Soul Patch

CHAPTER FIVE

A ruined marriage is a peculiar thing. After the dust settles, I think you can look back and see that both parties had a fair amount to do with the collapse. At first blush, it’s easy to point the finger at one party or the other, especially when there’s cheating involved. And even though that wasn’t the case with Katy and me, I’d have to confess to having known a few people who would have cheated regardless of what their spouses did or did not do. But a lot of the time, cheating is as much a reaction as an action. I guess it’s not only cheating that works that way.

I’d been thinking about this shit a lot lately. Maybe a few of our troubles can be traced back to the miscarriage, maybe most of them. Sometimes, though, I think the fatigue was structural, a flaw in the design. It’s like when there’s an undetected crack in the airframe of a jet as it first rolls out of the factory, but it takes thousands of flight hours before the aluminum fails and the plane disintegrates. Were we like that, I wondered, Katy and me? Were the cracks there even before we took our vows?

I mean, it’s not like Katy and me got together under the best of circumstances. Her big brother had been killed in Nam. She’d been recently divorced and Patrick was missing. Me, I was lost without my job and so drugged up from the pain medication for my knee that I could barely see straight. Jesus Christ, the first time I met Katy we were standing over a body-the cops thought it might’ve been Patrick-that had washed up in the Gowanus Canal. Now how many people have a Guess How I Met My Wife story like that one? Pretty fucking romantic, huh?

Then Katy went and converted to Judaism. Don’t look at me! Wasn’t my idea. Worst of all were the secrets. Yeah, secrets, plural. There was the big one between her dad and me, but there were others-things I’d uncovered about Francis Sr. and Patrick, about myself even, that I kept locked away where no one else but me could see them. All the ingredients except the miscarriage were there from the very beginning. What more proof do you need for the blinding power of love?

But for the two days since I’d told Larry McDonald to go fuck off, the shaky legs of my marriage were all I could think about. Paradoxically, his threats had made me ponder what I’d be losing if Katy and I stopped pushing the boulder up the hill and let gravity have its way with us. In one sense or another, people had been threatening me my whole life and I hadn’t gotten any more comfortable with the process. Nothing like being pushed to make a man push back.

Red, White and You was my baby for the time being, so on Monday and Tuesday I’d schlepped out to the new store and settled into the same boring routine that had, for the preceding dozen years, passed for my life’s work. “Same shit, different venue,” that’s what Ferguson May, the late philosopher of the 60th Precinct, used to say. He would have laughed his big black ass off at the thought of me explaining the differences between Australian and South African Chardonnays. Too bad he got a shiv shoved through his eye and into his brain while trying to break up a domestic dispute. There were days I wondered if he wasn’t the lucky one.

As it was, I was fiercely regretting Larry having threatened me. If he had only had a little patience and given me a few days back in the stupefying world of wine sales to come around. Don’t think I hadn’t been tempted to call him and tell him as much. I’d played the scenario out in my head during the few moments’ break between the boredom and my contemplations on marriage. I never got the chance.

“Moe, line one.” A voice woke me from my torpor.

“This is Moe, how can I help you?”

“Moe, how are you?”

It was a woman’s voice, a vaguely familiar one, and the words it spoke belied its tone. This voice was worried, and not about how I was doing.

“Margaret! Margaret McDonald, is that you?”

“It’s Margaret Spinelli now.”

The woman on the phone was Larry Mac’s ex-wife. They’d split up about four years back and we’d lost touch.

“I guess congratulations are in order then.”

“Thanks, Moe.”

“But this isn’t a wedding announcement, is it?”

“It’s about Larry. I’m worried about him.”

“Why?”

“I hadn’t heard from him for a few years. Then about two weeks ago he started calling out of the clear blue. He just kept apologizing for the way things had turned out between us and how if he could only take it back. . things like that. And last week, there was this one call when he just broke down. He asked me to come out to dinner with him, just so we could talk. He said he needed to tell me some stuff in person.”

“What happened?”

“At first I told him to stick it up his ass. He really hurt me, Moe. The man turned his back on twenty years of marriage. One day, what, he decides he’s had enough? Do you know what that felt like? After I got done throwing up, I thought they’d have to sweep me off the floor in pieces.”

“I’m sorry. Did you tell him this?”

“Every word and more.”

“And. .”

“He took it. Then he did something I never thought I would ever hear Lawrence McDonald do.”

“What was that?”

“He begged me.”

“He begged you?”

“See, you can’t quite believe it either, can you?” She sounded relieved, like someone being told they weren’t crazy after all. “I was stunned, because as ambitious as my ex-husband is, regardless of the things he’s done to get ahead, the one thing I was always sure he would never stoop to do was beg.”

“Did you agree to see him?”

“Yeah. Frank, he’s my husband, he’s down visiting his mom in Florida. So I agreed to meet Larry this once, at the Blind Steer in the city.”

“I know it. He took me and Katy there once.”

“How are you guys?”

Don’t ask! “We’re great. Sarah’s getting big. But what about last night?”

“He didn’t show. I checked with the maitre d’ and Larry had made reservations, but he just never came. I waited at the bar drinking red wine for hours. I used their phone to call every number I knew, but. .”

“Did you-”

“I tried every number, Moe, even the police special contact numbers. Nothing. No one’s seen him. They tell me he’s taken some vacation time and he won’t be back for a week.”

“Maybe he just forgot about dinner, or thought better of it and flew down to the islands,” I said, not quite believing it. “You know how he loves the islands.”

