Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery

by Dallas Murphy

  I knelt beside the bed and pulled away the tape as painlessly as I could while Lydia whimpered behind me. Crystal had gone to the kitchen and returned with a butcher knife—in time to see Bruce retch twice and then disgorge a fat wad of bills from his throat with a full-bodied heaving motion, just the way Jellyroll disgorges seawater. The three of us froze momentarily in disbelief at what we had just seen, while Bruce gasped for breath like a beached blue-fish. Then Crystal began sawing at the ropes tied around his ankles.

  Before he was free, before he even caught his breath, he turned his head to Lydia, who had pressed herself against the wall, arms akimbo. “Where the hell have you been!”

  “Don’t talk to me like that!” she screeched.

  Crystal cut his hands free.

  He moaned when he turned over and tried to get a look at his back. “How bad is it?” he gasped. “Is it bad?” He curled into a tight ball as an answer to his own question.

  Crystal knelt at the other side of the bed to examine his wounds.

  Bruce picked up the wet wad of bills and shoved it under the mattress. “God, I thought I’d choke to death—” he muttered. “Choke to death on my own money. Bummer.”

  I try not to be too judgmental of my old friends, but I admit that I found this whole scene sordid and disgusting. I asked the obvious question.

  “Is there bone showing?” Bruce wanted to know.

  “No,” said Crystal. “There aren’t very many cuts.”

  I repeated the obvious question.

  “Shysters,” muttered Bruce.

  “Shysters?”

  “Loan sharks.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why? Because I owed them. I meant to pay up, but I didn’t get around to it. I thought I’d have to lie here till I died. Thanks, Artie—”

  Why didn’t the shysters just take the wad of money, why tape it in his—?

  “I’ll get some antiseptic,” Crystal said and headed for the bathroom.

  “Bruce, why did they—?”

  “Christ, I don’t know. What do you think I am, a shyster shrink? They’re nuts, that’s why. Maybe they wanted to teach me a lesson.”

  “Did they?”

  Crystal returned. “Bruce, there’s nothing in the medicine cabinet but an evaporated bottle of Aqua Velva.”

  “They whipped me with a deep-sea fishing rod!” Bruce exclaimed.

  “A fishing rod?” said Lydia. “Where’d they get a fishing rod?”

  “They brought it with them!”

  Something was wrong here. This didn’t make good business sense from the loan shark’s point of view, teach a welsher a lesson, but leave his money behind—in his mouth?

  “Look,” said Crystal, “I’m going to go to a drugstore.”

  “There’s a Love Drugs on Amsterdam,” Lydia offered. “I’ll go with you.”

  I almost said no. I came a breath from saying, No, things aren’t what they seem here, so we’ll all go together or not at all. But I didn’t. I was still trying to work out the sense of this scene when Crystal and Lydia left.

  Bruce slowly, painfully unfolded himself. Waft s of urine stink followed him. Piss had darkened the mattress in a big circle. “Hell, I’ve been here since last night,” said Bruce. He staggered and dropped to one knee. “They loved inflicting pain. Fucking sadist shysters.”

  “You want to call the cops?”

  “Sure. When they get a load of all this stuff, I’ll just tell them nobody beats the Wiz.”

  I helped him to his feet. He made a tortured trip toward the john, and I let him do that by himself. After he turned the corner, I lift ed the mattress, propped it up against my shoulder, and sift ed through the wad. Barely a third of the way through it, I had counted over two thousand bucks. Yes, this was wrong, all right. Where did he get that kind of bread to begin with, and, second, why did the shysters leave it here? But then, this was Bruce’s life—

  The door slammed open. Lydia shrieked twice. I stumbled over toasters getting back into the living room.

  Lydia clutched her face with both hands. “They kidnapped her! They kidnapped her! They kidnapped her!”

  I leapt at her, grasped her shoulders, gave her a shake I really didn’t intend, and screamed, “Who!”

  “I don’t know! A Good Humor truck! Two guys jumped out of the Good Humor truck, they stuck something over her face and threw her in the back!”

  Bruce, still naked, appeared from the direction of the john.

