Gun Machine

Eight

THE PERIMETERS of the 1st Precinct form a shape like a cracked arrowhead pointing out to sea. It totals one square mile of Manhattan. Tallow had to go in the other direction, away from his mile, and that never filled him with joy.

At this moment, Tallow did not feel like he had friends at Ericsson Place. Or, perhaps more correctly, he felt that any aid he’d get there would come from pity. He told himself that pity would lead to half-assed work, but in his gut there was a churn of humiliation and offendedness at the thought. And when he considered going back to the house on Pearl Street to canvass the residents, he felt sick. So he spent ten minutes with his laptop on ACRIS, the online city register, and grabbed the name and office address of the building’s landlord.

It was going to be a long drive uptown. Through the narrow, coldly shaded streets of the deep 1st, just now starting to get that sweetish, sweaty scent of halal gyro and shish from the early phalanx of street vendors setting up their shiny, flimsy carts and their piss pots for their sixteen-hour workdays.

Tallow felt uncomfortable in the driver’s seat. A constant juddering sense of being on the wrong side of the car. He hoped that the long drive would retrain his brain a little.

Past the holes-in-the-wall offering sixty-minute divorces, and the strangely denuded storefronts that Vice continually begged for the budget to surveil for drug traffic. Past Ground Zero, this morning sound-tracked by the gunfire snapping of badly secured plastic tarps in the breeze and the cursing of the mini-entrepreneur suckfish trying to stop their 9/11 picture postcards from blowing off their folding-card tables by the fence.

And then out, into the territories of others.

Tallow drove with the unit’s radio on. He would rather have driven with music, but he’d learned to appreciate police-band chatter as its own kind of sound structure. So he rolled with the waves and eddies of crime and its management as he drove. Officer down in the Bronx, off duty and unluckily walked into a robbery at an auto body shop; reports that when the officer took one and fell, a school safety agent snatched up his dropped gun and returned fire. Mother and daughter found stabbed to death in Sheepshead Bay, reporting officer commenting that they were so holed and smashed that they looked like ragged wet blankets. The body of a missing Bronx man found in the trunk of a stolen car abandoned in Long Island; the detectives who had been looking for him in order to hang an attempted murder around his neck had some choice comments, quickly drowned out by responders to a Midtown location where a guy had apparently doused his pregnant ex-girlfriend in gasoline and set her alight when she didn’t give him whatever he had wanted.

Because it’s all about what other people want, Tallow thought as he threaded his way through Manhattan and its bodies.

He was in the late West Fifties when traffic slowed to a crawl. As he edged the car along, he saw a heavy woman with gray hair dyed an unconvincing black kneeling in front of one of the sickly trees planted in the sidewalk. Her shins, in faded woolen socks, were resting on the short wrought-iron fencing that framed the square of dirt the tree was struggling to live in. There was something silvery sticking out of the back of her neck. Paramedics and cops were standing around her, clearly so wrapped up in the problem of her that they weren’t bothering with the little crowd of gawkers grabbing cell phone shots. Tallow realized that the slim shaft of metal had gone right through the back of the woman’s neck and out through her throat, pinning her to the slender tree trunk.

Ahead of him, the traffic broke, revealing the paramedics’ rig parked beside a fat Chrysler Town & Country with one wheel on the curb, and a bike and its rider under it. The back wheel of the bike looked like it’d burst, the tire shredded and the rim hanging open like a dented letter C. The rider was in a couple of pieces. Lime Lycra smeared in meat.

Tallow realized that several of the bike wheel spokes were missing. He counted a few of them scattered back across the sidewalk. He knew where the last one was. Some freak of torsion must’ve flung it through her neck like a loosed arrow.

He considered badging a uniform or a paramedic to get the whole story but in the next second decided he didn’t need it. He drove around the scene and away from a dead woman praying to a tree in New York City.

West 145th in the 500s was far enough away that by the time he finally reached it, Tallow had tension pains locked across his upper back, and posture pain rammed into his lower back. He clambered out of the parked unit like a dying crab. When he tried to straighten up, important-sounding bones crunched frighteningly inside him.

He took a deep breath and got a noseful of sun-warmed dog shit for his trouble.

The landlord’s office was a sliver of closet slipped between a firetrap overstating itself as a hotel and a CARIB & SOUL FOOD vendor with a frontage painted in the shade of green that reminded Tallow of hospitals. There was a rangy kid of sixteen or so in a retro Knicks shirt standing in the narrow doorway smoking a blunt. He had a deep, laid-open scar running down from the corner of his mouth to somewhere under his chin. On profile, it made him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. A switchblade handle was outlined in his pants pocket. Chocolate and mint hung on the weed smoke drifting his way from the blunt. Tallow took another look at the kid and shaved a year or two off his age.

“You a cop,” said the kid without looking at him.

