Bloody London Page 12

  A few minutes later she came out again, a jelly donut in her hand, then looked up at my window – I’ve known Cal since she was a little kid, used to babysit her for Mike. She had her yellow blazer on now, and she saw me at the window, put her hand in front of her eyes to shade it from the sun, and slowly, donut still in her hand, waved to me. Then she turned and ran for the subway.

  I shuffled the mental snapshots. Two boys in the park near the Middlemarch, their yellow jackets, one boy raising his hand in a salute. The boy who turned out to be Mishkin’s son. Callie’s jacket was yellow like his. It was the day Frankie Pascoe gave me the list, the day she watched me watching the boys in the park. Frankie Pascoe and Leo Mishkin in Brighton Beach together. I figured Mishkin killed Thomas Pascoe. He had the connections, motive, the muscle.

  I jammed my feet into sneakers, I raced downstairs and on to the pavement. She’d turned the corner. I banged full frontal into a pair of kids trying out their Halloween gear; a six-year-old Teletubby hit me up for a buck. I caught Callie at the subway.

  “Hey, Artie.” She gave me a sloppy kiss.

  “You have a minute?”

  “For you, always.” She grinned big – she has that infectious smile – and walked alongside me. She spotted a coffee shop and said, “Come on, I need a hit. You can treat me.”

  We sat at a table. She licked the foam off her coffee. “Double cappuccino with skim.” She drank steadily. “I really need my hit, you know.” She laughed. “Caffeine’s drug of choice at all the best schools. So what’s up?”

  Callie leaned back and yawned. Her high round breasts pushed against the school shirt. She’s just fourteen, but my friend Steve says with girls like Callie, you want to look right over their heads. I see her, I think: jailbait, but I always say, “You look very cool,” and keep the rest shut up in a real dark place. I don’t look inside that place except when I’m drunk, and I’m not drinking much these days.

  “How’s the others? Justine? Sophie?” Callie blows hot and cold about her two older sisters. She grinned. “The good girls, you mean? The brainiacs? They’re cool. So what kind of case are you on, Artie?” She smoothed out her skirt.

  “I’m working that thing at the Middlemarch, building by the river?”

  “Cool,” she said. “Guy gets his head chopped in a swimming pool – omigod, I should be like more reverent, but it’s so totally weird.”

  “I noticed some kids from your school hanging around the scene.”

  “Warthog Park, you mean. You’re interested because it’s near the scene, right? Is that right?”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “Sure. We all go there a lot.”

  “So, Cal, you know a kid named Mishkin?”

  She polished off her coffee and blushed. “Everybody knows Jared Mishkin. He’s a junior at my school. He’s pretty cool. Class President, that kind of stuff,” she said. “I could get to know him better, if you want,” she added, then flushed again, red, like a little tomato.

  I said, “You like him?”

  “Everyone likes him,” she said. “How come you’re asking?”

  “Anything special about him? You ever met his family?”

  “No. He doesn’t ask people over. I think he’s embarrassed, you know, I mean, he has like foreign parents, you know. Russians. So what?” She was defensive, then she kissed me on the cheek. “I could get to know Jared Mishkin a lot better if you want,” she giggled. “I’ll do some undercover work today, so meet me tonight if you want. Look. Meet me tonight at the park. I’ll show you.”

  I left Callie at the subway. I was at my door when I heard Angie Rizzi call my name. She was across the street, leaning against the coffee shop. I went over. Angie’s beautiful face was papery, ravaged, the huge dark eyes full of panic.

  “Where’s Mike?” I said.

  “At the bank. Sneaking a smoke. You saw her.”

  “Sure.”

  “She won’t talk to me.”

  “You want me to try?”

  “She says she hates being set up for conversation.”

  “It’s normal, Ange.”

  Angie’s voice rose. “Normal? Jesus, Artie, I’m at my wits’ end. Such a wasted life.”

  “Callie’s only fourteen.”

