Love and Death in Brooklyn

by Glenville Lovell

  When she kissed me I could feel the release of tension built up in the weeks we’d been apart as the dust of our misunderstanding floated away. She brimmed with peppery sensuality. One whiff of her sexual scent and I was frantic with anticipation. I hosed her taut body with my tongue, languishing for a long time on her fat nipples as she teased my manhood with her strong hands and talked to me, her voice mischievous with laughter. We spent a long time caressing each other, something she’d taught me to do, playfully prolonging the explosion we knew was coming.

  She got on top of me, her eyes never leaving mine. It was a snug fit and with a hard sigh she settled onto my chest, her face flushed with urgent passion. Undulating her hips with a rhythm so deceptively gentle that it looked as though she was barely moving, she lay on my chest flicking her tongue over my nipples. That drove me crazy. My hands roamed her hard buttocks, urging her on, but she kept her rhythm smooth and contained, concentrating on teasing me into losing control. Her easy rhythm picked up pace and she began to buck, grinding her pelvis into me with sustained power. She sat upright, her palms braced against my shoulders, and began to rise up and down, steadily bouncing on my manhood. Her mouth fell open and guttural sounds she made spurred my passion even more. I incited her in a language beyond reason or respect. This pushed her into overdrive. She screamed and the fire flowed from her sex up through my stomach, into my brain and back to her. Ignited, we exploded together.

  EVER SINCE I left the NYPD in a cloud of anger and frustration I’ve kept a low profile at police social events. The albatross of anger I had carried around over my shooting almost proved too heavy for my marriage, and it cost me a number of good friends in the department, but I still had a few left.

  The next day, Friday, I called Terry Doyle at the 112th in Queens shortly after 10:00 A.M. Promoted recently to captain, Terry came from an Irish-American police family. Father was a cop. His uncle too, until he was caught shaking down drug dealers, and Terry’s son was about to graduate from the Academy.

  On one of the few occasions when I gathered with other cops since leaving the department, I celebrated Terry’s promotion with him and some of his buddies at a pub on Steinway Boulevard. Only a handful of the cops present knew anything about the shooting that led to my resignation, and I liked it that way. I was able to relax and have a good time.

  A few minutes passed before I heard Terry’s chirpy hello.

  “Terry, Blades here. How’s it going, pardner?”

  “Blades, you son of a gun! I better check my lotto tickets. Whenever I hear from you I win something. The last time you called me on the job I got promoted the next day, remember?”

  I chuckled. “That’s why they call me Santa Claus.”

  “Who calls you that, your wife?”

  “Never mind.”

  “So what’s shaking, dude?”

  “A couple of squirrels got squashed in Forest Hills night before last in a drive-by. What your boys got on it?”

  “Forest Hills. Can you freaking believe that? What’s your angle, big man?”

  “Straight up. A friend of mine was caught in the crossfire.”

  “With her panties down?”

  “Come again?”

  “Somebody did. All over the seat of the limo. Was she the one playing horsy?”

  “I never said it was a woman.”

  “We found the limo with semen stains all over the seat. Found a pair of panties too. That would suggest a woman was present. Your friend got a name?”

  “This person wants to remain this person for now.”

  “Achew!”

  “Bless you.”

  “Excuse me,” Terry sniffled. “Caught a cold from my niece.”

  “Robbie’s daughter?”

  “Yeah. She’s been spending a lot of time over at the house lately.”

  Terry’s twin brother, Robbie, a firefighter, died in the World Trade Center terrorist attack.

  “How’s the family doing?” I said.

  “Robbie’s wife still can’t sleep in her own bed. She’s basically moved into my house. Practically housebound. Gave up her job. Just sits around watching soap operas.”

  “How’s your mom?”

  “She wants to move to Dublin. Too many bad memories here, she said. First Joe, and then Robbie.”

  “Is she from there? I mean, was she born there?”

  “No. Her father was, though. She was born here, but her mind is locked in mourning.”

  “Your father, he’s retired, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he moving too?”

