Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (18 page)

“Son,” he said.

He looked good. He was wearing a pressed blue shirt and navy blue slacks that rode high on his waist and shimmered with a thousand dry cleanings. Harry wrapped his arms around him and pulled him close, the old man’s bones going stiff as Harry planted a kiss on his cheek. He broke the clinch, taking both of Harry’s biceps in his hands, and gently shoved him away. Giving him that same shoulder pat, he sat him at the table.

It was covered with a yellow oilcloth bright with blue gardenias, giving the room a hopeful, morning feel. A stack of placemats covered with the same pattern sat in the center of the table, under a plastic vase stuffed with plastic daisies, their plastic hearts a shade or two off the yellow of the cloth.

There wasn’t a single dish in the sink, not even a glass on the drain board. Harry said, “What’d you do, Pop, hire a maid?”

“I was just gonna brew up some java. Could you go for a cup of bean?”

“If you’re gonna make it, then I’ll drink it. But don’t go out of your way.” Harry was looking for an ashtray. He got up and opened the cupboard where they used to keep them, but there weren’t any there.

“If you’re gonna smoke,” his father said, “open that window and blow the smoke outside.” He leaned against the sink and stared at the gurgling Mister Coffee, scratching his wrist in a way that didn’t look like he had an itch.

“Forget it,” Harry said. “I can’t stay anyway.”

“I put it down, you know. Fifty-something years of the goddamn things, I finally gave ’em up.”

Harry said, “That’s real good, Pop. They don’t do a thing for you.”

“But you don’t realize how it’s ruining you till you quit. When you see how good you feel, you think, what the hell was I doing to myself all those years?”

He must’ve broken down and bought new glasses, retro-style, wire frame-numbers. If the old man had worn glasses in the ’50s, this would’ve been the pair. The lenses had a slight emerald tint. He brushed his hair straight back with a gel that knocked out the curl. There was plenty of white speckled into it, but it still hadn’t gone all the way grey, and neither had his fussily clipped mustache. Harry took this as a positive sign for his own prospects.

The old man took a carton of milk out of the refrigerator, and the sugar bowl from a different shelf than it used to sit on when Harry lived here. The coffee was almost done brewing.

“So,” Harry said after a minute of awkward quiet, “you still gigging or what?”

“I sit in with this meringue band, but their dates are always way out in Brooklyn. I don’t know where I’m going when I get there, and then I gotta hang around till four in the morning to get paid. They work every weekend, but I don’t go with ’em every time. Depends on how I’m feeling. And I jam with these neighborhood kids.” He laughed. “Swing cats.”

“Swing?” Harry said. “Who plays swing?”

“Kids, I’m saying, younger than you. Standards and jump blues, like that Louie Jordan stuff. Very popular with a younger crowd. But it’s strictly for love, that gig. I go home some nights, twenty, thirty bucks.”

“You’re too pro to play for that kind of money. Don’t they know who you are, Pop?”

“You got that right. You know I gigged with Louie, dontcha?”

“Paramount Theatre, 1950.”

“Did I tell you the story?”

“Once or twice,” Harry said.

His father shrugged, disappointed, either because he couldn’t steamroll Harry with the details for the hundredth time, or because his memory was slipping and he honestly didn’t remember having told him.

He poured coffee into a pair of mugs. Then, from a cabinet under the sink, behind the cleanser and the Windex and the laundry soap, he pulled out a bottle of off-brand whiskey with the Irish flag on its label.

“Gotta be five o’clock somewhere in the world, right?” He spilled some booze into his mug, and was about to do the same to Harry’s when Harry stopped him.

On second thought, he said, “I’ll take half a shot, Pop. In a glass, neat.”

His father said, “No water?”

“No water.”

“Because you know what W.C. Fields said about water.”

“Fish fuck in it,” Harry said, but the stale punch line made him wince.

An extra serious voice on the radio made Harry aware it was on, describing a piece of music they were about to hear, and then tiny, muted horns came across, trumpets for sure, and other brass, softly.

“Since when do you like classical, Pop?”

He downed some whiskey-laced coffee. “Since forever. He’s very subtle, Mozart, but he was tearing it up in his own way. Dig the way those strings come in behind the horns. Gradually. You gotta take the time to appreciate him, but it’s worth it.” The old man closed his eyes, his hands around his mug.

