Motherless Brooklyn (19 page)

But I was hardly in a position to criticize lost causes. I had no reason for visiting the Casino except that I associated it with Minna, with Minna alive. If I visited enough of his haunts before news of his death spread along Court and Smith Street, I might persuade myself against the evidence of my own eyes—and against the fact of the homicide cop on my heels—that nothing had happened.

“What’re we doing?” said the detective.

“I, uh, need something to read with my sandwich.”

The desultory magazines were shelved two deep in the rack—there weren’t more than one or two customers for
GQ
or
Wired
or
Brooklyn Bridge
per month around here. Me, I was bluffing, didn’t read magazines at all. Then I spotted a familiar face, on a magazine called
Vibe:
The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Before a blurred cream background he posed resting his head against the neck of a pink guitar, his eyes demure. The unpronounceable typographical glyph with which he had replaced his name was shaved into the hair at his temple.

“Skrubble,” I said.

“What?”

“Plavshk,” I said. My brain had decided to try to pronounce that unpronounceable glyph, a linguistic foray into the lands
On Beyond Zebra
. I lifted up the magazine.

“You’re telling me you’re gonna read
Vibe
?”

“Sure.”

“You trying to make fun of me here, Alibi?”

“No, no, I’m a big fan of
Skursvshe.”

“Who?”

“The Artist Formerly Known As
Plinvstk.”
I couldn’t quit tackling the glyph. I plopped the magazine on the counter and Jimmy,e Korean proprietor, said, “For Frank?”

“Yeah,” I gulped.

He waved my money away. “Take it, Lionel.”

Back outside, the cop waited until we’d turned the corner, into the relative gloom of Bergen Street, just past the F-train entrance and a few doors from L&L’s storefront, then collared me, literally, two hands bunching my jacket at my neck, and pushed me up against the tile-mosaic wall. I gripped my magazine, which was curled into a baton, and the bag from Zeod’s with sandwich and soda, held them protectively in front of me like an old lady with her purse. I knew better than to push back at the cop. Anyway, I was bigger, and he didn’t really frighten me, not physically.

“Enough with the double-talk,” he said. “Where’s this going? Why are you pretending your man Minna’s still with us, Alibi? What’s the game?”

“Wow,” I said. “This was unexpected. You’re like good cop and bad cop rolled into one.”

“Yeah, used to be they could afford two different guys. Now with all the budget cuts and shit they’ve got us doing double shifts.”

“Can we go back to
—fuckmeblackcop
—back to talking nice now?”

“What you say?”

“Nothing. Let go of my collar.” I’d kept the outburst down to a mumble—and I knew to be grateful my Tourette’s brain hadn’t dialed up
nigger
. Despite the detective’s roughhousing, or because of it, our frenzy had peaked and abated, and we’d earned a quiet moment together. He was close enough to invite intimacy. If my hands hadn’t been full I would have begun stroking his pebbly jaw or clapping him on the shoulders.

“Talk to me, Alibi. Tell me things.”

“Don’t treat me like a suspect.”

“Tell me why not.”

“I worked for Frank. I miss him. I want to catch his killer as much as you.”

“So let’s compare notes. The names Alphonso Matricardi and Leonardo Rockaforte mean anything to you?”

I was silenced.

Matricardi and Rockaforte: The homicide cop didn’t know you weren’t supposed to say those names aloud. Not anywhere, but especially not out on Smith Street.

I’d never even heard their first names, Alphonso and Leonardo. They seemed wrong, but what first names wouldn’t? Wrongness surrounded those names and their once-in-a-blue-moon uttering. Don’t say Matricardi and Rockaforte.

Say “The Clients” if you must.

“Never heard of them,” I breathed.

“Why don’t I believe you?”

“Believemeblackman.”

“You’re fucking sick.”

“I am,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“You should be sorry. Your man got killed and you’re not giving me anything.”

“I’ll catch the killer,” I said. “That’s what I’ll give you.”

He eased off me. I barked twice. He made another face, but it was clear it all would get chalked up to harmless insanity now. I was
smarter than I knew leading the cop into Zeod’s and letting him hear the Arab call me Crazyman.

“You might want to leave that to me, Alibi. Just make sure you’re telling me all you know.”

“Absolutely.” I made an honorable Boy Scout face. I didn’t want to point out to
good cop
that
bad cop
hadn’t learned anything from me, just got tired of asking.

“You’re making me sad with your sandwich and your goddamn magazine. Get out of here.”

I straightened my jacket. A strange peace had come over me. The cop had caused me to think about The Clients for a minute, but I pushed them out of view. I was good at doing that. My Tourette’s brain chanted
Want to catch him as much as miss him as much as a sadwich
but I didn’t need to tic now, could let it live inside me, a bubbling brook, a deep well of song. I went to the L&L storefront and let myself in with my key. Danny wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The phone was ringing. I let it ring. The cop stood watching me and I waved at him once, then shut the door and went into the back.

