Buy Back (12 page)

I folded my arms and looked at Kootie, waiting.

He winces, and says kind of quiet, “He said it was a buy back.”

I’m not sure I hear it right, so I say, “A buy back?”

The two goofballs nodded together.

“How much were you offered for the paintings?”

“Hundred,” they said.

“Your internal split?”

“Me and Frank each got a thirty,” Kootie said.

My deal with Huey had been for whatever I could squeeze out of Max. Had I squeezed a hundred I would have bagged forty percent, leaving Huey to split sixty. It was customary for the crew leader to take forty percent, so these two knuckleheads would get eighteen had Huey not double-crossed me.
Had
they been paid.

“You guys met Huey in a coffee shop yesterday. What did you talk about?”

“He was going to pick up our money.” Kootie looked like a kid who’d dropped his lollipop.

“He was going to give us our split tonight, like, right now.” Frank’s lollipop was in the dirt, too. “Shit.”

“What if I told you guys I know where the money is?” I was assuming that the money was in the duffel bag Huey put in the storage locker on Third Avenue.

The goofballs leaned in, and Frank knocked his drink over again. “God damn it!”

“It’s in a storage locker,” I said, “but before I tell you where, you have to get the key.”

They nodded eagerly.

“The key to the locker was probably on Huey when he was shot.”

Frank perked up. “We’ll go to the hospital, put on some scrubs, see if we can find it.”

I says, “Hospital?”

So Kootie says, all glum, “He’s not dead yet. Whatever. I don’t think he’s going to make it. His brain is mostly gone.”

“Get the key to the storage locker, and then we’ll go get the money.” I got to my feet. “I’ll let you split a single twenty-five share if you pull this off. If not, well…”

Smiling, I walked out on them. If I put my hands on the hundred, I’d take Huey’s forty percent and give the goofballs their thirty each. My money troubles with the pink monkey would be solved, and I wouldn’t care who had the paintings. Maxie could go jump in a lake.

Did I really think these two goofballs could come up with the key? It was a long shot.

Still, it was a shot.

Fortunately not a shot buzzing past my head.

OUTSIDE THE TIKI BAR THE
streets were wet. I zipped up my raincoat. Looked like I was the rainmaker of Carroll Gardens. I snapped my fingers, people’s heads exploded. I put on my raincoat, it rained.

The clock in the dry cleaners told me it was eight o’clock. My stomach told me I hadn’t eaten anything but toast in two days. And I wondered why I was running out of energy chasing that punk who jumped in the canal full of used condoms and fuel oil. That mental picture didn’t help my appetite. I did need to eat, though, whether I was hungry or not.

While doing some serious rumination about what was what.

I don’t do sushi. That doesn’t mean I have something against Orientals or their food. There was a new Thai place a few blocks down. That’s actually sort of an ironic thing to say in Carroll Gardens, because there was always some new Thai place opening up on Smith Street. Anyway, I dropped in and ordered some Prom Grom Gam Gluk or whatever it’s called, along with some spring rolls. Took the stuff home.

I approached my building carefully, from the opposite side of the street, out of the streetlight glare and in the shadow of the sycamores. If the word on the street was that I was on a rampage making people’s heads explode, I might have other visitors, other than Frank and Kootie. Maybe the Mafia, maybe Doh and Crispi from the NYPD, I couldn’t be too sure, which is why I really needed to lock myself in for the night and clear my head.

I made it into my apartment, and bolted the front door like I was locking myself in a cell for safekeeping. Instead of shades I have interior wood-slatted shutters on my windows, and I closed them tight before turning on the lights. The punk was still rattling around Brooklyn, and for all I knew he’d tagged himself another sniper rifle.

I dropped in a Cal Tjader CD. He leads his orchestra with a vibraphone, kind of soothing after the kind of day I’d had. I lit an aromatherapy candle on the coffee table.

With a snifter of brandy and my chopsticks, I tucked into the food. On my second snifter, I was looking at the ceiling, chewing the chopsticks instead of the Goo Glop Gam Jam.

