Lush Life (23 page)

"That's a needle in a haystack, Chief." Matty in his despair actually starting to enjoy all his negative responses. "All due respect."

"Well, Jesus Christ, the guy lives in sneaker distance of the scene? Then go to his house, get in there and talk to him, rattle his cage, I want more on that gun. We're not done with him yet."

"Chief"-Matty flushed-"hang on, why are we burning bridges here, the guys our only witness and he already hates us. I don't see-"

Ignoring him, Mangold turned to Upshaw. "This is not good. With the press"? This is a problem."

"In terms of that?" the chief of Manhattan d's said softly, as if discussing a patient just out of earshot. "I think we let it die, weather the storm."

Once again that ring of solemn nods, Matty seeing it all: a gag order on the press as of this moment. Then inevitably, after a day or two, a more media-friendly murder, with 90 percent of the detectives he'd commandeered quietly returned to their precincts; leaving Matty in the middle of the room with a cardboard box of 61s and 5s and no backup except, maybe out of pity, Yolonda; everyone else tacitly avoiding him on this one like a landlocked Ahab, like an ass-pain Ancient Mariner, like he had halitosis of the brain.

The ruminative silence that had come down on the conference room was finally broken by Mangold himself, giving Matty his eyes for the second and last time.

"A simple paraffin test," he said dreamily, his voice filled with withering amazement.

Matty found himself levitating into a half crouch, his fingers splayed red and white on the table, and for a swollen second or two it looked like he was going to lower the boom on every boss in the room, lay it all out for Mangold, phone call by phone call, all of them stone -
faced now, reading his mind, but then, but then ... he just ate it, any one of these career-long careerists having enough juice to deep-six his own career, send him to work via the Verrazano and its $7 toll every remaining day of his professional life.

As he sank back into his seat, he could palpably sense the relief behind the facades.

Fuck it. At least they all know.

"Look, just go to his place, knock on the door, apologize, and come back," Matty said to Iacone and Mullins, doing his best to follow orders without getting Eric Cash any more agitated than he already was.

"No search?"

"No search. No search." Then, grudgingly adding, "I don't know.

See if he has anything else to say about the gun, but tread light, then get the fuck out of there."

The lieutenant stalked past without looking at him.

Matty waited for Carmody s door to slam, then called a friend in Vice. "Hey. You're gonna get a call from 1PP to do an underage ops on this bar Berkmann's?"

"We did already." "Hit it?"

"No. Got the call. We're going in sometime this week. Tomorrow, day after, like that."

"Look, the owner's a friend to the squad, never gave us trouble, always helped us out, so, I'm just curious, you have any idea who you're sending in?"

The friend from Vice hesitated for a beat, then, "I like this Dominican kid, a cadet still, but done it before."

"Oh yeah? Nice-looking?" Matty grabbed a pen.

"Not really, kind of short, on the chunky side, wears an earring through her left eyebrow."

"No kidding." Jotting this down.

"Has kind of a metallic red dye streak going."

"Kids today, huh?" Matty clucked, still writing. "You'll give me a heads-up before you roll?"

He wasn't exactly sure how this would pay itself back, but with the investigation about to die, having Harry Steele owe him a favor right now seemed like an instinctual good move.

When Eric opened his door, he was not surprised to see that the City of New York wasn't finished with him. He had been sitting on his folded-up futon sofa all morning, just waiting for something like this.

"Eric?" Jimmy Iacone offered his hand "I'm Detective Iacone, big guy here"-chucking a thumb over his shoulder-"is Detective Mullins. And basically we came by to see if you're OK, and you know, again, to extend our apologies for yesterday."

They were a dream come true: Mullins, huge, blond, and mute, his lightless eyes trained on the center of Eric's forehead; the other one fat and transparently unguent, like the villain in a spaghetti western.

"Fortunately," Iacone went on, "we never stopped working for you. Just kept at it until we could find someone to support your story . . . Unfortunately, we have one loose end left."

Eric's shoulders began to do that pop and ripple thing again, drawing Mullins's gaze from the sweet spot above his eyes.

Iacone took a cheerful step forward, making Eric back up. "May we come in?"

The place was doorless straight through to the window, and as Mullins strolled into the book-lined front parlor, Iacone steered Eric into the dining nook/kitchenette, then turned him so that his back was to his partner.

"You mentioned you had a .22?"

"Yeah, I told the detective, what's it . . ." Eric's fingers chittered through his wallet until he found Matty's card. "Clark. Detective Clark. That I did a cash-for-guns exchange." He could hear Mullins prowling behind him.

"Right," Iacone said, laying a light hand on Eric's arm to keep him from turning around. "Can anyone verify that you actually . . ."

"Did it? Well, the cop who took it from me gave me the cash receipt, it was years ago, I have no idea his name, and, hang on, I believe I went with a friend, Jeff Sanford."

Iacone wrote down the name. "How we can get in touch with Jeff?"

"To make sure I'm not lying?"

"This is just how we do." Iacone shrugged apologetically, his pen poised over the notepad.

"He's somewheres upstate, Elmira?"

"The correctional facility?"

"The what?" Eric reared back. "No. The city He's a teacher in the high school." Then, at the sound of a fallen book, "What's he doing?" Finally wheeling to the parlor, where Mullins was going through the bookshelves packed with Alessandra's research material.

"It's not what it looks like," Eric said. "All that's my girlfriend's, it's for her master's degree, you can ask Detective Clark, we, this is all research material, every . . ."

With an Arabic sex-tour guide for Thailand in one hand and a German spanking magazine in the other, Mullins gave Eric a look that pulverized whatever was left of him.

"Please." His voice breaking.

"Johnny," Iacone said softly.

