Lush Life

by Richard Price

  “No. Hold on . . .” Sounding as if he were shouting in his sleep.

  “Eric, listen, Matty and me? Every day we’re up to our ass in human garbage. Psychos and sociopaths and common household scum. Every, day. Does that even remotely sound like you? Doesn’t to me. As far as I’m concerned? You’re almost as much a victim in this as Ike, so here’s the deal. You tell us how it went down, tell us where the gun is, and we’ll make this as close to a cakewalk for you as we can. Will be happy to. But the first move here has got to be yours.”

  Eric frowned at the blank table, then abruptly jerked back, chin into chest.

  “C’mon now, Eric, work with us.”

  “Work with you . . .”

  “Use your head,” Matty snapped. “When we go talk to Ike, he’s going to tell us what really happened anyhow, right?”

  “I hope he does,” Eric said, small-voiced, his eyes still trained on the table.

  “You what?” Matty cupped an ear.

  Eric didn’t repeat himself.

  “Why do you think we’re holding off on going to the hospital right now?” Yolonda’s eyes shining with emotion.

  Eric stared at her.

  “If he lays it out for us with you still holding on to this story of yours? What do think that’s gonna look like? To us, to the DA, to a judge. We’re holding off to give you one last chance to help yourself.”

  “I don’t understand.” Eric near grinning in disbelief.

  “Look, I know you’re scared, but please, trust me on this.” Yolonda palmed her heart. “Nothing good will come of you sticking to a lie.”

  “It’s not a lie.”

  “No? Well, let me tell you something,” Matty said. “If I was, like you claim to be, an innocent man? Right about now I’d be hopping around this fucking room like my ass was on fire. Any innocent person would. That would be the natural instinctual reaction. But you’ve been sitting here all morning, you’re coming off a little bored, a little depressed, a little nervous. It’s like you’re at a dentist’s office. You went to sleep, for Christ’s sakes. In twenty years, I have never seen an innocent man just rack out like that. Twenty, years. Never.”

  At first, given the lack of eye contact, Matty thought Eric was literally shrugging off the barrage; then he realized that his body was spasming.

  “Eric,” Yolonda said. “Tell us what happened before Ike does.”

  “I did.”

  “Did what,” Matty snapped.

  “Tell you what happened.”

  Yolonda shook her bowed head in grievous surrender.

  “You’re a terrible actor, you know that?” Matty yanked at his tie. “No wonder you wound up working at a restaurant.”

  “Look, what if, God forbid, Ike doesn’t pull through?” Yolonda again. “Do you think that’s somehow better for you? All we have then is your version and the witnesses’ version. Where does that leave you?”

  “It leaves me wherever you want me left.” His voice still small, but with a shaky touch of defiance.

  This is costing him, Matty thought. This man is a mouse, and hanging tough here is taking everything he has in him, is taking everything out of him.

  “All that shit about running into the building to get better phone reception,” Matty said. “You never even tried to call 911, did you.”

  Eric hunched his shoulders as if waiting for a blow.

  “Admit that at least, for God’s sakes.”

  Silence, then, “No, I didn’t.”

  “Your buddy is lying there with a bullet in his chest, and innocent man that you are, you refuse to dial the three numbers that could save his life? How can that be? Even if you were telling us the truth about this, this Afro-Hispanic stickup team, which you’re not, the question remains, what kind of human being would refuse to do that for a friend? Or, no, excuse me, an acquaintance from work.”

  “I just wanted to get away,” Eric said minutely, addressing the space between his hands. “I was scared.”

  “Was what?” Matty squinted in disbelief, then turned to Yolonda. “He was what?”

  Yolonda looked helpless and grief-stricken, a powerless mother watching her child being beaten by her husband.

  Eric finally raised his face, stared at Matty, gape-mouthed.

  “Yeah, you look me right in the eye, you fucking ant.”

  “Matty . . .” Yolonda finally put out her hand.

