Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery (12 page)

“I do.”

“Artie, I want you as a lover, not as a stake horse.”

“I know. We don’t need to make a habit of it. But if you think you can beat him…”

“You think I can?”

“He’s tough. But the spot is fair. You never really recovered from missing that one ball in the first game. Maybe starting from scratch—but I get fifty percent if you win, plus I get to perform certain twisted sexual acts on your person.”

“That’s a hard offer to pass up.”

I slid two of Bruce’s hundreds out of my pocket and put them on her knee. She took a deep breath for courage and went after Earle Grundy.

It took all night, literally. The sun was well up when they finally quit. Crystal won that first set and paid me off right away. Then she won the next set. She was playing flawless, intelligent pool. She safetied Earle to death in those sets. She dumped him into one untenable position after another. It blew his patience. But no one ever said Earle Grundy lacked heart. He came back to win the next two. Side betting was very heavy. There must
have been fifty people sweating the match. Even the bangers got in on the action. About four a.m. a quartet in evening clothes wandered in. Twenty minutes later they were calling for Spanish Jackie. It was an orgy of side wagering.

Most of the people in New York were shouldering their way to work when Earle called it quits by unscrewing his cue. His eyes were red and sunken. So were Crystal’s, but the big difference in their eyes was that hers had won. Some players contend that in pool nothing else matters.

Earle paid off, congratulated her like a gentleman, and walked out the door, alone, into the raw daylight. By then the sweaters had diminished in number, but not by much. Some had taken a cold bath. The odds at one point went to four to one against Crystal. The losers sat silently, bleary-eyed, smoking cigarettes.

I could tell Crystal’s adrenaline was still pumping even before she said, “I’ll take you back to your place, where I’ll let you perform—what was it?—twisted sexual acts on my person.”

I was walking on my ankles by then. I didn’t think I could come up with anything twisted, except my spine.

Driving up Amsterdam, she said, “I’ll never be really good at this game, because I always feel sorry for the person I beat.” We stopped at the light at Seventy-second Street. “And poor Earle didn’t have anybody to go home with.”

TEN

T
HE TELEPHONE WOKE me about noon. A woman with a squeaky voice: “This is Lydia Segal. Remember me? With Bruce? From the pool hall?”

“Sure, Lydia.” I always felt sorry for Lydia, an anorexic woman barely out of her teens who Bruce used to drag into the Upscale Poolroom after a weekend of debauchery. They’d stagger around the table, dribble coffee down their chins. On those rare occasions when she showed up straight, she was an intelligent person with psychological insight and a sense of humor. Now she didn’t sound particularly straight.

“I was supposed to see him last night. I went over to his place. I saw light coming under the door, but he didn’t answer. I went away. I came back today and there was still the light, but he still didn’t answer.”

If Bruce had been a normal citizen who pays taxes, I would have suggested that Lydia call the police. “I saw Bruce last night,” I said. “He had a wad of money.”

“Money?…Bruce?”

“He said he won it in a card game.”

“I thought maybe since you live right around the corner, you’d be with me when I open the door. I got a key. I’m scared something happened. Cops have been around.”

“Cops?”

“Well, one cop. And other weird people.”

“Where are you now?”

“Up on Broadway.”

“I’ll meet you at his place in twenty minutes.”

“What could I say?” I asked Crystal after I had related Lydia’s call. “I couldn’t just say no…Could I?”

“I’m going with you,” she said.

“No, there’s no need for you—”

“Yeah, but there might be.”

Bruce lived in a shitty brownstone on Ninety-eighth Street near Amsterdam Avenue. The usual members of the community were standing around. A wasted old man on a walker sang, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” A group of kids played tackle football in the street. Crystal and I looked around for some kind of trap, but we knew that if there were one, we’d never see it. That caused the commonplace to assume an air of menace. I hate it when the commonplace assumes an air of menace.

Lydia was sitting on the stoop. Her knees looked like oranges in bags too narrow. She stood up when she saw us. Her eyes were black holes. Why was I involved with such people? Why didn’t I move to Scarsdale or Greenwich, play golf and barbecue shrimp with those who hold traditional values and pay income tax?

“Lydia,” I said, “this is Crystal.”

“Hi, Crystal. We’ve met.”

