“So,” reaching for the white bread, “I hear you arrested that bastard who broke our window.”
“Actually?” Lugo’s eyes strayed to the miniature TV propped behind the counter. “I believe they cut him loose.”
“What?” Nazir straightened up. “Why?”
“Something about him not having done it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Be that as it may.”
“They don’t tell us shit,” Scharf said.
“They don’t like us getting in their business,” Daley said.
“Upstairs is upstairs,” Geohagan said. “We’re just infantry.”
“But that’s stupid.” Nazir waved a bread knife. “Who spends all the time on the street, you or them?”
“Tell me about it,” Lugo said.
The store descended into a momentary silence as they watched a girl eat a slug sandwich on a rerun of Fear Factor.
“What the fuck’s that got to do with fear?” Daley said. “That’s just disgusting.”
“If you want to see good Fear Factor contestants, you have to come to my part of the world,” Nazir said, wrapping the first bacon-and-egg sandwich. “We’d do great on that show.”
A kid with a stitched cheek came barreling into the store so tricked out in Crip blue that no one took him seriously.
“I need four quarter,” thrusting a dollar across the unoccupied register counter, his head turned to the street as if something was out there.
“Oh!” Lugo reared back, wincing. “Where’d you get slashed like that?”
“Hah?” the kid said, then, “On my cheek.”
Daley gave him change for the dollar.
As Nazir scooped another fried egg off the griddle, the 6:00 a.m. news came on, the president rolling in grainy waves on the screen.
“He’s coming into the city this week, right?” Daley asked.
“The day after next or something,” Lugo said. “Naz, you hear his speech last night?”
“Yes, but on the radio.”
Lugo and Daley looked at each other.
“Everything he said I agree with.” Speed-wrapping the second grease bomb. “My brother too.”
“Good,” Lugo said. “Glad to hear it, man.”
“Yemenis like a strong father. We respond to a strong father. The young people who come in here, they’re very mocking about him and what he has to do now.”
“In this neighborhood?” Scharf lit a cigarette. “Tell me about it.”
“Sometimes your father does things you don’t understand, but a father doesn’t need to explain all his actions to you,” Nazir said. “You need to have faith and trust that behind every act is love. Then later you look back or you sit quietly and it becomes clear that these things which seemed harsh at the time saved you. You were just too much a child to understand, but now you are a man with health and prosperity and all you can say is thank you.”
“Fair enough.” Lugo took a wolf bite out of his sandwich.
Preceded by his smell, Boulware stumbled in, misbuttoned, his face waffled with abrasions.
“Do you have an ATM?” he asked Nazir.
“Whoa, bro.” Lugo straightened up. “That just happen?”
“What . . . ” Boulware blinking.
“It’s like the fuckin’ knife and gun club in here tonight, Naz,” Daley said.
“Where’d you get the tune-up?” Lugo asked.
“Where?” Boulware absently frisked himself.
“No ATM,” Nazir lied.
Boulware wandered back out into the street, Quality of Life eating their breakfast sandwiches as they watched him negotiate the early-morning traffic.
“Hey.” Minette Davidson came into the squad room carrying the weather, flush-faced and breathless.
“Hey, how are you?” Matty shot to his feet, flattening his tie and offering her the chair sidesaddle to his own.
“I’m Minette Davidson, Billy Marcus’s wife?”
“Sure, I know. Detective Clark. Matty Clark.”
“I know,” mechanically shaking his offered hand. “Has, has Billy been in touch with you?” The corners of her eyes were creased with sleeplessness, her reddish hair carelessly brushed.
“Billy? No.”
“So you don’t know where he is . . .”
“Do I?” Then, “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. He finally came home yesterday morning, then left again last night, never came back. I was thinking, I just thought, maybe he was down here somewhere, came in to see you.”
“You try to call him?”
“He didn’t take his phone.” She unconsciously began touching random objects on his desk.
Matty willfully kept his eyes from watching her restless fingers.
“But you think he’s somewheres down here.”
“Why.” Her smile a twitch. “Where do you think he is?”
“Me?” Matty thinking, The hell would I know, then, “My guess he’s probably off somewheres trying to hash things out.”
Minette stared at him bright-eyed, as if waiting for more.
More.
“Personally, if I were in his shoes? I’d want to be with my family right now, but with these kind of situations, in my experience, people, they just . . . they can go every which way, you know?”
Minette continued to stare at him avidly, as if each word were a key to something.
Then, snapping out of it, she went into her purse, took out pen and pad, and wrote down her number.
“I need to ask you two things.” Handing him the sheet. “If he comes in to see you or you come across him, could you please let me know?”
“Of course.” He tucked her number in the upper corner of his blotter.
“The other is, if there’s any developments . . .” She whipped her head around as Yolonda entered the room. “If you could keep me in the loop.”
“Absolutely.”
“And on my end . . .” She trailed off.
“You OK?”
“I think . . . OK. I hope it’s just, I believe it’s what you said, he’s probably off somewheres trying to clear his head.”
“Good.” Matty glanced at Yolonda at her desk, going through the District Arrest Books again but listening.
