Londongrad

by Reggie Nadelson

  “What did the hazmat guy say?” Bobo asked.

  “Give him your number, he’ll call you.”

  “So would you work this with me, Artie?”

  I told him I was seriously on vacation.

  “I can call you for some advice?” He was polite, but I didn’t feel comfortable with this guy. Maybe all he wanted was to do the case right, but there was something I couldn’t explain. I wanted to get away.

  “Or maybe we could have a beer together once in a while and I could talk through it with you?”

  “Sure,” I said, and headed for the street, Bobo following me, scribbling in his notebook fast as he could write.

  Outside the playground, I leaned against Bobo’s red Audi TT and wondered how he could afford it.

  “Nice car,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “So what do you think?” said Bobo, dragging in smoke the way only a Russian guy can do it.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Me either. I mean, Artie, you been on the job all this time, and who the fuck tapes up some poor girl and leaves her to suffocate in this shitty place?”

  “I don’t know, Bobo, I don’t know who likes making people feel pain.”

  “You’re wondering if they taped her up before she was dead?” said Bobo.

  “I have to go,” I said. “Keep in touch.”

  “A guy once told me once you get close to a case, you can’t let go, isn’t that right? Artie?”

  “He was probably drunk,” I said. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Stacks of pink cold cuts lay on trays, little mountains of cubed cheese, orange, yellow, white, carrot sticks, candy bars, bagels, rolls, pastries that glistened, shiny under the lights, were arranged on platters, and NYPD guys in uniform were gobbling up food as fast as they could, as if they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, shoving food into their mouths, piling it high on paper plates. The long tables were set up outside the sound stage.

  “Craft Services, they call it,” said Sonny Lippert, my ex-boss, when I found him at the Steiner Movie Studios where the old Brooklyn Shipyards had been.

  He picked up his plate and sauntered out into the courtyard, and I followed him. He sat on a canvas directors’ chair and gestured to another one. I sat next to him.

  I wanted his advice before I saw Bobo Leven again. The dead girl wasn’t my case, it was Leven’s, but I couldn’t let it go. The image of the girl on the swing stayed with me like floaters that stick in your eye, float on the surface of your brain, clog your vision. Some guy had told Leven when I got close to a case I couldn’t let it go, but that was crap. I was happy to turn it over to Leven. I was curious was all. I had seen the girl on the swing first and I was curious.

  Or was I fooling myself? Had I become some kind of obsessive, one of those cops who can’t get the smell of a homicide out of his nose?

  It wasn’t that I planned to work the case, I only wanted advice. Any information I got I’d pass on. Anyhow, I owed Sonny Lippert a visit. I hadn’t seen much of him lately.

  “So, Artie, good to see you, it’s been a while,” said Sonny, who was wearing a captain’s uniform, the kind of dress blues guys wore to funerals. I had never in my life seen Lippert dressed as a cop. Almost all the years I’d known him, it was after he left the police force to work as a US attorney.

  “What’s with the outfit?” I said to Lippert who had been my boss on and off for years until he retired.

  “Nifty, right,” said Sonny, smoothing his navy blue jacket. “Fits me nice, right? I sucked up to the wardrobe lady, man. These people are cool. Listen, man, you want to go hear Ahmad Jamal with me in the fall, one of the last of the greats, man?” he said.

  Long ago Sonny and me had started listening to music together. He still calls everyone “man”, a leftover from his younger years when he hung out with jazz guys. He still listened to the music with real love.

  When I was still a rookie and broke, he sometimes invited me to concerts at Carnegie Hall and sometimes to the Vanguard. It was with Sonny I first heard Miles Davis in person, and Stan Getz, and Ella.

  “What the hell are you supposed to be?” I said, smiling because I suddenly felt affectionate towards Sonny.

  “I’m a police captain, man,” he said, buttering a roll he had on the plate on his lap. “I’m an extra. The movie I’m working. I’m a consultant. I told you. Didn’t I?”

