Pariah

SIX

Tony Alvarez begins to think he must be getting old or sick or something. Not so long ago he would have been hitting the bars and clubs about now, working his charm, making his moves. Or else he would be in bed, bouncing it against the wall to the tune of some female vocal accompaniment beneath him. Instead, here he is, sitting in front of an empty pizza box, two empty beer cans, and an empty TV program. He feels a little like Homer Simpson. Okay, he didn’t get much sleep last night, but that was never an excuse he would have made before now.

He worries about getting old. His father, God rest his bones, passed only a month after his fiftieth birthday. Tony doesn’t want to go when he’s fifty. Or even ninety, for that matter. The only plan he has for his police pension is to stock up on the huge supply of condoms he’s going to need.

Since he has to blame his apathy on something, he decides to blame it on the fact of Joe Parlatti’s death. Man, he thinks, that is some serious shit. Joe was a nice guy — everybody liked him. Stands to reason that a good guy getting whacked like that — someone he worked with, no less — is bound to affect a man’s libido. Keeping the old johnson at half mast tonight is just paying the proper respect.

He is still in his work clothes, and he notices that there is now a tomato stain on his striped shirt. Anything less than sartorial perfection is also unlike him, and this only serves to confirm to himself how badly his state of mind has been altered by today’s events.

Enough of this shit, he thinks. Bring back the old Tony.

He gets up and heads toward the bathroom, stripping as he goes. He takes a long, hot shower, trying to wash away the grime from his body and his mind. Images flash in his brain. Of Joe, lying amidst the garbage, three small holes drilled into his skull. Alvarez tells himself that he shouldn’t have to think about such things. He is young. He should be able to think about women and beer and having fun. And today, somebody robbed him of that youth.

As he rinses the shampoo from his hair, he lets out a shout, a roar of anger and emotional pain. The noise fills his head, distracting him from the images. For now at least.

When he steps from the shower cubicle and wraps a warmed towel around his waist, there is a ringing in his ears. It takes him a second or two to realize that it’s coming from his cellphone. He walks back into the living room, finds the phone in the pocket of his jacket.

‘Hello?’

‘Tony, it’s Vic, down at the house. I hope you don’t mind me calling you like this.’

Vic is one of the detectives on duty at the station house. He will know that Alvarez has put in a very long day, and that there has to be a good reason to disturb him now.

‘Go ahead, Vic. What’s up?’

‘I took a call just now. Very weird. Guy won’t give his name, but says he’s got something on the Joe Parlatti case. I ask him for the details, but he refuses. Says the only person he’ll speak with about it is you.’

‘Is that it?’

‘No. He gave me a number you can call him back on. Said it can’t wait, neither. You want to hear what he has to say, you need to call him straight away. Oh, and one other thing. .’

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know if it means anything, but he said to tell you that Fancy and Choo-Choo send their regards.’

TC, Alvarez thinks. Tremaine Cavell.

He dips a hand back into his jacket pocket, takes out a notebook and pen.

‘Okay, Vic, thanks. You got that number?’

He writes it down and hangs up. He looks again at the number, starts dialing, but changes his mind. Moving into the bedroom, he opens a drawer in his bureau and pulls out an Olympus voice recorder and a TP-7 cable. He plugs one end of the cable into a jack on the recorder, and pops the other end into his ear. Switching the recorder on, he dials the number he’s been given.

‘Yeah, who that?’

Nice telephone manner, Alvarez thinks.

‘Tremaine, it’s Detective Alvarez. I hear you want to talk to me. You got something for me?’

‘Nah, man, not on the phone. What I got for you got to be face to face.’

‘You prepared to meet me at the precinct station house?’

Cavell barks a laugh. ‘Fuck that shit. Only time you get me in there is when you arrest my ass. Niggers see me walking in there without ten cops on my back, I might as well write my obituary now.’

‘Okay, so where?’

‘One of my girls got a crib on West Seventeenth. Meet me there.’

‘What’s the full address?’

Cavell gives him the building and apartment numbers, and Alvarez scribbles them below the phone number that Vic gave him.

‘Okay, let me get in touch with Detective Doyle-’

‘Whoa! Hold up! I ain’t throwing no party here. This is me and you, man. That’s it.’

‘Detective Doyle was with me earlier today. He’s working the case with me.’

He hears a sigh from Cavell. ‘You don’t get it, do you? What I got for you is some heavy, heavy shit. A cop like Doyle be the last motherfucker I want around me when I break this out.’

