StoneDust

by Justin Scott

  I took out another twenty. “Where do I find Martello?”

  “Are you going to arrest him?”

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “Buy dope?”

  I started to answer no, thought better of it, and said, “Maybe.”

  “Be very careful. The junk he sells can kill you.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “Haven’t seen him in a week. Heard he got hurt and split to Bridgeport. He’s got family there.”

  “Is there any way I can leave a message for him?”

  “Give me money and I’ll see he gets it.”

  “How about a hundred?”

  “How about two hundred?”

  Every instinct told me this was one negotiation I would lose. So I didn’t bother and forked over two hundred dollars I couldn’t afford, along with my business card. “Tell him to call me.”

  “Real estate agent? This for real?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think if you’re really looking for dope you’re taking your life in your hands, and if you’re some sort of cop you’re in over your head. But if this whole thing is a hustle to set me up, you’re going to be disappointed, again. I’ll tell you what I’ve told every damned cop who’s busted in here or tossed my apartment: The Popes are not a gang. We’re a family. We fight to keep our kids in school, off dope, and out of jail.”

  “Good luck.”

  I stood up to go, passed her my change from the beer I hadn’t touched, minus a couple of bucks for the bartender. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Try.”

  “Is it worth it?”

  “Ever hear of Joe Hill?”

  “He was a labor organizer.”

  “When they hung him, his last words to a friend were, ‘Well, Gurly, we fought the good fight.’ I’d like to be able to say that when my turn comes.”

  I left Waterbury, west on I-84, thinking Connie Abbott might have liked her. But she made me uncomfortable, wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. I plugged in the car phone and called Ramos’s Bar. “I don’t know her name, but the lady I was sitting next to…Madame President? Listen, if you ever do end up living in a box? Call me.” I figured if worse came to worst, I could somehow squeeze her into the barn with Alison and Mrs. Mealy.

  She told me she had no plans to retire.

  My sleepless night was dragging me down, again. Yawning through Danbury, I almost rear-ended a truck. With time to spare before my dinner reservation, I pulled off on the shoulder just before the New York line and shut my eyes.

  A trooper woke me, rapping his flashlight on the window. Sleeping wasn’t allowed. Still spoiling for trouble, I told him it was pull over or run into a bridge abutment. He made me breathe on his hand to check my breath. Here, at last, a guy I could fight. But when I passed, he gave me polite directions to the next rest stop.

  ***

  New York. Downtown, on a warm summer night.

  I found Brassée casting friendly light on an oddly angled Tribeca corner, and a few blocks south a parking garage brightly lit and freshly painted to appear safe to nervous out-of-towners like Reg Hopkins. The attendant didn’t recognize his picture.

  Walking up to the restaurant, I suddenly recognized a vestige of my past. Brassée was a ’Nineties reincarnation of an ’Eighties minimalist nouvelle cuisinery that I and my fellow financial wizards would occasionally hit for a quick plate of hundred-dollar monkfish and snowpeas. I couldn’t recall the original place’s name; what lingered was a vague memory of feeling ripped off, but being far too rich—and way too busy—to mind very much.

  Gone were the monochrome paintings that had hung on infinitely more interesting peach walls, gone the steel-and-laminate chairs ergonomically designed to discourage slow eaters, gone the cacophony of self-congratulation echoing like jackhammers between hardwood floor and plaster ceiling. The new place was romantically candlelit, quieter, lusher, darker, sexier, and happier—as if the proprietors of a bistro and a bordello had fallen in love, long after either thought such a thing was still possible, and had celebrated their good fortune by going into business together.

  I noticed three things as I waited for the maitre d’ to deal with those ahead of me. Brassée was a late scene, my nine-thirty dinner reservation nowhere near the tail of the evening. The twenties I had brought for information should have been fifties, although I had to admit it didn’t look like a place Reg had scored heroin. And, while the well-dressed, well-heeled crowd was a high-octane Manhattan mix of Wall Street suits, downtown art and movie entrepreneurs, Seventh Avenue fashion shakers, and uptown ad execs, I was one of the very few straight guys in the restaurant, and the only one without a date.

