Blue Eyes (8 page)

“Manfred, why do you need him?” Once behind the counter Papa had to shout to hear himself over the girls. “César.”

“Information, Papa. César can help me find a runaway girl.”

“A goya or a Jew?”

“A goya, Papa.”

“Manfred, you know the dairy restaurant on Seventy-third near Broadway? Go there. Maybe eight, nine at night you'll see the old cockers with boutonnieres. Pick up a flower and wait. It's a dice-steering location. Get in the car with the old men. Give my name to the steerer. Say Moses, not Papa. That's the closest I can get you. Manfred, you won't forget Jerónimo? You'll tell me if he likes it with his brother?”

“Papa, I will.”

Coen avoided his father's egg store, south of the Guzmanns on Boston Road. He didn't want to dream of eggs tonight Now a pentecostal church, painted sky blue, it was another Guzmann policy drop. Coen met Jorge outside the candy store. The middlemost of Papa's five boys, stupid and uncorruptible at thirty-nine, with few attitudes about his brothers, and wifeless like them, he was carrying quarters in his pockets and in his sleeves; because he was poor at arithmetic and could get lost turning too many corners, Jorge walked the line of Boston Road accepting only quarter plays. Papa bought him shirts and pants with special pockets, but by the afternoon Jorge had to store quarters in his shoes. Weary in his overalls, weighted down to his heels, Jorge had no appetite to chat with Coen. He grunted his hellos, and tried to pass. Coen held on.

“Jorge, where's Isaac? Please.”

Still grunting, he twisted his chin toward the electrical signboard of the Primavera Bar and Grill on Southern Boulevard and 174th. Not knowing how to thank him, Coen jerked Jorge's sleeve, then he jumped between traffic and entered the Puerto Rican bar. He recognized a bald man at the last stool with gray curls around the ears. The man climbed off before Coen could say “Isaac” and locked himself in the toilet. Coen could have flicked the latch with his Detectives Endowment card. He called into the opening.

“Isaac? I'm wearing your burglar picks. I could pull you out if I want.”

Either Coen heard the toilet flush, or the man was weeping inside.

“Isaac, are you front man at the bar? I'm stalking for Pimloe. Can I trust him, Isaac? Is he wagging my tail? Chief, could you use some bread?” Coen put twenty dollars under the door from the boodle Child had given him. He couldn't tell whether Isaac was scraping up the money. The bartender glared at Coen. “No more checkers, Isaac? Nothing.” He wanted to clarify his involvement with Child, his perceptions of Odile. Coen had little to do with other detectives. He could only talk shop with Isaac. After Isaac's disgrace Coen sleepwalked through detective rooms in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens, shuffling from one homicide squad on his way to the next. He was Isaac's creature, formed by Isaac, fiddled with, and cast off. He made no more overtures to the door. He tied the boodle with a rubberband and went over to the IRT.

The rookies Lyman and Kelp were cruising the Bronx in an unmarked Ford, complaining about the policewomen who had been in their graduating class. They belonged to a new breed of cop—enlightened, generous, articulate, with handlebar moustaches and neat, longish hair and an ironic stance toward their own police association. Lyman was living with an airline stewardess, Kelp had a stock of impressive girlfriends, and the two rookies were taking courses in social pathology and Puerto Rican culture at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“Cunts in a radio car,” Lyman said. “Man, that's unbelievable.”

“Alfred, you expect them to type all day in the captain's office? Imagine all the hard-ons they'd generate.”

“Listen, when the shit begins to fly, when it gets hairy over on Seventh Avenue, the junkies poking antennas in your eyes, the transvestites coming at you with their sword canes, these stupid cunts lock themselves in the car, and they won't even radio for help. And control thinks you're banging them in the back seat. Unbelievable.”

The rookies had just been reassigned; they were snatched away from their precincts and picked up by Inspector Pimloe of the First Deputy's office. It was no glory post. Instead of undercover work, with wires between their nipples and a holster in their crotch, they chauffeured inspectors from borough to borough in a First Deputy car. They would have cursed Pimloe on this day, called him a high-powered glom, but the DI (Pimloe) had put them on special assignment: they were going to meet the First Deputy's old whip, the legendary Isaac who had disgraced himself and left a smear on the office. But the investigators attached to the First Dep were still devoted to the Chief; through them Lyman and Kelp had heard stories of the old whip. These investigators demurred over Pimloe; they remained “Isaac's angels.”

“Alfred, how much do you think Isaac took? Half a million?”

“More, much more. Why would he fuck his career for anything less?”

“Shit, we get Pimloe, and we could have had the Chief.”

“Man, he should have waited a few years before going down the sink with a bunch of gamblers. Can you imagine being on a raid with Isaac? Shotguns coming out of your ass. Unbelievable.”

