Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery (24 page)

I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. But one thing was clear—he believed it. I glanced back at Crystal. She looked like she was about to throw up.

The ChapStick dribbled from his hands and bounced on the cigarette-burned carpet. I picked it up for him. As I straightened, I realized that Chet was sobbing silently. His body jerked. His eyes were clenched, but tears still poured from the slits. His lips were drawn away from his teeth in a rictus grin.

“I wish I’d never heard of the bastards! I had a family, a kid, but I fucked it up. I could have been a family man, love and all that, Little League games, but now I’m going to die alone, goddamnit!”

“Aww,” I said like a fool, “it’s just the flu. It really gets you down—”

“No, I think they’ve killed me!”

“What?”

“I never thought they’d kill me!”

“Who?”

“Concom!”

“Killed you?”

“Hell, I can hardly lift my arms.”

“How? I mean, how—?”

“Look, I’m going now.” He slid off the stool and stood unsoundly. “I’ll call you or something.” He snaked a path to the door.

“Chet,” I called, but he waved me off.

One of the regulars hit on him for a game before he left.

Calabash joined us. “What was dot?”

I told him. He said, “Hmm.”

Bruce was heading our way, so I whistled for Jellyroll and we left. We were back in Crystal’s car and on the move uptown before I realized I still had Chef’s ChapStick clutched in my sweaty fist.

We found a parking place near my building, but then decided to put the car in a garage, where you pay exorbitant overnight rates in the hope that your car will be there when you want to drive it again.

Calabash watched our backs as we walked up to Akmed’s newsstand on Broadway. Akmed and Jellyroll made their daily fuss over each other.

When the greeting subsided, I handed Akmed my laundry slip and asked him to translate. His brow furrowed as he read.

“One pants…Two shirt—”

“I’m sorry, Akmed, the other side.”

He turned it over, looked at the writing I had copied from Uncle Billy’s living-room wall, then looked back at me.

“I don’ understand,” he said.

“Isn’t that Arabic?”

“No.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Squibbles. How do you call it?” He drew “squibbles” in the air.

“Thank you, Akmed.”

As we headed for Riverside Drive, Crystal said, “That sounds like something Trammell would do. Write ‘Pool Is Satan Game’ and a bunch of phony Arabic bullshit on the wall. This is making me very depressed, Artie.”

“I’ve got to do that R-r-ruff shoot now,” I said. I’d thought about calling in sick, and with the slightest encouragement from Crystal, I would have. “Do you want to go?” I asked when she offered none. She seemed numb.

“Can I stay at your place in case Uncle Ray calls?”

“You can stay at my place forever.”

“Thank you.” She put her arm around me. A fine romance.

Mr. Fleckton pounced on us before we’d finished signing in at the security desk in the lobby.

“Is he
eating
it?”

“Yes, he—”

Mr. Fleckton seemed to levitate with joy and relief. His two lackeys, James and Willard—I can never get straight which is
which—clapped each other on the back and made those pumping-piston moves with their fists you see so much these days as signs of masculine delight on beer commercials. After the day I’d had, I was glad to spread a little happiness. Jellyroll wagged his tail with a “what’s up?” look on his face. He cocked his head from side to side.

“Look at that wonderful animal! Will you just look at him!” Mr. Fleckton giggled like a seventh grader. “And he’s eating it!”

“Congratulations, Mr. Fleckton,” said James or Willard.

Mr. Fleckton turned to them. “James, Willard, Willard, James—it’s been a grand campaign. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

It was almost touching. Jellyroll looked up at me for a cue as to what was going on. I didn’t know what to tell him.

We went into the studio.

“Clippity-clop, clippity-clop,” went the soundtrack as lights came up on a painted backdrop: the fruited plain. The pioneer prairie. Yellow hills faded away in forced perspective all the way to the shining Rockies. A yellow wagon-rut road, also in forced perspective, curved across the studio floor. There was a bowl of New & Improved R-r-ruff at the end of the road.

Then horses,
real
horses, f four of them, came on from stage left. I’m no student of horseflesh, but these horses looked like the kind you’d put King Arthur on if you were doing a King Arthur thing, magnificent creatures with rippling flanks and huge tossing heads…They were pulling a stupid Conestoga wagon made out of plywood with a muslin cover. “R-r-ruff or Bust” was painted on the muslin.

