A musician. I looked around the room. No piano. No guitars. No sign of a horn or even a music stand.
“Oh? What do you play?”
“I compose.” He sounded insulted, as though actually playing an instrument was beneath him.
“Modern? Classical?”
He did not sneer, but I felt it anyway. “Techno. I record street sounds and work it into a dance, pop framework. Want to hear some?”
Not a chance. “I’d like to ask you about Brian.”
He let out a long sigh. “Oh, man. Can’t you just take his stuff?”
“His stuff?”
“It’s been forever. I want to rent the room, but I’ve got to get his stuff out. His parents said they’d come get it, but I don’t think they meant it. I mean, why would they come all the way from Missouri for a bunch of stuff?”
I thought he made a good point.
“Do you mind if I go through it?”
“That big guy from your office already did that. He took a couple of things.”
“Did the big guy have a name?” I asked. Like Jack Avery? Or Gene Barilla?
Mitch shrugged. I had the feeling that Mitch shrugged a lot.
“If you just put it out at the curb, it’ll all be gone by morning.”
“I’ll have someone take care of it,” I lied.
Mitch laughed. “See? That’s just what he said!”
I wanted to kick myself—or him. I had given up a Yankees game and a couple of beers at P&G’s to come out to Brooklyn to entertain young Mitch.
“What can you tell me about Brian? What kind of a guy was he?”
Shrug. “He was a good roommate. He worked days, I worked nights. We got along.”
The definition of a good roommate in the world of youth today. At Ray Brook, a good roommate was someone who didn’t insist on soaping your back in the showers.
“Did you think he was under any stress before he died? Anything at work that might have been bothering him?”
Shrug.
“Did he ever open up about anything? Did you two ever talk?”
“We talked about whose turn it was to clean the bathroom. He was my roommate, not my sister.”
The commercials ended. The bald man returned. Mitch turned the sound back on. Interview over.
“Sorry. I’ll just take a look around his room,” I said.
Mitch didn’t answer, but then, I hadn’t expected that he would.
Brian’s room had been searched—by someone who didn’t care whether anyone knew about it or not. Drawers had been dumped and overturned. The floor of the closet was three feet deep in clothes, still attached to their hangers. It was a good-sized room, with that rarity of New York amenities, a window that looked out on something other than an airshaft—in this case, the street and a smog-throttled ginkgo tree.
I went through the mess, but if there had been anything there that would have given me a better feel for Brian Sanders, I couldn’t find it. He read Neal Stephenson and Robert Heinlein and Cormac McCarthy. He bought his suits—quite sensibly, I thought—at Saint Laurie. The shirts were all Lands’ End. Boxers, not briefs. He preferred ribbed condoms. But there were no letters, no bank or brokerage statements, no appointment book, address book, or diary. Like most of his peers, he had kept all that on his computer—and that was gone.
It was a wasted trip.
“I’m taking off,” I said to the back of Mitch’s head. “Don’t get up.”
He hit the mute button again. “Wait. You’re not taking his stuff?”
I had his attention, even if briefly and misguided. “I don’t see a laptop around. Did I miss it, or did the other guy take it?”
“It’s in his gym bag.”
“I didn’t see a gym bag.”
“Check the bottom of the front hall closet. By the door.”
The closet held three seasons of windbreakers, leather jackets, overcoats, and down bubble coats. There was also a small pile of old boots, discarded running shoes, and worn-out sandals. And three cases of empty Corona bottles. And a single ski pole, a chipped clay flowerpot holding a long-dead poinsettia, and, at the bottom, a black nylon bag, scuffed and battered.
I pulled the bag out. It was heavier than it looked.
“Hey. How come the other guy didn’t take this?” I called out.
Mitch waited until the commercial, touting some kind of chicken-coating mix, reached its denouement before answering.
“Nobody asked.”
Maybe the roommate was smarter than he looked.
I opened the bag. Wrapped carefully in a foul-smelling towel, and buried beneath a pile of assorted, once white anklet socks, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and nylon shorts, was a red Dell laptop. But what lay spread across the bottom of the bag was even more interesting.
I looked up at Mitch. He was again transfixed by the negotiations between the blond and the bald guy.
The bag sloshed as I moved it. Hundreds—possibly a thousand or more—of casino chips slithered across the bottom of the bag. Black, green, blue, and purple. The logos on the chips were for at least half a dozen casinos all over the tristate area. My mind was racing, trying to estimate a total value, but it was impossible. There was at the very least well over $100,000. I was looking at financial security for myself and the Kid for some time to come.
There would be complicating factors—such as what my parole officer would say if I were caught in a casino, in another state. He had the power to send me back to jail for spitting in the subway. That set one parameter—he must never know.
“I’m going to take the whole bag with me, if that’s okay,” I said.
“When are you coming back for the rest?” He barely turned his head.
“I’ll be in touch.”
The blond lady was hugging the bald guy. He didn’t look happy about it.
I let myself out.
