by Lee Lamothe
But the hint of Marko was there, too, that day: she was wearing a fine and thin gold necklace. She hadn’t said anything, but Preston knew it was a gift from Marko. No one except Julia Gurr mentioned Markowitz to Bobby Preston.
It was as though there’d been a horrible death and it was best not mentioned.
The taste of the pho was still on his lips when he disembarked the city bus and walked the three blocks to his apartment. It took a while. There were things to do. He had to make certain that each car on his block was familiar to him. He had to make sure no one was sitting idling. Homeland Security. The federales. He was retired, but two of the migrants’ bodies from the previous winter had washed up on the city side of the river and that made them city murder cases.
There were no cars on the block that he didn’t recognize. He went up the next street and down an alley and hopped his back fence and stood in the unkempt foliage, watching his second-floor windows. They were dark in the early evening. The left-most window that he’d left shut was open a few inches. The faintest of yellow glow, then a plume of smoke drifted out. Someone was smoking in the back living room, sitting by the window. Considerate.
He softly walked to the stack of bricks beside the house, slid a few aside, and reached into a shallow hole and took out a gun wrapped in a zip baggie.
With the gun in his hand, hidden in his armpit, he silently let himself in. Going up the inside back steps, he wondered if he could shoot someone. He’d killed in the river by negligence; it could be construed as accidental if you were charitable. But to put a gun on someone, maybe a cop, maybe a disgruntled customer? And pull the trigger? He knew he wasn’t that kind of crook, didn’t even pretend to be.
His apartment took up the entire second floor of the house. He stepped out of the stairwell into a long corridor lined with Mayan masks and several photographs his daughter had sent him from Mexico and Central America. All were of faces. Children, old men, old women. Bright and hopeful, or sad with that good-fucking-luck look old people presented to the young. They all, the faces and the masks, seemed to be watching him, waiting to see what he would do. The door to the back room was mostly closed to keep the smoke from permeating the entire flat. Considerate. Not cops.
He pushed the door open softly with the barrel of the pistol.
Julia Gurr, sitting on a low trunk in front of the window, looked up at him, blowing smoke off a cigarette in her right hand, her left covering the rippled bones of her left cheek. “Bobby? Zoe.”
Bobby Preston let the gun in the baggie dangle from his hand and said, “Oh, fuck.”
Chapter 8
They had dinner at Gratelli’s where the Sancerre and seared scallops put Paris into their mouths. Ray Tate’s flapping shirt tail and hacked jacket got them a reluctant place off in the corner, where waiters banged in and out of the kitchen and dishes rattled.
They sat side-by-side at a tiny banquette, looking out over the room. They’d often sat in Paris this way, side-by-side, pirating tastes from each other’s plates, commenting softly and easily into each other’s ears.
It was early but the restaurant was nearly full. A Canadian ballet dance troupe had hit town with a week-long run, something sophisticated and Russian. Groups of folks dressed in jackets and ties and dresses and jewellery sat around tables yakking enthusiastically. The rail near the entrance was wall-to-wall with after-workers, shouting to the bartenders and high-fiving each other about their day in the brokerages of Market Street or in the banks or in the retail trade.
Ray Tate felt pretty good about that. A year earlier the city was almost lost to race riots, serial murder, and disease. Gratelli’s had been taken apart by mobs of looters and rioters, the entire restaurant thrown out onto the street. You wouldn’t know it now. The place had been rebuilt almost exactly as it had been, right down to the stained-glass globe lights above the zinc bar.
We bounce back, he thought, city proud, country proud. He’d once gone to New York to see a Keith Haring retrospective and had visited Ground Zero. What had happened to Murder City was minor compared to horror on that scale, but the city’s riots had been a rude awakening, done by Americans to Americans and the city had survived. We come back. We’ll always come back. We’re America and that still means something. He loved the dream he and Djuna Brown had of Paris, but he knew, no matter what or how or when, he’d always come back here if he felt needed. He’d been a door-step baby of the state, abandoned at birth, and some part of him was grateful that even being dealt the low cards, anything was possible. He was convinced it wasn’t about him at all, it was about American heart. You just had to show up; that heart would do the rest.
