Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery (22 page)

While we fumbled with Crystal’s steering wheel, a Hispanic transvestite with hairy hands was ranting about Iranians. At least it sounded like Iranians. I was wondering if Norm had bugged Crystal’s car.

“It’s loose,” Crystal pronounced when we were done affixing the wheel.

We went back at it, got it right this time.

Off to Sheepshead Bay—Crystal driving, Calabash riding shotgun with his knees under his chin, Jellyroll and me in the back—I wondered who was following us now. Billy didn’t answer his phone; maybe he was still off fishing, maybe not. The purpose of this trip was more emotional than practical. Crystal felt she had to do something concrete—like make sure he wasn’t dead in his apartment. Also, she needed clothes. I began to fantasize, heading down the West Side Highway, that we’d find Uncle Billy hacked to pieces. Or maybe Trammell. My imagination flew from one gory corpse to the next. Almost everybody I ever met was dead in that apartment, stacked up like Lincoln Logs. A lovely day in the neighborhood.

Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, I noticed that Calabash and Crystal were also tense and silent. Crystal’s eyes kept darting from the road to her rearview mirror. These fuckers were pros. We could have a line of spooks back there the size of the Godfather’s funeral procession and never know it.

“Why don’ you let me out near de place while you go around de block, like we don’ know each other. Den I can watch your back when you go in.”

“Uh, actually, Calabash, you’d be pretty conspicuous in my neighborhood. It’s not like Manhattan.”

“No?”

“We’d better go in together.”

Unlike at the Upscale Poolroom, where gamblers would still be going strong from last night, the Golden Hours was nearly empty. Players at the three active tables stopped and waved to Crystal. She greeted them by name, trying to seem friendly, normal. No corpses yet.

A young woman with a long ponytail was sitting behind the desk. “Hi, Crystal, I haven’t seen you for ages.”

“Hello, Sally, how are you?”

“Pregnant.”

“Congratulations.”

“Again.”

“You’re pretty fertile, Sally.”

Crystal introduced Calabash and me to Sally.

“Say, have you seen Uncle Billy?” Sally asked. “The Coke guy was in yesterday. He says he won’t deliver no more till he gets paid. Also, there’s other bills.” She took a stack of business envelopes from behind the desk and handed them to Crystal.

Her brow furrowed as she thumbed through them. “Look at the postmarks on these,” she said to Calabash and me. “Some of them are two weeks old.”

“Pardon me,” said Sally, “but isn’t that the R-r-ruff Dog?”

Jellyroll was sitting staring up into Sally’s face.

“Yeah, that’s him,” said Crystal.

Sally clutched her face and squealed. “I
love
the R-r-ruff Dog! I heard he was here—can I pet him!”

“Go see,” I said to Jellyroll. He and Sally smooched as we looked at postmarks. He followed us up the stairs while Sally tried to call him back.

There were two doors at the top of the landing. Crystal went right and knocked on that one. “Uncle Billy—” No answer.

“Is that your place?” I asked about the other door.

“Yeah. You’ve never been there, have you? Uncle Billy—?” She put her ear to the door. Silence. She led us to the other door and unlocked it. The three of us gasped at the sight, and our gasps brought Jellyroll, sauntering in, to an abrupt halt.

Crystal’s apartment was a cramped studio with a tiny alcove kitchen. I had wondered on occasion how Crystal lived when she was alone, but even as I looked, I still couldn’t tell, because her place was completely wrecked. Devastated. Wasted. Crystal began to whimper in the doorway.

Calabash gently moved her aside by the shoulder as he pulled a gun and went in. Adrenaline surged as I watched Calabash look left, right, then go into the bathroom gun first. He came back out. We were alone with the wreckage. We stood silently staring at it.

Drawers had been yanked from the dresser, their contents hurled around. The splintered remains of one drawer lay at the foot of the opposite wall, against which it had been smashed. Likewise, kitchen cabinets had been emptied, the contents broken. Shards of glass and utensils covered the black-and-white linoleum floor. The cushions from the convertible couch had been sliced open and disemboweled, tuft s of stuffing strewn about. The bed had been pulled out, its mattress gutted. Crystal’s clothes covered the wreckage as if blown there by a horrific wind. She began to cry softly. I put my arm around her shoulders.

Calabash, thinking, pulled the door closed and bolted it.

