“I know lots of people, Kalisha, but I’m most interested in Malik’s friends.”
“Look, I told y’all, I don’t know nothing ’bout friends.”
“Then where’d he get the money for the coke?”
She checked her watch again. “Look, my john-I mean my new man gonna be here any second. Won’t look good, me standing here talking with you. Can’t we talk another time?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow.”
“When I say tomorrow, it’s not a question. I’ll meet you at this corner at two.”
“Okay, then, just get outta here now.”
I did as she asked, retreating into the shadows across the street. I turned to look back at the hard girl. Yet, as hard as she was, Kalisha just seemed a sad, bitter woman from the darkness in which I now stood. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old and life had already beaten all the good out of her. I couldn’t help but wonder what another twenty-five years would do to her. What small percentage of her soul would remain? I needn’t have worried.
I heard the rumble of a loud engine coming down Surf Avenue. Even before its brakes squealed and the car pulled over, I knew something was wrong. But what? I couldn’t seem to think fast enough. My head was foggy, my mouth dry, my heart racing. What’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s wrong? It rang in my head like church bells. Kalisha took a step toward the passenger door and stopped. Her face went from falsely happy to blank to genuinely panicked. The car! I recognized the car. It was the same Camaro that had tried to make me its new hood ornament.
“Look-”
Before I got the second syllable out of my mouth or taken a full step, the barrel of a shotgun stuck through the open window of the passenger door. There were two flashes and roars. Kalisha’s head fairly exploded and her lifeless torso sat down, one rubber leg under her, the other kicked out toward Sea Gate. The Camaro gunned its engine and fishtailed, smoking its back tires as it went.
I was swimming in quicksand as I came back across the street. The acrid cloud of burned rubber swallowed up the twin puffs of gun smoke like finger food, and its stink overwhelmed the cordite, the sea, the stench of human waste. Strangely, I could still smell grace notes of Kalisha’s grassy perfume, although the neck and ears on which she’d
I ran to my car and took off. No lights had come on since the shooting. No new faces had appeared in second floor windows, at least none I could see. They were there all right. When the cops showed, no one would have heard or seen a thing. When I was on the job, I used to think the lack of cooperation was just pure hatred of the cops. Not anymore. Some of it was hatred and resentment, sure, but mostly it was resignation. This is how life worked. This is how it was in the Soul Patch. What was another dead nigger? What was another murdered prostitute to the cops?
As I tore down the street, I once again found myself thinking of Israel Roth and Auschwitz. “You can get used to anything,” he’d say. “The very essence of humanity is adaptability. Some people think it’s what makes us great. Me, I think it’s a curse. There are things we shouldn’t be able to live with.”
I also thought of Mable Broadbent. What would she do with her grief now that Kalisha was dead?
I found the Camaro down by Coney Island Creek. As I turned the corner it was already in flames. And when I saw the long, wet rag sticking out of where the gas cap should have been, I knew it was only a matter of seconds until the whole thing blew apart. It didn’t disappoint. For decades, the city used to have free firework displays along the boardwalk on summer Tuesday evenings. Those displays were fun, but nothing compared to an exploding Chevrolet. I split before New York’s Bravest and Finest appeared.
I used a booth on Mermaid Avenue and got Melendez at home. If I felt weirder making a call in my life, I’d be damned if I could remember it. For fuck’s sake, talk about mixed emotions. My guts were twisted in bunches. I had stood there for five minutes with the phone in my hand, rehearsing what to say. But there was no rehearsing a conversation that might cover lust, guilt, murder, and betrayal. When she picked up, I found I could not speak.
“Moe, Moe is that you?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t hate me?”
“I feel a lot of things about you, Carmella, but hate isn’t one of ’em. I think I wish it was. Things would be easier that way.”
“You were all I thought about today.”
I ignored that in self-defense. “That’s about to change.”
“Why?”
“Malik’s girl, Kalisha. .”
“What about her?”
“Someone blew her head off with a shotgun about fifteen minutes ago.”
“How’d you find out?”
“I was standing across the street.”
“What happened?”
“We talked, Kalisha and me, and we agreed to meet again to talk some more. I walked toward my car and that Camaro that tried to run me down the other day pulled up. She walked over to the passenger door and. . Bang! Bang! She was a mess. I found the Camaro in flames over by the creek.”
“Why kill the girlfriend?”
“I’ve got some ideas about that. You on tomorrow?”
“Uh huh.”
“Think you can get away from Murphy for lunch?”
“I’ll call you.”
“Okay.”
“Moe.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
I said I did, but I didn’t know a goddamned thing anymore.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mundane.
Given that in the last few days Larry Mac had either been killed or killed himself, that someone had tried to kill me, that I’d kissed Carmella Melendez, and that I’d witnessed a woman’s head being blown off and was reading about it at the breakfast table, you’d think mundane would be the last word to come to mind. But I had a family and a business and a house and taxes to pay. I had pancakes to serve to a little girl and I had to catch the mailman.
“Yo, Joey!”
But when Joey the mailman turned around, he wasn’t Joey. Years ago, there was a local New York kids’ show called The Merry Mailman. Well, not only was this guy not Joey, but he was as merry as a mortuary.
“Sorry,” I said, handing him some letters to be mailed.
“Gee, thanks, just what I need.”
I let that go.
“Did your neighbors move?” he asked.
“The Bermans? Yeah, they moved down to Boca about two weeks ago. Why?”
“Look at this crap!” Mr. Mortuary said, shoving a fistful of envelopes at me. “I have to carry all this shit around with me all day because some idiot screwed up their change of address card.”
I was seriously considering telling this numbnuts to go fuck himself, but thought better of it. You never want to piss a waiter off before he brings you your meal and you never want to screw with the mailman after you’ve just handed him the envelope containing your mortgage payment.
“Have a nice day. .” Asshole!
When I got back inside, Sarah was talking to someone on the phone. “Un huh. . Yeah, I’m in fifth grade. . Sometimes I help my mom out downstairs with her design work and my daddy takes me to the stores with him. .”
“Who is it, kiddo?”
“Excuse me a second,” she said into the phone. “A lady named Margaret,” she said to me.
“Okay, kiddo, I’ll take it from here.” Sarah handed me the phone.
“Hi, Marge.”
“Frank tells me you came by yesterday to talk to me about Larry.” Her voice was grave. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“It’s not like that, Marge. I just wanted to talk, to try and jar your memory a little about Larry.”
“My memories of Larry don’t need any jarring, Moe.” She began softly sobbing.
Frank Spinelli was no fool. He understood his new wife very well. Margaret’s love for Larry was, indeed, a once-in-her-life thing. Although crushed by the divorce, Marge had probably kept the faint hope of some sort of reconciliation alive. She had married Frank Spinelli as revenge. It was foolish, of course. You can’t poke someone in the eye when they’re not looking at you. My guess was that when Larry had called Margaret a few weeks back to arrange for dinner, she had gone to the Blind Steer fully prepared to do whatever she had to, to recover at least some small part of what she had lost, her own dignity be damned. I can’t imagine how much it hurt when Larry failed to show.