CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (5 page)

“Hey,” Lindfors said, “that’s what they got juries for. This is
America, Smith, haven’t you heard? We got the greatest legal system in the world.”

I put my cigarette out, finished my beer.

“No, see, I’m just a cop,” Lindfors went on. The couple in the next booth stood up, collected themselves. Lindfors ran his eyes over the girl, followed her swaying rear as she ambled out of the room. “I just bring ’em in. I bring in shitloads of evidence, I Mirandize ’em, I’m real, real, careful not to touch a hair of their precious heads. And it don’t matter a fucking damn, because they’re back out again before you got time to jerk off.”

The waitress brought the drinks. Lindfors sipped at his, put it down with exaggerated care exactly in the ring the one before it had made on the tabletop. He gave me a casual shrug. “But, hey, Smith, this Downey kid? Well, yeah. Yeah, I do know who killed him.”

N
INE

E
hring’s had started to fill up around us. Tired middle-aged executives stopped for a quick one on the way home, sat at the bar next to young guys who drove trucks or worked at gas stations and had their whole lives ahead of them. The rhythm of voices got faster and the pitch got louder. The vinegar aroma of bratwurst and sauerkraut was added to the warm beery smell. The waitress came by again, left us a bowl of pretzels and a sweet smile.

I tasted my new beer, waited for Lindfors to go on.

Low, not looking at me, he said, “There are a lot of motherfuckers out there, Smith. A lot of guys, if I could lock them up for this, I would, and I wouldn’t give a shit whether they done it or not.” He sipped his drink. “But I can’t lock up anybody. Not fucking anybody.”

“Lindfors—”

“Yeah, yeah.” He drank again. “You heard of a street gang over there, the Cobra Crew?”

I was surprised. I wondered if it showed. “The Cobras? Real tall skinny guy named Snake? And a fat kid, Skeletor? They wear tattoos?”

Lindfors stared, unmoving. “Yeah. Friends of yours?”

“Go to hell, Lindfors.”

His face suddenly reddened. He half rose from his seat. My whole body tensed in answer, because I recognized what was in his eyes. I knew that anger, that volcanic rage that claws a man apart inside unless he finds a way to let it erupt; and so he searches, in a bottle, in a stranger’s unthinking words or a friend’s meaningless joke, for an excuse, a trigger, a reason to explode. I knew that too well not to recognize it in another man.

But Lindfors must have seen something in my eyes, too. Slowly, he settled against the bench again. He drank, lifting his glass with care. He smiled a cold smile, directed inward, not at me.

“That tall guy, Snake LeMoyne,” he said. “He’s a bad son of a bitch. If he didn’t do your boy personally, one of his posse did.”

I wanted another cigarette. It went with the beer and the anger; but I held off.

“That’s what they do,” Lindfors said. “The Cobras.” He snapped off a piece of pretzel, stuck it in his mouth, licked the salt off his fingers. “When LeMoyne was a kid, he used to come around a PAL program they had over there. That was in the days when you thought, maybe …” He didn’t finish. He swirled his drink around in his glass. “He learned karate there. He was good, long legs, long arms. Skinny runt, but he made up for it. Had what they used to call heart, in a fighter. You shoulda seen his eyes, pounding another kid. Ten years old, already mad enough to kill. A couple of bouts, he had to be pulled off the other guy. You shoulda seen it.”

I drank my beer and thought of the eyes of the kid who’d held me down that morning.

The waitress went by and Lindfors watched her pass. Then he went on. “When he got the height—that’s when he started to call himself ‘Snake’; his name’s Anthony—he went out for basketball. Good, but nothing special. Never had the moves. An average kid. But average don’t make it over there. Special don’t make it. Genius maybe. Genius could get you to an NCAA school even if you can’t fucking read, and then maybe a kid would have a chance. The rest of them, the average kids …” Lindfors gave me the curled-lip smile again. “The rest of them get drafted.”

“That what happened to LeMoyne?”

Lindfors nodded. “Six, eight years ago, the City closed the community center the PAL program was in. Sold the building. Reopened the center a few months later, across the Concourse, but by then Snake was hanging with a gang called the Icemen. The new place wasn’t on Icemen turf.” He shrugged, drank. He rubbed a corner of his mustache absently, his eyes far away.

