Blue Eyes (6 page)

Coen was tempted to stop off at the club (Schiller kept Coen's bat, sneakers, towel, and trunks in a closet filled with shoes). If he entered Schiller's he would spend the afternoon slapping balls and there would be little energy or enthusiasm left for the Port Authority pimps. So he flattened the crease in his trousers and hiked to Times Square. Coen was one of the last detectives in New York who didn't have a car. Occasionally he borrowed a green Ford from the homicide pool and chauffeured himself around the precincts. But he preferred the subways or his own feet. Sitting behind the wheel he would recall his father's eggs, Jerónimo, his wife's two girls, and his attention would drift away from the road. The bulls from his squad thought Coen had a secret driver, someone from the First Dep's office to take him around, which convinced them all the more that Coen was a rat and a shoofly for the chiefs.

He took Ninth Avenue down. He sucked an orange on Forty-seventh Street. He browsed in the spice markets. He bought a Greek doughnut, pleased with his choice of Ninth Avenue over Eighth. The sidewalk porno shows, the fake leather shops, the night club barkers in fedoras and duck suits would only depress him. Coen, who had seen murdered babies at the morgue and smelled crispened bodies after a fire, went from the academy to the First Dep, from the First Dep to homicide, without having to raid a pornographer's shop. He circled the Port Authority building, noticed black pimps in Buicks and Cadillacs on the opposite streets. They waved to him as he poked his head, shooting their power windows up and down, so Coen couldn't peek at their faces. The pimps were alone. No country girls with torn satchels were in the neighborhood. Coen stepped into a beige Sedan de Ville squatting between two taxicabs on the Ninth Avenue side of the terminal. He couldn't find any other white pimp. “Elmo Baskins?”

Elmo wouldn't give him sitting room, and Coen had to lean against the window. He was polishing the vamps on his platform shoes with a dry finger when Coen arrived. He wore pinkie rings and wrist straps studded with glass. “Who wants me?”

On a hunch Coen said, “Vander Child.”

Elmo laughed into his wrist straps. “Child's gun? You'll rip my belly off with stuff like that. You must be Coen, the little cop who owns Manhattan.”

Coen slumped down and tried to intimidate the pimp. “You can speak to me, Elmo, or you can cry to the DA. Stealing girls out of private schools isn't going to increase your popularity.” He plucked three of his fingers. “That's sodomy, rape, carrying minors over the state line. Nobody loves a kidnapper.”

Elmo wasn't buying the bluff. “Here, man, I'll help you make the collar. I'll drive you. Take me in.”

“Elmo, how's the slavery business? Where'd you put Child's girl?”

“Go to sleep, man.”

They sat without touching, maybe three inches apart, Elmo blowing on his rings, Coen wishing he could forget Pimloe and catch homicides again, until Arnold arrived from the left and bumped Elmo into Coen. Elmo raged. “Bringing Puerto Ricans into my bus?” Arnold had already dropped a two-dollar bag of heroin into Elmo's ashtray (the shit came from Betty). He waited for Coen to move on the pimp. Arnold wasn't jittery. He had dirtied Cadillacs before. Elmo chewed his own spit. He hated scrounging between a cop and his stoolie. He snarled first. Then he saw Arnold's sword. Coen was amazed. The pimp couldn't control his knees. Only a crazyman would carry a sword on Times Square. Elmo wasn't safe around such dudes. They were capable of slashing his seat covers. “Guzmann's the one you want.”

“Why Guzmann.”

“He's feuding with Child.”

“Vander says he never met César.”

Elmo lost a little respect for the sword. He played with his spit. “How long have you been working for him?”

“You think César snatched the girl?”

“Not César. But he could tell you where she is.”

“Peru?” Coen said.

Elmo sneered openly. “There's no trunkline to Peru.”

“Give me César's address.”

“I can't, Coen. I swear. He has a string of apartments. For his crap games. He floats with the games. That's why you can't pin him down.”

“Are you stalking the Carbonderry School for César? The place on Eighty-ninth.”

“Eighty-nine? Man, you won't find me up that far.”

“What about Child's niece? Odile. You know her?”

“The chick with the long legs and the narrow crotch? She's into cat flicks. She goes to The Dwarf a lot. It's a gay bar on Thirteenth. Strictly for the girls. Coen, you'll need a pass to get in. The lady bouncers don't honor a cop's badge.”

“I've been inside The Dwarf, Elmo. Tell me, are César and Child feuding over the rights to Odile?”

“I'm not sure.”