  “No! No!” screeched Lydia. “It wasn’t a Good Humor truck! It was a Mister Softee truck! They shoved me down into the garbage bags, and they drove off!”

  Stupid with panic, I burst out the door, down the hall, and outside as if to stop ice-cream trucks of all stripes until I found one with my love aboard. I ran west, stopped, turned, ran east before I could think again. I ran back to Bruce’s apartment.

  “Phone!” I screamed at Bruce. Neither he nor Lydia had moved. Bruce’s eyes were wide with panic—that was the only difference. “Phone!” I spotted it. On the floor in the corner. I shoved TVs out of my way. Glass shattered.

  “Wait! Artie! What are you doing!”

  “What the fuck do you think I’m doing! I’m calling the cops!”

  “No, you can’t do that!”

  A terrible calm came over me. “Why?”

  “…How can I explain all this—?”

  “Bruce, I don’t care about your stolen goods. Crystal’s been kidnapped. I’m calling the cops, and”—I turned on Lydia—“you’re going to tell them what you saw!”

  “Artie, please don’t.” Bruce began to sob. “If you call the police, they’ll kill me.”

  I watched his shoulders heave for a moment. “Who will?”

  He began to collect himself. I could see his wheels turning. He was searching for a line of bullshit.

  I didn’t wait. “Okay, Bruce, here it is. You tell me what’s going on, tell me now, or I go straight to the police and tell them everything I’ve seen. Five seconds, Bruce.”

  He sat down on a TV box. He grimaced in pain. “You’ve got to promise you won’t bring in the cops. They told me they’d kill me if I brought the cops in. They will, Artie. They don’t give a fuck. They’ll kill me and then go order out Chinese. Look what they did to me already.”

  “I told you, Bruce, I don’t care about you. I only care about Crystal.”

  “They’ll kill her if you call the cops,” he said.

  “You better tell me who, Bruce. Now!”

  “Trammell’s alive. We staged his death. He paid me to help him. That boat stuff—it was all bullshit.” He folded his hands over his genitals, as if suddenly shy.

  “Who’s Trammell?” said Lydia.

  “Those people who beat you—that’s what they wanted to know?”

  “How could I not tell them, flaying me with a fucking fishing pole! You’d have done the same thing.”

  “Who were they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “A black guy and a white guy, both big.”

  What was I going to do? I had to think, but suddenly I was exhausted. I sat down on a TV box. “What did they say while they were beating you?” My mouth was so dry I could barely speak.

  “They kept asking me if Trammell was alive.”

  “What else?”

  “That they’d kill me if I told anyone.”

  “Why didn’t they just kill you after you told them?”

  “They want me to find him for them.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Why did they kidnap Crystal?”

  “Maybe they think she knows where he is.”

  “You mean they’re going to torture her like that?”

  “…I don’t know.”

  “Bruce, as far as I’m concerned, this is your fault. If you don’t tell me everything, I’ll—”

  “Come on, Artie, don’t threaten me…I’ve b
een through hell.”

  “And Crystal’s just arrived there.”

  “I introduced you,” he blubbered. “Give me a break…Please don’t call the cops. They probably won’t kill her, they didn’t kill me.”

  I stood up, trying to look like my knees were stable.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” I walked out.

  ELEVEN

  I SPED UP amsterdam to 104th street, then west, but I didn’t feel the street beneath my feet. I didn’t see street sights. Rage, fear, confusion overwhelmed them. I felt like screaming. I felt like smashing objects at random, like pushing people out of my way. Who could I vent this pain upon? Failing that, who could I hate? Hatred empowers the impotent. Hatred was made for the likes of me. Trammell, I could hate him, and I could hate…who else? Bruce? Why not, the twisted little fence? Sweat rolled under my glasses, stinging my eyes. This Tiny Archibald, he was hateable, and so was Chet Bream, wasn’t he? I began to smell whiff s of myself, the stink of fear and indecision. I was nearly running now. I had to think! I couldn’t just run around stinking up the neighborhood, dreaming of hatred and violence.

  Jellyroll took one look at my face as I blasted, thinking, through the door, and his tail dropped. He cowered along the wall. “It’s all right,” I told him in a pinched voice he didn’t even recognize. I didn’t recognize it, either.

