Bronx Noir

by S. J. Rozan

  The priest had his back to me. The services were indeed over. He was near the altar, actually toward that providential chapel, and didn’t see the new arrival trying to make his own luck. I slipped down the far aisle, and snuck over to the statue of St. Nicholas at the back. That key to the sanctuary, to the vestment drawers, was my chance. That drawer was hiding close to $25,000.

  In the dark at the rear of the church, I was invisible. I felt quickly around the statue’s base, and located the nib of the key. It barely protruded; Jimmy had done a good quick job of shoving it under there. I needed to tilt the statue to get to it, but it was a little too highly placed for me to do it with ease from where I stood. But I had little time, and couldn’t draw attention to myself by searching for a bench. Ah, but there, by the vestibule door, a little table with the parish bulletins. I was able to lift it, and position it near St. Nicholas. I didn’t see the priest, that Father Farrell, who must still be getting ready to close for the night. I managed to get myself atop the table, though I scattered a couple of bulletins, which floated down to the aisle. They sounded like a rush of leaves to me, but they were, I hoped, still too faint to be heard up by that chapel.

  Standing on the table top, I pushed the head of the statue toward the wall. It was heavy, heavier than I had thought. I didn’t know how I’d get that key from the bottom without making noise. Jimmy and I hadn’t thought of that back then on that fatal night. We hadn’t fully thought things through, as usual with the two of us, especially when we were in our cups, as we had been since I’d returned the day before to see him. But now I was sober. Or at least not drinking or using. And I needed that key. And that money. And to leave.

  I tested the statue’s angle of repose, and it stayed leaning against the wall. I hopped off the table, exhaling an unfortunate oomph as I hit the hard floor. I was no longer young. But I heard no sounds of alarm. The light was almost nothing here, though my eyes had adjusted. I reached under the tilt of the statue’s base and found the key, scooping it back and pocketing it. I wanted to leave the statue where it was and get out fast, but that would be foolhardy in the extreme, as I’d forgotten gloves and my prints were all over the patron saint of this benighted parish. I crept back up onto the table, repositioned the statue, and rubbed it over with my shirt sleeve, hoping I’d erased everything I touched. I was careful descending from the table this time, managed to move it back to its place by the door and retrieve the fallen bulletins. I placed them back on top, in no particular order of language, the Babel of parish news.

  I still saw no one, and apparently no one had seen me. I’d been planning this moment for so long—pictured myself à la Shawshank on a Mexican beach whiling away my twilight years.

  I crept toward the chancel. I hadn’t heard the door shut, but the priest must have gone home, perhaps through the sanctuary door that connected to the rectory. I hoped the lock hadn’t been changed—another point we’d never considered—and then that purloined key fit easily in the slot. As I turned it, the door swung open and the lights went on ablaze.

  I squinted. Before me was Father Farrell. And Bella, a look of menacing satisfaction on her face.

  In my shock, all I could utter was a stupefled, “What are you doing here?”

  “We could ask the same of you,” Bella said. “Father Farrell, this is my brother Davey, long lost and now returned. Father Farrell’s fairly new here, Davey, and probably would have noticed you at mass earlier. Luckily, I gave him a call as to what you were probably up to, and my hunch proved, as you can see, correct.”

  I started to turn.

  “And don’t try leaving. The police are on the way.”

  “My money.”

  “Oh, I know why you’re here. But even if you’d managed to get in, you wouldn’t have found it. Do you think you were the only one who knew about that trick drawer, you and Jimmy? You think you were the only altar boys, and only altar boys knew about that hiding spot that the priests had nailed shut? You think altar boys are sworn to a vow of silence? You think we schoolgirls knew nothing about your filthy ways? Hah. You didn’t live in a vacuum, Davey, though for all you noticed about what was going on around you, you could have. Just because you didn’t talk to anyone didn’t mean people didn’t talk about you, or about the church, or about anything that went on there. Your secrets. Brother. You thought you’d had it over everyone, didn’t you?”

