Johnny nodded in agreement. “At my place is good. Here, let me give you my info.” He took out his wallet, removed a card from it, and handed it to her.
“The only thing is,” the girl hesitated a moment as if embarrassed to continue, holding Johnny’s card close to her chest. “We need some money now, for somewhere to stay until we get settled and to buy some food. Do you think, maybe, you could help us with that?” Her voice was small and plaintive again.
“We’re good, don’t worry. I have cash on me.” There was the eight hundred he was carrying for Bones. He could hand it over as a down payment of sorts. After all, he had the winning ticket. What did he have to lose? “Here’s what we’ll do,” he said as he reached for the money, his fingers brushing against his lucky silver dollar, which had finally paid off.
Johnny was all smiles, watching the girl and boy walk away when Bones lumbered up to him, his two apes a half-pace behind. “So, my friend, Detective Walker, you got something for me tonight? I hope you didn’t make me come all the way down here for nothing.” He shook his finger in Johnny’s face in a bad De Niro impression. “You know how much I hate being disappointed.”
“Bones, you’re not gonna believe this.” Johnny’s excitement was palpable as he reached for the winning ticket. He glanced down the street and realized that the girl and boy had disappeared. All he could hear was a low laugh echoing back from where they’d been.
It hit him in an instant. Shit, I’ve been played. A red-hot anger filled his mind, and he began to shake all over.
“Hey, Detective, you look like someone just pissed on your shoes. What the hell just happened?” His eyes bored into Johnny’s. “I hope we don’t have a problem here.”
Johnny didn’t know how’d they’d done it, but whether they’d switched the ticket or forged it, the one he was holding was bogus— a fucking worthless fake. His hand jerked out of his pocket, sending the ticket and his lucky silver dollar flying into the gutter. He felt Bones’ hand snake around the back of his neck like the knot of a noose ready to be tightened. He was shit out of luck. And that was only the beginning.
TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DAY
Lynne Lederman
HE was flicking the old Zippo and thinking it needed a new flint, before he was even aware of the cigarette he’d plugged into the corner of his mouth.
Damn. Can’t smoke with the kid here. He removed the cigarette and contemplated it. Can’t go outside, can’t leave her. Really too cold to hang out the window, let alone sit on the fire escape. She’d know, anyway. He shredded it into the ashtray. Have to get rid of that, and the matches. Weren’t little kids always playing with them, starting fires?
Kids, and also drunks passing out on the couch with a lit butt in their hand, he thought, glancing at the charred hole in the rug. He got up and edged the couch over the spot. That re-exposed the worn path behind it, but hey, can’t have everything. He turned to the window and looked down to the street four flights below. Not high enough to escape the traffic noise from Roosevelt Avenue, the El that roofed the avenue, or the Long Island Railroad trains squealing into the Woodside station just down the block.
Several men were loitering in the glow from the spotlights illuminating the front of Ernie’s Elbow Rest across the street. Could go out for a quick smoke. No, can’t leave her. Tomorrow, then. No, poor little girl didn’t even have a coat when that witch from Child Protective Services showed up with her. She hadn’t said a word yet, not to him, not to the cops, not to that so-called social worker. Probably heard the whole thing, whatever happened. Maybe even knew who it was. Then doing what? Cowering behind the bedroom door, hiding in the closet in case someone came back for her? Phone jack ripped out of the wall, and no one heard a thing. Nothing in the kitchen either, except her mother lying there with her head bashed in. Didn’t that little girl deserve some kind of help? And now, today, not Monday or whenever they were planning to come back and check up on her.
How do people do it? he asked himself out loud. He could see the bar patrons talking across the street, first one frosty exhale, then another in response. How do you take a kid out in the cold to get a coat? How do you buy the coat without the kid? His hand sought his breast pocket and cradled the pack of unfiltered cigarettes within— just one to think with. No.
He paced. He looked at the shreds in the ashtray. Did snuff look like that? He was pretty sure it did not. Maybe he could chop it up. This is ridiculous, he told the pack.