  “They invent things. They lie all the time. You’ve met some of the kids she goes with, they’re polite and all, but they’re fourteen going on forty. I used to think anything was worth it, but with kids, from the minute they pop out you’re on the rack until you die. I’m sorry, Artie, it’s an unhappy atmosphere at the minute, but it’s her lying. I lie in bed rigid as a board waiting for her to come home. She says she’s just going out by the river. To talk. What kid goes to the river at night to talk? I smell her breath. I find a forty-ounce empty in her room.

  “Everyone does it, Mom, she says, you wanted me to go to St Pete’s. Then she slams her door. She’ll be thrown out of school, she’ll have a rap sheet that will follow her. It’s not like with rich kids that got fathers who are big-time lawyers or movie producers, who can fix it for their kid. It will follow her.”

  “Christ, what’s she done?”

  Angie whispers, “Dope. They’re smoking dope. Someone caught them in the girls’ locker room. Pot.”

  I smiled. I was relieved as hell. “That’s it? That’s all it is?”

  She was irritated. “You and Mike, you’re hopeless,” she said. “I have to go.”

  I spent all day chasing my tail. I was worried about Sverdloff. Frankie Pascoe didn’t take my calls. Leo Mishkin’s company, when I read the files, was big and it appeared clean. He had branches in London and Moscow. He seemed clean as a fucking whistle. Everyone at the Middlemarch had been interviewed now, residents, janitors, supers, doormen. Nothing. Nobody talked. I went to Queens to see Pindar Aguirre, the Middlemarch janitor.

  Aguirre lived on a narrow street in Astoria, in a four-story house with aluminum siding. Old men sat on the stoop and smoked in the sun. When I buzzed, Pindar came out and we walked a while. He led me to the sculpture garden on the river near the old Steinway piano plant. We stared at the Noguchi sculptures for a while. On the other side of the East River you could see the Middlemarch, a tiny limestone castle. All the time we were there I had the sense someone was watching. There was no one at all in the garden. I figured the paranoia was getting me.

  “You all right?” I said. “I heard you quit.”

  He snorted. “I was fired.”

  “How’s that?”

  I was on my way out already, you know, they didn’t like it I wouldn’t play ball.”

  “How play ball?” I offered him cigarettes. He shook his head, took a small black cheroot out of his pocket and lit it.

  “Something not right in that building. You ever see down there? You saw how lousy it looks in the basement, except the pool?”

  I thought of the empty storage rooms, cafeterias, the fallout shelter.

  He said, “There was never no money for fixing stuff up. I complained.”

  “The monthly maintenance must be huge.”

  “Yeah, but so was the needs of certain people.”

  “Board members?”

  He looked nervous. “Maybe. Maybe so.”

  Aguirre tossed his cheroot down and rubbed it out with his foot. A car seemed to backfire. Nothing else. I thought it was a car until I saw a red stain on his shoulder, spreading through the material of his white T-shirt. He saw me looking and glanced down and seemed surprised. Then he grabbed his arm and held it, his fingers spread over the surface of the wound.

  I spun around. Nobody. Nobody in the sculpture garden or near the river. Somebody had been there, though. Someone took a pot shot at Aguirre, I thought, as I hustled him into my car and over to a local hospital. He wasn’t hurt bad. The shot grazed the fleshy part of his shoulder, but it was shocking, coming out of nowhere.

  I sat with him while they dressed the wound and he said softly, “Somebody didn’t want I talk to you.”

  I nodded
. “I’m sorry.” After they released him, I drove Aguirre home, gave him some cash. Apologized some more. But it stayed with me, the bullet out of nowhere on a sunny afternoon, the sudden red spot on his shirt, the fact it was probably some thug trying to threaten him because he talked to me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the poor son-of-a-bitch all that day and for the day after either. I couldn’t shake it.

  Half a dozen dog walkers lounged on benches in the park with the bronze warthog. Their pups sniffed the earth and each other. A stream of people cruised the river front. Their chatter floated out on the night air, along with the cars that honked on the drive and the noise from a boombox and the yappy dogs. Leaves crackled underfoot and I could hear the water, and in Queens, across the river, lights twinkled. I leaned against the railing and waited.

  Two flights of stairs up, along the terraced façade with its little park, was the Middlemarch. I could look up and see it through the stand of trees in the park, branches almost bare.

