Feelers (16 page)

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, making a show of my anguish.

“OK, Dexter, I will tell you. But you must believe me that I am an innocent party in this who has been drawn into harm’s way. I think maybe Danny Kessel thinks I recovered his money. I cleaned the house owned by his uncle. I found a little money. But not five million, I swear before God.”

His eyes: squinting. His lips: pursed. I was being examined very closely.

“Look, we feelers often find money. Ask Frog.”

“Frog?”

“Yes, Franco, he hangs out at Oscar’s. He does apartments, mostly.”

“Mostly . . .”

“He does the occasional house. Did one next door to the Trux place.”

“Trux place . . .”

“The place I cleaned, Danny’s uncle.”

“Hmm.”

“So I found some money. And as I often do, I shared some of it with the day laborers. They went out drinking, and word got out that I had found a lot of money. It is unfortunate that my discovery comes at this time, when Danny—”

“Not five million?”

“Not even close. It was more than I have ever found. But if it was five million . . .”

“You wouldn’t be here now. You’d be long gone.”

I clapped my hands. “As you say.”

“But nobody knows for sure that Danny hid the money in the house, right? You haven’t run into him yet, that right?”

“I have only run into Wolfman, at Oscar’s. But he is parked outside my apartment right now.”

“Wolfman?”

“Yes. The cop with the flyers. Very hairy man. I think he shaves his nose.”

Dexter chuckled about that. “And he’s staking you out?”

“Yes. The idiots down at Oscar’s sold me out for a hundred bucks. Mim—”

“Mim?”

“An old-timer, sits at the far end of the bar. She recognized the photo, knew it was Danny, knew that Danny’s uncle lived there on Vanderhoosen Drive . . .”

“And ’cause there were the rumors of the money . . . got it.” Dexter began to rock in his chair. He was liking my story. Probably because it was the truth. “And you won’t go to the police because . . .”

“Hey, I got that money fair and square. The next of kin signed a release of all the house contents to me. All a hundred percent legal. The cops will take that money away as evidence or something. I got plans.”

“Plans?”

“There is a place I want to buy. A place far from here, start a new life.”

“You lived here all your life. You don’t like Brooklyn?”

“You would not understand. It has to do with my family. I want to buy my family’s house back in . . . well, out of the country.”

Dexter was now playing with a pencil, tossing it in the air and catching it.

“Morty, this is one fucked-up story. Thank you. I owe you one.”

“All I ask is that you try to help get me out of this. I am not the bad guy.”

He caught the pencil and pointed it at me. “Just the lucky guy.”

“
Almost
lucky.” I stood and began pacing. “Shit, man, I got nowhere to go. I cannot even go home. Wolfman is waiting for me.”

Dexter struggled out of his seat and staggered over to his coatrack. “Let’s go.”

“Go?” I watched as he slid on his Panama hat. It was like watching a soldier put on his helmet.

“We have a date with the Wolfman.”

ARE YOU SURE THIS IS
the best idea?” I was sitting in Dexter’s Mustang convertible, one of the new ones, in black. The top was down, yet somehow Dexter’s Panama didn’t ever seem in danger of flying off as we drove over. Perhaps he flexed his head muscles to keep it on, I do not know.

“First rule of journalism: Go to the source. Besides, how would you get home otherwise?”

I shrugged and climbed out of his car. Better him than me—nobody better to put one over on a cop than a reporter. Besides, I was beat. It was almost two thirty. I could hear the siren song of my pillow.

His car growled around the corner onto my street, and I stayed by the corner watching.

The Mustang’s taillights flared as it pulled to a stop next to the Wolfman’s SUV.

I watched. Dexter lurched out from the driver’s door and leaned in the open passenger window of the SUV.

That was my cue.

My building is two in from the boulevard. There is nothing but sidewalk, signs, and a couple small dying trees. The brick
buildings are at the back of the sidewalk. No bushes or anything like that to block the view from the SUV. Only parked cars along the entire length of curb down to my building.

