Lush Life

by Richard Price

  Closing his eyes, he once again felt the buck of the .22, saw the guy’s eyes going up, up, then listened to that bird again, its insane tweety song. Turning his head to the window, he saw its trembling, magnified silhouette against the lightly flapping manila shade: monster bird.

  He stared at the ceiling for a bit, then closed his eyes again.

  He was OK.

  FOUR

  LET IT DIE

  The next morning, giving his back to the rumple and clutter left behind by his departed sons, Matty stood hunched over the railing of his AstroTurfed seventeenth-floor terrace, coffee cup in hand, and looked down on the neighboring streets to the west, an aerial checkerboard of demolition and rehabilitation, seemingly no lot, no tenement untouched; then looked south to the financial district, to the absence of the Towers. He always imagined the slick obsidian office building that as of last year dominated the view as embarrassed, like someone exposed by an abruptly yanked shower curtain.

  He felt mildly embarrassed himself, for avoiding his sons again, for sleeping in the bunk room. At least it was just that one night; Jimmy Iacone, unable to get it together after his separation, and preferring to spend his disposable income in Ludlow Street bars, had been straight-up living in that windowless hamper for the last six months.

  Matty’s piano-legged neighbor stepped out onto the adjoining terrace and, ignoring him, started beating a throw rug like an intractable child. Hers was the only Orthodox family in the building willing to use the self-starting shabbos elevator as opposed to walking up the stairs from Friday sundown through Saturday, and therefore the only Orthodox family willing or able to live above the sixth floor. But they had only a two-bedroom and she was pregnant again, the third time in five years, so they’d probably be moving soon, selling for at least half a million, most likely to some young Wall Street couple who liked the idea of walking to work. Each December you could track the increase in gentile couples living in this formerly all-Jewish enclave simply by counting the new Christmas-light-trimmed terraces along the twenty-story building front; last year’s influx finally enough to vote in a seven-foot Scotch pine in the lobby next to the perennial Hanukkah menorah.

  The ringing of the cell phone set his shirt pocket trembling. He peered down at the number coming up, Berkowitz. And so it began.

  “How you doing, Inspector.”

  “He wants to see you.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You got a hell of a lot of explaining to do.”

  “I do, huh?” Matty rained the dregs of his coffee cup down onto Essex Street.

  “How come you didn’t tell us how weak this was?” Berkowitz said.

  “How come I didn’t?” Pacing the AstroTurf now. “How many times did you hear me say, ‘I have some real problems with him being the perp on this.’ How many times.” The persistent pounding one terrace over was giving him a headache. “And all I ever heard back from you and everybody else was wrap him up, pull the plug, wrap him up, pull the plug. The DA too. I laid it out like carpet. Guy says, ‘Two wits trumps no gun, we have probable cause with the wits.’ The DA says go, when do we ever say no? Tell me one time.”

  “Eleven o’clock.”

  The chief of detectives’ office in 1PP was like a cabin in the sky, the fifteenth-floor reception area tricked out like a banged-up precinct house complete with an old wood-scarred receiving desk, poorly maintained fish tanks, and paint-chipped newel-and-post barriers, walls covered with cheaply framed photos, petty administrative notices, and an American flag big enough to cover a king-size bed.

  Once you got past the stage set, however, into the inner suites, it was all teak, hush, and power.

  Which is where Matty found himself two hours later, standing already exhausted in his best suit directly outside the chief of detectives’ conference room, Deputy Inspector Berkowitz beside him, one hand on the doorknob but going nowhere for the moment.

  “This isn’t good.” Berkowitz’s voice an urgent murmur.

  “So you said.”

  “They’re all trying to find a way out.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “My boss doesn’t want to be embarrassed.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “So. Who authorized this arrest?”

  “He did.”

  Exhaling through his nose, Berkowitz quickly scanned the barren corridor, then brought his face even closer.

  “Who authorized this arrest?”

  “You did?” Matty knowing what Berkowitz wanted to hear.

  Another exhalation, another walleyed scan.

