Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery

by Dallas Murphy

  “Crystal—”

  “Huh?”

  “Is there a back way out?”

  “Through Billy’s place. There’s stairs down to the little patio in back…We had a pool out there when I was a kid—” She pointed at the window. “You can see it down there.”

  “Why don’t you pack some things and let’s get out of here?”

  “This is where I live! They came where I—and did this! Bastards! I’ve had it with these fuckheads, Artie!”

  Calabash peeped out the window. So did I. Nothing below but an empty, leaf-littered patio, where once Crystal had splashed in the pool.

  “While you pack, could we check Billy’s place?”

  She handed me a key ring, Billy’s key isolated between her thumb and forefinger. The rest rattled in her trembling hand.

  I kissed her. “Keep Jellyroll with you. Lock this door behind us, okay, darling?”

  Calabash’s gun reappeared in his hand as Crystal did so. We approached Billy’s door, the landing creaking loudly beneath our feet. Calabash took the keys from me. He pointed to the hinged side of the door—that was where I was to stand. I stood precisely there.

  Calabash stood to the other side of the door, put the key in the lock, turned it—then he shoved the door all the way open against its stop. At the same time he held up an enormous hand to tell me to remain where I was. I didn’t need to be told twice. He remained where he was, the gun muzzle pointing up at the ceiling. I heard pool balls click below. Compared to banks, poolrooms seemed places of innocence and goodwill. He slid down the wall and crouched with his knees under his chin. From that level, he looked in over his gun hand. No shots got fired.

  We walked in. The same search-and-destroy tactics had been applied in here. We closed the door behind us but didn’t relock it. This was a much larger place. The living room and dining room were visible. Beyond, I could see the doorway to the kitchen. A hallway led back to the bedrooms and bath, I assumed. I could see the traces of French doors that had been walled up to separate Crystal’s little adulthood apartment from her childhood home, both now wrecked. Calabash disappeared down the hall.

  The furnishings were all 1940s era. Brocaded chairs with doilies on the arms, heavy fabric curtains, floor lamps with yellowed shades, knickknacks and porcelain objects decades out of fashion. Most of these things were broken, sliced, or overturned. I crunched across broken glass into the dining room.

  Crystal knocked on the door and called my name. I opened up. She had an overnight bag in one hand and a pillowcase in the other. Jellyroll slipped in, but Crystal surveyed the destruction from the doorway. “He’s not dead in here, is he?”

  “No.” Of course, he could be dead somewhere else. “Are you okay?”

  “I guess so. Artie, look at this—” She knelt and spilled the contents of the pillowcase onto the rug…It was her lingerie. Jellyroll sniff ed until I eased him aside. I picked up a pair of black panties. The crotch had been sliced out. There was a matching bra. The nipples had been sliced off. I sift ed through the pile. They were all mutilated. I looked up at Crystal. She was clutching her mouth. “Who are these people, Artie?”

  “Come look at this,” called Calabash.

  Crystal and I shoved the ravaged underwear back into the pillowcase and then went to see.

  Calabash was in the first bedroom off the hall. He leaned out and gestured to us. The room was ransacked, but we were used to that. That wasn’t what he wanted us to see. He was pointing at the wall above the bed:

  POOL IS SATAN GAME

  It was scrawled across floral wallpaper in red spray paint, letters two feet high. But the letters were ill-formed, as if written by a non-English speaker.

  “What…?” asked Crystal.

  All around that statement other letters were painted. But these weren’t English letters. I copied them on the back of my laundry slip, checked to be sure I’d gotten them right, and returned the laundry slip to my wallet.

  “What is it?”

  “Arabic.”

  “Arabic? What do the Arabs want with Uncle Billy?…And my underwear?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” I suggested.

  NINETEEN

  WE SPED HEADLONG up ocean parkway.

  “They’re making me very angry, the fucks!” snapped Crystal. “They kidnap me, shove drugs down my throat. They kidnap you! They ruin my place. They might already’ve killed my uncle!”

  “Dey don’t deserve to live,” agreed Calabash.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked. “Do you want to go to the police? Maybe we could get a real one this time.”

