Fresh Kills Read online

  We were standing near the plane wreck. Billy had been trying to get up closer to it, but a guy in uniform asked him to step back, and he did it right away, politely, and nodded sagely as if he understood. Later he told me he was learning his way around cops, how they worked, imitating them, practicing their moves. He wasn’t just playing around, he said. How old do I have to be to be a cop? he asked me. How long before I can start?

  “Fuck you doing here, man?” The voice was Sonny Lippert’s.

  Sonny didn’t shake my hand. Instead, he gave me one of those half hugs American guys go in for, then stepped back as if he’d startled himself by his own affection, and sank up to his ankles in the soft sand. With a neat wiry body, like a boy’s, he was a little guy. He looked well, though. He looked like he was taking some care of himself. He patted his pockets.

  “Where the fuck are my glasses?” said Sonny.

  He wore a yellow shirt, black linen jacket, good chinos, and expensive loafers. His hair, a tight cap of black curls, was turning gray and I figured he had finally quit dyeing it. Sonny was about sixty-five, but his skin was tight and smooth. I didn’t believe the rumors that he’d had work done on it.

  “What am I doing?” I said. “What are you doing, Sonny?” I looked at his polished shoes. “You came out for some sun on the beach, wearing shoes that cost you four hundred bucks?”

  “Don’t break my balls, man,” said Lippert. “You told me you were at the beach eating pizza, where else were you going to be except Coney? I need something from you,” he added softly, as he surveyed the chaos on the beach. “You remember what happened on this particular beach, man? Two years ago already.”

  “I was trying to forget until you showed up.”

  Still looking for his glasses, Lippert went over to one of the guys who was close up to the wreck and asked him a couple of questions. The guy paid attention. You could see it impressed him that Sonny Lippert was asking his opinion. Everyone knew Lippert.

  “So?” I said, when he came back.

  “It’s a fucking mess,” Lippert said, gesturing at the wreck. “They don’t know dick about what happened either, at least not yet. Ask me, I don’t think it’s terrorists, I mean what’s the percentage in crashing a plane with a few people on a practically empty beach on a weekday? Probably some lousy tourist plane they put too many people in, they’re too heavy and boom, ground coming up at you, you going down. So, Artie, man, you came out here to eat a pizza?”

  “You called me, Sonny, remember? You got here pretty quick.”

  “I was in Brooklyn anyhow.” He kicked aside a red flip-flop that lay upside down on the beach. “I hate it when there’s only one shoe. I mean where the fuck is the other one?”

  After his wife left him, after 9/11, Lippert had been next door to dead. Back then he was drinking a bottle of Scotch a day, sometimes two. He seemed better, sober, OK. After forty years in law enforcement, Sonny only worked special cases now, usually child crime. When he was working, he was sharp, honed, wound up tight as ever, maybe too tight, like a million-dollar clock that you always figured was about to bust.

  “Sonny, what’s going on?”

  “An old case,” he said. “Something’s come up.”

  “What’s that?”

  Sonny looked around him. The beach had filled up with people, officials, tourists who had stopped to gape at the plane, kids down from the boardwalk.

  People walking their dogs stopped and the dogs howled, maybe smelling something in the summer sun. Near me were the men who’d been playing cards on the beach and their wives, and they were discussing the crash in English with thick Russian accents.

  “Terrorists,” one man said. “For sure.”

  “Bastards,” said another guy. “Foreign pricks.”

  “With you everything is terrorists,” said one of the wives. “Maybe this is regular accident. Everything with you is aliens,” she said and I wondered what kind of alien she meant, from Pakistan or Mars. It was New York. The argument went on.

  “Not here,” said Sonny. “Not now. I need to talk to you alone, man. Let’s go.”

  “Can’t do it,” I said.

  “So what are you really doing here, man, I mean, we going to play some kind of game?” Sonny glanced in Billy’s direction. “Who’s the kid?” Finally, Sonny found his glasses in his jacket and put them on. “So?”

