Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery (27 page)

A little white Japanese car, a Subaru or something, made the same left onto Irving Place. No other vehicle did so. Irving Place ends at the park—I could see the statue of Edwin Booth as Hamlet—and traffic must turn right onto Twentieth Street, one-way eastbound. We could clear our tail by circling the park. I suggested that.

The white Subaru went right around with us. There were two men in the car, but I couldn’t tell much more than that because by then the windows were pretty badly fogged. Dog breath is strong stuff. I told Jellyroll to sit, and that made him even more interested. He cocked his head at me. I told him he was a good dog.

“See the white car?” I asked.

“Hmm,” said Calabash to the sideview mirror.

Crystal was looking in the rearview mirror as well. We turned onto Gramercy Park West. So did the little white car. Then it began to flash its lights at us at it moved up close behind us. Attack mode?

“Artie,” said Calabash in his deadly calm voice.

“Yes, Calabash?”

“Move over behind me, ’cause I gonna shoot tru dat left -hand window.”

I hunched my shoulders, pulled Jellyroll into my lap, and did as I was told. At the time, shooting through the window made perfect sense to me. It had come to that by then, the exchange of gunfire on a venerable residential street. I still could smell Chet’s death on my hands. There was no reasoning with these assholes. You couldn’t sit down with them, have a cup of coffee and work things out. You simply had to shoot them through their thick brows and worry later about the repercussions. Contrary to popular belief, you still can’t hold a running gun battle on the streets of NYC and not suffer some legal repercussions.

“Wait!” shouted Crystal. “It’s my Uncle Ray—”

Yes, I could see him now, in the passenger seat of the Subaru, and that was Ronnie Jax driving. The entire right side of the Subaru was mashed. What happened to his Lincoln? Mafia cutbacks? Uncle Ray was motioning for us to pull over.

Crystal did so, stopping beside a fire hydrant. With my toe, I shoved the tape farther under Calabash’s seat. Uncle Ray got his elbows out of the little car and used them to pry himself the
rest of the way out. He waddled over to Crystal’s car and hauled himself in with me. It felt like an air bag had just gone off back there. From my lap, Jellyroll sniff ed him up and down. Uncle Ray was sweating profusely. It smelled faintly of marinara sauce. He wore no fancy three-piece suit now. A black-and-green running suit had taken its place. He must have ordered it from a tent store.

“They whacked Danny Barcelona,” he panted. His eyes were wide. “I gotta back off. I’m sorry.”

“What about Uncle Billy?” Crystal wanted to know.

“I ain’t found him yet, but now I gotta quit looking. Fuckin’ Danny—I used to know him—he let somebody make a movie of him doing business. They can’t have that. A smoking gun. How can they have that? So they had him whacked.”

“Who did?” I asked.

“The honchos. The heavies. The hot shits. And if they whacked Danny, they’d whack me if they even had a dream one night I knew something. So I can’t know nothing. I’m sorry. Crystal, you need to get clear away from this. It wouldn’t be a bad thing you were to get out of the country for a while. Take Billy.”

“But Uncle Ray, I don’t know where he is!”

“Listen, Crystal, I ain’t trying to be a tough guy, but at this point, you got to think Billy’s gone for good. Might never turn up. And you got to think about yourself.” Jellyroll licked Ray’s ear.

Double-parked, Ronnie was blocking traffic. Very dangerous. Obstructions make New York drivers crazy, even though there are obstructions everywhere. They began to honk long, hostile blasts. Ronnie Jax leaned out the driver’s side. “Shuddup! I’m parkin’ here!” He shook his fist at them. That annoyed me. They took the precaution of changing clothes and cars only to attract attention by starting a street altercation, the dumb fucks.

It seemed to annoy Uncle Ray, too. “Ronnie, you stupid gink, get outta the way!”

“But, boss—”

“Go around the block! Or you’ll be back pickin’ shit with the homing pigeons!”

Ronnie drove off.

“Crystal, if there’s hard evidence out there that’ll land them in the joint, they ain’t gonna ask a lot of intelligent questions before they start whacking. You got to take me serious on this.”

“I do, Uncle Ray.”

“…It’d be best if we didn’t talk for a while.”

“Okay,” said Crystal without turning around.

“Do you forgive me on this?”

“Sure, Ray.”

