Hot Poppies (2 page)

“What's your security like?”

He stabbed his cigarette into the coffee carton where it hissed and died. “I have first class alarms. But this office I only use for paperwork. Sometimes I come in early to catch up. Mo, the accountant, does the books sometimes. I read a little. Pray. Next door at my uncle's where they keep the stones they got locks from Fort Knox.” He tried smiling, but all the gusto was gone.

“Then how did this girl slip through your door on a Sunday night, Hil? How? Talk to me.”

“I don't know. I don't know anything any more.” He was closer to despair than I've seen him in fifteen years.

“Call 911,” I said. “I'll wait until they come. Call like you would if you just found the girl. What else did you see when you got here?”

Clutching the portable phone, he punched 911. I looked at the body shrouded in Hillel's black coat. I'd seen worse stuff. Much worse. I'd gone numb with seeing stuff over the years, like cops do, drinking too much, getting ulcers, telling competitive horror stories for the laughs. “You hear about the baby on the plane that never cried?” some detective would say in a bar after work. “It was dead, man, hollowed out, stuffed with cocaine. They don't put that shit on TV.” Maybe being off the job, I had turned back into some kind of human being.

The radiator came on. The room grew suffocatingly hot and airless. Sweat trickled down my sides like ants. So a Chinese girl was dead, I thought. It was tough, but it happened all the time. When I looked at the body, though, I had the feeling this thing would snowball, it would get bigger and bigger, I could run away but it would roll over me. Run me over, gobble me up. I didn't want it. I lit another cigarette.

“Take your coat off her. Someone's gonna get real pissed off if they think you messed up the scene.”

Squatting on his heels, he pulled the coat back off the body then he got up. I crouched beside the girl. Lime green hairs from a sweater in a small pile of clothes next to it had drifted into the air and settled on her, stuck in the dried blood. I picked up the sweater. In the pocket was a stick-on label, an address printed in magic marker, like a kid going to camp. You could send her back if she got lost. Return to sender: one dead girl. No name. Probably never would have a name. I scribbled the address on a matchbook I had in my pocket.

Then I found the photograph—the girl in it fooling around next to the white Caddy. I looked at the girl on the floor, then back at the picture in my hand. They were the same. The same person, one alive and smiling, the other dead, her face ripped apart.

“Artie?” Hillel plucked at my arm and, only half conscious I was doing it, I slipped the photograph into my pocket and got up from the floor.

In Hillel's outstretched palm was a red cloth flower, the kind you see all over Chinatown. “I also found this. Red's good luck with the Chinese.” He shook his head. “Some luck!”

Hillel's a realist. In his line of work, you have to be, not to mention his religion that gets in people's faces and makes them hate. The certainty, I envied; I wondered if there was anything that could make him doubt.

Maybe he has the inside track spiritually, but I don't get the prayer stuff, or the accessories, the shawl, the box on the forehead, and I'd be dead before I'd walk around with a yarmulke all day. I'm not that kind of Jew. I'm not sure I'm any kind of Jew.

“Look, I have some money.” Hillel put a neat fold of bills on the desk. “You could use the money. I need your help.” The phone was still in his hand and he spoke into it. “Dead. I told you. Yes. Sure, I'm sure. Sure. There's tracks on her face. Her belly's ripped wide open.”

“I can't take your money,” I said. Then I heard the sirens in the distance. The cops were on their way. “Hil, you'll be OK now. You will. I swear to God. But I can't do any more. If I get sucked into this kind of cesspool again, I'm going to fucking drown in it.”

The snow fell, the wind tinkled on the window, the radio played more Sinatra. In the tangle of clothes on the floor next to the dead girl, I imagined I saw something almost alive, something I didn't want to name, hadn't wanted to think about from the second I arrived.

“You knew,” Hillel said. “You knew right away when you came through that door, didn't you? Didn't you, Artie?” His voice rose. He was almost hysterical now.

“Yeah, I knew.”

“She was pregnant, Artie. She was pregnant and they ripped up her face and cut her open. Then they killed her and the baby both.”

