Lush Life (31 page)

"Is this a bad projects?" Billy said lightly, his chest laboring.

"Not too," Yolonda said.

"Hey." Matty stared at him.

"I understand."

As Matty transcribed Billy's description into his own notebook, Yolonda turned to the backseat again.

"You know why this isn't too bad a place? The kids are so close to all walks of life around here, you know? Most projects are kind of like, that's all they know, but you go two blocks in any direction from here, you got Wall Street, Chinatown, the Lower East Side, they're like release valves, you know? They give you the confidence to mix it up in the world-"

"And jux everybody in sight," Iacone murmured.

"You're so cynical, I swear to God," Yolonda said. "J was a projects kid, I didn't jux anybody." Then, to Billy again: "I hate that, people say projects kid, projects girl, like everybody's got your number."

"Ready?" Matty said to her.

Once outside, Yolonda circled around to Jimmy Iacone's window, gestured for him to roll it down, and whispered in his ear, "Fuck yourself, you fat homeless guinea prick."

The Clara E. Lemlich Houses were a grubby sprawl of fifty-year
-
old high-rises sandwiched between two centuries. To the west, the fourteen-story buildings were towered over by One Police Plaza and Verizon headquarters, massive futuristic structures without any distinguishing features other than their blind climbing endlessness; and to the east, the buildings in turn towered over the Civil War-era brick walk-ups of Madison Street.

As Matty and Yolonda entered the grounds on this dead gray Sunday heading for 22 Oliver, many of the young men hanging out in front of the buildings in their path wandered off flat-faced at their approach, then casually regrouped behind them once they had passed.

"The Nature Channel," Matty muttered.

"What's your problem, today?"

"He's fucking lying."

"Who is?"

"Marcus. He didn't call home."

"So he didn't call home. What are you, his mother?"

Matty walked in silence, trying to work it out. "Last week I promised him we'd make it right, and now it's all going south so fast . . ."

"So you take it out on him?"

"When did you ever hear me make a promise like that. Who with more than two minutes on this fucking job ever makes a promise like that."

"So you take it out on him?"

"You should have seen them in there, Yoli. Like fucking roaches with the lights just turned on."

Yolonda took over the spiel, doing Matty flawlessly: " 'I never knew that.' You never told us that.' 'How could you not give him a paraffin test?'And I just had to eat it. Everybody running under the stove and I just had to eat it."

Three kids in hoodies were sitting on the wood-slat bench before the entrance to 22 Oliver, one black, one white, one Latino, like the advance guard of a UN youth brigade, all fixedly staring at the ground with half-mast eyes.

"Hey, how you guys doing?" Yolonda stepped up, Matty always deferring to her on the street. "You see a girl go in maybe an hour ago, light-skinned Latina, fifteen, sixteen, wearing a pink zip-up, a little on the skinny side."

They kept their heads down and grunted, Matty thinking they were probably OK kids given the overdramatic quality of their stonewall.

"No?" Yolonda smiled. "How about you?" Addressing the black kid, three hundred pounds and a Neolithic thrusting brow "No one you know?"

"Nuh-uh," he said, without looking up. He held both Carlito's Way 3 and Danger Mouse: Likely to Die game boxes in his lap.

"That doesn't sound like anybody in the building? Nobody around here?"

All three shook their cowled heads like grieving monks. "She's not in trouble or anything . . ."

A girl came out of the building looking more or less like the one Yolonda had just described.

"Hey, how you doing?" Yolonda stepped in her path. "Listen, who's that girl here looks kind of like you, lives here, maybe visits friends in here, wears a pink velour zip-up. She's not in trouble or anything." "Looks like me?" the girl said slowly. "Yeah, not as pretty maybe . . ."

Yolonda hooked her arm and started walking her towards the car. "Irma, maybe?" the girl drawled. "Irma who?"

"I don't know her name." "Lives in here?" "I don't know. She might." "About how old?"

"Eleventh grade? But I don't really know."

"Who does she live with?"

"I don't know her like that."

"What's your name?"

"Crystal."

Yolonda waited.

"Santos."

They were back on Madison Street.

Yolonda looked to the car. Iacone leaned into Billy, then shook his head no.

"You make your family proud of you, Crystal?" "I don't know."

"Make your family proud, OK?" "Right now?"

"In general. Every day." "OK."

When Yolonda returned to the front of 22 Oliver, the three boys were still scowling and squinting as if in pain, each looking off in a different direction, Matty standing before the bench with his hands clasped behind his back.

"Irma," Yolonda said to Matty, then turning to the three, "Which apartment s Irma s?" The kids looking back at her like she was speaking Urdu.

"They all fucking know," Yolonda muttered. "Call the Housing Wheel."

The Housing Police information line had three Irmas on file for 22 Oliver: Rivera, forty-six; Lozado, eleven; and Nieves, fifteen.

"Give me the fifteen," Matty said, getting the apartment number. "Any history on the door?"

According to the Wheel, no outstanding warrants lived in 8G, no one who would answer the bell and suddenly go all fight-or-flight on them.

The elevator smelled like fried chicken and piss, its walls lined in what looked like dented aluminum foil. It was a crowded ride; an African mother and her three children, the woman in her bright, intricate headwrap roughly straightening their jackets and caps as if fed up with something, and an elderly Chinese couple shrink-wrapped around their shopping cart.

On the dimly lit eighth floor there were raised voices or TV tracks behind at least three doors, but when Matty rang the bell for 8G, as he expected, it all fell silent. He looked to Yolonda, then started banging with the side of his fist. Nothing.

"Fucking drag," she muttered, and started to ring all the doorbells, nothing doing.

As they turned for the elevators, though, 8F cracked a sliver.

