Death Will Help You Leave Him (13 page)

“The teddy bears are new,” Luz whispered.

She and Barbara stood as close together as possible, drawing courage from each other’s body heat. Ishmael, wearing a rich blue caftan heavily embroidered in gold and a cap of kente cloth, gave them time to look around. The teddy bears, of every style and size, perched on the leather sofa and matching chairs, sprawled back to back as bookends, and flopped halfway out of every drawer and cubbyhole. A massive teak wall unit held a sound system that looked astronomically expensive.

Ishmael flashed them a genial smile, his shark’s teeth gleaming.

The better to eat you with, my dear,
Barbara thought.

His cheekbones were as gorgeous, his eyes as hard, as she remembered.

Ishmael laid his palms together and bowed.

“Namaste. Ladies, come and sit. How may I serve you?”

Namaste, my right foot
, Barbara thought. More like “Welcome to my castle. I am Count Dracula.”

He ushered them to the deepest couch. Its golden oak leather, a perfect match for Ishmael’s skin tone, was buttery and supple. When Barbara sat, she sank deep into the cushions beneath as well as behind her.
Not a sofa bed
, Barbara thought.
I bet he never has his friends for a sleepover.

Ishmael chose a roomy armchair of the same leather and sat. His long legs were crossed under the caftan, his back as straight as a Zulu warrior’s.

Washing the spears
, Barbara thought, riffling through her memories of one of Jimmy’s favorite military periods. Didn’t that mean dipping them in the enemy’s blood? And here we are, planning
not
to keep our wits about us.

Ishmael took off the kente cloth cap and laid it carefully on the arm of his chair. He whipped an oversized silk bandanna out of his sleeve with the air of a prestidigitator and rubbed it across his already burnished skull.

“You will smoke with me.”

It seemed to Barbara as if the paraphernalia appeared by magic.

“Sinsimilla. You won’t have had any this good. Or would you prefer hash? I have a Turkish water pipe that is to a bong what the Kentucky Derby winner is to a Mexican donkey. Or— this?”

It was a crack vial. Barbara shook her head.

“No way! I mean, no, thanks. Marijuana is fine.”

Without comment, Ishmael whisked out a packet of rolling papers— still using Bambù after all these years, Barbara observed— and began rolling joints, his slim, elegant fingers dexterous. When he licked the papers, his tongue caressed them like a lover’s.
He’s doing that on purpose
, Barbara thought.
He’s trying to see how uncomfortable he can make us, because he knows damn well we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t want something from him.

Ishmael snicked a roach clip onto the end of one joint and laid the rest aside. Flame spurted from his fingertips.
Don’t be an idiot
, Barbara admonished herself,
at least not till you’re stoned. He had the lighter in his sleeve, he could palm it because his hands are big but not bulky.
The roach clip looked like sterling silver. It had diamond chips set into it. He offered it to Luz. She cast an apprehensive glance at Barbara, who nodded. Luz set the joint to her lips and drew in a long, deep breath. Her eyes closed as she held the smoke in, then expelled it in a slow stream.

Dammit, I don’t care
, Barbara thought
. I’m glad Luz can get away from reality for a couple of hours. She’s in so much pain. So what’s my excuse? Oh, the hell with it.

Luz handed her the joint. No turning back now. She inhaled.

In a couple of minutes, she and Luz were giggling helplessly. Ishmael, who had taken only one hit to their two or three, showed no alteration in mood or self-control.

“Probably habish— habitch—” Barbara said aloud, then, “Oops!” She pressed her fingers to her mouth like a child who has said a forbidden word. Ishmael was probably habituated to the drug. Addicts and alcoholics always thought a hard head meant they were in control. On the contrary, increased tolerance was a hallmark symptom of addictions. Now she had lost her train of thought. She felt a gentle movement of the leather cushion beneath her, like a boat rocking on a calm sea. Was Jimmy in the boat with her? No, she was here with Luz. She turned her head to the side to look for Luz. The movement seemed to take forever, as if her neck had become the axle on which her head revolved like one of those slow-spinning restaurants in the sky.

Luz cradled one of the teddy bears, rocking as she sang to it in Spanish. It was the cuddly kind, with pale cream fur and golden eyes that seemed to regard Luz with compassion. Some of the bears were dressed, in outfits ranging from a sailor suit to a tuxedo, but this one wore only a blue satin bow.

“All right.” Ishmael’s voice came as if from the other end of a wind tunnel.

