Hurt machine mp-6

by Reed Farrell Coleman

  Rush hour was at an end and the traffic was pretty thin as I headed around the bend from Bath Beach to Bay Ridge, the Verrazano Bridge looming up before me. It was hard for me to remember when I was a kid and the bridge wasn’t there, when you used to have to ferry across from Brooklyn to Staten Island and the lost world of New Jersey beyond. The bridge opened to traffic in ’64, like Shea Stadium and the World’s Fair. Now, with the fair long closed and Shea turned into a parking lot for Citi Field, only the bridge remained.

  I don’t know what it was that drew my attention to the old ’75 Buick Electra in the right-hand lane. Maybe it was its darkly tinted windows or the fact that the sun’s glare off its windshield made it impossible for me to see the driver’s face. Maybe it was the sparseness of the traffic and the fact that the Buick seemed to be hanging back and to my right, but keeping its distance constant. I shook my head at my paranoia. I think if Brian Doyle hadn’t shown up on my doorstep with that black eye and sounding the retreat, I would never have noticed the Buick at all. So to test out my paranoia, I floored the gas pedal and shot under the bridge. When I looked in my passenger side mirror, the Buick was gone. Problem was, I looked in the wrong mirror.

  Bang! The tail of my car jerked and fishtailed, but I held it steady. There was the Electra again, this time in my sideview and only a foot or two off my left fender. Before I could react, it closed in, ramming the left side of my back bumper. This time the hit was much harder, but he’d lost the element of surprise. Surprise or no surprise, it took all my police training and years of driving savvy to keep my car steady. I couldn’t be sure whether the guy driving the Buick was a pro just trying to scare me-mission accomplished-or if he was an amateur trying to kill me who didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. I’d have to worry about that later, because amateur or not, a few more hits like the last one and I wouldn’t be able to keep my car on the road. It was time to play offense.

  I put my foot to the floor again and my car zoomed forward. I knew the Buick probably had a huge old V8 under its hood and that it would quickly catch up. I was counting on it. While the Electra was built for straight line speed, weighed as much as an Abrams tank, and was great for ramming smaller cars off the road, it maneuvered like an ocean liner. I saw the Buick coming up fast as we both approached the point where the Belt Parkway curves right and up onto the Gowanus Expressway. I had one chance and it was now. Just when the Electra got within a car’s length of me, I stepped hard on my brakes and yanked my steering wheel hard left.

  Bang! I caught him pretty close to where I was aiming, the rear passenger tire. I’m not sure how close exactly, but close enough. The old Buick spun out in front of me and flipped over as I passed. I counted it flipping over twice more in my rearview mirror before it came to rest against a guardrail. It didn’t burst into flames. Cars don’t do that as frequently as in the movies, but I couldn’t imagine the driver would walk out of that wreck unscathed. I exhaled for the first time in minutes. I shouldn’t have.

  My left front tire exploded. That much, I remember.

  When I came to, a cop was gently shaking my shoulder and I noticed my car, which had been in the left lane and facing Manhattan when my tire blew, was now up against the opposite guardrail and facing traffic. My side airbags had deployed. I also noticed that I had a hell of a headache and that my neck hurt like a son of a bitch. There were flashing lights everywhere I looked and the wailing sound of a siren in the distance.

  “Did I hit anybody else?” I mumbled, trying to work the pain out of my neck.

  “Nah. You slid across all the lanes, but everyone avoided you. You all right? There’s some EMTs on the way.”

  “I’m okay. A little sore.”

  He asked for my name, asked me the day and date, asked if I’d been drinking, held some fingers up in front of my eyes, and did some eye tracking thing with a pen. When he was done, I made to get out of the car.

  “Wow, pal, you better wait there till the paramedics clear you.”

  I stayed put. “I used to be on the job,” I said to the cop. “Used to work the Six-O.”

  “Long time ago, huh?”

  “Long time, yeah.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Front left tire blew and I lost it. Busy night?”