  “Yeah, so, I came out here to catch a few rays and eat at Tolonno’s, just like I told you.”

  “It’s Tuesday, Artie. The holiday weekend is over. What’s going on?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Say I care,” he said. “Say I care because I want something from you.”

  Before Sonny could say anything else, the detective in the red jacket I thought I had recognized jogged over across the sand, and smiled at me.

  “Artie, right?” she said.

  “Yeah. How are you?”

  She put out her hand, “Clara Fuentes from Red Hook.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Yeah, hi, nice to see you.”

  On a case over in Red Hook the year before, I’d met Clara, a good-looking woman, dark hair in a ponytail. Mostly I remembered her by the bright red windbreaker. I recalled that she had asked me if I wanted to go to a big party she was working during the Republican Convention.

  “How you doing, Clara?”

  She held up her left hand to show me the gold ring and beamed. “I got married.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Last summer.”

  “Bunch of bourgeois pussies we are, right? You happy? What’s her name?”

  “Maxine,” I said.

  “Congratulations.”

  “You too.”

  “I’m gonna have a kid.” Clara patted her stomach.

  “Great.”

  She waved her hand at the plane. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  No matter how deep the lull or how quiet the city felt or how complete the illusion that things were fine now, everything – a downed sightseeing plane, an overturned gas tanker that set off a fireball on Bruckner Boulevard, a freak Staten Island ferry crash – made me tense up. Me and every other cop in the city. I saw a couple of guys from the city’s anti-terrorism squad on the beach. Unlike the Feds, these guys were good. Fast, too, like shit off a shovel.

  Billy was talking to a guy in uniform, very serious, very interested, the two of them glancing over at the wreck. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans, and pulled his jacket across him like he was cold. He waved at me and started in my direction. When he shambled up to us, I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “This your boy?” Clara said.

  “Hi, I’m Billy,” he said.

  Clara shook his hand, patted my arm, and walked away towards the wreck.

  Lippert shifted his attention. “You going to introduce us, Art, man? What’s your name?” he said to Billy.

  Billy put out his hand to Lippert and said, “Billy Farone.”

  Lippert didn’t move. His face looked gray. The muscles in his forehead twitched. I thought he was maybe having another heart attack. He just stood and stared at Billy, then suddenly moved back, maybe an inch. No one would have noticed, except me. Me and maybe Billy.

  It unnerved me, the way Lippert looked, what he might do, the way he retreated from Billy, the way his eyes flickered.

  Everything seemed to go quiet. The noise around us, Russians gabbing, the cops, the ambulances, the people on phones, the wind, all faded. It was as if the soundtrack on a movie had shut down. The three of us stood on the beach not talking. I could see that Lippert was literally shocked. He didn’t say anything.

  Maybe Lippert didn’t know that Billy was temporarily on vacation from the facility in Florida. Maybe no one had told Lippert and he was pissed off because he was out of the loop. Maybe I should have called him. So we stood, Lippert unmoving, Billy smiling and holding out his hand.

  I knew that Billy was cured. In the facility in Florida, school, juveni
le center, prison, whatever the hell it was called, they had made him better. Kids could change. Billy was better. When I had picked him up in Florida a couple of days earlier, I’d met his shrink and his shrink said Billy was OK. He was funny and easy and charming and intelligent, like the little child he had been once a long time ago, before everything got screwed up. I saw it almost right away. It wasn’t an imitation. It was for real.

  “Hi,” said Lippert finally. He shook Billy’s hand, and tapped him on the shoulder, a weird gesture, not really a pat, more like a doctor testing your knee to see if your reflexes were good.

  “Yeah, nice to meet you,” Billy said.

  “I’ll call you,” Sonny said to me.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Lippert walked off with a backward wave of his hand, not saying anything, just walked away towards the crash site. He didn’t say why he had wanted to see me. Maybe he didn’t want to talk in front of Billy.

