Bad to the Bone (6 page)

“The doctors say she had a stroke.”

“Bullshit.” Moodrow was old-fashioned. He wasn’t in the habit of using street language in the presence of a strange woman, no matter how coarse, but the diagnosis of stroke shocked him. “People don’t get dumped in lots in the Bronx for having strokes. What do the cops say?”

Connie grinned broadly. “At last,” she crowed. “At last I got a man with guts. You find a girl like this in a lot in the Bronx, you gotta know someone did something wrong. She was wearing a three-hundred-dollar outfit, for Christ’s sake.”

“Please, Connie.” Moodrow ignored the compliment. “What do the cops think?”

“All the cops wanted to do was dump her off on me and forget about it. The doctors said it was a stroke, right? If no crime was committed, why should the cops be involved? Well, I got a lawyer, a real
finocchio
with Italian suits and a stretch Mercedes. So much marble in his house, you think you’re in a Greek museum. He took it up the line, from the detective who took her fingerprints to the lieutenant to the precinct commander to the borough commander to One Police Plaza where the hotshots work. They sent some people out, but they couldn’t even give her an address. They couldn’t tell us where she lived for the past years. Or who her friends were. Or how she made a living. Or where her son is. Finally I get to this guy with all the white hair, the
chief
of all the detectives. ‘No crime was committed.’ That’s all the
strunza
can say. ‘No crime was committed.’ If I want to take it farther, I should hire a private investigator. Then he recommended you.”

“Franklyn Goobe,” Moodrow sighed.

“You and him didn’t get along?” Connie asked hopefully.

“He was a bigshot in the cops and I was a precinct detective. Getting along doesn’t really have anything to do with that relationship. In the army, a colonel doesn’t get along with a lieutenant. Orders come down and you do what you’re told, like it or not.” Moodrow deliberately left out the fact that he’d manipulated the NYPD (and Franklyn Goobe) as much as possible. His new employer was trying to make the cops into adversaries and Moodrow didn’t see the point of it. Not at this stage. “What about your grandson? It could be anybody’s kid. Maybe your daughter was trying to get back at you by inventing a grandson you’d never see.”

“Smart, Moodrow. You ask smart questions. I had the lawyer check birth records for the year he would have been born and we found him easy enough. January 15 in Beth Israel Hospital on First Avenue. A baby boy, Michael, born to Florence Alamare. She listed her address as 1117 Ludlow Street which is where the commune is.”

“And the cops didn’t check out the Hanoverians at all?”

“They went there and Davis Craddock told them my daughter left the commune two years earlier. He hadn’t heard from her and couldn’t care less. Look, Moodrow, one of the reasons I picked you is you spent your career on the Lower East Side. You know the territory.”

Moodrow shook his head. “It’s not gonna be that easy. The Hanoverians aren’t neighborhood. They’re closed off.”

“I want my grandson,” Connie said evenly, “and I’m willing to pay. I got a check for $10,000. Put it in the bank and mail me the bills. When that check’s used up, I’ll send you another one. You find my grandson, you get a $15,000 bonus. You get proof on Davis Craddock, it’s fifteen more. I got so much money, I need a computer to count it. What am I gonna spend it on? I need an heir and that girl lying in the bed needs justice. Do the right thing, Moodrow. Do the right thing.”

P
ETEY RAGSDALE WAS IN
seventh heaven: he had a pocketful of PURE and pretty Polly in her 13th Street apartment, the 4th of July and Christmas wrapped up in one beautiful package. More good fortune, he had to admit, than any junkie is entitled to in the course of a mostly desperate fucking life.

But fresh is fresh, and he had no intentions of not
enjoying
his blessings, deserved or not. PURE hadn’t been on the market for more than a month and it was already the rarest dope on the Lower East Side. Every day (as soon as he scrounged the bank) Petey searched for PURE, but the one lousy dealer who controlled the PURE action, Deeny Washington, didn’t seem to have more than a few hundred bags a day.

The worst bitch about it was that everybody knew about PURE. Every junkie in the city was lookin’ for PURE, but takin’ whatever brown shit the regular dealers were holdin’. For the last five days, Petey had gotten the same crappy story from his brothers in junk.

“Maannnn, you missed the muthafucka by a hair. I got the last bags off his ass and they was tight, man. Baddest damn dope in New Jack City.”