Harry drank the whiskey. They weren’t talking about anything, the way they never talked about anything, but this newfound appreciation of Wolfgang Amadeus, which was not bad at all, was making Harry suspicious. His father had never owned a single recording of any kind of classical music, did not attend concerts or operas, and had never said a single word about it before today.

Something was up. But figuring out what it was wasn’t why he was here. Truth was, he didn’t really care. He could’ve gone another year without seeing the old man, no problem. What he wanted was to know how close the law was to him, and he wanted to find out without having to come right out and ask. If they were on his trail, and there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t be by now, with Leo or Aggie or Bryce Peyton giving him up, this’d be one of their first stops.

“How’s Arthur doing?” Harry asked.

“Good,” the old man said. “Arthur’s doing good. You don’t need to worry about Arthur.”

“I’m not worried about him, Pop. I just asked how he was.”

“Well, if you’re so concerned, why don’t you give him a call?”

It seemed like every conversation with the old man ended in some kind of confrontation. Harry wanted to get out of there before that happened. He decided that if the cops had paid a visit, the old man would’ve said something about it by now.

“Anyway, listen,” his father said, “I know this sounds terrible, but I’m gonna have to ask you to leave. Rosa’s due home any second and I don’t want you to get her upset.”

Harry wasn’t sure what the old man had told Rosa about him that would make his presence so upsetting, whoever Rosa was, but she explained a lot of things. The home economics kitchen, the secret bottle of hooch, the bright, summery tablecloth. He felt stupid for not figuring it out sooner.

Harry wanted to use the bathroom before he split, and in order to get there, he had to pass through the back bedroom, the room he’d shared with Ernie growing up. The flowery lingerings of an old-ladyish perfume thickened the air. An oversized bed hogged up most of the space, and the dresser and nightstand were dotted with cheaply framed poses of Rosa’s grandchildren, an infant with a drooly, open-yawped grin, a pair of girls with ribbons in their hair. They could’ve been twins, sporting newly sprouted permanent teeth three gauges too large for their bright, thin faces.

Harry didn’t know what the sleeping arrangements were, but he noticed the old man kept the front bedroom, where he used to sleep with Harry’s mother, intact. He had a portrait gallery of his own, but every single one of the pictures was of him. The old man with Charlie Parker, signed by Bird and wishing him all the best. The old man with Mayor John Lindsey, with Max Gordon at what must’ve been the Vanguard. The old man fronting his Joe Healy Six, eyes squeezed tight in black and white, ripping off a righteous solo.

Solo. That was the old man. Kids or no kids, Mom or no Mom, Rosa or whoever, the old man was a solo act.

It didn’t bother Harry. Why should it bother him? Heading down the stairs and lighting a cigarette Rosa would never get a whiff of, he said out loud, “Who gives a fuck?”, but he did. He did.

You were going to find Jimmy De Steffano in one of three places: pulling a job, on Rikers Island, or swilling two-forone suds in this saloon long overrun by NYU students. If Harry hadn’t been so distracted, he would have made it a point to avoid this route, but as it happened, here he was on the sidewalk with Jimmy, behind door number three.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” De Steffano said. “I heard you were back in town.”

It hadn’t been two days. Harry said, “From who?”

“Bad news travels fast.” De Steffano had reverted to his paroled physique. No jailhouse muscles puffed him up. “C’mon, I’ll buy you a beer.”

“I wouldn’t get arrested in this shit hole. Why do you drink here?”

De Steffano cocked an eyebrow at a mouse-haired chunkette, the ordinary, easily flattered type. The kind they bred in the heartland, who was pudgy and astigmatic and got a genuine thrill out of hanging around a New York hood, smallish even by small-time standards, but a real live criminal all the same.

“We gotta stand here all night?” He was wearing a wife-beater under a leather car coat, rushing the season, catching a chill. “Let’s go inside.”

“I can’t. I got something to do.”

“You’re hurting my feelings. You don’t see me for a year, now you won’t give me the time of day.”

His black hair gleamed in the street light, the back and sides clipped as close as the shadow of goatee that darkened his chin. A crucifix and a crooked horn hung from a chain around his neck. Jimmy D, hitting all the strides.

Harry told him he had to be somewhere, which was about half true, and De Steffano, determined to talk, abandoned the NYU girls for some later hour.

