Rhode Island Red (11 page)

I
am a cradle being rocked

by a hand in the

center of a crypt
…

But someone else maintains it means:

Deep in the hollow earth

my childhood is ravaged by

a fist
…

Ask Verlaine which is closer to the truth.

But Verlaine is long dead.

Diego, however, wasn't. Maybe if he were presented with those very words, they'd mean something to him.

They had meant something to Charlie Conlin and to Inge. I was fairly certain the two of them had died because of those words.

I heard a muffled cheer from the next room. Somebody must have made a basket or something.

It was only a little after noon, but the day was over for the bulk of the workers in the flower district. Their shift began at three or four in the morning. I looked up and down the cramped streets with their double rows of potted plants squeezing the pedestrians into single file, and I wondered where the workers ate their lunch at, say, 6.30
A.M.
What would you have for lunch at six-thirty in the morning? There had been this guy, Dale, a fellow grad school student, who liked prowling the streets at all hours of the morning. He used to take me into these funky coffee shops—places where the transsexuals were the respectable folks and the rest of the patrons went down the social ladder from there—where he would down gallons of shitty coffee and natter at me in that sincere Marxist way of his about the hidden injuries of race and class. I sometimes thought he got off on people assuming I was a hooker.

What made me think of that? I was wasting time. I was stalling, postponing my entrance into the wholesale market where Diego worked. But I picked up my feet and walked toward the place.

I evoked a couple of half-hearted lewd remarks from the guys lounging outside the front door. Ignoring them, I looked up at the window of the apartment where Inge had died.

An old man was slowly squeegee-ing a sheet metal table on which a million flowers had been trimmed. Wet leaves and petals clung to his trouser legs like appliqué.

“Is Diego here?” I asked him.

He gestured to the rear of the room. I walked through a set of swinging doors and into a dingy room with nine lockers nailed against one wall. In front of them was a long wooden bench where Diego sat lacing up his sneakers. Beside him was an open beer can in a paper bag and a cigarette left burning at the edge of the seat.

I called his name.

The boy looked up dumbly.

“Diego?” I called again.

It took a full thirty seconds for him to react, and when he did he only heaved a tremendous sigh. Diego was good and high.

“Do you remember me?”

He swayed a little on the bench. “Yeah. You one of the lady cops.”

“No, I'm not, Diego. I came in with them, but I'm not a cop.”

He smirked then, enjoying a joke I wasn't in on.

I sat down at the edge of the bench. Not only was Diego stoned, he looked as if he hadn't slept in days.

“I need to talk to you for a minute, Diego.”

No answer.

“It's about Inge, the woman who was killed upstairs.”

“What?” He sat a bit straighter then, and suddenly ran his hands over the post adolescent stubble on his chin.

“I want to know if Inge ever mentioned something called Rhode Island Red to you. Do you ever remember hearing those words before—from her or anybody else?”

“Say what?”

“Rhode … Island … Red.”

“No. No. I don't remember.” He found his cigarette and took a desperate pull on it but it had gone out.

“Are you sure, Diego? See, maybe when you thought you heard—”

He picked up his beer then but apparently the can was empty. I guess that tore it, because in a second he was on his feet, hurling the empty can against the nearest locker.

“I didn't hear nothing, man!” he bellowed. “I don't know what those stupid fucking words are!” Next, he grabbed the bench itself, nearly knocking me to the floor, and sent that flying against the wall. His little frame was trembling with rage.

I wanted to get out of there but I was afraid any sudden move might send him after me. He took a step toward me. I tensed, searching the room for something to fend him off with.

But Diego had no more violence in him. He staggered over to the lockers and collapsed against them. “Don't you think I remember everything she said to me?” he choked out. “Don't you think I know what she said, man?” Then he was overtaken by the sobs.

Oh wow. Damn. He had been in love with her.

“Diego, will you—”

“Fuck you, man! Get out of here. Get out and leave me alone. I wish I was dead, I wish I was with her—dead. I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. I just hope that fucking cop of hers is burning in hell. I just wanna see how much she loves him now.”

