Motherless Brooklyn (18 page)

“Who’s the car for?”

It was the homicide detective. He’d been waiting, staking us out, slumped to one side of the doorway, huddled in his coat against the chilly November night. I made him right away—with his 10
P.M
. Styrofoam cup of coffee, worn tie, ingrown beard, and interrogation eyes, he was unmistakable—but that didn’t mean he had any idea who I was.

“Lady inside,” I said, and tapped him once on the shoulder. “Watch it,” he said, ducking away from my touch.

“Sorry, friend. Can’t help myself.” I turned from him, back into the building.

The elegance of my exit was quickly thwarted, though—Julia was just then galumphing down the stairs with her overstuffed suitcase. I rushed to help her as the door eased slowly shut on its moaning hydraulic hinge. Too slowly: The cop stuck out his foot and held the door open for us.

“Excuse me,” he said with a sly, exhausted authority. “You Julia Minna?”

“I was,” said Julia.

“You were?”

“Yes. Isn’t that funny? I was until just about an hour ago. Lionel, put my bag in the trunk.”

“In a hurry?” the detective asked Julia. I watched the two of them size one another up, as though I weren’t any more a factor than the waiting limo driver.
A few minutes ago
, I wanted to say,
my hands
—Instead I hoisted Julia’s luggage, and waited for her to move past me to the car.

“Sort of,” said Julia. “Plane to catch.”

“Plane to where?” He crushed his empty Styrofoam cup and tossed it over his shoulder, off the stoop, into the neighbor’s bushes. Thy were already decorated with trash.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“She’s going to a
precipice, pleasurepolice, philanthropriest
—”

“Shut up, Lionel.”

The detective looked at me like I was crazy.

My life story to this point:

The teacher looked at me like I was crazy.

The social-services worker looked at me like I was crazy.

The boy looked at me like I was crazy and then hit me.

The girl looked at me like I was crazy.

The woman looked at me like I was crazy.

The black homicide detective looked at me like I was crazy.

“I’m afraid you can’t go, Julia,” said the detective, shaking off his confusion at my utterances with a sigh and a grimace. He’d seen plenty in his day, could cope with a little more before needing to bust my chops over it—that was the feeling I got. “We’re going to want to talk to you about Frank.”

“You’ll have to arrest me,” said Julia.

“Why would you want to say that?” said the detective, pained.

“Just to keep things simple,” said Julia. “Arrest me or I’m getting in the car. Lionel, please.”

I humped the huge, unwieldy suitcase down the stoop and waved at the driver to pop the trunk. Julia followed, the detective close behind. The limo’s speakers were oozing Mariah Carey, the driver still mellow on the headrest. When Julia slid into the backseat, the detective caught the door in his two meaty hands and leaned in over the top.

“Don’t you care who killed your husband, Mrs. Minna?” He was plainly unnerved by Julia’s blitheness.

“Let me know when you find out who killed him,” she said. “Then I’ll tell you if I care.”

I pushed the suitcase in over the top of the spare tire. I briefly considered opening it up and confiscating Julia’s pistol, then realized I probably didn’t want to emerge with a gun in front of the homicide cop. He was liable to misunderstand. Instead I shut the trunk.

“That would involve us being in touch,” the detective pointed out to Julia.

“I told you, I don’t know where I’m going. Do you have a card?”

As he straightened to reach into his vest pocket she slammed the door, then rolled down her window to accept his card.

“We could have you stopped at the airport,” he said severely, trying to remind her of his authority, or remind himself. But that
we
was weaker than he knew.

“Yes,” said Julia. “But it sounds like you’ve decided to let me go. I appreciate it.” She palmed his card into her purse.

“Where were you this afternoon when Frank was killed, Mrs.

Minna?”

“Talk to Lionel,” said Julia, looking back at me. “He’s my alibi. We were together all day.”

“Eat me alibailey,”
I breathed, as quietly as I could. The detective frowned at me. I held my hands open and made an Art Carney face, pleading for a common understanding between us—women, suspects,
widows, whattayagonnado? Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, eh?

Julia powered her tinted window back up into place and the Legacy Pool limousine took off, idiot radio trickling away to silence, leaving me and the detective standing in the dark of Baltic Street by ourselves.

“Lionel.”

Alibi hullabaloo gullible bellyflop smellafish
, sang my brain, obliterating speech. I waved a farewell at the detective and started toward Smith Street. If Julia could leave him flat-footed, why couldn’t I?

He followed. “We better talk, Lionel.” He’d blown it, let her go, and now he was going to compensate with me, exercise his deductive and bullying powers.

“Can’t it wait?” I managed, without turning—it took a considerable effort not to swivel my neck. But I felt him right on my heels, like a pacing man and his shadow.

“What’s your full name, Lionel?”

“Lullaby Gueststar—”

“Come again?”

“Alibyebye Essmob—”

“Sounds Arabic,” said the detective as he pulled even with me. “You don’t look Arabic, though. Where were you and the lady this afternoon, Alibi?”

“Lionel,” I forced myself to say clearly, and then blurted
“Lionel Arrestme!”

“That’s not gonna work twice in the same night,” said the cop. “I don’t have to arrest you. We’re just taking a walk, Alibi. Only I don’t know where we’re going. You want to tell me?”

“Home,” I said, before I recalled that he’d been to the place I called home once already this evening, and that it wasn’t in my best interests to lead him there again. “Except actually Iȁd like to get a sandwich first. I’m starving. You want to get a sandwich with me? There’s a place on Smith, called Zeod’s, if that’s okay, we’ll get a sandwich and
then maybe part ways there, since I’m kind of shy about bringing people back to my place—” As I turned to deliver my speech my shoulder-lust was activated, and I began reaching for him again.