It’s only for a weekend. Well, maybe it’s a sign I should finally quit. Crumble them all up? But then I’d probably just get out the rolling papers or the hash pipe. Have to get rid of those, too. The hash pipe. Why did I keep it? To prove how strong I am? His Narcotics Anonymous sponsor had told him he was just asking for a relapse. Some sponsor that guy was, he thought. I’m clean, he’s out on a street corner, selling crack, last I heard.
Matches. Well, have to keep some of those around. What if we have another blackout and have to light a candle? I guess you lock them up somewhere. But where? That old trunk? Then what do I do, carry the key around until I lose it and I have to get the kid to pick the lock? Bet she knows how, too.
He emptied the pack of cigarettes into a trash bag. This is why we need garbage disposals in this building, he told the cigarettes. Get rid of things while you have the strength. He sprinkled their shredded colleague over the cigarettes and anointed them all with several, generous shakes from the bottle of Louisiana hot sauce that sat on the kitchenette counter next to the remains of what had passed for dinner.
A coat. Food. What else? He turned to the window in time to witness that unmistakable glow in the cupped hands of one of the loitering men. As he watched, a big man shouldered his way through the group and into the doorway. The door opened, and the neon glow from the Elbow’s interior flared briefly before the big man continued into the bar, blocking the light almost completely as the entry absorbed him. Even from this height, you could tell you wouldn’t want to come up against that guy, especially not after spending a few hours at the Elbow.
Why is tobacco any different from the drugs or booze? He thought of all those AA and NA meetings, the chain-smoking, the endless pots of coffee. Coffee. Surely I can still have that, can’t I? Just one bad habit. Anyway, maybe it’s just until Monday. Sure, she was his niece’s only kid, but still, who in their right mind would leave a kid with him for any length of time? True, he’d lost track of the rest of his family, but he couldn’t be the only one left, could he? He didn’t remember his niece mentioning which of her many boyfriends was the little girl’s father, and no one in her building knew, that’s for sure. They hadn’t even noticed she wasn’t around until the smell got so bad.
His niece had been lying in the kitchen for days, the medical examiner said. Thank goodness someone remembered about the girl, remembered his weekly visits, knew enough to get the cops to search for her address book and his number. They found the girl cowering in the bedroom closet behind a pile of old clothes and rags. You’d never even notice there was someone there under all that junk, the cops said. They sure hadn’t seemed motivated to look around much, although they’d mentioned the empty bottles that they’d knocked over when they’d pushed open the slightly ajar bedroom door. One of them had sneered. Your niece always let the kid play with wine bottles? Just another loser who got no worse than she deserved, his tone implied.
Maybe we’ll eventually figure out who did it, he’d said. But we can always use more information, and the sooner the better, because the kid ain’t talking. It just gets harder as the trail grows colder.
Almost half the homicides in this city are never solved, the sarcastic cop said. With all those men coming and going, we can’t count on fingerprints and fibers being much use here. Maybe she’d surprised a burglar, hard to tell what might have been stolen, though. Was her place always such a god-awful dump?
They had talked to several guys in particular. The current boyfriend, some mousey little guy. He and the kid didn’t
seem to get along. You could say that for most of them, like the one before the Mouse, that bodybuilder who lived downstairs. And a couple of delivery guys in the area, identified through the take-out containers littering the kitchen counter. Someone from the Chinese restaurant they were sure was an illegal, but it wasn’t their concern. A gawky teenager from the pizza parlor, seemed really nervous, lots of reasons for that. But the dates on the receipts were from too long ago. Did they come back on their own? Who knew? Not enough evidence to hold any of them. None of the neighbors seemed to recall who else had been around recently, but then they hadn’t heard someone beat his niece to death with fists, maybe feet, either. The Mouse seemed real shaken up, sure, but he’d seen the body, walked in while the rookie who was waiting for the detectives was forgetting to secure the place, standing there in shock, his first homicide. A sight like that is not something you ever get used to, take it from me, the sneering cop had said, tossing him his card on the way out.
