Lush Life (18 page)

"You know, what good neighbors we are, how we helped you out with the Lam murder."

"I'll check with my boss, but I can't imagine him having a problem with it."

Two months earlier, when an elderly Chinaman had been shot and robbed on Rivington Street in the middle of the night three blocks from Berkmann's, no witnesses, the cops had spent hours looking at the cafe's security tapes, both internal and street-facing, and caught an image of the perp, briskly walking past the place a few minutes after the deed.

They also caught footage of one of the cooks bending a busboy over the slop sink and two waiters in the locker room sharing a bottle of $250 Johnnie Walker Blue Label, that one never leaving the restaurant, although the word was that Steele screened it at a full staff meeting, busboys to managers, before firing the stars.

"I'm sure it's no problem. Just give me a day or two heads-up," Matty said, beginning to rise.

"You hear what happened at the last meeting?" Steele asked, making no move to rise himself. "They tried to get the board to revoke our liquor license because we sell alcohol within five hundred feet of a school." Steele looked out the window at the nineteenth-century junior high across the street. "You ever see the kids that go there? I mean, Jesus, we need protection from them. I mean, who do you deal with out here, right?"

"I hear you," Matty said neutrally.

"And you know who does all the complaining at these meetings, don't you?"

"Who?" Matty sank back down, thinking, Here we go, thinking, Five minutes.

"The whites. The, the pioneers' . . . The Latinos? The Chinese? The ones been living here since the Flood? Couldn't be nicer. Happy for the jobs. The thing is, the complainers? They're the ones that started all this. We just follow them. Always have, always will. Come down here, buy some smack squat from the city, do a little fix-up, have a nice big studio, rent out the extra space, mix it up with the ethnics, feel all good and politically righteous about yourself. But those lofts now? Those buildings? Twenty-five hundred square feet, fourth floor, no elevator, Orchard and Broome. Two point four mil just last week."

Matty saw three police techs walk in, heading directly for the office downstairs where they kept the tapes.

"Bunch of middle-aged, talentless artistes and armchair socialists complaining about the very people who made them rich. Sitting there saying they have a right to perfect peace and quiet in their own neighborhood . . . No. You don't. This is New York. You have a right to reasonable peace and quiet.

"I mean I live here too. I live with the noise, the drunks, the tour buses. It's called revitalization.

"Do you remember it down here when we first opened? A hellhole. A dope souk. You guys were suiting up like you were in Baghdad."

"Remember it well," Matty said distractedly, this diatribe an oldie.

"It's called resurrection."

"All right then," Matty repeated, rising and shrugging on his coat.

"I swear to God"-Steele glared out the window-"I wish they'd all put their shit on the market, take the money, and move to Woodstock."

"Let me just ask." Matty stood over him. "What happened with Eric Cash in Binghamton a few years ago. Losing the restaurant and that drug collar. I heard you helped him out around that?"

Steele looked off, gave up a tight smile. "Like I said, Eric is very good at what he's good at. But sometimes you have to give people their head." Then, looking directly at Matty, being the teacher now, "Trust me, it comes back to you in spades."

On his way out, Matty ran into Clarence Howard, the bouncer
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doorman, on his way in to work and was embraced in a backslappy hug before he could set himself. Howard was a weight lifter and an ex-cop who had been fired his first year in uniform for walking out of an indoor crime scene he was safeguarding in possession of a stamp, an upside-down 1918 "Flying Jenny" misprint worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They'd have brought criminal charges, but the thing was found stuck to the inseam of his pants, not inside his pocket; room for doubt regarding intent. Matty thought the kid got a bad deal and helped secure him this gig with Steele, only to find out a year later, as they drank their way south on Ludlow one night, that Clarence had been not only the youngest but also the first African-American president in the history of the Forest Hills Philatelists Club.

Matty still liked the guy.

"Some sad shit," Clarence said, sipping from a cup of take-out coffee.

"You knew him?"

"Who, Eric?"

"The vie."

"Nah. He just started on days. I'm nights."

"How about last night?"

"I was about to say, although I did see the three of them at last call."

"And . . ."

"The fat guy was shitfaced, the vie was like halfway back to sober."

"How about Cash."

"Cash . . ." Clarence shook his head, blew on his coffee. "I tell you, man, I hope you got some hard evidence on him because, Eric'? I don't get that."

Matty felt sick. "Does he ever carry a piece?"

"Not that I ever saw."

"And not last night."

"Not that I noticed."

"How'd he strike you coming out of here?"

"Unhappy. I mean, Eric's an OK guy, but he always struck me as an individual needs to have a little more fun in his life, you know?"

Clarence paused to watch a cab pull up, three women loaded down with shopping bags exiting from the rear seat.

"Although today don't seem like it's gonna be a good day for him to start, huh?"

Although still off-duty, Clarence held the door to the restaurant for the women, the last one inside turning back and dropping a quarter in his coffee cup, the liquid dancing above the rim.

White-faced with embarrassment, she turned on her heel and race
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walked to her friends at the bar.

"Happens all the time," he murmured, pouring his drink into the gutter.

"So you're doing OK, Clarence?"

"I'm doing what I got to be doing, you know?" The kid hungry to say more, but then Yolonda rang.

"Hey, Matty," she said, "guess who's awake."

Walking into the hospital room, they came up on either side of Steven Boulware's bed.

Blood sick, stomach pumped, flat on his back, and sprouting IVs from both arms, the kid still managed to project an air of thick sensuality, his hooded eyes both vacant and on the prowl.