“Because he felt like, he feels like, if he had only . . . I don’t know . . . If he had done this instead of that, or that instead of this . . .”
“I can’t tell you how many parents put themselves through that hell.”
“So you’re saying that’s meaningless, right?” she asked gingerly, her fingers back to handling the objects on his desk.
“Let me tell you something,” Yolonda chimed in, Minette wheeling to her voice. “If you’re the parent in a situation like this, and you’re intent on blaming yourself? You can just pick a reason out of a hat.”
“Right. Yes.” Minette bobbing her head.
“It’s like your mind becomes this vicious warehouse, you know?”
“Yes.” Minette all hers now.
“Although it doesn’t help very much to say that, does it.”
“No, no, everything, anything.”
“Do you think he’s maybe trying to find the guy himself?” Matty asked, making Minette wheel back to him.
“How would he even know how to do that?” Her face twisting with incredulity.
Matty said nothing, just watched her eyes.
“That’s insane.”
“OK.”
“That’s a movie.”
“Good.”
Then she was gone again, something making her draw deeper breaths, her lips slightly parted.
“Minette . . .”
“What?”
“Are you worried he might hurt himself?”
“Hurt himself?”
Matty waited, then lightly touched her hand. “It’s not a trick question.”
“I don’t think . . . No. No.”
Yolonda half-turned, studying them.
“OK. Good.” He took his
hand back. “To be honest, we don’t really have the time to track him down and also do the work we have to do on the other.”
“I understand.”
“But I’ll get the word out.”
“Thank you.”
“Everyone here knows what he looks like.”
“Thank you.”
“Anticrime cruises these streets twenty-four seven,” Yolonda said. “If he’s walking around, they’ll pick him up.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t mean to spook you like that,” Matty said.
“You didn’t.” Then, after a long moment of silence, “You didn’t,” her voice husky and distant.
She closed her eyes and immediately nodded off, her chin dropping, then jerking up.
“Whoa,” she said. “Sorry.”
There was nothing, no real business left, but Minette continued to sit and Matty wasn’t inclined to rush her out of there.
“Can I get you something?” he asked. “Coffee?”
“You know, when Billy left his wife and moved in with me and my daughter, Ike was what, ten, maybe?” looking to Matty as if for verification. “He lived with Elena, but he came over every weekend, and when he did, it was like, me, Billy, and Nina would be watching television and Ike would be watching us. I mean, oh my God, we’d go to a restaurant, a movie, a basketball game, always the same thing. Never smiled, never spoke unless spoken to, and never took his eyes off us.”
Minette went off with the recollection, Matty just looking and looking at her.
“But, it wasn’t sulking, it was more like, observing. I swear to God, I’d never felt so observed in my life.” Smiling at him, through him.
“I mean Nina was a little hinky towards Ike and Billy too, but she was a lot younger than him, more babyish, and her I could talk to, but that first year with Ike? That was not fun. I did everything I could to make him feel at home with us. And Billy did too, of course, but the distance that kid maintained, that watching, it was like Children of the Damned, you know?”
“That movie scared the hell out of me,” Yolonda said.
“Then, like maybe after a whole year of that, one Sunday we all go to Van Cortlandt Park, the two kids and us. Billy’s trying to get Ike to have a catch, he won’t take his nose out of some book, you know, got the spycam up, but Billy gets him on his feet, Ike’s catching and throwing like it’s a two-ton medicine ball, then all of a sudden, he sees something over his dad’s shoulder, drops his glove, and breaks into a dead run, yelling, ‘Hey! Hey!’
“We’re like, what the hell? Take off after him. It turns out that a couple of older kids had my daughter cornered by some trees, were trying to take all her little stuff, earrings, charm bracelet, play purse, she must’ve been too scared to cry for help, but Ike, Ike he just like, launched himself at them, and they were bigger kids too, came in on them like a buzz saw, but before they could get it together to kick his narrow little ass, they see me and Billy bringing up the rear, so they had to take off. But Ike, he’s not done, he chases them halfway across the green, then stands there, shouts out, ‘You keep your fucking hands off my sister!’
“His sister.” Minette went off somewheres, came back laughing. “And my daughter, she hears him, turns to me, says, ‘Ike’s got a sister?’ ”
“Wow.” Matty ran his fingers across his lips.
“Yeah. And that kind of broke it open. By the time we got married two years later? The kids gave us a toast together.”
Matty just sat there, his face smeared into his hand.
“You know the thing I loved about Ike the most? He was a good kid and all, but the best thing about him was that he always seemed so ready. Does that even make sense?”
“Sure,” Matty said.
“And the, the irony is, Billy always kicked himself for having to leave Ike behind, but the truth of the matter? That kid turned out good to go. A big heart and happy. A lot happier than either of his parents.”
Minette hoisted her bag to her shoulder and wiped her eyes. “It just works out that way sometimes, you know?”
A moment after she left, Yolonda murmured to her computer screen, “If the kid had been a little less ‘ready,’ he might still be alive, you know what I’m saying?” Looking up at Matty, who was still looking at the door.
