Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery (13 page)

“…I don’t know.”

“Bruce, as far as I’m concerned, this is your fault. If you don’t tell me everything, I’ll—”

“Come on, Artie, don’t threaten me…I’ve been through hell.”

“And Crystal’s just arrived there.”

“I introduced you,” he blubbered. “Give me a break…Please don’t call the cops. They probably won’t kill her, they didn’t kill me.”

I stood up, trying to look like my knees were stable.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” I walked out.

ELEVEN

I
 SPED UP amsterdam to 104th street, then west, but I didn’t feel the street beneath my feet. I didn’t see street sights. Rage, fear, confusion overwhelmed them. I felt like screaming. I felt like smashing objects at random, like pushing people out of my way. Who could I vent this pain upon? Failing that, who could I hate? Hatred empowers the impotent. Hatred was made for the likes of me. Trammell, I could hate him, and I could hate…who else? Bruce? Why not, the twisted little fence? Sweat rolled under my glasses, stinging my eyes. This Tiny Archibald, he was hateable, and so was Chet Bream, wasn’t he? I began to smell whiff s of myself, the stink of fear and indecision. I was nearly running now. I had to think! I couldn’t just run around stinking up the neighborhood, dreaming of hatred and violence.

Jellyroll took one look at my face as I blasted, thinking, through the door, and his tail dropped. He cowered along the wall. “It’s all right,” I told him in a pinched voice he didn’t even recognize. I didn’t recognize it, either.

Where was DiPietro’s card? That was the first thing to do, call the cops, no matter what I told Bruce I’d do.

Where was that goddamn card! In my shorts pocket. I went looking for my shorts in the bedroom, hurling clothes, throwing them behind me, digging like a panicky prairie dog, and that’s when I saw the red light on the phone machine. Crystal! It must be Crystal telling me it was all a mistake—I leapt for it. Then,
hand in mid-reach, I froze. I had been here before, a phone message from a woman I loved. She was dead before I heard it…

I pushed the play button:

“Artie Deemer, you don’t know me, but it looks like our life paths have crossed. I’m Norman Armbrister”—Norman Armbrister? Wait! Christ! He was one of the guys in the tape! Bream said he was the CIA guy—“I’m calling to tell you don’t trust DiPietro. That cop dodge is one of the man’s favorites. He’s no cop, never was. I thought you should know. Listen, I’ll get back in touch with you.”

Rage faded. DiPietro was a phony cop? I fell into dispirited torpor. What was he really? Identity had lost its meaning. Everybody knew about me, but I didn’t know about anybody. What chance did I have? What chance did Crystal have? Even now they were probably—I couldn’t think about that.

I sagged onto the bed and sat staring at the patterns in the patch of peeling paint under the window. Jellyroll slunk in to see what I was doing. He sat down in front of me and stared fearfully into my eyes. He remembered this look on my face; he remembered when my last lover died…Jellyroll is so sensitive to human mood that sometimes I hide my feelings so as not to upset him, but that of course has more to do with me than the presence of an extraordinarily attuned dog. “It’s okay.” I grinned weakly. He of course didn’t buy it. He cocked his head from side to side. This is what Uncle Billy meant when he said a dog like that could break your heart.

I thought about verifications. Why should I believe a voice on a phone machine? Norman Armbrister? Who was Norman Armbrister? How did I know that
was
Norman Armbrister, just because a voice says so. Why should I believe him about DiPietro? How did I even know Norman Armbrister actually existed, except that Chet Bream told me so? Why should I believe Chet Bream? DiPietro seemed like a cop to me. How could I verify?

I keep taped to my telephone in the kitchen a list of emergency numbers, among them that of the Twenty-fourth Precinct. I held the number on DiPietro’s card up beside the precinct-house number. They weren’t even close. I called DiPietro’s number.

“Hello, this is Detective DiPietro,” said a recorded message, “I’m not in now, but if you leave a message—”

I didn’t. What did that prove? He wouldn’t give me a phone number that, when called, would reveal him to be a phony. However, if I could put an address with that number, I’d know where DiPietro lived. Or worked. Why would I want to know that? Maybe, if they hurt Crystal, I’d want to murder him. My hands were trembling. Now what?

Calabash!
Now was the time for heavy firepower, no matter what happened next. If you can’t beat ’em, kill ’em. Calabash was no killer, but he had a keen sense of justice. Injustice pissed him off, turned him deadly. I’d seen it before. Calabash lives in the Bahamas. I called him there. Our connection was tinny.

