I said to Sonny, “Where’s the baby now?”
“They’re taking her to the hospital, man, but she’s dead.”
I pushed my way through the crowd in the alley and made it to the ambulance that was getting ready to drive off. I pestered the driver. I had to see. Later I was sorry I had looked.
The baby was tiny, very wrinkled, like an old woman, one of those ancient people they sometimes found in an arctic wasteland. I couldn’t look at her, couldn’t look away.
I went back to the alley and said to Lippert, “You think she was already dead, you think Bingo only thought he heard her?”
“I don’t know,” Sonny Lippert said.
“No, man,” Bingo said. “I heard her. You wouldn’t last long in the fucking deep freeze, would you? But I heard her cry.”
Rizzi kept blueberries for his pies in the freezer, along with other reserves, a side of bacon, frozen pancake mix he got suckered into buying wholesale. I didn’t know how often Rizzi used any of it. On a hot summer day once, I found him out there sitting on the freezer having a smoke.
The wall where I was leaning was damp. I could feel the heat from the others, smell Lippert’s breath, hear my own heart pumping adrenalin, and taste the horror that hung in the alley.
Someone from the ME’s office came over and told Sonny Lippert the baby had not been frozen long, far as he could tell. It was possible that Bingo had heard some kind of noise, but maybe it was only been the thump and grind of the elderly freezer.
“You’re saying it’s really possible she was alive when some bastard stuck her in there?” Lippert asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, and then someone pushed me out of the way back into the street while two other cops went in.
I got a cigarette out of my pocket and called Mike Rizzi. He was already on his way.
Lippert was holding two phones in one hand, and had another clipped to his belt. Around us the crowd of officials grew bigger.
“You want to talk, Artie, man? You want me to help you?” Lippert’s voice was soft, almost gentle. His raincoat hung open over the green shorts I’d seen him in earlier and his bare feet were stuck in a pair of loafers, same expensive loafers he’d worn on the beach in Coney Island, little loafers, small as a boy’s.
“Help me with what?”
I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to go back to Billy, I was on the street a block and a half away from my loft where a dead baby girl had been carted off in an ambulance. The area was crawling with law enforcement.
My neighborhood, my turf, the place I had lived for twelve, almost thirteen years, where I knew everyone and where I belonged. Being here had made me feel like a New Yorker instead of an immigrant.
I was a sucker for community and I went to block meetings, dragged friends to street fairs where we ate greasy calzone to raise money to plant trees and other shit. I complained when local shops shut down and Starbucks opened up. The Englishman with dreadlocks at the bike store on Lafayette, best bike store in town, checked my bike for free because I liked making bike talk, and he didn’t get that many cops, and the Korean dry cleaners I used were as courteous as some ancient noble clan.
Some of the time I drank at a little bar a few blocks away where a furious bartender thought he should be a film director. And there was Mike Rizzi, of course, and his pies. It was the life in this piece of lower Manhattan that kept me sane.
The image of the tiny, nut-like, frozen face of the baby girl stayed in front of my eyes; it looked less real than the face on one of the dolls.
“Where did the baby come from?” I said to Lippert. “You’re thinking Shank, right, but where did he get her?”
“They’re checking hospitals, orphanages, daycare centers, also anyone who called in a baby that got snatched. People still leave babies alone and then they say, I only turned my head for one second. Fucking people,” said Lippert. “Come on, man, let’s get away from this, there’s plenty of people on it, nothing you can do, let’s sit down somewhere. You want to go up to your place?”
There was a Chinese take-out on the corner that stayed open late.
“We can sit there,” I said. “I want to stay around until Mike Rizzi gets here.”
“Who?”
“Mike Rizzi, you met him, the guy that owns the coffee shop. He’s a friend.”
“You always got friends, Artie, you always got a lot of friends, maybe too many,” Lippert said, but this time he wasn’t sarcastic. Usually, he meant I was a sucker for people who were nice to me, but not this time. He took my arm.
