Matty couldn’t remember her name, first or last.
“Do you have people here?” he asked.
“People? What do you mean, people.”
“Family.”
“Yes.” Pointing to the blood without looking at it again.
“This is not a good place for you right now,” he said.
“Elena?”
They both turned to see Billy Marcus stumbling towards the crimescene tape as if it were a finish line.
At the sight of him, her face inflated with rage, and for a second Matty thought she was going to attack him. Marcus apparently did too, stopping dead and lightly closing his eyes as if bracing for it, but then she started to cry, and he first tentatively, then more emphatically, wrapped his arms around her, sobbing himself, the shooters having a field day until Matty and some others chased them off.
“It’s OK,” Marcus said, then, putting his arm around his ex-wife, began to walk her out of there, both looking decades older than they were.
Bobby Oh emerged from the building, caught Matty’s eye, then shrugged apologetically: no gun.
When prisoner transport finally arrived, ninety minutes after they were called, Yolonda and Matty reentered the interview room, Eric again rising and extending his wrists.
“Actually,” Matty murmured, turning him by his shoulders and cuffing him so that his curled hands rested on the small of his back.
“Huh,” Eric said. “Up in Binghamton they did it from in front.”
The door to Billy Marcus’s hotel room at the Landsman was unlocked, but there was no response to Matty’s knocks, so calling out a tentative greeting, he let himself inside. It was like walking into a cave, the curtains having been drawn all the way around against the sun.
The first thing to catch Matty’s attention in this murk was the smell: alcohol-infused sweat, and a hint of something alkaloid beneath that. The second thing, when his eyes began to adjust, was the king-size bed, its great synthetic polar-bear spread humped and bunched, the pillows and sheets beneath rumpled or cast to the floor altogether.
The third was the silence: a silence so complete that he assumed he was alone until a brief slish of stockings drew his attention first to one shadowed corner, a huff of breath to another.
“May I?” Matty said, then carefully parted just enough of one curtain to not disrespect the desire for dark.
They were sitting on opposite ends of the room, the mother in a hard plastic easy chair, the father on the radiator, their clothes in disarray; Elena wearing only one shoe, Marcus barefoot, the both of them staring at him with the unself-conciousness of animals, with unblinking pie-eyed shock.
The floor was equally chaotic, littered with splayed luggage and jumbles of trance-snatched personal items: clothing and slippers, prescription bottles and a travel iron, a quart bottle of Herbal Essences conditioner and a pint bottle of baby oil, which, upended, slowly pooled on the rug, adding its own nutlike scent to the atmosphere. He counted three plastic bathroom cups around the room, filled with varying amounts of melted ice and what he guessed was vodka, then spotted a fourth on the night table, using an open Gideons Bible as a coaster.
Pulling out a chair from beneath a small desk, he positioned himself midpoint between them and leaned into the infused air. “I came here to tell you that we’ve arrested Eric Cash.”
“OK,” the father said neutrally.
“But he still hasn’t confessed and I’m not going to lie. Like I told you before, Mr. Marcus, there’s still a huge amount of work to be done for the charges to hold up.”
“He’s arrested?”
“He’s . . . yes, he is.”
“In court?” Marcus sounded like he was talking in his sleep.
“He’s in Central Booking being processed.”
The mother had been looking directly at him since he entered the room, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t heard a word he’d said.
“Why’d he do it again?” Marcus asked.
“That’s one of the elements we’re still trying to put together right now.”
“But he’s in court?”
Matty took a breath. “Going in that direction, yes.”
“OK, good,” Marcus said faintly. “Thank you.”
Another silence came down, Matty obliquely studying the mother, looking off glassy now, lightly stroking her right temple with a fingertip.
And once again he was taken by the contrast between her face and body; the feline ease and coiled readiness of a woman twenty years her junior, but those eyes carried the years, and an unhappiness that he didn’t think began in the last few days.
“Is there anything else I can do for either of you. Anything you need.”
“No, no thanks,” Marcus said. “Thank you.”
Matty hesitated. “How about some fresh ice.”
“No. Thank you.”
Matty tilted forward to rise. “I understand you’ve already been to the medical examiner’s office. Do you have any—”
“No!” the mother shouted, out of her seat in a blur, flying at Marcus. “He’s been!” Swiping at his face, the guy listlessly raising a hand to shield himself. “He’s been!”
Marcus’s eyes sagged in their sockets.
Matty stayed put.
“I go there, to see Isaac, and they say no. They say the father has been and we don’t show twice.
“I say, I am his mother, please, let me see him, please, what kind of a rule is this? No. Sorry. No.”
“How was I supposed to know?” Marcus said without heat.
“He’s been!” She caught him on the cheek with a nail, a line in the flesh there blooming from blanched to pink to dripping like a fast-forwarded film.
“Elena, I told you, all they show is a photo,” Marcus pleaded. “You wouldn’t have—”
“Don’t you say to me wouldn’t! You don’t say to me anything!”
She turned, stalked across the room, flung open the door, and left. Matty couldn’t tell if the unsteadiness of her stride was from the drinking or from her only wearing one shoe.
