Lush Life (49 page)

She got up and went to her dirty-book bookshelf, grazed the drunken chorus line of mostly soft spines. "Hello, boys, you miss me?" Then turned back to Eric. "It is so, weird to be back here."

"I can imagine."

"But I didn't mean to kick you out."

Matty had called the deputy inspector four times during the day; in the morning he was told the warrants squad was setting up, but as far as the other units requested, Berkowitz was "still working on it."

At one in the afternoon he was told that lining everybody else up was "just about there."

At four, the phrase used was "iron out some last-minute kinks."

At six he got Berkowitz's answering machine, Matty telling himself at that point that it didn't mean anything other than it was getting to be Saturday night and the guy didn't want to be disturbed.

He had said barring a massacre it was all going to happen, and Berkowitz was about as straight a shooter as you could be for someone in his position, so have another beer.

At eight, though, the TV news led off with the kidnapping of the granddaughter of a politically wired Washington Heights-based minister, and Matty knew that once again, his recanvass was fucked.

It was a funny kind of fucking.

He wasn't even sure they would be sleeping in the same bed, not that there was a second option, and he sat upright on the futon in his street clothes, waiting for the water to stop running in the bathroom to see what would be emerging, and she came out straight-up naked, her body tight and spare and unconflicted, all nipples and hip bones, and Eric just became another person, silently stripping down and then holding her, one hand at her nape and one on her belly, lowering her onto the futon like laying a rare musical instrument into its case. There was nothing hurried but nothing preliminary, just putting himself inside her right away, and moving at the same not slow not rushed pace, hovering but in deep, the concentration like nothing he had ever possessed before. Nothing could make him speed up, nothing could make him stop, and Alessandra started looking at him sideways-Who are you-her body beneath his rigid, sprung against sprung, but she couldn't hold it and started to come, then come some more, and he still wouldn't, couldn't alter what he was doing in response, could go on pumping her all night long, would have if she didn't push up against his chest, needing a break, Eric lifting out of her as barlike as he was going in, still holding her, but having nothing to say, just waiting until she was ready for more, then going back in with the same maddening steadiness, Alessandra starting to go a little wall-eyed trying to look into him, but he was not to be found and soon she didn't even have the strength to ask for another break but just floated away.

At midnight, watching the news updates on the kidnapping while fried to the hat in Waxey's, Matty couldn't remember if his ex-wife had really called him that morning about the kid moving to New York or if he had imagined it, so he stepped into the quieter red-washed back room of Chinaman's Chance and started thumb-stabbing his cell for a verification.

"Hello?"

He didn't know if he had inadvertently called Minette Davidson just now or if she happened to call him at ten after midnight just as he happened to open his phone to call upstate; the question was too complicated to think about at that moment, in any event, so he hung up on everybody and made his way back to the bar.

Sunday morning Berkowitz was once again a recorded voice.

And when Matty called a friend from the warrants squad to see how the preliminary sweeps in Lemlich and Cahan had gone, he heard that they didn't.

"Aw, man, all hell broke loose last night with that kidnapped ministers kid. They dragooned us up to the Heights, we hit like fifty doors, going right back out in a few to hit fifty more."

Whomever he called in Vice, Narcotics, Patrol was, big surprise, "out in the field," meaning, presumably, uptown with the kidnapping, and would get back to him as soon as they got in.

At three o'clock Sunday afternoon the girl came back on her own, just walked into her grandparents' house with a story about being abducted by seven men in a blacked-out van and taken to a mansion where she was blindfolded and drugged. She couldn't remember what she did there, what was done to her, or how she got home.

Nonetheless, at five in the evening everybody was still out in the field or had just clocked out after having pulled a double shift and then some, in order to bring that girlie-girl home.

At six he got a call from another buddy in Narcotics, on the q. T., telling him the truth, that they personally were never called up into the Heights, were in fact in the field all day preparing to hit Lemlich and Cahan for him tonight but were told at the last minute by their lieutenant to stand down, no explanation given.

Matty tried calling Berkowitz continuously after that, got the recorded voice each time, but even if he had managed to get him on the phone, all the guy would do was plead the Higher Powers Act, say his own bosses got wind of it (the rats, they're everywhere in this department) and pulled the plug, and that he tried, he gave it his all.

Matty would never find out who, ultimately, deep-sixed his recanvass again, but it didn't really make a difference.

Screw me twice, shame on me.

And so later that evening, he called in five of his own detectives, all on unauthorized overtime, and did what he could with the manpower he had, which basically boiled down to manning the intersections nearest the murder spot from 3:00 a. M. to 5:00 a. M., bookending by an hour the exact time of the shooting ten days previous; passing out flyers and doing whatever on-the-spot interviewing they could, with Yolonda as the swing man, shuttling back and forth from the corner of Eldridge and Delancey to the Eighth Precinct to interview whomever the overtime-happy Quality of Lifers managed to drag in.

Unsurprisingly, it all came to shit.

So at sunrise, Matty rejigged the game plan.

Chapter
Seven.

They sat across from each other at the Castillo de Pantera, Billy having come back down to the Lower East Side so fast after Matty's call that if he hadn't answered the phone up there in Riverdale himself, Matty would have suspected that the guy had been lurking around the corner all along. The only other customers at this midmorning hour were two young crew-cut women wearing paint-spattered farmer johns, one of them giving her order to the Mayan-looking waitress in halting Spanish.

