Now Goodman feels like he’s just been in a game of rock-paper- scissors, only this time, the objects displayed turned out to be not rock or paper or scissors, but thrift and recklessness. And, lo and behold, recklessness has completely demolished thrift. He shifts his groceries and the bottle of wine to his left arm and punches the air in front of him crisply with his right fist, delivering a perfect noogie.
Back at the apartment, Carmen takes the groceries from Goodman and orders him to go sit down and watch TV. He does as he’s told and is soon absorbed in the evening news. Only vaguely does he occasionally become aware of scraping noises, pots and pans clanging, and aromas drifting toward him from the far end of the room.
When she announces that dinner is ready, he finds she’s created a minor masterpiece: pasta con tono, she calls it - spaghetti covered with a rich mixture combining the sauce Goodman bought with chunks of fresh tomato and onion and flaked tuna. There is a green salad drizzled with oil and vinegar. She’s warmed the bread and wrapped it in a red bandanna he uses as a pot holder. The Chianti’s found its way into two wine glasses he didn’t even know he owned, and a red-and-white-striped bath towel of his has been transformed into a tablecloth.
“My God” is all he can think to say, but what it lacks in articulateness, it apparently conveys in spontaneity and Carmen laughs brightly. Goodman takes his seat at what used to be his card table. He has never been across an ocean, but he instantly imagines that this is what it must be like to dine at a trattoria in Rome or a cafe in Paris. Lifting his glass, he tries to think of a toast worthy of the occasion, but no words come to him.
“To my rescuer,” Carmen says finally.
“To the Ballerina Princess,” says Michael Goodman softly.
At 8:15 Tuesday evening, docket number 96N047335 is called for arraignment in part AR-4 of the Manhattan Criminal Court. “Reddington!” calls the bridgeman, so called because he stands behind the table - or “bridge” - that separates the lawyers and the defendant from the judge.
A large black man rises from a bench adjacent to the pen area and ambles over to the bridge, where he takes his place beside his lawyer.
“Docket ending three-three-five,” intones the bridgeman, “People v. Dwayne Reddington. Defendant is charged with violating Section Five-eleven of the Vehicle and Traffic Laws. Your appearance, counselor.”
“Morton Wieselheimer, Four-oh-one Broadway, New York, for the defendant,” says the lawyer.
“Counselor, do you waive the reading of the defendant’s rights but not the rights themselves?”
“Yes.” He’s never been able to figure out what that means.
“Notices, People?”
“The People serve statement notice,” says an earnest-looking assistant district attorney, who then reads from the write-up in front of him. “At the time and place of arrest, the defendant said to the arresting officer, ‘You got me.’ No further notices.”
“Are you requesting bail?” asks the judge, a onetime radical lawyer named William Mogulescu.
“Yes,” says the ADA. “The defendant has a lengthy record, including three felony convictions. He’s used different names in the past, as well as different dates of birth and Social Security numbers. We’re asking for bail in the amount of $7,500.”
“Judge-” Wieselheimer protests, but the judge silences him with an open palm held up in his direction.
“Let me get this straight,” Mogulescu booms. “You’re asking for $7,500 in a misdemeanor suspended license case?”
“Uh, yes, Your Honor. The defendant has seventeen prior arrests-”
“Yes, yes,” Mogulescu interrupts. “You told us about his record. Any history of bench warrants?”
The ADA studies a computer printout for a while before saying, “It doesn’t appear so.”
“Who owns the car, this Bentley Mr. Reddington was driving?”
“It appears the defendant owns it.”
“Where’s the car now?” the judge asks.
“It was impounded, Your Honor. We’re checking it for evidence.”
“Oh, I see. You think maybe you’ll find a written confession in the glove compartment, or a copy of the VTL in the trunk?” Without waiting for the ADA to respond or for Wieselheimer to say anything, he rules on the request for bail. “The matter is adjourned to November eleventh. The defendant is released on his own recognizance. Next case.”
