Playland (7 page)

“So how’s it going?”

“So far so good.”

“You getting good stuff?”

“Great.”

“The cat got your tongue or something? Give me a taste.”

“I really haven’t listened to the tapes, Marty.”

“There’s nothing you can remember?”

“A few things.”

“Like what, for Christ’s sake? I got to pay long-distance rates to get the runaround?”

“Well, let’s see.” I had been exposed to so much of man’s inhumanity to man, directly and indirectly, in the two weeks I had been in Detroit that I had begun to think of the aberrant as the norm. “There’s a rapist loose around town, the cops call Fido. That’s because he—”

“… fucks them up the ass, right?”

“Right.”

“Doggie style, right?”

“Right.”

“So they can’t see him, the chicks, right?”

“Right.” Marty was not usually that swift. I suspected that Maury Ahearne had already told him the same story that time he was babysitting Marty’s publicity junket. Showing him the goods, so to speak, there’s more where this came from. Maury Ahearne’s stories, as polished and smooth as old stones, were a kind of black-market currency, selling at less than the official rate. He was like a sidewalk vendor looking for a mark, and in Marty and me I think he saw the main chance.

“I like that. Tough to shoot, but a good dialogue scene. A bunch of the guys bullshitting around the precinct …” He made a noise into the telephone, something like
ba-ba-ba-BOOM
, I am sure miming at his end of the line the pelvic thrust he imagined the detective (or his actor surrogate) performing in the squad room. “Anything else?”

“Nothing else I can really think of,” I said. Not for Marty, not over the telephone, make him wait. “Offhand.”

“Say again.”

“Nothing else I can really think of. Offhand.”

“That’s it? Two weeks in Detroit living in the lap of luxury, and that is it, that is all?”

“That’s funny.”

“I wanted funny, Jack, I could hire Letterman, he’s funnier, save myself some expense money.”

“No, I mean you’re thinking living in downtown Detroit is the lap of luxury. That is really funny. Hilarious.” When he did not immediately reply, I said, “Marty, what exactly is your deal with Maury Ahearne?”

“What do you mean what’s my deal with him? He’s a pal. I slipped him a couple of Jacksons that time I was in Detroit, he said anytime I needed anything, just give him a call, he’d help me out. You trying to tell me I’m out two cees?”

I loved Marty when he tried to be street hip. He was incapable of ever getting the dialogue right. “Forty bucks,” I said. “That explains it then.”

“You have a hearing problem? I said two hundred.”

“That’d be two Franklins, Marty.”

As expected bluff and bluster. “What the fuck are you talking about? You back to writing those nut letters again? They have any shrinks in Detroit? Maybe you can find some Polack. They got a lot of them there, I hear.”

His heart was not really in it. I laid out for him exactly what Maury Ahearne had said. It was simplicity itself.

“So, Jack, how much you getting paid for this movie?” Maury Ahearne stared at me over the cup of lukewarm coffee he held in his strangely soft hands. His fingers were manicured, I noticed for the first time. Cuticles trimmed, moons perfectly shaped. I suddenly remembered an article of faith from my childhood: Someone with no moons on the fingernails had Negro blood. Was it the nuns at St. Peter Klaber’s parochial school in San Francisco who had spun this old wives’ tale? Or my mother?
More likely my mother. Gertrude Mary Mahoney Broderick, living saint though she was (and indeed so eulogized at her funeral), would occasionally reveal an antipathy to those she invariably referred to as “people of color.” The prissy choice of words betrayed perhaps more than she intended, and in a spasm of penance she was always adopting some “little pickaninny” (again her words) with large eyes and a famine-distended stomach she had seen staring from the back pages of the Catholic magazines she subscribed to and read from cover to cover,
America
and
Maryknoll
and
Commonweal
. Every month she would dutifully write to little Joseph in Senegal or tiny Moise in Ghana, occasionally receiving in reply a letter from the nuns who took care of them, Joseph had died of diphtheria or Moise of dysentery, and please keep your contributions coming, dear Mrs. Broderick, our work is never ended, and your reward will come in the kingdom of heaven.

“I don’t have a deal yet, Maury.” We were sitting in a window booth at the coffee shop across from St. Cyprian’s Roman Catholic church. Through the peeling red letters on the window—
CAFÉ CYPRIAN
, named after the church, I supposed—I watched the small knots of blue-uniformed policemen on the far side of the church slowly disperse. A cop funeral. With all the trimmings that accrued to the rank of the deceased, a decorated captain. An honor guard and the mayor and the chief of police in attendance, the cardinal on the altar. A death not in the line of duty, but a stroke at age fifty-one. In his prime, the monsignor delivering the homily had said. In the saddle, Maury Ahearne had corrected. On top of his girlfriend. Human fallibility seemed to comfort Maury Ahearne. It was an attitude we shared. Maury, with his soft hands wrapped around his coffee cup, his blue patrolman’s uniform unbuttoned and peeled back so that the badge and the brass buttons did not show. The uniform appeared to make him uneasy, embarrassed. Worn only at department funerals and at parades he could not escape. I hate the fucking bag, he said, a rare confidence, the bag his blue uniform I figured out after a moment. You know why I never
took the sergeant’s exam? Because I’m back on patrol wearing the bag if I make it. Department regs. Promotion puts you back in uniform. Out on the fucking streets. Or in a black-and-white with a fucking siren. With some jiveass kid, wants to run upstairs and go break down doors, gets himself decorated and me iced. Fuck that shit.

