Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery (26 page)

This summer day, sunny, not yet uncomfortably hot, was taking on an air of menace. The commonplace exuded death. A slight breeze from the direction of the river riffled the leaves of the locust trees, and I thought of cemeteries in autumn, desiccated leaves blowing across fresh graves. Crystal and I might be buried side by side, warm below while freezing rain killed the flowers above. I could skip this, I told myself. I could go back across the street and crawl into Calabash’s pocket for him to carry me, when he felt like it, back to Crystal in the Toyota, but I didn’t.

I crossed the street, headed straight for the winos on the stoop. They stank! Fifteen feet away I could smell them. There’s no stench like the stench of the human body unwashed. That stink commonly clears entire subway cars during rush hour. You can’t fake that. You can dress up like a wino, but you can’t stink
like a real one. The poor dissolute fuckers didn’t even glance at me as I walked up their stoop.

The inside door was not locked. I went in. I waited, then peeked back at the winos. They hadn’t moved. Dark stairs rose on my left.The banister was cracked, stiles missing. From apartment 1A I heard angry voices, a male and a female fighting in a foreign language. The hallway was narrow and shadowy, a film noir hallway down which I’d seen the stupid characters walk when another corpse was needed for suspense. If they’d killed Chet, they’d kill me too. And Crystal. And Jellyroll. I went stiff-legged down that hall to apartment 1B.

I knocked softly. Silence. A board creaked inside. Then Chet said, “Who?” from behind the door. It was made of cheap wood. I could have kicked a hole in it. There was enough adrenaline pumping through me to kick a hole in the old Berlin Wall. Chet was flipping dead bolts, about six of them. He peeked out through a crack. I recoiled a step at the sight of him and at the stink of shit that waft ed through the crack.

His eyes blinked wetly from the bottom of two black craters. His skin seemed to have melted around the bones of his face. How long since I’d seen him on the beach at Fire Island? The change was shocking. His mouth hung open, and he gasped for breath. Each one whistled.

He opened the door wide enough for me to squeeze through, then he shut it again by leaning, almost falling, against it. On the beach, I remembered, his movements had been jerky, birdlike. Now he moved as if under water or something thicker, crank-case oil. Even his fingers, relocking the dead bolts, were emaciated and colorless. Chet wore a sad flannel bathrobe, blue socks without shoes.

“It’s like cholera…Cholera. You shit yourself to death. Did you bring your gas mask?” He tried to chuckle, but it didn’t work. He began to cough dryly.

“Come on, man, we’ve got to get you to the hospital—”

He put his palm up. “Get real. They don’t shoot you full of shit you can go to the doctor to get rid of. He’d want to take tests. I’d be dead before the results returned. I didn’t think they’d do this to me, Artie. I really didn’t think they would.” He was sobbing, I think. Or maybe he was just breathing. I was beginning to panic with the shit stink and the fear. “Look, I got to sit down—” he said.

I half carried him to a ratty couch with the stuffing sticking out of the arms. “Where’s your phone, Chet?”

“Why?”

“Why? Because I’m going to call an ambulance.” The walls were bereft of everything, including telephones. The room was cluttered with dirty clothes. The phone was probably under them somewhere. I could see shit dried to a crust on a few garments.

Chet waved the forget-it gesture at me, then let his hand flop in his lap. “It’s in the freezer.”

“The freezer?”

“The tape. That’s where I hid it. You can get it on your way out. But there’s a few things you’ll need to know. I can’t say them twice. So listen…No, you tell me. What do you remember about the tape? Remember what I told you?”

“Johnny Barcelona, Tiny Archibald, Norman Armbrister, Trammell, and the Fifth Man are there.”

“Not Johnny Barcelona. Danny Barcelona. What else?”

“There’s a party going on around the pool. You can see the house in the background—why, Chet?”

“Table. What kind of table are they sitting around?”

“An aluminum one. With an umbrella over it.”

“What color’s the umbrella!”

“I don’t remember.”

“Green! It’s a fucking great green umbrella!”

“Okay, Chet—”

“I felt a pinprick in my ass on the subway platform. Number Two train at the Times Square station. I thought it was a prank. Hell, I guess it was.”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know. You want to hear a guess? Concom. That’s the story here. Remember when it breaks. Concom’s the story. My wife and kid…ex-wife, actually. I wrote them a letter.” He gestured to his chest pocket, but he didn’t have the energy to reach up there. “I’m sorry I don’t have a stamp. Look, man, maybe you can do me a favor? I mean, besides mailing the letter.”

