Motherless Brooklyn

INTERROGATION EYES

Minna Men wear suits. Minna Men drive cars. Minna Men listen to tapped lines. Minna Men stand behind Minna, hands in their pockets, looking menacing. Minna Men carry money. Minna Men collect money. Minna Men don’t ask questions. Minna Men answer phones. Minna Men pick up packages. Minna Men are clean-shaven. Minna Men follow instructions. Minna Men try to be like Minna, but Minna is dead.

Gilbert and I left the hospital so quickly, and drove back in such a perfect fog of numbness, that when we walked into L &L and Tony said, “Don’t say it. We already heard,” it was as though I were learning myself for the first time.

“Heard from who?” said Gilbert.

“Black cop, through here a few minutes ago, looking for you,” said Tony. “You just missed him.”

Tony and Danny stood furiously smoking cigarettes behind L &L’s counter, their foreheads pasty with sweat, eyes fogged and distant, teeth grinding behind their drawn lips. They looked like somebody had worked them over and they wanted to take it out on us.

The Bergen Street office was as we’d renovated it fifteen years before: divided in two by the Formica counter, thirty-inch color television playing constantly in the “waiting area” on this side of the counter, telephones, file cabinets and computer on the rear wall, underneath a massive laminated map of Brooklyn, Minna’s heavy Magic Marker numerals scrawled across each neighborhood, showing the price of an L &L ride-five bucks to the Heights, seven to Park Slope or Fort Greene, twelve to Williamsburg or Borough Park, seventeen to Bushwick. Airports or Manhattan were twenty and up.

The ashtray on the counter was full of cigarette butts that had been in Minna’s fingers, the telephone log full of his handwriting from earlier in the day. The sandwich on top of the fridge wore his bite marks. We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centerpiece, as incoherent as a verbless sentence.

“How did they find us?” I said. “We’ve got Frank’s wallet.” I opened it up and took out the bundle of Frank’s business cards and slipped them into my pocket. Then I dropped it on the counter and slapped the Formica five times to finish a six-count.

Nobody minded me except myself. This was my oldest, most jaded audience. Tony shrugged and said, “Him croaking out L and L as his dying words? A business card in his coat? Gilbert giving out names like a fucking idiot? You tell me how they found us.”

“What did this cop want?” said Gilbert stoically. He would deal with one problem at a time, the plodder, even if they stacked up from here to the moon.

“He said you weren’t supposed to leave the hospital, that’s what he said. You gave some nurse your name, Gilbert.”

“Fuck it,” said Coney. “Fuck some fucking black cop.”

“Yeah, well, you can express that sentiment in person, since he’s coming back. And you might want to say, ‘Fuck some fucking black homicide detective,’ since that’s actually what you’re dealing with here. Smart cop, too. You could see it in his eyes.”

“Fuckicide,” I thought to add.

“Who’s going to tell Julia?” said Danny quietly. His mouth, his whole face, was veiled in smoke. Nobody answered.

“Well, I won’t be here when he comes back,” said Gilbert. “I’ll be out doing his work for him, catching the motherfucker who did this. Gimme a coffin nail.”

“Slow down, Sherlock,” said Tony, handing him a cigarette. “I wanna know how’d it even happen in the first place? How’d the two of you even get involved? I thought you were supposed to be on a stakeout.”

“Frank showed up,” said Gilbert, trying to flick his depleted lighter again and again, failing to make it catch. “He went inside. Fuck. Fuck.” His voice was clenched like a fist. I saw the whole stupid sequence playing behind his eyes: parked car, wire, traffic light, Brainum, the chain of banalities that somehow led to the bloody Dumpster and the hospital. The chain of banalities now immortalized by our guilt.

“Inside where?” said Tony, handing Gilbert a book of matches. The phone rang.

“Some kinda kung-fu place,” said Gilbert. “Ask Lionel, he knows all about it-”

“Not kung fu,” I started. “Meditation-”

“You’re trying to say they killed him with meditation?” said Tony. The phone rang a second time.

“No, no, we saw who killed him-Viable Guessfrog!-a big Polish guy-Barnamum Pierogi!-I mean really big. We only saw him from behind.”

“Which one of us is going to tell Julia?” said Danny again. The phone rang a third time.

I picked it up and said, “L and L.”

“Need a car at One-eighty-eight Warren, corner of-” droned a female voice.

“No cars,” I said by rote.

“You don’t have any cars?”

“No cars.” I gulped, ticking like a time bomb.

“How soon can you get a car?”

“Lionel Deathclam!” I shouted into the phone. That got the caller’s attention, enough that she hung up. My fellow Minna Men glanced at me, jarred only slightly from their hard-boiled despair.

A real car service, even a small one, has a fleet of no fewer than thirty cars working in rotation, and at the very least ten on the street at any given time. Elite, our nearest rival, on Court Street, has sixty cars, three dispatchers, probably twenty-five drivers on a shift. Rusty’s, on Atlantic Avenue, has eighty cars. New Relámpago, a Dominican-run service out of Williamsburg, has one hundred and sixty cars, a magisterial secret economy of private transportation hidden deep in the borough. Car services are completely dependent on phone dispatches-the drivers are forbidden by law to pick up customers on the street, lest they compete with medallioned taxicabs. So the drivers and dispatchers litter the world with business cards, slip them into apartment foyers like Chinese take-out menus, leave them stacked beside potted plants in hospital waiting rooms, palm them out with the change at the end of every ride. They sticker pay phones with their phone number, writ in phosphorescent font.

L &L had five cars, one for each of us, and we were barely ever available to drive them. We never handed out cards, were never friendly to callers, and had, five years before, removed our phone number from both the Yellow Pages and the sign over the Bergen Street storefront.

Nevertheless, our number circulated, so that one of our main activities was picking up the phone to say “no cars.”

As I replaced the receiver Gilbert was explaining what he knew about the stakeout, doggedly. English might have been his fourth or fifth language from the sound of it, but you couldn’t question his commitment. As Bionic Dreadlog was my likely contribution-my mourning brain had decided renaming itself was the evening’s assignment-I was in no position to criticize. I stepped outside, away from the chainsmoking confusion, into the cold, light-washed night. Smith Street was alive, F train murmuring underneath, pizzeria, Korean grocer, and the Casino all streaming with customers. It could have been any night-nothing in the Smith Street scene required that Minna have died that day. I went to the car and retrieved the notebook from the glove compartment, doing my best not to glance at the bloodstained backseat. Then I thought of Minna’s final ride. There was something I’d forgotten. When I steeled myself to look in the back I saw what it was: his watch and beeper. I fished them out from under the passenger seat where they’d slid and put them in my pocket.

