Brick House

by Daniel Nayeri

  “Don’t talk ’bout my godmutha like that,” warned Alvarez, kicking his legs off the desk. He crumpled up the newspaper and looked like he would have lunged at them if Goodie hadn’t distracted him.

  “Tell the maggots about our case, dearie,” she said, not looking up. Mack noticed that the pile of meat had gotten smaller, but she hadn’t seen Goodie put down the knitting.

  Alvarez said, “We gotta case.”

  “Yeah, we heard that already,” said Mack.

  “Murder one,” said Alvarez. “Brother wants brother out of the way. Big one too. Sila maybe.”

  Saul opened the door to the captain’s office. “So go work the case,” he said.

  “When we’re ready,” said Alvarez. “Just thought to tell ya so you’d eat some when we close our case before you close yours.”

  Mack walked into the office. Ari spoke over the comm unit, “Hey, Tinker Bell called, said she wants her wings back —” Saul shut the door before Alvarez could scream curses at him.

  Cap looked more like a tax man — khakis, loafers, the urge to call him grandpa — than a chief of Ds. He was about the size of Saul’s left leg, with a slouch he got from riding a desk too long. His office was no bigger than a falafel stand, but it was orderly. The files hung in perfect rows under block-lettered tabs. The routing slips were stacked as neatly as printer paper. The pens in the pen holder stood in color-coded divisions — subdivided by type, ballpoint, fountain, retractable. His hand trembled as he wrote something on his desktop calendar. He was bent over so close to the page that his glasses almost touched the paper.

  The captain didn’t look up as he said, “Hello, Saul. How’re you doing? Good?” His lower lip was sucked in a little, like his dentures didn’t quite fit. When he finished saying anything, he’d mush to a slow stop. His glasses magnified his eyes.

  Saul stood at attention. “Yes, sir. Can’t complain.”

  “Did you see the new coffee creamers we have?”

  “Yes, sir. Hazelnut, sir.”

  “You enjoy that,” said the captain. “That’s there for you to enjoy.” He was still writing on the calendar.

  “I will, sir.”

  The captain looked up. “And you, Detective, how’s your first case back from lash detail?”

  Mack straightened under the gentle glare of the captain’s attention. “Um, yes, sir. Enjoying it very much.”

  “Are you making progress?”

  “Good progress, sir. We think the boy’s wish will attack the family around dinnertime. We’ll be there to apprehend.”

  “And why is that?” said the captain.

  “What?”

  “Why do you think it’ll attack at dinnertime?”

  “Well, sir . . .” said Mack.

  The captain threaded his fingers together and put them on the desktop calendar. He said, “Why don’t I let Ari debrief me on this.”

  Saul pulled the plastic bag out of his pocket and placed it on the mouth of an empty mug. “We got nuthin’, Cap,” said Ari. He took a quick lap around the cone-shaped space to get his bearings. “We’re lost at sea over here. The brat says his wish was a one-off, should have been a quick lookup and lockup, na-mean?”

  “I know what you mean,” said the captain.

  “Right, but there’s no sign of the ghul anywhere. Meanwhile, we got another kid, a little older, orphan, who’s playing all nice-nice with the family.”

  The captain nodded. “The kid you brought in last night.”

  “The one,” said Ari. “Mack and the big guy gave him the hard sell, but he ain’t buyin’.”

  Mack coughed into her fist. The captain raised an eyebrow. “You don’t agree with the assessment, Detective?”

  “No, sir,” said Mack. “I think the orphan knows more than he’s letting on. More than the Muppet show he gave us, anyway.”

  “Fine,” said Ari. He puffed a few bubbles. “May it represent on the record that DT Mack over here believes our Little Orphan Annie is secretly a sila, a friggin’ sila, for God’s sake.”

  “Noted,” said the captain. “Go on, Ari.”

  “That’s just it, Cap. No place to go. The mom’s life is cornflakes. The dad might have something on the side, but a guy like that, he’s already having the affair with his job. We could tail him if you want.”

  “No point in it,” said the captain.

  “Cornflakes,” said Ari, “bland as brunch.”

  “We do have one lead,” said Saul. “Old lady Cavanaugh, the foster mother.”

  “That ain’t a lead,” said Ari. “That’s a shred of a hunch. It’s fish food.” Then Ari swam over to Mack’s corner of the bag and said, “See how that works? I can say stuff like that ’cause they’re my people.”

