Lush Life (27 page)

"That movie scared the hell out of me," Yolonda said.

"Then, like maybe after a whole year of that, one Sunday we all go to Van Cortlandt Park, the two kids and us. Billy's trying to get Ike to have a catch, he won't take his nose out of some book, you know, got the spycam up, but Billy gets him on his feet, Ike's catching and throwing like it's a two-ton medicine ball, then all of a sudden, he sees something over his dad's shoulder, drops his glove, and breaks into a dead run, yelling, 'Hey! Hey!'

"We're like, what the hell? Take off after him. It turns out that a couple of older kids had my daughter cornered by some trees, were trying to take all her little stuff, earrings, charm bracelet, play purse, she must've been too scared to cry for help, but Ike, Ike he just like, launched himself at them, and they were bigger kids too, came in on them like a buzz saw, but before they could get it together to kick his narrow little ass, they see me and Billy bringing up the rear, so they had to take off. But Ike, he's not done, he chases them halfway across the green, then stands there, shouts out, 'You keep your fucking hands off my sister!'

"His sister." Minette went off somewheres, came back laughing. "And my daughter, she hears him, turns to me, says, Ike's got a sister?'"

"Wow." Matty ran his fingers across his lips.

"Yeah. And that kind of broke it open. By the time we got married two years later? The kids gave us a toast together."

Matty just sat there, his face smeared into his hand.

"You know the thing I loved about Ike the most? He was a good kid and all, but the best thing about him was that he always seemed so ready. Does that even make sense?"

"Sure," Matty said.

"And the, the irony is, Billy always kicked himself for having to leave Ike behind, but the truth of the matter? That kid turned out good to go. A big heart and happy. A lot happier than either of his parents."

Minette hoisted her bag to her shoulder and wiped her eyes. "It just works out that way sometimes, you know?"

A moment after she left, Yolonda murmured to her computer screen, "If the kid had been a little less 'ready,' he might still be alive, you know what I'm saying?" Looking up at Matty, who was still looking at the door.

Eric sat alone in Cafe Berkmann's cramped cellar-level office, the narrow plank desk before him covered with neat stacks of cash and empty envelopes.

Despite his knuckles having continued to swell overnight to the point of splitting the skin, his fingers skittered across the face of the calculator in a controlled frenzy. And as always when stealing from the tip pool, he not only moved his lips but whispered the numbers out loud as if the TI-36 were in on the scam.

As a manager as opposed to, say, a bartender, he found it hard to steal or, as he preferred to think of it, shave, but Eric did what he could.

In divvying up the nightly tip pool, it was all about the cash value of a "point," which changed every night, and what fraction of that point your job was assigned.

Managers, hostesses, and waiters earned a full point per hour, jobs of lesser status, three-quarters to a quarter of a point.

Last night, the house took in $2,400 in tips, which, divided by 77, the accumulated number of points working the floor, gave a point value of $31.16.

So a waiter working eight hours was owed $31.16 times his full eight points, or $249.28; a busboy, getting one-third of a point, was due roughly $83 for putting in the same amount of time.

But, but ... If Eric "miscalculated" and declared the point value for the evening not to have been $31.16 but, say $29.60 (no one ever checked up on him), then that waiter took home only $236.80, the busboy $78.93, and Eric would pocket $13 and $4 respectively, times ten waiters, seven busboys, plus everyone else in the pool equaled Eric walking out the door with an extra few hundred in cash every week.

The key to not getting caught was self-control; he never shaved more than $1.50 off the true value of a point and rarely pulled the scam more than once a week; never more than twice.

But since the shooting, he'd been dipping into that pool every day and yesterday had increased his shave to $2.50 a point, a new high or low for him.

Something furry ran past the office on its way to the storage room, and Eric scribbled a note to himself to call the exterminator. Then he saw the damned thing again, running in reverse this time-a trick of the eyes. Since his release from the Tombs, he hadn't been able to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, a combination of free-fall dreams and late-night alcohol. So in the subterranean quiet of the office right now he briefly laid his head between the cash and the envelopes, closed his eyes, and drifted off. When he woke, Matty and Yolonda were seated across the plank desk from him, Yolonda's eyes filled with that pitiless pity of hers, Matty unreadable . . . When he woke, he was on his feet staring at the brick wall. Shaking it off as best he could, he applied himself to the stuffing of envelopes, today's skim surpassing for the first time $3 a point; suicidal most likely, but he just needed to leave; this city, this life, and he would do what he had to do to make it happen.

Avner Polaner, a tall, bony Ashkenazi-Yemeni Israeli, sat before the digital photo manager, staring listlessly at the mug shots coming up at him six to the screen, droning, "No, no, no," his head aslant on the heel of his palm.

Of the three robberies on the All Sheets featuring two dark-skinned males and a handgun, Polaner's mugging coincided most neatly with that of Ike Marcus; three in the morning and took place only a few blocks away on Delancey and Clinton. The downside was the incident had happened ten days ago, and he had never been interviewed on it because five hours after the encounter he was on a plane to Tel Aviv. But with Eric Cash out of the loop, Avner was the closest thing Matty and Yolonda had to a best hope.

"No, no, no." The guy bored out of his mind.

Yolonda, operating the monitor, threw Matty a look.

Polaner appeared to be in his early thirties, basketball tall, his long, kinky hair bound up in an urban samurai topknot. An hour earlier, when he had come into the squad room shoulder-carrying a bike as long and thin as himself, Matty thought he had moved with the geeky grace of a flamingo.

