Lush Life (60 page)

"-and kid like that. The sister, the girl." "Nina," Billy said as if ashamed.

"Did you ever find out what's under those bandages? Or would you rather not know."

His knees running like pistons, Billy drained his third glass as if he were late for something but made no move to rise. Matty's cell rang again. "Now what."

"Excuse me?" Yolonda said. "Sorry, I thought . . ." "We got a body in the Cahans." "In the Cahans?"

"I just said that." Then, "You sound like you're chewing glass." "Like what?"

"Are you too shitfaced for this?"

"No, I'm good."

"Yeah?"

"I'll be right there. Where in the Cahans?" "I'll pick you up," she said. "I'm on Clinton and Delancey."

"Which means you're in Chinaman's. What the fuck, it's not even dark yet."

"Clinton and Delancey."

Matty hung up then struggled to his feet.

"Where are you going?" Billy asked.

"Christ, I'm blind off my ass."

"Can I help?"

"You're done with helping." Matty widened his eyes to get air around the sockets. "Go home."

"I just need to go back-"

"To where, the hotel? Why. What's there."

Billy stared at him.

"Billy"-Matty laid a hand on his knee-"your son's not down here anymore. Go home."

In the darkened room Billy's eyes seemed to glow then dim, as he sank into what Matty hoped was acceptance, although he continued to sit there as Matty weaved his way through the empty tables then out the side door to his next customer.

By the time they made it to the Cahans there was already a shrine going, a cardboard humble, two open grocery cartons laid on their sides to make a shelter for the half-dozen botanica candles placed inside. A few cellophane-stapled bunches of flowers lay on the sidewalk. Iacone and a new kid, Margolies, a white shield fresh from Anti-Crime, were already interviewing potential witnesses.

The heart-shot body starfished on the pavement in front of a projects bench was a Cahan kid, Ray-Ray Rivera, wearing an oversize white T and shin-length shorts, his belly a sizable mound even beneath his tentlike shirt.

There were two separate clusters of weeping people standing at opposite ends of the crime-scene tape; one, a group of teenage girls, the other made up of old people, again women mostly, surrounding a short, stocky white-haired man in a guayabera whose reddened face was clenched with grief.

There were no boys or men even close in age to the victim.

Crime Scenes hadn't shown up yet.

"His friends suck," Iacone said.

"Where are they?"

"Exactly"

"But they were here?"

"Apparently. Well, find 'em. Where the hell they gonna go?"

"How about them," Yolonda nodding to the girls. "You talk to them?"

"I thought I'd leave that to you."

"Any cameras?" Matty asked, squinting at the small strip of stores across the street.

"None working," lacono said.

Yolonda studied the group of seniors, keyed in on the weeping man in the middle. "Oh shit, I know that guy. He's got the candy store around the corner, been running bolita in there since I was little. What's, why's he here?"

"It's his grandson."

"You're kidding me, his grandson? His son got shot too. Oh my God, Matty, you remember five years ago on Sherrif Street? Angel Minoso? Jesus. This guy's been running numbers for forty years around here without a scratch. His grandson now?"

"Does he know anything?" Matty asked.

"I don't think so," lacono said, "they came and got him when it happened."

Yolonda stepped toward the body. "Those girls there?" addressing the new guy, "get them corralled and down to the house."

"I talked to a few already," he said.

"Yeah?" slipping on her gloves. "And?"

"Nobody saw nothing. They heard something about a black guy from Brooklyn. But apparently nobody knew him."

"No? Then how did they know he was from Brooklyn?"

"That's what I said."

"Yeah? And?"

He looked at her then back at the girls, two of whom were already wandering off.

"Down to the house."

She watched him approach the girls with his arms out as if to scoop up strays.

"Who is that again?" she asked Matty.

"Something Margolies." Matty shrugged. "We should check the notes in those boxes there too."

"Well, not in front of people," Yolonda said.

"I didn't mean right now," Matty snapped, slightly insulted, then went off, thinking about the difference between Raymond Rivera's shrine and the one for Ike Marcus.

He'd go to his grave swearing that he cared equally about his victims, that if there was anything that got him more pumped over one than the other it wasn't race or class but innocence. He cared equally, well, maybe some more equally than others, but even if he was selling himself a bunch of wolf tickets with that one, Yolonda here was the great leveler, because this was where she came from, where she felt the need to shine, and where she found it easiest to locate that shred of genuine pity that made her so effective in the box.

Looking up, he saw a kid in a marshmallow T and stubbled haircut similar to the vie, peeking from around the corner of a Chinese restaurant across the street to see what was happening. Matty pointed a finger at him, Stay right there, but the kid took off anyhow. Matty started out after him then stopped. Like lacono said, where s he going to go.

When he turned back to Yolonda, she was inside the yellow, dropped to one knee alongside the body, staring at it vaguely perplexed, as though she could revive him if she could only remember how.

"You want to hear something?" she said. "I knew this kid too. Not like to say hello to, but he lived in my grandmother's building. I used to see him in the elevator."

"Oh yeah? Good kid?"

"I think he dealt a little weed, but he wasn't bad."

Still on one knee, she scanned the greasy-bricked Cahans like a tracker, a hand over her mouth.

"So his friends suck, huh?" she said drily. "We'll see about that."

And then she looked up at Matty with that look.

My turn.

Chapter
Nine.