Barbara had forgotten Ishmael. She turned her head toward him, again rotating it with infinite slowness on her neck, which felt as long as Alice in Wonderland’s. Luz raised her head, nursing the teddy bear against her breast.

“Now,” Ishmael said. “What you bitches really here for?”

Isn’t it amazing
, Barbara thought,
how relaxed I feel around Ishmael. I don’t even mind the B word. When he says it, it’s just vocabulary.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said.

Ishmael grinned like a wolf.

“Girl, that be chemical courage. Why, if somebody smart enough, he just roll it up and smoke it and be brave whenever he wants.”

Luz held her teddy bear up like a shield and waggled its paw toward Ishmael.

“Tell us about Frankie,” she said in a growly bear voice.

Ishmael uttered a hoot of laughter.

“I told you that be good shit. What you wanna know, little girl?”

Luz hugged the teddy bear against her chest.

“Was he in trouble?” she demanded.

A long silence fell. Barbara dreamily examined the pattern on the Persian rug. As she followed the mazelike twists and turns, she thought,
this must be how obsessive compulsives feel. If I lose the thread, I have to start over.

Ishmael took a long drag on the water pipe. Barbara hadn’t even noticed him setting it up. It gurgled pleasantly, and he blew out a stream of smoke.
Ishmael’s hash is better than my mother’s corned beef hash,
Barbara thought.
Ooh, am I in trouble. Not like Frankie, though.

“What precisely do you mean by trouble?” Ishmael asked.

He can turn that Ebonic talk on and off
, Barbara thought.

“You mean
was
he trouble,” Ishmael asked, “or was he
in
trouble? Why you be botherin’ yo head about that, anyway? Ohhhh, I get it. You playin’ no shit Sherlock. Only right now you playin’
good
shit Sherlock.”

Ha!
Barbara thought.
He is stoned. He just knows better how not to show it.

Luz’s arms tightened around the bear.

“I need to know how he died,” she said fiercely. “If you know, you must tell us.”

“Or you’ll what?” Ishmael jeered. He sprawled in his chair, long legs stretched out so far that his feet almost touched the women’s toes. “Oooh, I’m so scared.”

Get a grip
, Barbara told herself.
You came along to help Luz
. She forced herself to speak, her voice sounding remote and unfamiliar in her ears.

“We know he was dealing,” she said. “Did he cheat anybody? Sell bad drugs? Steal from— from someone up the line?”

Better not ask if he’d stolen from Ishmael. She wasn’t foolhardy enough, even stoned out of her gourd, to ask Ishmael outright if he had a motive. But he might have. Maybe they hadn’t thought this through enough. She had assumed that “drug traffickers,” if they had murdered Frankie, were shadowy figures from the underworld, Colombians maybe, executioners for omnipotent “lords”— not a guy who lived a few subway stops from her, a guy she’d met at a funeral in Brooklyn.

“Maybe I know, and maybe I don’t,” Ishmael said. “What you gonna give me if I tell?”

Luz and Barbara looked at each other. Was he asking them for sex?

Ishmael intercepted the look and read it with scorn.

“I don’t do no white pussy,” he said.

Just vocabulary, just vocabulary
, Barbara told herself.

He stood, rising up so tall and close that Barbara had to restrain herself from shrinking back. Dealing with Ishmael was like meeting a grizzly bear or mountain lion in the wild. You might end up dead, but you couldn’t show fear. And if you ran, he’d run you down.

“Come on,” he said. “We goin’ for a ride.”

At least, Barbara thought as they followed him out onto the dark street like the children of Hamlin, he hadn’t made them buy the marijuana. She had failed to think of a safe way to dispose of it.

On the street, Ishmael triggered a remote, and down the block a car beeped and flashed its lights. Barbara expected something expensive but flashy, maybe a Fifties Cadillac with enormous tail fins and an airbrushed custom paint job. But the car, when they reached it, was a black Mercedes. With an ironic bow, he ushered them into the back seat, which was as soft as the couch in his apartment and smelled of new leather. Ishmael walked around to the driver’s side. Settled behind the wheel, he picked up a peaked cap from the empty seat next to him and covered his shiny dome.

“How do you like that, ladies?” he said. “Now you got your very own show-fur.” He reached a long arm over the backrest and patted the teddy bear, still clasped in Luz’s arms. “Hang onto that. We gonna need him.”