I took a couple of tentative steps in his direction. When he turned toward me his face was soggy, old. Then he opened his mouth and a raw, primordial scream came out. The elderly man I'd seen earlier appeared then, along with one of my admirers from out front. I pushed my way past them.

Out on the street again, I walked quickly, taking deep breaths of the heady green air. Talk about burning in hell, Diego's pain had scorched me. I wanted to put some distance between me and all that throbbing hurt.

I didn't get very far.

That fucking cop of hers. See how much she loves him now
.

That cop. Diego wasn't talking about Leman Sweet. He meant Charlie Conlin—Sig. Except, Inge didn't know Sig was a cop. So how did Diego know? Unless … Oh.

There had been nothing in the papers about Sig's death. Presumably because the police had suppressed the story. The murder of a poor blind girl and her dog had made a splash in the news, but there had been no mention of a lover killed a few days earlier. Certainly there had been no mention of Charlie Conlin at the time Diego was questioned.

The lovesick little b-boy from the Dominican Republic seemed to know one secret too many.

I called Leman Sweet—again.

Diego had obtained a fresh beer. He was just leaving when Leman Sweet swung into the locker room, with me two paces behind him. We three had a kind of slapstick collision in the doorway.

The boy stood paralyzed, his eyes locked with the massive cop's. Sweet's big booted foot spasmed suddenly and Diego landed upright on the bench he had tried to destroy fifteen minutes ago.

Sweet strode over to the boy. “You got something to say to me, don't you, Pancho?”

Diego only winced.

Sweet snatched him up off the seat as though Diego were a shopping bag full of air. Fingers against his throat, he flung the boy in my direction.

I screamed and tried to throw my arm protectively across Diego's chest.

The detective sent me halfway across the room with a shrug of one shoulder.

“Don't kill him!” I shouted.

“Open that motherfucking locker, you,” Sweet boomed.

“Open it yourself,” the kid wheezed.

Sweet hit him in the stomach savagely and Diego crumpled.

I moaned then and covered my eyes.

Sweet took a fistful of the boy's hair and twisted him over to the wall. “Open it!”

“Open it!” I cried, echoing him. “He'll kill you!”

Diego complied.

“You move and I'll shoot your heart out,” Sweet told him. The detective thrust both hands into the locker and began pulling objects out in a frenzy. Diego stood there maniacally squeezing his palms together. “What's the matter, you think I'm gonna break your crack pipe? What am I gonna find in here, Diego, huh? What am I gonna find?”

Sweet picked through tee-shirts and hairbrushes and jock straps and plastic shampoo containers, heedlessly flinging each thing away from him. Then he came out with what appeared to be a crowbar and a small precision drill. “Somebody started working on the cylinder of your door lock that night. Probably using just this kinda stuff,” he said over his shoulder to me. He placed the objects gently on the floor.

Next came a grimy white envelope closed with a paperclip. He spilled out the contents onto the wooden bench: photographs. He looked through them quickly, replaced them, walked over to the silent Diego and slammed the envelope into his ashen face. Once Sweet had handcuffed the kid, he took the envelope and tossed it over to me.

I opened the flap and removed the stack of photos. They were all of Inge, in various stages of nudity. She may or may not have known she was being photographed—or spied on—whatever.

A hundred questions were running through my mind. About Diego and Inge. About Inge and Sig. About love turned to madness, and madness to murder. Was Diego, too, part of the Rhode Island Red mystery? Was he possibly connected to Henry? Or was his part in all this mayhem and unhappiness strictly localized, coincidental—having only to do with his obsession with the blind woman?

I looked up from the pictures at that moment, looked across the room to see Leman Sweet aiming his revolver at the bridge of Diego's nose. I just stood there waiting for the roar of the gun. No matter how horrible it was going to be, I knew I wouldn't be able to look away.

“You killed my partner, didn't you, scum? You put that ice pick in Charlie.”

