Lush Life

by Richard Price

  “Billy”—touching his shoulder—“what did you want to show me.”

  “Do you believe in dreams?”

  “I never know how to answer that one.”

  “Last night?” Billy said, avoiding looking at the tattered newsphoto of his son still taped to the wall of 27 Eldridge. “I dreamt Ike was fighting off lions. I was too scared to help him. I kept finding reasons not to jump in.”

  “That’s just—”

  “Guilt. Yeah, I know, but look.”

  Billy pointed to the building facade and there they were, lions, half a dozen of them ornamenting the upper stories of brickwork in front of the murder spot; pitted, century-old grimestone beasts carved open-mawed and snarling.

  “I don’t understand why that guy won’t help you on this.”

  “Who,” Matty asked, feeling for his car keys.

  “If he didn’t do it, why would he care about immunity?”

  There was a dangerous word-for-word repetitiveness in Billy’s complaint, Matty thinking, And so it begins.

  Half an hour later Matty sat parked with him in front of his building in Riverdale, Billy in no rush to go upstairs.

  “So let me ask you something.” Matty said. “It’s really none of my business, but, your wife . . .”

  Billy looked at him.

  “Maybe you don’t want to deal with her on this for whatever . . . I don’t know, you’re an adult, she’s an adult. But the kid. The girl.” Matty shrugged helplessly. “You seem like a decent guy.”

  Billy’s chin disappeared quivering into the arc beneath his mouth. “We talk,” he managed to get out. “We talk.”

  Minette came out of the building a moment later, crossed the pavement barefoot to the car, and reached through the driver’s window to lay a brief hand on Matty’s arm. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Don’t be,” Matty said.

  As Billy got out on the passenger side, she walked around the front to him and he broke down, reaching for her like a child.

  Matty watched as she guided her husband back home, then he continued to sit there for a few minutes after they were gone.

  On his way back down the West Side Highway, he nearly tore the car apart searching for Sarah Bowen’s phone number before admitting to himself that he’d lost it.

  Handcuffed to the arm of Lugo’s office chair, Albert Bailey winced in ostentatious discomfort as he spoke to someone on a squad-issued cell phone. Daley and Lugo sat facing him in the otherwise deserted room, their fingers laced across their guts and their high-tops ankle-crossed up on their desks.

  “How about the boy Timberwolf?” Albert said into the phone. “Timberwolf in Cahan . . . No one’s gonna mess with you over there if you’re goin’ over to do business . . . Just rent it off him or somesuch, I’ll pay you back soon’s I get clear of this mess, soon’s I get clear . . . Bring it to in front of St. Mary’s on Pitt and I’ll meet you . . . Naw, naw, naw, the police ain’t gonna do nothing to you, man . . . Look, I got to get them a hammer or I’m long gone, I swear on my unborn child, man . . . Awright, call me back, call me back. This number right here. Call me back.” Then, flipping the phone shut, “He ain’t calling me back.”

  “I hope he does, brother.” Lugo yawned into the back of his hand. “For your sake.”

  Albert started undulating a little, as if to soothe himself.

  “Anybody else you can call?” Daley asked, his ankle holster playing peekaboo with the cuff of his jeans as he idly rocked in his flex-backed office chair.

  “I would if I could, man, but a gun, I’m not . . . That’s never been my thing, guns . . .” Wincing again as he tried to get a new lay of the cuff biting into his wrist.

  “No, no, I hear you,” Lugo said mildly, “but for real, there are those that subscribe, correct?”

  “Yeah, but me, I’m not . . . see, you fellas, you don’t know me. All’s you saw was a black man in a hooptie holdin’ a hundred dollars’ worth of brown.”

  “Don’t forget the boxcutter.”

  “Like, for example, I’m a news buff. You searched my car, I probably had a newspaper in there, right? I could tell you about anything, Tyco, Amron, steroids, bin Laden, Rove . . .”

  “Who’s Rove?” Daley asked.

  “Shit, my girl? She’s three months heavy now with my first child. A thirty-five-year-old black man just having his first kid? You know I was waiting.”