  “Do whatever you want,” said Mack, arms crossed. “I think fish food is great. Had a salmon steak last Thursday.”

  “I loathe you,” said Ari, a quiver rolling over his iridescent scales.

  The captain frowned. He didn’t frown often. The grooves of his old age had given him a permanent wistful look.

  “I’ve been getting calls all morning about two detectives flashing badges all over town,” said the captain. Ari swam to attention. Mack straightened up. “The scientist called in, got the brass worried about exposure.”

  “Sorry, sir,” said Saul.

  “We’ll keep a lower profile,” said Ari.

  “You should do that,” agreed the captain. “Act like the regulars unless you have to.”

  The comm channel crackled in their earbuds. Voice of Angie. “Ji-Ji, this is Central, do you copy?”

  “Ten-four, Central,” said Saul. “But I’m a little —”

  “I got the information you asked for,” said Angie.

  Saul put two fingers up to his ear and looked at the captain. “Go on,” said the captain. “And be more neighborly. And try the hazelnut.”

  Saul nodded, grabbed Ari’s bag, and walked out. “I’m in the building, Angie. Be there in a second.” Angie didn’t turn off her mike in time to cut her swoony exhale.

  When Saul closed the door, the captain said to Mack, “How are you really?”

  Mack didn’t know how to answer. She railed the zipper of her jacket up and down. “Good,” she said. She hadn’t figured out old man Magoo just yet. The whole squad respected him, even Alvarez. Her last captain was a megaton of slobbery abuse who tooted more than a steam train and smeared beef grease on every report he pawed at. This guy had on a cardigan and probably took his grandkids to the shore.

  “Your previous issue . . .” said the captain.

  “Won’t be a problem again, Captain. My word on that.”

  The captain smiled at her, which pushed the wrinkles up his cheeks and closed his eyes. He mushed invisible creamed corn and looked sleepy.

  “Thank you for the opportunity.”

  “Don’t thank me,” said the captain. “Saul was the one who requested you. Otherwise, he and Ari work alone.”

  Mack walked out of the captain’s office, back into the sleepy detectives’ bureau. Saul was gone.

  “Hey, Alvarez,” she said. He was still reading the paper. A Pixy Stix dangled from his mouth. “Saul never had a partner but me?”

  “Man,” said Alvarez, making a snikt sound through his teeth. “Punk ain’t even really Wish Police.”

  “Captain says he’s even better than the first-grade detectives.”

  “That’s ’cause regulars keep it tight like that. If it wasn’t for the goldfish, Saul wouldn’t even be ICU.”

  Goodie clarified, “The ape is the minnow’s chauffeur, dearie.”

  “You’re on the donkey ride, Mami,” said Alvarez, laughing. “And Saul is the donkey.”

  “Wait. Wait, you guys think Saul’s a regular? A regular regular. Like, just a regular schmo carting the magic fish around?”

  Alvarez and Goodie just smirked.

  “But his last name is Djinn,” said Mack.

  “Don’t be stupid, dearie. No one’s a djinn.�
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  Mack skipped the comeback. Nobody would believe Saul was the only free genie in the unknown world. And maybe he wasn’t. What proof did she have? Just the guy’s word. Worse yet, the whole squad thought he was Ari’s goon. But then, if they had all the angles covered, why had Saul requested a discipline case like her?

  “So the captain is a regular, too?” said Mack. Alvarez snapped the paper in half and looked at Mack like she was pudding thick.

  “Did you see pixie wings on him? Last name Rumpelstiltskin, hawkin’ magic beans on the corner? No? Just an old white guy in power? That’s that, whatevuh bein’ whatevuh. I mean, he’s captain. Believe that. But he don’t do wishes.”

  Goodie said, “He is very organized, though.”

  That was the first nice thing out of the old troll. Mack noticed that her meat platter had been licked clean. Mack couldn’t decide if a compliment from Goodie meant you were starlight . . . or scum chunks.

  Saul walked back from the Wishing Post Central Dispatch. Mack was waiting outside on her bike. Saul saw her through the double doors and stopped short. Before he opened the doors, he switched to the private channel and said, “Hey, Angie? I forgot one thing.”

  Angie rolled a salacious “Hmmm?” over her tongue, like maybe he’d forgotten to ask for her house key.

  “Do me a favor and run a background check on Mack?”