The Pioneer (ex-Space Traveler) sat on the wagon seat going “Giddy-up, giddy-up” to these glorious animals. The Pioneer’s full-leg cast was covered by a big set of leather chaps. (Somebody had suggested to the director that you don’t wear chaps while riding on a wagon. “Who gives a rat’s ass?” he’d replied.) A happy grin on his face, Jellyroll sat beside the Pioneer. No matter how
absurd the humans’ concept, Jellyroll always seemed to enjoy himself, smiling, glancing around the studio until he caught my eye. That attitude takes a lot of guilt off my shoulders.

“Won’t be long now, R-r-ruff, boy,” said the Pioneer in a bullshit general-western accent. “We’re in New-and-Improved territory now, boy.” Clippity-clop, clippity-clop. “Whoa! Whoa!” The Conestoga wagon came to a stop. The horses fidgeted and flared their nostrils.

I glanced over at Mr. Fleckton. He stood in the light spill behind the cameras with both hands pressed over his mouth. It wouldn’t be long now.

“There it
is!
” said the Pioneer from his perch, pointing at the bowl of New & Improved R-r-ruff as if at the Promised Land.

At this point, Jellyroll was to jump from the wagon, which he did, and run to the R-r-ruff. Originally, the Pioneer was to have jumped down as well, but that was out of the question with a fresh compound fracture. Everyone held their breath as Jellyroll approached the bowl…

He slowed, sniff ed, approached, leaned down—and he began to eat heartily. Everyone in the room cheered—silently, but you could feel the vibrations—as he ate. The cameras rolled. But then he stopped abruptly.

His stomach heaved. Uh-oh. I’d seen that move at the beach. That’s how it always began. Now his whole body heaved, and he began to retch. As the room watched, Jellyroll threw up this horrible, wet, brown mass of congealed New & Improved R-r-ruff. Silence. Interminable silence. He sniff ed his expulsion and walked away.

The room trembled with the pressure of suppressed laughter. Then it started at one of the camera positions. A titter. Somebody else giggled, and that was enough. All at once it burst out, bellows of it, paroxysms of giggles and cackles. Jellyroll loved it. He delights in human mirth. He pranced.

Once started, there was no stopping it. The place was paralyzed with hilarity. But the laughter, or something, seemed to be spooking the horses. The horses were growing restive, agitated. One’s agitation spread to its adjacent teammate, and in that way it built. They sputtered, stomped, shook, and neighed. Fear fed on itself. One of the lead horses, a huge white one, reared up on its hind legs. Handlers sprinted from the back to calm their horses, but they were driven back by flying hooves.

“Get me off this fucking wagon!” screamed the Pioneer/Space Traveler, hanging on for dear life. “Get me off—! Jesus, please! Get me off—!”

The wagon lurched violently. I saw the white of his cast as it was hurled over his head and he disappeared into the back of the wagon. Another wave of handlers rushed onstage. They had black horse hoods in their hands. I called Jellyroll away from the wild horses so he wouldn’t get his snout kicked off.

Finally the handlers got their horses quieted and under control. Techies heft ed the Pioneer, rigid as a railroad tie, out of the back of the wagon. He was babbling and whimpering. The giggles took hold again. They quickly spread. The people in the control room had their heads down on their consoles, lurching with silent laughter.

Mr. Fleckton leaned against the back wall, staring off into space like a shell-shocked doughboy. James and Willard wrung their hands and paced around him:

“We could cut right before he threw up.”

“Sure we could!”

“It was great up until then—”

“Excellent until then.”

“He was eating it—”

“Until then.”

But Mr. Fleckton didn’t even blink. He was looking into the
nihil
. What could I do? I had troubles of my own.

There was a pink Cadillac double-parked in front of my building when I returned. Two wiseguys were hovering around it. The day would never end.

TWENTY-ONE

T
HE MOOD WAS tense, but then that was nothing new. Tension was our life now. Crystal and Calabash were there. So were Uncle Ray, his man Ronnie Jax, and another wiseguy who went unintroduced and who looked just like Ronnie.

The clear focus of attention was sitting in my morris chair. He was a man near seventy with a beer gut, bald head, a reddish-purple nose with bad veins, and black eyes that darted here and there. The others were gathered loosely around him. The man’s head was down. He had the demeanor of a man who’d been badgered. When I opened the door, he looked hopefully up at me as if I were there to extricate him.

Crystal met me in the foyer as Jellyroll went directly to the man in the middle. Jellyroll can recognize focus. “I hope this is okay with you,” she whispered. “They just showed up at the door. What could I do?”

