Calypso (9 page)

    "No, your coin is crooked. He has a crooked coin, kid."

    "I say, old boy, are you trying to escape?" Kling said, and began laughing again.

    "Have you got a quarter?" Carella asked him.

    Still laughing, Kling reached into his pocket. Carella accepted the coin, examined both sides of it, and handed it to Meyer for his approval.

    "Okay," Meyer said, "heads or tails?"

    "Heads," Carella said.

    Meyer flipped the coin. It hit the corner of Kling's desk, flew off it at an angle, struck the floor on its edge and went rolling across the room to collide with the wall behind the water cooler. Carella and Meyer both ran across the room. Squatting near the cooler, they examined the coin.

    "It's tails," Meyer said triumphantly.

    "Okay, you get the vaudeville performer of your choice," Carella said.

    "Barragan's way the hell out in Calm's Point," Meyer said. "I'll take Bones."

    

    

    Some days you can't make a nickel.

    Frederick Bones's address was indeed 687 Downes, which was in the heart (or perhaps the kidney) of Isola and only a fifteen-minute subway ride from the station house. Meyer drove the distance downtown in his beat-up old Chevy, his wife, Sarah, enjoying the rights to the family's second car, a used Mercedes-Benz. Meyer knew exactly what his father (rest his soul) would have said if he'd lived to see the car: "Are you buying from the Germans already? What kind of Jew are you?" Meyer sometimes wondered.

    He had no such doubts about what kind of Jew his father Max had been. His father Max had been a
comical
Jew. It was Max who'd decided to send his only son through life with a double-barreled monicker-Meyer Meyer, very funny, Pop. "Meyer Meyer, Jew on Fire," the kids used to call him when he was growing up in a neighborhood that was almost exclusively Gentile. He kept trying to think of clever taunts with which he might counterattack. Somehow, "Dominick Rizzo, Full of Shitzo," did not do the trick, especially since it only caused Dominick to come after him with a baseball bat the very same day Meyer had his poetic inspiration, occasioning the taking of six stitches at the right side of Meyer's head in order to keep his ear from falling off. "Patrick Cassidy, Kiss My Assidy" resulted in fifteen-year-old, two-hundred-pound Patrick chasing twelve-year-old, one-hundred-and-twenty-pound Meyer for eight blocks before he caught him, whereupon Patrick lowered his trousers, flashed a huge harvest moon, and ordered Meyer to kiss it unless he wanted a broken Hebe head. Meyer bit Patrick on the ass instead, an unprovoked and inconsiderate attack that contributed little toward relieving Judeo-Hibernian tensions. When Meyer got home later that afternoon, he washed his mouth out with Listerine, but the taste of Patrick's Irish ass lingered and did not improve the taste of his mother's fine
knaydls.
At the dinner table that night, his comical father Max told a joke about an Italian sewer worker who complained about taking shit from a Jew.

    It was not until Meyer got to be sixteen years old and five-feet eleven and three-quarter inches tall that the kids in the neighborhood stopped calling him names. He had begun lifting weights by then, and when he wasn't pumping iron, he was pumping gas at the local service station and wishing he would hurry up and gain the extra quarter of an inch that would make him a six-footer. He figured that once he got to be six feet tall and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, he would grab Dominick and Patrick by the scruffs of their necks and bang their heads together. He was so busy measuring himself that he didn't notice the name calling had stopped. Dominick Rizzo joined the navy and got killed in the war. Patrick Cassidy became a cop. It was Patrick, in fact, who talked Meyer into quitting law school and becoming a cop himself. Patrick was now a deputy inspector temporarily assigned to the D.A.'s office and investigating organized crime. Whenever he ran across Meyer, he asked him if he wanted to see the teeth marks that were still on his behind. Meyer always felt uncomfortable in his presence. But he did not feel guilty about having bought the Mercedes.

    He parked the Chevy a block from Bones's apartment building-the closest spot he could find-and then walked through the pouring rain toward 687 Downes, a tidy-looking brown-stone in a row of similarly tidy-looking buildings. In the lobby, he looked for a mailbox marked with Bones's name, found none, and rang the bell marked super. A white man in his late fifties opened the inner lobby door. Meyer showed his shield and his identification card, and told the man he was looking for Frederick Bones.

