Lush Life

by Richard Price

  The old lady sank into herself, eyelids fluttering with relief.

  “¿Está ella en la casa?”

  “Entra.” Widening her door.

  The apartment was greasy and narrow, the linoleum sticking to the bottom of their shoes. In the small front room where she left them to get her granddaughter, piles of clothing were everywhere, on the couches, chairs, in open garbage bags on the floor, and spilling over the lips of stacked plastic storage bins. A few magazine tear-outs of Jesus were pushpinned into the otherwise bare walls.

  Two little boys wandered in from a room in the back to stare at them.

  “What’s she doing?” Matty asked. “She’s waking the kid up?”

  “I think so,” Yolonda said.

  “If she’s still asleep, it’s not her.” He shrugged, heading for the door.

  “Well, hang on.” Yolonda touched his arm. “We’re here, so . . .”

  Matty stared out the lone living room window, the view probably once upon a time bucolic, broad river and the Brooklyn shore, but barely a slap of lead-colored water was visible now through the weave of high-rises and the stone-and-steel expanse of the Manhattan Bridge.

  The grandmother came back in and gestured for them to follow.

  Irma Nieves’s room was small and cramped, three-quarters of it taken up by a triple stack of queen-size mattresses. The girl was sitting slumped on a corner of the unmade bed in pj bottoms and a baby T, her hands palms up in her lap. She was sloe-eyed, which accentuated her midday sleepiness, and slim-pretty save for crocodilian buckteeth and a narrow strip of dark pimples on one side of her face.

  “Hey, Irma, I’m Detective Bello. We’re looking for a girl looks a little like you in this building, maybe just visits here, light-skinned Latina, your age, wears a pink velour tracktop. She’s not in any trouble, we just need to talk to her.”

  The two little boys came flying into the room and leaped up onto the bed, Irma clucking in languid annoyance.

  “Looks like me?” she finally said, then seemed to drift off.

  “It wouldn’t be Crystal Santos, would it?”

  “Crystal? Crystal don’t look like me.”

  Yolonda shot a look to Matty: What did I tell you?

  The grandmother hovered anxious and uncomprehending in the doorway.

  Matty took in the rest of the room: a small dresser topped with jars of baby oil, Vaseline, a half-eaten Big Mac, and a paperback of The Bluest Eye sporting a Seward Park High School sticker; a mirror trimmed with photos of Latino and black teens hanging in an amusement park; and pristine pairs of sneakers parked wherever space permitted. The view out the lone window was nearly abstract, a sky-blotting crosshatch of those monoliths to the west: 1PP and Verizon.

  “Somebody’s got to look like you around here,” Yolonda said. “Maybe not as pretty.”

  “Tania?” Irma said. “But I don’t know.”

  “Tania lives here?”

  “With me?”

  “In this building.”

  “I think so, but I don’t know.”

  The two boys started wrestling. Irma clucked her tongue again, then looked to her grandmother in the doorway to do something, but the woman seemed afraid to step over the threshold.

  “What’s Tania’s last name again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s this, Rye Playland?” Yolonda pointed to the photos around the mirror.

  “Yeah, uh-huh.”

  “Is she on here?”

  “No, I don’t know her like that.”

  “She’s a wild kid, good kid . . .”

  “Wild?” Then, “I couldn’t say.”

  “So this Tania, who else knows her?”

  A third little boy came flying into the room, a kitten under each arm.

  “Who else knows Tania, Irma?”

  “She hangs with this fat boy Damien sometimes?”

  “Moreno?”

  “Nigger, yeah, uh-huh.”

  Matty thought of that big kid on the bench.

  “What’s Damien like?”

  “To eat.”

  “No. As a person.”

  “Nice, I guess.”

  “Who else does she run with?”

  “This boy, I think his name’s True Life?”

  “Good kid? Bad kid?”

  “I don’t know him, but, yeah, he’s most definitely from the dark side.”