Their checkpoint was a mailbox on Minford Place, two blocks down from Boston Road. The man at the mailbox didn't bother signaling to them. He wouldn't sit in the back, on the “commissioner's chair.” He climbed up front with them. They weren't put off by his rags; Isaac was a master of disguise. But his stench was overpowering. Lyman, the man in the middle, had to sit with his nose upwind. Kelp, who lived in a flophouse once doing field work for a course at John Jay, had more experience with unwashed men. He volunteered the first question.

“Chief, am I driving too fast?”

Isaac growled at him. “Don't call me Chief.”

“Should I slow down, Inspector Sidel?”

“I'm Isaac. Just Isaac. Drive the way you like.”

Kelp turned the wheel with smug looks into the mirror; the investigators had exaggerated Isaac's reputation. He was only a fat man with unruly sideburns and a balding head. A dishonored deputy chief inspector going to pot from his exiled station in the Bronx. Kelp was glad now he had never been given the opportunity to be one of Isaac's angels. Pimloe began to flush out with esteem in Kelp's mind. Pimloe had manners. Pimloe had a Harvard ring. Pimloe didn't own layers of fat behind his jaw. Pimloe showed respect for a rookie. He wouldn't humiliate you by sitting up front.

They crept toward Manhattan in a silent car. Unbelievable, Lyman thought, afraid to mutter a word. The stink drove his face into Kelp's shoulder. Kelp welcomed Isaac's reserve. He didn't want to discuss tactical matters with a double-chinned cop. He watched this fat man in the glass. Let him swallow his lip. Near the Willis Avenue Bridge Isaac opened up. “How's Herbert?”

“Pimloe?” Lyman mumbled under Kelp's arm. “He's fine. The whip said we should take care of you. He sends his regards.”

“Did he scratch my chair?”

“What?” Kelp said.

“The chair he sits on. In my room. Is it scratched?”

“Isaac, I didn't notice.”

Kelp was pleased with his response; he was standing up to the Chief. Kelp had the badge now, not Isaac. He would tell his rookie friends: He's nothing, this Isaac. I blew in his face, and he didn't blow back.

They drove the Chief to an apartment house on East Ninety-first with two doormen and a glass canopy. Isaac went past the doormen in his rotten clothes. He hadn't even thanked the rookies.

“What a personality,” Lyman said, able to breathe again. “The guy goes anywhere in a beggar's suit. Unbelievable.”

Kelp had less charity for Isaac. “Good riddance. He's a glom, can't you see? That smell was no cover-up. Alfred, it's for real. He's nothing but piss and scabby ankles.”

“Isn't this the First Dep's house? Would the First Dep invite him in if it's only piss? Use your brain. How are we going to earn the gold shield? The First Dep must be fond of Isaac. Maybe he's going to repatriate him, bring Isaac back. He wouldn't waste his time on a reject.”

“Let Pimloe worry.”

Kelp headed for the East River Drive; if he watched the speedometer they could cruise downtown at a walk and make the office while Pimloe was out to lunch; it would be malteds for them, feet on their desks, telephone calls to their sweethearts from inside their own cubicles.

“Unbelievable.”

7
At the dairy restaurant Coen wore his “gambler's coat,” a red jacket with green piping under the pockets; he had once seen a reputable crapshooter in a similar coat. He picked his father's favorites off the menu in the window: broiled mushrooms on toast, split pea omelette, chopped Roumanian eggplant, prune dumplings, and a seed cake called mohn. All the Coens were confirmed vegetarians, father, mother, and uncle Sheb; only the son was spared. Coen had fewer meatless days than any of them. A growing boy needs a little chicken in the blood, his father pronounced, so Coen had to eat chopped turkey, chopped liver, and chopped chicken in his lettuce hearts. At thirty-six Coen still gagged over the sight of lettuce being washed. The odor of chicken livers depressed him, and the stink of turkey made him cross.

Old men were coming out of the restaurant with roses in their lapels. They were dressed in baggy tan or gray, with stockings bunched over their ankles and scuff marks on their shoes. César couldn't have found his calling in Manhattan if he catered to these fish. Coen worried about a boutonniere until he noticed a stash of pink, short-stemmed roses for sale near the cash register. He smiled at the thoroughness of César's operation: the restaurant provides the roses. But he had trouble buying one. The cashier claimed they were for her regular customers. She gave in when she saw Coen's eyes go slate blue, an inhuman color according to her. He walked away sniffling, with the boutonniere oversweet in his nose. He stood near the old gamblers, giddy from all the fumes. Ignoring him, they played with their buttonholes.

