Lush Life

by Richard Price

“Sorry,” he said, his lids turtling down.

  “This must be like a nightmare for you,” Matty said.

  “I’m so tired.” Eric looked at them with ragged eyes. “When can I go home?”

  “I promise, soon as we get to the bottom of this?” Yolonda said in her mournful voice. “You are out of here.”

  “Bottom of what . . .”

  “Let’s talk a little more about the actual shooting.”

  Eric cupped his temples, stared bug-eyed at the table.

  “The guy who throws the shot.”

  “What?”

  “Shoots,” Yolonda said.

  “Yes.”

  “How was he holding the gun?”

  “How?” Eric closed his eyes and, after a moment’s hesitation, extended his arm, his gun hand turned sideways, his elbow slightly higher than his shoulder, so that the bullet would have a downward trajectory.

  “That gangsta style from the movies?” Matty asked.

  “I guess, yeah.”

  The coroner would verify the accuracy of that.

  “OK. Then what.”

  “They take off.”

  “They take off. And you did what.”

  “Me? I tried to call 911.”

  “From where exactly.”

  “First I tried right on the sidewalk, but I couldn’t get any reception, which I told you before, so I ran into the building to try in there.”

  “No luck?”

  “No.”

  “But you definitely tried. Punched in 911?” Matty asked.

  “Yes.” Searching their faces. “Of course.”

  “How long would you say you were in the building for?”

  “I don’t know. As long as it took to try a few times?”

  “A few times.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, guess.”

  “A minute?”

  “A minute,” Matty echoed, thinking of all the possibilities for stashing a small gun in a broke-down walk-up with sixty seconds at your disposal.

  “And where in the building were you exactly?”

  Again, with each new question, Eric’s responses became both more tentative and more alert.

  “In the lobby, you know, the ground-floor hallway.”

  “Anyplace else?”

  Eric faltered then. “Maybe up the stairs.”

  “Up the stairs? Why would you go up the stairs?”

  “To see if I could possibly get better reception higher up?” The exhaustion leaving his eyes altogether.

  “Do you know anybody in the building?” Yolonda asked.

  “No.” Eric again looking from face to face.

  “I’m just asking,” she said, “because most buildings, the street doors are locked, so unless you know someone to buzz you in, or . . .”

  “Well, this one was open.”

  “OK.”

  “Probably a boat building.”

  “A boat building?”

  “You know, two hundred Chinese guys sharing an apartment, you have to keep the front door open or make a million keys.”

  “A boat building.” Matty turned to Yolonda. “I never heard that one before.”

  The door opened, Fenton Ma, cap in hand, popping his head in.

  “Excuse me, I’m looking for the witnesses they brought in on the shooting last night?”

  “Who, him?” Yolonda chucked a thumb.

  Ma recognized him, Matty could tell, his expression of naked surprise making Eric Cash feel both humiliated and lost.

  “No,” Ma said. “The, the Chinese people from the canvass? I’m supposed to interpret, they said to check with you.”

  “We don’t have them.” Yolonda shrugged.

  “They’re somewheres around,” Matty said. “Ask the desk.”

  “All right.” Ma giving Eric one last look. “Thanks.”

  “Canvass came up with a couple of people in some of the buildings near 27 Eldridge claimed they saw the whole thing from their windows,” Yolonda said.

  Eric didn’t respond, most likely, Matty thought, either too busy rejigging his story or still lost in the Chinese cop’s eyes.

  “My guess, however,” Matty said, “is the most we’ll get out of them are aerial head counts, you know, how many people were there when the shot went off.”

  “That would be five, right?” Yolonda said.

  “Yes,” Eric said carefully, “that would be five.”

  “Good,” Matty said, then settled into himself without losing eye contact, as if it were Eric’s obligation to keep the conversation going.

  “I didn’t think . . .” Eric finally said just to say something. “Can you guys just barge in on each other in rooms like this?”

