Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery (3 page)

“Hey, Monroe, I’ll play you one game for a t’ousand,” said Ted Bundy.

“What game, Ted?”

“Nine ball. One game for a t’ousand.”

“I don’t play nine ball, Ted. Nine ball is a game for riffraff. Sheep fuckers play nine ball. I play straight pool, Ted. Only straight pool.”

“Okay, straight pool for a t’ousand.”

“You’re on, Ted.”

Nobody moved. Chinese Gordon sighed deeply and said, “Anybody wanna order out?”

Thumper hobbled back and took his place on the regulars’ bench.

“Hey, Thumper, I’ll play you one game for a t’ousand.”

“One game of what, Ted?”

“Hopscotch.”

Too Louis made the nine on the break and chortled, setting several layers of blubber twitching and pulsing.

“Hey, Too Louis,” said Viscount Pitt, “when’s the last time you saw your prick without a mirror?”

Time was running short for my fifty dollars, but Crystal hadn’t come in yet. Too Louis scuttled around the table, thighs chafing, sinking balls, and when he lacked reasonable run-out opportunities, he played smart, demoralizing safeties. My attorney seemed to be growing visibly smaller each time he stepped to the table.

Crystal Spivey walked in carrying her hand-tooled leather cue case. She wore tight jeans and an attractive fuchsia tank top with no bra. I mooned as subtly as possible. Outta-Town Brown elbowed me in the ribs and giggled.

My attorney didn’t get a shot in game five.

Savage feedback, followed by Davey: “Phone call for Ernie’s wife. Ernie’s wife, you gotta call.” Ernie’s wife had gotten good enough to beat Ernie’s brains out, so Ernie never came in anymore.

Crystal took a table by herself and began to assemble her break cue and her playing cue.

My attorney got a shot in game six, actually made two balls, the two and the three, and the rest of the table up to his seven-ball spot looked easy. He missed the four. Too Louis ran out.

Crystal was practicing by shooting the same long-rail shot time after time. With some shame, I tried to look down her top, but she was too far away.

In the next game, Too Louis made the one on the break, and the nine rolled to a stop in front of the end pocket, four inches behind the two ball. My attorney whimpered. Too Louis pounded in the two-nine combination. “Double or nothin’?” Greed seemed to make Louis lighter on his feet, almost balletic.

My attorney would actually have done it. He looked to me and made that money sign by rubbing his thumb and forefinger together.

I motioned him over. “If you don’t introduce me to Crystal Spivey right now, you’ll never get another red cent.”

“Okay, okay. But first a word.” He grasped my elbow and glanced around furtively as if somebody might be listening. He always did that as a way to enhance the significance of the bullshit he was about to shovel on the listener. “There’s something I should tell you about Crystal.”

“What?”

“She’s married.”

My heart sank.

“You’ll never imagine who to. To Trammell Weems.”

“No—!”

“God’s own. As a matter of fact, I introduced them. Trammell, of course, paid me handsomely for that service, but I wouldn’t expect the same from you. At least not until something comes of the relationship.”

I had ambivalently attended law school about a hundred years ago at a second-rate southern institution which should remain nameless. Among my fellow students, using that word loosely, were Bruce Munger and Trammell Weems. There were Weemses on the
Mayflower
. A Weems ha had signed the Declaration of Independence and served as secretary of the treasury in the Adams administration. Another from the naval side of the family fought under Farragut at Mobile Bay, charted a major chunk of Antarctica, and invented some kind of celestial-navigation wrinkle for determining longitude. And there was Thaddeus
Weems, the powerful publisher of a New York abolitionist newspaper who is supposed to have carried on a lifelong affair with Harriet Beecher Stowe.

While we were in law school, Trammell’s uncle was the senior senator from Virginia. There was also a famous Doctor Weems, who did something big in the battle against tropical disease, but I forgot just what. Then there was the famous psychologist after whom a syndrome or two were named. And, of course, the world of finance and international banking was as warm with Weemses.

Plus Trammell himself had been a child star. He played Timmy in “The Mayhews,” a sickening comedy series about family life that the entire nation watched in the early sixties. He had contacts everywhere. And he had the brains and charm to do anything he wanted, even without the heavy family connections. But Trammell wanted only to be a professional black sheep. He referred to his kin as “the inbreds.” He wanted mainly to climb up on some high place and flash obscene gestures at them, anything at all to off end, embarrass, and outrage them.