Crystal said she remembered. Crystal was tense and stiff.

Lydia unlocked the street door and led us down a dark hallway to a T at the end. We went left. Lydia knocked on the second door on our right. “Bruce! Hey, Bruce!”

“I hate you!” shrieked a woman to someone on an upper floor.

Bruce didn’t answer. Lydia looked up at me. I motioned for her to try the key. She did, then pushed the door open. We hesitated there in the hallway, wondering what we’d find inside. Wait a minute, I suggested to myself, we didn’t have any real evidence
to assume there was something terrible waiting inside, just the fears of a largely unreliable burnout. I led the way inside.

I had never been to Bruce’s place before, and it was worse than I imagined. The only furniture in the living room was a grimy beanbag chair. I’m not one to fault a person for the absence of furniture, but this was a different matter. Here there was no room for furniture because of all the stolen goods packed into the room. There were about fifteen television sets, most still in unopened boxes. There were stacks of car radios and boom boxes. A little path snaked through the hot stuff to the kitchen. I heard a sound, a sort of muffled mewing, coming from the bedroom.

“Bruce?”

“Mmmmff f!”

I picked my way cautiously around air conditioners, over cameras, moving bicycles from my way. I paused a moment at the bedroom doorway. I glanced back at Crystal and Lydia. Crystal, her mouth agape, peered at the hot stuff. Lydia’s eyes were wide. I peeked around the threshold.

Bruce was totally naked. He lay on his stomach on the bare mattress with his arms and legs spread out and tied to the corners of the bed frame. Bruce had been whipped with something. Savage red welts, some oozing blood, latticed his back from the tops of his thighs over his buttocks to the tops of his shoulders. He whined and mewed. Then I saw that his mouth was sealed with flesh-colored tape. I felt Crystal and Lydia behind me. Both gasped at once. Lydia began to weep. The bedroom stank of urine.

I knelt beside the bed and pulled away the tape as painlessly as I could while Lydia whimpered behind me. Crystal had gone to the kitchen and returned with a butcher knife—in time to see Bruce retch twice and then disgorge a fat wad of bills from his throat with a full-bodied heaving motion, just the way Jellyroll disgorges seawater. The three of us froze momentarily in disbelief at what we had just seen, while Bruce gasped for breath like
a beached blue-fish. Then Crystal began sawing at the ropes tied around his ankles.

Before he was free, before he even caught his breath, he turned his head to Lydia, who had pressed herself against the wall, arms akimbo. “Where the hell have you been!”

“Don’t talk to me like that!” she screeched.

Crystal cut his hands free.

He moaned when he turned over and tried to get a look at his back. “How bad is it?” he gasped. “Is it bad?” He curled into a tight ball as an answer to his own question.

Crystal knelt at the other side of the bed to examine his wounds.

Bruce picked up the wet wad of bills and shoved it under the mattress. “God, I thought I’d choke to death—” he muttered. “Choke to death on my own money. Bummer.”

I try not to be too judgmental of my old friends, but I admit that I found this whole scene sordid and disgusting. I asked the obvious question.

“Is there bone showing?” Bruce wanted to know.

“No,” said Crystal. “There aren’t very many cuts.”

I repeated the obvious question.

“Shysters,” muttered Bruce.

“Shysters?”

“Loan sharks.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why? Because I owed them. I meant to pay up, but I didn’t get around to it. I thought I’d have to lie here till I died. Thanks, Artie—”

Why didn’t the shysters just take the wad of money, why tape it in his—?

“I’ll get some antiseptic,” Crystal said and headed for the bathroom.

“Bruce, why did they—?”

“Christ, I don’t know. What do you think I am, a shyster shrink? They’re nuts, that’s why. Maybe they wanted to teach me a lesson.”

“Did they?”

Crystal returned. “Bruce, there’s nothing in the medicine cabinet but an evaporated bottle of Aqua Velva.”

“They whipped me with a deep-sea fishing rod!” Bruce exclaimed.

“A fishing rod?” said Lydia. “Where’d they get a fishing rod?”

“They brought it with them!”

Something was wrong here. This didn’t make good business sense from the loan shark’s point of view, teach a welsher a lesson, but leave his money behind—in his mouth?

“Look,” said Crystal, “I’m going to go to a drugstore.”