  “I have listened to your shit in here all day. You are a self-centered, self-pitying, cowardly, envious, resentful, failed-ass career waiter. That’s your everyday jacket. Now, add to that a gun and a gutful of vodka? I don’t believe that shooting last night was an accident. I think you were a walking time bomb and last night you finally went off.”

  Eric sat there in a rapture of attention, chin uptilted as if for a kiss, his eyes never leaving Matty’s.

  “We are giving you one last chance to tell us what happened. Save your own skin and give us any version you want to justify your own part in it, but you get the ball rolling right here, right now . . . And I swear to fucking Christ, if you hand us one more time that pernicious horseshit about a, a Hispanic and, or, and, or some, some black guy coming out the shadows or wherever, I will make sure this goes down for you in the worst possible way.”

  They waited, Eric shimmering in his seat, Yolonda giving him the mournful big eye, Matty glaring at him, but praying that he was even vaguely justified in laying into the guy like this.

  “All I can say is what happened,” Eric finally said, his voice infinitesimal, his eyes still fixed on Matty’s.

  And there you have it.

  Jimmy Iacone walked back towards the Landsman in a funk; Matty didn’t have to say anything, just give him that what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you stare, and he had made an about-face in the squad room without a word.

  Still, a block from the hotel, he was surprised to come upon Billy Marcus in the street, standing across from the hilly guts of the recently collapsed synagogue on Rivington, gawking at the devastation as if he couldn’t tell whether what he was looking at was really there or just a hallucinatory extension of his new eyes.

  And whether it was due to the weight of the two overflowing shopping bags in his arms, emotional exhaustion, or just the sun chopping at the back of his knees, he repeatedly half dipped, then quickly straightened up, looking to all the world, if you didn’t know his deal, like a junkie on the nod.

  “Mr. Marcus?”

  Billy wheeled, a quart bottle of hair conditioner bouncing on the sidewalk.

  Jimmy stooped to retrieve it, carefully wedged it back into one of the overfull shopping bags.

  “I’m sorry, I forgot to ask you. Are you going to need someone to take you for the identification? Or is another family member dealing with that.”

  • • •

  Matty, Yolonda, ADA Kevin Flaherty, and Deputy Inspector Berkowitz, the designated point man on this for the chief of Manhattan detectives, all stood by the one-way again, watching Eric Cash tilted forward in his chair, his forehead on the edge of the table, his hands clasped between his knees.

  Both Flaherty and Berkowitz had been wandering around the squad room talking to their respective bosses for hours.

  “This stinks,” Matty said.

  “Why,” Yolonda said, “because you made him feel bad and he didn’t confess?”

  “He’s too guileless to be hanging tough like this. We hit him with the eyewits and he still doesn’t ask for a lawyer? Doesn’t even ask for a phone call? What is that, some kind of reverse psychology?”

  Berkowitz kept his peace, observing them like a parent letting his kids work it out for themselves.

  Flaherty’s cell phone rang and he stepped away, a finger in his free ear.

  “Yeah, well, about those eyewits.”

  “Hey.” Matty raised his hands. “I don’t know what to say about that. But I will tell you, if somehow, some way they’re wrong and this poor bastard here’s telling us the truth?” Wheeling to Berkowitz, “Boss
, we’re completely fucking ourselves, wasting all this time while the real shooter goes Running Man with something like a twelve-hour head start.”

  “Kevin.” Yolonda snapped her fingers to get the ADA’s eyes. “How many times did you reinterview those two?”

  “You see me on the phone here?” he snapped, palming the mouthpiece.

  “Look.” Yolonda punched Matty’s arm. “He went right back to sleep again.”

  “DA says charge him?” Matty asked Flaherty, fresh off the phone.

  “Says we have problems, but we also have probable cause.”

  “This stinks,” Matty said again.

  “I’m not nuts about it either,” Flaherty said, “but it’s what I told you from the jump. Two eyewits trumps no physical evidence. If we let that guy walk out of here and he decides to go skiing in Switzerland before we can clear him for sure? Can’t chance it.”

  “Switzerland? The guy’s a fucking waiter.”

