Lush Life
Page 44
Lugo tapped the horn. “C’mon, let’s go there, Humpy.”
Without taking his eyes from the girls, the driver just gave them a raised finger via the rearview and continued making his play.
“Oh no he di’ent,” Lugo said to Daley to Scharf to Geohagan, then mounted the misery light onto the roof of the taxi.
Having found three sticky buds of Purp underneath Little Dap’s seat, Lugo and Daley were by the Xerox machine, photocopying the contents of his wallet as the kid looked on from the minuscule holding cell.
“Hey, the last police told me anything under a dime bag is a walkaway.”
“Did he now,” Daley said.
“And that’s a police sayin’ it.”
“What’s this?” Lugo held up a much creased never-endorsed check.
“What.” Little Dap squinted through the bars.
“This.”
“Hah?”
“Who the fuck do you know in Traverse City, Michigan?”
“In where? Oh. Yeah. This dude gave me that. This guy I met.”
“What dude. What’s his name. And don’t bullshit me, it’s right on the check.” Lugo hiding it now as if they were playing liar’s poker.
“Aw, man. Fuck I remember.”
“OK . . . How about this,” Daley chimed in. “What’s Traverse City famous for, huh? This dude’s your buddy, he’d’ve told you this. As a Traversian, he’d be very proud of this.”
“Hell I know. What.”
“It’s the cherry-picking capital of America, Fucknuts, and I don’t think you know this guy at all except to jux him. We’re calling up there first thing tomorrow, but you’ll be right here coolin’ your jets when we do. And if this is what I think it is? We’re talking interstate indictability.”
“Ouch,” Lugo said.
“What?”
“Crossing state lines in the commission of a crime.”
“I didn’t cross no state lines.”
“Your vic did.”
“I ain’t tell him to come.” Little Dap blinking like a ship in the fog.
“So he was your vic, huh?”
“What? No. I ain’t say that.”
“Hey, you jux someone from out of state? That’s a guideline felony.”
“A what?”
“Classical guideline felony.”
“Plus this whole area is historically landmarked,” Lugo reminding Daley, “which makes it . . .”
“Pre-indicted.”
“As in federal.”
“And federal crime . . .”
“Means federal time.”
“The fuck! It’s just a check, man, I ain’t even cashed it!”
“They’ll just take him away from us, the feds.”
“I hate those pricks, everybody’s bin Laden to them. Won’t even listen to us.”
“I don’t feel too good,” Little Dap slurred.
“You’re kidding me.”
“Where am I?” Lolling his head, then resting it on the bars.
“About two inches from a supermax.”
“How about I get you a gun?”
“Hey, that’s our line.”
“You niggers always asking a gun.”
“We’re all ears.”
“Shit . . . What if I give you the shooter of that white boy?”
“All ears, brother.”
“But ’fore I tell you jack, you all got to get me some immunity. You know, like, first one talking gets the deal? You know how you do.”
“All ears.”
Lugo woke Matty up an hour later.
“And after all that, he says to us, ‘I want immunity.’ ”
“And you said . . .”
“We’ll see what we can do, but for now start taking plenty of C, B complex.”
“Good.” Matty got up, rubbed his face.
He wasn’t all that excited, but still . . .
“So, anyways, that’s what the kid is saying, but who’s to say.”
“All right, I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Then, reaching for his shirt, “So what is he, hard, soft?”
“Butter.”
After six hours of going over it, then going over it some more, Arvin “Little Dap” William’s story still held water. He didn’t know Tristan’s last name, but he knew where he lived, and by the time Yolonda came in the next morning, Matty had already gotten all the vitals from the Housing Wheel.
An hour later, with Iacone and Mullins standing out of sight halfway down the hall, Matty murmured to Yolonda as he knocked on the door, “You sure you don’t want to have another little one-on-one pep talk with him?”
“I’d like to drag this fucking kid out by his hair,” she said through her teeth.
Matty knocked again, and a woman wearing yellow Playtex cleaning gloves peered through the width of the top chain, then opened up when she saw the badge.
“We’d like to speak to Tristan,” Yolonda said. “He’s not in trouble or anything.”
“Tristan?” her face crinkling with anxiety as she reflexively looked towards a bedroom. “You should wait for my husband.”
“We’ll be quick,” Yolonda said.
Leaving Iacone in the living room, Matty, Yolonda, and Mullins walked past two small kids quietly watching TV to the bedroom, Matty sliding the woman off to the side before opening the door.
Tristan sat on the foot of the bed hunched over his spiral notebook, his Beatbook, alternately squinting at his ex-stepfather’s House Rules and dropping rhymes.
