“When?”
“When you killed him.”
“I’m-a no guilty.”
“Good. Now tell us what he did to you.”
Pina’s Story
Pina liked it when the Dutchman tied her up and punished her, and the Dutchman liked it because Pina liked it. She had often submitted to him this way when she lived with him. But after she left him to work for Mame, why did she go back and do it again? Well, he pursued her and promised her a major payday. Mame told her to go with him and find out what he’d told the troopers about Bindy’s seven houses. Did he know how much, and who they paid off at the state level?
The Dutchman, Vernon Van Epps, age fifty-four, drinking more than usual, decided that only the rope trick would activate his engine, and Pina, because she had not yet gotten the information from him, said okey dokey. He sat her on the bed, put the gag in her mouth, tied her hands behind her, raised the skirt of her dress, and looped another rope around her ankles and up between her legs, leaving her exposed, pulling the rope tighter than usual over her shoulder. She shook her head no and he laughed and pulled it tighter still. She writhed in resistance but she was his bundle now, and he lifted her, fully wrapped, off the bed and carried her to a corner of the room near the bed and sat her on a wooden chair. He tied her to the chair, and the chair to a heating pipe that ran floor to ceiling, then he blindfolded her.
Pina, alone in her darkness, hears the Dutchman drinking, clinking glass and bottle. Time. He removes her blindfold and she sees him standing naked before her, toying with himself, drinking while he toys. He readjusts her skirt upward and goes to bed with himself and watches her. He gets up and blindfolds her again. Time. She smells the ganja. She cannot loosen her bonds, and serious pain is developing in her legs and thigh the way she is bent. A long darkness. A long silence, then voices. He removes the blindfold and she sees a naked woman in bed with him. Pina doesn’t recognize her. The woman and the Dutchman use each other as they watch Pina. The Dutchman reapplies the blindfold. Pina does not know how long she has been here, but it is night and silent. When he removes the blindfold again it is daylight. She does not think she has slept. The Dutchman is alone, wearing a robe, and asks if she is ready. She nods and he undoes her legs but she cannot stand. The clock says four. He says he went on the nod and forgot her. She has been his prisoner for eighteen hours. She is very, very hungry. He has on his bed photographs of favorite starlets, tied up and not, from his pornographic lending library. He takes the gag from her mouth and loosens the rope between her legs. He carries her to the bed. She lies on it feeling wretched, stretching her legs to ease her pain. She asks him for whiskey to stop the pain and he pours her three fingers, which she drinks, and then she lies silent. Time. He watches her. The pain diminishes and she pulls herself into a sitting position by grasping the headboard of the bed. She stands, very wobbly. The Dutchman moves in front of her, unbuttons her dress, and takes it from her. He helps her step out of her panties and removes his own robe. He seems to be drunk again. She says she needs water and he nods once and falls back on the bed. She walks very slowly to the kitchen and fills a water bottle, takes a glass from the cupboard and drinks, puts the large steak knife inside the fold of a dish towel. She carries bottle, glass, and knife on a tray to the bedroom and sets it on a bedside table and puts herself between it and the Dutchman. She smiles at the Dutchman, who is now toying. She picks up one of his dildos and penetrates herself with it. He likes to watch this. He sits up in the bed, leans toward her, and watches. Balancing himself on one elbow, he takes the dildo in hand and works it in and out of Pina. He throws the dildo aside and puts his mouth on her. She takes the steak knife out from under the towel and pushes it into the left side of his throat, then into his chest. He rolls and she stabs him in the back, again and again. When he rolls over, she stabs his chest until she is sure she has hit his heart. While he gurgles his last, she washes the blood off herself in the bathroom, then washes the knife in the kitchen sink and puts it back in its drawer. She finds sliced Swiss cheese in the Frigidaire and puts it on saltine crackers from the pantry, dabs it with mustard, eats. She dresses herself and stands by the window watching a tugboat push a barge down the river. She thinks she will never see this sight again. It is five o’clock in the afternoon and the sun is shining. Pina does not have the information Mame wanted from the Dutchman, but some things did get done.
Roscoe chose Black Jack McCall’s grill in North Albany as a meeting place because the Governor’s investigators wouldn’t be listening there. After Jack McCall died in 1937 at age seventy-nine, the grill was locked, and iron grids installed on its windows against intruders. But Roscoe chose it also because it was where the original McCall faction of the Party had taken root in Black Jack’s day. Patsy perpetuated that tradition by opening it at election time for the annual meeting of ward leaders and candidates — a spread of roast beef, turkey, salads, and Stanwix — and Roscoe delivering Election Day street money to ward leaders, one by one, in the back room. Then it was locked till next year. O.B. was already inside with Patsy, the two of them leaning against the empty bar, when Roscoe, Mac, and Bindy arrived with Pina. The place was a cube of dead heat, punishing; but Roscoe closed the door.
“What’s she doing here?” Patsy said. “I don’t want whores in here.”
“Hear me out, Pat,” Roscoe said. And he took three chairs off the tabletop and set them upright, put one in a far corner for Pina and gestured for Mac to keep her company, pushed one at Patsy, and sat backward on one himself. Then, in the rapidly spoken shorthand he had used all his life with Patsy, he told the story of Pina’s bondage and retaliation and, in a whisper Pina could not hear, mentioned this was usable, which Patsy heard with reluctant clarity, frustrated that his own Notchery raid had not put his brother in jail. He stared with frigid eyes at Bindy, who, with O.B., moved closer as Roscoe talked softly of Dory Dixon and Dillenback. And we have to arrest Pina, Roscoe said. He would speak as her attorney.
“She’ll have to go inside,” Patsy said. “She know that?”
“Vaguely.”
“She won’t be very friendly when that happens.”
“We’re the only friends she’s got. We’ll go for justifiable homicide, and the grand jury may not even indict. You know those grand juries.”
“We’ll give it back to those rat bastards,” Patsy said. “We go public now with all we got.”
What Roscoe had heard from Patsy was evidence on an undercover state cop who was a wife beater, but his wife wouldn’t talk against him — a weak case, but something. Also, an aide to the Governor had gotten drunk and punched a bartender; not much mileage there. But the best bit, and we’d find a way to use it, was the Spanish pimp held by his ankles out a tenth-floor State Office Building window by undercover state police trying to make him talk about Albany cops on the take. The pimp truly had been ankled out the window, but the anklers were two New York cops on their day off, doing Patsy a favor by impersonating sadistic state troopers.
“Bindy also has a movie, don’t you, Bin?” Roscoe said.
Bindy shook his head. No deal, Roscoe.
“Whatta you got?” Patsy asked Bindy.
“Nothin’ for you,” Bindy said.
Patsy came up out of his chair, a bear in a wild lunge, and flung a right hand to Bindy’s chin. Bindy rammed him with a high elbow on the side of the head, and both brothers shook off their blows, Patsy gut-butting Bindy with his head, staggering but failing to topple the fat man, Patsy taking more head blows from Bindy’s fists as the improbably nimble Bin bounced out of Patsy’s range. O.B. and Roscoe moved between the brothers, brothers on brothers, and stopped the fight.
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