Marilyn the Wild (21 page)

The chauffeur had trouble with Isaac's twisting speech. He felt obliged to titter. “At least let me do something. Isn't
The Toad
on La Guardia Place? Isaac, I could sabotage their press. It's easy. They'll have to print with crayons and rubber bands.”

The Chief was putting on his slipover. He didn't liven to Brodsky's plan for wasting
The Toad.
Isaac was superstitious about journalists. You couldn't kill their stories. If you took their print from them, they'd write on the bark of a tree. Cut off their fingers, and they'll spell with a nose.

“Isaac, don't you want your limousine?”

“Never mind. I'll walk.”

“Eighteen inches, Isaac, that's what they predict. The car has snowshoes. Why should you wet your feet?”

Isaac met a few “crows” on the stairs. They leaned into the bannisters to give the Chief some clearance. None of them would whisper “Tony Brill” in his face. Even a “crow” might not survive one of Isaac's bearhugs. They needn't have worried. The Chief was into his own head. He stepped on a “crow's” foot without excusing himself. The problem was Marilyn. With Rupert sending bishops through the mail, Isaac had no cheap solution. Should he strap her to his shoulder, take her everywhere with him? Or find a cubicle for her in the women's house of detention? He had to rely on Coen. Marilyn would have bitten off the tongue of any cop or matron Isaac could provide. Now he'd have to move into Ida's place. His own detectives would laugh at him; they'd say Coen had dispossessed him, bumped him out into the street.

Brodsky was wrong about the snow. Eighteen inches? Isaac felt a thin powder under his shoes. He noticed a man on the sidewalk through the haze of falling snow. Isaac thought he could recognize the grim shoulders of Jorge Guzmann. He wasn't in the mood for a heavy embrace. Isaac looked again. It was Gula One Eye, his old nemesis.

“Gula, you'll catch cold. They're predicting a hurricane.”

Gulavitch couldn't talk without eating some snow. “Isaac, you should have blinded me twice. It wasn't smart I'm your enemy. Why did you leave me with a good eye in my head?”

Isaac didn't have to slap Gulavitch's pockets: the old man wouldn't carry a weapon other than his extraordinary thumbs. Still, Isaac had to get him out of here. If the “crows” spotted him, they'd squeal to Cowboy Rosenblatt, and Cowboy would arrest Gulavitch for blocking the sidewalk. They'd take him down to the cellar, make him pose without his eye patch, call him Isaac's idiot.

“Gula, don't you have to peel potatoes for Bummy? Go to East Broadway. Bummy needs you.”

The old man licked snow off the top of his lip. “Isaac, I got plenty to peel. Your nose, your eyes, your mouth.”

Isaac hailed a patrol car coming from the garage on Mulberry Street The driver squinted through his window. He couldn't understand why a big Jewish Chief would be hanging around a retard with snow on his face. But he didn't question Isaac.

“This is Milton Gulavitch. He's a friend of mine. Take him to Bummy Gilman's on East Broadway. It better go smooth. Milton doesn't like bumpy rides.”

Isaac walked to the Garibaldi social club. He didn't bother peeking over the green stripe in the window. He went inside. This was a poor hour to annoy Amerigo Genussa. The landlord was making pasta for the Garibaldis. He had his own witchery. Amerigo could transform the club into a trattoria with a few mixing bowls, crumbled sausage, anchovies, green and white spaghetti, walnuts, Parmesan cheese, and a pepper mill, bunched around the club's espresso machine. The landlord had niggardly counter space. He was obliged to hop from bowl to bowl, with a wire beater in his chest.

Isaac didn't wait for overtures from Genussa. “Landlord, I told you once. I don't want your stinking goons near Essex Street.”

Amerigo continued to hop. The beater would fly into a bowl with little turns of the landlord's wrist He dealt with Isaac only after the froth began to rise. “Did I invite you to dinner? You've been copping too long. I mean it Your manners are in your ass. I don't hire degenerates. All my men have families. It looks funny to me, Isaac. You have the best detectives in the world, and you can't catch a Jew baby. So it's up to us.”

“He's my property, Amerigo. You won't enjoy your spinach noodles if your friends cross the Bowery one more time.”