So I ran at a crouch behind the parked cars, dodging the street hardware as I went. At the spaces between cars, I shot an eye out to my left, toward the SUV, the Mustang, and Dexter. Each time there was a flash of streetlight and a glimpse of the cars across the street. It was like a slow-moving motion picture, frame by frame, interspaced with a view ahead along the sidewalk, sign posts, streetlamp, and skinny trees.

In front of my building I stopped and got an eyeful of the Mustang and Dexter standing at the SUV. Gently, I fished my building keys out of my pocket so as not to make any jingly sounds. I found the front door key—but also saw the key to the locker.

The locker with the eight hundred grand in it. This was all worth it, right? I did a flash review of the evening.

Buying grapes and flowery trash can. Fanny’s voice on the phone about the bath. At Oscar’s, realizing I was in deep, deep shit. The itchy cop and crime scene at Mary’s. Running down Speedy on the boulevard. The sweet massage from the chica. Mamma and Pitu beating the crap out of the Balkan Boys. Mim spewing. Frog frightening. Dexter Lewis pointing his pencil at me and saying, “Just the lucky guy.”

There I was crouching behind a car, like a criminal, in front of my own apartment, caressing a silver key to eight hundred grand and savoring my dream of my La Paz birthright.

I gave my head a shake.
Daydream once you’re inside, idiot!

Confirming that Dexter was still blocking Wolfman’s sightlines, I scuttled like a crab up to the apartment vestibule, slid the key in the lock, and gently swung the door open.

Halfway open, it stopped.

I shoved, and it seemed to shove back.

My breath stuck to the back of my tongue like a mollusk—I dared not move. There was someone in the vestibule.

No, you idiot—look, it’s the wooden door wedge
.

From the street, I heard Dexter laugh about something—and at first I thought it was at me, but he couldn’t even see me from where he was talking to Wolfman.

I pulled the door open a little, reached around, and moved the stupid wedge the landlord keeps there for propping the door open. Next I knew I was safely in the light of the vestibule, mailboxes on the wall above me.

Which reminded me: I had completely forgotten about the white envelope from the genealogical people. The one containing my ancestry. I could picture tossing it on the backseat of the Camaro, the white envelope wedged in the corner when I shoved the Scottish suitcase into the backseat.

I slid the next key into the next door and pushed it open into the hallway, keeping an eye out the window to see if Dexter was still standing there. Yes, they were still out there. And I was undetected.

Still crouching, I pushed the door closed and turned.

“What the hell is this?”

You have heard the term “jumping out of one’s own skin”? My muscles and skeleton dashed up the stairs leaving only my skin, brain, and eyeballs in the front hall.

It was the monster frog, of course—my landlord. The monster frog’s belly stuck out of his green-and-white-striped pajamas like a hairy bloated cantaloupe, a cellophane-wrapped stogie in his top pocket, a Mets baseball cap on his head, green flip-flops on his feet.

God only knows what he was doing up at that hour, standing in the hallway, watching as the door slowly creaked open and I backed into the building.

I had collapsed into a sitting position against the wall, clutching my brain to make sure it did not leave only my eyeballs down here with the monster frog and the inevitable inquisition that I would now have to deal with after this ferociously long and complicated day.

“Did I scare yah?” He now stood over me, hands on his hips.

I could not imagine why he would ask such a thing when the answer seemed clear.

“Good God, man, what are you doing standing around in the hallway at this hour?” I had a hard time keeping the peevishness from my voice.

“My goddamn hallway. I’ll stand here all night long if I wanna. There’s people standing in the street talking, I was gonna go tell them to get the fuck away from here. Now I find you creepin’. Morty creepin’ in my hallway.”

Brooklyn: a borough of over two and a half million souls. Every year we have a couple hundred murders, double that number of rapes, double
that
number of assaults, and thousands and thousands of thefts. If any one of these were to happen in front of my building, I have no doubt my landlord would close his shades and plug his ears. But two men talking in muted tones at three in the morning? It is
this
that upset him enough to get out of bed, exit the building in his green-striped pajamas, and tell them to go away.

Then again, this is the man who feels up all the garbage bags for contraband—that is, recyclables. A year ago I tossed a small recyclable milk carton in the garbage, and I still hadn’t heard the last of it.

