Hello and Hapy Friday,

Try it, I hope you like it. Any comments good or bad, let me know.

Lori


GHOST TOWN

By
Lori Mathews-Shabazz
mathewsla@hotmail.com















“The phone rang while Detective Owen Story was making love to his wife.
“Leave it,” Lorna slid her hands up his chest as he rose toward the phone on the bedside stand, “It’s one in the morning.”
She looked into his eyes, the look in hers a mixture of passion and the moon light gently lighting the room. She’s beautiful Owen thought, gazing down at her before glancing at the ringing phone.
Who the hell was it? He wasn’t on duty tonight so it couldn’t be the station. News of a dead relative? Pop? But they’d seen him only a few hours ago and he’d been fine. I should just let it ring until the party on the other end gives up, but it rang again and again as he and Lorna stared at each other.
“They’re not giving up,” he said. “I’ll just get rid of whoever it is.” Lorna plopped back onto the bed as he picked up the receiver.
“Owen,” he heard and knew the voice, its sound clearing his mind.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Yeah, but I need your help.”
Without hesitating, “All right, in forty-five minutes at Babe’s.” He hung up, gathering himself before turning toward her. She’d turned on her side, her back to him.
“Giordano,” she stated it cold with bitter resignation. “Only he would have the nerve to—”
He put a restraining hand on her hip, “I promise not to be too long.”
“You haven’t seen him in more than a year, he calls up out of no where and bang; you’re gone.”
He rose off the bed and over to the closet pulling out jeans, a sweater and dressing quickly.
“Hey,” she rolled over, a slow inviting smile turning up her lips as she drew the sheet down her body, “I’ll be asleep when you return.” Her voice was soft, alluring, lighting the challenge in her green eyes, “And then it’ll be too late.”
He stumbled putting on his shoes as he silently cursed his friend but saying only, “I’ll be home as soon as I can.” Grabbing his jacket, he left the room without looking back.
“Already too late,” he heard her say as he closed the door behind him.
Forty minutes later, cold and furious at himself for leaving her, he stood behind Babe Brothers Car Emporium staring at empty brand new Chryslers and stomping his feet for warmth. I’m crazy, nuts; look at me, out here freezing-- by myself--while my wife is naked and warm at home and if I were there together we would—he shut off the thought closing his eyes; there was no use thinking about what they could be doing right now, hell, what Lorna may never do with him again, it was only making this night that much colder and him feel just that much more a shit.
Ten minutes later, a dark blue Econoline van with the word’s Rudy’s Reliable Carpet Company printed on its side pulled up, the passenger door falling open. Inside, Owen looked at the man he hadn’t seen for a long time. Giordano hadn’t changed much still looked like the young man who’d laughingly helped him fight off bullies eons ago; before life had given up a world of choices before kicking your ass for choosing the wrong ones.
“I need you to go with me back to Straw Martin,” Giordano said pulling away from the lot out onto the highway, his eyes on the road. Owen stared at him surprised as Giordano calmly glanced back, “Hopefully, this won’t take all night.”
“I haven’t been back,” Owen admitted, “not since the funeral.”
“Welcome home then.”
Without another word, Giordano headed the van toward their old stomping ground, the small town of Grange, Long Island and Owen’s old neighborhood, a place he hadn’t though about—at least not pleasantly—for six years, not since he’d buried his mother there.
As they made their way through, Owen sadly saw it had deteriorated even more than he remembered: more streets made up of second hand furniture stores, pawnshops and boarded up buildings sitting beside rickety, run down apartments and dilapidated houses with saggy porches and peeling paint.
Nearing Straw Martin, Owen realized he’d never wanted to call it home, though it had always been the residence of blue-collar workers living from paycheck to paycheck because they had no choice; who made do with what they had; who rented rundown apartments; who paid for the necessities on a week-to-week basis; who rarely looked toward the future because they couldn’t afford to or believed they didn’t have one. He knew it well, the neighborhood and them because he’d been one and feared he’d always would be.
Giordano turned the van onto Wasford, a street Owen didn’t know; lined with small apartment houses and storefront businesses with thick iron gates pulled across their fronts. The street looked better than most they’d passed through, though signs of poverty and desperation were still clearly visible in the empty shops and broken down derelict cars haphazardly parked.