  “She’s a pub wench, and her voice sounds like she’s got too much makeup on.”

  “C’mon,” said Saul.

  “Fine,” said Angie. “Slow night, anyway. Lot of wishes but none of them are biting.”

  “Maybe the goodness thing is taking off. You know. Bibles on Broadway.”

  Angie scoffed over the channel. Saul did the same. Maybe bad dreams were going out of style. Sure. Maybe a lot of things.

  Saul pushed open the double doors. Mack tossed a helmet his way and said, “What’d you get?”

  Saul saddled the bike and talked as Mack raced a Chinese deliveryman downtown.

  “Turns out Mother Bieman’s about as bland as Tabasco on tobacco. She used to be a hand model by the name of Sandy Pumpkin, then danced at a knockoff Alvin Ailey for a while, played in a few indie films. All the while she was going through more men than an X-ray. The only problem was she got wrinkles. Nobody wanted to see her frolicking in the Lincoln Square fountain anymore. Became a theater instructor.”

  “It was midnight and the Pumpkin turned into a stagecoach,” said Mack, through the comm unit.

  “Yeah. So she met Dr. Bieman, who’d already played Prince Charming to a couple wives. Left his third wife to marry Sandy. Their first kid was already on the way.”

  “Scandal in a lab coat,” said Mack.

  “Guess that’s why they named him Randy,” said Ari.

  “So where does that get us?” said Mack. They came up to the Brooklyn Bridge in the early autumn sunlight.

  “Nowhere,” said Saul. “The birth records panned out. Randy’s their kid. He wants them dead. We have no idea where the wish is.”

  The towers of the bridge brooded over them like a colossus straddling the gates of an eternally lost city. Its waist disappeared above the ceiling of the clouds. But the people had gone and leashed the giant with a thousand steel cables, thought Sulaiman al Djinn. Without reason, maybe fear, they’d chained their own guard. Made him stay put. Made the protector a prisoner.

  And like a free genie, the colossus wasn’t a colossus anymore. It was the dead hulking towers of a bridge gone sad. Rocks inanimate. Rocks regular. The foot stones would only move with the shifting silt on the river floor. No one would ever see the eyes of the gentle giant again. The bridge would only ever get you to Brooklyn.

  Mack drove like she’d left her pot of gold someplace. The East River lapped at the piers of the Navy Yard and smelled like the ocean’s infected eardrum.

  The houses on Ocean Parkway didn’t look out on the ocean. The view was an interstate highway clogged with white vans delivering cold merch to the city. All the businesses in the outer borough — carpeting, studio space, restaurant equipment — existed to service the great floating island of Manhattan. Every single block of the crystal city needed ten blocks in the outer boroughs for glass warehouses, cleaning supplies, and a little casa for the window washers to sleep in.

  The whole neighborhood felt like it was a low-res version of another neighborhood, surviving on the hopeless idea that they’d get a turn on the swings someday if they pushed long enough, if they stuck with their lives of propping up other people’s lives.

  Lady Cavanaugh’s house sat on the corner of a block of houses as mismatched as a box of crayons. Periwinkle eaves hung over the wraparound porch like an afterthought. The siding was sea-foam green. The front door used to be red. Every other piece of the house looked like donated material and fit together like Frankenstein’s quilt.

  When Mack knocked on the screen door, it dropped off the hinge and made a divot in the porch. Kids were laughing in the back. Mack knocked again.

  “Awright, awright! Gimme a second, will ya?”

  The woman who yanked open the door wasn’t quite so big as an ice-cream truck, but she could probably pack as many Klondikes. She had a hairnet on a wispy scalp and the gaunt twitchy eyes of either a pill popper or a mother of ten. She said, “Who’re you two?” The detectives heard a sudden shriek come from inside the house. Lady Cavanaugh looked back in the hallway and screamed, “Carissa! Get that cat out the washin’ machine!”

  “Just your regular old NYPD,” said Mack. “Here to talk to you about one of your kids.”

  “They ain’t my kids,” said the lady. “Most these brats ain’t even orphans yet. Bunch of rat parents leaving their weasel kids for others to take care of. Carissa! I know you heard me the first time, now you get that cat out the rinse cycle or God-help-me I’ll slap you into yer twenties.”

  “Nana? Is that you?” said Ari on the comm unit.

