Playland (6 page)

“It’s a store. Bottega Veneta. On Madison Avenue. They sell leather bags. She was carrying one. This guy grabs it.”

“The John Doe.”

“I don’t know his name. She just took her bag and left.”

“What bag?”

“The bag the guy grabbed.”

“That must be the bodega bag, Leo.”

“Bottega Veneta—”

“How do you spell that, cowboy?”

“B-O-T-T-E-G-A V-E-N-E-T-A.”

“He knows how to spell, Al. Even in spic.”

“He’s a writer is why, Leo. You got to be a good speller to be a writer, right, cowboy?”

“You find this woman—”

Al said, “What woman?”

Leo said, “What bag?”

“The one he took—”

“We didn’t find any bag.”

“She took it. She grabbed it back, and took off.”

“I thought you said he took it,” Al said.

“Got to keep your stories straight, cowboy,” Leo said.

“There were people in the street, somebody must’ve seen what happened.”

Leo said, “Well, they’re not busting down the door of the precinct, cowboy, so I wouldn’t count on that. Anyway, you see this coon—”

“Leo …”

“Sorry, I forget you’re so sensitive, Al.” To me: “So anyway, you see this colored guy with the curls.”

Al on cue: “Those fucking curls can really get to you—”

“And you just boil over, you hit him with the sheets, it happens, right, Al?”

“All the time.”

“Look, if you can just find this woman—”

“What woman? You’re the only one who’s seen her. What does she look like then?”

Great tits, nice ass, and put your money on a bush with a bikini cut. No. Hold that. I did not need an additional charge of sexual deviation added to my rap sheet. “Young.”

“Hey.”

“Hair. Short. I mean, above the shoulder. Brown, I think.”

“That really narrows it down. I thought writers were supposed to have powers of description, didn’t you, Leo.”

I was losing control. “I’m telling you, he took her fucking bag.”

“What bag?”

BILLIONAIRE BRODERICK HEIR IN RACIALLY MOTIVATED MURDER INVESTIGATION
was one of the more muted headlines, in the
Times
, page one, below the fold. The rest of the press was in what it
likes to call, in retrospect, when it examines its collective conscience and absolves itself of its excesses, a feeding frenzy, with me the sacrificial offering. I was a Broderick and I carried all the overweight baggage of my family’s history and wealth and arrogance and entitlement. Beginning with my father the billionaire. After his stroke, which kept his natural litigiousness in check, and even more so after his death, Hugh Broderick was the stuff of cheap headlines, the spotlight focusing on how he had made his money, and who he had fucked (the real object of interest, you can be sure), practically everyone (and here the inventiveness soared, a sonata of sexual fantasy) from Eleanor Roosevelt to Mother Theresa, Mme. Nehru to Mrs. Thatcher, from Blue Tyler to Marilyn Monroe (the ground somewhat firmer here), even my first wife, Leah Kaye, although this was more in the form of sly innuendo than outright allegation, as my own disposition for litigation had not been tested. Leah, the radical lawyer shot and killed in San Francisco with my brother, Bro, the Benedictine priest and adviser to presidents. A saga of license, tragedy, and meaningless death, with all the opportunities it offered for prurience and sentimental vulgarity. I had thought that with Lizzie’s death the narrative had played itself out. I had not counted on Shaamel Boudreau. The story was made for tabloid ironies. The Broderick fortune and the homeless indigent felled by $331 worth of Bergdorf-Goodman sheets and pillow slips. Silk sheets, the
Post
insisted, naturally. For a few days I was on the evening news once again, of course with an insert of my mug shots, along with the number NYPD-45-23-9387.

Of course it finally got straightened out.

“Nice of that chick to show up,” Marty Magnin said.

“Finally,” I said. Charges had been quickly dropped, and for a moment the former murder suspect became an urban hero. Citizen action against street crime. “After I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life in Attica.”

“She just got scared. She’s not a bad kid.”

“Oh?”

“We schmoozed, her and me. After she came forward. She did the right thing, Jack. She did right by you. You know, she’s a broker. A securities analyst at Drexel. Motion picture stocks. We had lunch. I gave her a few tips. Who’s in, who’s out. Touted Sydney Allen’s new picture. A blockbuster, Jack, and I’ve got his next under his old deal.”

By his smirk I knew he wanted me to ask if he had fucked her, screwing everything available and then talking about it was a tropistic instinct with him, but I really didn’t care if he had. “You weren’t going to call, were you? Until I got my name in the paper.”

“I had a lot of appointments, Jack. I had to make time. And I made it, right? That’s what friends do.”

“I’m honored you could fit me in, Marty.” We were making our way up Fifty-seventh Street toward the Russian Tea Room. The skies were leaden and threatened snow. A cab slowed and the driver shouted at me through the open window, “How to go, killer,” and then flashed the V sign before speeding off.

“Jesus,” I winced.