Dwayne Reddington smiles, turns around, and walks out of the courtroom. He will get his Bentley back within twenty-four hours. He’ll pay his outstanding summonses and, when he returns to court next month, no doubt he’ll be permitted to plead guilty to a minor traffic infraction and pay a $50 fine. Wieselheimer will get $300 for an evening’s work. But none of that matters, of course. What matters is that Big Red now has an ironclad, airtight alibi for the homicide of Russell Bradford.
The meal turns out to taste every bit as good as it looks, and the three glasses of Chianti he’s drunk provide Goodman with a pleasant buzz. Carmen insists on doing the dishes. “I don’t have any money to help out,” she explains. “It’s the least I can do.”
Afterward, they sit on the sofa, finishing the last of the wine. Pop-Tart joins them, settling between them and pretending to sleep.
“So tell me about yourself, Michael,” Carmen says.
“There’s not much to tell. I’m an accountant, though I’m only working part-time right now. I have a daughter who’s six years old. She’s staying with her grandmother for the moment.”
“What about your wife?”
“She’s dead, a car accident.”
“You’re widowed,” Carmen says. “How sad. I’m so sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
“And your daughter - what’s her name?”
“Kelly,” he says, and the sudden crack in his voice causes her to raise an eyebrow. “She’s sick,” he tells her, the wine overcoming his reticence. “Or at least they seem to think she is.”
“Is it serious?” Carmen looks truly pained.
“They’re talking about a possible brain tumor. They want to do more tests.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know.”
“Of course not. How could you?”
“Is she the Ballerina Princess?”
“Yes,” he smiles. “She’s the Ballerina Princess.”
They sit in silence for a while, but for Goodman it’s not one of those embarrassing silences he’s suffered through so many times in his life. It’s an okay silence, a pause during which there’s simply no need for anything to be said. He wonders about this person who’s so suddenly come into his life, but seems to be able to make him feel so good. He wants to do as she did, turn to her and say, “So tell me about yourself, Carmen.” But he’s afraid he might somehow break the spell. He decides she’ll tell him her story when she’s ready to.
He sleeps on the floor again that night, but not before Carmen spreads out layers of towels for him to cushion his body. The resulting bed is warmer and softer than last night’s, though still not quite good enough for Pop-Tart, who again elects to curl up with Carmen on the sofa bed. He throws Goodman a look somewhere between contempt and pity before settling in for the night.
Fifteen hundred miles to the south, Gustavo Fuentes settles in for the night, too, on a king-sized mattress in his suite on the top floor of the Hotel Fontainbleau in Miami Beach. But sleep does not come easily to Mister Fuentes (as he prefers to be called, and therefore is). Mister Fuentes has a problem. He doesn’t yet know the name of his problem, but he knows this much: His problem is a smallish man who lives in a particular apartment in a particular building on the East Side of Manhattan, in New York City. It seems the man has something that belongs to Mister Fuentes, something worth mucho dinero. That, of course, is not how things should be.
Mister Fuentes suffers from an extremely low threshold of pain. He doesn’t like having hangnails, shaving cuts, or blisters. He especially doesn’t like having headaches. As a result, he d
ecides he’s going to be forced to take whatever steps are necessary to see that this one goes away.
Michael Goodman is up early Wednesday morning, a slight headache the price for his three glasses of wine. He showers, shaves, and sneaks out of the apartment while Carmen and Pop-Tart sleep. He returns with the paper and a box of sugared doughnuts.
Carmen is awake, and they breakfast on doughnuts and tea. Goodman tells her he’s going to spend the day with his daughter. This time, she asks him if she can borrow some of his clothes, and he readily agrees. He takes it as a good sign that she wants to get dressed, perhaps even go out.
While she showers, he reads the Times. There’s a small article about a woman from Connecticut who claims to have been raped in Central Park while she slept, a report of a bicycle rider injured by a hit-and-run motorist in the East Village, and a piece describing the alleged beating of a carriage horse by its owner on Fifty-Ninth Street as horrified pedestrians looked on.