  I leaned against the railing and waited and watched. I looked at the passing faces. Everyone smiling. Low crime, fat economy, this was fun, and even the Pascoe story added a buzz: rich people, fabulous apartments, tyrannical co-op boards, the Russians moving in, the Natashas flaunting it.

  A group of teenagers drifted into the park and stood around a knotted dwarf tree. Some smoked, others stared at the water or made out in the shadows of the trees. An old Portishead number played on the boombox. The smell of pot was in the air, and the sound of beepers. Private-school kids wore beepers on their belts.

  I watched them, the white kids sprawled across the park who ate French fries and Big Macs and sipped out of forty-ounce beers. They were pale, tall, long-boned kids, the best stuff the gene pool can produce.

  “Hi.” Callie came up alongside me and leaned on the railing. She was in skinny black jeans and a white T-shirt.

  “What happened to the bell bottoms?”

  “Very last year.” She looked at the kids near the tree. “They call it the Feeling Tree. It’s OK, Artie, you can laugh.”

  Nights, if they didn’t go to Central Park, kids from St Pete’s came here to the river, Cal told me, then she looked over at the street.

  “Oh God. The Guidos, omigod.”

  Music blaring, a two-tone Buick Regal, bronze and tan, pulled up alongside the park. Two boys, Guidos from Astoria, she called them, tumbled out. They were followed by a couple of their girls. The boys wore tight silky shirts and pressed jeans, the girls had bell bottoms, platform shoes, earrings through their eyebrows. Cal said they came over the Triboro or the 59th Street Bridge, Guidos like them, and cruised the rich kids. The boys from St Pete’s tried to get off with the Guidettes. Sometimes it happened.

  They eyeballed each other, and snickered at each other’s outfits. From where I stood, the mating rituals looked harmless. One of the Guidos smoothed his hair and postured for Callie’s sake.

  She giggled. “Don’t tell Mom, OK? She thinks it’s bad news, the Guidos, but they’re OK. So, Artie?”

  “What?”

  “There’s Jared Mishkin. By the bench.”

  I said, “Introduce me. Say I’m your uncle, whatever.”

  Callie said, “Don’t be such a jerk, I’ll say you’re my friend.”

  She introduced me to a couple of her girlfriends first. They wore tight Ts and showed cleavage and puffed on joints. The smell of pot was so thick now it clogged my nostrils. Then Callie said, “This is Jared Mishkin.”

  Up close, the Mishkin kid was dazzling. He was sixteen, tall, well built, graceful; he had a handsome face, black hair fell over his forehead and he stroked it away from his eyes, which were very light, very blue.

  Jared tossed a cigarette on the grass and rubbed it out carefully with his foot, then reached down, picked up the butt and pocketed it. He smiled. He had a heartbreaking thousand-watt smile. “The environment,” he said. “I’m hoping to go into politics on a green ticket some day.” At first I figured him for a smartass New York kid, but he was serious. Callie watched me watch him; she was crazy about the kid.

  “Where’s Harry?” Callie asked him.

  He said, “Some poor bastard homeless guy got beat up, crawled out of a cash machine. Harry found a cop, took him to the shelter. Harry’s still there.”

  I said, “What shelter?”

  “For the homeless. Mr Pascoe’s place.”

  “Thomas Pascoe?”

  “Yeah. Under the bridge.”

  “Cal, I’ll drop you home. Nice meeting you, Jared.”

  “What’s the hurry, Artie?” She was irritated.

  A picture was forming up in my head. I was making connections and it made me tense. I wanted Callie out of here. “Let’s just go,” I said.

  Jared said, “If Callie wants to stay, I could see she gets home on time.”

  Callie’s eyes narrowed; don’t blow this, the look said; give me some space here. I didn’t want to leave her but I left, looking over my shoulder. Jared was whispering to her, his mouth near her hair. She looked young and vulnerable.

  As I left the park, I looked back again and saw the kids. Callie’s pals were a lot tougher than the Guidos – a couple of the boys from Queens lingered on the fringes – who only had crappy cars for turf. The St Pete’s kids, Jared, his pals, who commandeered the park with a chilling sense of entitlement, owned the access routes to the bigtime. In a few years, they’d own the neighborhood.

