“All right.” Matty stretched. “I think what I’d like to do is go over that sketch you gave us.”
“I have to tell you,” Eric said, gently massaging his fractured cheekbone, “it’s more that I can recognize him than create him.”
“Nonetheless,” Matty said, then, “You want to get something to eat first?”
“Let’s just do it,” Eric said, dropping his head into the cradle of his crossed arms.
Yolonda moved in to knead his shoulders. “Oh my God,” she said, “it’s like you have golf balls under there.”
As the sketch artist, carrying a portrait barely different from the one he came in with two hours earlier, closed the lieutenant’s office door behind him, Matty looked to Yolonda with impassive disappointment, then uncharacteristically put his own consoling hand on the bleary, fuck-faced witness. “All right, Eric, we appreciate your coming in. I know we didn’t exactly make it easy for you.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s a lot,” Yolonda said. “We can pick this up tomorrow.”
“Maybe we should go back to the scene,” Eric said, “I’m OK to do it. Maybe it’ll shake something loose.”
“You telling us how to do our job?” Yolonda asked mildly.
“No no no.” Eric reached out for her. “I’m just suggesting.”
“Eric,” Matty said. “She’s kidding you.”
“She what?”
“I’m erasing the tension,” Yolonda said. “You want to go? Let’s go.”
It took twenty minutes to locate the car key, which was not on the board like it was supposed to be, then another twenty to locate the car, which was not parked where it was supposed to be. On foot, 27 Eldridge was ten minutes from the precinct, but with rare exception, no one ever walked anywhere.
As Yolonda reached for the driver’s door, Eric sidled up to her, spoke urgently into her ear. “Can I go alone with you? Just for the ride.”
“Why?”
“Or walk with you, either way.”
“Just, why?”
“I need to tell you something.” His eyes were as red as if he’d been at a fire.
In order not to embarrass Cash at being overheard, Matty started walking off as if that had been his intention from the jump. “I’ll meet you over there,” waving them on.
Eric started in before Yolonda could even put the key in the ignition. “I need for you to know I’m not like what you think I am.”
“I think you were in a tough spot,” she said, backing out.
“I was a bug.”
“What do you mean, a bug.” Yolonda taking the long cut to give him the time.
“You turned me into a bug that day.”
“Well, Matty was going for the gold there, when he unloaded on you like that, but you have to understand . . . ,” waving to a squad car.
“No.” Eric’s voice started to waver. “You did. With that one question.”
Yolonda turned to him.
“You asked me why, why, after talking to you all day about what happened, hours and hours of review and recap and going over it, going over it, I never once asked how Ike was doing, or just even whether he was dead or alive.”
“Wow.”
She pulled up three blocks from the scene and threw it into park. This could be a long one.
“And I hadn’t. I hadn’t because I was so scared of the two of you in that room, I was so busy trying to survive, it slipped my mind. Can you imagine that? Becoming like that? What kind of human being just mentally blots out another life like that? Abandons the most basic . . . All it took was a few hours with you two and I turned into a bug. But I turned, you see what I’m saying? You couldn’t have done it without me. You just brought it to the surface. I mean, what the shooter started, you finished, but it was in me, you see? Do you understand that?”
“Huh.”
“And so when you finally put the cuffs on? That was nothing. That was peanuts. Three hours, three years, at that point it felt right.”
“Yeah,” Yolonda said, “sorry.”
“But I’m so much better than that.”
“OK.”
“I’m so much better than anything I’ve ever done.”
“I hear you.”
“I need you to know that.”
“Absolutely.”
“I need to know that.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, you know?”
Eric wept into his hands.
“You’re a good guy, OK?” pulling back out into traffic.
Matty was waiting for them in front of 27, nothing left of the shrine now but Willie Bosket glaring at them through the tattered, windwafted newsprint, looking as if he were peering out from behind his own image.
As they came out of the car, Matty looked to Yolonda, What was that about?
Yolonda shrugged.
“He didn’t mean to do it,” Eric said within a minute of standing at the scene.
“Who.”
“The guy with the gun.”
Matty and Yolonda looked at each other, Eric off in his vision.
“The guy with the .22. Ike moved to him and he just squeezed one off. Then he leaned in like”—Eric lunged forward, closed his eyes—“ ‘Oh!’ or ‘Oh shit!’ The other guy without the gun grabbed his partner, said, ‘Go!’ and they were gone.”
“Gone which way.”
“Downtown.”
“Eric, I’m not trying to trip you up here, but you originally told us east.”
“No. Downtown.”
So, Lemlich.
“The guy with the .22 said, ‘Oh.’ The other one said, ‘Go,’ and they went.”
“Anything else they said?”
“No. I don’t . . . No.”
“The shooter, he leans forward after the shot, his face is in the streetlight?”
“Maybe, I don’t . . .”
“Close your eyes and see it.”
“A wolf. I know that’s what I said before but . . .”
“Hair?”