The steerer arrived in a twelve-passenger limousine, counted roses, and allowed Coen to get in. The gamblers occupied eight of the seats. With Coen among them, they were in a foul mood. The steerer tried to shake off their long faces. He was a fattish man in a silk girdle-vest; the vest gave him bumps along both sides. “Julie Boy, would I hit you over the head? Boris Telfin doesn't lead his friends to a poisoned game.” Coen didn't like the steerer's glibness, his winks, his habit of pulling the buckles on his vest. He mumbled three words.

“Moses sent me.”

The steering car shot uptown, turned east, dawdled at the top of the park, then crawled to a second location a few blocks north of the dairy restaurant. Five of the gamblers climbed out and waited in front of a launderette. The steerer deposited a sixth gambler at a shoemaker on Amsterdam. The final two gamblers were humming now. “Boris, will the sky hold up? It looks to be rain.” Coen was the one with the long face. The steerer went south. His limousine was equipped with a police-band radio, and on the ride downtown Coen could hear a dispatcher from his own district summon a team of burglary detectives back to the house. The steerer was showing off. He wanted Coen to know that César had his finger on the Manhattan police. He switched frequencies and jumped on a citizens'-band. Two men were screaming out the merits of alpha and beta waves. The gamblers sat with dumbfounded jaws.

—Did you or didn't you
succeed
at alpha?

—I'm not so sure.

“If you cover your eyes with half a ping-pong ball, you can have a white-out in under twenty minutes,” Coen muttered into his sleeve. The gamblers figured he was another moron from the Bronx; they knew the case histories of César and his brothers; the tantrums, the bouts of forgetfulness, the swollen eyes. But Coen didn't have the look of the Guzmanns; he was only talking to the radio. Isaac had introduced him to the idea of brain waves. At checkers with Coen, Isaac would slice a fresh ping-pong ball with Coen's scissors, cup each eye, squeezing the halved ball into place with his cheekbones, sip Coen's lukewarm tea, and “go into alpha” while Coen washed the dishes and waited for both halves of ball to pop out of Isaac's eyes. This meant Isaac was coming out of alpha to trounce Coen in checkers and solve whatever police mystery had been plaguing him on that day. Coen himself had little success with the ball; be could sit for hours with his eyes shuttered up and experience nothing but a cramp in his neck and a burning sensation where the ball kissed his cheek.

The steerer made East Broadway and stopped at Bummy's, where Coen had searched for Chino Reyes. He sat alone in the car, the gamblers accompanying the steerer into Bummy's. Coen wondered how long they would keep bouncing him. He might get to see Staten Island or the best Brooklyn wharves. Two mutts from Bummy's climbed in with him; Coen recognized them as drifters who hired out at thirty dollars a day. It had to be hard times for César. They squeezed Coen into the upholstery. He wasn't surly. He knew they would have to feel him up; the steerer must have warned them to be sure he wasn't carrying a wire. “Monkey,” the first one said, “who sent you?”

“Moses.”

“Sherwin,” the second one said, “he's a monkey all right. Should I touch up his face?”

“Monkey, are you after Jerónimo?”

Coen shrugged his head. “I'm looking for César Guzmann.”

“Monkey, who are you?”

“Detective Coen, Second District Homicide and Assault Squad.”

“Sherwin, I told you, he's a monkey with a badge. He wants to sink Jerónimo.”

“I went to school with César,” Coen said. “I drank malteds with Jerónimo. What would I want with him? Just get César on the phone. Tell him Manfred's here. In his car.”

The two drifters made faces over Coen, conferred, warned Coen not to move, and brought the steerer out of Bummy's. The three of them fussed over Coen's shield. They bounced him east and west before they drove him to a parking lot on Hudson Street. Coen was desperate to pee. They allowed him to go behind the watchman's shack. They giggled at the crackling of the boards. These giggles made Coen pee in spurts. He shook off most of the drops and returned to the limousine. He couldn't find the steerer or the two mutts. Then the mutts began to whine. “How can we tell? He says classmate, he says school. What do we know about a badge?” They had to be behind the shack now with a fourth party. The second mutt emerged holding his cheek. The steerer skulked around to the opening in the shack. The first mutt approached the limousine and held the door for César. Coen couldn't be sure if César had come to murder him or give him a hug. He was the most volatile of all the brothers, craftier than Alejandro, stubborner than Jorge, the youngest, the skinniest, the shrewdest, the one with the nerve to break out of Papa's fist. His code name had been Zorro the fox before he eloped to Manhattan. This was how he was known in the heaviest policy circles. He wore suspenders this evening, a mohair shirt, and narrow boots. He snarled his greetings to Coen. “If I wanted you, Manfred, I'd sit and wait on your stoop. Why do you come to me using Papa's name?”