Alvarez feels like a bony finger has just stroked his spine. What’s the problem with Doyle? Why exclude him?

‘What makes you think I’m any better than Doyle?’

A pause. ‘I don’t. Let’s just say your name didn’t crop up in what I heard.’

‘And you want to take that risk? Why the good citizen act all of a sudden, Tremaine?’

‘Because some motherfucker took out one of my bitches, and that makes me mad. So if the only way I can get back at him is through you, then that’s what I have to do.’

Alvarez considers this, and knows that he’s hooked. Tremaine is too stupid to make up a story like this, and too unadventurous to follow through on such a lie. He knows something, and he wants to capitalize on that knowledge.

‘All right, Tremaine, I’m coming over. This better be worth it.’

He hangs up, then switches off the recorder.

Quickly drying himself off, he dresses in jeans, Timberlands and a woolen sweatshirt. He shrugs on a tan overcoat, then clips his Glock to his belt and drops three more loaded magazines into his pocket. He picks up his cellphone and the recorder, with the intention of returning the latter to the bedroom drawer, then thinks better of it and slips both gadgets into his other side pocket.

As he heads out into the night, his thoughts are troubled by one thing. Or, rather, one person. And it’s not Cavell.

Alvarez parks up on West Seventeenth, close enough to get a good view of the apartment building Cavell specified, but not directly in front. He turns off his lights and remains in the dissipating warmth of his Toyota for a good ten minutes while he watches the five-story walk-up.

He sees nobody go in and nobody come out, and as far as he can tell, there is no sign of anybody else keeping an eye on the building from out here on the street. The only indication that anyone is aware of his presence comes when a coiffured poodle takes an interest in his car’s front bumper. The dog’s owner, a middle-aged man in a long coat and wide-brimmed hat, warns the pooch that the cute-looking driver probably isn’t ready for that level of intimacy, and they continue on their merry way.

Alvarez takes out his cellphone and voice recorder, then connects up the cable microphone and inserts the earpiece. He searches the phone for the last number he called, then redials. As he listens to the ring tone, he switches on the Olympus.

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s Detective Alvarez, Tremaine. I’m gonna be a little bit longer. My car’s decided it’s too cold to move.’

‘Fuck is this, man? You want to hear this shit or not? I don’t need to be taking no risks like this.’

To Alvarez, Cavell sounds a little flustered. Not quite the cool gangsta image he had adopted in the garage.

‘All right, Tremaine. Keep it puckered. I’ll be with you in fifteen, twenty minutes tops.’

‘Aiight, but any more than that and I’m gone.’

Alvarez hangs up. He disconnects the recorder and puts it into the glove compartment, then drops the cellphone back in his pocket. He pulls his Glock, checks the indicator telling him there’s a round in the chamber, then reholsters it.

When he climbs out of the car and locks it up, the cold hits him. He feels as though he will freeze to the sidewalk if he stands here too long.

He walks toward the building, glancing into the interior of each vehicle as he passes it. At the lobby door he doesn’t ring the bell for Cavell’s apartment, but instead buzzes the superintendent.

When the super opens the door, Alvarez flashes his badge and ID.

‘I need to speak with one of the tenants. Unannounced.’

The super, a gray-haired, grumpy-looking man, has spaghetti sauce around his mouth and is still chewing.

‘There gonna be shooting?’ he asks, losing a strand of spaghetti as he does so.

Alvarez says, ‘Well, it’s not on my to-do list.’

The super sucks the pasta back in, chews some more.

‘’Cause I don’t need no holes in my building. And not in my tenants neither. I just want a quiet night. Good food, cold beer and Barbarella.’

‘Your wife?’

‘I wish. The movie. Jane Fonda stripping off in zero-G. My wife, she looks more like Henry Fonda.’

Alvarez is already heading for the stairs. ‘Enjoy the movie,’ he says.

‘No holes, remember,’ the super calls after him, and then Alvarez hears a door shutting.

He takes the stairs two at a time, but with stealth, listening as he goes. Outside apartment 3C he puts his ear to the uniform slab of a door.

He doesn’t fear Cavell. Cavell is a young punk. But Alvarez doesn’t like the fact that, right now, Cavell is calling the shots and acting kinda weird. And so it seems sensible to Alvarez, especially acting without backup like this, to proceed with some caution.