  “Well, we’re trying to help you here,” Lugo said, peering at his watch, “but it’s a gun or you might not be there for the coming-out party.”

  “And then some,” Daley added.

  Bailey closed his eyes and spoke faster, as if to fend off, to drown out. “See, my girl, she’s not, she’s not a street girl, has got a college diploma, I mean, I don’t know what she saw in me, you know? And like, at first? It was too easy to fool her about this stuff . . . Be high and say I’m just tired. She’s innocent, you know? But sometimes being innocent, like, if you got a conscience? The innocent ones can be a lot harder to lie to than the wise ones. So like six months ago I went and confessed to her about my addiction? I tell you, man, she up and surprised the hell out of me, didn’t even blink. Tied me to the bed for two days till I was clean, just like the Wolfman.”

  “Wow,” Daley said.

  “But in all fairness to myself? I’m not too bad a guy . . .” Bailey chattering, rocking with ache, “Like, out on the street? I’m kind of the neighborhood babysitter. I mean, people know I’m, you know . . . But I don’t ever do it in front of anybody, I don’t entice and shit . . . I started a, a chess club, a basketball team. In high school? I was a athlete. Man, I never even so much as smoked a cigarette until I was twenty-five. I couldn’t stand the smell of them things.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Curiosity,” Albert muttered.

  “That sucks,” Lugo said, eyeing the time on the cable box: 1:15. “Why don’t you try your buddy again.”

  “I do, you know what’s gonna happen? He ain’t gonna pick up.”

  “Try,” Daley said.

  Albert did, and got the voice mail. “Ey, yo . . .” he began halfheartedly, then abruptly jackknifed in his seat, as if attempting to pick something up off the floor, came back up hissing in pain.

  “You’re starting to come off a little squinchy there, brother . . . You getting the grips?”

  “Yeah.” His face bunched, then went pop-eyed wide. “I’m feeling it now. This ain’t gonna be fun in there.”

  “We keep wanting to help you out, man.” Lugo raised his hands. “But it’s a two-way river.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know, but . . .” Albert’s hand fluttered above the cell phone. “Fuck it. It’s what I deserve.”

  The large, near-empty room descended into a brief disappointed silence, which was abruptly disrupted by Geohagan and Scharf escorting their own last-call collar through the door, an overweight Latino kid sporting a Yankees bomber jacket and a long, braided pigtail. They steered him to a desk as far away from Lugo and Daley’s play as possible, cuffed him to the chair, and placed Scharf’s cell phone on the table before him.

  “You know the drill, bro,” Geohagan said, “so start dialing.”

  Matty was at the beach with Minette and his own sons, who were little kids again, when his cell jerked him awake.

  “What am I supposed to tell myself,” Billy hissed in his ear, “it was his time? He was summoned? It was for his own good? He’s better off now? He’s romping in some, some, cloud meadow? He was sacrificed to prevent some greater evil from happening?”

  “OK, look—” Matty began.

  “And my son isn’t watching over me. He doesn’t live on in my heart. He doesn’t talk to me. I talk to me and what I say to myself—”

  “OK, hang on, stop.”

  “Cherish your memories . . . My memories feel like knives and I would gladly burn them out of—”

  “Just stop.”

  “And that guy who’s not helping you? A few hours in jail a
nd now he won’t go through a mug book? The Tombs. Fuck the Tombs. My son’s got the rest of . . . has eternity in the Tombs.”

  SIX

  THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

  As Matty was on the phone with Borough Patrol trying to rejig tours for this evening’s canvass, Steven Boulware popped up on the TV again, a clutch of microphones bearding his face.

  “At one p.m. tomorrow afternoon at the Eugene Langenshield Center on Suffolk Street there will be a memorial service in honor, in celebration, of Ike Marcus, my friend Ike Marcus, followed by a procession to Twenty-seven Eldridge Street, where he”—Boulware struggled—“where he left us. This will be open to all, I invite you all, to come not to mourn his death . . . but celebrate his life, his spirit, his legacy.”