Sometimes I had trouble admitting I lived upstairs in the apartment above the L&L storefront, but I did, and had since the day so long ago when I left St. Vincent’s. The stairs ran down into the back of the storefront. Apart from that inconvenient fact, I tried to keep the two places separated in my mind, decorating the apartment conventionally with forties-style furniture from the decrepit discount showrooms far down Smith Street and never inviting the other Minna Men up if I could help it, and adhering to certain arbitrary rules: drinking beer downstairs and whiskey upstairs, playing cards downstairs but setting out a board with a chess problem upstairs, Touch-Tone phones downstairs, a Bakelite dial phone upstairs, et cetera. For a while I even had a cat, but that didn’t work out.

The door at the top of the stair was acned with a thousand tiny dents, from my ritual rapping of my keys before opening the door. I added six more quick key-impressions—my counting nerve was stuck on six today, ever sine the fatal bag of White Castles—and then let myself in. The phone downstairs went on ringing. I left my lights off, not wanting to signal to the detective, if he was still outside watching, the connection between upstairs and down. Then I crept to my front window and peered out. The corner was empty of cop. Still, why take a chance? Enough light leaked in from the streetlamps for me to make my way around. So I left the lamps dimmed, though I had to run my hands under the shades and fondle the switches, ritual contact just to make myself feel at home.

Understand: The possibility that I might at any time have to make the rounds and touch every visible item in my apartment dictated a sort of faux-Japanese simplicity in my surroundings. Beneath my reading lamp were five unread paperbacks, which I would return to the Salvation Army on Smith Street as soon as I’d finished them. The covers of the books were already scored with dozens of minute creases, made by sliding my fingernails sideways over their surfaces. I owned a black plastic boom box with detachable speakers, and a short row of Prince/Artist Formerly Known As CDs—I wasn’t lying to the homicide cop about being a fan. Beside the CDs lay a single fork, the one I’d stolen from Matricardi and Rockaforte’s table full of silverware fourteen years before. I placed the
Vibe
magazine and the bag with the sandwich on my table, which was otherwise clean. I wasn’t so terribly hungry anymore. A drink was more urgent. Not that I really liked alcohol, but the ritual was essential.

The phone downstairs went on ringing. L&L didn’t have a machine to pick it up—callers usually gave up after nine or ten rings and tried another car service. I tuned it out. I emptied my jacket pockets and rediscovered Minna’s watch and beeper. I put them on the table, then poured myself a tumblerful of Walker Red and dropped in a couple of ice cubes and sat down there in the dark to try to let the
day settle over me, to try to make some sense of it. The way my ice shimmered made me need to bat at it like a cat fishing in a goldfish bowl, but otherwise the scene was pretty calm. If only the phone downstairs would stop ringing. Where was Danny? For that matter, shouldn’t Tony be back from the East Side by now? I didn’t want to think he’d go into the Zendo without some backup, without letting us other Minna Men in on the score. I pushed the thought away, tried to forget about Tony and Danny and Gilbert for the moment, to pretend it was my case alone and weight the variables and put them into some kind of shape that made sense, that produced answers or at least a clear question. I thought of the giant Polish killer we’d watched drive our boss away to a Dumpster—he already seemed like something I’d imagined, an impossible figure, a silhouette from a dream. The phone downstairs went on ringing. I thought about Julia, how she’d toyed with the homicide detective and then flown, how she’d almost seemed too ready for the news from the hospital, and I considered the bitterness laced into her sorrow. I tried not to think of how she’d toyed with me, and how little I knew it meant. I thought about Minna himself, the mystery of his connection in the Zendo, his caustic familiarity with his betrayer, his disastrous preference for keeping his Men in the dark and how he’d paid for it. As I gazed past the streetlight to the flickering blue-lit curtains of the bedrooms in the apartments across Bergen Street, I lingered over my paltry clues: Ullman downtown, the girl with glasses and short hair, “the building” that the sardonic voice in the Yorkville Zendo had mentioned, and Irving—if Irving really was a clue.

While I thought about hese things, another track in my brain intoned brainyoctomy brainyalimony bunnymonopoly baileyoctopus brainyanimal broccopotamus. And the phone downstairs kept on ringing. Sighing, I resigned myself to my fate, went back downstairs and picked up the phone.

“No cars!” I said forcefully.

“That you, Lionel?” said Gilbert’s friend Loomis, the sanitation inspector—the garbage cop.

“What is it, Loomis?” I disliked the garbage cop intensely.

“Gotta problem over here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Sixth Precinct house, in Manhattan.”

“Dickweed!
What are you doing at the precinct house, Loomis?”

“Well, they’re saying it’s too late, no way they’re gonna arraign him tonight, he’s gonna have to spend the night in the bullpen.”

“Who?”

“Who’d you think? Gilbert! They got him up on killing some guy name Ullman.”