If this is some kind of trap, Alvarez thinks, then Cavell will believe he can breathe easy for a while, his victim not expected for a good fifteen minutes yet. He’s not going to stand there with a cannon pointed at the door for that long. And if he’s got anybody else in there with him — say a whole bunch of his homies laden with artillery — then it’s likely that they will be equally at ease for now. There’ll be some conversation. A couple of jokes. Maybe even some detailed description of what fun things they are going to do to that spic cop when he walks in.

But Alvarez hears nothing. Not a murmur. He is not even certain that Cavell himself is in there.

He draws his gun and lowers it to his side, then knocks on the door. It is only seconds before the door opens and Cavell’s face appears in the gap. He is wearing a gray Hilfiger hooded zip-up over a blue T-shirt. He looks slightly surprised.

‘That was fast, man. You get the car-’

Alvarez snaps his gun hand up and aims the weapon at the center of Cavell’s forehead. With his other hand he pushes the door wide open to get a view into the apartment.

‘Turn around,’ he orders.

‘Yo, what the-’

‘Turn around. Now!’

Cavell does as he is told, raising his arms slightly in surrender as he has probably done a hundred times before. Alvarez puts the muzzle of the Glock to the back of Cavell’s head, then places his left hand on his shoulder. He pushes him forward into the apartment, kicking the door closed behind him.

He marches Cavell into the middle of the living room, his eyes darting as he moves. The room gives off to a small kitchen area and there are doors into two other rooms. Alvarez picks one and guides Cavell toward it.

‘Open it!’

Cavell pushes open the door and stumbles in, Alvarez tight behind him. A bedroom. All pink and lilac and teddy bears. A huge unmade bed filling the space. Some kind of black skimpy nightwear on the end of it.

‘The closet,’ Alvarez says, and Cavell twists his head slightly toward him.

‘The closet? You think you Inspector fucking Clouseau or something? You think I got fucking Cato hiding in there?’

Alvarez jabs the gun muzzle hard into Cavell’s skull. ‘Do it!’

Cavell sighs and steps over to the closet. Alvarez stays near the doorway, his gun on Cavell’s back but his eyes constantly flicking back to the living room and that other unopened door.

Cavell yanks open the closet. There is a sudden movement within. Alvarez tightens his trigger finger. A red shoe falls from the shelf and lands at Cavell’s feet, and Alvarez steps down the pressure on the trigger.

‘Back that way,’ he says. He keeps his gaze fixed on Cavell as he retraces his steps. As Cavell passes, he puts the gun back to his head.

‘You don’t gotta do that,’ Cavell complains.

‘Shut up! Open the other door.’

They cross the living area, and Cavell follows his instructions. Alvarez doesn’t need to enter the tiny bathroom to see that it’s unoccupied.

‘Happy now?’ Cavell asks.

‘No,’ Alvarez answers. ‘Against the wall.’

Knowing the drill, Cavell puts his hands high on the wall, alongside a window looking onto the street below. Alvarez kicks his feet apart, displacing his center of gravity so that any attempt to come away from the wall will have him falling flat on his face. Keeping his gun in place, he pats Cavell’s armpits, then down both flanks. He checks Cavell’s waist, then drags his gun down Cavell’s spine and runs his free hand over the man’s legs. Straightening up, he does a similar run along Cavell’s arms. Finally, he dips his hand into the hood of Cavell’s sweatshirt.

‘Stay there,’ Alvarez says. He walks back to the apartment door and sees that it has a locking bar. He fixes it into place, just in case some friends of Cavell’s should decide to pay a visit.

‘Now I’m happy,’ he says, putting the Glock away.

Cavell straightens up, drops his arms and turns to face Alvarez.

‘The fuck you gotta do all that shit for, man? I tole you I was trying to help you out.’

Alvarez is warm after the exertion and the stress of the last few minutes. He takes off his coat and slings it over the back of the sofa, then folds his arms and looks around the room. It’s clean and tidy. Vases of dried flowers on the coffee table and on the kitchen counter. On one wall, a poster of the good-looking black doctor from ER.

‘You like that guy, Tremaine?’

Cavell curls his lip at the insult. ‘Like I said, this my girl’s place.’

‘One of your hookers?’

‘One of my own private collection. I don’t like to mix business with pleasure.’

‘Uh-huh. So why bring me here, Tremaine? What’s all this about?’

‘I got a message for you.’

‘A message, huh? Who from?’

