by S. J. Rozan
The air around me was fiery, red-streaked. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move.
“Bill!” Mary’s voice brought me back. “You get it taped?”
I lowered the phone, released my vise-grip on the counter. “I’ll kill that motherfucker.”
“Great. Later.” Mary grabbed her jacket. “Let’s go.”
8
MARY RACED THAT car through Queens. She wasn’t the natural driver Trella was, but she was motivated. The hard braking and whiplash starts told me she was used to letting sirens and flashing lights cut her a path, but we couldn’t risk picking up an escort, some bright-eyed radio car looking for a commendation for helping a detective in a hurry. So Mary pushed it, but, as Trella had, under the radar. We did fine most of the way, roaring over the bridge, through Harlem, down Second Avenue. Then at Ninety-sixth we hit traffic, a snarl-up like a wall. Mary slammed the horn, but everyone was doing that. So she clicked the siren on. Other drivers turned to look. She slapped the flashing gumball onto the dash. One or two cars halfheartedly tried to move; but when we made no progress, they gave that up, joined the herd again.
“Damn you!” Mary yelled to all of them, to no one. “Pull over! Let me through!”
Lots of noise, no movement. We sat, stuck, eight blocks north and two long ones west of where I needed to be. “Arrest them all,” I said, and got out.
I’m not young, but I’m not ready for the rocking chair. But I’d been through the sledgehammer-Ming treatment not so long ago. And I smoke. Ninety-Sixth and Second, that’s Carnegie Hill. Absolutely nothing got me up to Lexington but fear and adrenaline. Gasping when I hit the avenue, I turned south, more slogging than running, my heart outpounding my leaden feet. I slid around pedestrians, cut off a cab whose driver honked and cursed. I’d covered three blocks, wheezing like an accordion, when I saw, a few streets ahead at Eighty-ninth, a humpbacked Sanitation truck waiting for a man in green to empty a trash can into its hopper. He did, it started to grind, he dropped the empty can back on its corner and pounded the truck’s side to signal the driver. The truck rolled on. The garbageman followed, sauntering down the sidewalk.
Heading for the next trash can, the one at Eighty-eighth.
My trash can.
Where I got the burst from I will never know. I was flying. I was the Flash, Superman, Lightning Boy. My feet barely touched the ground until Eighty-eighth Street, where I leapt across space and brought down one of New York’s Strongest.
He was hefting a trash can, not a situation a coach ever covered. My tackle was bad: I hit him off center, grabbed more shirt than shoulder. But it worked. I laid the poor guy flat, heard his groan and then a faint, “What the hell?” He said it again when I yanked the plastic bag from the can he’d been manhandling and ran off.
Bill Smith, Reverse Santa, charging through New York with a stolen bag of garbage. Lydia would laugh herself silly. Except garbage was goddamn heavy and it goddamn stank, I hadn’t drawn a breath in what felt like a month, and it was stop or die.
Ahead: Eighty-sixth Street, a subway station. A wheezing guy with a battered face and a smelly plastic bag, who’d notice? I staggered down the stairs, swiped my card through, and leaned on a steel column, hoovering up air until a train came. I got on, ignoring the curled lips and cold looks, rode three stops, got off outside Bloomingdale’s and called Mary.
“Where the hell are you? What did you do?”
“I got the bag.”
“Mount Sinai just sent an ambulance to Eighty-eighth and Lex.”
“He’s not really hurt.”
“Who?”
“The garbageman. I had to fight him for it.”
I waited in the shadows of Fifty-eighth Street, trying to look homeless but harmless. As soon as I got my breath back I lit a cigarette. Even I knew that was wrong. A guy who can’t do ten blocks through the city, he might think about quitting.
It was the best smoke I’d ever had.
Mary popped the trunk as she pulled up. I slung the bag in, slammed it, climbed in beside her. “We have to look through it right away.”
“No, I thought we’d just drive around with it for a while. Damn it, can’t you do anything without attacking a city employee? You know the penalty for assaulting a sanitation worker is the same as for a cop?”
“Ought to be more. Cops, it comes with the territory. That guy, you should’ve seen his face.”