“Snake came up through the Icemen. Started on the street corner as a lookout, worked his way to enforcer. Had his own special style, Snake did.” Suddenly he gulped down what was left in his glass. “Where the hell’s that waitress? Annette!” he bellowed. “C’mon over here, sweetie.” He asked me, “You want another? No? Your loss. Annette, baby, get Daddy another drink.” The waitress smiled again, took his glass.

Lindfors fell silent, stared broodingly at the table. I was trying to think how to prod him on without coming across as belligerent. He was at that stage of a drunk where he could head off in a dozen different directions, and I didn’t have the patience for it. But he jump-started himself.

“They’re better armed than the fucking Marines, those gangs.” He seemed to be talking only half to me now. “They got Uzis and TEC’s, AK-47’s, every other cocksucking piece you could name. But Snake, he was proud of his hands. He was quick and quiet and he liked the personal touch. Enjoyed his work. It got so you could tell a LeMoyne job, you know how?”

“No,” I said. “How?”

“You’d find the vic beaten to a blob on the sidewalk. Something you couldn’t even recognize anymore. After you scraped him up, you’d find he’d been shot through the foot, once, with his own piece. After he was dead.” Lindfors’s eyes moved around, found mine again. “We found a twelve-year-old like that once. A kid named Laurence Brown. He was a runner for the Icemen. His friends said he’d been skimming a few bucks off each payment he delivered.”

I pulled out the cigarette I’d intended not to have. “And you found Mike Downey like that?”

“Yeah,” Lindfors said. “Like that.”

I needed to say something else, not to let the silence start. “What happened to the Icemen?”

“What happens to those guys? They do time, or they die, or
they die doing time. Snake and another kid, the Rev, they took over the territory. Then the Rev got busted, and the fat kid, Skeletor, took up with Snake.” He poked his finger through the bowl of pretzels. “We thought Snake might have trouble with Skeletor. He’s one smart, ambitious bastard. But there’s no trouble. Skeletor’s just waiting. Someday Snake’ll go down, and the whole thing’ll be his. See, it’s endless over there. Fucking endless. Save one kid, wouldn’t matter anyway.”

Annette came over with Lindfors’s fourth drink, or at least the fourth I’d seen.

“What are you drinking?” I asked.

“I’m drinking fucking Dewar’s and what’s it to you?”

“I just wondered. In case I ever need to buy you a drink.”

“You won’t ever need to buy me a drink, because you’re not going to be drinking with me anymore. This is a one-time-only, Smith. For the Captain. I pay this debt, you and me are history.”

“How will you know when it’s paid?”

He stared at me over his glass. “Fuck you,” he said, and drank.

“Did you bring LeMoyne in?”

“Of course I fucking brought him in. Then I let him go. He has three eyewitnesses where he was all night. All
I
got is an M.O. that everybody in the Bronx knows, and, as Snake’s very clever motherfucking lawyer pointed out, anyone could imitate.”

“Lindfors,” I said, “why would the Cobras have done that to Mike?”

“Ah, shit. You don’t get it, do you? They didn’t do it for a reason. They don’t gotta have a fucking reason. Maybe they were high. Maybe they were graduating a new Cobra. That’s one of the exams you got to pass, to make it to the top of the crew.”

“Random murder?”

His eyes, when they lifted to mine, were sad, old, and tired beyond belief. “Yeah,” he said.

There wasn’t much more. He hadn’t brought the M.E.’s report and he told me what I could do with my request to see a copy of it. He told me what was in it, though. “No blunt instruments. No wood splinters or rust or stone chips in the wounds. Hands and feet, Smith. Leather gloves and leather shoes, that’s how you do that. Gloves and shoes. Shit.”

I stayed a little longer, asked a little more, but it was no use. Lindfors had said everything he’d decided he was going to say. His speech was distinct, his movements controlled and careful; but a deep, angry drunkenness looked out of his eyes.

In the end I gave up. When he was looking somewhere else I folded two twenties, slipped them under my beer mug. That would take care of where Lindfors had already been and help him along if he were looking to go farther. I stood to leave.

“See you, Lindfors,” I told him.

“Not if I can fucking help it,” were his parting words to me.