  “I don’t know. It’s one big drama right now, you know. She says she’s moving with or without him. She’s got a sister there and lots of relatives. My father says he ain’t running away from America. Look, Blades, would love to stay and chat, but I’ve got a precinct to run.”

  “Gimme some love, Terry. What you got on the people who got chopped?”

  “Three down. All males. Two Caucasians. One black. Excuse me, African-American.”

  “He wasn’t American, anyway.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Come on, Terry. Don’t make me beg.”

  “The investigation is ongoing. That’s the official word.”

  “Fuck the official word.”

  “A bone for a bone, Blades. Who is she?”

  “This person is just an innocent bystander.”

  “Then bring this person in to talk to us.”

  “There’s gotta be something you can share with me, Terry.”

  “One of the body bags was a low-level diplo from the Bahamas. He calls the limo company from the airport in Arizona to pick up someone at a Bronx address. The house, we discovered, is rented to RL Investments. A full year paid for. RL Investments happens to be a shell company owned by our dead diplo. The other two bags were the limo driver and a clipper from out of town. Russian. We believe he was part of the hit squad and got chopped down himself. We have no theory yet on how that happened. There may’ve been bodyguards in the limo. We got several species of slugs at the scene.”

  “What do Russian mobsters want with a third-rate diplomat? Was he dirty?”

  He hesitated. In the short break I heard his heavy breathing. He coughed.

  “What, Terry?”

  “You want any more information talk to the Feds.”

  “FBI?”

  “FBI. State Department. It’s their show. The FBI might’ve been watching this diplomat for a while.”

  “A sting?”

  “I don’t know what was going down.”

  “Thanks, Terry. Say hi to the wife.”

  “You bet.”

  AROUND ONE O’CLOCK that afternoon I got my hair cut at Shirley’s Salon on Rutland Road, where I listened to Shirley and his crew discuss cricket and Caribbean politics. I heard all about the debate in Barbados over one Lord Horatio Nelson, a British naval hero, and whether or not the Barbados government should remove his statue from its place in the center of the capital, Bridgetown, because it was a symbol of imperialism and colonialism. Most of the regular patrons, older men in their fifties and sixties waiting for their weekly trim, argued that the statue should stay since it had become a popular tourist attraction, but one fire-tongued youth with cornrows said he would volunteer to go down and blow up the statue himself since the man it memorialized hated black people and had been a slave trader.

  ANAIS SHOVED her head into the family room where I was listening to Mingus. It was just after four. She asked if I wanted to walk with her and Chez to get roti on Flatbush Avenue. Ordinarily, when I was troubled, Mingus’s music had a way of speaking to me, leveling out the rough edges of my emotions. For some reason I wasn’t feeling him today. Perhaps I was just too tired. I agreed to go with them.

  Looking west I saw a sky stippled purple and orange as the sun played hide and seek with tall buildings. The air was smoky gray from a fire somewhere in the neighborhood, and as we walked past the large apartment building at t
he corner of Flatbush and Maple the smell of pot wafted through an open ground-floor window. From overstuffed garbage bins along Flatbush refuse had overflowed onto the oil-speckled sidewalk serving up fetid fumes of decayed fruit and meat.

  The condition of the sidewalk so disgusted me, I wanted to turn around and go home, but Chez had her mind set on roti, and new to this role of father, I relented.

  Straining to pull a shopping cart behind her, an old woman in a multistained red coat with a white dirt-caked wool cap pulled over her face slipped past mumbling to herself. I turned to see her rifling the garbage bin, retrieving the lofty prize of a half-eaten McDonald’s burger.

  The roti place was crowded. As we waited on line for Chez’s beef roti my cell phone rang.

  Noah grunted at me in a deep voice from the other end. “I just called your house. Where’re you?”

  “I didn’t know I was under house arrest.”

  “Not in the mood for your smart-ass talk, Blades,” he barked. “Meet me in Manhattan in an hour.”

  “What’s shaking, Noah?”