There is no article about Russell Bradford, no mention of his being gunned down and left for dead on West 129th Street, in the shadow of the West Side Highway, shortly before his seventeenth birthday. Perhaps the omission has something to do with the fact that, unlike the woman and the pedestrian and even the horse, Russell Bradford was not white.
Or perhaps not.
Carmen emerges from the shower wearing the clothes Goodman’s put out for her: the new jeans he bought in Florida and a white button-down shirt. Her feet swim in a pair of his sneakers. Although she’s the same height as he is, her body is that of a teenager, and his clothes make her look like a child who’s raided some grown-up’s closet. The bruises on her face have faded almost to the point of being invisible, and her hair has taken on a luster that a day and a half ago would have seemed unimaginable. She is nothing less than stunning.
Goodman says nothing, but he knows full well that the look in his eyes has betrayed his silence. He turns to the phone and calls his mother-in-law, who answers on the first ring.
“Hello,” he says. “It’s me, Michael.”
“Yes, hello, Michael.”
“How’s Kelly?”
“She seems okay. She’s asking for you. This is too much for me, Michael,” she tells him. “I’m too old to start being a mother all over again.”
The three of them - Goodman, his daughter, and his mother-in-law - had gone together to a counseling agency shortly after Shirley’s death. It had been the counselor’s suggestion that Kelly move in with her grandmother for a while, just until Goodman could find a new job and get back on his feet financially. At the time, Goodman had suspected that the real motivation behind the suggestion had been the counselor’s concern for Goodman’s mother-in-law, her perception that she needed Kelly even more than Goodman did at that particular moment. Like her daughter, Shirley had been an only child, and her death had been truly devastating to her mother, who herself had been widowed several years earlier. Allowing Kelly to stay with her grandmother after her mother’s death had therefore seemed like a kindness to both child and grandmother, so Goodman had gone along with the suggestion. Now, however, it seems as though it’s time for him to reclaim his daughter.
“Let me speak with her,” he says.
After a minute, he hears his daughter’s soft “Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, angel. You up for some fun?”
“What kind of fun?”
“Oh, I don’t know. We’ll think of something. I’ll pick you up in a little while, okay?”
“Okay. Daddy?”
“Yes?” he says, fearful he’s about to hear about her headaches.
“Can Larus come?”
“Absolutely.”
Carmen announces she’s going out as well, that she’s going to visit a girlfriend, see if she can get some “real” clothes.
“You’re rejecting my wardrobe?” he asks in mock pain.
“I reject nothing about you,” she says, and kisses him on the tip of his nose.
He gives her the second set of keys that came with the new lock to his door. They find Tony the Super, who comes up with a spare key to the downstairs door, but only after giving Carmen a thorough up-and-down and Goodman a knowing wink.
At Lexington Avenue, Goodman and Carmen go their separate ways, he to the west, she downtown. As soon as she’s out of sight, he takes his index finger and touches the tip of his nose. It seems to tingle.
The sun feels good, and Goodman coaxes Kelly into going to Central Park, Larus in tow. But after awhile, though she complains of no headaches, he notices her squinting as though the light is too much for her. He blames himself for not thinking of a cap or a pair of sunglasses.
“How would you like to go to the museum?” he asks her.
“Can we have lunch there?”
“You bet.”
The museum is their museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the one they always go to. They know it almost by heart, from the dinosaurs to the great whale to North America Mammals exhibit. They have their favorites: the pearl-diver exhibit, Peter Stuyvesant coming ashore to meet the Indians, the geological crystals, and anything where you can push a button and make things happen.
Today, they head for Ocean Life and Biology of Fishes, where it’s dark and cool. They make their rounds, following the same route they always do. They check on the killer whales, the sharks, the pearl divers in their underwater caves, and watch a tiny movie showing the angler fish cast for its prey for the hundredth time.
Lunch means the cafeteria, where they dine on grilled cheese sandwiches and iced tea at a long wooden table. Kelly cuts her sandwich into tiny squares, which from time to time Goodman has to remind her to eat.