Giordano pulled the van around back of a small variety store. Through a small window on it side Owen thought the place looked dark and empty. Giordano parked next to the backdoor and got out, Owen followed as Giordano opened the van’s backdoors wide before entering the shop.
Looking from the van’s open doors to the store’s dark entrance, Owen stayed put; he was bothered by the set up without knowing why.
“ Come on,” Giordano stepped out into a strip of moonlight that brightened one half of his face leaving the other side dark, hidden and Owen jumpy at the sight. “It’s all right.”
Finally stepping over the threshold Owen glanced once over his shoulder as he and stomped on the urge not to go any farther, to turn back, no-- run back--though it was already too late and he’d known it the instant he’d gotten in beside Giordano. He followed him down a narrow hall into a large room brightened only by the ambient lamp light coming through the small window.
“Wait, I’ll hit the switch,” Giordano said.
A few seconds later the lights flared. “Oh shit,” Owen expelled a shock of air as his gaze fell on the body of an obese man sprawled face down on the grimy linoleum floor. A pair of steel framed glasses lay bent and broken underneath half the man’s face. “Oh, shit,” he repeated. “Is he dead?”
“Should be,” Giordano answered as he came over and stood beside him. “If he isn’t, he’s doing the best imitation of a dead guy I’ve ever seen.”
Owens’s eyes moved over the swelled heavy body which lay covered in a fine white dust reminding Owen morbidly of the laughing, playful doughboy on the cookie commercials. Scanning the table the man part way beneath; he took in the scattered baking utensils and the spilled box of flour suddenly realizing he was looking at a murder scene, though he saw no weapon or any other sign of what caused the man’s death.
“Dare I ask who he is and what happened?”
Giordano looked at him shrewdly, “Are you asking as my friend or as a cop?”
“A cop?” Owen snapped, angry now instead of scared half out of his mind. “Would I be here if I let my being a cop get in the way?”
Giordano grinned, “Take it easy.”
“Christ,” Owen said; he’d been a detective-third-grade for only six months and was sensitive about it. “Who is it?”
“Someone my father used to know.”
“You do this?”
Giordano shook his head, “My old man put him out of his misery, but it’s up to me to take him to his final resting place; with your help I hope. Because as you can see it won’t be like moving a piano.”
“More like two at once.”
They didn’t speak for a long time, just stared at the body, weighing the circumstances and contemplating what they had to do at its most basic level, putting aside any questions--having no choice but to do so--of rightness or morality, there wasn’t time for them and at this point, staring down at a murdered guy how do you turn back?
What am I about to do here? Owen caught the tail end of the question as it skittered across his mind into the darkness. This is a crazy, unreal, nuts for chrissakes. Yet, he’d known the moment he stepped into the room, whatever he was getting into wasn’t a quilting bee.
“Wait a minute; I thought you and your father had parted ways because you don’t want anything to do with his business.”
“No change there,” Giordano’s dark eyes flickered with quick pain before smoothing out again. “We’re still at opposite ends of the world on just about everything; but this here is different, this I had no choice. He was Peter Costello and when my father was twenty-two and sent up for the first and last time, this piece of human waste product,” he nudged the body with the toe of his right shoe, “along with a couple of his buddies, raped and nearly beat my old man to death.”
Owen was stunned as his mind quickly ran over the solid, unchangeable images in his head of Roberto Giordano: old, with gray beard and hair never having been young, who played the grand piano with bony arthritic fingers in the early mornings to sooth his soul; melancholy, mourning a wife gone for years; frail and thoughtful who looked with long, loving impatience at a son so unlike himself; a man with a rare and beautiful smile who never once questioned his son’s friendship with a poor and defensive nobody whose family cared only about surviving day to day.
“I’m the only other person in the world who knows, besides you. He thought this man was dead like his buddies; he’d checked over the years and found nothing but could only inquire so many times without questions being asked.”