  “One more time.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Berkowitz glared at him, Matty thinking, Okeydoke.

  “I did.”

  Berkowitz hesitated for a second, searching his face, then finally opened the door, taking his seat before Matty could even cross the threshold.

  Despite his righteous truculence, Matty’s first sight of the seven men waiting for him around the long, burnished table high above the East River momentarily turned him into a child.

  The chief of detectives, Mangold, impeccable, telegenic, pissed, seated at the short end, flanked by Berkowitz and Upshaw, the chief of Manhattan detectives; the others included two full inspectors; Mangini, the division captain; and seated as far away from the other bosses as possible, Carmody, the Eighth Squad lieutenant.

  “So.” Mangold tilted his chin in Matty’s general direction. “What the hell happened?”

  For the thousandth time Matty gave his recitation: his concern about the absence of the gun, the absence of a motive, the ultimately prevailing counterbalance of two seemingly dead-on eyewits, the DA saying, Probable cause, saying, Better safe than sorry.

  “Let me ask you a simple question,” Mangold, said, squinting out at the East River, the mountain chain of rubbled lungblocks lurking beneath the dapple. “Did you at least do a paraffin test?”

  Matty wanted to laugh, thinking this had to be some kind of Candid Camera thing, April Fools’ thing, but no. Everybody was either glaring out the window or scowling at his nails.

  “There was a time concern according to CSU,” he finally said, setting himself up for the next shot.

  “In that case I have another simple question.” Mangold had yet to look at him directly. “Who was running this case, you or the techs?”

  Matty could feel the color rushing into his face. “I was.”

  “And so you let them talk you out of a paraffin test. You’ve got no gun, no motive, a situation like that, we’re talking the most elemental, the most basic . . .” Shaking his head in disbelief. “A detective of your experience.”

  “This is news to me, boss,” the chief of Manhattan d’s said, sounding both mournful and mind-boggled.

  In a moment everyone at the table was doing the exasperated head shake, the entire phone tree plus Carmody, who was completely out of the loop on this one, who, on the simplest of jobs, couldn’t find a lump of coal in a snowball.

  “Don’t you shake your head at me,” Matty blew at the lieutenant before he could stop himself, Carmody the only one in the room almost safe enough to snap at. Almost, but not really.

  They all had their eyes on him now—where’s he going with this—until Mangold said, “All right, enough,” as if bored. “Now you’re gonna do things my way.”

  Everybody exhaled.

  “You have Vice involved?” Mangold asked Matty.

  “Vice?”

  “Back in ’92 we had a ton of pross in that area. Call Vice, see if they have any kites on that block, any informants, maybe it was a john from an encounter.”

  “We’re on it,” Berkowitz said.

  A john . . .

  “Hit any after-hours clubs, gambling activity.” Mangold speaking to the river again. “Your robbery parolees in the Eighth, you know who they are?”

  “Actually I do,” Matty said. “Most of them are in their thirties and forties, nobody that fits.”

  “Get Parole involved an
yhow. We had a PO down there when I was on foot patrol back in the eighties? Guy must’ve closed half a dozen cases for us. A human computer.”

  “The eighties?”

  “Also that bar, the one they were last at?”

  “Berkmann’s.”

  “Somebody knows something there hasn’t said it yet. I want Vice to do an underage ops, call Narcotics, see if they have any kites for that place. I want an all-out effort in there until somebody waves a flag.”

  Matty thought about opening a bar, teaching high school, junior high, anything. What did he know enough to teach . . .

  “OK, next. Guy claimed to have a gun?”

  “Who.”

  “The guy you locked up.”

  “Not anymore,” Matty said. “Says he handed it in at one of the guns-for-cash exchanges at the Eighth a number of years back.”

  “OK, fine. Find out if he actually did that.”

  “We can’t, Chief.” Matty again. “We don’t keep records for that.”

  Mangold finally looked at him directly, his eyes starred with marvel. “Man, you are nothing but trouble for me.”