  Chapter 20

  Reg?

  The maitre d’, a first-class professional who greeted customers politely before checking his reservations book, managed to be efficient, friendly, and flatteringly flirtatious all in the same breath. He made people feel welcome and attractive—provided, of course, they had dressed to the top of whatever fashion they conformed to, and had a reservation. If an aging Paul Stuart blazer and Burberry trousers were a trifle bumpkinous, at least I had had the wit to book ahead.

  Reg, gay?

  “Mr. Abbott, for two. It will be just a teensy wait.” Then, glancing over my shoulder, “Your companion?”

  Reg, gay? No way.

  Flummoxed by the unexpected, the unimaginable, the impossible—and with Rita still churning my brain—I blurted, “I may have been stood up.”

  Well, that sounded just wonderful, and he smiled. “Maybe you’ll get lucky at the bar.”

  Maybe I should have turned around and walked out the door. But even a frothing-at-the-mouth homophobe—which I was not—would have stayed a week to find out how, of all the three or four or ten thousand restaurants in Manhattan, his old friend, the elk-shooting, fish-hooking founder of Hopkins’s Septic, had discovered this mostly gay one the night he died.

  I accepted the maitre d’s promise of a table soon and let him direct me toward the bar—a fine affair of French-polished walnut, and a welcome change from last decade’s zinc and stainless steel. I reminded myself that I had no proof, yet, that Reg had actually dined at Brassée. Then, I wanted to know what the hell he was doing here? And with whom?

  I discovered at the bar that Brassée was not a singles scene. Couples and foursomes were waiting for tables. In fact, I was the only guy who looked like he was cruising. Wonderful.

  The bartender noticed and hurried over.

  I ordered club soda. When he brought it, I laid three twenties on the bar. “Could I trouble you for a fifty?”

  “What about the other ten?”

  “I was hoping it would cover the club soda.”

  “Barely,” he commiserated in a pleasant way and scampered off to fetch my fifty. I guessed that he was a kid recently off the bus from Nebraska—a country boy come to shine in New York. That was a good break. I could talk to a country boy. (Heck, son, I’m from Newbury? We got pigs and horses just like you.)

  “I’m looking for someone,” I said.

  He smoothed his cowlick, a mite warily.

  “Saturday around eight o’clock, three weeks ago. Were you on?”

  “I think so. Yes. I started a month ago, a week before that.”

  “Welcome to New York.”

  He actually said, “Thank you.” He was so nice I wanted to take him home and give him to my mother. (Here you go, Mom. A son you can be proud of.) He had, however, been in town long enough to notice I had left the fifty on the bar, and he paid attention when I said, “A man named Reg Hopkins. He would have had a reservation for eight or eight-thirty.”

  “What does he look like?”

  I showed him the photograph from the Clarion. Scooter had dredged it up from his morgue, a shot several years old, commemorating Reg’s Rotary Club presidency.

  “Nice,” said the man next to me.

/>   Having crashed somebody else’s scene, the least I could do was be polite. The trick here was to be polite without adding to the confusion. I smiled. The man next to me looked confused, and the nice bartender—despite a hungry eye on my fifty—admitted he had never seen Reg and suggested I ask the maitre d’, who had the reservation book. Except, as the maitre d’ was hustling his buns all over the dining room, I had to continue confusing people at the bar until he had finally settled the nine-thirty seating.

  When he had, it was nearly ten o’clock. I cornered him as he sank wearily behind his desk, complaining, “It’s the standing that kills you.”

  “This man,” I said, extending the newspaper photo with the fifty-dollar bill, “my friend Reg. Was he in here three Saturdays ago?”

  “Oh, hon, if I got in the middle of these things I wouldn’t have a friend in town.” Still, he glanced at the picture. “Well, no wonder you got stood up.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Tit for tat. You stood him up. Tonight he stands you up. Fortunately, I have a couple at the bar who will kill for your table. Maybe next time you two will get your acts together.”

