Lush Life (29 page)

"You hear that?" Yolonda said. "I follow that guy's kid around every day hoping he screws up again so I can save his ass and move out of the fucking Bronx."

"The thing is, the guy never once mentioned his son to me, what happened. Just, 'I hear you've been looking.' "

"This is all from being a rabbi?"

"This is all from saying vote for so-and-so and fifteen thousand people down here do it."

"Of course Matty has to keep the guy's kid out of trouble as long as he lives there, but . . ."

"A mere bag o' shells," Matty said, then, opening his cell, "Hello?"

"Detective Clark?"

"Speaking."

There was a moment's hesitation, Matty thinking it might be *Marcus's wife but waiting.

"Yeah, hey, this is Minette Davidson?" as if she wasn't sure.

"Minette." Thrown for a second by the last name.

Yolonda recognized the voice before he did, giving him the eye as she used a napkin to blot up some of the grease on her second slice.

"Billy Marcus's wife?" Minette said.

"Of course. Sorry, hey."

He could hear the drone of a voice over a PA in the background: airport or hospital.

"Hey. Is anything . . ." She trailed off.

"We're interviewing possible wits, witnesses, as we speak, but . . ."

Fenton got up for a third slice, sauntering past the rabbi, studying him.

"And nothing on Billy?"

"He hasn't contacted me. They're out there looking, though."

Another amplified drone in the background, someone being paged.

"Minette, where are you."

"Where?"

Another voice, in the room with her this time, tentatively calling out for a Miguel Pinto as if reading the name off someone else's handwriting.

"Are you in a hospital?"

"Yeah, no, it's nothing."

"What's nothing. Are you OK?"

"Me? Yeah." Then, muffling the receiver and calling out, "Excuse me, miss?" Coming back to him. "I have to go." And hanging up. Fenton came back with his slice. 'Your girlfriend?" Yolonda asked wide-eyed. "She called from some hospital." "Is she all right?" Yolonda asked flatly. "I have no idea."

Matty hit Received Calls, got back Restricted. "Shit."

"Didn't you take her number in the office?" "I left it there."

"Maybe you should run back and get it," she said straight-faced.

Then his phone died altogether.

"So, what hospital is she in?"

"I just told you. I have no idea."

"Is she all right?"

"I just said, I don't know."

"So, what hospital is she in?"

"Why are you fucking with me?"

"Me?"

Fenton dug into his third slice.

The rabbi got to his feet, wiped his lips, shook hands with his dining partner, then walked towards the door, squeezing Matty's shoulder without looking at him as he passed the table. "Rabbi," Matty said.

Fenton tilted into the aisle to track him out onto Grand Street. "Yeah, we got guys like him down in Chinatown," he said, straightening up. "But I was in Brooklyn North until six months ago, so I don't really know them yet."

"Make it your business," Yolonda said. "Jesus." Matty glared at his dead phone.

As it turned out, Ming Lam did speak English, not that it mattered much given that the first half of the interview took place on the street through an intercom, the old man needing twenty minutes of coaxing before he would even let them up.

He lived in one and a half rooms with his wife, the half tub in the kitchen covered with a wooden board to double as a dining table.

Again Matty and Yolonda stepped off to let Fenton do the talking, Ming Lam's wife, a small woman the exact size and shape of her husband, reluctantly offering them seats on a bedsheet-covered couch half-piled with Chinese newspapers.

They could tell right away that Fenton wasn't going to get anywhere with this guy despite the old man's obvious pleasure at seeing a Chinese kid in uniform.

"You have to help us."

"Oh yeah?" Ming Lam said. They were standing toe-to-toe in the middle of the small room. "And when you catch him, what are you do, cut off his hands? Give him a beating? No. He'll be out on the street next day. Then he come after me."

"No, he won't. Not if you help us put him away. If you don't help us? Then, yes, maybe he comes after you again. You give off that kind of vibration to these guys."

Matty knew that he and Yolonda were making it harder on the kid just by being there.

"You never put them away. I got rob twelve times, told the police about the first three, then gave up on you. You arrest one guy for one day, and then he out here again, and I had to hide because he knew it was me told the police."

"Well, now it's different."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. Now you have me."

"What the big deal about you?"

"That last guy that robbed you? I know he's still watching you, thinking about doing you again. But you know what? I'm watching you too. You were on Essex Street yesterday, right? Right?" The kid winging it. "I saw you but you didn't see me, did you. And you didn't see him. I already look out for you. And I promise, I will put this guy away if you help me."

"No. He'll come out next day and kill me."

"You know what?" Fenton said, starting to sputter. "If you don't help me get him off the street, maybe he will kill you. Or your wife. Or your children. How are you gonna feel, I'm saying to you help me and you didn't, and then he goes and hurts someone in your family, huh?" "No."

Feeling bad for the kid, Matty sat up to pitch in, but Yolonda touched his arm and he settled back.

"Look, we can subpeona you, make you help us. Do you want that?"

"I'm not scared of you."

"All we're talking about is looking at some pictures, maybe a lineup, no lawyers, no court."

"No."

Fenton turned to Matty and Yolonda on the couch, flashing them quick I-told-you-so eyes.

"But you know what?" The old guy's voice turned Fenton back around. "This," patting his chest, his uniform, then smiling, "makes me happy."

Matty sat there on the musty couch; we are fucked.

On the way down the stairs Matty put his arm around Fenton's shoulder. "Can I tell you something in confidence?" walking him out of Yolonda's hearing range even though he knew she knew what he was about to say. "You know that story I told you about saving the rabbi's son from an arrest that night? It was bullshit. I always knew about that guy and his thing for pross, everybody did, and my connect in Vice knew to give me a heads-up if he ever got collared, you know why? Because I also knew that if I ever had the opportunity to save his bacon, his old man would probably swing something to get me into the Dubinskys." Matty stopped walking and reared back to see how the kid was taking the story. "It's a nightmare down here, real estate."

