Lush Life

by Richard Price

  “‘OK, good. Take it easy,’” Marcus mimicked, wheezing like a radiator.

  “Mr. Marcus, do you have asthma?”

  “Billy. My name is Billy. I told you that”—he paused to draw breath—“the last time. Yeah, I do. A little.”

  Matty took Billy’s hand and placed it atop the paper towels, went to one of the empty desks, and took the Advair inhaler from the overnight kit John Mullins kept in his bottom drawer.

  “You know how to use one of these?” Shaking it up before handing it over.

  “Yeah, thank you.” He took a hit with his free hand.

  As he stared at Billy now from less than a foot away, it dawned on Matty that for all their encounters over the last few days, he had never gotten a good fix on Marcus’s face. His features seemed both half-erased and constantly fluctuating, as if the trauma had blurred him physically as well as mentally; his face normally nowhere near this puffy or gaunt, complexion this blanched or ruddy, eyes this muddy or fiery, hair this lank or wild. He seemed both older and younger than he was, his body slim and nimble, yet Matty had seen him move with the geriatric tentativeness of someone crossing an unfamiliar room in the dark; the bottom line here being that even from this close range and concentrating on the task, Matty still couldn’t say what Billy Marcus looked like.

  One thing he did know for sure, though, was that the guy was still wearing the same clothes from three days ago.

  “God knows I’m not passing judgment, but are you drunk?”

  Marcus ignored the question, dug a hand into his pants pocket, pulling out a crumpled page of that day’s Post.

  “Please.” Offering it to Matty.

  It was a page from the sports section, an editorial about the immaturity of the new point guard for the Knicks, then he saw the ballpoint scrawl running in the margin: 22 Oliver skinny caramel lat pink vel zip track st wash niks black.

  “What’s this?”

  Marcus palmed his chest, then lowered his head between his knees.

  “What is this.”

  Marcus lifted up, eyes to the ceiling. “I was,” taking a breath, “I was at a newsstand, and there’s the papers, and, the front page? If you saw, today, it had the building on Eldridge with the flowers and all? That picture there, on your desk?” He spoke with a chattering quickness now, as if the room were freezing. “And, standing next to me, is this girl, Latin girl, and she picks up the paper, looks at the photo, and her eyes got like, huge. And then she says, ‘Oh, shit. I thought them niggers was bullshitting.’ Then she puts the paper down and walks away, so, I follow her to see where she’s going, because she said it like she had heard the guys who did it bragging about it, don’t you think?”

  Or had friends who told her about a neighborhood shooting that they had seen on TV. There had been a dozen half-assed leads like this.

  “So you follow her.”

  “Yeah. A block into it I realized I should have bought the paper she was holding, you know, because it had her fingerprints? But . . . I follow her to . . . What?” Trying to read his notes upside down now in Matty’s hand.

  “Twenty-two Oliver?” Matty said.

  “Yes.”

  “The Lemlich projects?”

  “Some projects, yeah. I can’t believe I didn’t catch the name.”

  “We know it.”

  “And so, she went into the building, I didn’t think it was smart to follow her past that, so I wrote down what she was wearing, as you see, and I came straight here.”

  Marcus hadn’t blinked once since Matty and the other cop had lifted him off the floor.

  On the other hand, 22 Oliver wasn’t a bad address for this; it lay in the general direction of the shooters’ flight pattern, and they’d been guessing the Lemlichs from the jump.

  “And this is her description.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you read it for me?” Handing him back his writing.

  “Skinny, caramel Latina in a pink velour zippered tracktop, stonewashed jeans, and black Nikes.”

  “How old about?”

  “High school.”

  “And where was this newsstand?”

  “Eldridge and Broome? You know, right around the corner from . . .” Marcus shook up the inhaler but forgot to take another hit. “Don’t you think this is a good lead?”

  “We’ll check it out. But can I ask . . .” Matty hesitated, then, “Billy, why are you still down there?”

  “Why?” He gawked incredulously.