  That met with silence.

  Crystal swerved into the right lane and stopped behind a car full of Hasidim vacating their parking place. The Hasidim hit the car in front, setting off its alarm, then hit the car behind, doing the same thing. Then, having gotten a feeling for distance, they pulled out. I had thought that was the Manhattan method of close-quarter maneuvering—hit the car in front, hit the car behind—but it seemed to obtain in Brooklyn as well. Crystal took the spot. We sat between the wailing alarms with the engine running. This was a pleasant, tree-lined neighborhood of large red-brick apartment buildings where the races seemed to mix in reasonable harmony.

  “Where are we going, anyway?” Crystal snapped. “Do we have any kind of purpose?”

  “I told Chet Bream I’d meet him at the poolroom. We could blow him off, but if we do, he’ll be knocking at my door by dark.”

  “How are we ever going to get out of this? Huh, how? This’ll never end. They’ll just keep doing things to us! Do you believe these goddamn alarms! They’re trying to make us crazy on top of everything else!” Shouting over the noise, Crystal slammed both hands down on the steering wheel. I ineffectually put my hand on her shoulder. I hoped she wasn’t cracking.

  “We could blow dem up,” suggested Calabash.

  “We could?” That idea clearly appealed to Crystal.

  “I got de goods.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think there’s more here than we could blow up,” I said, the voice of restraint.

  “Yeah, we’d have to get more o’ de goods.”

  “If they’ve hurt poor Uncle Billy, then let’s blow them up,” said Crystal, jaw set. I looked at her in the rearview mirror. I saw there the face of a woman capable of pushing the plunger, or whatever you do these days to set off the goods.

  “Can we think of anything else?” I asked.

  “We could go to Poor Joe Cay. There ain’t no dangerous strangers dere. We keep track of ’em on de Cay.”

  A black car had pulled up behind us. Two men sat in the front seat and watched us. They were wearing uniforms, but not from the military or the police. We watched them. Even Jellyroll watched them.

  The driver got out and stood beside his car. Calabash reached inside his jacket. But the driver didn’t approach, merely stood beside his open door. His uniform was from one of the private security agencies. “Hey, lady, you leavin’ or what?”

  “No,” Crystal snarled. “Get outta heah!” Trouble brought out the Brooklyn in Crystal. I liked it. But the alarms were turning me morbid. I suggested we leave this place.

  “I’ve got another uncle,” Crystal said after a few blocks. “His name is Ray. He’s in the rackets. Small time, a bookie, like that. Uncle Ray can be a loudmouth asshole sometimes—he drives around the neighborhood in a pink Lincoln with a Continental kit on the back. But he knows people, and he loves me. He could put out some feelers for Billy, it’s just I’m not sure he can keep his mouth shut.”

  “What’s a Continental kit?” Calabash wanted to know.

  “A spare tire in a stupid case…Maybe I should bullshit Ray. Maybe I should tell him Billy got into money trouble or something.”

  “What about Danny Barcelona?” I asked. “Do we mention Danny Barcelona? He’s in the rackets, too.”

  “Yeah…You don’t like the idea. I can tell.”

&n
bsp; “It’s not that exactly. It’s just you said he had a big mouth.”

  “What do you think, Calabash?”

  “It just depends how much you trust dis Uncle Ray. ’Course you could tell him if he fucks us over den we blow up his Continental kit with him inside.”

  “Where would we find Uncle Ray?”

  “He minds a pizza parlor in the East Village, on Avenue A. I think the place is a money laundry.”

  “Lotta dat goin’ around,” said Calabash.

  Through the rearview mirror, Crystal looked me in the eye. “I told you that first night my family was tacky.”

  We turned south off of Twelfth Street, and there it was, two doors down from the corner on Avenue A. Ray’s Absolutely REAL Original Pizza Parlor (Believe It, said a sign below the name). And there was the pink Lincoln, with Continental kit, double-parked in front, along with five other gaudy gas-guzzlers. Hard-looking guys hung around the cars talking and smoking cigarettes. A couple of guys were eating pizza slices, leaning over to keep the grease from running down their silk shirts. We cruised past to check it out before we committed ourselves…We seemed to be free of tails.

