Lush Life

by Richard Price

  “No, no, I couldn’t find the, the city, the whole fucking New York City. I took the Saw Mill instead of the Thruway, and I wound up at the Whitestone Bridge somehow, then—”

  “You came down from . . .”

  “Tarrytown, the Con Ed remediation seminar, but you know if this had happened a day earlier, I would have been coming from Riverdale, which is just like thirty minutes away.”

  Matty nodded as if everything he was hearing now was both reasonable and interesting.

  “Are you here by yourself?”

  “Myself, yeah.”

  “You drove in by yourself.”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t . . .”

  Sliding his hand inside Marcus’s arm, Matty steered him out to the street and gestured to the thrumming SUV in the middle of the block.

  Marcus gave a start like he was falling out of a tree.

  “Keys are still in there?”

  “I can’t believe . . .”

  Matty flagged Jimmy Iacone, coming out of the building for a smoke. “Hey, Jimmy? Would you park Mr. Marcus’s car for him?”

  Iacone reared up a little at the request, then Matty watched the name register in his eyes.

  “Just put it in the lot.” Then, turning to Marcus, “Look, like I said, I’m sorry to have to meet you under these circumstances.”

  “Well, you know they woke me this morning, the cops up there, actually it was this VP from Con Ed, I guess for the personal touch, and, I don’t know, honestly? I think I’m handling it pretty well so far, but I need to ask you something, and this is the main . . .” Marcus looked off for a second, palming his mouth. “Do you have his driver’s license?”

  “We have his effects,” Matty said cautiously, wishing it were Yolonda here instead of him.

  “OK. Did you notice . . . Did he happen to check the box for organ donation? And if he did, could I, as his father, override that? I really don’t want anybody harvesting his organs. Really don’t.”

  “No, no. We can take care of that.”

  Two young Latino cops in matching black and blue NYPD windbreakers and fiberglass helmets came through the front door and walked their patrol bikes past Matty and Marcus down the handicapped ramp. Jimmy Iacone, on his way back from parking Marcus’s car, drawled, “You guys look like twin centerfolds for Blueboy.”

  “Yo, bitch, you said nobody here’d see that thing,” one bike cop vamped to the other, all three low-key laughing like life is life is life, then going about their business.

  “Mr. Marcus, do you want to come upstairs? We can sit and talk.”

  “Sure,” bobbing his head.

  Matty turned to the building, but sensed that Marcus was suddenly no longer with him. Turning back, he saw him transfixed by the sight of John Mullins escorting a teary red-haired woman and a stunned-looking teenage girl towards the house.

  He started to ask Marcus if they were his wife and daughter, but the guy abruptly took off towards the building without him, and by the time Matty made it back inside, all he could see of Marcus were his unlaced shoes high-stepping up the open stairs, the reception cop finally on his feet but doing nothing.

  Marcus wasn’t on the second floor in any of the assorted squad rooms or bathrooms, nor on the third, in the half-assed gym or locker rooms, but on the unpopulated fourth, which was empty save for storage rooms and weapons cabinets, the guy having apparently just climbed blind until he ran out of stairs.

  Matty came on him pacing between the bolted gun racks and the wall-pegged hazmat suits.

  “Mr. Marcus.”

  “Please.” He gulped for breath. “I don’t want to see them now.”

  “Was that your family?”

  “Can you get them out of here?”

  Matty couldn’t tell if Marcus was distraught or just winded.

  “I’m begging you.”

  The captain’s office downstairs was undergoing renovations, and Carmody was on the phone in the lieutenant’s office, so the best Matty could offer the father in terms of privacy was the squad’s eating alcove, half-hidden from the cramped sea of desks by a chest-high partition.

  He seated Marcus behind the salvaged Formica desk that served as a dining table, turned off the portable TV before they could run any news footage of the murder, stacked and discarded the multiple partial copies of the Post and the News strewn about the tabletop. He could do nothing about the mingled ghost-reeks of Chinese and Dominican takeout or about the bathroom a few feet away, someone in there now having a splashy time of it.