I locked the car and rehearsed a few imaginary options. I could go back to the Yorkville Zendo by myself and have a look around. I could also seek out the homicide detective, earn his trust, pool my knowledge with him instead of the Men. I could walk down Atlantic Avenue, sit in an Arabic storefront where they knew me and wouldn’t gape, and drink a tiny cup of mudlike black coffee and eat a baklava or Crow’s Nest-acid, steam and sugar to poison my grief.

Or I could go back into the office. I went back into the office. Gilbert was still fumbling with the end of his account, our race up the ambulance ramp, the confusion at the hospital. He wanted Tony and Danny to know we’d done all we could do. I laid the notebook flat on the counter and with a red ballpoint circled WOMAN, GLASSES and ULLMAN, DOWNTOWN, those crucial new players on our stage. Paper-thin and unrevealing as they might be, they had more life than Minna now.

I had other questions: The building they’d spoken of. The doorman’s interference. The unnamed woman Frank lost control of, the one who missed her Rama-lama-ding-dong. The wiretap itself: What did Minna hope I’d hear? Why couldn’t he just tell me what to listen for?

“We asked him, in the back of the car,” said Gilbert. “We asked him and he wouldn’t tell us. I don’t know why he wouldn’t tell.”

“Asked him what?” said Tony.

“Asked him who killed him,” said Gilbert. “I mean, before he was dead.”

I remembered the name Irving, but didn’t say anything.

“Somebody’s definitely going to have to tell Julia,” said Danny.

Gilbert grasped the significance of the notebook. He stepped over and read what I’d circled. “Who’s Ullman?” said Gilbert, looking at me. “You wrote this?”

“In the car,” I said. “It’s the note I took in the car. ‘Ullman, downtown’ was where Frank was supposed to go when he got into the car. The guy in the Zendo, who sent him out-that’s where he was sending him.”

“Sent him where?” said Tony.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “He didn’t go. The giant took him and killed him instead. What matters is who sent him-Failey! Bakum! Flakely!-the guy inside the place.”

“I’m not telling Julia,” said Danny. “I don’t care what anyone says.”

“Well, it ai tellin;t gonna be me,” said Gilbert, noticing Danny at last.

“We ought to go back to the East Side-TrickyZendo!-and have a look around.” I was panting to get to the point, and Julia didn’t seem to me to be it.

“All right, all right,” said Tony. “We’re gonna put our fucking heads together here.”

At the word heads I was blessed with a sudden vision: Lacking Minna, ours, put together, were as empty and tenuous as balloons. Untethered by his death, the only question was how quickly they would drift apart, how far-and whether they’d burst or just wither.

“Okay,” said Tony. “Gilbert, we gotta get you out of here. You’re the name they’ve got. So we’ll get you out doing some hoofwork. You look for this Ullman guy.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” Gilbert wasn’t exactly a specialist in digging up leads.

“Why don’t you let me help him?” I said.

“I need you for something else,” said Tony. “Gilbert can find Ullman.”

“Yeah,” said Gilbert. “But how?”

“Maybe his name’s in the book,” said Tony. “It’s not so common, Ullman. Or maybe in Frank’s book-you got that? Frank’s address book?”

Gilbert looked at me.

“Must still be in his coat,” I said. “Back at the hospital.” But this triggered a compulsive self-frisking anyway. I patted each of my pockets six times. Under my breath I said, “Franksbook, forkspook, finksblood-”

“Great,” said Tony. “That’s just great. Well, show some initiative for once and find the guy. That’s your job, Gilbert, for chrissakes. Call your pal, the garbage cop-he’s got access to police records, right? Find Ullman and size him up. Maybe he’s your giant. He might of been a little impatient for his date with Frank.”

“The guy upstairs set Frank up,” I said. I was frustrated that Gilbert and his jerk friend from the Sanitation Police were getting the assignment to track Ullman. “They were in it together, the guy upstairs and the giant. He knew the giant was waiting downstairs.”

“Okay, but the giant could still be this guy Ullman,” said Tony irritably. “And that’s what Gilbert’s going to find out, okay?”

I raised my hands in surrender, then snatched an imaginary fly out of the air.

“I’ll go up to the East Side myself,” said Tony. “Take a look around. See if I can get into this building. Danny, you mind the store.”

“Check,” said Danny, stubbing out his cirette.

“That cop’s gonna come back around,” said Tony. “You talk to him. Cooperate, just don’t give him anything. We don’t want to look like we’re panicking.” Implicit in this assignment was the notion of Danny’s superior rapport with the fucking black cop.

“You make it sound like we’re the suspects,” I said.

“That’s how this cop made it sound,” said Tony. “It isn’t me.”

“What about me?” I said. “You want me-Criminal Fishrug!-to go with you? I know the place.”

“No,” said Tony. “You go explain to Julia.”

Julia Minna had come back with Frank from wherever he’d gone between the dissolution of the moving company and the founding of the detective agency. She might have been the last and greatest of the Minna girls, for all we knew-she sure looked the part: tall, plush, blond by nurture, defiant around the jaw. It was easy to imagine Minna joshing with her, untucking her shirt, taking an elbow in the stomach. But by the time we got to meet her the two had initiated their long, dry stalemate. All that remained of their original passion was a faint crackle of electricity animating their insults, their drab swipes at one another. That was all that showed anyway. Julia terrified us at first, not for anything she did, but because of her cool grip on Minna, and also how tense he was around her, how ready to punish us with his words.

If Julia and Frank had still been animated, quickened with love, we might have remained in infantile awe of her, our fascination and lust still adolescent. But the chill between them was an opening. In our imaginations we became Frank and loved her, unchilled her, grew to manhood in her arms. If we were angry or disappointed with Frank Minna we felt connected to his beautiful, angry, disappointed wife, and were thrilled. She became an idol of disillusionment. Frank had shown us what girls were, and now he’d shown us a woman. And by failing to love her, he’d left a margin for our love to grow.

In our dreams we Minna Men were all Frank Minna-that wasn’t news. But now we shot a little higher: If we had Julia we would do better than Frank, and make her happy.

Or so went dreams. I suppose over the years the other Minna Men conquered their fear and awe and desire of Julia, or anyway modulated it, by finding women of their own to make happy and unhappy, to enchant and disenchant and discard.

All except me, of course.

In the beginning Minna had Julia installed in the office of a Court Street lawyer, in a storefront as small as L &L’s. We Men used to drop in on her there with little deliveries, messages or gifts from Frank, and watch her answering phones, reading People, making bad coffee. Minna seemed eager to show us off to her, more eager than he was to drop in himself. Similarly, he seemed pleased to have Julia on showcase there, under glass on Court Street. We all intuitively gasped Minna’s instinct for human symbols, for moving us around to mark territory, so in this one sense Julia Minna had joined the Men, was on the team. Something went wrong, however, something soured between Julia and the lawyer, and Minna dragged her back to Carlotta Minna’s old second-story apartment on Baltic Street, where she’d stayed for most of fifteen years, a sulking housewife. I could never visit without thinking of Carlotta’s plates of food being carried down the stairwell by Court Street’s assorted mugs. The old stove itself was gone, though. Julia and Frank mostly ate out.