They veered right at the metal cube that marked Astor Place. The skateboard army was out on maneuvers. Peacocking goofy, Easter egg-colored hair, their jeans were so baggy that two of their skinny asses would’ve fit into a single pair. Unlike the concrete jockeys blighting Avenue A, these kids didn’t bum change, and some of them were real athletes, executing swirls and jumps on boards that never left the bottoms of their sneakers.

Three skaters circled a garbage can they had dragged into the street. One made a pass at it, measuring the distance it would take to vault it, swinging wide, powering himself up the block. He idled thirty yards from the target, sucked in one deep breath of concentration. Right leg churning, he started his run, blue-green hair blown back, his billowing sweatshirt flattened against his chest.

De Steffano said, “Ten bucks the kid don’t make it.”

“The kid makes it easy,” Harry said.

“A sawbuck says no.”

“You’re on.”

Harry was afraid his boy had jumped too soon. It looked at first like he’d crash mid-bucket, but as he neared the peak of his arc, he was soaring, arms stretched out for balance, the board at his feet throwing gravity a big fuck you. Landing soft on the asphalt, he had three feet to spare.

“Everybody’s gotta be good at something,” De Steffano said. He forked over the tenner. “What I was doing at his age, I was trying to get laid.”

“So’s he,” Harry said, thinking not much had changed in Jimmy’s life, except he was committing more serious felonies. And how much had changed in Harry’s life? He was still picking up ten dollar bets from Jimmy De Steffano.

“How was Florida?” De Steffano said. “You didn’t say nothing about Florida.”

“Florida was a fucking disaster. The weather’s nice, though.”

“Not in the summer it ain’t. In the summer there, you die. And then you get your hurricanes.”

“Alright,” Harry said. “So much for Florida.”

“I got something going,” De Steffano said, getting to the meat of their walk-and-talk, “that I think is right up your alley.”

Harry said, “I don’t wanna hear it.”

“Thing is, it needs perfect timing. Two brothers, Hasids, working the diamond racket. They make the same deposit out of the same satchel at the same bank every Thursday at ten o’clock. We need four guys, one van, and one car. We grab the brothers and throw ’em in the van. We ride ’em around and dump ’em in Brooklyn, where our fourth guy is waiting with the car. We switch vehicles and we’re gone.”

“This sounds real familiar.” Harry was thinking back. “Didn’t somebody try this a few years ago? Bunch of guys got dead, and it was a set-up besides. Like the Feds were in on it? Remember?”

De Steffano didn’t remember.

“Yeah, a Fed got it, a crook got it, and one of the Yids got it. They were brothers, too. Where’d you get this brainstorm? Out of a stack of old newspapers?”

“Cookie Levitas has been hot to pull it for months.”

“Cookie Levitas. Another loser primed to take another fall. Pass.”

Assuming they made it out alive, this asinine adventure was a straight ticket to Attica. Jimmy was airtight on a job, but he was no planner. And Harry was nowhere near up for this James Bond shit.

“Which alley of mine were you thinking about, Jim? Kidnapping? This is my life, it isn’t a movie. If I decide to pull anything right now, anything at all, I gotta make sure it’s fast, it’s clean, and I get away. Tell me something. What’ve you got pending?”

“They got nothing on me,” De Steffano said.

“Then they’re waiting for you to make a move. And you’re a fucking idiot. Go off half-cocked on this crazy caper. With your sheet? You’ll get life. You’ve gotta start trying to think realistically. Like consider getting a job.”

De Steffano’s eyes went blank.

“I’m serious. It’d be a lot less work than coming up with these schemes. Something soft comes up, like that warehouse thing, you move on it. You keep a finger in, but you’re basically legit. That’s my advice to you.”

“I’m asking you to grab a skinny, bearded freak and conk him on the head. That’s the extent of your involvement, for twenty-five percent of the take. Advice,” De Steffano hissed, “who the fuck are you to give anybody advice?”

They stopped walking. A bum shambled up, shaking a coffee cup, but De Steffano’s black glare sent him packing. He looked left and right, as if he were searching for a witness to Harry’s assault on his honor.

“Fine. I don’t fucking need you. Go file your W-2 forms.”

They were near the corner of Spring and Lafayette, by the entrance to the 6 train. A group of women with swollen ankles chattered in Spanish. A guy holding his briefcase between his knees was trying to get a cigarette going in the wind.