  But then Berkowitz surprised Matty by stepping in, although all he did was state the obvious: “The whole point of cash for guns, Chief, is no names, no questions, that’s the hook for it, otherwise . . .”

  “Then go back to the Eighth, find out the year he supposedly gave it in, check the invoice log, and see if any .22s were vouchered at that time. Get me something makes me a little fucking happy here.”

  “That’s a needle in a haystack, Chief.” Matty in his despair actually starting to enjoy all his negative responses. “All due respect.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ, the guy lives in sneaker distance of the scene? Then go to his house, get in there and talk to him, rattle his cage, I want more on that gun. We’re not done with him yet.”

  “Chief”—Matty flushed—“hang on, why are we burning bridges here, the guy’s our only witness and he already hates us. I don’t see—”

  Ignoring him, Mangold turned to Upshaw. “This is not good. With the press? This is a problem.”

  “In terms of that?” the chief of Manhattan d’s said softly, as if discussing a patient just out of earshot. “I think we let it die, weather the storm.”

  Once again that ring of solemn nods, Matty seeing it all: a gag order on the press as of this moment. Then inevitably, after a day or two, a more media-friendly murder, with 90 percent of the detectives he’d commandeered quietly returned to their precincts; leaving Matty in the middle of the room with a cardboard box of 61s and 5s and no backup except, maybe out of pity, Yolonda; everyone else tacitly avoiding him on this one like a landlocked Ahab, like an ass-pain Ancient Mariner, like he had halitosis of the brain.

  The ruminative silence that had come down on the conference room was finally broken by Mangold himself, giving Matty his eyes for the second and last time.

  “A simple paraffin test,” he said dreamily, his voice filled with withering amazement.

  Matty found himself levitating into a half crouch, his fingers splayed red and white on the table, and for a swollen second or two it looked like he was going to lower the boom on every boss in the room, lay it all out for Mangold, phone call by phone call, all of them stone-faced now, reading his mind, but then, but then . . . he just ate it, any one of these career-long careerists having enough juice to deep-six his own career, send him to work via the Verrazano and its $7 toll every remaining day of his professional life.

  As he sank back into his seat, he could palpably sense the relief behind the facades.

  Fuck it. At least they all know.

  “Look, just go to his place, knock on the door, apologize, and come back,” Matty said to Iacone and Mullins, doing his best to follow orders without getting Eric Cash any more agitated than he already was.

  “No search?”

  “No search. No search.” Then, grudgingly adding, “I don’t know. See if he has anything else to say about the gun, but tread light, then get the fuck out of there.”

  The lieutenant stalked past without looking at him.

  Matty waited for Carmody’s door to slam, then called a friend in Vice. “Hey. You’re gonna get a call from 1PP to do an underage ops on this bar Berkmann’s?”

  “We did already.”

  “Hit it?”

  “No. Got the call. We’re going in sometime this week. Tomorrow, day after, like that.”

  “Look, the owner’s a friend to the squad, never gave us trouble, always helped us out, so, I’m just curious, you have any idea who you’re sending in?”

  The friend from Vice hesitated for a beat, then, “I like this Dominican kid, a cadet still, but done it before.”

  “Oh yeah? Nice-looking?” Matty grabbed a pen.

  “Not really, kind of short, on the chunky side, wears an earring through her left eyebrow.”

  “No kidding.” Jotting this down.

  “Has kind of a metallic red dye streak going.”

  “Kids today, huh?” Matty clucked, still writing. “You’ll give me a heads-up before you roll?”

  He wasn’t exactly sure how this would pay itself back, but with the investigation about to die, having Harry Steele owe him a favor right now seemed like an instinctual good move.

  When Eric opened his door, he was not surprised to see that the City of New York wasn’t finished with him. He had been sitting on his folded-up futon sofa all morning, just waiting for something like this.

  “Eric?” Jimmy Iacone offered his hand “I’m Detective Iacone, big guy here”—chucking a thumb over his shoulder—“is Detective Mullins. And basically we came by to see if you’re OK, and you know, again, to extend our apologies for yesterday.”