  “Reg came here?”

  The maitre d’ sighed and returned the picture, minus my fifty. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but he looked a lot more disappointed than you do. Do you ever ask yourself why you’re putting him through this?”

  “How long did he wait?”

  “He gave you forty-five minutes—twenty more than you’d get from me.”

  “Was he high?”

  “No, he wasn’t high. He was sad…Life is shorter than ever, hon. Don’t waste it. Give a little, get along—If he comes by, want me to tell him where you’ll be?”

  “Tell him I went straight home.”

  There’d been a shift change at the garage, and the new attendant remembered Reg fondly. “Man says he’s staying overnight.”

  “All night?”

  “I go, ‘You sure?’ He goes, ‘I sure hope so.’ That being the case, I take it up in the back. Bunch more all-nighters come in, I take them up and in the back. Then your man comes back in less than one hour and wants his Blazer. I go, ‘You kidding? It’s buried.’ He goes, ‘You an undertaker?’”

  I laughed. That was Reg.

  The attendant was not so easily amused. “Oldest joke in the parking game. I go, ‘Sorry, mister. You said all night. It’ll take me an hour to move all them cars in front of yours.’ Know what he does?”

  “What?”

  “The man gets tears in his eyes. I’m thinking, What is this, like an actor, gonna cry to make me feel sorry for him? But he whips out his wallet—you know how some folks carry an emergency hundred?”

  I nodded. I’d given both of mine to the president of the Latin Popes.

  “Hundred dollars. The man goes, ‘I wanna go home. This is yours if I’m outta this damned place in five minutes.’”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened? I’m tossing cars like poker chips. He comes up with me and helps out—real smooth—does exactly what I tell him. ’Tween the two of us, Blazer’s down here in ten minutes. Not five, but he gives me the money anyway. Even pays separate for the ticket—so I got the whole hundred. You tell me how many people woulda done that.”

  I drove straight home.

  ***

  I think the parking story threw me harder than the fact that Reg had been stood up by a dinner date in a mostly gay restaurant. It was so like him. The way the man told the story, the ten minutes’ camaraderie would stay with him longer than the money.

  I felt a grim triumph in finally filling in Reg’s missing hours: After he had freed his car, he had just enough time, stepping on it, to get back to Newbury and swing by Dr. Mead’s for ice cream.

  As for Reg’s date at Brassée, I could think of no way I’d ever find out who he was meeting. The Brassée had been the only New York number listed on his entire long-distance bill. Whether the guy he was meeting had called Reg, or had a local number that wouldn’t show up on the bill, I couldn’t guess.

  Why did I assume it was a man and not a woman? Ninety-five percent of the Brassée’s patrons had been men; and the maitre d’ who recalled him had assumed Reg was gay. (I was not unaware he had made similar assumptions about me too, but I chalked that up to context.) Also, I recalled the expression of distaste wrinkling Janey’s lips when I had asked whether Reg was dating. Janey knew.

  I tried to imagine the sheer loneliness Reg would have endured in his marriage. And how desolate he must have felt among his friends. We certainly had been no help.

  Beyond sympathy and a vague sense of guilt, however, I wasn’t sure how I felt. Reg and I had known each other since we were four feet tall. How many years had he carried his secret? How long had he lived like a spy in his own town? What would I have done if he told me?

  I made the flagpole a little after eleven, just about the time he had. The town was quiet. I debated swinging down Church Hill in hopes of persuading Dr. Mead to draw me a pistachio cone—I was starving—but it had been a hell of a long day, much of it in the car, and I felt too punchy to make a decision. The car rolled to a stop in the deserted intersection. Then, gazing blearily up Main Street, I noticed an unmarked state police cruiser parked in front of my house.

  Major Case Squad Detective Sergeant Bender was sitting on my front step, swatting mosquitoes. He stood up, dodged moths circling the light, ignored my hand, and extended an envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  “Warrant to search your house, your car, and your person.”