“I was with him when he laid eyes on this tub of shit for the first time in almost forty years. We were at the farmer’s market in Hadley Commons; you remember that one? It comes through every other Saturday. He called me up to drive him over because he wanted fresh spinach to make wedding soup for these cold nights. We hadn’t spoken for a while, had argued…and well you know the story, Owen. Lucky me right?”
“Anyway, I’m standing there looking at these tomatoes bigger than my head—grown with what I don’t know—when I look over and he’s sweating and white as a sheet; I thought he was having a heart attack. I rush over and he acts as if I’m not there; doesn’t say a word just stares at Costello who is standing a few rows over buying eggs. I ask, ‘What is it? Where does it hurt?’ He just shakes his head and tells me to take him home. I didn’t hear from him again until four hours ago.”
“He all right?”
Giordano shrugged, “When I got here I found him shaking all over, unable to catch his breath. He had strangled Costello with his bare hands. Can you imagine that? Over sixty, got high blood pressure, arthritis and he’s a quarter of Costello’s weight, but he manages to kill the fat fuck. After he told me what happened he wanted to stay and help me take care of this but he was in no condition. I sent him home; he could barely put the car in drive. And after a while I called you.”
“Thanks a hell’va lot.”
“You’re welcome,” Giordano laughed then sobered. “You’re the only one I can trust with this.”
“Why move him at all?” Owen looked around the kitchen. Costello obviously sold homemade products making the food right there and selling it out front. “It looks as if he could’ve been the victim of a robbery gone bad or some kind of assault. We could just get out of here and call the police.”
Giordano shook his head, “A robbery couldn’t of happened here; not on this block, not on this street. Almost every store or business around this neighborhood has been held up, five, six times, but not this one; it’s never been touched and never would be.”
“You have to be kidding me?” Owen shook his head, “No.”
“Yes,” Giordano nodded, “Connected. Big time. The Gianconna Brothers in White Plains. So he’s got to disappear; it’s the only way.”
The rules and regulations of gangland life, Owen thought bitterly as they stared down at the dead man.
“This won’t be easy to do,” Giordano said.
They were silent again as their minds rummaged through the possibilities of how they could handle this.
“We’re going to have to hide him in plain sight,” Owen finally said on a deep, weary sigh.
“Not in any of the usual places,” Giordano said. “No new construction sites. Not the dump.”
“Definitely not the dump,” Owen added.
“Or in one of our quaint Long Island bogs.”
After a moment they looked at each other and grinned.
“The cemetery,” they said in unison, ignoring the sheer graveness and possible insanity of the idea just glad to have come up with a solution to their big problem.
“Lakeview on Highland Road,” Giordano suggested. “The front gates are locked at this time of night but there’s a back way few people know, behind the oldest part that’s been more or less abandoned. Come on; let’s get this over with its getting late. Which end you want?”
Owen laughed, the sound almost hysterical, “God, I can’t believe this,” he managed to control himself but had a hard time doing it. “I’ve just made detective, shield not yet blemished and I’m going to commit a crime and get rid of a body; I can’t believe it.”
“Yeah, life is funny,” Giordano said and repeated. “Which end you want?”
His eyes closed briefly, Owen said, “I’ll take the bottom half; get his glasses.”
Giordano pulled them from underneath the man’s head causing his face to flop sideways onto the left cheek. His eyes were open and they stared useless and blank, Owen looked away and watched Giordano grab the man under the armpits.
“Okay,” Owen lifted the man’s thick legs up against his sides, tightened his knees and back and prayed. “On three. One, two, lift. Ahhhh,” he grunted. He’d been right; it was like picking up a piano or two by himself. “Jesus,” his knees popped, his back creaked and arms shook with the strain of literally lifting overweight dead weight.
He looked at Giordano who looked like he felt; his face was bright red, his mouth pulled open in a grimace of painful effort.
Quickly baby stepping toward the doorway; Giordano led as they squeezed their load through the door’s frame, dislodging one of the man’s shoes as they went. Moving down the narrow hallway they stopped before the closed door.
“Try and move sideways,” Giordano panted, “so I can get at an angle to open the door.”
Owen stepped the body sideways, his numb arms gripping the man’s legs tighter as his back hit up against the wall, glad to rest a minute as Giordano got one hand up through the man’s armpit and grabbed the doorknob carefully easing the door open part ways. Shuffling over a few steps, he put a foot around the door’s edge and swung it the rest of the way open.