  They were a dream come true: Mullins, huge, blond, and mute, his lightless eyes trained on the center of Eric’s forehead; the other one fat and transparently unguent, like the villain in a spaghetti western.

  “Fortunately,” Iacone went on, “we never stopped working for you. Just kept at it until we could find someone to support your story . . . Unfortunately, we have one loose end left.”

  Eric’s shoulders began to do that pop and ripple thing again, drawing Mullins’s gaze from the sweet spot above his eyes.

  Iacone took a cheerful step forward, making Eric back up. “May we come in?”

  The place was doorless straight through to the window, and as Mullins strolled into the book-lined front parlor, Iacone steered Eric into the dining nook/kitchenette, then turned him so that his back was to his partner.

  “You mentioned you had a .22?”

  “Yeah, I told the detective, what’s it . . .” Eric’s fingers chittered through his wallet until he found Matty’s card. “Clark. Detective Clark. That I did a cash-for-guns exchange.” He could hear Mullins prowling behind him.

  “Right,” Iacone said, laying a light hand on Eric’s arm to keep him from turning around. “Can anyone verify that you actually . . .”

  “Did it? Well, the cop who took it from me gave me the cash receipt, it was years ago, I have no idea his name, and, hang on, I believe I went with a friend, Jeff Sanford.”

  Iacone wrote down the name. “How we can get in touch with Jeff?”

  “To make sure I’m not lying?”

  “This is just how we do.” Iacone shrugged apologetically, his pen poised over the notepad.

  “He’s somewheres upstate, Elmira?”

  “The correctional facility?”

  “The what?” Eric reared back. “No. The city. He’s a teacher in the high school.” Then, at the sound of a fallen book, “What’s he doing?” Finally wheeling to the parlor, where Mullins was going through the bookshelves packed with Alessandra’s research material.

  “It’s not what it looks like,” Eric said. “All that’s my girlfriend’s, it’s for her master’s degree, you can ask Detective Clark, we, this is all research material, every . . .”

  With an Arabic sex-tour guide for Thailand in one hand
and a German spanking magazine in the other, Mullins gave Eric a look that pulverized whatever was left of him.

  “Please.” His voice breaking.

  “Johnny,” Iacone said softly.

  Mullins made a show of replacing each item to the slot from which he had taken it, but the shelves were overstuffed, and with each put-back, other books and magazines spilled out, each freakier than the last.

  “I’ll get it. I’ll get it.” Eric knelt before Mullins and began stacking the spillage with shaking hands.

  “What’s in there?” Mullins asked, gesturing to the padlocked steamer trunk covered with a fringed brocade shawl between the futon couch and the TV.

  “You know something?” Eric looked up at him from the floor. “I have no idea. It was locked when I moved in here, she never gave me the key, and I never saw her open it. Probably something really embarrassing, but it’s hers. Everything in here is hers, look.”

  Springing to his feet, he marched into the kitchenette and flung open the cabinets, displaying the shelves stuffed with beans and lentils and supplements. “Hers.” Then striding to the lone shared closet exploding with zippered bags full of coats, sweaters, and dresses. “Hers.”

  Then to the bathroom, where he pulled back the shower curtain to reveal the dozens of dolphin, giant squid, and whale decals glued to the wall tiles. “All hers. And you know what? I don’t even know when, or even if she’s coming back, OK?”

  “All right, all right,” Iacone said, hands up in retreat. “Like I said, we just came by to tie up loose ends.”

  “And to apologize,” Mullins added.

  Eric could hear them as they went trudging down the stairs.

  “We should get a warrant for that trunk, you know?” Mullins said.

  “Fuck it,” Iacone said, then: “Research.”

  “You should have seen them in there, Yoli.” Matty was sitting on the edge of her desk. “Like roaches with the lights just turned on. ‘I never knew that,’ ‘You never told us that,’ ‘News to me, boss,’ ‘Great idea, boss,’ and I just had to eat it. Everybody like, skittering under the stove and I just had to eat it.”