Isaac heard the wicked suck of the espresso machine. Cappuccinos couldn't tempt him now. The landlord sprinkled walnuts into a bowl.

“Go scratch yourself,” he said, walnuts dropping out of his fist. “Isaac, don't tell me how you're going to torture us with the FBI's. Newgate's a prick, just like you.”

Isaac shoved a helping of walnuts and anchovies into the nearest bowl. His hand came out stiffened with egg white. The Garibaldis glowered from their tables. The landlord smiled.

“Play, Isaac. You can be the new macaroni man. No cock-sucker's going to provoke me into a fight The City pays you to kill. Wait … be careful at the corners, Inspector. You could get run over by a bicycle thief.”

Isaac couldn't blame Amerigo too much. The landlord had to avenge the old people of Little Italy for the trespasses of Rupert Weil. But Isaac wouldn't tolerate baboons peering into the windows of Puerto Rican and Jewish grocers. The snow was thickening on Mulberry Street An enormous Chrysler cruised behind Isaac. The Chief scowled at the car.

“Brodsky, who told you to hang a tail on me?”

The chauffeur stuck his head outside the Chrysler to gape at Isaac and spit a few words into the snow. “Chief, the dispatcher's been paging you for fifteen minutes. Wadsworth bought it in the neck.”

“With a slug?” Isaac said, getting into the limousine.

“Isaac, there aint a hole in the nigger's body. It must have been a crowbar.”

The Chrysler hugged the ground with the help of Brodsky's miracle “snowshoes,” tires that could climb walls and stick to any ceiling. They weaved around ordinary sluggish automobiles and arrived at the Tivoli Theatre in under ten minutes. The theatre had already been roped off. Patrolmen in high galoshes and yellow raincoats kept civilians outside the rope and planted “crime scene” placards behind the ticket booth. Brodsky had to hold his belly while he ducked under the rope. The lobby was swollen with homicide boys and “crows” from the Chief of Detectives' office. Isaac paddled between them. He didn't have to fish for the corpse. Isaac's milky nigger was huddled over a chair in the middle of the orchestra, surrounded by a small band of detectives. He had a blue hump where his neck was broken. His eyes stared out of his skull. His tongue was in his shoulder. “Jesus,” Brodsky said, with the taste of puke in his nose. He put his hand over his mouth and ran for a drink of water, his trousers falling to his knees. The chauffeur had flowered underpants. The skin on his thighs was pale white. One of the detectives turned to Isaac.

“Any ideas, Chief?”

“No,” Isaac said.

“I thought the little nigger belonged to you.”

“So what,” Isaac growled. “Get him into a goddamn body bag. I don't want him lying around like that.”

“Isaac, have a heart We can't interrupt the investigation. We'll bag him soon as we can.”

The police photographer was on his knees snapping pictures of Wadsworth from different angles. Two “latent” experts dusted the chairs in Wadsworth's row. The man from “forensic” was busy chalking the outline of Wadsworth's body, the exact fall of his arms and legs. Isaac had scant respect for these laboratory freaks. Chalk marks made pretty clues, but they couldn't sniff out a murderer for you. Brodsky came back from the water fountain. He whispered in Isaac's ear. “It was a crowbar. I'm telling you. You can't twist a human being like that without a piece of iron. Look, they gave him a hunchback.”

Isaac couldn't see the bite of any metal; Wadsworth had no scrapes on his neck. The “crowbar” was Jorge Guzmann's elbow. He walked out of the Tivoli, Brodsky chasing after him. “Isaac, don't leave me behind.”

“Why not? I don't need you until tomorrow.”

The chauffeur shuffled on the sidewalk. “Isaac, what should I do?”

“Talk to yourself. Sit in the car. Read a porno book.”

Isaac trudged to Tenth Avenue in search of Zorro's great-uncle Tomás, the haberdasher who dealt in seconds and thirds. The snow had begun to penetrate Isaac's shoes; their tongues were growing wet. The haberdasher had a tight cellar door. Isaac wouldn't fiddle with locks today. He toppled the door with a heave of his shoulder. Zuckerdorff wasn't alone. A Puerto Rican gunsel sat with him, a killer from Boston Road. Isaac raised the gunsel by the tufts of his sideburns, carried him around the cellar until a rusty pistol and a roll of quarters in a handkerchief spilled out of the gunsel's shirt Then he placed him gingerly at Zuckerdorff's feet. The gunsel was in agony. He had a torn scalp from this loco policía. “You pull on my brain, man? You crazy motherfucker.” Isaac booted him behind Zuckerdorff's chair.