‘Can’t say.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’

Cavell just shrugs.

‘Okay, so why not tell me on the phone? Or send me a letter? Or a fucking carrier pigeon?’

‘Don’t know. I was just told this is the way it has to be.’

‘You always do what you’re told, Tremaine? Whose bitch are you being right now?’

Cavell flares his nostrils and bares his teeth. Alvarez knows that the slur got to him, but when Cavell bites on his bottom lip, he realizes it’s not enough. Somebody, somewhere, has a grip on Cavell’s testicles and is threatening to squeeze.

‘And why do I have to keep Detective Doyle out of this? What’s that all about?’

Again Cavell shrugs, and Alvarez accepts he’s wasting his time.

‘All right, Tremaine, give me the fucking message. And this better have something to do with the case we’re working, or I’ll run you down to the station house so fast your ass won’t be able to keep up. So spit it out.’

Cavell licks his lips, acting like he’s about to give a damn speech. He’s looking nervous too, Alvarez thinks. Almost ready to pee himself. What the fuck is going on here?

‘The message is. .’ Cavell begins.

Alvarez waits for the rest. He notices that beads of sweat have broken out on Cavell’s forehead. So much for the street-hard pimp.

‘Yeah?’ he prompts.

‘The message is. . you got too close.’

For a second, Alvarez feels he is in a surrealist painting. Or reading a foreign pamphlet in which the text has been badly mistranslated. Cavell’s words just don’t fit any mental template he knows how to process.

And now he feels he is being dicked around.

‘The fuck you talking about, Tremaine? Is that it? That’s your fucking message? That’s what you dragged my ass all the way across town to hear? Get your coat, Tremaine. We got a trip to make, and don’t plan on seeing your woman in her skimpy shit tonight. Second thoughts, bring the frillies with you. You can wear them for the nice big cellmate I’m gonna hook you up with.’

Cavell holds his palms up, his shoulders high. The body language of someone who is trying to plead his case.

‘Serious, man. That’s what I been told to say. You got too close. Dude said you’d understand what it means.’

There is a wavering pitch to Cavell’s voice now, Alvarez notices. Like he really needs to hear confirmation that his words have struck some big-ass bell in the mind of the detective.

‘Don’t mean shit, Tremaine. Let’s go.’

He beckons to the pimp, but Cavell doesn’t budge from his position near the wall. He waves his hand at Alvarez.

‘Hold up. I got more. Something else I got to deliver.’

Alvarez raises an eyebrow. ‘What?’

A note. Over there, on the counter.’

Alvarez looks to where Cavell is gesturing. Lying on the kitchen counter is a white envelope. Alvarez steps over to it and picks it up. It weighs little, and bears no writing on the front. He glances at Cavell, then pushes his thumb under the sealed flap and rips it open.

Inside, there is a single sheet of paper, folded once. He opens it up and reads the typewritten text:

Bang. You’re dead.

Alvarez feels his heart pound harder. He senses that he’s been dropped into the middle of a situation he doesn’t fully understand. He doesn’t know whether to be afraid or angry.

He glares hard at Cavell and flaps the note at him. ‘You write this, Tremaine? This your idea of a fucking joke?’

Cavell is shifting his weight from foot to foot. ‘I don’t even know what’s in the fucking note, man. Just take it and leave, okay? I done my part. Take the note and get the fuck out of here. That’s what’s supposed to happen.’

Alvarez shakes his head in an effort to clear his confusion. ‘What are you talking about? What do you mean: supposed to happen? I ain’t going nowhere until you start talking some sense.’

Cavell just stares back. His eyes are bulging. His chest is heaving.

And then he does something totally bizarre.

He begins talking to himself.

Or, rather, to an imagined person behind him.

He twists his head so that it is angled over his shoulder and says, ‘We done, right? I done what you said. We straight now.’

Alvarez whips his gun out. He doesn’t know why, or what he is going to do with it, but it seems the prudent thing to do in the face of this insanity.

He levels the gun at Cavell’s face. ‘What’s going on, Tremaine? Talk to me, man.’

Cavell continues to stare and to suck hard on the air, like he’s having trouble getting enough oxygen into his system. Alvarez rushes toward him and puts the gun to his nose, squashing it against his face.

‘Who you talking to, Tremaine?’

He puts his left hand around Cavell’s throat and forces him back against the wall. Cavell almost screams his protest: ‘My back, man! Watch my back!’