Eric sat alone in Café Berkmann’s cramped cellar-level office, the narrow plank desk before him covered with neat stacks of cash and empty envelopes.
Despite his knuckles having continued to swell overnight to the point of splitting the skin, his fingers skittered across the face of the calculator in a controlled frenzy. And as always when stealing from the tip pool, he not only moved his lips but whispered the numbers out loud as if the TI-36 were in on the scam.
As a manager as opposed to, say, a bartender, he found it hard to steal or, as he preferred to think of it, shave, but Eric did what he could.
In divvying up the nightly tip pool, it was all about the cash value of a “point,” which changed every night, and what fraction of that point your job was assigned.
Managers, hostesses, and waiters earned a full point per hour, jobs of lesser status, three-quarters to a quarter of a point.
Last night, the house took in $2,400 in tips, which, divided by 77, the accumulated number of points working the floor, gave a point value of $31.16.
So a waiter working eight hours was owed $31.16 times his full eight points, or $249.28; a busboy, getting one-third of a point, was due roughly $83 for putting in the same amount of time.
But, but . . . If Eric “miscalculated” and declared the point value for the evening not to have been $31.16 but, say $29.60 (no one ever checked up on him), then that waiter took home only $236.80, the busboy $78.93, and Eric would pocket $13 and $4 respectively, times ten waiters, seven busboys, plus everyone else in the pool equaled Eric walking out the door with an extra few hundred in cash every week.
The key to not getting caught was self-control; he never shaved more than $1.50 off the true value of a point and rarely pulled the scam more than once a week; never more than twice.
But since the shooting, he’d been dipping into that pool every day and yesterday had increased his shave to $2.50 a point, a new high or low for him.
Something furry ran past the office on its way to the storage room, and Eric scribbled a note to himself to call the exterminator. Then he saw the damned thing again, running in reverse this time—a trick of the eyes. Since his release from the Tombs, he hadn’t been able to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, a combination of free-fall dreams and late-night alcohol. So in the subterranean quiet of the office right now he briefly laid his head between the cash and the envelopes, closed his eyes, and drifted off. When he woke, Matty and Yolonda were seated across the plank desk from him, Yolonda’s eyes filled with that pitiless pity of hers, Matty unreadable . . . When he woke, he was on his feet staring at the brick wall. Shaking it off as best he could, he applied himself to the stuffing of envelopes, today’s skim surpassing for the first time $3 a point; suicidal most likely, but he just needed to leave; this city, this life, and he would do what he had to do to make it happen.
• • •
Avner Polaner, a tall, bony Ashkenazi-Yemeni Israeli, sat before the digital photo manager, staring listlessly at the mug shots coming up at him six to the screen, droning, “No, no, no,” his head aslant on the heel of his palm.
Of the three robberies on the All Sheets featuring two dark-skinned males and a handgun, Polaner’s mugging coincided most neatly with that of Ike Marcus; three in the morning and took place only a few blocks away on Delancey and Clinton. The downside was the incident had happened ten days ago, and he had never been interviewed on it because five hours after the encounter he was on a plane to Tel Aviv. But with Eric Cash out of the loop, Avner was the closest thing Matty and Yolonda had to a best hope.
“No, no, no.” The guy bored out of his mind.
Yolonda, operating the monitor, threw Matty a look.
“No, no, no.” Then, plunging his face into his hands, “OK, stop,” rearing back. “Look, a dark kid with a gun is a dark kid with a gun. That’s the price of living here, is every now and then it’s going to happen, so you don’t do anything stupid like the guy you just told me about, you just shrug it off and go about your business. You go on.”
“Are you worried about some kind of payback?”
“Please. I was stationed on the Lebanese border for two years, I don’t sweat the occasional stickup. Besides which, as I told you already, I knew better than to give him a good look right in his face, so really, this here is a waste of everybody’s time.” He took a deep breath, reset himself. “That being said, I have a question.”
They waited.
“What would it take to arrest Harry Steele?”
“Backtrack a little there, Avner.”
“Do you know why I went to Tel Aviv right after the holdup instead of coming in here to look at this stuff? To get some sleep.”
“Avner,” Matty said, “backtrack.”
“Of all his tenants I pay top dollar, sixteen hundred for an apartment so small I have to leave the room to change my mind because everybody else in the building has been living there since the Flood. The welfare queen below me pays six hundred, the hippie spinster on top a thousand, and the millionaire, an eighty-five-year-old man who remembers shaking hands with Fiorello La Guardia in the lobby, remembers the seltzer man, the iceman, toilets in the hallway, who owns three hot-sheet motels in the Bronx and half the town of Kerhonkson, New York, he pays three hundred and fifty dollars.
“And you should see how they keep their places, crusted food on the stoves, shower curtains that could grow penicillin, cat piss on the carpets, roaches, mice . . . You know what I have on my floors? Wide-board pumpkin pine. I installed it myself, paid for it myself. And when I move? I’m going to take it with me so Steele doesn’t have another reason to jack up the rent on the next poor sucker.”
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