T
EN

T
raffic was bad all the way downtown and I didn’t get home until close to six-thirty. That left me with less time than I’d wanted but I spent some of it showering, anyway. I stood in the pounding heat, washing away the soreness, the sweat, the old people with vacant eyes, the young ones with empty futures, what I’d seen, what I’d heard, the Bronx.

Dry, I pulled on fresh jeans, T-shirt, sneakers. I set the timer so I wouldn’t have to think about the time, poured an inch of Maker’s Mark and went to the piano. Sipping the bourbon, I tried to clear my mind.

I started with exercises, to warm up. When I was ready, I breathed controlled and slow; then I moved into the Schubert B-flat Major, which I’d been hearing in my head all day. I hadn’t been playing it through very long, only a week or so, and that was all I wanted to do tonight: put it together, make the connections. That’s when I really start to learn a piece: after I hear what I’ve got, what I’m able to do that I didn’t know about, what I can’t do that I’d hoped I could.

The piano demanded, as it always does, total focus, absolute single-minded concentration. It was the piano that saved me, when Annie died; and after Dave was killed, caught in an ambush that put me in the hospital for a month, the worst hell was the weeks, even
after I came out, that I couldn’t play. Time will bring with it the ability to go on—but only if you can somehow live through those first days and weeks. There are only two ways I know to do that. One is the bottle, and the other is music.

I finished before the timer went off, though my speed was not good, especially at the end. I’d have to work on that, I thought as I wiped my face with a towel; but overall I was pleased. I was playing much better than I had the night before, playing close to the core of the piece. Soon I’d know it well enough to go to working as a watchmaker would on the smallest elements of it, adjusting, refining, until what the music brought to me and what I brought to it had merged under my hands.

More than anything I wanted to play it again; I wanted to do nothing but play it for the next few days, until what was about to happen had happened. A piece can slip away from you at this point, and if it does sometimes you can’t get it back. It had taken me years to feel ready for this sonata, and I didn’t want to lose it.

But it was eight, and I was meeting Bobby. And Lydia.

I switched the T-shirt for a sweatshirt; I wasn’t in the mood for comments on the tattoo, even the regular ones from the regulars. I closed the piano, switched on the alarm. Then I clattered down the two flights from my place, went out the street door, twelve steps east, and through the beveled-glass, gilt-lettered door to Shorty’s Bar.

The smell was liquor, cigarette smoke, grilling burgers. The conversation was low and the faces familiar. I crossed the tiled floor to the L-shaped bar in the back, exchanging greetings and wise-ass remarks with the people I passed. On the side of the bar I preferred, the short leg of the L, there were no empty stools, but that was all right. At Shorty’s I didn’t mind sitting with my back to the door.

Shorty O’Donnell, behind the bar, looked over as I sat down, started a smile that fizzled when he saw my eye. He tried to keep his doubts from showing on his face, but they were there.

“Hey, kid,” he said, in the hoarse voice that has never been clear in all the years I’ve known him. The greeting was more tentative than I liked, but I had no one to blame but myself.

“It’s okay, Shorty,” I told him. “I was helping out a friend and I got in the way.”

Shorty’s face relaxed then, probably less because of what I’d said than what he’d heard in the way I’d said it. His bristling eyebrows, almost as white as his hair, smoothed out, and he stretched
for the square Maker’s Mark bottle. He poured me a shot over ice. “You want to tell me about it?”

“It’s no big deal,” I said, but I described the fight briefly so he wouldn’t feel like I was holding out on him. The only change I made was to make it sound as though I’d known Carter already, as though I’d been coming to the aid of a friend, not a stranger. This was because I’d been thinking a lot about how really stupid you have to be to do what I really did.

Shorty took in what I had to say without comment. That meant it was okay with him and I wouldn’t hear any more about it. “You want something to eat?” he asked me.

“Later. I’m meeting Bobby and Lydia; I’ll wait for them.”

“Oh, shit, kid. She called.”

“Lydia?”

“Yeah. She said she can’t make dinner, but she can get here around ten, if you want. She said she left a message with your service but she wasn’t sure you’d call in for it.”

Of course she was right; I hadn’t called in. “What am I supposed to do? Call her?”

“Only to tell her not to come. Otherwise she’ll be here later. Hey, cheer up, kid. It’s only two hours.”

I didn’t answer that. “If Bobby comes in, tell him I’m here.” I slipped off the bar stool, took my drink to the phone by the rest rooms.

