Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  The teacher looked at me like I was crazy.

  The social-services worker looked at me like I was crazy.

  The boy looked at me like I was crazy and then hit me.

  The girl looked at me like I was crazy.

  The woman looked at me like I was crazy.

  The black homicide detective looked at me like I was crazy.

  “I’m afraid you can’t go, Julia,” said the detective, shaking off his confusion at my utterances with a sigh and a grimace. He’d seen plenty in his day, could cope with a little more before needing to bust my chops over it—that was the feeling I got. “We’re going to want to talk to you about Frank.”

  “You’ll have to arrest me,” said Julia.

  “Why would you want to say that?” said the detective, pained.

  “Just to keep things simple,” said Julia. “Arrest me or I’m getting in the car. Lionel, please.”

  I humped the huge, unwieldy suitcase down the stoop and waved at the driver to pop the trunk. Julia followed, the detective close behind. The limo’s speakers were oozing Mariah Carey, the driver still mellow on the headrest. When Julia slid into the backseat, the detective caught the door in his two meaty hands and leaned in over the top.

  “Don’t you care who killed your husband, Mrs. Minna?” He was plainly unnerved by Julia’s blitheness.

  “Let me know when you find out who killed him,” she said. “Then I’ll tell you if I care.”

  I pushed the suitcase in over the top of the spare tire. I briefly considered opening it up and confiscating Julia’s pistol, then realized I probably didn’t want to emerge with a gun in front of the homicide cop. He was liable to misunderstand. Instead I shut the trunk.

  “That would involve us being in touch,” the detective pointed out to Julia.

  “I told you, I don’t know where I’m going. Do you have a card?”

  As he straightened to reach into his vest pocket she slammed the door, then rolled down her window to accept his card.

  “We could have you stopped at the airport,” he said severely, trying to remind her of his authority, or remind himself. But that we was weaker than he knew.

  “Yes,” said Julia. “But it sounds like you’ve decided to let me go. I appreciate it.” She palmed his card into her purse.

  “Where were you this afternoon when Frank was killed, Mrs.

  Minna?”

  “Talk to Lionel,” said Julia, looking back at me. “He’s my alibi. We were together all day.”

  “Eat me alibailey,” I breathed, as quietly as I could. The detective frowned at me. I held my hands open and made an Art Carney face, pleading for a common understanding between us—women, suspects, widows, whattayagonnado? Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, eh?

  Julia powered her tinted window back up into place and the Legacy Pool limousine took off, idiot radio trickling away to silence, leaving me and the detective standing in the dark of Baltic Street by ourselves.

  “Lionel.”

  Alibi hullabaloo gullible bellyflop smellafish, sang my brain, obliterating speech. I waved a farewell at the detective and started toward Smith Street. If Julia could leave him flat-footed, why couldn’t I?

  He followed. “We better talk, Lionel.” He’d blown it, let her go, and now he was going to compensate with me, exercise his deductive and bullying powers.

  “Can’t it wait?” I managed, without turning—it took a considerable effort not to swivel my neck. But I felt him right on my heels, like a pacing man and his shadow.

  “What’s your full name, Lionel?”

  “Lullaby Gueststar—”

  “Come again?”

  “Alibyebye Essmob—”

  “Sounds Arabic,” said the detective as he pulled even with me. “You don’t look Arabic, though. Where were you and the lady this afternoon, Alibi?”

  “Lionel,” I forced myself to say clearly, and then blurted “Lionel Arrestme!”

  “That’s not gonna work twice in the same night,” said the cop. “I don’t have to arrest you. We’re just taking a walk, Alibi. Only I don’t know where we’re going. You want to tell me?”

  “Home,” I said, before I recalled that he’d been to the place I called home once already this evening, and that it wasn’t in my best interests to lead him there again. “Except actually Iȁd like to get a sandwich first. I’m starving. You want to get a sandwich with me? There’s a place on Smith, called Zeod’s, if that’s okay, we’ll get a sandwich and then maybe part ways there, since I’m kind of shy about bringing people back to my place—” As I turned to deliver my speech my shoulder-lust was activated, and I began reaching for him again.