Arnold sulked in the taxicab going up to the seventies with Coen. He wished he could have questioned the pimp. He was wearing three socks and a broken slipper over his bad foot. The sword lay across his knees. “Manfred, you should have asked him more.” Arnold nagged him every five blocks. Coen was grateful anyway. He couldn't have opened Elmo by himself. They stopped at Arnold's single-room hotel. “Manfred, take me to The Dwarf.”

“Spanish, I'm not going to The Dwarf today. I'll take you if I go. I've had enough.”

Arnold limped into the hotel. Coen shouted after him. “Spanish, should I bring you some gypsy pudding?”

“I'm not hungry,” Arnold said from inside the stoop.

“Do you want to watch me hit at Schiller's?”

“Not today.”

Coen was no longer in the mood for ping-pong. His thighs would get cold in his navy trunks. Schiller would remind him how many times Coen's table had to be scrubbed. And he didn't want to touch The Dwarf, no matter how much Odile could help him. Three years ago Coen had staked out The Dwarf from a panel truck that belonged to the First Dep. He had even taken pumps, skirts, and hair out of the surveillance closet to get inside the place. Smelling a cop, the bouncers frisked him at the door. Coen had left his holster with Isaac. He was clean. He danced with a librarian out of Brooklyn. The librarian had lovely bosoms and a hand that could relax the bumps along Coen's spine. He clamped his legs to keep his erection down. He was already half in love. He agonized over telling the librarian he wasn't a girl. She would spit at him. The ‘bouncers would tear out his arms. Both of them were burly girls. His throat had grown hoarse from having to whisper so often. The librarian counted on his infatuation. She expected money from Coen. She was on salary at The Dwarf. Coen pressed Isaac for a raid. Isaac dawdled with him. Coen went back to the panel truck. Finally Isaac told him the raid couldn't go down. A deputy commissioner had queered it for them. Some big fish in the Mayor's party had a twin sister who practically lived at The Dwarf.

Coen decided he would visit his remarried wife. So he walked over to Central Park West. The doorman told him Stephanie wasn't upstairs. “I have her key,” Coen lied. He opened Stephanie's lock with the set of burglar picks Isaac gave him, fumbling in the hall for the right pick. He snacked out of the icebox, spreading fancy Dijon mustard over a soda cracker and drinking a glass of Portuguese wine. Charles Nerval, Stephanie's other husband, had grown rich in the East Bronx exaggerating Medicare claims at his dental clinic. Coen got out of his pants, put his holster aside, and found one of Charles' woolly robes. He had gone to the High School of Music and Art with Stephanie and Charles. Coen, who could trace an egg and draw his father's knuckles, got in because the school was desperate for boys. Charles, whose father was a ragman, played the violin. Stephanie played the flute. The prize of older boys, she seldom talked to Charles or Coen. She went on to Oberlin, lived with the dean of music after her degree, raised tulips in Ohio, had an abortion, came home to New York, met Coen in the street, married him. Coen relaxed in Stephanie and Charles' tub, his wineglass on the sink. He tried Charles' Vitabath, and sat in foam up to his jaw. He didn't hear Stephanie come in. “Bastard,” she said in front of her girls—Alice, three, and Judith, four—wearing identical gray jumpers. “Who gave you permission to break in here?”

She was pleased to see Coen and ashamed to admit that the girls liked him better than Charles. He frowned and begged kisses off Judith and Alice. If he hadn't been preoccupied with Elmo, he might have raided the five-and-ten for the girls, escaped with licorice, orange slices, and peppermint lumps. Stephanie set towels for Coen. A fecund girl, she had wanted children with him. Coming off the peculiar death of his mother and father, Coen shied away from long families. Now, removed from Stephanie, he loved the two girls and wouldn't allow them to call him uncle, only Dad or Freddy Dad. These devotions to the girls also drew Stephanie to Coen. She had never gotten over the pure coloring of Coen's eyes.

“Freddy, the girls shouldn't see you naked like that.”

“Who says? I'm under the suds. Don't they peek at Charles?”

She gathered up Judith and Alice, took them to their room, turned the humidifier down to low, pulled out their toy trunk, and came back to Coen. He was busy toweling his buttocks. Stephanie admired the curled lines his abdominals made with every sweep of the towel. The hair over his belly dried in the shape of a tree.

“Why aren't you out looking for that maniac who mutilates little boys?”

“I'm not very popular, Steff. The chief who's carrying the case probably wouldn't want me around. I might contaminate his men. They can't forgive me for being Isaac's pupil.”

“How is that lonely son-of-a-bitch?”

“Isaac? The First Dep's new whip claims he's working for the Guzmanns. A schmuck by the name of Pimloe. He's been jerking me off the last few days.”

