Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  Rimbaldo finally turned to Kennedy and said, in careful diction, not wishing to be misunderstood by this alien cop, not wishing to be in his debt even for the price of a moment’s toleration: “Where is Salto? A donde?”

  Kennedy knew what he meant, what he wanted. But he tried to turn it aside. “That’s not your grandson, sir?”

  The eyes in the weathered brown face were yellow and sunken in the skull, taxidermic eyes, shining like plastic buttons stitched in place.

  “Perhaps. Let me touch him.”

  What was the point? They walked down the hall to the elevator and rode downstairs and Kennedy showed him what was left of his Porfirio Magdalena Ruiz.

  “Yes, señor,” said the old man. “That is Salto. That’s my daughter’s boy.” He stood that way for a long time, inches away from the trolley, his hands half-raised either to touch the body or to fend something off.

  There was a form to sign. He waved away the yellow Bic that Kennedy handed him, reaching instead into a pocket of his oversize black suit pants to find an old Parker fountain pen in emerald-green lucite. The pen had a gold nib, as clean as a scalpel, and when the man put it to the form, rich black ink flowed seamlessly and thickly from the nib. The old man wrote the characters of his name in full, in a stylized hand, certain and steady and without hesitation. When Kennedy took the forms away he could see that the signature floated above the dotted line and that even where a down-stroke had required the man to cross the green line, it was done quickly, in a cutting slash, the nib rising again to the name. No quarter, thought Kennedy. Like Santa Ana at the Alamo. Play the De Guello and give them no quarter. The old man must be a son of a bitch to live with. A man like Kennedy’s own father. How he must have ridden the boy. What it was like to be a child in this man’s house, it was too late to ask.

  It was full dark by the time they got back to the Riis Houses to let the grandfather out at the curb. Reedy music was coming from a store across the street. Overhead the city glowed smoky orange. Cars were racing down the FDR on the far side of the project lot. Kids were playing in the street. Maksins and Kennedy watched him walk slowly up the path toward the gritty doorway.

  “Hard-nosed little fucker, eh, Eddie?”

  Kennedy looked across at Maksins.

  “Yeah. He is. What time is it?”

  Maksins held his watch up to the light coming from the store across the street. “Twenty hundred hours, my son. A little after. Monday night, Budweiser time.”

  “You don’t want to chase down this little hooker? This Nadine number?”

  Maksins smiled over at Kennedy. “Kennedy. You been on since six this morning! You look like forty miles of bad road. You want to fuck up those nifty new Florsheims of yours, climbing around in every wet basement and every pond-scum hotel in Alphabet City, in the goddam dark yet, well then, you just run along and do that! Me, I’ve got eight hours loose before the wife gets off the evening shift, and if I don’t have a cold beer in this mitt before the little hand gets to the six, I’m going to hold you responsible. Besides, all your finks are still out looking to score. You won’t get anything tonight. Give it a break, okay? The kid’ll still be dead in the morning.”

  Kennedy was thinking about his apartment. Even Dudley would be out somewhere raising a little hell.

  “Who’s on tonight? Kolchinski?”

  “Yeah, but he’s on that Angel bust. They’re supposed to bag a material witness sometime tonight. Leave the sheet on the peg. One of the night guys can drive around, try to get a line on this broad. Enough’s enough, Eddie.”

  He’s right, said Kennedy to himself. What’s the problem here? You don’t want to go home, get some sleep?

  No. He didn’t. He realized he was rubbing the place on his leg where the spike had gone in.

  “Yeah, Wolfie. Okay. It’s Miller time, hah?”

  Wolfie laughed once, staring out the side window at four black males in do-rag head scarves, old clothes. Two of the boys were carrying cheap plaid lumberjack shirts. A third youth was flipping a ragged vest over his back.

  “Check it out, Eddie. It’s street-crew time. Check out the throwaways.”

  Kennedy leaned over to get a better look at the group. He could see the shirts in their hands. The shirts went on before a mugging and came off right after. It helped to screw up the pursuit. It changed the description. Throwaways always marked a crew of muggers, usually heading out for the midtown area, looking for victims.

  Maksins watched them turn the corner. “You want to fuck them up a little, Eddie? Bet you the first drink they got their tools on them.”

  “What are you, Citywide Street Crime? I thought you were thirsty. Now you want to dance some niggers around?”

  Maksins turned back to Kennedy and grinned.

  “Yeah, Eddie. I do.”