“A goatee. I said that from the first too. Pretty sure a goatee.”
“Hairstyle?”
“Short, shortish.”
“Straight, curly, Afro . . .”
“Not Afro, maybe curly, I’m not . . .”
“Eyes?”
“I don’t . . . I wasn’t going to look at him like that. Meet his eyes . . .”
“Sometimes you do, not meaning to.”
“No.”
“Scars?”
“I don’t . . .”
“How old.”
“Late teens? Early twenties? I’m sorry, the gun, it takes all your attention.”
“Sure.”
“Wait. He might have had a scar.”
“What do you mean, ‘might’?”
“There was this whitish shine under the goatee.”
“Whitish shine . . .”
“I don’t know. Like a bald streak in the beard? I don’t know, maybe. It could have just been the lighting, the streetlight, I don’t know.”
“A bald streak?” Yolonda looked to Matty, who scribbled it down.
“Am I . . . Is this helping?”
“Oh yeah,” Yolonda said, Matty nodding in agreement, Eric crushed by the absence of electricity, by the politeness.
After twenty more minutes of frustrating Maybes and I’m not sures, the door to the adjoining building opened and Steven Boulware came outside, looking down at them from the top of the stoop, a knapsack slung over one shoulder.
“Hey.” Smiling as he made it down the crumbling stone stairs. “How’s it going?”
“Still working it,” Yolonda said.
“Yeah.” Boulware frowned at the sidewalk, hands on hips. “It’s, I can’t even . . . It’s like a nightmare, a living nightmare.”
“Anything ever kick loose?” Yolonda asked. “Anything you can help us with?”
“I wish. I’d almost make shit up if it would help.”
“Going on a hike?” Matty n
odded to the backpack.
“Oh no, no,” giving it another reflective moment. “An audition. This TV thing, it’ll probably be for naught, but . . .”
“For naught?” Eric blurted.
Boulware cocked his head and squinted at Eric as if he were mildly puzzling, Matty and Yolonda looking from one to the other to see what would shake out.
“But”—Boulware shrugged the knapsack higher up on his shoulder—“you can’t win it unless you’re in it, you know? So . . .”
He shook hands with the cops and walked off towards Delancey, Eric staring after him, then up at the sky, up at the gods.
“You know what?” Matty said. “I think we should call it a day.”
“That’s it?”
“Would you be willing to come in tomorrow, look at some more photo arrays?” Matty asked.
“What’s wrong with now?”
“The thing with right now?” Yolonda chimed in. “People tend to get fried pretty quick if you load up the day on them. Especially with mug shots.”
“We’re talking hundreds of faces here,” Matty said. “You glaze over pretty quick. Next thing you know the bad guy went right past your eye.”
“Yeah, we need you fresh for that.”
“I’m as fresh as fuck,” Eric squawked. “Let’s do it now.”
Stopped at a light on their way back to the Eighth, they saw Boulware, a cab waiting for him at the curb as he comforted a crying young woman on the corner of Delancey and Essex, his fingers caressing the small of her back.
Yolonda turned to Eric and touched his arm. “I want to write this book when I retire,” she said, “ ‘When Good Things Happen to Bad People,’ ” then reared back to get in his eyes. “Know what I mean?”
“Thank you,” Eric said, barely able to get the words out.
Scar
The face
No one can place
The man the plan
The gun in the hand
No one can understan
But its better that way
Stay out and play
All night all day
Tristan heard the big chair out in the living room dragged into position, heard the Yankee theme music come on, which meant roughly seven-thirty, which meant his ex-stepfather would be passed out by nine-fifteen, nine-thirty at the latest. Perfect.
Scar scar
Get in the car
It’s just a short ride
But I’ll take you far
Two and a half hours to go.
They could tell right off the photo manager was going to be a bust, Eric looking too hard, sitting there hunched over, mouth agape, wanting to ID the shooter or his partner so badly that he was taking forever with each six-man array, studying each face as if his salvation were to be found in this one’s half-dead eyes, that one’s freshly busted lip.
At the current rate of scrutiny, Matty calculated that it would take him over eleven hours to work his way through the lot.
At the forty-five-minute mark, one of the faces made him nearly jump out of his seat: Milton Barnes, a twenty-one-year-old walleyed strong-armer from Lemlich.
“What.” Yolonda blowing up the image.
“No,” Eric saying it faster than any no previous.
“Are you sure?”
Matty came to the desk. “Hammerhead.”
“No. He just looked like, never mind.” Eric ran a fluttering finger across his brow.
“You never did tell us who gave you that beatdown.”
“Just, no . . .” Eric tilted his chin to the photo manager. “Keep going.”
Matty wandered back to his desk, made a note to bring in Hammerhead Barnes for a lineup, although it would be hard to find five other look-alikes with oblique peepers like that.
“You want to rest your eyes for a little?” Yolonda offered.
Eric wouldn’t even look away from the screen to answer her. “Not really.”
