Lush Life (47 page)

"Boss." Matty nearly lunged across the blotter. "You want to help me on this? I need people to go the extra mile. I need people to pick up the phone when I call, I need more than-"

"All right, stop, stop." Berkowitz shifting, bucking, thinking it through. "OK. Here's the deal," lowering his voice. "In order for me to help you here, keep my own head off the block, it's got to play out like this. Anything you need, anything you want, from now on you go through me, only and directly, and I will take care of it."

"Really."

"Really"

"Great." Matty leaned back, then came forward, elbows on the desk again. "For starters? Give me my seventh-day recanvass. Better late than never. But that means I need to be able to get the manpower, I need to be able to reach out to Warrants, Narcotics, Borough Patrol, Anti-Crime . . ."

The DI took out a datebook and a small gold pen from the inside pocket of his jacket, started writing.

"I need targeted narco sweeps and vice sweeps in the Lemlichs and Cahan. I need targeted warrants. I need a Crimestoppers van cruising the Fifth, the Eighth, and the Ninth from the East River to the Bowery and from Fourteenth to Pike." Matty trying to keep his wish list rolling while twisting his head nearly upside down to see if Berkowitz was actually writing any of this down. "I need detectives and patrol from an hour before to an hour after the time of the shooting, that'd be four a. M., passing out flyers on all the key corners down there, doing on -
the-spot canvasses . . ."

The more Berkowitz wrote without complaint or question, the queasier Matty became.

"I want detectives on call to go to the Eighth to interview the collars as they come in, and I need all this to happen, when . . . When can I get this . . ."

"Sunday night," Berkowitz said, closing the book like a cigarette case and slipping it back into his jacket. "I'll take care of it."

"Sunday night going into Sunday morning?"

"Going into Monday morning."

"Boss, we re looking for habituals. Who's going to be out there. Who goes barhopping on a Sunday night."

"You want this happening or not. Saturdays too soon, Monday I can't promise, Tuesday's unpredictable to the point of science fiction."

"OK. All right, I'll take . . ." His next worry not even letting him get through the sentence.

"OK?" Berkowitz got to his feet.

"Hang on, wait." Matty putting a hand out. "Just, all due respect . . . Just, let me worry about this going the other way. We're talking Sunday, today's already Friday . . ."

"Did I just not say I'll take care of it?"

"Just . . ." Matty put his hands flat on the desk, lightly closed his eyes. "Can you just indulge me here, let me just paint a worst-case scenario here. OK, tomorrow's Saturday, right? Me being the way I am, I won't be able to help myself but to call you on your day off to get a progress report. If I'm lucky, I'll catch you maybe making breakfast for your kids or coming out of Home Depot with a new sander or whatever, but you'll have your hands full, be distracted, say, 'Yeah, yeah, everything's good to go,' and I won't be in a position to press for details.

"Now, if nonetheless I start calling the promised people Sunday morning and start getting a lot of 'He's out in the field' again? If, and once again I'm talking worst-case scenario here, if it all goes south come D-day? Forget about it. It's Sunday, you're not going to be reachable. Even I wouldn't take my call. Boss, make me believe."

"All I can say to you is, barring some massacre over the weekend, I will take care of it."

Berkowitz rose to his feet, draped his London Fog across his arm.

"Boss . . ." But Matty was unable to press for further reassurances, just didn't have the juice, and that was the problem.

"Matty. You're a good guy I'm trying to keep you from getting hurt."

Alone in the elevator, Tristan whispered new beats to himself, jerking his shoulders and slicing the air with short chops of his downturned hands, then got into being onstage doing it with Irma Nieves in the audience, Crystal Santos maybe, but definitely Irma Nieves-the concert abruptly canceled when the door groaned open on seven and Big Dap got on.

As was expected of him, Tristan backed into the opposite corner of the small car, this being the same elevator in which Big Dap had shot a police with the guy's own gun a year ago.

Dap wouldn't even look his way, but beneath the royal icing, Tristan took the opportunity to give him a good once-over; Big Dap not so big in private, a little taller than him, a lot heavier, but his body was peanut-shaped, pear-shaped, some kind of food-shaped, and he was ugly; stubble-haired with slit eyes under a heavy brow and a sour mouth like a small McDonald's arch.

So what was so big about Big Dap. What was so big was that when the shit went down, he didn't flinch. In a world of fronters he thought with his hands and dealt with the fallout later. But wasn't that what Tristan had done? So we're down to uglier and bigger. And we're down to people knowing about it or not . . .

As the elevator opened on the ground floor, before stepping out into the day, Big Dap slowly turned his head in Tristan's vague direction and sucked his teeth.

"At least mine couldn't get up afterwards," Tristan said a moment later, after he heard the door to the street whack against the mailboxes.

As soon as Bree spotted him at the bar, he could tell that she, like everybody else, had read the article.

She crossed to him directly

"That was true?" Looking at him with those heart-stomping bright eyes.

"Its complicated."

"Complicated?"

It was over between them. Over before it began.

"I don't understand, why wouldn't you help?"

Eric couldn't bring himself to speak.

"I mean, he's dead, you're alive, and you knew him?"

"Not that well."

Did he really just say that?

She sounded like the cops now, like the father in the papers, like the official spokesperson for the contempt of this so-called neighborhood.

Cocaine.

He'd have made good money off it the first time if he hadn't then had to host everybody buying it from him at his bar, if he hadn't worried about everybody thinking of him as a great guy.

Keep it tight this time. In and out.

"Can I ask," he sighed, "that stuff you had last night?"