  Two years ago, when I found Billy at the beach club at Breezy Point, Sonny had been there. More than two years. It had been the end of the trail that started with the pile of clothes on Coney Island beach. Sonny was there when I found Billy sitting by the body of a dead man.

  3

  “Who was that guy, the little skinny one on the beach?” Billy said when we were sitting in a cafe on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach about a mile from Coney Island. “He was like kind of weird with me. You think I did something wrong, Artie? He was looking me over like I was some kind of specimen. I don’t think he liked me a lot.”

  “You were fine.” I handed Billy a menu. “What do you feel like eating.”

  “But who was he?”

  “His name is Sonny Lippert. He’s sort of my boss. Don’t worry about him. He’s pretty strange some of the time, like people are when they get older, you know? You didn’t recognize him?”

  “Why should I?” said Billy.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah, I’m so happy to be home, honest, but I’m like a little scared.”

  “What of?”

  “You know, if people will be OK with me, if people don’t want me around,” he said. “Hey, so can I have the lamb, is that OK?” He looked over the menu at me and smiled.

  It was early evening, the beach emptying, people beginning to arrive at the cafes and restaurants spread out along the boardwalk. Near us, tables filled up, people talking English and Russian, tourists gazing at the menu, locals ordering beer and vodka. Groups of musicians played on the boardwalk, a trio of girl violinists, some folkies.

  “You know who Vladimir Vysotsky was?” I said to Billy.

  “Who?”

  “He was like a Russian Bob Dylan,” I said and Billy nodded knowingly and we both watched as families crowded the boardwalk, women pushing strollers, men hoisting bottles of Baltika beer, others eating sunflower seeds from sacks and spitting the husks over the railing onto the sand. From loudspeakers at a cafe down the boardwalk pop music blared, the kind sung by mustachioed men with balalaikas for backing.

  Old men sat on benches at the edge of the boardwalk; once they had talked about going home, but their home had disappeared. The Soviet Union had simply stopped existing. Like spacemen without a country to land in, they just sat here on the coast of America, staring at the ocean.

  “Do you think I can have the lamb, Artie?” Billy said.

  “You can have whatever you want, you know that, anything, you don’t have to ask.”

  “Honest?”

  “Honest,” I said.

  Billy ordered his dinner from the waitress in Russian. His accent wasn’t bad though he stumbled some with vocabulary. The waitress, who wasn’t more than twenty, blonde, pretty, with brown eyes, and a pair of very tight white jeans, looked at Billy as if he were a grown man she wanted. He asked for a Coke.

  “Your Russian’s really good,” I said to Billy and ordered a beer.

  “I worked on it,” he said. “I wanted my Russian to be good, like yours.” He took a piece of bread from the basket and ate some. “At home, it’s so weird, my mom talking Russian half the time, my dad not really understanding anything. In any language, you know, I mean his English is funny, and he says stuff like ‘ain’t’, doesn’t he? I mean I love him, but he’s not so smart, except with the restaurant. He does that really great, right?”

  The waitress came back with the drinks.

  “Your dad is really famous for his food,” I said to Billy. “Johnny makes terrific food. He’s a twenty-six in Zagat.” I said. “You know what that means?”

  “Sure, it’s that restaurant guide thing. Course I know. Can I have a sip of your beer?”

  I pushed the glass towards him, he tasted the beer and made a face, gave it back to me and drank some of his Coke.

  “See, it’s kind of hard with them,” said Billy earnestly. “I’m not saying it’s their fault, but my mom with her all her crazy Russian stuff, history, language, everything rattling around in her head like, I don’t know, dried fish bones. She’s scared they’re going to send her back to Russia or something, then she gets scared we’ll still be fighting in Iraq when I’m eighteen and I’ll have to go. She is so screwed up, Artie, and she makes up for it buying clothes and going to psychics.” Billy gulped down the rest of his soda. “My dad isn’t like that but his family, you know, it’s all religion, his mom wanting me to see priests. You know her? My grandma, Big Tina? The crazy one whose house smells of vanilla candles? I mean, who wouldn’t be a nut job around them, right?”