  He knocked my hand away. “Slow down, Alibi. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Tourette’s syndrome,” I said, with a grim sense of inevitability. Tourette’s was my other name, and, like my name, my brain could never leave the words unmolested. Sure enough, I produced my own echo: “Tourette is the shitman!” Nodding, gulping, flinching, I tried to silence myself, walk quickly toward the sandwich shop, and keep my eyes down, so that the detective would be out of range of my shoulder-scope. No good, I was juggling too much, and when I reticced, it came out a bellow: “Tourette Is the Shitman!”

  “He’s the shitman, huh?” The detective apparently thought we were exchanging up-to-the-minute street jargon. “Can you take me to him?”

  “No, no, there’s no Tourette,” I said, catching my breath. I felt mad for food, desperate to shake the detective, and choked with imminent tics.

  “Don’t worry,” said the detective, talking down to me. “I won’t tell him who gave out his name.”

  He thought he was grooming a stool pigeon. I could only try not to laugh or shout. Let Tourette be the suspect and maybe I’d get off the hook.

  On Smith Street we veered into Zeod’s Twenty-Four-Hour Market, where the odors of baloney and bad coffee mingled with those of pistachio, dates, and St. John’s bread. If the cop wanted an Arab, I’d give him an Arab. Zeod himself stood on the elevated ramp behind the Plexiglas-and-plywood counter. He saw me and said, “Crazyman! How are you my friend?”

  “Not so good,” I admitted. The detective hovered behind me, tempting me to turn my head again. I resisted.

  “Where’s Frank?” said Zeod. “How I never see Frank anymore?”

  Here was my chance to deliver the news at last, and my heart wasn’t up to it. “He’s in the hospital,” I said, unable now to keep from glancing nervously at the homicide detective. “Doctorbyebye!” recalled my Tourette’s.

  “Some crazyman you are,” said Zeod, smiling and arching his hedge of eyebrows knowingly at my official shadow. “You tell Frank Zeod asks, okay, partner?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do that. How about a sandwich for now? Turkey on a kaiser, plenty of mustard.”

  Zeod nodded at his second, an indolent Dominican kid, who moved to the slicer. Zeod never made sandwiches himself. But he’d taught his countermen well, to slice extraordinarily thin and drape the meat as it slid off the blade so it fell in bunches, rather than stacking airlessly, to make a sandwich with that fluffy compressibility I craved. I let myself be hypnotized by the whine of the slicer, the rhythm of the kid’s arm as he received the slices and dripped them onto the kaiser roll. Zeod watched me. He knew I obsessed on his sandwiches, and it pleased him. “You and your friend?” he said magnanimously.

  The detective shook his head. “Pack of Marlboro Lights,” he said.

  “Okay. You want a soda, Crazyman? Get yourself.” I went and got a Coke out of the cooler while Zeod put my sandwich and the cop’s cigarettes into a brown paper bag with a plastic fork and a sheaf of napkins.

  “Charge it to Frank, yes, my friend?”

  I couldn’t speak. I took the bag and we stepped back out onto Smith Street.

  “Sleeping with the dead man’s wife,” said the detective. “Now you’re eating on his tab. That takes some gall.”

  “You misunder
stand,” I said.

  “Then maybe you better set me straight,” he said. “Gimme those cigarettes.”

  “I work for Frank—”

  “Worked. He’s dead. Why didn’t you tell your friend the A-rab?”

  “Arab-eye!—I don’t know. No reason.” I handed the cop his Marlboros. “Eatmebailey, repeatmebailey, repeatmobile—could we continue this maybe another time? Because—retreatmobile!—because now I really urgently have to go home and—eatbail! beatmail!—eat this sandwich.”

  “You work for him where? At the car service?”

  Detective agency, I silently corrected. “Uh, yeah.”

  “So you and his wife were, what? Driving around? Where’s the car?”

  “She wanted to go shopping.” This lie came out so blessedly smooth and un-tic-laden it felt like the truth. For that reason or some other, the detective didn’t challenge it.

  “So you’d describe yourself as, what? A friend of the deceased?”

  “Trend the decreased! Mend the retreats!—sure, that’s right.”

  He was learning to ignore my outbursts. “So where are we going now? Your house?” He lit a cigarette without breaking stride. “Looks like you’re headed back to work.”