  He would have done anything to have Yolonda in his place right now. At least cosmetically, though, he was probably the better choice. Most families found more reassurance in the big, lantern-jawed Irishman, all ass-kick and unrelentingness, than the Bambi-eyed Latina; no matter that for all her touchy-feely vibes Yolonda was a better hunter than he’d ever be.

  Marcus seemed less babbly now, more dazed, although he tended to jump at everything, the sound of the toilet flushing a few feet away, the scattered telephone rings and disembodied call-outs, the sudden appearance of a detective who leaned in from around the bend of the partition and, seeing that the bathroom was occupied, palmed his tie to his gut and without ceremony spit a stream of mouthwash into the newspaper-filled garbage can.

  When the bathroom door finally swung open, Jimmy Iacone stood there still adjusting his belt, at first startled, then embarrassed, to see Marcus sitting just a few feet away. Whisper-coughing, “Excuse me,” he turned back to make sure the bathroom door was closed, then as he sidled past, murmured to Matty, “Give me a heads-up or something.”

  “I apologize for the mess, we’re not—” Matty cut himself off and twisted around, tracking Marcus’s distracted gaze to a baseball cap that sat atop the TV, its legend, scripted in red on the brim, NYPD CRIME SCENE UNIT, beneath which read WE SEE DEAD PEOPLE.

  “Sorry,” Matty said. “Unfortunately that’s how we cope.”

  “Gallows humor,” Marcus said evenly.

  As Matty got up to stow the hat, he glanced out the window and saw John Mullins escorting Marcus’s distraught wife and kid back to his car.

  “All due respect?” Matty said, turning back to the table. “I think you’re making a mistake not being with your family right now.”

  “It was a robbery?” Marcus asked lightly, the red creeping back into his face.

  Matty hesitated, wanting to keep campaigning for at least the wife being here, but got caught up in the trickiness of the question. “Well, at this point we don’t think so.” He hesitated, then forged ahead. “In fact, let me tell you exactly what’s going on. Right now we have two credible witnesses who’re telling us they saw three white males standing in front of a building, one of which takes out a gun, fires at your son, then runs into the lobby.”

  “OK,” Marcus said, his eyes wandering.

  “When, when the first officers responded to the scene, that same white male who ran inside was back out there and told them that he and his buddies had been robbed at gunpoint by two black or Hispanic males, one of whom fired the shot. But, as I said, our two eyewitnesses say otherwise.”

  Matty wasn’t sure if anything he’d just said had registered in the slightest on Marcus, but he knew there was a good chance that this nutshell of a scenario could come to take over the man’s life until his own death.

  “Mr. Marcus, would you like some water?”

  “Why’d he do it?”

  “Honestly? We’re not sure. They were all drinking pretty heavily, there could have been some kind of argument, possibly involving a girl, but basically—”

  “They were friends?”

  “They worked together at Café Berkmann, his name is Eric Cash. Did you ever hear your son mention that name?”

  “No.” Then, “He’s here?”

  “He hasn’t been charged yet but we’re talking to him.”

  “Here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “That we can’t do.”<
br />
  “I just want to ask him—”

  “We can’t do that, Mr. Marcus, try to understand.”

  “OK. I just thought, you know, both for your sake and mine I could . . .”

  “It’s not . . .”

  “I understand,” Marcus said reasonably. Then, “Where was he shot?”

  Again, Matty hesitated. “The upper-body region.”

  “Did I ask you that!” Marcus shouted, the unseen squad room beyond the partition suddenly quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” Matty said carefully, “I misunderstood the question.”

  “Where, out there, in New York.”

  “On Eldridge Street, a few blocks south of—”

  “I’m . . . Eldridge? Can I ask what number Eldridge?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “We’re from Eldridge, Houston and Eldridge . . . Ike’s great-grandfather.” It was the first time Matty had heard him utter his son’s name, and Marcus took a moment to catch his breath, the ambient clamor filling the void.