The shock of Cavell’s cries sends Alvarez reeling away from him.

He looks Cavell up and down and thinks, I frisked the guy. He’s not strapped. What did I miss?

It strikes him then how warm it is in this apartment. The heating is turned up high. And yet Cavell — the man who earlier today was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt in near-freezing conditions — is now hiding his muscles under a zip-up sweatshirt.

Alvarez takes up a two-handed shooting stance, the gun aimed at the exact center of Cavell’s chest.

‘Take off the sweater,’ he orders.

‘What? No, man.’

‘Do it, Tremaine, or I start shooting.’

Cavell’s eyes seem to shiver in their sockets.

‘Do it!’ Alvarez barks.

Slowly, shakily, Cavell reaches for his zip and starts to slide it down. He talks over his shoulder again. ‘I have to do what the cop is asking. Don’t do nothing now, okay? Stay cool.’

He takes off the sweater, lets it drop to the floor.

‘Now the shirt,’ Alvarez says.

Cavell consults his invisible friend again. ‘It’s okay, man. This ain’t nothing. Just ride it out.’

He pulls the T-shirt over his head and lets that drop too. His muscular torso glistens with a sheen of perspiration.

‘Turn around,’ Alvarez tells him.

Cavell swallows, his eyes saying to Alvarez, I hope you know what you’re doing.

Slowly, he turns to face the wall, and that’s when Alvarez sees it.

The package is taped high up, nestling in the deep channel between Cavell’s shoulder blades. The hooded top had covered the bulge, and Alvarez had missed it in the pat-down.

Shit!

Alvarez raises his eyes from the sights of his gun and refocuses on the package. There are wires — for a microphone of some kind. Somebody has been listening in to everything that has been said in this apartment.

But this isn’t just a listening device.

Alvarez recalls what was in the note. The note which Cavell hasn’t yet seen. .

. . and that’s when he decides it’s the moment to get out of here.

In that instant, time slows to a trickle. Alvarez turns toward the door. Run, he tells his legs. Run like fuck!

But it is like trying to swim through treacle. He can see where he needs to be, and he knows what he needs to do to get there, but he’s like a toy with a dying battery.

A sudden realization descends on him that he will never reach his goal. Not like this. Not unless he can sprout wings and fly.

And then his wish comes true. He is flying. Flying while the heat and the light and the pressure overwhelm his body and tear it apart.

Sitting in the hired Ford van, behind its blacked-out windows, the man listens to the reverberations of what he has just done.

His finger is still on the button, pressing so hard that the nail has turned white. He removes it, watches the blood rush back.

It worked. There were moments when he had his doubts, when he worried that he was trying to be too clever, too ingenious.

He had worried, too, about the amount of explosive to use. A bigger charge could have been stashed in the apartment somewhere, but it carried the risk that Cavell would have run away from it at the first opportunity. Turning Cavell into a human bomb like that, along with a microphone that would reveal any attempt to remove the package, was a stroke of genius. He can still picture the moment when he told Cavell. He’d put a gun to Cavell’s head, forced him against the wall, slapped the bundle onto his back. Stepping away, his gun still raised, he revealed to Cavell what he’d just done. The expression of disbelief and horror on the pimp’s face was so exaggerated it was comical.

Even with Cavell’s big muscles and the hooded sweater there was only so much explosive that could be taped to him without it being obvious, but that didn’t matter. C-4 detonates at a velocity of 18,000 miles per hour. You don’t need much of that shit to take out a whole roomful of people.

And if Alvarez had found it, so what? It would have simply meant pressing the button that little bit sooner.

But Alvarez missed it in the frisk, didn’t he? A trained cop, years on the job, and he missed it. Ha! How delicious was that?

It meant that the message could be delivered, offering Alvarez the chance to puzzle over what it was he had done wrong. And yet he suspected nothing. Even when confronted with the reason for his imminent demise, he was still too stupid to grasp its implications.

It meant too that the note could be given to Alvarez, allowing him to contemplate the sounding of his death knell.

But above all, it meant that everything that Alvarez said and did right up to the moment of his annihilation could be overheard.

The man in the Ford leans back and reviews his accomplishment here tonight. He feels like he should be lighting up a cigarette, the way they do in the movies after great sex. In the distance he can hear sirens, and he knows he will have to drive away soon. But he will allow himself to revel for a moment longer. This has been so much more satisfying than the killing of Joe Parlatti.