  “You said the money hadn’t been found.”

  “So I did. So I lied. So, in your words, ‘sue me.’ We found it soon after you were sent away. I told the cops where they might look, and your little stash was history.”

  “So you planned it. All afternoon. Pretending to be nice to me.”

  “You never did see the obvious, Davey. Always too smart for everyone. You think Danny wouldn’t talk? You think Ma was feebleminded by your Prodigal Son returns act? You think no one but you knew the score? Too many books and not enough sense. You thought you kept things close to you, but you were like a bad movie. You always wanted the easy way out.”

  “That was my money.”

  “Never. Father, do you hear this?” The priest was silent, uncomfortable, a bit ashamed, I felt, to be witness to a sister selling out her brother, her only surviving brother just returned from years away, unseen, unloved. Father Farrell’s head tilted; the sound of sirens grew closer.

  “In my own home. You betrayed me.”

  “It was never your home, Davey. You said that yourself. You couldn’t wait to leave. Your home is far away now, and has been for a long while. You took us for fools. Now you can go and stew on it once again, and figure out where you went wrong.”

  I shook my head at her. I would not let her win. The police arrived and I submitted to the handcuffs as if I were a Pentecostal penitent in the arms of rebirth. I looked away from Bella, and at the priest. Maybe I’d seen the light, or at least I could make do with what I had. “I will espouse you the right of justice,” I told him, keeping my eyes on his horrifled face as the cops led me out to the car. “I open myself to a God who loves me.”

  NUMBERS UP

  BY MILES MARSHALL LEWIS

  Baychester

  Kingston believed he wasn’t a regular at Golden Lady, seated at the bar sipping a plastic cup of whiskey. Silky served his Scotch and amaretto without asking only because she had a great memory like most bartenders, he thought. Kingston considered the cup in his hand and reminisced over the club serving bottles of beer and glasses of mixed drinks years back, before some brawls with smashed Coronas forced a policy change. He also recalled gonzo tricks Silky used to perform with Heinekens in her dancing days, way before her transition to barkeep. Kingston raised his Godfather to Lacey, onstage sliding down a silver pole at the center of her baby-oiled, spread-eagle legs, eyeing him from upside down. Lacey was just the thing to take Kingston’s mind off the hundreds he’d lost earlier at Yonkers Raceway, the robbery of his house days ago, and other recent troubles.

  Disorienting strobes bathed Lacey and two other bodacious young women pacing the stage, gyrating hips and stripping under the synthesized pulse of Ciara’s “Oh.” Kingston didn’t consider himself a regular but Lacey’s partners knew from experience not to bother trying to entice money out of the black guy in the stingy-brim fedora. Lacey sauntered over to the head of the crowded bar, bent down, and flashed her fleshy ass just for Kingston, flexing the muscles of each cheek to the beat. Kingston shifted her garish yellow lace garter belt with a finger to place one, two, three paper-cut-crisp twenty-dollar bills between her thigh and the elastic band. Lacey undulated her thick behind in ecstatic waves of motion.

  Come 2 o’clock, Golden Lady’s neon sign—a naked blonde lounging in a martini glass—quickly faded into the distance. Kingston and Lacey sat in his onyx Buick zooming up the Bruckner Expressway and out of Hunts Point. Full-blast cool air circulated new-car smell throughout the ride. Kingston’s radio, per usual, tuned in to CD101.9: “I’m in the Mood for Love,” King Pleasure. Plastic jewel cases of smo
oth jazz CDs cluttered the floor and butter-leather backseats. En route to Baychester Diner, Lacey peered into the illuminated sun visor applying foundation, lipstick, and eyeliner, bitching about the shady tactics Butterfly and Sunflower used to dominate lap dances all summer long. Kingston’s characteristic silence was so typical that Lacey never considered that her sugar daddy might be disturbed.