That bodybuilder, he thought, eyeing me like competition, until I’d made my relationship with my niece perfectly clear. What had his niece seen in that gorilla, anyway? Not his personality, certainly not his appearance. You didn’t see a lot of men with skin that bad. Maybe he had qualities that weren’t obvious. She was always looking for someone to help support her and the kid. However much he’d promised his sister he’d look after his niece, he’d never been all that helpful. That was back when he was using and boozing. He knew the gorilla was, too. Easy to recognize a fellow traveler. Maybe not booze, but something.
How relieved he’d been when she’d said she’d finally broken it off with him a few weeks ago. Sure, she kept running into him, and he was always calling, trying to get her to take him back. She said he was always putting down her new boyfriend, what did he call him, the runt? And she’d laugh about it, say he didn’t scare her, no one did, most guys were all bluff.
Anyway, her new boyfriend could take care of her. He’s your size, that’s not so runty. Plus, he does some kind of martial arts thing, but it’s only for self-defense, she’d said. He’d never hurt anyone if he didn’t have to. I just need to convince him the old guy’s really history. Sure, she’d gotten into a couple of screaming contests with the new guy. He was jealous, but he was all bark. Anyway, she’d say, have you seen how skinny my ex’s legs are? Some bodybuilder, just works his chest and arms, legs like toothpicks. Couldn’t take a joke about it either, she said. That’s why she broke up with him, no sense of humor. Although, come to think of it, the new guy didn’t have such a sense of humor, either, when she’d found out the martial art, some Brazilian-Afro-American thing, was done to music. What happens if there’s no soundtrack when someone attacks you? she’d asked. For a minute there, she’d thought he was about to show her, but since then, things had been okay. And he had a job at the post office. A boyfriend with a job, that was progress for her.
He should have been more insistent about her moving out of that dump in Corona and living somewhere around here. Could have kept an eye on her and the kid, could have gotten her a waitressing job at the Stop Inn on the corner, maybe. Being a dishwasher there had to be good for something besides minimum wage and dishpan hands. True, his neighborhood wasn’t all that attractive, but you could walk around at night without feeling like you’d be taking your life in your hands. The Long Island Railroad station and all the comings and goings helped. Maybe he should have put better locks on her door. Her building was always being broken into, as if the residents actually had something worth stealing. The cops seemed to think she’d let the person in, although they admitted, given the condition of the locks and the door, it was hard to tell.
He picked up the Zippo, one of the few things he had left from his father. The old man had carried it wherever the hell he’d been during the war. The big one, a whole lot grander than his own war, to hear the old man tell it, and tell it he did, and often, whether you were interested or not. Ernie, of Ernie’s Elbow Rest, whose name was really Ted— but you know how expensive sign work is— Ernie collected the damn things, World War II-era Zippos and such. Ernie had seen the lighter one of the times he’d tested himself, going into the Elbow for a soft drink. Ernie wanted to buy it from him, got real excited when he’d mentioned the trunk and all the other crap in it, the uniforms with the name tags, the canteen, all that other junk he didn’t want, but couldn’t bring himself to part with. Apparently the value had something to do with it all having belonged to a known person. What did he call it? Provenance.
He looked at the lighter and for once, instead of conjuring up some incoherent reminiscence, he pictured a little girl’s coat. And what’s-her-face downstairs, Amy or Meg, one of those cute three-letter names, she could help, she has some little kids, she could tell him where to get the coat. At the Salvation Army? Maybe she’d watch his grandniece until he got the money for the stuff. Meg, no, Sue? Well, anyway she got her kids’ things there, didn’t she? They outgrow them so fast, she said, and they’re so young, they really don’t mind wearing someone else’s clothes.
When his little girl outgrew her coat, he’d give it to Meg’s kids. That would be fair. His little girl. Shit, listen to me. Shit, probably can’t be cursing like that either. She’ll learn it on her own on the street anyway, hell, in this very building just walking up and down those damn stairs every day. Or in the elevator, if they ever get around to fixing it. Thank goodness we’re not on the top floor. So much to think about. Well, if they let him keep her, anyway. It would be for the weekend, for sure, they said they wouldn’t be back until Monday morning and even then they’d have all the other emergencies they’d have to deal with. And he couldn’t give her back to the CPS without a coat. Hat. Mittens. A scarf, boots, socks, everything. And a decent meal, he thought, as he scraped the last of the canned beans onto the cigarettes. She’d eaten almost as much as he’d eaten himself. Poor little girl. When had she had her last meal, anyway?
