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Copyright © 2015 by Mark Wisniewski
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Portions of this novel have appeared, in slightly different form, in The Antioch Review, The Best American Short Stories 2008, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Idaho Review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wisniewski, Mark S., date.
Watch me go / Mark Wisniewski.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-17799-4
1. False imprisonment—Fiction. 2. Jockeys—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Organized crime—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.I8773W38 2015 2014026895
813'.54—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
FOR ELIZABETH
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1 | DEESH
2 | JAN
3 | DEESH
4 | JAN
5 | DEESH
6 | JAN
7 | DEESH
8 | JAN
9 | DEESH
10 | JAN
11 | DEESH
12 | JAN
13 | DEESH
14 | JAN
15 | DEESH
17 | DEESH
18 | JAN
19 | DEESH
20 | JAN
21 | DEESH
22 | JAN
23 | DEESH
24 | JAN
25 | DEESH
26 | JAN
27 | DEESH
28 | JAN
29 | DEESH
30 | JAN
31 | DEESH
32 | JAN
33 | DEESH
34 | JAN
35 | DEESH
36 | JAN
37 | DEESH
38 | JAN
39 | DEESH
40 | JAN
41 | DEESH
42 | JAN
43 | DEESH
44 | JAN
45 | DEESH
46 | JAN
47 | DEESH
48 | JAN
49 | DEESH
50 | JAN
51 | DEESH
52 | JAN
53 | DEESH
54 | JAN
55 | DEESH
56 | JAN
57 | DEESH
58 | JAN
59 | DEESH
60 | JAN
61 | DEESH
62 | JAN
63 | DEESH
64 | JAN
65 | DEESH
66 | JAN
67 | DEESH
68 | JAN
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
AMONG DOUGLAS “DEESH” SHARP’S well-guarded thoughts was the idea that his public defender, Lawrence Gerelli, might win more often if he’d now and then iron a shirt. Worse, Gerelli had a tendency to show his hand by letting himself go sour-faced, and here Gerelli was, doing that again as he sat across the table in the small white room and said, “Mostly, Mr. Sharp? You have a belief problem.”
“As in you don’t believe me?” Deesh asked.
“As in we need twelve jurors to believe you, and they’re going to be hard to find.”
“So you’re saying plea bargain.”
“The plea bargaining’s already begun, Mr. Sharp. The prosecution here in the Bronx is talking about sending you back to Pennsylvania—where, unlike here, people are still relatively comfortable with the death penalty.”
And there was that sour face again, and Deesh found himself leaning back in his folding chair to say, “Man, nobody gets to twelve without first having two in this room.”
Gerelli began gathering his notes and electronics. “I’m late for an arraignment,” he said. He snapped closed and yanked up his briefcase. “You want life here in New York, Mr. Sharp, just say the word and I’ll bust my ass to get that for you.” He glared at Deesh, who glared back. “You still want to go for broke, we’ll talk about building cases next time.” He walked out, and the door swung closed.
And right away, Deesh felt less alone. He flattened his hands beside the bolted steel ring his wrists were cuffed to. He appreciated this small white room, its cleanliness and brightness, the safety implied by its particular silence.
Then, from behind the room’s white door, there was a cough. And a knock. The door opened, and just behind the guard stood someone short, so this wasn’t who Deesh had hoped—it wasn’t his son—and the guard stepped aside and Deesh saw the face, a woman’s face, a way-too-fine, almost dollish face on a very short, white, deeply suntanned young woman whose curves struck Deesh as impossibly sweet, too.
“Who the hell is this?” he asked the guard.
“She signed in,” the guard said.
The cop’s wife? Deesh thought, but the woman eyed the handcuffs so intently there was no way she hung with cops. Deesh felt himself holding his breath while she stood behind the chair Gerelli had left, braced as if she were set to run off if need be.
“So you’re the infamous Deesh,” she said, in her own kind of sadness.
“All day.”
“I’m Jan Price.”
“Means nothing to me.”
“I knew Tom Corcoran personally,” she said, as if this explained everything. “The jockey,” she added. “And there are things about his gambling I can testify about.”
Bullshit, Deesh wanted to say, but she looked away quickly, at one of the bright white walls, brow knitted, maybe about to cry, maybe not.
She said, “But I need to know you didn’t kill those other two guys.”
She kept on looking at that wall.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Deesh said, and he knew, given his experience with whites this beautiful, that right about now was when the ugliness in her would show.
“Then why are you in here?” she asked.
Her eyes met his, but he was already shaking his head, as if to suggest that, no, he would not have this conversation, though now here he was, also asking, “Isn’t that obvious?”