“Go with it, Jack. You’re a hero. Answer me this. How many times does a writer get to be a hero?”

“The man is dead, Marty.”

In Marty Magnin’s mind an irrelevancy. Perhaps he was right. Maybe I was making too much of a meal out of it. How much of a pose was this ostentatious show of regret? Was it only because I thought this was the way I was supposed to feel? Guilt is a luxury of the entitled.

“What kind of name is Shaamel anyway?” Marty Magnin asked.

“I never got a chance to ask.”

“They got funny names, these people. The Rams have got two guys in the defense secondary, Tyreese Snipes and Safrican Smith. You think they knew him?”

I pretended not to hear.

“He could have been named after his parents. They do that. Shana and Mel, say. That gives you Shaamel, right?”

“Give it a rest, would you?”

“Salou. Salou Magnin.”

“What?”

“Sadie and Lou. My parents. If they’d named me like the
schwartzes
do, I’d be Salou Magnin. You like that? I like it.”

We entered the Tea Room and took a booth across from Sydney Allen and Sam Cohn. Marty went over and kissed them on both cheeks and then I heard him try out Salou Magnin on them and the agents in the adjoining booths. Much laughter. Two of the agents whistled at me and made the pumping gesture tennis players make after winning a big point at Wimbledon. I wondered if Sydney Allen would incorporate my sheets adventure into the picture he was working on with Marty Magnin. If not there, I knew he would use it at some future time in some other project. Sydney was a born
gonif
.

“Sydney’s sending over a bottle of Dom Perignon,” Marty said when he slipped back into the booth.

“And charging it to the budget of whose picture?”

“You’re very touchy, you know?”

The waiter brought the champagne and handed me a note. “ ‘You’ve made our town a safer place. Thanks. Sydney A.’ ” As opposed to Sydney P. I swirled the amber liquid around in the champagne tulip and then raised the glass in the direction of Sydney A. “
Ciao, bene
,” Sydney Allen mouthed from across the room.

“What kind of name is Sydney Allen anyway?” I suddenly said to Marty Magnin.

“What does that mean?”

“I’ve got to get out of here, Marty.”

“You going to be sick?”

“No. I mean out of here. Out of town. I’m sick of cabdrivers blowing their horns at me in the street and asshole directors sending me bottles of Dom Perignon on someone else’s fucking tab. I got asked for my fucking autograph yesterday in the park. And a fucking Japanese tour group wanted to take my fucking picture. Jesus. The guy with the name you think is so fucking funny is dead.”

“Calm down, Jack.” Marty Magnin was smiling at the room and talking like a ventriloquist trying to throw his voice. “People are looking.”

“Let them look.”

Marty suddenly rose. “Sydney,
ciao
. See you on the Coast.” Beads of sweat appeared on Marty’s brow as he sat down. It was as if I were a bomb he was afraid would go off at any minute. “Listen, Jack, you want to get out of town?” He snapped his fingers as if a lightbulb had just gone off in his brain. “I’ve got a great idea. Detroit.”

“Detroit? Detroit’s not the out of town I had in mind, Marty. Australia. Tuscany. Antarctica. Not fucking Detroit. I’ve never been to Detroit, I don’t know anybody in Detroit, what am I supposed to do in Detroit?”

“You remember that idea we kicked around once? The cop and the basketball player. A
schwartze
, his knees are fucked up, he can’t play anymore, he and the cop become a team, the cop’s not crazy about darkies, the
schwartze
’s into black power, you can see the conflict already. I mean, he’s seven feet two, this guy, this
schwartze
, who’s going to fuck with him? I see Kareem, maybe, he’s got some film I can look at. I already got a title registered.
Murder One
.”

A title I had given him, but to Marty that was only a technicality. “So?”

“There’s this cop I know in Detroit …”

“How?”

“Say again.”

“How do you know a cop in Detroit?”

“We were doing publicity on
Cave Man
. The cop assigned to us had a million stories. A homicide cop …”

An alarm bell. “What’s a homicide cop doing babysitting a movie press junket anyway?”

“Temporary desk job. They took away his gun for shooting some spade …” Marty glanced quickly at me. “That going to be a problem? It was all cleared up. Investigation board. The whole shmeer. A good shoot. A hell of a good shoot, they said. A great shoot.”

“You make it sound like a picture, like a fucking production schedule.”

Marty was in overdrive. “Two weeks in Detroit, you drive around with him, you soak up a little atmosphere, you’re good at that, Jack, the best, you come back, we go to the Kahala, we work out a story …”

“An awful lot of
we
in this, Marty. It’s me who’ll be doing all the work.”

Marty Magnin smiled and without answering directly picked up his champagne flute. He knew I had agreed. “Detroit,” he said, “the Paris of the Midwest …”

M
aury Ahearne on tape (Tape 3, 12:14:27 to 13:21:09):