“You won’t, ’cause he ain’t done it. You got his prints on the gun?”
“No, but-”
“You got mine?”
“Yeah, but I saw you pick it up!”
“Can you prove that’s when them prints come from? Nah, forget it, I know you can’t. I shot the old lady and I give you the gun, with my prints from when I done it.”
“Rex,” the white cop said from his beat-up desk, “you did this, tell us why.”
“He was robbing her,” said the black cop. “Wanted her pocketbook.” Way he said it, it was clear to Rex he wasn’t buying that.
“Uh-uh,” Rex said. “Not that. ’Cause she look like Berniece, that’s the reason right there.”
“Who’s Berniece?”
“Skinny-ass bitch that sent me up.”
Something looked over at Something Else and Rex knew he had them.
“Fuck,” Rex said. “Why you think I been jerking you ass-holes around? Do that kid a favor? Why I’m gonna do that? Do I owe him something?
“Then why’d you change your mind and give us the gun?”
“You was gonna take me in! I thought I could give you some bullshit story, put my hands on the gun so you’d think my prints come from then, and you’d be dumb enough to buy it.”
The white one flushed. “And why’re you having a change of heart now?”
Rex shrugged. “Didn’t expect you to be so dumb to where you gonna go pick up that kid. He all right, that boy. Ain’t done nothing.”
“So you’re just gonna give it all up? You’re gonna go back inside, just like that?”
“Shit,” Rex said. He thought about the room with the roaches, the job with the sawdust. He thought about the Landry boy’s eyes.
He thought about things that wasn’t there before someone made them, and he thought about the pressure building, building.
“I was going back in, sooner or later,” he said. “I got tired of it, is all.”
“Well, damn,” the cop said. “What the hell, garbage is garbage, I guess. If we can’t get one of those kids, I suppose we’ll take you.” He looked over to Something’s desk and waited for the brown teeth to smile. “All right,” the white teeth said, “if that’s what you want, I’ll book you. That it, Rex?”
“Yes,” said Rex, and added, not to neither of these fools, but to himself, definitely to himself, “sir.”
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENT IN NEW YORKBY JUSTIN SCOTT
Chelsea
I will cut her heart out,” Tommy King announced in a loud, clear voice, placing near equal emphasis on each word.
I said, “You shouldn’t be saying that.”
“Who you going to tell?”
“See the blondes at the bar? How do you know one of them’s not a cop? Or a cop’s sister looking to get him promoted?”
Tommy King lowered the decibels to a vodka mutter. “Whoa. Almost blew it. Thanks, Joe.”
We were seated at a four top in the back of Morans, an expensive Irish joint on Tenth in Chelsea around the corner from what I was already thinking of as “my apartment.” Which was premature, considering how negotiations had gotten jammed up. Tommy King was the real estate agent who had steered me to it after a six-month search. The table was roomy because he always reserved for three and gave his name as “Dr.” King.
“I don’t want to give the cops any ideas. Shouldn’t even tell you.” He was finishing off his second martini, not drunk enough to ignore. I was used to his harping on his ex-wife, but suddenly he was vicious, gripping my arm and pulling me close to whisper, “I’m going to buy a surgeon’s scalpel.
What she did to me. I just have to figure out how not to get caught-What’s the matter? You’ve never been mad enough to kill anybody?”
Hoping to shift the subject from ex-wife killing back to business, I said, “Right this minute I could kill the owner of that apartment.”
“No, no, no. Jesus H., don’t even say such a thing.” He ducked lower. “You don’t want to do that. Kill him and you’ll end up negotiating with his heirs. I’m telling you, heirs are the worst. Soon as they inherit free money, it’s not enough.”
“It’s the most beautiful apartment in New York.”
“I used to say that about my wife. The most beautiful woman in New York. She still is, I’ll give her that. Opens up that big smile of hers, she lights the whole street.”
“I didn’t realize you were still seeing her.”
“From a distance. You have to get right in her face to see the evil.”
Tommy waved his glass for a third drink.
I stood up. I’d heard enough evil-ex for one night. From a distance almost sounded like he was stalking her. “I’m out of here. We’ll go up again tomorrow, right?”
“Seven p.m.”
“Why so late?”
“He wants you to see the sun changing colors on the Empire State Building.”
“He’s enjoying jerking me around.”
Tommy put down his glass and said, seriously, “Two things you want to keep in mind, Joe. He can only jerk you around if you show him he’s getting to you. And, he knows what he’s got.”
“What’s that?”
“What you just said, man. The most beautiful apartment in New York.”
It was a walk-up. And the kitchen was a bad joke.
It ran the full length and breadth of the parlor floor of a Greek Revival town house built in 1840. It had two fireplaces and nine-foot ceilings. Listed as a one-bedroom, it had the extra nooks and crannies you find in an old house. One would hold a desk. Another, the upright piano I’d had in storage since I came to New York. It had a view in the back of narrow gardens and a view out front, across the street, of a gigantic plane tree in a green field beside a gothic stone seminary whose church, gardens, and dormitories occupied the entire block from Ninth to Tenth Avenues.
The plane tree spread its branches in a hundred-foot circle that screened the only ugly thing in view, the seminary’s 1960s-modern three-story office complex that had all the charm of a suburban elementary school. When I asked how the church had skated it past the Landmark Commission-which maintained strict architectural control of historic blocks like this one-Tommy had answered, “This city was built on loopholes.” The tree blocked most of it. Above the tree the Empire State Building sailed into the sky like a vertical ocean liner.
“Hard to believe you’re in the city,” said Richard, the owner. Richard had renovated the building forty years ago when-he told me every time I went back for another look-brave pioneers could buy crumbling property on a dangerous street for what today would buy a time-share in a parking garage. He had knocked down rooming house partitions and opened it up into floor-throughs, occupying the ground floor himself and renting the rest. Now, old and Florida-bound in a booming market, he had emptied the rentals by the simple expedient of jacking the rent to Park Avenue penthouse rates and had sold the third, fourth, and attic floors. “Mine” was the last and most expensive, since, Richard assured me, it was the best.
His negotiating strategy was effective, and downright intimidating. I had instructed Tommy to offer forty thousand less than his exorbitant asking price, then Richard raised his asking price by forty, making it insanely exorbitant. I should have walked away. Instead, I walked in at 7 o’clock, agreed that it was hard to believe we were in the city, and admired the light on the Empire State Building shift color from a metallic tan to red to blue-gray as the sun crept past the city.
It took a while, but Richard was in no rush. He was a non-stop talker who loved a captive audience. He told me that the reason the staircase sagged was some idiot had cut a main beam in the basement while running a new sewer line when they converted the original town house into a rooming house for the dockworkers back in World War II. He told me he put a new roof on the building. He told me that a disused air shaft could be converted to a kitchen exhaust fan in “your apartment.”