by J. L. Abramo
“Are you crazy? I just told you I lost five grand of your money,” I said, as I sat across from Goldblatt in a Starbucks on East 60th Street within shouting distance of the Bridge Market, which considerably jazzed up the base of the Queensboro Bridge. By now, the snow that had fallen the night before had morphed into ugly puddles of gray slush laced with salt, creating small inert ponds of floating ice by the curbs. The more intrepid pedestrians waded right through, while the more circumspect found alternate routes, some of which took them far afield from the corner they were crossing. Me, I was somewhere in the middle, trying to find the shallow spot that wouldn’t overrun my supposedly waterproof shoes. Sometimes I was right, sometimes I wasn’t.
“Easy come, easy go,” he said, forcing my attention back to Goldblatt, who hadn’t even bothered taking off his coat, despite the fact he’d been waiting for me when I arrived. Cynical of me, I know, but I couldn’t help wondering if he was hiding anything under that oversized down jacket. “Besides, it wasn’t my money. Anyway, we should open up, like an agency, you know. We kinda complement each other, don’t you think?”
“How do you figure?”
“You’re the outside man, I’m the inside man.”
“You mean I’d do all the work and you’d sit around on your fat ass and collect the money. No thanks.”
“It wouldn’t be anything like that. One hand washes the other, Swann.”
“When was the last time you washed your hands, Goldblatt?”
He laughed, which only encouraged me to insult him even more. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you didn’t like me,” he whined.
“Nothing could be further from the truth. I like you; I just don’t trust you. And why would I want to partner up with someone I didn’t trust? So, if it wasn’t your money, whose was it?”
He shrugged. “That’s inconsequential.”
“Not to the people you’re going to owe it to.”
“That’s my problem.”
“Precisely. And that’s why I don’t think it would be a good idea if you and I teamed up. I don’t want your problems to become my problems. I’ve got enough of my own, thank you very much.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. You need me, Swann.”
“Really? Remind me what you bring to the table, other than your elbows.”
“I could be the rainmaker. You know, bring in the clients. I’m good that way. You wouldn’t believe the kind of connections I have. And listen, there are plenty of people who could use our services.”
“I’m still not clear on what ‘our’ services would be.”
“Whatever’s needed.”
“I don’t do whatever’s needed. In fact, I try to do the least of what’s needed. I think we share that philosophy and regardless of what you might think, two negatives do not necessarily make a positive.”
“This could be a beautiful thing, Swann.”
“I doubt it. Listen, why don’t you take your coat off? You’re making me nervous sitting there all bundled up. It’s like you’re expecting a blizzard to hit the inside of Starbucks.”
“Too much trouble. Hey, guess how many layers I’m wearing.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on. Guess.”
“Three.”
“Five,” he announced proudly, as he opened his coat and lifted each one, counting them as he did. “It’s the secret to staying warm, my friend. Layers.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“Hey, how about I get you a chocolate chip cookie and maybe one of those fancy latte things while you think about my proposition?”
I smiled. If you didn’t take Goldblatt seriously, and who could, he was damned amusing. “Do they have plain, old-fashioned coffee here?”
“Don’t know. I’ll check it out. Don’t go anywhere.”
He got up and moved, make that waddled, to the counter while I checked my phone for messages. Nothing. I never expect anything, but I check anyway. Once I got back into the business I realized I didn’t really need an office anymore. With one of those smartphones you carry your office with you. That and a pocket full of business cards and you’re all set. Of course, you do need somewhere to meet potential clients, assuming there are any, so that’s why I “borrow” an office from a friend, Ross Klavan, a rare book dealer I met on a case I worked a year or so ago. Like Goldblatt, he’s amusing, but in a very different way. He knows he’s funny, the smart kind of funny, whereas Goldblatt is funny only when he’s dead serious.
Goldblatt returned with my coffee, some fancy, high-caloric, foamy drink for himself and an assortment of cookies and Danishes.
