“What happened?” he asked.
“Front left tire blew and I lost it. Busy night?”
“You know it. Must be a full moon coming tonight. There’s a car flipped over on the Belt about a mile back.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“If there was, they didn’t hang around. It was a stolen car. Amazing.”
“How’s that?”
“It was an old beat-up piece of shit. Who the fuck’s gonna steal something like that?”
Somebody who wants to run another car off the road. “Listen, Rafferty,” I said, reading his name badge. “Do me a favor and take some pictures of my car. I was supposed to go up to Vermont and visit my girlfriend tonight. I need some proof.” I handed him my cell phone. “She’s the jealous type.”
“Sure, for a brother, no problem.” He took the pictures and handed the phone back to me. “Okay, the EMTs are here.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Pam believed the pictures of my smashed-up car and said she’d be down to take care of me. I didn’t even try telling her not to come. I wanted taking care of. I needed it. I’d been on an island by myself for too long and since that exile was self-imposed, I had only to look in the mirror to ascribe blame. I don’t suppose I ever forgave myself for Katy’s murder. It took seven years for Sarah to absolve me and the rest of the universe either didn’t know or didn’t care. If there was any persuasive argument for the existence of God, it wasn’t in the biology of things, but in emotion, in feelings. I couldn’t quite see how guilt and forgiveness had evolved from the primordial stew. I don’t know, maybe the “adult” relationship I’d been sharing with Pam over the last two years was just part of my self-inflicted exile. I let her in, but not inside. Suddenly, I wanted off the island and I didn’t care why.
When I refused treatment or to go to the ER, the EMTs told me to go home, rest, and to make an appointment with my regular physician if the pain in my neck didn’t clear up or if any new symptoms arose. It’d been weird, sitting there, talking to them, and not asking them questions about Alta and Maya. I wouldn’t have known what to ask, really. What could I have asked them, what could they have said to change the essential facts of the case? Maya Watson and Alta Conseco had simply stood by and let a man die. A month later, someone stuck a knife into Alta Conseco and killed her.
It truly was a fool’s errand I had taken on. Even if I stumbled upon all the right answers and found out every gory detail of how this tragedy had unfolded, so what? Neither Lazarus nor Lady Lazarus would be coming back from the dead. Justice would not be served because there is no justice for the dead, only for the living and sometimes not even then. Had every murderous Nazi son of a bitch been captured, convicted, and put to death, the innocent dead would not have risen. The dead are beyond the reach of justice. And the truth wasn’t going to bring justice. It was my experience that where tragedy was involved, the truth made things worse. Always. What naive fool was it, I wondered, who had made the specious connection between truth and justice in the first place? One thing I knew about him, whoever he was, he wasn’t nearly as big a fool as me. If he had known what I knew, he would have closed up shop and gone home. Not me. I meant to get to the bottom of this if for no other reason than I was a curious bastard and didn’t want to leave loose ends behind me.
I called up one of those rental places that delivers the car to your door. My taste in cars ran to the small, sporty side, but this one time, I went big, really big. Given that someone, probably a crazy fireman, had just tried to run my ass off the road, I would have rented a city bus if I could have. A Chevy Suburban was the best the rental company could do on short notice. That suited me fine. I met the woman who delivered it downstairs and didn’t bother going back up. I wanted to leave before Pam got there. She had keys and I would let her take care of me when I got back, but I needed to finish what I started.
Kid Charlemagne’s wasn’t exactly a bucket of blood, but not for lack of trying. In the seventies, the East Village was a mess, a perch from which junkies, artists, punks, and pretenders could both watch the world go down the toilet and go along for the ride. Kid Charlemagne’s wrecked and dingy decor was meant to capture a sense of those long-ago times when Joey Ramone and Jean-Michel Basquiat roamed these self-same streets. It failed miserably. To begin with, naming a faux punk restaurant-whatever the fuck that was supposed to be-after a Steely Dan song was less than genius. Steely Dan was almost as antithetical to the ethos of punk as Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And as if to make the whole thing even a bigger farce, Lady Gaga was playing when I walked in. God, it was so self-consciously dreadful that it almost seemed to be the point. It didn’t hurt that the hostess wore a purple and magenta Mohawk wig and was dressed in a ripped Sex Pistols T-shirt, studded leather pants, and red Chuck Taylors. Her lipstick was black, her eye shadow a thin rectangle of red powder that was splashed across both eyes and the bridge of her nose.
“Oi! What can I do for ya, rude boy?” she said in an affected low-rent British accent.
I was tempted to bust her balls about her not having been born until New Wave was old hat and hair bands had gone bald, but I didn’t figure on that making much of an impression. Instead, I asked to see the boss or the manager.
“Get lost, granddad.”
“Oi, Siouxsie, go play with the Banshees and stop wasting my time. Granddad is a copper,” I said in a far better accent than hers, showed her my badge, and quickly put it away.
Her eyes got big. “Sorry, I was just-”
I cut her off. “Forget it. Just take me to the office.”
The fake punk hostess kept apologizing-her accent far more Bronx than Brixton now-as we cut past the bar and through the dinning room. Strangely enough, the crowd was much hipper than the place merited. There were even some faces among them I recognized: the novelist who’d dissed Oprah, some painter I remembered from when I was looking for Sashi Bluntstone, and an actress who’d spent more time in rehab than on her syndicated superhero show. Christ, I even saw Lou Reed coming out of the men’s room. I was at a loss to explain it. I felt like the one person at a comedy club who didn’t get the joke.
“Give me a second, okay?” she said as we stopped outside an unmarked door on the other side of the restrooms. She knocked and the door buzzed open. Not smart, I thought, just buzzing someone in who might be armed with bad intentions and a gun. Then I noticed the closed circuit camera above me and to the right. She stuck her head in the office and then quickly back out. “The boss says for you to go right in.”
“Thanks,” I said, sliding past her, into the office, and closing the door behind me. When I turned around, I nearly shit.
“Hello, Moe,” he said, an embarrassed half-smile on his face. It was Nathan Martyr.
Nathan Martyr was a collapsed super nova: an artist who exploded on the New York art scene one day and then imploded in short order. After his fast fifteen minutes, he devoted his wretched life to making bad art, shooting heroin, and blogging about Sashi Bluntstone. Martyr was one of Sashi’s most ardent critics. It was on his blog that I found Photoshopped images of Sashi’s nude body being crucified, flayed, and tortured. In the end, Martyr’d had nothing to do with Sashi’s disappearance, but I loathed the asshole just the same. It was Martyr’s ex-cop doorman and toady who had tried, nearly successfully, to put me in the grave. If Pam hadn’t zapped the prick with her handy little Taser, my oncologist would have had one less patient to worry about now.
Still, Martyr seemed different somehow. He had been a twitchy bastard when we first met, but now his demeanor was calm, if not quite Zen-like. He’d been junkie-skinny back then. He’d put on a few pounds since and while he was by no means heavy, his face was fuller. He sported a tan. A tan! Jesus, talk about breaking the New York artist protocol. He was expensively and stylishly dressed. The last time I’d seen him, he smelled like he’d been wearing the same clothes for a week. Now he smelled of money.
“You clean these days?” I asked.
“Clean and healthy. I guess I owe some of that to you.”
“How’s that?”
“That thing with Sashi, it woke me up finally.”
“To what?”
“To the hole at the center of my being that I tried to fill in with hate and heroin,” he said, his voice cracked