Rules by fools to be observed by tools
Don’t dicker with my liquor
Drugs are quicker make you sicker
Blood runs thicker
in the street
where we the elite
defeat
any kind of heat
you want to bring
aint no thing,
Im a player a slayer
so be understandful
of the handful
that I am
Shadows darkened the page, Tristan looking up to see the three detectives standing over him.
And if you say obey?
“Get up, please?”
“Hold on.” Tristan still head-down, scribbling as he gestured for them to wait.
You better pray
Cause its a brand new day
Then hands on his biceps lifted him like a child, the notebook hitting the floor.
• • •
It was midday and Eric was trying to remember how to get out of bed. At this point in time no one seemed to care whether he was human garbage or not, and it was just killing him.
The indifferent choir in his head consisted, among others, of Ike Marcus’s father, those two detectives, and Bree.
Strangely, Ike Marcus himself was not among them; most likely because he had died oblivious to what Eric was about to do or not do for him, although they would play catch-up somewhere soon enough.
There was no office for assistance here, no grievance committee, no redemption center.
And then he saw Harry Steele’s gift basket.
Eric sat at the granite kitchen island under the parti-colored wash of the stained-glass Star of David.
“I hear you fired Danny Fein,” Steele said.
“Didn’t need him anymore.” Eric looked off, his kneecaps pumping under the table. After half a lifetime in Steele’s service, it still made him nervous to be alone with him outside of a restaurant.
“OK.”
Eric sipped his cold coffee, then stared at the dregs like they were legible.
“What,” Steele said.
“What?”
Steele breathed through his nose, his restless gaze all over the room, critiquing, redesigning. “Anything else?”
With his eyes beading wetly at the corners, Eric took the plunge.
“I’m a thief.”
“You’re a thief.”
The quiet came down again, accentuated by the ticking of an unseen clock.
“I sha
ve points off the tip pool, once or twice a week, comes to about ten thousand a year going back about five years. Maybe a little more. I fuck everybody. Waiters, the bar, busboys, runners. And you. Ten thousand about. Every year.”
“You’re serious,” Steele said.
Eric didn’t respond.
“Ten.”
“Yes.”
“I actually figured you for about twenty.”
“What? No.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Why?”
“You’re supposed to keep your mouth shut.”
“What?”
“Everybody steals from me. They just don’t piss me off by telling me about it.” Then, “Ten,” shaking his head.
“Yes.”
“Compared to everyone else around here? The bar? The kitchen?”
This wasn’t going the way Eric envisioned.
“What’s your problem exactly?” Steele asked.
“My problem?”
“What, your conscience is bothering you? And so you want me to do what. Fire you, sue you, press charges, what . . .”
“I want to pay you back,” Eric said by reflex.
“Not me. You’re talking the tip pool. You have to track down all those busboys over the years, all those three-weeks-and-see-ya waitresses from God knows where.”
Eric sank into a hopeless silence.
“You know why you’re telling me? Because you feel bad about yourself, about Ike Marcus, and you want somebody to punish you or forgive you or who the hell knows.” Steele shook his head in marvel. “Ten thousand. My kid’s babysitter probably steals more. My kids steal more. Jesus, do you have any idea what I take out of there?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s a bit of good news.”
Eric looked down at his fingers, twisted between his legs.
“You’re a good guy, Eric, I’ve always known that.”
“Thank you,” Eric whispered.
“And you’re my guy.” Steele leaned forward. “As I am yours, yeah?”
Eric balked a tic, then, “Yeah,” then just let go in a gush of gratitude, “Yes.”
“You come to my home for some kind of exoneration or, or validation, and I can’t even begin to give you enough . . . Years together, you and I. You’re like family. You are family.”
“Yeah.”
Steele got up, Eric following his lead, but Steele gestured for him to sit and brought a fresh press of coffee to the table.
“That being said”—he poured—“you must be pretty tired of this neighborhood.”
“Yeah.”
“Raked over the coals like that.”
Eric couldn’t answer.
“Well, then here’s some good news for you . . . I’m opening a new place.”
“I heard something about that,” Eric’s voice quickening. “Harlem? I could go for that.”
“That’s still just a rumor, but I’ll tell you what’s for real.”
“OK.”
“Atlantic City.”
“Where?”
“I’ve been in meetings with the Stiener Rialto, they’re developing a new concourse off the casino floor.”
“Where?”
“You know how in Vegas they’ve got the Pyramids, Eiffel Tower, and whatnot? . . . Well, these guys want to create a Little New York arcade, historical, three sections, Punky East Village, Nasty Times Square, and Spirit of the Ghetto Lower East Side.”
“Atlantic City?”
“You know, tenements, pushcarts, no synagogues of course, but an egg-cream joint, and for the high rollers, a Berkmann’s.”
Then, seeing the vapor-locked look on Eric’s face, “I mean, you and I know ten years ago Berkmann’s was a crack squat, but it looks like it’s been there forever, and what’s the difference? This whole neighborhood, I mean, it’s all what the realtors want it to be anyhow, right?”
