Fresh Kills (2 page)

“I don't know.”

To change the subject, I told Billy how Charles Lindbergh opened Floyd Bennett Field a few miles away, one of the first airports in the country. 1923. Over by Dead Horse Bay, which was what they called it back then when the city's dead horses were boiled down for fat there and the stink was unbearable.

“Who's Charles Lindbergh?” Billy said, and I explained about the guy who first flew the Atlantic solo, took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island by himself and how after that they called him Lucky Lindy. Billy was pretty interested in the
story – he was a kid who mopped up information and paid attention to the answers when he asked you questions – but he made me stop when I him told how Lindbergh's baby was kidnapped. Case of the century, they had called it.

After a while, we went and sat on the boardwalk steps. Billy told me that he could tell right away from the arc of the plane that it hadn't been coming anyplace near us, and that he felt pretty crappy because he found himself waiting for the crash. He had wondered if it would spin, or just plunge nose down. He didn't want it to fall, but if it was going to, he wanted to see.

“It's the way people feel about car racing, right? Isn't it?” he asked me. “If it's going to happen, you want to see. Right Artie? I mean it was just crazy. You want some of my cucumbers?”

He took a plastic bag full of cucumber strips from the knapsack he carried over one shoulder. “God, I love cucumbers,” said Billy and told me he liked the way the pale green flesh looked, the coolness and the crunch. In Florida, he added, cold cucumbers were great on a hot day. What did they say, cool as a cuke? Also, Billy said, he loved slicing them up, peeling the dark green skin with the red Swiss Army knife I had given him when he was younger. He held out the plastic bag.

People were all over the wreck of the plane. I stayed where I was; I figured no one needed an off-duty Manhattan detective like me messing up the scene.

“What?” Billy ate a piece of cucumber.

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Artie, what?” He smiled. “What? Tell me. Please, please, please, please. I want to know what you're thinking.”

I didn't answer him because I didn't want to lie. I was thinking how I couldn't believe that Billy was the same kid who had killed a man – been accused of killing a man – a couple of years back.

“Artie?”

“What?”

“You think we could go fishing tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Awesome.” He put the cucumbers back in his bag.

“You have any place in mind?”

“I was thinking out on the island, like Montauk? Any place, so long as it's you and me and we could fish, like before, the way we used to, you know?”

Before. Before Billy had been locked up in the place – they called it a therapeutic facility – in Florida. Before.

I nodded.

“I could make sandwiches for us,” he said eagerly. “I'm really good at it. I can do those giant heroes with salami and cheese and ham and pepperoni and roasted peppers, and we can take sodas, and just hang together. I heard they got stripers running already. Blues. Guess what?”

“What?”

“Guess.”

“Tell me.”

“I even heard you can fly-fish in Central Park now,” Billy threw his arm up and out in an arc as if he was fishing. “It sounds goofy, though, right?”

“We'll go to the island,” I said. “You feel good and all?”

“Great.” He put his hand on my sleeve, tentatively, wanting to hold on like a little kid, but too big for that now. His hand was as big as mine, the skin was rough and I knew he played ball without a glove.

“You know what?” he said.

“What's that?”

“You won't believe this. You'll laugh.”

“Try me.”

“I'm sort of hungry.”

“You can't be hungry,” I said. “We ate a whole pizza, and
some calzones, you ate cucumbers, we had waffles for breakfast, and bacon and about a quart of OJ.”

“I'm a growing boy, right?” Deepening his voice, he mimicked some pompous pundit he'd heard on TV. He had the family knack for mimicry.

Again I thought how OK he was now. He was cured. Everything had finally fallen into place and he seemed like a normal New York kid who could talk a blue streak, fluent and funny, and sometimes pretty wry, and very observant. The sickness was gone. It was over.

“Artie?”

“Let's eat,” I said. “Whatever you feel like.”

“Something else.” He was shy. “I need to ask you something.”

“Whatever you want,” I said, but my phone rang before he could answer.

“Where are you?” Sonny Lippert said on the phone when I answered it.

“On the beach,” I said. “I'm busy.”

