Drawing Dead

H
E HAD AN ODD EXPRESSION ON HIS FACE
. Half smile, half grimace. Part puzzlement. That may add up to more than a whole. But death does strange things to people.

He was lying face up. His right arm was twisted behind his back. He clutched something in his left hand. I couldn’t make out what it was.

He was in black tie. Tuxedo. White ruffled shirt. Bow tie. Bare feet. Clean, though. As though recently shod.

Oh, Brendan, I whispered. What have you done?

A guy in a lumpy brown suit waved me back.

Hey, I said. That’s my friend.

Sure, he said. And I’m J. Edgar Hoover.

Who’s in charge here? I asked.

Who wants to know?

I told you. He’s my friend.

And I told you. I’m J. Edgar Hoover.

I wasn’t getting any respect.

Maybe it was the squid-shaped wine stain on the front of my shirt. My bleary eyes. The two days’ growth of intermittent beard.

J. Edgar, on the other hand, presented a more imposing figure. Sagging belly. Stick legs. That lumpy brown suit. And a gun.

There was no way around that last bit. I had to go over his head.

I stepped back. Unholstered my cell phone. Called my buddy, Butch Hardiman. New York cop. Shaved head. Mammoth shoulders. Not a bad poker player. He’d probably say he was better than me. I’d disagree.

Butch, I said.

Rick, he said in his big baritone voice.

Brendan’s dead.

You’re fucking with me, he said, his voice suddenly smaller, far away.

No, I’m not. I wish I were. I’m at the casino. They won’t let me near him. Can you pull some rank?

I’ll pull whatever rank I have down here. Which isn’t much.

Do your best.

Have I ever done less?

No, I had to admit. He hadn’t.

He called some friends who called some friends. It’s a small world, law enforcement. Butch could almost always find someone. Someone who knew someone who could call someone who could call in a favor, real or imagined. Even in Vegas. Especially if the favor was a minor one. Like letting him and his buddy past a bit of crime scene tape.

I waited for him at a long bar studded with the usual array of electronic keno and poker machines. You barely had room to put down your glass. Why waste a moment of drinking time when you could be losing some more money to the house? I stared at the plasma screen behind the bar. Some goddamn horse race. Never understood that horse race thing. Lack of empathy, I guess. But it seemed like only the most degenerate gamblers played the horses.

I couldn’t identify.

I drank a scotch. I drank another one.

A hand on my shoulder. I turned around. Butch.

What the fuck? he said.

I don’t know, I said. I don’t know anything. He’s over there.

Butch strode over. Asked for Detective Warren. The stick-leg guy. Butch introduced himself. Mentioned a name. The name did it.

Call me Earl, J. Edgar said, extending a hand to Butch.

Guy had a lot of names.

Rick Redman, I said, extending my own hand.

J. Edgar ignored it.

He lifted up the yellow tape. We ducked under it. Walked towards the huddle of uniforms. The well-dressed remains of my former brother-in-law.

I hung back a bit. I didn’t want to get too close. See too much. I’d never get it out of my dreams. There were enough dead bodies in there already.

Butch went right up. Nudged a couple of blue shirts aside. Knelt down. I felt stupid, hanging back. So I followed, blank.

I looked. I didn’t want to look.

The technicians were doing their technician thing. Butch wasn’t there to interfere. He wasn’t there to help, either. He wanted to see the scene for himself. Do what I couldn’t. File it away. Every scratch mark and dust mote. Every stain on the elaborately tiled lobby floor. What Brendan had in his hand.

The hell is that? I asked. A chopstick?

It’s a knitting needle, said Butch.

I leaned in to get a look. A technician bagging evidence looked up, nodded.

Jesus, I said. The hell does that mean?

Butch shrugged.

I wandered over to the lobby’s central grotesquerie. Concrete fishes and small boys were respectively spouting and pissing into a green pool. Generating little fountains of splash. One of which was slowly soaking the jacket of an old guy sitting on the low retaining wall. Old and spotted and hunched forward. The Universal Loser.

A couple of cops wandered over, poked him with a stick. He looked up. Calm. Resigned. Too far gone to be startled.

The cops asked questions. How long had he been there? What was his name? Had he seen anything unusual?

Unusual? I stared blankly at the concrete fish, the pissing boys. I guessed it was a matter of context.

I heard Butch’s voice. Rick, he said. I turned around. Saw his extra-wide smile. Trying to be reassuring. Succeeding, a bit.

Come on, he said. Let’s go home.

Home. The Dusty Angel Motel.

I felt his arm around my shoulder.

I suppose, I said, as Brendan’s closest known relative, even if by defunct marriage, I should hang around. Find out what they’re planning to do with him.

They have my cell number. They’ll call.

Okay, I shrugged.

I’d seen a morgue or two before. There’d be time for the formalities later.

We flagged a cab. It smelled of sardines and sweat.

B
UTCH ALWAYS KNEW WHAT WAS RIGHT
. Well, most of the time he did. More often than me, for sure. Which isn’t saying much. He had a temper on him, though. On a guy that big, the temper could be a problem. Once in a while it came in handy.

When serious shit happens, it brings you together. Butch had been with me through a lot of serious shit. The Case of the Red Car Door. That had been good shit. We solved a crime. Butch found the photos. Somebody had hidden them away. The witnesses said the car was all black. The pictures showed a red driver’s-side door. Prosecutorial misconduct, we convinced the judge. Got some innocent kids off. Got some good press.

Then there was the FitzGibbon case. Foisted on me by my unlamented former boss, the über-pompous Warwick. FitzGibbon was a major client of our firm, back then. He had a wayward kid. Turned out they were both big-time nut jobs, FitzGibbon and the kid, but the kid was worse. And his adoptive brothers put them both to shame. Twins. Wheels within wheels. Daddy got dead. So did the kid. The twins got life without. So Butch and I solved another crime. But not before a bunch of people got dead. It was hard to call that one a victory.

I wasn’t a detective, a cop. I’d never even been a prosecutor. Hell, I was just an ordinary litigator who got caught up in some criminal shit once in a while, and tried to do the best for my client. Who usually wasn’t paying. So, I could never have played detective without Butch to do the real work. Get access, get the phone records, run the license plates. Find the photos, think in a straight line. Pack the gun. Most important, go in first. I had a thing about going in first. Wouldn’t do it. Scared the shit out of me.

And Brendan. Dear, fucked-up Brendan.

I hadn’t quite known what to do with Brendan. Being as he was my former brother-in-law, or maybe still my brother-in-law—had he retained the status after Melissa died? anyway, he felt like family—it was like I owed him something, somehow. Which I didn’t, really. But one thing for sure, I was all the family he had. And he had a certain naïve charm, and played a mean game of poker.

There was a Friday at the bar, a couple months before. The Wolf’s Lair. My hang. My home. My commiseration. Thom behind the bar.
The cool brass rail. The warm mahogany. The endlessly various New York crowd. A serious bar. Two blocks from home, even better.

I was telling Thom about my new outfit. I called it The Outfit. So far it consisted of me. I’d quit my day job as a litigator to pursue my overstuffed dreams of poker grandeur. I felt I needed a cover. Just in case later I’d need another gig. Didn’t look good on the resumé: failed poker player. Actually, it was a little more complicated than that. Something about a woman. Dorita. A tall babe with a killer set of legs and an attitude to match. Maybe we’d get to that later.

A woman sat down to my right. The sad-sack barfly type. Downcast eyes and a world of long lonely days hanging from her shoulders like the ancient Laura Ashley dress she wore, drifting to the floor, and had worn, it looked like, on every one of those days. She had a big, pouting mouth. On a girl with good bone structure it would have been striking. But it just accentuated the homeliness of her soft oval face. The freckles were cute, though. Cute enough to draw my attention for a second longer than mere curiosity required. That and her air of depressed and vulnerable sensuality.

I noticed that she was wearing only one shoe. I noticed how red it was. The shoe.

It was on her left foot.

On her right was a yellow bandage. Her toenails were painted with small piglet faces.

Five tiny snouts.

She noticed me looking. Turned to me.

I was up all night, she said. Hydrating my cat.

Well, this was a promising entrée, but just at that moment Butch showed up, and I had to excuse myself from the Piglet Lady.

Butch started bitching right away. He’d had another run-in with Inspector Nose.

Fucking guy, Butch said. Suspended Ritchie for throwing away a perfectly good paper clip. Wasting police property. I gotta get out of there.

I wasn’t sure I believed the story. Not literally, anyway. But The Nose—I could never remember his real name, but the schnozz was unforgettable: long, lean, hooked, barely restraining a serious case of out-of-control nasal hair—was a tight-ass kind of a guy.

Mostly Butch and The Nose had managed to stay out of each other’s way over the years, but Butch had got promoted, thanks to the
FitzGibbon case, and had to spend a lot more time in the precinct. Funny how it works. One day you’re about to be fired for doing shit you weren’t supposed to. Like babysitting a stupid lawyer named Rick Redman, in way over his head. Next day, the bad guys get caught, it’s all over the
Daily News
. You’re a fucking hero. You’re a big shot.

But Butch wasn’t happy about the promotion. He was a real cop. A street guy. A hustle guy. Now he had to lord it over a bunch of newbie geeks. Check on their paperwork. Tell them how to wear the blue shirt.

He hated it.

It’s like the Peter Principle, he said. But I didn’t get promoted to my level of incompetence. I got promoted to where I just want to get the hell out of there.

Maybe it’s the same thing.