Plainclothes Naked (24 page)

“Well why else would these be in the glove compartment?”

“Oh
fuck!
” Tony poked at the scab under his nostrils, then fumbled in the baggie and dug out a soggy rock. He managed to light up and take a weak hit before the pipe sputtered out.
“Fuck!”
He gagged after a brief coughing fit. “She musta sent this Lipton guy to scope us out.” Tony dabbed blood from his ear with Lipton’s business card as Mayor Marge’s Caddy inched past. “She’s probably seen us, too. Now we have to
kill
her! Where’s my piece?”

“Are you
insane?
” McCardle twisted his buff torso on the seat and grabbed Zank’s shoulders. “You can’t just kill her! She’s not some ho bag, man, she’s the mayor.”

“Don’t
touch
me,” Zank erupted, and shoved him away. “Didn’t I tell you before? Don’t
ever
fucking touch me!”

“Okay, okay! I’m just trying to de-chill you, bro.You can’t go ’round

killin’ mayors ’n shit. Besides, all we gotta do is get the damn photo, then trade it for green. We don’t have to kill nobody.” McCardle brightened suddenly and bounced in his seat. “Hey, who knows, maybe our girl already collected on the nut-shot. Did our business for us. Heck,T-bone, she done that, all we gots to do is swoop in, take her off for the cash, and get the fuck out of Dodge.”

Zank eyed him for a second, then nodded grudgingly. “You know, when you’re not hallucinating rock-goblins or tryin’ to prang me up the butt, you’re not half stupid.”

McCardle, blushing, kept his eyes straight ahead.

1818 Pike, the address on Carmella’s driver’s license, was located smack in the center of Grimston, Butt-burg’s perennial poverty pocket, a four-block enclave of falling-down row houses carved up into two rat-infested apartments, each holding an entire extended family or two. About half the residents were Puerto Rican, half dirt-poor hillbillies up from Appalachia. Over the years, the two had intermingled, lending the neighborhood a whole new breed of fearsome shit-kickers, known locally as “Puerto-billies.”
‌

Manny swung the Impala to a stop by a beat-to-hell house with the bottom half of a truck on its axles in the dirt patch where the yard used to be. “Ever been down here?”

“Don’t ask,” said Tina. “I wasn’t always the glamorous rest home attendant you see before you.”

The pair picked their way through the rutted mud, stepping through an obstacle course of mangled tricycles, a three-wheeled wagon, and a mysterious scattering of doll parts, mostly arms and torsos.

“This is 1818,” said Manny, shouldering the door open. Tina followed gamely. “Don’t believe in doorbells?”

Manny checked out the row of name slots by the tarnished buzzers. “They’re always broken. All these places are run by slumlords. Nothing works. Besides, who’s gonna open up for a cop? ’Cause, believe me, they’ll know I’m out here.”

Tina unsnagged the sleeve of her blouse from a nail in the wall. “What’s wrong with phoning?”

Manny shook his head. “Hanky calls are always in person. Official policy. You can’t just phone somebody up and say, ‘Hi, it’s the police, we just wanted to let you know your mother was stabbed to death. Have a nice day!’ ” He stopped talking and looked glumly around the dark vestibule. “The trick is trying to find the right door to bang on.” Just then two small boys, one smacking the other one with a stick, both sporting shaved heads and pants so baggy they showed their butt—

cracks, tore past without looking up.

“Whoa, whoa,” said Manny, grabbing the stick-wielder by the scruff of his flannel shirt. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The kid raised his serious brown eyes with something like pity. “Whatchu think I’m doin’? I’m beatin’ his ass!”

“Terrific,” Manny said.

Tina kneeled down in front of the junior perp, who made no secret of peeking at her cleavage. “You gonna smoke him or just fuck him up?”

The boy broke into a yellow-toothed grin. “Fuck him up.”

They shared a wholesome laugh over that, before the kid came back at her. “You got nice titties. You the po-lice?”

Tina feigned shock. “I oughta smack your face! I’m lookin’ for my cousin. Carmella Dendez?”

The boy nodded, considering. “I got fifteen cousins. Used to be sixteen. But one live in a cardboard box down by the railroad tracks. He’s a poo-butt. We don’t count him.”

“I wouldn’t either,” said Tina. “So you know my cousin?

Carmella?”

The boy stuck his pinkie in his mouth and started chewing, work ing hard around the nub of the nail. He scoped out Manny.
“You
the po-lice?”