  At the mention of Noah’s name Anais’s eyes turned on me, her face rapidly tightening with displeasure.

  “If I wanted to discuss it over the phone, I wouldn’t ask you to meet me, now would I?”

  “Where you want me to meet you, old man?”

  “Joe Lilly’s. I’ll be at the bar. And I warned you already about that old man crap.”

  I rang off and clipped the phone back onto my belt. Anais’s eyes were demanding an account of the conversation.

  “Noah wants to see me. I gotta go to Manhattan.”

  I didn’t wait for any further questions to filter through her insistent eyes. I bent down and kissed Chesney. “I gotta go to see a friend, Chez. I’ll see you later.”

  “Why can’t we come?” Chesney asked innocently.

  “Next time, baby.”

  She giggled. “You always say that.”

  “Your father says a lot of things he don’t mean,” Anais chimed.

  I crossed my eyes at her. “Don’t say things like that to her.”

  Anais folded her hands over her chest. “When’re you coming back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Should I wait up?”

  “You bet.”

  I tried to kiss Anais on the lips; she turned her face and my lips fell on her moist cheek. Chesney giggled at our childishness.

  TEN

  t he thought of driving crossed my mind but only for a second. Prospect Park station on the B line was a block away and I felt adventurous, a prerequisite for descending into the New York subway. Like many of the B-line stations in Brooklyn, Prospect Park was under renovation. Here, the tracks, while below street level, were open to the elements. The token booth was not underground as it was in many of the other stations, but housed in a dilapidated building above ground.

  The ground beneath me shook as a Manhattan-bound train rumbled into the station. I swiped my Metrocard through the computerized turnstile and slid through, racing down the steel stairs as the train screeched to a stop.

  I found a seat in the last car and immediately wished I’d brought a book. New York subway rides were never boring; there was always someone begging for money or food, or a struggling singer armed with a guitar eager to share his talent, or some loud fool who sought his fifteen minutes of fame on the train. I would prefer not to be an eavesdropper on other people’s conversations, or be a witness to the many subterranean dramas, familial and otherwise, but the alternative was taking on the congestion above ground. No picnic that.

  Seated next to me was a woman eating fervently from a large bag of Wise potato chips. Opposite her, a man reading the Times, his round pink face like an inflated balloon. Intermittently he glanced at her suspiciously, until he could no longer stand the noise of her chomping jaws and got up. The only other seat in the car was between two black men. He looked over in their direction, then walked to the far end to stand against the door.

  I got off the train at West 4th Street and walked briskly down the underground tunnel, past rows of movie posters defaced by scribblings of pubescent youngsters in all likelihood bragging to themselves and anyone else bored enough to try to decipher their hieroglyphics about girls they probably never saw naked. The walls of the New York subway system were tainted with many such testosterone-inspired fantasies.

  Joe Lilly’s on Carmine was one of Noah’s favorite joints. The margaritas were dirt cheap and got me adequately inebriated, but I didn’t like the food, which could only be described as maudlin Southern, everything fried and smothered.

  I found Noah at one end of the long mahogany bar, his back to the door. Alongside him was a woman whose blond hair flopped at the nape of her neck like crushed silk. She was applying rouge to her cheeks with the visual aid of a compact, a glass of white wine set on the bar in front of her.

  Noah dragging carelessly on a bottle of dark beer.

  The woman leaning toward him to say something.

  It was clear he’d been drinking for a while. He tilted away with the stiffness of an over-the-hill boxer as if he didn’t want to hear what she had to say.

  I came up on his right shoulder and tapped him. He must’ve sensed my presence before I touched him because he didn’t turn around right away. Instead, he lifted the Samuel Adams bottle to his mouth and drained it, throwing his head back with uncompromising abandon, the act of a man bordering on drunkenness or done to establish some external term of reference for someone’s benefit.

  The seat next to him was empty so I sat down. Noah turned in my direction, his eyes dull as a piece of gray cardboard.

  “What you drinking, Blades?” he said.

  “The usual.”