"Listen." Matty leaned in, dropped his voice. "I've always been honest with you, yes? And, I have to say, right now I see this whole thing going south at warp speed."

"What about Eric Cash?"

"Nothing."

"What if I-"

"No more with him."

"What if-"

"I asked you to say very specific things to that reporter, none of which showed up in the paper. I understand you're emotional-"

"Emotional . . ."

"Yeah. Emotional. But the point was to bring Cash in, not bury him."

"Maybe I should talk to him again," Billy said. "Explain-"

"No. Let it be. What we did was a push, any more and we can both get good and bit."

"But what if-"

"I said let it be."

Billy attempted to say one more thing but gave up, subsiding into an alert vacancy, as if that part of his programming had just been removed.

"Look," Matty reaching out and laying a hand on his arm to bring him in. "The powers that be want this case to go away, and I can't let that happen. We can't let that happen." "OK."

"And, at this point the only way left to prevent that, the only way to keep this thing from getting any colder, is to keep it in the public eye, and so here's what I'm thinking . . . The reward at this point is twenty
-
two thousand, but if we could raise it, say, another twenty? That would justify a fresh presser."

Billy nodded.

Matty waited.

"So, another twenty" Matty cocked his head. "What do you think?"

"Sounds good," Billy said, continuing to look like a facsimile of himself.

The guy wasn't getting it.

"What I'm saying to you is, that in some cases, the family of the victim, if they're in a position, voluntarily kick into the kitty to get some fresh publicity, light a fire under lPP's ass."

"OK." Blinking at him.

"So. Can you raise . . ."

"Me?" Billy jerked back from the table.

The guy didn't have it.

"I have to apologize." Matty flushed. "I thought-"

"No. Hold on." Billy shifting gears, bearing down.

"Look, I feel bad," Matty said. "I don't know why, but I was under the impression-"

"Just hold on."

"I didn't mean to put you up against a wall-"

"I said hold on\" A verbal smack that had the urban farmgirls at the other table jumping. "All right, there's an account. His, has about twenty-five thousand." "OK."

"Accumulated birthday cash, mostly from his mother's side, that I'm, that she doesn't want any part, that, that reverted to me." "OK."

"It's his birthday money."

"Billy, I can't tell you what to do."

"What do you mean, 'I can't tell you what to do ? You just did."

Matty offered his palms. "I want the best results here."

"Jesus Christ, do I have to take it out today?"

"The sooner the better, but-"

"Fuck," Billy barked, jumped up, stalked out of the restaurant, then came charging back in. "It's his birthday money!" Spraying the room with gall.

Eric was making a shambles of it today, so shaky he didn't trust himself to pick up a dish. A few of the waiters were giving him the thousand
-
yard stare, a few customers, one even saying without looking at him on his way out, "What goes around comes around."

But the worst of it was Bree, who continued to take small bites out of his heart every time she walked past him as if he weren't there. The only way Eric could manage to survive the shift was by concentrating on his exit strategy and by reminding himself that in so many ways, he was already gone.

It was easier, these days, back at the apartment; easier as in blanker, purely physical, and nuts; Eric surprising himself and Alessandra the last two nights by fucking as if in her absence he did nothing but study every one of those sex manuals and porno funnies she had left behind. He had never, ever been either that focused or slow to come in his life, making her go off over and over, something he had never been able to do before except when going down on her, his ex-girlfriend waking up Sunday morning, calling her Filipino fiance in Jersey City to say she needed an extra day, Monday morning, just one more day, mi amor, and making Eric do it again the minute she hung up. She took it as a sign of renewed passion between them, but it wasn't her; it was what she had said Saturday night about his being so close to death. It wasn't as if he hadn't known that, but in the week and a half since the murder he hadn't ever had the stillness in him to really reexperience that, be quiet with that, and the shock of seeing her emerging from the bathroom fresh-naked just moments after she had laid that on him really put him right back there in front of 27 Eldridge, the bullet so close he could have stopped it with his palm-Eric fucking all weekend like that, he would hate to tell her, simply to outrace the goddamned thing.

He was coming to the end of his shift, had an hour break before the second half of his double, and could barely stay upright. Punching out, he started to walk the four blocks back to his apartment, remembered that Alessandra was there waiting for him, turned around, went back into Berkmanns, and crashed in one of the subterranean supply rooms.

The store, four blocks from his school, was called BD Wing Funerary, and Tristan had never seen anything like it: nothing but paper replicas of every kind of luxury item imaginable, from Gucci loafers to cell phones to cigarette cartons to a four-foot-tall, three-story private house, every brick and window shade sketched to scale.

"What is this?" Tristan held up a paper tuxedo wrapped in plastic and folded to the size of a pressed shirt.

"Not for you," said the owner, a gray-haired Chinese who had been trailing him from the door on in.

"I ain't stealing nothing. What is it, for kids?"

"For nobody," the guy said, tilting his head to the door.

Across Mulberry Street in Columbus Park, a full-court shirts-and
-
skins basketball game was being played, every kid Chinese and most probably, like himself, cutting school.

"Ey, yo." Gameboy materialized from the back shadows of the store, from beneath his own brows, a brick of what looked to Tristan like fake Chinese money in one hand, two video boxes in the other.

"He with you?" the old guy said.

"Yeah."

"Tell him buy something or go."

"OK." Gameboy nodded, then tilting his head to Tristan, " 'S up."

'You come here?"

'Yeah."

"What is it?"

"The shits madhouse, right?"