  Matty retreated.

  “So when are you going over?”

  “To?”

  “Find that girl.”

  “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “As soon as I get you squared away.”

  “Come again?”

  “Get you home.”

  “No.”

  “Your wife’s been here. She’s out of her mind trying to find you.”

  Billy looked away.

  “And your daughter was in the hospital last night.”

  “What? What happened?”

  “She cut herself.”

  “Cut herself?”

  “I believe she’s OK,” Matty said, “but she did take some stitches. You should go home and find out, don’t you think? I can have someone drive you.”

  “But you say she’s OK?”

  Matty felt like smacking him. He gestured to the phone on his desk. “Call your wife, tell her where you’re at.”

  “I will.” Looking away, his hands in his lap.

  Fuck it, Matty would call her himself later.

  “I need to go with you,” Billy said.

  “Go where?”

  “On this.” Nodding to his writing.

  “Mr. Marcus, we don’t do that.”

  “You have to. That description I gave you is a million kids. I’m your eyes.”

  Matty often wondered what was worse, knowing who killed your son, your wife, your daughter, or not. Having a name and a face to go with your demon, or not.

  “You have to.” Billy nearly lunged out of his seat. “Grant me my . . .” Then, losing track of what he wanted to say, he finally blinked, then seemed unable to stop blinking. “I’m not as drunk as you think. And I’m not as crazy.”

  “I never said any of that.”

  “It’s a good lead. I know it. I’m begging you.”

  Yolonda walked into the office carrying a café con leche.

  “I miss anything?” Then seeing Marcus: “Oh my God,” her voice automatically shifting to high and tender. “How are you doing?”

  “I overheard a girl talking about the shooting and I followed her to a building.”

  Yolanda looked to Matty, who shrugged and said, “I was just telling Mr. Marcus here that we’d check it out, but that he can’t really come with us.”

  Yolonda blew on her coffee. “Why not?”

  Matty picked up the phone and handed it to Billy. “Call home.” Then took Yolonda by the elbow and walked her around to the dining alcove.

  “What’s wrong with you?” His face inches from hers.

  “Oh, big deal, let him go for the ride.”

  “He hasn’t been in contact with his family for days.”

  “Sounds like you.”

  “Funny. The guy is out of his mind.”

  “Of course he’s out of his mind. I take one look at him and I see he needs to do something, feel like he’s doing something, or he’s gonna kill himself.”

  “Then let him take care of his family. That’s doing something.”

  Yolonda shrugged, sipped her coffee.

  Jimmy Iacone, preceded by a swirl of night funk, came toddling out of the bunk room, a towel and a toothbrush in his left hand.

  “Do you have any idea how loud you’re talking?”

  Matty looked out into the big room, Billy hanging up the phone after having talked to his wife, supposedly talked to his wife. He then grabbed a notepad off Mullins’s desk and began writing.

  Matty walked in a tigh
t circle as Yolonda sipped her coffee. “He does not leave the car.”

  “So Mr. Marcus.” Yolonda twisted around, hooking an elbow over the seatback. “I know this is a loaded question, but how are you holding up?”

  “Not . . . I’m trying to, to, you need to use your mind, to, to battle this?”

  “That’s good,” she said, squeezing his wrist. “But you need to be patient. This isn’t some ladder you climb, every day better than the next, do you know what I’m saying?”

  But Marcus had already tuned out and was lifelessly staring at the world running past his side window. Sitting across from him, Jimmy Iacone was doing pretty much the same, the both of them looking for the moment like bored kids on a long trip. The car was suffused with the smell of alcohol coming through someone’s pores, but it could easily have been Jimmy’s.

  “And your family,” Matty said, trying to hold Marcus’s eyes in the mirror. “How are they holding up?”

  “They understand,” Marcus said distantly.

  “What,” Matty said. “They understand what.”

  Yolonda touched Matty’s arm. The steno pad Marcus had liberated from the office was lying open in his lap, Matty reading what was written there via the rearview:

  HAVE I EVER BEEN A COMFORT TO YOU

  “And your daughter?” he kept it up. “How’s she doing? How was the hospital?”

