Soul Patch (8 page)

“How’s it working out?” I repeated. “We’re still married. That’s how.”

“That bad.”

“Worse.”

“If you want my opinion, it’s not Katy.”

“No?”

“No, it’s you.”

“Can we go back to that part about wanting your opinion?”

“You’re bored,” he said.

“Thank you, Dr. Freud, but that’s not exactly breaking news.”

“Alan, he’s my lover, he—”

“I know who Alan is, for chrissakes! You don’t need to tell me that every time you mention his name.”

“Okay, boss, put your claws back in. He’s a psychologist and he’s about five years your senior.”

“Yes, I know. We’ve met. Is there like a point to this or are you gonna make me wish I had gone to the Manhattan store and let Aaron aggravate me instead?”

Klaus ignored that. “Well, before me, Alan had been in a ten-year relationship, and he said when he hit forty and he’d been with his partner for a long time . . . he just lost it. He felt bored and lost and wanted to jump out of his own skin.”

“Did he buy a red 911 and start sleeping with cheerleaders?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. Why, don’t you think a gay man can have a midlife crisis?”

“I wouldn’t know. I figured you’d tell me when the time came. So, that’s what you think this is, a midlife crisis?”

“Why, did you think you were immune? Being aware of the phenomenon is no protection against it.”

“I suppose.”

“Okay,” he said, “I can see it’s time for a change of subject.”

“Nice segue.”

“If you prefer, we can go back to—”

“No, that’s fine.”

“So what are you doing here? There’s a rumor that we have a new store and that you’re supposed to be there now.”

“Christ, you’re starting to sound like my brother.”

“Bite your tongue!”

Aaron thought the world of Klaus in a business sense, but they weren’t the same kind of people. It wasn’t Klaus’ being gay that bothered Aaron so much, though I don’t think he was completely comfortable with it either. It was that Klaus was obsessively plugged in, so much an animal of fashion and music, of what was coming next. Without really trying, he tended to make you feel out of it, passé. And Aaron was very much his father’s son, a traditionalist. My big brother was old when he was young. He felt way more comfortable with Elvis Presley than Elvis Costello and couldn’t have imagined any set of circumstances that would have allowed for the words sex and pistols to be in close proximity in the same phrase. As Klaus had once said of Aaron, he was more a fugue than a frug kind of guy.

“Sorry,” I said. “But I took a few days off.”

His face lit up. “You’re working a case! But what are you doing
here
?”

“Kenny Burton.”

“Sorry, you’ve lost me.”

“We used to work together when I started out as a cop. Now he works for a private security firm that has a contract with the Marshal Service over at the Federal Courthouse on Centre Street. I’m going over there to talk to him in a little while.”

“So, you’re killing time.”

“Couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather kill it with.”

“Yet another sad commentary on your life.”

“Fuck you, Klaus!”

“Ah,” he said. “There’s the Moe I know and love.”

 

TEN YEARS MY elder, Kenny Burton had the old-cop look, somehow grizzled and clean-shaven all at once. Except for my recent phone call, we hadn’t spoken or seen each other in many years, but I was unlikely to miss him. Everything about him, from his get-the-fuck-outta-my-way strut to the you-don’t-want-a-piece-of-me manner with which he blew cigarette smoke into the faces of oncoming pedestrians, screamed asshole. Or maybe I saw that in him because I knew him a little bit from when I had started on the job in the late ’60s.

Priding himself on things most other cops would hide like a crazy aunt, Kenny Burton was a brutal, thick-skulled prick who was trained in the ways of pre-Knapp Commission, pre-Miranda Rights policing. He never paid for a meal, a cup of coffee, or a blow job until word came down from on high. He never arrested anyone who wasn’t guilty or didn’t deserve to have the crap beat out of them. His motto might well have been:
Why use your head when you can use your fists instead?

“Caveman Kenny Burton, is that you?” I said, walking up to him outside the courthouse. He flicked a still-burning cigarette at the open window of a waiting cab. The cigarette barely missed, bouncing harmlessly off the cab’s door.

“Who wants to know?”