  “Moreno?”

  “Dominicano. No. Well, like, half?”

  “Half and half?”

  “Looks like it, but I don’t know.”

  “Ever locked up?”

  “I think so.”

  “You know his name?”

  “True Life.”

  “No, his name.”

  “Not really.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Like, eighteen? Twenty? But I don’t know.”

  “But he’s dark side.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Like, what’s his thing?”

  Irma shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”

  “He’s got a gun?”

  “Could.”

  “How about a running buddy? Somebody he likes to jux heads with out there.”

  Irma shrugged.

  “Can you come down to the precinct, look at some photos?”

  “The make-a-face?” She smiled. “OK.”

  “In about an hour?”

  “An hour? I’m supposed to see somebody.”

  “Who.”

  “My boyfriend. We’re going over to my cousin’s in Brooklyn.”

  “Can you go to Brooklyn later?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you can,” Matty said. “Come down to us in an hour and get it over with, OK?”

  “You hear about that shooting on Eldridge Street last week?” Yolonda asked.

  “The white boy got shot?”

  “You hear anything about that?”

  “Not really.”

  “We’re looking for some bad people, here,” Matty said.

  “OK.”

  “You’re not in any trouble,” Yolonda said.

  “OK.”

  Yolonda turned to the grandmother. “Ella no tiene ningún problema.”

  “OK,” the grandmother said.

  “You have a nice family,” Yolonda said to the girl. “Your abuela takes care of a lot of kids.”

  “Thank you,” Irma said.

  “You ever make her worry for you?”

  “She’s just a nervous-type person,” Irma said, then nodded to one of the little boys. “He’s the bad one here.”

  “Girl’s got a touch of Gump to her, huh?” Yolonda said as they came out of the elevator.

  “Grandma too, maybe,” Matty said. “Keeps a nice house, though.”

  The three kids were still on the bench, and Yolonda went straight for the fat boy, his game boxes propped on his thigh. “Hey.”

  Caught by surprise, the kid actually looked right at her, his eyes beneath that browridge like something peering out of a cave.

  “You’re Damien, right?”

  His wounded reaction was impossible to mask, the other two instantly dropping their heads to mask their sniggers.

  “Naw,” he said, his voice surprisingly high. “That’s the other one.”

  “Other one what?”

  “Other fat nigger,” the Latino bawled, almost in tears.

  The big kid exhaled through his nose, forbearing.

  “So what’s your name?” Yolanda played through.

  “Donald.”

  “Like in Trump?” she said kindly.

  “You know where we can find him, Donald?” Matty asked.

  “No.” The boy winced. “I just know him from . . .” He looked down at himself, his explosive girth.

  “Ho.” The white kid was struggling so hard not to laugh that his hood was trembling.

  “How about a girl Tania, you know
her?” Yolonda asked the white kid directly to stop the laughing.

  “Tania?” he drawled. “I know mad Tanias around here, yo.” Slapping palms with the Latino kid.

  “How about a guy True Life, you know True Life?”

  “True Life? I don’t know, like, maybe, I’m not sure.”

  “How can you be not sure if you know someone named True Life?” Matty asked.

  “I know a boy Blue Light,” the white kid said.

  “True Life,” Yolonda repeated.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How about you?” she asked the Latino kid.

  “Hah?”

  “You?” She brought it back around to Donald, still clutching his game boxes.

  But he was deaf to the question, unnerved as he was by the sight of Billy Marcus, who had escaped from the car and was now standing there staring at him, his face streaming tears.

  Iacone, bringing up the rear, looked to them and shrugged: I tried.

  Yolonda glanced at Matty, You win, lose him.

  “OK then,” she said.

  The three boys got up as one, turned, and began to lumber-toddle away with an over-the-shoulder wall-eyed self-consciousness, with Sunday-afternoon boredom.

  Iacone mimed pulling a hood over his face, made his voice go high. “They killed Kenny, those bastards.”