A trio of diamond dealers in long black coats minced along 47th Street like old ladies afraid to fall on the ice and crack their bones. I had come out of Hillel's. Listening to the sirens, I sat in my car, waiting for the cops. A patrol car pulled up followed by a vintage silver Porsche. From it emerged a guy in a white jacket. He pushed his Raybans on top of his head and, without offering any to the cops standing around, took some cigarettes from his pocket and lit up. He gestured at Hillel's building, then turned to look in my direction. He wasn't looking at me, though. He was waiting for the TV van that, even while I was sitting there, came up 47th Street and stopped in front of Hillel's.

I'd seen the cop on TV. Chan? Chen? Something Chen? He was a big deal. When there was a case involving the Chinese, they called him in. Hillel would be OK now, I told myself. He'd be OK. I drove back to 10th Street and slipped into Lily's bed. Without waking up, she turned and draped her leg over me.

I lay awake and watched Lily. We'd been going out, on and off, for around a year and a half. There was someone else in her life, but he was mostly in England.

Asleep, all six feet of her, she resembled a gangly twelve-year-old. Lily's forty-six, maybe forty-seven. I think. She won't tell me. It's her Achilles heel, the age thing, not that I give a rat's ass how old she is. She's very smart. Nice. We get along great, the sex is great, we love the same music. There's never any hidden messages with her either, and she has great legs. Also, Lily was born in New York.

Like a special perfume, she wears the city in her skin, has its confidence, style, class. It's the air she breathes, and she reminds me of my dreams. When I met her, I felt I'd sailed into a safe harbor.

Outside the window, weird fat flakes of snow were failing very fast. I love New York when it's cold and sharp and the air has that awesome clarity, when you lie in bed and watch the day come up and do its tricks with light all over again.

Half asleep now, I drifted. Maybe it's the only Russian thing left in me, loving the winter. It's twenty-five, twenty-six years since I left Moscow, the asshole of world cities. Skating in Gorky Park is one of my good memories. That last winter, a daring park apparatchik put Domenico Meduno doing “Nel Blu del Pinto del Blu” on the sound system. We bribed him to put a Beatles number on and our parents caught a lot of shit for it, but my mother, who always laughed at the system, laughed even harder. A long time ago, I thought, trying to settle into the warm pocket of sheets next to Lily's back. But I was restless.

Lying there, I tried to reclaim the guy I'd been a couple of hours earlier. We'd been good, me and Lily, ever since I quit. Mellow is what I'd been feeling right up until Hillel called. I tried to get it back. I didn't want to tell Lily about the dead girl. My last case, the one in Brighton Beach, had scared the shit out of her, and I figured if I stayed off the job, if I finally quit, maybe we could have a life together. But maybe I was kidding myself.

“What's going on?” Lily opened her pale blue-gray eyes, rubbed them, switched the TV on. “You OK? Artie?”

“Yeah. I'm fine.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing much.”

“Who was on the phone before?”

“Hillel Abramsky. He needed a favor.”

“What kind of favor?” The voice grew tart. “Artie? What kind of favor?”

“Some trouble at his shop. I helped him out. I owed him.”

“You owe too many people,” she said, but she was smiling, sitting up, watching the weather report as intently as a gambler at the track now, watching his horse come in. “I think this is going to be the biggest blizzard in New York history, you know.” She got up, grabbed her green silk pajama top from the floor and put it on.

“Come back to bed,” I said, but Lily was already at the window.

“Snow.” Gathering her hair into a pony tail and tying it with a rubber band she found in her pocket, she beamed. “Lots of snow. Lows, troughs, gale force winds, the whole awesome thing.”

Her clear eyes liquid with delight, she blew me a kiss, then headed for the bathroom door, where she turned and grinned like a cat that's just spotted a huge dish of cream. “Like I said, impending disaster, toots.” She meant the snow.

I was sweating bullets. By now I had realized what was driving me nuts. I knew her.

I knew the girl. I didn't know how I knew her or where, but what kept me awake, what made me sweat, was I knew the dead girl on Hillel Abramsky's floor.

