Lush Life (5 page)

He was a shovel-jawed, sandy-haired Irisher with the physique of an aging high school fullback, slope-shouldered and dense, his low center of gravity, despite his heaviness, making him appear to glide rather than walk. When he was asked a question, his eyes, already narrow, would screw down into slits and his lips disappear altogether as if speaking or maybe just thinking was painful. This gave the impression to some of his being slow, to others of being a sullen fumer; he was neither, although he could definitely live without ever feeling the need to verbalize the majority of his thoughts.

There wasn't a single evening in his time at the No Name when he hadn't been the oldest human in the room; the baby-faced bartender
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proprietor, Josh, like a twelve-year-old in dress-up, sporting garter sleeves and suspendered pants, hair bowl-cut and pomade-parted, but as earnest as a Kinsey researcher, every drink chin-pondered before acted upon, advising his equally young patrons, "Tonight we're featuring . . . ," the entire rail-thin establishment smelling like the tea candles that were its sole source of illumination, smelling like specialness . . .

Although the clientele were primarily the Eloi of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, an incident a month earlier had involved a platinumed-out crew of Bronx Morlocks: some words tossed around about coming back and lighting the place up, immediately after which a meet had been arranged through an ex-cop intermediary between the owner and Matty, and his off-the-books job for the last few weeks had been to sit quietly in the candlelit shadows, cultivate a taste for scratchy Edith Piaf recordings, not hit on any of the silky-looking mixologists, and not get too smashed in case something did actually jump off. It was a perfectly cushy gig, especially for someone who, at forty-four, still saw closing his eyes at night as a punishment, who liked the feel of unreported cash in his hand as much as any cop, and who enjoyed watching the making of drinks last seen, he imagined, at the Stork Club.

And now the gig was over, his only consolation on this last night the inadvertent violation of the hands-off-the-mixologists rule; inadvertent as in, she started; a new hire, tall, dark, and moody like a long twist of smoke, eyeing him all evening, slipping him samplers across the bar when the Baby King wasn't looking, then giving him the high sign on her 3:00 a. M. break; Matty following her out through the rear loading entrance into the hidden tenement-ringed courtyard. After he passed on her offered joint and watched her take a few hits, she just hopped on up, her arms around his neck, her legs locked over his hips, and he commenced, more for traction and for relief on his lower back than out of passion, whamming her against the brick wall. She had to be fifteen years younger than him, but he couldn't even relax enough to appreciate it, to go exploring, it was all about the hop up, the hoisting, the whamming, until alarmingly, she started weeping, at which point he started whamming her more tenderly, at which point she dried up on the spot: "What are you doing?"

"Sorry," going back to hard whamming like moving a credenza: Over here, lady? Like this, lady? The sex had been unnerving, not exactly fun, but still, it was sex. Besides, she seemed happy again, back to weeping. So.

Regarding the call from Night Watch . . .

He could let them handle the investigation until his tour began at eight or jump in now; Matty deciding to jump because the bar was so close to the crime scene he could see the fluttering yellow tape from where he stood. What would be the point of going home for only a few hours' sleep?

Besides, his sons had come down for a few days to stay with him and he didn't particularly like them.

There were two: the one he always thought of as the Big One, a jerk of a small-town cop in upstate Lake George, where his ex-wife had moved after the divorce, and the younger one, whom he naturally thought of as the Other One, a mute teen who had still been in diapers when they broke up.

He was at best an indifferent parent but didn't know what to do about it; and the boys themselves were pretty conditioned to think of him as a distant relative down in New York City, some guy obliged by blood to let them crash now and then.

Additionally, about a month earlier, his ex-wife had called to tell him that she was pretty sure the Other One was dealing weed at his high school. Matty's response was to call the Big One at his upstate precinct house; who said, Til take care of it," a little too quickly, Matty knowing then that they were in it together, and letting it be.

Better to keep working . . .