“You need money?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Here, take two grand.” He handed the bills to Calabash. “Good luck, sweetie—” Uncle Ray couldn’t extricate himself from the car. I gave him a shove from behind. Out, he turned around and thanked me.

No one followed us back uptown. At least, we didn’t see anybody follow us uptown.

Crystal, Calabash, and Jellyroll lined up on the bed as I inserted the tape into the mouth of the machine. I couldn’t remember my bedroom ever being so full of thick tension before. Malaise, yes, sexual longing and loneliness, certainly, but never a tension like this. We had in our hands—more precisely, in my VCR—that which all the crazies wanted, the thing for which Chet had died young. I took a seat in the gallery, aimed the remote, and pressed the button…

A snowy street in a small town. Homes bedecked with Christmas ornaments. A sign on a post: “You Are Now in Bedford Falls.”

What?

The people in the homes, solid, simple, American homes, are praying:

“God, help George Bailey.”

“He never thinks of himself, God, that’s why George is in trouble tonight.”

Then cut to the night sky, the firmament—Heaven—where God and Joseph are talking:

“Hello, Joseph, trouble?”

“Looks like we’ll have to send someone down. A lot of people are asking for help for a man named George Bailey.”

“Send for Clarence. He hasn’t earned his wings yet.”

“Hey,” said Calabash, “I saw dis movie!
It’s A Wonderful Life
.”

Crystal and I sat staring at these old, familiar images with our jaws hanging slack. Jellyroll wagged his tail at all the togetherness on the bed. George Bailey rescued his brother Harry, future war hero, from the icy pond…For a dim instant, I thought Chet must have hidden the wrong tape in his freezer.

Then the light dawned. Suddenly I understood. Even before I could sort through the twisted logic of the thing, I understood. I was certain—

There never was any tape! It never existed.

“What is this,” said Crystal, “some kind of sick joke?”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“Chet made it up.”

“What do you mean, Chet made it up?

On the beach at Fire Island, Chet had told me that his story came to a dead end “but then he heard about the tape.” He didn’t
hear
about the tape. He invented it. He invented it to shake up the principals in the story, to dislodge them from deep cover, to blow them out into the open. And it worked. He’d started a war—trouble was, he had ended up one of its casualties. Even while I thought him utterly nuts, I admired him for his dedication.

“What are you talking about!” Crystal demanded.

I had drift ed off, left her hanging.

“Chet was dying, and he knew it. He could barely talk, but he started coaching me on the contents of the tape. He told me how the assholes—Trammell, Tiny, Norm, Danny Barcelona, and the Fifth Man—were dressed, the time of day, even the color of the umbrella. Why did he waste his last breaths on that, if I could see for myself by watching the tape? Because I couldn’t watch the tape—because there never was a tape.” God and the angels watched while young George Bailey saved Mr. Gower, the distraught druggist, from ruin by not delivering those poison capsules.

“Look at it like this. Everything got started because the assholes thought there was a tape that’d incriminate them, a smoking gun, as Uncle Ray put it. Trammell decided to drown. Tiny Archibald kidnapped you as a way to get to Trammell, because he thought Trammell made the tape. Norm Armbrister showed up to help rescue you because he thought Tiny made the tape.” The dance floor parted over the swimming pool. George and Mary went in first.

Crystal was staring off, thinking. “But wait a minute. He couldn’t make up the meeting. There had to actually have been a meeting, right?”

“Yeah. Somehow Chet got wind of it. He said that the meeting took place during a garden party around Tiny’s pool. Presumably, a lot of people attended. Chet must have learned about it from one of them. He said something about a guy whose body had to be identified by dental records—”

“Great.”

Mary and George sang, “Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight, come out tonight—”

“It doesn’t make sense any other way…Something else Chet said before he died—he said, ‘If you use it right, this tape can save your lives.’ ”

“Right, it worked great for him.”

“But his purposes were different from ours. He wanted to stir things up. We want to do the opposite. I think he meant that
if they thought we had the tape, if they thought that harming us would cause the tape to go public, then they’d leave us alone.”

“Yeah, when they hear we got our own copy of
It’s a Wonderful Life
, they’ll be paralyzed with fear.”

“I love dot angel Clarence,” said Calabash.

The phone rang. “Every time a bell rings, it means an angel gets his—”

“Hello?”

“Jesus, Artie, I just heard—” It was Shelly, Jellyroll’s agent. “He actually
threw
up? Right there o on the set, he barfed it right up—?”

