The Dog Killer of Utica Read Free

and would return later today, possibly tomorrow morning—no later than that. To Troy to attend to the most recent of the self-inflicted crises of her twenty-three-year-old daughter, which she’ll resolve, quickly, by writing a check. That’s all it was. While there, if she had time, she’d stop in to see her former partner, their mutual pal, Detective Robert Rintrona.
    “Give Bobby my regards if you see him,” he’d said, as she, looking her blazing best, got into the car.
    “Any special message for Bobby?”
    “Tell him not to be concerned about a thing.”
    She looks sharply at him, “Concerned? What could Bobby possibly be concerned about? Unless it’s the latest inadequate replacement for the King of the High Cs?”
    He puts his guard back up with a smile. He touches her shoulder and withholds the truth he’d withheld from her for a year: “That’s it exactly, Ms. Cruz. The latest Pavarotti imposter. That’s all I had in mind.”
    On that bitter mid-December Sunday morning, in this town on life support, which calls itself The Gateway to the Adirondacks, she replies, “One of these days, Mr. Conte, you’ll tell me the secret. Or else—pow! pow!—you’re dead,” as she mimes shooting him, then speeds off to the Thruway exit in North Utica for the eighty-mile ride down to Troy.
    6:15, he’s shoving open with unnecessary force the glassdoor to POWER UP!, the studio for personal training adjacent to the northern edge of Utica College’s campus, where he’s been a regular, three times per week, for the last nine months, beginning a month after he’d suffered a severe beating at the hands of an “unknown assailant” (as it was phrased in the
Observer-Dispatch
), whose identity Conte was certain of. (It was Ralph, who’d come east after Nancy had received Eliot’s letter accusing Ralph of sexually abusing his girls.) He had revealed the assailant’s identity only to Antonio Robinson, who promised to keep “this thing between ourselves, as our good father taught us, may his soul rest in peace.” Robinson then added, coldly, “Eventually you make the long-delayed journey to the West Coast and deliver life-changing gifts to your ex and this cunt Ralph Norwald, who abused your kids. Deliver them, soon, El, from life to the other side, where they sent your daughters.” Conte replies softly, without affect, “Emily and Rosalind.”
    The studio opens at 6:30, but his trainer arrives at 5:45 for his own daily workout and Conte comes eagerly fifteen minutes in advance of his 6:30 appointment to watch Kyle Torvald in the last jaw-dropping phase of his routine: fifty strict pull-ups and a fifty-first at the top of which Kyle actually muscles himself up and over the bar—this morning bellowing “Con-TEEEEEE”—dropping to the floor, palms up: “In the dog house? Where’s our fair lady? Where is Detective Catherine Cruuuuuz?”
    In this place of violent manly exertion, Conte finds a curious tranquility, as if he’d entered the enclosing warmth of an unfailingly supportive home. No pangs, here, of physical inadequacy, not a trace of macho thrust and parry, exceptin parodic mockery, never a hint of the bloody male imperative, except once, at the first interview, when Kyle—ex-paratrooper with a problematic back—in response to Conte’s question, “What’s a reasonable fitness goal for a guy my age?” replies with a wink, “When you take off your shirt, big guy, you look like you might, and likely will, sooner or later, kill somebody.” Kyle Torvald stands 5’10” at 160 pounds, a fair blond of Scandinavian descent and delicately chiseled handsomeness, beside Eliot Conte’s 6’3”, 220, and all southern Italian shadow.
    Kyle says (with glee), “Addicted to breathing? I can fix that. Get on the rower and give me two thousand meters, all out, and vomit! Vomit your guts!—quick, down on the floor, forty push-ups, crack your spine!—quick! Quick! Bench two hundred pounds to muscle