  “Twenty-seven Eldridge,” Marcus finally said, nodding to himself. “Did he suffer?” Then before Matty could respond, “No. Of course not. How could you possibly tell me yes.”

  “He did not suffer,” Matty said nonetheless, hoping it was true.

  “It was instantaneous?” The question was real, Marcus unable to hold on to his ironic edge.

  “Instantaneous.”

  They sat there for a moment, Matty seeing the beginnings of a slightly less shell-shocked pain seep into the man’s face.

  “Look,” Matty plowed on. “I know now is a bad time, but honestly we have some real problems figuring out the why of things, so if there’s anything you can tell us about your son . . .”

  “I can’t remember when I talked to him last,” Marcus said. “When I saw him last. Hang on.” His mouth hung open as he searched the ceiling. “Hold on.”

  And Matty knew there was no way this guy could help the investigation. The thing to do now was get him with his people.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Marcus.”

  “Do for me.”

  “If you don’t want to be with your family, which, as I said, I think is a mistake, is there someone else I can call?”

  Marcus didn’t respond.

  “Do you need a place to stay?”

  “To stay?”

  “We can arrange—”

  Marcus jumped as Yolonda abruptly materialized alongside him, leaning against the partition.

  She touched his shoulder in sympathy, gave him her sad face, and he finally started to cry.

  Matty’s cell went off: Bobby Oh. Leaving Yolonda to babysit the father, he took the call around the corner.

  “Mr. Bobby, tell me something good.”

  “Nothing from nothing,” Oh said, then yawned.

  Matty could just see him after eight hours on the scene, pink-eyed, shirttails flapping, the sparse hair rimming his scalp shooting straight up like frozen fire.

  “Nobody in the building knew him or ever saw him before, so I can’t imagine he passed it off to some in-house confederate, the roof’s clean, so’s the neighboring roofs, the fire escapes, drainpipes, stairwells, basement, we went through the garbage cans on six corners, tracked down the sanitation truck which makes the nighttime pickups around here, holding that for a go-through, got EPA coming in to dredge manholes and sewer grates . . . Anything we missed?”

  “This guy’s a regular fuckin’ Rip van Winkle,” Yolonda said, tilting her chin at Eric Cash through the glass. “If I got that much sleep, I’d look ten years younger.”

  “I’m just not feeling him for this.”

  “I do.”

  “And I’ll tell you something else. If he’s telling us the truth about last night, he was six inches from catching a bullet. And with what we’re putting him through?”

  “You’re such a good person,” Yolonda said. “So how do you want to play it?”

  “I don’t know. Give him one last run for his money, then let the DA call it.”

  “OK. So how do you want to play it?”

  “Let me go at him hard.”

  “Why you? You say you don’t even like him for it.”

  “Yeah, I know, but he gets real upset when I come off disappointed in him.”

  Deputy Inspector Berkowitz materialized alongside them, his London Fog draped over his arm.

  “Where we at?” Going into a half dip to eyeball Cash through the glass. “The natives are getting seriously restless.”

  Matty and Yolonda started arguing again like an old couple with a road map.

  “Well, I’ll tell you.” Berkowitz straightened up and checked his watch: 12:45. “I were you, I’d be getting ready to wrap this guy up.”

  “You got it, boss,” Yolonda said, looking at Matty as if she were dying to stick out her tongue in triumph.

  With Billy Marcus in no shape to drive and, in any event, unwilling to return to his family in Riverdale, Matty had booked him a room at the Landsman, a new hotel on Rivington that had a goodwill arrangement with the precinct, offering a cheap rate for drug-sting suites, and economy singles for out-of-town testifiers, victims, and on occasion family members waiting for the release of a body. The Landsman would have gotten out of the deal if it could. The owners had panicked midway during construction and started scrambling for long-term commitments within the community, fearing that they had overestimated the allure of the neighborhood, but in fact the place had been a hit from the door on in.