  All around us real cops and fake movie cops, both, smoked and ate. One guy bit off half of an enormous sesame bagel stuffed with cream cheese and lox, tossed the other half in a garbage can and began kicking a soccer ball around the huge yard of Steiner Studios. Beyond the yard that was surrounded by a high chain-link fence, twelve, fourteen feet, was the old waterfront. With the staggering view of Manhattan and the river, once all this had been the Brooklyn Navy Yards where World War II ships were built.

  “What do you know, you haven’t been a cop since Shaft was in action,” I kidded him, drinking my root beer.

  “I sit around all day and actors come by and we shoot the shit about being a detective, and I tell them how to walk and talk, make it look real.”

  “How the fuck do you know how cops walk and talk?”

  “It’s not brain science, you know, Artie, man. One of the producers, so-called, said to me, you have that authority thing, Sonny. You got it. Teach them.” He laughed. “I tell them how it is, then they go and put the girls in low-cut tops and tight pants. I mean, what female detective is going to fucking dress like that in real life? Or maybe they do now. Maybe the real ones get how they dress from the TV cops,” said Sonny, heading into one of his riffs. “Truth is nobody knows what’s real anymore,” he added. “A lot of actual cops I know have stopped using the old lingo. Once civilians started picking up stuff from Law and Order, you know, bus for ambulance or on the job for being a cop, guys started dropping it. Hard to tell the difference, right, man? Reality and fiction, man, who can tell?”

  “Jesus, Sonny.”

  “So you came by to chew the fat, shoot the breeze, what, Artie?”

  Sonny sat back on his canvas chair and looked me over.

  Small and tightly wound as clockwork doll, his hair is still black and I have to figure he dyes it because Sonny must be pushing seventy. He seems a lot younger, doesn’t look much different from when he recruited me out of the academy back when. Over the years, I had worked for him on and off, usually on Russian cases. He likes to remind me how green I was when he first spotted me. I talent-spotted you, man, he’d say, like he invented me. Used to make me nuts.

  Growing up in Moscow like I did, I thought I was pretty streetwise. Moscow kids, we figured ourselves at the center of the universe, the center of a vast country that was always centralized. Moscow was the place where everything happened, politics, literature, science, movies, music, everything.

  We thought we were hot shit. In fact, we were so cut off from the world, we didn’t know how provincial we really were until word began to trickle through. Back then, all I had from outside, the only evidence there was better, something that reminded me of my dreams, was the music, Willie Conover’s Jazz Hour on Voice of America, and a few illegal Beatles tapes.

  Anyhow, when I met Lippert, I was new in New York, young, willing. Lippert saw he could use me. I spoke languages, I knew which fork to use, more or less, and Lippert told me he could use me on certain special jobs. I was plenty available for flattery, which Lippert doled out in just the right doses.

  For years I didn’t trust him. I knew he used me when it was convenient, but, retired or not, he was still the most connected guy I knew in the whole city.

  The cop actors vied for Lippert’s attention, asking him if they looked okay, if they walked okay, if they resembled the real thing. For a while, he passed out advice, and they sucked it up gratefully.

  “You should get in on this consulting thing, man,” said Sonny. “It’s very competitive, I mean every
ex-cop wants in, and some still on the job would love it, and I could help you get a gig if you want, you could be a movie cop, if you wanted, maybe even go on screen, like an extra or something, man. You’re still pretty good-looking. I could introduce you.” He glanced over at the fence that surrounded the studio, “Jesus, look at that,” he added.

  Beyond the fence was a group of Hassidic men, with long black curls and big black hats, white shirts, black pants. They had been kicking a soccer ball around. Now they came to the fence, and stared, incredulous, hostile, at the fake cops. Maybe they figured them for the real thing.

  A black actor was sitting on a canvas chair, reading, his back against the chain-link fence. He heard somebody rattle the fence and looked up. A Hassidic guy said something disdainful about blacks. The actor got up, body tense. Other actors crowded around him.

  Insults were exchanged. You could feel the anger rise. Everyone started yelling. Only the fence kept them from fighting.

  It was as if the Crown Heights riots were starting all over.

  “Just fucking cut it out,” a crew member yelled. “Everybody, just back off,” he said, and then it stopped. On our side it was only make-believe, and there was the chain-link fence.