“He’s with me,” Tina said, straightening the boy’s collar and but toning a button he missed.

“Well. . . .” The boy’s jelly-stained mouth formed a calculating smirk. “It’s maybe I do know and it’s maybe I don’t.”

Tina winked at Manny, who pulled a short stack out of his pocket and peeled off a five. Tina took the bill and waved it in front of the jun ior informer. He snatched it and held it up to the watery ceiling light, just like the grown-up fourteen-year-olds when some big spender gives them a C-note for rock. The boy’s older brother, L’il Pepe, had been working a corner right by his school, Clemente Elementary, for two years, and sometimes slipped him a twenty for working lookout. But he didn’t mention that to the two strangers standing in his build ing. “Looks okay, I guess.” He jammed the cash in his pants. “But I don’t know no Carmella.”

“You sure?” Tina showed Manny her palm and he slapped down another fin.

“My friend T. C.,
his
name be Dendez,” the boy confided, keeping his voice low as he grabbed the second five. “He live right up the top of the steps.” He hesitated, whacking at a crumpled paper on the floor with his stick, then added, “Don’t say I told you,’kay? Sometimes they give me supper.”

“C’mere Shorty,” said Tina, and pulled the little boy into her chest.

She hugged him until Manny had to tap her shoulder.

When she let him go, the boy dawdled. “You gonna come back?” “I might move in!”

“Cool,” he cried, then scooted off down the hall.

They climbed the rotten steps and stopped at the top. Manny cast his eyes at the two apartment doors on either side of the narrow hall. One was slightly ajar. “You’ve got hidden skills,” he said. “That little gangster’s ready to go home with you.”

“Yeah, well in two months he’d dump me for some other mommy. Men are all the same.” Tina pointed to the unlocked door. “This one.”

“How do you know?”

“They got a kid running in and out. It’s too big a pain in the ass to keep locking and unlocking.”

Shaking his head, Manny knocked gently, careful not to push the door open. They heard heavy footsteps. The door swung back and an overweight teenager holding a math book squinted at them through thick glasses. “Can I help you?”

Manny took a deep breath. “We’re here about Carmella Dendez?” “Who?”

Before Manny could explain further, the boy closed his oversize eyes and yelled. “There’s somebody at the door!”

Manny stepped back, embarrassed, while Tina watched with amuse ment. A second later, a slightly older and flabbier version of the teenager pulled the door all the way open. The man looked to be in his early twenties, and had a napkin tucked in the collar of a brown work-shirt with
HECTOR
stitched on one pocket and
ROTO
-
ROOTER
on the other. His glasses, if anything, were thicker than the first boy’s, like the Plexiglas that protected cab drivers from stray bullets.

“Yes?” he said.

“I’m Detective Rubert,” said Manny, doing his best to sound offi cial without being threatening. “And this is Mrs. Podolsky. She’s a social worker. I was wondering if we could come in. It’s about your mother.”

“My mother?”

“Right. Is your name Dendez?” “Yeah, but—”

“Please,” said Manny, “is it all right if we come in?”

Hector shrugged a
would-it-matter-if-I-said-no?
shrug and stepped aside. The front room was tiny and neat. A threadbare brown couch and matching BarcaLounger faced a portable television with balled-up tinfoil on the antenna. An old-fashioned TV tray stood before the chair, to which the teenaged boy had returned with his homework. An Anglo Jesus, wilted palm leaf tucked in the frame, gazed dolefully down from the wall over the whole scene. Then a third man clomped in from the kitchen. Number Three was a still fatter and older variation on the first two. His pocket said
LOUIE
. They were fellow Roto-Rooters. Manny thought he could see some resemblance to Carmella.

“Like I was saying, I’m Detective Rubert, and this is, uh, Mrs. Podolsky. We’re here because we have some news about your mother.”

“How do you do?” said Tina.

The two standing brothers exchanged glances. The teenager blinked his magnified eyes from the recliner.

“Look, Detective, there must be some mistake,” said Louie, the biggest Dendez. He was holding a half-eaten barbecued chicken wing, which Manny recognized as a Babe’s, from Babe’s Pico-Rico BBQ. Manny’d eaten maybe five hundred of those wings himself, when he was still in uniform. Merch used to have them for breakfast, washed down with Schlitz.

The portly chicken-eater gave Manny a look that was equal parts quizzical and threatening.