I went to that apartment now, and knocked on the door, rolling my knuckles to get the right sound.

“Hello, Lionel,” Julia said after peering at me through the peephole. She left the door unlatched and turned her back. I ducked inside. She wore a slip, her ripe arms bared, but below it she was already in stockings and heels. The apartment was dark, except for the bedroom. I shut the door behind me and followed her in, to where a dusty suitcase lay open on the bed, surrounded by heaps of clothing. It wasn’t going to be my privilege to be first with the news anywhere, apparently. In a mass of lingerie already inside the suitcase I spotted something dark and shiny, half smothered there. A pistol.

Julia rummaged in her dresser, her back still turned. I propped myself in the closet doorframe, feeling awkward.

I could make out her labored breathing as she fumbled through the drawers.

“Who told you, Julia? Eat, eat, eat-” I ground my teeth, trying to check the impulse.

“Who do you think? I got a call from the hospital.”

“Eat, ha ha, eat-” I revved like a motor.

“You want me to eat you, Lionel?” Her tone was grimly casual. “Just come out and say it.”

“Okayeatme,” I said gratefully. “You’re packing? I mean, I don’t mean the gun.” I thought of Minna reprimanding Gilbert at the car, a few hours before. You with no gun, he’d said. That’s how I sleep at night. “Packing your clothes-”

“Did they tell you to come over here and comfort me?” she said sharply. “Is that what you’re doing?”

She turned. I saw the redness in her eyes and the heaviness and softness of the flesh around her mouth. She groped for a pack of cigarettes that lay on the dresser, and when she put one between her grief-swollen lips I checked myself for a lighter I knew I wasn’t carrying, just to make a show of it. She lit the cigarette herself, chopping at a matchbook angrily, throwing off a little curl of spark.

The scene stirred me in about twelve different ways. Somehow Frank Minna was still alive in this room, alive in Julia in her slip with her half-packed suitcase, her cigarette, her gun. The two of them were closer at this moment than they had ever been. More truly married. But she was hurrying away. I sensed that if I let her go, that essence of him that I detected would go, too.

She looked at me and flared the end of the cigarette, then blew out smoke. “You jerks killed him,” she said.

Her cigarette dangled in her fingers. I fought off a weird imagining: that she’d catch her slip on fire-it did seem flammable, practically looked aflame already-and that I’d have to put her out, drench her with a glass of water. This was an uncomfortable feature of Tourette’s-my brain would throw up ugly fantasies, glimpses of pain, disasters narrowly averted. It liked to flirt with such images, the way my twitchy fingers were drawn near the blades of a spinning fan. Perhaps I also craved a crisis I could master, now, after failing Minna. I wanted to protect someone, and Julia would do.

“It wasn’t us, Julia,” I said. “We just didn’t manage to keep him alive. He was killed by a giant, a guy the size of six guys.”

“That’s great,” she said. “That sounds great. You’ve got it down, Lionel. You sound just like them. I hate the way you all talk, you know that?” She went back to stuffing clothes anarchically into the suitcase.

I mimed her striking of the match, one long motion away from my body, more or less keeping my cool. In fact, I wanted to run my hands through the clothes on the bed, snap the suitcase latches open and shut, lick the vinyl.

“Jerktalk!” I said.

She ignored me. A police siren sounded out on Smith Street and Baltic, and I shuddered. If the hospital had phoned her, the police couldn’t be too far behind. But the sirens stopped half a block away. Just a traffic stop, a shakedown. Any given car on any given evening on Smith Street fit a profile, some profile. The cop’s red light strobed through the margin of window under the shade, to throw a glow over the bed and Julia’s glossy outline.

“You can’t go, Julia.”

“Watch.”

“We need you.”

She smirked at me. “You’ll manage.”

“No, really, Julia. Frank put L and L in your name. We work for you now.”

“Really?” said Julia, interested now, or feigning interest-she made me too nervous to tell. “All I see before me is mine? Is that what you’re telling me?”

I gulped, jerked my head to the side, as though she were looking behind me.

“You think I should come down and oversee the day-to-day business of a car service, Lionel? Have a look at the books? You think that might be a good occupation for the widow?”

“We’re-Detectapush! Octaphone!-we’re a detective agency. We’re going to catch whoever did this.” Even as I spoke, I tried to order my thoughts according to this principle: detectives, clues, investigation. I should be gathering information. I wondered for a moment if Julia were the her had lost control of, according to the insinuating voice on the wire at the Zendo.

Of course, that would mean she missed her Rama-lama-ding-dong. Whatever that was, I couldn’t really picture Julia missing it.

“That’s right,” she said. “I forgot. I’m heir to a corrupt and inept detective agency. Get out of my way, Lionel.” She set her cigarette on the edge of the dresser and pushed past me, into the closet.

Inupt and corrept, went the brain of Essrog the Idiotic. You are corrept, sir!

“God, look at these dresses,” she said as she poked through the rack of hangers. Her voice was suddenly choked. “You see these?”

I nodded.

“They’re worth more than the car service put together.”

“Julia-”

“This isn’t how I dress, really. This isn’t how I look. I don’t even like these dresses.”

“How do you look?”

“You could never imagine. I can barely remember, myself. Before Frank dressed me up.”

“Show me.”

“Ha.” She looked away. “I’m supposed to be the widow in black. You’d like that. I’d look really good. That’s what Frank kept me around for, my big moment. No thanks. Tell Tony no thanks.” She swept at the dresses, pushing them deeper into the closet. Then she abruptly pulled two out by the hangers and threw them onto the bed, where they spread over the suitcase like roosting butterflies. They weren’t black.

“Tony?” I said. I was distracted, my eagle eye watching the ash burn longer, the glowing end of the abandoned cigarette inching toward the wood of the dresser.

“That’s right, Tony. Fucking Frank Minna Junior. I’m sorry, Lionel, did you want to be Frank? Did I hurt your feelings? I’m afraid Tony has the inside track.”

“That cigarette is going to burn the wood.”

“Let it burn,” she said.

“Is that a quote from a movie? ‘Let it burn’? I feel like I remember that from some movie-Burnamum Beatme!”

She turned her back to me, moved again to the bed. Untangling the dresses from their hangers, she stuffed one into the suitcase, then held the other open and stepped into it, careful not to snag the heels of her shoes. I gripped the closet doorframe, stifling an impulse to bat like a kitten at the shimmery fabric as she slid the dress up around her hips and over her shoulders.

“Come here, Lionel,” she said, without turning around. “Zip me up.”