“Ray? Where are you?”
“Just thinking. Last year. The riots. The looting and burning. And here we are. Did you think, then, that we’d ever sit in Grat’s again and have a meal, talking about Paris? Back when it was spread over the street?”
Her memories of those times weren’t as melancholy as his. For her it was a different context. For her it was the lowest point of her life, letting something unleashed out of herself, something ugly, vicious, careless, liberating, and illustrative. She’d become what she was supposed to be against.
They talked about nothing much through dinner. Ray Tate could see his references to the riot were upsetting her a little, so he pointed out a couple of bandits in the crowd at the rail. Fraud guys who ran pump-and-dumps over on the Chicago Exchange, he said. There were three prostitutes working. Two left, trailed a few seconds later by older men. Djuna Brown made observations about the diners as the room thinned out for the evening ballet performance.
When the waiter leaned in to pour the last of the Sancerre, Djuna Brown caught a glimpse of a familiar face through a break in the rail crowd. “Ray? Elbow of the rail, between the guys in the grey suits, he’s talking to the hooker.”
He leaned around the waiter for a look. “Markowitz. This place was on the surveillance logs.” He looked around the room carefully. “No Jerry Kelly. No blond chick.”
Markowitz was drinking something golden from a balloon glass, holding it under his nose, and talking to the remaining prostitute. She was a tall redhead with dangly earrings that almost touched her shoulders. She wore a dark blue business suit, but it was cut short with a deep slit up the thigh and her red blouse was full and unfastened one button too many. She ran a long fingernail down the lapel of Markowitz’s windowpane suit and leaned in close, whispering.
Markowitz smiled and nodded. Then he held up one finger and jumped his hand to his belt and punched into his cellphone. He read the screen, smirked then keyed something in and glanced at his watch, and nodded to the woman. They left together.
When the prostitute and Marko Markowitz in his blue Mercedes drove directly to a terraced apartment building on the lake, Ray Tate and Djuna Brown hung well back in the bulky black Chrysler. The Mercedes slid neatly into a visitors’ parking slot. Markowitz and the woman disembarked and went into the building, the woman a little ahead with a long stride and oscillating swing, the preview shuffle.
“Honey Baxter,” Ray Tate said. “She works for Honey. She’s got a half-dozen apartments floating in these buildings.” He parked across the street in the lot of another building, with a view on the Mercedes.
“Something weird, there, Ray, about that Benz.” Djuna Brown stared at it for a few seconds. “Snow tires. Summertime and he’s still got the snow belts on.”
“What did the DMV say? He’s got two of them, both blue? One winter, one summer? Call Records, get someone to find out if he’s rolling uninsured off season. Then we can take him anytime, if we need to. Shake him up.”
Djuna Brown hit the freddy. “Green Desk? Asset Four. We’re on a special. Can you put through … ah …” She squinted through the windshield and read off the plate. “Operator is … ah … Markowitz….” She’d forgotten his first name. “FNU, late forties, white male. Should come back to a blue Benz.”
They watched the door of the building for a f
ew minutes and the desk dispatcher came back. “Blue twenty-ten Mercedes SL registered Laszlo Markowitz, dob nine nine sixty-four, male, white, two-ten, five-eight, brown and brown. Sixty-six Stonetown Way, unit seven ten. Insurance status: insured. One of two twenty-ten MB blue to same insurer and rider, recently adjusted to all-year. Other MB vehicle insurance cancelled. This subject MB vehicle was insured November one to May one, now annual coverage.”
“Four dispatch.” Djuna Brown clicked off. “So, Ray, why’s he driving his winter car?”
“Maybe he had a crash.” Ray Tate dialled Occurrences on his cellphone. “Ray Tate, asset seizure, can you put through Markowitz, Laszlo, for incidents or accidents?” He recited his badge number and phonetically spelled Markowitz. “Can you see if he lost a car, pranged one up, it got seized or tagged, and if so where and when?” While he waited, he put his hand on Djuna Brown’s leg and hummed a jazzy tune. “This is unpaid overtime, you know. Above and beyond. I say we stick the Cashman for a room at the Whistler and —” He spoke into the phone. “I’m here. Okay, that’s it? What else?” He listened and clicked off. “Nice. A resident of Markowitz’s condo building in Stonetown reported a week ago the sound of gunshots in the underground garage. Our guys arrived to find Marko’s summer car had been thoroughly ventilated by gunfire.”
