“Always this busy?” I asked the bartender to kill some time and to make sure he wasn’t actually in a coma.
“This time of night, yup.”
“Things pick up later?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but I saw his focus shift to over my right shoulder. “Hey, Mr. Roussis,” he said, giving a quick smile.
“Wyatt,” Nick said, clamping a hand on my shoulder, “this gentleman’s tab is comped. Have a bottle of ’97 Opus One sent over to table three and tell the chef to come out to see me.”
“Okay.” Wyatt headed for the kitchen.
I chucked a five onto the bar.
“Generous,” Nicky said.
“You can’t take it with you.”
“Wyatt’s a good boy. Come on.”
We sat at what I guessed was table three. I could see why the owner would want to sit here. It was the best vantage point in the place from which to watch the bar, the comings and goings from the kitchen, the waiter’s station, the hostess’ podium, and the rest of the dining room. What people don’t understand about owning a business is that when you’re there you can’t ever relax. There’s no such thing as being off duty when you’re in-house. The chef came out to us, introduced himself, shook our hands. Nicky spoke to him in Greek and the chef went away.
“I hope you don’t mind, but he does this thing with rib steak that I absolutely love. I ordered it for us. It’s not very Greek, but we don’t do strictly Greek here, anyways. That okay with you?”
“Fine. I hate that you’re going to waste a bottle of Opus One on me. I haven’t been feeling great lately and-”
“Don’t worry, Moe. It won’t go to waste. No one’s spilling the Opus One down the drain or watering the plants with it.”
Dinner, what I ate of it, was fantastic. We started out with a platter of dips and vegetable concoctions, only some of which I recognized, then salad, the marinated steak with lemon, garlic, and rosemary roasted potatoes, creamed spinach and feta tarts, and dessert of assorted pastries. I ate just enough of each to carry the wine. Nick was right about the wine, there would be no Opus One going to waste. I had way, way too much of it and by my third glass I didn’t really care about the physical price I was going to pay for indulging. The food aside, it was a lot of fun to tell the old stories about the Six-O. Enough time had passed for me to forgive and forget the betrayals so, at least for one night, I let myself feel about the guys the way I felt about them then. It was okay for me to laugh about what a ladies man Rico had been and to shake my head at what a practical joker Larry McDonald could be. I even laughed about the time Kenny Burton laid out a fireman during a pickup basketball game we played in Coney Island. Maybe it was the wine or maybe it was the dying that set me free of the baggage and the pain. Probably both.
When we weren’t talking old times, we talked about our families and business and where we’d come to in our lives. In a weak moment at the end of the meal and with my third glass of Grand Marnier in my hand, I told him the truth about why I’d come to the Gelato Grotto the other day. That I wasn’t working for the Tillman family at all, but that Alta Conseco was Carmella’s older sister and I felt obligated to look into things when she asked me to.
“I knew that story you told me at the Grotto was a crock a shit,” Nick said, but not angrily. “I figured you’d tell me. You always was big on the truth.”
I laughed. “Not as much as I used to be. Life has weaned me off it.”
He didn’t pursue it. “Look, I get why you told me what you did. You didn’t figure I would help otherwise. And I understand your helping out. You and Carmella was once family and her sister was her sister even if she did a terrible thing. You can’t abandon your family no matter what. That’s what a family does, it stands together when things get bad. Am I right?”
“Exactly. I couldn’t just say no to Carm.”
“But you should watch your back, Moe. Not everybody’s gonna be as understanding as me if they find out what you’re really up to. Defending those EMTs is kinda like defending Osama Bin Laden in this city, you know what I mean?”
“Thanks. I’m being careful.”
“So what you find out so far?”
I figured I owed it to him to tell him as much as I could. Here was a guy I hadn’t seen in fifteen years and the first thing I did was lie to his face. Plus, he’d been really cooperative based on that lie. He’d given me the surveillance video and sent me to Fuqua.
