“But Ruiz says he was only in on the one we got him for. Like I told you on the horn, when it comes to teaming up, Tucker’s a real impulse shopper.”
“Projects kid?” Yolonda asked.
“Yeah, from Cahan, but apparently from an OK family. Father’s a motorman, mom’s a teller for Chase. He’s like the black sheep or something.”
“Got beautiful hair,” Yolonda murmured.
“Well, I’ll tell you, right now he’s not talking to anybody.”
“No?” Yolonda said, then turned to Matty. “Don’t you think he’s got beautiful hair?”
When Matty left, Yolonda remained in the Ninth Precinct squad room, commandeering a vacant desk to check her mail and do busywork on the computer. Periodically she would get up and cross the room to the coffee station, and each time she did, Tucker would saunter up to the bars to track her, but look away whenever she returned the eye contact or threw him a smile.
After an hour of this, she finally stepped directly to the cell and gestured for him to come to the bars.
“What’s your story,” she half-whispered. “Everybody around here says you come from a nice family. What happened, they treated you bad? You were the light-skinned one or something?”
Tucker smirked in dismissal.
“You got that nice café con leche skin,” she said. “That’s what we called it.”
“Who’s we.”
“My family. I bet that was it. Your father’s darker than you, right? Your brothers and sisters? Am I right?”
He clucked his tongue and returned to the bench, Yolonda lingering a beat, then walking away too.
A few minutes later she left the squad room, went to Katz’s, and returned with a murderous six-inch-high triple-decker pastrami on rye held together by two extralong, cellophane-bowed toothpicks.
Unwrapping it at the desk, she announced, “What the hell was I thinking?” Split it into two, wrapped half in a paper towel, walked back to the cell, and passed it to him through the bars.
“You’re a nice-looking kid, but you’re too skinny.”
“Whatever.” But taking it before giving her his back.
“How’d you get the tag Blue Light?”
Tucker shrugged, muttered through a mouthful of deli, “How’d you get the tag Detective?”
Yolonda started to answer, it was an interesting story, then thought better of it.
“Ever go by True Life?”
“It gets misheard,” he said.
“OK.”
Back at the desk, she wolfed down her half of the sandwich, then stepped into Kenny Chan’s office.
“Do me a favor? However it goes with the other lineups today, don’t let them transport this Tucker kid. Just hold him here for me, OK? I’ll be back tonight.” Again she returned to the desk, ordered a few movies from Netflix for her kids in Riverdale, fired the dog trainer her husband had insisted on hiring the week before, then left without giving Tucker another look.
Harry Steele lived in a desanctified synagogue on Suffolk Street, which had itself been converted from a standard tenement ninety-five years earlier. And now it was a private palazzo, the huge stained-glass oval above the door, overlaid with a wooden Star of David, the only outward sign of its nearly century-long stint as a house of worship.
A young East Indian woman sporting a bull ring through her nose, one of those confusingly hip domestics Matty always seemed to be running into down here, met him at the door and after a moment’s hesitation led him inside and up a flight of stairs to the wraparound gallery that overlooked the main floor.
The building was three stories tall, the two upper levels of apartments removed by the congregation to make one high, hollow hall, as narrow as it was long, with only that interior balcony at the top of the landing for the women to view the services.
Down below, rough paintings of the Hebrew zodiac ran six to a side along the ocher-plastered walls, and a built-in Torah ark held Harry Steele’s collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookbooks interspersed with ancient pottery and cookware from Asia and the Middle East.
Matty had heard about the place from an Eighth Squad detective who had responded to an attempted break-in; had read about it too; but even if he hadn’t, he could still feel the holy-of-holies aura that lingered here, no matter that the long-dead immigrant worshippers had today been replaced by a group of Berkmann managers, hosts, and bartenders bathed in the same rainbow wash of color from the great oval window as they sat around the freestanding granite cooking island that had replaced the cantor’s platform as the center of the house.
Steele hadn’t said anything about a meeting and certainly hadn’t told him that Eric Cash himself would be there. Matty watched the poor bastard go ashen when he caught sight of his former interrogator leaning over the now childproofed and reinforced women’s rail twenty feet above his head.
This was fucked. Legally he couldn’t talk to Cash in any event, but even if he could, somebody fresh should be the go-to, not him.
Matty stepped back into the shadows.
“If anybody has forgotten that we live in a complicated city,” Steele addressed the troops, “the tragic incident of a few days ago . . .” Everyone around the island reflexively looked to Cash, who started twisting his shoulders as if stabbed. Steele shifted gears.
“Look, let’s be realistic. What happened wasn’t a crime wave, wasn’t a rash, wasn’t an outbreak, but it did happen, and one of the stations of the cross on the way to disaster was our bar, which brings us to the subject of protecting our customers and protecting ourselves, so every-body . . .” Steele searched the faces. “You need to develop a sixth sense about trouble. You see a customer’s not right? You go to the door and get Clarence.” Gesturing to Matty’s solemn-faced protégé, sitting alone at the far end of the island, his arms crossed in front of his absurd chest.
Matty could sense that Cash was desperately trying not to look up at him, the guy staring straight ahead and rocking in his seat as if channeling one of the long-dead Torah readers.
