Losers Live Longer (4 page)

None of my business if he wanted to play grab-ass with death, but I told him, “You almost got it, junior.”

“
Got what?” His blue eyes all bright innocence.

“
Squashed.”

He shook his head. “Never happen.”

“
Happens all the time, an old guy just got killed a couple of blocks back.”

His eyes gleamed.

“
What did you take off him?”

“
How’s that?”

“
The old man, what chew get? I saw it. I saw you.”

He had a put-on street accent and a knock-off attitude, which told me nothing about him except that he flipped through magazines and channel-surfed. His face was tanned, freckles clustered around his nose. Blue eyes flashed behind his veil of dirty-blond hair.

“
Money, what? C’mon, tell me,” he whined. “I could go back, y’know, and tell ’em what I saw.”

I stopped.

“
You saw it, the accident?”

He cackled.

“
Accident? Right.” His voice turned level and cold. “I saw what you did.”

“
Then that makes you a witness. You should go back and tell them.”

He said, “I could say I saw more.”

“
Uh-huh? Like?”

“
Like you shoved the old guy in front of that car. I could tell them I seen that.”

That plank slap sound I’d heard beneath my window.

I said, “Were you practicing your ollies on the corner when it happened?”

“
Ha, practicing? I got it down—I kill ’em every time.”

He stopped briefly to demonstrate, making his board jump up by stepping hard on the back end. He had my interest now but not for his SK8R moves.

I kept pace with his smooth, even glide.

I asked, “So…what
did
you see?”

“
I saw you…going through the old guy’s pockets,” he said, deliberately raising his voice, “so ya better tell me what you got, or—”

One of the few upsides of having nothing left to lose was calling people’s bluffs. I called his. I stopped in my tracks.

“
All right, let’s go back.” I looked back toward Twelfth Street, lights of the EMS van and a cruiser’s blue strobe still flashing.

The kid laughed harshly. “No way.”

He spun on his back wheels and stopped beside a row of free-newspaper dispensers, clustered by the street corner like giant, multi-colored building blocks.

Used to be only one or two of these bins could be found on every other street corner, but over time more formed, sprouting up like mushrooms all over the city. Eight in this row: the
Voice
, the
New York Press
,
L magazine
,
Real Estate Market
,
The Villager
,
Our Town
, and the two free dailies,
AM NY
and
Metro
.

The blond kid reached into a Velcro-sealed pocket by his knee and pulled out a magic marker, an extra-large black Sharpie the size and shape of a store-bought hot dog. He uncapped it and shook hair out of his eyes.

“
Like I’m goin’ tell cops. For
free
? You’re wacked. If I tell anyone, it’ll be the TV news. And if I
don’t
tell, cash only. I’m not wasting it. I’m going to be somebody. Be fucking famous one day, you’ll see.”

“
Famous for what?”

He took instant offense, like it was a trick question people were always testing him with. He let his bangs settle back over his eyes.

“
Famous!” he said, as if it was self-evident. “People lining up to get my autograph. Girls, shit. You’ll see. The whole world’ll see.”

Picking the newest newspaper bin—an unmarked bright yellow one—he began to scribble on it with his marker.

“
Lot of kids with boards and Sharpies,” I said. “That’s not going to make you famous.”

Tip of his tongue sticking out in concentration, he drew a long flowing stroke with the marker, adding a slash, then a dot.

“
That’s what you know, ha!”

“
What, got yourself a sugar daddy?”

“
Sugar mama, dude,” he said to show me up, but his face went cross, like he’d said too much.

Something occurred to me and I asked him, “Why aren’t you in school today, kid?”

“
School? What for? Half the millionaires in America never finished high school.”

“
Where’d you hear that?”

“
What, I bet you went to school, huh? And look at you, you’re picking in the garbage for shoes. School’s for fools. Shit, you’re wasting my time, dude. Good luck with your dumpster-diving.”

He re-capped his marker and put it back in its pocket. He mounted his skateboard, dipped down and shoved off with one foot, propelling himself west on Ninth Street.

I wasn’t sure what that was all about, but was glad to see him go.

I read the tag he’d scrawled on the yellow bin. In big rounded letters like bloated black intestines: FL!P

A shout of “Hey!” made me turn round.

The kid had stopped only twenty feet away and was holding something out in front of him aimed at me. His cell phone.

“
Say cheese,” he shouted, snapping my picture. Pocketing the phone, he took off again on a glide.

I wondered had he snapped a shot of me digging into Owl’s pockets? And what else?

I watched his retreat, an irrational urge in me to chase after him and smash his phone. Like an uncivilized native who’d just had his soul swiped.

But nothing worth chasing after for.

Not in these shoes.

Chapter Three: THE BRIEF CASE

Walking fast or slowly made no difference, the shoes still cut into me. After a while the pain dulled. Not much farther. Next street down was St. Marks. Owl’s hotel was an avenue over.