This Ms. French had that punk kid out there killing everybody attached to this theft, but it all seemed so unnecessary. We were only talking about a hundred grand, and she already had the paintings, so what was the deal? I obviously wasn’t a prime target or I would have been shot first—and probably second had the shooter really wanted to take me out; he was a crack shot to hit someone in the head like that. The mayhem was upsetting the police and the Mafia, not to mention me and the ones who got killed. Very unprofessional. I don’t condone murder, but I at least expect people who kill for money to do it in a businesslike way. It didn’t pay to upset the police and the mob; it worked against good business sense.

Also, to kill so publicly, by blowing people’s brains out on a public street—it was like it had some other meaning, like there was a message.

I lifted some more food to my mouth, and the pile of slick red curry noodles suddenly reminded me of the stuff all over the town car in front of Donut House and on the bistro window.

With a jar of peanut butter, a container of baby carrots, and a fresh brandy I went to bed to watch TV. There wasn’t a lot to watch except the news, so I thought I’d just ease my anxieties for a while and be entertained by other people’s problems.

I was just mellowing out over turmoil half a planet away when the black lady anchor suddenly had a picture of a bull’s-eye behind her with the word brooklynin big bloody letters across it.

“Tragedy in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn today. In broad daylight, a sniper shot a restaurant worker in the head. Darla Draco is on the scene. Darla, isn’t this the second shooting like this in Carroll Gardens in two days?”

The TV screen split between the black anchor lady and a reporter with too much blond hair and too much makeup. I’ve noticed those two things sometimes go together. She was holding an umbrella, and she was standing just around the corner from where I was in bed drinking brandy and eating carrots and peanut butter. She was standing where the police had all those bright lights on Smith Street. Pretty screwy to be watching TV and see what’s going on down the block from where you’re watching TV.

“That’s right, Lola. This is the second sniper attack in this neighborhood in two days, both in broad daylight. And the local community is not happy about this.”

The screen went all to one picture of the front of Donut House earlier in the day. Darla’s voice kept going.

“Yesterday, a customer of this coffee shop on Court Street was gunned down when he left after breakfast.”

Garrison’s face filled the screen, a yellow microphone in his face, the inside of the coffee shop behind him. His name appeared at the bottom of the screen.

Darla’s voice asked Garrison questions, and I guess she was holding the mike.

“Garrison, you actually witnessed yesterday’s brutal murder in front of your restaurant. What was that like?”

“It was like nothin’ else. Man’s head exploded outside. Don’t see that every day and don’t want to.”

“He was shot in the head?”

“That’s right, just after breakfast. Terrible.”

A snapshot of Jo-Ball in shorts and a T-shirt was suddenly where Garrison had been. Johnny was kneeling next to a golden retriever. I never knew he had a dog. Darla continued to tell us more.

“This man, Johnny Culobrese, was a beloved fixture in the neighborhood, the maître d’ at Brooklyn’s famous Italian restaurant Dominic’s. At eight forty-five yesterday morning he was shot down in cold blood.”

Now they were interviewing the old guy who owns Dominic’s, Louie Parella, and his name was on the screen. I knew him a little. Never liked him, though. His eyes were close together and never stood still, with dark circles under them. His hair was dyed black and slicked. Not the kind of guy I generally think of as trustworthy to look at. Still, I’d never heard anything bad about him, except that he was a son of a bitch to Johnny most of the time.

“Mr. Parella, you knew Johnny—he worked for your restaurant for many years. Tell us about him.”

“I loved that man like he was my own brother. My own brother! I’m sick. I’m sick. How could this happen, in a family neighborhood? The police are down the block, I don’t think they have any idea what’s what. Two innocent people dead in two days! Tomorrow is another day. Who’s next? One of my customers? We pay taxes, don’t we? I have a business to run.”

We cut back to Darla in the rain, standing next to a uniformed cop who looked like brass by all the medals or whatever on his chest. His name appeared on the screen, and under that it said nypd spokesperson.

She put the mike to him.

“Can you tell us what the people of this besieged neighborhood should expect when the sun comes up? Is there a serial killer on the loose?”

The cop looked like he was nursing a sore tooth, but my guess was he was tired of news reporters trying to create a panic.