SHE'LL BE APPLES

The ground floor of the Stiener Rialto hotel in Atlantic City had no end to it. It took five minutes for him to get from the front doors to the cordoned-off construction site, the indoor New York theme park going up on the perimeter of the casino floor. Separated only by a spattered sheet of plastic from a red and gold acre of slots, it seemed to him, big surprise, that the constant shriek of band saws and groan of cement mixers did nothing to shake the concentration of the players sitting there moon-eyed, clutching milk-shake cups filled with silver.

The Berkmann's sign was up already, but the restaurant, half the size of the original, was still a work in progress, all hammer bang and power whine.

Twenty feet away, trompe 1'oeil tenement scrims were being hoisted into place and nail-gunned into their wooden braces; some windows adorned with cats or aspidistras, others with fat-armed Molly Goldbergs, their elbows propped on pillows.

Around the bend from Yidville was the hotel's Times Square Land, all neon girlie-show signs, kung-fu-movie marquees, and a functioning Automat.

And around the bend from that was Punktown, one long poster
-
plastered, graffitied mock-up of St. Marks Place circa 1977, tattoo parlors, vinyl-record shops, and a rock club/restaurant, BCBG's.

As far as Eric was concerned, Harry Steele was attempting to ship him off to hell.

Then he saw a face he thought he knew, Sarah Bowen, she of the seven dwarfs, arguing with a guy in an expensive suit and a hard hat outside a nearly completed reconstruction of the Gem Spa on St. Mark's Place and Second Avenue.

Eric waited until they walked away from each other before going up to her.

At first she couldn't place him either; it was the surroundings, at least that's what she told him and what he chose to believe.

She had just landed the job of hostess at BCBG's.

"That asshole wants me to wear safety pins through everything as part of my getup, can you believe that? The last time I wore a safety pin 1 was in a diaper."

"Me, I think I'm supposed to be wearing a derby and arm garters."

They took it out on the boardwalk, where the gulls ate cigarette butts, twenty-four-hour gamblers staggered around like sunstruck vampires, and the sand resembled kitty litter.

"I figure it this way," she said. "I'll be making more here, saving more here, two maybe three years from now I'll finally have enough to go back to Ottawa and open that massage parlor."

"There you go." Eric felt himself relaxing.

"So when are you moving down?" offering him a cigarette.

"I don't know if I am."

She gave him a long speculative look, then returned her gaze to the waves. "You better."

"Yeah?"

She shrugged, continued to look out at the water.

"Do you remember me and you one time about a year, year and a half ago?" he asked.

"I'm lucky if I remember my name from back then," grazing her chin with a long nail.

"Thanks. Thank you."

"But, yeah, I do." Then, "It wasn't a very good year for me. Do you ever have years like that?"

"No." Eric finally took one of her cigarettes. "I've been blessed."

"So I hear," she said, smiling in sympathy as she lit him up, her hands cupping his against the breeze. "You know, just because you earn here doesn't mean you have to live here. Me and a few other refugees rented a house three towns over, big old Victorian, backs up on a preserve. There's a bedroom available. You want it?"

"Refugees from what. The city?"

"From some city or other. New York, Philadelphia, or wherever. We're all pretty much in the same boat, down here hosting or managing something, no drifters, killers in the rain, or whatever . . . So, I'm thinking, if this Filthy McNasty's, CBGB, BCGB thing doesn't work out, maybe we can all get a sitcom out of it or a reality show or something."

"You were with Ike that night?" Eric catching himself by surprise with his own question.

"Yeah," she said carefully.

"What was that like."

"Excuse me?"

"Who died with me. Who was I with."

"Honestly?" she said. "I didn't even know his name until the cops came and talked to me."

Eric waited.

"I don't know ... I was stoned, but ... He was pretty enthusiastic, you know? Like a big puppy. But very sweet. And very flattering."

"Huh," wanting more.

"So, that bedroom, do you want it?"

Eric looked out on the water. How the hell could a major ocean, one of the biggest we have, he thought, look like it needed a garbage pickup; look like a flooded back alley off East Broadway.

Going once . . .

"Flattering," Eric said. "What did you mean when you said he was very flattering."

"Ike? Like, like he couldn't believe he was actually making it with me. Like it was the luckiest night of his life."

"Oh." Eric exhaled.

"Going twice . . ."

"Hold it. Jesus, just . . ."

"Going . . ."

"OK, OK." He took a last drag then flicked his butt into the sand beneath the boardwalk. Tm in."

He hated Port Authority; fifteen years ago, when he was a uniform assigned to Midtown North, its gliding predator/prey vibration had always made him feel like he was underwater.

But before that, for the three semesters that he lasted in college, he was in and out of this place a dozen times a year, back and forth between his home in the Bronx and SUNY Cortland upstate.

Getting off the bus back then meant holiday, meant reunion, meant family; the younger Matty too full of his own sensations to see the place as it was; to see himself in it through the eyes of the carnivores around him.

And as he sat here now, waiting for the bus to arrive from Lake George, he wondered if the Other One would experience this place in that same way, coming in here, that surge in the chest triggered by the hydraulic hiss of bus doors released, that wide-open readiness for whatever was to happen next.

As the kid's bus, originating in Montreal, rolled into its bay, Matty stood with a few others directly inside the receiving doors, his eyes on the silhouettes of the disembarking passengers backlit by the subterranean garage lighting.

No Eddie.

His first thought was that the kid hopped off somewhere in between Lake George and New York, a little escape artist, scam artist. Drug boy.

He didn't have the kid's cell number so he called his ex and got a recording. "Where is he, Lindsay? I'm standing here like an asshole at an empty bus. Call me."