Drawing Dead (4 page)

“I don't,” said Crow.

Zink broke into a snorting laugh.

Wicky went momentarily slack, then laughed loudly and almost put his hand back on Crow's shoulder, but caught himself at the last moment.

“Well, I like you,” Wicky said.

The cat that fell 32 stories on concrete, Sabrina, suffered only a mild lung puncture and a chipped tooth. One explanation may be that the speed of the fall does not increase beyond a certain point. This point, “terminal velocity,” is reached relatively quickly in the case of cats. Terminal velocity for a cat is 60 mph; for an adult human, 120 mph. After terminal velocity is reached, the cat might relax and stretch its legs out like a flying squirrel, increasing air resistance and helping to distribute the impact more evenly.

—
The New York Times
, August 27, 1989

Dickie Wicky opened a new jar
of pimento-stuffed olives and, using his fingers to keep the olives in the jar, poured the brine down the kitchen sink drain. He stood and watched the last drops of liquid drip away, then dumped half of the olives into a thick glass tumbler that bore the etched initials “R & C.” When guests noticed the initials, he would say they stood for “Rude and Crude.” People liked that. They thought it was funny. The glass was the last of a set of eight.

He set the tumbler on the counter, took a frosty green bottle of Tanqueray from the freezer, opened it, measured three jiggers of subzero gin into the glass, capped the bottle, returned it to the freezer compartment, and closed the door. Wicky stood balanced on his bare feet and watched the frost collect on the outside of the glass. The Mondo Martini was his own invention, and he always took a moment to appreciate the physics. The bottom third of the glass frosted first and thickest. The middle third, to which the olives had migrated, frosted to a lesser degree, and the top third remained clear and empty. Wicky lifted the glass by its rim and carried it through the condo and out onto the balcony, where he set it on a glass-topped table.

It was a few minutes past noon, Sunday morning, and he had just gotten home from the game at Zink's. Wired from the coke, the action, and a twenty-three-hundred-dollar loss—most of which he'd dropped on the last hand—he needed the drink to jack down, get some sleep, quit thinking about who his wife was fucking.

The mid-June sunlight was intense. He went back into the apartment and found his Vuarnets. When he returned to the balcony, the frost on the martini had begun to melt and pool on the tabletop. Wicky settled into the chaise longue, picked up his drink, and swallowed a quarter of it. The icy gin left a tingling path from his mouth to his stomach, and Wicky smiled. He fished out three of the olives and pushed them into his mouth. Chewing, he looked down through the balcony railing at the swimming pool twenty-five floors below.

The outdoor pool, a shallow, obese boomerang—useless for swimming—was empty. A half-dozen sunbathers were lying on the adjoining patio. Wicky could not distinguish their faces, but the body shapes and swimsuit designs were distinctive, and he immediately picked out the black-haired woman. She was on her back now, arms held a few inches away from her sides. Her bikini bra featured two neon colors, green on her left and orange on the right. The bottom half of the bikini was neon yellow, an eye-searing triangle even from twenty-five stories up. The back, he knew from earlier observation, was an equally compelling neon pink. A deeply tanned young man with blond hair was crouched beside her. They were drawn to her like dogs to a bitch in heat. Wicky took another gulp of his martini. The man was resting one hand on her leg. Wicky munched another olive and watched. After a few minutes, the man stood up and went toward the bank of vending machines concealed behind a tall hedge at the far side of the pool area. Wicky kept his eyes on the woman, who remained motionless. The man returned and handed her something. Wicky knew that it would be a Diet Pepsi, an invariable element in her poolside flirtations. She sipped it and set the can under her lounger, out of the sunlight, then turned her face directly toward Wicky and waved. The blond man looked up, shading his eyes. Wicky scowled and shifted back from the railing.

When he looked back over the edge a minute later, the man had disappeared and the woman was lying on her stomach, mooning him in pink neon. Wicky ate another olive and examined the inscription on the glass. The tumblers had been a wedding gift. To Richard and Catherine. It had taken them two years to break the first seven glasses in the set. The penultimate tumbler had shattered a week ago when he had made the mistake of inviting Jack Mitchell, one of the other salesmen at Litten Securities, to drop by for cocktails after work. He and Mitchell and Catfish had been sitting on the balcony, sipping gin and tonic, when Mitchell asked him what the etched “R & C” stood for.