2

The girl looks up at me hopefully from the photograph I've swiped from the scene at Hillel's. Half an hour after I left Lily's, I was drinking coffee in the front booth at Mike Rizzi's, the picture on the table next to me, trying to figure out how the hell I knew the girl in it.

At the counter, three taciturn customers knocked back their coffee like it was booze and, behind it, Mike fried eggs.

The photograph is crumpled and grimy, but the girl is fixed up like a million bucks. She's wearing the pink jacket with fur around the hood. She's posed next to that Cadillac, with its wire wheels and red leather interiors, and it confers some kind of status on her, you can see that in the sexy pose, one hand on her skinny hip, the other on the gold hood ornament in some imitation of possession. She has on too much make-up—she's maybe eighteen, nineteen, but she looks like a kid—and her head is tilted jauntily at the camera, the aspirant smile outlined in bright red lipstick.

“Artie? You want the eggs over easy? You want anything on the bagel?” From behind his counter Mike was peering over at me.

Farm girls in the 1930s is what I was thinking of. In the Depression, girls went to Hollywood to make it in the movies. Had their photos taken in fancy clothes, with big cars, then sent them home to show they had it made in Tinseltown. Most of them ended up on dope or as whores, or dead, like this one, this Chinese girl in the picture in front of me. Who was she, this girl, this kid who is all make-up and longing?

Digging in my pocket, I pulled out the matches where I'd written her address, and I grabbed my jacket as the pulse in my forehead began to pound. Who was she? I looked out of the window. In the street, the snow gathered on the cars, the buildings, the sidewalk. Hurrying to work, people kept their heads down against the snow that fell now in a thick white sheet.

Through the snow, I could see my own building. It was opposite Mike's coffee shop. Home. I could crash, I could climb into bed and forget it, but adrenalin shot me out of the booth where I sat and I grabbed my coat.

“Artie? What about your breakfast? Where in the hell you going, man?” I heard Mike yell as my bagel flew from the toaster and he caught it. But I was already halfway out the door and into my car. Praying the sucker would hold out for one more day, I drove like fuck the few blocks to Chinatown.

Rats scuffled behind the door on the seventh floor of the building on Market Street. Something like rats, something that scuffled and chattered and scraped its claws along the floor. Taped to the door was a sign with Chinese characters; under it was a scrawl in English: Joy Fun Sewing Company, it said. I banged on the door. No one answered. In the dank hallway, the linoleum tiles were shredded and gray slush ran into puddles. I looked around. I banged some more and felt in my ski jacket for the gun; the little Seecamp was a gift from an old friend and I carried for it luck. “Police,” I shouted and hoped to God I didn't run into any other cops.

Bolts turned. The door opened. A woman with a rough Asian face flew at me, screaming in Chinese. I shoved the picture of the dead girl under her nose and pushed my way in. The racket in the room was terrifying.

Most of it came from the sewing machines. Women, forty, fifty of them, were hunched over, pedaling like it was the Tour de France, like their lives depended on it. Lit from above by savage fluorescent lights that dangled from the ceiling, the room was about 1500 square feet. It was freezing. Drafts blew in under the big windows. A few decrepit space heaters gave off the stink of propane but hardly any heat. But it was the noise that got me, the rat chatter of the manual machines, the hiss of steam irons, the shouts of the pressers when they banged into metal rails where garments hung shrouded in plastic. From a boombox came the whine of “Yesterday” played on windchimes. Everywhere in the freezing shop, the women coughed.

On TV I had watched celebrities burst into tears over the sweatshops, but no one mentioned the noise could fry your inner ear so bad you couldn't stand up straight.

“Yes sir?”

The high-pitched voice belonged to a fat kid, a regular little Moby with a face like an undercooked dumpling. Zipping his pants up with one hand, a chocolate chip muffin in the other, he lumbered out from behind a curtain. He took it all in: me with the picture in my hand, the rough-faced woman staring at it. As soon as he appeared, she retreated.

“Is that woman your mother?”

“Yessir,” he said.

“Is this her shop?”

“Yessir,” he said again and ate the muffin.

I showed him the picture. “Do you know the person in this photograph?”

Prodding his teeth, he looked at it. “There is no such person here. Go away now. Cops already came.”