Fresh Kills (16 page)

The only seats I could get at the last minute that didn't cost a fortune were high up. Billy, who was so excited he couldn't sit still, got up, sat down, then hung so far over the railing that for a minute I got nervous, but he said he only wanted a better look at Randy Johnson. Sitting down, Billy discussed if Randy's pitching could bail the Yankees out with a man sitting on his other side.

“I still love Derek,” he said. “I think I love him best. I think. I know all Derek's stats, you want me to tell you? Or Mariano. He's pretty cool. He reminds me of Gary Cooper in
High Noon
.”

“You know a lot of stuff.”

“Well, duh. You keep saying that, of course I know stuff. I'm taking film history in school.”

“Everyone loves Derek,” I said, as Jeter singled in the fourth.

Billy said, “So where's this thing? The birthday party for Luda.”

“A toy store,” I said. “Big one. Midtown. I'm sure your mom took you there sometime, right?”

“You think we should get Luda a present, or something?”

“You think?”

“We could get her some Yankees things, like a jacket and a cap or whatever,” said Billy.

“Fine.”

“Is the party going to be mostly little girls?”

“Probably,” I said. “Yeah. But Val will be there.”

“Right,” he said, rolled his eyes, gave this big wicked grin he had started using when he was pleased, and stole the last sip of my beer.

*

We were leaving the Stadium, making our way with a huge crowd towards the subway, when a pair of Chevrolet Suburbans screeched up the curb. Sirens blazing, lights on, the drivers jammed on their brakes. We were near enough to the edge of the crowd that I got us, Billy and me, onto the sidewalk.

The vans had blacked-out windows. The doors flew open. Four guys, Kevlar vests, helmets, holding their M4s like they were marines getting ready to hit the beach in a movie, jumped out. The crowd still pouring out of the Stadium stopped, froze.

Next to Billy and me, a clutch of Japanese tourists in short-sleeved shirts, probably here to see Hideki Matsui hit a couple homers, looked frantic. I heard voices from the crowd, people wondering if there was a terrorist attack. Maybe it was a movie, someone said. From the Stadium you could still hear Sinatra singing “New York, New York” over the speakers, which they always played when we won a game – Liza Minnelli sang it when we lost – and Billy looked up at me.

I held up my hand for everyone around me, the Japs, Billy, other fans, to stay still. The guys in the Suburban were a Hercules team, part of the city's street-level anti-terrorist operation. They showed up places around town at random, for practice, and to let people know they were a presence. These guys were good. They were fast. A dog one of them held on a lead sniffed the ground.

Was there an attack? Was this practice? Real? Voices rose out of the crowd.

“We are here to protect you,” I heard one of the Hercules guys say to a woman who was arguing with him because she couldn't cross the street.

“What about my civil rights?” she said, in a thick Bronx accent.

“Lady, shut the fuck up,” said a man nearby.

“This is like the fascists,” the woman said, furious.

“Listen, you might be old, but you're not a vegetable and if you don't put a sock in it, I'm going help you do that,” a man in a Yankees shirt said.

“You think it's a bomb-sniffing dog?” Billy whispered to me, while one of the officers explained to a tourist from Baltimore that protecting people was their job.

“It's not an attack,” someone yelled.

“Idiot,” someone else said.

For a couple of minutes, the huge crowd tensed up, waiting, and then it let go. It was an exercise. It was OK. For now. People set off for the subway again.

No one in the city believed the Feds could do much if there was another attack. The city's own anti-terrorist operation was getting ready. Intelligence people sat in an unmarked warehouse down in Tribeca near my place. Other units inhabited facilities in every borough.

The sight of the bulked-up Hercules guys with guns made me feel, for an instant, something bad was coming again, but I got hold of Billy's arm and we got over to the Yankees shop to buy a present for Luda.

“You OK, Artie?” Billy said.

“Yeah,” I said, when my phone rang. It was Sonny Lippert. His voice was excited.

“I got a lead, Artie, man.” Lippert said loudly. “I'm closing in on a couple of suspects for the creep that killed the little girl in Jersey.”