  On my way to the shelter, I called Sonny Lippert.

  He snorted into the phone. “Yeah, Pascoe and the homeless. City shelters. International rescues for the homeless, too, it eats my liver, Art, you know.”

  I held my tongue.

  “The goyim, a certain type WASP, they get off on that kind of thing.”

  “You know anything about St Peter’s?”

  “The school?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure, it’s where they train the kids up to inherit the parish of the privileged. The ironies of the New York rich are endless, man.”

  14

  Under the bridge, near the river, a couple of homeless guys played cards on an empty crate where a flashlight was stuck upright in a coffee can. Hidden by the old tiled arches of the bridge, the makeshift camp had gone up. Cardboard boxes, tents made out of black plastic garbage bags on poles, supermarket carts. A few blocks north of the Middlemarch, but hidden in the shadows of the bridge.

  Traffic roared overhead on the bridge, the boats buzzed the river, a few blocks away Callie and her pals flirted in the park, but the guys playing cards, the others who sat and smoked or snored on cardboard, were shut off from the rest of the city.

  I picked my way through the cardboard and the garbage, and from out of nowhere, someone touched my arm. I jumped. He said, “Got a smoke?”

  I gave him the pack. He took three and returned it, then started for the street. Under the streetlight I saw he was a middle-aged guy, round face, dull eyes.

  I said, “You know anything about a shelter around here?”

  “Come on.”

  I followed him past the bridge where the arches had been restored, the turn-of-the-century tiles buffed up to a creamy glow, ready for the new market, the restaurants, food stores, shops, that would change the neighborhood. It would all change: the homeless would go; the old ladies who drank their pensions dry in bad Chinese dives on First Avenue would die off. At buildings like the Middlemarch, the co-op boards would give way; more new money would arrive. I thought about the new buildings towering over the rest of them. “Steals our air,” Frankie had said. Somewhere a dog barked.

  Near the bridge, a derelict tennis bubble loomed up and the homeless guy headed for it. The light was dull and I squinted. Slowly, out of the dark, I saw a mass of bodies take shape in the night. It was a long line of figures that snaked its way from the camp near the river towards the converted tennis club.

  I followed the moving figures up the street. In the streetlight it was a weird sight: the long line, passive, sullen,
weary, shuffling, jostling on the way in, then coming out the other side of the temporary building. Now the line of people moved quickly, food clutched in their hands, people darting out of the light to eat.

  The guy I gave the smokes to got in line. He said, “Soup kitchen.”

  “What’s the shelter like?”

  “It ain’t exactly home, but it’s OK, one of the best. Good neighborhood, after all.” He laughed.

  By the time we got up to the shelter door, I saw a couple of cops climb out of a blue and white, the lights on it flashing. I told one my name and he said, “Homeless guy got beat up. Crawled part way here, one of the kids that volunteers brought him in. You seen the goons they got patrolling the cash machines?”

  I thought of the black guy in the bank lobby with the mayor’s mask on. “Yeah, I did.”

  “Someone tried a little outreach on him. We got a situation. The New Social Order, right? Clean ’em out of the bank lobbies and you got a city that’s squeaky clean. You a detective?”

  I nodded.

  “He’s been asking for someone, you mind speaking with him? He got hurt pretty bad. He’s inside, I’ll take you, OK?”

  On the wall of the shelter was a picture of Thomas Pascoe in a frame. Underneath it was a vase with white carnations. Everywhere was the heavy smell of soup.

  The shelter had been carved out of part of the tennis club and the dome-like roof made it cavernous. At the far end were long metal tables, and a steam table where a crew of servers produced soup and sandwiches.

  The young cop led me to a section of the shelter that was partitioned off from the main room. It had six beds. A man sat on one of them. The cop said, “This is the guy that got beat up.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed. Someone had patched up his face and I sat next to him. He was young, twenty-five, not more, squat, with the biceps of a body builder but pale milky eyes that were a little vacant. His name was Dante Ramirez, he said. He held a newspaper in one hand. In the other was a cup of coffee that he set down on the floor by the bed.