In school, he seldom bathed. His hair, tied in a ponytail with fat rubber bands, was always matted and greasy. The drunken old coach who ran the gym where we played handball insisted Trammell take showers
before
he played or go find another gym to stink up, fucking hippies. This pleased Trammell. Also, being at the bottom of the class pleased him. Only Bruce scored lower, until Trammell bribed someone to falsify Bruce’s records, moving him up out of the place Trammell viewed as his birthright.

Trammell Weems was also a doper. One of the reasons I discontinued my study of the law was that I didn’t want to be a lawyer, but another was that law school became a threat to my physical and mental health. I had a brush with dangerous drugs. So did Bruce. Trammell led the way. We lacked the character to resist. In fact, we flocked along.

“Look, students, at what I got from my cousin at the San Diego Zoo—
rhino
tranks. These soothe the savage beasts.”

There was medicinal-strength acid from the uncle-with-the-syndrome’s office, ether from the Boston School of Medicine, pure THC, Vietnamese pot, Campuchian opium mailed to us by Ambassador Weems’s assistant, Apache peyote, and a lot of pills from vets at the San Diego Zoo. The ingestion of these interfered with my understanding of jurisprudence. The law school agreed.

“Wait,” said Bruce. “Did I say Crystal was married to Trammell? I meant to say Crystal
was
married to Trammell.”

“You mean they are no longer?”

“Exactly.”

“Bruce, is this bullshit?”

“Absolutely not. Crystal Spivey and Trammell Weems were husband and wife in the sight of God. But He blinked. However, if I were you, I wouldn’t mention you knew Trammell. It’s a sore subject with her.”

Coincidences no longer surprise me. I think that at about the age when one recognizes that all governments lie, one has seen enough coincidences not to be knocked out by the next.

“Hi, Crystal—” said my attorney.

“Beat it,” said Crystal without looking up from her stance.

“Come on, Crystal, don’t be like that. I want you to meet an old friend of mine. We attended divinity school together.”

“If he’s a friend of yours, why would I want to know him?”

“I’m no friend of his,” I said. “I picked him up hitchhiking.”

Crystal peered at me. “You’re the guy who owns the R-r-ruff Dog.”

“Right. Absolutely.”

“Where is he?”

“Jellyroll,” I called. He had been lying on Ted’s shoes, but he leapt up and trotted over for me to take advantage of his household name.

Crystal knelt down to fuss over him, and he kissed her cheek. She said, “Since you’re no friend of this bum’s, maybe you want to play some. I need to beat someone for practice.”

At first I didn’t realize she was talking to me. “Sure.” Did she like me, or was she just after my dog?

Bruce hung around kibitzing for a while as Crystal and I played, but, ignored, he finally wandered off. “Excuse me,” he said, “I think I’ll just go into the john and open a vein.”

“Make sure you use the men’s john,” Crystal said.

“You play pretty good,” she said to me after she’d won the first set. I had made her work hard for it, however, and she seemed to enjoy that. I enjoyed watching her move around the table, deep in concentration, planning her moves, improvising when necessary, a lithe feline predator on the scent. Her long, fluid stroke seemed to me to be the most exciting thing I’d seen in a woman. She made the game beautiful.

I, too, was concentrating with an intensity unfamiliar to me. I had to. Whenever I made a mistake, Crystal would run the game out. We didn’t talk much, and I tried to keep her braless fuchsia tank top separate from the business at hand. Pool is not a social game when played seriously, but we were communicating. We were speaking to each other across the great green gulf.

Once while I was racking the balls after Crystal had run out from the break with textbook control over the cue ball, she knelt down to pet Jellyroll, who was lounging happily under the table. “So do you work or do you live off your dog?”

“Oh no, I’m a hard worker.”

“Yeah? At what?”

“I’m a test pilot.”

She nodded.

“Spaceships, mostly. Very dangerous work.”

Crystal broke the balls with that ferocious full-bodied snap of hers, and the nine rolled directly into the corner pocket like it had eyes and intent. She glanced up at me almost coquettishly
from under her bangs as if to say, “There, that’s what men get when they bullshit me, even in fun.” I was utterly captivated by that break of hers. I felt as I watched her break that something wonderful had come into my life, and for the moment I forgot about Trammell Weems.