"No, no, no." Then, plunging his face into his hands, "OK, stop," rearing back. "Look, a dark kid with a gun is a dark kid with a gun. Thats the price of living here, is every now and then its going to happen, so you don't do anything stupid like the guy you just told me about, you just shrug it off and go about your business. You go on."

"Are you worried about some kind of payback?"

"Please. I was stationed on the Lebanese border for two years, I don't sweat the occasional stickup. Besides which, as I told you already, I knew better than to give him a good look right in his face, so really, this here is a waste of everybody's time." He took a deep breath, reset himself. "That being said, I have a question."

They waited.

"What would it take to arrest Harry Steele?"

"Backtrack a little there, Avner."

"Do you know why I went to Tel Aviv right after the holdup instead of coming in here to look at this stuff? To get some sleep"

"Avner," Matty said, "backtrack."

"Of all his tenants I pay top dollar, sixteen hundred for an apartment so small 1 have to leave the room to change my mind because everybody else in the building has been living there since the Flood. The welfare queen below me pays six hundred, the hippie spinster on top a thousand, and the millionaire, an eighty-five-year-old man who remembers shaking hands with Fiorello La Guardia in the lobby, remembers the seltzer man, the iceman, toilets in the hallway, who owns three hot-sheet motels in the Bronx and half the town of Kerhonkson, New York, he pays three hundred and fifty dollars.

"And you should see how they keep their places, crusted food on the stoves, shower curtains that could grow penicillin, cat piss on the carpets, roaches, mice . . . You know what I have on my floors? Wide
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board pumpkin pine. I installed it myself, paid for it myself. And when I move? I'm going to take it with me so Steele doesn't have another reason to jack up the rent on the next poor sucker."

"This is in the Berkmann's building?" Yolonda asked, slowly rolling her head from ear to ear.

"Worse. I'm across the street, so not only do I get to hear all the
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drunken assholes who have to go outside for their smokes until three in the morning every morning, not only do I hear all the pukers, the cab whistlers, the moon howlers, but I have the proper angle of vision to see them as well. And you know what he has the nerve to say to me, Steele? He says, 'Avi, nobody ever complains but you.' He says I'm an environmental hypochondriac.' Can you imagine that?"

"Huh."

"I have friends run restaurants and shops in the neighborhood, everybody says to me, 'Avi, you got to roll with it. The guy is running his business just like you. Be realistic, be sympathetic.' But no. Not just like me. I own two delis around here. One on Eldridge and Rivington-"

"The Sanaa?"

"That's one, yes."

"I thought the brothers ran that."

"The Two Stooges? Those guys couldn't run a race. They work for me.

"So how'd you like the Virgin Mary showing up there the other day?" Yolonda asked.

"The who?"

"The Virgin Mary."

Avner shrugged. "Did she buy anything?"

"Excuse me." Matty got up and took a short walk around himself.

The thought of returning to the house of Babel with a Chinese uniform to once again try to track down Paul Ng made him want to drop to his knees with despair.

And the only other vie on the All Sheets who seemed like a possible match to the Marcus shooters was a guy named Ming Lam, also Chinese, also reluctant to file his complaint, and with the added bonus of old age-seventy-six, according to the report.

They were fucked without Eric Cash; he just knew it.

"My point is," Avner said, "never has one of my stores ever got a public-nuisance citation. So I go to all the state Liquor Board hearings every month, I file noise complaint after noise complaint. 'Avi, nobody complains but you.' Oh yeah? I get so many names on petitions 1 could start my own political party. I go in there and talk to them about the fact that he's selling alcohol less than five hundred feet from a school, I talk about the exhaust pollution from the delivery trucks, how his sign is too bright, too big. I research everything, I try everything. At this point I know every state Liquor Board member by their first name, but he's Harry Steele, they all live in his ass and that's that."

Matty toyed with the idea of making a backdoor plea to Danny the Red; beg him to call off this waiver-of-immunity pissing match.

"He says he'll pay me ten thousand if I move. Says he'll pay for the moving van, help me find another apartment in the neighborhood, he'll even throw in the key money on the new place, says I'm paying close to market value already, so what's the big deal. The big deal, Mister Hot Shit Harry Steele, is I was here before you opened the restaurant, I was here first. You move."

"Why don't you just go back to Israel?" Yolonda said, more out of boredom than anything else.

"If I was a black man complaining like this"-Avner smiled
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"would you tell me to go back to Africa?"

"I would if that's where you grew up."

"I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriends a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place."

"Avner." Yolonda leaned forward, elbows on knees. "I want you to keep looking at these faces."

"It's a waste of time."

"It's a homicide," Matty snapped. "The shooters are still out there, and the victim could have just as easily been you."

Avner seemed to think on that, went off somewheres behind those raccoon eyes, then abruptly came back. "You want to hear the worst?" He leaned into them, smiled softly. "Now he's pushing for sidewalk tables."

Eric sat the bar with a brandy and soda, the last of the sun slashing at him through the Venetian blinds.

He surprised himself by recognizing Bree's silhouette through the Rivington Street window shades and had her tip envelope in hand before she came through the door.

She stood near the pulpit looking around for him, Eric once again thinking "Irish eyes," half song title, all cliche.

She was maybe twenty, twenty-one, fourteen-fifteen years younger than him, wearing a hippie-vintage light orange Indian blouse and a worn pair of jeans a size too big in the seat. He could imagine her rising this morning and grabbing them from the rumpled pile of clothes that lay alongside her flat-to-the-floor mattress.

"Hey" She stepped to him at the bar, accepted her envelope, then took a deep breath as if drawing herself together. "Look."