Buy Back Page 10

  We cut back to Darla in the rain, standing next to a uniformed cop who looked like brass by all the medals or whatever on his chest. His name appeared on the screen, and under that it said nypd spokesperson.

  She put the mike to him.

  “Can you tell us what the people of this besieged neighborhood should expect when the sun comes up? Is there a serial killer on the loose?”

  The cop looked like he was nursing a sore tooth, but my guess was he was tired of news reporters trying to create a panic.

  “Darla, the department has every available resource on this, and we are looking at a variety of motives and suspects at this time.”

  My door buzzer sounded. I climbed out of bed and peeked through the shutters. Doh and Crispi were on my stoop. Is that screwy or what? It was like the TV was telling me what was going to happen next.

  The cop on TV kept talking as I peeked at the detectives.

  “We don’t believe these murders were random, and we encourage the public to come forward with any information they may have about the incidents this morning and the morning before. They should call 311 if they saw anything here that may help us.”

  I shut the TV off and sat in the dark listening to the front buzzer. It stopped after ten buzzes.

  I saw a lot. I wasn’t calling 311, though. I was pulling the covers over my head and going to sleep.

  I was ready to move on to another and better day. Only I wasn’t real confident that one was in my future any time soon.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  BROOKLYN STREETS PLAY MUSIC AT night like a symphony.

  The music of human activity bops along right up until about 1:00 A.M. It’s then that the music slows. You still have the burble of people going home from bars, a car zooming down the block, the stray truck rumbling slowly on night deliveries. By 3:00 a.m.things quiet down even more. Foot and car traffic tapers off, buses rarely hum down Smith Street, and there’s only the occasional rhythmic clunk and rattle deep in the ground, the subway work trains collecting garbage. On a Tuesday night in October at 4:00 a.m., the music of the street is about as slow and quiet as it gets in Carroll Gardens. I think the guys in the front of the orchestra with the fiddles are about to nod off and the conductor can barely keep his baton in the air.

  At 6:00 a.m.the sky is waking up over the dark brownstones even if most of the apartment windows are only just beginning to light up. It’s like that moment you see on public TV when the philharmonic is about to play. The conductor suddenly taps the podium and raises his baton, ready to make some noise with the next movement. The orchestra seems to sit up straight and take a deep breath, ready to charge into the next part, something that moves and gives life. Imagine that baton-in-the-air moment being the better part of an hour, because it may last that long before the heating oil delivery trucks and trash trucks come booming down the block. Blue jays conk, crows caw, and starlings squabble. A steady flow of buses hiss down Smith Street, and the subway trains rattle the glassware. Traffic helicopters chop and chatter in the distance. This music is light but quick, letting you know that the full flush of rush hour is about to have the whole orchestra sawing and banging away at their instruments.

  So I’m suddenly like a poet or something. Well, I had a lot of time that night to listen to Brooklyn’s night quiet, and think about what it sounded like, and imagine it on public television as a symphony. Not bad for a guy with an art history degree and questionable scruples. I slept a little. Not much.

  Believe it or not, I didn’t spend the night thinking about much of anything about my predicament. I just lay there listening to Brooklyn and to myself breathe, my heart beat. The sound of me being alive. Had the punk’s aim not been put out of whack by the old lady’s broom, I wouldn’t have heard that sound anymore. I wouldn’t have been in Brooklyn, but somewhere else. On my back in a satin-lined box, a hairy-lipped woman leaning over trying to paste the pieces of my face back together.

  OK, so maybe I did think a little about my predicament. I didn’t want to end up standing around Smith Street with half my head missing. Seeing Huey like that was actually worse than seeing Jo-Ball’s tongue wiggling in the air. Like I said, it seemed humiliating. Images like that in my head, small wonder I was a little sleepless.

  I wasn’t going to let the situation get the better of me. Pop taught me not to let that happen.