  “You know it. Must be a full moon coming tonight. There’s a car flipped over on the Belt about a mile back.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “If there was, they didn’t hang around. It was a stolen car. Amazing.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It was an old beat-up piece of shit. Who the fuck’s gonna steal something like that?”

  Somebody who wants to run another car off the road. “Listen, Rafferty,” I said, reading his name badge. “Do me a favor and take some pictures of my car. I was supposed to go up to Vermont and visit my girlfriend tonight. I need some proof.” I handed him my cell phone. “She’s the jealous type.”

  “Sure, for a brother, no problem.” He took the pictures and handed the phone back to me. “Okay, the EMTs are here.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Pam believed the pictures of my smashed-up car and said she’d be down to take care of me. I didn’t even try telling her not to come. I wanted taking care of. I needed it. I’d been on an island by myself for too long and since that exile was self-imposed, I had only to look in the mirror to ascribe blame. I don’t suppose I ever forgave myself for Katy’s murder. It took seven years for Sarah to absolve me and the rest of the universe either didn’t know or didn’t care. If there was any persuasive argument for the existence of God, it wasn’t in the biology of things, but in emotion, in feelings. I couldn’t quite see how guilt and forgiveness had evolved from the primordial stew. I don’t know, maybe the “adult” relationship I’d been sharing with Pam over the last two years was just part of my self-inflicted exile. I let her in, but not inside. Suddenly, I wanted off the island and I didn’t care why.

  When I refused treatment or to go to the ER, the EMTs told me to go home, rest, and to make an appointment with my regular physician if the pain in my neck didn’t clear up or if any new symptoms arose. It’d been weird, sitting there, talking to them, and not asking them questions about Alta and Maya. I wouldn’t have known what to ask, really. What could I have asked them, what could they have said to change the essential facts of the case? Maya Watson and Alta Conseco had simply stood by and let a man die. A month later, someone stuck a knife into Alta Conseco and killed her.

  It truly was a fool’s errand I had taken on. Even if I stumbled upon all the right answers and found out every gory detail of how this tragedy had unfolded, so what? Neither Lazarus nor Lady Lazarus would be coming back from the dead. Justice would not be served because there is no justice for the dead, only for the living and sometimes not even then. Had every murderous Nazi son of a bitch been captured, convicted, and put to death, the innocent dead would not have risen. The dead are beyond the reach of justice. And the truth wasn’t going to bring justice. It was my experience that where tragedy was involved, the truth made things worse. Always. What naive fool was it, I wondered, who had made the specious connection between truth and justice in the first place? One thing I knew about him, whoever he was, he wasn’t nearly as big a fool as me. If he had known what I knew, he would have closed up shop and gone home. Not me. I meant to get to the bottom of this if for no other reason than I was a curious bastard and didn’t want to leave loose ends behind me.

  I called up one of those rental places that delivers the car to your door. My taste in cars ran to the small, sporty side, but this one time, I went big, really big. Given that someone, probably a crazy fireman, had just tried to run my ass off the road, I would have rented a city bus if I could have. A Chevy Suburban was the best the rental company could do on short notice. That suited me fine. I met the woman who delivered it downstairs and didn’t bother going back up. I wanted to leave before Pam got there. She had keys and I would let her take care of me when I got b
ack, but I needed to finish what I started.

  Kid Charlemagne’s wasn’t exactly a bucket of blood, but not for lack of trying. In the seventies, the East Village was a mess, a perch from which junkies, artists, punks, and pretenders could both watch the world go down the toilet and go along for the ride. Kid Charlemagne’s wrecked and dingy decor was meant to capture a sense of those long-ago times when Joey Ramone and Jean-Michel Basquiat roamed these self-same streets. It failed miserably. To begin with, naming a faux punk restaurant-whatever the fuck that was supposed to be-after a Steely Dan song was less than genius. Steely Dan was almost as antithetical to the ethos of punk as Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And as if to make the whole thing even a bigger farce, Lady Gaga was playing when I walked in. God, it was so self-consciously dreadful that it almost seemed to be the point. It didn’t hurt that the hostess wore a purple and magenta Mohawk wig and was dressed in a ripped Sex Pistols T-shirt, studded leather pants, and red Chuck Taylors. Her lipstick was black, her eye shadow a thin rectangle of red powder that was splashed across both eyes and the bridge of her nose.

