Lush Life (24 page)

"So who's happier, her in-laws or yours?"

"Actually? Neither. We all got along great."

"Yeah?" Matty lit a cigarette. "How are the kids?"

"Insane."

Sorry.

"No, sorry would have been us staying together."

They took five to watch a bum fight start up in front of the bulletproof liquor store on the far side of the Williamsbridge Bridge supports, two young-old men windmilling ineffectually at each other.

"You know that whole 'show me the waiver' thing you pulled in there?" Matty said. "You could have just as easily told Flaherty all that over the phone."

"Yeah, I guess."

"So what did you come in for, a little Danny in the lion's den?"

The lawyer snorted, looked off smiling.

"Or you just didn't want to miss out on seeing our faces when you said it."

Danny squinted up at the Brooklyn-bound traffic on the Williamsburg. "Both."

"C'mon, Danny," Matty said, "you're just using this kid to stick it to us.

"And, so, what," Danny said as he began to walk down the ramp, heading back to his office a few blocks away. "You don't think the police need an occasional sticking to?"

"Cut the crap. From your heart, what's the right thing here."

"The right thing?" Danny walking backwards now. "How about keeping you guys accountable."

"Fuck yourself, you commie rat bastard," Matty said absently.

"Hey, if I could, I'd never leave the house."

Tristan needed to go to the bathroom, but from the bedroom he heard the dragging of the chair and then the crowd noise on the TV, the Yankees announcer saying, "Bottom of the fourth," and he knew he was trapped. His ex-stepfather had played in Yankee Stadium in the PSAL championship game of 1984, shortstop for James Monroe, no errors and a single off a pitcher from DeWitt Clinton who was later drafted by the Expos, and now he was a waiter in Dino's Bronx cafe, where a lot of the Yankees and visiting teams brought their girlfriends for dinner, and even though he had too much self-respect to ever mention it to any of them, they knew he wasn't just some plate monkey; Bernie Williams and El Duque always greeted him by name, and if it wasn't for the pooling of the tips, most nights during the season he'd come home with more in his pocket than anybody else; all of which was to say that whenever he was off and the Yankees were on, he would drag his chair from its spot in the corner to the center of the room, his chair, sit in it and die, and everybody else had to tread light for the next few hours, and you better believe they did. By the third inning he was usually dangerously drunk, still alert enough to use those wicked-quick infielder's hands; by the sixth he was too wobbly to do any real damage, but that wouldn't stop him from trying to go for you if you got in his eyes or ears, so you pretty much had to wait until after the seventh -
inning stretch, his snoring in the eighth like an all-clear signal for everybody to come out and go about their business. But being that the game wasn t even out of the fourth yet, Tristan had no choice but to piss out the bedroom window.

After checking the facing buildings to see if anyone was looking out and might call the housing cops on him like last year, he went up on his toes, unzipped, and thrust his hips forward to get the stream to clear the outside sill. He thought he was doing pretty good, until he heard, felt, and smelled pee-splash bouncing off the wall; Tristan looking down to see the six-year-old boy imitating him, looking up with his little thing in his hands and laughing as his own stream spread across the bedroom floor, rimming Tristan's shoes.

After four hours spent rescouring the All Sheets, spent pulling the last two years of District Arrest Books, Matty stepped out onto the ramp again for a smoke. As he did, the drivers door of a Mini Cooper swung open across the street, and Mayer Beck, the young clubfooted reporter from the New York Post, struggled to his feet, a sheepish I'm-not-really -
here half-grin on his face.

Beck's self-consciousness was painfully obvious as he corkscrewed across Pitt to the ramp in front of an audience, Matty looking away to lighten his embarrassment, shaking his head as if he'd had it with these media vultures. In fact, he kind of liked the kid.

"No comment, right?" Beck said as he adjusted his football yarmulke. "Let it die a pressless death?"