  He laughed, then hollered to the bartender. “One margarita over here, Pedro. Easy on the salt. This man is very health conscious. And bring me another beer. Make sure it’s cold. The last one was too warm. Warm dark beer tastes like shit.” He launched into a raucous laugh. Other people sitting at tables around the restaurant turned to look in our direction.

  “Are you okay, Noah?”

  “Am I okay? You tell me, Blades. You’ve known me a long time. Am I okay?”

  Noah wasn’t drunk but he wasn’t himself, which was understandable. My friend was still fighting the chokehold of shock and it was almost as painful to watch his inner struggle as it was to remember the tragedy that dispatched his mind into this state of confusion.

  “Blades.” Noah’s face was suddenly serious. “I want you to meet someone.”

  He stood up and took a few steps back from the bar so that the woman sitting next to him could see me clearly. As our eyes met for the first time I was impressed with the steadiness of her gaze. Her hazel eyes never wavered from my face and there was a purposefulness to her demeanor that suggested someone who was not easily distracted, someone who knew when and how to take charge of a situation.

  “Billie Heat. This is Blades Overstreet,” Noah said.

  I got up and stepped close enough to shake her hand. Her handshake was all business: firm, brief. Throughout she kept eye contact with me, smiling at the last moment when I mouthed that it was nice to meet her, but she said nothing.

  “Miss Heat is a therapist,” Noah continued. “Why don’t we exchange seats, Miss Heat? That way you can talk to both of us.”

  “Actually, it’s Dr. Heat, and I’m a psychologist. But call me Billie, please.” She stood up for the first time to take over the seat previously occupied by Noah. She was tall and straight as an exclamation mark, her skin bright as a hologram.

  The bouncy olive-skinned bartender brought my margarita. I used to think he was the owner but Noah had told me that he was a cousin of the owner’s wife, whose name was not Joe Lilly; to tell the truth I can’t remember the owner’s name, but he was an ex-cop, someone who worked with Noah back in the day.

  I rubbed the lip of the glass to distribute the salt evenly, allowing myself a moment of indulgence as my fingers l
ingered to absorb the sensuality of salt grains on a frosty glass. The salt burned my lip on the first sip. But I expected that. My lips chapped in cold weather and I often forgot to apply balm to keep them moist. I licked my lips, dissolving the remaining salt, and took another sip of my drink. Then I put the glass on the bar top and turned to look at Dr. Heat, whose snooty demeanor was beginning to crackle my blood.

  Noah began to speak. “Dr. Heat . . . Billie called me yesterday after she read about Ronan. I want you to hear what she told me.”

  Dr. Heat turned to face me. She spoke in a clear authoritative voice. “Ronan was a patient of mine. As recently as two weeks ago he talked about fearing for his life. He intimated that somebody might’ve been stalking him.”

  My eyes were fastened on the tall woman’s eyes as she spoke, an old habit left over from my days in the NYPD. Drug addicts were notorious liars, and since I used many of them as informants I had to be sure they weren’t feeding me chicken shit. By carefully analyzing their eye movements I discovered that I could quite accurately determine when they were lying. Ever since Ronan’s assassination I’d gone into investigative mode, where I approached everyone and everything related to Ronan with skepticism.

  “Did he say who might’ve been stalking him?” I said.

  “No,” replied Dr. Heat.

  “Do you know if he went to the police?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you suggest it?”

  “I should’ve, I suppose.”

  “How long have you been treating Ronan?”

  “About six months.”

  “Did you take his concerns seriously?”

  She paused and lifted her glass to her mouth, sipped, then put the glass back down and sighed. That gentle sigh, the pause to catch a breath, made her seem human, finally. “I couldn’t tell. At times he appeared paranoid.”

  “What are the signs of paranoia?” I asked.

  Her eyes flickered violently and then she smiled. With bony fingers she combed her treacle-thick blond hair, then flicked her head, flashing her shiny mane through the air. She looked at me and her eyes were sharp enough to do bodily harm. “I can tell you don’t like psychologists,” she said.