“And . . .” Matty nudged.
“And these two guys, they come out of the dark like two wolves, put a gun on us, say, ‘Give it up.’ And I’m, I immediately hand over my wallet, I had to let go of Steve to do it, he just flops to the sidewalk, but then Ike, I don’t know, Ike, he like steps to them, says, ‘You picked the wrong guy,’ like he’s ready to fight, then ‘Pop,’ just ‘Pop,’ and they’re gone.”
“ ‘You picked the wrong guy.’ ” Matty wrote it down. The kid had told Bobby Oh his friend said, “Not tonight, my man.”
“They didn’t say anything else?”
“I think one might have said, ‘Oh.’ ”
“ ‘Oh’?”
“Like ‘Oh shit,’ then maybe the other said, ‘Go.’ ”
“Nothing else?”
“ ‘Oh’ and ‘Go.’ I think.”
“And which way did they go.”
“That way,” pointing south. “But I’m not sure.”
South now, not east, which is what he told Bobby. South presented a whole new set of projects but no subway stations, making the shooters local, most likely from the massive Clara Lemlich Houses. Unless this guy had been right the first time and they ran east . . .
Finished with their canvass, two Night Watch detectives exited the tenement directly across the street from the scene, one of them making slant eyes with her fingertips, i.e., crammed to the rafters with Fooks.
Matty saw Bobby Oh catch the gesture, his expression, Matty hating to admit it, inscrutable.
“And just one more time,” he said to Cash. “Describe them for me?”
“I don’t know. Black. Hispanic. I’m not trying to be racist, but in my mind? I close my eyes and see wolves.”
Matty noticed that Nazir in his store was studying this guy as he spoke, giving him a hard eye.
“Other than wolves . . .”
“I don’t know. Lean, they were lean, with a goatee.”
“Both had goatees?”
“One of them. I think. I don’t know, I was mostly looking down. Hey, listen,” he said, unconsciously doing the Twist again as he blindly scanned Eldridge. “I already told all this to the Asian detective earlier, at this point my memory’s getting worse, not better—”
“All right, look, this is got to be hard for you. I understand, but—”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” his voice starting to break.
“No one said you did,” Matty said carefully.
Nazir rapped on his window to get Matty’s attention. He looked furious.
“Just bear with me, Eric. I know you want to catch these guys who shot your friend as much—”
“I told you, he isn’t my friend. I don’t even really know him.”
Matty noted Eric’s use of the present tense, wondered if this kid knew that Marcus was dead. Cash had yet to ask how the other guy, friend or not, was doing.
“Can you describe the gun at all?”
Eric sagged, took a deep breath. “I think it was a .22.”
“You know your guns?”
“I know my .22s. My father made me take one when I moved to New York. I ditched it the minute I got here.”
“OK,” Matty said after a pause, “then what happened.”
“What?”
“They shot Ike and ran off. Then what happened.”
“I tried to call 911 on my cell, but I couldn’t get any reception, so I ran into the, the vestibule there to try indoors.”
“You ran indoors.”
“It must’ve been dead altogether, so then I ran back out to the street to get help, and all of a sudden there’s these four cops pointing guns at me.” Eric took another breath. “Huh.”
“What?”
“I just realized . . . I’ve had five guns pointed at me in the last two hours.”
As a patrol car took a weakly protesting Eric Cash back to the Eighth Precinct, Nazir rapped angrily on his glass again, beckoned for Matty.
Bobby Oh said the guy hadn’t seen anything, but the store was in Matty’s bailiwick so he would give him a few minutes to complain about being shut down, rail about how he was going to make the city pay for his broken window.
As he stepped to the storefront, the Yemeni raised his riot gate from inside the shop.
“Nazir, Crime Scenes is a little backed up, but I’ll have you opened as soon as I can, buddy.”
“No. That too, but I want to tell you something. That son of a bitch you were talking to? Whatever he said to you, don’t trust him. He’s no damned good.”