  “Wolfie, you gonna bounce every nigger in town? Your attitude sucks, buddy.”

  Maksins turned away and looked down the street where the crew had disappeared. He was thinking that the city was full of street crews looking for trouble.

  “You like to fuck them around, don’t you, Wolfie?”

  “Yeah, Eddie. It’s what I do best. Come on. The little hand is almost on the six and I don’t see a beer in this car. I don’t get a beer soon, something terrible happens.”

  “You’re a weird fucker, Wolfie.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  CHAPTER 5

  BLOODS

  Krush and Jimmy Jee went over the turnstile at the 116th Street entrance to the downtown IND like a pair of Dobermans, squeezing by the doors of the last car just as the train started rolling. The aging black in the bulletproof cage never even looked up.

  There was a Transit cop in the car, a Latin kid. He saw them come over the rail and it was his job to do something about that, but he was a “cream” in a car full of home boys and bloods from the black projects around Morningside Heights. He kept his mouth shut and settled for a hard look at Krush and Jimmy.

  Jimmy was weighty, short and muscular, with bad skin the texture and color of quarry clay, but Krush was something else. He was lean and hard-looking; like so many of the street blacks up in Harlem he had that special glow, the light of a Burundi or a Bantu from East Africa. They had chiseled faces and long necks and a graceful syncopated way of going; they had a kind of amber halo about them, and skin with the tint of blue smoke. Krush knew he was good-looking, but good looks had been a problem in Rikers, getting him “maytagged” at least eight times before he got old enough and fast enough to cause some pain in the process, and he had hooked up with Jimmy on his last tour in the prison, partly because Jimmy was, at fifteen, too mean to bother, even for the roughest. Not that Jimmy hadn’t been maytagged as well, once or twice. The trick was to make the trade-off of sex for blood too irritating. Since Krush’s last stay at Rikers he and Jimmy had formed an “association.” Jimmy had the moves and Krush had the judgment.

  This far down the line it was still home country. There were no “poppy loves” or “vics” in the car, no white people at all, but by the time the train got down past 86th Street the magical transformation had begun. “Heads” and “poppy loves” and assorted victims were appearing here and there against the wall of black skin like little popcorn puffs in a skillet. Krush and Jimmy Jee could feel a heat in their chests, a sick joy with no bottom.

  “Be gettin’ busy, my man,” said Jimmy, just to hear his voice. Krush smiled at a pair of white girls in matching Daniel Hechter sweatshirts.

  “Word up, fool. We be fresh tonight.” Fresh meant well-dressed, the only path to respect back in the housing project they lived in. Fresh was new jeans or a suit of clothes, maybe a gold tooth. Swatch watches, Gucci loafers, a sweater from Perry Ellis; neither of them looked any further than that. The way to get those things, Krush and Jimmy had decided two years back, was to get out on the streets of Manhattan and take the money. There was an expression on the streets at the time: “Manhattan make it and Brooklyn take it”—or Queens,
or Harlem. The point was, as Krush said so often it had become a kind of incantation for Jimmy Jee: “You better take it, ’cause they sure ain’t goin’ to give you none!” They called their work “fiending the heads.”

  The pair wasn’t fresh yet. Krush was wearing faded Levis, still muddy from this afternoon’s stickball game, a gray sweatshirt with the hood up over his head, and a pair of Reeboks he’d taken from a kid who’d come into the projects from East Harlem to buy heroin from Krush’s older brother. Jimmy Jee had a do-rag on, a kind of pirate head-scarf pulled tight around his city curls; a white T-shirt stretched over his chest; jeans, and white sneakers. Both kids were carrying about a dollar in change and a pair of “throwaways.”

  They got off the train at the 42nd Street station and walked up the filthy stairs to Eighth Avenue in a crush of Monday-night daters. Out on The Deuce there were ten thousand people milling about a mile-square area full of fry shops, porno parlors, head shops, electronic stores, clubs, bars, theaters, bookshops. Between Sixth and Eighth, 42nd Street is brighter than Vegas, a million candlepower of pinlights and strobes pulsing and fluttering through smog and smoke from a thousand cars and buses. It’s a permanent honky-tonk fantasy. Krush and Jimmy Jee had to turn down three offers of cocaine and six bargain-rate blow jobs from assorted transvestites before they got twenty yards along the littered sidewalk. They strolled across the asphalt and potholes of Eighth Avenue to a pretzel vendor in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He gave them a couple of charred pretzels and a can of Dr. Pepper just for good will. Krush and Jimmy never even had to push him. It was always that easy.

