Soul Patch

“He begged me.”

“He begged you?”

“See, you can’t quite believe it either, can you?” She sounded relieved, like someone being told they weren’t crazy after all. “I was stunned, because as ambitious as my ex-husband is, regardless of the things he’s done to get ahead, the one thing I was always sure he would never stoop to do was beg.”

“Did you agree to see him?”

“Yeah. Frank, he’s my husband, he’s down visiting his mom in Florida. So I agreed to meet Larry this once, at the Blind Steer in the city.”

“I know it. He took me and Katy there once.”

“How are you guys?”

Don’t ask! “We’re great. Sarah’s getting big. But what about last night?”

“He didn’t show. I checked with the maitre d’ and Larry had made reservations, but he just never came. I waited at the bar drinking red wine for hours. I used their phone to call every number I knew, but. .”

“Did you-”

“I tried every number, Moe, even the police special contact numbers. Nothing. No one’s seen him. They tell me he’s taken some vacation time and he won’t be back for a week.”

“Maybe he just forgot about dinner, or thought better of it and flew down to the islands,” I said, not quite believing it. “You know how he loves the islands.”

“You trying to convince me or you? He would never do that, not after begging to see me.”

“I guess you’re right, Marge, but I’m not sure what I-”

“Moe, check around for me, please. He really sounded awful. Something’s wrong, very wrong. I can feel it.”

“Maybe something is wrong, but why should you care?” I asked, the vapor from the chill in my voice almost visible.

“He left me, Moe, not the other way around. He stopped loving me, but I never stopped loving him. That’s why it hurts so much.” Her use of the present tense wasn’t lost on me.

“Okay, I’ll ask around and see what’s what.”

She gave me her numbers and address, then hung up. Her worry hung in the air around the phone like ground fog. Margaret was right about there being something wrong, only I don’t think she had a clue that her chief-of- detectives ex-husband had started his storied police career in someone’s pocket. There’s a lot of shit a cop’s wife doesn’t know, and even more she doesn’t want to know.

No one had any idea of Larry Mac’s whereabouts. Margaret was right about that. I called everyone I knew who knew him. Well, almost. Told them I was hunting him down because I was thinking of having a Six-O reunion party and wanted his input. Cops are wary of anything but a party, especially when the guy throwing it owns liquor stores. They’re always up for that. Even put in a call to a black chick I knew he used to visit down in Atlantic City. She hadn’t heard from

Then there was that last call, the one I’d avoided making. I picked up the phone, dialed, put the phone down. There are just some things a man has to do in person. This was one of those.

“Jeff,” I called to my assistant, “I’ll be gone for the rest of the day.”

Rico Tripoli had once been closer to me than my own brother. We had been through the war years in Coney Island. We’d patrolled the boardwalk, done drug raids in the Soul Patch. And as my dad had once schooled, nothing bonds men together like combat. Along with Larry McDonald we were known as the Three Stooges: Moe, Larry, and Curly. Rico’s hair had actually been thick, black, and wavy, but wavy was close enough for our precinct brethren. Cops are like newspaper reporters in that way. They shape the facts until they fit.

Rico Tripoli had shaped the facts of his life into a chronic disaster. He’d gotten his gold shield on the pretense of a huge case. The truth, as always, was far more complicated. The Grinding Machine Mob were a bunch of wiseguys who had become the modern equivalent of Murder, Incorporated. They not only killed their own targets, but became the subcontractors for most of the five New York families. After luring their victims to a convenient spot and executing them, they’d destroy the bodies by running them through industrial meat grinding machines. But as was always an occupational hazard, they began enjoying their work a little too much. They started murdering for the sake of murder and dispensed with bullets. Word on the street was they’d developed a taste for throwing their victims into the grinders while they were still alive. Rico played a major role on the task force that finally brought these sick fucks to justice.