Marcus drifted from the radiator to the edge of the unmade bed and distractedly wiped his cheek with a corner of the top sheet. He seemed to notice the massive disarray for the first time.
“Do you want me to catch up with her, make sure she’s OK?”
“No,” Marcus said. “She’s . . .”
“You know, I could probably cash in a favor at the medical examiner’s, you know, if she really needs to see . . .”
“Don’t,” Marcus said with a flare of sudden energy. “You don’t know her, she doesn’t need, she . . . Just, don’t. Please. Thank you.”
“No problem.”
Marcus took a long, exhausted breath, then gestured to the rumpled sex-damp sheets.
“She said we should make another one right away,” plucking at the synthetic fur. Then after a moment’s hesitation, “That’s crazy, right?”
The intake entrance to the Tombs was surprisingly funky for a prison so well known: a small, rackety roll-down gate on a narrow backstreet in Chinatown. Inside the building itself, all of the bureaucratic way stations leading to the holding cells maintained the same grubby proportion: gun locker for the accompanying officers, paperwork submission, fingerprinting, photographing, medical interview, and finally, body search, each stop bookended by its own modest wire-mesh security gate, its own low air-duct-cramped ceiling; this massive institution as far as Eric could tell a claustrophobic multileveled maze of stairs and short hallways, a life-size game board of Chutes and Ladders. He had been inside for half an hour so far, escorted every step by the two detectives who had taken him from the precinct just a few blocks away, and he had yet to see another prisoner. Those detectives, while impersonally polite and even-tempered in their dealings with him on the way over, once inside the gate became increasingly on edge, more so than he was; probably, he figured, fearing some procedural snag that would trap them in here for hours.
He himself wasn’t afraid; more lik
e inordinately preoccupied, still vibrating with fragments of things said or unsaid by him, to him; things done or not done, again by him, to him; and lastly, sneaking up on him like a recurring bout of fever, what he’d seen.
Matty walked into Berkmann’s in the midst of its late-afternoon sunbath and took a seat at the empty bar. The place was as quiet as a library save for the staff meeting going on, Harry Steele addressing his managers at a back banquette.
“Unfortunately, at this point, we need to talk about hiring a new bartender.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“I know, I’m sorry,” he murmured, “but . . .”
“Handsome Dan?” one of the managers finally said.
“The waiter?” Steele half smiled. “He’d want a little wind machine back there for his hair.”
“Well then, we should get that English guy from Le Zinc, looks like he got bit by a crocodile.”
“Too far the other way.”
“How about that kid I was telling you about, the cafeteria cashier from NYU, spiked his Hawaiian Punch dispenser with vodka, had a tray line around the block.”
“No,” Steele said, “I don’t like operators.”
“Never got caught.”
“Exactly.”
Not sure Steele knew he was waiting, Matty briefly stepped away from the bar to catch his eye, the owner holding up a finger, one more minute, without looking at him.
“You know what?” one of the female managers said quietly. “I don’t really think I can talk about this right now.”
The table descended into another silence, until Steele nodded. “No, you’re right.”
There was another reflective pause, people nodding to themselves, chewing knuckles, staring into their coffees until Steele finally said, “OK, then.”
As they began to rise and collect themselves, Steele remained sitting there in a glassy-eyed brood.
“Lisa,” he said, freezing one of his people midrise in a higheyebrowed smile, waited for the others to walk away, then gestured for her to sit back down. “Why did you put that solo at the table next to me yesterday morning,” wincing as he spoke. “The entire restaurant was empty. It was embarrassing, two men alone that close. You never put solos of the same sex next to each other. It’s like an ad for loneliness. Like a bad Hopper painting.”
“The guy wanted a window seat,” she said.
“Are you hearing me?”
Through the windows, Matty counted four detectives out there canvassing Rivington.
Three others entered the café in a flourish of topcoats, nodding to Matty, then eyeing the staff, mentally divvying up the room.
Matty took the place of the dispersed managers at the back banquette, accepted the French press from the busboy with a nod. Across the floor there were more tables full of detectives and employees than there were of customers, those tall glass cylinders of roasted coffee floating around the room like helicopters.
“Terrible,” Steele said softly, the pouches under his restless eyes looking like thumbed clay. “Half the business today was reporters.”
“You tell them anything you should’ve told me first?” The two of them had known each other since the café opened for business eight years ago and Matty had handled the discreet off-the-premises arrest of a waiter for selling meat out of the kitchen to other restaurants.
“Did you get to know him at all?” Matty asked.
“Marcus?” Steele shrugged. “In all honesty, I just hired him because he looked right.”
“Did he have any problems with people?”
“After two days?”
“Who would have known him the best in here?” Matty asked.
“No idea.” Steele shrugged. “You have any leads?”
“We’ve made an arrest,” Matty said reluctantly, then, “Tell me about Eric Cash.”
“Eric?” Steele smiled with a combination of affection and something less, then, “Eric?”
Matty drank more coffee.
“You cannot be serious,” Steele said. “Why would he do something like that?”
“He’s been with you a long time?”
“From a pup.”
Matty waited for more.
