Dope (18 page)

I
didn't sleep too well again that night. My mind kept running over the craziest things. Like the time when I was a little girl and Shelley was just a few years old, and our mother left us alone for the first time. Just the two of us alone in that tiny apartment. When my mother came back, three days later, I put Shelley down in our bed and went outside without saying a word and sat on the stoop and cried and cried and cried. I'd been so scared. The second time I didn't wait. I left Shelley with the lady next door and I went to the market and I begged the grocer for credit. After a few times my credit was no good. But by then I'd wised up how to make money fast.

After a while I gave up on sleeping and got up and looked out the window again. I took out the gun I'd bought from Harmon. I took the bullets out and then put them back in again and took them out again. I held it in my right hand, straight out ahead of me like I was going to fire. It was heavy. I wondered how long I could hold it for. Not long. With the chamber empty I shot up my apartment.
Click.
There went the percolator.
Click.
My coffee mug.
Click.
A bottle of scotch.
Click.
Here's one for you, Springer.
Click.
That's for you, Jerry McFall.

If he wasn't already dead, I could have killed him.

S
helley lived in a fine old building near Gramercy Park, the type of place where all your neighbors have to approve you before you move in. How Mike, the guy who paid for Shelley's place, ever sneaked her in I'll never know. It was mostly ladies who lived there. You could tell from the lobby, where everything was perfect and neat as it would have been in a house on East Sixty-seventh Street. Shelley's doorman didn't mind me waiting in the lobby for her, or at least he didn't mind at first. After five or six hours, he started dropping hints that I might be more comfortable elsewhere. He would even call me when she got there. The doorman was a fellow of about forty who had Brooklyn written all over him, no matter how fancy his uniform was and what kind of airs he put on.

Finally I looked right at him and started to cry. I don't know how I did it, because I've never been able to cry on purpose before. But I just willed myself to start crying and I did.

“Oh, Chr—Oh, I'm sorry,” he said. He started to look frantic, looking around for a tissue or a clean handkerchief or maybe a lollipop to give me.

“It's just—” I let out in between sobs. “There's been an emergency in Miss Dumere's family—” I broke off and started crying again before I could continue. “I really need to speak to her the instant she gets in, the very minute—”

“Oh, I'm sorry, lady,” he said again. Finally he found a clean handkerchief in his desk and handed it to me. I cleaned myself up a bit and then squeezed the handkerchief like it was a life preserver. “I'm so sorry I said anything,” he sputtered. “I didn't mean—”

“Oh, it's all right,” I said. “I know I must be in your way here.” He apologized a few hundred more times and then left me alone, and after a few more minutes I made myself stop crying.

Shelley came in at a little after nine. She was wearing a white spring dress, just a plain cotton sundress, but it fit her so snugly and looked so nice I knew it had cost a fortune. She was carrying an armload of shopping bags from different stores, which she dumped at the doorman's feet without even a word. I guess he was supposed to carry them upstairs for her.

Then she saw me. She didn't try to cover up her disappointment. “Joey,” she said, flatly. “What a surprise.”

I stood up. “Hi, Shelley. Can I come up? I need—”

She cut me off. “I'm happy to see you, Joe, I really am. It's just that Jake is supposed to come by any minute now, and he doesn't like it so much when I have girlfriends over.” I didn't know who Jake was. I thought the guy who paid for the apartment was named Mike. This must have been a new one. But I didn't care.

Without ever talking about it, Shelley and me had made kind of a deal. I wasn't her sister anymore. Not in public, at least. She was going places and me . . . well, I'd been places, and far too many of them. For me to be here now was making her angry. I could see it on her face. What if one of the neighbors saw us, me in my cheap suit and nylon stockings? What if Jake or Mike or whoever it was came by? He probably didn't even know Shelley had a sister.

I had always stuck by my end of the deal. But this was different. I glanced over at the doorman. He was busy helping some old broad into a taxi. “You take me upstairs right now,” I hissed to Shelley under my breath. “Or I swear to God I'll call up every fat old lady in this building and tell them you're a goddamned whore. I'll get you thrown out of this place faster than you can blink.”