As I reached out, I was compelled to tap each of her shoulders twice, gently. She didn’t seem to mind. Then I took hold of the zipper tab, eased it upward. As I did she took her hair in her hands, raised her arms above her head and turned, so that she rolled into my embrace. I kept hold of the tab, halfway up her back. Up close I saw how her eyes and lips looked like something barely rescued from drowning.

“Don’t stop,” she said.

She rested her elbows high on my shoulders and gazed up at my face while I tugged at the zipper. I held my breath.

“You know, when I met Frank I’d never shaved my armpits before. He made me shave.” She spoke the words into my chest, her voice dopey now, absent-sounding. All the anger was gone.

I got the zipper to the nape of her neck and dropped my hands, then took a step back and exhaled. She still held her hair bunched above her head.

“Maybe I’ll grow the hair back. What do you think, Lionel?”

I opened my mouth and what came out, soft but unmistakable, was “Doublebreasts.”

“All breasts are double, Lionel. Didn’t you know that?”

“That was just a tic,” I said awkwardly, lowering my eyes.

“Give me your hands, Lionel.”

I lifted my hands again, and she took them.

“God, they’re big. You have such big hands, Lionel.” Her voice was dreamy and singsong, like a child, or a grownup pretending to be a child. “I mean-the way you move them around so quickly, when you do that thing you do, all that grabbing, touching stuff. What’s that called again?”

“That’s a tic, too, Julia.”

“I always think of your hands as small because they move so fast. But they’re big.”

She moved them to her breasts.

Sexual excitement stills my Tourette’s brain, not by numbing me, dimming the world like Orap or Klonopin, those muffling medications, but instead by setting up a deeper attentiveness in me, a finer vibration, which gathers and encompasses my urgent chaos, enlists it in a greater cause, like a chorus of voices somehow drawing a shriek into harmony. I’m still myself and still in myself, a rare and precious combination. Yes, I like sex very much. I don’t get it very often. When I do, I find I want to slow it down to a crawl, live in that place, get to meet my stilled self, give him a little time to look around. Instead I’m hurried along by the conventional urgencies, by those awkward, alcohol-fueled juxtapositions of persons that have so far provided my few glimpses of arousal’s haven. But oh, if I could have just spent a week or so with my hands on Julia’s breasts, then I could think straight!

Alas, my very first straight thought guided my hands elsewhere. I went and plucked the smoldering cigarette off the dresser, rescuing the finish, and since Julia’s lips were slightly parted I stuck it there, filter end first.

“Double, see?” she said as she drew on the cigarette. She combed her hair with her fingers, then straightened her slip under her dress where I’d held her.

“What’s double?”

“You know, breasts.”

“You shouldn’t make fun of-Lyrical Eggdog! Logical Assnog!-you shouldn’t make fun of me, Julia.”

“I’m not.”

“Did something-Is there something between you and Tony?”

“I don’t know. Screw Tony. I like you better, Lionel. I just never told you.” She was hurt, erratic, her voice straying wildly, searching for a place to rest.

“I like you, too, Julia. There’s nothing-Screwtony! Nertscrony! Screwtsony! Tootscrewny!-sorry. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I want you to like me, Lionel.”

“You’re-you’re not saying there could actually be something between us?” I turned and slapped the doorframe six times, feeling my face curdle with shame, regretting the question instantly-wishing, for once, that I’d ticced instead, something obnoxious to obliterate the conversation’s meaning, to smother the words I’d let myself say.

“No,” she said coldly. She set the cigarette, what was left of it, back on the dresser. “You’re too strange, Lionel. Much too strange. I mean, take a look in the mirror.” She resumed crushing her clothes into the suitcase, more than seemed possible, like a magician stuffing a prop for a trick.

I only hoped the gun wouldn’t go off. “Where are you going, Julia?” I said tiredly.

“I’m going to a place of peace, if you must know, Lionel.”

“A-what?” Prays of peach? Plays of peas? Press-e-piece? “You heard me. A place of peace.” Then a horn sounded outside.

“That’s my car,” she said. “Would you go and tell them I’ll be out in a minute?”

“Okay, but-pressure pees-that’s a strange thing to say.”

“Have you ever been out of Brooklyn, Lionel?”

Breasts, underarm hair, now Brooklyn-for Julia it was all just a measure of my inexperience. “Sure,” I said. “I was in Manhattan just this afternoon.” I tight=”0em” not to think about what I’d been doing there, or failing to do.

“New York City, Lionel. Have you ever been out of New York City?”

While I considered this question I eyed the cigarette, which had at last begun to singe the dresser top. The blackening paint stood for my defeat here. I couldn’t protect anything, maybe least of all myself.

“Because if you had, you’d know that anywhere else is a place of peace. So that’s where I’m going. Would you please go hold my car for me?”

The car service double-parked in front of the building was Legacy Pool, the furthest upscale of the Brooklyn competitors, with all-black luxury models, tinted windows, cell phones for the customers, and built-in tissue-box holders under the rear window. Julia was running in style. I waved at the driver from the stoop of her building, and he nodded at me and leaned his head back on the rest. I was trying out his neck motions, nod, lean, when the gravely voice appeared behind me.

“Who’s the car for?”

It was the homicide detective. He’d been waiting, staking us out, slumped to one side of the doorway, huddled in his coat against the chilly November night. I made him right away-with his 10 P.M. Styrofoam cup of coffee, worn tie, ingrown beard, and interrogation eyes, he was unmistakable-but that didn’t mean he had any idea who I was.

“Lady inside,” I said, and tapped him once on the shoulder. “Watch it,” he said, ducking away from my touch.

“Sorry, friend. Can’t help myself.” I turned from him, back into the building.

The elegance of my exit was quickly thwarted, though-Julia was just then galumphing down the stairs with her overstuffed suitcase. I rushed to help her as the door eased slowly shut on its moaning hydraulic hinge. Too slowly: The cop stuck out his foot and held the door open for us.

“Excuse me,” he said with a sly, exhausted authority. “You Julia Minna?”

“I was,” said Julia.

“You were?”

“Yes. Isn’t that funny? I was until just about an hour ago. Lionel, put my bag in the trunk.”

“In a hurry?” the detective asked Julia. I watched the two of them size one another up, as though I weren’t any more a factor than the waiting limo driver. A few minutes ago, I wanted to say, my hands-Instead I hoisted Julia’s luggage, and waited for her to move past me to the car.

“Sort of,” said Julia. “Plane to catch.”

“Plane to where?” He crushed his empty Styrofoam cup and tossed it over his shoulder, off the stoop, into the neighbor’s bushes. Thy were already decorated with trash.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“She’s going to a precipice, pleasurepolice, philanthropriest-”

“Shut up, Lionel.”

The detective looked at me like I was crazy.