“Everything looked good, so I got one of everything. Help yourself,” he said, plopping them on the table while daintily lowering himself into his chair. It suddenly occurred to me that for such a big man he was surprisingly graceful except, of course, when he ate. Over the years, he’s told me several stories about himself, none of which I necessarily believe, though I suppose in some alternate universe they could be true. That he was a boxer and had, in fact, gone a few rounds with Norman Mailer and Muhammad Ali, though not at the same time and before, I hoped, Ali came down with Parkinson’s and Mailer’s head got so big he was in danger of toppling over without being pushed. That he worked for the CIA and had been stationed in Southeast Asia. That he climbed Mount Everest, though he did allow that he never made it all the way to the top, having to turn back as a result of bad weather. That he was an Olympic quality skier, but fucked up his knee just before the trials. And so on. Over the years, I just listened and nodded because, in the end, who knows what the truth is and, even more important, who cares? It is what it is and that’s all that it is.
Goldblatt broke off a piece of the Danish like he was snapping a twig and jammed it into his mouth. “It looks like shit, probably sitting there half the day, but it don’t taste half-bad. Here,” he said, shoving the other half in my direction.
“No, thanks. I’ve had my cholesterol fix for the day.”
“So,” he said, pulling back the Danish. “You think it over?”
“It doesn’t take all that much thought, Goldblatt.”
“Then we’ll do it!”
“Not so fast. I just want to get things straight. You want us to be partners, but I’m still not sure what’s in it for me and what exactly being partners means. I can get clients on my own,” I lied. “I don’t need you.”
“Never bullshit a bullshitter, Swann. And don’t make me ask you to pony up your wallet to show me what’s inside. But the truth is, I offer more than just supplying us with clients. I can provide backup, if necessary.”
“What kind of backup are you talking about?”
“Information. Sources. Muscle.”
I laughed. “From where I sit, I see a lot of fat but very little muscle.”
“In my time I was known as something of a badass,” he said, puffing up his chest.
“Maybe you used to be a badass, but now you’re just an ass.”
“See, that’s another service I bring to the table. I can be the butt of your hostile, puerile, juvenile jokes, which takes the edge off. It’s better and much more convenient than going to the gym.”
I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted burnt. For three, four bucks a shot you’d think they could provide a smooth cup of joe.
“What about an office?”
“We don’t need no stinkin’ office. This is our office,” he said, swinging his arms out wide.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Starbucks, my friend. You can sit here for hours and no one bothers you. And I’ve got other places like this, all over town. It’s the twenty-first century. We’re mobile, my friend. We go where the clients are. So, whaddya say?”
I took a sip of my burnt coffee. I didn’t have to look at my bank account to know I needed something to give me a cash infusion, because I certainly didn’t want to go back to the cable company, or find myself another real job. Beside
s, what harm could there be partnering up with Goldblatt? It wouldn’t be anything official. It wasn’t like we were signing papers, or anything. I’d use him. He’d use me. Fair play, we both came to see.
“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?” he said, his face widening with a smile.
“‘I do perceive here a dividing duty.’”
“Huh?”
“Shakespeare.”
“Whatever. So, you are thinking about it, right?”
“Yeah. God help me, I am.”
“You won’t regret it, Swann.”
“I already do.”
He reached out his hand. “So, let’s shake on it.”
“Do we have to?”
“Not if you don’t want to, partner.”
But I did. I don’t know why, I just did it. I closed my eyes and shook his sticky, stubby-fingered hand.
“This is great. By tomorrow, I’ll have some work for us. You’ll see.”
“Yeah, sure. But there’s one more thing before I leave you alone with your pastry.”
“What’s that?”
“You owe me a hundred and fifty bucks for last night.”
“Oh, yeah.” He took out his wallet and carefully counted out some bills and handed them to me.
“You’re a little short here, Goldblatt. It’s only seventy-five.”
