Hot Poppies (19 page)

“Do you trust him?”

“For a lot of the brass, he's a kind of addiction. They figure he'll fix stuff up in Chinatown because he's Chinese. Ethnic without an accent, you know what I mean, man? If you're really asking, I don't like him. I don't trust him. I think he's emotionally bent. He hates a lot. I also think the killer is still out there. More than one. They multiply like cockroaches and they'll last just as long,” Sonny said. “This is corporate. The cockroaches got lists, they got phone numbers, beepers, e-mail, area codes. Electronic hoods. How can I beat them? Now they got pictures. It's not going to stop until we make a paper trail. Until we find the money. Until we figure out who the banker is, then, maybe we can nuke the cockroaches. Until then, we use Jerry Chen.”

“Or he uses us.”

“Yeah, that, too, Art. That's always possible.”

Sonny finished talking and reached into his desk drawer. The manila envelope was eleven by fourteen. It was addressed to me.

“What's in it?”

“I don't know. I don't, man. It came through the Russian consulate. I was going to call you Monday. I really do have to go. But listen, remember, it's always about money. The killing will never stop until we find the money,” he said. “I got to go meet Jen, Art. But use the office if you want. Finish the coffee, OK.” Sonny opened the door. “You look perplexed, man. You didn't really think it was Sherm? You and I, Art, we both know Sherm Abramsky couldn't kill a lobster if it crawled onto the Passover table.”

Inside the envelope that Sonny gave me was a brown cardboard folder, faded, the label neatly written in old-fashioned copperplate—writing I recognized. At Sonny's desk, I drank the coffee and looked through it. It had come from my Aunt Birdie in Moscow; I squinted in the wintry glare and my eyes watered.

The consulate had left me messages. I never called back. I don't want to hear from Russians. What did they have to tell me that I want to know?

Birdie was dead. My father was long gone, my mother was in the home in Israel.

Wrapped in tissue paper were some photographs of myself that I'd sent to Birdie, of my loft, of me clowning around with the Taes at a house in Sag Harbor. There was a picture of Svetlana I'd taken in the Russian countryside and beside her, her cousin Tolya Sverdloff who saved my life but couldn't save hers. I had met and almost married Svetlana the one time I went back to Moscow. Because of a job, because of me, she was dead.

I thought about Svetlana for a while. I put my hand near her face. Then I put the picture away.

There was something terribly final about the package. Birdie wasn't really an aunt but a distant relative who left Brooklyn for Moscow in what?—1930, '31—to support the Revolution, and never went home. When I was a kid in Moscow, she taught me English and about New York. She had been dead for more than a year, but this package was like a headstone. The end. It stuck in my chest like heartburn, and I missed her.

There was something else in the envelope, a stiff tan paper sleeve so old it crumbled in my hand. It contained a bank book. The Downtown Savings Bank, the faint logo said. Inside it, Birdie Golden had written her name. I thumbed through it carefully but the ancient paper left dust on my fingers.

When Birdie left home, Abe, her father, put money into the savings bank. She never withdrew a cent. Maybe she was saving for a rainy day. I knew better: she had been saving it for me. There was more than five thousand dollars in the account.

Goose pimples covered my arms. Five grand when you're broke is enough to make you feel pretty good, and I figured it had to be a sign of more good times coming. There was a branch of the bank around the corner from City Hall. I got on the phone; it was open Saturdays. I went home and picked up some papers and some ID and went to the bank.

The clerk at the bank said, “Nobody has touched this account for seventy years except for an annual deposit of ten dollars.” Birdie had been meticulous. She had kept the account open, somehow putting in ten bucks every single year, though how she transferred the money from Moscow was a mystery. She had managed.

“Excuse me, sir,” the clerk said and went away and returned with a supervisor who looked at me like I was a crook. I tossed him the notarized papers that proved, in two languages, that I was Birdie Golden's sole heir. The supervisor reconsidered and offered me a seat near a desk with a potted plant on it. Half an hour passed. Excited clerks scurried around. What's going on? I thought, and ate a stale candy cane out of a bowl on the desk. The supervisor returned and sat down and hit the keys of an adding machine.

