French Kiss

Chapter 12

K. Burke thinks a good New York cop solves a case by putting the pieces together. K. Burke is wrong.

You can’t put the pieces together in New York because there are just too goddamn many of them.

One step out the revolving door onto East 68th Street proves my point. It’s only midday, but everywhere I look there’s chaos and color and confusion.

Bike messengers and homeless people and dowagers and grammar-school students. Two women wheeling a full-size gold harp and two guys pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks. The Greenpeace recruiter with her clipboard and smile, the crazy half-naked lady waving a broken umbrella, and the teenager selling iPad cases. All this on one block.

The store next to the Auberge bar entrance is called Spa-Roe. According to the sign, it’s a place you can visit for facials and massages (the “spa” part) while you sample various caviars (the “roe” part). Just what the world has been waiting for.

Right next to it is a bistro…pardon…a bar. It’s called Fitzgerald’s, as in “F. Scott.” I stand in front of it for a few moments and look through the window. It’s a re-creation of a 1920s speakeasy. I can see a huge poster that says GOD BLESS JIMMY WALKER. Only one person is seated at the bar, a pretty young blond girl. She’s chatting with the much older bartender.

I walk about twenty feet and pass a pet-grooming store. A very unhappy cat is being shampooed. Next door is a “French” dry cleaner, a term I’d never heard before moving to New York. There’s an optician who sells discounted Tom Ford eyeglass frames for four hundred dollars. There’s a place to have your computer fixed and a place that sells nothing but brass buttons. I pause. I smoke a cigarette. The block is busy as hell, but nothing is happening for me.

Until I toss my cigarette on the sidewalk.