“We’re partners now, Swann. Everything’s fifty-fifty, so that’s all I owe you. The other half is mine.”
I could already see this was going to be a bumpy ride.
Back to TOC
Here is a preview of Thomas Pluck’s Bad Boy Boogie…
Chapter 1
When Jay Desmarteaux walked out the gates of Rahway Prison, the sun hit his face like air on a fresh wound. The breeze smelled different, felt charged, electric. A rawboned middleweight, he was broad at the shoulders and hips, as if God had attempted to halt his growth and he’d thickened out of spite.
“Go on,” the guard said. Jay couldn’t remember his name, but he was all right, as far as COs went. “Ride’s waiting for you at the curb.”
Jay squinted at the road. The only vehicle waiting in the early summer heat was a black Suburban parked at the yellow curb. The wind played with his shock of black hair. He had spent twenty-five years as a monk locked inside a dank Shaolin temple dedicated to violence and human predation while the men who put him there lived free from fear.
Men who needed killing.
Mama Angeline raised him to understand that some folks just needed killing. There was nothing you could do for them.
And she’d been right.
He’d met many such people, both in prison and the real world. He didn’t make a habit of giving them what they needed. There were too many of them.
He hadn’t been all that surprised when he’d been unable to convince either the police or the jury to agree. The friends he’d saved from the rotten son of a bitch’s rape and torment had either been too afraid to speak the truth, threatened out of doing so, or in one case, had twisted things around to ensure Jay’s imprisonment.
But that didn’t change the fact that Joey Bello had needed killing.
Jay had been vocal about it, before he had expectations of ever walking free. The sentence, delivered a month past his sixteenth birthday, had been life without parole. Then after twenty years behind bars, thinking it was his forever-home, the Supreme Court ruled that sentencing a juvenile to LWOP was cruel and unusual punishment.
He wasted no time finding a jailhouse lawyer, and after years of appeals, they got the attention of a bleeding heart named Martins, who did pro bono work for lost causes such as Jay’s. There’d been pushback, from law enforcement and the Bello family; Jay’s case got bounced from court to court as defense and prosecution appealed, until a circuit judge ruled that despite the infamy of his crime, Jay had served more time than any other juvenile in the state, and sentenced him to time served.
After that it was all paperwork, according to Martins. They put him in reentry classes, but Jay had been one step ahead: after he’d beaten the rage out of his young hands in the yard or in the boxing ring, he’d gotten his GED and taken every mechanic and repair course the prison offered. Five years back, the governor had even given him a special award for having more certifications than anyone in the country, free or imprisoned. The man’s rubbery smile had been fake as plastic fishing worms, but he’d used Jay’s example to get the prison a new auto shop, built by one of his cronies. The old shitbird warden, unfazed by Jay’s newfound penitence, made life hell for him until the day he retired, but the inmates and even some of the guards gave him respect.
He’d get none of that outside. The best he could hope to be was to be anonymous, which would be difficult given the infamy of his crime.
All he could do was live well. Okie, his old con mentor, always said that was the best revenge.
Jay felt otherwise.
The air electrified his lungs. He left the guard without a word and pointed his brogans toward the pickup area, following a chain fence topped with a Slinky of razor wire toward the row of waiting cars. Okie had told him it was bad luck to look back on freedom day, so Jay didn’t even peek over his shoulder once at the dirty brick castle he had called home since his eighteenth year.
He flipped it the finger.
Two men got out of the black Suburban wearing jeans and black T-shirts. They had the scoured faces of men who’d endured the desert sun. Black fanny packs at their belts. They smelled like cop.
“Martins sent us,” the driver said, and held out an envelope.
Jay opened it. Greyhound ticket, Newark to New Orleans.
The passenger, a big man with a brush cut, opened the rear door for him.
Jay obeyed out of habit, then cursed himself, holding his duffel bag possessively in his lap. He’d have to get used to doing things his own way. No one out here could put black marks in his jacket, or take away his privileges. Get him thrown in Ad Seg, alone with four green walls until he punched the bricks to feel anything other than bugshit crazy.