  “Oi! What can I do for ya, rude boy?” she said in an affected low-rent British accent.

  I was tempted to bust her balls about her not having been born until New Wave was old hat and hair bands had gone bald, but I didn’t figure on that making much of an impression. Instead, I asked to see the boss or the manager.

  “Get lost, granddad.”

  “Oi, Siouxsie, go play with the Banshees and stop wasting my time. Granddad is a copper,” I said in a far better accent than hers, showed her my badge, and quickly put it away.

  Her eyes got big. “Sorry, I was just-”

  I cut her off. “Forget it. Just take me to the office.”

  The fake punk hostess kept apologizing-her accent far more Bronx than Brixton now-as we cut past the bar and through the dinning room. Strangely enough, the crowd was much hipper than the place merited. There were even some faces among them I recognized: the novelist who’d dissed Oprah, some painter I remembered from when I was looking for Sashi Bluntstone, and an actress who’d spent more time in rehab than on her syndicated superhero show. Christ, I even saw Lou Reed coming out of the men’s room. I was at a loss to explain it. I felt like the one person at a comedy club who didn’t get the joke.

  “Give me a second, okay?” she said as we stopped outside an unmarked door on the other side of the restrooms. She knocked and the door buzzed open. Not smart, I thought, just buzzing someone in who might be armed with bad intentions and a gun. Then I noticed the closed circuit camera above me and to the right. She stuck her head in the office and then quickly back out. “The boss says for you to go right in.”

  “Thanks,” I said, sliding past her, into the office, and closing the door behind me. When I turned around, I nearly shit.

  “Hello, Moe,” he said, an embarrassed half-smile on his face. It was Nathan Martyr.

  Nathan Martyr was a collapsed super nova: an artist who exploded on the New York art scene one day and then imploded in short order. After his fast fifteen minutes, he devoted his wretched life to making bad art, shooting heroin, and blogging about Sashi Bluntstone. Martyr was one of Sashi’s most ardent critics. It was on his blog that I found Photoshopped images of Sashi’s nude body being crucified, flayed, and tortured. In the end, Martyr’d had nothing to do with Sashi’s disappearance, but I loathed the asshole just the same. It was Martyr’s ex-cop doorman and toady who had tried, nearly successfully, to put me in the grave. If Pam hadn’t zapped the prick with her handy little Taser, my oncologist would have had one less patient to worry about now.

  Still, Martyr seemed different somehow. He had been a twitchy bastard when we first met, but now his demeanor was calm, if not quite Zen-like. He’d been junkie-skinny back then. He’d put on a few pounds since and while he was by no means heavy, his face was fuller. He sported a tan. A tan! Jesus, talk about breaking the New York artist protocol. He was expensively and stylishly dressed. The last time I’d seen him, he smelled like he’d been wearing the same clothes for a week. Now he smelled of money.

  “You clean these days?” I asked.

  “Clean and healthy. I guess I owe some of that to you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “That thing with Sashi, it woke me up finally.”

  “To what?”

  “To the hole at the center of my being that I tried to fill in with hate and heroin,” he said, his voice cracked and brittle with emotion.

  “Forgive me if I don’t get all choked up.”

  “Hey, look, I understand that you’ve got no reason to care, but you asked.”

  “I did. So, what happened?”

  “Have you ever had something in your life that you thought defined you and you woke up one morning and it was gone, just totally gone and you couldn’t get it back?”

  “Yeah, I know what that’s like.”

  “That’s what happened to me. I was an artist one day and the next day I wasn’t and no matter how hard I tried to get my muse to dance with me again, she wouldn’t. I tried everything: all sorts of therapy, drinking-”

  “-heroin.”

  “That is how I got started, out of despair. I didn’t really hate Sashi Bluntstone. I hated myself.”