“I feel for you, man. Listen, your friend who owns the coffee shop, Rizzi, tell him to get a good lawyer. His prints will be all over the freezer.”
“Mike’s a good guy.”
“Probably he is, but he’ll need someone. Let’s sit down,” Lippert said and we went into the take-out.
Inside under fluorescent lighting was a single table. We sat. Behind the counter, a Chinese guy slept, his head against the wall.
There were no customers, only Sonny and me, sitting with a couple sodas in front of us. From where we sat we could watch the street, people moving up and back, cop cars parked everywhere, lights flashing, people hanging out of their loft windows, dog walkers stopping. I tried not to think about the baby’s face before they zipped up the bag, but it was all I could see.
“You think there’s really a chance the baby was alive, Sonny?”
He looked down at his soda can, then up at me. “Probably not,” he said. “Probably not, man. You seem restless.”
“I’m tired,” I said. “I’m really tired, Sonny. Maybe I’ll go home.”
“I’m sorry about Billy, but you knew he had to go back to Florida, right? You knew it wasn’t good, him being with you, didn’t you, Artie?”
I didn’t answer.
“You think it was always like this, the way things happen with kids, man?” said Sonny. “I don’t remember anymore. I don’t remember so much shit from when I was a kid but maybe it was because no one ever talked about it, they kept it in the family when someone whipped a kid and almost killed him, because it was OK to hit children. You read Dickens, like I told you to?”
“Yes.”
“How come people treat children like garbage, man? I don’t get it. They kill themselves to get one, and then they get divorced and they use the kid like a fucking domestic football,” said Sonny. “It’s like the whole fucking society went nuclear, boom, and the fallout is the little kids who are just trash. Garbage. I don’t know.” He leaned over the Formica table. “Artie, man, I have to ask you this. You know the poor bastard got kicked to death in Chinatown?”
“What?” I was surprised he wasn’t asking about the baby.
“Maybe you didn’t hear, a guy kicked to death, lay bleeding in Chinatown?”
“Maybe I heard something on the news,” I said.
“He was a kid, fourteen maybe, small for his age. You want to tell me exactly where Billy was during that time?”
“With me.”
“All the time?”
I didn’t say anything. We sat for a while in silence, and I could hear everything out of sync, my heart, my watch, the snores of the Chinese guy behind the counter who was still asleep. From outside came the insistent sound of a car alarm.
“Artie, you and me, we go way back now,” said Sonny. “I helped you all I could with Billy after we found him with Heshey Shank out in Breezy Point, right, I helped you fix it so he went to Florida instead of Spofford or some other fucking terrifying juvie place. It was us, me, you, poor dead Sid McKay, we made deals with the prosecutors and Sid manipulated the media so the way the story came out the kid was practically a hero. Billy the Kid, wasn’t that what they called him? Said he was kidnapped and defended himself?” Sonny stopped.
“I don’t know why the fuck they let him out even for a few weeks, but they did, and I don’t want you in this again,” he added.
“Yeah, so you say.”
“Artie, for G
od’s sake. They’re bringing kids up on adult charges at eleven, twelve. You know how many kids under fifteen, sixteen are doing life in prison in this country? I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s where we’re at, kids who don’t get a decent lawyer or say whatever the prosecutor wants, and they go away for fucking life and people say you’re lucky it wasn’t the death penalty, kiddo. We kept Billy out of all of that. So you take him back to Florida because it’s the best deal he ever got in his life.”
“Go on.”
“I think you’re fucked up about him. You’re in denial. I was pretty fucking surprised when I saw you on the beach with him Tuesday.”
“Yeah, you sure let him know.”
“Artie, for chrissake, get real. The boy killed a man.”
“I’m taking him back to Florida, but it’s to keep him safe from Shank.”
“Whatever. Tomorrow night I’m going to call the facility, you hear? Make sure he’s in Florida.” Lippert’s eyes glazed over some and I could see he’d had a couple of drinks before he came out. “Artie, I’m asking you, stay away from the Farone boy. I know you’re attached.”