“They kidnapped my girlfriend, Calabash!”

“Only one way to reason wid dat kind,” he said after pausing to give the matter some thought. “I’m leavin’ now.”

I nearly wept with gratitude. “I’ll have a ticket waiting at the airport…Thank you, Calabash.”

“Don’t do nothin’ crazy till I get dere.”

I called American Airlines and paid for a first-class ticket by credit card.

What could I do now that wasn’t crazy? I called Islip, Long Island, information and asked for DiPietro. They had no such person listed. Hell, that proved nothing. I didn’t believe that family-outing-from-Islip bullshit when I thought DiPietro
was
a cop…The obvious finally occurred to me. I called the Twenty-fourth Precinct house. A Sergeant Brannigan answered.

“Detective DiPietro, please.”

“Who?”

I repeated it.

“Nobody by that name here. Can I help you?”

“Well, this isn’t business, it’s personal. I’m the alumni director from his old high school, and I’m trying to get in touch with him about the class reunion. Maybe I have the wrong precinct. Do you have a general department directory?”

“Yeah, I went to my twenty-fifth reunion. Hated it. Hang on…DiPietro. Yeah, here we go, DiPietro, Seventy-fourth—Nope, wait. Monica DiPietro. That don’t sound like the party you want.”

“No others?”

“Nope, that’s it.”

“Thank you.”

The phone rang.

“Artie?”

“Crystal!”

“I’ve been trying—busy.”

“Are you all right! Where are you!”

“I’m…I’m down by my car. Where we parked it.” Her words were slurred. Why were her words slurred? “Please come and get me!”

“I’ll be right there. What did they do to you, Crystal?”

“They…drugged me.”

“But you’re all right?”

“Yes, I—”

“I’m on my way—” Oh, relief! They only drugged her, the fuckers! My step was breezy, I felt giddy, like chuckling to myself. I was dancing for the door when I stopped, stood silently, thinking. I turned on my heel and went into the kitchen, pawed around in the knife drawer, but chose instead an ice pick. I’d need some kind of point guard. Is that an ice pick sticking in your thigh, or are you glad to see me? I opened an indifferent bottle of red wine for its cork. If I was giddy with relief, why was I so frightened? Why was I arming myself?

I sprinted to Riverside Drive. Crystal had parked on the east side of the drive near the western terminus of 104th Street,
but I didn’t go there directly. I ran up to 105th and approached from the north on the opposite side of the avenue…I didn’t see anything funny, funnier than usual, that is. A man slept in a refrigerator crate on a bench, only his bare feet sticking out. His worldly goods were packed into two shopping carts tied together with string. The other end of the string was tied around his big toe. Another guy was singing, “Seventy-six trombones led the big parade,” as he pissed over the wall into the park below. Car alarms blared and whooped and whined. “No Radio,” said signs on the windshields. “Already Stolen.” Yesterday a sanitation truck had swerved off Riverside Drive and smashed into an elm tree. I saw the elm tree up ahead, torn to shreds. The driver had failed the drug test. Then I saw Crystal’s car.

She was in it! She was sitting on the passenger side, her head leaning against the window. I jogged across the street, dodging a crazed cabbie who swerved to get me, and I climbed in behind the wheel.

“Darl—!”

She turned her face to me—

I gasped. It wasn’t Crystal at all! It was a man in a wig. He was a thick-browed simian fucker with no neck. He grinned at me. Brown teeth. That face under the Crystal wig was the most obscene sight I’d ever glimpsed. Repulsed, I sat there staring at him, frozen. He began to chortle.

From the rear seat, somebody—he must have been lying on the floor—clapped a rag over my face and jerked my head back against the rest. Ether. I’d smelled that smell before. Trammell and Bruce used to do ether in law school. I never did. I didn’t like the smell. It reminded me of a hospital in my youth. My mother was there at my bedside with some crew-cut pilot. She told me I’d be fine, everybody has their tonsils out, as a nurse put the wire-mesh mask over my lower face…My peripheral vision went first, in shimmering waves of light too bright to look at directly, but I
found the handle in my jacket pocket. Could I get it out; having gotten it out, could I get the cork off the point?