  “Can we talk, please?” I said to Sonny again. “And not about make-believe, okay? Now?”

  “Don’t get your hair in a braid, man,” he said and walked me across the cement courtyard, away from the crowd.

  We sat on a cement block and he asked what was eating me, what I’d been up to.

  I told him what I knew about the dead woman – or maybe she was a girl – on the swing, and about Dina, the kid who found her.

  “You went there how? How come?”

  “I was taking some books to an old lady in Brooklyn, that part doesn’t fucking matter, and I saw Dina running around in the street. I want you to tell me about duct tape, and about who does this kind of murder, does it ring any bells with you, anything you ever heard of? Sonny?”

  “I heard about some, Albanian, maybe even Russkis, they get these girls, they prostitute them, the girls refuse, they try to run away, the creeps who own them do this kind of stuff. The duct tape, killing them this way, it’s a warning, keep still, don’t do anything, keep your mouth shut. It could be Mexicans, but I don’t think so, not around here.” He looked at his watch. “I can get out of here for an hour, if you want, I can take a look at the scene,” he said. “You have your car? I’ll follow you.”

  I didn’t want Sonny at the scene, it wasn’t my case, it would complicate things, but he was already on his way to the parking lot. I saw he was eager, glad somebody had asked him about the real world.

  “Murder Inc.,” were the first words out of Sonny Lippert’s mouth when he climbed out of his dark green Jag near Fountain Avenue.

  I walked him over to the playground where I’d seen the body. It had been taken away, but forensic crews were still picking over the site. Lippert followed my gaze.

  “She was there,” I said. “On the swing. Tied to it. Posed.”

  “Go on.”

  “Somebody was making a point,” I said. “Right?”

  “Anybody look good for it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Weird, man, this is exactly where the mob used to dump the bodies times I was a kid,” said Sonny. “Murder Inc., Jesus Christ, it was famous, man, I mean we used to come over here and look for them. The bodies. You remember a song called ‘When My Bobby Gets Home’? We kids used to sing ‘When the Body Gets Cold’. All of us kids, all we wanted was to play ball for the Dodgers or join up with Murder Inc., maybe get to kill someone. Sometimes we did a cat, you know, strung it up from a light bulb, dumped the body out here. You don’t think it’s funny? Come on, Artie, man.”

  “Listen to me, Sonny, try to think.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay, there were real Jewish gangsters then, big time. Jews and Italians got along, man, you know why?”

  “Yeah, what’s that, Sonny?” I said.

  “We were all short,” he laughed. “You know, we called this part of Brooklyn the Land of the Lost,” he added.

  When Sonny Lippert set out on one of his riffs, when he rambled, you had to wait. Tangled in his past, he had to climb out of the web. It took him longer and longer these days. I sometimes felt he’d just disappear into his own past and never return.

  “The Land of the Lost, used to be wild dogs, packs of them, around here because of the garbage dump close by.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll make some calls, if you want,” Sonny said.

  “Sure, Sonny, thank you. I should probably get going.” I knew there was no point keeping him here.

  “You know you can call on me anytime, man, you know that.”

  “Thanks.” I put my hand on his shoulder and he smiled slightly. “Thank you.”

  “She was naked?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look for her clothes, man. I’m telling you, look for the clothes. You always find it in the clothes. They looked? Your girl on the swing, girl on a red velvet swing.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, man. Just something out of a story,” said Sonny, then looked up as Bobo Leven appeared at the edge of the playground.

  He greeted Sonny formally. He was polite, he showed deference. He asked him some questions about the case, what did Sonny think, did he have any insights? He was attentive.

  “I have to go,” Sonny said.

  “I’ll walk you,” I said, and went with Sonny back to his car.

  “What is he?” said Lippert glancing towards the playground and Bobo Leven. “What is he, Artie, your Sundance?”

  *

  “He have anything interesting to say, Mr Lippert, I mean?” said Bobo when I got back to the playground.

  “Anybody find the girl’s clothes?” I said.

