Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  The phone downstairs went on ringing. L&L didn’t have a machine to pick it up—callers usually gave up after nine or ten rings and tried another car service. I tuned it out. I emptied my jacket pockets and rediscovered Minna’s watch and beeper. I put them on the table, then poured myself a tumblerful of Walker Red and dropped in a couple of ice cubes and sat down there in the dark to try to let the day settle over me, to try to make some sense of it. The way my ice shimmered made me need to bat at it like a cat fishing in a goldfish bowl, but otherwise the scene was pretty calm. If only the phone downstairs would stop ringing. Where was Danny? For that matter, shouldn’t Tony be back from the East Side by now? I didn’t want to think he’d go into the Zendo without some backup, without letting us other Minna Men in on the score. I pushed the thought away, tried to forget about Tony and Danny and Gilbert for the moment, to pretend it was my case alone and weight the variables and put them into some kind of shape that made sense, that produced answers or at least a clear question. I thought of the giant Polish killer we’d watched drive our boss away to a Dumpster—he already seemed like something I’d imagined, an impossible figure, a silhouette from a dream. The phone downstairs went on ringing. I thought about Julia, how she’d toyed with the homicide detective and then flown, how she’d almost seemed too ready for the news from the hospital, and I considered the bitterness laced into her sorrow. I tried not to think of how she’d toyed with me, and how little I knew it meant. I thought about Minna himself, the mystery of his connection in the Zendo, his caustic familiarity with his betrayer, his disastrous preference for keeping his Men in the dark and how he’d paid for it. As I gazed past the streetlight to the flickering blue-lit curtains of the bedrooms in the apartments across Bergen Street, I lingered over my paltry clues: Ullman downtown, the girl with glasses and short hair, “the building” that the sardonic voice in the Yorkville Zendo had mentioned, and Irving—if Irving really was a clue.

  While I thought about hese things, another track in my brain intoned brainyoctomy brainyalimony bunnymonopoly baileyoctopus brainyanimal broccopotamus. And the phone downstairs kept on ringing. Sighing, I resigned myself to my fate, went back downstairs and picked up the phone.

  “No cars!” I said forcefully.

  “That you, Lionel?” said Gilbert’s friend Loomis, the sanitation inspector—the garbage cop.

  “What is it, Loomis?” I disliked the garbage cop intensely.

  “Gotta problem over here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Sixth Precinct house, in Manhattan.”

  “Dickweed! What are you doing at the precinct house, Loomis?”

  “Well, they’re saying it’s too late, no way they’re gonna arraign him tonight, he’s gonna have to spend the night in the bullpen.”

  “Who?”

  “Who’d you think? Gilbert! They got him up on killing some guy name Ullman.”

  Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone.

  I felt some version of this thrill at the news that the garbage cop delivered, of Ullman’s demise. But too, I felt its opposite: a panic that the world of the case was shrinking. Ullman had been an open door, a direction, a whiff of something. I couldn’t spare any grief for the death of Ullman the human being—especially not on The Day Frank Minna Died—but I mourned nonetheless: My clue had been murdered.

  A few other things I felt:

  Annoyed—I would have to deal with Loomis tonight. My reverie was snapped. The ice would melt in my glass of Walker Red upstairs. My sandwich from Zeod’s would go uneaten.

  Confused—let Gilbert glower and lurch all he wanted, but he’d never kill a man. And I’d watched him blink dumbly at the name Ullman. It had meant nothing to him. So no motive, unless it was self-defense. Or else he’d been set up. Therefore:

  Frightened. Someone was hunting Minna Men.

  I took an agency car into Manhattan and tried to see Gilbert at the precinct house, but didn’t have any luck. He’d already been shifted out of the front cage, to the back, where he’d been grouped with a bunch of other fresh arrests for a night of what the cops euphemistically called “bull/diverapy”—eating baloney sandwiches, using the toilet in the open if he had to go, shrugging off petty advances on his watch and wallet, and trading cigarettes, if he had any, for a razor blade to protect himself. Industrious Loomis had already exhausted the cops’ patience for Gilbert’s rights and privileges: He’d had his phone call, his moment’s visitation at the cell bars, and nothing more would be allowed to happen to him until the next morning at the soonest. Then he could hope to be arraigned and sent out to the Tombs to wait for someone to bail him out. So my effort was rewarded by learning nothing yet being saddled with driving Loomis back to Brooklyn. I took the opportunity to try to find out what the garbage cop had heard from Gilbert.

  “He didn’t want to say much without a lawyer, and I don’t blame him. The walls have ears, you know? Just that Ullman was dead when he got there. The homicides picked him up coming out the place like they’d been tipped. Time I saw him, he’d mouthed a little and been roughed around, asked for a lawyer, they told him he had to wait for tomorrow. I guess he tried to call L&L but you weren’t picking up, fortunately I was around—Hey, sorry about Frank, by the way. It’s a shame a thing happens. Gilbert didn’t look too good about it either I can tell you. I don’t know what he said or didn’t but the guys weren’t too happy with him by the time I showed. I tried reasoning with the guys, let them see my badge, but they treat me like I was lower than a fucking prison guard, you know? Like I couldn’t make the fucking cut.”