  “You’re definitely not a nut job.”

  “Thanks,” Billy said. “I don’t want to seem spoiled, they’re OK for parents, they give me nice stuff, I just kind of wish I could help my mom understand so she wouldn’t be so totally upset all the time.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “They just can’t read me at all,” he said. “They don’t have any, what’s that word? Empathy. My mom and dad, they can’t see how I feel, they never could, you know, so if I seemed different from other kids, they got scared I wasn’t just an ordinarily weird kid, but beyond strange.”

  “So talk to me,” I said.

  Billy took a deep breath, picked some ice out of his Coke glass and put it in his mouth, crunched it up, swallowed.

  “When I was a little kid, I thought everything had feelings, including the fish in my aquarium,” he said. “I gave them names, I got them little plastic castles to live in.” He stopped suddenly. “I’m talking too much.”

  “Go on,” I said to Billy.

  The waitress appeared and put down two plates of grilled lamb kebabs and rice pilaf. We ate. Billy ate like a kid who never got enough. At his age I’d been the same way, my mother joking around, telling me I probably had tapeworm. In the late 60s, there had been plenty of food in Moscow; for breakfast, along with boiled eggs, my mother served up caviar, red, black, whatever I wanted. At school I ate big plates of stew. All winter long I ate ice cream on my way home. Even now I could taste the sour vanilla flavor of Russian ice cream.

  Finishing his last forkful of rice and green peppers, Billy sat back slightly and yawned.

  “Tired?”

  “Yeah, a little. I get sleepy a lot. In Florida, you have to get up for school early, and I always think how I wish I could just have five more minutes. I can sleep absolutely anywhere, anytime. It’s like I never get enough.”

  “Maybe it’s growing pains.”

  “You think? Sometimes I think I can hear myself getting taller.”

  “Billy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How come you wanted to go to Coney Island as soon as we got back to the city? I mean, was there a reason, except for going to the beach?”

  “Like I said, it was for the pizza.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know, see places I used to like,” said Billy, yawning again. “I thought maybe we could go over to my house. There’s stuff I want to pick up. See my fish. I don’t know if mom kept my aquarium going. Do you know? You think the fish a
re all dead? Do you think anyone took care of them? I wrote and wrote and wrote, lots of e-mails and even some letters saying what to do with the fish. I told my mom what fish food to buy and how she should put the lights on at certain times. I just wanted to come and hang out and maybe take a swim. See my fish, like I said. Did I say that? Get a whiff of the ocean.”

  “You don’t swim in Florida? They don’t have a beach?”

  “Do you think the fish are all dead?” he asked again. “What? Oh, I’m sorry, you asked me about swimming. They don’t take us to swim,” he said. “Except in the pool inside the school, which is plenty far away from everything including a beach. You get told it’s rural so the kids can fool around out of doors, but what they mean is we can’t run away. You see, Artie? And like who can blame them, I mean there’s a lot of very bizarre kids in there. Dumb, and seriously strange. There’s this kid who was a habitual shoplifter – that’s a good word, habitual, right? Anyway, he only ever shoplifted major amounts of school supplies. What kind of kid wants school supplies, unless he’s selling them cheap? He’s nuts. He does a lot of weed, and he gets punished plenty. Can we not talk about it right now?” Looking at me, Billy shrugged his shoulders apologetically.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said very softly. “I don’t mean to like shut you out or anything, it’s just too soon. I just need to forget about it for a little while.”

  “That bad?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s fine, I just don’t want to think about it right now.”

  “You want dessert?”

  “Can we maybe go get some cones? There’s this place that has the best mint chocolate chip.”

  “Sure.”

  Billy didn’t move.

  “What is it?”

  “That man, Artie. Look.”

  I turned around. A fat guy on the boardwalk was staring at us, but as soon as I got up, he walked away. I put some money on the table and looked around for the waitress. Billy was on his feet.