When he made it to the scene at 4:35, twenty minutes after the call, it was still dark, although the first bird of the day could be heard chittering in a low tree somewhere close, and the ancient tenement rooftops of Eldridge Street were beginning to outline themselves against the sky.

Directly beneath the streetlight in front of the building, a yellow plastic evidence cone was next to a spent shell, Matty guessing a .22 or .25, but the two bodies were gone: one whisked away by an ambulance, leaving an almost acrylic-bright runnel of blood worming its way to the curb; the other now upright and puking over the siding of a stoop a few doors south, his eyelids askew with liquor. A uniform stood babysitting discreetly downwind, smoking a cigarette.

Matty preferred his outdoor crimes to come about in the wee hours, the eerie repose of the street allowing for a deeper dialogue with the scene; and so he now pondered the shell casing, .22 or 25, thinking, Amateurs, 4:00 a. M. the desperado hour, the shooter or shooters young, probably junkies looking for a few bucks, didn't mean to use that piece of shit, now they'll hole up for a little, look at each other, "Oh, man, did we just . . . ," shrug it off, get high, then come back out for more, Matty telling himself, Look at who just got out, talk to Parole, to Housing, hit the dope spots, the dealers.

Nazir, one of the two Yemenis who worked the twenty-four-hour mini-mart, was back inside his store, sitting glumly behind his just
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cracked front-window display of hangover-themed pharmaceuticals, the rarely used riot gate pulled down over the narrow door, Matty assumed, at the request of the cops.

He counted six uniforms, four sweatshirts, but no sport jackets.

Then Bobby Oh, the Night Watch supervisor who had called him, came out of the vestibule of 27 Eldridge.

"It's just you?" Matty asked, shaking his hand.

"I'm stretched like piano wire tonight," Bobby said. He was a short, trim middle-aged Korean with an all-business manner and hectic eyes. "We had a bar shooting in Inwood, a rape in Tudor City, a hit-and-run in Chelsea . . ."

"... a Scout troop short a child, Khrushchev's due at Idlewild . . ."

". . . and a cop beaned with a marble up in Harlem."

"With a what?" Matty began scanning the street for surveillance cameras.

"Guy was a lieutenant." Bobby shrugged.

"So what's the story," pulling a steno pad from the inside of his jacket.

"Story is . . ." Bobby flipped open his own pad. "Three white males, after a couple of hours barhopping, last stop Cafe Berkmann on Rivington and Norfolk, walking from that location west on Rivington, then south on Eldridge, are accosted by two males, black and/or Hispanic in front of Twenty-seven here, one of whom produces a gun, says, 'I want all of it.' One guy, our witness, Eric Cash, hands over his wallet, then steps off. The second guy, Steven Boulware"-Bobby pen-pointed to the puker hugging himself on the stoop-"is so boxed, his response is to take a little power nap on the sidewalk. But the third guy, Isaac Marcus? He responds by stepping to the gunman, saying, quote, 'Not tonight, my man.' "

" 'Not tonight, my man,' " Matty marveled, shaking his head.

"Suicide by mouth. In any event, one shot," pen-pointing to the shell casing by the yellow cone. "Home run to the heart, the shooter and his partner book east on Delancey."

East on Delancey: Matty glancing towards the two possibilities, the multiple projects there or the subways, the Lower East Side too isolated, too Byzantine, for anybody other than local kids from the PJs or Brooklyn rollers taking advantage of the hop-on, hop-off BMT.

"Quality of Life shows up five minutes later, a bus from Gouverneur a minute after that, Marcus is pronounced on arrival, I talked to the doc myself."

"Got a name?" Matty head down, writing every word.

Bobby consulted his notes. "Prahash. Samram Prahash."

"Nine-eleven calls?'" "Nope."