“So you think it’s somebody in the FDNY?” Nicky asked.
“I don’t know what to think, but it’s possible.”
“Okay, I’ll keep my eyes open. I hear things. People do a lotta loose talking in restaurants. You’d be surprised at the shit you hear when you’re not even trying.”
“Thanks, Nicky. I appreciate it. This was fun. Next time, dinner’s on me.”
We shook hands. “Let’s do it soon, Moe.”
“Soon. You have my word on that.”
Dinner with Nick would have to be soon, I thought, or it probably wouldn’t be at all.
SEVENTEEN
If I thought the cab ride with the windows rolled down was going to cut into the intensity of my alcohol buzz or take the edge off the searing pain in my gut, I was wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time. The cabbie dropped me at the corner of Ashford Street and Atlantic Avenue. Carmella’s grandmother’s house was a few houses in off Atlantic. For many years, Carmella had lived in the upstairs apartment while her abuela lived on the first floor. She had willed the house to Carmella and I’d wrongly assumed that Carmella had sold the place after moving up to Toronto. When she’d sent me that packet of information, I’d been surprised to see she’d written down this address as where she was staying. I stood outside, looking up at the old place. Except for a coat of paint, the house hadn’t changed much in the last twenty years. This was where I kissed Carmella for the first time, a pretty chaste kiss even as first kisses go. And shortly after that, this house is where I learned of Carmella’s true identity.
I tasted the tears and felt the wetness on my cheeks before I fully realized I was crying. I didn’t make a habit of crying and I wasn’t usually a sad drunk, but nothing about my life was usual these days. I had a laundry list of things worth crying over, yet I knew these tears weren’t about Carmella. I may have had a pocketful of unresolved feelings for her. So what? She was here now, she’d be gone tomorrow. Maybe I’d be gone tomorrow. Who could say? These tears were for absent friends, for Wit and Mr. Roth and yes, even for Rico. When you reach a certain stage in life, you do a lot of wondering about the people who’ve passed in and out of it. Soon enough, I realized, I’d be someone’s absent friend. You add alcohol to thoughts like that and you get tears. Who, I wondered, would shed tears for me? It’s an unhealthy thing to think about, but nothing I’d done recently was very healthy. I walked up onto the porch and rang the upstairs bell.
Even through the front door I could hear the steps creaking under Carm’s feet. I remembered how those cranky old stairs complained the first time I walked them, as we both walked them, trying not to awaken her grandmother. We had stood in her little kitchen, talking quietly, drinking Coronas, flirting.
“I want you to like me,” she’d whispered.
As I recall, I said something like, “What do you think I’m doing here?”
“No,” she’d said, “I want you to like me, Moe, not just want me. I know how to make men want me. That’s something I could do even before I knew how.”
Then I’d leaned forward and put my lips very gently on hers. In a way, it was more a caress than a kiss, but it was still electric. She slid her lips off mine and nestled her body against me. She was the first “other woman” I’d kissed with intent and it was to be the full extent of my extramarital activity in the twenty years of marriage to Katy. Yet that kiss was nearly as exciting to me now as it had been then, almost as exciting as the first time I slept with Carmella after Katy and I split. I was thinking about that kiss when the door pulled bac
k.
I felt weak because the figure standing in the little vestibule wasn’t Carmella at all. He was dressed in Shrek pajama bottoms and a Toronto Raptors T-shirt. His blue eyes were bleary from too many video games and not enough sleep. He had his mother’s skin tone and hair, but his face and blue eyes were his father’s: not my eyes, not my face, his real father’s-a hotshot lawyer named Dukelsky who’d had a short, torrid romance with Carm, but who couldn’t afford the stain of a bastard son. It was one thing to see Israel in the pictures Carmella had given me. It was something else to be standing in front of him. I wanted desperately to scoop him up in my arms, to swallow him up with eight years worth of love and pain, but I didn’t want to frighten him.
“Didn’t your mom teach you not to just open the door for strangers?”