“Shelly, can I get back to you—?”

“I just got a call from the Mr. Big Butthole at R-r-ruff. He said Fleckton’ll never work in this town again. He’s a goner. Mr. Big said New and Improved R-r-uff ’s a goner, too. You know how he put it? He said, ‘We’re gonna have to eat this one.’ I picture the dumb fucks sitting around this big boardroom table munching tons of kibble. Tell me, Artie, was it hilarious? When he hooped?”

“It was pretty hilarious.” Poor Mr. Fleckton.

“They want to renegotiate. We’re within our rights to stick them with the rest of the contract. As Jellyroll’s agent, I suggest that we’ve got them by the short ones, and we ought to run with it.”

“Whatever you think, Shelly.”

“You okay? You don’t sound too good. Jellyroll’s okay, right?”

“Everything’s fine. I’ll get back to you.”

The phone rang again as soon as I hung up. “Hello.”

“Can I speak to Crystal, please?”

“Uncle Billy? Is that you?”

Crystal leapt up beside me.

“This is Uncle Billy. Is this Artie?”

“Yes, Billy.”

“Is Crystal there?”

I passed her the receiver.

He spoke for a while. Head bowed, Crystal listened. “Come on up, Billy.” She hung up. “What could I do?” she asked me. “He was right around the corner.”

“It’s okay.”

“There’s probably a string of assholes following him. But I couldn’t tell him to hang around on the street. Could I?”

“Of course not.”

“I gonna go down and clear de way for him,” said Calabash, sliding a gun into his waistband. I’d noticed that as time had passed, the guns Calabash stashed on his person had grown larger and larger. This one looked like a small bazooka.

I walked him to the door. “Be careful of yourself first, Calabash.”

“Don’t worry about dot.”

When I returned to the bedroom, I found Crystal supine on the bed, her arm across her eyes.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I was trying to remember what it was like. When we’d just met. When we’d make love. They took that from us.”

“I still love you.”

“You do?”

I lay down beside her. I felt inopportunely aroused.

Calabash knocked his tap-tap-tappity-tap on the front door.

I got up to open it, and Calabash ushered Uncle Billy into the room. He was the picture of contrition, hands clasped in front, head down. I wanted to say something encouraging, but I couldn’t think what.

“I hope you’re not mad at me, Crystal.”

“Don’t worry, Uncle Billy, I’m not. I’m just glad to see you safe.”

Uncle Billy, knees crackling, crouched laboriously to pet Jellyroll. I made coffee. We sat in the living room after Calabash and I dragged chairs in from the dining table.

“Where have you been, Uncle Billy?”

“I been hiding. People’ve been after me. That’s why I decided to drown…like Timmy. But that didn’t work out so good. I hid on Arnie Lovejoy’s boat—remember Arnie?—but that didn’t work out so good, either. People came. I’m tired of hiding, so I came here.” He looked from one to the other of us and, finally, even to Jellyroll. Jellyroll licked his hand. I thought Billy was going to cry. “I never loved Timmy more’n I loved you, Crystal. I loved you both.”

“I love you, too, Uncle Billy.”

“He liked me to call him Timmy. He was like a son to me.”

“Do you mind if I call him Trammell?”

“No.”

How long had it been since I’d heard a measure of jazz?

“Uncle Billy, Trammell didn’t really drown. He faked it. He stole money from thieves and had to disappear.”

“No,” said Billy categorically.

“No?”

“Timmy wouldn’t do that to me. He wouldn’t. I mean, he’d steal things. Timmy was not a good person, but he wouldn’t go away like that and not tell me where he went. We was partners. No, not Timmy. Timmy just wouldn’t.”

“You were partners?”

“Yes, partners.”

“In what?”

“Well, before Timmy drowned, he said I ought to have money for the Golden Hours and things like expenses. He put the money in a bank in Nassau, Bermuda. He said he knew he didn’t treat you too good. He said when I died, I could give the money to you, and then maybe things’d be even. See, I told Timmy I knew he didn’t treat you good as a husband, but it takes a man to be a good husband. Timmy wasn’t a man. Timmy was still a boy. That was Timmy’s problem. He did as best as boys can.”

“Uncle Billy, do you mean to say you have their money now?” Crystal asked, as if speaking to a child.

“Their money? It’s our money. Timmy gave it to us because he was sorry.”