"Not at all," Matty said. "In fact, here's an exclusive. Colin Farrell did it."

"Sorry about that." Beck half-smiled. "Seriously, can you talk?"

Matty flicked his butt into the gutter. "I'll see you around, Mayer," turning to head back inside.

"You sure about that?" the reporter said, his reflection caught in the swing of the glass doors. "Last chance."

It was ten in the evening and Eric was hiding again, this time in his sanctuary of last resort, the fungal coal cellar, former coal cellar, that lay two stories beneath Cafe Berkmann like a crypt. The sketchy illumination that came from the four worklights scattered about the earthen floor highlighted both the long, irregular brickwork of the walls, brickwork the likes of which hadn't been seen in this city since the Civil War, and the four crude hearths that still stood like neolithic kilns, one in each corner of the room, the source of both heat and light for the ones who had once lived down here, all that remained of them now the names and Yiddish phrases, some in Roman letters, some in Hebrew, carved into the blackened joists not even an arms length overhead.

Upstairs, Cafe Berkmann was in full effect, packed at the bar and at the tables with the usual 30 percent overbookings and unpredictable number of walk-ins spilling out the door.

Most times when the place was thrumming like this, it operated more smoothly than when it was half-empty, clamor having a way of making everyone go on automatic pilot, do what they were hired to do; no spacing out, drifting, hanging. If you want good service, go to a busy restaurant, Steele liked to say, but with Eric Cash running the show tonight, the room was pure hell; he could feel himself provoking a chain reaction of surliness and dysfunction that extended from the door to the tables to the kitchen, starting with the customers, Eric personally putting them in an ass mood all night by showing them to their tables as if it weren't his job, dropping the menus, then giving them his back, the oblivious waiter now a sitting duck; doing a further number on the waiters by occasionally taking an order himself and wordlessly handing it to them on their way over as if they were too slow to live, pulling the same on the busboys by clearing tables himself, ignoring staff complaints about the lack of flow with the kitchen, about wrong orders coming out altogether, about customer bitching, the lame-ass tips.

And the bartender Steele had hired to replace Ike Marcus had been straight-up giving him fits; anytime Eric looked over there, he had seen the same shit attitude on display; the guy stone-faced and forbearing as if he actually thought he was the only one working here who envisioned a higher calling for himself; talking to his customers as if each word cost him blood, meditating on his fingernails during the lulls . . .

Eric had taken the shift only at Steele's suggestion; get right back in the saddle; and to his credit he was trying: all evening he'd been attempting to duck out and get himself together, but always the question was where, where, he couldn't leave leave, and he'd already been down to the bathrooms under the pretext of restocking the toilet paper, the paper towels, the liquid-soap dispensers, had already gone out into the stairwell to check on the extra-chair stacks, as if chairs were prone to wandering off by themselves, had been to the prefab supply shed in the small rear courtyard to ogle the lightbulbs and backup silverware, and so now, here he was in the cellar . . .

All he wanted was ten minutes, five minutes to have a smoke, be alone, alone being a relative term around here with all the surveillance cameras, but each time he went AWOL, he had only come back upstairs in a deeper funk because quiet time below invariably meant heightening chaos above, so all evening, after a taut minute or two in some musty nook, it was back to the floor, the door, the mob at the reservations pulpit having doubled in his absence, no one even able to squeeze inside from the sidewalk, forcing him to do triage; Eric speed-reading faces, sending some straight back to New Jersey, Long Island, the Upper West Side, or wherever, others over to the three-deep bar with a false promise of just a few minutes' wait, that fucking bartender there . . .

And so now it was time again, Eric crushing his butt into the moldy earth and taking a last look at the word gallery above his head, finding his favorite, one of the few Yiddishisms that he understood: goldeneh Medina, City of Gold; someone down here back then having had one hell of a sense of humor.