“Guess,” Wicky had said, grinning.

“Runt and Cunt?” Mitchell guessed, showing all his teeth.

What really pissed Wicky off was how hard Catfish had laughed—laughing so hard she had to hold herself up by grabbing Mitchell's thigh, causing him to drop the glass.

“Jesus, Dickie, I'm sorry,” he had said, not sounding sorry at all, Catfish looking at the shattered glass, still laughing, digging into Mitchell's thigh with her red nails.

Wicky squeezed his eyes shut and drained the rest of the martini, still cold, letting the last six olives roll into his mouth, then he looked down again at his wife, Catfish, and wondered how close he could come to hitting her with the glass. He knew from having thrown other objects off the balcony that accuracy from such a height was difficult. The poolside was farther out from the building than it appeared.

He looked again at the glass, now warm and smudged from his fingers. Richard and Catherine. Rude and Crude. Runt and Cunt. He shrugged and walked back into the condo, where he still had half a jar of olives waiting beside the kitchen sink. He would have another martini. He thought about how rich he would soon be, and that made him feel better. He would have another martini and think about that. He looked again at his Rolex and felt the power of ownership warm his groin. He would have another martini and think about some other things he could own.

Catfish's goddamn cat, Katoo, was sitting in the sink, lapping water from the dripping faucet. When Wicky stepped into the kitchen, Katoo panicked, launched himself from the sink, hit the floor running, and disappeared into one of the bedrooms. The jar of olives shattered on the tile floor, olives rolling in all directions. Blinking, Wicky looked at the explosion of green-and-red spheroids. He said, as though answering a question, “The goddamn cat.”

Cautiously circling the broken glass, Wicky pulled a new jar of olives from the rear of the refrigerator and made himself a fresh Mondo Martini. He took it to the balcony, set it on the table, and looked down over the railing. Catfish was on her back again, this time attended by a thin man with a bald spot on top of his head. Wicky thrust out his lower jaw and ground his teeth. Then he went back inside to get the cat.

I'll play for any kind of money, even dimes and nickels, so long as everybody agrees that a nickel is worth something. Otherwise it's not fair.

—Joe Crow

Joe Crow was sitting
at the kitchen table in his underwear, eating a peanut butter sandwich and paging through a brochure from Bobick Realty, when the telephone rang. It rang four more times before he managed to swallow what he had in his mouth and answer it with a passable, if slightly thickened, “Hello.”

“Joe?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Rich.”

“Who?” Crow turned the page in the brochure.

“Rich Wicky.”

“Dickie?”

It took Rich Wicky a second to reply. “Right. You got a minute?”

Crow looked at the clock radio on his kitchen table. Two-thirty in the afternoon, and he hadn't thought of a reason to get dressed yet. He had been looking at photographs of lake properties, reading the brief descriptions. It wouldn't hurt to look, he thought. A guy had to have a dream. His head was full of acres, feet of shoreline, elevations, and abbreviations such as “FP.” Fireplace? Front porch? Either would be fine. None of the listings in the brochure was for an island. That would be something, to have his own island, a place to be with himself. No phone. No Dickie Wicky.

“Joe?”

“Yeah, I'm here.”

“I need to talk to you about something.” Wicky paused.

Crow waited, trying to imagine what it could be. He had never seen or talked with Dickie Wicky other than from across a card table, nor had he ever wanted to. He didn't even like playing cards with the guy. Wicky was everything Crow had avoided becoming—overweight, overfamiliar, overpaid—and he was a user, both of people and of substances. Crow liked users about as much as he had liked himself when he was using, which was to say, not at all. He decided in that moment to buy an answering machine. He had never liked the things, but if it would screen out one call from a guy like Dickie Wicky, it was worth the price. He turned to the next page of the brochure: “Bird Lake, 210' lksh, secluded, on pt, cozy 4 rm getwy, FP, grt fshng.” It was hard to see the cabin in the picture because it was surrounded by trees. He liked that. “$140,000.” That was a bit of a problem, since his entire net worth would come in at something like twenty thousand dollars, most of it tied up in his Jaguar XJS. The three thousand he had won last night was a start, but not nearly enough. Was there such a thing as a cabin on an island for ten or twenty thousand?

