Lush Life (6 page)

"Eric?" As he opened the door, Eric Cash turned to him with shock
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starred eyes. A slight tang of alcohol was in the air, although Matty was fairly certain that the kid had the drink chased out of him a while ago. "I'm Detective Clark. I'm very sorry for what happened to your friend."

"Can I go home now?" Eric said brightly.

"Absolutely, in a little bit. I was wondering though, it would be of tremendous help to us ... Do you think you could maybe come back around the corner and show me exactly what happened?"

"You know," Eric continued to speak in that lively dissociated tone, "I always heard people say, 'I thought it was a firecracker going off.'And that's exactly what it sounded like. It's like, I don't remember how many years ago, I read this novel, whatever one, and the character is in some city and he witnesses a stabbing, and he says it was like the stabber, I'm paraphrasing here, the stabber just like, tapped the other guy on the chest with the knife, just a pat, really soft, and the stabbed guy just carefully laid himself down on the cobblestones and, that was it."

Eric looked at Matty, then quickly looked away. That's what it was like, 'Pop,' so soft. And that was it."

Coming around the corner back onto Eldridge Street, Eric Cash did a little baby-step shuffle of distress when he saw the blood still there, Matty supporting him by the elbow.

Day was breaking faster now, fresh and soft, the street a madhouse of birds. A dawnish breeze made Nazir's tattered pennants snap above his shop as if they were strung from a mast, and the tenements themselves seemed to be rolling forward beneath the scudding clouds.

Every cop on the scene, every Night Watch, every plainclothes and uniform, was either on a cell phone calling in, calling out, calling up, or else feeding each other's steno pad; Matty always taken by that, how you could literally see the narrative building right before your eyes in a cross-chorus of data: names, times, actions, quotes, addresses, phone numbers, run numbers, shield numbers.

By now the La Bohemers had mostly packed it in, but they were being replaced by another group, the video freelancers hopping out of vans, one of them even rolling up on a ten-speed bike, a police scanner lashed to his handlebars.

"OK," Cash began, wincing and tugging on his hair as if he had forgotten something critical. "OK."

"Take your time," Matty said.

Bobby Oh had stepped off to direct a canvass of those kids who remained on the scene, see if anything personal out here was keeping them from their beds.

"OK, so . . . We were walking across Rivington from Berkmann's, the three of us, heading for Steve's apartment here?" pointing to the tenement next to 27. "He was, we had to get him up there, he was shit
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faced, I don't really know him, I think he went to college with Ike, I don't really know Ike either, and . . ." He started to drift, whirling a little as if looking for someone.

"And . . ." Matty nudged.

"And these two guys, they come out of the dark like two wolves, put a gun on us, say, 'Give it up.'And I'm, I immediately hand over my wallet, I had to let go of Steve to do it, he just flops to the sidewalk, but then Ike, I don't know, Ike, he like steps to them, says, 'You picked the wrong guy,' like he's ready to fight, then Top,' just 'Pop,' and they're gone."

" 'You picked the wrong guy.'" Matty wrote it down. The kid had told Bobby Oh his friend said, "Not tonight, my man."

"They didn't say anything else?"

"1 think one might have said, 'Oh.'" " 'Oh'?"

"Like Oh shit,' then maybe the other said, 'Go.'"

"Nothing else?"

" 'Oh' and 'Go.' I think."

"And which way did they go."

"That way," pointing south. "But I'm not sure."

South now, not east, which is what he told Bobby. South presented a whole new set of projects but no subway stations, making the shooters local, most likely from the massive Clara Lemlich Houses. Unless this guy had been right the first time and they ran east . . .

Finished with their canvass, two Night Watch detectives exited the tenement directly across the street from the scene, one of them making slant eyes with her fingertips, i. E., crammed to the rafters with Fooks.

Matty saw Bobby Oh catch the gesture, his expression, Matty hating to admit it, inscrutable.

"And just one more time," he said to Cash. "Describe them for me?"