I tried to think, too. What kind of way was this to search for something? If I were searching someone’s apartment for a thing—a thing like Barraclough’s bankbook, say—I wouldn’t sling stuff around like this. I’d conduct an orderly search, area by area, take things out, put them back. The object I was searching for might otherwise get covered in the rubble of my own destruction…That was thinking…But maybe this wasn’t a search.

“Crystal—”

“Huh?”

“Is there a back way out?”

“Through Billy’s place. There’s stairs down to the little patio in back…We had a pool out there when I was a kid—” She pointed at the window. “You can see it down there.”

“Why don’t you pack some things and let’s get out of here?”

“This is where I live! They came where I—and did this! Bastards! I’ve had it with these fuckheads, Artie!”

Calabash peeped out the window. So did I. Nothing below but an empty, leaf-littered patio, where once Crystal had splashed in the pool.

“While you pack, could we check Billy’s place?”

She handed me a key ring, Billy’s key isolated between her thumb and forefinger. The rest rattled in her trembling hand.

I kissed her. “Keep Jellyroll with you. Lock this door behind us, okay, darling?”

Calabash’s gun reappeared in his hand as Crystal did so. We approached Billy’s door, the landing creaking loudly beneath our feet. Calabash took the keys from me. He pointed to the hinged side of the door—that was where I was to stand. I stood precisely there.

Calabash stood to the other side of the door, put the key in the lock, turned it—then he shoved the door all the way open against its stop. At the same time he held up an enormous hand to tell me to remain where I was. I didn’t need to be told twice. He remained where he was, the gun muzzle pointing up at the ceiling. I heard pool balls click below. Compared to banks, poolrooms seemed places of innocence and goodwill. He slid down the wall and crouched with his knees under his chin. From that level, he looked in over his gun hand. No shots got fired.

We walked in. The same search-and-destroy tactics had been applied in here. We closed the door behind us but didn’t relock it. This was a much larger place. The living room and
dining room were visible. Beyond, I could see the doorway to the kitchen. A hallway led back to the bedrooms and bath, I assumed. I could see the traces of French doors that had been walled up to separate Crystal’s little adulthood apartment from her childhood home, both now wrecked. Calabash disappeared down the hall.

The furnishings were all 1940s era. Brocaded chairs with doilies on the arms, heavy fabric curtains, floor lamps with yellowed shades, knickknacks and porcelain objects decades out of fashion. Most of these things were broken, sliced, or overturned. I crunched across broken glass into the dining room.

Crystal knocked on the door and called my name. I opened up. She had an overnight bag in one hand and a pillowcase in the other. Jellyroll slipped in, but Crystal surveyed the destruction from the doorway. “He’s not dead in here, is he?”

“No.” Of course, he could be dead somewhere else. “Are you okay?”

“I guess so. Artie, look at this—” She knelt and spilled the contents of the pillowcase onto the rug…It was her lingerie. Jellyroll sniff ed until I eased him aside. I picked up a pair of black panties. The crotch had been sliced out. There was a matching bra. The nipples had been sliced off. I sift ed through the pile. They were all mutilated. I looked up at Crystal. She was clutching her mouth. “Who are these people, Artie?”

“Come look at this,” called Calabash.

Crystal and I shoved the ravaged underwear back into the pillowcase and then went to see.

Calabash was in the first bedroom off the hall. He leaned out and gestured to us. The room was ransacked, but we were used to that. That wasn’t what he wanted us to see. He was pointing at the wall above the bed:

P
OOL
I
S
S
ATAN
G
AME

It was scrawled across floral wallpaper in red spray paint, letters two feet high. But the letters were ill-formed, as if written by a non-English speaker.

“What…?” asked Crystal.

All around that statement other letters were painted. But these weren’t English letters. I copied them on the back of my laundry slip, checked to be sure I’d gotten them right, and returned the laundry slip to my wallet.

“What is it?”

“Arabic.”

“Arabic? What do the Arabs want with Uncle Billy?…And my underwear?”

“Let’s get out of here,” I suggested.

NINETEEN

W
E SPED HEADLONG up ocean parkway.

“They’re making me very angry, the fucks!” snapped Crystal. “They kidnap me, shove drugs down my throat. They kidnap you! They ruin my place. They might already’ve killed my uncle!”

“Dey don’t deserve to live,” agreed Calabash.

“What do you want to do?” I asked. “Do you want to go to the police? Maybe we could get a real one this time.”

That met with silence.