  “We didn’t find anything, not yet,” Bobo said.

  “Put a few uniforms to work on it, Bobo, get some of the beat cops to look everywhere for the clothes,” I said and shoved the necklace with the blue charm on it in my pocket, and didn’t know why.

  All the way to Brighton Beach the presence of the charm in my pocket, reminded me of the dead girl. I was going to meet Valentina Sverdloff. By the time I got there, I wished I’d unloaded the charm on Bobo Leven.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Hello, darling Artie,” said Val as soon as I saw her at Dubi Petrovsky’s bookshop. She kissed me like a big sloppy puppy on the cheek, not having to reach up because she was as tall as me, just met me head on and kissed me. “Did you get my message?”

  I’d come from the playground. By the time I got to Dubi’s, on Brighton Beach Avenue, people were out strolling in the late afternoon, a holiday afternoon, buying fruit, eating hot dogs, heading for the beach.

  The bookshop was next to a juice bar. Dubi sold books in Russian, other Sov languages, English books on Russia, his own books on the Beatles in the former Soviet Union, other stuff too, CDs, DVDs, said you had to do it to stay afloat. He had added photographic equipment, old-style cameras, antique lenses, dusty packages of printing paper. From someplace in back “Penny Lane” was playing. I didn’t mention the girl in the playground to Dubi, or to Val; I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want it in my life.

  “I got your message,” I said to Val. “Do you want to go swimming?”

  “I need a favor,” she said.

  “Anything.”

  “Thank you.”

  *

  For a while Val had worn her hair chopped into a platinum crew cut, but she had started growing it and letting it go back to her natural red color. I liked it better. She wore a little white t-shirt and cut-off jeans.

  “I was going to call you,” said Petrovsky, emerging from the back of the shop. “You thirsty?” he asked, then, without waiting, disappeared and returned, carrying a trio of cold Baltikas for us. “Good to see you, Artyom. You want this beer, young Valentina?”

  She thanked him a
nd asked about his own work, claiming his attention, his affection, like she always did. She was the most instinctively generous person I knew, curious about everyone. She rarely talked about herself, except to a few close friends, never dropped names; in spite of her height and beauty, she was a modest girl.

  “What are you looking at?” She grinned at me, and went back to the books.

  I drank some beer. “Go on, Dubi. You said you were going to call me?”

  “This was a peculiar visit yesterday,” said Dubi, rubbing his hand over the high forehead, the large hawk-like nose. “This skinny guy in western boots comes by to look at books, he says, and makes conversation about you, tries to make it casual, like how good is your Russian, do you buy Russian books? I get this impression this is why he comes.”

  “He gave you a name?”

  “He used a credit card to pay for some stuff. R. Pettus,” Dubi said.

  “Yeah, he’s nobody, Dube. Just a guy, an FBI agent I knew around 9/11, we worked some stuff together. He retired.”

  “He buys a Russian-English dictionary, and says give Detective Artie Cohen my regards, if you see him.”

  “Right.” I wondered, for the second time that day, what the hell Roy Pettus wanted. “It was probably nothing,” I said, but

  I didn’t believe it. A cold hand seemed to brush my shoulder, like a ghost. Except I don’t believe in ghosts.

  “I’m just going outside to make a call,” I said. “Val? You okay?”

  She put her head up over the boxes. “Happy as a pig in shit,” she said. “Dubi has the most wonderful photographic books. I’ll be a little while longer.”

  Nobody except a security guard at the desk in the FBI office answered when I called. It was a holiday. I called a number I had in Wyoming. All I got was a machine. I remembered Pettus had a daughter somewhere, New Jersey, maybe it was. There was a Cheryl Pettus listed in South Orange. A man who answered said she had moved. Finally I got her.

  Cheryl told me sure, she was Roy Petttus’ daughter, and as it happened her dad was in town for her wedding. I told her who I was and she was okay with it, but said she had to go over to Seton Hall, the Catholic college where she was teaching a summer course. She said she’d get her dad to give me a call. Said she didn’t want to give out his cellphone. I said congratulations on the wedding, but it was urgent, and we hung up.