Over the next hour Yolonda would periodically stare at Matty until he finally gave her the go-ahead to insert the Moment of Truth array. Ten minutes later it was over, the screen of the monitor dark, Yolonda turning Eric’s chair to face her.
“Eric, that’s it for today.”
“Why?”
“You’re fried.”
“No.”
“We appreciate your dedication, but you’re done. We can pick up where we left off tomorrow.”
“I don’t understand, you hound me for weeks to come in, and when I finally do, you what, send me home?”
“Let me show you something.” Yolonda punched in an array on the monitor, then leaned back with her hand over her mouth to study him, the gesture accentuating the size of her eyes.
When the six faces that composed the Moment of Truth popped up, Eric looked at the screen, then reared back in confusion.
“Is this supposed to be a joke?”
On the monitor were photos cropped to look like mug shots, of Jay-Z, John Leguizamo, Antonio Banderas, Huey Newton, Jermaine Jackson, and Marc Anthony.
“What is this?”
“This is an array you looked at five minutes ago and didn’t say shit.”
“What? No.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the most racist thing I’ve ever seen,” he said desperately.
“Well, no,” she said mildly. “We have a white one too.”
“Eric, go home,” Matty said. “We’ll pick it up again tomorrow.”
“Can I tell you something?” Matty sat on the edge of Yolonda’s desk ten minutes after Eric had left. “I think that guy was telling us the truth from day one more than he knew. I think he didn’t see shit. And I’ll tell you something else. If we’re ever lucky enough to collar this guy? No way is Cash getting anywheres near that lineup. He’ll fuck it up for us with a wrong ID.” Matty tapped the blank photo manager with a knuckle. “I’m serious, Yoli, he’s useless.”
At nine forty-five, because of a goddamn middle-of-the-game rain delay in Boston, instead of its being the bottom of the ninth or thereabouts, it was only the top of the sixth. But sixth or ninth, enough time had gone by in front of the tube that his ex-stepfather should still have been passed out; and as Tristan snuck a peek from around the edge of the bedroom door, he saw that his eyes were closed; but something about him, the smoothness of his lids, the lack of any of the usual sleep noises, made Tristan feel like he was pretending, was waiting for Tristan to try to cross the danger zone between the chair and the TV to the front door, had been waiting for a moment like this ever since Tristan had beat his ass over a week ago, and this new tactic spooked him so bad that once again, despite his shots-traded victory, he couldn’t get it up to make his move and so waited in his bedroom until the snores came in the eighth; but by the time he made it downstairs at ten-thirty, Big Bird had already taken off with everybody to that party in the Bronx and the streets were dead.
• • •
Matty was on the phone with a third-person verbal from the Pursue pile, an older black man who owned a candy store outside the Red Hook houses in Brooklyn claiming that he overheard a girl this morning commenting on the reward money and how badly she was tempted for her kids’ sake, but how it wasn’t worth it if you believed in what goes around comes around.
“You know her?”
“I know her voice,” the man said.
“Can you describe her?”
“It was low, what I’d call caramel-toned, with a Puerto Rican inflection, talking to a African-American girl had braces that made slishing salivary sounds.”
Matty closed his eyes, took a three-second nap.
“How about what she look like?”
“The Puerto Rican sounded on the petite side, the black girl overweight.”
“Sounded?”
“I’m blind, son.”
Tristan went back upstairs, crossed between the chair and the TV, Joe Torre on the postgame show looking like an undertaker, went into the bedroom, and without waking any of the little kids got the .22 from und
er the mattress. He came back out into the living room, stood behind the chair, and aimed the gun at the back of his snoring, slumping dome.
He didn’t even know if there were any bullets left, and he couldn’t quite get it up to find out, just stood there experimenting with the trigger pressure and glassily watching the TV, the muzzle almost kissing his ex-stepfather’s scalp.
Derek Jeter came on, then an ad for Survivor: Komodo Island, then one for the new smaller Hummers, then the eleven o’clock news.
Hypnotized by the TV, he lost track of time so he didn’t know how long the wife had been standing there, but there she was, on the far side of the dining table, just watching him with the gun to the back of her husband’s head. They stared at each other in silence, the woman expressionless, Tristan unable to lower the gun, and then she just walked back to her bedroom without saying a word, quietly closing the door behind her. It was the most scared Tristan had been since that night; worse even, he could barely move, then his ex-stepfather cut loose with an abrupt and loud snort, and startled, Tristan squeezed the trigger. The gun clicked on an empty chamber.
Still thinking about the wife’s deadpan face, Tristan went back to his bedroom and, just as she had, quietly closed the door behind him.
The full-up Mercury Mountaineer with Maryland plates abruptly pulled to one side of Clinton, blocking the narrow street and making Lugo slam on his brakes. The driver then leaned across his passenger to roll down the curbside window and hit on three girls sitting on a stoop.
Lush Life Page 43
