Cold Comforts Read online

  Cold Comforts

  Tom Piccirilli

  First Digital Edition January 2010

  Published by: Delirium Books P.O. Box 338 North Webster, IN 46555 www.deliriumbooks.com

  Cold Comforts © 2009 by Tom Piccirilli All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Ed Brubaker

  1

  They’d hired two strippers and a hooker who brought her own black bag of action for Philo’s bachelor party, all three of them staying busy entertaining the gang while the music raged and the city burned.

  A firebug had been busy working across the upper west side, taking down two apartment buildings on 73rd right off Columbus, and another on 86th near the park. Philo’s place was on 96th and Broadway and everybody kept making jokes about how we were all going to get our asses scorched before the night was out. It had the ring of truth.

  The strippers had finished stripping about twenty minutes into their gig and now walked around the place topless collecting dollar bills for the occasional shake and wag. They flirted and touched thighs and giggled cutely, collecting dollar bills the whole time.

  The hooker had stolen Philo into his bedroom and did things to him that made him sound like feeding time at the zoo. She’d definitely earned her pay. At the moment he was sitting on his leather couch barefoot with his shirt buttoned up the wrong way, holding a Jack and Coke on the rocks to his forehead and sort of groaning happily. Her price was high but a lot of Philo’s friends had solid jobs, or had wives with solid jobs, and they could spare the cash. She beckoned them in one after the other and sometimes in pairs.

  Philo sipped his drink, looked at me with foggy eyes, and said, “You need to tap that.”

  I didn’t think tapping it would work. The guys in there with her right now sounded like they were hitting it with ball-peen hammers and it was hitting back. Her black bag intimidated me. The rug burns on Philo’s forehead looked like they might scar. I turned to the window and watched the night sky glow with hundred foot high flames.

  “Seriously, Tommy,” Philo said, “you need to have some fun. And she’s clean. I checked. I tested her.”

  “You tested her?”

  “I made her get tested and I read the results.”

  “That was before you screwed her, though, right?”

  “Well...right after the first time...sure...”

  The strippers finished parading around for the guys, did a half hour lezzie act without much of a finish, and then collected bills off the floor and split. When I went to the kitchen to get another beer I saw the other me sitting at Philo’s piano, humming a 40s crooner tune out of key with three other teetotalers. He had a cane propped beside him.

  It was the first time I’d seen him in almost two years. I’d heard he’d been in and out of the hospital for heart trouble. I’d been in and out with a series of minor strokes. The left side of my face was still a little numb and wasn’t fully functional. When I smiled only half my mouth raised up while the other half mostly just hung there. Which was why I didn’t smile much anymore.

  The other me’s name was Gray Beckenridge. He was about three inches taller than me and a couple of years older and twenty pounds slimmer, but folks still sometimes confused us. Our careers paralleled each other, and occasionally our lives as well. If his latest novel flopped, then so would mine. If I won a minor industry award, so did he. If he was a guest of honor at a local convention, I could expect to be asked as well.

  It wasn’t as weird as it seemed. We’d started in the trenches at the same time. Our sales figures were the same caliber of shit. Our fathers had been abusive, our childhoods filled with the same blunt pains and sharp edges. We wrote about our old men as a form of survival. We’d wished our dads dead. We’d both come through adolescence with scars and hate.

  We were often referenced in each other’s reviews. We’d been called “stylized brothers with the same literate sensibility.” It probably wasn’t a good thing. He eked out his own living as a creative writing teacher, but his wife was loaded. I managed to swing the bills by digging around second hand bookshops, garage sales, and church bazaars and finding rare items to sell on eBay. A dead man’s cache of pulp magazines was paying my rent this month.

  He caught my gaze and winked at me. I winked back with my good eye. That was enough interaction for another two years.

  Philo was out cold on his couch. I decided I’d had about all the fun I could take for one night. I walked out and waited for the elevator and saw that it was stuck down in the lobby. I felt antsy and didn’t want to wait. I hit the stairs and hotfooted down to the ground floor.

  I checked my watch. It was midnight. I caught a late bite at the corner diner to soak up the alcohol and read for a while. A lot of folks would think it weird to bring a paperback to a bachelor party. But I always had a book with me. This one was a shredded copy of Woodmere’s last novel Stop at Nothing. It smelled like mildew and sixty years of dust. There was no hope of selling it, but I was interested in Woodmere’s early attempts at noir.

  While I was sipping coffee and finishing up a chapter, my agent Monty Stobbs slid into the booth opposite me and said, “So, did you at least get laid?”

  “What the hell are you doing here, Monty?”

  He reached over and took a bite out of what was left of my grilled chicken on whole wheat. “Jesus, no mayo?”

  “I don’t need another stroke, Monty.”

  “Right. So tell me about it. Man, I would’ve given anything to hit Philo’s bachelor party.”

  “You’ve been wandering the streets pouting?”