  Gilbert had befriended Loomis somewhere near the end of high school, when they both were hanging around the Carroll Street park watching the old men play bocce. Loomis called to Gilbert’s lazy, sloppy side, the nose-picker and cigarette-grubber, the part of him that didn’t want to always have to keep up with Minna and us other Men. Loomis wasn’t sharpened up the way even the most passive and recalcitrant of us orphans had to be—he was a sort of shapeless inadvertent extension of his parents’ couch and television set and refrigerator, and he assumed independent life only grudgingly. At Gilbert’s side he’d come slouching around L&L in the formative days and never show a glimmer of interest in either our cover-story car service or the detective agency lurking just underneath—we might have an open packet of Sno-Balls or Chocodiles sitting on the counter, though.

  Loomis was nudged by his parents toward police work. He struck out twice at the civil-service qualification test to become a regular beat cop, and some kindhearted career counselor nudged him again, gently downward, to the easier test for the sanitation police, which he squeaked past. Before he was the Garbage Cop, though, Minna used to call him Butt Trust, a term he would apply with a measure of real tenderness.

  Me and the other Boys let it go the first five or six times, thinking an explanation would be offered, before finally asking Minna what he meant.

  “You got your brain trust, your most-valued,” said Minna. “Then you got the rest of them. The ones you let hang around anyway. That would be the butt trust, right?”

  I was never overfond of the butt trust. In fact, I hated Loomis—let me count the ways. His imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts—his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world, his attention like a pinball rolling past unlit blinkers and frozen flippers into the hole again and again: game over. He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing—so it was my duty to loathe him instead.


  Tonight, as we roared across the metal grating of the Brooklyn Bridge’s roadway, he settled into his usual dull riff: The sanitation force gets no respect. “You think they’d know what it’s like for a cop in this city, me and those guys are on the same team, but this one cop keeps saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you come around my block, somebody keeps stealing my garbage.’ If it weren’t for Gilbert I would of told him to stick it—”

  “What time did Gilbert call you?” I interrupted.

  “I don’t know, around seven or eight, maybe nine almost,” he said, succinctly demonstrating his unfitness for the force.

  “It’s—Tourette is the stickman!—only ten now, Loomis.”

  “Okay, it was just after eight.”

  “Did you find out where Ullman lived?”

  “Downtown somewhere. I gave Gilbert the address.”

  “You don’t remember where it was?”

  “Nah.”

  Loomis wasn’t going to be any help. He seemed to know this as well as I, and immediately launched into another digression, as if to say, I’m useless, but no hard feelings, okay? “So you heard the one about how many Catholics does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

  “I’ve heard that one, Loomis. No jokes, please.”

  “Ah, come on. What about why did the blonde stare at the carton of orange juice?”

  I was silent. We came off the bridge, at Cadman Plaza. I’d be rid of him soon.

  “ ’Cause it said ‘concentrate,’ get it?”

  This was another thing I hated about Loomis. Years ago he’d latched on to Minna’s joke-telling contests, decided he could compete. But he favored idiot riddles, not jokes at all, no room for character or nuance. He didn’t seem to know the difference.

  “Got it,” I admitted.

  “What about how do you titillate an ocelot?”

  “What?”

  “Titillate an ocelot. You know, like a big cat. I think.”

  “It’s a big cat. How do you titillate it, Loomiseemed D; “You oscillate its tit a lot, get it?”

  “Eat me Ocelot!” I screamed as we turned onto Court Street. Loomis’s crappy punning had slid right under the skin of my symptoms. “Lancelot ancillary oscillope! Octapot! Tittapocamus!”

  The garbage cop laughed. “Jesus, Lionel, you crack me up. You never quit with that routine.”

  “It’s not a—root—ocelot,” I shrieked through my teeth. Here, finally, was what I hated most in Loomis: He’d always insisted, from the time we met as teenagers to this day, that I was elaborately feigning and could keep from ticcing if I wanted to. Nothing would dissuade him, no example or demonstration, no program of education. I’d once shown him the book Minna gave me; he glanced at it and laughed. I was making it up. As far as he was concerned, my Tourette’s was just an odd joke, one going mostly over his head, stretched out over the course of fifteen years.

  “Tossed salad!” he said. “Gotcha!” He liked to think he was playing along.

  “Go touchalot!” I slapped him on the thickly padded shoulder of his coat, so suddenly the car swerved with my movement.

  “Christ, look out!”

  I tapped him five more times, my driving steady now.

  “I can’t get over you,” he said. “Even at a time like this. I guess it’s sentimental, like a way of saying, if Frank were still here. Since that routine always did keep him busted up.”

  We pulled up outside L&L. The lights in the storefront were on. Somebody had returned since my jaunt to the Sixth Precinct.

  “I thought you were driving me home.” Loomis lived on Nevins Street, near the projects.

  “You can walk from here, gofuckacop.”

  “C’mon, Lionel.”

  I parked in the open spot in across from the storefront. The sooner Loomis and I were out of each other’s presence, the better.

  “Walk,” I said.