“Moe Prager wants to know.”

Burton grunted, one corner of his mouth turning up. From him this was a hug and a kiss on the lips. “What you doing around here?”

“Waiting for you. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Sure. There’s O’Hearn’s on Church.”

O’Hearn’s was your basic New York version of an Irish pub. What did that mean? It meant it was just like any other shithole bar in the city, only with cardboard shamrocks on the walls in mid-March and the occasional barman who understood that hurling had meaning beyond vomit.

Burton’s malicious blue eyes pinned me to my chair as we sipped at our drinks. We were boxers staring across the ring before the bell for round one. He was doing the silent calculations. I could hear the gears churning nonetheless. The mistake people make about judging brutes is to assume they’re fools. Kenny Burton was no fool. We had never been close, even during the few years we served together. Larry Mac, on the other hand, always considered Kenny a pal. Only after I’d come to know Larry well did I figure out that odd coupling. Kenny Burton appealed to Larry’s ambition, not his heart. Ambitious men are like baseball scouts—they can spot everyone’s special talent and how that talent can serve them. Frankly, I didn’t want to know how Caveman had served Larry’s ambition.

“This about that party thing we spoke about on the phone?” Kenny asked, knowing it wasn’t.

“Nope.” I waved to the waitress for a second round. “That was bullshit.”

“I figured. We ain’t exactly blood brothers, you and me. What it’s about then?”

“Larry’s missing.”

He didn’t react, but I didn’t read much into his deadpan. The gears continued churning. Then, “Missing? Missing how?”

I ignored the question. The waitress came, plopped our drinks down. When she tried clearing Kenny’s first glass, he stared at her so coldly I thought she might freeze in place. “Leave it!” She did.

“He was acting weird the last time I saw him,” I said.

“Weird?”

“Nervous. Jumpy. Not like Larry at all. Then . . .”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. We got together back in Coney on the boardwalk and he started talking crazy about the good old days.”

“Good old days, my ass. Fucking job!”

“I know what you mean,” I said, just trying to see if he’d say something on his own. He didn’t disappoint.

“You do, huh? I remember you being a cunt, Prager.”

“Nice.”

“Ah, you was like all them new cops, more worried about the skells and scumbags than the victims.”

“For every corner guys like you cut, you create two more. I was worried about following the law.”

“Fuck the law! The only law is the law of the jungle. You pussies never understood that.”

“Was Larry Mac a cunt?”

Kenny actually laughed, an icy breeze blowing through O’Hearn’s. “Larry was a lot of things.”

“Was?”

“Don’t be such a fucking asshole, Prager. You know what I mean.”

“I do?”

“What, you want me to throw you a beating? With that bum leg a yours, it’d take me like ten seconds to kick your ass twice around the block.”

“Now there’s something to be proud of.”

“Get to the point, asshole.”

“Larry missing is the point.”

“That’s what you say, but even if he is, I don’t know shit about it. I owe Larry Mac,” he said, taking his eyes off me for the second time since we sat down. “He kept me on the job till I made my twenty. It was a fucking miracle that he pulled it off. I was like a poster boy for I.A.B. for the last half of my career. Then after a few years, he got me this gig with the Marshal Service. Job’s a fucking tit.”

I had made the acquaintance of two retired U.S. marshals during the Moira Heaton investigation. One killed himself. The other tried to kill me. Only time in my life I exchanged gunfire with anyone. I think I hit him, but I didn’t stick around to check. Got the hell out of there and didn’t bother looking back.

“Okay. You hear anything, let me know.” I threw my card and a twenty on the table. I made to go.

He grabbed my forearm. “You really think something’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

He let go of my arm and studied my card in earnest. “I hear anything, I’ll call.” He slipped the card into his wallet.

I took a few steps and turned back around.

“What?” he growled. “You gonna annoy me some more?”

“You remember D Rex Mayweather?”

If I thought I was going to catch him off guard with that, I was wrong.

“That dead nigger? Yeah, what about him?”

“Nothing.”