  Where was DiPietro’s card? That was the first thing to do, call the cops, no matter what I told Bruce I’d do.

  Where was that goddamn card! In my shorts pocket. I went looking for my shorts in the bedroom, hurling clothes, throwing them behind me, digging like a panicky prairie dog, and that’s when I saw the red light on the phone machine. Crystal! It must be Crystal telling me it was all a mistake—I leapt for it. Then, hand in mid-reach, I froze. I had been here before, a phone message from a woman I loved. She was dead before I heard it…

  I pushed the play button:

  “Artie Deemer, you don’t know me, but it looks like our life paths have crossed. I’m Norman Armbrister”—Norman Armbrister? Wait! Christ! He was one of the guys in the tape! Bream said he was the CIA guy—“I’m calling to tell you don’t trust DiPietro. That cop dodge is one of the man’s favorites. He’s no cop, never was. I thought you should know. Listen, I’ll get back in touch with you.”

  Rage faded. DiPietro was a phony cop? I fell into dispirited torpor. What was he really? Identity had lost its meaning. Everybody knew about me, but I didn’t know about anybody. What chance did I have? What chance did Crystal have? Even now they were probably—I couldn’t think about that.

  I sagged onto the bed and sat staring at the patterns in the patch of peeling paint under the window. Jellyroll slunk in to see what I was doing. He sat down in front of me and stared fearfully into my eyes. He remembered this look on my face; he remembered when my last lover died…Jellyroll is so sensitive to human mood that sometimes I hide my feelings so as not to upset him, but that of course has more to do with me than the presence of an extraordinarily attuned dog. “It’s okay.” I grinned weakly. He of course didn’t buy it. He cocked his head from side to side. This is what Uncle Billy meant when he said a dog like that could break your heart.

  I thought about verifications. Why should I believe a voice on a phone machine? Norman Armbrister? Who was Norman Armbrister? How did I know that was Norman Armbrister, just because a voice says so. Why should I believe him about DiPietro? How did I even know Norman Armbrister actually existed, except that Chet Bream told me so? Why should I believe Chet Bream? DiPietro seemed like a cop to me. How could I verify?

  I keep taped to my telephone in the kitchen a list of emergency numbers, among them that of the Twenty-fourth Precinct. I held the number on DiPietro’s card up beside the precinct-house number. They weren’t even close. I called DiPietro’s number.

  “Hello, this is Detective DiPietro,” said a recorded message, “I’m not in now, but if you leave a message—”

  I didn’t. What did that prove? He wouldn’t give me a phone number that, when called, would reveal him to be a phony. However, if I could put an address with that number, I’d know where DiPietro lived. Or worked. Why would I want to know that? Maybe, if they hurt Crystal, I’d want to murder him. My hands were trembling. Now what?

  Calabash! Now was the time for heavy firepower, no matter what happened next. If you can’t beat ’em, kill ’em. Calabash was no killer, but he had a keen sense of justice. Injustice pissed him off, turned him deadly. I’d seen it before. Calabash lives in the Bahamas. I called him there. Our connection was tinny.

  “They kidnapped my girlfriend, Calabash!”

  “Only one way to reason wid dat kind,” he said after pausing to give the matter some thought. “I’m leavin’ now.”

  I nearly wept with gratitude. “I’ll have a ticket waiting at the airport…Thank you, Calabash.”

  “Don’t do nothin’ crazy till I get dere.”

  I called American Airlines and paid for a first-class ticket by credit card.

  What could I do now that wasn’t crazy? I called Islip, Long Island, information and asked for DiPietro. They had no such person listed. Hell, that proved nothing. I didn’t believe that family-outing-from-Islip bullshit when I thought DiPietro was a cop…The obvious finally occurred to me. I called the Twenty-fourth Precinct house. A Sergeant Brannigan answered.

  “Detective DiPietro, please.”

  “Who?”

  I repeated it.

  “Nobody by that name here. Can I help you?”

  “Well, this isn’t business, it’s personal. I’m the alumni director from his old high school, and I’m trying to get in touch with him about the class reunion. Maybe I have the wrong precinct. Do you have a general department directory?”