“Oh yeah?” Matty eyed the jagged branches of the window fracture. “Why is that?”
“We had the Virgin Mary in here yesterday, did you know that?”
“Yeah, I heard. Congratulations.”
“Congratulations? That bastard came in with a friend and they wiped her out like this.” He snapped his fingers. “Broke everybody’s heart.”
“Disappointed a lot of her fans, huh?” Matty said, then, glancing at his watch, “All right, boss, I’ll get you open as fast as I can.”
“Hold on,” Nazir said, digging in his pocket and pulling out a cell phone. “This is what that bastard threw at my window,” handing it over. “I’ll be goddamned if I give it back to him.”
Flipping it open, Matty discovered that not only was Eric Cash’s phone fully charged, not only wasn’t the last outgoing call to 911, but, as Matty scrolled down the Recent Calls screen, none of the others were either. When he pressed the send button, the phone rang through to the last number dialed, Café Berkmann, getting a recorded message at this nonhour, but the reception clear as a bell.
OK, maybe the guy in shock had just imagined he called. Or maybe there was a temporary power glitch, or a signal glitch. Or Matty hadn’t heard him right, or . . .
Daley, one of the Quality of Lifers, a weight lifter made twice as big by the bulk of the vest under his sweatshirt, caught his eye and waved him over to where he stood with two kids, a tall, husky carrothead, his long frizzy hair pulled back in a bushy ponytail, and an equally tall black girl, slender as a gymnast, her chopped hair laquered down into pixie bangs.
“He’s the guy you talk to.” Daley gestured to Matty.
“What’s up?” Matty asked.
“As I was just saying to this officer, me and my girlfriend were listening to that guy tell you what happened?” the redhead said. “In fact, we hung around specifically to hear what he was going to say because we were right here on this side of the street when it all went down.”
“Hold on,” Matty cut him off, then pointed out Oh in the crowd. “Tommy, can you get him over here?”
Daley made his way through the crowd as Matty rested his hand on the redhead’s arm to keep him quiet until Bobby could come over and they could separate the couple. The kid seemed jagged with the hour but sober, his girlfriend a little jittery but clear-eyed too.
A moment later Matty was walking the kid around the corner, his girlfriend looking over her shoulder at him as Oh swept her along in the opposite direction.
“OK,” Matty said when they were finally alone in front of a ramshackle shteibel, a Talmudic reading room on Allen. “What’s up?”
“Like I said already, my girlfriend and I were right there when it all went down.”
“When all what went down.”
“The shooting.”
“OK.”
“What that guy said to you about two black guys, Dominican guys, or whatever coming up on them out of the blue?” The kid lit a cigarette, then blew a brisk stream. “He’s a fuckin’ liar.”
At 5:30 a.m. Eric Cash rose stiffly from the back of the squad car and turned to face the Eighth Precinct station house, an octagonal Lindsay-era, siege-mentality fortress set down on razed lung-block acreage like a spiked fist aimed at the surrounding projects—Lemlich, Riis, Wald, Cahan, and Gompers—the rest of the neighborhood squat and dumpy and far east enough to be a world of pre-land-rush lasts: the last Hebrew old-age home, the last bulletproof li
quor store, the last Chinese take-out hole in the wall, and the last live-poultry market, everything and everyone cast in permanent gloom beneath the massive stone arches of the Williamsburg Bridge.
As he was being escorted up the short steps to the main entrance, the front doors abruptly flew open, two EMTs luge-racing a gurney directly at him, then at the last moment taking a sharp left to hit the handicapped ramp along the side of the building, Ike’s friend Steven Boulware looking up at him with sunken eyes, his head lolling with every bump and jostle.
• • •
At the same hour two Night Watch detectives crossed the chipped octagonal tile of the front foyer of 27 Eldridge, then began trudging up the saddle-backed marble stairs to the top floor to begin their canvass.
