Motherless Brooklyn

=”0em” width=”1em” align=”justify”›Or say “Garden State Brickface and Stucco.” But not those names.

“Never heard of them,” I breathed.

“Why don’t I believe you?”

“Believemeblackman.”

“You’re fucking sick.”

“I am,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“You should be sorry. Your man got killed and you’re not giving me anything.”

“I’ll catch the killer,” I said. “That’s what I’ll give you.”

He eased off me. I barked twice. He made another face, but it was clear it all would get chalked up to harmless insanity now. I was smarter than I knew leading the cop into Zeod’s and letting him hear the Arab call me Crazyman.

“You might want to leave that to me, Alibi. Just make sure you’re telling me all you know.”

“Absolutely.” I made an honorable Boy Scout face. I didn’t want to point out to good cop that bad cop hadn’t learned anything from me, just got tired of asking.

“You’re making me sad with your sandwich and your goddamn magazine. Get out of here.”

I straightened my jacket. A strange peace had come over me. The cop had caused me to think about The Clients for a minute, but I pushed them out of view. I was good at doing that. My Tourette’s brain chanted Want to catch him as much as miss him as much as a sadwich but I didn’t need to tic now, could let it live inside me, a bubbling brook, a deep well of song. I went to the L &L storefront and let myself in with my key. Danny wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The phone was ringing. I let it ring. The cop stood watching me and I waved at him once, then shut the door and went into the back.

Sometimes I had trouble admitting I lived upstairs in the apartment above the L &L storefront, but I did, and had since the day so long ago when I left St. Vincent’s. The stairs ran down into the back of the storefront. Apart from that inconvenient fact, I tried to keep the two places separated in my mind, decorating the apartment conventionally with forties-style furniture from the decrepit discount showrooms far down Smith Street and never inviting the other Minna Men up if I could help it, and adhering to certain arbitrary rules: drinking beer downstairs and whiskey upstairs, playing cards downstairs but setting out a board with a chess problem upstairs, Touch-Tone phones downstairs, a Bakelite dial phone upstairs, et cetera. For a while I even had a cat, but that didn’t work out.

The door at the top of the stair was acned with a thousand tiny dents, from my ritual rapping of my keys before opening the door. I added six more quick key-impressions-my counting nerve was stuck on six today, ever sine the fatal bag of White Castles-and then let myself in. The phone downstairs went on ringing. I left my lights off, not wanting to signal to the detective, if he was still outside watching, the connection between upstairs and down. Then I crept to my front window and peered out. The corner was empty of cop. Still, why take a chance? Enough light leaked in from the streetlamps for me to make my way around. So I left the lamps dimmed, though I had to run my hands under the shades and fondle the switches, ritual contact just to make myself feel at home.

Understand: The possibility that I might at any time have to make the rounds and touch every visible item in my apartment dictated a sort of faux-Japanese simplicity in my surroundings. Beneath my reading lamp were five unread paperbacks, which I would return to the Salvation Army on Smith Street as soon as I’d finished them. The covers of the books were already scored with dozens of minute creases, made by sliding my fingernails sideways over their surfaces. I owned a black plastic boom box with detachable speakers, and a short row of Prince/Artist Formerly Known As CDs-I wasn’t lying to the homicide cop about being a fan. Beside the CDs lay a single fork, the one I’d stolen from Matricardi and Rockaforte’s table full of silverware fourteen years before. I placed the Vibe magazine and the bag with the sandwich on my table, which was otherwise clean. I wasn’t so terribly hungry anymore. A drink was more urgent. Not that I really liked alcohol, but the ritual was essential.

The phone downstairs went on ringing. L &L didn’t have a machine to pick it up-callers usually gave up after nine or ten rings and tried another car service. I tuned it out. I emptied my jacket pockets and rediscovered Minna’s watch and beeper. I put them on the table, then poured myself a tumblerful of Walker Red and dropped in a couple of ice cubes and sat down there in the dark to try to let the day settle over me, to try to make some sense of it. The way my ice shimmered made me need to bat at it like a cat fishing in a goldfish bowl, but otherwise the scene was pretty calm. If only the phone downstairs would stop ringing. Where was Danny? For that matter, shouldn’t Tony be back from the East Side by now? I didn’t want to think he’d go into the Zendo without some backup, without letting us other Minna Men in on the score. I pushed the thought away, tried to forget about Tony and Danny and Gilbert for the moment, to pretend it was my case alone and weight the variables and put them into some kind of shape that made sense, that produced answers or at least a clear question. I thought of the giant Polish killer we’d watched drive our boss away to a Dumpster-he already seemed like something I’d imagined, an impossible figure, a silhouette from a dream. The phone downstairs went on ringing. I thought about Julia, how she’d toyed with the homicide detective and then flown, how she’d almost seemed too ready for the news from the hospital, and I considered the bitterness laced into her sorrow. I tried not to think of how she’d toyed with me, and how little I knew it meant. I thought about Minna himself, the mystery of his connection in the Zendo, his caustic familiarity with his betrayer, his disastrous preference for keeping his Men in the dark and how he’d paid for it. As I gazed past the streetlight to the flickering blue-lit curtains of the bedrooms in the apartments across Bergen Street, I lingered over my paltry clues: Ullman downtown, the girl with glasses and short hair, “the building” that the sardonic voice in the Yorkville Zendo had mentioned, and Irving-if Irving really was a clue.

While I thought about hese things, another track in my brain intoned brainyoctomy brainyalimony bunnymonopoly baileyoctopus brainyanimal broccopotamus. And the phone downstairs kept on ringing. Sighing, I resigned myself to my fate, went back downstairs and picked up the phone.

“No cars!” I said forcefully.

“That you, Lionel?” said Gilbert’s friend Loomis, the sanitation inspector-the garbage cop.

“What is it, Loomis?” I disliked the garbage cop intensely.

“Gotta problem over here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Sixth Precinct house, in Manhattan.”

“Dickweed! What are you doing at the precinct house, Loomis?”

“Well, they’re saying it’s too late, no way they’re gonna arraign him tonight, he’s gonna have to spend the night in the bullpen.”

“Who?”

“Who’d you think? Gilbert! They got him up on killing some guy name Ullman.”

Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone.

I felt some version of this thrill at the news that the garbage cop delivered, of Ullman’s demise. But too, I felt its opposite: a panic that the world of the case was shrinking. Ullman had been an open door, a direction, a whiff of something. I couldn’t spare any grief for the death of Ullman the human being-especially not on The Day Frank Minna Died-but I mourned nonetheless: My clue had been murdered.

A few other things I felt:

Annoyed-I would have to deal with Loomis tonight. My reverie was snapped. The ice would melt in my glass of Walker Red upstairs. My sandwich from Zeod’s would go uneaten.

Confused-let Gilbert glower and lurch all he wanted, but he’d never kill a man. And I’d watched him blink dumbly at the name Ullman. It had meant nothing to him. So no motive, unless it was self-defense. Or else he’d