Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

I don’t mean to say I didn’t appreciate the sex. I’d never had sex with anyone before, and it was a nice relief from that. And I had no reason to think sex could be better, since it was already so different from anything I’d seen in a movie or read in a book.

But I did realize there had to be more to it than smacking your head on a radio while someone who seemed impossibly soft and old (she was younger than I am now, and all breasts turn out to be soft, but who knew?) squirms on you with her uniform shoved past her knees, and all the time you’re wondering how much harder you can push her to get some real, usable information from the Detective Grade 3’s and 4’s who must know something about who killed your grandparents. Plus it’s winter, so everything outside of her is freezing.

What Officer Brennan eventually found out for me was this:

The detectives didn’t think it was Nazis, neo or otherwise, since those people tend to target Hasidim. Nor was it much of a robbery, since so little was taken, and burglars avoid old people on the grounds that they’re home all the time and don’t tend to keep cash in the house anyway. The few things that were stolen, like the VCR, probably constituted either impulse shopping or a calculated attempt at misdirection.

“So who?” I asked Mary-Beth Brennan.

“He didn’t say.”

“You’re lying,” I said.

“I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Fuck that.”

She told me. The murders had probably been the point of the whole event. Old people may not make great burglary victims, but they’re fantastic homicide targets. They move slowly, they have a better chance of lying around for days before they get discovered, and, like I say, they’re usually at home. Anyone determined to commit murder who doesn’t care who the victim is wants someone like my grandparents. And that kind of person falls into one of two categories: serial killers and auditioning mobsters.

In West Orange, New Jersey, in early 1992, you’d be a jackass to bet on serial killers.

So most likely this was someone looking to prove he could kill, and to give the mob leverage over him as an initiation fee. Or rather it was two people, since there was a victim for each, and my grandparents had been shot with bullets from different guns.

According to one of the detectives Officer Brennan hit up for me, this meant there was a good chance that eventually these guys would be caught. Mob omertà bullshit runs both ways—the old guys blackmail the new guys, and the new guys finger the old guys. So eventually the police would hear about two particular fuckheads who’d gotten made at the same time, and they’d have their suspects.

But that might be decades from now, and there might or might not still be evidence, or interest, by then. And it assumed that these guys actually managed to get “made,” and didn’t get rejected, or choose to just go back to their jobs at Best Buy or whatever.

The whole thing was weak. It was thin. Maybe it had been a serial killer after all. Or some junkies.

But the hounds don’t shun the fox for being mangy. The mob theory was all I had to go on, so I chased it.

And nothing else was coming. I’d pushed Mary-Beth too hard one day, and she had cried on my chest and said she worried that I didn’t really love her.

When you grow up in northern New Jersey you hear a lot of bullshit about the mafia and whose fathers are in it. But you also hear about a military academy day school in Suffern, where every time you meet someone who goes there he’s some smug dipshit with an Iroc-Z and a gold necklace that looks like it’s going to break his cocaine mirror. And where, when you look up luminaries of the Five Families in Who’s Who in New Jersey, a fuck of a lot of them turn out to have gone to school.

I won’t name it. Suffice to say it has the same name as one of the more famous military academies in England, despite having been founded 150 years after the Revolutionary War.

I’d been expecting a Catholic school, but it didn’t make much difference. I was already doing the push-ups.

I transferred over the summer. The school was expensive, but I still had money from the wills and the insurance settlement. And, like I say, I didn’t have too many other needs.

As a military school it was a hoax. Reveille at “07:30” and “14:30,” forty minutes a day of parade class, parade show once a month. There was a core of dipshits who took it all seriously, and went out for the sports teams and so on, but everyone else smoked pot in the bathrooms and snuck out to the Pizza Hut on the highway to hook up with the girls from the girls’ school, which was on the other side of the tennis courts and the woods. The bathrooms at the Pizza Hut were coed.

You had to wait in line.

I chose Adam Locano to make friends with because he was so popular, not because of his mafia connections. I wasn’t even sure those existed until later, when I asked him how he got his nickname, which was “Skinflick.”

I’d heard it was because he’d made a porn movie with his babysitter when he was twelve.

“I wish,” he told me. “It was a hooker in Atlantic City. Dude, I don’t even remember it, I was so drunk. Then some asshole from my dad’s social club stole the tape and made copies for everyone. It sucked.”

Bells went off, and I knew I’d stepped knee-deep into mafia. But before then I couldn’t be sure, because Locano was different from the other mob kids.

Like me, he was fifteen. Unlike me, he was pudgy, with puffy, diagonally creased nipples and a Droopy Dawg face with jowls and eye bags. His lower lip was too fleshy. Also unlike me, he was cool . He made looking like he did a point of pride, managing to appear—even in the dumbass uniforms we had to wear on parade—like he’d been out all night drinking. In Las Vegas. In 1960.

Another part of his charm (and another part I could only wonder at) was that he seemed to speak his mind with absolute freedom. He’d talk casually about whacking off or taking a crap, or about how he was in love with his first cousin, Denise. The second he got angry or frustrated he said so—including, inevitably, when he was annoyed at how much better I was at sports or fighting than he was.

I did my best to avoid those kinds of situations, but, being kids, and particularly kids at a so-called military academy, they came up. And I was permanently impressed by how gracefully Skinflick dealt with them. He would bellow in rage, then laugh, and you knew he’d been honest in both responses. On top of which, despite the way he acted, and his claim that he had read only one book cover to cover in his life, he was the smartest kid I’d ever met.

He was also self-assured enough to be friendly with all kinds of people—geeks, cafeteria workers, everybody—and this made it possible to get close to him.

Not that I didn’t have to work for it. I cut down on the Old Europe mannerisms and started dressing shaggy-preppy, with Vuarnets and a coral necklace. I slowed my speech down and lowered it, and spoke as seldom as possible. Every loner high school kid should be given a deadly serious incentive to fit in. It cools you up fast.

I also started dealing drugs. I had a connection through a nerd I’d known at my old high school, before my grandparents were killed and all my friends had stopped speaking to me because they didn’t know what to say. The nerd’s older brother was making a business of it, and got me eight-ounce bags of weed and full-on ounces of cocaine for a good rate. I think the two of them thought I was self-medicating.

I ended up having to sell for below cost anyway—it turns out buying friends is not the world’s most unique idea—but it worked. It was through pot that Skinflick and I met.