There were three apartments to a floor, each with its own paint-slathered century-old husk of a mezuzah, the front doors painted the same dull carmine as the embossed tin that lined the bottom half of the stairways from lobby to roof.
Each took a door, turning the ancient twist-knob ringers like tweaking a nose, the resulting sound tinny and minute. At first, no one responded on the top floor, but when they were halfway down the stairs to the next level, one of the tenants, a small Asian woman, by what anyone could see of her, peeked out through the crack of her door.
“Excuse me, ma’am?” Kendra Walker trotted back up the stairs, flashing her ID as she came.
It had been a warm night and she carried her sport jacket over her arm, revealing a male name tattooed beneath her fleshy shoulder in a script as jazzy as a team logo.
“Do you speak English?” she asked, talking as if volume enhanced comprehension.
“English?” the woman repeated.
Behind her, the cluttered apartment, lit by a lone overhead fluorescent halo, was not much more than a high-ceilinged single room with attached nooks and crannies.
“No English?”
“No.” The woman couldn’t take her eyes from Kendra’s tattoo.
“That’s my son’s name,” Kendra said, then saw the boy come out of a bathroom. “Hi.” She smiled, the kid freezing in midzip. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes,” he answered briskly as if a little insulted. He came to the door without prompting.
“Is this your mom?”
“My aunt,” he said, then, “Kevin,” reading Kendra’s arm.
“What’s your aunt’s name?”
“An Lu.”
“An Lu.” Writing down Lou. “Can you ask her . . .” Kendra hesitated, the boy not more than ten or so. “There was a shooting downstairs a few hours ago. A man was killed.”
“Killed?” He winced, baring his teeth.
“Could you ask your aunt if she saw—”
“How was he killed?” the kid asked.
An Lu turned from speaker to speaker without blinking.
“Like I said, he was shot.”
“Shot?”
“Yes, shot,” she said slowly. “Can you ask your . . .”
The kid translated to his aunt, the woman taking it in with a neutral expression, then turning to Kendra, she shook her head no.
“OK, can you ask her if maybe she heard anything?”
Again the boy translated, this time the woman having something to say.
“She heard people yelling at each other, but she doesn’t speak English so . . .”
“These people she heard, what did they sound like, white, black, Spanish . . .”
Another quick exchange, then, “She says American.”
“She wouldn’t be able to pick out any words, maybe a name.”
The kid waved off the question as hopeless. “Why don’t you ask me?”
Kendra hesitated, no time for games, but if the kid maybe heard something . . .
“OK.” Flourishing her pen like a baton, giving him a show. “What’s your name?”
“Winston Ciu.”
“OK, Winston Ciu. How about you? Did you see or hear something?”
“No,” he said. “But I wish I did.”
On the third floor the Dominican woman who came to the door jumped back, hand to chest, when she saw the detective standing there.
“Jeez, do I really look that bad?” Gloria Rodriguez said, patting her hair. “Sorry to bother you so early, but there was a shooting right outside.”
“An hour ago,” the woman said. She wore spin-rack reading glasses, a floral housedress, and vinyl slippers.
“You saw it?”
“Heard. I was in bed.”
“What you hear?”
“Like a shot, shots.”
“Which.”
“One, like a firecracker, like ‘pop pop.’ ”
“That’s two.”
“Yeah, no, just one.”
Gloria could hear Kendra knocking on a door below her, getting a nibble.
“OK, so, you heard the shot, the pop. You look out the window?”
“No, I don’t do that.”
“You overhear any talking? Arguing?”
“I don’t do that either. If I hear something? I don’t listen.”
“Maybe you couldn’t help it. Maybe . . .”
“I heard arguing, maybe. Maybe I was dreaming it.”
“What were they arguing about?”
“In my dream?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t remember my dreams.”
Gloria looked at the woman. “You know there’s still some bad people around here we’re trying to get off the street.”
“Good.”
“You probably see them every day, right?”