Diego looked right into the barrel of that gun. Slowly, slowly, he raised his hands, almost in a gesture of supplication and began to nod his head.

Just like in the movies, the action seemed to take place through a curtain of gauze, slow, so slow, everything happening in slow motion. Sweet pulling back the hammer of the gun. Diego importuning, nodding. Me doing my imitation of Buckwheat.

Then I heard Sweet reciting the Miranda warnings about the right to silence and hiring an attorney. He was reholstering his gun.

“I've got to ask you some questions,” I said to him when he had finished.

“Uh uh. You ain't got to ask me nothing. Only question now is whether we nail him for one murder or two.”

CHAPTER 10

Epistrophy

I wasn't expecting the NYPD to give me a medal for finding the murderer of an undercover cop. And they didn't disappoint. I got zip.

Madder fack, as I'd once heard a TV evangelist say, they appeared to be pissed at me for showing that Sig's death had nothing to do with the investigation he and Leman were part of. The killing of poor Sig/Charlie was motivated by nothing more conspiratorial than unrequited love … jealousy. Diego's formal confession had stated that he never knew Sig was a cop until the night he killed him, when he'd discovered Sig's ID taped to his leg holster.

As for the world's nastiest civil servant, Detective Leman Sweet, he seemed even more eager to get shed of me than I was him. After Diego was behind bars—his room on Rivington Street swept clean of all the sicko bondage magazines and his pitifully inchoate love letters to Inge—I had tried to talk to Sweet about the crazed chain of events that had linked us all. But he was resolutely not interested. The days went by. And the autumn weather turned the leaves to flame. There were no more mystery calls summoning me up blind alleys. No white girls shoving pistols up my nose. And, to be sure, no Henry Valokus.

He and whoever it was he was working with, working for, or running from, had obviously determined I wasn't a player in their game. For which I had only to be grateful. And so I tried to bury the Rhode Island Red business as deep as the dead leaves of those first yellow roses.

If only I played the sax half as well as I played the fool. Ah, I could only try. Jefferson, my coach, said I was making progress even if I didn't know it yet. I kept to the street gig, though, and that along with the few bucks coming in from the translation work I did for an avant-garde French publishing house kept me afloat.

Not to mention the help I got from Walt. He never knew what a beacon in the darkness he was for me. Oh, our carnal thing was still in place, but that wasn't the main thing for me anymore. After all this time, I found out I could sort of talk to Walter about things—sort of. He tried to listen a little when I talked about Verlaine and I tried to listen when he worried aloud about the coming merger at work or bitched about the snotty fag at the tie counter at Barney's.

I needed a substitute ear these days because, as of late, Aubrey was powerfully distracted. By something I couldn't blame her for: my girl was in love.

I'd never seen Aubrey goofy before. Up until then, I thought her constitutionally incapable of it. But there she was—acting goofy. It was fifty percent treat and fifty percent pain in the ass. But she had my patience and indulgence coming to her, given all the dumb crushes and mad
affaires de cæur
she'd nursed me through over the years.

Her man was named Jeremy. He was tall, slender, fall down dead gorgeous, black as night—
and British
! And every time he dropped a consonant or called her “luv”, she just about came in her jumpsuit.

Jeremy was actually more suitable for me. Yeah, I know how trifling that makes me sound. All I mean is, in a parallel universe, he and I probably would have got down immediately, as if preordained to do so. Jeremy was a working class genius who went to Oxford and now made his living as a music critic—everything from Schoenberg to Hendrix. But his passion was jazz. He was quick and hip and worldly and traveled and charming. He had taken time off from his music magazine job to write a book on Fletcher Henderson and was in New York relaxing after having turned a first draft over to his editor.

Lucky for the lovers, we were in
this
universe, where Jeremy had walked into the Emporium one night in the company of a friend of his (a drag queen who calls herself Velveeta) and had taken one look at Aubrey and … Well, it makes me rethink who was predestined to be with who. Lord, were they hot together, Aubrey and Jeremy. And it was out there for everybody to see. I was truly happy for her.