Brush Cut got in beside him. The truck smelled of mint chewing gum and new leather. The air conditioning felt like heaven.
“First class chauffeur service,” the driver said. “Only the best.”
The truck rumbled toward the highway.
That morning two guards had taken Jay to administrative segregation with the punks, psychos, and informers, where the reentry counselor told him his release date had been moved up, citing good behavior. Jay found that hard to believe, but hadn’t argued. The little man rushed through his spiel and gave him a duffel containing safe sex pamphlets, a pack of condoms, a cheap fleece hoodie, and a spare pair of socks and underwear. Then the bursar gave him a sizable roll of twenties. His gate money, minus fees.
“We took the liberty of purchasing you a bus ticket to New Orleans,” the social worker said. “Martins said that’s where your family’s from.”
Jay hadn’t spoken to Mama Angeline or Papa Andre for twenty years. Their silence had burrowed inside him, a cold creature with sharp claws that squirmed its way behind his belly. Late at night, ravaged by hope, he would dream they were all back at the fishing camp tipping beers and swatting mosquitos, and the thing inside would twitch and gnaw.
Jay asked for a phone call, and the social worker said there’d be payphones at the bus station. Jay told him to give his radio and paperbacks to his celly, a Dominican who was in for installing secret compartments in dealers’ rides, but the man didn’t even look up from his papers while the guard escorted Jay out, straight to the gates.
The truck’s door locks snapped shut.
A familiar paranoia cinched a ring around Jay’s abdomen. He had been under the complete control of others for most of his life. He’d walked a tightrope between an alpha dog’s bravado and a coyote’s fine-tuned sense of danger, and his hackles rose as they trucked toward Newark Penn Station.
An unbroken stretch of strip malls, diners, and motels scrolled by. Wo
rking-class beaters jockeyed with sleek black sedans. Grimy white trucks and semi-trailers towing corrugated shipping containers herded toward the port. The sheer constant activity set him on edge. Prison was boring. The routine kept things sane, but also drove you mad. At least one riot during Jay’s tenure, started because one wild young con had been bored out of his skull and wanted to see what would happen if he stirred things up.
Jay held loose but dead still. Staying wound up like a spring would kill you; Okie had taught him to float, like when he was in the ring. No need for footwork until the opponent made their move.
The two men didn’t make a move, and they weren’t much for talk, either. The truck got caught in the molasses of Jersey traffic once they reached Newark.
“I want to talk to Martins,” Jay said. “He said he’d be here.”
“He’s in court,” the driver said. “Saving some other psycho killer from doing his time.”
Jay had worked on modern vehicles; he knew with the child-safe lock, the rear handles wouldn’t work. He’d have to elbow Brush Cut in his cinder block of a face and then heave himself up front, claw the driver’s eyes and go for the door handle. He played it over in his mind.
“Don’t you worry,” Driver said. “You’re going home. Real home. Louisiana. An old friend’s making sure of it.”
Jay couldn’t think of many friends. There was Tony, who owned an auto shop near their hometown. He’d suggested Jay take the mechanic certifications, and offered him a job if he ever got out. They hadn’t spoken since the last court case. Once Jay’s release became a possibility, Tony never seemed to answer the phone.
Cheetah, his celly from juvenile, was supposed to be running a club for the Italians in Newark somewhere according to the grapevine. He sent a package once a year around Christmas and a check to keep Jay’s commissary account flush. He wasn’t much for letters, and Jay didn’t have his number.
And his family, they’d been gone since his conviction. Mama had written a few times. Sent pralines, Jay’s favorite. When her letters dried up, Jay had been high on the former warden’s enemies list, so he assumed they’d been confiscated. But when the new warden came in, no letters appeared, old or new, and the letters Jay sent continued to be returned. His folks had always been on the move, so that didn’t mean anything. He hoped.