She stared at him. "What?"

What was he thinking?

"Nothing . . ."

"I just don't understand you," she said, giving him a last look, then walking off to the lockers.

He'd been out of the loop for a long time. An ounce these days must go for something like $700 to $900, which could be bagged up into twenties and forties, or straight hundred-dollar grams, times 28 is 2,800 bucks minus the 900 is 1,900 clear in a few days, and that was without even stepping on it.

A discarded copy of the Post lay amid the debris of an unbused corner banquette. Eric walked over, slipped it under his arm, and retreated downstairs to the office.

Otherwise it's cowardly, it's unconscionable, it's unspeakable.

And then came the next quote, Eric never having gotten that far in his previous readings.

And the people of this city are with me.

He flipped the paper onto the desk.

The people of this city are with nobody.

The people of this city are rubberneckers, he thought, and I'm the car crash.

That dude look like, what'sit, Ice-T." The voice at Matty's back was young, male, and Latino. He finished taping the new reward poster to the bus shelter outside the Lemlichs, this one featuring Eric Cash's police sketch, the generic lynx-eyed urban predator who looked like anybody but, they had ultimately decided, was better than nobody.

"Twenty-two thousand?" the kid said. "Yup."

"Huh."

"You hear anything?" Matty purposely keeping his back to him in order not to spook him.

"Me?" the kid snorted. "Nah."

"Twenty-two's a lot of money."

"I mean I heard it was some nigger from Brooklyn, someshit."

"Oh yeah? Where'd you hear that?"

"Just like, in the air, you know what I'm sayin'?"

"But from anybody in particular?"

"I know who told me, but . . ."

"Yeah? Who told you?"

When he got no answer, Matty turned around to at least get a look at the kid before he vanished, but he was too slow.

And then he crossed the street to hit the Lemlich lobbies proper, the posters snug against his ribs, a roll of masking tape around his wrist like a bracelet.

At seven that evening, Eric's girlfriend, Alessandra, live from Manila, came into the restaurant with a man.

After nine months, her unannounced appearance, in the midst of his own furious preoccupations, was so disorienting to him that he had escorted them halfway to their deuce before realizing who she was.

"Jesus," he finally said, hovering over their table.

"Carlos." The guy extended his hand. He had a high black pompadour like an old-time Mexican movie star.

"Why didn't you tell me you were coming back?" Standing there gripping a seatback, he remembered what he had liked about her, those greeny-green eyes in a heart-shaped face, the rest of it never more than what went along with that. She was smart, he guessed, that was something.

They had lived together for two years, a record for him, but right now all he felt was distracted.

"Maybe you should sit down for this, Eric," she said. "Carlos and I-"

"Are in love," he finished for her, surveying the room. "Congratulations."

"Thank you," Carlos said, and offered his hand again.

"So how's it going otherwise?" Eric asked her.

"I'm moving to Manila permanently."

"OK."

"OK?"

"What do you want me to say?" The beginnings of a traffic jam by the door.

"Do you want the apartment?" she asked.

Bree hustled by hefting a tray of entrees.

"Eric?"

"I'm, I don't know, not for long." Then, forcing himself to focus, "Do you two need to stay there tonight?"

"Would that be awkward?"

"Are you fucking kidding me?" a female customer screamed from directly outside the front door. "I have my whole life in there!"

Clarence the doorman took off after the purse snatcher, seemingly everyone in Berkmann's half rising from their tables to watch the chase, framed by the full-length Norfolk Street picture window. Clarence had the guy by the nape before he could even get past the end of the glass, and the room broke out in applause.

"Eric?" Alessandra waiting.

"What."

"Would that be awkward?" "What."

"Staying there tonight."

"Extremely"

"That's OK," Carlos said to Alessandra. "We can stay with my aunt in Jersey City."

"Is that OK?" Eric asked.

"Sure," she said haltingly, then, "Are you OK?"

"Am I OK?" He thought about saying something clever, but . . "Did you read today's paper?"

"About what?" she said.

"This city," Lester Kaufman said, one knee crossed over the other, a cuffed hand dangling languidly from the restraint bar, "people are doing so well, you know? But you can't ask them for shit anymore. It's never been so bad."

Matty grunted in sympathy.

Clarence had told Matty that the first thing this guy had said when he grabbed him after the attempted purse snatch in front of Berkmann's was "Let me go and I'll tell you who shot that white kid."

"I swear, man," Lester said to Matty for the tenth time in the last half hour, "I just said that like in a panic. Like the first thing that came into my head. What's left of my head."

Unfortunately, Matty believed him.

Lester yawned like a lion, revealing a dull steel ball pierced through his tongue.

Iacone, roused from sleep for this, yawned in response.

"But I'll tell you, man, I'm really worried about my girlfriend. I gave her a hundred dollars to get me something, you know, get me well? She said fifteen minutes, then left me standing there three hours. I had no idea where she went, what happened to her. Fifteen minutes ... I mean I never would have done that if she didn't leave me there like half the night watching everybody coming out of that place for smokes, drunker and drunker, half the damned bags right on the sidewalk." Another titanic yawn, the dirty, dull tongue-pierce winking.

"Sucks," Iacone said. Strapped for a partner, Matty had cajoled him out of the bunk room with the promise of overtime and an easy commute.

"I mean I'm fucked, I know it, but can you just check your computer, see if she's in the system? I'm hoping she just got collared, nothing worse, but . . ."

"What's her name?"

"Anita Castro or Carla Nieves."

Iacone rose and went to the screen on Yolonda's desk.