  There was a crack store across the avenue masquerading as a bodega. You can always spot the crack stores by their bereft shelves and by the clots of jittery youths bobbing around on the sidewalk out front waiting to use the pay phones—just like you can spot the crooked pizza parlors by the wiseguys and the pink Lincolns loitering in front. There was a dreary Ukrainian restaurant on one side of Ray’s, Madam Casbah’s, Fortunes Told, on the other.

  The wiseguys watched us park. Crystal’s Toyota was dwarfed by the Cadillacs and Buicks. Crystal left the engine running and got out alone. She said hello, by name, to a couple of the wiseguys as she went in. I think they made rude remarks about her ass as she did so. Calabash and I stared straight ahead.

  Five minutes later, Crystal came back out with Uncle Ray, a fat man of several chins and arms that didn’t touch his sides. He wore a blue three-piece suit, expensive but still ill-fitting in the shoulders. He was bald on top, but he’d made a futile attempt to cover it by combing sparse strands of black hair over the hole. When Uncle Ray saw Jellyroll, he stopped dead in his tracks in the gutter and clapped his hands together.

  “Christ, it is!” he exclaimed, chins twittering. “Crystal tells me, I think she’s kidding her old uncle!”

  I rolled down the rear window. Uncle Ray stuck his big face in, and Jellyroll licked it. Uncle Ray squealed.

  We got out of the car.

  “Hey, you guys, here, look here!”

  A half a dozen wiseguys gathered. They all wore pegged pants and silk shirts buttoned up around the neck. I wondered where they hid their guns.

  “This is my niece, Crystal, and this is the R-r-ruff Dog!”

  “Naw—”

  “No shit?”

  “Jumpin’ Jesus, it is!”

  “Lookit that smile! That’s him, all right!”

  “Can I pet him?”

  “Holy shit, I petted the R-r-ruff Dog. I’ll never wash my hand again!”

  “Okay, boys,” said Uncle Ray, “beat it.”

  They dispersed, chattering, and Ray was clearly pleased with his power to assemble and disperse lackeys.

  Crystal introduced Calabash and me.

  “You all get in that little car together!” He bellowed laughter. “Welcome Calabash, welcome to Ray’s Real Original Pizza Parlor, where I’m Ray. Say, Artie, how much you want for that dog? We can come to terms on this. Cash, services, you name it, pizza for life, whatever. Gimme a starting figure on which we can bicker—” He laughed and clapped me on the back with a fat, soft hand. “Come on in.” He put his other arm around as much of Calabash’s shoulders as he could reach and led us into the pizza parlor-cum-money laundry. He stopped in the threshold, turned, and said, “Hey, you guys, keep an eye on that Toyota.”

  Wiseguys sat at round Formica tables and dropped cigarette butts into cups of Coke. Two Mexicans cooked pizza behind the counter. They humbly averted their eyes as the boss and his entourage entered. Ray led us around behind the counter, between the ovens.

  “Hey, Jesus. Hey, Pancho. Look here, this is the R-r-ruff Dog!”

  The cooks looked sheepish, grinning uncomfortably.

  “El pero de R-r-ruff ?…”

  They returned blank stares.

  “Never mind—”

  He led us through a beaded curtain, into a closet-sized back room. It was already crowded to capacity by a little Formica bistro table, four mismatching chairs, and ceiling-high stacks of Coke cases that seemed to loom over us like Stonehenge. We squeezed in and took seats at the table.

  “How ’bout some wine? I mean good wine. Want some top-of-the line wine? Jesus!”

  A Mexican man appeared at the beads.

  “Wine, Jesus. The good stuff. You know. El vino primero.”

  Jesus went to fetch it.

  “Gee, it’s good to see you, Crystal. I ain’t seen you in, what, must be two years, since at Billy’s birthday party.”

  Jesus returned with a bottle of Chianti and four glasses. He poured a taste for Uncle Ray, who swilled it around like mouthwash. “Mmm, good.” There wasn’t room for Jesus to enter, so he reached an arm in through the beads and poured from without.