  “Not exactly. Not with these fires. They’ve got all of Columbus cordoned off. I think a third building is going to go along with the others on 73rd. The wind is rising too. I don’t even know what’s happening on the east side. It’s insane. I hope they catch this prick soon.”

  “Me too.”

  “Okay, so tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “About the party. I bet he had a first-rate call girl to show everyone a good time, right?”

  I thought about it. “Do the first-rate ones carry black bags?”

  “I don’t have any idea,” he said.

  “Me neither. But she seemed to know her business.”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  He ordered a burger and flirted with the waitress for a minute. It wasn’t all that surprising to find Monty out on the streets at one in the morning. He suffered from insomnia and often stopped by my apartment or tracked me down at all kinds of ungodly hours.

  “Good news, Tommy.”

  I didn’t believe him. Monty never had good news. Monty showing up always set my teeth on edge and made my guts knot. “What news?”

  “I’ve got a Hollywood producer interested in The Repentance of Killjoy.”

  I tried not to sigh. “The last time you said a Hollywood producer was interested in one of my novels you turned a coming of age story into a softcore sorority girl slasher flick. And you played the slasher.”

  “You’re still seeing residuals off the back end.”

  “Off the back end of my ass. My last royalty check was for $12.67.”

  His burger arrived and Monty set upon it like he hadn’t eaten in three days. When he came up for air he breathed fried onions in my face. “This time the money will be good. And they’re willing to bring you on as a ‘consultant.’”

  “Do I actually get to consult?”

  “No, probably not. But you get paid extra. They’ll fly you out and put you up. And you will be on-set. Unless y
ou bitch too loudly or get in their way. Then they’ll boot you off.”

  “And when does all this happen?”

  “He says he wants to fast track it. Vince Schreiber. Major player.”

  “You don’t deal with major players, Monty. What else has he done?”

  Monty rattled off a list of titles, most of which I’d never heard before. But there was one I’d actually seen. It was a big budget bombastic action flick and stupid as fuck all. I had given up most of my notions of making anything resembling art on the day I’d had my first prostate exam.

  “Monty, I want you to listen to me carefully.”

  “I always do.”

  “You never do, but forget about that. This time, I want script control.”

  “They won’t give it to you. This guy loves your work, but nobody’s giving a writer with zero Hollywood success script control.”

  “I’m not having another one of my projects turned into a psycho killer gutting open co-eds flick that only turns up on late night cable.”

  “Hey, I emoted the shit out of that role.”

  “You emoted shit anyway. Just go get me what I want.”

  “I’ll do what I can.” He finished his last few fries, threw a five down, and rushed out the door like he had another important middle-of-the-night meeting to make. The five bucks wouldn’t even cover the tip.

  I walked back to my apartment on 56th and West End Highway. I still felt edgy and enjoyed the chance of getting a little exercise. But instead of calming I grew more anxious. The sky looked like it was burning. The fire on the west side had spread. More police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks raced down the avenues. They had to be calling in additional help from the Bronx and Jersey. The wind was working against them.

  I glanced up at the sky to the east and could see the glow from at least one more building over on the other side of town flaming and illuminating the night. The stench of ash was overwhelming. The columns of smoke drifted across the face of the night and blotted the moon. I kept my chin down and my hands in my pockets and picked up my pace a little.

  By the time I got to my building I was drenched with sweat and breathing heavily. I stood in my foyer at the bottom of the four-flight walk-up with an inch and a half of Chinese menus and other advertisements scattered under my feet.

  I checked my cell and found that I had one missed call. I retrieved the message. It was from Gray. He’d sent it over an hour ago, just about the time I walked out of Philo’s place.

  The other me’s voice said, “Have you seen your first ghost yet?”

  2

  A month earlier I’d walked into my apartment with a stated first edition of Harlan Ellison’s Angry Candy and found my Boston Terrier Winston running in circles, barking and snapping at nothing.

  I called to him and he ignored me. I got up close to try to grab him but he avoided my hands while he chased whatever it was he was seeing that I didn’t. I poured myself three fingers of rum and shot the glass back, then filled it again. I sat on my loveseat and watched Winston for ten minutes. I called his name a few more times and he acted like he didn’t hear me.

  When I was sixteen my father, who was drunk at two in the afternoon, backed out of the driveway and ran over Winston. I was just coming home from school. The bus had let me off at the end of the block and before I’d taken a half dozen steps toward home I heard the crunch, Winston’s shriek of agony, and the delayed screech of brakes.

  I sprinted the rest of the way. My old man climbed out of the car, saw the crushed carcass of the dog, and handled his shame the way he always did. He diverted, denied, and shielded himself from it with anger.

  He glared at me and said, “Don’t say a fucking word. And don’t tell your mother. If she asks, he ran away. Go get an old blanket to wrap him up in.”

  I did as I was told. Then he unwound the hose and waited for me to pick up Winston so he could get to work cleaning away the blood and grue off the cement.

  I held his broken body to me and whispered against his soaked fur. I told him I loved him. I told him that one day my father would burn in hell. I said that I would be the one to send my old man there.

