Lush Life (28 page)

And he did. Her face was so white it was pale blue, like skim milk.

What did that drunk cop once call it? Cheap Irish skin.

Hardly.

"I don't know who you think 1 am, or who you think you are, but the tone you took with me last night was totally uncalled for."

It sounded worked on, sounded like it wasn't easy for her to say that, and it slayed him.

"Totally uncalled for," he agreed, training his eyes on the hands that held the envelope. "I'm sorry." Then, impulsively added, "It was on my mind all night last night. I couldn't sleep." The words coming out with a husky catch that he didn't trust in himself these days, but there it was.

She stood there for a moment, sizing him up, then slowly said, "Me neither."

And just like that they were talking about something else.

"So, we're good?" he asked, forcing himself to raise his eyes to hers.

"Sure.''

She was supposed to go about her business now, head down to the lockers, but she hesitated, took an extra second to lag behind herself, Eric knowing all about that extra-second lag, everything in the world contained in that extra-second lag.

"So where are you from?"

"Me?" The question seemed to relieve her, the both of them on the same page. "You never heard of it."

"Try me."

"Tofte, Minnesota?"

"You sure?" Making her laugh.

Fourteen, thirteen years difference, maybe less.

"So, how long you been here?"

"Here, New York?"

"Here New York."

"Six weeks?" Her eyes on fire with the insanity of it all.

Six weeks . . .

"And what are you . . ." Suddenly, alarmingly, he felt himself beginning to fade.

"What am I? Like, what religion?"

"No, no. What do you want . . ." He had trouble finishing the question, could barely get out the "to be."

"Ideally?" she began, and he didn't hear what she said after.

"Interesting," he said automatically, then, "So."

She caught the dismissal in his tone, and projecting both disappointment and confusion, she stepped off for the lockers downstairs.

"Hang on," he called after her, and when she turned with those unbearable bright eyes, he put his hand out for her envelope. "Let me check that for a sec, make sure you got the right one."

He took the envelope into the kitchen, stared at it without opening it, then came back out and returned it to her still $29 light.

"Good to go." Taking one last look at that rice-powder throat, those pearly hands, thinking, No prisoners.

They were all sitting on Irma Nieves's bed: Crystal, Little Dap, David, Irma, Fredro, Tristan, and Devon, passing the blunt and eating chips, when Fredro just had to fucking start.

"Bzzt." The others looking to him.

"What?"

Fredro nodded to Tristans exposed chin and did it again. "Bzzt." Like the sound of an electrical zap: like the sound of Tristans zigzagged, cross-mouthed scar.

Most of them in their stoned way got it, saw it, and just fell out bawling; Tristan once again feeling the resigned heaviness that came with being the natural target of others. Well, if it wasn't the scar, it would have been something else; it didn't take much and it had soaked into everybody's routine; what's Tristan doing or not doing, saying or not saying, today; people counting on him for entertainment like welfare heads count on the mailman.

The alternative, though, was home; was hamster watch.

"Oh, nigger." Fredro with tears in his eyes, rearing back in mock
-
horror. "Please grow that motherfucker back."

"Oh!" The bed trembling with sniggers.

"Put like a bandanna on, someshit." Devon's turn.

"Nigger never get no dugout now."

"I get bookoo dugout," Tristan said, couldn't help saying, knowing that the worst thing he could do was give them any kind of response.

" 'Bookoo dugout . . .'" Irma snorting out smoke, provoking another round of howls.

He liked Irma anyway, liked the way her teeth bucked out, the way she kept her hands curled palms-up in her lap when she wasn't doing anything.

"Motherfucker got to put a pork chop round his neck just to get the dog to play with him." Devon again, Tristan seeing that white boy's eyes going up, up, as he went down, down, then pretending it was Devon that night instead, it was Fredro, it was all of them; except Irma.

"Ain't you scare those little kids with that?" Fredro got off the bed to imitate one of Tristan's hamsters, raising his arms and looking up.