“A customer’s slurring, sleeping, muttering, bothering other drinkers?” Steele said. “Get Clarence. He doesn’t need to be at the door all the time. He’s going to start coming in once an hour, ask how it’s going. I mean, it’s a delicate situation, we can’t just have him hanging there eyeballing a customer, we’ll work something out, but in general, for now, if it seems even vaguely like we have someone on our hands who won’t be able to negotiate the street? Do not wait.”
Steele paused as another domestic brought out a platter of what looked from above like assorted mini-tortillas, the managers waiting for the boss to grab one before reaching in themselves.
“The red zone for all this, of course”—Steele swallowed—“is last call. You have someone at last call, a woman especially, can’t stand up, is trashed, is a temptation, is trouble waiting to happen, you get Clarence to help and pour her in a cab. You and Clarence pour her in a cab together so that you have each other to back your story. And make sure she has enough money. Take the cab’s number. Make sure the driver knows you took the cab’s number. Get her home safe.”
“What if they won’t go?”
“Use your judgment. They can’t fend for themselves? You call the cops. Otherwise we’re responsible. Pretend they’re family. Treat them like family.”
“An asshole relation is still a relation,” one of the managers volunteered.
“Also,” Eric Cash said hoarsely, “remind your bartenders that they have the power to cut people off. And they should use it.”
The managers stared at him as if waiting for more, but Cash finally looked up, locked eyes with Matty, and lost his thread.
“Absolutely,” Steele said, stepping into the breach. “And don’t worry about hurting someone’s feelings. If they’re so far gone that you’re even thinking about it, they’re not going to remember the next day anyhow.”
Eric’s face, still lifted to Matty’s, bore the same eerily yielding ex
pression as it had that day in the interview room when he had called him a gutless self-pitying failure and, let’s face it, a murderer.
Again Matty took himself out of sight, stepping back from the railing and absently wandering among the divans, leather easy chairs, and bookshelves that lined the back wall. Much like the cookbook ark below, the aged Mylar-wrapped hardbacks up here mingled with artifacts: a handwritten Eighth Precinct incident book from 1898, a leather medical case holding instruments used to examine immigrants for trachoma and other rejectable eye diseases at Ellis Island, an eighteenth-century Dutch clay pipe unearthed in Steele’s backyard privy mounted alongside the twentieth-century glass crackpipe found lying in the grass next to it, a still-loaded revolver that once belonged to Dopey Benny Fein.
But for all this reborn carriage house’s ingenuity, its artful attempt at appeasing its own history while declaring itself the newest of the new, it was the double layer of evicted ghosts—pauperish tenants, greenhorn parishioners—that still held sway for him, Matty having always been afflicted with Cop’s Eyes; the compulsion to imagine the overlay of the dead wherever he went.
Soft-stepping around the horn of the gallery to the front of the building, Matty peered though the lower triangle of the Star of David out to the People’s Park on the corner with Stanton, a fenced-in quarter acre of crackpot sculpture, plastic-bucket pyramids, and a flag of no nation but the one inside the head, a heavily tattooed biker down there doing jailhouse dips on some monkey bars, Matty laughing, then suddenly there was a breathy grunt in his ear, guttural but human, snatching at his heart, then gone, this fucking place haunted, he’d swear it.
Then another abrupt sound had him wheeling thick-tongued from the stained glass to see a young woman seemingly emerging right out of the wall across the gap of the gallery.
“Fuck,” he hissed, a few of the managers glancing up to see what was happening.
But the woman was real, Matty noticing now the outlines of the door she had come through.
“Hey,” he whispered.
“Hey.” Walking over to join him at the window. “Are you the new security guy?”
“Something like that,” the question an instant chasm, not that he’d mind at least a part-time gig like that. “Matty Clark,” extending his hand.
“Kelley Steele.”
At the sound of her voice Harry Steele briefly looked up, smiling, and gave a short wave.
“What’s behind there?” Matty gestured to the hidden door.
“The other house.”
“What other house.”
“We used to have all our bedrooms in the basement here? The rabbi used to live down there with his family, but it was too damp, so we bought the house next door to sleep in.”
She was great-looking, tall and gray-eyed, twenty-one, tops, Matty thinking, These guys . . .
“So what did you do with the basement?” Asking just to keep her here.
“It’s a gym,” leaning on the rail next to him.
“I like the zodiacs,” he said, once again just to say something.
“Well, take a snapshot, because their days are numbered.”
“You’re painting them over?” trying to sound like he cared. “That’s a shame.”
“You think? They’re a little creepy for me. It’s like, for Jews, it’s forbidden to paint faces, right? So the archer, what’s it, Sagittarius?” She pointed. “Check it out, just a bow and an arm, a weapon and a body part. Same thing with Virgo, see? A woman’s hand and a sheaf of wheat. And Taurus over there is a cow, because bulls are supposed to be pagan.”
“No kidding.”
Down below, Cash, after jerking a glance up to the empty side of the gallery, stood in a half-crouch to pass the empty platter to one of the domestics.
“You see that guy?” Kelley flicked a finger. “Eric?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the guy was at that murder. You wouldn’t believe what the cops put him through.”