  Around the time that Krush and Jimmy were chipping away at their pretzels, and Wolfie Maksins was putting away his third beer at Jackson Hole on Third at 36th, a business major from Buffalo, second year and a B average, by the name of Jamie Spiegel was closing the door to room 1445 at an aging midtown hotel on Broadway. Jamie was supposed to be on a train for Wilmington, Delaware, but he’d danced the schedule around enough to free up a week in Manhattan. He was twenty-one, slightly overweight, and he’d postponed this experience long enough. First a couple of hard-core flicks at something like the Pussycat, then a live sex show up at a place he’d read about in Screw, and then a few bucks dropped at one of those private-viewing video booths in the basement at the Show World Center. He was taking a roll of the hotel toilet paper. What the hell. So he was sick. Jamie bathed for an hour in hotel shampoo, splashed Blue Stratos all over his pale body, and bought himself a twelve-pack of ribbed condoms. After killing a six-pack of Kronenbourg that he’d smuggled past the concierge (hotel beer was three bucks a bottle!), he was ready for the sleazoid delights of 42nd Street. He sure as hell hoped it was ready for him. Jamie split up his money, shoving two hundred under a loose corner of the wall-to-wall in the hall closet. (A maid found this a week later when she came in to clean. She laughed when she saw it, since she’d loosened the corner herself. She thought of it as her trap-line, and it came up with something for the kitty at least once a month. Jamie had other problems by that time, anyway.) He put the remaining one hundred into two flat packets. One packet went into his Bass loafers, under the foam insole. The other went into the right-hand pocket of his Calvin Klein jeans, where it made a nice neat little outline as the thin denim fabric stretched over Jamie’s soft thigh.

  “Diamond season?” said Jimmy. Krush looked over his shoulder at the chubby Jew talking to a uniform cop up at the corner of Eighth and 46th. The Jew was Hasidic, an obvious victim down in this area. He had the black felt homburg, the temple curls. Krush looked for “pocket prints,” signs that the man was carrying a fat wallet or a gun; many of the merchants from the diamond district on West 47th Street had carry permits. Diamonds got traded on a handshake and a family name, carted in Baggies across the street, like peanut butter sandwiches, between scrufly little third-floor shops and basement vaults; more money on the street in any afternoon than Amsterdam or Zurich. Diamond season.

  “You be in crime two year and you don’ know no DT when you be seein’ him. He knock you so fast you be bleedin’ in The Great Adventure before you say please mister postman!” Krush sometimes felt like giving up on Jimmy Jee. Man was a mope and no mistake. But strong. Jimmy still didn’t get it.

  “He be a vic, man!” Jimmy’s voice always got shrill when he was angry, way up there in the high notes, like a bird. Krush thought of Jimmy as Birdman because of this voice. “You be jivin’ me, man. That’s my poppy love and he be goin this night!”

  “Ain’t no hymie poppy love be on The Deuce Monday night, fool! He be home in Mount Vernon with his fat lady and his VCR, watching his fucking hymie cartoons. Jewboy be on the rag ever’ Monday, man. Ain’t no Jewboy that, and that ain’t no vic. That be a DT, so shut the fuck up!”

  Krush watched Jimmy think this one through but he kept an eye on the chubby man in the dark suit. Something was telling him right here that the man was a detective, but he couldn’t say just what. The mark strolled away up Eighth. Krush watched his ankles. Big heavy black shoes. Maybe at the curb. Just before the man stepped off to cross 47th, Krush caught a flash of buckle and belt under the man’s right cuff. A DT all right. So The Man was on The Deuce tonight. Krush thought about the pretzel vendor they’d put the moves on; The Man loved those pretzel carts. All over town Krush had seen pretzel men by their pushcarts with their wires hanging out their dumb-ass cuffs and their fucking guns shoved into the steamer. Krush’s older brother—now there was a master, good old Duke of Destruction himself—he once saw the man working his stupid pretzel-cart number outside a shooting gallery on 125th Street. The Duke had pulled in a crew and they’d taken the pushcart cop like the Russian cavalry. Con Ed truck on the corner tried to follow and two of the Duke’s boys had spray-painted the windows. The Con Ed truck had gone through the front of a check-cashing parlor, spilling plainclothes cops like fleas off a rat. The Duke came home with a gold shield, an NYPD ID card, a Smith & Wesson Model 10 .38 Special, and the DT’s drop gun, a Llama .32 with masking tape on the handles. The event had made The Duke from the Heights to Drew Hamilton Houses.

