Lush Life (33 page)

"Marai," the kid bawled, although the wail didn't reach her eyes, which creeped him out.

"Just shut up, man."

"Mami!" A flat blaring.

"Damn . . ." Tristan hissed. "MAMI!

The bedroom door finally opened, the kid's mother in a swish of nightdress coming in, clucking her irritation.

"I don't like Tristan now."

"Sssh." Moving between them like he wasn't even there.

"I don't like Tristan."

"Good, you little bitch," he murmured, "fuck I care."

The mother turned rigid when he said that, then picked her daughter up to bring her back to her own bed, the kid giving him those calm adult eyes over her mother's shoulder.

"I ain't do nothing." Tristan's face in the moonlight red as a berry.

Snatching his beat book from under the mattress, he wrote furiously in the dark:

The will to fill the bill kill or thrill a man stands up a man stands down sits tight when its right

My no is a blow to your yes my power by the hour grows like a tower

Hey, am I calling too late?" Matty said softly into his cell. "Who is this?" Minette responded a little shakily. "Mat
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Detective Clark." Fending off a wave of embarrassment as he leaned on the railing of his terrace and took another sip of beer. "Oh, hi," she said. "Any news?"

"Not ... I was just calling to see how everything's going."

"Well . . ." she half-sang, such a loaded question.

"Your daughter's all right?"

"She's . . . We're watching a movie."

"Oh yeah?"

Seventeen stories below, two ambulances, one Hatzolah, the other from Cabrini, raced from opposite ends of Grand Street to the same collision, the combination of beer and altitude making them look like electric insects.

"And how's the mister doing?" "Who?"

Matty hesitated. "Your husband."

There was a long silence on Minette's end, then, "What do you mean?"

"I brought him back this afternoon, remember?" "What?" Minette's breathing a little more pronounced. "When?" Matty started pacing the AstroTurf. "This afternoon." "I was here all day." Her voice starting to climb. "He was here?" He knew he should have hung in a few more minutes before driving off when that asshole entered the building.

"Well, he's in one piece, at least," Matty said as she started to cry. "I can tell you that much."

She continued to weep into his ear, the proximity of her frustration making him dizzy.

"So," he began, then lost track. "Is there anything else I can do for you?

Twenty minutes after the wife took her hamster out of the bedroom, Tristan felt himself yanked to a sitting position on his bed by his ex
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stepfather.

"What you say to my wife?"

"What?" Tristan reflexively grabbing the arms that had grabbed his.

"What? What? What?" The guy bughouse with eighty-proof eyes.

"Nestor." Hissing from somewheres in the shadows.

"You disrespect my wifeT Spraying him with spittle.

Tristan had grabbed his ex-stepfather to keep from getting hit, and now he noticed that his thumb and fingertips overlapped around the guys wrists.

The ex-stepfather tried to free one hand to raise up and smack him, and just as an experiment, Tristan wouldn't let him, the guy's eyes protruding now like eggs.

Dizzy-thrilled, terrified, Tristan abruptly bellowed, "I'M POPEYE THE SAI-LOR MANN . . ."

The ex-stepfather tried to free his hand again, Tristan gripping harder, bleating louder, "I LIVE IN A GARR-BAGE CANN."

Then it became just too disorienting, how easy it was to hold the guy, and so he let go, knowing what would happen if he did.

A second later he was flat on his mattress again, the taste of copper trickling down the back of his throat.

The blows kept coming, each one singing behind his eyes, Tristan drifting off underneath, the sensation of his thumb and fingertips overlapping around the guy's wrists like that coming back and back to him.

Finally the wife said "Nestor" again and the hitting stopped, his ex
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stepfather leaning over him now as if to kiss him goodnight. "You are a destroyer, but you will not destroy my home." Then rose up and stormed out of the room, his equally bug-eyed mopstick skeeve of a wife bringing up the rear.

In the dark, in the quiet, Tristan grinned through blood-rimmed teeth.

With the upstairs anticrime squad room working on three other collars at the present, the Dominican kid with the cardboard license plate found himself sitting handcuffed between Lugo and Daley in the minuscule juvenile interview room on the ground floor of the precinct.

"First, say goodbye to that car."

"What?" The kid reared back. "No. Why you got to take my car?"

"Auto Crimes gonna take it to pieces," Daley said.

"Oh, don't tell me that."

"Money in the bank they check the VIN, it's been switched with some long-gone junker. But in the eyes of the law? They're not gonna differentiate between you and the car-ring assholes you bought it from."

"Don't tell me that."

"Possession is nine-tenths of the jackpot."

"Criminalistically speaking? That forged plate automatically makes this a RICO charge. Twenty years mandatory."

"As in years."

"Do not tell me that." The kid whipping his head so fast his hair was a blur.

"That baby due in five months?" Lugo yawned.

"Gonna be calling some other guy Daddy," Daley finished.

"You'll be Uncle Plexiglas."

The room settled into a bruised silence.

"Thoughts?" Daley finally said. "Comments? Suggestions?"

"I don't understand why you got to take my car."

"Bro . . . Did you hear anything of what we just said?"

"Yeah, but why you got to take my car?"

Daley and Lugo stared at each other.

"Least of your problems, bro."

"If I lose that car, man, I swear to God . . ."

Lugo widened his eyes and delicately placed his fingertips to his temples. "Let me ask," he said softly. "When you were a kid and the teacher saw you walking into the classroom in the morning, did she used to go all white and start shaking?" "What?"

"Look, between us?" Daley leaned in close. "We don't give a shit about that bogus plate. We're in here staying late with you because you seem like a decent guy and frankly, you're getting fucked."