The windows of the Mercedes were tinted. It was hard to see out, although red and green traffic lights and the orange of the sodium street lights cast a dim glow through the glass. Barbara could sense when the marijuana started to wear off, because the light show began to lose its fascination.

“I wonder where we’re going,” she murmured.

“Me too,” Luz said. “I tell myself we must be safe as long as we are together.”

“And we’ve each got our own Higher Power,” Barbara said. “I wonder why they say there are no atheists in foxholes. I should think that would be the perfect time to have doubts.”

“Barbara, you’re still high,” Luz said.

“I hope I don’t end up with a migraine,” Barbara said. “How about you?”

“Mine is wearing off,” Luz said.

“I feel like a chiffon scarf blowing in the wind,” Barbara said. “If he’s taking us into danger, I hope it’s a long ride. I need to get a few more of my bones and muscles back.”

“I don’t know about that,” Luz said. “Where could a long ride from upper Manhattan end?”

“Hmm. A lot of places, none of them appealing. Staten Island, New Jersey, Canarsie.”

“Don’t you worry bout them outer boroughs,” Ishmael remarked. His eyes locked with Barbara’s in the rear view mirror. “Don’t you worry bout nothin.”

Barbara and Luz fell silent, and the car rolled on. Ishmael drove with precision, timing progressive traffic lights so that he never had to stop for a red. He never exceeded the speed limit or cut in blind ahead of a van or truck. Even Ishmael, Barbara thought, if he wasn’t careful, could get stopped by the wrong cop for DWB— Driving While Black.

Ishmael took the curve through the bottom of Riverside Park onto the West Side Highway. Barbara turned her head to look at the motorboats, yachts, and houseboats bobbing in the Hudson at the 79th Street Boat Basin. The motion didn’t take forever this time. Maybe the high was wearing off.

“I’m starving,” she said.

“I am hungry,” Luz said at the same moment.

They both giggled.

Ishmael tossed a couple of Snickers bars over his shoulder in their general direction. Evidently, munchies were part of the service. Barbara tore the wrapper off hers and crammed it in her mouth.

They reached Chelsea Pier and the park-like stretch below it, where the whole waterfront had been developed and landscaped in recent years. It was too late for joggers, but a few dog walkers panted along, their dogs straining at their leashes, eager for the next fascinating sniff. Barbara wondered if, after all, they would leave Manhattan. The lights on the Jersey side of the river twinkled. Ahead lay the Battery Tunnel, beyond that, the swing around the tip of Manhattan to the Brooklyn Bridge. To the east lay Queens, the airports, and all of Long Island. Would they turn east to the maze of streets in the Village? What was open at night in lower Manhattan?

As they approached the covered walkway that arched over Chambers Street, Ishmael turned on his left blinker. Although the intersection was deserted, he waited for the light. The car wove its way without hesitation through the skyscraper canyons, so crowded with life and color during the day. Not the Stock Exchange, not the Fed, not the courts. They passed 26 Federal Plaza and the police headquarters on Centre Street. Barbara wondered what would happen if she yelled, “Help! Help!” But they had not been taken for a ride in the abduction sense. They had come of their own free will, tit for tat.

“How do we know you’ll tell us the truth?” she demanded, raising her voice for Ishmael.

“You just gonna have to trust me.” His voice carried a teasing lilt, but the eyes in the rear view mirror remained hard as stones.

Ishmael pulled up in front of an Art Deco tower on Broadway a few doors above the monumental bronze bull that declared the extended Wall Street area a temple to economic expansion.
Why don’t they replace it with a giant bear when the market goes down?
Barbara wondered.
Silly
, she answered herself,
in a bear market they can’t afford it.

“Come on,” Ishmael said. He clicked their right-hand door unlocked from the driver’s controls with one hand as he pushed his own door open with the other.

Barbara realized only then that they had been locked in the back seat with no controls of their own. In that respect, the Mercedes resembled a police car. She stepped out onto a yellow line. Ishmael had parked perfectly, twelve inches from the curb, but illegally. She wondered if he had a license. It was hard to imagine Ishmael taking his driving test and flunking the first time, like everybody else. He walked around the hood and reached in on the passenger side. In one flowing motion, he tossed the chauffeur’s cap on the seat, threw a laminated card on the dashboard, and scooped up a high-end Eagle Creek backpack that must already have been stowed under the seat. She squinted to read the card. She doubted Ishmael was a member of the Police Benevolent Association, but it was a great way not to get a ticket.