“He was twelve years old when it happened, Sonny.”
“He was plenty smart. He pulled off something a grown-up couldn’t have done. He was smart and he was bad.”
“He’s better.”
“Yeah, and Heshey Shank is still dead. Look, man, it was me helped you fix it all up so Billy didn’t get a needle in his arm, it was me talked to the judge and got him adjudicated to the place in Florida,” said Sonny. “I did that for you. But it doesn’t mean I think he’s a saint suddenly. It doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s capable of some other shit.”
“Maybe they let him out because he is better. He’s a kid, kids change. Maybe he was sick. Maybe he didn’t do what we thought.”
“You’re dreaming, man, you are. You want me to spell it out for you?”
I got up. “I have to go.”
“You’re in fucking denial, man. If I hear one single thing about that boy that makes me suspicious I’m going to be in touch with the facility in Florida, or if I don’t hear he’s heading back on time, I’m also calling. So do me a favor, take the boy to his parents and then take him back to Florida.”
I lied. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. OK, I’ll do that.”
“I have to ask you. You don’t have to answer me, man,” he said, “but you have to think about it. What Billy has, whatever his craziness is, I’ve seen kids a lot like him sometimes get threatened if someone gets in their way. There anyone around who gets attention from you when he’s around?” Sonny got up. “I have to go, but think about if there’s anyone Billy could see as competition.”
“It has all the marks of something Shank would do,” I said to Sonny when we were out on the street. “He told me he sells bootleg dolls, his prints were on at least one of the dolls in the warehouse in Chinatown. You have it all wrong, Sonny. He’s trying to set Billy up; he wants him dead or locked up for good. He does this religious thing about not hurting Billy because he’s a Christian, and the truth is he never gave a rat’s ass for Heshey, but it gives him someplace to put his rage.”
“What about May Luca, and now the little girl, Ruthie Kelly, who was killed over in Jersey, you’re saying Shank did that, too?” said Sonny.
“Why the hell not? He’s an animal. Him and old man Farone liked little girls, maybe a little girl got to talking about how the old men felt them up or maybe raped them.”
“OK, so we get Shank for the dolls, and maybe even for Ruthie, Kelly and May Luca, so for argument’s fucking sake, let’s say I like him for that, and so does the DNA. What about this? What about the baby girl in the freezer?”
“You don’t think Shank could do it? I have to go,” I said.
Sonny got hold of my sleeve.
“Listen to me. Maybe you forgot that Billy Farone made that poor retarded Heshey Shank, a guy that wouldn’t hurt a flea, run away with him,” said Sonny. “You recall? You want me to go into the details, how Billy fixed it all up, how he organized it, how he highjacked Heshey, or kidnapped him, whatever you want to call it, and left a trail making us believe it was the other way around, that Heshey abducted Billy? How he put everyone on the wrong track, namely you, Artie, man. And then he took Shank out to Breezy Point and carved him up. Slow. You remember? Carved little pieces out of him, hung fishing nets around him, and left him to die, and it took what, two days for Shank to die like that, tangled up in nets. Billy sitting right nearby. You remember we found him sitting there like nothing at all happened?”
I didn’t answer him.
“One more thing, Artie, man.”
“What’s that?”
“I had Stan Shank picked up earlier today.”
27
In my loft, Billy was still asleep. I closed the bedroom door, went into the kitchen and put on a single light so I wouldn’t wake him. It was one in the morning. Outside in the street, I heard news crews arrive, greedy for the story of the dead baby in a freezer they could get on the early morning shows if they hustled. I drank some Scotch from the bottle. Tried to flush the image of the baby out of my head.
No exact time had been attached to the baby’s death, not yet. Even if Shank had been picked up, maybe he had killed the baby first. It wasn’t impossible, and there were always Shank’s pals. The little baby in the freezer would have been a great way to set Billy up. Shank would have known.
Billy’s duffel bag was near the front door, his jacket hanging over it. I rummaged around in it. I couldn’t find his phone.