  “Why not?” Yolonda shrugged. “It’s not like we’re in the middle of an interrogation or anything.”

  A knock on the door brought round one to an end, a detective waiting for Matty’s “Yeah” to stick his head in.

  “Sarge, Chief Upshaw?”

  Leaving Yolonda to small-talk her way out of the interview room, Matty eyed the time as he walked to his desk: 9:00. Five hours since the shooting, not great in regards to the test, but . . .

  “Yeah, hey, Chief, thanks for getting back to me.” Matty taking the call standing up in order to stay up.

  “What’s this about a paraffin test?” The chief of Manhattan detectives not sounding too happy.

  “Well, here’s what we got—”

  “I know what you got, and the answer’s no.”

  “Chief, it’s only been five hours, we still have a shot at a positive, otherwise . . .”

  “Well, at this point, if in fact he is the shooter, which with your two wits it sounds like he is, you got a better chance of getting a false negative.”

  “Boss—”

  “False negatives, false positives, too easy to screw up a case from the door on in. Look, the bottom line here is that Chief Mangold doesn’t trust that test under the best of circumstances. Any of those others you talked to before me this morning could have told you the same.”

  Matty and Yolonda stood behind one-way glass watching Eric Cash work with a tech on the digital photo manager, Eric staring pie-eyed at the computerized mug shots coming up on the screen six at a time.

  “Bottom line?” Matty said. “Mangold hates the test, wouldn’t’ve OK’d it two minutes after the shooting. Baumgartner, Mangini, Berkowitz, Upshaw, it was like the pass-the-buck Olympics.”

  “Fuck it.” Yolonda shrugged, studying Cash through the window. “He was like a cornered rat in there.”

  “Or like he didn’t know where we were coming from,” Matty said.

  “Right. What I said.”

  “Well, he’s lying about calling 911.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he was in shock and just thought he did.”

  “Thought he tried it over and over?” she said.

  “Can I be honest with you?” Matty began, then let the rest of it go.

  “He never asked how Marcus was doing,” Yolonda said. “Or did I miss that.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “He doesn’t know the guy’s dead, does he?”

  “I don’t think so,” Matty said.

  “Good.” Then, “Check it out,” tilting her chin at Eric, his eyes at half-mast as he sat slightly rocking before the computer screen. “He’s not even looking at the thing.”

  “Let’s just go nice and easy until they find the gun,” Matty said.

  Fenton Ma stepped to them, his cap in his hand. “Was I OK?”

  “You were great,” Matty said. “Thank you.”

  “You were so convincing, you should be an actor,” Yolonda said, looking into his eyes. “Matty, don’t you think he’d be a great actor?”

  “It looked like you recognized him in there,” Matty said.

  “Yeah, Eric something. Works at that restaurant nobody can get a table at over on Rivington.” Then, rearing back a little, “He’s the perp?”


  “We’re just talking,” Matty said. “Anything you can tell us about him?”

  “Let me jump the line once with my girl.” Ma shrugged. “Good guy by me.”

  “Well, like I said, we’re just talking.”

  “Thanks again,” Yolonda said.

  Ma continued to stand there.

  “What?” Matty said.

  “Just . . .” Ma fidgeted. “So, there are no Chinese witnesses, right?”

  “And so handsome too,” Yolonda said, patting his cheek.

  “You catch anybody?” Eric Cash asked almost listlessly as Matty and Yolonda walked back into the room thirty minutes after they had left him.

  “Not as yet,” Matty said, dropping into his chair.

  Whether it was the tediousness of the photo manager or just the interlude itself, the guy seemed transformed: emotionally flattened and near-agog with fatigue.

  Matty had seen that before in here; sometimes the first go-round did no more than set up the physical and mental plummet of the break, which in turn yielded a much less artful customer for round two; it was the interrogation equivalent of rope-a-dope.

  “Eric?” Yolonda briefly covered one of his hands. “We need for you to run us through the night.”

  “To what?” He raised his eyes to her as if they were attached to sinkers. “From when?”