“Yeah, man. Gotta be a mistake,” his brother Hector seconded. “Well, that’s what we’re here to find out,” said Manny.

Before anybody could say anything else, Tina asked if she could sit down. Hector and Louie, clearly unnerved, mumbled something that sounded like “Sex is the way,” though Manny figured it must have been “Guess it’s okay.” He couldn’t tell. He didn’t really listen to the words, only how they muttered them. Something was off. It was nor mal to be awkward when weird, official-looking white people barged into your home. But this was different. Manny saw how both men fid geted and stole glances at Tina. Louie took a bite of chicken and then, as if caught doing something dirty, placed the wing in an ashtray and grabbed the napkin out of his brother’s shirt to cover it up.

Tina took a seat on the couch, and Manny eased himself down on the other end. With nowhere to sit unless they squeezed between them, Louie and Hector remained standing, shifting from foot to foot in their steel-toed boots.

“Well,” said Manny, “we might as well get to it.”

Nobody said anything, so he pulled out the snapshot of Carmella he’d taken from her wallet. In the picture, she was poured into a tight electric-green dress and spiked heels. But now that he was here, he wished he’d just brought her driver’s license. With her hair piled up in that towering beehive, her lips a flaming scarlet, and her hands at her mouth as if blowing kisses to a bevy of appreciative fans, Carmella might have passed for a full-bodied but vivacious salsa legend. Either

that or a burly stripper with her clothes still on. Manny stole a glance at the brothers before handing it over.

“Okay,” he said, as evenly as possible. “I want you all to take a look.”

“But this is
wrong!
” It was the youngest son, eyes bulging through those coke-bottle spectacles. He spoke up in a tremulous voice. “Our mother passed away, like, six years ago.” He glanced nervously at Hec tor and Louie. “She got the female cancer right after she had T. C., my baby brother.”

Manny was not sure what to say. But Tina, smiling as she had at the junior
vato
in the hall, seemed perfectly assured. She oozed concern. “I’m really sorry,” she said to the boy. “What did you say your name was?”

The youngster looked at his big brothers, who nodded permission. “Enrique, but my mom always called me Gordo, ’cause I was fourteen pounds when I was born.”

“Well, Gordo,” said Tina, “let me tell you what we’re doing. A lady named Carmella Dendez passed away a couple of days ago. Since she had this address on her driver’s license, we thought she lived here. That’s why we came over. We have to find out who this lady is. Do you understand?”

“I guess so.”

“Good.” Tina took the photo from Manny and handed it to the boy. “So this is definitely not your mother?”

Gordo stared at the picture, his eyes swelling to the size of ostrich eggs. Something clicked in his throat. His mouth began to quiver, and there was a brief, dizzying pause before he screamed. “No, no! Hector, Louie....
No!
”

The youth shoved the picture back at Tina, then bolted from his chair, upsetting his TV tray. He ran from the room with his hand over his mouth. In seconds, the sound of violent retching filled the apart ment. Hector, looking furious, stepped forward, snatched the picture out of Tina’s hand, and held it up.
“Mother of Jesus!”
he muttered, then backed into the BarcaLounger and collapsed. His face flushed and he began breathing rapidly. Averting his eyes, he passed the photo to his older brother, who stared at it and went red.

“What is this,” Louie demanded, “some kind of joke?”

A sharp spasm stabbed Manny in the gut. He realized what had happened. But it was too late. Louie was charging, and Hector jumped off the chair to hold him back. The large man’s face contorted, wet with tears. Veins bulged like plump worms under his temples. Still in a headlock, Louie waved the photo in the air and shouted at them. “This is my father! My
father,
you hear me! What did you
do?
”

Before their eyes, Louie’s rage gave way to fear and shame and some mutant emotion there wasn’t any name for. His sobs tore out of him in great, strangling heaves, and Hector joined in. The brothers stood together, crying in each other’s massive arms.

Manny knew he should say something, but what? “I’m sorry for your loss?” “Your father died a happy woman?” He sat there, morti fied, trying not to dwell on why he, Manny Rubert, of all the bent and depresso cops in the world, should be the one who had to walk into this dingy apartment and tell three boys that their daddy had become their mommy and died. Not that Manny’s angst mattered much to Hector, Louie, or Gordo. They’d have their own weird demons to wrestle with the rest of their lives. All Manny had to do was make it out of there and gulp some codeine. No doubt he’d feel fine in a decade or two.