  “For what?”

  “Your guns.”

  “What the hell for?”

  Bender did an excellent job of looking simultaneously world- weary and alert. And for a little guy, he had a remarkable ability to look dangerous, as if any second he would spring straight at the throat, like a mink or a weasel.

  “I don’t really believe that you were stupid enough to ask for Little John Martello in Waterbury, leave your business card, then drive down to Bridgeport to shoot the whacked-out bastard. But I’ll sleep better after I check your guns.”

  “Somebody shot Martello?” I echoed stupidly.

  Wait a minute. Somebody shot Little John the day after I informed the Jacuzzi Eight I knew Reg had died at their party?

  “I’ll start with your person,” said Sergeant Bender.

  I hardly heard him. One day after I asked them who knew John Martello, the gangsta was dead?

  “Spread ’em!”

  I heard that—like wooden clubs banging iron bars—and turned angrily on Bender: “Unless you want to start reading me my rights while I call my lawyer, why don’t we start with my alibi?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Not within twenty miles of Bridgeport.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I drove from Waterbury—I’m sure you can tell me what time I left—to New York City and back here.”

  “Bridgeport happens to be between Waterbury and New York.”

  “Not if you take I-84. Bridgeport’s on 95. I can prove I spent a half hour in a Manhattan restaurant, and I have a parking receipt for my car.”

  “Can you prove you took 84?”

  “You can. One of your road cops caught me sleeping on the shoulder, just east of the New York line.”

  “Got his badge number?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Sergeant Bender wrote down the time and asked to see the parking receipt. He wanted to keep it. I demanded he write me a receipt for it.

  “Oh, yeah, and I made a phone call from 84. Ask Lynx Mobil. It was to the lady in Ramos’s Bar, the one who probably turned me in.”

  “Told you I didn’t think you were that stupid. Well, at least it saves me having to root through your house, though I will have a look in your car. And maybe a peek under your jacket.”

  I looked around, confirmed the street was empty, and said, “Be my
guest.”

  Bender patted the places I might have a gun and then searched my Olds from trunk to engine with a mini-Maglite. “What the hell is this?”

  “The motor.”

  “From what, a locomotive?” He played the light lovingly over it and finally closed the hood. “You’re clean.”

  “Could have saved yourself the drive to Newbury.”

  “I remembered you were stupid enough to lie to me about not spotting Martello in the gang file.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Extremely. One shot to the head, close range.”

  “Suicide?”

  “The back of his head.”

  “I hear he sold bad dope, and he quit his gang, which I gather was frowned upon.”

  “Especially when you then start up your own gang.”

  “Close range?” I asked. “I thought the Popes did drive-bys.”

  Bender shrugged. “Maybe they couldn’t find a car to steal.”

  “Who was his buddy? The Spanish guy?”

  He turned away. “What’s the matter, couldn’t find him in the file?”

  I trailed him down the front walk. “The file is out of date. Do you know his name? He’s ‘Spider’ on the street.”

  Bender paused with his door open, looked at the night sky peeping through the trees, and said, “You know what I wish? I wish this thing was a convertible. I’d really like to ride home with the top down.”

  I offered to lend him a can opener.

  He told me that if I went looking for Spider, the entire Connecticut state police force would go out of the way to make my life miserable. He demonstrated this ability by writing me a citation for the expired emissions sticker he had noticed on my windshield.

  “I’m not a polluter,” I protested. “The car runs cleaner than a new one.”

  “Tough.”

  At last, someone I could fight with. “Screw you.” I tore up the ticket and ground the pieces into the walk.

  Bender wrote a second one for littering. “You got ten days to pay the fines or I’ll get a bench warrant for your arrest.”

  ***

  I stomped into the house and telephoned Ramos’s Bar. It was after midnight, but I bet few of the afternoon drinkers had strayed. “Ben Abbott, again,” I told the bartender. “The lady at the bar I was talking to? Madame President?”