“Yeah?”
“What a bunch of assholes.”
“I heard he’s not cooperating now.”
“The hell, would you?”
It was a stupid game, Matty dropping it with a shrug.
“You know what’s my favorite?” she asked.
“Favorite what.”
“Cancer.”
“What?”
“That one.” She pointed to a panel featuring what looked to him like a South African rock-tailed lobster.
“Cancer the crab, right? But the artist was kosher, he didn’t even know what a crab looked like. Then some other kosher Jew shows him a lobster in a restaurant window, says, ‘There’s one,’ and so there you go.”
“Wow.”
“Harry loves that one. He’ll probably keep it, start a new restaurant around it.”
Below, the meeting was finally winding down, dwindling into small talk and anecdotes, people leaning back, faces softening, ready to laugh at something. One of the managers, a wiry woman wearing a heavily starched and oversize man’s white dress shirt, began telling a story about being trapped in the locker area while, in the next room, the Chinese chef and the Dominican prep man were having a grossly graphic conversation about fucking their wives. She described how she kept banging things and clearing her throat so they’d clam up and she could walk past the kitchen without anybody getting embarrassed, but how they just wouldn’t take the hint.
“I was stuck for like half an hour.”
“So what were they saying?” Steele asked.
“I’d rather not say.”
“Aw, c’mon, don’t do that to us,” Cash said too loudly and with a strangely atonal jocularity, as if he were reading his line off a page.
As the meeting broke up, Matty waited until Cash left the house before coming downstairs.
“So.” Steele offered him a seat at the island.
Between them hung three chandeliers constructed of full red Campari bottles arranged in rings around halogen bulbs, the support wires disappearing into the nebulous upper reaches of the building.
“Why didn’t you tell me Cash was going to be here?”
“If I told him, I don’t think he’d’ve showed up.”
“No. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“If I told you, I’d have to tell him.”
Matty hesitated, Steele having a little too much fun right now.
“Well, look, in any event, I can’t just step to the guy like that,” he said. “Did you talk to him at all?”
“About what happened? Yeah.” Steele half-laughed. “You guys really did a number, you know?”
“I know. That’s why I was hoping you were going to help me bury the hatchet.”
“Well, look, I thought, if you were here, he was here, it’s someone’s home . . . What else can I do?”
“Fact of the matter is,” Matty said, “legally, I can’t even approach the guy anymore. That’s why I asked you.”
“Can’t approach . . . Because of the lawyer?” Steele said, then, sounding as if he were speaking more to himself, “I had no idea.”
Matty studied him for a moment. “You’re not . . . Aw shit. Are you the one set him up with that guy?”
Steele looked off. “That’s not an appropriate question for you to ask.”
Matty leaned back, took in the zodiac panels, the images both maidenly and warlike, the cookbook Torah nook.
“You’re paying for him too, aren’t you.” Grinning as he said it.
Steele stared at him with his sad-sack eyes.
“I’ll tell you who else is having a good time with this,” Matty said. “That lawyer? I know that Kingston Trio–playing son of a bitch and he is having a ball. On your dime too. And I’m not going to stop pressing, so you better believe that meter will be running.”
Steele shrugged helplessly.
And right now he was still the only conduit to Cash, so . . .
“They run that underage op on you last night?”
“Yeah.” Ste
ele yawned. “But not until after midnight. I was at the goddamned door for hours.”
“Better that than the other, though, yeah?”
“True.”
“Well, I’d really like to be able to give you a heads-up next time too, you know?”
“That would be brilliant.”
“Wouldn’t it. So talk to the guy. Please. And lose that fucking lawyer.”
“It’s his lawyer.”
“It’s your money.”
Kelley Steele appeared again, this time from somewheres behind the ark, leaned into Steele’s shoulder, and took a sip of his cold coffee before leaving the house.
“I don’t know how you guys do it,” Matty said, trying to make nice.
“Do what?”
“The last time I was with a twenty-one-year-old? I was twenty-two.”
Steele jerked back a little, winced. “That’s my daughter.”
“Really.” Matty colored. “I guess I’m not much of a detective, huh?”
But feeling a little better for it too.
Walking back to work from Harry Steele’s house after the meeting, Eric stepped in front of a parked and unoccupied van at the corner of Rivington and Essex and, thinking it was still moving, jerked in terror.
The unexpected appearance of Matty Clark had paralyzed him and was, even now, throwing his perception of the physical world into chaos.
That fucking cop; whatever other reasons Eric had for not coming forward, and they switched up on him almost hourly, the one sure thing he had learned today was this: that he would rather slash his own throat than go behind a closed door with either him or his partner ever again. It would be quicker.
At seven that evening, Yolonda came back into the squad room of the Ninth bearing two grocery bags. Three other prisoners were in the cell with the kid now, and when she finished cooking in the kitchen nook, she had fried-egg sandwiches for all of them, neither singling him out nor even making eye contact.
After a half hour of feeling him staring at her back, she returned to the bars, Tucker stepping to her without prompting.
“You hanging in?” she asked in a conspiratorial murmur, her long brown fingers curled around the bars.
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