My life story to this point:

The teacher looked at me like I was crazy.

The social-services worker looked at me like I was crazy.

The boy looked at me like I was crazy and then hit me.

The girl looked at me like I was crazy.

The woman looked at me like I was crazy.

The black homicide detective looked at me like I was crazy.

“I’m afraid you can’t go, Julia,” said the detective, shaking off his confusion at my utterances with a sigh and a grimace. He’d seen plenty in his day, could cope with a little more before needing to bust my chops over it-that was the feeling I got. “We’re going to want to talk to you about Frank.”

“You’ll have to arrest me,” said Julia.

“Why would you want to say that?” said the detective, pained.

“Just to keep things simple,” said Julia. “Arrest me or I’m getting in the car. Lionel, please.”

I humped the huge, unwieldy suitcase down the stoop and waved at the driver to pop the trunk. Julia followed, the detective close behind. The limo’s speakers were oozing Mariah Carey, the driver still mellow on the headrest. When Julia slid into the backseat, the detective caught the door in his two meaty hands and leaned in over the top.

“Don’t you care who killed your husband, Mrs. Minna?” He was plainly unnerved by Julia’s blitheness.

“Let me know when you find out who killed him,” she said. “Then I’ll tell you if I care.”

I pushed the suitcase in over the top of the spare tire. I briefly considered opening it up and confiscating Julia’s pistol, then realized I probably didn’t want to emerge with a gun in front of the homicide cop. He was liable to misunderstand. Instead I shut the trunk.

“That would involve us being in touch,” the detective pointed out to Julia.

“I told you, I don’t know where I’m going. Do you have a card?”

As he straightened to reach into his vest pocket she slammed the door, then rolled down her window to accept his card.

“We could have you stopped at the airport,” he said severely, trying to remind her of his authority, or remind himself. But that we was weaker than he knew.

“Yes,” said Julia. “But it sounds like you’ve decided to let me go. I appreciate it.” She palmed his card into her purse.

“Where were you this afternoon when Frank was killed, Mrs.

Minna?”

“Talk to Lionel,” said Julia, looking back at me. “He’s my alibi. We were together all day.”

“Eat me alibailey,” I breathed, as quietly as I could. The detective frowned at me. I held my hands open and made an Art Carney face, pleading for a common understanding between us-women, suspects, widows, whattayagonnado? Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, eh?

Julia powered her tinted window back up into place and the Legacy Pool limousine took off, idiot radio trickling away to silence, leaving me and the detective standing in the dark of Baltic Street by ourselves.

“Lionel.”

Alibi hullabaloo gullible bellyflop smellafish, sang my brain, obliterating speech. I waved a farewell at the detective and started toward Smith Street. If Julia could leave him flat-footed, why couldn’t I?

He followed. “We better talk, Lionel.” He’d blown it, let her go, and now he was going to compensate with me, exercise his deductive and bullying powers.

“Can’t it wait?” I managed, without turning-it took a considerable effort not to swivel my neck. But I felt him right on my heels, like a pacing man and his shadow.

“What’s your full name, Lionel?”

“Lullaby Gueststar-”

“Come again?”

“Alibyebye Essmob-”

“Sounds Arabic,” said the detective as he pulled even with me. “You don’t look Arabic, though. Where were you and the lady this afternoon, Alibi?”

“Lionel,” I forced myself to say clearly, and then blurted “Lionel Arrestme!”

“That’s not gonna work twice in the same night,” said the cop. “I don’t have to arrest you. We’re just taking a walk, Alibi. Only I don’t know where we’re going. You want to tell me?”

“Home,” I said, before I recalled that he’d been to the place I called home once already this evening, and that it wasn’t in my best interests to lead him there again. “Except actually Iȁd like to get a sandwich first. I’m starving. You want to get a sandwich with me? There’s a place on Smith, called Zeod’s, if that’s okay, we’ll get a sandwich and then maybe part ways there, since I’m kind of shy about bringing people back to my place-” As I turned to deliver my speech my shoulder-lust was activated, and I began reaching for him again.

He knocked my hand away. “Slow down, Alibi. What’s the matter with you?”

“Tourette’s syndrome,” I said, with a grim sense of inevitability. Tourette’s was my other name, and, like my name, my brain could never leave the words unmolested. Sure enough, I produced my own echo: “Tourette is the shitman!” Nodding, gulping, flinching, I tried to silence myself, walk quickly toward the sandwich shop, and keep my eyes down, so that the detective would be out of range of my shoulder-scope. No good, I was juggling too much, and when I reticced, it came out a bellow: “Tourette Is the Shitman!”

“He’s the shitman, huh?” The detective apparently thought we were exchanging up-to-the-minute street jargon. “Can you take me to him?”

“No, no, there’s no Tourette,” I said, catching my breath. I felt mad for food, desperate to shake the detective, and choked with imminent tics.

“Don’t worry,” said the detective, talking down to me. “I won’t tell him who gave out his name.”

He thought he was grooming a stool pigeon. I could only try not to laugh or shout. Let Tourette be the suspect and maybe I’d get off the hook.

On Smith Street we veered into Zeod’s Twenty-Four-Hour Market, where the odors of baloney and bad coffee mingled with those of pistachio, dates, and St. John’s bread. If the cop wanted an Arab, I’d give him an Arab. Zeod himself stood on the elevated ramp behind the Plexiglas-and-plywood counter. He saw me and said, “Crazyman! How are you my friend?”

“Not so good,” I admitted. The detective hovered behind me, tempting me to turn my head again. I resisted.

“Where’s Frank?” said Zeod. “How I never see Frank anymore?”

Here was my chance to deliver the news at last, and my heart wasn’t up to it. “He’s in the hospital,” I said, unable now to keep from glancing nervously at the homicide detective. “Doctorbyebye!” recalled my Tourette’s.

“Some crazyman you are,” said Zeod, smiling and arching his hedge of eyebrows knowingly at my official shadow. “You tell Frank Zeod asks, okay, partner?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do that. How about a sandwich for now? Turkey on a kaiser, plenty of mustard.”

Zeod nodded at his second, an indolent Dominican kid, who moved to the slicer. Zeod never made sandwiches himself. But he’d taught his countermen well, to slice extraordinarily thin and drape the meat as it slid off the blade so it fell in bunches, rather than stacking airlessly, to make a sandwich with that fluffy compressibility I craved. I let myself be hypnotized by the whine of the slicer, the rhythm of the kid’s arm as he received the slices and dripped them onto the kaiser roll. Zeod watched me. He knew I obsessed on his sandwiches, and it pleased him. “You and your friend?” he said magnanimously.

The detective shook his head. “Pack of Marlboro Lights,” he said.

“Okay. You want a soda, Crazyman? Get yourself.” I went and got a Coke out of the cooler while Zeod put my sandwich and the cop’s cigarettes into a brown paper bag with a plastic fork and a sheaf of napkins.