It was this surly cop talk, exactly this, that had helped turn Stephanie off Coen; Charles had shallower eyes, he was awkward around his own girls, he had soft abdominals, but he didn't scowl or curse out of the side of his mouth. Most of Coen's vocabulary came from Isaac. But she no longer had to live with him, so she could be less of a scold. She touched his collarbone. Coen fetched her with the towel. They kissed against the shower curtains, his tongue in her throat. Charles didn't know how to kiss. He would cuddle her for a minute, snort once, and fall into the pillows. With one lousy finger Coen could pick all the sensitive places from her wings down to the middle of her thighs. But she didn't cling to him on account of expertise. In his grip, removed from her babies, her husband, recollections of her flute, she could feel the sad pressure of a man crazied by the loss of mother and father, a man beyond the pale of detectives and supercops.

Later, feeding Charles, Alice, Judith, and Coen, Stephanie felt embarrassed about the blush lines on her neck. She served the largest portions to Charles. Coen grew moody opening the jacket of his potato. He wouldn't be hunching over a baked potato if Charles resented him more. He, Coen, couldn't have tolerated an old husband in his midst. But with Coen around, Charles was less money-minded, more boyish, aware of his girls and his wife. He turned Judith's napkin into a hat. He tasted Alice's spinach. He called Stephanie “Mrs. Coen.” Coen had watched over him in high school, discouraging neighborhood boys from poking fun at Charles' fiddlecase. Even then Charles was amused by Coen, who smelled of eggs and couldn't draw. Despite his blue eyes and blond features, Coen was the shy one around girls. It was Charles who carried prophylactics in his rosin bag, Charles who could unhook a bra with the end of his bow, Charles who grabbed a wife away from Coen.

“More carrots,” he grunted. “More peas. Manfred, do you ever use the pistol range at Rodman's Neck?”

“No. I play ping-pong instead.”

Judith bit her ice cream spoon. “What's ping-pong, Daddy Charles?”

“Ask your Daddy Fred.”

Stephanie brought the coffee mugs and volunteered to tell Judith.

“It's for mutts,” Coen said. “For people who hate the sun. We hit little balls on a green table with rubber sandwiches.”

Coen went down the elevator with an apple in his hand. He saw some red hair in the bushes across the street. He ran into the park. “Chino,” he hollered. “Come on. Show your face.” Nothing came out of the bushes. “You keep shadowing me, I'll kill you, Reyes.” Wagging his pistol Coen blustered deeper into the park. His apple got lost. He was behaving like a glom, chasing wigs in a bush. He put his pistol away.

The Dwarf's senior bouncer, a former handwrestling queen at the Women's House of Detention called Janice, made herself Odile's churchwarden and benefactress. She cut in soon as Dorotea placed a hand near Odile's crotch. She wouldn't allow hickeys or dry humps that close to the bar. None of the regulars, short or tall, could dance with a face in Odile's chest. Sweeney, a slighter girl, and the bouncer's partner and cousin, tried to soften Janice's stand. “Sister, aren't you coming down a little too heavy? Pick on somebody else. How come Lenore can kiss in the front room, and Dorotea can't?”

“Lenore isn't dancing with Odile, that's how come. Odile draws the sisters like flies in a sugar pot. I won't tolerate it when I'm on call.”

“You're jealous, that's the truth. You want Odile sitting down where you can watch her all the time.”

“Sister, you shut up.”

And Sweeney had to concede; her cousin owned the biggest pair of brass knuckles in New York. She could afford to back off from Janice without compromising her position at The Dwarf. Anyway she had news for Odile.

“There's a man outside looking for you, baby. A pimp with a funny shoe. I'd swear he's that Chinaman who pesters the girls, only there's something different about him today.”

“Shit,” Odile said. “Shit.” She might have used stronger talk in describing the Chinaman if Janice hadn't forbidden swearwords in the front room. Still, she broke from Dorotea to catch the Chinaman through a slice of window between the curtain and the curtainrod. She had to control her laugh or deal with Janice's sour disposition. The Chinaman was wearing an enormous shoe on his left foot, a crooked coffee-colored shoe, a shoe with a hump in the back and the thickest sole she had ever seen; it had wrinkles on both sides along the leather, ugly tan laces with plastic nibs half eaten away, and it climbed to the middle of the Chinaman's calf, where it bit into the trousers and ruined the line of his cuff. He also had some ratty hair in his eyes. He swayed on his hip, pivoting off his plainer, lower shoe. Odile moved over to the door, near enough to Sweeney at least, and spit warnings in the Chinaman's direction.