“You’re not a stranger. Mom has pictures of you in our house. You’re her friend Moe. I saw you through the top glass on the door when I was coming down the steps.”
When he called me his mom’s friend, it hurt much worse than my gut. “So your mom talks about me?” I said, trying to smile through the hurt.
“Sometimes. She smiles when she talks about you. You used to work together, right, when she was a detective?”
“That’s right.” I put out my hand out and we shook. “I knew you when you were a very little boy.”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s okay.” I winked. “I do. Where’s your mom?”
“She’s sleeping.”
“Can I come in?”
He thought about that for a minute. “My mom’s asleep,” he said. “I don’t think-”
“That’s okay, Israel,” Carmella called down from the top of the stairs. “Tell Moe to come in. And you, mister, get to bed. It’s late.”
“Mom!”
“C’mon, you, up here and to bed!”
“Good night, Israel, it was nice seeing you again,” I said, voice cracking. I patted his shoulder. “Listen to your mom and go on.”
“Good night,” he said without much enthusiasm, then turned and ran up the stairs.
I followed slowly behind him, my grip firm on the handrail. My knees were shaky and not from the wine and Grand Marniers. At the top of the stairs, Carmella kissed Israel on his forehead, gave him a quick hug, and gave him a gentle shove. He didn’t look back. I watched him disappear for the second time in my life.
Carm, dressed in a loose cotton T-shirt over faded and torn jeans, stared down at me. Her eyes were still a little cloudy with sleep. “Beer?” she asked, leading me into the kitchen.
“No, thanks. I remember getting into some mischief the last time we shared a beer in this kitchen.”
“I remember that too.” She stretched the sleep out of her muscles and yawned. “What are you doing here, Moe?”
“I’m a little drunk.”
“I can see that.”
“I didn’t know you had him here with you.”
“How could you know?”
“Were you going to tell me?” I asked, a sharp pain bending me over.
“Are you okay? Sit.”
She pulled back a chair for me and I took it.
“I ate and drank too much. My stomach’s been off lately. Sorry.”
“Can I get you something?”
“No. I’m okay now,” I lied. “So, were you going to tell me Israel was here with you?”
“I thought about it, but…”
“He’s a good boy. Handsome too. Best features of his mom and dad. Do you ever talk to-”
Carmella shushed me, shaking her head no and putting her finger across her lips. I got the message and moved on.
“He does well in school?”
“Top of his class and a good hockey player too.” She beamed like any proud mom.
“Hockey!” I snorted. “Mr. Roth would think it was funny that someone named for him would be a hockey player. He loved baseball.”
“Moe, what are you doing here?”
“I’m not sure. I came to see you.”
“No shit, really?”
“What did you know about your sister?”
Carm’s body clenched. I’d asked her precisely the worst question. “Why?”
“Because if you were hoping that the witnesses had somehow gotten it wrong, that Alta hadn’t ignored Tillman and that all the rest of it was some big misunderstanding… well, stop hoping. If there’s one thing I know for sure about any of this, it’s that Alta and her partner refused to help the guy. And to be totally brutal about it, it seems to me it was Alta’s call. She was the one who made the decision not to treat the guy. What I can’t understand is why.”
“I don’t know why, Moe. I did not know my sister except when we were little. You know my parents sent me back to Puerto Rico after… after the thing happened to me.”
“Was she a good big sister when you were little?”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything now?” She was red with anger, but careful not to yell. She lowered her voice to a vicious whisper. “I did not ask you to be a psychologist for me. I asked you to-”
“People don’t change, Carm. My brother Aaron is pretty much the same as he was when he was eight years old, and your buddy and my little sister Miriam has always been a troublemaker. So, was Alta a good big sister?”
Carmella bowed her head. “Yes. She was always protecting me like I was her own. She was a mother bear. I think when I was taken as a little girl, it hurt Alta more than anyone. She felt like she didn’t do her job. Why don’t you go to the partner, Maya Watson, to ask her about Alta?”
