Londongrad

CHAPTER FIVE

Stacks of pink cold cuts lay on trays, little mountains of cubed cheese, orange, yellow, white, carrot sticks, candy bars, bagels, rolls, pastries that glistened, shiny under the lights, were arranged on platters, and NYPD guys in uniform were gobbling up food as fast as they could, as if they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, shoving food into their mouths, piling it high on paper plates. The long tables were set up outside the sound stage.

“Craft Services, they call it,” said Sonny Lippert, my ex-boss, when I found him at the Steiner Movie Studios where the old Brooklyn Shipyards had been.

He picked up his plate and sauntered out into the courtyard, and I followed him. He sat on a canvas directors’ chair and gestured to another one. I sat next to him.

I wanted his advice before I saw Bobo Leven again. The dead girl wasn’t my case, it was Leven’s, but I couldn’t let it go. The image of the girl on the swing stayed with me like floaters that stick in your eye, float on the surface of your brain, clog your vision. Some guy had told Leven when I got close to a case I couldn’t let it go, but that was crap. I was happy to turn it over to Leven. I was curious was all. I had seen the girl on the swing first and I was curious.

Or was I fooling myself? Had I become some kind of obsessive, one of those cops who can’t get the smell of a homicide out of his nose?

It wasn’t that I planned to work the case, I only wanted advice. Any information I got I’d pass on. Anyhow, I owed Sonny Lippert a visit. I hadn’t seen much of him lately.

“So, Artie, good to see you, it’s been a while,” said Sonny, who was wearing a captain’s uniform, the kind of dress blues guys wore to funerals. I had never in my life seen Lippert dressed as a cop. Almost all the years I’d known him, it was after he left the police force to work as a US attorney.

“What’s with the outfit?” I said to Lippert who had been my boss on and off for years until he retired.

“Nifty, right,” said Sonny, smoothing his navy blue jacket. “Fits me nice, right? I sucked up to the wardrobe lady, man. These people are cool. Listen, man, you want to go hear Ahmad Jamal with me in the fall, one of the last of the greats, man?” he said.

Long ago Sonny and me had started listening to music together. He still calls everyone “man”, a leftover from his younger years when he hung out with jazz guys. He still listened to the music with real love.

When I was still a rookie and broke, he sometimes invited me to concerts at Carnegie Hall and sometimes to the Vanguard. It was with Sonny I first heard Miles Davis in person, and Stan Getz, and Ella.

“What the hell are you supposed to be?” I said, smiling because I suddenly felt affectionate towards Sonny.

“I’m a police captain, man,” he said, buttering a roll he had on the plate on his lap. “I’m an extra. The movie I’m working. I’m a consultant. I told you. Didn’t I?”

All around us real cops and fake movie cops, both, smoked and ate. One guy bit off half of an enormous sesame bagel stuffed with cream cheese and lox, tossed the other half in a garbage can and began kicking a soccer ball around the huge yard of Steiner Studios. Beyond the yard that was surrounded by a high chain-link fence, twelve, fourteen feet, was the old waterfront. With the staggering view of Manhattan and the river, once all this had been the Brooklyn Navy Yards where World War II ships were built.

“What do you know, you haven’t been a cop since Shaft was in action,” I kidded him, drinking my root beer.

“I sit around all day and actors come by and we shoot the shit about being a detective, and I tell them how to walk and talk, make it look real.”

“How the fuck do you know how cops walk and talk?”

“It’s not brain science, you know, Artie, man. One of the producers, so-called, said to me, you have that authority thing, Sonny. You got it. Teach them.” He laughed. “I tell them how it is, then they go and put the girls in low-cut tops and tight pants. I mean, what female detective is going to fucking dress like that in real life? Or maybe they do now. Maybe the real ones get how they dress from the TV cops,” said Sonny, heading into one of his riffs. “Truth is nobody knows what’s real anymore,” he added. “A lot of actual cops I know have stopped using the old lingo. Once civilians started picking up stuff from Law and Order, you know, bus for ambulance or on the job for being a cop, guys started dropping it. Hard to tell the difference, right, man? Reality and fiction, man, who can tell?”

“Jesus, Sonny.”

“So you came by to chew the fat, shoot the breeze, what, Artie?”

Sonny sat back on his canvas chair and looked me over.

Small and tightly wound as clockwork doll, his hair is still black and I have to figure he dyes it because Sonny must be pushing seventy. He seems a lot younger, doesn’t look much different from when he recruited me out of the academy back when. Over the years, I had worked for him on and off, usually on Russian cases. He likes to remind me how green I was when he first spotted me. I talent-spotted you, man, he’d say, like he invented me. Used to make me nuts.

Growing up in Moscow like I did, I thought I was pretty streetwise. Moscow kids, we figured ourselves at the center of the universe, the center of a vast country that was always centralized. Moscow was the place where everything happened, politics, literature, science, movies, music, everything.

We thought we were hot shit. In fact, we were so cut off from the world, we didn’t know how provincial we really were until word began to trickle through. Back then, all I had from outside, the only evidence there was better, something that reminded me of my dreams, was the music, Willie Conover’s Jazz Hour on Voice of America, and a few illegal Beatles tapes.

Anyhow, when I met Lippert, I was new in New York, young, willing. Lippert saw he could use me. I spoke languages, I knew which fork to use, more or less, and Lippert told me he could use me on certain special jobs. I was plenty available for flattery, which Lippert doled out in just the right doses.

For years I didn’t trust him. I knew he used me when it was convenient, but, retired or not, he was still the most connected guy I knew in the whole city.