  “This Boulware kid’s an actor?” Mullins asked.

  “Aspiring,” Matty said.

  “Got the cameras now.”

  “Matty.” Yolonda holding up the phone. “Dargan from Berkowitz.”

  Matty braced, Detective Dargan, Deputy Inspector Berkowitz’s Bad News Bear. “Hey, Jerry.”

  “Yeah, hey, Matty, look, we just got word, the president’s coming into town tonight instead of tomorrow.”

  “OK.” Matty waited for the other shoe.

  “So, we’re going to need to postpone your recanvass.”

  “What?” Matty tried to come off stunned. “Why?”

  “The word from on high is to pull manpower from all units, including yours. No excusals.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? I spent the last two days lining everybody up for this. You couldn’t have told me earlier?”

  “We just found out ourselves.”

  “How the fuck can you not know the president’s coming in until the day.”

  “Hey,” Dargan said calmly, “I have nothing to do with this. I’m just the messenger.”

  Fucking Berkowitz.

  “Is he in? Let me talk to him.”

  “Not a good idea,” Dargan said.

  “And you’re taking people from my squad? It’s a seventh-day homicide recanvass. You can’t take my people.”

  “No excusals,” Dargan said. “Sorry.”

  “This fucking sucks. Let me talk to him.”

  “Not a good idea. And Matty? Truly . . . let it be.”

  As he slammed the phone down, Yolonda snapped off her cell. “They’re pulling me and Iacone,” she said. “You know something? I don’t think I’ve ever been inside the Waldorf.”

  At eleven that morning, Berkmann’s was once again a white dream, the sun coming in like a brass band through the large windows, bouncing off the artfully mottled mirrors, the eggy glazed tiles, the shimmering racked bistro glasses.

  The only customer at this limbo hour, however, was a lone woman at a window deuce getting quietly plastered on Chocolatinis as she leafed through yesterday’s New York Times.

  “Last night there was a small dustup at the bar.” Eric Cash’s voice rang through the cavernous room as he addressed the assembled waitstaff at one of the back banquettes. “Eric the second, who is no longer with us, lifted someone’s change, thinking it was a tip, and the customer, who was drunk, accused him of stealing and threw a punch. Then Cleveland here”—Eric gestured to the dreadlocked bartender—“came to the rescue, leaping over the bar like Zorro and bum-rushing the guy out the door himself, no one hurt and nothing broken.”

  There was a smattering of applause, Cleveland standing up and bowing at the waist.

  “Now, the reason I’ve invited Cleveland to this meeting is to tell him the following. If you ever try anything like that again, you are gone.”

  The kid half smiled, not sure if Cash was joking.

  “I wouldn’t want security making the margaritas, and I certainly don’t want you playing amateur hero. You like to read, Cleveland?”

  “Sometimes.” The kid still processing this, confused and humiliated.

  “Then you know heroes are often tragic,” Cash said, then dismissed him with a nod towards the bar, waiting for him to return to his post behind the stick before resuming the meeting.

  “OK, and lastly,” Cash said to the rest, “everybody here . . . when this room is hopping the way it has been recently and the busboys are overextended? You people need to start helping them out, none of this ‘It’s not my job.’ When this place starts to look like some Soviet-style who-gives-a-shit cafeteria, which is exactly what it’s been looking like come the peak hours, it damn well is your job.

  “Everyone at this table is expendable, and this neighborhood is crawling with experienced waiters. So. You take the check but leave the dirty dishes? No. You have ketchup still on the table when the dessert comes out? No.

  “The check comes, that table is clean. You want to serve? You have to bus.”

  Eric Cash flipped over the top sheet of his legal pad. “And that’s it on my end. Anybody have anything else they want to bring up? Questions? Suggestions?”

  Even in his disembodied state Eric was cognizant enough to sense that no one at the table would risk opening their mouth for fear of saying what they were probably thinking of this prick, this ball-breaking entity who had taken him over. It was if he was watching himself from the sidelines as he turned his own people against him.