“I have something I want you to do for me,” said Lippert, my sometime boss. “A favor. I'm tied up in a shitty case and there's something I don't have time for, man, and I want you to do it.”

“I'll call you tomorrow.”

“Which beach?” Lippert said.

“What does it matter, I'm on the beach, I came to eat a pizza, whatever. I'll call you later. Hello?” I pretended the signal had gone.

Billy said, “Who was that?”

“It doesn't matter. Where do you want to eat? You want some hot dogs at Nathan's?”

“Let's go look at the plane.”

“What about the hot dogs?” I said, but he had already started walking towards the wreck on the beach.

I said, “What?”

“What?”

“You were talking to yourself.”

“No kidding? That's crazy.” Billy was halfway down the beach, loping towards the wrecked plane. “Jeez, Art, I'm going to be like some young old guy, talking to myself. You never know, I could be drooling soon.” He laughed as he imitated an old man stumbling along. Then he straightened up, and walked next to me.

“I'm almost as tall as you now,” he said. “How old do I look? For real.”

“Seventeen,” I said.

There had been big tall men in my family in Russia when I was growing up there. My own father was tall, but my uncle Joe was a giant. He was almost seven feet tall with huge shoulders and a neck thick as a tree. He played basketball in school. Later on, because he thought he was a freak, he killed himself. I was fifteen when it happened but no one told me.

I got it out of my mother later on. Joe ran a vodka factory in Vladikavkaz near the river Volga. The peasants, shriveled and sickly from the war and malnutrition, were scared by Joe's size. They taunted him. Said he was a monster, that his size was the devil's work. Uncle Joe was forty-two when he shot himself.

“Hey, you wanted to ask me something,” I said to Billy.

“It doesn't matter.”

“Talk to me.”

Billy stopped walking.

“Artie, can I come live with you for good? I can, right? I mean maybe not right now, but later, you know? I want to be like you so much. I think about it all the time. I could help you with cases and stuff, and we'd be together, like all the time.”

I didn't know what to say. He was home on leave. He would go back to Florida in a couple of weeks. It would be a long time
until he was free. I didn't answer at first and then, because I wanted to see him happy, I said, “Sure.”

“Hey, I'll race you,” Billy said, and began running down to the water, kicking up sand with his black sneakers.

Until I saw Sonny Lippert coming towards us, I didn't think a whole lot about the fact that it was near this stretch of beach a jogger had found a heap of kid's clothing a couple of years back. It had been the dead of winter – a woman in a red fox fur coat walking her dogs on the snow-bleached boardwalk that day. More than two years. I remembered now. As soon as I saw Lippert, I remembered everything, and then I thought, so what? It didn't mean anything.

We were standing near the plane wreck. Billy had been trying to get up closer to it, but a guy in uniform asked him to step back, and he did it right away, politely, and nodded sagely as if he understood. Later he told me he was learning his way around cops, how they worked, imitating them, practicing their moves. He wasn't just playing around, he said. How old do I have to be to be a cop? he asked me. How long before I can start?

“Fuck you doing here, man?” The voice was Sonny Lippert's.

Sonny didn't shake my hand. Instead, he gave me one of those half hugs American guys go in for, then stepped back as
if he'd startled himself by his own affection, and sank up to his ankles in the soft sand. With a neat wiry body, like a boy's, he was a little guy. He looked well, though. He looked like he was taking some care of himself. He patted his pockets.

“Where the fuck are my glasses?” said Sonny.

He wore a yellow shirt, black linen jacket, good chinos, and expensive loafers. His hair, a tight cap of black curls, was turning gray and I figured he had finally quit dyeing it. Sonny was about sixty-five, but his skin was tight and smooth. I didn't believe the rumors that he'd had work done on it.

“What am
I
doing?” I said. “What are
you
doing, Sonny?” I looked at his polished shoes. “You came out for some sun on the beach, wearing shoes that cost you four hundred bucks?”

“Don't break my balls, man,” said Lippert. “You told me you were at the beach eating pizza, where else were you going to be except Coney? I need something from you,” he added softly, as he surveyed the chaos on the beach. “You remember what happened on this particular beach, man? Two years ago already.”