"But like we told you, bro, all we can do is hope you get us a gun." Lugo sounding glum. "Otherwise we're powerless."

"And it's got to be in the next hour because that's all the time we're allowed to stay, so . . ."

"Hey, yo, I would help you if I could."

"No, you got it backwards, bro." Daley leaned back, clasped his hands over his belly. "We're the ones trying to help you."

"I don't know a gun."

"You don't have to know." Daley rushing back in on him. "A guy knows a guy knows a guy."

"You're not a bad person." Lugo completing the bookend. "We know that."

"That's why we're talking to you."

"The other times you got popped, did any of the other officers converse with you like this? Did they invest in conversation like this?" "No."

"Listen." Daley touched his arm, looked into his eyes. "Me and him, we've done this forty times at least. Guy says, 'I don't know a gun,' we wind up with a piece."

"And they weren't bullshitting us," Lugo said.

"Well, some were."

"Granted, but most times? It's six degrees of separation. A guy calls a guy calls a guy and we're off to the races. The last guy sitting right where you are now? In deeper shit than you, frankly, came through for us? Walked out of here come sunup, rubbing his wrists, wondering where to get breakfast. It happens, bro. But in your case? Due to the exigencies of the service, it's got to be right now."

"I don't, know, a gun."

"We never said you did. Are you listening to us?"

Apparently not; the kid muttering to himself, staring at his lap.

Lugo and Daley looked at each other, then shrugging, shifted gears. "How 'bout cuz in there?"

"Benny? He's my best friend."

"We have best friends go south on each other all the time in here. But that's not even what we're asking."

"Benny don't know no guns."

"No? You don't think he can reach out to someone?"

"Naw, man, Benny's a busboy like six years at Berkmann's. He don't ... He taught me about work."

'You sure about that?"

"Yeah."

"Then I hate to say this, bro, but you are done for."

The kid shook his head in sorrow, then looked to Lugo. "But why do you got to take my car?"

After loitering at the shrine for an hour, hoping to at least catch Billy if no one else, Matty had himself buzzed in at the No Name, thrashing his way through the double layer of thick, sound-muffling theater curtains that immediately confronted him once past the scarred industrial street door.

Despite the hour, the narrow room was full, both bartenders, the young lacquer-haired owner and the long Italianate author of his two most sexually depressing encounters of the year, working those silver shakers like maracas.

The new hostess, having never seen him before, began to ask him if he had a reservation, then thought better of it, gracefully gesturing towards the one free seat at the bar; not because she knew that he was a former employee but because she read him correctly and no bar or restaurant down here ever turned away a police.

Matty sat watching his morose off-again, off-again lover from inches away, her lean, dark, unsmiling face underlit by the low-watt bulbs installed discreetly beneath the four cocktail-specific ice containers: shaved, cubed, slabbed, and fjorded.

"How are you doing?" Speaking as quietly as he could without whispering.

"Good," she said briskly, eyes on her work, pouring equal amounts of liquefied ginger and fresh-squeezed apple juice over a double shot of potato vodka and a crag of ice.

"That looks good," he said.

"Sazerac and a sidecar?" the sole waiter requested as if paging someone in a plush hotel lobby.

Matty sat there in the sepia-toned room staring into the luminous tubs of ice.

The thing about Minette was that she was no kid, that she was
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how else to put it-a woman, a strapping woman with presence; clear
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eyed, mature, with a red-brown saddle of freckles across the bridge of her nose; Matty thinking, Does it still just come down to that? Eyes and vibes and freckles across a stongly defined nose? Yes and no, yes and no, but, yeah, yes, of course, until the deathbed; it's the visual triggers that kick off the daydreaming.

"You know what?" He leaned in towards his bartender, unconsciously speaking in the delicate tone the room seemed to demand. "It is personal. It does have something to do with me."

She neither looked his way nor stopped her furious industry; Matty thinking, Mixologist, gathering himself to leave when, still unsmiling and without any eye contact, she slid one of those apple-vodka-ginger things in front of him, Matty quietly grateful to her for this last-minute save of his dignity and wishing like anything he could remember her name.

Chapter
Five.

The call from Kenny Chan, a Robbery sergeant in the Ninth, came to Matty as he was handing a blowup of Billy Marcus's driver's license photo to the daytime bartender at Kid Dropper's.

"Mr. Matty, we picked up one of your guys this morning off the Want Cards, Shawn Tucker?"

"Who?"

"Tucker, goes by the tag Blue Light? Got ratted out by his partner on a robbery."

"My Want Card?" Not remembering. "Who's the partner?"

"Which robbery? We ran some lineups, got three hits on Tucker so far, but the vies are all describing a different second guy. Apparently ol' Blue Light's democracy in action, just grabs whoever's around, takes whatever's handy, gat, knife, stick, tomahawk, says, 'Let's snatch a head,' and off they go. We have seven more vies on their way in, it's like we're having a clearance sale with this douche. You want to wait until we're done or you want to talk to him now?"

"Wait. Let him rack up all the hits first."

"Actually one of the vies is from your neck of the woods."

"Yeah?"

"Old Chinese guy, Ming Lee?"

"Who?"

Hang on." Muffling the phone to talk to someone, then, "Sorry. Ming Lam," then, "Fenton Ma says to say hello."

Matty had no idea who this Blue Light was, but with at least one of the comparable victims off the All Sheets having made a positive ID, Matty was desperate now to have Eric Cash eyeball this guy-a lineup, a photo array, a drive-by, anything-and so he finally called Danny the Red to make a behind-the-DA's-back plea for cooperation. He got a recorded greeting, first in Spanish, then English.