For far from the first time, Tallow wondered why this kind of conversation ever had to happen. He would have thought that of all the items of information that got passed from generation to generation or peer to peer, the unfortunate results of idly screwing around with a cop to feel tough would be among the first and would not be forgotten.

“Is that a problem?”

“Not if you going someplace else.”

Tallow heard giggling from inside. The kid had an audience. Tallow wasn’t sure if he was really in the mood for this. He preferred to be easy about these things. Jim Rosato would’ve put the kid’s head into a wall without thinking twice.

Tallow took a few easy steps toward the door. The kid, still not looking at him, moved to block the door, puffing on his blunt. Chocolate and mint. Kids’ flavors.

“You going someplace else.”

More giggling. Tallow walked right up to the kid, who shifted again to block him. Tallow leaned the other way, shuffled, raising his hands and making an awkward show of clumsily trying to get past the kid. The kid couldn’t help but grin as he moved again. Young boys were cracking up inside the office.

Tallow stamped on the kid’s instep. He shrieked and fell backward, scrabbling to clutch his foot.

“Oh my God, I’m sorry,” Tallow said. “Are you okay?”

The kid was incoherent, screaming, trying to pry his Nike fakes off his swelling foot. Inside, three boys between ten and fourteen were suddenly very quiet. One of them had taken the office chair from behind the space’s single desk and had been spinning around on it. Tallow watched him slowly rotate to a stop and then considered them all with a chilly study.

“It was an accident. I was trying to get past him and I accidentally hurt him. You understand what I’m telling you, don’t you?”

A big voice came from the back room. “What the fuck is going on out there?”

“Police,” Tallow said.

A wide man in his forties shouldered his way out of the back, one hand on his belt. He might have been a linebacker or a weight lifter once, but he’d gained some weight, probably in the past year or two, and his pants weren’t staying on his waist anymore. He wasn’t ready to change the way he dressed or start wearing suspenders, so he walked around with one hand on his belt to continually tug his pants up off his hips and over his belly. He took in the scene.

“What the fuck, man?”

Tallow showed him his badge. “Looking for Terence Carman.”

“That’s me. But what the fuck is this?”

“Your boy here fell over. Isn’t that right, kids?”

The children just stared.

Carman put his shoulders back and moved into the room, yelling. “You get the fuck out of here now, you little shits. Go on, move it, find some other blood to piss off. Del, stop that fucking noise and stand up, you sound like a piglet getting it up the ass from an angry horse, man. Help him the fuck up, go on, get out.”

There was moving and dawdling and bitching as they left. Carman turned to Tallow with a massive shrug. “My sister’s kids, man. What you gonna do, they’ve got to be someplace. Oh shit, would you look at that.”

Tallow followed his angry glance and bent to pick up the blunt from where it had been smoldering a small brown hole in the thin carpet.

Carman watched him. “You’re not going to make a thing out of that.”

“I don’t know yet. You own an apartment building on Pearl Street.”

“Yeah, I figured I’d be getting a visit. Just not so soon.” Carman reached for the blunt. Tallow jerked it back.

“I am in a bad mood. I’ve just had to dance with your relatives, and I’ve recently had to shoot one of your tenants dead while wearing my partner’s brains on my sleeve. So how about I get some open and friendly cooperation, so I don’t have to balance this little thing here on top of the mound of shit I could pour through your door.”

Carman looked at Tallow and gave up. He seemed to sag inside himself, the skin around his neck rucking up like a kicked rug.

“Okay, okay.”

Tallow held his gaze on Carman a few beats longer. Carman sank a bit more, trudged to the front door, and, with great theatrical effort, closed and locked it. “C’mon,” he said, wading through knee-deep misery toward the back room.

The room was a grimy box. Metal shelving stuffed with binders lined one side. Two ratty armchairs, a small table with two overfilled ashtrays, and a few stools stolen from unwary or uncaring drinking establishments filled it out. Carman took what was obviously his armchair and spilled into it, a hand on either arm, legs slightly apart and solidly planted. Tallow imagined that this was what passed for the patriarch’s chair in Carman’s world.

Tallow pressed the end of the blunt into the ashtray. Carman nodded. Tallow considered the nearest stool—the pink plastic seat covering split like an idiot grin, yellowed foam lolling out—and decided to risk the other armchair instead. Sitting, he discovered that some padding and probably a few of the springs were gone. He was lower down than Carman. Tallow wondered if Carman had cut the padding out himself.

“So you killed Bobby Tagg, then,” Carman eventually said.

“Was that his name?”

“You didn’t know his name?”

“It’s all a bit of a blur, to be honest. So, what, we called you, or…?”

“Hell no. My other fucking tenants called me. Pretty much all of them. Shit, they called me before they called you. Like I was going to do something about Bobby Tagg stripping bare-ass naked and waving a goddamn shotgun around. And then you can be damn sure they were all back on the phone when you wasted the crazy asshole.”