“Darla, the department has every available resource on this, and we are looking at a variety of motives and suspects at this time.”

My door buzzer sounded. I climbed out of bed and peeked through the shutters. Doh and Crispi were on my stoop. Is that screwy or what? It was like the TV was telling me what was going to happen next.

The cop on TV kept talking as I peeked at the detectives.

“We don’t believe these murders were random, and we encourage the public to come forward with any information they may have about the incidents this morning and the morning before. They should call 311 if they saw anything here that may help us.”

I shut the TV off and sat in the dark listening to the front buzzer. It stopped after ten buzzes.

I saw a lot. I wasn’t calling 311, though. I was pulling the covers over my head and going to sleep.

I was ready to move on to another and better day. Only I wasn’t real confident that one was in my future any time soon.

BROOKLYN STREETS PLAY MUSIC AT
night like a symphony.

The music of human activity bops along right up until about 1:00
A.M
. It’s then that the music slows. You still have the burble of people going home from bars, a car zooming down the block, the stray truck rumbling slowly on night deliveries. By 3:00 a.m.things quiet down even more. Foot and car traffic tapers off, buses rarely hum down Smith Street, and there’s only the occasional rhythmic clunk and rattle deep in the ground, the subway work trains collecting garbage. On a Tuesday night in October at 4:00 a.m., the music of the street is about as slow and quiet as it gets in Carroll Gardens. I think the guys in the front of the orchestra with the fiddles are about to nod off and the conductor can barely keep his baton in the air.

At 6:00 a.m.the sky is waking up over the dark brownstones even if most of the apartment windows are only just beginning to light up. It’s like that moment you see on public TV when the philharmonic is about to play. The conductor suddenly taps the podium and raises his baton, ready to make some noise with the next movement. The orchestra seems to sit up straight and take a deep breath, ready to charge into the next part, something that moves and gives life. Imagine that baton-in-the-air moment being the better part of an hour, because it may last that long before the heating oil delivery trucks and trash trucks come booming down the block. Blue jays conk, crows caw, and starlings squabble. A steady flow of buses hiss down Smith Street, and the subway trains rattle the glassware. Traffic helicopters chop and chatter in the distance. This music is light but quick, letting you know that the full flush of rush hour is about to have the whole orchestra sawing and banging away at their instruments.

So I’m suddenly like a poet or something. Well, I had a lot of time that night to listen to Brooklyn’s night quiet, and think about what it sounded like, and imagine it on public television as a symphony. Not bad for a guy with an art history degree and questionable scruples. I slept a little. Not much.

Believe it or not, I didn’t spend the night thinking about much of anything about my predicament. I just lay there listening to Brooklyn and to myself breathe, my heart beat. The sound of me being alive. Had the punk’s aim not been put out of whack by the old lady’s broom, I wouldn’t have heard that sound anymore. I wouldn’t have been in Brooklyn, but somewhere else. On my back in a satin-lined box, a hairy-lipped woman leaning over trying to paste the pieces of my face back together.

OK, so maybe I did think a little about my predicament. I didn’t want to end up standing around Smith Street with half my head missing. Seeing Huey like that was actually worse than seeing Jo-Ball’s tongue wiggling in the air. Like I said, it seemed humiliating. Images like that in my head, small wonder I was a little sleepless.

I wasn’t going to let the situation get the better of me. Pop taught me not to let that happen.

So by six I was up and making pancakes to Tito Puente’s timbales. Those are a kind of drum, sort of like congas, and nobody beat up timbales like Tito. The album was from the fifties, called
Night Beat
, all instrumental. Tito’s drums beat out a rhythm that argued with trumpets, fought with saxophones, back and forth, with little side commentary by guitar and piano. There was something driving and urgent about this music. It was much darker than Prado and especially Cugat. Dark and urgent. That’s how I felt.

I ate a pile of pancakes and drank black coffee.

I showered, shaved, and put on a brown suit, one with a vest.

By eight I was in the lobby of the Williamsburg Savings Bank pointing a twenty at the guard. I had my back to the stream of people flashing their IDs over the automatic gates so they couldn’t see my motivational tool.