Dancing, other than slow dancing, makes absolutely no sense to me. I don’t understand the enjoyment anyone could get from standing in one place and wildly gyrating. If it’s such a blast, do these people turn on the radio when they’re alone at home and start doing contortions? I don’t think so.
So if they only do it in public, it must be because they’re being watched by other people. They clearly think they look good doing it. They don’t. If rooms like this were ringed with mirrors, 95 percent of all dancing would be eliminated.
This kind of dancing also violates my space-alien principle. I judge things by the measure of whether aliens, landing on earth for the first time, would observe something and deem it stupid. And unless the aliens were from the Planet Bozo, dancing would land squarely in the “stupid” category.
But Laurie likes to dance, so I cave in about once every four songs. I do this because I’m a terrific guy, and because I think on some level that it will increase my chances of having sex when we get home. Sex would also look stupid to aliens, but who cares what they think? They’re aliens, are we going to let them run our lives?
Sitting at our table are Vince Sanders, Willie and Sondra Miller, Pete Stanton and his wife, Donna, and Edna Silver. Vince, Pete, and Willie are my three best friends in the world, with the notable exceptions of Laurie and Tara, my golden retriever.
Pete is a lieutenant on the Paterson, New Jersey, police force, which is where I grew up and where Laurie and I live. Willie is a former client and my partner in the Tara Foundation, a dog-rescue operation that we run.
Edna is what I used to call my secretary, but she now refers to herself as my administrative assistant. She’s in her sixties, though she’d never admit it, and has occasionally talked of retirement. Since she doesn’t do any actual work, I’ve got a hunch that her retirement isn’t imminent.
“You going to write this up for tomorrow?” I ask Vince, the editor of the local newspaper. I’m sure Kevin would like it, but he’d never ask Vince, who can be rather disagreeable approximately 100 percent of the time.
“This wedding? Only if somebody gets murdered on the dance floor.”
As the evening is nearing an end, Kevin comes over and says, “I just want to thank you again for being my best man.”
“It was an honor. And I thought I handled the whole ring thing flawlessly.”
He smiles. “Yes, you did.”
“So, are you guys going to stay in your house, or move?” Kevin has a small house in Fair Lawn, where they have been living.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he says. “We’re going to move to Bangladesh.”
I do a double take. “Bangladesh? Is there a Bangladesh, New Jersey?”
“No, I’m talking about the real Bangladesh. Andy, I should have told you this earlier, but Kelly and I are leaving the country. She’s going to practice medicine where people really need her, and I’m going to offer whatever services I can.”
I’m having trouble getting this to compute. “Bangladesh?”
He nods. “Bangladesh.”
“You know how hot it is there? You can throw a Wiffle ball and hit the sun. The cement sweats.”
“I know.”
It’s an amazingly selfless thing that they’re doing, and since it doesn’t seem like I can talk him out of it, I might as well try being gracious. “That’s incredible, Kevin. Really remarkable.”
“Thanks for understanding,” he says.
“Really, I totally admire it, but aren’t there other, closer Deshes that you could go to? Maybe a Desh with plumbing?”
“We’ve researched it pretty well,” he says. “And since we haven’t taken on a client in six months…”
“We’ll be okay.” I smile. “Edna will just pick up the slack.”
“If you need help, you should bring Eddie Lynch in. I think he’s left already, or I would introduce you.”
“I met him. He’s a real room brightener. When are you leaving?”
“A week from Wednesday.”
“So this is the last time I’m going to see you?”
He nods. “You want to hug good-bye?”
I smile, because Kevin knows I’m not a big fan of guy-hugs. “No, but Laurie will want to.”
“Good,” he says. “She was my first choice anyway.”
On the way home I tell Laurie about Kevin’s decision. “I know,” she says. “I think it’s wonderful.”
“He told you tonight?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No… maybe two months ago. He asked me not to tell you.”
“I can’t believe he told you before me,” I say.
“He told pretty much everybody before you,” she says. “I think he was afraid you’d be disappointed in him.”
This is annoying me no end. “For devoting his life to helping people? I’d be disappointed with that?”
“I’m not sure I’d put it that way,” she says.
“How would you put it?”
She thinks for a few moments, then smiles. “I guess I would put it that way.”
As we get near the George Washington Bridge, I get off the Palisades Interstate Parkway and take city streets to Route 4. Like everybody else who lives in northern New Jersey, I wear my knowledge of back streets and shortcuts in the area near the bridge as a badge of honor.
Suckers take highways.
We’re on Lemoyne Avenue in Fort Lee when we see flashing lights from at least five police cars down a side street.
“I wonder what that’s about,” says Laurie. As an ex-cop, I think she’d like to help out in whatever is going down. As a non-ex-cop, I want to get home and go to bed.
My point of view changes when I see that there are three animal control trucks intermingled with the police cars. As a certified animal lunatic, I want to know what could provoke such a massive government response.
“Let’s check this out,” I say.
Having seen the animal control trucks, Laurie knows exactly why I’m interested. “Why, you think a bunch of Chihuahuas might have broken into a PetSmart?”
