by Brian Selfon
The fucking name.
Henry is reminded of a lesson learned from his parents’ deaths, how death moves forward and backward in time, erasing everything. Present: your special someone is gone. Future: they’re never coming back. Past: you never knew them in the first place.
Hello, Charlie Gladney. So terrible to meet you.
Footsteps, Uncle Shecky coming back. Henry pockets the cards and exchanges a look with Kerasha: This is between us.
part five
the widow and her ex
chapter 21
Shecky would rather be home. Cold Guinness in hand, tenderloin in the oven, the kids at the table with him—he aches to be under his own roof. Instead he’s waiting on a police report—an incident report, in blue-speak. He’d heard about them from Fat Boris, the family’s ID printer, at an emergency meeting that day.
“I’m fucked,” Shecky had said, “but how fucked?”
“Get your hands on that incident report. You’ll know.”
And so now Shecky wants to be home, but home is not an option.
Home, Jesus forgive him, is dangerous.
First the blue Impala, then the green Mustang. Next a gun on his kitchen table, and right beside it that detective’s badge. Now a murder. And a quarter-million-dollar bag is in the wind, and who will be missing it? A client known to go after families first, so you can walk in on their pieces. Home should be a sanctuary, but these days he feels eyes everywhere.
Years ago Shecky did a drop in Baltimore, three million cash. A duffle bag then—many of the bills were small—but this was before you could load up Amex cards, before you could fit three million in your pocket. And the Baltimore drop was also before Henry, before Shecky had someone he could trust with a job like this. So he drove the money himself, spent as much as he had to on security, and made the drop “without incident,” as he would proudly report to the client. On his way back, though, he stayed at a fleabag with actual fleas. Felt them crawling on his skin for weeks, though he never saw evidence of them outside that filthy room. And it’s the same now with the police, and with Red Dog’s gunmen: they’re not here, and yet they’re with you. Little feet, little mouths on your skin.
Right now Henry is at a sandwich shop across the street from the Eighty-Third Precinct. He’s having an evening coffee with his connect Starr, trading a thousand crisps for the almighty incident report. Apparently Starr has learned the value of her position, having just taken a thousand from them yesterday. Clever girl. As for himself, well, life is all smiles for Shecky Keenan. He sits alone at the counter of a Polish greaser called Knish-Knosh. Before him is a plate with three and a half potato pierogi and two apple fritters, the one on the left halved with a fork but not yet bitten. Shecky loves food, loves eating, but tonight he can’t put anything in his mouth. If his life is a ship (his supposed dad was a merchant marine, and as a child, Shecky imagined fantastical adventures for him), it’s keening for the rocks.
The waitress is a slim woman with highlights and cold eyes. She refills his coffee and moves on. No how-is-everything, no hip swing—no pleasure in her work, Shecky senses. Must be around Kerasha’s age. He wonders if someone’s looking out for her, a father. A parole sponsor. Probably doing better with his charge, Shecky guesses. No detective crawling around his house.
He looks at his phone. It’s been twenty-eight minutes since Henry went off to get the incident report. There are countless Henry- not-dead reasons the swap could be taking this long. Maybe Starr got stuck at her desk. Maybe Henry ducked into a bathroom stall to cry it out. Could be crouched in there, eyes closed, his big hands together—a prayer, a double fist. Shecky’s seen this. Walked in on Henry one time. This was before Kerasha, but Henry was grown, and he forgot to lock the bathroom door. And Shecky came in—he had a soft step, Henry didn’t even look up—and there Henry was, his long arms and legs pulled into a tight crouch. Eyes closed. A whisper: “I’m trying, Mom. But I just can’t … I’m not good.” And Shecky soft-stepped right back out, knowing too well how the dead can be great comforters. Patient listeners. They know the power of the first loss, how it’s all just ripped out of you. How all later deaths will take you back.
Like me with Dannie, he thinks. Of course Henry will need to check in with his parents.
So Shecky understands that twenty-eight minutes—twenty-nine now—might mean nothing. Maybe the kid has to break apart before he can put himself back together. Think about Lear, a role Shecky never dared: that old bastard had to bring down the lightning before he went clear. Let the kid mourn a little, for the love of Jesus.