  “I don’t know. From knocking off work, say.”

  “From me knocking off work?”

  “Why not?”

  Eric hesitated, then, with his forehead supported by a splay of fingers, he addressed the tabletop before him. “I don’t know, I left Berkmann’s at eight, went home, took a shower, then I went to this coffeehouse on my corner.”

  “Which one?” Yolonda asked.

  “Kid Dropper’s on Allen. You know, everybody’s in there with a big mug and a laptop. Except me, I like a martini after work. They have a bar, so . . .”

  “What time are we talking?”

  “Eight-thirty, eight-forty-five? They were having some kind of open-mike thing in the back room. I take a look and I see Ike at the podium, and he’s reading.”

  “Reading out loud?” Yolonda asked.

  Eric stared at her. “That’s what the microphone was for.”

  “What was he reading?”

  “I guess it was poetry because it had that pronouncement thing, you know, where you say each word like you’re angry at it?”

  “OK,” Matty said, clocking the new tone.

  “I just looked around, then went to the bar up front, had my drink, and a half hour later there’s this big clapping and everybody comes out of the back room. Ike sees me at the bar, says he’s going over to the Congee Palace with his buddy for dinner, do I want to come.”

  “So you’re friends?”

  “With Ike? No. I told you that. We just work under the same roof.”

  “So you never hung out before?” Matty asked.

  “No . . . But so I go with him, it’s him, me, and that guy Steve that, that was with us last night.” Eric faltered, his jaw working.

  “What,” Yolonda said.

  “Nothing.”

  “So . . .”

  “So . . . We go over to the Congee on Allen.” Eric hesitated, working his jaw again. “I mean that asshole was already half-wasted at the reading. And who the hell orders mojitos at a Chinese restaurant?”

  “You’re talking Ike?”

  “No. Steve . . . Stevie.” The fatigue starting to lead now, as it often did, to a sloppy, sullen candidness.

  “What time was this?”

  “Nine-thirty or so.”

  “What did you guys talk about?”

  “Me? I didn’t say much. But they’re all irons in the fire, like, apparently Steve had just gotten a callback for a movie, right? His first callback, you know, like next stop the Oscars, then it’s Ike’s turn, gonna start up some online literary magazine, raise money for a documentary, we’re all gonna collaborate on a screenplay, la-la, la-la, the usual bullshit.” Matty and Yolonda solemnly nodding, neither of them wanting to stem the flow.

  “Anybody have problems with anybody?” Matty asked.

  “You mean between them?”

  “Between them, you, anyone else . . .”

  Eric hesitated. “No.”

  “What was that.” Yolonda smiled.

  “What was what,” he said, then, “I just get so fucking tired of hearing all of that, you know? Everybody’s big plans around here.”

  “Sure.”

  “I have mine too, you know. I just don’t . . .”

  “Don’t . . .”

  Eric held up a hand, turned profile to the table.

  “So where’d you go next?”

  “Next?” Eric’s voice suddenly bright with anger. “Steve, because he wasn’t quite hammered enough, took us to this top-secret bar on Chrystie. You’re supposed to have a reservation, but if you have any kind of name down here, they just let you in. I didn’t think either one of them would have even heard of it.”

  “How’d that go?” Matty asked, thinking they had to have been there and gone before his own shift.

  “Well, they both started drinking absinthe. And I got a little lecture about how it isn’t real absinthe unless it’s from Czechoslovakia, and how even if it was from Czechoslovakia, it had to have wormwood in it or tapeworms or whatever . . .”

  “You sound like you weren’t having a very good time with these guys,” Yolonda said.

  “I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like everybody I know down here went to the same fucking art camp or something.” Eyes brimming, he stared at his hands, then added as if ashamed, “Ike was OK.”

  “So the top-secret bar was from when to when?” she asked.

  “We were out of there probably by eleven or so.”

