The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (32 page)

“This be twenty-five gees.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Intense green, my man.”

It certainly was. In 1963 twenty-five thousand was roughly equivalent to a quarter million today.

“For a good cause.”

“But this much? Why you don’t just give it to the man youself?”

I smiled as I thought Shushan might, a broad tooth-baring grin. Probably I failed. Shushan had large teeth, several of his molars capped with gold, giving his laughter added sparkle. “Because I want
you
to give it to him. I want it to come from you.”

The brothers looked at one another, waiting for more. Finally Royce let it out. “What the catch, man?”

“The catch is I want you guys to take part in this,” I said. “I want you to be there when those redneck assholes try to bust up some little piccaninny trying to go to the wrong school in Selma, Alabama or people trying to register to vote in Philadelphia, Missisissippi, which activity you probably don’t bother with up here—which is okay, because the right to vote also means the right not to, except that you probably voted for that schmuck Kennedy—or trying to get a tuna on toast at any drug store below the Mason-Dixon Line. I want you and the brothers to
be
down there, because with guys like you down there the heads going to be busted won’t just be nappy ones.”

“I don’t get it, Mr. Russell.”

“You just got it. Now give it forward. In person.”

“How I going to find Dr. Martin Luther King?” he asked.

It made me laugh. “I think his current address is the Birmingham city jail.”

On the way out Jimmy Wing took my arm and whispered, “You know, Mr. Newhouse, the last thing on my mind would have been to ask anything for our help yesterday.”

The man fibbed well. “Of course,” I said.

“Only if you could help us with Mr. Sfangiullo...”

“Of course.”

“There are issues. Sometimes Chinatown and Little Italy, they encroach. You know, issues of territory, accommodation. Good relations.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Mr. Sue, he knew your dad.”

Did everyone know my father but me? “How so?”

“Mr. Sue has long been a major figure in Chinatown.”

“So you said.”

“In a case of mistaken identity—you know all Chinese look alike, right?—Mr. Sue was arrested in a minor matter having to do with gambling.”

“How minor?”

“Major.”

“Where does my father come in?”

“Detective Newhouse, he sprung him.” 

“Just like that?”

“Mr. Cats asked him to see what he could do.”

Idly I wondered what else my father had done for Shushan in the years before he was kicked off the force. “And Mr. Sue remembers?”

“Mr. Sue forgets nothing. Not to the bad, not to the good. And he remembers the sons of those who were kind to him.”

“He seems like a fine man.”

“In his time he was the most feared man in Chinatown,” Jimmy said. “Now he is among the most respected. Maybe next year he will graduate to most loved.”

I clasped Jimmy’s hand as we stepped outside. From within I could see Royce and the brothers still socking it away. “Which I take it is your goal as well?”

“A long life opens the door to possibility.”

Inside the Cadillac Ira started the engine. Justo was already in the middle seat, the wide red door of the boat open in invitation. I removed the twenty still clipped by the wiper blade to the windshield. A night in November, it had grown cold. We put the top down, turned on the heat.

“Whatever you want on the radio, Ira,” I said.

He smiled under his thin mustache and leaned forward to turn it on. It took a moment to warm up.

“¡
El presidente esta muerto. Viva el presidente
!”

As with the radio, a few seconds would pass before I realized Justo was not talking about Lyndon Baines Johnson. With the sound of Ned Miller singing “From A Jack To A King,” a country song that unexpectedly had crossed into pop, it came to me what I would lose if Shushan returned. I’m ashamed to say it but as the big Caddy sailed uptown I hoped he
was
dead. By noon the next day I would have my corpse, but it would not be that of Shushan Cats.

As usual Ira preceded me into the suite to tuck me in. This was what he called it. He just wanted to make sure, he had been trained to make sure, there would be no surprises for his boss when he opened the door. That night there was, but it was pleasant. A woman’s black lace bra and panties, both generously sized, lay on the green couch opposite the door. Ira took one look and decamped.

When I awoke the next morning Darcie was serving me breakfast on a tray. Never in my life had I eaten a complete Ozzie-and-Harriet breakfast. Now I was having it in bed.

“You sleep well, honey?”

“Um.”