But Shecky never feels comfortable about Henry when he can’t lay eyes on him.
He picks at a pierogi, pokes open the skin and scoops out a speck of potato. His other hand dances over his coffee mug. He is lost in his head when a tall young man strides into the restaurant, his gaze sweeping the room.
It’s Henry, but there’s a moment of estrangement. To Shecky this man is a surreality, a creepy stage effect. A temporary apparition, the real Henry—
Changed. Gone, Shecky knows. A new death opens up grief everywhere. Can make you mourn the living. Miss you most of all, my little Hen.
Henry’s footsteps are heavy across the hardwood floor. “I got new phones out to everyone this morning. Let’s go to the window.”
The night he moved in, Henry cried out so often that Shecky came into his room, comforter under one arm, pillow under the other—came in and bedded down on the floor. And when he awoke, there was a little ten-year-old sleeping beside him. A beautiful thing. They were floormates for over a month, and thank Jesus Henry came into his strength. But Shecky misses those weeks when, for this small someone, he was the only person left in the world.
Still seated, Shecky whispers, “Did you get the report?”
Henry’s whisper: “They think it was a mugging.”
Not a whisper: “That’s great!”
“Ears,” Henry says, indicating people seated nearby. They go to a window table, and the waitress brings over Shecky’s dinner.
“You move, you should tell me,” she says to Shecky.
And your tip will be nothing, he thinks. But this is a joke, of course: Shecky knows a server’s life, always tips well. Especially when his mood is bright. “A mugging!” he whispers. “This is amazing news.”
“My friend is dead. This is the murder report.” Henry drops a rolled-up stack of papers on the table. “The fuck is this amazing?”
“No, no, no. Of course. I didn’t mean—I’m sorry.” He is, and he waits for Henry’s nod. “You’re right, nothing is amazing here. But deliberate murder means an investigation, and with a mugging, everyone gives up.”
“Not everyone.” Henry flattens the papers, flips them over, and points to a yellow sticker on the back of the last page. “You seen this before?”
Shecky picks up the report. Printed on the yellow sticker: I-Card. Scrawled underneath that: Det. Fung 7229.
The report drops to the table. “Jesus fuck,” Shecky says, wiping his hands on his pants. Scooching his chair back. “The fuck is I-Card?”
“I said the same thing to Starr.” Henry is almost smiling, but there’s no joy in it. “It means someone—a case officer—had an eye on him.”
“So there was a case before he got himself killed?” Shecky says. “The fuck was that? I told you you’re too trusting.”
For fuck’s sake, when will it stop? It’s like the last act of an Aeschylus play—and the kids are dead too, and—you ate them! Only this is his family. And again Shecky is itemizing the evils—can’t stop himself, his own training always to recount, to double-check, his lists. The gun on his kitchen table, the badge. The Impala, the Mustang. The frozen account, the closed account, the internal inquiry. And now the yellow sticker.
Your friend, he wants to spit at Henry. Your fucking friend. Whatever that kid meant to you, here’s what he was to the cops: a giant flashing billboard—look here! look here!—pointing right at our family.
>
“Emil didn’t get himself killed,” Henry says at last. “This is on us. On me.”
Shecky is considering his response when—chair scrape—Henry’s on his feet. He’s taken back the incident report, he’s refolding it—he’s hurrying out the door.
“Henry, where…?”
A moment later, Sheckys sees him out the window. Not running from him, thank Jesus, but walking off after a girl.
chapter 22
“Okay, artist.” Detective Kurt Fung hands the tracking phone to Emil. “Remind me how this works.”
Downtown Brooklyn, a narrow alley off Bond Street, a scarred white van blocking the entrance. Outside: graffiti, cracked sidewalks, police officers dressed like vagrants. Within: Zera, Kurt, and Emil Scott—still alive, for a few more hours.
“I do my pickup,” he says. “I give you the bag.” His tone is very yeah-yeah-yeah, but Zera can see he’s nervous.