“You still there?”

“I'm here. What's on your mind?”

Wicky cleared his throat. “I got a little problem. Listen, Joe, you do, like, odd jobs, right?”

“I'm not really looking for work, Dickie.” Milo, Crow's oversize black tomcat, bumped against his leg.

“I heard you did some investigating work for Frank Knox.”

“I did him some favors.” Crow set the peanut-butter-covered knife on the linoleum floor. Milo set to work, scraping it clean with his rough tongue. Crow had served some papers for Frank Knox and chased down a reluctant witness to an auto accident, but that was about it. Aside from his poker winnings, he was professionally and financially adrift, waiting for something to inspire him.

“You used to be a cop, right?”

“Not much of one. Dickie, what is it you're looking for?”

“It's sort of complicated. Do you think you could come down here?”

“Where is 'here'?”

“Litten Securities.”

“That's downtown, right?”

“We're in the Mills Building.”

“Maybe you ought to tell me what you want to talk about. I don't want to waste your time.”

“A business proposal.”

“I don't have any money to invest, Dickie.”

“You won't need any money. But there might be something in it for you.”

“You want me to sell Amway, you can forget it.”

“I don't want you to sell Amway. Look, I'll pay you for your time. A consultation fee. What would you charge me for a half hour of your time? Just to listen.”

“Three hundred dollars,” Crow said, hoping to discourage him.

Wicky did not hesitate. “How about ten o'clock Friday morning?”

After
agreeing, reluctantly, to meet with Dickie Wicky, Crow put on his gray sweats, brewed a cup of strong coffee, and went out onto the porch to drink it. He brought the real estate brochure with him. Milo, who had finished with the peanut butter knife, followed, his kinked tail held proudly aloft.

Crow rented the top half of a duplex on First Avenue, an eighty- year-old clapboard house that, unlike most of the properties in this marginal neighborhood, retained all of its windows, was vermin-free, and sported a coat of white paint less than a decade old. His porch, which ran the length of the house, faced a row of rapidly aging brownstones, each building containing its own unique mix of humanity. Crow could sit in his wicker chair for hours, watching his neighbors live their lives.

He looked again at the brochure from Bobick Realty. In the north woods, sitting outside his cabin, he would be watching the birds and the squirrels. He would see a deer, or a fox. Or maybe he would be on the dock, watching a red-and-white bobber dance on the afternoon chop.

Was that what he wanted? The idea of isolation was seductive. If he could be alone with himself, away from all the crazy people, maybe he would find out what he wanted from life. If he could capture that long quiet moment, all would become clear. Here, in the city, the distractions ruled.

People like Dickie Wicky were everywhere.

What did Dickie want?

Sipping his coffee, wishing he had quoted a five-hundred-dollar consultation fee, Crow watched four kids from the building directly across the street holding the corners of a blanket, moving up and down the sidewalk, their faces tilted skyward. He watched them for several minutes, his mind drifting from Dickie Wicky to the north woods, before he started to wonder what they were doing. At first he couldn't see it; he was looking too high. The four blanket holders, three blond girls and a little Hmong boy with a purple Batman cape, were shouting something at the sky, but Crow could not understand their words over the steady stream of cars and buses roaring down the avenue. Finally he spotted the object of their attentions, a calico kitten on a ledge between the second and third stories. As the kitten moved along the ledge in one direction, the blanket crew would follow, trying to remain in rescue position. Now that he had a context, Crow could hear what they were shouting:
Jump, kitty, jump!

He sighed and let a smile melt across his face. “Jump, kitty, jump,” he said. Milo, sitting on the porch rail, twitched his tail. Crow watched until the kitten, the first to become bored with the game, followed the ledge around the corner of the building to the fire escape and descended to safety. Crow drained the last of his coffee, let his head hang over the back of the wicker chair, felt the muscles in his scalp and face loosen. He closed his eyes and willed his body to go slack, hazily remembering an afternoon, thirty years before, spent trying to rescue a cat from its comfortable perch twenty feet up a shaggy walnut tree. Had the rescue succeeded? He couldn't remember, but he suspected it hadn't. Perhaps the cat had found his antics entertaining, a good way to pass a summer afternoon.