“It’s after ten,” she said, a gentle tone of maternal reproach in her voice. I suppose men who had mothers never need to hear that, never need to take a nipple between their lips—maybe they did or didn’t do it, but they didn’t
need
it—never took pleasure in the yielding flesh of a woman old enough to be their mother. “I bought orange marmalade, or you could have raspberry jam, or both. You want another cup of coffee, Russy?”

While I sat up against the pillows happily munching I heard the doorbell ring. Half asleep, it meant nothing. Then, half-awake, everything. Who was this woman lulling me into a sense of well-being? For all that I had fucked her she was a stranger about whom I knew little and, it shocked me to realize, trusted less. Why had the doorbell rung without a call from the desk clerks below to ask if someone could come up? Was it some neighbor asking to borrow a cup of sugar? Bullshit it was. I was out of bed in an instant, looking for something, anything. There was a gun and a collection of baseball bats upstairs, but I had depended on Ira for protection. For all I knew the entire Tinti clan was in the next room, and the closest thing I had to a weapon was my dick.

Quietly I approached the door and tried to hear over the sound of the television who it was. Ever since the assassination televisions remained on all over the city, probably all over the country. At night from my window the surrounding apartment house windows radiated an eerie blue-white. Now, straining to hear who the bitch had let in all I could hear was a young newscaster named Dan Rather telling us that Lee Harvey Oswald would soon be transferred from the basement of a Dallas police station to county jail. Killing a president got you only county jail? I wondered what killing the heir to Shushan Cats would get you. But it soon became clear that I was not going to be the victim that day.

It was not the Tintis who had gotten past the security downstairs but Terri Cats. Of course. Why should they even bother to call to say she was coming up? She had a key. She knew all the desk clerks, had for years. Hurriedly I got into a red silk robe from Shushan’s closet and stepped out into the living room.

“Well, well,” Terri said. “The young lion.”

“Just the zoo kind.”

“Not from what I hear,” she said, rising to kiss me on both cheeks like a French sister-in-law in those movies I loved at the Eighth Street Cinema. “God, Russell, you smell like pussy.”

“There may be a reason for that,” I said.

The reason reentered from the kitchen with a cup of coffee and handed it to Terri. I had almost reached for it.

“I’ll get yours, sweetheart,” Darcie said, then turned to Terri. “The tough guy here takes it black.”

It occurred to me Darcie had not asked how our guest wanted hers. “You okay?” I asked.

“Compared to what?”

“Compared to a couple of days ago. The whole country’s in sackcloth and ashes.” I pointed to the television, where a crowd of reporters was waiting to shout questions at Lee Harvey Oswald in what would go down in history as the world’s most viewed perp walk. “In case you didn’t notice.”

“You know what?” Terri said, shrugging her delicate shoulders for emphasis. “Every day half a million people die in this country alone, a good many of them in agony. Do you really think I’m going to sweat the death of a fucking politician?”

Although I’d felt much the same, the harshness of its expression was not so much unpleasant as personal: I was being reprimanded for a softy. “A death’s a death.”

“He fucking had it coming,” she said. “I told you he wanted to do good. He just never got around to it. Kennedy was a fraud.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Russell,” she said. “Yes, we all create illusions for other people to believe, and for us as well. But when it comes to serious stuff—love, hate, work, things that matter—it helps when we know the difference. In my professional opinion, kid, the man didn’t even know he was a fraud. The new president, that’s a whole different story. He’s the most real president since Truman. You’re going to see things happen, not just talked about.”

“Like.”

“War, peace, that kind of thing. He’s going to do things, some good, some bad, maybe even tragic. But he’s not the kind of jerk-off that invades Cuba with three CIA guys and two hundred pissed off out-of-shape ex-country club types who want their cigars back. If we have a war, Johnson is the kind of guy who is going to unleash the dogs. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the president that changes the black-white equation in this country.”

“He’s a Texan.”

“Exactly,” Terri said. “You think a Yankee is going to get in there and bang heads in the South? No, Johnson is going to prove himself by out civil-rightsing the civil rightsers. It’s the way of the world. Look at you. Last week you were a kid who lived in books. Now you have one of the world’s biggest private libraries upstairs and I’ll bet you haven’t cracked one book in it.”