He went to the bedroom door with a vague feeling he should check on her. What did you check for, though? The band of light between the door and the jamb flowed from the tiny hallway into the room and over his bed. His niece’s daughter lay smack in the center. She’d rolled the blanket up like a rug and arranged it as a barrier around her sides and feet. What is she trying to keep out, he wondered. Or who? Then he thought, it’s freezing in here. He went back to the living area, picked the afghan up off the couch, and returned to slip through the partially open door, cautiously, quietly, through a space that just admitted his slender frame, careful not to wake her, although with the time she’d had, and the late hour, surely she’d be sound asleep. Hadn’t he seen Meg’s little ones snooze peacefully in their stroller while ambulances screamed by? As he cleared the narrow opening, he barely glanced down at the floor, knowing full well the obstacle course of discarded items that lay between him and the bed. Later, he’d say that he’d never believed people who’d claimed their hair really did stand on end, and he now wished to apologize to them all, for he experienced it himself then, as he saw what she’d put behind the door— a stack of books topped by an empty bottle, the bottle that had contained what had so far been his last drink.
If he’d been bigger, he’d have had to push the door open at least a bit, and the books and the bottle would have fallen and woken her. Well, if she wanted to keep him out, it didn’t work. Good idea, though, for a five-year-old. Might give her enough time to hide. The open closet door caught his eye. It was where he kept the bottle. He knew he’d shut the closet this morning after he’d decided which of his three shirts to wear. She had to have opened it. Plus, it was the only place to run to in here, she wouldn’t have been able to open the window to the fire escape, too heavy. He pictured his niece’s apartment. Their fire escape opened off the living room window, and it had done neither his niece in the kitchen nor his grandniece in the bedroom any good.
He stood by the bed, watching her scrawny chest rise and fall. I guess this is what I’m checking for, that she’s breathing. F
or the first time he thought, maybe that’s why I ended up a medic in ’Nam, so that all these years later, if my niece’s kid ended up in my care, I’d know how to do CPR if she stopped breathing.
Sure. His niece was always the one to connect the unlikeliest things. Lucky for you, she’d say, that you had that experience. No, he thought, if I’d been lucky I’d have had a high number in the draft lottery and learned CPR at the Y, which I’d never need because my niece would have married some decent guy and not gotten her head bashed in.
He folded the afghan in half and eased it down onto the sleeping child. Pajamas. She can’t keep sleeping in her clothes. His mother had made that afghan for him when he was the kid’s age. She should have it, wherever she ends up, have a connection to her great-grandmother.
He slipped back out. Seeing the bottle reminded him that in AA, it was acceptable to keep certain symbols of your former failings, your weaknesses. The cap off your last bottle of beer that you could trot out when it was your turn to share, there for all to see, a reminder of your sobriety. Who knew for sure if it was really the cap of the actual last beer, but you learned not to question things like that. The whiskey bottle was another story. What hypocrites they were to criticize him for having saved it and the hash pipe. Whose business was it if he wanted to torture himself with them? His fault for having mentioned it. If he’d really wanted to torture himself, he wouldn’t have rinsed the bottle out. The smell, how much more dangerous that was, how easy a yearning to fulfill, what with the Elbow across the street and all. And when the Elbow closed, there was the all-night convenience store next to the entrance of his own building that he had to walk right past on the way up to his apartment. Sure, the choice of beverages was limited, but when you couldn’t sleep, when the DT’s were lying in ambush, just how picky would you be?
And those guys in NA, taking his inventory for him. How his drugs of preference were so bad compared with some of theirs. Illegal is illegal, right? High is high, right? Well, no, not according to them. Some of them took the stuff for a good reason, not just to get high. So if some do-gooder judge made them show up at NA with all the real losers like him instead of facing jail time, well, they’d put up with it. Those were the guys who’d do ninety meetings in ninety days, get themselves off the hook, and be gone. Until they got caught the next time.
Fresh Slices Page 14