“I’m ready,” she tells him between bites.
“Ready for what?”
“Another chapter of the story.”
“Ah,” he says, though in truth, he’d at that very moment been working on the next segment and knew precisely what she was ready for the moment she spoke. “The Ballerina Princess. Where was she when last we left her?”
“She was being good even though they kept giving her these tests. Is she finished with the tests?”
The Ballerina Princess (Continued)
The Ballerina Princess had indeed been very good about the tests. She’d kicked obediently when they’d hit her knee with the rubber hammer, she’d laughed when they’d tickled the bottom of her foot, and she’d said “Ouch!” when they’d stuck her toes with the safety pins, just as she was supposed to do. And the whole time, she never complained once. So it certainly seemed only fair that there should be no more tests.
But, alas! Even in the magical kingdom of Yew Nork, things weren’t always fair. And it was decided that the Ballerina Princess needed another test after all.
“Was it the kind of test that hurt her?” Kelly asks him.
“I’m afraid so,” he has to tell her. “At least it was the kind that hurts a little bit.”
But the Ballerina Princess was very brave, remember. And on the day of the test, she wasn’t alone. On one side of her, she had her father, the Keeper of the Numbers. And on the other side, she had the brave and loyal Prince Larus.
“Did she cry?”
She cried a little bit, which was all right, because sometimes crying a bit could actually make the Ballerina Princess feel better. But the test was an important one, because it would help the doctors figure out what the matter was and how to make her all better.
“Can I go back home with you, Daddy?” she suddenly asks him.
“Would you like that?”
“If Grandma won’t mind.”
“We can call Grandma,” he says. “I’m sure she won’t mind.”
“Can I sleep at your house?”
“Of course you can.”
On this Wednesday, Annise Bradford uses her lunch hour to travel 115 blocks each way by subway to spend twenty minutes in her mother’s room at Jacoby Hospital.
“Hello, Nana,” she says, using the name everyone’s called he
r mother since before she can remember.
“Hello, Ni.” She sounds it like knee. She still speaks out of the corner of her mouth. One side of her body continues to be virtually paralyzed. The doctors have admitted that they’d hoped for noticeable improvement by this time.
“How you feeling, Nana?”
Her mother totally ignores the question, asks instead, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Annise Bradford says, before the tears burst from her.
Nana gives her a minute. “It’s Russell,” she says then, “isn’t it?”
“It’s Russell,” Annise Bradford sobs. And she falls to her knees beside the bed and lowers her head onto the mattress, her shoulders heaving uncontrollably. Her mother reaches out with the only arm she can move and cradles her child’s head in the crook of her elbow, rocking it gently to the rhythm of some ancient, wordless song.
Nana will die in her sleep less than forty-eight hours from this moment. The doctors will attribute her death to complications arising from the stroke. Her death certificate will identify heart failure as the official cause of death.
But in a sense, at least, it can rightly be said that the twenty kilos will have claimed their third victim.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Ray Abbruzzo and Daniel Riley are about to enter an abandoned brownstone on 144th Street in the South Bronx. They intend to use an empty apartment on the top floor as an OP, an observation post. An observation-post operation is a variation on the theme of the buy-and-bust operation. Instead of depending upon an undercover officer to buy drugs before calling in the backup team to make arrests, officers man the observation post, scanning the street below - sometimes with binoculars, sometimes with the naked eye - for drug sales. As they spot a transaction, they radio a description of the buyer to the backup team. As soon as the departing buyer rounds the corner, he’s scooped up. After two or three such transactions, the sellers themselves are arrested, and their stash - if the observing officers have been able to pinpoint its location - is seized. The buyers are charged with misdemeanor possession counts and are often permitted to “plead down” in court to disorderly conduct. The sellers are charged with felonies - “observation sales” rather than “direct sales” - but every bit as serious as had they been caught selling to an undercover officer.
Shoot the Moon Page 18