And she said, “No.”
He raised a cuffed forearm, pointed at it best he could.
“But Deesh,” she said, “you’re not the only black guy out there. I mean, for some reason, they arrested you. And what’s eating
me up is that I happen to know that, when it comes to Tom Corcoran, you’re as innocent as a colt learning to walk. But if you’re a killer anyway, why should I help you?”
And it was only now that Deesh realized he could actually care about this woman—in that same solid way he’d once cared about his state champion teammates—because here he was, saying to her, “Ms. Price, you’re asking me to tell you a very long story.”
And she said, “Not necessarily, Deesh. I’m asking you to tell me the truth.”
1
DEESH
NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN it’s a woman who calls Bark to answer his classified ad in the Westchester Pennysaver, and sometimes when we pull up to her yard in his pickup, she’s outside waiting for us. Sometimes she even has something inside for us to eat, which, besides needing money, is why James and I never ask Bark if he wants our help. We just get in his truck and hope he lets us go.
But the truth, Jan, is that on the morning he drives us north of Poughkeepsie, no woman, or anyone, is waiting outside. Maybe this has to do with the five hundred dollars this woman offered—she doesn’t feel the need to be friendly beyond that. Or maybe she’s with the junk that needs to be hauled. Anyway Bark pulls off the country road into her driveway, which drops through her uncut lawn toward her shabby yellow house, and we all get out, Bark headed to knock on her front door.
“Hey,” I hear from the left-hand side of the house, and I turn but see no one. “Down here,” the voice calls, and there, crouched near an open crawl space hole, is a woman about as dark as me, maybe five years older.
“Over here, Bark,” I shout, and Bark makes his way down the porch, then over to her, James and I lagging behind to let her know he’s boss.
“I took care of the rest myself,” she says, and Bark kneels beside her, then pokes his head and a good half of him into the crawl space. He stays in there for a while, making sure, I figure, that we can do what needs doing. Then he’s back out, and he stands, slapping dirt off his knees.
“Just that oil drum?” he says.
“Yeah,” she says.
“I thought you said there was a bunch of stuff,” he says.
“No,” she says. “Just that.”
“What’s in it?” he asks.
“I have no idea,” she says, but she’s scratching her arm and keeps scratching it; if she’s not flat-out lying, she’s more than a little nervous.
“Because the thing is,” Bark says, “I can’t just take a drum like that to a dump without them asking what’s inside.”
“Then don’t take it to a dump,” she says. “Just, you know, get rid of it.”
Bark grabs his unshaven jaw, considering. Probably he’s stumped by why a sister is living more than an hour north of the city; plus it doesn’t make much sense that any woman living in a house this shabby could have five hundred dollars, let alone give it to us to haul off a drum with nothing bad in it. It crosses my mind this woman loves some guy who’s given her five hundred to get rid of the drum, some dude, maybe a white one, that she has it bad for and cheated with—and that inside the drum is this man’s wife. But all kinds of things are crossing my mind, including how I could use five hundred dollars divided by three.
“How ’bout a thousand?” the woman says.
Here’s where all of us, including her, gaze off at her uncut lawn, the dandelions and weeds in it, some of them pretty enough to call flowers. We gaze our separate ways for a long time, letting whatever truth of what’s going on sink into us while we play as if it isn’t, and I feel my guts work their way higher toward my lungs, threatening to stay there if Bark agrees. But there’s a lot I could do with my share of a thousand, especially since I’m used to walking away from these jobs with fifty at most. I could eat more than apples and white bread and ham. I could start saving for a truck of my own—to haul things for pay myself.
Then, to the woman, Bark says, “In cash?”
“As soon as that drum’s in your truck,” she says.
Bark glances at James, who nods.
“Deesh?” Bark asks me, and I know he’s working me over with his eyes, using them to try to convince me in their I-don’t-care-either-way manner, but what I’m watching is the woman’s feet, which are the tiniest bit pigeon-toed. They are also perfectly still, which could mean she’s no longer nervous, but my eyes, I know, are avoiding her fingers and arms. Still, the sight of those pigeon-toed feet has me giving her the benefit of the doubt, maybe because I once had it bad—really bad—for someone who stood like that.
“Why not?” I answer. I haven’t, I tell myself, actually said yes, but when I look up, James is following Bark into the crawl space, the woman checking me out.
“Sure appreciate it,” she says, in the flat way of someone who’s been with enough men to deal with us no problem. But now she’s scratching her collarbone—over and over she’s scratching it, without one bug bite on her. There’s death in that drum, I think, but with her pigeon-toed feet aimed at me, I fall even more in love.
