. “Sorry for the delay.”

Willie clapped me on the shoulder with a greasy hand.

“Come up for a coffee, listen to the local gossip.” Then, quietly: “Angel wants to see you. I told him you’d be around.”

I nodded and followed him up the stairs. Inside the office, which was surprisingly neat, four men sat around a desk drinking coffee and whiskey from tin mugs. I nodded to Tommy Q, who I’d busted once for handling pirated video-cassettes, and a thickly mustached hot-wire guy known, unsurprisingly, as Groucho. Beside him sat Willie’s other assistant, Jay, who, at sixty-five, was ten years older than Willie but looked at least ten years older than that again. Beside him sat Coffin Ed Harris.

“You know Coffin Ed?” said Willie.

I nodded. “Still boosting dead guys, Ed?”

“Naw, man,” said Coffin Ed. “I gave all that up a long time ago. I got a bad back.”

Coffin Ed Harris had been the kidnapper to beat all kidnappers. Coffin Ed figured that live hostages were too much like real work, since there was no telling what they might do or who might come looking for them. The dead were easier to handle, so Coffin Ed took to robbing mortuaries.

He would watch the death notices, pick a decedent who came from a reasonably wealthy family, and then steal the corpse from the mortuary or the funeral home. Until Coffin Ed came along and bucked the system, funeral homes weren’t usually well guarded. Coffin Ed would store the corpses in an industrial freezer he kept in his basement and then ask for a ransom, usually nothing too heavy. Most of the relatives were quite happy to pay in order to get their loved ones back before they started to rot.

He did well until some old Polish aristocrat took offense at his wife’s remains being held for ransom and hired a private army to go looking for Coffin Ed. They found him, although Coffin Ed just about got away through a bolt-hole in his cellar that led to his neighbor’s yard. He got the last laugh, too. The power company had cut off Ed’s electricity three days before because he hadn’t been paying his bills. The old Pole’s wife stank like a dead possum by the time they found her. Since then, things had gone downhill for Coffin Ed, and he now presented a down-at-the-heel figure in the back of Willie Brew’s garage.

There was an uneasy silence for a moment, which was broken by Willie.

“You remember Vinnie No Nose?” said Willie, handing me a steaming cup of black coffee, which was already turning the tin mug red hot but still couldn’t hide the smell of gasoline from its interior. “Wait’ll you hear Tommy Q’s story. You ain’t missed nothing yet.”

Vinnie No Nose was a B amp;E guy out of Newark who had taken one fall too many and had decided to reform, or at least to reform as far as any guy can who has made a living for forty years by ripping off other people’s apartments. He got his nickname from a long, unsuccessful involvement with amateur boxing. Vinnie, small and a potential victim for any New Jersey lowlife with a penchant for inflicting violence, saw an ability to use his fists as his potential salvation, like lots of other short guys from rough neighborhoods. Sadly, Vinnie’s defense was about as good as the Son of Sam’s, and his nose was eventually reduced to a mush of cartilage with two semiclosed nostrils like raisins in a pudding.

Tommy Q proceeded to tell a story involving Vinnie, a decorating company, and a dead gay client that could have put him in court if he’d told it in a respectable place of employment. “So the fruit ends up dead, in a bathroom, with this chair up his ass, and Vinnie ends up back in jail for peddling the pics and stealing the dead guy’s video,” he concluded, shaking his head at the strange ways of non-heterosexual males. He was still laughing his ass off at the story when the smile died on his face and the laugh turned into a kind of choking sound in his throat. I looked behind me to see Angel in the shadows, curly black hair spilling out from under his blue watch cap and with a sparse growth of beard that would have made a thirteen-year-old laugh. A dark blue longshoreman’s jacket hung open over a black T-shirt, and his blue jeans ended in dirty, well-worn Timber-lands.