“And he’s seen yours.”
I shrugged. How much more wanted could I get? “Where are we going?”
“How many options do you have left?”
She maneuvered us down the FDR and off onto Fourteenth Street. As we waited at a light her phone rang. “Text,” she said, thumbing buttons. “Phone number for your buddy Lu.” She rattled it off; I wrote it down. “And,” she muttered, “the seats Patino likes at playoff games.” A few blocks later she headed the car into an underground garage. We grabbed the bag, rode the elevator to three, unlocked a door at the end of the hall.
We were in Mary’s apartment. Small, neat, lots of light. Comfortable furniture, photos on the walls. Her family, her boyfriend, her friends. Lydia.
Mary spread a sheet on the wooden floor. I dumped out the bag. The loudest smell was dog shit, with old coffee a strong second. Brown stains leached along the sheet away from the mound in the center. Mary tossed me rubber gloves from her sink, found a pair of ski gloves for herself. We waded in, sorted, trying to find an order, a way to understand.
A pizza crust nestling on a Blimpie’s wrapper; a pretzel tangled in an exhausted bouquet. Crumpled paper frothing everywhere, and baggies of scooped poop. Full and empty plastic grocery bags: D’Agostino, Gristedes. I moved half a sandwich, a yogurt container dripping gunk. I lifted the sports section of yesterday’s Post, soggy with God knew what, and stopped.
“Mary.”
She looked up.
I nodded at a tied-up grocery bag. Orange, thin, the kind cut-price stores give you. The kind you get in Chinatown.
The kind I’d found on my door.
I extracted it, dumped it out on the edge of the sheet. “This is it.”
Mary didn’t argue. The contents—a fragment of a bicycle wheel, a jar of honey, a Lord & Taylor bag, a Bruce Lee biography, and a horseshoe-patterned silk scarf—were too random and too clean to be garbage. The bag hadn’t been used, the honey was unopened. The book wasn’t new but it was in good shape.
“All right,” Mary said, not sounding any more upbeat now than before. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
We stood staring at this collection of unrelated junk, this fragmented garbage Rosetta Stone. I tried to clear my head, let the things in front of me float back and forth, nudge against each other, turn and bump and show new angles. I got lots of things—bike/fast/go/tire/bee/sweet/hive/sting/shop/department store/Fifth Avenue/fight/read/kung fu/life story/horses/accessory/silk/keep warm—but none of it amounted to more than noise and glare. Mary didn’t seem to be doing any better.
It was almost a relief when my phone rang.
“Linus?”
“Dude, this ain’t happening.” Linus sounded discouraged, a strange note for him. “Nobody here knows anything, not Mrs. Chin, no one. The Golden Adventure ladies say Lydia didn’t come in yet today. Nothing in her computer or on her desk or anything. Should we, like, ask up and down the block? At the noodle shop and like that?”
“No. It was a long shot anyway. Come up here. We need those fresh eyes again. We got more clues.”
“Dude! You did? You didn’t call right away?”
“We had to race into Manhattan, he didn’t give us much time.”
“Race where?”
“To the Upper East Side. But we’re not there now, we’re at Mary’s. You know where she lives?”
“We’re on the way.” Low mood gone, Linus was back in gear. “And check it out: send me pictures.”
“What?”
“Cell phone pictures. We can look while we drive.
”
“I don’t know how—”
“Not that el cheapo phone I gave you, it won’t do it. But probably Aunt Mary’s does.”
Mary’s did and she knew how. She sent them to Linus while he asked, “Where did he leave them? On another door?”
“In a trash can. We had to dig through the rest of the garbage to find them.”
“You sure what you have is them?”
“Yes. But we don’t know what they mean.”
“ ’K, here they come.” A short silence; then: “Wow! Dude! Grossarama! Hey, Trella, check this out! Godzilla puked in Aunt Mary’s living room!”
9
FIFTEEN LONG, UNPRODUCTIVE minutes later, a buzzer growled and Linus’s voice came squawking from the speaker. Another thirty seconds and in they came.
“Shit!” Linus said. “It smells like it looks!”