  “I’ll meet you back at the house?” Yolonda asked Matty, quick-tilting her chin towards the weeping Billy, Get him out of here.

  “What did I ask of you?” Matty said as he headed back uptown, Billy Marcus raw-eyed in the passenger seat.

  “I’m not a child,” he muttered, staring straight ahead.

  Matty started to say something more on the subject, then just dropped it.

  They crossed Canal Street into the Lower East Side, the names of long-gone hosiery wholesalers still readable through flaking paint above boarded-up doors.

  “Did I help at all?” Billy’s breathing was still faintly labored, a wheeze like a distant teakettle seeping from his mouth between words.

  “I hope so,” Matty said, squelching an impulse to tell him about Eric Cash going south on them, about Let It Die.

  “Do you think it’s True Life?”

  “Honestly? No, I don’t.”

  “True Life,” Marcus repeated, then as Matty turned west on Houston towards the West Side Highway, “Where are we going?”

  “I’m driving you home.”

  “Stop.” Marcus put out a hand. “I’m not there.”

  Matty pulled to the curb by a twenty-four-hour kebab house.

  “So where are you.”

  Marcus rested his head on his fist, his eyes pinking up again. “You know . . . I wake up every morning, and, for a second everything’s OK . . .”

  “Mr. Marcus, where are you staying?”

  “. . . which makes it worse. Can’t you just call me Billy? For Christ’s sake.”

  “Billy, where are you staying?”

  “I keep thinking I see him, you know? Not him, but like, his walk, say, walking away from me, then last night I smelled him in this bodega on Chrystie, but really faint, like I had just missed him by a second.”

  “Billy, let me take you home.”

  “No. Not just . . .” Marcus cut himself off, his eyes filled with agenda. A faint humming was coming from beneath his wheeze, a Master Plan vibration, but Matty was pretty sure it was nothing, a sugar castle spun out of madness.

  “This is not good.” Matty nodded grimly.

  Billy stared out the side window, knees jiggling furiously.

  “Look, I’m sorry, it’s just, you’re adding to your own torture and you’re torturing them. I hate to—”

  “No, you’re right,” Billy said, continuing to stare out that window as if looking for someone.

  “Your wife is breaking down my door every day, ‘Where is he. Where is he.’ Your daughter, I can’t even imagine—”

  “I said, you’re right. You’re right. You’re right. You’re right.”

  Matty took a moment, then, “Give me your address again?”

  “Henry Hudson into Riverdale,” Billy said after a long pause. “I’ll direct you from there.”

  Sunday afternoons were the casual Fridays in the squad room, the usual jacket and tie replaced by a precinct-logo T-shirt and jeans underneath the preponderance of all-week military brush cuts.

  “Anybody know a guy, True Life?” Yolonda called out, tossing her bag on her desk.

  “I know a guy, Half Life,” John Mullins said.

  “I know a guy, Twenty-five to Life.”

  “I know a guy, Blue Light.”

  Yolanda sat down at a digital photo manager and punched in True Life; no one in the system popping up with that tag. She then started cross-feeding factors for Irma Nieves’s viewing: race, age, hunting grounds.

  • • •

  They were in Riverdale, sitting in the car by the entrance to Billy’s building on Henry Hudson Parkway.

  “I apologize for my bluntness earlier.”

  “No problem,” Billy said distantly, squinting at the canopy over the building’s entrance.

  Again Matty debated whether to tell him how leprous this investigation had become; families often fed on even the bad news; deemed precious any scrap of new information, newness its own virtue. He understood that but could never get behind it. Besides, even here, in front of his home, even now after the long day together, Matty still felt like he hadn’t quite gotten the guy’s attention.

  “You hanging around down there shadowing people at newsstands, following them back to their lairs, that’s gonna stop now, yes?”

  “I didn’t even mean to do that,” Marcus said, still squinting at his building. “It just happened.”