  So by six I was up and making pancakes to Tito Puente’s timbales. Those are a kind of drum, sort of like congas, and nobody beat up timbales like Tito. The album was from the fifties, called Night Beat, all instrumental. Tito’s drums beat out a rhythm that argued with trumpets, fought with saxophones, back and forth, with little side commentary by guitar and piano. There was something driving and urgent about this music. It was much darker than Prado and especially Cugat. Dark and urgent. That’s how I felt.

  I ate a pile of pancakes and drank black coffee.

  I showered, shaved, and put on a brown suit, one with a vest.

  By eight I was in the lobby of the Williamsburg Savings Bank pointing a twenty at the guard. I had my back to the stream of people flashing their IDs over the automatic gates so they couldn’t see my motivational tool.

  “I’m looking for a guy who visited the building yesterday. I want to know which office he went to.”

  I was faced with a black woman with a wide jaw and beaded hair. Her uniform was only half as tight as she made the corners of her eyes.

  She says, “Who are you?”

  So I says, “I’m one of those people who looks for people but nobody knows I was ever there. Except the one person with the extra cash.”

  She curled her lip at the twenty but glanced nervously to either side. “Who do you think you are?”

  “Look, darling, you can either help me or I’ll come back later and find someone who will. You know your fellow employees. You seriously think one of them wouldn’t like to make a fast buck and flip through the images of that security camera? Either you take this or one of them will. Makes no difference to me except I have to come back. But that’s what I do. Twenty bucks for five minutes is two hundred and forty bucks an hour.”

  We both looked over at the camera positioned on the security dais. It looked like a softball with a camera lens in the front. Visitors to the building stood in front of it holding a driver’s license and told the camera who they were there to visit. Or in some places they just take the picture to print out a building pass with your photo on it. Either way, the photo of Huey would have a company name attached. As soon as I came in and saw the camera, I knew they had the information I wanted on their system. Maybe they even had as far back as Ms. French.

  The woman kind of growled, but I don’t think it was at me. She slid next to the computer and said, “Time?”

  “How far back does it record?”

  “Forty-eight hours.”

  Like I figured. Sunday, the day Ms. French had breakfast with Jo-Ball and then came here, was recorded over. I was kicking myself for not coming to Billy Bank before. At least Monday afternoon, when Huey came to get his money, would be on the security hard drive.

  “Monday, around four in the afternoon. You can’t miss him. He has short white hair, but he isn’t that old.”

  She poked at the keyboard with long fingernails, the kind with custom paint jobs. Then she pointed one of those nails at the screen and said, “LaMouche? Huey LaMouche?”

  “That’s him.”

  She waddled back over to me, examining the rank and file behind me shoving through the turnstiles. Finally her eyes met mine again. “You must think I’m cheap.”

  “Sweetheart, I’ll be honest. You seem like a nice person in a job that isn’t so great. Your boss is a jerk.”

  She stares at me a moment and says, “How you know all this?”

  So I says, “I can see it in your face.”

  Of course, all I was doing is what fortune-tellers do: tell people the story of the human condition. Almost everybody hates their boss, and
fewer still ever really dreamed of becoming a security guard. Frankly, she looked like she thought she deserved better. How? Maybe it was the fingernails.

  “I make closer to five hundred an hour,” she says.

  I held out my other hand, where only she could see it. It had another twenty in it.

  I says, “See? I even knew you were smart.”

  Flattery is everybody’s friend.

  She practically smiled when she made the two twenties do a vanishing act. “He went to Dunwoody Exports, fourteenth floor.”

  I practically smiled back at her. “We never met.”

  I left Billy Bank then because I couldn’t exactly dash upstairs at that time without that security guard worrying I’d make some sort of trouble. Besides, I needed to find out more about Dunwoody Exports before I went barging in there.

  On the street, I found a coffee cart at the corner, and I bought a cup. The sun shone low on Flatbush Avenue, Manhattan orange and twinkling in the distance. I sipped my coffee in the shadow of the cart, wishing I could have Blaise put a man out front of the building to watch for Ms. French, but Garrison’s description was too weak to make the ID.