The woman shrugged.
“Who am I talking about . . .”
The woman shrugged.
“Who’s got a gun around here.”
She tilted her chin to Gloria’s hip. “You do.”
On her way down the stairs, Gloria could hear another tenant also talking about an argument out on the street, but when she got to the floor, she saw that the person she was talking to wasn’t Kendra but a reporter.
At a quarter to six, Bobby Oh stood across the street from the still-bustling crime scene with Nikki Williams, the redhead’s girlfriend.
“I still can’t believe, it’s like, it’s like your life. I mean all you have to do is walk down the wrong street . . .” The tall, slender kid was shivering, her eyes stark in her head.
“Nikki . . .”
“It was like nothing. It was like God snapped his fingers.”
“Nikki”—Bobby gave a little wave—“you need to tell me what you saw.”
“There’s a famous line in this poem, ‘the world will end not with a bang but with a whimper.’ ”
Bobby took a breath, spoke to her eyes. “ ‘This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.’ ”
Nikki stared at him with naked surprise.
“Now please, time is everything. Tell me what you saw.”
She took a deep, shuddery breath, palmed her heart, followed the arc of a pigeon scouting the commotion.
“Nikki.”
“OK. Me and Randal we were walking towards each other on Eldridge?”
“Towards each other?” Bobby cocked his head. “I thought you were together.”
Nikki took a moment to smile at him. “How do you know T. S. Eliot?”
“The apes that raised me were surprisingly intelligent. So you were walking towards each other?”
“Well, yeah, I mean originally we had come around the corner from Delancey together, but I guess he stopped to light a cigarette or something and I didn’t notice, because all of a sudden I’m halfway down Eldridge by myself, so I turned to see where he was and he had like, just rounded the bend onto Eldridge, which was when I started walking back to him, and on my way back, I saw three guys across the street kind of in between us? They were just standing there, then all of a sudden I heard this sharp pop or snap sound and then there’s like this flurry of movement like they were all jumping away from something, then two of them fell down and t
he third one ran into the building with something metallic in his hand.”
“Metallic.” Bobby needed to rear back a little, Nikki having a good four inches on him.
“I figured a gun because the two of them were laying there, but I just saw the shine of it in his hand, so . . .”
“And you first saw the three of them on your way back down to rejoin your boyfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“Were they facing you?”
“No, more like with their backs to me, like facing the building.”
“Did you see any other people with them?”
“I didn’t. No one else on the street even, just Randal.” Then: “I can’t believe I’m just standing here like this,” running her thumb lightly across the ridges of her lips.
“And how long would you say you were aware of them before you heard the shot?”
“I don’t know. As long as it took to walk back towards Randal with him walking towards me? What’s that, ten seconds? Twenty seconds? I don’t have a very good sense of time.”
“And were you watching them for all that time?”
“Not like, staring at them, just seeing them out the corner of my eye because it was just us and them out here.”
“Did you happen to hear anything?”
“From them?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean like conversation?”
“Anything. Conversation, random words, a name, some kind of outburst . . .”
“I don’t think so. I would’ve remembered, I think.”
“Some of the tenants around here said they heard arguing or shouting before the shot was fired. But you didn’t hear anything?”
Nikki hesitated, cocked her head as if thinking something through; began to say something, then said something else. “Did I offend you by acting so surprised that you knew that T. S. Eliot line?”
“Absolutely not,” Bobby said. “So you didn’t hear any arguing?”
“Not from them.”
“What . . .” Bobby said.
“I mean, when those cops came out of that taxi a few minutes later with their guns out, they were shouting like crazy, you know, ‘Police. Put it down. Don’t fuckin’ move. Drop the fucking gun.’ That was pretty loud, and then the guy from that little grocery store came out, they broke his window, somebody did, and he was shouting pretty good too for a while. Maybe those people heard that, but, no, I didn’t hear anything from those three guys.”
Lush Life Page 5