  “All right then.” He raised and dropped his hands on the edge of the table. “I’m still working on the envelopes, they should be ready at about three. Class dismissed.”

  They all rose in silence, not even daring to make eye contact with each other.

  He remained at the table, though, staring straight ahead, the agitation in his features fading into a brooding slackness as he drifted off into tabulating how much he had pocketed from the tip pool so far this week: close to $500; way too much; not nearly enough.

  Boulware’s studio apartment, in the building next to 27 Eldridge, was a featureless two-year-old efficiency that bore no trace of the building’s nineteenth-century exterior; walls, doors, fixtures; everything cheap and new; Matty thinking they must have gutted the whole thing and rebuilt it for the newbies, kids used to dorms.

  “This memorial service?” Matty, seated across a coffee table from Boulware, inched forward in the sling chair. “I think it’s a great thing you’re doing for your friend and we’re behind you a hundred percent. Just, it would be good for us to know in advance what you plan on talking about tomorrow.”

  “Talking about?” Boulware reached for one of the beers standing between them. “About Ike, what else?”

  His cell rang. “Sorry,” holding up a finger and calling out the name of the person on the other end. “You’re coming, right?”

  Matty got up and wandered to Boulware’s lone window, which looked out on the rear Dumpsters of a Chinese restaurant on Forsyth Street.

  The walls were bare save for three framed SUNY Buffalo theater posters—Mother Courage and Her Children, Equus, and Lost in Yonkers—Boulware’s name getting either first or second billing on each.

  The only other personal touch in here was the dozens of small plastic soldiers and Star Wars figures that marched across the back of the convertible sofa and along the kitchen counters or rappelled on shoelaces down the sides of the TV and the refrigerator.

  After Dargan’s call, Matty had spent the remainder of the morning on the phone, trying to set up his own little backdoor recanvass for tonight in defiance of Berkowitz’s postponement; attempted to call in every marker he had in Warrants, Vice, Narcotics, and Borough Patrol and had gotten blown off by people who owed him hugely, which should have told him something, but he was too hot to take the hint.

  “I swear to God, if you don’t show tomorrow?” Boulware smiled at the response, then, “Peace,” hanging up, his face electric with life. “I’m sorry, you were saying.” His cell rang again. “Sorry, just . . . Yeah? Hey. I have to call you back . . . I have to call you back . . . I have to call you back . . . Yeah . . . Yeah . . . OK . . . OK.” Hanging up. “I’m sorry, it’s just this thing tomorrow, it’s going to be like,
boom.”

  “That’s great, that’s good. We just need to know if you’re going to be saying anything about the investigation.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything.”

  “I don’t understand.” And Matty believed him.

  “Is there something you want me to say?”

  “More like, don’t say.”

  “Don’t say.”

  “It’s just, it’s been difficult, this investigation, but any criticism of us at this point, any negativity to the press . . .”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Anything about Eric Cash . . .”

  At first the name didn’t even register, Matty thinking, Just drop it.

  “What about him?”

  “We’re trying to work with him, but it’s a very delicate situation. He kind of needs, feels he needs to lay low for a bit, so maybe you should include him out, if you know what I mean, let him grieve in his own way.”

  “I’m still not a hundred percent following.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “OK.” Then, “You’re coming, right? You and your partner?”

  “Most likely.”

  “This will be a good thing.” Boulware nodded. “A very good thing.”

  • • •

  Lightning frightening

  Your gut tightning

  Evidence inamissible

  Power indivisable

  Touch me once ill touch you twice

  Mess with me youll be on ice

  Tristan closed the notebook and headed off to make his delivery for Smoov, this one here his last of three and the easiest, the storefront law office on Hester, just a couple of blocks from the Lemlichs.

  The place was long, wooden, and funky like an old-time saloon, and except for a photo of one old white dude with a guitar, the walls were hung with posters of mostly olden-days morenos and borinqueños with Jiffy Pop dos and dime shades, fists raised in front of microphones or crowds.