Beach Road

The artist looks no more than seventeen and neither does his girl, who sits on the leather couch on the other side of the glass with an infant on her lap dressed just like his dad, right down to the cockeyed cap and retro Nikes. A dozen others are scattered around, and whether dazzlingly elongated or powerfully compact, they all seem like the fullest expression of who they are.

Who is in charge? No one that I can tell, and there’s no desk or receptionist in front.

“Manny’s making dupes,” says a tall woman named Erica, and she nods helpfully when a cable-thin guy with a jet-black ponytail steps out of a back room.

In Manny’s arms is a stack of what look like pizza boxes. “Got to deliver these to another studio,” he says, heading out the door. “Come and we’ll talk on the way.”

In a crosstown cab, Manny lays down the plotlines of his frenetic life. “I was born in Havana,” he says. “My father was a doctor. A good one, which meant he made a hundred dollars a month. One morning, after a great big breakfast, I got on an eight-foot sailboat, pushed off from the beach, and just kept going. Twenty hours later, I almost drowned swimming to shore fifty miles south of Miami. I was wearing this watch. If I died, I died, but I had to come to America.”

Three years later, Manny says he’s a break away from becoming the Cuban-American Eminem. “I’m dope, and I’m not the only one who knows it.”

I suspect he’s confused about why I’m here, but I’ll set him straight in a minute. We get off on West Twenty- first Street in front of a Chelsea townhouse, and he drops his tapes at another apartment-turned-recording- studio.

“I’m not going to be doing this much longer,” he tells me.

I offer to buy him lunch around the corner at the Empire Diner, and we take a seat at a black-lacquered table overlooking Tenth Avenue.

“So what label you with?” Manny asks once our orders are in.

“I’m not with a label, Manny. I’m a lawyer, and I’m representing Dante Halleyville. He’s falsely charged with killing three people at Smitty Wilson’s court in East Hampton. I know you were there that night. I’m hoping you saw something that can save his life.”

If Manny is disappointed that I’m not a talent scout looking to sign him to a huge deal, he keeps it to himself. He looks at me hard, as if he’s running through his loop of images from that night.

“You’re the ballplayer,” he says. “I seen you there. You were a pro.”

“That’s right. For about ten minutes.”

“You got a tape recorder?” he asks.

“No, but I’ve got a pad. I’ll take careful notes for now.”

“Good. Let me hit the bathroom. Then maybe I got a story that could save that tall black boy.”

I wrestle my legal pad out of my case and hurriedly scribble a list of key questions in my barely legible shorthand. Stay calm, I tell myself, and listen.

I’ve been lost in my notes, and Manny still isn’t back when the waiter drops the food on the table. I twist around, and I see that the bathroom door is wide open.

I jump out of my chair and run like a maniac to the street.

I’m just in time to see Manny Rodriguez hop into a cab and roar away up Tenth Avenue. He finger-waves out the back window at me.

Chapter 49. Loco

THERE’S A GRAY, pebbly beach on the bay side of East Hampton where on Sunday afternoons the Dominicans, Ecuadorians, and Costa Ricans play volleyball. During the week, they put in seventy hours mowing lawns, clipping hedges, and skimming pools. At night they cram into ranch houses that look normal from the street but have been partitioned into thirty cubes. By Sunday afternoon, they’re ready to explode.

These games are wild. You got drinking, gambling, salsa, and all kinds of over-the-top Latin drama. Every three minutes or so two brown bantamweights are being pulled apart. Five minutes later they’re patting each other on the back. Another five minutes, they’re swinging again.

I’m taking in this Latin soap opera from a peeling green bench fifty yards above the fray.

It’s six fifteen, and as always, I’m early.

It’s no accident. This is part of the gig, the required display of fealty and respect. Which is fine with me. It gives me time to light my cigar and watch the sailboats tack for home at the Devon Yacht Club.

I should cut back. The Davidoff torpedo is my third this week. But what’s life without a vice? What’s life with a vice? Did you know Freud smoked half a dozen cigars a day? He also died of mouth cancer, which I like to think was poetic payback for telling the world that all every guy wants to do is kill his father and boff his mom. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t need to know that.

Speaking of authority figures, a drumroll please, because here comes mine-BW-and he’s right on time, eleven minutes late.

With his three-hundred-dollar Helmut Lang jeans, torn and faded just right, and his God-knows-how-expensive light-blue cashmere hoodie and week-old growth, he’s looking more like a goddamn weekender every day. But who’s got the stones to tell him? Not me, bro, and they call me Loco for a reason.

“What’s up?” asks BW, but not in the convivial way most people use it. Out of BW’s mouth, it sounds more like “what’s your problem?” or “so what’s your problem now?” But this time it’s not just my problem, it’s our problem, which pisses him off ten times more.

“Apparently, we had company,” I say. “Out behind Wilson ’s house.”

“Oh, yeah? Who told you that?”

“Lindgren.”

“That sucks.” For all his peccadilloes, BW has an impressive ability to cut to the chase.

Down in the sand, a drunk volleyballer is pointing at a ball mark and screaming bloody murder in either Spanish or Portuguese.

“What should I do now, boss?”

“Whatever you think is best.”

“Whatever I think is best, BW?”

“And let me know when you’ve done it.”

Then, like a puff of smoke from an overpriced cigar, BW’s gone, and it’s just me, the night, and the salsa.

Chapter 50. Loco

WHATEVER I THINK is best, huh? I think I get BW’s point, which means another trip to Brooklyn and another shitty, shitty, bang, bang.

Like his compadres out in the Hamptons, Manny Rodriguez works way too hard. It’s three in the morning, and I’ve been parked across the street from Manny’s apartment since eleven, and everyone in Bed-Stuy is asleep but him. Is it that immigrant work ethic or is something boiling in their blood? Quien sabe, ay?

Wait just a second-here comes Manny. Just in time, because my stomach couldn’t take any more bad coffee tonight.

Even now, our boy is still hopped up, bouncing to the music pumping through his headphones.

If you ask me, nothing’s ruined the city more than headphones and iPods and computers. It used to be New York offered the kind of random interaction you couldn’t get anywhere else. You never knew when you might have a moment with the beautiful girl waiting next to you for the light to change.