  The all-night Baychester Diner harbored the same two wisecracking women in kempt hairweaves found at the counter every weekend past midnight. Each sported something slightly outré signaling her street profession. One wore a bright Wonder Woman bodice with deep cleavage on display, the other scarlet fishnets with a spiked leather dominatrix collar. Both brandished five-inch stilettos. At the far corner banquette a young couple argued in Creole patois.

  “Si ou pa vlé bébé-an, ale vous an,” hissed the pregnant teen in the pink Von Dutch cap.

  Kingston and Lacey found an isolated booth and ordered breakfast from a homely waitress. Rain broke the August humidity, slicking the asphalt of Boston Road, while Kingston explained all about the Hernández brothers pushing their numbers turf further down Washington Heights into Harlem, their violent efforts to force him out, and his contingency flight plan to New Orleans.

  “King. You gonna up and leave just like that?” Lacey asked. She craved a Newport.

  “They ain’t runnin’ me out,” he bluffed. “I done made plenty these past fifteen years. I don’t mind it. Business ain’t like it used to be nohow. Playin’ the numbers is old school, kiddo. More white folks is movin’ into Harlem now and they don’t know nothin’ about me. They play Lotto.”

  Lacey laughed.

  “You never talked about retiring to New Orleans before.” Not to me, she thought.

  “I done told you ’bout the house. We ain’t never been together, but it’s down there. Since 2000. My cousin look after it, she over in Baton Rouge.”

  “When are you talking about going?”

  “I ain’t right decided yet. Could be two weeks.”

  “Two weeks? That’s enough time for you to wrap up everything?”

  “We gon’ see.”

  Kingston held the door for Lacey and a trucker hand-in-hand with the collared mistress from the counter. Outside all four smelled a faint aroma of barbecue sauce wafting from the local KFC. The illicit couple commiserated on the corner and crossed Baychester Avenue, stilettos clicking on concrete, to a motel with three-hour rates.

  Kingston pulled his sedan out of the lot and down Boston Road blaring “This Masquerade.” By the song’s end he’d parked again, less than a mile away at Boston Secor Houses. Lacey grabbed his humidor from the glove compartment.

  On the red leather sofa Kingston silently flipped stations searching for baseball scores and fiddled with his cigar while Lacey showered. His sky-blue fedora rested on the adjacent pillow, revealing the receding hairline of his freshly cut Caesar specked with gray. He clicked off her TV and leaned over to untie his Stacy Adams, tightening abdominal muscles buried underneath a stout stomach. His growing belly caused him to chuckle at his own jealousy, wondering what sort of younger man her own age a sexy girl like Lacey would attract once he was gone. Lacey would adapt easily, Kingston imagined. She was all of twenty-two. Life adjustments would come harder to Kingston. Comfortably set in his ways, he never vacationed away from his St. Martin time-share, never ate anything outside of the standard ten dishes he either bought from takeout restaurants or Gussy cooked for him, never deviated from his usual Yankees game, jazz concert, or horse race for recreation. Deciding to uproot his life from 1839 Bruner Avenue to the bayou sprang as much from Kingston’s recent unidentified angst as the threats from Héctor and Eddie Hernández. Kingston finally took a lighter to his cigar.

  “One of us has too much clothes on,” Lacey said.

  She left her cream silk robe untied at the waist, smoking her own tobacco of choice. Tracey Lott bore only fraternaltwin resemblance to her onstage character, always fragrantly oiled, primped, oversexed. Nearly naked again for the second time tonight—clean, shea-butter-exfoliate scrubbed, and nail-polished in her own apartment now—Tracey looked softer, younger.

  Kingston called her Tracey at times, Lacey most often, but it didn’t bother her. The last time they saw one another Lacey had dropped X before his unexpected arrival at Golden Lady and rambled all sorts of private personal information afterwards, about her Jehovah’s Witness upbringing, her strict mother (the neighborhood crossing guard), her young cousin’s molestation, her absent dad, and her first fuck at fourteen. Maybe too much for Kingston, she thought.