“Charge it to Frank, yes, my friend?”

I couldn’t speak. I took the bag and we stepped back out onto Smith Street.

“Sleeping with the dead man’s wife,” said the detective. “Now you’re eating on his tab. That takes some gall.”

“You misunderstand,” I said.

“Then maybe you better set me straight,” he said. “Gimme those cigarettes.”

“I work for Frank-”

“Worked. He’s dead. Why didn’t you tell your friend the A-rab?”

“Arab-eye!-I don’t know. No reason.” I handed the cop his Marlboros. “Eatmebailey, repeatmebailey, repeatmobile-could we continue this maybe another time? Because-retreatmobile!-because now I really urgently have to go home and-eatbail! beatmail!-eat this sandwich.”

“You work for him where? At the car service?”

Detective agency, I silently corrected. “Uh, yeah.”

“So you and his wife were, what? Driving around? Where’s the car?”

“She wanted to go shopping.” This lie came out so blessedly smooth and un-tic-laden it felt like the truth. For that reason or some other, the detective didn’t challenge it.

“So you’d describe yourself as, what? A friend of the deceased?”

“Trend the decreased! Mend the retreats!-sure, that’s right.”

He was learning to ignore my outbursts. “So where are we going now? Your house?” He lit a cigarette without breaking stride. “Looks like you’re headed back to work.”

I didn’t want to tell him how little difference there was between the two.

“Let’s go in here,” I said, jerking my neck sideways as we crossed Bergen Street, letting my physical tic lead me-navigation by TouretteWherx2014;into the Casino.

The Casino was Minna’s name for Smith Street’s hole-in-the-wall newspaper shop, which had a single wall of magazines and a case of Pepsi and Snapple crammed into a space the size of a large closet. The Casino was named for the lines that stretched each morning to buy Lotto and Scratchers and Jumble 6 and Pickball, for the fortune being made on games of chance by the newsstand’s immigrant Korean owners, for the hearts being quietly broken there round the clock. There was something tragic in the way they stood obediently waiting, many of them elderly, others new immigrants, illiterate except in the small language of their chosen game, deferring to anyone with real business, like the purchase of a magazine, a pack of double-A batteries, or a tube of lip gloss. That docility was heartbreaking. The games were over almost before they started, the foil scraped off tickets with a key or a dime, the contrived near-misses underneath bared. (New York is a Tourettic city, and this great communal scratching and counting and tearing is a definite symptom.) The sidewalk just outside the Casino was strewn with discarded tickets, the chaff of wasted hope.

But I was hardly in a position to criticize lost causes. I had no reason for visiting the Casino except that I associated it with Minna, with Minna alive. If I visited enough of his haunts before news of his death spread along Court and Smith Street, I might persuade myself against the evidence of my own eyes-and against the fact of the homicide cop on my heels-that nothing had happened.

“What’re we doing?” said the detective.

“I, uh, need something to read with my sandwich.”

The desultory magazines were shelved two deep in the rack-there weren’t more than one or two customers for GQ or Wired or Brooklyn Bridge per month around here. Me, I was bluffing, didn’t read magazines at all. Then I spotted a familiar face, on a magazine called Vibe: The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Before a blurred cream background he posed resting his head against the neck of a pink guitar, his eyes demure. The unpronounceable typographical glyph with which he had replaced his name was shaved into the hair at his temple.

“Skrubble,” I said.

“What?”

“Plavshk,” I said. My brain had decided to try to pronounce that unpronounceable glyph, a linguistic foray into the lands On Beyond Zebra. I lifted up the magazine.

“You’re telling me you’re gonna read Vibe?”

“Sure.”

“You trying to make fun of me here, Alibi?”

“No, no, I’m a big fan of Skursvshe.”

“Who?”

“The Artist Formerly Known As Plinvstk.” I couldn’t quit tackling the glyph. I plopped the magazine on the counter and Jimmy,e Korean proprietor, said, “For Frank?”

“Yeah,” I gulped.

He waved my money away. “Take it, Lionel.”

Back outside, the cop waited until we’d turned the corner, into the relative gloom of Bergen Street, just past the F-train entrance and a few doors from L &L’s storefront, then collared me, literally, two hands bunching my jacket at my neck, and pushed me up against the tile-mosaic wall. I gripped my magazine, which was curled into a baton, and the bag from Zeod’s with sandwich and soda, held them protectively in front of me like an old lady with her purse. I knew better than to push back at the cop. Anyway, I was bigger, and he didn’t really frighten me, not physically.

“Enough with the double-talk,” he said. “Where’s this going? Why are you pretending your man Minna’s still with us, Alibi? What’s the game?”

“Wow,” I said. “This was unexpected. You’re like good cop and bad cop rolled into one.”

“Yeah, used to be they could afford two different guys. Now with all the budget cuts and shit they’ve got us doing double shifts.”

“Can we go back to-fuckmeblackcop-back to talking nice now?”

“What you say?”

“Nothing. Let go of my collar.” I’d kept the outburst down to a mumble-and I knew to be grateful my Tourette’s brain hadn’t dialed up nigger. Despite the detective’s roughhousing, or because of it, our frenzy had peaked and abated, and we’d earned a quiet moment together. He was close enough to invite intimacy. If my hands hadn’t been full I would have begun stroking his pebbly jaw or clapping him on the shoulders.

“Talk to me, Alibi. Tell me things.”

“Don’t treat me like a suspect.”

“Tell me why not.”

“I worked for Frank. I miss him. I want to catch his killer as much as you.”

“So let’s compare notes. The names Alphonso Matricardi and Leonardo Rockaforte mean anything to you?”

I was silenced.

Matricardi and Rockaforte: The homicide cop didn’t know you weren’t supposed to say those names aloud. Not anywhere, but especially not out on Smith Street.

I’d never even heard their first names, Alphonso and Leonardo. They seemed wrong, but what first names wouldn’t? Wrongness surrounded those names and their once-in-a-blue-moon uttering. Don’t say Matricardi and Rockaforte.

Say “The Clients” if you must.

=”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 been set up. Therefore:

Frightened. Someone was hunting Minna Men.

I took an agency car into Manhattan and tried to see Gilbert at the precinct house, but didn’t have any luck. He’d already been shifted out of the front cage, to the back, where he’d been grouped with a bunch of other fresh arrests for a night of what the cops euphemistically called “bull/diverapy”-eating baloney sandwiches, using the toilet in the open if he had to go, shrugging off petty advances on his watch and wallet, and trading cigarettes, if he had any, for a razor blade to protect himself. Industrious Loomis had already exhausted the cops’ patience for Gilbert’s rights and privileges: He’d had his phone call, his moment’s visitation at the cell bars, and nothing more would be allowed to happen to him until the next morning at the soonest. Then he could hope to be arraigned and sent out to the Tombs to wait for someone to bail him out. So my effort was rewarded by learning nothing yet being saddled with driving Loomis back to Brooklyn. I took the opportunity to try to find out what the garbage cop had heard from Gilbert.