Mullins made a show of replacing each item to the slot from which he had taken it, but the shelves were overstuffed, and with each put
-
back, other books and magazines spilled out, each freakier than the last.

Til get it. I'll get it." Eric knelt before Mullins and began stacking the spillage with shaking hands.

"What's in there?" Mullins asked, gesturing to the padlocked steamer trunk covered with a fringed brocade shawl between the futon couch and the TV.

"You know something?" Eric looked up at him from the floor. "I have no idea. It was locked when I moved in here, she never gave me the key, and I never saw her open it. Probably something really embarrassing, but it's hers. Everything in here is hers, look."

Springing to his feet, he marched into the kitchenette and flung open the cabinets, displaying the shelves stuffed with beans and lentils and supplements. "Hers." Then striding to the lone shared closet exploding with zippered bags full of coats, sweaters, and dresses. "Hers."

Then to the bathroom, where he pulled back the shower curtain to reveal the dozens of dolphin, giant squid, and whale decals glued to the wall tiles. "All hers. And you know what? I don't even know when, or even if she's coming back, OK?"

"All right, all right," Iacone said, hands up in retreat. "Like I said, we just came by to tie up loose ends."

"And to apologize," Mullins added.

Eric could hear them as they went trudging down the stairs.

"We should get a warrant for that trunk, you know?" Mullins said.

"Fuck it," Iacone said, then: "Research."

"You should have seen them in there, Yoli." Matty was sitting on the edge of her desk. "Like roaches with the lights just turned on. 'I never knew that,' You never told us that,' 'News to me, boss,' 'Great idea, boss,' and I just had to eat it. Everybody like, skittering under the stove and I just had to eat it."

"Yeah, see, thats why I never took the sergeants test," she said. "It's the first step to being that way. Its like a gateway drug."

Mullins and Iacone returned to the squad room.

"So how'd it go?" Matty dreading the answer.

"Good," Iacone said.

"You think he'll be up for helping us with this?"

"I don't see why not."

Occupying his new client's old hot seat in the Eighth Squad's interview room, Danny Fein, aka Danny the Red, of the Hester Street Legal Initiative, his thick, square teeth glinting like old mah-jongg tiles through his ruddy beard, sat facing Matty, Yolonda, and Kevin Flaherty, the ADA.

"Look," Flaherty said, "we have a basic description of the perps, we know who most of the local bad guys are, we just want Eric to browse through some photo arrays, maybe sit down with a sketch artist again so we can get a better likeness and make something good happen."

" 'A better likeness.'You mean get a sketch that's not just a stall to buy you time to build a case against him?"

"Exactly," Flaherty said.

"Sure, no problem." Danny hauled one leg across the other. "Like I said, soon's I get a signed waiver says he's immune from prosecution."

"You're not . . ." Flaherty looked off, laughed through his teeth. "C'mon, Danny, all indications say he's not the perp, but we can't do that and you know it. It's an open investigation."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

Matty and Yolonda exchanged tight glances, Matty sitting there already with a few array folders in his lap like a visual aid.

Rumor had it that Danny had just moved out on his black wife, Haley, and two sons, Koufax and Mays, to live with his Jewish ex-girlfriend from college and that no one in the Legal Initiative was talking to him.

"What are we asking for," Yolonda said softly, "descriptions of clothing, facial hair . . ."

Danny made a show of cocking his head in amazement. "You grilled him for eight hours and you didn't get all that?" Then, leaning forward, "Show me the waiver."

"Could we have been any more up-front about how it went down?" Flaherty said. "They were out there all day trying to bolster his story."

"Bolster, huh? You're lucky he's not filing a suit."

"No one's sorrier about how it went down than us," Matty finally chimed in, "but we had two eyewits. What would you have done? We cut him loose the minute we could. But now he's our only real witness, and simple human decency says he needs to step up."

"Show me the waiver."

"This boy, Isaac Marcus, has parents," Yolanda said. "You know why I say has instead of had? Because when a child is killed and somewheres down the line someone innocently asks, 'So, how many kids you folks have?' they always include the lost child in the number. Never fails. They're like phantom limbs."

"Yolonda," Flaherty warned. She was the only one who had never met Fein before this conversation.

"You ever spend any time with the parents of a murdered child, Mr. Fein?"

"Ah shit," Flaherty murmured, Matty thinking, Here we go.

"Yeah actually," Danny said brightly, "Patrick Dorismond's among others."

A silent sigh filled the room.

"I'm sorry," Yolonda again, "did we shoot your client yesterday?"

"Show me, the waiver."

"C'mon, Danny," Flaherty tried to jump back in. "Ike Marcus and Eric Cash were friends. They were work-"

"Show me, the waiver."

The ADA finally lost it. "You don't think we won't go to the media with this? How's he ever going to show his face?"

"You interrogate him for eight hours, throw him in the Tombs groundless, and now you're what . . . threatening to publicly humiliate him?" Danny leaned back in his chair as if to see them better. "It never ceases to amaze me, the balls on you people."

"You people?" Yolonda tried to look insulted.

"Look, you can put any kind of spin on this you want," Matty said, "but you know what we're asking for here is the right thing."

"Show me, the waiver."

Matty followed Danny out of the building, spoke to him on the handicap ramp.

"I heard you and Haley split up."

'Yeah, but amicable-like."

Two uniforms escorted a cuffed Latino, one eye swollen and already turning a metallic purple, up the ramp, Danny slipping his card in the guys front jeans pocket as they passed.

"Let me ask," Matty said, "not to be personal, but whats worse for a black woman. Your white husband leaves you for another black woman? Or he goes back to his own kind."

"I hate generalizing like that," Danny said. "How the fuck do I know. Leaves her for another guy"