He hit the adding machine a few more times, flicked his shirt collar under his jacket and tried not to touch the acne on his face. Then he talked rollovers, percentages, accrued interest. I tried to keep from getting excited.

“You have some ID, sir?”

I tossed it all on the desk, license, passport, ATM card.

Triumphantly, he pulled a long paper tape out of the adding machine and presented it to me. “It's quite a bit of money,” he said excitedly.

“How much? How much?”

“Fifty-six thousand, two hundred and eighty-three dollars,” he said. “And seventy-four cents. Would you like to roll it over, sir? Would you like us to open an account for you? We have excellent investment arrangements,” he said and told me I was a valued customer. Very valuable. The bank would like to help me. What could they do to help me?

“One thing,” I told him. “There's only one thing.”

“Yessir, anything at all.” He offered me more candy.

I took a candy cane, peeled the cellophane slowly, put it in my mouth, got up, shook his hand, yawned, and said, “I'll take the cash.”

I was free!

Fifty-six big ones. And change. Even after they soak you for taxes, that's a pretty nice windfall.

I'm off the hook, I thought. I'm free. Free. People say money can't make you free: it's the other big lie.

For a minute, I didn't care about Chinatown or death or anything at all, only about the money. Who could I admit it to? Who could I tell I had suddenly become the guy I used to be, only better. Happy and rich. In my heart, I knew if I didn't watch it, I could easily end up one of those dorks who buys driftwood plaques that read: “Life is for the Living.”

I took a cab to my own bank. I went to the teller and made a very large deposit. Then I went home. The first call I made was to the dickhead who owns the club in SoHo. I told him he could shove his job. He told me I was already fired, having failed to show up. I told him to go fuck himself. He replied in kind. Then I called my friend Rita at her flower store on Spring Street and sent Lily loads of yellow roses. I ordered a purple mountain bike for Justine. I was on a roll.

I put Tony Bennett singing Fred Astaire on the CD. I did a few dance steps myself and felt I was almost as good as Fred. Then I sat down at my desk and opened all the bills, even the ones I'd been scared to look at. Some were stuffed in the bottom of a drawer. Some had fallen behind the radiator. Crawling around on my hands and knees, digging into places I had pretty much forgotten, I got them out, opened them and paid them. All of them. Mortgage, electricity, telephone, credit cards, loans, to the last cent. I called the Salvation Army and offered them a tweed sofa-bed and two beanbag chairs. I ran downstairs and across the street.

“You want my car?” I knew Mike needed a second car bad.

“What do you mean, want it?”

“I want to give it to you. It's in the shop. It'll be OK in a few days. Do you want it?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

I threw him the keys. “It's all yours.” I swiped a cheese Danish from the cake stand, waved it at him and went out the door. I ate the pastry in the cab going uptown and gave the driver a twenty for a tip.

All my life I wanted to do what I did next. It was a red Cadillac. It had creamy leather seats. Pre-owned, they call it. Used, in other words. But this one was a honey; it didn't have much mileage. I'd seen it before and I had wanted it a lot. When I got to the dealership over on Eleventh Avenue, it was still there.

The dealer, who had seen me before, didn't pay much attention to me until I let him see a wedge of money as fat as his arm.

It had my name on it, this particular car, we agreed, oh, yessir, the salesman dripped sincerity. A slow season, what with the weather, the salesman told me. He could do me an excellent deal. Like I was some kind of high roller, I let the guy see the wad of dough again. He was awed. For cash he could do a very very nice deal, he said, and I could hear him thinking, Geez, in this weather, this is great. He gave me the keys so I could take the red Caddy for a spin.

Sure, I realized it was a Cadillac and so was the white car in Chinatown. But mine didn't have wire wheels or hood ornaments. Also, I didn't care. This much irony I could live with. This was the car I'd wanted for a long, long time. When I was a kid in Moscow, I once saw a red Cadillac in an American exhibition. At night, under the covers, I looked at it in the four-color catalogue. In Moscow, cars came in black. Sometimes gray. The red Caddy looked like America. One day, I thought. One day.