The cop actors vied for Lippert’s attention, asking him if they looked okay, if they walked okay, if they resembled the real thing. For a while, he passed out advice, and they sucked it up gratefully.

“You should get in on this consulting thing, man,” said Sonny. “It’s very competitive, I mean every ex-cop wants in, and some still on the job would love it, and I could help you get a gig if you want, you could be a movie cop, if you wanted, maybe even go on screen, like an extra or something, man. You’re still pretty good-looking. I could introduce you.” He glanced over at the fence that surrounded the studio, “Jesus, look at that,” he added.

Beyond the fence was a group of Hassidic men, with long black curls and big black hats, white shirts, black pants. They had been kicking a soccer ball around. Now they came to the fence, and stared, incredulous, hostile, at the fake cops. Maybe they figured them for the real thing.

A black actor was sitting on a canvas chair, reading, his back against the chain-link fence. He heard somebody rattle the fence and looked up. A Hassidic guy said something disdainful about blacks. The actor got up, body tense. Other actors crowded around him.

Insults were exchanged. You could feel the anger rise. Everyone started yelling. Only the fence kept them from fighting.

It was as if the Crown Heights riots were starting all over.

“Just fucking cut it out,” a crew member yelled. “Everybody, just back off,” he said, and then it stopped. On our side it was only make-believe, and there was the chain-link fence.

“Can we talk, please?” I said to Sonny again. “And not about make-believe, okay? Now?”

“Don’t get your hair in a braid, man,” he said and walked me across the cement courtyard, away from the crowd.

We sat on a cement block and he asked what was eating me, what I’d been up to.

I told him what I knew about the dead woman – or maybe she was a girl – on the swing, and about Dina, the kid who found her.

“You went there how? How come?”

“I was taking some books to an old lady in Brooklyn, that part doesn’t fucking matter, and I saw Dina running around in the street. I want you to tell me about duct tape, and about who does this kind of murder, does it ring any bells with you, anything you ever heard of? Sonny?”

“I heard about some, Albanian, maybe even Russkis, they get these girls, they prostitute them, the girls refuse, they try to run away, the creeps who own them do this kind of stuff. The duct tape, killing them this way, it’s a warning, keep still, don’t do anything, keep your mouth shut. It could be Mexicans, but I don’t think so, not around here.” He looked at his watch. “I can get out of here for an hour, if you want, I can take a look at the scene,” he said. “You have your car? I’ll follow you.”

I didn’t want Sonny at the scene, it wasn’t my case, it would complicate things, but he was already on his way to the parking lot. I saw he was eager, glad somebody had asked him about the real world.

“Murder Inc.,” were the first words out of Sonny Lippert’s mouth when he climbed out of his dark green Jag near Fountain Avenue.

I walked him over to the playground where I’d seen the body. It had been taken away, but forensic crews were still picking over the site. Lippert followed my gaze.

“She was there,” I said. “On the swing. Tied to it. Posed.”

“Go on.”

“Somebody was making a point,” I said. “Right?”

“Anybody look good for it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Weird, man, this is exactly where the mob used to dump the bodies times I was a kid,” said Sonny. “Murder Inc., Jesus Christ, it was famous, man, I mean we used to come over here and look for them. The bodies. You remember a song called ‘When My Bobby Gets Home’? We kids used to sing ‘When the Body Gets Cold’. All of us kids, all we wanted was to play ball for the Dodgers or join up with Murder Inc., maybe get to kill someone. Sometimes we did a cat, you know, strung it up from a light bulb, dumped the body out here. You don’t think it’s funny? Come on, Artie, man.”

“Listen to me, Sonny, try to think.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay, there were real Jewish gangsters then, big time. Jews and Italians got along, man, you know why?”

“Yeah, what’s that, Sonny?” I said.

“We were all short,” he laughed. “You know, we called this part of Brooklyn the Land of the Lost,” he added.

When Sonny Lippert set out on one of his riffs, when he rambled, you had to wait. Tangled in his past, he had to climb out of the web. It took him longer and longer these days. I sometimes felt he’d just disappear into his own past and never return.

“The Land of the Lost, used to be wild dogs, packs of them, around here because of the garbage dump close by.”

“Right.”

“I’ll make some calls, if you want,” Sonny said.

“Sure, Sonny, thank you. I should probably get going.” I knew there was no point keeping him here.

“You know you can call on me anytime, man, you know that.”

“Thanks.” I put my hand on his shoulder and he smiled slightly. “Thank you.”

“She was naked?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look for her clothes, man. I’m telling you, look for the clothes. You always find it in the clothes. They looked? Your girl on the swing, girl on a red velvet swing.”

“What?”

“Nothing, man. Just something out of a story,” said Sonny, then looked up as Bobo Leven appeared at the edge of the playground.

He greeted Sonny formally. He was polite, he showed deference. He asked him some questions about the case, what did Sonny think, did he have any insights? He was attentive.

“I have to go,” Sonny said.

“I’ll walk you,” I said, and went with Sonny back to his car.

“What is he?” said Lippert glancing towards the playground and Bobo Leven. “What is he, Artie, your Sundance?”

*

“He have anything interesting to say, Mr Lippert, I mean?” said Bobo when I got back to the playground.

“Anybody find the girl’s clothes?” I said.

“We didn’t find anything, not yet,” Bobo said.

“Put a few uniforms to work on it, Bobo, get some of the beat cops to look everywhere for the clothes,” I said and shoved the necklace with the blue charm on it in my pocket, and didn’t know why.

All the way to Brighton Beach the presence of the charm in my pocket, reminded me of the dead girl. I was going to meet Valentina Sverdloff. By the time I got there, I wished I’d unloaded the charm on Bobo Leven.