They moved out, breathing hard in thick pulls. At the mouth of the van they took deep breaths, gathered strength and heaved the body onto the van’s floor, it rocked like a boat in a storm before settling on its wheels.
Stumbling back, his arms shaking, “And we have to do it again.” Owen groaned.
“Yeah,” Giordano wiped his sweaty face with a sleeve before slapping at some of the flour that had come off onto his clothes. Stepping up into the van, he placed the body on its back wedging it in place against the wall with rolls of new carpet. Moving into the driver’s seat he said, “Could you get the doors?”
Closing the doors Owen said, “I’ll be right back.”
Inside the building he picked up a roll of paper towels and wet a handful at the sink, then stooping he used them to clean up the outline of the body and the tracks they’d made in the flour. Next, he picked up the shoe before going over to the light switch and using the sleeve of his coat, carefully wiped around the plate before flipping the lights off, again with his coat sleeve. Out in the hall he wiped down the doorknob before easing it open with his shoulder. Outside, again with his sleeve, he closed the door.
At the van, he tossed in the used paper towels before hopping into the passenger seat and holding up the shoe.
“If found, it would’ve caused me trouble,” Giordano said.
An hour later they made their way down a dirt road overgrown on both sides with weeds and dense, black woods. His skin prickling, Owen stared out the window at the harsh moonlight bouncing off row after row of gravestones and monuments spread beyond them in the cemetery proper.
Giordano stopped the van beside a patch of short grass where beyond sat a few rows of overturned tombstones looking like stumps of broken teeth.
“Here we are,” Giordano thumbed behind him as he got out of the van. “He’s lying on the digging tools, could you get’tem.”
“Terrific,” Owen muttered and moved into the back.
Moving the carpets aside, he laid a finger on the body; it was cold and waxy pale. Grimacing, he heaved it over pulling from underneath it two shovels and a pick-ax.
Giordano opened the backdoors and Owen jumped out looking around at the dark, silent woods before joining him. They studied the body like two movers maneuver a side-by-side refrigerator.
“How about I unroll one of the long carpets,” Giordano suggested, “we roll him tight into it and then we can pull the whole thing out and carry it like a fat tube.”
“Let’s decide where we’re going to put him before we carry him all over the place.”
“Behind the last row of graves over there,” Giordano pointed.
“Let’s get this damn thing over with.”
Shrouding the corpse in a long weaved sand colored carpet, Giordano said, “I’ll take the back end while you pull him out.”
Owen grabbed the part facing him by its open end and pulled as Giordano pushed; the mound slide toward him. Tensing his muscles as it began clearing the van; Owen lifted the rug-shrouded corpse keeping it from dropping to the ground as Giordano moved forward, his head clearing the top of the van before jumping down taking hold of his end.
“You ready?”
“ "Hell, yes,” Owen said and they again quick stepped the victim toward his last resting place.
Stepping over an ankle high sagging fence separating the cemetery from the road, they slowly maneuvered their way through and around toppled and deteriorating head stones.
This part must be ages old Owen thought, and forgotten by those who have people buried here. Though hurrying as fast as he could carry a large corpse, he was able to glance at an occasional name and date: Born 1854 Died 1884, Jean Talbot. Good wife and mother; Born and Died Winter of 1908, William Joseph Halloran, the Son We Love.
They passed a few more half-buried stones, the words on them made unreadable by weather and time. They moved behind these onto damp earth covered with leaves and sticks, its soft wet richness Owen could smell even in the harsh cold.
“Let’s dig here,” Giordano dropped his end of the rug. “I’ll get the tools.”
Owen eased his burden to the ground and tightened the rug over the body. He couldn’t look at it again and turned, hand out as Giordano jogged back handing him a shovel.
They dug slowly then fast as the could as time seemed to grow shorter, the early morning hours flying by though they’d had yet to dig the grave Halfway; let alone bury the body and cover it over. Thinking about this and his waiting-still-pissed-off-wife, Owen picked up speed, digging furiously, his muscles straining, his breathing labored as he piled up the dirt behind him.