“You trying to convince me or you? He would never do that, not after begging to see me.”

“I guess you’re right, Marge, but I’m not sure what I-”

“Moe, check around for me, please. He really sounded awful. Something’s wrong, very wrong. I can feel it.”

“Maybe something is wrong, but why should you care?” I asked, the vapor from the chill in my voice almost visible.

“He left me, Moe, not the other way around. He stopped loving me, but I never stopped loving him. That’s why it hurts so much.” Her use of the present tense wasn’t lost on me.

“Okay, I’ll ask around and see what’s what.”

She gave me her numbers and address, then hung up. Her worry hung in the air around the phone like ground fog. Margaret was right about there being something wrong, only I don’t think she had a clue that her chief-of-detectives ex-husband had started his storied police career in someone’s pocket. There’s a lot of shit a cop’s wife doesn’t know, and even more she doesn’t want to know.

No one had any idea of Larry Mac’s whereabouts. Margaret was right about that. I called everyone I knew who knew him. Well, almost. Told them I was hunting him down because I was thinking of having a Six-O reunion party and wanted his input. Cops are wary of anything but a party, especially when the guy throwing it owns liquor stores. They’re always up for that. Even put in a call to a black chick I knew he used to visit down in Atlantic City. She hadn’t heard from

Then there was that last call, the one I’d avoided making. I picked up the phone, dialed, put the phone down. There are just some things a man has to do in person. This was one of those.

“Jeff,” I called to my assistant, “I’ll be gone for the rest of the day.”

Rico Tripoli had once been closer to me than my own brother. We had been through the war years in Coney Island. We’d patrolled the boardwalk, done drug raids in the Soul Patch. And as my dad had once schooled, nothing bonds men together like combat. Along with Larry McDonald we were known as the Three Stooges: Moe, Larry, and Curly. Rico’s hair had actually been thick, black, and wavy, but wavy was close enough for our precinct brethren. Cops are like newspaper reporters in that way. They shape the facts until they fit.

Rico Tripoli had shaped the facts of his life into a chronic disaster. He’d gotten his gold shield on the pretense of a huge case. The truth, as always, was far more complicated. The Grinding Machine Mob were a bunch of wiseguys who had become the modern equivalent of Murder, Incorporated. They not only killed their own targets, but became the subcontractors for most of the five New York families. After luring their victims to a convenient spot and executing them, they’d destroy the bodies by running them through industrial meat grinding machines. But as was always an occupational hazard, they began enjoying their work a little too much. They started murdering for the sake of murder and dispensed with bullets. Word on the street was they’d developed a taste for throwing their victims into the grinders while they were still alive. Rico played a major role on the task force that finally brought these sick fucks to justice.

Unfortunately for Rico, he often chose his friends and lovers unwisely. When he got me involved with the search for Katy’s brother, Rico already had one divorce under his belt and was well on his way to another. He’d also gotten mixed up with a crooked politician who had plotted to ruin Francis Maloney’s political career and who used me to do it. He tried buying me off with a gold shield and a pat on the back. Apparently this pol figured all cops were like Rico and would sell their souls at discount prices. I told him and Rico to drop dead. The pol obliged, dying in a plane crash upstate. I’d barely uttered a word to Rico in the last decade.

Some of that was my doing, but Rico was mostly responsible. For the past five years, he’d been at the state correctional facility in Batavia. In the early ’80s he’d been assigned to Midtown South Narcotics. He’d started drinking heavily and once again sold himself cheaply, this time to the Colombians. Rico alerted them to drug raids on their big stashes and shipments. In return, they threw him some midlevel busts, spare change, and all the hookers he could handle. When one of the Colombians got collared, it took him about fifteen seconds to give Rico up in exchange for a reduced sentence. Prison is hell for a cop. And for his own protection, Rico did his stretch in isolation.

I’d heard through sources, mainly Larry Mac, that the time in stir had really taken a toll on Rico. It was the isolation mostly. Rico was a social animal. I think sometimes that’s why he sold himself so cheaply. His payoff wasn’t the power or the pussy, but the hypnotic blend of danger and newfound alliances. He got off on meeting new people, making new buddies. I know it sounds crazy, but there it is. I mean, I knew the guy better than anyone; at least I used to.

In NYC, S.R.O. has two meanings. On Broadway or at Shea, it means standing room only. On the street it means single room occupancy. If you’re more familiar with the latter, it also means you’re fucked, big time. New York City may not be a factory town, but we are a city of warehouses. And the commodity we warehouse least effectively are the homeless and poor. S.R.O. hotels are a landlord’s ultimate wet dream. Dilapidated, shitbag buildings on the verge of collapse are miraculously transformed into money machines. Between city, state, and federal agencies, landlords are paid thousands of dollars per month per room for filthy, crime-ridden cesspits that couldn’t be given away for free. See, in New York, it’s the buildings, not the streets, that are paved with gold.

Rico Tripoli lived, if you were generous enough to call it living, in the Mistral Arms. You gotta love that name, a holdover from a time when romance and whimsy had a place in American life. I tried picturing it as it might have looked new, with Gatsby and Nick driving quickly past in a flashy yellow Rolls-Royce on the way to lunch with Meyer Wolfsheim. See what a few years of knocking around the city university system will do for a broken-down cop? It gives him pretentions. Shit, maybe I was cut out for the wine business, after all.

All pretense had been beaten out of the Mistral Arms long ago. You needed a sharp eye to see that its plywood and graffiti entrance had once been a grand work of wrought iron and thick green glass. