“Did what,” he said.
“Was it that asshole guy you live with?”
“No.” Then, “I ain’t telling you.” Then, “But not him.”
“OK.”
“And I never did it to them.”
“The little ones.”
“Yeah.” Looking off again. “And I could’ve if I wanted to.”
“That’s because you know right from wrong.”
Another shrug.
“You do.” Touching his arm. “And for what you been through? You’re strong. Stronger than anybody knows.”
She could feel his tendons begin to unknot beneath her fingers.
“If we ever get to be friends, me and you?” She waited until he looked at her. “I got some secrets that’ll make your hair fall out.”
“Like what.”
“My father was in jail, but not for drugs.”
“Then for what.”
“You look at me and you answer your own question.”
He didn’t look at her, couldn’t look at her, she knew, if he expected to see his own experience mirrored there.
Just as well, since she wasn’t crazy about this kind of lying.
She squeezed his hand in communion.
“So, Tristan, this blanco on Eldridge, did you know him from before?”
“Before what.”
“That night. That incident.”
“No.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Then, leaning in, whispering, “I’m trying to help you.”
He stared at her hand.
“He must’ve done something.”
“Scared me.”
“Scared you how.”
“He started to like, step to me, and I flexed. Bap.”
“Bap. Meaning you shot him?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“Just say it to me. Say what you did. You’ll feel better.”
“I shot him.”
“OK.” Yolonda nodded, patting his hand. “Good.”
Tristan exhaled like something punctured, his body slowly sinking in on itself.
“I miss my grandmother,” he said after a while.
EIGHT
17 PLUS 25 IS 32
Back at Chinaman’s Chance, they sat facing each other in the otherwise shut-down club, the smell of Clorox wafting in from the front room.
“I don’t want to know his name.” Billy’s voice quivering.
“I understand,” Matty said, thinking, Then move to Greenland.
“I don’t want his name in my head.”
“No.”
“I’m not going to ask to see him,” Billy said.
“That wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“He said he did it?”
“Yeah.” Matty sipped his third drink. Lit a cigarette. “Plus we have his partner and the gun.”
“Why?” Billy scowled as if looking into the sun.
“Why’d he do it?” Matty expelled a shred of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. “Sounds like a robbery gone bad. Sounds like what we figured from the jump.”
Billy did an abrupt half-turn to hide an anarchic gout of tears, then turned back. “Is he sorry?”
“Yeah,” Matty lied, “he is.”
They sat in silence for a moment listening to the Chi-Lites coming in from the front-room jukebox, the half-a-homeless-guy mopping the floor out there entertaining himself.
“So what’ll happen to him.” Billy asked.
“He’s seventeen, so he’ll be charged as a juvenile, but he’ll get the big-boy treatment. The DA’ll go for hard time, felony murder in the commission of a robbery, twenty-five years automatic.”
“Huh,” Billy breathed.
“Here’s the deal.” Matty leaned forward. “The DA keeps a scorecard, OK? Now, this is a projects kid, nobody’s stepping up for him, no family, nobody. So, the guy knows he’ll be going up against some Legal Aid lawyer, and it’s pretty much a slam dunk.
“Now, this lawyer, he’ll bring up the kid’s age, the fact that he’s got no record, et cetera, et cetera, but the DA knows a winning hand when he sees one, so he’ll stand pat on the twenty-five. Problem is, he’ll have to go to trial to get that, which no DA ever wants to do, so then he’ll come to you, as father of the victim, say something like ‘We could stick it to him for the full quarter, but to spare you having to relive the whole thing in court, I’ll let his lawyer plea out for twenty and you can just get on with your life.’ ”
“Huh.”
“But what the DA won’t tell you is that once he’s inside, twenty, with good behavior, becomes more like fifteen.”
“Fifteen?” Billy slowly raising his eyes. “How old is he again?”
“Seventeen,” Matty said. “Which puts him back on the street at thirty-two.”
Billy churned in his chair as if his back were killing him.
“I’m sorry, I’m just trying to give you the true picture.”
“I don’t want to know his name.” Billy grinding in his seat.
“I understand,” Matty said patiently, pouring himself another few inches from the bottle he had liberated from behind the darkened bar.
“In or out, he’ll be in my life forever.”
Matty’s cell rang.
“Excuse me,” half turning away.
“Got a pen?” It was his ex.
“Yup.” Making no move to find one.
“Adirondack Trailways 4432, arriving Port Authority, four-fifteen tomorrow.”
“A.m. or p.m.?”
“Guess.”
“All right, whatever,” glancing at Billy. Then, “Hey, Lindsay, wait.” Matty lowered his voice, his head. “What’s he like to eat?”
“To eat? Whatever. He’s a kid, not a tropical fish.”
Not a tropical fish; Matty hanging up in a rage; Lindsay always with that mouth, that superior attitude. He drained his fourth and glared at Billy.
“Let me ask . . . Are you still down here?”
“Kind of.” Billy looked away.
“Kind of?”
“I just need to . . .”
“Because I want to tell you something,” Matty said. “You got a nice family, you know?”