The incident must have just begun, because the police have not yet set up a perimeter. Laurie and I get out of the car and walk right into the middle of it. She recognizes one of the cops and asks what’s going on.
He shrugs. “Beats me. A dog got loose, and the alert went out for all cars in the area. You’d think it was Osama bin Laden.”
At least fifteen people, mostly cops and the rest animal control officers, have cornered a German shepherd whose back is literally against the wall of a building. He is an absolutely beautiful dog, well built and powerful, with two of the coolest ears I’ve ever seen.
Two of the officers are pointing guns at him. They are strange-looking weapons, and I assume they’re some kind of stun guns. Even in his cornered position, the dog does not seem afraid, or even hostile. In fact, he almost looks bored.
I certainly don’t want to see this dog hurt, so I yell, “Relax, everyone! Calm down! No reason to hurt that dog!”
One of the officers says, “Who the hell is that? Get him out of here.”
I take out my cell phone and point it in the general direction of the dog and the officers surrounding him. “I’m videotaping this,” I say. “Anything happens to that dog, it’s going viral.”
Of course, I barely know how to use the cell phone, and I can’t imagine it has video capabilities, but it’s dark out, and the officers would have no way of knowing that.
This time the officer is more insistent. “Get him out of here.”
Two officers move toward me, including the one Laurie knows. “That dog is not going to hurt anyone,” Laurie says. Then she yells out to the others, “Just put a damn leash on him. Give one to me and I’ll do it.”
As I’m being led away, one of the animal control officers approaches the dog with a leash, and the dog calmly lets him slip it around his neck. The officer then leads the docile dog away toward an animal control van.
; When I get to the car I look back and see Laurie talking to some of the officers. Having been in the Paterson Police Department for a number of years, she pretty much knows everybody.
When she finally joins me at the car, I ask, “What was that about?”
She shrugs. “Nobody seems to know, but it was made very clear that the dog was not to get away.”
We get in the car. “I don’t see how Kevin could leave this kind of excitement. You don’t see drama like this in Bangladesh.”
JERRY HARRIS HAD ALWAYS TAKEN PRIDE IN HIS WORK. Since that work usually consisted of theft and murder, he understood that most people would have trouble understanding the gratification he felt when a job was accomplished smoothly.
But Jerry realized that sometimes events beyond his control got in the way, and that’s what had just happened. First there was that dog, and then that other lunatic who attacked him. It seemed like they had been waiting to make their move, though he had no idea who they were or why they were there.
So when it was time to report back to his employer exactly what had transpired, he felt some regret that he couldn’t claim total success. It wasn’t a complete failure, the target was effectively eliminated. But the point of the operation, securing the envelope, simply did not happen.
Jerry sat in his car at three in the morning behind a strip mall in Hackensack, the meeting place that had been designated last week, when he had been hired. At that time he had been given one hundred thousand dollars, in cash, with the promise of another hundred to follow the successful completion of the job.
The second hundred, Jerry understood, would now be the subject of a negotiation.
A Lexus pulled up alongside him, and his employer got out. It irked Jerry that he did not even know the man’s name, or what his interest was in all of this.
Jerry had mentally nicknamed him Smooth, since he conveyed a calm, unruffled demeanor. He wore expensive clothes and jewelry, with a watch that probably cost more than Jerry’s car. “Smooth” was obviously used to getting what he wanted, but that wasn’t going to happen this time.
It might be unpleasant, but Jerry would handle it. He’d handled a lot tougher situations before.
Smooth entered the car and sat in the passenger seat without saying a word. His real name was Marvin Emerson, called M by the few people who knew him well. Not even Marvin himself really remembered if that started because it was his first initial, or the sound at the beginning of “Em-erson”. In any event, he had never given his name or nickname to Jerry, and saw no reason to do so now.
“Hey, how ya doin’?” said Jerry.
“Please report on the evening’s events.”
“Well, we had a bit of a problem. It’s going to sound nuts, but right after the guy gave me the envelope, I put a bullet in him, but then this dog comes out of nowhere and grabs the envelope and runs off with it.”
“A dog…,” M said. It was a way to prompt Jerry to finish the story, although M already knew everything that happened. He’d had a person in place, hidden across the street, who saw the entire thing.
“Yeah, and then some guy comes charging at me as I was trying to shoot the dog. He grabbed the gun, and I got the hell out of there.” Jerry decided to leave out the part about getting kneed in the groin; it was humiliating and would cast him in a bad light.
“That’s quite a story,” M said. “Did you know this man?”
Jerry shakes his head. “Never saw him before. But the guy who gave me the envelope won’t ever bother you again.”
“The envelope is what was important. I thought I conveyed that to you.”
“Hey come on, I did the best I could. How could I know that dog would do that? For all I know, you set it up.”
“You’ll get the remainder of the money when I get the envelope,” M said.
Jerry was now annoyed. “That’s bullshit. How the hell am I going to get the envelope now? I don’t know where the damn dog went. You tell me where it is, and I’ll go get it.”
By now M was convinced that Jerry was telling the truth—that he really had no more knowledge of the dog or the other man than he said.