“Good, that's good,” I said, watching Billy comb the aisles of the Yankees shop.

“Listen, I'm not going ask you to work this Jane Doe with me, I'm not, you did plenty going out to Rhonda's relative and taking that off my hands, but I want to ask if you still have any notes from that case out by Sheepshead Bay a couple years back.”

“I could look. I probably turned my stuff in.”

“But maybe you kept something? Maybe you remember something you didn't want people to know?”

“I don't know what you mean, Sonny. I could look. You want to spell this out?”

“You're alone?”

I glanced out at the heaving crowd coming out of the ballpark, trying to get to the subway.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I'm at the Stadium.”

“You remember how it turned out to be some crackhead?”

“So?”

“I'm not so sure anymore, Artie, man. That's what I'm calling about. We're gonna try to get some DNA on this Jane Doe and match it up with some others.”

“How come?”

“They way the little girls looked. The kind of knives somebody used on them.”

“I'll look for the notes, Sonny.”

“Thanks, man. You remember her name, right?” said Sonny, and I knew he'd been stringing me along, that he remembered her name fine, but he wanted me to say it.

“I remember her name.”

“Yeah?”

“Her name was May Luca, Sonny, you knew that already. I have to go.”

“So how come you're so defensive, man, I mean, be happy about this, right. One more thing.”

“What?” I knew what was coming, I didn't want to know. “I'm getting on the train, Sonny, OK, I'm losing the signal.”

“So May Luca, man, the little girl that was killed over by Sheepshead Bay? Wasn't she friends with Billy Farone? Back when? Didn't they attend some school or other together, man? Weren't May and Billy friends?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, man, I just thought the kid might recall something about May. You with him now?”

“Yeah, Sonny.”

“Good. That's good.” Lippert's tone softened. “Be with him. I wish I was with my kids.”

“I'll try to get you the notes,” I said and hung up.

“What do you think?” Billy was holding up the presents he had chosen for Luda; a miniature version of his own dark blue satin Yankees jacket was in one hand and in the other, a bobble-headed Derek Jeter doll. “You think she'll like these? I mean if I get her one the same as mine?”

I told him I was sure Luda would like the presents he had chosen and I paid for them, we left the store, climbed the stairs to the subway platform – the train ran out of doors from an elevated platform up here in the Bronx – and waited. My heart was racing. I was out of shape, I told myself; running up the subway stairs had winded me. I checked my watch. It was twenty after six. July 6.

“Welcome, welcome,” said the girl in harlequin hot pants, a purple chiffon bow around her red-white-and-blue curls, and a yellow fur jacket that could have been dyed bunny. “I am Miss Jelly Bean, and I hear you'll be spending the night with us here at Toy Heaven. Have some candy, please,” she added, plucking jelly beans and fruit-colored Lifesavers from the emerald green tutu she wore over the hot pants.

From a waist-high container built to resemble a large see-through purple jelly bean, Miss Jelly Bean pulled cell phones, all of them pink and purple with soft covers painted with flowers. One was handed to each little girl who stopped by. The ring tone played the Barbie song.

Behind Miss Jelly Bean were more enormous see-through containers of candy – jellybeans, red hots, Good and Plenty, nonpareils, raisinettes, M&Ms, red Swedish fish, Gummy Bears, in a dozen colors, including pink. The kids, all girls, all around nine or ten, the same age as Luda, yakked excitedly to each other as they ran all over the place, some munching on slices of pink pizza, others running into a photo booth to get their pictures taken,
some having their faces painted or their arms temporarily tattooed.

There must have been twenty little girls. A couple of them, shooting the breeze about their outfits, candy and sodas in their hands, resembled miniature Manhattan ladies at a cocktail party. Overhead, on a trapeze hooked up to the ceiling, an acrobat did terrifying stunts while the little girls looked up and screamed. Pink balloons also hung from the ceiling. Silver and pink mirror balls hung among the balloons and on every shelf available were giant pink lava lamps.

“Jeez, Artie,” Billy said. “How insanely weird is this?”

“Think of it as a sociological study,” I whispered. “You know what I mean?”