"Unca Tristan, pick me up, wipe my ass-whoa, shit!" Like the kid just saw the scar for the first time, everybody crying again, the cramped room dense with smoke.

Only Little Dap was holding himself together, but scowling at him, hating him for the burden of it.

"Yo, I'm sorry, man," Fredro said between howls, tears running down his face. "I just can't . . ." Howling again.

"Oh, man, I'm outa here." And within a minute most everybody was up off the unmade bed and still snorting and whooing, filing out of the sticky, filthy apartment.

Only he and Irma remained, Tristan at the head of the big bed, buzzing with alertness, Irma at the foot still puffing on that blunt until she finally looked up and realized it was just the two of them.

"You forget where the door's at?"

At least his ex-stepfather insisted on a clean house.

She thought the mermaid would be the easiest. She wasn't a bad copier, even if it was just from memory, and at first when all she intended to do was draw, it was coming out pretty good, but when the point of the pen started pressing in a little more than she intended, when it started to break the skin, when it started to hurt like hell but not so bad that she wanted to stop, it became increasingly hard to keep a steady hand.

And an hour later, when her mother came in without knocking, took one look at all the bloody towels piled at her feet and started screaming like a lunatic, Nina knew that Ike's panther and devil's head would have to wait for another day.

"Wheres he live?" Fenton Ma asked.

"Twenty-four East Broadway."

"Fook?"

"I have no idea," Matty said.

"I don't speak Fook. You better hope he speaks Mandarin."

"You're Mandarin?"

"Mandarin's the language. I'm Cantonese. From Flushing. But East Broadway's Fook. Bottom dogs get to live in the bottoms."

It was a hot night, and beneath the iron shadow of the Manhattan Bridge's looping overpasses, East Broadway reeked of the iced fish that lined the sidewalks, Fenton Ma getting more and more stressed with each blabbing gaggle of women they passed.

"They're all speaking that hillbilly shit. I'm telling you, man, I don't understand a single word."

Once again they walked straight up from the street and into the top: floor apartment without encountering a single locked door. As they headed for the communal kitchen at the far end of the flat, they peered into the makeshift bedrooms and cubicles, saw the men lying on the bunks and planks, their cigarettes jerking in the dark like fireflies.

In the empty kitchen, the dining table sat spotless, the karaoke machine was turned off, and the carp tank was empty.

"Hello, police," Matty said to no one.

The young, compact guy who'd followed them into the hallway last night emerged from a bathroom.

"I think that's the go-to guy here," Matty said to Fenton, then stepped off to let the two men talk.

"They ate that fish?" Yolonda whispered, nodding to the empty tank.

After a moment's conversation the manager led Fenton past Matty and Yolonda back down the hall to one of the larger bedrooms, said something to one of the smokers lying in the dark, then left them to it.

The guy's plank was the third one up from the bottom, so although flat on his back, he was on eye level with Ma, both of their faces intermittently illuminated by the flare of his inhalations.

A moment later Fenton came out, muttering, "Fucking eebageebas," and signaled for the manager to come in and translate for him.

"Is that our guy?" Yolonda asked.

"No," Fenton said, then returned with the manager to his conversation.

After a while the mingled odors of sweat and smoke coming from the bedroom made them retreat to the kitchen, where they waited in silence until Fenton came back out into the hallway and signaled for them to head on out.

"That wasn't Paul Ng?" Matty asked, leading the way down the stairs.

"That was his tenant."

"Whose tenant?"

"Paul Ng's."

"Tenant of what?"

"The plank."

"The what?"

Fenton stopped on the second-floor landing.

"Ng rents that plank for a hundred and fifty a month from the guy in the kitchen, who leased the whole apartment, but three days a week they got Ng working in a restaurant up in New Paltz, so he sublets his plank to that guy laying there now for seventy-five bucks."

Jesus.