“Sure, what can I do?”

“Hold me. Just hold me for a minute.”

I did. I sat down beside him. I hugged him.

Then Chet died. His position on the couch didn’t change. He didn’t jerk or gasp—but I knew he had died. Life had sagged out of him. I looked in his eyes. Death had taken the place of life in his eyes. I’d never seen that happen in human eyes before, but I’d seen it in a dog’s eyes. My childhood dog, a wild springer spaniel, got hit by a car. I ran to him. He lay on his side. He raised his head to look at me, then lowered it again. He was alive when he rested his head, but then he was dead. You didn’t have to be a vet to tell. The lights went out in his eyes.

I sat there for a while holding Chet. Then I began to sob. It burst out. I wept loudly, the way I’d wept as a child while I carried my dead dog out of the street. I hugged Chet and wept for a long time.

I’m not a naive person. I knew life was cheap here and everywhere else. Worse things than this were probably happening within two blocks of here even as Chef’s lights went out. But the murder of Chet Bream, its means, it was so cold-hearted, so
personal
—something bad had to happen to these murderers. Maybe I’d see to it. When I stood up, Chet slouched sideways, but he didn’t go all the way. He just listed there at forty-five degrees, head hanging.

I stopped crying. I paced, trying to decide what to do. For a short while, I forgot the stink. I took the letter out of Chet’s
pocket—there were four ChapStick tubes in there—and put it in mine. Then I took Tiny Archibald’s phone number out of my wallet along with DiPietro’s card—the Concom numbers—and I slid them into Chet’s pocket. I wasn’t sure what I was doing or what effect it would have, but I wanted to do something. I noticed the pathetic way Chet’s stringy hair hung across his face.

I began to wonder if that was a bit too subtle. What else might I do, just a tad more blatant?…I looked around the kitchen, for what, I didn’t know. I opened the cupboard under the sink and shoved cleaning fluids around. I spotted a can of spray paint. What color? I spun the can in my hand. Red. Can’t beat red for blatancy.

I stepped up on the couch where Chet sat dead, and in two-foot letters, I sprayed:

C
ONCOM

When I stepped off the couch to survey it, Chet fell on over, burying his nose in the cushion. I stepped back up and put an exclamation point at the end. Then I began to wipe off my fingerprints with a greasy dish towel. I hear real cops chuckle sarcastically at the TV shows where actors get perfect prints every time, but why take a chance? What all did I touch? Not much. The inside of the door. Chet himself. Can you take prints off a corpse? I decided to take that chance.

I opened the freezer door with a spoon. There was a tape in there, all right, wrapped in aluminum foil. I stuck it inside my belt. God, I was thinking clearly, edges sharp, crisp. Did it take death and fear to cause that? I wiped the paint can and shoved it back under the sink. My fingers were red. I wiped them as best I could. I pocketed the dishcloth.

Farewell, Chet.

The winos hadn’t budged.

Seldom does one inhale NYC air with delight at its purity. I did. It felt like Rocky Mountain air, babbling, crystalline brooks, John Denver clichés. I nearly ran the half block to Crystal double-parked at the corner.

“What!” She covered her mouth with her hand when she got a look at my face. I didn’t know it was that bad.

“He died,” I panted. “He’s dead!”

“Ohh—” she moaned.

Jellyroll sniffed me thoroughly from the backseat. When he was done, he looked at me with sagging ears and closed mouth.

I jumped across the gap in the seats and began to kiss Crystal.

“Mmmf?”

I covered her face with my own.

“Artie, this isn’t such a great time—”

“Kiss me!” I hissed in her ear. “DiPietro’s coming around the corner!”

She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me…Gee, it had been a long time. Almost instantly, a wave of desire broke across my body, enveloping me. No, call it lust, a wave of lust, flat-out, four-stroke lust. Crystal couldn’t help but notice.

“What, you like danger?”

DiPietro went straight up the stoop past the wino statues and in the door. What was he doing here!—the question too obvious to ask aloud. We watched. Though double-parked, we weren’t conspicuous, because we were in a line of double-parked cars. We slouched behind the dashboard, however. I told Jellyroll to lie down. “Good boy.”