I became acutely aware of the few black faces seated around O’Hearn’s. Burton had been purposely loud. It served the dual purpose of embarrassing me and of challenging anyone in hearing distance. Kenny Burton hadn’t changed. He was the same asshole I had known twenty years before. You could set your watch by him.

That night as I stared up at the ceiling, it wasn’t Kenny Burton’s face I was seeing in the dark. It wasn’t Larry’s. Not Katy’s. Not what was left of Malik’s either. What I saw was a pair of almond-shaped brown eyes burning with a cold fire set against dark, creamy skin. I saw an angular jaw, a perfect, straight nose with slightly flaring nostrils above plush, angry lips. All of it framed in hair blacker than the darkness itself.

COPS IN CARS can’t follow suspects worth a shit. Even if they were to possess the requisite skills, the damned unmarked cars would give them away. Unmarked cars are about as inconspicuous as the Good-year blimp. So it didn’t take more than a glance in my rearview mirror to spot the unadorned blue Chevy as it pulled away from the curb. The whole way to Sarah’s school, the car trailed half a block behind, the driver trying to keep other traffic between us.

I kissed Sarah, watched her walk into the schoolyard and up the front steps. When she had disappeared behind the heavy metal doors, I rolled slowly into traffic, making certain to get caught at the first red light. My tail was four cars back in the right hand lane, the same lane as me. I scanned the cross street for oncoming cars and, seeing it was clear, put my foot to the floor. With tires smoking, I swerved across the left lane, through the red light, and onto the cross street.

With my foot still hard on the pedal, I drove a further three blocks before making a sharp left down a dead end street that ran perpendicular to the Belt Parkway. About a hundred feet from the dead end, I backed up an empty driveway until the houses on either side obscured my car from view. I waited. Either they would give up before cruising this street or, as I hoped, they would roll down the street, distracted, annoyed, simply going through the motions rather than searching for me under every stone.

Neither hearing it nor seeing it, I sort of sensed their car coming. Then I caught a glimpse of its nose as it rolled down the block. Went right past me. As it passed, I pulled out of the driveway, slammed on the brakes and put it in park. In a moot display, the cop at the wheel of the Chevy threw it in reverse. Too little too late. My car was widthwise
across the street, making it impossible for the cops to turn around or back up past me. I hopped out and strolled up to the driver’s side window of the unmarked car, rapping my knuckles against the glass. The sun was strong and the refraction off the glass made it difficult for me to make out the face of the person at the wheel.

When the window disappeared halfway into the door, I recognized the driver. I had seen her face on the backs of my eyelids and suspended in the dark air above my bed only a few hours ago. But before I could react, Detective Melendez threw her door open, smacking it hard into my bad knee. Reflexively, I backed up and bent down to rub it. Big mistake. Melendez and her partner were out of the car and on me like wolves on a crippled lamb.

“All right, dickweed, you know the drill,” said Bronx Irish as he threw me into the side of their car.

Still favoring my bad leg, I hit the car awkwardly, the right side of my rib cage taking the full force of impact. Hurt like a son of a bitch and it didn’t do much for my respiration.

“Assume the position,” she barked.

Still trying to catch my breath, I was slow to follow her instructions. Big mistake number two. My arms were being yanked up and thrust forward, palms slapped down on the hood of the Chevy. Bronx Irish kicked my legs apart and back. He frisked me, removing my wallet and .38.

“So, Mr. Prager,” Detective Melendez said, “you always speed like that in a school zone?” It was a question for which she wanted no answer. “That was quite a display of stupidity you put on back there.”

“I noticed I was being followed. How was I supposed to know you were cops?”

“Don’t be such an asshole, Prager,” said Bronx Irish. “What should I do with him, Carmella?”

“Cuff him and throw him in the back.”

“Hey, I—”

“Shut the fuck up!” she cut me off. “Keys in the car?”

“What?”

“Are your fucking keys in the car, Prager?”

“Yes, Detective.”

“John, you take care of him. I’ll park his car right.”

Bronx Irish cuffed me and slid me into the rear of the unmarked Chevy. He got into the passenger seat. As we waited for Melendez to reposition my car, I tried striking up a conversation.