My skeleton and musculature slumped reluctantly back into my skin with my brain and eyeballs. I worked my jaw to make sure it might be able to form words.

“It is perfectly simple,” I began, not having a clue what I would say next—and knowing that nothing was simple anymore.

“You know those two out there?” he grumbled.

“I do not even know who you are talking about. I did not notice anybody.”

“Well, they’re out there, and they’re talking. In front of my building.”

Monsters lead small lives.

“I assure you that I . . . you see, it is my girlfriend.” When in doubt, blame it on your girlfriend or wife—other men are only too willing to accept this variety of excuse.

“Ooo. The one from . . . from . . .” He waved his thumb toward the west, unable to bring himself to say “New Jersey.”

“Yes. That is the one.”

“That figgers.”

“I was out with someone else, and I think she may be suspicious, so I wanted to be careful coming home. You are a man of the world, you know how it is.”

More like a man of the four-story brick building in East Brooklyn. I doubt he had left the neighborhood for twenty years. This didn’t keep him from tugging up on his pajama bottoms as if his cock were hanging down to his gnarled yellow toenails.

He sniffed and looked somewhere off into the middle distance, probably picturing his last conquest, sometime when Nixon was in China. I shuddered. I could only imagine what that lucky girl looked like, much less what they looked like together. I tell you, I gagged.

“You OK? Youse ain’t gonna barf in my hallway, are yah?”

“No, I am fine, really.” I got unsteadily to my feet, my stomach somehow being the last part of me to rise up from the floor. “Well, it was nice talking to you. Good night.”

“I tell you, Morty.” He was saying this to my back as I tromped up the stairs. “You got an interesting life.”

Interesting? The irony of that made me chuckle. “Good night.”

“And Morty . . .”

I paused.

“Yes?”

“No more milk cartons in the garbage. We’ll get a ticket.”

AS I REACHED MY FRONT
door, I looked toward the floor for the gum wrapper.

Ah
.

I neglected to put the gum wrapper in the doorjamb eighteen hours or so ago when I left with Fanny. Why? Because I knew the Balkan Boys had already been there. Back in that blissful, carefree world eighteen hours ago, I did not know Danny Kessel was hunting me.

I unlocked the door and stepped in.

I heard something move.

Who was it that turned into a pillar of salt? Medusa? That was me.

For about two seconds, until I heard the movement again, over by the couch.

A weapon. I needed a weapon, and fast.

A flash-fast mental inventory of my apartment zoomed in on the image of my baseball bat. I do not play baseball. I would venture to guess that most Brooklynites do not. But even as it may be customary in South Jersey to keep pigs inside your house or in California to keep your convertible Bentley in the garage, in
Brooklyn most people keep a baseball bat somewhere handy. You know, just in case there is trouble. It is not like Brooklyn is particularly dangerous, do not get me wrong, but we are a cautious people, many of us having lived through times that were more dangerous. This weapon is customarily kept somewhere near the front door, where presumably a frontal assault on your apartment would occur.

Mine was in the coat closet. Near the front door, yes, but not next to the front door. I had moved it when straightening up my place for Fanny. To get it would require moving toward the person in my dark apartment and opening the closet and feeling around in there to find my bat. Far too many movements involved, and I would surely expose myself to being clobbered by the uninvited guest.

The kitchen. If I ran to my left, I would put distance between me and my intruder and have both knives and mop handy to defend myself. I began my dash for the kitchen even before I finished thinking about whether this was the best option.

I made two long strides before my feet shot out from under me and I was landing on my back, the air whoofing from my body.

Idiot
. I had forgotten about all the junk that was still thrown around the floor. I slipped on a book or something.

Well
, I thought to myself,
this is it, the intruder will be on top of me in a moment, knife to my throat, or bashing my skull in with a brickbat
.

I didn’t have much time to dwell on my fate, because there was a woman screaming. In my apartment. Somewhere over by the couch. All I could see was small splotches of light from the windows in stray patterns across the dark cave of my apartment. It was like some kind of eye test or something the doctor gives you.