“Thank you.”
Matty faltered, then . . . “So don’t make this into a multiple.”
“Don’t what?” Billy said.
Matty held off for another moment; then, Fuckit, leaned forward again in the rattan chair, elbows on knees. “Here’s what happens.” He waited for Billy’s eyes. “Any way you cut it, it’s gonna be rough for you and yours for a long time to come, OK? But I swear to God, if you continue to bail on them like this, pretty soon everybody in your house is gonna start doing some variation of the same, and it’s gonna be bad.” Matty drew a breath. “Who finished the vodka, there was a whole bottle here yesterday, where’s my sleeping pills, there was a whole bottle here yesterday, this is Officer Jones, I have your son here, your daughter here, your wife, your husband, lucky no one was killed but they failed the Breathalyzer, refused the Breathalyzer, this is Assistant Principal Smith, your son was fighting again, your daughter was stoned again, drunk again, found a gun in his locker, a bag of dope in her locker, this is Happy Valley Rehab, this is family court, this is the Eighth Precinct, the ER, the morgue, could have been an accident, could have been something else, that’s what the autopsy’s for, but just so you know, we found her in back of a club, in a motel room, a bus station, a dumpster, wrapped around a tree, a telephone pole . . .
“That poor Marcus family, they lost the one boy last year, now this.”
Billy gawked at him, held out a hand like a stop sign, but Matty couldn’t stop.
“Are you hearing me? Everybody starts closing doors on each other, and I promise you, I will stake my pension on it, someone else is not gonna make it.”
“No, you don’t understand.”
“I mean, Jesus, if I had a wife—”
“I know, I know.”
“—and kid like that. The sister, the girl.”
“Nina,” Billy said as if ashamed.
“Did you ever find out what’s under those bandages? Or would you rather not know.”
His knees running like pistons, Billy drained his third glass as if he were late for something but made no move to rise.
Matty’s cell rang again.
“Now what.”
“Excuse me?” Yolonda said.
“Sorry, I thought . . .”
“We got a body in the Cahans.”
“In the Cahans?”
“I just said that.” Then, “You sound like you’re chewing glass.”
“Like what?”
“Are you too shitfaced for this?”
“No, I’m good.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll be right there. Where in the Cahans?”
“I’ll pick you up,” she said.
“I’m on Clinton and Delancey.”
“Which means you’re in Chinaman’s. What the fuck, it’s not even dark yet.”
“Clinton and Delancey.”
Matty hung up then struggled to his feet.
“Where are you going?” Billy asked.
“Christ, I’m blind off my ass.”
“Can I help?”
“You’re done with helping.” Matty widened his eyes to get air around the sockets. “Go home.”
“I just need to go back—”
“To where, the hotel? Why. What’s there.”
Billy stared at him.
“Billy”—Matty laid a hand on his knee—“your son’s not down here anymore. Go home.”
In the darkened room Billy’s eyes seemed to glow then dim, as he sank into what Matty hoped was acceptance, although he continued to sit there as Matty weaved his way through the empty tables then out the side door to his next customer.
By the time they made it to the Cahans there was already a shrine going, a cardboard humble, two open grocery cartons laid on their sides to make a shelter for the half-dozen botanica candles placed inside. A few cellophane-stapled bunches of flowers lay on the sidewalk. Iacone and a new kid, Margolies, a white shield fresh from Anti-Crime, were already interviewing potential witnesses.
The heart-shot body starfished on the pavement in front of a projects bench was a Cahan kid, Ray-Ray Rivera, wearing an oversize white T and shin-length shorts, his belly a sizable mound even beneath his tentlike shirt.
There were two separate clusters of weeping people standing at opposite ends of the crime-scene tape; one, a group of teenage girls, the other made up of old people, again women mostly, surrounding a short, stocky white-haired man in a guayabera whose reddened face was clenched with grief.
There were no boys or men even close in age to the victim.
Crime Scenes hadn’t shown up yet.
“His friends suck,” Iacone said.
“Where are they?”
“Exactly.”
“But they were here?”
“Apparently. Well, find ’em. Where the hell they gonna go?”
“How about them,” Yolonda nodding to the girls. “You talk to them?”
“I thought I’d leave that to you.”
“Any cameras?” Matty asked, squinting at the small strip of stores across the street.
“None working,” Iacono said.
Yolonda studied the group of seniors, keyed in on the weeping man in the middle. “Oh shit, I know that guy. He’s got the candy store around the corner, been running bolita in there since I was little. What’s, why’s he here?”
“It’s his grandson.”
“You’re kidding me, his grandson? His son got shot too. Oh my God, Matty, you remember five years ago on Sherrif Street? Angel Minoso? Jesus. This guy’s been running numbers for forty years around here without a scratch. His grandson now?”
“Does he know anything?” Matty asked.
“I don’t think so,” Iacono said, “they came and got him when it happened.”
Yolonda stepped toward the body. “Those girls there?” addressing the new guy, “get them corralled and down to the house.”
“I talked to a few already,” he said.
“Yeah?” slipping on her gloves. “And?”