“It’s okay, don’t worry. This is what we’re doing now. Arnie Lovejoy?”

“Yeah. Wait’ll you hear.”

Jellyroll was sniffing Arnie’s shoes for a clue to his identity. “This is himself, isn’t it?” Arnie said to me as I approached.

“Yes, that’s him. He likes you.”

Crystal introduced us. Arnie Lovejoy stood up and gripped my hand with both of his. Frightened puppy eyes peered up at me from under his brow.

“Okay, Arnie,” said Uncle Ray gently, “tell him what you told us.”

“Well…” Arnie sat back down. “Uncle Billy drowned.”

What? I looked to Crystal. She rolled her eyes at me.

“We was fishing way out on Baltimore Canyon, but we ain’t catchin’ nothin’, and…and he fell overboard. I go down to get us our sandwiches, and I hear a shout and a splash. I come runnin’ up on deck and, sure enough, there’s Billy in the water. I throw him a life ring, I get my hands on him and try to get him back aboard”—he leaned forward in his chair as if over the rail of a boat and heft ed at the man in the water—“but the current carried him off …and he went down.”

“Did you report the drowning to the cops?” Ray asked.

“…No.”

“Did you report it to anybody?”

“No.”

“Why not, Arnie? Thing like that ought to be reported to the proper authorities. It’s the law of the sea.”

“Because it never happened.”

“Billy didn’t drown?”

“No.”

“He didn’t even fall off the boat, did he?”

Arnie shook his head. “Hell, we didn’t even go fishing. But that’s what Billy wanted me to say. He sorta wanted to disappear. Billy was scared to be seen anywhere.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t want to say.” He turned to Crystal. “I known you all your life, Crystal. From the neighborhood. I ain’t one to betray his friends.”

“Sure, Arnie.”

“I just couldn’t go tell the cops about how he drowned. I mean, it just didn’t sound like a good idea to me.”

“You did the right thing, Arnie,” said Uncle Ray.

“You really think so?”

“Yes, I do. They wouldn’t have believed you.”

“Where is he now, Arnie?” Crystal asked.

It was happening too fast, and I was too tired. What if Norm had bugged my living room?

“City Island. He’s livin’ on my boat up to City Island.”

“You mean up in the Bronx?” said Ray.

“Yeah, you know, like near Co-op City and Pelham and like in there—”

City Island is an incongruous piece of New York City, a thin peninsula hanging off of the Bronx into the waters of Long Island Sound at its western end, near where it passes under the Throgs Neck Bridge and becomes the East River. City Island looks more like a shabby New England fishing village—seafood restaurants, marine-supply and antiques stores, boatyards, and several yacht clubs—than a Bronx community.

“Zuzu’s her name.” He turned again to Crystal. “That’s what I used to call my wife. You remember her, don’t you? My wife?”

“Sure, Arnie, I remember her.”

“Zuzu. That was like a—whattaya call it?—a pet name. She’s been dead fifteen years now,” he said to me. Then back to Crystal he said, “Billy didn’t want me to tell nobody except you. I was supposed to tell you he didn’t drown.”

“Would you like something, Arnie?” I asked. “A drink or something?”

“God, I’d love a drink. But I don’t do it no more. It didn’t help.”

“Some orange juice?”

“I don’t want to put you to no bother.”

I got him orange juice and put some water to boil for coffee. It was too late now. If he was listening, Norm knew by now. “Hey, Norm, you fucking spook,” I said, but not too loud, “you want some OJ?”

“Arnie,” Ray was saying as I returned to the living room, “tell us what Billy was scared of.”

“Well, I don’t know. He wasn’t real clear about it. He said bankers was on his ass.”

“Bankers?” Uncle Ray stiffened. “What bankers?”

“He thought they wanted to take away his money.”

“Money? What money?” Ray wanted to know.

“I don’t know. I think he owed money to bankers. Maybe they was going to repossess it.”

Back in the Toyota again, Crystal was driving, Calabash riding shotgun without adequate headroom, Jellyroll and I in the back. I was getting sick of riding in this Toyota, but Jellyroll still loved it.

“Artie,” said Crystal, looking to me in the rearview mirror, “they just showed up. What could I do? I couldn’t say, ‘Look, let’s go in the bedroom, because some CIA crazy bugged the rest of the place.’ I mean, could I?”