"Hey, how are you." Yolonda stepped to the eye peeping out, flashed her tin. "I'm Detective Bello?"

The woman opened the door wider, standing there in a housedress and sweater.

"Let me ask, we're trying to reach the Nieves girl, Irma? Next door? You know her, right? She's not in trouble or anything, could I-"

"Anna!" the woman abruptly bellowed, the door to 8G opening slightly, the woman who stood there stooped over in shapeless stretch pants and an oversize T-shirt, squinting at them, no teeth on the left side of her head.

"tTu eres la abuela de Irma?" Again, Yolonda flashed tin.

The woman immediately went wide-eyed, clapping her hands over her mouth.

"No, no, no, no es nada malo" Yolonda lightly touched her arm. "Ella no tiene ningun problema, solamente tenemos que hablar con ella. Tenemos que preguntarle algo de su amiga."

The old lady sank into herself, eyelids fluttering with relief.

"^Estd ella en la casa?"

"Entra." Widening her door.

The apartment was greasy and narrow, the linoleum sticking to the bottom of their shoes. In the small front room where she left them to get her granddaughter, piles of clothing were everywhere, on the couches, chairs, in open garbage bags on the floor, and spilling over the lips of stacked plastic storage bins. A few magazine tear-outs of Jesus were pushpinned into the otherwise bare walls.

Two little boys wandered in from a room in the back to stare at them.

"What's she doing?" Matty asked. "She's waking the kid up?"

"I think so," Yolonda said.

"If she's still asleep, it's not her." He shrugged, heading for the door.

"Well, hang on." Yolonda touched his arm. "We're here, so . . ."

Matty stared out the lone living room window, the view probably once upon a time bucolic, broad river and the Brooklyn shore, but barely a slap of lead-colored water was visible now through the weave of high-rises and the stone-and-steel expanse of the Manhattan Bridge.

The grandmother came back in and gestured for them to follow.

Irma Nieves's room was small and cramped, three-quarters of it taken up by a triple stack of queen-size mattresses. The girl was sitting slumped on a corner of the unmade bed in pj bottoms and a baby T, her hands palms up in her lap. She was sloe-eyed, which accentuated her midday sleepiness, and slim-pretty save for crocodilian buckteeth and a narrow strip of dark pimples on one side of her face.

Hey, Irma, I'm Detective Bello. We're looking for a girl looks a little like you in this building, maybe just visits here, light-skinned Latina, your age, wears a pink velour tracktop. She's not in any trouble, we just need to talk to her."

The two little boys came flying into the room and leaped up onto the bed, Irma clucking in languid annoyance.

"Looks like me?" she finally said, then seemed to drift off.

"It wouldn't be Crystal Santos, would it?"

"Crystal? Crystal don't look like me."

Yolonda shot a look to Matty: What did I tell you?

The grandmother hovered anxious and uncomprehending in the doorway.

Matty took in the rest of the room: a small dresser topped with jars of baby oil, Vaseline, a half-eaten Big Mac, and a paperback of The Bluest Eye sporting a Seward Park High School sticker; a mirror trimmed with photos of Latino and black teens hanging in an amusement park; and pristine pairs of sneakers parked wherever space permitted. The view out the lone window was nearly abstract, a sky-blotting crosshatch of those monoliths to the west: 1PP and Verizon.

"Somebody's got to look like you around here," Yolonda said. "Maybe not as pretty."

"Tania?" Irma said. "But I don't know."

"Tania lives here?"

"With me?"

"In this building."

"I think so, but I don't know."

The two boys started wrestling. Irma clucked her tongue again, then looked to her grandmother in the doorway to do something, but the woman seemed afraid to step over the threshold.

"What's Tania's last name again?"

"I don't know."

"Where's this, Rye Playland?" Yolonda pointed to the photos around the mirror.

"Yeah, uh-huh."

"Is she on here?"

"No, I don't know her like that." "She's a wild kid, good kid . . ." "Wild?" Then, "I couldn't say." "So this Tania, who else knows her?"

A third little boy came flying into the room, a kitten under each arm.

"Who else knows Tania, Irma?"

"She hangs with this fat boy Damien sometimes?"

"Moreno?"

"Nigger, yeah, uh-huh."

Matty thought of that big kid on the bench.

"What's Damien like?"

"To eat."

"No. As a person."

"Nice, I guess."

"Who else does she run with?"

"This boy, I think his name's True Life?"

"Good kid? Bad kid?"

"I don't know him, but, yeah, he's most definitely from the dark side."

"Moreno?"

"Dominicano. No. Well, like, half?" "Half and half?"

"Looks like it, but I don't know." "Ever locked up?" "I think so." "You know his name?"

Irue Lire. "No, his name." "Not really." "Where's he live?" "I don't know." "How old is he?"

"Like, eighteen? Twenty? But I don't know." "But he's dark side." "Oh yeah."

"Like, what's his thing?" Irma shrugged. "I couldn't say."

"He's got a gun?" "Could."

How about a running buddy? Somebody he likes to jux heads with out there."

Irma shrugged.

"Can you come down to the precinct, look at some photos?" "The make-a-face?" She smiled. "OK." "In about an hour?"

"An hour? I'm supposed to see somebody." "Who."

"My boyfriend. We're going over to my cousin's in Brooklyn." "Can you go to Brooklyn later?" "I don't know."

"I think you can," Matty said. "Come down to us in an hour and get it over with, OK?"

"You hear about that shooting on Eldridge Street last week?" Yolonda asked.

"The white boy got shot?" "You hear anything about that?" "Not really."

"We're looking for some bad people, here," Matty said. "OK."

"You're not in any trouble," Yolonda said. "OK."

Yolonda turned to the grandmother. "Ella no tiene ningun problema." "OK," the grandmother said.