  Uncle Ray was right about the wine. He arched his eyebrows and nodded, wanting us to like it.

  “Excellent,” I pronounced.

  “It’s Billy I’m worried about, Uncle Ray.”

  “Billy?” Uncle Ray looked at Calabash and then at me. He was wondering, no doubt, what we had to do with Crystal. I looked in his eyes. This guy was no fool, even if he acted like one. Acting like one might have been his strategy for survival.

  Crystal, too, was thinking, debating silently. “Remember Trammell Weems?”

  “Sure. He drowned, right?”

  Crystal paused. “I think he’s alive.”

  “I’m glad you’re not trying to kid me, Crystal. That would hurt my feelings.”

  “I thought about it, Uncle Ray, but, no, I’m not going to kid you. It’s possible Uncle Billy was—or is—involved with Trammell.”

  “Uh, would this have anything to do with a bank?”

  “I’m afraid it does.”

  Ray nodded gravely.

  “Why, Ray?”

  “There’s talk on the street. Professionally, it ain’t in my best interests to get near the banking business…Where’s Billy now?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why we came to you. I thought maybe you could ask some questions around town.”

  “Where was he last seen?”

  “An employee at the Golden Hours told me he went bluefishing up to Montauk with Arnie Lovejoy.”

  “Arnie Lovejoy, the lush?”

  “I hear he quit. Talk to me, Uncle Ray. What are they saying on the street?”

  He paused, considering…“Crystal, who are your friends?”

  “Artie is…my boyfriend.” She glanced at me to see if I minded her putting it like that. I certainly did not. “We haven’t known each other that long, but we like each other. Now my ex-husband’s crooked business affairs are ruining it. Calabash is Artie’s friend. He’s here to help us.”

  “I’m de bodyguard of dem both.”

  Ray nodded again. “So you got no other interest, like financial interest? You ain’t kiddin’ me?”

  “We’re interested in being left alone,” said Crystal. “But I want to find Uncle Billy. I want him to be safe, too.”

  “I’m a pizza man. I ain’t in the banking business. I’m in the pizza business.”

  “Okay, Uncle Ray, I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble.”

  “Of course family is family, blood is thicker than what-have-you. Marinara sauce.”

  “There’s something else I should tell you, because maybe you’ve heard of him. The name Danny Barcelona has come up.”

  This didn’t seem to surprise Uncle Ray. “Who raised it?”

 
; “A guy who used to be in the CIA. He’s one of the people we want to leave us alone.”

  “CIA, huh? I told them not to get mixed up with those guys, they’re crazy. But they wouldn’t listen to me, a pizza man. Uh, what about the name Archibald? Tiny Archibald? Did that name come up?”

  “Yes, it came up.”

  “I heard things. On the street.”

  “That’s why we came to you about Uncle Billy. Maybe you heard something.”

  “Not about Billy.” He looked down into the surface of his wine, and his head hung, at least as far as his chins allowed, in silence for a while. “We got to do this carefully. Little cat steps…But hell, he’s my relative. No reason why I can’t look around for him, right? Hey, Jesus—”

  Jesus appeared behind the beads.

  “Jesus, call Ronnie Jax in here.”

  Ronnie Jax was a hood in his late twenties with an unsuccessful mustache and long, slicked-back black hair. “Yeah, boss?”

  “I want you to go over Sheepshead Bay and find an old guy, late sixties, gotta big booze gut, name of Arnie Lovejoy. Tell him I wanna talk with him. Bring him back here if you can. But be polite. If he can’t make it, tell him get in touch with me, tell him today.”

  “You got it, boss.” Ronnie Jax left.

  “Uncle Ray, somebody ransacked my apartment and did the same to Uncle Billy’s place. We just came from there.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You mean like they were looking for something?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t know what?”

  “No.”

  “Where should I get in touch with you?”

  I gave him my phone number.

  He leaned down to pet Jellyroll, then he straightened and said, “Crystal, it’s good to see you. I been missing you.”