“I will ask her, but it won’t get me anywhere. She was very cooperative until I brought up what happened with Tillman. Then she clammed up. I don’t know why. You’d think she and Alta would have been desperate to explain their side of things, but instead they refused to say a word about it. That’s only one of the things that doesn’t make much sense about this case.”
“What do you mean?”
“I went to the High Line Bistro. On an EMT’s salary, you couldn’t afford an appetizer and a bowl of chowder in that joint. Their least expensive wine was sixty bucks. Coffee is seven bucks a pop. It’s not the kind of place people in uniforms go to. But Alta and Maya traveled over there from the other side of Manhattan for a quick lunch? I don’t buy it. And under careful questioning, some of the witnesses said that Alta and Maya were arguing when they came in. About what? It’s just weird, Carm. It doesn’t feel right. I don’t think they were there about lunch.”
“Then what for?” she asked.
“That’s the million dollar question. What the hell were they doing there?”
I think I had something else to say, but suddenly I was lightheaded. No, it was more than that. I was dizzy and my vision got hazy around the edges. My heart was beating its way out of my chest and up into my throat. My head, now impossibly heavy, fell back over the top of the chair. I could feel myself soaking through my shirt. I was nauseous as hell.
“Moe! Moe!” I heard someone calling my name, but from somewhere far far away. “Moe, are you all right? You look gray.” I felt a hand touch my face, my neck. “You’re clammy. I’m going to call 911.”
“No! No. Get me to the bathroom,” I slurred, holding my leaden arms out. “I’ll be okay.”
I was up, but not for long. My legs were deboned and demuscled. I remember feeling myself dropping. I don’t remember landing. It must have been a hell of a fall.
EIGHTEEN
I stopped at my condo for another shower and a change of clothing before heading over to see Detective Jean Jacques Fuqua. Neither the shower nor the new clothing made me feel like a new man. I was past the age when feeling like a new man was possible. The best I could hope for was feeling like a retread and recently even that had become a pipe dream. I no longer got just tired. That ship done sailed. These days my exhaustion was profound as a Russian novel. Exhaustion for me was now a whole other state of being and last night had taken more out of me than I ha
d to give. I wasn’t sure if this new state of being was simply my body giving me a preview of what I’d feel like once chemo and radiation kicked in or if it was preparing me for death. Death, I thought, had all sorts of potential for unpleasantness, especially if I was wrong about all those many things I didn’t believe in. What if the face of God was a sneering one and he was the type to say I told you so? What if he was just a universal hurt machine? Man, in either case, I was fucked.
Even last night as I lay on Carmella’s bathroom floor, I knew I wasn’t quite dead. I couldn’t imagine the departed could taste their own vomit or feel as though their kishkas were being torn apart from the inside out. Nope. I was pretty sure that sort of unpleasantness was reserved for the living, but as poorly as I felt, it was much better than I had at the kitchen table. The nausea was gone and my vision was no longer blurred at the edges. My view of the base of the toilet was crystal clear. I was weak, but my arms were no longer leaden and my legs seemed like they might once again support my full weight. I hadn’t been foolish enough to test them out. I was content to just lie there and enjoy the coolness of the tiles.
Eventually, I got around to showering and rinsing my mouth. There wasn’t enough mouthwash left in Carm’s medicine cabinet to fully rid me of that awful taste. There probably wasn’t enough in all of East New York to do that. I was feeling much better when I spit the last of the mouthwash into the sink, but the exhaustion had set in. It was the exhaustion, along with some other less savory symptoms, that had forced me to go to my doctor in the first place. I looked at myself in the mirror. I’d been doing that a lot lately. I looked old. I noticed my hand on my abdomen and turned away. I wrapped two big bath towels around me, and asked Carmella if I could lie down on the couch and just shut my eyes for a few minutes. A few minutes turned into a long deep sleep of forgotten dreams.
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