The Art of Disposal Read Free

really did have a respectable job involving chests of aged tea and silk scarves from other countries.
    Marcia left, and it felt like I was in that little waiting room for an eternity. I got to thinking that maybe I was in purgatory, the newest sinner of the lot, and Lucifer would come through the door at any minute to tell me he was sorry but the bad things I'd done over the years outweighed the good ones by a fair margin, and I would have to follow him down a long flight of hot stairs. But when the door finally opened it was only Doc Brillman.
    “What is it today?” he said.
    “Sick as a dog.”
    “Syphilis? Schistosomiasis? Skin Cancer?”
    “Feels like it could be all three.”
    “We all gotta go sometime,” Doc Brillman said with a wink, and I saw a flashing image of Al Da Paolo's stiff hand next to a dead blue fish.
    Doc Brillman wrote me a prescription, and I said goodbye to Marcia and headed back to Eddie's place. But I kept seeing this image of one Fisherman's Friend cough drop lying on the floor near the bedroom door.
    I was in such a hurry when I left. Maybe it was still there. Maybe the cops would trace it back to me. I bought the cough drops right before the crime. Could something so trivial ever get linked together like that? They’d search the place and see that Crazy Al didn’t own any cough drop tin. It must've come from the killer, they’d say. Some detective would jot it down in his little book and he’d be off like a bloodhound.
    You've seen too many Columbo's, I told myself.
    Dan the Man was napping on the sofa like a well-fed dog when I shuffled into the front room of Eddie's Vacuum Sales and Services.
    He yawned and sat up. “It’s done?”
    “Done.”
    “How'd it make you feel?”
    “Like a bad kid,” I said.
    “Eh,” Dan the Man said, and handed me back my Beretta.
    Eddie came out of the back room, his thumbs tucked under his suspenders. For some reason it seemed funny to me—a guy as dangerous as Eddie wearing suspenders.
    He hugged me and patted my back. “You're a real salesman now. I'm proud of you. I won't forget what you done for me.” He tucked the three grand into my hand and shook it furiously.
    “I lied to you earlier,” Eddie said. “I have seen a sick dog before. Freckles. What a sweet girl. Pop let us sit on the bed with her for an hour, and we fed her cold green beans. Then he drove her off to get the final shot.”
    Eddie looked like he might shed a tear.
    “Go get some shut-eye,” he said.

THE UNEXAMINED LIFE
    Things changed after the Da Paolo job. Eddie put me with Dan the Man on a full-time basis. The idea was to have me learn from a true master of the craft. It sure as hell wasn't material you'd pick up at the Junior College, but it was still an education.
    I never knew how deadly Dan the Man was until Eddie gave me a brief synopsis of all the guys he'd shot, stabbed, and garotted over the years.
    “Dan the Man has sent more guys to hell than a law degree.”
    That's how Eddie summed it up. Maybe he'd always been grooming me up for this line of work. I was a heavyweight now. Al Da Paolo was a test, and I had passed. Sometimes I would lay in my bed and stare at the ceiling, thinking about what would have happened if Crazy Al had gotten away. And I knew that I would have ended up in the trunk of Ricky Cervetti's 1987 Buick Park Avenue, probably right next to Al Da Paolo's smelly corpse.
    I'd been affiliated with the Sesto crew for three years before I whacked Crazy Al, and in all that time I never knew all the ins and outs of the business—I wasn't in deep enough. I knew about the shylocking and the stolen car operation. The numbers racket. The drugs.
    Eddie Sesto is well connected, but he's no top dog. More like a mutt hanging out and picking up scraps from the key players. Dan the Man hit me up with some details when we were out collecting debts. I asked him if Eddie was pissed about not ever being made.
    “Hell no,” Dan the Man said. “Why would he