  “At least lemme use the can,” he whined. “Those jerks at the station wouldn’t let me. I been holding it.”

  “If you’ll do one thing for me.”

  “Whuzzat?”

  “Ullman’s address,” I said. “You found it once. I need it, Loomis.”

  “I can get it tomorrow morning when I’m back at my desk. You want me to call you here?”

  I took one of Minna’s cards out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Call the beeper number. I’ll be carring it.”

  “Okay, all right, now will you lemme take a leak?”

  I didn’t speak, just clicked the car locks up and down automatically six times, then got out. Loomis followed me to the storefront, and inside.

  Danny came out of the back, stubbing a cigarette in the countertop ashtray as he passed. He always dressed the prettiest of us Minna Men, but his lean black suit suddenly looked like it had been worn too many days in a row. He reminded me of an out-of-work mortician. He glanced at me and Loomis and pursed his lips but didn’t speak, and I couldn’t really get anything out of his eyes. I felt I didn’t know him with Minna gone. Danny and I functioned as expressions of two opposed ends of Frank Minna’s impulses: him a tall, silent body that attracted women and intimidated men, me a flapping inane mouth that covered the world in names and descriptions. Average us and you might have Frank Minna back, sort of. Now, without Minna for a conduit between us, Danny and I had to begin again grasping one another as entities, as though we were suddenly fourteen years old again and occupying our opposite niches at St. Vincent’s Home for Boys.

  In fact, I had a sudden yearning that Danny should be holding a basketball, so that I could say “Good shot!” or exhort him to dunk it. Instead we stared at one another.

  “ ’Scuse me,” said Loomis, scooting past me and waving his hand at Danny. “Gotta use your toilet.” He disappeared into the back.

  “Where’s Tony?” I said.

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I hope he’s doing better than Gilbert. I just left him in the lockup at the Sixth.” I realized it sounded as if I’d actually seen him, but I let the implication stand. Loomis wouldn’t call me on it, even if he heard from the bathroom.

  Danny didn’t look all that surprised. The shock of Minna’s death made this new turn unimpressive by comparison, I supposed. “What’s he in for?”

  “Ullmanslaughter!—the guy Tony sent Gilbert to find, he turned up dead. They pinned it on Gilbert.”

  Danny only scratched at the end of his nose thoughtfully.

  “So where were you?” I said. “I thought you were minding the store.”

  “Went for a bite.”

  “I was here for forty-five minutes.” A lie—I doubted it was more than fifteen, but I felt like pushing him. “Guess we missed each other.”

  “Any calls? See that homosapien, homogenize, genocide, can’tdecide, candyeyes, homicide cop?”

  He shook his head. He was holding something back—but then it occurred to me that I was too.

  Danny and I stooensively regarding each other, waiting for the next question to form. I felt a vibration deep inside, profounder tics lurking in me, gathering strength. Or perhaps I was only feeling my hunger at last.

  Loomis popped out of the back. “Jesus, you guys look bad. What a day, huh?”

  We stared at him.

  “Well, I think we owe Frank a moment of silence, don’t you guys?”

  I wanted to point out that what Loomis had interrupted was a moment of silence, but I let it go.

  “Little something in the way of remembrance? Bow your heads, you turkeys. The guy was like your father. Don’t end the day arguing with each other, for crying out loud.”

  Loomis had a point, or enough of one anyway, to shame me and Danny into letting him have his way. So we stood in silence, and when I saw that Danny and Loomis had each closed their eyes I closed mine too. Together we made up some lopped-off, inadequate version of the Agency—Danny standing for himself and Tony, I for myself, and Loomis, I suppose, for Gilbert. But I was moved anyway, for a second.
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  Then Loomis ruined it with a clearly audible fart, which he coughed to cover, unsuccessfully. “Okay,” he said suddenly. “How’s about that ride home, Lionel?”

  “Walk,” I said.

  Humbled by his own body, the garbage cop didn’t argue, but headed for the door.

  Danny volunteered to sit by the L&L phone. He already had a pot of coffee brewing, he pointed out, and I could see he was in a pacing mood, that he wanted the space of the office to himself. It suited me well enough to leave him there. I went upstairs, without our exchanging more than a few sentences.

  Upstairs I lit a candle and stuck it in the center of my table, beside Minna’s beeper and watch. Loomis’s clumsy pass at ritual haunted me. I needed one of my own. But I was also hungry. I poured out the diluted drink and made myself a fresh one, set it out on the table too. Then I unwrapped the sandwich from Zeod’s. I considered for a moment, fighting the urge just to sink my teeth into it, then went to the cabinet and brought back a serrated knife and small plate. I cut the sandwich into six equal pieces, taking unexpectedly deep pleasure in the texture of the kaiser roll’s resistance to the knife’s dull teeth, and arranged the pieces so they were equidistant on the plate. I returned the knife to my counter, then centered plate, candle and drink on the table in a way that soothed my grieving Tourette’s. If I didn’t stem my syndrome’s needs I would never clear a space in which my own sorrow could dwell.

  Then I went to my boom box and put on the saddest song in my CD collection, Prince’s “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore.”