“What a night,” he said through teeth clenched against the strain of digging, the –need to get this done and the act itself buried as deep in his mind as they would bury the corpse, he viciously punctured the earth with the shovel,. “Here I am, instead of being a good cop cozy at home with my loving wife, I’m deliberately and with knowledge forethought, committing a crime.”
“Come on,” Giordano said, working just as hard at finishing up the job. “The crime’s already been committed; we’re just cleaning it up so to speak and we’ll be done before you know it. And Lorna’ll get over it.” He stopped digging and flashed a grin of sharp white teeth in the moonlight, “Next spring.”
“Shut up and get back to work,” Owen snapped.
They dug as deeply as they thought necessary to hold a three hundred plus pound man. Heaving themselves out of the hole, they wiped sweat and dirt off their hands and faces best they could, resting a few minutes, Owen leaning heavily on the shovel
“Let’s roll it in and then get the hell out of here,” Giordano said.
“You do the honors” Owen stepped back.
Giordano, like a man laying a rug in someone’s nice, suburban home, shoved the carpet forward with the flats of his feet, grunting with the effort as it rolled slowly over and over until it reached the edge of the grave. With one last powerful shove with his right foot, it tipped, motionless for a moment in the cold still air before it rolled over into the hole and hit bottom with a loud whump, the sound reverberating around them; he tossed the glasses in after it.
“Ready?” Owen asked, turning back after looking away from that part of the proceedings. Jackass, he thought, after what you’ve already done tonight you get squeamish at the burial. Picking up the shovel he began tossing dirt into the hole.
Silently they filled the grave as quickly as their frozen fingers would allow, then quickly patting down the earth before throwing tufts of grass and leaves on top of the soil. Finally after what seemed like days, they were done.
Their breaths harsh vapors, “Damn, “Owen said. From his pocket he retrieved the shoe. Bending down, he dug a shallow hole near the grave and stuffed it inside before covering it over.
“No one should be looking here for him anytime soon,” Giordano said, “but just in case…” turning he hurried toward the van, moments later he was back carrying a large oblong sack. Stooping at one end of the grave he removed the sack’s contents and Owen laughed; despite the cold rattling his bones, his troubles at home and what he had done tonight, he laughed.
A headstone, Giordano had produced a headstone and was busily planting it; it was thin, smooth gray stone and totally blank.
“You knew we’d end up here.”
“No we just think alike,” Giordano stood and wiped off his hands. “That’s it.”
They stared down at the grave before Owen said with supreme irritation, “What are we standing around here for?”
Back in the van, gear stowed, they slowly left the cemetery, almost creeping just as they had arrived until they got to the highway where Giordano switched on the lights and sped up. Back at Babe’s Owen got out of the van to stare at his friend through the window.
“I’ll wipe it down,” Giordano said, “then leave it where I found it.”
“If you can help it, don’t ever—ever—ask this kind of shit of me again.”
“I’ll try,” Giordano grinned. “Thanks, Owen. I knew I could count on you; if no one else.”

Owen nodded, not sure if he felt good about that.
“We probably won’t talk for a while.”
“That’ll thrill my wife.”
Giordano laughed, “Be sure to give her my best,” he said and drove off without looking back.
Owen stood for a long time starring after the van and contemplating the night and what they’d done—he’d done. The crime. There was no way of getting around it was there? Was he an officer of the law or a joke? A fraud? By day, a newly minted detective responsible for holding up justice and order, but by night, breaking that pact which may someday come back to haunt him in the shape of a ghostly fat man.
Yet, wasn’t this a special circumstance? An inconceivable situation that had to be taken care of? Giordano was more than a friend, he was the same as a brother. And Giordano’s father could have been killed by the people from White Plains right? So wasn’t his actions justified? Shaking his head, blowing out the thought, a man could justify any damn thing he wanted to live with himself for another day, including being a party to murder.
Tired of thinking in the cold, alone, he filed tonight’s episode away in his heart of deep, dark secrets he prayed would never see the light of day and got into his car. Backing away from the lot he stopped on the brakes,” Lorna,” he’d momentarily forgotten about her; she was going to kill him.
Driving off quickly he wondered if there was a twenty-four hour florist around.


THE END