  “What can I say.”

  “You want me to do the honors?” Yolonda asked. “He likes me.”

  “I’ll do it,” Matty said.

  “Whoever,” Berkowitz said. “Just pull the goddamn plug already. Jesus Christ.”

  Besides Marcus and Iacone, only two other people were in the ground-floor waiting area of the medical examiner’s office, a stone-faced black couple, both younger than Marcus, sitting side by side but not touching, the woman clutching a crumpled but dry Kleenex.

  And after twenty minutes of silence, of sitting there breathing in the faintly refrigerated, vaguely skunky air and staring at the large city-owned oil painting of a golden sunset that hung directly above their heads, Marcus abruptly stood up, crossed the room, and, standing with his hands on his knees to be on eye level with them, said, “I’m very sorry for your loss,” sounding like he owned the place, then returned to his seat.

  A few minutes later, a powerfully built detective with the dropped shoulders of a boxer emerged from a side door, murmured, “William Marcus?” Billy popped up again as if goosed. After introducing himself as Detective Fortgang of the Identification Unit and nodding to Iacone—they had played on the NYPD football team together before Iacone blew out his knee and gained seventy-five pounds—escorted them back through that same door down two flights of cement stairs, the smell of disinfectant intensifying with each step.

  Traveling along a cinder-block corridor, Fortgang’s extended arm behind but not touching Marcus’s back all the way, they were ushered into the room Iacone hated more than any other in the city of New York, large yet barren with only a single desk and two chairs. A long, rectangular viewing window, covered by thin metallic venetian blinds, was set into one of the walls.

  Remaining on his feet as the father was offered the chair alongside Fortgang’s desk, Iacone watched Marcus tensely scan the clutter there: a photo of Fortgang in sweats standing next to a teenage girls’ softball team, a coffee mug with NEVER FORGET and NYPD superimposed over a drawing of the Twin Towers, and a stack of manila envelopes labeled in ballpoint with names, dates, and an initialed shorthand that didn’t seem as if it would be too hard for anyone to decode.

  Looking off, Iacone noticed a Polaroid wedged under a leg of the desk, a headshot of a middle-aged Latino, his eyeballs bulging from their sockets like a horny cartoon wolf, the butt of a plastic airway tube still taped into his mouth. Then he saw that Marcus was staring at it too.

  “Sorry,” Fortgang said, then leaned down to retrieve it, slip it into a drawer.

  Marcus exhaled in a tremulous huff, then nodded to the long, shuttered window.

  “The body’s behind there?”

  “No, that’s not really necessary.”

  “OK.”

  Fortgang teased an envelope from the middle of the deck, Isaac Marcus scripted in a looping feminine hand followed by GSW Hom. 10/8/02.

  “Mr. Marcus, we have an individual here”—the detective’s voice sonorous—“may or may not be your son. All we need for you to do is to look at these photos, there’s two of them and, if in fact it is, you know . . . You just sign the back of each and we’re done.”

  “OK.”

  “Before . . . I just need to tell you that Polaroids like this, sometimes they’re a little gritty.”

  “Gritty?”

  “You’re not seeing the person in their best light.”

  “OK.”

  “Are you OK?” Fortgang’s hand on the envelope clasp.

  “What?”

  “Do you want some water?”

  “Water? No.”

  Fortgang hesitated, glanced up at Iacone, nodding for him to get ready, then took out two three-by-five Polaroids, carefully laying them side by side facing the father. In the first, Ike Marcus was faceup, slack-mouthed, one eye peeking dimly from beneath a three-quarter-drooped lid, Iacone wondering why they wouldn’t at least close that eye all the way before taking the picture; you were most likely going to be showing it to a parent, and it made their kid look retarded.

  Marcus frowned as he studied the photos, as if perhaps the tattoos on the arms, the mermaid, panther, and devil’s head, were unfamiliar and throwing off his concentration. The entry wound seemed inconsequential, a third nipple slightly off-center between the other two.