  Skip, my nephew, would be the right man for this project. OK, so “man” might be stretching it a little. He’s thirteen, going on forty. I pushed some buttons on my phone.

  “Hullo, Uncle Tommy.”

  “Skip?”

  “How many people call you Uncle Tommy, Uncle Tommy?”

  “You have a point. Just didn’t sound like you.”

  “I’m eating cereal.”

  “Explains it.”

  “And they put braces on me.”

  “Sorry to hear that, Skip.”

  “And my voice is changing.”

  “That happens.”

  “Why didn’t you text me?”

  “I don’t text. I only e-mail.”

  “Well, hello Mr. Caveman!”

  “I can only keep up with so much technology.”

  “Let me guess: You need something?”

  “It’s not your birthday.”

  “That was last month, and you didn’t call then, either.”

  “You want some work or not, Skip?”

  “Sure, yeah, why not.”

  “Got a pen?”

  “I got a brain.”

  This kid, my nephew, he had some kind of mouth, didn’t he? I don’t know if it comes across, but he was pretty sarcastic. Maybe I was a smart ass to adults when I was a kid, but I’m an adult, and this crap from a nephew can be pretty annoying. I let it go because I wasn’t raising him, and I needed his help.

  So I says, “Dunwoody Exports. They have offices in the Williamsburg Savings Bank, in Brooklyn.”

  “Oh, is that where the Williamsburg Savings Bank is?”

  You want to smack kids sometimes, don’t you? But it’s best not to act out with the youngsters, so they tell me.

  “Get me everything you can on these guys, this afternoon if you can.”

  “Want me to tell Mom I need to skip class so I can make your deadline?”

  “Skip, take it from me. Sarcasm is bad karma. If you want forty, make it this afternoon. Thirty if it’s tomorrow.”

  I killed the call before he could make another smart remark.

  Kid was a jerk. Made sense, though. His dad, Ralphie, who sold cars out in Bay Ridge, he was a jerk, too. Felt a little sorry for my sis, Kate, but she’s the one who married Ralphie, her choice, her problem.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  THERE ARE A LOT OF things screwy about funerals. For me, it’s having all those people from different parts of your life together in one room, next to each other. Friends, relatives, acquaintances all bunched up together. In Brooklyn, even more. The guy who slices your ham real thin at the deli, who you know only as Bobby, he will show up to your funeral. In Brooklyn, people go to funerals of friends’ parents or uncles who they may have never met. My accountant goes to the funerals of his client’s relatives. So you get the picture. A Brooklyn funeral can get crowded, and with faces that are so out of place that you don’t recognize the person. It’s a little embarrassing. I arrived on time, 10:30 A.M.

  My neighborhood is known in certain circles for art thieves, and others for Italian pastry, and in still others for the many fine funeral homes. How this came to be, I don’t know, but we have something like eight in a ten-block radius. All Italian. Back in the day, a mobster got shot up, there were big traffic jams around here. The B75 bus had to be temporarily rerouted, and there would be a line of cars over to Green-Wood Cemetery, which is a mile away or more in Sunset Park. The hearse would be passing through the cemetery’s stone archway just as the last flower wagon was leaving Viscotti’s.

  You should see Viscotti’s. It’s on the corner, sort of a brownstone mansion four lots wide surrounded by an ornate black iron fence. There’s a big garden out front with a fountain and a pond and a boatload of ivy. At night it all lights up with little white lights. It’s pretty, but in a dark and kind of spooky way, even during the day. I guess it wouldn’t make sense for a funeral home to look like an Easter parade.

  I know that in other parts of the country it may be customary to have funerals at a church. We do that sometimes. Brooklyn was going on three million citizens, and on its own was bigger than all but three other U.S. cities. I kid you not. With weddings and baptisms and Saint This Day and Saint That Day, the churches had a lot on their plate with fried salami on the side.