    "Freddie Bones, huh?" the super said. "You just missed him."

    "By how long?" Meyer asked.

    "By three months!" the super said, and burst out laughing. His teeth were tobacco stained, he was sporting a grizzled three-day-old beard on his cheeks and his chin. He cackled loudly in the hallway and seemed amazed that Meyer was not sharing his amusement.

    "Moved away, did he?" Meyer asked.

    "Got
sent
away," the super said, and burst out laughing again.

    "Sent where?" Meyer asked.

    "Castleview, upstate."

    "The prison?"

    "The prison, right enough," the super said.

    "Shit," Meyer said.

    

    

    The neighborhood in which Vicente Manuel Barragan lived had until as recently as five years ago been an Italian ghetto, but it was now almost exclusively Hispanic, and the neon signs that blistered the falling rain announced bodega and carniceria and joyeria and sastreria. Patterson Boulevard was a wide avenue with a tree-planted divider running up the middle of it. The trees had not yet begun to turn; the leaves hung limp and green in the downpour. Beneath the trees patches of grass sprang up between the tightly spaced cobblestones that paved the divider. The avenue itself had once been paved with cobblestones, but it had been resurfaced with asphalt, and the blacktop glistened in the rain, reflecting the glow of the street lamps, already illuminated in defense against the 3:00 p.m. gloom. The traffic light on the corner turned from red to green, and the blacktop echoed the change, a shimmering green ball suddenly appearing in the road ahead. Carella found a space across the street from 2557, thanked his lucky stars, turned down the visor to which was rubber-banded a hand-lettered sign announcing police officer on duty, and then got out of the car, remembering to close the window this time. In the pouring rain, he ran across the street to Barragan's building, raced up the front-stoop steps two at a time, threw open the glass-paneled entrance door, and stepped inside to a small foyer lined with brass mailboxes. A black plastic inset under one of the mailboxes told him that barragan was in Apartment 3C. He rang the bell, and then reached for the knob on the inner lobby door just as an answering buzz sounded.

    The building was spotlessly clean. A blue-and-white-tiled inner lobby, walls newly painted a muted blue, light bulbs in all the wall sconces, not a trace of graffiti anywhere. The steps smelled of Lysol. He took them up to the third floor, and heard the sound of someone playing a woodwind instrument -clarinet or flute, he could not tell at first-as he came down the hallway to Apartment 3C. The music was coming from inside the apartment, a flute he guessed now. He rang the bell and the music stopped in mid-passage.

    "Who is it?" a man called.

    "Police," he answered.

    "Police?" the man said. "What the hell?"

    Carella heard footsteps approaching the door. The door did not open. Instead, the peephole flap rattled back, and the man said from within, "Let me see your badge, please."

    Carella flashed the tin.

    "Okay," the man said. The peephole flap fell back into place. Carella heard the lock click open. The door itself opened a moment later.

    "Mr. Barragan?"

    "That's me," the man said. He was a light-skinned Hispanic with a heavy black mustache under his aquiline nose, thick black hair styled to fall softly over his forehead and ears, dark brown eyes that studied Carella with curiosity now. "What's the trouble?" he asked.

    "No trouble," Carella said. "I'm investigating a homicide, and I thought you might be able to help me. All right if I come in?"

    Barragan looked at him. "Is this about Georgie?" he asked.

    "Yes. You know he was killed then?"

    "I read about it in the paper. Come on in," Barragan said, and stepped aside to let Carella by. Beyond the entrance foyer, Carella could see an open arch leading into a kitchen, another arch leading to a living room. A music stand was set up in the center of the living room, a straight-backed chair behind it. On the seat of the chair, Carella saw a flute-he'd been right about that.

    "You want a beer or anything?" Barragan asked.

    "Not allowed," Carella said, "but thanks."

    "Mind if I have one? I've been practicing the past three hours, my throat's kinda dry."

    "No, go right ahead," Carella said.