“He didn’t want to say much without a lawyer, and I don’t blame him. The walls have ears, you know? Just that Ullman was dead when he got there. The homicides picked him up coming out the place like they’d been tipped. Time I saw him, he’d mouthed a little and been roughed around, asked for a lawyer, they told him he had to wait for tomorrow. I guess he tried to call L &L but you weren’t picking up, fortunately I was around-Hey, sorry about Frank, by the way. It’s a shame a thing happens. Gilbert didn’t look too good about it either I can tell you. I don’t know what he said or didn’t but the guys weren’t too happy with him by the time I showed. I tried reasoning with the guys, let them see my badge, but they treat me like I was lower than a fucking prison guard, you know? Like I couldn’t make the fucking cut.”

Gilbert had befriended Loomis somewhere near the end of high school, when they both were hanging around the Carroll Street park watching the old men play bocce. Loomis called to Gilbert’s lazy, sloppy side, the nose-picker and cigarette-grubber, the part of him that didn’t want to always have to keep up with Minna and us other Men. Loomis wasn’t sharpened up the way even the most passive and recalcitrant of us orphans had to be-he was a sort of shapeless inadvertent extension of his parents’ couch and television set and refrigerator, and he assumed independent life only grudgingly. At Gilbert’s side he’d come slouching around L &L in the formative days and never show a glimmer of interest in either our cover-story car service or the detective agency lurking just underneath-we might have an open packet of Sno-Balls or Chocodiles sitting on the counter, though.

Loomis was nudged by his parents toward police work. He struck out twice at the civil-service qualification test to become a regular beat cop, and some kindhearted career counselor nudged him again, gently downward, to the easier test for the sanitation police, which he squeaked past. Before he was the Garbage Cop, though, Minna used to call him Butt Trust, a term he would apply with a measure of real tenderness.

Me and the other Boys let it go the first five or six times, thinking an explanation would be offered, before finally asking Minna what he meant.

“You got your brain trust, your most-valued,” said Minna. “Then you got the rest of them. The ones you let hang around anyway. That would be the butt trust, right?”

I was never overfond of the butt trust. In fact, I hated Loomis-let me count the ways. His imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts-his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world, his attention like a pinball rolling past unlit blinkers and frozen flippers into the hole again and again: game over. He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing-so it was my duty to loathe him instead.

Tonight, as we roared across the metal grating of the Brooklyn Bridge’s roadway, he settled into his usual dull riff: The sanitation force gets no respect. “You think they’d know what it’s like for a cop in this city, me and those guys are on the same team, but this one cop keeps saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you come around my block, somebody keeps stealing my garbage.’ If it weren’t for Gilbert I would of told him to stick it-”

“What time did Gilbert call you?” I interrupted.

“I don’t know, around seven or eight, maybe nine almost,” he said, succinctly demonstrating his unfitness for the force.

“It’s-Tourette is the stickman!-only ten now, Loomis.”

“Okay, it was just after eight.”

“Did you find out where Ullman lived?”

“Downtown somewhere. I gave Gilbert the address.”

“You don’t remember where it was?”

“Nah.”

Loomis wasn’t going to be any help. He seemed to know this as well as I, and immediately launched into another digression, as if to say, I’m useless, but no hard feelings, okay? “So you heard the one about how many Catholics does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“I’ve heard that one, Loomis. No jokes, please.”

“Ah, come on. What about why did the blonde stare at the carton of orange juice?”

I was silent. We came off the bridge, at Cadman Plaza. I’d be rid of him soon.

“ ’Cause it said ‘concentrate,’ get it?”

This was another thing I hated about Loomis. Years ago he’d latched on to Minna’s joke-telling contests, decided he could compete. But he favored idiot riddles, not jokes at all, no room for character or nuance. He didn’t seem to know the difference.

“Got it,” I admitted.

“What about how do you titillate an ocelot?”

“What?”

“Titillate an ocelot. You know, like a big cat. I think.”

“It’s a big cat. How do you titillate it, Loomiseemed D; “You oscillate its tit a lot, get it?”

“Eat me Ocelot!” I screamed as we turned onto Court Street. Loomis’s crappy punning had slid right under the skin of my symptoms. “Lancelot ancillary oscillope! Octapot! Tittapocamus!”

The garbage cop laughed. “Jesus, Lionel, you crack me up. You never quit with that routine.”

“It’s not a-root-ocelot,” I shrieked through my teeth. Here, finally, was what I hated most in Loomis: He’d always insisted, from the time we met as teenagers to this day, that I was elaborately feigning and could keep from ticcing if I wanted to. Nothing would dissuade him, no example or demonstration, no program of education. I’d once shown him the book Minna gave me; he glanced at it and laughed. I was making it up. As far as he was concerned, my Tourette’s was just an odd joke, one going mostly over his head, stretched out over the course of fifteen years.

“Tossed salad!” he said. “Gotcha!” He liked to think he was playing along.

“Go touchalot!” I slapped him on the thickly padded shoulder of his coat, so suddenly the car swerved with my movement.

“Christ, look out!”

I tapped him five more times, my driving steady now.

“I can’t get over you,” he said. “Even at a time like this. I guess it’s sentimental, like a way of saying, if Frank were still here. Since that routine always did keep him busted up.”

We pulled up outside L &L. The lights in the storefront were on. Somebody had returned since my jaunt to the Sixth Precinct.

“I thought you were driving me home.” Loomis lived on Nevins Street, near the projects.

“You can walk from here, gofuckacop.”

“C’mon, Lionel.”

I parked in the open spot in across from the storefront. The sooner Loomis and I were out of each other’s presence, the better.

“Walk,” I said.

“At least lemme use the can,” he whined. “Those jerks at the station wouldn’t let me. I been holding it.”

“If you’ll do one thing for me.”

“Whuzzat?”

“Ullman’s address,” I said. “You found it once. I need it, Loomis.”

“I can get it tomorrow morning when I’m back at my desk. You want me to call you here?”

I took one of Minna’s cards out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Call the beeper number. I’ll be carring it.”

“Okay, all right, now will you lemme take a leak?”

I didn’t speak, just clicked the car locks up and down automatically six times, then got out. Loomis followed me to the storefront, and inside.