“Atlantic City?”
“Besides, it’s over. It was over the minute people knew to come here.”
“Yeah, no.”
“All these kids down here, they walk around starring in the movie of their lives, they have no idea.”
“No.”
“ ‘Not tonight, my man’ . . . I mean, where did he think he was?”
“No. Yeah.”
“If you think about it, A.C.? The artificiality down there will be the truest part of the whole setup.”
“Sure.” Eric’s screen a blank.
“Anyways, I’d like you there.”
“OK.”
“I need someone I can trust.”
“OK.”
“Someone who keeps it to ten thousand.”
“OK.”
“Yeah?” Steele poured him some more coffee.
“Yeah.”
“It’ll be a new start for you.”
“Yeah.” Sinking, then grasping, “Can I ask you one favor for this?” Steele waited.
“Let me offer someone a decent job down there. At least offer it.”
“Offer to who, that waitress? Whatsit, Bree?”
Eric sat back.
“C’mon, Eric, the kid’s a kid, let her live the dream a little.”
“OK.”
“And, no more trying to sell coke in my place.”
“No.”
“All right then.” Steele rose, made the sign of the cross, “Ego te absolvo,” then disappeared behind a door.
Eric sat there, wondering what just happened.
Yolonda asked Matty if she could do the shooter solo; kids like this one were her meat and potatoes, and the last thing she needed in there when she started asking her touchy-feely questions was some big, bucket-headed Irishman inhibiting the flow. And he knew from experience that when it came to perps like Tristan Acevedo, it was sheer self-destruction not to give Yolonda her way.
Nonetheless, the kid seemed unbreakable; as in, broken so many times there was nothing left to break; coming off as if he were sitting in the back row of a meaningless class, barely interested in his own lying answers as to where he had been that night, as to how he came upon the gun found under his mattress; indifferent to the point of boredom to all the contradictions pointed out to him in his narrative; indifferent to his own fate. None of which was a deal breaker in itself, since they did have the gun and Little Dap’s testimony, but they couldn’t take a chance on this kid being stony now, then turning into a motormouth at the trial, revealing that Ike Marcus had brutalized his little sister or something, the DA winding up looking like a horse’s ass.
After an hour Yolonda came out of the interview room at the end of their first go-round to get the kid a snack and give herself a breather.
“You’re putting him to sleep,” Matty said.
“Kid’s retard tough,” she said, blowing a strand of hair off her face. “I hate that shit. Kids don’t care if they live or die. It’s sad, you know? Fuck it. I’ll get him.”
Twenty minutes later, armed with a soda and a Ring Ding, she went back inside.
“Tristan, you grew up around here?”
“Yeah.” Staring at his treats. “Some.”
“Your mother had problems?”
“I don’t know.”
“You lived with her?”
“A little.”
“How old were you when you moved out?”
“Which moved out.”
“The first moved out.”
“First grade.”
“And why was that?”
“What.”
“Why did you have to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was she sick?”
“Yeah.”
“Drug sick?”
He shrugged.
“You were so little.”
Another shrug.
“You moved in with your grandmother?”
“Some.”
“Then where?”
“My mother again some. Her boyfriend. I don’t know.”
“What else was it
like for you as a kid?”
“Hah?”
“What kind of childhood did you have?”
“I just told you.”
“Tell me more.”
“I don’t know no more.”
“You don’t know what kind of childhood you had?”
“I don’t know. What kind a childhood you has?” his voice a querulous murmur.
“Mine?” Yolonda leaned back. “Bad. I was in foster homes because my mother was too high to take care of me and my father was in jail for dealing heroin. We used to stand on line for hours every week to get these big government blocks of cheese, then we’d take ’em home, cut ’em up into smaller blocks, and sell them to the bodegas. It sucked.”
It was all bullshit except for the cheese, but she got him listening.
She reached out but didn’t touch his left cheek, the scar running from there into the left corner of his mouth, then out the right corner, and continuing in a downward jag to the right side of his jawbone.
“What’s that from?”
“I chewed into a cord.”
“A cord. What kind of cord?”
“ ’Lectrical.”
“You what? You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself.”
Another shrug.
“Why?”
“I wanted to put my house on fire.”
“Why?”
“It’s a secret.”
Yolonda had thought so. She had been in too many rooms with too many kids like Tristan not to be able to recognize that eerie stare of his, both averted and burning.
“How old were you?”
“I don’t know. Five. Six.”
“Aw, Jesus,” sounding like she was about to cry. “And who did it to you?”
“I just told you, I did it myself.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, Tristan.”
“Nobody did nothing to me.”
Yolonda stared at him, her chin resting on the knuckles of her fist.