Mary had thrown wide her windows, and it was cold enough that I’d zipped my jacket, but Linus was still right. We all stood together, silent, on the shore of the reeking garbage sea. Silent except for Woof. Trella held his leash and the dog was frantic, wagging, whining, straining to get into the mess and roll around. Linus crouched beside him, rubbed his ears. “This stuff at the edge here? This is it?”
“Yes.”
“Nasty. Could make me want to never eat honey again. Or ride a bike. Hey, that the Bruce Lee book? Wow, it is! Hey, I read that.”
“You did?” Trella asked.
“Man, I read everything about Bruce Lee! Had his picture on my wall, big poster. I was gonna be Bruce Lee. A serious badass mofo, just like him.” He ignored Mary’s snort. “I went to kung fu school for a year.”
“Couldn’t take the discipline?” Mary asked. “Master whacking you with a stick, all that?”
“Cut me some slack, Aunt Mary. I was digging it. My folks made me stop.”
“Their mistake.”
“No shit.”
“Linus?” I asked. “What is it about Bruce Lee? About that book? Why would this guy include it?”
Linus shook his head.
“Could be it’s not this book,” Trella said. “Just, a book. Or maybe, something about the author.”
“If Bruce Lee and the dead girl and Lydia weren’t all Chinese, I’d buy that,” I said. “But the coincidence is too big. Linus? What can you tell us?”
“Dude.” Linus looked a little desperate, but he frowned in concentration, and said, “All I know, I was heavy into Bruce. I wanted to do everything just like him. You know, get up at five in the morning to practice, meditate all the time, that stuff. My folks thought it was, like, weird, but they were all, okay, whatever, with lifting weights, and when I started drinking protein shakes, and stopped eating bread.”
“Bruce Lee didn’t eat bread?” I didn’t see how that could turn into a clue, but it was unusual, it was specific.
“Wheat. Thought it was bad for you. My mom said that was stupid, but she gave me rice and told my dad it was a phase and he should leave me alone. But when I told them I didn’t believe in God anymore, that was the end of Bruce. Of course,” he reflected, “it probably didn’t help that I karate-chopped the coffee table in half.”
“I didn’t know that about you.” Trella looked impressed. “You were that good?”
Linus shrugged modestly. “It was a pretty dinky table.”
“Wait,” I said. “Go back.” I swept my eyes over our clues, rested on the shopping bag, “Lord & Taylor” in brown script flowing along its side. “You stopped believing in God? Because of Bruce Lee?”
“Check. Talk about getting grounded! My dad’s an elder, Chinese Presbyterian church out where we live. I had to mow the lawn there all summer. See, the there-is-no-God thing, it’s, like, the only bad thing about Bruce. But it’s really bad, you know? He made a big deal about it. Anyone into martial arts, they all know. That was the thing about the curse, when he died so quick? Everyone said the triads got him. But you ask my mom, God got him. She didn’t want God to get me, so it was bye-bye Bruce.”
“A really bad thing about a hero,” I said slowly. “That sounds like our guy, focusing on that.” I pointed to the shopping bag. “There is no God,” I said. “No Lord?”
Linus and Mary followed my finger. Trella’s glowing eyes were fixed on me. “No Lord,” she repeated. “Just a Taylor?”
Mary pointed to the length of silk, asked, “To sew up a scarf?”
“No! No!” I said. “Goddamn! Honey: bee! Tire rim: spoke! A bespoke tailor!”
“Wow! Yes!” said Trella.
“What?” said Mary.
“Dude?” Linus stood. “Dudes?” Looking from me to Trella. “Um, what are you talking about?”
I said, “Custom clothes. When they’re very high end. That’s who makes them. That’s what you call him, a bespoke tailor.”
“Like Old Man Wu at the laundry?” Linus was skeptical.
“No,” Trella said. “Like my uncle Luigi.”
“Luigi’s cool,” Linus admitted.
Mary was frowning at the trash. “I don’t know.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes! Look: the first clue, Fatima’s. A bar that was hot, in its time. Fatima said she got the A-list but Spano said it was all money people. Bespoke clothes, it’s a big status thing for money people.”