  Lacey flicked cigarette ash into a seashell and sat in Kingston’s lap. The leather sofa farted. As she unbuttoned his shirt both their thoughts clouded with notions of tonight maybe being their last tête-à-tête.

  Kingston and Lacey were both more passive than active participants in their own lives, mirrors of each other in that sense. Kingston had inherited the mantle of running numbers from his late father, working under his wing after a brief enlistment in the Gulf War. His life’s work was more due to his own passivity than the passion for the numbers game that his father had held close. Kingston loved Gussy in his way but their union was mainly convenient. She was his Girl Friday on the job. Their relationship saved Kingston the trouble of seeking a woman attracted to his limited social graces who could also be trusted and accepting of his illegal trade. Money only goes so far. Despite over half a million squared away from almost two decades of business, Lacey, an exotic dancer from the projects, was the most ideal mistress he found himself able to draw.

  Lacey, too, let her life dictate its own direction, leading from a bust-up with her mother at seventeen to accepting dubious advice from her stalker ex-bf Tré-Sean to sell nude photos to websites and dance at Hunts Point holes like Al’s Mr. Wedge and Golden Lady. The night a zooted pair of homeboys roughly snatched off her thong and dashed out the club with their booty nine months ago, she was comforted by Kingston, a familiar, benevolent customer, and their affair began.

  Stripping his shirt, standing and leading him to her bedroom, she felt powerless to trip up the chain of events sweeping Kingston out of her life. Lacey thought sex might solve the problem, her familiar recourse. Their cigarette and cigar sat burning away in an Orchard Beach conch, plumes of smoke dancing an acrobatic tango.

  Kingston returned to 1839 Bruner Avenue in the early morning to discover the SUV stolen.

  Gussy would find the charred BMW of their steady bettor Wallace parked outside Fordham Hill Apartments on her nighttime jog to the Harlem River, stripped and torched to black cinders save for the pristine license plate: CRM-114.

  Like aging hippies cooking organic groceries in a kitchen full of all-Hendrix-all-the-time, Gussy and Kingston were throwback ’70s soul babies. This wasn’t immediately obvious but there were telltale signs: Gussy’s leonine Afro and multitudinous silver bracelets, Kingston’s allegiance to jazz musicians like George Benson and Grover Washington, Jr., who were on the rise when he first started buying vinyl.

  The couple met in Kuwait and were instantly simpatico. For Kingston the army was brief, another way to synchronize his life with that of his father, who served in WWII. Buckshot shrapnel lodged near his heart resulted in a quick honorable discharge. For Gussy the army was a career move lasting five years longer than the Persian Gulf strike. With her discharge nine years behind her, former Private Augusta Wilson still hit the shooting range a few times a year and took weekly power runs through Fordham with Parliament on her headphones.

  On Monday, Kingston and Gussy put in a normal day at the spot. The sparse bodega Kingston rented on Amsterdam was locally understood as a storefront for his operation. Starting shortly after 12 o’clock, Harlemites stopped by with their three-digit numbers on betting slips, handing them off (with their cash) to Hillside at the front counter. Some old-timers sat for a spell with the Daily News, picking out items to talk shit about: the Maori-inspired tattoo covering Mike Tyson’s face; Michael Jacks
on’s expatriation to Bahrain. Both Kingston and Gussy fielded calls in the large back office, jotting down more phoned-in numbers. (Lacey played Kingston’s DAV-485 license plate in a box combination: 485, 548, 854, etc.) All day Kingston’s two runners—Pookie and Elliott—returned from the backs of bars, bodegas, barbershops, beauty parlors, billiard halls, and street corners throughout the Bronx and Harlem, dropping off their books of bets. Gussy tallied the incoming cash on an old adding machine till her index finger was sore, at which point she’d use the end of her pencil. From noon to 6 each of the three numbers would post based on the last dollar digits of the total handle from Yonkers Raceway’s daily win, place, and show bets.