  Krush liked to stop thinking about The Duke at this point. The rest of the story was sort of a downer. The Duke had hit the wrong clubhouse on a rip-off scam last February and Krush had found him in the airshaft behind their block on 118th Street at Manhattan. Somebody had given him a “necktie.” His throat had been cut just wide enough and deep enough to allow his killer to reach up inside and pull the thick muscle of his tongue out through the wound. They left it hanging down over the bloody shirt. Krush had been looking for him for two days. He never told his mother just exactly how the boy had died. A uniform sergeant from the 31st had shown her the pictures a week later, trying to get some information about Krush. This man was marked down in Krush’s book. Jimmy was poking him again.

  “Word up, Mister K. Got us some fine white pussy up the street.” Jimmy pulled Krush into the dark of a closed storefront. They had reached 55th, the northern limit of their hunting ground. If they hit nothing good this far north they’d cross to Broadway and go down toward The Deuce again. There were fewer people on the street up here. It was a dead area in between the action on 42nd and the café scene up above Columbus Circle on the West Side. Krush stood in the doorway for a moment, trying to figure out what Jimmy was talking about. There was movement inside a cigar store across the street. A woman in a scarlet cloth coat was paying for cigarettes at the counter. Even from this distance, close to sixty feet, Jimmy had seen the gold bangle on her wrist as it caught the light inside the store. Out on the street a car was idling at the curb. The woman was still talking to the store clerk. It looked like there was no one in the Buick.

  “I be on it, man. That’s gold. That’s a stack. Check it out, man.” Krush had some misgivings. Well, the job had its risks, right?

  Eighth was fairly thick with cars, but the shops up here had their iron down, slatted flexible-steel grates that rolled down over the entire front of the store. The
y were secured by case-hardened padlocks. In the midtown area, entire city blocks could turn into a canyon of grated steel fronts. It had been years since New York had stayed open all night. Here and there a local store catered to people from the brownstones. Sometimes Krush and Jimmy simply waited in the dark across from a neighborhood deli—a parallel to jungle cats at a watering hole that had not escaped Krush’s vivid imagination.

  “Jimmy, man. That’s a vie. Let’s go.” Jimmy nodded once. Krush got a look at his heavy face in the glow of the streetlights. He was a little wide around the eyes, and his throat was working. He could have been stoned, frightened, or thinking about rape. Thinking about spreading some fine white legs and getting some of that uptown honey on his fingers. Krush could feel his crotch warming up, and his belly got numb.

  “Shit, man. Get paid and get pussy too.” Jimmy was a pace in front, bracing to rush the woman as soon as she came out of the store, take her in a storm of boots and fists, knock her to the ground and rip that gold away. Krush had to jerk his shoulder once, twice.

  The routine was a classic purse snatch, with some assault thrown in, the idea being to stay on the vic no longer than fifteen, maybe twenty seconds. Get paid and get laid but don’t get made, that was the creed. But the idling Buick had given Krush an idea. If the doors were unlocked?

  “Yo, Jimmy. Wait. We goin’ now, get into the bitch’s wheels. Be inside when she get out. Give her a time, man. Maybe even score her keys, cards. Shit! Have us a party up in some fucking penthouse way up there, man!”

  Jimmy and Krush had never been in a white woman’s home, at least not when the owner had been there. Even then, the kind of places they could take were mostly transitional brownstones in the West 70’s or 80’s, and once they’d gotten by the doorman in a building on 38th Street near the heliport. But they had fantasies about white money and white women, about apartments as big as the mess hall at Spofford, all covered in white furs and white marble, with white drapes that moved back as silent and smooth as a blade through table cream. And beyond the window there it was: the whole n chee lah dah, as Jimmy put it, maybe a look at Manhattan from Central Park West with that big square box of the park, a black hole cut right out of the core of the city. Krush used to lie down on the roof on the nights when his mother had men in and imagine the way the lights of the buildings all around Central Park would reflect off the waters of Harlem Lake and the reservoir at night. Everything would be black and those lights in the water would glitter. He’d be on the balcony and he’d have one of those big round glasses in his hand. Live like he was meant to live, like it was in Ebony, be a sleek black man in a white apartment.