  Lady Cavanaugh stared down the hallway, brandishing the back of her hand in some kind of standoff. Carissa must have relented; a mewling sound came from a drenched cat, and Cavanaugh huffed, “Gaw, I wish to high heaven some of these kids would —”

  “Whoa, whoa there, lady,” said Mack.

  “Can we come in, ma’am?” asked Saul.

  The lumpy lady didn’t have space on either side to let the detectives through. She wiggled backward into the hall like a catfish. Before Mack followed, she unzipped her jacket and felt the twin Desert Eagles dislodge from the grooves they’d dug in her rib cage. She glanced up at Saul, whose hands were still in his pea coat, and wondered if he even carried a firearm other than the BB shooter. She stepped inside the house first, just in case he was stupid enough not to.

  Lady Cavanaugh barreled through the house toward the kitchen, smacking random kids and shouting threats, but otherwise resigned to living with a tangle of unwashed gremlins. The walls of the foster home had running tracks of Magic Markers, crayons, and the treads of toy cars. Saul counted at least seven different kinds of cereal scattered on the carpet. Two boys were wrestling on a second-floor landing, one of them squishing a Jell-O pudding cup in the other’s hair. A little girl in an oversize shirt, Carissa most likely, ran across Mack’s path dragging a run-down cat by the neck. The sharp sounds of toys with ratchets inside, a game of shriek tag, and blaring TV commercials paired nicely with the dull smells of moldering dishes, dried slobber, and dusty windowsills.

  Mack stepped around a girl with a Mets cap who was spray-painting a boy’s name on the drapes.

  Everything in the kitchen was broken in some way. The glass doors leading to the backyard were splattered with grease from a fry-o-lator by the stove.

  Lady Cavanaugh turned and said, “Well, which one do you want?”

  “Kid named Mustard,” said Saul.

  “Runt of the litter,” said the lady.

  “We just left him on the island,” said Saul. “Seems he’s picked up a day job doing chores for a Bieman family.”

&nb
sp; “Wanted to talk to you ’bout him,” said Mack.

  Lady Cavanaugh crossed her arms and rested them on her countertop chest. “I don’t know no Biemans, but Mustard sure don’t have no day job.”

  “We just spoke to him, ma’am,” said Mack.

  “Well, you just got yourself dizzy, ’cause you didn’t ‘spoke’ to no Mustard.”

  From Saul’s pocket, Ari said into the comm channel, “Man, she has got to be my nana. Saul. Hey, Saul, ask her if she ever used to be a snaggly old catfish. Or no, better not take the chance — just shoot her now.”

  Old Lady Cavanaugh did resemble a catfish. Her bottom teeth were as jagged as the city skyline. Mack missed something the lady said because of Ari yapping. She put her chin in her shoulder and said, “Shhh.”

  “Don’t shush me, missy,” said Lady Cavanaugh.

  “I wasn’t —”

  Lady Cavanaugh interrupted, “I said you bunch of tick-tack po-leese can’t even shake down a ten-years-old boy for his name? And now you waste my day, tell me I got a kid runnin’ around half-cocked on the island when I know —”

  Ari couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m telling you, Saul,” he shouted into the comm channel. “Shoot her. Shoot her. Take a gun, and put a bullet in her.”

  “Sorry, buddy, don’t carry a gun,” whispered Saul.

  But Lady Cavanaugh had a librarian’s ears. She cocked her head back. The steam coming out of her ears would probably smell like French fries. “Boy, you didn’t just say that,” she said. “You don’t carry a gun? What’s that supposed to mean? You threatening me?”

  “Shoot her, Saul. Knock her out with BBs if you have to. Do it.”

  “You don’t carry a gun,” scoffed the lady. “You don’t carry your daggum right mind, either.”

  “I would kill her,” said Ari. “Or at least wound her. I would. I’d take the departmental heat, shuffle the paperwork, but I’d put her down. I’d do it.”

  Mack had to shout over Lady Cavanaugh’s tongue lashes and Ari’s tirade in their ears to say, “Can you tell us anything about Mustard?”

  Lady Cavanaugh stopped. “No,” she spat. “Nothing he couldn’t tell you himself.”

  Mack slouched against the fridge. She was tired of coming up short. This was the first chance to do real police work since the disciplinary committee had busted her down the ranks. And now they’d have to drive all the way back to the Bieman residence with no more leads than when they left a few hours ago. Then Lady Cavanaugh grumbled, “See for yourself. He’s been out there all morning, making a rocket or something.”