“You give us five minutes to do our inventory,” Kurt says, “we give your bag back to you.”
“Not my bag,” Emil says, hands up: oh, innocent me.
“Okay, jackass. We give the bag back to you.”
“I go back to the train and finish my job. And you give me a hundred dollars.”
“But you’ll do it right this time.” Kurt is shorter, but he’s broad with muscle, and his hand lands heavy on Emil’s shoulder. “Won’t you.”
Emil’s smile is unsteady. “I always do my best.”
“Of course. Always.” Kurt pretends to think a moment. “Except last Tuesday. What was the problem then? Oh right, you accidentally-on-purpose turned off your phone. And the Monday before. Whoops, forgot to take pictures of the money. And then you somehow deleted the texts from your buddy.” Kurt leans in. Rubs Emil’s shoulder. “It’s okay. I know how you’re feeling. ‘Hey, he’s my buddy, he made me some money, I don’t want him to get in trouble.’ But here’s the thing.” Kurt leans in closer. “It’s way too late for that. You’re in deep with us. Everything is documented.” A let’s-be-friends-again smile. “And fuck him, man. He’s the one who got you into this mess.”
Emil shakes free of the detective’s hand. He stuffs the tracking phone into his back pocket, his whole body a bend and a strain. Quietly: “He’s my friend.”
Zera’s eyes are on the tracking phone in the back pocket. “That’s not the right place for that.”
Emil gives her a nod, which is also a playful smile. “You’ve got a different face,” he says. “Anyone tell you that?” He waits for her to react. She doesn’t. “Angles, shadows,” he continues. “Everything just a little … haunted. You know?” His smile moves away from playful now. He wants something, she thinks, my attention, my approval—my submission. Zera has had many men look at her like this. She’s unimpressed. “And your eyes are lonely.” With this, he walks off to leave the alley, squeezing around the parked van.
“Watch your ass,” Kurt calls.
“That’s your job.” Emil pats his back pocket and then he’s gone.
Kurt, under his breath: “Fucking hipster.”
Zera takes out the master tracking phone. The map on her screen shows a moving red dot. Emil is turning left on Schermerhorn Street, heading to the subway station. If the official MTA schedule means anything, and sometimes it does, Emil will catch the 10:47 a.m. G train back to—
“Officer Montenegro.”
She looks up at Kurt, but her face is already a clear no. She’s had enough “charm” for one morning.
“Are you really not going to tell me,” he says, “how you got to be the queen of money laundering? Not ever?”
Her face goes from no to fuck-off, and then her phone beeps. “We’ve lost the signal,” she says, looking down at the screen. “He’s underground.”
* * *
Renaissance Java: a familiar name, but looking around, she knows she’s never been here. A short line, then she’s at the counter. “Large ice, six sugars,” she says. Kurt’s order. For herself: “Large drip. Milk.” Money on the counter. Change in the tip jar. She steps back, waiting for the coffees, and checks the tracking phone. The red dot is moving again. The train is aboveground. No, the dot is zigging: Emil must already be on foot.
“Large ice? Large drip?” The barista holds up the drinks and then fits them into a cardboard tray.
Zera pockets the phone, takes the tray, and is nearly out the door when she belatedly recognizes a man—seated—she’s just walked past. Thin, small, salt-and-pepper hair, a short-sleeved yellow-and-white button-down, open at the collar: it’s Shecky Keenan.
Renaissance Java—of course. It came up in one of the intelligence reports, one of the coffee shops he’s been in and out of over the past few months.
He looks different in person.
Pinned to the wall above her desk is a smeary blowup of his driver’s license, enlarged to fill most of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper. An identical smeary blowup is attached to the draft intelligence briefing she put on her supervisor’s desk last month. So yes, it’s him, she’s certain: she looks at his face every day. But while the smeary picture has no movement, this man is nothing but. He shifts his shoulders and winces—a slipped disk, maybe, that never got back in place. He wipes his eyes with the palms of his hands, and yawns like he hasn’t slept since the cold war. And even having recognized him, she finds it hard to believe that they’re the same, the smeary picture and this small man with his paper coffee cup.