She turned around and without a word we walked into the elevator and went up to her apartment. When you walked into Shelley's place everything was white. There were white marble tables and a white velvet sofa and little white chairs that you couldn't sit in and white china and even the bar glasses had white flowers painted on them.

We sat down on the white sofa. She glared at me. I didn't think she'd ever been so angry at me before. “Look,” I said. “You're gonna tell me everything you know about Jerry McFall. And don't try telling me that you didn't know the guy, not now.”

Shelley looked astonished. She really was a good actress, after all. “Joey, I have no idea what you're talking about. Really, I—”

I felt bad for Shelley. I really did. Our mother was a good-for-nothing drunk, a drunk and a whore. We didn't have the same father, at least we thought we didn't, because neither of us knew who our father was. And she ended up with a worthless junkie as an older sister. Life's tough for some people, and for Shelley it was tougher than most. But I didn't have time to worry about that now. She'd lied to me, and that was fine, but now I needed to know the truth.

I did something then that I'd never done before. I hurt her. I grabbed her arm and turned it around, not hard enough to really cause pain but enough to give her a taste.

“Okay!” she finally said. “All right, I'll tell you.”

I let go and she grabbed her arm and started rubbing it, as if it still hurt. Her face fell and she didn't look angry anymore, just tired and maybe ashamed of herself. “I heard about what happened,” she said softly. “About him getting shot and everything. Guess that screwed everything up for you, huh? I mean, there's no way for you to find that girl now.”

“I don't know, Shell,” I said. All the steam had gone out of me. I couldn't stay mad at her. “I'd like to. But I'm not really worried about her right now.”

Shelley looked at me with her eyes wide. “You didn't have nothing to do with him getting killed, did you?”

I'd always tried to protect Shelley, even though I had never done a very good job of it. But I would protect her from this if it was the last thing I did. There was no way Shelley was getting mixed up in this. I swallowed hard, and hoped I was a better liar than Jim. “No, of course not. I just need to know.”

“I knew McFall,” she said quietly. “I used to buy junk from him once in a while. Save your damn lectures—I don't need them. I know it was stupid, but sometimes . . . I don't know. I got bored, I guess. Usually I met him at this little coffee shop in Times Square so no one I knew would see me. I mean,
my
kind of crowd—they never go around there.”

“Jesus, Shelley.” I was going to say more, but I didn't know what to say.

“I know,” she said. She put her head in her hands and laughed the way you do when nothing's funny at all. “I've always been the smart one, huh? Jeez, what a ninny. I don't know why I do it. I don't know why I do half the things I do really—it's like I can't help myself.” She laughed again. “Hey, did you hear? I got the part, the part on the television show.”

I smiled. “Yeah, of course I heard. I'm proud of you.”

She looked down. “Yeah, well, you wouldn't be if you knew how I got it.” She sat up and looked at me. “Want a drink?”

“Sure,” I said. “Scotch is good.”

She went to the kitchen. I picked up a business card off the coffee table. Jake Russo, Real Estate.

She came back with a water glass full of scotch for each of us. “This him?” I asked. “The guy who pays for the apartment?”

She nodded. “Cheap bastard,” she said. But she said it softly, like her heart wasn't in it. “He doesn't even pay for this place, you know. He's in real estate, rents out places all over Manhattan. He just fixed the books a little and he doesn't have to pay for this place at all.” She looked down at the floor. “I'm sorry I didn't tell you, Joe. About McFall. I wanted to help, I really did. I just didn't want you to know how stupid I'd been, that's all.”

“It's okay,” I said. “It doesn't matter. You can tell me now. Do you know the girl, Nadine?”

Shelley shrugged. “I dunno. I might have met her with McFall before. She was one of his girls, right?”

I nodded. “Do you know where McFall got his dope from?”

She took a long drink of her scotch. “I really don't know, Joey, honest. But I did go to a buy with him once.”