Shifting my thighs over the leather seats, I drove up the West Side Highway and back down. I watched the sun pop into the water, a gilded orange ball doing a flashy sunset, showering the frozen buildings with gold coins just for me.

The thing rode like a dream. I tested the surround-sound system with a couple of CDs I brought specially for this purpose, Gershwin playing his own stuff on the piano and a remastered version of Louis Armstrong doing “Potato Head Blues”. The sound was magic, even a tune recorded in 1926 on mono sounded wonderful. I wished I could give Satchmo a ride. George, too. Back at the showroom, I bought the car. For cash.

I was driving the car, of course, when I pulled up outside Lily's that evening. She hates it if I'm early and she's getting dolled up, so I parked and waited, head against the leather headrest, eyes closed, music playing.

When I opened my eyes, I saw Pete Leung. I saw him saunter out of Lily's building. Her doorman, José, raised his hat to Pete which meant Pete had tipped him plenty. Saunter was what Pete did. No, it was a swagger. There was a swagger to his walk, a knowing familiarity, a sense he knew his way around the building and had been there before. He climbed into his battered VW that was parked at the curb. I don't think he saw me, but I saw him, saw him smile into his own rear-view mirror, a self-satisfied little smile. Could be that Pete Leung had other friends in Lily's building, I thought to myself, but I didn't believe it.

17

Baby Vanelli was dead.

The pink lipstick that doubled as a knife was under the rug the next morning when we found Babe Vanelli's body in Lily's apartment. The blade had some kind of dried mucus on it, along with hairs from the rug and dust from the floor. It must have rolled.

Babe was dead. Sherm was in jail, but the killing had not stopped. I recognized the scars on Babe's face; they looked like the tracks I'd seen on Rose. The monsters had been looking for me. Instead, they got Babe Vanelli.

The night before, after I saw Pete Leung leave Lily's building, the two of us went to Raoul's and ate bar steaks and drank a couple of bottles of Cabernet.

When I asked what she had wanted to talk about, Lily said, “Let's just have a nice time. Let's not talk tonight. I'm feeling good now.” I didn't ask what Pete Leung was doing in her building. I should have asked, but I guess I didn't want to know.

Lily stayed at my place and Babe stayed at Lily's because Babe had a big date Saturday and her heat was still on the fritz. In the morning, Babe was dead.

The hall table in Lily's apartment was turned over. A green pottery vase lay shattered on the floor, and the yellow roses I'd sent Lily were broken and scattered. The way Babe was lying on the hall floor, her arm stretched out, her fingers seemed to grasp for the shards of the green jug, and I thought I saw her short, sexy fingers twitch.

Kneeling on the rug that was soaked with water and Babe's blood, Lily tried to gather up the flowers. “Why?” She stared at the roses. “Why, Artie?” She sat down on the floor, some of the broken flowers in her hand, shoulders shaking.

It was a fight, said the cops who arrived. Someone attacked her. She fought back. After the cops, the MEs came, all of them crowding into Lily's apartment. Babe had probably been strangled.

Every time the door opened, I saw some of Lily's neighbors in the hall. Shuffling in their slippers, clutching bathrobes around them, they bent down to pick up the
Sunday Times
from their doormats and looked up quickly, frightened, furtive, eager to help, more eager to close their doors. Can we help, a few called out, then closed their doors again as fast as it was decent.

A cop from the Sixth that Lily knew came by to offer his assistance. He swore he'd keep me in touch with the case. I called Sonny Lippert at home and filled him in.

After everybody who needed to see the body had a turn, Babe Vanelli was zipped into a black bag and taken away. By now, Lily was dry-eyed. She asked me to take her to Babe's parents on West End Avenue.

When we got there I said, “Should I come with you?”

Lily shook her head. “I should tell them myself. I should do that, don't you think so, Artie? You go find the piece of shit who did it, OK? You find him. I think I should go alone,” she said, and I watched Lily get into the elevator and the doors close.

It didn't take long to put it together. The guy from the Sixth was as good as his word. Babe's date had not flown in from the coast the night before. Instead, she had phoned an actor named Dirk. She told him she was free. Dirk and Babe spent the evening together.