He scanned their IDs, then looked away, as if ashamed. "How's Ike?" His voice metallic with hangover.

"Ike?" Matty said.

"What happened last night?" Yolonda tilted her chin at him.

"Are you serious?"

They stared at him, waiting.

He stared back, as if the question were mined.

"What do you remember?" Matty said as placidly as he could.

Boulware slowly inhaled, exhaled, remained silent.

"I know," Yolonda said tenderly, smoothing back the hair on his forehead. "But talk to us."

"We were by my building, the three of us, late," he began. "And these two guys come out of nowhere, they must have been laying up for somebody One had a gun, said something like, 'Give it up, fork it over.' I'm like, shit . . ."

Matty and Yolonda looked at each other, Matty's mind a scramble. "This older guy from Ike's restaurant that was with us, I can't remember his name, I think he just did what they said." Boulware paused. "But then Ike, Ike goes and gets all chesty about it, I heard him say to the guy, something like, 'Not tonight, my man.' Or, I don't know, something to the effect of get fucked . . . And then I think, I think he started to go for the guy." Boulware closed his eyes, then crossed his arms over his chest, a pharaoh in repose.

"What do you mean, you 'think,'" Yolonda said calmly, starting to balloon with anger.

Boulware continued to play corpse, long enough for Matty to want to rip the IVs out of his arms.

"We're going to need you to look at some photo arrays, sit down with a sketch artist," Yolonda said, glaring at Matty. "Like, today"

"Honestly?" Boulware winced, opened his eyes. "I don't think I can do that."

"We'll bring everything here," Yolonda said, making it sound like great fun. "You won't even have to get out of bed."

"No, it's not . . ." He craned his neck to the right, a yearning for escape in the upward roll of his eyes.

"What's the problem, Steve?" Matty asked, his bottled distress adding a little more zip to his tone than usual.

"Look. Last night? I have ... I was off my nut. Ike and that other guy were actually kind of holding me up. But as soon as I saw that gun? I just hit the deck and stayed there. And my eyes were closed the whole time after that."

"Playin' possum, huh?" Yolonda said as if amused.

"I'm not going to lie to you. I was scared. I mean, I was off-my-ass drunk too, but I was really fuckin' scared." He paused, looking at them for sympathy. "So I went with the drunk thing."

"The drunk thing."

"I wasn't faking, ask anybody here, but sometimes, when I'm good and rocked? I get into this zone where I can tell myself I'm physically more this, or more that, than I really am, and ... it becomes true. And it's not just with making myself more drunk. It could be like, making myself stronger, faster, have a better voice, whatever."

"You ever tell yourself you can fly?" Yolonda asked.

"Look, I saw that gun and that thing I do just took over, like a survival reflex. For all I know, it just might've saved my life, but ... I mean, it's not like I feel proud of myself about it. I don't feel . . . shit, I mean even after the cops came, I was still so ripped I couldn't talk. I couldn't . . ."

Again he looked to them for understanding, a free pass; got only stares.

"But you were definitely held up at gunpoint," Matty said.

"Oh yeah. Yes . . ."

"By two males."

"Yes." Then, "I'm pretty sure it was two, could have been more, but like I said . . ."

'Tour eyes were closed."

"Well, how many voices do you remember?"

"Just what I said. Ike and the guy with the gun."

"Think on it again."

"Maybe you should close your eyes," Yolonda said. "You know, get in the mood."

Matty cut her a look, Yolonda twisting her lips.

"I think there was a girl there."

"A girl was with them?"

"No. Separate, like, behind us, across the street maybe, I'm not sure."

"What do you mean, a girl? A child?"

"No. Just young, like, my age? Like, arguing with someone, maybe?"

"Arguing about what?"

"I don't know."

"What did she sound like, white, black, Latino . . ."Yolonda's anger made her rattle through the litany as if she were bored.

"Black. She kind of sounded black."

"What do you mean 'kind of.'"

"Like, educated?"

"Nicely put," Yolonda said.

"What?"

"This, educated black girl, who was she arguing with, male or female?"

"I'm pretty sure male."

"White, black?"

"His voice?"

"Yes," Yolonda said, "his voice."

"White maybe? I'm not ... I don't know."

Matty stared at Yolonda, the both of them thinking the same thing.

"No," Yolonda said to Matty, "no fucking way"

Matty was unable to respond, to put their troubles in size order as he tried to calculate the dozens, the hundreds, of warrants they would now be executing on the Lower East Side in the next twenty
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four hours on the off chance that one of their homegrown skeeves out there knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who overheard someone; as he tried to calculate the hundreds of old robbery-pattern reports to be pored over, the reinterviewing to be done, the recanvassing, the threatening, the cajoling, the bargaining, the bullshitting, the bluffing, the whole hopeless pig-in-a-poke cluster fuck this was about to become if Boulware's account turned out to be accurate, which it probably would; if the witness accounts turned out to be flawed, as they probably would; as they tried to play catch-up with a robbery-homicide nearly fourteen hours after the horses had left the gate.

"So is Ike OK?" Boulware asked sheepishly

"Your friend Ike?" Yolonda said brightly. "He's dead."

At six in the evening, Kevin Flaherty, the ADA who had reinterviewed Randal Condo on the street earlier that morning, went at him again, this time in one of the squad's small rooms, Matty pacing outside like an expectant father.

"Go back to right before you heard the shot. What were you doing?" Flaherty said.

"Walking up Eldridge towards Nikki while she's walking down Eldridge towards me." Condo looked like he hadn't ever gone to sleep from the night before.

"Talking to each other?"