At the corner, a white-haired guy with glasses, a tan Labrador lying beside him, was sitting cross-legged at the base of a lamppost cementing bits of broken china to its base. Jim the Mosaic Man retouching one of his pieces of art. I’d read an article the week before about the campaign to complete his mosaic trail through the East Village.

I nodded a hello as I turned right, but he was engrossed in his work. I walked down the block. On this stretch of St. Marks Place all the buildings were fronted with shops aimed at the tourist trade. T-shirts and souvenirs, used CDs & DVDs, sandwich shops, acupressure and shiatsu, leather goods, consignment clothing. At this hour most weren’t open yet. Young Latin men in soiled kitchen whites scrubbed and hosed down the sidewalks in front of the eateries.

The Bowery Plaza’s entrance was a single glass door on Third Avenue between a pizzeria on the corner and a hair salon. Easy to miss if you weren’t looking for the hotel.

I hadn’t been inside for years—last time tracking a runaway—and couldn’t remember if hotel guests had to pass the front desk or not to get to the elevator or stairs.

Expense account item one: two cups of coffee bought out of Owl’s twenty. At the corner, I grabbed one of the free dailies from a red bin. I went back to the Bowery Plaza and walked in.

The essence of disguise is to be easily classified. The goal isn’t to be invisible, but to be seen and then disregarded.

I walked through the door of the hotel with Owl’s card key in one hand and the two coffees balanced in the other. Walking on the balls of my feet to minimize the shoes’ squishy sound.

The lobby was the size of a freight elevator and the elevator the size of a broom closet. The clerk, a salt-and-pepper-haired blur in a blue blazer behind the counter, didn’t even look up as I cruised by.

I pushed three and ascended at a sluggish crawl, scanning the newspaper’s headlines: GOP VP’s PREGNANT TEEN; FORMER SITCOM STAR, 19, DIES IN O.D.; FASHION WEEK PREVIEW. By the time I reached the third floor, I’d finished one of the coffees.

The anonymous corridor was as lively as a sun-shrunken condom. Crooked wall sconces with lampshades apparently made from recycled nicotine filters.

Outside the door marked 3-E, I stopped and listened before swiping the card key. Hoping for silence, but instead I heard a woman shouting, “No! Now!…I don’t care.”

I took a sip of overflow from the lid of the other cup, and waited. The voice wasn’t from TV, none of the vacuous joviality, bright appeals, or musical bridges. Just the woman. And no other voice—her gaps in speech weren’t answered, unless in whisper, but more likely she was on the phone.

I checked the receipt. The right room number. I inserted the card key and got the lock’s green light.

Turned the knob, inched the door open a crack.

The woman continued to spew ire. A clear gravelly timbre to her voice.

“
Listen you fucking shit, you owe me…I don’t care, just get it…and not that same…what? No, now!”

I pushed the door open all the way. A single low-ceilinged room with a narrow bed, the bedspread ruffled but unslept-in. The woman was seated on it with her back to me, a cell phone to her ear, her legs crossed, one foot spastically tapping the air.

I walked in. The carpeting was the color of spaghetti sauce. The wallpaper was peeling, dog-eared in its high corners. To my left a dusty window with gauzy curtains. Two chairs, a TV—switched on, but mute—a nightstand with a lamp, a digital clock, a full ashtray, a scratchpad, pen, and the telephone. To my right, a mirrored dresser with a closed brown-leather briefcase on top, and beyond that the bathroom, its door partly shut.

“
No, I don’t have to listen—you do. In half a—”

Must’ve caught my motion, because she whipped round.

“
Call you back.” She closed her phone and stood up.

She was a tanless white with straight short hair dyed the purplish-red of beets. In her late twenties, five-eight and too thin. Eyes with that sunken-skull look associated with eating disorders and substance abuse.

But what eyes. A strange sparkling color, neither green nor grey, but like emeralds with an embedded diamond swirl. She had a too-wide mouth and long nose, but it didn’t matter, not with those eyes. She was dressed in a clinging green silk blouse and black knit skirt revealing shapely legs.

“
Who the fuck are you?”

“
Morning to you, too, bright eyes.”

I’d left the door wide open on my way in, for a clear exit. She shoved past me and slammed it shut.

I crossed to one of the chairs and sat down, my tortured feet singing hallelujah.

A wastebasket beside me. Empty pack of cigarettes and crumpled tissues at the bottom along with something else. A plastic wristband like the kind you get when admitted to a hospital. I dropped my empty cup on it.

The woman came back from the door.

She held her cell phone in a tight fist. There was a ring on her left hand’s fourth finger, a diamond-shaped diamond.

“
Who are you, what do you want?” she asked.

Even with her voice pitched low, it still had that gravelly quality, like she’d spent her youth shrieking to be heard above house music.

“
Did the old man send you?” she asked.

“
Yeh. Owl sent me.”

“
Who?”

Sounded like a joke, but neither of us laughed.

“
The old man,” I coughed up. “George Rowell.”

“
Well?”