My God, I thought. She’s right. “I’ve been busy.”

“Yeah,” she said, winking. “I heard.”

Darcie handed me a fresh cup of coffee, then sat close to Terri and put her head on her shoulder. Terri reached around and began stroking Darcie’s back under her robe. Darcie made a noise I had not heard. It wasn’t a loud shudder or the muted orgasmic scream that went off like a distant siren, growing louder as she grew closer. It was a purr.

“What the fuck is that, Russell?”

“What the fuck is what?”

Darcie shifted to look as Terri pointed.

This was worse than junior high. From under the soft folds of Shushan’s red silk robe a part of me was pointing back.

“Tsk, tsk,” Terri said.

If she was going to say something to further humiliate me I’ll never know what it was, because just at that moment a muffled shot exploded softly in the room, like a gun fired under a down pillow, followed by sounds of a struggle, men hollering, and Dan Rather shouting in excitement, “This is unbelievable. It appears Lee Harvey Oswald has been shot. I repeat. Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of President Kennedy, has been shot live on tv.”

Probably every conversation in America stopped at that moment, as ours did, but mixed with the shock I shared in seeing a second murder of national proportions only two days after the first was my own special shock—of recognition. “My God,” I said aloud to myself. “I know that man. That’s Jack—” I searched my memory for the name. “That’s Jack Ruby!”

“Who’s Jack Ruby?” Terri asked.

Fear flushed through me. “Shushan’s friend,” I said. “He was just here.”

With serpentine grace Terri extricated herself from Darcie, rose silently from the couch and switched off the set. Standing there she seemed to replace Dan Rather, Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby, everything. “Shushan
knew
this guy?”

“Knew?”

“Knew, knows. I’m asking you a direct question, sweet-face. I’m his sister. I want to know.”

I looked to Darcie. She took the hint and went straight to the bedroom and shut the door. “It could be his double.”

“With the same name? They just said it. Jack Ruby.”

“I don’t know.”

Terri came and sat beside me so that I could smell more than her perfume—which was, however inappropriately,
Joy.
It could just as well have been
Fear.
Her face an inch from mine, she fixed me with her eyes. I could hear her swallow, almost feel it. “Russell, listen to me. Listen carefully. This is trouble.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” I said, not believing it. “This guy Jack Ruby, he probably knows two thousand people. Think about it. Even the Dallas cops knew him, know him. They let him get into the room. They let him get close enough to shoot. Not everybody he knows, who knows him, is going to be implica—”

Terri raised her finger to my mouth.

Despite my fear I wanted to feel it
in
my mouth. “It means nothing,” I said.

She pressed her finger hard on my lips. “We don’t know what it means. We probably can’t know. Not all of it. But believe me, sweet-face, this is not good.” Although it seemed impossible, she drew closer. I could see the fine peach fuzz on her cheek, the smudge of mascara where she had been a bit less than exact, the flecks of gold in her brown eyes. “What the fuck do you know about this?”

“Nothing, I swear.”

“Where’s my brother?” she said. It was not a question but a threat. Then a cry of desperation: “
Where’s Shushan
?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Maybe dead.”

“Maybe,” she said slowly, “not.”

“I just don’t know.”

With that the toughest woman I had ever met dissolved onto my shoulder in tears. They poured down her face and onto my neck, then darkened the red silk of my robe—Shushan’s robe. She wept for what seemed like an hour. Probably it was only minutes. Eventually Darcie came out—she must have heard the sobbing—and took up a position on Terri’s other side, hugging her until they wept together, all three of us a human sandwich of confusion, doubt, fear, despair. We might have remained that way all afternoon but for the phone.

It was the front desk. “Mr. Newhouse, sorry to disturb you, but there’s a man downstairs wants to come up.”

“Does he have a name?”

“A lot of names. Says you know him. He’s a dentist.”

This was expected, but not so soon, not mere moments after the assassin of John F. Kennedy—the alleged assassin: we would never know—was himself murdered on network television by a man I had met. I had thought him a clown. Maybe he was. But unlike Oswald, who was declared dead at the same hospital Kennedy’s lifeless body had been delivered to two days earlier, there was no doubt of Jack Ruby’s guilt. We had all seen him do it.