Bad to the Bone
Authors: Stephen Solomita
A Stanley Moodrow Crime Novel
Stephen Solomita
for Susan my sister
,
my friend
Have to thank some people. As usual. Ken Inglima for the chemistry lessons and for his patience in the face of willful scientific illiteracy. N. D. Wruble for the info on tox screens. My aunt and uncle, Grace and Al, for the Italian lessons. And Judy Appello, intrepid researcher. Without Judy, I might actually have to work for a living.
This is a work of fiction. Despite the fact that designer drugs have been created in the past and continue to be created. For instance, even though the overall chemical strategy described in this novel is accurate, any actual formula is more likely to make chicken soup than super dope. A word to the wiseguy.
ONE
T
HE AFTERNOON TRAFFIC OUTSIDE
the small Eighth Avenue bar, the Blue Rose, where Flo Alamare waited patiently (in direct contrast to the truckers and cabbies out on the street), was backed up from 34th Street down into Chelsea. The root cause of the heavy traffic, on this particular day, lay within Flo Alamare’s view—two dozen buses, triple-parked in front of Madison Square Garden, were trying to load a thousand Bronx grammar school students. After three hours of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, the kids were enormously excited and the raised voices of exhausted teachers, desperately trying to keep order, complemented the shouts of the children and the blaring horns of frustrated drivers. It was a situation familiar to the teachers, of course, a situation which continually threatened to descend into chaos as some of the more adventurous children cartwheeled down Eighth Avenue.
Inside the Blue Rose bar, the shrieking horns formed a riotous counterpoint to the frenetic salsa pouring from an enormous jukebox. The Blue Rose was a Latino neighborhood bar at night and a haven for local alcoholics during the day. The owner, Henry Martinez, working behind the bar, was used to the horns and the salsa. He understood himself as a businessman and was only interested in filling his customers’ needs. The dirt and the noise (he’d decided long ago) was exactly what they needed. Just like they needed the cigarette-scarred bar, the mismatched ashtrays and the dusty bags of pretzels.
He poured an inch of Canadian Club into a small tumbler. Like most bartenders, he knew that his livelihood depended on staying sober enough to collect and count the money coming across the bar. He also knew that his sanity depended on staying just high enough to ignore the depressing, ultimately boring misery that haunted his afternoons. Just high enough to shrug and say “okay” when one of the drunks puked on the floor or pushed a glass into his neighbor’s face.
“Bartender?”
Henry Martinez turned to the woman (
la
bitch
blanquita
was the name he’d given her when she first walked through the door) sitting on the stool closest to the window. She presented him with a smooth, white profile framed by shoulder-length black hair, an indifferent profile as cold as her ice-blue suit and white-on-white silk blouse.
“Wha’ you wan’?” he asked, glancing toward the other patrons.
La
bitch
blanquita
wasn’t the only female in the Blue Rose. Carla Santa Cruz was there, too, all three hundred pounds of her squashed into a booth near the smelly toilet. Carla had been wearing the same clothes for three days and looked more like a pile of wet laundry than a human.
“A Coke.” The
blanquita
was looking out the window, as serene and confident as if she’d just stepped up to the bar at the Plaza.
Henry decided to make a joke. “A cocaine?” he asked. “We don’ got no cocaine.”
“Coca-Cola.”
She corrected him without turning her head, and he decided he didn’t give a shit whether she was a paying customer or not. He poured her a foamy Coke and took it the length of the bar with every intention of slopping it all over that blue dress. But then she opened her purse to get money to pay him and he looked inside and saw a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson lightweight nestled between her lipstick and her Kleenex.
He was so surprised he stood there with the Coke in his hand, staring into her purse like he couldn’t figure out what he was looking at. “Wha’?” he said, then repeated himself. “Wha’?”
He looked up to find
la
bitch
blanquita
offering him a five-dollar bill. Her eyes reached out for his and held him while she communicated her amusement. Her mouth said, “Keep the change,” but her eyes were calling him a stupid, insignificant drunk. A man dead to everything except the dirty glasses and human garbage contained by the walls of the Blue Rose.
“
Gracias
,” Henry Martinez said, backing toward the register as the woman turned to the window again. “
Gracias
.” A few minutes later, as she was leaving, he nodded and whispered it again.
Gracias
.
Gracias
.