Not this time, though. Not
this
fucking time. He’d gotten lucky, today, spied an asshole delivery man leave the roll-up door on his GMC unlocked and been rewarded for his eagle eye with two thirteen-inch Sonys. You didn’t need no fence for no fuckin’ Sonys in the box. Just walked into the nearest gas station on Houston Street and the boss snatched them up for a buck twenty-five apiece.

As soon as the money was in his pocket, Petey hustled his ass over to the projects on Pitt Street and waited for Deeny to show up. Course, he wasn’t the only sick junkie hangin’ out in the small playground. The swings and seesaws were covered with freaks, half of ’em lookin’ like they were dyin’ of goddamn AIDS. When Deeny dragged his black ass across the parkin’ lot, they moaned in anticipation. It sounded like the noise his granny made when the nurses tied her hands to the bed rails.

After Deeny was gone, Petey’s best bro’, a car thief named Littlerock, asked Petey did he want to go off to a squat on Attorney Street to get off.

“Can’t do it, baby. Got me some new pussy,” Petey told Littlerock. “Come down to the Lower East Side from Malapan, New Jersey. Like, her father does cows for a livin’. Milkin’ ’em and shit. Course, the bitch don’t care for no cows. The bitch wanna be hip. She wanna learn the Bohemian way and be like one of the fuckin’ people.”

“And I
know
you gonna be the one to show her how to be a people.”

They’d slapped themselves a pair of low fives and nearly dropped dead laughin’. Pretty Polly was like winnin’ the lottery. Like a good luck lightning bolt. He’d been there before (so had Littlerock), and he knew it wouldn’t last forever. Most likely she’d straighten up and dump his ass into the street. Or she’d show up stoned for a family dinner and her family would lock her up in a drug rehab center. Or she’d steal from everyone she ever loved until she became the same broke and desperate junkie he was.

But right now this very goddamn minute she was waitin’ for her little Petey to bring the goodies home. He’d fixed her for the first time a week ago and it was like she was made for dope. Lying back in the bed, noddin’ out while the TV flickered the only light in the room. Pretty soon, he’d start charging her to get high. Pretty soon she’d be payin’ to get
him
high.

He was careful to look behind him when he turned into 13th Street. Sooner or later, the vampires would be drawn to pretty Polly. That was another way he could lose her which is why he wanted her away from other junkies for as long as possible. He’d turn her loose when she ran out of money. (After all, he wasn’t a fuckin’ pimp. Let somebody else turn her out.)

“Let’s screw first. I wanna be close to you.”

She said it before he could even close the goddamned door. “There’s time and
time
,” he said, figurin’ to confuse the bitch. Couldn’t really be showin’ her how sick he was, could he? Or how sick he was gonna be if he didn’t get off real soon? “Appropriateness is what I’m sayin’. What’s chill later ain’t necessarily chill now. Like there ain’t nothin’ wrong with spontaneous, but life got a progress and you gotta tune yourself to it.”

She looked down at the rug and said, “You’re a junkie, aren’t you? You can’t stop yourself.”

So he didn’t have no choice except fuckin’ her into the ground. No choice whatsoever. Not that it was all bad. Bitches that wanted to make you better sometimes fell in love with you. If she fell in love, he’d own her ass for a long, long time. If she fell in love with him, she’d escape from the drug rehab center to get back to him. She’d steal from her parents, write bad checks, carry dope…anything to keep her Petey from gettin’ sick.

He didn’t come. She was completely open to him, but his mind was on PURE and how he was gonna feel when he had it runnin’ through his veins. She didn’t seem to mind, though. The bitch fucked hard when she wasn’t stoned, and he was pretty sure she’d gotten off a bunch of times. He took Polly’s spike out of the closet and put it next to his own. (“Never use
nobody’s
toys, Polly.
Never
. I seen one after another dead from AIDS.” As if he gave a shit. As if he wasn’t already infected.) One of the good things about PURE was that you didn’t have to cook it up. Just dump it in water and watch it vanish: no quinine, no mannitol, no cut whatsoever. But today he had a few bags of brown dope one of the dealers had laid on him. The dealers were desperate because nobody wanted their product.

“Try this brown shit, Petey. Smiley D is more worser than PURE, ’cause the man loadin’ up on the quality.”

He set his little tripod over the candle, dropped a bottle cap into the slot on top, added half the brown dope and a syringe full of water, lit the candle. Smooth and practiced. He was about to add the PURE, enough for his needs and not for hers, when she started bustin’ his chops again.

“Do me first, Petey.”