  I didn’t want to tell him how little difference there was between the two.

  “Let’s go in here,” I said, jerking my neck sideways as we crossed Bergen Street, letting my physical tic lead me—navigation by TouretteWherx2014;into the Casino.

  The Casino was Minna’s name for Smith Street’s hole-in-the-wall newspaper shop, which had a single wall of magazines and a case of Pepsi and Snapple crammed into a space the size of a large closet. The Casino was named for the lines that stretched each morning to buy Lotto and Scratchers and Jumble 6 and Pickball, for the fortune being made on games of chance by the newsstand’s immigrant Korean owners, for the hearts being quietly broken there round the clock. There was something tragic in the way they stood obediently waiting, many of them elderly, others new immigrants, illiterate except in the small language of their chosen game, deferring to anyone with real business, like the purchase of a magazine, a pack of double-A batteries, or a tube of lip gloss. That docility was heartbreaking. The games were over almost before they started, the foil scraped off tickets with a key or a dime, the contrived near-misses underneath bared. (New York is a Tourettic city, and this great communal scratching and counting and tearing is a definite symptom.) The sidewalk just outside the Casino was strewn with discarded tickets, the chaff of wasted hope.

  But I was hardly in a position to criticize lost causes. I had no reason for visiting the Casino except that I associated it with Minna, with Minna alive. If I visited enough of his haunts before news of his death spread along Court and Smith Street, I might persuade myself against the evidence of my own eyes—and against the fact of the homicide cop on my heels—that nothing had happened.

  “What’re we doing?” said the detective.

  “I, uh, need something to read with my sandwich.”

  The desultory magazines were shelved two deep in the rack—there weren’t more than one or two customers for GQ or Wired or Brooklyn Bridge per month around here. Me, I was bluffing, didn’t read magazines at all. Then I spotted a familiar face, on a magazine called Vibe: The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Before a blurred cream background he posed resting his head against the neck of a pink guitar, his eyes demure. The unpronounceable typographical glyph with which he had replaced his name was shaved into the hair at his temple.

  “Skrubble,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Plavshk,” I said. My brain had decided to try to pronounce that unpronounceable glyph, a linguistic foray into the lands On Beyond Zebra. I lifted up the magazine.

  “You’re telling me you’re gonna read Vibe?”

  “Sure.”

  “You trying to make fun of me here, Alibi?”

  “No, no, I’m a big fan of Skursvshe.”

  “Who?”

  “The Artist Formerly Known As Plinvstk.” I couldn’t quit tackling the glyph. I plopped the magazine on the counter and Jimmy,e Korean proprietor, said, “For Frank?”

  “Yeah,” I gulped.

  He waved my money away. “Take it, Lionel.”

  Back outside, the cop waited until we’d turned the corner, into the relative gloom of Bergen Street, just past the F-train entrance and a few doors from L&L’s storefront, then collared me, literally, two hands bunching my jacket at my neck, and pushed me up against the tile-mosaic wall. I gripped my magazine, which was curled into a baton, and the bag from Zeod’s with sandwich and soda, held them protectively in front of me like an old lady with her purse. I knew better than to push back at the cop. Anyway, I was bigger, and he didn’t really frighten me, not physically.

  “Enough with the double-talk,” he said. “Where’s this going? Why are you pretending your man Minna’s still with us, Alibi? What’s the game?”

  “Wow,” I said. “This was unexpected. You’re like good cop and bad cop rolled into one.”

  “Yeah, used to be they could afford two different guys. Now with all the budget cuts and shit they’ve got us doing double shifts.”

  “Can we go back to—fuckmeblackcop—back to talking nice now?”

  “What you say?”

  “Nothing. Let go of my collar.” I’d kept the outburst down to a mumble—and I knew to be grateful my Tourette’s brain hadn’t dialed up nigger. Despite the detective’s roughhousing, or because of it, our frenzy had peaked and abated, and we’d earned a quiet moment together. He was close enough to invite intimacy. If my hands hadn’t been full I would have begun stroking his pebbly jaw or clapping him on the shoulders.

  “Talk to me, Alibi. Tell me things.”

  “Don’t treat me like a suspect.”

  “Tell me why not.”