  I buried Winston under the dying plum tree in the corner of the yard. My old man and I told my mother that Winston had run off. She cried for three days straight. I didn’t do a good enough job of hiding the evidence of my father’s crime and about a week later my mother found the grave. I told her that I had run over Winston while practicing my driving. She threw the toaster at me and it clipped my temple. I needed four stitches.

  Now Winston seemed to finally notice me. He cocked his head in a quizzical ratchet and nervously pranced back and forth.

  I got a little closer to him. I put my hand out. He went as if to lick it. He didn’t turn transparent or run through a wall.

  Instead, it was like I fell asleep for an instant, and when I awoke he was gone. Except I hadn’t fallen asleep.

  I phoned Gray, got his voice mail, and said, “Yes.”

  3

  Two days later Monty stopped over while I was wrestling with the mid-novel blues. I could start them strong and end them strong, but the middle portion of a book always kicked my ass. I’d throw out three pages to every one I was satisfied with. I had a habit of pontificating, tossing in new sub-plots that tangled up and petered out. I’d pull collections of my favorite stories down from the shelves and hunt for inspiration. The masters always made it seem easy but a hell of a lot of them had wound up snuffing themselves. They’d held themselves to the highest standards and eventually shattered beneath the burden of their own genius.

  When I was younger I admired them for their refusal to accept mediocrity. Now I’d willingly accept incompetence, banality, and obscurity in a heartbeat if it helped me to pay down my Visa bill.

  I sat on the fire escape, drinking a beer, catching a little sunshine. Smoke from the charred ruined buildings still littered the sky.

  Monty joined me on the fire escape. He unknotted his tie and said, “Schreiber wants a sit-down.”

  “So go sit down with him.”

  “He wants it with you.”

  I frowned and took another pull on the bottle. “Why? Producers hate writers.”

  “I know, but he wants to discuss the project with you. He’s in New York next week and booked Tavern on the Green. He seems to have respect for the source material.”

  “So how the hell did he become a producer?”

  “Beats the shit out of me, but this is what you want, right?”

  I thought about it. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  “What, you’re not convinced now?”

  “I’m just curious about this guy.”

  “He’s curious about you too, that’s why he wants to meet. He doesn’t seem like the usual pricks I’ve had to deal with. This might actually be real money and turn out to be a good film. Don’t blow it.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Do better than that, right? How’s the new novel coming?”

  “It’s not.”

  Monty did his best to look concerned. He didn’t quite know how to do it. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters. You’re my client and my friend. What can I do to help?”

  “Monty, you’ve repped me for what, nine years?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And handled seven novels.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever read any of them?”

  He reached over and grabbed the beer out of my hand and took a long pull. “I read one. It had a blue cover. I remember liking it. Well, mostly liking it. I don’t think I got what was happening at the end of it. Something about a guy and his dog falling off a cliff or something? I think they were dead. Nice cover though.” He took another sip. “Blue.”

  4

  That night, my cell vibrated in my pocket. It felt like a hand clutching at my thigh and startled the hell out of me. I’d never set it to
vibrate in the five years I’d had the thing.

  “Hello?”

  “You need to come visit Billy.”

  I shut my eyes. I took a breath. “Barbara–”

  “You missed his little league game on Saturday. You know how he waits for you. He can’t even concentrate when he’s up at bat, he keeps looking into the stands hoping you’re there.”

  “No, he doesn’t. He’s never done that. He never did that.”

  “You’re such a selfish prick, Tom. I knew it when I married you but I kept hoping you’d change. And now you’re breaking Billy’s heart. You need to see him. You need to show up right now, tonight. Spend some time with him. He needs you around, even if you’re just pretending you care.”

  “No, Barbara, I don’t have to see Billy,” I said. “You and Billy died in a car accident four years ago. You were loaded, you rotten bitch. You killed my son.”

  5

  Vince Schreiber turned out to be like nothing I was expecting. He didn’t have an LA tan. He didn’t have ultra-white capped teeth. He wasn’t wearing a rug to cover his thinning silver hair. He shook my hand with a fierce sense of restrained strength. His watch was expensive but not a Rolex. He wore a diamond cat’s eye pinky ring, the kind that hadn’t been fashionable since the early 70s.

  I’d worn a black suit, thin black tie, and white dress shirt. I looked more like my father than I wanted to admit. Back in the day he used to go out with his boys and play third-rate rat pack down in Atlantic City. I remember him working his hair with a brush in each hand, arguing with my mother while he stared at himself in the mirror. She’d be in the kitchen crying and he’d fall back into his Brooklyn tough guy guinea accent, throwing out the occasional Italian curse. He’d shoot his cuffs before he left the house. He’d always return broke and smelling of cigar smoke, vomit, and good perfume. My mother would soak his shirts in the bathroom sink and scrub the waxy lipstick out of his collar.

  Schreiber had ordered a good bottle of wine but not the best. He poured me a glass without bothering to ask if I wanted any.