Holdin’ out her arm like she was cuter than the fuckin’ pig on the Muppets. It was another test, but this little test wouldn’t last long. Petey had the touch. Always had it. From the first time he fondled a set of works. He could get the bitch off inside a goddamned closet. Get her off in her eye in the dark if he had to. He dropped a tiny speck of PURE into the bottle cap and waited for the mixture to come to a boil.

The hit was instantaneous. Naturally. The needle slid into a thin vein on the outside of her forearm, and he grunted his satisfaction as he loosened the tie and slid the plunger home.

“Bout time you be learnin’ how to do this to yourself,” he said, already turnin’ toward his own rush.

The feeling was glorious. Almost as good as the hit. His body began to tingle with anticipation as he prepared the cure for all disasters. The difference between so sick you wanted to die and chief kaiser of the whole goddamned universe. He watched the brown heroin until it bubbled, blew out the candle, then emptied two red vials of PURE into the cooling liquid. He let the anticipation roll up into his throat as he dropped a small tuft of cotton into the fix and drew the liquid up into the needle.

“Sweet mama on the rock,” he said, turning back to find pretty Polly lying in a heap on the bed. Lying stone fuckin’ cold unconscious. Nothin’ moving. Not even her tits goin’ up and down. He snatched her off the sheets and started slappin’ her, but she didn’t move a fuckin’ muscle. Her skin didn’t have no color at all. Except, maybe, blue.

Panic replaced the joyous buzz of anticipation. He shook her and began draggin’ her ass around the room. Screamin’, “Wake up, bitch. Don’t die. Don’t die you fuckin’ bitch.” Like he was in a movie, but it wasn’t no good, no how. One thing he’d seen plenty of since he brought his monkey back from Vietnam was dead ODs. Pretty Polly wasn’t gonna be eatin’ no crackers no more.

He dumped her body on the bed and calmed himself down. Thinkin’,
did anybody see your ass come into this buildin’
? Askin’ himself did he have time to fix or did he have to get his Keds in gear right now this fuckin’ minute?

“Nobody know nothin’ ’bout me and the bitch,” he said to no one in particular. “Gotta be crazy ta walk outta here without gettin’ well.”

He looked back at Polly as he wrapped the tie around his left bicep, feeling all kinds of regret. Thinkin’ how maybe she got some cash lyin’ around the apartment. Or like a 14-carat chain or a cross or one of them Jewish good luck letters the bitches like to wear. Fifteen seconds later, he was dead.

W
HEN BETTY HALUKA FIRST
hatched the notion of a housewarming dinner at Stanley Moodrow’s new apartment, she was well aware of the fact that Moodrow’s idea of a home-cooked Italian meal was limited to a crusty loaf of bread, a box of Ronzoni and a jar of Ragu. Moodrow had never learned to cook, despite three decades of bachelorhood, because he’d never needed to learn. There were too many restaurants within walking distance of his apartment, most reasonably priced and featuring a unique cuisine. As the avowed protector of his neighborhood, Moodrow was known everywhere and the usual cop discount made eating out as cheap as cooking.

Still, he did love to eat, and he wasn’t entirely unhappy when Betty announced the menu.
Pasta e fagioli
; an enormous cold antipasto; fusilli with grilled hot sausage and broccoli; chicken in garlic, wine and vinegar; homemade Italian cheese cake and espresso with anisette. What bothered Moodrow was the prospect of spending four hours shopping for the ingredients.

“We could buy everything on this list within a mile of here,” he’d insisted.

“We’re having a housewarming, Stanley. It’s a special occasion. When was the last time you moved?”

“In 1955,” he’d admitted sheepishly, “when the Dodgers won the World Series.”

“Then either you have to sneak into your new home in the dead of night or you have to celebrate with something special. You can’t compare supermarket cheese with what you can buy at DeLuca’s. And that goes double for freshly made pasta.”

Moodrow had grunted into his morning coffee. “I think I’ll sneak.”

“You can’t sneak. We already invited Jim and Rose and the kids.”

“First I move into a yuppie apartment and now I’m gonna shop like a yuppie. This is culture shock and I’m too old for it. Correction:
we’re
too old for it. Plus it’s bad for my image. Next thing you’ll be movin’ me out to Connecticut.”

“If it makes you feel better, you can wear a ski mask. Besides, you don’t have to shop. You have to drive and wait in the car. C’mon, I want to hear about the Alamare case, anyway. We’ll talk while we go.”