"I don't just grieve for my friend and his family," Steven Boulware said, his alcohol-softened face framed by the TV in the Eighth Squad eating alcove, "I grieve for the murderers, for their own human degradation. We as a society need to take a hard look at ourselves, at our culture of violence, of unfeelingness . . ."

Yolanda came out of the adjoining bathroom, sliding her holster back onto her belt.

"As long as our legislators continue to pocket handouts from the NRA, as long as they continue to condone a way of doing business that readily puts guns in the hands of the marginalized and the desperate, of children who see no other access to their share of the American dream . . ."

"Didn't we ask that asshole not to talk to the press?" Tossing a shredded paper towel in the garbage can.

"Yeah, but can I tell you something?" Matty wiped his mouth free of tomato sauce, then ditched the heel of his slice. "Right now I don't really give a shit, because as long as its still on the tube, in the papers? They can't pretend it never happened."

It had all gone down as he knew it would. The only way a detective caught talking to the press wouldn't be transferred to Staten Island was if he already lived there, in which case he'd be transferred to the Bronx. And with 90 percent of his dragooned manpower already returned to their home squads not forty-eight hours into the investigation-the hell with a cosmetic grace period-a near absolute state of Neverwas had descended upon the Marcus homicide with record speed.

Four days from now they'd at least have the mandatory seven-day recanvass; Borough Patrol would flood every corner near the crime scene, canvassing for habitual walk-by witnesses who had possibly passed through the area on the same day and hour one week before. They were obliged to give him at least that; but until then his squad was pretty much on its own.

For all the time Matty spent poring over the Lower Manhattan All Sheets, only three unsolved street robberies in the area had jumped out at him: the victims, two Chinese, one Israeli, all held up at gunpoint on the Lower East Side by young black and/or Latino tag teams. Unless someone off one of his Want Cards got pinched and offered up the shooters, all they could really do was go out and take a shot at reinterviewing those complainants.

"Look, I know it's my first night, and I know you don't know me, so you just have to believe me when I say I'm not a complainer." The new waitress, Bree, had Irish eyes like damp stars and a way of angling her face that made her seem as if she were perpetually on the verge of ecstatic surrender. "But I just had my ass grabbed again."

"Again, huh?" Eric tried to stop himself, but . . . "By a new customer? Or the same one from an hour ago."

She faltered, turned a bright pink, then mumbled, "A new one."

Well, it could be true.

The Quality of Life taxi rocketed past the big picture window on Norfolk, Eric tamping down a surge of panic as the lazy wash of its misery lights briefly played on the new waitress's delicate face.

It could be true . . .

"All right, switch tables with Amos,M he said, unable to look at her anymore.

He watched her go to the service station at the short end of the bar to pick up a tray full of novelty martinis and speak briefly to Amos, who shot Eric a what-the-fuck glance from across the room, Eric gesturing for him to just do it, creating another happy camper in here, then turning and almost walking nose-first into a familiar-looking guy in a bright green skullcap.

"Just you?"

"Just me."

"We re kind of jammed, you want to eat at the bar?"

"Sure." Smiling at Eric like he knew something delicious. "So how you holding up, man?"

"Holding up?" Eric at first thrown, then, "Oh, fuck no."

"No?"

"No comment."

"No, I just ... It mustVe been a hell of an ordeal."

"Do you want to order at the bar or not?"

"Sure, I'm just... I kind of seen you around. I'm from the neighborhood."

"Half the country's from the neighborhood."

"True dat," Beck allowed, taking a stool, lightly slapping a nervous riffle on the bartop, then signaling to the new bartender, who at first simply gave him the once-over as he continued to wipe a few wineglasses, then stepped to him as if picking his way barefoot through broken glass.

And Eric just flipped, flinging himself nearly halfway across the zinc. "Can I speak to you?"

"I'll be with you in a minute," the bartender said as if Eric was out of line.

Cleveland, the other bartender, the dreadlocked one, stepped in to take Eric's order. "What you need, boss."