"Hey, between the seventy grand he's probably working off to the snakehead that got him over here and sending a little something back to his family on the mainland? He's kicking back about eighty percent of whatever shit salary they're paying him, all of which is to say you sublet that fucking plank."

"You get the name of the place in New Paltz?"

"Golden Wok."

"We should send somebody up there," Yolonda said.

"I guess." Matty shrugged, no one all that hopeful about something coming from it, or Paul Ng in general.

"So you guys need help with anybody else? I'm kind of liking the change of pace here."

"Actually," Matty said, "we have one more possible on the robbery pattern, also Chinese."

"I'm there."

"Guy is"-checking his notes-"Ming Lam." "OK."

"You up for this?"

"Hell yeah. Another boat house?"

"No, he lives with his wife."

"Down here?"

"One fifty-five Bowery."

"With his wife? How old?"

"Seventy-six."

"Oh, forget it." Fenton suddenly blushing with projected failure. "Those old dudes never talk."

"That's because they never had someone like you ask them to before." Yolonda going eyes into eyes with the kid, Fenton blushing all over again. "Don't be so negative all the time."

As they came back out on East Broadway, Quality of Life was parked right in front of the building, misery lights revolving, a beat-up. Toyota with tinted windows pulled over and waiting a few car lengths ahead.

Matty leaned into the front passenger window as Lugo ran the Toyota's plates on the dashboard-mounted computer.

"C'mon, fucking thing." Scharf whacking it as they waited for the information to kick back.

"So how much dope you take off the street tonight?" Matty asked.

"About six hours' worth?" Geohagan said drily.

A blowup of Billy Marcus's driver's license photo was taped over the glove compartment.

"Hair nor hide?"

"You'll be first to know," Lugo said.

Thinking the kid needed some fortification before the next interview, they grabbed a table in the Grand Street kosher pizzeria around the corner from Ming Lam's apartment and ordered a few slices.

The place was large and near empty at this hour, a sea of indoor picnic tables, just one other party across the room, a heavy, gray-bearded Orthodox in shirtsleeves sitting with a younger man in an elegant three-piece suit, this second guy tanned and groomed as if for a press conference.

Yolonda leaned into the table, whispered to Fenton, "That guy there? He wiggles his fingers, five people die in Oklahoma."

"He looks it."

"Not him. The fat one."

The pizza came, three slices floating in a clear orange fluid.

"You want to hear something?" Matty's turn to whisper. "I'd been trying to get a place down here for years, right? You know the Dubinsky Co-ops down the block? Three-year waiting list. I was like fifty names from the top. Not that I could ever afford it, but anyways, the reb over there, two years ago his son gets picked up in a john sweep on Allen. They bring him in, and I know him from the neighborhood, know he's got a wife, three kids, the wife's sick. Anyways, they haul everybody into the Eighth for processing, I see him in cuffs, looks like he's going to kill himself. My guy in Vice is there, owes me a favor, make a long story short, he lets me cull the herd a little, hustle him out the back door, say, sin no more."

" 'Sin no more,' " Yolonda clucked.

"Sin no more. My good deed for the night, right? The next morning, I get called down to the captain's office, I'm thinking, 'What did I do now?' Go in there, the old man, the rabbi? He's sitting with the captain plus, plus, Deputy Inspector Berkowitz from 1PP. I go in, both the cap and the DI give me this look, then just leave the office. The rabbi stays, offers me a seat, says, 'I hear you've been looking for an apartment.' I say, 'How'd you hear that?' The guy shrugs, I remember then who he is down here, say, 'Well, yeah, in fact I'm on the waiting list for Dubinsky.' He says, 'Interestingly enough, a couple of sunbirds in there, they decided they're getting a little too old for all the back-and-forth to Florida, and they're looking for a responsible year-round subletter for up here. Very reasonable rent too.'... A week later I'm standing on my new terrace, corner view, can see all three bridges, got three and a half rooms behind me, fourteen hundred a month."