He knocked my hand away. “Slow down, Alibi. What’s the matter with you?”

“Tourette’s syndrome,” I said, with a grim sense of inevitability. Tourette’s was my other name, and, like my name, my brain could never leave the words unmolested. Sure enough, I produced my own echo: “Tourette is the shitman!” Nodding, gulping, flinching, I tried to silence myself, walk quickly toward the sandwich shop, and keep my eyes down, so that the detective would be out of range of my shoulder-scope. No good, I was juggling too much, and when I reticced, it came out a bellow:
“Tourette Is the Shitman!”

“He’s the shitman, huh?” The detective apparently thought we were exchanging up-to-the-minute street jargon. “Can you take me to him?”

“No, no, there’s no Tourette,” I said, catching my breath. I felt mad for food, desperate to shake the detective, and choked with imminent tics.

“Don’t worry,” said the detective, talking down to me. “I won’t tell him who gave out his name.”

He thought he was grooming a stool pigeon. I could only try not to laugh or shout. Let Tourette be the suspect and maybe I’d get off the hook.

On Smith Street we veered into Zeod’s Twenty-Four-Hour Market, where the odors of baloney and bad coffee mingled with those of pistachio, dates, and St. John’s bread. If the cop wanted an Arab, I’d give him an Arab. Zeod himself stood on the elevated ramp behind the Plexiglas-and-plywood counter. He saw me and said, “Crazyman! How are you my friend?”

“Not so good,” I admitted. The detective hovered behind me, tempting me to turn my head again. I resisted.

“Where’s Frank?” said Zeod. “How I never see Frank anymore?”

Here was my chance to deliver the news at last, and my heart wasn’t up to it. “He’s in the hospital,” I said, unable now to keep from glancing nervously at the homicide detective.
“Doctorbyebye!”
recalled my Tourette’s.

“Some crazyman you are,” said Zeod, smiling and arching his hedge of eyebrows knowingly at my official shadow. “You tell Frank Zeod asks, okay, partner?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do that. How about a sandwich for now? Turkey on a kaiser, plenty of mustard.”

Zeod nodded at his second, an indolent Dominican kid, who moved to the slicer. Zeod never made sandwiches himself. But he’d taught his countermen well, to slice extraordinarily thin and drape the meat as it slid off the blade so it fell in bunches, rather than stacking airlessly, to make a sandwich with that fluffy compressibility I craved. I let myself be hypnotized by the whine of the slicer, the rhythm of the kid’s arm as he received the slices and dripped them onto the kaiser roll. Zeod watched me. He knew I obsessed on his sandwiches, and it pleased him. “You and your friend?” he said magnanimously.

The detective shook his head. “Pack of Marlboro Lights,” he said.

“Okay. You want a soda, Crazyman? Get yourself.” I went and got a Coke out of the cooler while Zeod put my sandwich and the cop’s cigarettes into a brown paper bag with a plastic fork and a sheaf of napkins.

“Charge it to Frank, yes, my friend?”

I couldn’t speak. I took the bag and we stepped back out onto Smith Street.

“Sleeping with the dead man’s wife,” said the detective. “Now you’re eating on his tab. That takes some gall.”

“You misunderstand,” I said.

“Then maybe you better set me straight,” he said. “Gimme those cigarettes.”

“I work for Frank—”

“Worked. He’s dead. Why didn’t you tell your friend the A-rab?”

“Arab-eye!
—I don’t know. No reason.” I handed the cop his Marlboros.
“Eatmebailey, repeatmebailey, repeatmobile
—could we continue this maybe another time? Because—
retreatmobile!
—because now I really urgently have to go home and—
eatbail! beatmail!
—eat this sandwich.”

“You work for him where? At the car service?”

Detective agency, I silently corrected. “Uh, yeah.”

“So you and his wife were, what? Driving around? Where’s the car?”

“She wanted to go shopping.” This lie came out so blessedly smooth and un-tic-laden it felt like the truth. For that reason or some other, the detective didn’t challenge it.

“So you’d describe yourself as, what? A friend of the deceased?”

“Trend the decreased! Mend the retreats!
—sure, that’s right.”

He was learning to ignore my outbursts. “So where are we going now? Your house?” He lit a cigarette without breaking stride. “Looks like you’re headed back to work.”

I didn’t want to tell him how little difference there was between the two.

“Let’s go in here,” I said, jerking my neck sideways as we crossed Bergen Street, letting my physical tic lead me—navigation by TouretteWherx2014;into the Casino.

The Casino
was Minna’s name for Smith Street’s hole-in-the-wall newspaper shop, which had a single wall of magazines and a case of Pepsi and Snapple crammed into a space the size of a large closet. The Casino was named for the lines that stretched each morning to buy Lotto and Scratchers and Jumble 6 and Pickball, for the fortune being made on games of chance by the newsstand’s immigrant Korean owners, for the hearts being quietly broken there round the clock. There was something tragic in the way they stood obediently
waiting, many of them elderly, others new immigrants, illiterate except in the small language of their chosen game, deferring to anyone with real business, like the purchase of a magazine, a pack of double-A batteries, or a tube of lip gloss. That docility was heartbreaking. The games were over almost before they started, the foil scraped off tickets with a key or a dime, the contrived near-misses underneath bared. (New York is a Tourettic city, and this great communal scratching and counting and tearing is a definite symptom.) The sidewalk just outside the Casino was strewn with discarded tickets, the chaff of wasted hope.