I went into the bedroom and without waking him found the phone on the floor. I picked it up and went back to the kitchen. I needed another drink before I looked at the pictures. Didn’t know what I was going to find. Didn’t want to find anything.
It took me a couple of minutes to get the hang of it, but it was easy even by my technologically crappy standards. I found the stored images.
There were pictures of Stan Shank in the maroon Town car that Billy had probably taken when Shank was following us. There were pictures of the Farone house, including Billy’s empty room and his empty fish tank. Pictures of people out on Staten Island, the Provones, Vera Gorbachev, even the young cop reading a comic book outside Gorbachev’s house.
Everywhere Billy had been he had taken pictures, and he had saved them carefully as if he was building up some kind of archive of his time in New York.
There were no pictures from Florida, none of the school, or his grandfather, no friends, nothing. Maybe he had erased it from his mind. I found another picture. It looked like it had somehow been taken underwater, a fisheye view of the water and fish. I didn’t know if you could use a camera phone under water.
I tried to make some connection between the pictures but there wasn’t any, except a lot of them were of me. I hadn’t noticed Billy taking the pictures.
There were pictures of the party at the toy store, and my stomach turned over at what I saw in one of them. I started looking for my car keys.
The phone rang. I found my keys and I was out of the building and in my car in seconds, not stopping for a cop, not stopping for traffic lights, my head killing me, from noise, from Percoset, from things I had seen and didn’t want to think about. I made it over to Tolya Sverdloff’s place in five minutes flat. Lily was already there.
“Where’s Luda?” I said before I was all the way through the door and all I could see were Valentina and Lily sitting together on a red leather sofa holding glasses, and looking like they’d already had plenty to drink.
Val had a bottle of rum clutched in one hand. Lily was holding her other hand, and whispering to her like she was a little girl. Val’s face was wet. In spite of everything, or because of it, I was out of my mind glad to see Lily.
The TV was on, local news already showing a reporter near the alleyway where the baby was found.
Staring at the TV, Val sucked some rum straight out of the bottle, and I could see the picture
of a pirate on the label when she put it to her lips.
She placed it on the floor, picked at her hair, and twisted a piece of it around her finger, then plucked out a single strand. The skin on her face was tight and the circles under her eyes were purple with fatigue and wet from crying. She kept hold of Lily’s hands as if she’d sink without the support.
Tolya, who leaned over the back of the couch as if to protect the two women, talked into a phone, his voice furious.
“How did you know?” he said to me. “You saw it on TV? I was trying to get you.”
“Know what?”
“About Luda.”
“I just felt worried about her,” I said. “I don’t know anything. What should I know?”
“She’s gone,” Lily said. “Tolya called me, and I got here as soon as I could. She’s just gone. We left you messages. We called and Billy answered, and we told him. Didn’t he tell you?”
“He said he talked to Luda.”
“That was earlier,” Lily said. “Much earlier. We called again. I told him, please tell Artie to call. I said it was urgent.”
“How gone?” I said. “Tolya? What’s going on? I need you to tell me what happened.” I was talking in Russian very fast, but Tolya didn’t even look at me, just waved his hand in my direction to tell me to shut up while he was on the phone.
“My dad’s got a bunch of his guys on it, he says he doesn’t trust the cops, it’s no different from Russia,” Val said.
“What else?”
“I didn’t bring Luda into the country with all the right papers. You won’t report that will you?” Val’s beautiful face was pinched with fear.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I put my arms around her. “What would I report, anyway? You’re American.”
“But Luda isn’t.” said Val. “I got sick of waiting, I mean Luda’s ten, she was nine then, and she was so excited. I took her to the US embassy in Moscow and they wanted to know about her family and I said she was pretty much an orphan and they asked her all these stupid questions, and finally I lost my cool and I said, what the fuck kind of terrorist did they think Luda was? It didn’t really go down well and they more or less told me they’d never give her a visa. I pulled some strings. I asked daddy to spend some money on it, I asked him to get some friends to smooth things out,” Val said, and burst into tears.
Fresh Kills Page 24