Matty continued to scan the street for security cameras, didn't think he'd find any, eyed the tenement windows, wondering how much of a canvass, if any, he could manage before the squad came in at eight. Despite the limbo hour, the block was alive with an intersection of two parties: the last of the young kids still on their way home from the lounges and music bars just like the homicide and his friends; and the pre-land-rush old-timers, the Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Bangladeshi just starting their day, either leaning out those weathered stone windowsills or going off to work.

Many of the homebound kids lingered behind the tape, but the crime scene barely seemed to register on the ethnics, especially the undocumenteds, heading off for the market terminals, restaurants, and sweatshops around town.

The sky continued to almost imperceptibly lighten, the birds coming on in earnest now, dozens of them barreling low from tree to tree over the crime scene as if they were stringing beads.

Matty nodded towards Nazir in his quarantined shop, the guy smacking himself with frustration, both the kids ending their day and the workers starting theirs usually coming in for his bathwater coffee and a roll about now.

"Anybody talk to my man Naz?"

"The Arab? Yeah, me. Didn't see or hear shit."

Matty then gestured to the slack-lipped drunk on the stoop. "Boulware, you said, right? Why is he still here?"

"The EMTs said he's just intox."

"No, I mean why isn't he at the house?"

"We tried to get him over there, he threw up all over the back of two patrol cars, so I figured keep him around, flood him with coffee, see if he has something to say."

"And?"

"He's still so zotzed he's going to need a past-life regression therapist just to remember his name."

"Then I don't want him here. Can we get somebody to walk him over? Its only a few blocks. Maybe it'll clear his head. And the talker?"

"Cash? Around the corner in a squad car. I figured maybe you'd want to have him walk you through it, so . . ."

Night Watch tended to go light on the interviewing, not wanting to back somebody into a corner an hour before the local squad clocked in, handing over either a witness or a suspect already lawyered up before they could even get a crack at him.

Matty had made that mistake the first time he volunteered for the constantly revolving night pool, being too aggressive with a likely shooter, and the stony looks he got from the locals as he handed over a perp already with representation stayed with him for weeks.

"CSU coming?"

"About an hour out."

"Who else you call?"

"You, the bureau captain."

"Chief of Ds?"

"That's your call."

Matty checked the time, almost five. The chief of detectives got a daily 6:00 a. M. report, Matty wondering if this merited a one-hour
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earlier wake-up call, then thought, white vie, dark-skinned shooter in this Candyland of a neighborhood: a media shitstorm if there ever was one.

"Yeah, have the Wheel call him now." Matty thinking, Cover your ass by covering his, then, "Wait, hold off on that," wanting at least an hour's clear work before everybody began breathing down his neck.

"And of course you had somebody notify the family."

"Gee, I was just about to, then you showed up."

It wasn't Oh's job, but . . .

A tap on the shoulder turned him to face a deliveryman, cigarette dangling, his arms filled with long brown bags of rolls and bagels.

Nazir slapped his broken window, extended his arms as if the guy were holding his children.

"May I?" The man obese, bearded, and bored, the smoke stream from the corner of his mouth curling directly into his eye.

Matty signaled for a uniform to let the guy make his delivery. "Then I want that gate down again."

Just as he was about to make some calls, wake a few of his own squad, two sedans rolled up, more Night Watch, down from Harlem, from Inwood.

"S'up, boss?" addressing Bobby.

"Matty?" Bobby deferring to the local.

He was being offered four, two men, two women, three of them Hispanic, which was lucky given where they found themselves. "OK, canvass," waving at the tenements, seeing now that some of the doors to the street were slightly ajar, probably jimmied that way permanently, a sign of Fujianese overcrowding, dozens of men crammed together in the same apartment, needing to come and go at all hours. "You know, as much as realistic. I don't think there's any street-facing security cameras around here, but maybe the subway cameras caught them if they booked to Brooklyn. The nearest station is Delancey and Chrystie, talk to the porters, the token clerk, you know the drill," then to Bobby, "Where's this other guy again?"

Matty stood hunched over, a hand on the roof of the patrol car in order to be on eye level with the victim/witness sitting motionless in the backseat.