I nearly hit the roof. “So you do—”

“No,” she said. “I didn't see who it was. What happened was, I was supposed to meet him at that place in Times Square. You know, to get dope. So I get there, and he's got nothing. He buys me a cup of coffee and then after an hour or so, he says he'll be right back. Well, after a while, he's not back, and I've already given him my money, so I go outside to look for him. He's just getting out of a car. So we go back to his place, he cuts the stuff, bags it up, and gives me a few papers.”

“But you never saw who it was?” I asked.

Shelley shook her head. “All I saw was the car,” she said. “A brand-new Rocket 88.”

G
ramercy Park was a private park with a locked gate, and inside it looked like something from a movie, even at night; the flowers were starting to come out and the plants were starting to grow and you could tell that every little thing, the plants and the flowers and the trees and the benches, had been placed
just so,
probably by a staff of full-time gardeners. I walked by it on the way home. Just a few blocks south and east there was another park, if you wanted to be generous, because a better word would probably be a
square
or a
plaza.
There wasn't much grass and only a few trees, with a lot of concrete in between. I'm sure it had a name but I didn't know what it was, and I doubted anyone else did, either. There was a hospital with a mental ward nearby, and newly released patients were the only people who enjoyed the landscaping. This was the side of town I lived on, and this was the side of town I always would live on.

When I got to the Sweedmore, Jim was waiting for me in the lobby. He was sitting on the one chair Lavinia had put out; it was a small old-lady chair with faded black velvet padding, covered in dust and as uncomfortable as a straitjacket. I was surprised to see Jim on something so dirty. It might mess up his suit.

He stood up when he saw me come in. “Joey,” he said. “I was worried about you. How's it going?”

I told Jim it wasn't looking too good.

“Come on,” he said. “Let me buy you dinner.”

It was close to midnight. It was too late for dinner. But I said that would be fine. We walked west on Twenty-second Street without talking. I didn't know where we were going but it didn't matter. Any direction was fine.

We were on Twenty-second between Third and Lexington. It was always a quiet block and it was especially quiet now. All the neat little houses had their doors shut and their curtains down. No one was around. We turned north onto Lexington. All the shops were closed for the night, the small, sad little stores no one ever seemed to go into: the Italian cheese shop and the wig maker's and the radio repair shop and the breakfast counter that served awful breakfasts. We made a left onto Twenty-third. Everything here was closed, too, the store for nurses' uniforms and the art supply store and the bank and the florist's and the grocery. No one was around. It was a wide street and it seemed like a waste—all that space and no one there but me and Jim. All that space to ourselves.

“Find anything out?” Jim asked.

“Nah,” I said. “Not really. Nothing I didn't already know.”

We walked down the street quietly again, Jim in his perfect suit from Orchard Street and his new hat from Belton's. Just like he always wore.

“You want to go to Lenny's? I think he'll still be open.”

“Sure,” I said. “That'll be fine.”

“I've been thinking,” Jim said as we walked. “Maybe this wasn't about the drugs, after all. I mean, I'm sure plenty of people had reason to kill McFall. One of the girls, maybe, or one of their parents—”

“I talked to Shelley,” I said.

Jim stopped and looked at me.

Sometimes, if you've been unlucky enough to find out the truth, you're better off forgetting it. Especially when there's not much you can do with it. It was unlikely that anyone would believe me. I'd probably just go to jail for twice as long, for two murders. Or maybe get the chair twice. All I'd be getting was revenge. And what if the law did believe me? What did I have to fight for, anyway? Another thirty years of running from the law and trying to stay off dope and never having enough dough for much more than a good meal—it didn't seem worth trying too hard to keep. I could go to Springer, tell him to write down whatever the hell he wanted, and be done with it. At least that way I'd have three hot meals a day and a cot to sleep on at night for the rest of my life. That was more than I could say now. He'd be doing me a favor, when you looked at it like that. Maybe I should just try to take it like a man, take my medicine and go down with dignity and not take it personally.