  “I worked for Frank. I miss him. I want to catch his killer as much as you.”

  “So let’s compare notes. The names Alphonso Matricardi and Leonardo Rockaforte mean anything to you?”

  I was silenced.

  Matricardi and Rockaforte: The homicide cop didn’t know you weren’t supposed to say those names aloud. Not anywhere, but especially not out on Smith Street.

  I’d never even heard their first names, Alphonso and Leonardo. They seemed wrong, but what first names wouldn’t? Wrongness surrounded those names and their once-in-a-blue-moon uttering. Don’t say Matricardi and Rockaforte.

  Say “The Clients” if you must.

  =”0em” width=”1em” align=”justify”>Or say “Garden State Brickface and Stucco.” But not those names.

  “Never heard of them,” I breathed.

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “Believemeblackman.”

  “You’re fucking sick.”

  “I am,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be sorry. Your man got killed and you’re not giving me anything.”

  “I’ll catch the killer,” I said. “That’s what I’ll give you.”

  He eased off me. I barked twice. He made another face, but it was clear it all would get chalked up to harmless insanity now. I was smarter than I knew leading the cop into Zeod’s and letting him hear the Arab call me Crazyman.

  “You might want to leave that to me, Alibi. Just make sure you’re telling me all you know.”

  “Absolutely.” I made an honorable Boy Scout face. I didn’t want to point out to good cop that bad cop hadn’t learned anything from me, just got tired of asking.

  “You’re making me sad with your sandwich and your goddamn magazine. Get out of here.”

  I straightened my jacket. A strange peace had come over me. The cop had caused me to think about The Clients for a minute, but I pushed them out of view. I was good at doing that. My Tourette’s brain chanted Want to catch him as much as miss him as much as a sadwich but I didn’t need to tic now, could let it live inside me, a bubbling brook, a deep well of song. I went to the L&L storefront and let
myself in with my key. Danny wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The phone was ringing. I let it ring. The cop stood watching me and I waved at him once, then shut the door and went into the back.

  Sometimes I had trouble admitting I lived upstairs in the apartment above the L&L storefront, but I did, and had since the day so long ago when I left St. Vincent’s. The stairs ran down into the back of the storefront. Apart from that inconvenient fact, I tried to keep the two places separated in my mind, decorating the apartment conventionally with forties-style furniture from the decrepit discount showrooms far down Smith Street and never inviting the other Minna Men up if I could help it, and adhering to certain arbitrary rules: drinking beer downstairs and whiskey upstairs, playing cards downstairs but setting out a board with a chess problem upstairs, Touch-Tone phones downstairs, a Bakelite dial phone upstairs, et cetera. For a while I even had a cat, but that didn’t work out.

  The door at the top of the stair was acned with a thousand tiny dents, from my ritual rapping of my keys before opening the door. I added six more quick key-impressions—my counting nerve was stuck on six today, ever sine the fatal bag of White Castles—and then let myself in. The phone downstairs went on ringing. I left my lights off, not wanting to signal to the detective, if he was still outside watching, the connection between upstairs and down. Then I crept to my front window and peered out. The corner was empty of cop. Still, why take a chance? Enough light leaked in from the streetlamps for me to make my way around. So I left the lamps dimmed, though I had to run my hands under the shades and fondle the switches, ritual contact just to make myself feel at home.

  Understand: The possibility that I might at any time have to make the rounds and touch every visible item in my apartment dictated a sort of faux-Japanese simplicity in my surroundings. Beneath my reading lamp were five unread paperbacks, which I would return to the Salvation Army on Smith Street as soon as I’d finished them. The covers of the books were already scored with dozens of minute creases, made by sliding my fingernails sideways over their surfaces. I owned a black plastic boom box with detachable speakers, and a short row of Prince/Artist Formerly Known As CDs—I wasn’t lying to the homicide cop about being a fan. Beside the CDs lay a single fork, the one I’d stolen from Matricardi and Rockaforte’s table full of silverware fourteen years before. I placed the Vibe magazine and the bag with the sandwich on my table, which was otherwise clean. I wasn’t so terribly hungry anymore. A drink was more urgent. Not that I really liked alcohol, but the ritual was essential.