“Nobody saw nothing. They heard something about a black guy from Brooklyn. But apparently nobody knew him.”
“No? Then how did they know he was from Brooklyn?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Yeah? And?”
He looked at her then back at the girls, two of whom were already wandering off.
“Down to the house.”
She watched him approach the girls with his arms out as if to scoop up strays.
“Who is that again?” she asked Matty.
“Something Margolies.” Matty shrugged. “We should check the notes in those boxes there too.”
“Well, not in front of people,” Yolonda said.
“I didn’t mean right now,” Matty snapped, slightly insulted, then went off, thinking about the difference between Raymond Rivera’s shrine and the one for Ike Marcus.
He’d go to his grave swearing that he cared equally about his victims, that if there was anything that got him more pumped over one than the other it wasn’t race or class but innocence. He cared equally, well, maybe some more equally than others, but even if he was selling himself a bunch of wolf tickets with that one, Yolonda here was the great leveler, because this was where she came from, where she felt the need to shine, and where she found it easiest to locate that shred of genuine pity that made her so effective in the box.
Looking up, he saw a kid in a marshmallow T and stubbled haircut similar to the vic, peeking from around the corner of a Chinese restaurant across the street to see what was happening. Matty pointed a finger at him, Stay right there, but the kid took off anyhow. Matty started out after him then stopped. Like Iacone said, where’s he going to go.
When he turned back to Yolonda, she was inside the yellow, dropped to one knee alongside the body, staring at it vaguely perplexed, as though she could revive him if she could only remember how.
“You want to hear something?” she said. “I knew this kid too. Not like to say hello to, but he lived in my grandmother’s building. I used to see him in the elevator.”
“Oh yeah? Good kid?”
“I think he dealt a little weed, but he wasn’t bad.”
Still on one knee, she scanned the greasy-bricked Cahans like a tracker, a hand over her mouth.
“So his friends suck, huh?” she said drily. “We’ll see about that.”
And then she looked up at Matty with that look.
My turn.
NINE
SHE’LL BE APPLES
The ground floor of the Stiener Rialto hotel in Atlantic City had no end to it. It took five minutes for him to get from the front doors to the cordoned-off construction site, the indoor New York theme park going up on the perimeter of the casino floor. Separated only by a spattered sheet of plastic from a red and gold acre of slots, it seemed to him, big surprise, that the constant shriek of band saws and groan of cement mixers did nothing to shake the concentration of the players sitting there moon-eyed, clutching milk-shake cups filled with silver.
The Berkmann’s sign was up already, but the restaurant, half the size of the original, was still a work in progress, all hammer bang and power whine.
Twenty feet away, trompe l’oeil tenement scrims were being hoisted into place and nail-gunned into their wooden braces; some windows adorned with cats or aspidistras, others with fat-armed Molly Goldbergs, their elbows propped on pillows.
Around the bend from Yidville was the hotel’s Times Square Land, all neon girlie-show signs, kung-fu-movie marquees, and a functioning Automat.
And around the bend from that was Punktown, one long poster-plastered, graffitied mock-up of St. Marks Place circa 1977, tattoo parlors, vinyl-record shops, and a rock club/restaurant, BCBG’s.
Then he saw a face he thought he knew, Sarah Bowen, she of the seven dwarfs, arguing with a guy in an expensive suit and a hard hat outside a nearly completed reconstruction of the Gem Spa on St. Mark’s Place and Second Avenue.
Eric waited until they walked away from each other before going up to her.
At first she couldn’t place him either; it was the surroundings, at least that’s what she told him and what he chose to believe.
She had just landed the job of hostess at BCBG’s.
“That asshole wants me to wear safety pins through everything as part of my getup, can you believe that? The last time I wore a safety pin I was in a diaper.”
“Me, I think I’m supposed to be wearing a derby and arm garters.”
They took it out on the boardwalk, where the gulls ate cigarette butts, twenty-four-hour gamblers staggered around like sunstruck vampires, and the sand resembled kitty litter.
“I figure it this way,” she said. “I’ll be making more here, saving more here, two maybe three years from now I’ll finally have enough to go back to Ottawa and open that massage parlor.”
“There you go.” Eric felt himself relaxing.
“So when are you moving down?” offering him a cigarette.
“I don’t know if I am.”
She gave him a long speculative look, then returned her gaze to the waves. “You better.”
“Yeah?”
She shrugged, continued to look out at the water.
“Do you remember me and you one time about a year, year and a half ago?” he asked.
“I’m lucky if I remember my name from back then,” grazing her chin with a long nail.
“Thanks. Thank you.”
“But, yeah, I do.” Then, “It wasn’t a very good year for me. Do you ever have years like that?”
“No.” Eric finally took one of her cigarettes. “I’ve been blessed.”
“So I hear,” she said, smiling in sympathy as she lit him up, her hands cupping his against the breeze. “You know, just because you earn here doesn’t mean you have to live here. Me and a few other refugees rented a house three towns over, big old Victorian, backs up on a preserve. There’s a bedroom available. You want it?”
Lush Life Page 45