"I don't know. Black. Hispanic. I'm not trying to be racist, but in my mind? I close my eyes and see wolves."

Matty noticed that Nazir in his store was studying this guy as he spoke, giving him a hard eye.

"Other than wolves . .

"I don't know. Lean, they were lean, with a goatee."

"Both had goatees?"

"One of them. I think. I don't know, I was mostly looking down. Hey, listen," he said, unconsciously doing the Twist again as he blindly scanned Eldridge. "I already told all this to the Asian detective earlier, at this point my memory's getting worse, not better-"

"All right, look, this is got to be hard for you. I understand, but-"

"I didn't do anything wrong" his voice starting to break.

"No one said you did," Matty said carefully. Nazir rapped on his window to get Matty's attention. He looked furious.

"Just bear with me, Eric. I know you want to catch these guys who shot your friend as much-"

"I told you, he isn't my friend. I don't even really know him."

Matty noted Eric's use of the present tense, wondered if this kid knew that Marcus was dead. Cash had yet to ask how the other guy, friend or not, was doing.

"Can you describe the gun at all?"

Eric sagged, took a deep breath. "I think it was a .22."

"You know your guns?"

"I know my .22s. My father made me take one when I moved to New York. I ditched it the minute I got here."

"OK," Matty said after a pause, "then what happened."

"What?"

"They shot Ike and ran off. Then what happened."

"I tried to call 911 on my cell, but I couldn't get any reception, so I ran into the, the vestibule there to try indoors."

"You ran indoors."

"It must've been dead altogether, so then I ran back out to the street to get help, and all of a sudden there's these four cops pointing guns at me." Eric took another breath. "Huh. "

"What?"

"I just realized . . . I've had five guns pointed at me in the last two hours."

As a patrol car took a weakly protesting Eric Cash back to the Eighth Precinct, Nazir rapped angrily on his glass again, beckoned for Matty.

Bobby Oh said the guy hadn't seen anything, but the store was in Matty's bailiwick so he would give him a few minutes to complain about being shut down, rail about how he was going to make the city pay for his broken window.

As he stepped to the storefront, the Yemeni raised his riot gate from inside the shop.

"Nazir, Crime Scenes is a little backed up, but I'll have you opened as soon as I can, buddy.""No. That too, but I want to tell you something. That son of a bitch you were talking tor Whatever he said to you, don't trust him. He's no damned good."

"Oh yeah?" Matty eyed the jagged branches of the window fracture. "Why is that?"

"We had the Virgin Mary in here yesterday, did you know that?"

"Yeah, I heard. Congratulations."

"Congratulations? That bastard came in with a friend and they wiped her out like this." He snapped his fingers. "Broke everybody's heart."

"Disappointed a lot of her fans, huh?" Matty said, then, glancing at his watch, "All right, boss, I'll get you open as fast as 1 can."

"Hold on," Nazir said, digging in his pocket and pulling out a cell phone. "This is what that bastard threw at my window," handing it over. "I'll be goddamned if 1 give it back to him."

Flipping it open, Matty discovered that not only was Eric Cash's phone fully charged, not only wasn't the last outgoing call to 911, but, as Matty scrolled down the Recent Calls screen, none of the others were either. When he pressed the send button, the phone rang through to the last number dialed, Cafe Berkmann, getting a recorded message at this nonhour, but the reception clear as a bell.

OK, maybe the guy in shock had just imagined he called. Or maybe there was a temporary power glitch, or a signal glitch. Or Matty hadn't heard him right, or . . .

Daley, one of the Quality of Lifers, a weight lifter made twice as big by the bulk of the vest under his sweatshirt, caught his eye and waved him over to where he stood with two kids, a tall, husky carrothead, his long frizzy hair pulled back in a bushy ponytail, and an equally tall black girl, slender as a gymnast, her chopped hair laquered down into pixie bangs.

"He's the guy you talk to." Daley gestured to Matty.

"What's up?" Matty asked.

