Red Hook (8 page)

He lowered himself into a pillowy armchair and watched Mellow and his mother while Daskivitch disappeared down the hall.

The kid picked up a remote and turned up the volume on the big-screen TV. “
You
like the soaps, cop? Why don’t you stay and watch with us?” He leaned forward and took a potato chip from an economy-size bag on a coffee table and crunched it deliberately while staring at Jack.

“Mellow?” Jack said. “They call you that ’cause you’re such a laid-back guy?”

The mother snorted. “He used to like marshmallows when he was a baby.” Evidently she had too. She reached forward and grabbed a couple of chips.

Jack stared at them for a minute. They sat there coolly munching chips with two detectives in the apartment, yet somehow their composure seemed thin. The kid glanced around the apartment, scratched the side of his nose.

Something was definitely hinky.

“You find anything?” Jack called out.

Daskivitch came back into the room. “Zippo.”

“You try the kitchen?”

“Not yet.” Daskivitch crossed the living room and disappeared again.

Jack stared at the couple on the couch. They stared smugly back.

Too smug. It was the look of smart street dealers when a squad car pulled up. No savvy dealer would have stash on his person when he could be searched at any moment. Jack had found the little envelopes hidden in many places nearby, though: in the middle of a public trash can, inside the base of a lamppost, in a magnetic key case stuck under a parked car, even in a potato-chip bag…

“Mind if I have a chip?” he asked.

The mother went pale and struggled to rise out of the sofa.

Jack leaned forward and grabbed her outstretched wrist. With his left hand, he dumped the bag upside down onto the glass tabletop. He shoved aside a heap of chips and grinned at a handful of tiny wax-paper packets. The mother must have shoved them in the bag when her son called the warning.

“Dask!” he called.

His partner trotted back.

“Lookee here,” Jack said. “Do me a favor and escort this wonderful example of a mother out of the room and take a statement.”

The woman whimpered as Daskivitch led her down the hall. Lovely, Jack thought. Family values. He’d been a cop too long to be surprised.

He stared at Mallow.
Don’t say anything for a moment; let him sweat.
The kid didn’t look like a big bad murdering drug dealer, but he was certainly a lying weasel. Maybe he
had
gotten into a fight with Berrios; maybe he had a big friend willing to work the victim over. In the heat of the moment, Berrios gets stabbed…

Mallow scowled. “My mother didn’t know nothing about this.”

“Why don’t we fingerprint the packets, then?”

“Fuck you,” Mallow said. He didn’t have anything else to offer.

Jack pulled his chair forward until his knees were touching the kid’s. “You think you’re in trouble now? Try murder one.”

Mallow’s eyes went big. “What the hell you talking about!”

“You know one of your neighbors, name of Tomas Berrios?”

“I heard about it. That shit is
wack
.”

“Did you know him?”

“No. I mean, I saw him around, but—”

“Did he buy from you?”

“No.”

“Play straight with me. Maybe I can at least keep your mother out of jail.”

Mallow pressed his fingertips against his temples. “Fuck. I don’t…okay, I knew him. He bought from me a couple of times. Just some reefer.”

“Any coke?”

“Never.”

“I heard different.”

“Man, he was a pussy. All he ever wanted was
chiba
. That’s all.”

“How much did he owe you?”

Mallow shook his head. “I don’t give credit. I don’t have the muscle to collect. What am I gonna do, send my moms over to their house?” He rubbed his palms against his thighs. “Listen, man—I deal a little smoke, maybe a few grams of blow. That’s it. Don’t try to pin some
murder
thing on me, all right?”

“Where were you Sunday morning? Say, from eight A.M. to noon?”

“I was on Staten Island all weekend, man. I went to see my daughter.”

“Are you lying to me, Mallow?”

“No, sir. I swear it on my moms.”

“Yeah, she’s real trusty.”

“My ex-wife’s whole family was there, mister. Her moms, her sisters, her cousin…It was a birthday party for my daughter.”