“There’s a Love Drugs on Amsterdam,” Lydia offered. “I’ll go with you.”

I almost said no. I came a breath from saying, No, things aren’t what they seem here, so we’ll all go together or not at all. But I didn’t. I was still trying to work out the sense of this scene when Crystal and Lydia left.

Bruce slowly, painfully unfolded himself. Waft s of urine stink followed him. Piss had darkened the mattress in a big circle. “Hell, I’ve been here since last night,” said Bruce. He staggered and dropped to one knee. “They loved inflicting pain. Fucking sadist shysters.”

“You want to call the cops?”

“Sure. When they get a load of all this stuff, I’ll just tell them nobody beats the Wiz.”

I helped him to his feet. He made a tortured trip toward the john, and I let him do that by himself. After he turned the corner, I lift ed the mattress, propped it up against my shoulder, and sift ed through the wad. Barely a third of the way through it, I had counted over two thousand bucks. Yes, this was wrong, all right.
Where did he get that kind of bread to begin with, and, second, why did the shysters leave it here? But then, this was Bruce’s life—

The door slammed open. Lydia shrieked twice. I stumbled over toasters getting back into the living room.

Lydia clutched her face with both hands. “They kidnapped her! They kidnapped her! They kidnapped her!”

I leapt at her, grasped her shoulders, gave her a shake I really didn’t intend, and screamed, “Who!”

“I don’t know! A Good Humor truck! Two guys jumped out of the Good Humor truck, they stuck something over her face and threw her in the back!”

Bruce, still naked, appeared from the direction of the john.

“No! No!” screeched Lydia. “It wasn’t a Good Humor truck! It was a Mister Softee truck! They shoved me down into the garbage bags, and they drove off!”

Stupid with panic, I burst out the door, down the hall, and outside as if to stop ice-cream trucks of all stripes until I found one with my love aboard. I ran west, stopped, turned, ran east before I could think again. I ran back to Bruce’s apartment.

“Phone!” I screamed at Bruce. Neither he nor Lydia had moved. Bruce’s eyes were wide with panic—that was the only difference. “
Phone!
” I spotted it. On the floor in the corner. I shoved TVs out of my way. Glass shattered.

“Wait! Artie! What are you doing!”

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing! I’m calling the cops!”

“No, you can’t do that!”

A terrible calm came over me. “Why?”

“…How can I explain all this—?”

“Bruce, I don’t care about your stolen goods. Crystal’s been kidnapped. I’m calling the cops, and”—I turned on Lydia—“you’re going to tell them what you saw!”

“Artie, please don’t.” Bruce began to sob. “If you call the police, they’ll kill me.”

I watched his shoulders heave for a moment. “Who will?”

He began to collect himself. I could see his wheels turning. He was searching for a line of bullshit.

I didn’t wait. “Okay, Bruce, here it is. You tell me what’s going on, tell me now, or I go straight to the police and tell them everything I’ve seen. Five seconds, Bruce.”

He sat down on a TV box. He grimaced in pain. “You’ve got to promise you won’t bring in the cops. They told me they’d kill me if I brought the cops in. They will, Artie. They don’t give a fuck. They’ll kill me and then go order out Chinese. Look what they did to me already.”

“I told you, Bruce, I don’t care about you. I only care about Crystal.”

“They’ll kill her if you call the cops,” he said.

“You better tell me who, Bruce.
Now!
”

“Trammell’s alive. We staged his death. He paid me to help him. That boat stuff—it was all bullshit.” He folded his hands over his genitals, as if suddenly shy.

“Who’s Trammell?” said Lydia.

“Those people who beat you—that’s what they wanted to know?”

“How could I not tell them, flaying me with a fucking fishing pole! You’d have done the same thing.”

“Who were they?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did they look like?”

“A black guy and a white guy, both big.”

What was I going to do? I had to think, but suddenly I was exhausted. I sat down on a TV box. “What did they say while they were beating you?” My mouth was so dry I could barely speak.

“They kept asking me if Trammell was alive.”

“What else?”

“That they’d kill me if I told anyone.”

“Why didn’t they just kill you after you told them?”

“They want me to find him for them.”

“You know where he is?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why did they kidnap Crystal?”

“Maybe they think she knows where he is.”

“You mean they’re going to torture her like that?”