“You’re out of your mind.”
“There’s a headline. Tell me about him.”
“Eric?”
Matty waited.
“He’s very good at what he’s good at.” Steele curved his palms around the coffee press, frowned, and signaled for a fresh one. “Terrific reader.”
“Reader . . .”
“You know. Faces. Unhappy tables, cokey waiters, who’s passing by out there”—Steele tilted his chin at Rivington—“which of our neighborly neighbors is gearing up for another offensive at the next Liquor Board hearing. Great reader, great anticipator, alert as hell. There’s got to be some mistake.”
“What else?”
“Loyal? I’m not sure what you’re looking for.”
“Did he have any issues with Marcus? A run-in?”
“I have no idea. I doubt it, though.”
“He says they were in here together last night about two-thirty.”
“I’m never here past nine myself. Check out the tapes if you want.”
“What do you know about the Virgin Mary incident yesterday?”
“The what?” Steele blinked.
Matty stared at him but didn’t pursue.
“So this what, makes no sense to you?”
“Eric Cash . . .” Steele shook his head as if to clear it, then leaned forward. “Listen, speaking of the Liquor Board, how do you feel about maybe getting up there next month, saying a few words on our behalf?”
“Like what?”
“You know, what good neighbors we are, how we helped you out with the Lam murder.”
“I’ll check with my boss, but I can’t imagine him having a problem with it.”
Two months earlier, when an elderly Chinaman had been shot and robbed on Rivington Street in the middle of the night three blocks from Berkmann’s, no witnesses, the cops had spent hours looking at the café’s security tapes, both internal and street-facing, and caught an image of the perp, briskly walking past the place a few minutes after the deed.
They also caught footage of one of the cooks bending a busboy over the slop sink and two waiters in the locker room sharing a bottle of $250 Johnnie Walker Blue Label, that one never leaving the restaurant, although the word was that Steele screened it at a full staff meeting, busboys to managers, before firing the stars.
“I’m sure it’s no problem. Just give me a day or two heads-up,” Matty said, beginning to rise.
“You hear what happened at the last meeting?” Steele asked, making no move to rise himself. “They tried to get the board to revoke our liquor license because we sell alcohol within five hundred feet of a school.” Steele looked out the window at the nineteenth-century junior high across the street. “You ever see the kids that go there? I mean, Jesus, we need protection from them. I mean, who do you deal with out here, right?”
“I hear you,” Matty said neutrally.
“And you know who does all the complaining at these meetings, don’t you?”
“Who?” Matty sank back down, thinking, Here we go, thinking, Five minutes.
“The whites. The, the ‘pioneers’ . . . The Latinos? The Chinese? The ones been living here since the Flood? Couldn’t be nicer. Happy for the jobs. The thing is, the complainers? They’re the ones that started all this. We just follow them. Always have, always will. Come down here, buy some smack squat from the city, do a little fix-up, have a nice big studio, rent out the extra space, mix it up with the ethnics, feel all good and politically righteous about yourself. But those lofts now? Those buildings? Twenty-five hundred square feet, fourth floor, no elevator, Orchard and Broome. Two point four mil just last week.”
Matty saw three police techs walk in, heading directly for the office downstairs where they kept the tapes.
“Bunch of mid
dle-aged, talentless artistes and armchair socialists complaining about the very people who made them rich. Sitting there saying they have a right to perfect peace and quiet in their own neighborhood . . . No. You don’t. This is New York. You have a right to reasonable peace and quiet.
“I mean I live here too. I live with the noise, the drunks, the tour buses. It’s called revitalization.
“Do you remember it down here when we first opened? A hellhole. A dope souk. You guys were suiting up like you were in Baghdad.”
“Remember it well,” Matty said distractedly, this diatribe an oldie.
“It’s called resurrection.”
“All right then,” Matty repeated, rising and shrugging on his coat.
“I swear to God”—Steele glared out the window—“I wish they’d all put their shit on the market, take the money, and move to Woodstock.”
“Let me just ask.” Matty stood over him. “What happened with Eric Cash in Binghamton a few years ago. Losing the restaurant and that drug collar. I heard you helped him out around that?”
Steele looked off, gave up a tight smile. “Like I said, Eric is very good at what he’s good at. But sometimes you have to give people their head.” Then, looking directly at Matty, being the teacher now, “Trust me, it comes back to you in spades.”
On his way out, Matty ran into Clarence Howard, the bouncerdoorman, on his way in to work and was embraced in a backslappy hug before he could set himself. Howard was a weight lifter and an ex-cop who had been fired his first year in uniform for walking out of an indoor crime scene he was safeguarding in possession of a stamp, an upside-down 1918 “Flying Jenny” misprint worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They’d have brought criminal charges, but the thing was found stuck to the inseam of his pants, not inside his pocket; room for doubt regarding intent. Matty thought the kid got a bad deal and helped secure him this gig with Steele, only to find out a year later, as they drank their way south on Ludlow one night, that Clarence had been not only the youngest but also the first African-American president in the history of the Forest Hills Philatelists Club.
Matty still liked the guy.
Lush Life Page 13