“All of them?”

“Every last one.”

“Good. Tell me about the tenant in apartment three A.”

“Never met him.”

Tallow looked meaningfully at the stupid weed-stuffed mint-and-chocolate-flavored cigar butt sticking out of the ashtray. “This is your friendly cooperation?”

“No, no, stay sat. I’m explaining. Because I don’t want any trouble, and you’re gonna see why. The rent on three A is paid annually. In cash. What happens is, sometime in March, someone calls me up and says, How much for another year on three A? And I’m like, tax time’s coming up, so I take the rent, add on twenty percent for my trouble, make it a nice round number, and give them that. Next day, there’ll be an envelope on the floor with the cash in. And I forget all about three A for another year.”

“And that didn’t smell like trouble to you?”

“Listen, people rent from me for all kinds of reasons. I got people paying me four grand a month just for somewhere to fuck three lunchtimes a week. My old dad always said, Asking too many questions gets in the way of doing business.”

“What business was your dad in?”

“This one. I inherited it. The Pearl Street place has been in the family since the fifties. Inherited the guy in three A too. His original deal was with my old dad, and that too passed down to me.”

“So your dad met him.”

“I guess.”

Tallow sank lower in the chair. “This is where you tell me that your dear old dad collected his last rent check a while back.”

“Yeah. Retired, went to Disney World, died on the It’s a Small World ride.” Carman glanced around his shitbox fiefdom with a mirthless grin. “Yeah, there wasn’t any compensation. There were hookers involved. And explosives. Anyway. No, my old dad’s long gone.”

Tallow took out his notebook and pen, feeling like he was about to try to screw fog but professionally compelled to log what little this meeting had given him. “So, Mr. Carman. You never met the tenant of three A. It was a long-standing arrangement with your father. How long do you think this arrangement has run?”

“Twenty years, easy. I, you know, I don’t have paperwork on it to refer to.”

“I figured. Have you ever been inside apartment three A?”

Carman rubbed the back of his neck. Smiled. A smaller smile, but a real one this time. “Tried once. Back when I first took over running that building, when my dad was still around. I was younger, and I hadn’t learned that one thing yet. So I wanted to know something about the invisible man, you know? Couldn’t get in. He’d jammed the lock somehow. Hadn’t changed the lock, but there were dead bolts or some shit behind the door. Never did figure out how he got in and out of the place. And the next time I looked? He had actually changed the lock, and added some new ones. I said something to my old dad, but he said, It’s the guy in three A, leave it, it don’t matter.”

“What one thing? You said you hadn’t learned that one thing yet. What’s that?”

“Like I said, asking too many questions gets in the way of doing business. You got to learn not to ask questions all the time. That one thing is learning the right question to ask at the right time.”

“Is that right.”

“You’d know that, Detective. Right?” Carman sat proud in his back-room throne, having found a little epigram he’d probably heard on a TV show and offered it to his guest like an old subway token.

“Who are you selling the building to, Mr. Carman?”

“Some banking company. Vivicy. They’re, like, financial services, all that weird money stuff that no one understands and that never sounds completely fucking real.”

Tallow wrote Vivicy down and paused a moment. Made a small spiral movement with his pen, like he was stirring the fog.

“Mr. Carman. Why are you selling the building? Why is Vivicy buying it? And were you going to tell them about the man in three A who has secured his apartment door so that no one can enter it?”

Carman sucked his teeth. Tallow just gave him the dead stare.

“I’m selling it because they offered me enough money to retire on,” Carman said eventually. “And I don’t mean retire down to Florida, get loaded, and drown while trying to dynamite a children’s ride and get blown at the same time. I mean a fucking yacht someplace, and slaves and shit.”

“And.”

“And the guy in three A ain’t my problem. They’re going to knock that place down, and if the crazy guy’s still in there when it happens, then it still ain’t my problem, serve him right, and I got mine. That about cover it, Detective?”

“When do you get paid?”

“When the building’s empty.”

“I also asked why are they buying it.”

“Yeah, well, that wasn’t the right question at the right time. The first day my old dad figured I was bright enough to jerk off and chew gum at the same time, he told me this. He said, The thing about land, son, is that they don’t make it no more. So if you want a big shiny building in the financial district to keep your internets and your gadgets and your fucking gold treasure in, well, the financial district ain’t going to grow more land for you to put it on. So you need to find an old building and knock it the fuck down and build over the hole.”

“Give me the names of the people you’ve been dealing with at Vivicy.”

Carman tensed up quickly. “Why?”

“Because nothing’s getting knocked down until I say it is. Your building’s a major crime scene, and not one damn thing is going to happen to it before I want it to. Give me the names.”