  “Everybody still getting along?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I think I told you they got their MFAs together something like three months ago, now Steve’s all night, I’m not moving to L.A., man, L.A.’s ass. New York feeds me, feeds my soul. They want me, they gotta come here. And I’m not doing any studio bullshit.’

  “And Ike’s like, ‘And I’m not writing any.’

  “Then everybody, all together now, ‘I’ll fuckin’ starve first, man.’

  “I mean, what are they, two years old? Christ, he got one fucking callback. Do you have any idea how many . . .”

  The room was a silent for a beat, Yolonda nodding in sympathy.

  “What’s an MFA again?” Matty asked.

  “Master of fine arts.”

  “Right.”

  “So then where’d you go after that?” Yolonda asked.

  “After that it was Ike’s turn, he took us to some poetry bar on the Bowery, beatnik bar, or something.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Zeno’s Conscience.”

  “They can get that all on the sign?”

  “He said they had a midnight puppet porno show we couldn’t miss.”

  “A what?” Yolonda smiled.

  “The thing is? These guys, the both of them, they just moved downtown maybe what, a month ago? Two months? We walk in, they know everybody in the place. Ike, he’s like the street mayor or something. A real operator. I mean, shit, if a guy’s big enough a hustler, maybe he’s got a future for himself, who knows.”

  “My sister was like that,” Yolonda said. “My mother’s all like, ‘Yolonda! Would it kill you to smile? Why can’t you be nice to people? Why can’t you be more like Gloria?’ Made me want to slaughter the both of them.”

  “So how was the puppet show?” Matty asked.

  “The what?” Eric yawned, a spastic ripple streaking through his body. “He had the wrong night.”

  There was another knock at the door; Matty and Yolonda looking at each other.

  “Excuse me,” Matty said, and slipped out to see Deputy Inspector Berkowitz standing there, short, trim, and remarkably clear-skinned, like a teenager with gray hair.

  “
How’s it going in there?” he asked.

  “It’s going,” Matty said.

  “Let me just ask, the other guy, Steven Boulware, is he shaping up as a perp in this at all?”

  “Not, no, so far he’s maybe a witness, if that. He was pretty intox.”

  “OK.” Berkowitz slipped his hands in his suit pockets as if they had all the time in the world. “Just so you know, Boulware’s dad was apparently in the same Ranger unit with the police commissioner in ’Nam.”

  “Like I said”—Matty stared—“he was mainly intox.”

  “All right.” Berkowitz turned on his heel. “If something changes with that? Call me.”

  “Sorry,” Matty said, retaking his seat, then jerking his fist under the table, Yolonda catching it without changing her expression.

  “So the puppet bar, beatnik bar . . .” Matty faltered, looked to Yolonda, who looked at her notes.

  “Zeno’s Conscience,” Eric said slowly.

  “Right,” Matty said.

  “Anything happen there? Run into anybody memorable?” Yolonda asked.

  “No. I don’t know. I was probably smashed myself at that point. But, no, I don’t think so.”

  “All right, then . . .”

  “Then we’re supposed to call it a night, should have called it a night”—his face abruptly graying—“obviously.”

  “What did I say to you about blaming yourself?” Yolonda warned.

  “Right . . . In any event, at that point Captain Callback had already gotten sick on the sidewalk . . .”

  “Steve.”

  “. . . is talking at about a word an hour, but somehow we wind up at Cry.”

  “The bar on Grand?”

  “Right.”

  “What time are we talking?”

  “I don’t know, had to be one o’clock or so.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “How’d it go? We’re in there five minutes, Ike disappears with this girl at the bar.”

  “Disappeared where?” Yolonda asked.

  Eric looked at her again. “That’s why they call it ‘disappeared.’ ”

  “For how long?”

  “Just long enough. Fifteen, twenty minutes, left me with Steve, the guy is squinting at me like, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ ”

  “Did you know the girl?”

  “Actually? Yeah. She works at Grouchie’s on Ludlow. Been around here forever. A real old-timer.”