“I know what sociology is.” He helped himself to a scoop of M&Ms. “Also anthropology.” He looked at the girls. “Did you know there are places in Africa where they send all the boys away to live together when they're around fourteen, and they don't let them out until they grow up and become OK people? So what I want to know is, what about the girls? I mean, Artie, look at them. Jeez. Talk about hormones.”

From behind some shelves piled eight feet high with stuffed animals, including two life-size gorillas made out of some kind of mink-colored plush, Tolya appeared. I had half expected him to show up in clown clothes, but he wore a black silk shirt, bright red silk pants and red loafers made of some sort of rare skin. In one ear was the big emerald he sometimes wore. Beside him Valentina, who was wearing a short pink silk dress, held Luda's hand and looked at her father's shoes affectionately.

“Not exactly your regular American daddy,” she said to me. “Imagine how many reptiles died for my dad's shoes. You think I'll inherit them?”

“So nice birthday party for Luda,” Tolya said. “I buy whole store for tonight. Billy, I apologize that is mostly little girls.”

“That's OK. It's her party.”

“I have car for you, though, and video games. You want to see? Downstairs. One girl has brought her brother, about same age as you, so we should go downstairs.” He had fallen into his hood's English.

“Wow,” said Billy turning to grin at me. “Sure. Thanks. I'd like that a lot.” He hesitated.

“What is it?” I said.

“What should I call you?” he asked Tolya.

“You could call me Uncle Anatoly, if you want. But Tolya's OK.”

With Billy in tow, Tolya started for the escalator and the two made their way between shelves of lime green stuffed frogs, yellow plush snakes and kangaroos bulging with baby kangaroos all in blues and purples and other colors not really known in nature.

In the background, music from a karaoke stand played and a tiny girl in tight pink shorts and a halter-top, a miniature Streisand in the making, belted out “People”. Four “Village People”, all of them little girls, followed her and performed “YMCA”. The kids knew all the moves.

“God, they've been playing that at kids' parties since I was a kid,” said someone standing near me.

Half a dozen adults moved among the children, introducing themselves as guides and gurus. One of them, a guy who looked like he was in some chorus line on Broadway on other nights, introduced himself to me as the guru Heathbarishi whose mantra included good things about the Heath Bar. There were a couple of hobbits, and an Incredible who looked a lot like an out of work Arnold Schwarzenegger. All of them carried huge pink knapsacks out of which they produced presents for the kids – watches that sang, digital cameras, an assortment of clothing, bags of candy, and real money; the coins were colored pink.

Standing near me and holding Val's hand, Luda jumped up
and down, chattering in Russian, unable to stand still. Her hair was braided with glittery pink beads. Her purple dress matched high-heeled shoes, which were covered in glitter.

Part of the store had been turned into a designer boutique, and the girls selected what they wanted and changed into their new party clothes in a dressing room screened off by a pink velvet curtain.

“Stella McCartney,” said one midget fashionista emerging from behind the curtain.

“Galliano,” said another, adjusting her skirt. It was part of the deal, she said to me casually, and added she had attended quite a few of these parties. “At one we got very nice little mink jackets,” she cooed.

Luda plucked at my sleeve, and said in Russian, “Look, over there.”

“What?”

My sleeve still in her tiny hand, she steered me towards an area where a sign read: NURSERY.

In white nurse costumes, young women tended fake babies in this make-believe hospital nursery. The nurses picked up the babies and burped them. They fed them with real bottles. The babies came in white, black and Asian and could be special-ordered in “other”, which, the nurse informed me, included Native American. Another of the nurses who, given her body and the way she moved, probably worked most nights as a pole dancer on Eleventh Avenue, put a doll in my arms.

“Real lifelike, right?” she said. “The little girls love them. We keep running out, the mothers come in and go crazy. It's the hot item, I mean we can't keep them, I heard there's people selling them off the back of trucks, on the black market, they get double, triple even. Nuts, right?”

Swaddled in real baby clothes and a blanket, wearing a cloth diaper, the thing I held was four or five pounds and had the flesh of an almost real baby. I gave it back to the nurse fast.