Shit. Jack would call to check, but the alibi sounded solid. He sighed. “I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m not gonna take you in right now. You or your mother.” The truth was that a narcotics bust probably wouldn’t have held up in court, considering the way he and his partner had gained access to the apartment, but Mallow and Co. couldn’t be sure of that. “But I want you out on the street every goddamn second, listening for any word about who might have killed Tomas Berrios. Here’s my card—you call me if you hear anything. Leave a message if I’m not in.” Jack leaned in until he was inches from Mallow’s face. “And if I ever hear that you’re still dealing, or that you had anything to do with the Berrios murder,
anything
, I’m gonna personally come back here and make sure you
and
your mami go away for a hundred years. “You follow me?”

Mallow shook his head, dazed at his good fortune.

“Right now, I’m gonna need phone numbers for everybody who was at your daughter’s birthday.”

Daskivitch whistled in disbelief as they settled back into the car. “A day like this, it really does a lot for your faith in humanity.”

Jack sighed. The day hadn’t done much for his faith in cracking the case either. But he turned to his partner and grinned. “Egg salad and chips.”

Daskivitch shook his head and started the engine.

“You wanna get some dinner?” Jack said.

“I gotta get home. The wife’s expecting me.”

“How long you been married?”

Daskivitch scratched the side of his big square head. “Actually, it was just a few months after we worked that case in the Gowanus Houses.”

“Things going good?”

“Yeah. I like it a lot. I’d hate to be single again, I’ll tell you that.” He winced. “Uh, sorry. You’re divorced, right?”

Jack nodded.

“So, you seeing anybody, or what?”

Jack sighed. “I get out now and then.”

S
HEILA DIXON TURNED AFTER
she opened the door. “I’m just finishing up something on the computer. There’s wine—help yourself.”

Jack watched her small figure stride down the hall toward the back of her Brooklyn Heights apartment. It was after ten P.M. He’d dropped Daskivitch off at the Seven-six, eaten some eggplant parmigiana at an Italian place near the station house…He’d felt foolish calling Sheila so spur of the moment, but she didn’t seem to mind.

He took off his coat and slung it over the back of a rocking chair. In the hallway a row of sinister wooden masks stretched toward the bedroom. Between the front door and the hall hung an abstract painting, a sprawling, messy thing. Bookshelves covered the far wall. History, art history, books with French titles. Sheila taught at Columbia University. They’d met a couple of days after the murder of a local dry cleaner, when Jack was canvassing some of the victim’s regular clients. Sheila had sat on this couch drinking a glass of wine, looking through the sliding glass door, which gave out onto a wooden deck with a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline. She offered him a glass and—since it was near the end of an evening shift—he accepted.

He sauntered, into the cramped kitchen. As usual, an open bottle of expensive wine stood on the counter. He peered down into a case in the corner; nearly empty. He didn’t think Sheila was an alcoholic, but she definitely drank a lot. Maybe the quality of the wine made her feel better about drinking so much of it, about drinking it alone. He poured himself a glass, then peeked into her refrigerator. Other than a container of lactose-free milk and a couple of take-out cartons, it held only row after row of condiments. Curry paste. Hoisin sauce. Olive paste…In the five or six times he’d been here, he’d never seen her cook—she was too busy with her work. Maybe she put the condiments on the take-out food.

He wandered back into the living room, his mind never idle. If this was a homicide scene, who would have killed her? Disgruntled student, maybe, academic career ruined by a failing grade? Too
Columbo
. Most likely it would just be an interrupted B and E. Up over the deck, through the sliding door. Maybe the perp would leave some prints on a take-out food container, a mid-job snack. Jack would guess his nationality by the type of condiment left out on the counter.

“What are you thinking about?” Sheila asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.

He spun around, guilty over his morbid preoccupations. “Hm? Just enjoying the scenery.”

“That moron next door put a floodlight out on his deck. It really interferes with the view.”

Sheila sipped her wine. Petite Caucasian female, mid-thirties, short brown hair, fairly sexy figure, lipstick-model lips.

“This wine’s pretty good,” Jack said.

“Not really. It’s not very complex. I should have taken it back after I opened the first bottle.” She came around the sofa and perched on the far end. “To what do I owe this unexpected visit?”

“I don’t know, You need a reason?”

She lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. “I guess not. The inscrutable Detective Leightner.”

“Actually, I’m feeling pretty scrutable tonight.”

She considered him without so much as a grin.

“That was a joke,” he said. “Did you teach today?”

She pulled a shred of nicotine off her tongue and grimaced. “Don’t ask. I don’t know why they keep admitting these brain-dead kids.”

Jack didn’t come around often: her relentless negativity was hard to take. If he said the weather was nice, she’d point to a bad forecast; if he complimented her apartment, she’d complain about the lack of space. A couple of times he’d tried to tactfully point out this pattern, but Sheila had been surprised and defensive. She was always talking about spirituality, about being
centered
and
grounded
, but her cool exterior seemed brittle to him, the cap on an angry inner life. In short, she was a pain in the ass, but the next time he was feeling too single, he’d probably overlook that again and come back for more.

“What are you working on back there?”

She brightened, as he knew she would. The one thing that always improved her disposition was talk about her research. Sheila had her problems, but he liked listening to someone with such a vivid life of the mind. He wondered if he wouldn’t have enjoyed college himself, given the chance.

She allowed herself to relax back into the sofa. “I’m writing about a book from the seventies called
The Denial of Death
.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s it about?”

“Well”—she took a sip of her wine—“it’s a psychoanalytic—actually post-Freudian—work. The premise is that much of human civilization, from religion to war to art, has been developed by people to defend themselves against their fear of death.” She stopped as he rose from the sofa. “Am I boring you?”

“Not at all,” he said. “Hey, death’s my middle name, right?”

She didn’t crack a smile.

“I’m just getting some more wine,” he said. He went into the kitchen, returned with the bottle, and topped off their glasses.

“Maybe we should talk about something more interesting,” she said. Meaning, he gathered, that he wasn’t supposed to be able to handle an intellectual conversation. But wasn’t he a professional thinker too? He’d taken his own courses: Estimating Time of Death, Forensic Entomology, Death by Asphyxia and Narcotic-related Deaths, Interrogation Techniques…

“Why don’t you tell me about
your
work,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like, I don’t know—do you think you have a different attitude toward your own death than most people? Do you believe in an afterlife? You never talk about what you do.”

“I don’t know,” he said. He’d started to feel relaxed—now he recognized a clamping-off he always felt when asked such questions by someone who wasn’t a cop or a doctor or a forensics expert.

“You don’t know
what
? Surely you must have thought about these things. I mean, you have this job where you deal with
dead people
all the time.”

He stood up, crossed to the sliding door, and looked out at the glowing skyscrapers across the river.

“Well?” she said. “Tell me something.”

He tugged on the knot of his tie. “You really have to be there.”

“Where?”

“You have…I don’t know. “You have to have seen it.”

“That’s silly. I don’t have to go to the pyramids to learn about Egypt.”

He turned sharply. “Nobody’s talking about pyramids. I’m talking about…I don’t know—”

“
What?
Like this is supposed to be some macho thing that a woman can’t understand?”

“How about a little baby girl with half of her head blown off? You want to talk about that?”

Sheila winced.

Somehow there always seemed to be a tension between them and he didn’t know whose fault it was. “Look, I’m sorry” he said. “I just don’t feel like talking about work after a long day. Okay?” She didn’t respond.

An awkward silence.

“Am I keeping you up?” he finally asked.

Sheila didn’t answer. She had to drink a certain amount before she’d admit she wanted sex too. Before then, he had to pretend that wasn’t the reason for his visits. He leaned over to kiss her. She let him, but didn’t respond.

Christ, he told himself. Get up. Leave. What are you doing here?

The first few times, they’d kissed like hungry teenagers because they didn’t know what to say to each other. Now they went straight into the main event.

Jack slid below the sheets and started to kiss the inside of Sheila’s thighs. He worked his way forward, deeper. Her muscles stiffened—not with anticipation, but distaste.

“Come here,” she said, pulling him up. And then she moved down his body, took him in her mouth, and began to suck him with a detached earnestness, offering the act to avoid exposing herself. He lay back and tried to relax. Outside the bedroom window, the leaves of a tall tree shimmered silver in the street light.