  “I have, I used to have childhood asthma?” Marcus said to Yolonda. “It’s back. Thirty years and it’s back.”

  “That’s the stress,” Yolonda said.

  “No, I know that, I know . . .”

  “Trust me, it’s the stress. I had this lady once? Her son—” Yolonda cut herself off. “Anyways.”

  • • •

  As they pulled up on the Madison Street side of the Lemlich Houses, Marcus stared at every passing tenant as if he couldn’t quite get his eyes to open wide enough.

  “Here’s the drill.” Matty twisted around. “We have your description of the girl, we have the address. Detective Bello and I are going in and trying to find her. Detective Iacone will stay here with you. If we come across anybody who looks likely, we’ll walk them past the car. You make your ID to Detective Iacone. Under no circumstances are you to leave this vehicle. Do you understand?”

  Still wobble-mouthed with concentration, Billy continued to search every face that came past the car, every set of nickel-plated eyes.

  “Do, you, understand.”

  “Is this a bad projects?” Billy said lightly, his chest laboring.

  “Not too,” Yolonda said.

  “Hey.” Matty stared at him.

  “I understand.”

  As Matty transcribed Billy’s description into his own notebook, Yolonda turned to the backseat again.

  “You know why this isn’t too bad a place? The kids are so close to all walks of life around here, you know? Most projects are kind of like, that’s all they know, but you go two blocks in any direction from here, you got Wall Street, Chinatown, the Lower East Side, they’re like release valves, you know? They give you the confidence to mix it up in the world—”

  “And jux everybody in sight,” Iacone murmured.

  “You’re so cynical, I swear to God,” Yolonda said. “I was a projects kid, I didn’t jux anybody.” Then, to Billy again: “I hate that, people say projects kid, projects girl, like everybody’s got your number.”

  “Ready?” Matty said to her.

  Once outside, Yolonda circled around to Jimmy Iacone’s window, gestured for him to roll it down, and whispered in his ear, “Fuck yourself, you fat homeless guinea prick.”

  The Clara E. Lemlich Houses were a grubby sprawl of fifty-year-old high-rises sandwiched between two centuries. To the west, the fourteen-story buildings were towered over by One Police Plaza and Verizon headquarters, massive futuristic structures without any distinguishing features other than their blind climbing endlessness; and to the east, the buildings in turn towered over the Civil War–era brick walk-ups of Madison Street.

  As Matty and Yolonda entered the grounds on this dead gray Sunday heading for 22 Oliver, many of the young men hanging out in front of the buildings in their path wandered off flat-faced at their approach, then casually regrouped behind them once they had passed.

  “The Nature Channel,” Matty muttered.

  “What’s your problem, today?”

  “He’s fucking lying.”

  “Who is?”

  “Marcus. He didn’t call home.”

  “So he didn’t call home. What are you, his mother?”

  Matty walked in silence, trying to work it out. “Last week I promised him we’d make it right, and now it’s all going south so fast . . .”

  “So you take it out on him?”

  “When did you ever hear me make a promise like that. Who with more than two minutes on this fucking job ever makes a promise like that.”

  “So you take it out on him?”

  “You should have seen them in there, Yoli. Like fucking roaches with the lights just turned on.”

  Yolonda took over the spiel, doing Matty flawlessly: “ ‘I never knew that.’ ‘You never told us that.’ ‘How could you not give him a paraffin test?’ And I just had to eat it. Everybody running under the stove and I just had to eat it.”

  Three kids in hoodies were sitting on the wood-slat bench before the entrance to 22 Oliver, one black, one white, one Latino, like the advance guard of a UN youth brigade, all fixedly staring at the ground with half-mast eyes.

  “Hey, how you guys doing?” Yolonda stepped up, Matty always deferring to her on the street. “You see a girl go in maybe an hour ago, light-skinned Latina, fifteen, sixteen, wearing a pink zip-up, a little on the skinny side.”