    He waited in the foyer. In the kitchen, he saw Barragan opening first the refrigerator door, and then a can of beer. When he came back into the foyer again, he was carrying the beer can in one hand and a glass in the other. Together, they went into the living room and sat side by side on the couch. Through the large rain-streaked living room windows, Carella could see in the distance the elevated Calm's Point Expressway, bustling with traffic that edged slowly through the heavy rain.

    Barragan poured beer into his glass, took a deep swallow, said, "Ahhh, good," and then put the can on the floor, and began sipping more leisurely from the glass. "What do you want to know?" he said.

    "You played in a band years ago with George and-"

    "Yes, I did," Barragan said.

    "-and his brother Santo, is that right?"

    "Santo, yeah. He played bongos. We had Georgie on guitar, me on flute, Santo on bongos and a guy named Freddie Bones on the steel drum. That's his real name, Freddie Bones. Black guy from Jamaica. It wasn't such a bad combo. I heard worse," Barragan said, and smiled. His teeth looked startlingly white under the thick black mustache.

    "I want to know what happened seven years ago," Carella said.

    "When Santo split, do you mean?"

    
"Did
he split? Or did something happen to him?"

    "Who knows?" Barragan said, and shrugged. "I'm assuming he split of his own accord. I mean, Georgie checked with the police later, and there was no kind of report about anything happening to Santo, so I figure he just
decided
to go, and he
went."

    "Where?" Carella said.

    "I don't know where. California? Mexico? Europe? Who knows where somebody goes when he decides to go?"

    "Why'd he decide to go?"

    "Same reason the band broke up later."

    "What was that?"

    "Too much star power. Too much Georgie Chadderton. I hate to speak bad about the dead, but the man was a pain in the ass, you dig? A full-time ego trip. Thought the rest of us were there just to make him look good. I mean,
shit,
man, I'm a fair flute player, and Freddie was terrific on that steel drum, he could make that thing sound like a fuckin orchestra. So Georgie takes all the solos. On a
guitar,
no less. Like, man, unless you're really outstanding on the guitar, all it's good for is laying down chords for instruments that can run the melody line. You find very few guitar players can do justice to a melody. So here's a band with a flute and a steel drum in it-now what are those two instruments
for,
huh, man? For
melody,
am I right? Well, Georgie had us playing riffs behind his half-ass guitar stuff.
Whang, whang, whang,
and behind him is me doing
tootle-ee-oo-doo
over and over, and Freddie hitting two-note chords on the steel drum. For the birds, man. We finally had enough of it."

    "When was this? When did the band break up?"

    "A year after Santo split, I guess it was."

    "Tell me what happened that night."

    "That was a long time ago, man. I'm not sure I can remember it all."

    "As much as you can remember," Carella said. "First of all, when
was
it, exactly? Can you remember the date?"

    "Sometime in September," Barragan said. "A Saturday night the first or second week in September, I'm not sure."

    "All right, go ahead."

    "It was raining, I remember that. The band used to have this VW van we traveled in, maroon and white, we used to take it everywhere we played. The gig that night-"

    "Who owned the van?"

    "We all did. We chipped in for it. When the band broke up, Freddie bought us out."

    "Sorry, go ahead."

    "Like I said, it was raining very hard that night. The gig was at the Hotel Palomar in Isola-downtown, you know the place? Near the Palomar Theater? Very big hotel, very classy affair. We were the relief band, we were playing a lot of Latin shit in those days, rumbas, sambas, cha-chas, the whole bag. This was before Georgie got on his calypso trip. The other band-I forget the name of it-Archie Cooper?
Artie
Cooper? Something like that. Big band, ten or twelve pieces. This was a big fancy-dress ball-costumes, you know? A benefit of some kind, I forget now what it was-multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy, one of the two. Georgie got us the relief gig through a guy playing second trumpet on the Cooper band- Archie was it? Arnie? Georgie'd done the horn man some favors a while back, and when the kid heard they needed a Latin band as relief, he thought of Georgie and gave him a ring. It was a good gig. We used to play some good gigs when we were together. Well, like I told you, I've heard worse bands."