—
A SMALL GROUP of teenagers were huddled on the subway platform, just beyond the aura of the sputtering neon lights. They were all dressed in similar uniforms of dark hoodies, baggy jeans, and expensive-looking basketball shoes. They could have been on their way to gospel choir practice for all I knew, and if that were the case, I was sure they would forgive me for hugging the gym bag to my chest as I stood directly in front of the token booth attendant. The line between racial profiling and basic street survival skills is thinner in some neighborhoods than others.
When the two beefy men dressed in blue windbreakers and baseball caps and looking exactly like plainclothes cops came through the turnstile, I breathed a little easier. Until I noticed that they seemed to be paying much more attention to me than to the young men in the shadows. Or rather, working a bit too hard not to pay attention to me.
Policemen had never made me uncomfortable—before my troubles. Now they always did. But I was willing to endure a bit of discomfort for the security of an escort, as I carried my newfound treasure home through the wilds of Brooklyn.
I changed to the Number 2 train at Fulton Street. So did they. The odds of this being mere coincidence were all the way down at the far left side of the bell curve. They sat at the opposite end of the car, looking everywhere but at me. I started to sweat.
The older, grayer, and leaner of the two wore Nikes and slim-cut jeans. He seemed more reserved, contained. The younger man’s head never stopped moving, his eyes darting, catching everything. I waited until the train began to roll out of the station, got up, and moved to the next car. If they followed me, I wasn’t neurotic or paranoid, I was justifiably concerned. They stayed in the first car, leaving me convinced that I was neurotic, paranoid, and justifiably concerned.
The train was held at Forty-second Street, waiting for a local to arrive. I walked out and waited on the platform. I felt the younger of the two
watching me whenever my back was to him.
The local arrived. I stepped in and turned to stare at the two, daring them to follow. They ignored me. The doors closed and both trains headed uptown.
By the time the local pulled into the Lincoln Center stop, I was laughing at my own paranoid fantasies. The two guys in caps had no interest in me. It was another New York City coincidence, in a city that regularly defied all odds.
But when I got to the express stop at Seventy-second, I dashed out and darted up the stairs. Then I stopped at the top to see if anyone followed me. Then I cursed myself for being an idiot and went home.
—
THERE WAS STILL almost an hour before the Kid was due home. I dumped everything out of Sanders’ gym bag, spreading it all out on my bed, before succumbing to another attack of paranoia. I couldn’t afford to have any of this mess traced to me. I needed gloves, so there would be no incriminating prints.
Serious criminals always seemed to possess a ready supply of latex gloves, the kind the guards used for cavity checks up at Ray Brook. I didn’t even have a pair of rubber gloves for cleaning the bathroom. I pulled out drawers and searched through the bottom of the boxes Angie had left me, now hidden away at the back of the single closet. I found an old pair of Oleg Cassini rabbit-fur-lined leather gloves. They were not designed for delicate criminal enterprise, but they would have to do.
I packed all the dirty laundry back into the bag and tossed it by the front door. The laptop I set aside for later examination. Then I began to sort the chips into colored piles. The black pile of hundred-dollar chips was the largest. One thousand five hundred twenty. One hundred fifty-eight purple chips at five hundred apiece.
One hundred thirty-two ten-dollar blue chips. Thirty-four yellows—twenties. I did the math without thinking about it. An even two hundred thirty-three thousand dollars. 233. A prime number—an irregular prime. The twelfth integer in a standard Fibonacci series. A Markov number.
Why would Brian Sanders hang on to the chips? Why had he not converted them into cash? To avoid reporting them as winnings for tax purposes? That would only have put the problem off to another day. If he had been trying to remain inconspicuous, for any reason, he would remain so only up until he tried to cash in ten or twenty thousand dollars’ worth of chips. He would have done better to have passed them in small amounts. Unless he wasn’t interested in the cash, only the chips.
I scooped the chips into a plastic bag and hid them at the bottom of the kitchen garbage pail. It wasn’t foolproof, but it would do until I figured out a way to cash them. Then I packed all the workout clothes, sneakers, and towels back into the gym bag and carried it down the hall to the incinerator chute.
Which is how I came to be standing in the hall on a warm September night, wearing fur-lined leather gloves, when my father and son stepped out of the elevator together.
The Kid paid me no attention. He acknowledged my presence only by stepping around me as he dashed down the hall. My father, however, stopped and gave me a questioning look.
“I was doing some cleaning,” I said. “They were the only gloves I could find.”
“Well, then, I know what to get you for your birthday.”
“How was the Kid today?”
“The Kid had a great day. He touched a pig. And if he’s anywhere near as exhausted as I am, you’ll have him in bed within the hour.”
“Did he eat?”
“Two hot dogs.”
“How did you get him to eat a hot dog?” The Kid had a healthy aversion to food cooked by street vendors. More like a phobia.
“From across the street. Gray’s Papaya. They grill ’em. Best in New York.”
I could see the store from my front window. There were times when the line went out the door and down the block. Cabbies triple-parked out front in the middle of the night while they ran in and grabbed a quick dinner.
“I didn’t know the Kid would eat them.”
“What do I always tell you? Get to know your son when he’s young.”
“Right.” I couldn’t remember his ever having said that to me before.
“I got him a new car. The ’61 Jaguar.”
“Cool,” I said.