"As I was just saying to this officer, me and my girlfriend were listening to that guy tell you what happened?" the redhead said. "In fact, we hung around specifically to hear what he was going to say because we were right here on this side of the street when it all went down.""Hold on," Matty cut him off, then pointed out Oh in the crowd. "Tommy, can you get him over here?"

Daley made his way through the crowd as Matty rested his hand on the redhead's arm to keep him quiet until Bobby could come over and they could separate the couple. The kid seemed jagged with the hour but sober, his girlfriend a little jittery but clear-eyed too.

A moment later Matty was walking the kid around the corner, his girlfriend looking over her shoulder at him as Oh swept her along in the opposite direction.

"OK," Matty said when they were finally alone in front of a ramshackle shteibel, a Talmudic reading room on Allen. "What's up?"

"Like I said already, my girlfriend and I were right there when it all went down."

"When all what went down."

"The shooting." "OK."

"What that guy said to you about two black guys, Dominican guys, or whatever coming up on them out of the blue?" The kid lit a cigarette, then blew a brisk stream. "He's a fuckin' liar."

At 5:30 a. M. Eric Cash rose stiffly from the back of the squad car and turned to face the Eighth Precinct station house, an octagonal Lindsay-era, siege-mentality fortress set down on razed lung-block acreage like a spiked fist aimed at the surrounding projects-Lemlich, Riis, Wald, Cahan, and Gompers-the rest of the neighborhood squat and dumpy and far east enough to be a world of pre-land-rush lasts: the last Hebrew old-age home, the last bulletproof liquor store, the last Chinese take-out hole in the wall, and the last live-poultry market, everything and everyone cast in permanent gloom beneath the massive stone arches of the Williamsburg Bridge.

As he was being escorted up the short steps to the main entrance, the front doors abruptly flew open, two EMTs luge-racing a gurney directly at him, then at the last moment taking a sharp left to hit the handicapped ramp along the side of the building, Ike's friend Steven Boulware looking up at him with sunken eyes, his head lolling with every bump and jostle. At the same hour two Night Watch detectives crossed the chipped octagonal tile of the front foyer of 27 Eldridge, then began trudging up the saddle-backed marble stairs to the top floor to begin their canvass.

There were three apartments to a floor, each with its own paint
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slathered century-old husk of a mezuzah, the front doors painted the same dull carmine as the embossed tin that lined the bottom half of the stairways from lobby to roof.

Each took a door, turning the ancient twist-knob ringers like tweaking a nose, the resulting sound tinny and minute. At first, no one responded on the top floor, but when they were halfway down the stairs to the next level, one of the tenants, a small Asian woman, by what anyone could see of her, peeked out through the crack of her door.

"Excuse me, ma'am?" Kendra Walker trotted back up the stairs, flashing her ID as she came.

It had been a warm night and she carried her sport jacket over her arm, revealing a male name tattooed beneath her fleshy shoulder in a script as jazzy as a team logo.

"Do you speak English?" she asked, talking as if volume enhanced comprehension.

"English?" the woman repeated.

Behind her, the cluttered apartment, lit by a lone overhead fluorescent halo, was not much more than a high-ceilinged single room with attached nooks and crannies.

"No English?"

"No." The woman couldn't take her eyes from Kendra's tattoo.

"That's my son's name," Kendra said, then saw the boy come out of a bathroom. "Hi." She smiled, the kid freezing in midzip. "Do you speak English?"

"Yes," he answered briskly as if a little insulted. He came to the door without prompting.

"Is this your mom?"

"My aunt," he said, then, "Kevin," reading Kendra's arm.

"What's your aunt's name?"

"An Lu.""An Lu." Writing down Lou. "Can you ask her . . ." Kendra hesitated, the boy not more than ten or so. "There was a shooting downstairs a few hours ago. A man was killed." "Killed?" He winced, baring his teeth. "Could you ask your aunt if she saw-" "How was he killed?" the kid asked. An Lu turned from speaker to speaker without blinking. "Like I said, he was shot." "Shot?"