Maury Ahearne was persistent. “What do you usually get?”

“Never enough.”

“Stop jerking me around.”

I concentrated on the manicure, the soft hands, hands that had delivered abuse to miscreants who expected to be abused. “I’m not jerking you around, Maury. It varies.”

“You know how I find out how much you get?” he said reasonably. I did not reply. This was the kind of cop SOP I was there to learn. You had to hang out to get it. Be available. “I call a pal in the LAPD. I met him once, I had to go out to L.A., pick up a guy, bring him back here for trial. A real sweetheart, this guy. He ties his girlfriend to a chair and throws her out the window. Fourth floor in the back. You know with that thing in her mouth that she sticks up her cunt so she don’t get knocked up, you know what I mean …”

He snapped his fingers. My cue. “Diaphragm.”

“That’s it.” As always I was struck by Maury Ahearne’s ability to find a deviant footnote for every situation. It was as if the stories lent weight to his place in the world. “So she wouldn’t scream, I guess. Then he heads for L.A., this guy. LAPD picks him up, holds him till I get there. Which is how I meet my pal. A dumb fuck in Robbery-Homicide, but I got to think he can handle something like this. He knows people who know people in the picture business. He asks around, finds somebody he can squeeze. Everybody can be squeezed one way or the other, you get right down to it. I tell my pal to ask around, maybe squeeze somebody, get me a quote on your last price.” A large smile. “I think I get the quote on what your last price is. L.A., Detroit, it’s all the same, the way cops operate.”

I did not doubt it for a second.

“Marty, he wants half.”

“Half of what?”

“Half of my fee.”

“I can hang with that, Jack.”

“I tell you how Jimmy Jesus gets it?” Maury Ahearne asked the next afternoon. I was riding shotgun in a beat-up police department Chevy Nova, tape recorder at the ready. Hollywood screenwriter picking up gritty gutter wisdom.

“I don’t think so.” Don’t interrupt, no detours, don’t ask how Jimmy Jesus got his name.

“He’s having a sitdown with the spades. Ribs, collard greens, the works. Fixing things. This is my side of the street, this is yours. I sell here, you sell there. He picks himself up a slab of ribs, Jimmy, and the dumb fuck chokes on it. Face turns blue. One of the spades gives him the Heimlich hold. I don’t know where the fuck he learned it. I thought they were too dumb. Anyway this big spade, Milk Shake I think his name is, he puts his arm around Jimmy’s chest, and when he starts to heave, he feels the wire Jimmy’s wearing under his shirt. He’s looking at fifteen in Jackson, Jimmy, a narcotics beef, so he’s working undercover for some federal strike force, he wants to get into witness protection. The spades let him choke. An accident. Nothing on the fucking tape, it turns out except Jimmy dying.”

I was struck once again by the element of theatricality in Maury Ahearne’s performance, the sense that the 9-mm Beretta in his shoulder holster and the handcuffs hanging from the back of his heavy leather belt were the ultimate social equalizers that made him more than my match. There was about him a tendency to show off, a willingness, perhaps even a need, to push. I was only a tourist in Maury Ahearne’s world, a visitor with a limited visa, while he was in harm’s way, as contemptuous of my civilian airs and screen credits and brush with the world of fame and money as Al and Leo had been in New York.

“You talk to the Jewboy?”

I had to remember to tell that to Marty Magnin. “He said to say hello, give you his best.”

“Don’t smart-mouth me. You’re deadweight, you know that? I’m supposed to carry you around. Fuck you.” His voice began to rise, his face turned a choleric red, and I suspected that were I a felon I would at any second be on the receiving end of those soft manicured hands. “You could get me killed. For a handshake and a couple of cees stuffed in my pocket like I’m some kind of fucking headwaiter.”

With that Maury Ahearne picked up my tape recorder and threw it out the car window. I looked back and saw it bouncing on the street, three hundred dollars’ worth of Sony rechargeable, and in the gathering dusk I could see a pack of black children suddenly appear and begin fighting over it, as if they were predators feeding at a carcass too small to provide for all of them. Then Maury Ahearne stopped the Nova, reached over and opened the door on my side, and said, “Out.”

I got out. He drove off. The children abandoned the fight over the tape recorder and surrounded me, demanding money, not really children on closer look, but fifteen-year-olds in hightops and turned-around baseball caps and hooded sweatshirts, hardened by schoolyard basketball and petty street crime, as big if not bigger than I. I gave them everything I had. It did not seem the place to argue, nor to hope that Maury Ahearne was just circling the block and, like the cavalry, would soon return. In retrospect it seemed that there was a kind of justice in this humiliation, the revenge of Shaamel Boudreau from beyond the grave. But of course that idea derived from my propensity for seeing all sides of every question, my ability to dispense benefit of the doubt as if it was a sacrament. They had my money and had rejected my digital Casio watch as cheap honky shit. Then they simply melted into the early evening, leaving only the echoes of their slurs on my color and my manhood and my wristwear. On the skyline I saw a skyscraper and headed for it, the point on a one-man patrol.