She missed finally, and I got a shot. I proceeded to run out the game, cleanly, never losing control of the cue ball, machine-precise, as if I did that every day. I was out of my head.

Ted Bundy’s voice, from behind, said, “Anybody seen Artie Deemer? Glasses, geeky sort of fellow. Got a dog.”

A crowd of regulars had gathered to watch. Here and there side bets were being settled. I hadn’t even noticed their presence. The intimacy was blown.

“Are you free for dinner tonight?” I asked Crystal.

“No, but I am tomorrow night.”

“Fine, I’ll pick you up about eight. Oh, where do you live?”

“Sheepshead Bay.”

“Brooklyn?”

“Yeah, it’s one of the boroughs, south of here.” Her eyes twinkled.

“How about coming over to my place for dinner?”

“Where do you live?”

“One hundred and fourth and Riverside Drive.”

“Okay.”

How quickly life changes.

THREE

I
 FELL INTO an anxious snit. Too intimate, dinner at my place. I was getting ahead of myself, inflicting my private life on her, a virtual stranger. Besides, I wasn’t that hot a cook. The entire evening would make her nervous. We’d stare glassy-eyed at each other. She’d leave early.

Wait. Why was I being so juvenile? Weren’t we both reasonably cosmopolitan adult New Yorkers capable of at least one dinner and conversation? How hard was that?…However, I had been alone for a long time. Maybe I didn’t even know how to act around available women anymore. Maybe I’d become an eccentric hermit.

Jellyroll recognized that something big was afoot, because I cleaned house from stem to stern. He sat watching with a smile on his face, thumping his tail on the floor every time I glanced his way. He barked and snarled at the vacuum cleaner, lips curled, teeth bared, tail wagging at the same time—I unintentionally traumatized him with the vacuum cleaner when he was a tiny puppy, and now he attacks its hoses and attachments. It’s part of the routine of our lives. Cleaning accomplished, I went out to buy groceries.

One difference between New York and most other places is that in most other places you can go out to buy groceries without seeing the fabric of society unravel before your eyes. It’s one reason why New Yorkers move so quickly. The walking dead wandered Broadway shoeless. The visibly insane, with no other place to piss, pissed on the hubcaps of parked cars. Because of
the budget cutbacks, cardboard refrigerator crates had taken the place of public housing. The cruelty of class overwhelms the grocery shopper. I gave a woman with no teeth and dried shit stains on her insteps a five.

Remembering the effect Crystal’s top had on me, I bought a bouquet of fuchsia-colored anemones. Emerging from the florist’s, I ran into Seth, an embittered playwright, towing his bent shopping cart and his pale of funk. Everybody tries to duck Seth because he’s so depressing, but I kind of like him. “How’s it going, Seth?”

He stopped, rolled his eyes and sighed. “Had this staged reading last night. Broken Ass Rep. Way the fuck and gone out Queens Boulevard.”

“How’d it go?”

“Things don’t loosen up, I’m gonna have to get a job.” The very thought seemed to bring up hot bile. He grimaced.

From the island in the center of Broadway, where winos repose, Crazy Rodney jumped out in front of a northbound car with Massachusetts plates. The driver stomped the brakes, skidded to a neck-snapping halt, and Crazy Rodney, who wears a pair of found golf shoes, leapt back onto the island, cleats clattering, where he lay on his back and clutched his stomach against peals of deranged laughter. The family of faces in the Massachusetts car had turned ashen. I could see them all jabbering at once.

“Goddamnsonofabitch!” the father probably bellowed.

“Don’t say anything, Harvey! Roll up the window! That person’s obviously insane.”

“So’s this whole stinking town! Fuck you, New York!”

“Fuck you, New York,” the little towheads in the backseat began to chant, “fuck you, New York, fuck you—”

Crazy Rodney hadn’t been doing his traffic-jumping routine for a while. About a year ago, he had disappeared from the neighborhood. The life expectancy of the Rodneys in New York is below the national average, so I figured somebody had killed
him for no reason. Then Rodney returned—with a savage limp. For months, he hadn’t jumped in front of a car. He was still limping when he leapt in front of the Massachusetts car. I guess traffic-jumping is a hard habit to kick.

“That’ll be me in a few years,” muttered Seth, “things don’t loosen up. Hey, Artie, I hate to ask, but could you spot me a twenty?”