I called my service, to see if anyone besides Lydia had anything to say to me. No one did, and Lydia had said just what Shorty had said she’d said.

When I got back to the bar Shorty was standing over a booth, talking to Bobby. Bobby had trouble with the bar stools since the stroke, and he didn’t come in as often as before, but he was still a regular. And it seemed to me, though I couldn’t be sure, that when he wasn’t here there was always a booth or a table empty, waiting, even on those rare nights when Shorty had a crowd.

I slid into the booth opposite Bobby. Shorty’s benches and tables were wood, old and scarred with names and cigarette burns. I lit a cigarette of my own. Bobby put down his beer, looked closely at me. Before he could say anything I said, “It’s okay. It just looks bad.”

“Yeah, well, it does that,” Bobby said. “What are you drinking?”

“Bourbon. I’m set.”

“You hungry?”

“Uh-huh.”

“This Rosie’s day?” Bobby asked Shorty.

“No, José’s. He made this chicken thing. With sausage. He says his grandma used to cook it when he was a
muchacho
.”

Bobby looked at me. “Sounds like something you’d eat. I’ll have a burger.”

I ordered the chicken thing. When Shorty was gone Bobby said to me, “Shorty says you asked your girlfriend to come down. Business or pleasure?”

“Business. I told you I wanted someone on the outside; Lydia’s it. And lay off the girlfriend stuff when she gets here, okay?”

Bobby made a sympathetic noise. “Still no action?”

“Bobby—”

“Hey, no problem.” The hand he could lift he lifted innocently. “What’s she been doing?”

“For now, just backgrounds. Poking around. I’m working blind, Bobby.”

“Did you talk to Hank Lindfors?”

“Christ, yes.” I sipped my bourbon. “Whatever he’s carrying around inside him, I don’t want to be in the room when it blows.”

“Yeah, me either. What’d he say?”

I rolled the tip of my cigarette in the ashtray, said casually, “The gang I had the run-in with today, the Cobras? They’re the ones Lindfors has pegged for doing Mike.”

Bobby stared. Then his face flushed with the anger I’d been expecting. “Oh, great! And now they’ll be coming after you? Forget it, kid. You’re off this. If he’s right—”

“Bobby, cool down. You’re forgetting why you put me on it.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“It didn’t sound right to you before. It suddenly does now that the suspects have names?”

“If they have names Lindfors must have a reason.”

I shook my head. “Not much of one. Just that he recognized the m.o. And even if he’s right, he hasn’t been able to find anything that would put them away for it. Maybe I can. Bobby, tell me something: was Mike armed?”

Bobby stopped short, reining in the anger. When he answered his voice was calmer. “No.” He drank some beer. “Armed guards,
it’s a whole other thing, different insurance, all kinds of shit. I get a call for armed guards, I use ex-cops and moonlighters. No one else carries when they work for me.” He added, “Except you.”

“In the old days I didn’t.”

“No, for the same reason I wouldn’t let Mike. You weren’t trained as a cop and you were a goddamn hot-head.” He paused. “Why? You think if Mike’d been armed he could’ve—”

“Oh, Christ, Bobby, no. No. But Mike was shot, after he was dead. Did you know that?”

Bobby didn’t really move, but his chest seemed to deflate a little. Seeing the look on his face made my hand clench tight around my glass. In a small voice he said, “No, they didn’t tell me that.”

I said, “It’s what makes Lindfors think it’s the Cobras that did it. It’s a sort of a trademark with them. But they usually shoot a guy with his own gun.”

“So what? Mike didn’t have one, so they used theirs.”

“Why? Shooting a guy after he’s dead with his own gun makes a sick kind of sense. Shooting him with yours is just wasting a slug.”

Bobby was quiet, didn’t answer that. He said, “Tell me about Lindfors.”

I replayed my conversation with Lindfors, easing up a little on the description of what a LeMoyne hit looked like. I don’t know why; Bobby had seen Mike’s body.

Bobby listened through my report the way he used to, saving all his questions until the end. By the end our dinner had come. Kay, the waitress who brought it, kissed Bobby’s cheek and told him how sorry she was about Mike. When she left Bobby stared at the burger he’d ordered. “Ah, shit. I’m not hungry.”