The haberdasher put his head in his lap, leaving Isaac to stare at blue veins on a chiseled skull. He's older than my father, Isaac realized. The Chief hid his compassion from Zuckerdorff. “Uncle Tomás, your grandnephews have committed atrocities in my borough. They murder innocent men. If Zorro wanted a neck to crack, he should have come to me.”

Isaac couldn't vent his fury on blue veins. He attacked Zuckerdorff's haberdashery boxes, kicking them with his snowy shoes. The boxes crumpled around Isaac; he buried the gunsel under a pile of smashed lids. Zuckerdorff didn't move. Isaac stubbed his toes. He found no murderers inside a box. Isaac was the guilty one. He fed Wadsworth to the Guzmanns. He allowed his own feud with Zorro to compromise his stoolie. He'd forced Wadsworth to reveal a piece of informa tion that could only point back to him. Like a schmuck, a police animal, he'd turned Wadsworth into expendable merchandise. The Chief was through with boxes. He lacked his way out of Zuckerdorff's cellar showroom.

Ida wasn't fickle with her best customers. She put paprika in their cottage cheese. But her mind wasn't on blintzes and petty cash. She forgot to shave the celery stalks. The spinach bled into the egg salad tray. The dollar bills sitting in the register turned orange from paprika thumbs. The dairy restaurant wasn't used to such shabby tricks. What could Ida's bosses do? They were helpless without this horsey girl.

Ida Stutz was seeing snow, not pishy water, a mean Manhattan trickle, but dark Russian snow, the kind that could swallow lampposts and suffocate a pack of wild dogs. The Ludlow Street professors had to blow into their split-pea soup. None of them could get Ida out of the window. The girl had her nose in the glass. Let her dream, the professors advised. She'll get pains in her calves. And then we'll have our Ida. They smiled when Ida shook, tearing at the flesh on her hips. They figured she was coming back to them. It wasn't so. Ida saw a face on the other side of the glass, the face of an uptown savage, with harsh lips and rubber cheeks, a chin that dandled in and out of a bullish neck, piggling eyes, and a pumpkin's ingrown ears. Ida ran out of the restaurant.

“Isaac, did you lose something uptown? Maybe your life?”

She didn't think a man could sweat with snow in the air. The Chief was burning up. Ida scrutinized him. Poor inspector, he has engines that work overtime. “Where are you going, Isaac? That isn't the way to Rivington Street”

Do powerful engines make you dumb? The Chief kept marching towards Broome Street “Your place,” he mumbled with his big teeth.

“Isaac, how come?”

“Marilyn has a guest”

Ida fell in behind hurt She wasn't frail. She had her own combustion machine. “God bless that Marilyn of yours, is she keeping company again? A fourth husband?”

“No. I put him there. One of my detectives. Coen.”

Ida didn't enjoy his abbreviated talk Does a simple “Coen” solve everything? She knew about this handsome cop. Why was he throwing Blue Eyes at his daughter? She couldn't pluck more words out of him. The Chief had sinking shoulders. She tried to take him by the hand. He slapped at her fingers, Isaac the snarling bear. “I can walk,” he said. She'd have to feed him honey at home.

Ida lived on the sixth floor. The Chief was hugging bannisters. He could be exhausted by a flight of stairs. Ida pushed. The Chief arrived on her doorstep. She poked her key in the lock. Ida didn't bother with herself. She fixed a tub for Isaac, with perfumed bubble water from a town in Roumania. It said so on the box. She undiessed him, got him out of his slipover, sharkskin trousers, and holster straps. She tested the bath with a whirling finger under the bubbles. She sat him down in the tub. She combed his sideburns. She brushed his teeth with the clear toothpaste that came as a sample in yesterday's mail. She couldn't find Isaac's scrotum. The Chief was shriveled up. He blinked at her with a hooded eye.