He gave me a brief, awkward hug. “Take care, son.”
THE JAGUAR E-TYPE is considered by many car enthusiasts to be the most beautiful automobile ever built. It was first introduced in 1961 in the format that later came to be called the Series I, with a 3.8 liter, 6-cylinder engine, producing 265 hp. By modern standards, its 6.9 seconds zero to sixty may seem a bit sluggish, but at the time the XKE was quick enough to immediately enter the realm of legend.
“The 1961 Corvette did zero to sixty in eight-point-four seconds. It had eight cylinders.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “Shall I keep reading?”
He nodded. The Kid was wrapped up in his sheet, mummy-style. Pop had been right, he was exhausted. His head was already listing sideways.
The first 500 cars off the assembly line featured external hood latches and a non-sculpted floor, resulting in truncated leg room. These earliest models are especially prized by collectors, though subsequent models were much more comfortable to drive.
“This is a subsequent model. See? No hood latch.” He held up the latest addition to his collection.
How did he know what “subsequent” meant? He could barely say the word without stumbling. But he was speaking in real sentences.
Heather was very encouraging about the Kid’s fascination with cars. Of course, any interest of his, beyond the often painful limits of his own mind, was reason to be encouraged. If he had been into dinosaurs, instead of cars, he would have known how many teeth each one had, what they weighed when full-grown, and how they cared for their young. He would have been able to explain—at great length—that the Spinosaurus could never have kicked T. rex’s butt because T. rex wouldn’t exist for another 35 million years after ol’ Spiney was dead, and besides, they lived on different continents.
“Want me to read through all the specs again?”
He didn’t answer. He was gone. An inaudible click and he was out, as though the power source had been suddenly turned off. I checked to see that he was breathing. I held my breath and put my face next to his to listen. He smelled of Crest and hot dog.
—
I LAY AWAKE for a long time. Other than the hoard of chips, the trip to Brooklyn had been a bust. Sanders’ laptop held about eighty gigabytes of live jam band music—Galactic, The String Cheese Incident, and dozens of others, including, of course, a good bit of Phish. I also found a saved file containing the e-mail messages of a slowly deteriorating relationship with a girl named Cherysse, who had kept asking him to “get the fuck out of Wall Street” and join her in San Francisco. The messages ended a year before he died.
But if there was a secret file, in which our man confessed to all his worldly sins, and laid out the mechanics of a great conspiracy, I had somehow missed it.
The buzz of my phone, vibrating on the glass-topped coffee table, rescued me from the clutches of the Latin Kings, who were all leering in through the bars of my old cell at Ray Brook, as Jack Avery patiently explained that I was back in prison because I had stolen the pita chips. I had fallen asleep on the couch.
“Hello?” I checked my watch. It was close to midnight.
“Hey, Boo.” It was Angie. I did not want to talk with her, unless she was sending money.
“How did you get my number?” “How did you get my number, bitch?” was what I meant to say.
“Mamma.”
Of course. I had asked her not to give it to Angie. Unless it was an emergency.
“What’s up?”
“I need to talk to my little boy.” She was drunk. Not sloppy, but definitely beyond the point of operating a vehicle or attempting a de
licate telephone conversation. I could hear it in the way she made two syllables out of the word “boy.”
“The Kid is asleep. He’s been asleep for hours. I am not going to wake him up.” The Kid would have been up half the night afterward—and so would I. It would have thrown off his schedule the whole next day as well. It also felt good to tell her “No.”
“It’s not so late.” It is always noon if you are the center of the universe.
“Angie.” I softened my voice. “The Kid needs his rest. It’s what? Eleven there? It’s midnight here. Can we do this tomorrow? After he gets home from school? Dinnertime?”
“School? You have that boy in school?”
I wanted to reach through the phone and grab her and shake her by the nape of the neck until she started talking sense. “Angie, I don’t keep him locked up. Yes, he goes to school. He goes to the park. Today he went to a petting zoo with my father and got to meet a pig.”
“I’ve been talking with TeePaul and he says it’s okay if the boy comes live with us.”
TeePaul? Tee is Cajun for petit. Paul means “small.” It was like calling someone Little Small.
“I don’t think that’s going to work.”
“I want my boy back, Jason.” She went from steel to tears in a heartbeat. “Ma petit boug. I want to hug him and just cover him with kisses.”
The Kid would scream bloody murder.
“He is my Tout-tout, Boo. I know he’s not right, but there is nothing a mother’s love can’t fix. We just need time. You know he can’t be happy without his Mamma. I just want him to be happy.”
Why wasn’t I surprised? It wasn’t going to happen. She would change her mind tomorrow or next week. I had him and I wasn’t letting go.
“Angie, the Kid is going to a great school here. He’s doing really well. Tell you what, you and your Mamma come visit. We’ll get her tickets for Wicked—she’ll be in heaven. Meantime you can catch the Avedon retrospective at MoMA or hit the Chelsea galleries. Or spend an afternoon being pampered at Bergdorf’s. Then we’ll get my Pop to meet us and take your Mamma out to Brooklyn for steaks at Luger’s. Make it a vacation. You and I can even practice being civil to each other.”
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