Linus, for his part, was also unconvinced, but willing to follow along. “But where, dude? Suppose you’re right, that’s four of these things. The where must be what the scarf is for.”
A long, still moment.
Mary said, “Silk.”
Linus said, “Horse stuff.”
Trella said, “Hermès.”
Mary asked, “Wasn’t there once a Silk Stocking District?”
I asked, “Then why isn’t it a stocking?”
Linus asked, “Where do they keep the horses? To ride in Central Park?”
I said, “Maybe a carousel horse?”
Mary said, “The carousel has a canopy. Is it silk?”
Trella said, “Guys! Hermès!”
“Wait.” I held up my hand to the others. “Trella? What about Hermès?”
“That’s what it is. A Hermès pattern. Very ritzy. All the Park Avenue ladies wear them.”
“You think it’s about Park Avenue?” Linus asked.
“Or Canal Street,” Mary said. “Big business there, Hermès knockoffs.”
Trella shook her head. “This one’s real.”
“How do you know?”
“The colors are subtle. From expensive dyes. The knockoffs are coarser and gaudier.” Trella fingered the fabric, nodded to herself, found the tiny label sewn into the hem. “Yes. Real.”
Linus stared at her.
“They sell real ones at some of the department stores,” Mary said.
“Yes. But they have two boutiques, too. Just Hermès. Downtown, and on the Upper East Side.”
Linus had his iPhone out. He swiped his finger along the screen. “Madison at Sixty-first, and fifteen Broad. Trella, how do you know that shit about dyes and stuff?”
I said, “Linus, look for—”
“High-end custom tailors, I know, dude, I know.” More swiping, more jabbing. Silence in a room so tense it seemed to vibrate. Woof whined. I’d have grabbed the phone from Linus and done it myself if I’d known how.
Then a whoop. “Dudes! There’s a custom tailor on Sixty-second. At Madison, on the corner.” He punched some numbers, lifted the iPhone to his ear, lowered it again. “And the phone’s disconnected.”
The room’s voltage soared. Woof yapped, sensing it. Something was happening. We were about to move.
Mary squashed that. “I’m going. You’re all staying here.”
“A cop?” I couldn’t believe it. “Are you crazy?”
“What I should be doing is sending a CS team! You don’t think you’re going?”
“I’m the one he wants.”
“Last time he set you up!”
“Dude? Aunt Mary’s right.”
“Thank you, Lin
us,” Mary said acidly.
“Mary, we had a deal.”
“I’m not going to stand here arguing. You’re staying. That’s a direct order. Whatever I find, if it’s not a crime scene I’ll decide what to do then. If it is, and I expect it will be—”
“Mary, goddammit! If he sees a cop—”
“What cop? I’m a real estate agent.”
That stopped me. It stopped the kids, too. Mary disappeared into her bedroom and came out ninety seconds later with her braid pinned into a bun, her jeans exchanged for a wool skirt, her shoes for heeled leather boots. She left her jacket, grabbed a wool coat, turned and pointed a finger at the rest of us. “Do not leave this room.”
“When you get there, how are you going to get in?”
She leveled a cold stare. “You think you’re the only one here who can pick a lock?”
“Actually,” Linus said, “I think I’m the only one here who can’t.”
Mary strode across the room, turned once more to glower over her shoulder, then slammed the door behind her.
I lit a cigarette, counted the seconds. I didn’t like this plan and I couldn’t stay here, whatever Mary said. High-heeled boots or not, she looked like a cop to me. I just needed to give her time to get in the car and vanish around the corner.
“Dude,” Linus said quietly. “You think Mr. Crazy really killed someone else? Just to mess with you?”
It wasn’t hard to tell what answer he wanted. “Maybe not. Maybe this time he left something else, not a body, for me to find.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“You’re right.”
“So he’s, like, going around picking random people to kill?” Woof, uneasy at Linus’s tone, lifted a paw and whined. “Like you could be walking down the street, and—”
“Linus!” I stared. “Wait! You’re a genius! No, of course he’s not. That wouldn’t make a good game.” I dug out the scrap of paper from the car, dialed the number on it.
10
TWO RINGS, AND that cold Midwestern voice. “This is Lu.”