Danny came out of the back, stubbing a cigarette in the countertop ashtray as he passed. He always dressed the prettiest of us Minna Men, but his lean black suit suddenly looked like it had been worn too many days in a row. He reminded me of an out-of-work mortician. He glanced at me and Loomis and pursed his lips but didn’t speak, and I couldn’t really get anything out of his eyes. I felt I didn’t know him with Minna gone. Danny and I functioned as expressions of two opposed ends of Frank Minna’s impulses: him a tall, silent body that attracted women and intimidated men, me a flapping inane mouth that covered the world in names and descriptions. Average us and you might have Frank Minna back, sort of. Now, without Minna for a conduit between us, Danny and I had to begin again grasping one another as entities, as though we were suddenly fourteen years old again and occupying our opposite niches at St. Vincent’s Home for Boys.

In fact, I had a sudden yearning that Danny should be holding a basketball, so that I could say “Good shot!” or exhort him to dunk it. Instead we stared at one another.

“ ’Scuse me,” said Loomis, scooting past me and waving his hand at Danny. “Gotta use your toilet.” He disappeared into the back.

“Where’s Tony?” I said.

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Well, I don’t know. I hope he’s doing better than Gilbert. I just left him in the lockup at the Sixth.” I realized it sounded as if I’d actually seen him, but I let the implication stand. Loomis wouldn’t call me on it, even if he heard from the bathroom.

Danny didn’t look all that surprised. The shock of Minna’s death made this new turn unimpressive by comparison, I supposed. “What’s he in for?”

“Ullmanslaughter!-the guy Tony sent Gilbert to find, he turned up dead. They pinned it on Gilbert.”

Danny only scratched at the end of his nose thoughtfully.

“So where were you?” I said. “I thought you were minding the store.”

“Went for a bite.”

“I was here for forty-five minutes.” A lie-I doubted it was more than fifteen, but I felt like pushing him. “Guess we missed each other.”

“Any calls? See that homosapien, homogenize, genocide, can’tdecide, candyeyes, homicide cop?”

He shook his head. He was holding something back-but then it occurred to me that I was too.

Danny and I stooensively regarding each other, waiting for the next question to form. I felt a vibration deep inside, profounder tics lurking in me, gathering strength. Or perhaps I was only feeling my hunger at last.

Loomis popped out of the back. “Jesus, you guys look bad. What a day, huh?”

We stared at him.

“Well, I think we owe Frank a moment of silence, don’t you guys?”

I wanted to point out that what Loomis had interrupted was a moment of silence, but I let it go.

“Little something in the way of remembrance? Bow your heads, you turkeys. The guy was like your father. Don’t end the day arguing with each other, for crying out loud.”

Loomis had a point, or enough of one anyway, to shame me and Danny into letting him have his way. So we stood in silence, and when I saw that Danny and Loomis had each closed their eyes I closed mine too. Together we made up some lopped-off, inadequate version of the Agency-Danny standing for himself and Tony, I for myself, and Loomis, I suppose, for Gilbert. But I was moved anyway, for a second.

Then Loomis ruined it with a clearly audible fart, which he coughed to cover, unsuccessfully. “Okay,” he said suddenly. “How’s about that ride home, Lionel?”

“Walk,” I said.

Humbled by his own body, the garbage cop didn’t argue, but headed for the door.

Danny volunteered to sit by the L &L phone. He already had a pot of coffee brewing, he pointed out, and I could see he was in a pacing mood, that he wanted the space of the office to himself. It suited me well enough to leave him there. I went upstairs, without our exchanging more than a few sentences.

Upstairs I lit a candle and stuck it in the center of my table, beside Minna’s beeper and watch. Loomis’s clumsy pass at ritual haunted me. I needed one of my own. But I was also hungry. I poured out the diluted drink and made myself a fresh one, set it out on the table too. Then I unwrapped the sandwich from Zeod’s. I considered for a moment, fighting the urge just to sink my teeth into it, then went to the cabinet and brought back a serrated knife and small plate. I cut the sandwich into six equal pieces, taking unexpectedly deep pleasure in the texture of the kaiser roll’s resistance to the knife’s dull teeth, and arranged the pieces so they were equidistant on the plate. I returned the knife to my counter, then centered plate, candle and drink on the table in a way that soothed my grieving Tourette’s. If I didn’t stem my syndrome’s needs I would never clear a space in which my own sorrow could dwell.

Then I went to my boom box and put on the saddest song in my CD collection, Prince’s “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore.”

I don’t know whether The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is Tourettic or obsessive-compulsive in his human life, b know for certain he is deeply so in the life of his work. Music had never made much of an impression on me until the day in 1986 when, sitting in the passenger seat of Minna’s Cadillac, I first heard the single “Kiss” squirting its manic way out of the car radio. To that point in my life I might have once or twice heard music that toyed with feelings of claustrophobic discomfort and expulsive release, and which in so doing passingly charmed my Tourette’s, gulled it with a sense of recognition, like Art Carney or Daffy Duck-but here was a song that lived entirely in that territory, guitar and voice twitching and throbbing within obsessively delineated bounds, alternately silent and plosive. It so pulsed with Tourettic energies that I could surrender to its tormented, squeaky beat and let my syndrome live outside my brain for once, live in the air instead.

“Turn that shit down,” said Minna.

“I like it,” I said.

“That’s that crap Danny listens to,” said Minna. Danny was code for too black.

I knew I had to own that song, and so the next day I sought it out at J &R Music World-I needed the word “funk” explained to me by the salesman. He sold me a cassette, and a Walkman to play it on. What I ended up with was a seven-minute “extended single” version-the song I’d heard on the radio, with a four-minute catastrophe of chopping, grunting, hissing and slapping sounds appended-a coda apparently designed as a private message of confirmation to my delighted Tourette’s brain.

Prince’s music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger. When I listened to him I was exempt from my symptoms. So I began collecting his records, especially those elaborate and frenetic remixes tucked away on the CD singles. The way he worried forty-five minutes of variations out of a lone musical or verbal phrase is, as far as I know, the nearest thing in art to my condition.

“How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” is a ballad, piano strolling beneath an aching falsetto vocal. Slow and melancholy, it still featured the Tourettic abruptness and compulsive precision, the sudden shrieks and silences, that made Prince’s music my brain’s balm.

I put the song on repeat and sat in the light of my candle and waited for the tears. Only after they came did I allow myself to eat the six turkey-sandwich portions, in a ritual for Minna, alternating them with sips of Walker Red. The body and the blood, I couldn’t keep from thinking, though I was as distant from any religious feeling as a mourning man could be. The turkey and the booze, I substituted. A last meal for Minna, who didn’t get one. Prince moaned, finished his song, began it again. The candle guttered. I counted three as I finished a portion of sandwich, then four. That was the extent of my symptoms. I counted sandwiches and wept. At six I killed the music, blew out the candle and went to bed.

(TOURETTE DREAMS)

(in Tourette dreams you shed your tics)

(or your tics shed you)

(and you go with them, astonished to leave yourself behind)