  “That’s going to stop now, yes?” Matty stared at the side of Marcus’s face, the bruised bags under his left eye. “Because I cannot work this in full effect if I have to be worried about you too.”

  “OK.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “OK. Yes.” Then, turning to Matty full-on, “I get it.”

  Marcus made it halfway to the building, then came back, leaned into the driver’s window. “You know, all day you keep saying ‘your family, your family.’ You should understand something. I love Nina, but she’s not mine. When I met Minette, she was already six years old.” Then, “Ike is mine.”

  Irma Nieves sauntered into the squad room two hours later than she said she would, but no later than what Yolonda had expected.

  “I’m gonna punch up six faces at a time,” Yolonda said after she got the kid seated in front of the screen. “You don’t recognize anybody, just say no and we’ll move on, OK?”

  Irma ripped open a bag of Cheetos. “OK.”

  Yolanda brought up the first array.

  “No,” Irma said, blindly bringing the Cheetos from her lap to her mouth. The screen went gray, read PLEASE WAIT.

  “You come from a nice family,” Yolonda said.

  Six new faces popped up.

  “No.”

  “All boys are liars, you know that, right?”

  Another PLEASE WAIT, another set of six.

  “No.”

  “You’re pretty, but smart is better.”

  “No.”

  “You cut out of school a lot?”

  “No.” Then, “No.”

  “You’re lucky you have a good abuela, you better not break her heart.”

  “No.” Two of the faces in this last set were both bloody and over fifty.

  “Don’t ever let a guy you just met hand you a drink.”

  “No.”

  “You use protection?”

  “No.” Then looking at Yolonda for the first time, “What?”

  “Don’t wind up a pregnant stereotype, your poor grandmother gets stuck taking care of your kids too.”

  “Him.”

  “What?”

  “Him.” Pointing. “True Life.”

  Yolanda read the printout: Shawn Tucker, aka Blue
Light.

  “Button those things up, I’m freezing my balls off just looking at you guys,” Lugo said to the two young Latinos perched on their own rear bumper as Daley rooted around the rear seats.

  “Yeah, it got cold,” the driver murmured with resigned civility.

  “What a night, right?” Lugo lit a cigarette. “Where you from?” he asked the driver.

  “Maspeth?”

  “You?” Asking the other kid, who sported an eye patch.

  “D.R.”

  “D.R. Dominican Republic? I was just there last year. Bet you wish you were there now, huh? I know I do. What part?”

  “Playa?”

  “Oh, fuckin’ beautiful, right? We stayed at the Capitán, you know that?”

  “My uncle works there.”

  “Excuse please?” Daley moved them off the rear bumper, then popped the trunk.

  “Capitán’s the best, right?” Lugo said. “The girls. We had this kind of bodyguard, tour guide for the city? Guy took us everywhere, did our talking for us, showed us the highlights . . . And packed a piece.”

  “That’s smart,” the driver said with a little more life, maybe seeing himself driving away from this in a few minutes. “How much?”

  “Fifty a day,” Lugo said, absently swinging his arms, fist into palm.

  “Pesos or dollars?”

  “Dólares, baby.”

  “That’s a lot down there,” the passenger said.

  “You only live once, right? What happened to your eye?”

  “My cousin poked me with a wire when we was kids.”

  Lugo flinched. “Took it out?”

  “Just blinded it.”

  “That sucks.” Then addressing the driver, “Don’t that suck?”

  The driver shrugged, smiled shyly at his shoes.

  The kid with the eye patch laughed. “He’s the one that did it.”

  “And you still run with him?” Lugo squawked.

  “He’s my cousin.” He shrugged.

  “Look at this.” Daley brought over a cardboard temporary license plate from the trunk. “Somebody fucked with these numbers here, see?”

  They all crowded around to look, Daley holding it out with both hands like a newborn. “See the seven turned to a nine? That makes this a forged instrument.”

  “A what?” the kid with the eye patch said.