  Fortgang waited, watching his eyes.

  The second photo was of the kid lying on his stomach, his face profiled to the left, eyes lightly shut beneath arched eyebrows as if the radio alarm had just gone off and he was fighting waking up. His shoulders were hunched upwards towards his ears, and his hands were turned backwards so that his palms lay facing the camera. Marcus took in the stubble-cut hair and the backside of the tattoo that encircled the upper left arm, a vaguely Celtic-Navajo patterned band, and shook his head as if disappointed by the generic mystico-horseshit; as if he thought his kid had more irony to him than that. The exit wound in the lower back, once again, seemed hardly worth the hassle, no bigger than a strawberry.

  Marcus picked up one of the photos, then put it down.

  “It’s not him.”

  Iacone winced, but Fortgang didn’t seem surprised or put out.

  “Would you prefer some other family member to come down?”

  “Why? If it’s not him, then you have the wrong family, so what’s the point? I’m his father, wouldn’t I know?”

  Fortgang nodded. “I understand.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s OK. We can make the ID some other way.”

  “What other way?”

  “Dental.”

  “But if it’s not him, why would you go to his dentist? Again, you’re not making any sense.”

  Fortgang took a breath, glanced up at Iacone, then shrugged. “All right, Mr. Marcus, I’ll take it from here. Thanks for coming.”

  Marcus stood up, shook the detective’s hand, straightened his shirt, took a step to the door, then wheeled back around and let loose with a single whooping sob that should have been heard all through the building but was swallowed by the acoustically tiled walls: specifically installed, Iacone had once been told, in anticipation of moments such as this.

  “We’ve got some bad news, Eric,” Matty said in an almost apologetic tone while he slid his chair as close as he could without actually touching.

  Eric sat up straighter, waited.

  “Ike died.”

  “Oh.” His eyes starred with chaos.

  “And, after consulting with the district attorney, given the testimony of those two witnesses, we have no choice at this point but to charge you.”

  “Charge me. You mean arrest me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Eric,” Yolonda called him out in a heartbroken voice. “You can still help yourself. Tell us what happened.”

  But instead, he did something that genuinely shocked Matty.

  With his mouth locked in a rictus grin, he rose to his feet and extended his wrists.

  Matty could feel Yolonda’s I told you so right through the back of his head.

&n
bsp; “Relax,” Matty said, reaching out and lightly pressing down on Eric’s shoulder, “it’ll be a while yet.”

  “Eric, please,” Yolonda moaned, but then, taking in his vacant expression, just dropped it.

  As Matty came up on 27 Eldridge again, he sensed, by looking at the reporters, that something had happened out here. They were mostly quiet now, both focused and hesitant, staring at a middle-aged woman standing with her back to them just outside the tape, her hands resting with a light tension on the weightless plastic as if it were the keyboard of a piano.

  Oblivious to the attention she was drawing, she stared at the tenement without seeing it, her head tilted to one shoulder. Sporadically, one of the shooters would venture forward to capture her, the solitary snap, the whirring of videotape too loud in the tentative street.

  Like most of them, Matty was guessing that this was the mother, although how she got here or even who gave her the news was a mystery since even the boy’s father had no idea where she could be found, what country, what continent.

  In her mid-forties, dressed in a silk blouse and black skirt, she had the effortless bearing and frame of a young athlete, but her face, from what he could see, carried the years, weathered and puffy.

  Matty mentally set himself, then approached her from behind.

  “Did he say anything?” she asked him without turning around, without any introduction.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What was the last thing he said.” She had an accent that he couldn’t place.

  “We’re still gathering that.” He began to offer his automatic condolences, then curbed himself; she wouldn’t hear them anyhow.

  “Where was he standing. Exactly,” she quietly demanded, finally turning to him. She had jagged blue eyes, like cracked crystal.

  Matty glanced reflexively at the dried blood, the woman tracking his gaze, then abruptly hooting, the sound flutelike, a musical sob.

  “Idiot.” She brusquely swiped at her eyes as if slapping herself.