So he reached into his pocket, and in one remarkably swift motion took out a gun and shot Jerry in the right temple.
It didn’t give him pleasure, or make him feel better. Jerry was a loose end that had to be removed, no more, no less. But killing him did not solve M’s problem; only finding the envelope would do that.
M got out of the car and signaled across the street to two men who would come over and do the cleanup, getting rid of the body and car so that they would never be found.
M then got into his own car and drove away, already focusing on the next step, which had to be getting his hands on that dog, and the guy who owned it.
FOR THE LAST THREE WEEKS, I HAVE BEEN LIVING A NIGHTMARE.
Charlie’s, the greatest sports bar in the history of the civilized world, has been undergoing renovations. They chose to do it now because it’s July, and except for baseball there isn’t much going on in the sports world. Apparently they ignored the fact that in the heat of summer there is plenty going on in the beer world.
Vince, Pete, and I generally spend at least three evenings a week at Charlie’s. It used to be five, until Laurie moved back here from Wisconsin, where she briefly lived for a miserable year. It’s not that she objects to my being out with my friends; it’s just that I’d rather spend time with her than them. Of course, I would never tell them that.
Sports, lubricated by beer, is the glue that holds us together. But I sometimes wonder if they would be my friends, if I would have any male friends, without sports. It represents at least 70 percent of what we talk about.
My attitude toward sports has evolved as I’ve grown older. For years I wanted to play professionally, though down deep I knew that was never going to be a realistic possibility. Then I got to the point where I lived vicariously through modern athletes, and that was reasonably satisfying.
Now, approaching forty and fading fast, I think I’m embarking on a new phase. I’m going to start living vicariously through someone who is already living vicariously through an athlete. It should be far less exhausting. All I have to do is find someone to fill the role; I think this is why men have sons.
The renovation is scheduled to last for six weeks, although I have no idea why they would be doing it at all. Charlie’s is perfect, and in my experience perfection is generally a tough thing to improve upon.
So we have been spending our time at The Sports Shack, an upscale restaurant-bar located on Route 4 in Teaneck. It has a ski-lodge-impersonation motif, and it operates under the assumption that if you have enough TVs, and a gimmicky enough decor, everything else will take care of itself. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The hamburgers aren’t thick enough, the french fries aren’t crisp enough, and unless you tell them otherwise every single time, they serve the beer in a glass. Clusters of TVs sometimes all show the same baseball game, when there are plenty of others to choose from, and the other night one of the TVs was tuned to a Best of the X Games retrospective.
Best of the X Games? Now, there’s a show that should run all of ten seconds. In any event, what is it doing in a sports bar? What is happening to the country I love?
But here we sit, drinking our beer, eating our food, and watching our games, thereby trying to restore a sense of order out of this chaos.
Tonight Pete is late in arriving, and Vince is in a bad mood because the Mets are losing. He would also be in a bad mood if the Mets were winning, or if they were not playing, or if there were no such thing as the Mets.
He stares in the direction of the bar. “Do you see that?” he asks, then shakes his head. “Unbelievable.”
I look over there but don’t see anything that would be considered difficult to believe. “What are you talking about?”
“That guy is in a three-piece suit. With a tie.”
“So?”
“So?” h
e sneers. “So it’s supposed to be a sports bar. What’s next, flowers on the tables? That smelly stuff in a pot?”
“You mean potpourri?”
He looks at me like a bug he found in his soup. “Yes, Mr. Foo-Foo. That’s exactly what I mean.”
Pete arrives, and not a moment too soon. Vince is harder to handle one-on-one than LeBron James. Pete doesn’t say hello; for some reason greetings have never been a part of the relationship among the three of us. We don’t say good-bye, either. Or How was your day?
“I need a favor” is the first thing Pete says to me.
“Dream on,” I say, though we both know that I will do whatever he asks. Since I am a criminal defense attorney, Pete’s job as a police lieutenant makes him a valuable source of information for me, and I call upon him all the time. He grumbles, but he always comes through.
Even if that weren’t the case, I would do whatever Pete needs. Doing favors fits squarely within our definition of friendship, and to refuse one would be highly unusual. But pretending to resist is a necessary part of the process.
“Actually, I’m doing you a favor,” he says. “I’ve got you a client.”
“Just what I need,” I say. I am independently wealthy, a result of inheritance and a few major victorious cases. Since hard work in general, and hard legal work in particular, is not my idea of a good time, I rarely take on new clients.
“You read about the murder in Edgewater last night?” Pete asks.
“Was it on the sports page?”
Vince chimes in with “You’re an asshole.” I can’t decide if he says that because it was on the front page of his newspaper and he’s annoyed that I didn’t see it, or because he just thinks I’m an asshole and thought this was a good time to remind me. Probably both.
“I read about it,” I say.
“The guy they arrested for it is Billy Zimmerman. We graduated from the academy together, and we were even partners for a while.”
“An ex-cop?” I ask, and immediately regret the question.
“Wow, you figured that out all by yourself?” Pete asks. “Just from what I said about him going to the academy and being my partner? You are really sharp.”
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