  “Good to know I’m not alone.”

  He laughed. “You are now. I don’t hate anyone anymore, least of all me. Just look at me. I’m healthy. I go to the gym every day. I eat well and I’ve got the muse back on my side.”

  “Showing at the Brill Gallery again?”

  “C’mon, Moe. You struck me as a bright guy when we met. You’re inside the art right now. You’re part of it today.”

  “The restaurant?”

  “Is it a restaurant?”

  “Yes and no,” I said, catching on. “It’s staged.”

  “Not staged, exactly, no. When I came out the other end of rehab, I had a vision. I saw how small and unambitious my earlier work had been, how by working in one medium at a time I was self-limiting. I also saw that the commerce of art is set up to fuck the artist. I produce a painting or a sculpture and depend on the largesse of some patron or decorator or collector or speculator to buy it. Then the gallery owner and the agent would feed on the money, leaving the scraps for me. Bullshit! I don’t know about you, Moe, but when I get fucked I want to enjoy it. Being an artist used to mean getting raped and then having to say thank you to the rapist. This place was my vision. It’s visual art, performance art, street art, participatory art. It’s living art that changes from second to second. It’s theater and chaos and it turns a big profit. Everything having to do with this place-from its seemingly inappropriate name to its kitsch and camp-was done on purpose with a purpose. Each decision was, at least to some degree, an artistic calculation. The only things left to chance are the people who walk through the doors to eat and drink.”

  “Genius,” I said, not quite believing the word came out of my mouth. “You win both ways. The ones who get it get it, so it’s like knowing the secret handshake and being in an exclusive club. They get to enjoy the art and calculation. They get to feel superior, to laugh at the people who come here for a meal and are oblivious to the fact that they’re being messed about.”

  He flinched. “No one’s being messed with here. If people come for a meal, they get a good meal. If they come because they think this is what the East Village was like in the time of punk, that’s what they get. I’m no more exploiting the people who walk into this restaurant than a photographer is exploiting the people behind the faces in a crowd shot. But somehow I don’t think you came here to talk old times or to discuss the philosophy of art. Why are you here?”

  My answer was simple. “Robert Tillman.”

  “Oh, everybody’s favorite stroke victim. Why do you want to know about him?”

  “He’s my favorite too. I’m a fan.”

  He laughed again. “You’re pretty funny, but that’s not an answer.”

  “I’m working a case and hi
s name came up. He used to work here in the kitchen with a guy named Tino Escobar.”

  “Did you do all your homework this well when you were in school?”

  “And I gave my teacher a shiny apple every day. About Tillman, why did you hire him?”

  “Tillman was handsome in a rough sort of way. His looks appealed to my aesthetics and he was the best prep cook we’ve ever had.”

  “The eaters don’t see the kitchen staff, so why does it matter how they look?” I asked.

  “Everything matters. The art doesn’t stop at the kitchen door.”

  “Whatever. So, Tino recommended Tillman to you?”

  “You are a thorough bastard.” Martyr said. “Yes, Tino recommended him.”

  “And why did Tillman leave?”

  For the first time since I walked into the office, Nathan Martyr looked uncomfortable, his posture defensive. I repeated the question, loudly.

  “Some of the staff… some of the women who worked here said he made them uneasy.”

  “That’s pretty vague, Nathan. Uneasy how?”

  “He was inappropriate with them.”

  “Inappropriate. God, for a junkie you sure are a squeamish motherfucker. What are we talking about here?”

  “I don’t know the whole story, but Natasha Romaine, one of our hostesses, quit abruptly and Abigail Dawtry, our head bartender, came to me and said Robert had cornered her in the bathroom after closing one night. She got out, but she said he scared the shit out of her, so I had to let him go.”

  “Abigail working tonight?”

  He ran his finger along a schedule taped on the wall next to his desk. “Sorry. Abby is off tonight.”

  “Can I get her contact info and the info for the hostess that quit?”

  “After what happened between us with Sashi, I suppose I owe you that much,” he said, tapping at a keyboard. “It’s printing.”