Henry Martinez was wrong about Flo Alamare. She was much too purposeful to bother with Henry Martinez’s ego (which was an insult all by itself). She’d only come into the Blue Rose because she needed a clear view of the southwestern corner of Madison Square Garden. That’s where the school kids (who got the crummy seats in the upper balcony) would come out. She’d known, of course, that Henry Martinez was about to bust her chops—the smug, male triumph came off him like the stink of the Blue Rose itself. But his discomfort wouldn’t feed the source of her power. If there was anything to be learned from the years of submission, it was the relationship between obedience and obligation. They were wound about each other like the two snakes on the caduceus and translated themselves into commitment (not submission) to the will of Davis Craddock.
Flo closed her eyes briefly, enjoying the wave of sensation coursing through her body. The trucks, the horns, the cursing cabbies, the sharp stink of diesel exhaust—the city tingled beneath her skin, as smoothly sensual as a warm ocean breeze. When she opened her eyes to see the little girl with the two red ribbons, she wasn’t surprised. She crossed the street quickly, a kind smile pulling up the corners of her mouth, and waved, catching the girl’s attention.
“Auntie Flo,” the girl, Terry, cried in surprise. “Auntie Flo,” she repeated, throwing herself into Flo Alamare’s arms.
Marsha Goldstein, Terry Williams’ fourth-grade teacher, smiled indulgently. She was standing by the door of Bus 18, counting the kids as they boarded. It was the last important task of a hectic day, and she was anxious to get through it.
“What are you doing here?” Terry asked frankly. All the children had been taught to be direct, and Terry had been one of the brightest.
“Your daddy’s going to be a little late,” Flo said. “I told him I had an appointment in midtown, and he asked me to pick you up. I’m very glad to see you again.”
Flo glanced at Marsha Goldstein (remembering to smile with her eyes as well as her mouth) and the teacher smiled back, nodding her agreement.
“Let’s go out for ice cream sodas,” Flo said. She stretched out her hand and the child took it without hesitation.
“Why did Daddy make me leave Hanover House? He says I can’t go there ever again. Does he really mean it?”
Flo glanced back casually. They were standing at the corner, waiting for the light to change, and she wanted to make sure the teacher hadn’t heard. She needn’t have worried. Marsha Goldstein, having completed her count, was already stepping onto the bus.
Twenty minutes later, Flo and Terry were driving up Amsterdam Avenue toward 125th Street. Terry lived in the eastern part of the Bronx, in Throgs Neck, a neighborhood of single- and two-family homes with an occasional low-rise apartment building on the main avenues. The houses were not ostentatious, but the blue-collar, mostly Italian whites who dominated the neighborhood worked on their small yards every weekend. Their homes were as important to their collective golden years as their pensions, and neighborly conversations about property value had the same emotional impact as patriotism at a defense plant.
They found a neighborhood candy store on Eastchester Road near Pelham Parkway and ordered chocolate ice cream sodas. Terry wanted to know everything about her old buddies, especially Flo’s son, Michael, who used to be her best friend. She ticked their names off, one after another, and Flo provided the information as best she could. Flo was Terry’s bonding mother; she’d been freely chosen from all the women in Hanover House. Hanover House was the place of Terry’s birth, the only home she’d ever known until her father pulled her out. Now she was having problems with the neighborhood children.
“The other kids don’t like me,” she explained seriously. “They only have
one
mother and
one
father, and they hit each other
all
the time. They say I’m a dork.”
“Did you tell Billy about it?” Billy was her father’s name.
“I used to tell him, but he gets very sad. I think he’s having trouble at work.” She made a wry face, working her mouth into a thin semicircle. Terry had barely known her father when they were living in Hanover House, but the courts had given him custody after her mother’s death. “Do you think Billy means what he says? Do you think he’ll let me go back?”
Flo smiled her most loving smile, the one she’d worked years to perfect. She felt a confidence that bordered on ecstasy. Energy surged through her, yet her mind remained clear and serene. “That’s just what I want to talk to him about. About sending you for a visit.”
They walked back to the small van with Terry beaming at the prospect of seeing her old friends again. Flo returned the child’s warmth, thinking how much she really did like little Terry. “Do you want to play a game?” she asked the child.
“Okay.”
Flo opened the rear door instead of the passenger’s door and hustled the child into the back, climbing in after her. There was only one window in the side of the van, a convex bubble tinted a deep gray. The third row of seats had been removed and a thick lambskin rug lay across the metal floor.
“Let’s make Billy a nice surprise,” Flo said. “Maybe he’ll change his mind, if we give him a nice surprise.”
“Okay, what’ll we do?”
“Remember how we used to paint clown faces on the kids?”