  “Yeah, I went to my twenty-fifth reunion. Hated it. Hang on…DiPietro. Yeah, here we go, DiPietro, Seventy-fourth—Nope, wait. Monica DiPietro. That don’t sound like the party you want.”

  “No others?”

  “Nope, that’s it.”

  “Thank you.”

  The phone rang.

  “Artie?”

  “Crystal!”

  “I’ve been trying—busy.”

  “Are you all right! Where are you!”

  “I’m…I’m down by my car. Where we parked it.” Her words were slurred. Why were her words slurred? “Please come and get me!”

  “I’ll be right there. What did they do to you, Crystal?”

  “They…drugged me.”

  “But you’re all right?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “I’m on my way—” Oh, relief! They only drugged her, the fuckers! My step was breezy, I felt giddy, like chuckling to myself. I was dancing for the door when I stopped, stood silently, thinking. I turned on my heel and went into the kitchen, pawed around in the knife drawer, but chose instead an ice pick. I’d need some kind of point guard. Is that an ice pick sticking in your thigh, or are you glad to see me? I opened an indifferent bottle of red wine for its cork. If I was giddy with relief, why was I so frightened? Why was I arming myself?

  I sprinted to Riverside Drive. Crystal had parked on the east side of the drive near the western terminus of 104th Street, but I didn’t go there directly. I ran up to 105th and approached from the north on the opposite side of the avenue…I didn’t see anything funny, funnier than usual, that is. A man slept in a refrigerator crate on a bench, only his bare feet sticking out. His worldly goods were packed into two shopping carts tied together with string. The other end of the string was tied around his big toe. Another guy was singing, “Seventy-six trombones led the big parade,” as he pissed over the wall into the park below. Car alarms blared and whooped and whined. “No Radio,” said signs on the windshields. “Already Stolen.” Yesterday a sanitation truck had swerved off Riverside Drive and smashed into an elm tree. I saw the elm tree up ahead, torn to shreds. The driver had failed the drug test. Then I saw Crystal’s car.

  She was in it! Sh
e was sitting on the passenger side, her head leaning against the window. I jogged across the street, dodging a crazed cabbie who swerved to get me, and I climbed in behind the wheel.

  “Darl—!”

  She turned her face to me—

  I gasped. It wasn’t Crystal at all! It was a man in a wig. He was a thick-browed simian fucker with no neck. He grinned at me. Brown teeth. That face under the Crystal wig was the most obscene sight I’d ever glimpsed. Repulsed, I sat there staring at him, frozen. He began to chortle.

  From the rear seat, somebody—he must have been lying on the floor—clapped a rag over my face and jerked my head back against the rest. Ether. I’d smelled that smell before. Trammell and Bruce used to do ether in law school. I never did. I didn’t like the smell. It reminded me of a hospital in my youth. My mother was there at my bedside with some crew-cut pilot. She told me I’d be fine, everybody has their tonsils out, as a nurse put the wire-mesh mask over my lower face…My peripheral vision went first, in shimmering waves of light too bright to look at directly, but I found the handle in my jacket pocket. Could I get it out; having gotten it out, could I get the cork off the point?

  The asshole in the Crystal wig was trying to pin my arms to my side, but he was clutching me around the biceps. My lower arms were free, if I could just get the goddamn cork off—

  I did! Corkless, it was in my hand, and my hand was free. Now all I had to do was muster the strength before I crashed to stick—

  I brought the handle up to the level of my chin and plunged it into his thigh. That was all I could hit just then. He let out a long, falsetto wail. The Crystal wig fell off his head into his lap. The anesthesiologist in the backseat lost his grip on my face. I shot forward in the seat and came up hard against the steering wheel. Crystal’s car began to spin. I jerked the ice pick across my body all the way to the door, and then I swung with everything I had left.The man went “huuuff f,” like a punctured pair of water wings. I didn’t actually see it hit him, but it went in deep—I felt his clothes against the bottom of my fist. He howled, grabbed the Crystal wig, clapped it over his wound, and howled again. I felt so satisfied at the sound of that second howl that I decided to get a little sleep before I considered my next move.