Crystal swerved into the right lane and stopped behind a car full of Hasidim vacating their parking place. The Hasidim hit the car in front, setting off its alarm, then hit the car behind, doing the same thing. Then, having gotten a feeling for distance, they pulled out. I had thought that was the Manhattan method of close-quarter maneuvering—hit the car in front, hit the car behind—but it seemed to obtain in Brooklyn as well. Crystal took the spot. We sat between the wailing alarms with the engine running. This was a pleasant, tree-lined neighborhood of large red-brick apartment buildings where the races seemed to mix in reasonable harmony.

“Where are we going, anyway?” Crystal snapped. “Do we have any kind of purpose?”

“I told Chet Bream I’d meet him at the poolroom. We could blow him off, but if we do, he’ll be knocking at my door by dark.”

“How are we ever going to get out of this? Huh, how? This’ll never end. They’ll just keep doing things to us! Do you believe
these goddamn alarms! They’re trying to make us crazy on top of everything else!” Shouting over the noise, Crystal slammed both hands down on the steering wheel. I ineffectually put my hand on her shoulder. I hoped she wasn’t cracking.

“We could blow dem up,” suggested Calabash.

“We
could
?” That idea clearly appealed to Crystal.

“I got de goods.”

“You
do
?”

“Sure.”

“I think there’s more here than we could blow up,” I said, the voice of restraint.

“Yeah, we’d have to get more o’ de goods.”

“If they’ve hurt poor Uncle Billy, then let’s blow them up,” said Crystal, jaw set. I looked at her in the rearview mirror. I saw there the face of a woman capable of pushing the plunger, or whatever you do these days to set off the goods.

“Can we think of anything else?” I asked.

“We could go to Poor Joe Cay. There ain’t no dangerous strangers dere. We keep track of ’em on de Cay.”

A black car had pulled up behind us. Two men sat in the front seat and watched us. They were wearing uniforms, but not from the military or the police. We watched them. Even Jellyroll watched them.

The driver got out and stood beside his car. Calabash reached inside his jacket. But the driver didn’t approach, merely stood beside his open door. His uniform was from one of the private security agencies. “Hey, lady, you leavin’ or what?”

“No,” Crystal snarled. “Get outta heah!” Trouble brought out the Brooklyn in Crystal. I liked it. But the alarms were turning me morbid. I suggested we leave this place.

“I’ve got another uncle,” Crystal said after a few blocks. “His name is Ray. He’s in the rackets. Small time, a bookie, like that. Uncle Ray can be a loudmouth asshole sometimes—he drives around the neighborhood in a pink Lincoln with a Continental
kit on the back. But he knows people, and he loves me. He could put out some feelers for Billy, it’s just I’m not sure he can keep his mouth shut.”

“What’s a Continental kit?” Calabash wanted to know.

“A spare tire in a stupid case…Maybe I should bullshit Ray. Maybe I should tell him Billy got into money trouble or something.”

“What about Danny Barcelona?” I asked. “Do we mention Danny Barcelona? He’s in the rackets, too.”

“Yeah…You don’t like the idea. I can tell.”

“It’s not that exactly. It’s just you said he had a big mouth.”

“What do you think, Calabash?”

“It just depends how much you trust dis Uncle Ray. ’Course you could tell him if he fucks us over den we blow up his Continental kit with him inside.”

“Where would we find Uncle Ray?”

“He minds a pizza parlor in the East Village, on Avenue A. I think the place is a money laundry.”

“Lotta dat goin’ around,” said Calabash.

Through the rearview mirror, Crystal looked me in the eye. “I told you that first night my family was tacky.”

We turned south off of Twelfth Street, and there it was, two doors down from the corner on Avenue A. Ray’s Absolutely REAL Original Pizza Parlor (Believe It, said a sign below the name). And there was the pink Lincoln, with Continental kit, double-parked in front, along with five other gaudy gas-guzzlers. Hard-looking guys hung around the cars talking and smoking cigarettes. A couple of guys were eating pizza slices, leaning over to keep the grease from running down their silk shirts. We cruised past to check it out before we committed ourselves…We seemed to be free of tails.

There was a crack store across the avenue masquerading as a bodega. You can always spot the crack stores by their bereft shelves
and by the clots of jittery youths bobbing around on the sidewalk out front waiting to use the pay phones—just like you can spot the crooked pizza parlors by the wiseguys and the pink Lincolns loitering in front. There was a dreary Ukrainian restaurant on one side of Ray’s, Madam Casbah’s, Fortunes Told, on the other.