“Ooops.”
“Yeah, oops. And there was a fire at a commercial building Marko owned up in Smoketown. Clear arson.”
“Maybe it was a friction fire? He rubbed his mortgage against the resale value and … poof, ignition?”
“Dunno. Marko, though, needs more money like I need a club foot. The arson was the night before the car got aired out.”
“The Colombian. Pavo. Wanting his dough.”
“Old Markowitz is in the shit.” He stretched against the headliner. “If he’s on edge, maybe he makes a mistake and we’re there to help him out.”
Across the street Markowitz, with his shirt misbuttoned, came out of the lobby door of the apartment building. Djuna Brown glanced at her watch. “The eight minute man.”
“I’ve met some of Honey Baxter’s girls. If Marko lasted eight minutes I want to pull him over and interrogate him how he distracts himself.”
“Ah, you do all right, Ray. For an old white guy.”
They watched Markowitz board the Mercedes and leisurely leave the building’s lot.
“What do you want to do, Ray? Hotel room or work?”
“Let’s take him away. We’ll give it an hour, then go down to the Whistler, badge the front desk, and get stupid.”
Chapter 9
Through the plate-glass window of the Sparrow Grill, Bobby Preston watched the blue Mercedes fishtail into the gravel parking lot beside his battered, borrowed grey Chevy. He studied the passing traffic for anyone Marko might have carelessly brought along. A dark Chrysler that looked sketchy rolled past the parking lot without pause. It was an area that had a lot of cops, so he wasn’t sure. He watched Marko climb laboriously out of the Benz, a fattening man who looked like a tired boxer going through the ropes to face the inevitable music. He looks like his old man, Preston thought. An old guy who never put anything together that would last, addicted to the immediate effect of a gun in one hand and a bag of money in the other.
Dope did that to you, an adrenaline addiction of its own. Shipments were late, schedules were hopes, your destiny and your timing were at the mercies of circumstances you couldn’t possibly foresee. It was a business that ran as much on paranoia as it did on powders and currencies. It was the one business where torture and murder almost always went together, where you had to know things you could never truly know, but you’d activate a power drill just to be almost, nearly sure, or just a firm maybe.
Preston felt a brief old twinge of pleasure at seeing Marko, even this old tired Marko who had become a denizen in a glittering dark underworld that would have horrified their dads. He’d variously begged and urged Marko to get out of the drug business. He put up with it, pretended not to know, for a long time. But finally there was Marko on the television news, a kingpin, and that was that.
It was against the code of the neighbourhood.
“You gotta stop, Marko. I can’t have it near me.”
“I gotta make it big, Bobby,” Marko had said. “I’m gonna get a whack of dough, a big fucking honking car and some silk front from a Jew tailor.”
Remembering what his own dad had said, Bobby Preston had told him, “You’ll have nothing left Marko. Dope uses you up. The Marko who comes back here won’t be what anyone wants.” He tried to sway Marko, invoking the mixing of their blood. “We’ll buy you out of whatever deals you’ve got cooking, then you come home. We’ll put something together. You and me. I got a thing at the border.”
“Bobby,” Marko had said, “it’s new days. There’s nothing in bootlegging and loansharking and banging down banks. You run a few Chinamen over the river, and you make what? A grand, each? I move a bag and I make fifty, sixty.”
Finally Preston told him not to come around him anymore. “There’s too much heat,” he said, “and I’ve got stuff of my own going on. I can’t have dope near me, I can’t have you near me if you’re into it. I’ve got Julia and Zoe. I can’t do that kind of time I’ve got too much to lose. We’re quits.”
Briefly Marko had looked rattled and stunned. Then a rage visibly grew within him and he said, “Fuck you. We mixed blood. You can’t do this, Bobby, this isn’t how we are.”