  They kept their heads down and grunted, Matty thinking they were probably OK kids given the overdramatic quality of their stonewall.

  “No?” Yolonda smiled. “How about you?” Addressing the black kid, three hundred pounds and a Neolithic thrusting brow. “No one you know?”

  “Nuh-uh,” he said, without looking up. He held both Carlito’s Way 3 and Danger Mouse: Likely to Die game boxes in his lap.

  “That doesn’t sound like anybody in the building? Nobody around here?”

  All three shook their cowled heads like grieving monks.

  “She’s not in trouble or anything . . .”

  A girl came out of the building looking more or less like the one Yolonda had just described.

  “Hey, how you doing?” Yolonda stepped in her path. “Listen, who’s that girl here looks kind of like you, lives here, maybe visits friends in here, wears a pink velour zip-up. She’s not in trouble or anything.”

  “Looks like me?” the girl said slowly.

  “Yeah, not as pretty maybe . . .”

  Yolonda hooked her arm and started walking her towards the car.

  “Irma, maybe?” the girl drawled.

  “Irma who?”

  “I don’t know her name.”

  “Lives in here?”

  “I don’t know. She might.”

  “About how old?”

  “Eleventh grade? But I don’t really know.”

  “Who does she live with?”

  “I don’t know her like that.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Crystal.”

  Yolonda waited.

  “Santos.”

  They were back on Madison Street.

  Yolonda looked to the car. Iacone leaned into Billy, then shook his head no.

  “You make your family proud of you, Crystal?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Make your family proud, OK?”

  “Right now?”

  “In general. Every day.”

  “OK.”

  When Yolonda returned to the front of 22 Oliver, the three boys were still scowling and squinting as if in pain, each looking off in a different direction, Matty standing before the bench with his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Irma,�
�� Yolonda said to Matty, then turning to the three, “Which apartment’s Irma’s?” The kids looking back at her like she was speaking Urdu.

  “They all fucking know,” Yolonda muttered. “Call the Housing Wheel.”

  The Housing Police information line had three Irmas on file for 22 Oliver: Rivera, forty-six; Lozado, eleven; and Nieves, fifteen.

  “Give me the fifteen,” Matty said, getting the apartment number. “Any history on the door?”

  According to the Wheel, no outstanding warrants lived in 8G, no one who would answer the bell and suddenly go all fight-or-flight on them.

  The elevator smelled like fried chicken and piss, its walls lined in what looked like dented aluminum foil. It was a crowded ride; an African mother and her three children, the woman in her bright, intricate headwrap roughly straightening their jackets and caps as if fed up with something, and an elderly Chinese couple shrink-wrapped around their shopping cart.

  On the dimly lit eighth floor there were raised voices or TV tracks behind at least three doors, but when Matty rang the bell for 8G, as he expected, it all fell silent. He looked to Yolonda, then started banging with the side of his fist. Nothing.

  “Fucking drag,” she muttered, and started to ring all the doorbells, nothing doing.

  As they turned for the elevators, though, 8F cracked a sliver.

  “Hey, how are you.” Yolonda stepped to the eye peeping out, flashed her tin. “I’m Detective Bello?”

  The woman opened the door wider, standing there in a housedress and sweater.

  “Let me ask, we’re trying to reach the Nieves girl, Irma? Next door? You know her, right? She’s not in trouble or anything, could I—”

  “Anna!” the woman abruptly bellowed, the door to 8G opening slightly, the woman who stood there stooped over in shapeless stretch pants and an oversize T-shirt, squinting at them, no teeth on the left side of her head.

  “¿Tú eres la abuela de Irma?” Again, Yolonda flashed tin.

  The woman immediately went wide-eyed, clapping her hands over her mouth.

  “No, no, no, no es nada malo.” Yolonda lightly touched her arm. “Ella no tiene ningún problema, solamente tenemos que hablar con ella. Tenemos que preguntarle algo de su amiga.”