“Eat it, Bobby. It’s bad for you. It’ll do you good.”

Bobby gave me an unsure look, then doctored the burger with onions and ketchup and relish and salt.

My bowl of thick chicken stew was giving off clouds of garlic. I speared my fork into some hot Spanish sausage.

“What did you think of that place, kid?” Bobby asked. “The Home.”

I thought before I answered. “The isolation,” I said. “It’s not normal; or maybe it is, but it isn’t right.” I swallowed some spicy broth. “The neighborhood’s going to hell in a handbasket and that
place has fruit trees and a big high wall. It’s weird, and I’m not sure it’s what they’d want, if you asked them.”

“The old folks?”

“Uh-huh. They’re cut off. It’s like an island. They’re stuck for the rest of their lives with nobody but each other and they don’t have anything in common except being old. Christ, Bobby, I don’t know. It’s like doing time, except that it’s beautiful.”

Bobby said, “You remember that place I was in?”

“The rehab place? Yeah, I do.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said. “Being stuck there forever. Just that damn yellow room, all those damn people in those other damn yellow rooms wetting their beds and drooling. I was scared to death.”

He looked at me when he said this, and I met his eyes, but it was hard. I’d visited Bobby almost daily through the four months he was in the rehab hospital, but I’d never wanted to go, and that still shamed me. At first it was Bobby, helpless to control his body or any part of his world. Later, as Bobby got better, got ready to leave, it was the other people, the ones who weren’t going to get better, would never leave. I’d done six months behind county bars once, in another state. I used to look at the guards and visitors, people who could come and go when I couldn’t, the same way the people at the hospital looked at me.

“Kid, do you think I’m crazy?”

“Crazy how?”

“About this whole thing. Maybe Lindfors is right. I’m just a crazy old man. Maybe because I can’t do anything about what happened, I’m trying to make it into something I can do something about.”

“You never operated like that. If your gut says there’s something else going on here I’ll buy it.”

“And you wouldn’t just be humoring a crazy old man?” His eyes didn’t waver but his voice did, a little.

There were a dozen comebacks to that, cracks that would have broken the mood, but what I said was, “I would never do that, Bobby. Not to you.” I hoped it was true.

As I was polishing off the chicken stew the door opened, and I looked up toward it for the twentieth time since I’d sat down. A compact
figure, her hands in the pockets of her unzipped leather jacket, stood for a moment in the doorway. She looked around, registering everything. When she spotted me she smiled; I felt a warmth that didn’t come from Latin spices, or from bourbon.

She moved through the room, waved to Shorty behind the bar. When she reached our booth I rose. Bobby half stood also, then sank back. Lydia kissed my cheek, slipped in beside me on the bench. I moved over to make room, but not so far that I couldn’t feel the warmth of her thigh, an inch from mine, or smell the freesia in her hair.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” Lydia flashed me the smile again, then turned to Bobby. Her face softened. “Hi, Mr. Moran. Bill told me about your nephew. I’m really sorry.” She squeezed Bobby’s hand.

“Thanks,” Bobby said. There was a short silence; then Lydia lifted her hand to my eye. Her touch was soft and cool. “Was it fun, the fight where you got this?”

“Five on a one-to-ten,” I said. “But I’m getting a lot of mileage out of it. Are you hungry?”

“Oh, no, thanks. My brother Andrew came for dinner with a friend, and my mother put on a show. Steamed pork buns, watercress soup, and a thing that translates as ‘peculiar chicken.’ I don’t think I’ll eat for a week.”

“Was it peculiar?” Bobby asked.

“It was wonderful. I wish I could cook like my mother.”

“You just don’t get enough practice, that’s all,” I said. “You could practice on me. I could buy all kinds of strange ingredients and you could cook them and teach me their Chinese names. I promise I’d eat anything you fed me.”

“As long as I swallowed anything you fed me?”

“Me?” I asked innocently.

Bobby said, “If you two want to do this in private—”

“No, Mr. Moran, it’s okay. This isn’t what I came for.”

I sighed. “It never is. Okay. Let’s get to work.”

Kay came over to take away the plates and see if Lydia wanted a drink. Lydia ordered club soda with a splash of orange juice, Bobby got another beer, and I got coffee. When the table was clear, I lit a cigarette, said to Lydia, “Did you find anything?”