Then she walks off, toward a creek behind her house, and it hits me that if I want my share of the thousand, I should get my ass in that crawl space, since the actual removal of the drum might take but five minutes—and the last thing I need is Bark and James saying I don’t deserve a cent. Then I realize that if I don’t take a cent I might not be guilty of any crime that’s going on here. But wisdom like that helps only if you’re not desperate for cash, plus I need to be in Bark’s truck to get home, and even before I’m done thinking all this I’m on my hands and knees, my head brushing morning glory vines, then on its way through the square opening in the foundation of the woman’s house.
It’s quiet in there, and it stinks. James and Bark are on their bellies, snaking their way over damp dirt and rocks toward the drum, which lies on its side in the far corner. With the thousand in mind, I work myself toward them, trying to get a hand on the drum when they do—but Bark yells, “We got it, Deesh.”
“What are you saying?” I ask.
“I’m saying this is a two-man job, so back off.”
“You trying to cut me out of my share.”
“No. It’s just there ain’t enough room for all three of us if we want to get this thing past us.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
Bark humps up his backside, reaches into a front pocket, pulls out his keys, tosses them toward me. “Pull the truck down the driveway,” he says. His hands dig dirt away from the drum. “As close to the house as you can,” he says.
“Bark,” I say. “I haven’t driven in fifteen years.”
“You’ll remember,” he says. “Just start it, put it in gear, and steer so you don’t hit nothing.”
“Okay,” I say, though Bark’s confidence in me has taken away the little I have in myself. I used to have confidence—gold confidence—but the older I get, I have less. Still, I back myself out of the crawl space, pretend the woman isn’t watching as I jog up the driveway to Bark’s truck, hop inside it, start it, put it in drive and let it roll down there. Steering is easy, but when I put on the brake, I about fly through the windshield. The woman, still near the creek, has her arms folded now, and again she’s checking me out. There’s that kind of thing between us, that curiosity about each other we’d ruin with conversation, and I want to make love to her bad.
Now Bark and James are yanking the drum top first through the hole in her foundation; the drum is too wide to roll out. They struggle like hungry playground kids—whatever’s in that thing is dumb heavy. Wind blows past my face, the woman now picking a weed’s blue flower from between pebbles beside the creek. It’s her husband in the drum, I think. She got carried away in an argument over nothing and the thousand is all they ever saved.
“Deesh,” Bark calls to me. “Gonna help us or not?”
I nod, toss him his keys, which he catches li
ke it’s the old days. I walk toward him and James, and all three of us roll the drum to the driveway, flattening a strip of knee-high grass, acting like we haul mystery drums every day. This one is the rusted old orange you’d expect, but its new yellow lid has barely a scratch or a smudge on it, and as we team up near Bark’s tailgate and lift on the count of three, we take extra care to keep the lid on. Dead weight, I think as we lower the works onto the bed. If this isn’t a corpse, she would have said so.
2
JAN
WHAT I WOULD TELL A JURY from the get-go, Deesh, is that pretty much all of the horse folk you find at the Finger Lakes racetrack, not just the Corcorans, have long lived and breathed horseracing. For instance for pretty much all of my twenty-two years, certainly ever since I was the gossiped-about, shabbily dressed girl born to the reticent single mother in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, my dream had been to ride the fastest of thoroughbreds in upstate New York, seeing as that’s what my father did when he was still alive.
A jury would also need to know that thoroughbred racing often comes down to the keeping and telling of secrets. Matter of fact, for my entire life—until just a few months ago—all my mother had ever told me about my father’s death was that it happened three weeks before I was born, and that he had drowned well upstate from here, in a tangle of sun-bleached weeds near a shoreline owned by Tom Corcoran and his wife, Colleen. And that because of all this we were poor to the point that we should be grateful for her job working the counter at the Rexall on Main in Pine Bluff.
See, it wasn’t until the night before my mother and I left Arkansas to head for that lake—because the Rexall was forced to close thanks to a Walmart Supercenter two miles up Main—that she let me in on details beyond those. Like how when the search party of sheriffs and wardens and divers gaffed my father’s corpse, one of his legs was wrapped twice with thick black fish line leading to a huge prehistoric-looking fish. Like how this fish was a muskellunge—or, as people upstate would put it, a “muskie.” How this particular muskie was a monster, easily six feet long. How this muskie then lay in a sheriff’s outboard like guilt in the guts of a killer, and then, after the sheriff took photos, was dropped into the lake for dead by my mother, who, as soon as she headed off toward the Corcorans’ house, heard a splash and turned—only to see the muskie’s tail propel it back into those sun-bleached weeds.