Unfortunately for Rico, he often chose his friends and lovers unwisely. When he got me involved with the search for Katy’s brother, Rico already had one divorce under his belt and was well on his way to another. He’d also gotten mixed up with a crooked politician who had plotted to ruin Francis Maloney’s political career and who used me to do it. He tried buying me off with a gold shield and a pat on the back. Apparently this pol figured all cops were like Rico and would sell their souls at discount prices. I told him and Rico to drop dead. The pol obliged, dying in a plane crash upstate. I’d barely uttered a word to Rico in the last decade.

Some of that was my doing, but Rico was mostly responsible. For the past five years, he’d been at the state correctional facility in Batavia. In the early ’80s he’d been assigned to Midtown South Narcotics. He’d started drinking heavily and once again sold himself cheaply, this time to the Colombians. Rico alerted them to drug raids on their big stashes and shipments. In return, they threw him some midlevel busts, spare change, and all the hookers he could handle. When one of the Colombians got collared, it took him about fifteen seconds to give Rico up in exchange for a reduced sentence. Prison is hell for a cop. And for his own protection, Rico did his stretch in isolation.

I’d heard through sources, mainly Larry Mac, that the time in stir had really taken a toll on Rico. It was the isolation mostly. Rico was a social animal. I think sometimes that’s why he sold himself so cheaply. His payoff wasn’t the power or the pussy, but the hypnotic blend of danger and newfound alliances. He got off on meeting new people, making new buddies. I know it sounds crazy, but there it is. I mean, I knew the guy better than anyone; at least I used to.

In NYC, S.R.O. has two meanings. On Broadway or at Shea, it means standing room only. On the street it means single room occupancy. If you’re more familiar with the latter, it also means you’re fucked, big time. New York City may not be a factory town, but we are a city of warehouses. And the commodity we warehouse least effectively are the homeless and poor. S.R.O. hotels are a landlord’s ultimate wet dream. Dilapidated, shitbag buildings on the verge of collapse are miraculously transformed into money machines. Between city, state, and federal agencies, landlords are paid thousands of dollars per month per room for filthy, crime-ridden cesspits that couldn’t be given away for free. See, in New York, it’s the buildings, not the streets, that are paved with gold.

Rico Tripoli lived, if you were generous enough to call it living, in the Mistral Arms. You gotta love that name, a holdover from a time when romance and whimsy had a place in American life. I tried picturing it as it might have looked new, with Gatsby and Nick driving quickly past in a flashy yellow Rolls-Royce on the way to lunch with Meyer Wolfsheim. See what a few years of knocking around the city university system will do for a broken-down cop? It gives him pretentions. Shit, maybe I was cut out for the wine business, after all.

All pretense had been beaten out of the Mistral Arms long ago. You needed a sharp eye to see that its plywood and graffiti entrance had once been a grand work of wrought iron and thick green glass. Inside, an ill wind was indeed blowing as whiffs of crack smoke that had leaked out the sides of careless mouths rode into oblivion. In the lobby, the white marble floor and decorative pilasters were chipped and broken and defeated. A chubby Hispanic girl sat in a chair, ignoring me and rubbing the belly of a one-eyed cat. The chair wobbled on legs as sturdy as a junkie’s veins.

“Whaddaya want?” A man’s voice bounced around the marble and landed on my ear.

I didn’t look at the front desk, just held up my old badge. “Tripoli!” I barked.

“Three F.” I took a step. “Elevator don’t work,” he said.

What a fucking surprise! “Thanks.”

Cops may look back on their careers with a rose filter, but no cop misses places like the Mistral Arms. It’s hard to muster up fond memories of stepping in shit. I knocked on Rico’s door.

“Yeah, what the fuck?”

I saw an eye in the peephole, listened to locks clicking, a chain unlatch. The door pulled back. Framed by the empty jamb, a virtual stranger stood before me in a haze of blue smoke. If I had passed him on the street or stood next to him on a subway platform, I wouldn’t have recognized him as the man I had once loved above all others.