Matty had told him the truth as sort of a consolation prize for the old guy shaming him up there, but Fenton Ma was still obviously burning and hadn't heard a word.

It had rained hard for a few hours earlier in the day, and on this, the fourth night since the murder, the shrine felt all wrong, sodden and charred, sardonic and vaguely threatening; as if to say, this is what time does, what becomes of us mere hours after the tears and flowers. Someone had repositioned the teddy bear so that it now appeared to be buggering the stuffed eagle, the other plush animals lay on their sides like drowned rats, the coin offerings set before Lazarus and Saint Barbara had been all swiped, the incense reduced to spoorlike heaps and coils of ash. The tubular-steel mobile that formerly hung from a homemade flagpole had been scavenged and was now reduced to a single rod jammed into a gap in a pulled-down riot gate and acted as a divider between the shrine and a mound of garbage bags in front of the neighboring Sana a Deli. The only leaving that seemed untainted was a white T-shirt emblazoned with the Hells Angels logo, crisply folded and placed on the ground like a cold offer of revenge.

Of all the images and messages taped to the overlooking tenement exterior, only Ike's last words, not tonight my man, seemed untouched by graffiti and the elements, as bold and untattered as if they had been carved into the wall.

Not Tonight My Man . . . Every fifth or sixth person passing by took the time to read the words, some silently; you could track their, eyes scanning the print, some whispering it, others saying it aloud and shaking their heads, twisting their lips, smirking in marvel, What a dope. Some even saying it directly to Eric, standing at the edge of the shrine: Am I right or am I right?

They told him other stuff too; who did the deed: the Albanian Mafia, the Ghost Shadows, Rikers-based Five Percenters, Brooklyn
-
based jihadists, the po-po's, the government; and why: as payback for fucking a Latin King's queen, to keep him from telling what he knew about Cheney and the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, the Klan, to keep him from blowing the whistle on Sputnik and Skeezix, two Alphabet City detectives who had burned him in a drug deal; all these inside tipsters aimlessly jumpy, skittery-eyed, addressing Eric specifically because even though he could barely follow anything being said to him, he didn't move away from them, he looked like he was paying attention, like he genuinely wanted to know.

Not tonight my man . . .

He was filled with a livid despair when he heard the drawled recitations of Ike's last words, the jokes about verbal suicide, suicide by mouth, suicide by beer; in a white rage that he had to be immersed in this study, he didn't ask for this; this was thrust upon him by that naive jerk who decided to go out on a punch line that Eric would have laughed at if it hadn't so violently thrown him up against himself; hadn't turned his life inside out.

After all was said and done, he didn't really know why he wasn't at least going through the motions of helping out, if for no other reason than to get everybody off his back . . . But he did know this: the guy was dead and it wouldn't help bring him back or get him justice if Eric didn't see any faces or overhear any telling talk. And he knew this: after the shooters broke him in half that night, those bastards in the interview room had finished the job, removing every shred of innocence or inspiration or optimism that still clung to him after all these years, extracting whatever was left in him of hope or illusion, whatever amorphous yearning had managed to remain in him to shine, to he something; he'd been hanging on by his fingernails at best anyway, and now, and now, he was just saying No. He just didn't want to go along to get along anymore. He didn't want to break anymore. He'd picked maybe the worst thing to say No to, but there you are.

"Coward."

Eric looked up to see a middle-aged, blurry-faced man standing directly across the perimeter of streetlight from him.

"Fucking coward."

It was Ike's father, who else could it be; standing there crook
-
necked staring into the shrine pile as if it were a campfire. Entranced, Eric started to walk to him; to explain, to plead his case.

"Fucking cunt."

And then he stopped, backed away; the guy was oblivious to Erics presence, was addressing himself.

A stork-thin nutter in a homemade burnoose came out of the shadows race-walking a shopping cart past the shrine. "Not tonight, my man. Yes tonight, you dumb motherfucker, slip a the lip sink a ship, well it's too late now." Nearly mowing Eric down.

With the dark, skinny mixologist from the No Name having done it to him again last night, weeping all the way through sex but with the added bonus of wailing through hiccuping sobs afterwards, "It's nothing personal, it's not you," Matty was the first one in the squad room Sunday morning, the peal of competing church bells-Spanish Catholic from Pitt, black Episcopalian from Henry-agitating the dust motes drifting above the sea of vacant cluttered desks. He sat in the stillness, his hands clasped in front of him, looking down at the front page of that day's Post. The photo beneath the banner was of Steven Boulware, looking somewhat pounded on, solemnly leaving a floral arrangement in front of the increasingly ratty-looking makeshift shrine on Eldridge Street, the caption, Remembering a friend after a brush with death.

But the headline itself was given over to a Sanitation Department scandal, the Marcus homicide pushed back to page five and basically saying nothing.

Let it die; five days after the murder, and Matty had zip: no leads and no real manpower save for Yolonda, Iacone, and Mullins, but Yolonda mainly, because she owed him for hanging in on one of her own hopeless let-it-die homicides a year before.

Two days more until the seventh-day recanvass, but it already felt to him like a last hurrah. In fact, given the albatross vibes he'd been getting from 1PP, he had a growing suspicion that it might not even come to pass.

Ignoring the mountain range of paperwork on his desk, he pulled out his local-perp stack and began reviewing the ones that were sent out as Want Cards, reassessing those that he had previously thought didn't fit the bill.