Preston turned away and, except for a terse encounter at a funeral years later, never again spoke to Markowitz.
Marko Markowitz stood on the gravel lot and stared at the diner. He looked around at the sparse passing traffic, then pushed through the door.
The Sparrow was an old time diner with green plywood booths and anchored tables. Opposite the row of booths ran a long counter studded with chromium holders for menus, napkins, sugar, salt, and pepper, and a flat black grill that had been scraped raw by generations of obsessive grill men. Through the serving window Preston could see the cook’s head; he appeared to be asleep, collapsed back against a walk-in freezer. The waitress was nothing but tired and she sat reading a day-old paper beside a bright and silent jukebox.
When Marko came in she looked up and reached for the coffee pot and stood until he passed down the long room under the banks of tube lighting and sat opposite Preston. She took a mug from a tray and followed him. She filled the mug, and when she walked away Preston saw the tragedy of varicose veins on her otherwise perfect legs.
Markowitz looked brightly at Preston: “Late. Sorry. Had to get my nuts busted. So, a 9-1-1 from you? Fuck’s that all about?”
Preston looked away, out the window. “You come hot?”
“I’m not doing nothing. So, don’t think so.”
“Think?”
“Presto, you ain’t doing nothing either. You’re retired, right? So, we’re two guys, used to be pals, having a coffee.”
Preston lit a cigarette; he already had one going in a saucer on the window ledge beneath the No Smoking symbol. “Zo’s been pinched.”
“Zo’? Fuck off. What she do, lift a twenty from the collection plate to give to the poor? Someone’s yanking your wire.”
“In Mexico. Dope.”
Marko was perfectly still with convincing disbelief on his face.
“Carrying. Powder.”
With a little less force and a little doubt, Marko, again, said, “Fuck off.”
“Julia got a call from down there.” He didn’t like mentioning Julia Gurr to Markowitz. It was a flashpoint. “Zoe’s pinched, she’s in and I want her out.”
“Okay, I’m on it. I got some amigos down there. We’ll get her a good lawyer. Slow justice, that beaner justice, but you can buy it easily enough. I’ll make some calls.”
“I want to buy her out. I want her back here, now.”
“That’s different. That’s … a whole different thing, Bobby. That’s a lot of coin, a lot of connection, a lot of favours
.”
“Whatever it costs, just let me know. I’ll square it.”
Marko stared at him, leaned his face over the table, and went into quiet anger. “Am I the only one finding it odd that I don’t hear from you in years, I’m some kind of a fucking degenerate, and now I’m some fucking jinni you rub out of a bottle or something? What am I? Zippy the Fuckin’ Pinhead? Hey, Marko, meet me, chop chop. Hey Marko, do this, buy me that.”
“This isn’t business, Marko. This is Zoe. It isn’t that other stuff.”
Marko sat back and calmed himself. “Ah, fuck. I know. Jesus.” He appeared to be evaluating the situation and coming up empty. “You know I’ve got problems right now, right? Cops, rats, the fucking Colombians.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Okay, I’ll make a call, but I can’t do much more right now. In a week or two, I get this problem of mine out of the way, I’ll reach down there and twist somebody’s nuts for them.”
“Two weeks is a long time in there.”
“I know it is. I can line up a lawyer, I can get her moved to a better jail, I can get some local douche bags in there to look after her. That’s all just money. No prob. But I can’t start shaking things up, with this Colombian thing. You know about that, right? I’m getting ratted left and right. Pavo, the fucking Colombian dwarf cocksucker shot up my car, burned down my stash house. You know they got Julia, right? It was them. If I don’t run their dough into Canada real fast, I’m down the tubes, holes piped in my head.”
“I know you’re backed up. A call and a wire transfer will take a couple of minutes. You can bill me what you want.”
Marko was looking directly at Preston as if seeing him for the first time. “Can’t do it. Couple of weeks, unless I get dead or in the slammer, then we’ll get her out. You got a problem, I got a very different problem. Both are important to us. You know Zoe’s like my own kid. Give me a week or two, I’ll get her out and back here. Swear to God. But you can’t ask me to kill myself.”