  There was a line to get into Viscotti’s that wound out the gate and down the sidewalk. I guess mourners started lining up early to get a good seat. The people in front and in back of me—I didn’t know them. There was a side entrance for the family, people on the VIP list. The chapel at Viscotti’s was pretty big, though I guessed at a certain point they turned people away when the place got full.

  The line inched forward, and I had time to check out what was what.

  Down the block across Court Street at the deli I could see one ofthose unmarked police cars. Sitting inside was Doh, his arm hanging out the driver’s window, a cigarette dangling from his fingers. In the passenger seat was the silhouette of Crispi with binoculars. I guessed they could see me, so I waved. Doh pointed his cigarette at me and then went back to puffing on it. It was like he was saying We’ll see you afterward.

  I could only imagine the questions they wanted to ask me. Unless they had me dead to rights on chasing that kid, I wasn’t going to tip. One school of thought might be to tell the detectives everything I knew about the kid so they’d catch him and I wouldn’t have to. It might save my life, right, I mean if the kid was gunning for me?

  Picture this. The fuzz put their hooks into the punk. He starts talking, maybe to try to save his toast from being burned on death row. He’ll tip on who hired him, and why he exploded these guys’ heads. To do that would be to probably explain to the police all he knew about the art theft world in the neighborhood.

  That would include explaining my part in it.

  Strictly speaking, my profession is a hundred percent legal. OK, sure, my recent activity pushed things, but that was temporary, to raise the money to pay back the loan on the mud flap girl, Yvette. Just the same, if the cops threw out a net over all the goofballs around Carroll Gardens, I could see how I might have a lot of explaining to do. To be honest, it would also ruin my career. I had a vested interest in a healthy art theft industry. That may sound selfish at the expense of fine art, or the museums, or whatever. Trust me: If they grabbed all the goofballs in South Brooklyn, it wouldn’t matter. Within a year there’d be another neighborhood full of goofballs. Maybe in Sunset Park or Windsor Terrace. So what’s the difference?

  The difference is I got to stay in the game. At least until I could pay off the pink monkey.

  The line had moved me to the front gate of Viscotti’s when my phone buzzed. It was Blaise.

  So I says, “What’s up?”

  He says, “Heh. A lot is up. I see one of the dudes we followed
went belly up. Is there exposure, Tomsy? Give it to me straight.”

  He wanted me to tell him if there was any connection between me and Huey’s head exploding.

  “No direct exposure.”

  “Talk to me, Tomsy.” That sounded a little like a warning.

  “I didn’t tweak him. Something I’m working on may have something to do with it, though.”

  “You about to get hooked? Don’t want your phone falling prey, coming to me.”

  “Am I a kid, Blaise?”

  “Happened to many a man.”

  “I’ll throw it in the canal before I’d let them get my phone, and besides I know my rights.”

  “Good to know. I got a right to be careful.”

  “I look out for my friends, you know that. Life is all about keeping friends and avoiding enemies.”

  “Like I said, I got a right to be careful.”

  “OK, I understand. You’re smart.”

  “Heh.”

  “I’ll probably need more help with this over the next couple days. Still open for business?”

  “I’ll take your calls, Tomsy. Look, I didn’t call just to razz you. Blaise may have something that could help. Lost and found—but there’s a heavy price.”

  “Explain.”

  “I think somebody lost something yesterday in all the excitement.”

  “Explain.”

  “It’s black and dangerous.”

  “I’m a clever man, Blaise—”

  “Heh. I know, but not too smart sometimes. This missing item was found under a car. On Sackett. One of my peeps bought it from a ragman.”

  The punk’s gun. A ragman is someone who picks bottles out of the trash. One of them must have found it and tried to sell it down at the projects.

  “Damn, Blaise. That’s an important missing item.”

  “That’s why I’m calling you. The man don’t pay, and it’s too hot for the street. Nothing like it around here. German.”