Because here he’s a person.
He stirs, and she comes to herself. Hurries off, wondering what’s happening in her. Her tracking phone forgotten in her pocket.
She’s a half block away when she gets the call.
“You got our boy?” Kurt doesn’t sound full smiley, for once. Just a drop of worry, but she hears it.
“What’s going on?” She takes out her tracking phone.
“Thought you could tell me.”
“Stand by.” The tracking phone has decided to reboot. When it’s back online, she pulls up the live map. It shows a good part of Bushwick, from Flushing Avenue on the west to Gates Avenue on the east. Metropolitan Avenue to the north and Broadway to the south. And buildings are visible, and here’s a parking lot, and over there’s Maria Hernandez Park, where Zera met Emil for the first time.
And there’s no red dot.
Zera stops walking. She looks at her unchanging screen for a long time and feels a creeping horror move through her. The red dot never comes back.
chapter 23
Outside Knish-Knosh, the day after the murder, Henry slows before he catches up with the young woman. He keeps a safe distance as she reaches the door to the Thirsty Bear. She pulls it open, and for a moment the light is full on her, and he knows he’s right. It’s Imani Cable, Emil’s girlfriend.
Then the door is closed, and she’s inside, and Henry knows he can’t handle this alone.
A text to Lipz: Where you at, who you with?
Her reply, four long minutes later: Nunya.
The old joke makes him smile, his first since the HVAC room.
The HVAC room. Fuck, Henry’s back there now. Emil’s body, so pale, and that crater in the back of his head—
Henry shakes off the memory and, giving up on Lipz, texts Kerasha: @Thirsty Bear, need backup. He goes inside.
A small group of young men and women are gathering along the wall near the unfinished mural. Henry recognizes many of them, and one calls over to him. He finds himself in an intimate group of Emil’s friends and admirers. The conversation becomes a kind of spontaneous memorial service. There’s no order, no ceremony, no leadership, but almost everyone shares a story about Emil, some private memory that no one else seems to have heard before. Henry feels like an impostor. What could he share—the training, the fallbacks? And look what that did for him.
“He was the most generous person,” Imani says. “He gave everything away. If anybody on the street asked for money, or any friend … Once he had this neighbor who was late on her ren
t … It was like he didn’t want to hold on to the money.” She’s one of many who speak about Emil without even mentioning his art.
Henry shifts on his seat, can’t get comfortable. Doesn’t belong here. How different, his own experience with Emil, which began with cash, and ended with murder.
An hour and three tequila shots later, Henry’s alone at the bar. He puts away the Charlie Gladney license, which he’s been staring at for some time now, and takes out the business card Kerasha found in Emil’s room. Henry looks at the blank side—still blank. Flips it, looks again at the handwritten number. 646-555-0144—he hasn’t called it yet, knows he shouldn’t call until he has a plan. Tequila creates a plan: fuck it, just call. He puts in the numbers, brings the phone to his ear.
“Who this?” A male voice, rough and deep. A street voice, or someone trying to sound like that.
“It’s…” Henry has no idea. “Who are—” Click.
Fuck. Who knows if he’ll get another shot at that. Never let tequila decide the plan.
This is what he’s thinking when the stool beside him moves. He turns to glare at the newcomer—go away, can’t you see I’m being pissy here—but then he sees who it is. Imani gives him a hateful look-over.
“Meet me outside.”
Moments later, Henry is scanning the streets, looking for his backup, but of course it’s pointless. Kerasha’s invisible until she’s not. Years before they met, he heard stories about her, the famous child thief. Dropping down into sewers, popping car trunks. He’d assumed this was grade A Bushwick shitlore, and then she moved in. He’s sick of hearing his uncle say it, but he’s right: she’s a natural. Fuck knows how she ever got arrested. Meanwhile, here he is, wobbling over to Imani.
“It was a good memorial.” He feels stupid saying this, but it’s true. The stories people told. He wishes there had been something like this for Mom and Dad, instead of the bang-clang construction work that could be heard through the walls at Mom’s wake. Instead of the minister at Dad’s funeral, who got Dad’s first name wrong.