The asshole in the Crystal wig was trying to pin my arms to my side, but he was clutching me around the biceps. My lower arms were free, if I could just get the goddamn cork off—

I did! Corkless, it was in my hand, and my hand was free. Now all I had to do was muster the strength before I crashed to stick—

I brought the handle up to the level of my chin and plunged it into his thigh. That was all I could hit just then. He let out a long, falsetto wail. The Crystal wig fell off his head into his lap. The anesthesiologist in the backseat lost his grip on my face. I shot forward in the seat and came up hard against the steering wheel. Crystal’s car began to spin. I jerked the ice pick across my body all the way to the door, and then I swung with everything I had left.The man went “huuuff f,” like a punctured pair of water wings. I didn’t actually see it hit him, but it went in deep—I felt his clothes against the bottom of my fist. He howled, grabbed the Crystal wig, clapped it over his wound, and howled again. I felt so satisfied at the sound of that second howl that I decided to get a little sleep before I considered my next move.

TWELVE

B
LARING WHITE LIGHT and primordial darkness swirled in a contradictory combination, so I decided to ignore the inexplicable and get a little more sleep. When I woke up again, the light/dark sequence hadn’t changed. All light fades eventually of its own accord. I’d wait it out right here…Then I began to ruminate on just where “right here” might be. Normally, one determines that by empirically perceiving one’s surroundings and then checking whether they looked, smelled, felt—taste didn’t seem applicable—familiar.

Trees! Aha! Those black shapes, tops swaying gently, were trees, and that meant I was outside. I was outside, and I was sitting down—in a chair, a lawn chair. The trees were not green but black. That meant night. Progress. But what about this light? This light could only be artificial light, electric light, Thomas Edison…But something was wrong with my arms.

When I realized there was nothing wrong with my arms except that they were chained behind my back, the world around me came into sharper focus. That was bad. I was chained. I was sitting in an aluminum lawn chair on a concrete deck that circled a large swimming pool. The water was lighted from below the dead-flat surface. There was lawn all around, woods in the distance. We weren’t in Manhattan anymore. Now all I needed to do was get a move on, beat it out of this country club to the nearest train station. Could I get my money out of my pocket with my hands cuff ed behind my back?

“He’s all yours, Henry.”

The voice came from behind me. Apparently, this Henry fellow was back there as well. I spun as quickly as I could. I saw a black man, but he wasn’t Henry, apparently, because he was addressing Henry.

Henry was a white guy who wore a minute black-and-red bathing suit. I squinted at him as he passed through a dark patch and into a bright one. It looked like he had a tugboat hawser stuck down the front of his suit. His upper torso looked like an alpine rock face.

“He the gink I’m supposed to drown?”

“Yeah,” said the black guy, “that’s him.”

Drown? Did he say drown?

Henry was on me. He clamped the back of my neck and jerked me to my feet. With a powerful sweeping motion, he hurled me into the swimming pool. I believe I skipped once or twice like a flat stone across the surface. I stood up in nipple-deep water. Henry jumped in on top of me.

We came up face to face. His was crazy with activity. The chewing muscles at the hinges of his jaw were twitching a mile a minute; his mouth, brows, and forehead were ticcing rampantly, but his eyes were flat, like dead fish eyes. No compassion in those eyes. He was almost entirely bald. Even the skin on his crown jerked and wrinkled, flattened and wrinkled again.

He whipped me around, clutched the chain between my cuff s, and hoisted my hands high up my back, causing my face to slap the water. An immense force shoved me under. This was it, the termination of my life, right here, for something I didn’t even understand, in heavily chlorinated water. But I struggled, jerked and twisted around to get at him, to kick him in the hawser. The effort was hopeless, a waste of oxygen, but I wanted to hurt him in some lasting way before I died. He held me under with ease. I relaxed, gave in.

But he hoisted me back up into the air. I gasped a single, mostly liquid breath, and before I could take a drier one, he
ducked me again. He was going to drown me by bits! I thought for an instant I’d just inhale a lungful of water, get it quickly done. He yanked me out again.

“Stop!”

Somebody was shouting and waving his arms, coming toward us from what in my limited vision appeared to be an enormous mansion.

“What the Sam Hill are you doing, Henry!”

“Why, I’m drownin’ this gink. Rufus said he was the gink—”

“Rufus said, Rufus said! Rufus is a dick-up! This is
not
that gink! This is a different gink entirely! This is Artie Deemer.”