  Jimmy Iacone drew the job of handling the check-in. Since there was no luggage to carry and the hunt for a parking space could take half an hour, Iacone decided to walk Marcus the seven short blocks from Pitt to Ludlow. It was slow going, the guy moving as if he were walking through a neighborhood in the wake of a bombing, its storefronts in flames and bodies littering the pavement; and he couldn’t take his eyes off any of the kids coming their way, male, female, straight, freak, black, or white. Then, on the corner of Rivington and Suffolk, he stopped dead and turned to stare hang-jawed after someone or other they had passed, and Iacone knew that Marcus had just seen his son, most of them did; and that’s why he hated being a squad detective: he would rather go through the reinforced door of a dope house, roll in the dirt with a 250-pound ED off his meds, buy crank from a tweeking biker—anything but deal with the parent of a freshly murdered child.

  Because the hotel was nearly full, they had no choice but to give Marcus a room fit for a photo shoot, a sixteenth-floor glass-walled corner aerie, more perch than shelter, all white: white furniture, fixtures, wall-mounted flatscreen, and a king-size bed covered in synthetic white fur. Despite its stark opulence, the place was the size of a shoe box, with barely a foot clearance between that huge bed and the three-sided terrace, which offered an imperial overview of the area: a sea of cramped and huddled walk-ups and century-old elementary schools, the only structures out there aspiring to any kind of height the randomly sprouting bright yellow Tyvek-wrapped multistory add-ons, and farther out, superimposed against the river, the housing projects and union-built co-ops that flanked the east side of this grubby vista like siege towers.

  Marcus sat slumped on the edge of the polar bed, Iacone fidgeting before him as if they were breaking up and he didn’t know how to leave without provoking a scene.

  “Do you need anything, Mr. Marcus?”

  “Like what.”

  “Food, medication, fresh clothes . . .”

  “No. I’m OK now, thanks.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Thanks, thank you.” Reaching out and shaking his hand.

  Iacone extracted a card from the side pocket of his sport jacket, laid it on the night table, then continued to two-step for a minute, feeling a little guilty about how easily he was getting out of there.

  An hour after they had left Eric, they reentered the interview room, Matty whacking the door into the cinder block to wake him up.

  “What.” He jerked upright, his mouth whit
e with sleep. “Is he OK?”

  “Now you ask?”

  “We haven’t gone over there yet. Something came up.” Yolonda took her chair and slid it so close that their kneecaps intersected.

  “What.”

  “Eric, are you sure everything you told us is to the best of your memory?” she asked, leaning in even farther.

  “Considering that I was drunk,” he said carefully.

  “Well, you’re sober now,” Matty drawled, pushing himself upright off the wall.

  “What?” Eric repeated, his eyes ticking from face to face.

  “Almost the first thing you said to me walking into this room, you looked at that rail,” Matty barked, leaning on the table now, his shoulders humped higher than his head, “and you said, ‘I feel like I should be cuffed to that.’ ”

  “What were you trying to tell us?” Yolonda asked.

  “Nothing.” Rearing back from them. “I was feeling bad.”

  “Feeling bad. Bad for Ike, or for yourself?”

  “What?”

  “Here’s the latest.” Matty straightened up. “We now have two witnesses just came in the house, said they were right across the street last night when the shot went off. And guess what. They saw you, and Steve and Ike, and no one else. Explain that to me.”

  “No. That’s not right.”

  “They heard the shot, saw Ike go down, and you take off into the building.”

  “No.”

  “No, huh?” Fuming. “No.”

  “Look, we’re not here to hurt you,” Yolonda said. “There’s a million reasons why shit happens. You guys were horsing around, drunk off your ass, and the goddamn thing just went off.”

  “What?” Eric started to tremble, seemed embarrassed that he couldn’t control his own body.

  “Hey, for all we know, Ike grabbed it from you, or maybe the other guy did, whatsit, Steve,” Yolonda offered. “We have no idea, that’s for you to clear up, but I am telling you, Eric, as stupid as you were for bringing a gun with you on an all-night crawl like that? You are one lucky bastard because the jam you’re in could be a hell of a lot worse. Ike could be lying on a slab right now and you could be looking at a murder charge.”