“I was trying to forget until you showed up.”

Still looking for his glasses, Lippert went over to one of the guys who was close up to the wreck and asked him a couple of questions. The guy paid attention. You could see it impressed him that Sonny Lippert was asking his opinion. Everyone knew Lippert.

“So?” I said, when he came back.

“It's a fucking mess,” Lippert said, gesturing at the wreck. “They don't know dick about what happened either, at least not yet. Ask me, I don't think it's terrorists, I mean what's the percentage in crashing a plane with a few people on a practically empty beach on a weekday? Probably some lousy tourist plane they put too many people in, they're too heavy and boom, ground coming up at you, you going down. So, Artie, man, you came out here to eat a pizza?”

“You called me, Sonny, remember? You got here pretty quick.”

“I was in Brooklyn anyhow.” He kicked aside a red flip-flop that lay upside down on the beach. “I hate it when there's only one shoe. I mean where the fuck is the other one?”

After his wife left him, after 9/11, Lippert had been next door to dead. Back then he was drinking a bottle of Scotch a day, sometimes two. He seemed better, sober, OK. After forty years in law enforcement, Sonny only worked special cases now, usually child crime. When he was working, he was sharp, honed, wound up tight as ever, maybe too tight, like a million-dollar clock that you always figured was about to bust.

“Sonny, what's going on?”

“An old case,” he said. “Something's come up.”

“What's that?”

Sonny looked around him. The beach had filled up with people, officials, tourists who had stopped to gape at the plane, kids down from the boardwalk.

People walking their dogs stopped and the dogs howled, maybe smelling something in the summer sun. Near me were the men who'd been playing cards on the beach and their wives, and they were discussing the crash in English with thick Russian accents.

“Terrorists,” one man said. “For sure.”

“Bastards,” said another guy. “Foreign pricks.”

“With you everything is terrorists,” said one of the wives. “Maybe this is regular accident. Everything with you is aliens,” she said and I wondered what kind of alien she meant, from Pakistan or Mars. It was New York. The argument went on.

“Not here,” said Sonny. “Not now. I need to talk to you alone, man. Let's go.”

“Can't do it,” I said.

“So what are you really doing here, man, I mean, we going to play some kind of game?” Sonny glanced in Billy's direction.
“Who's the kid?” Finally, Sonny found his glasses in his jacket and put them on. “So?”

“Yeah, so, I came out here to catch a few rays and eat at Tolonno's, just like I told you.”

“It's Tuesday, Artie. The holiday weekend is over. What's going on?”

“What do you care?”

“Say I care,” he said. “Say I care because I want something from you.”

Before Sonny could say anything else, the detective in the red jacket I thought I had recognized jogged over across the sand, and smiled at me.

“Artie, right?” she said.

“Yeah. How are you?”

She put out her hand, “Clara Fuentes from Red Hook.”

“Sure,” I said. “Yeah, hi, nice to see you.”

On a case over in Red Hook the year before, I'd met Clara, a good-looking woman, dark hair in a ponytail. Mostly I remembered her by the bright red windbreaker. I recalled that she had asked me if I wanted to go to a big party she was working during the Republican Convention.

“How you doing, Clara?”

She held up her left hand to show me the gold ring and beamed. “I got married.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Last summer.”

“Bunch of bourgeois pussies we are, right? You happy? What's her name?”

“Maxine,” I said.

“Congratulations.”

“You too.”

“I'm gonna have a kid.” Clara patted her stomach.

“Great.”

She waved her hand at the plane. “What do you think?”

“I don't know.”

No matter how deep the lull or how quiet the city felt or how complete the illusion that things were fine now, everything – a downed sightseeing plane, an overturned gas tanker that set off a fireball on Bruckner Boulevard, a freak Staten Island ferry crash – made me tense up. Me and every other cop in the city. I saw a couple of guys from the city's anti-terrorism squad on the beach. Unlike the Feds, these guys were good. Fast, too, like shit off a shovel.