Who else was here? I poked my head back up and scratched my crown—that was the “alarm” sign to Calabash. He took a stroll past the stoop, glanced in, kept going. He stopped three doors away and pretended to drink.

How long did we wait like that? Fifteen minutes at most? DiPietro came back out. He was moving fast, glancing east and
west, then rushing east. Calabash followed from a distance. I thought about doing the same from the other side of the street, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to seem to like danger.

We waited. Crystal took my hand while we did so, the tops of our heads peeking over the dashboard, until we saw Calabash round the corner, stepping fast. He went right past the car without looking at us, continued west to the corner, and rounded it. I assumed he was clearing his back. Apparently satisfied, he returned a short time later. I got in the back so he could sit up front, the only place he’d fit.

“Who was dot mon?”

I told him DiPietro was the phony cop from the beach.

“He went up de way and made a call on de pay telephone. He didn’t talk long, but he seemed to do all de talkin’. Den he got in a cab and headed north.”

Jellyroll, who can spot a mood a mile away, crawled into my lap and peered up into my eyes.

“Wot happen in dere?”

I told him about Chet’s death. “I’ve got the tape.” I had shoved it under Calabash’s seat.

A panel truck pulled around the corner and stopped in front of Chet’s death house. “Mack’s Moving. Flatbush, Brooklyn” was painted on the side in big black letters. Three men, two white guys and a black guy, got out. They were all burly, barrel chested. I had never seen them before. They were pulling on gloves. The black guy pulled a stack of folded white sheets from the front seat, separated them, and tossed shares to the white guys. Without hesitating or speaking, the men hustled up the stoop and into Chet’s building.

“What the hell?” said Crystal. “You don’t think…?”

The black guy came back out carrying an armchair covered with a sheet. The chair was shaped just like the one in Chet’s apartment. He yanked open the big barn doors and shoved the chair into the back of the truck. A white guy, carrying the
aluminum pipe-legged table, tripped on the top step of the stoop but regained his balance and threw the table into the truck. He hotfooted it up the steps and back for another load. Then for a while nobody came out. We waited, the truth dawning on us. I had read something like this in a George Smiley novel. Something had happened, something they didn’t want found. They sent a truckload of guys to clean it up. They even had a name, something like the “House Cleaners.”

The men came out with the couch on which Chet had died and piled it into the truck. The black guy followed with a pair of lamps. Next came poor Chet himself. At least I assumed it was poor Chet. He was in a trunk, like a steamer trunk or a large box. It too was covered with sheeting. It took two guys to carry it.

“Let’s call the cops,” said Crystal. “Let’s call nine-one-one without giving our names. These bastards shouldn’t get away with this!”

When the movers went back into the building, we drove off in search of a phone—

“Dere’s de one de phony cop used.”

Crystal double-parked. I clambered out of the backseat and called 911. I must have waited through twenty rings before an operator answered. I gave her Chet’s address, repeated it, and said, “A man named Chet Bream has been murdered in apartment 1B. Now—I mean right now—some people are trying to dispose of the body. They’re posing as movers. ‘Mack’s Moving.’ If you hurry, you can catch them in the act.”

“What is your name, sir?”

“I’m not giving my name. Oh, and don’t forget to perform an autopsy on Mr. Bream.” I hung up.

We drove slowly around the block. We went around twice, each time looking down the street to be sure the van was still there. On the third lap, it wasn’t. Neither were the cops. We went around twice more. Still no cops. After two more trips, we gave up.

Maybe it was the cutbacks.

TWENTY-THREE

V
ULNERABLE TO ATTACK from the blind spot astern, fighter pilots used to slew their airplanes from side to side in order to see the approaching enemy before he snuck into attack position. Fighter pilots used to call this maneuver “clearing their tail.” That’s what we were doing, clearing our tail. Crystal drove in intense, two-hands-on-the-wheel silence. Hunched into the passenger seat, Calabash reached a huge hand out the window and adjusted the sideview mirror. Jellyroll and I in the back watched the following traffic. When I’m engrossed in a thing, he insists on knowing what it is. He stood on his hind legs, his front legs braced on the seat back. His breath fogged the window.

We drove crosstown on Fourteenth Street. There was too much traffic to determine whether any of it was following us or just going our way. So Crystal threw the car into a hard left across the westbound traffic onto Irving Place. We headed north toward the elegant wrought-iron gate to Gramercy Park several blocks ahead.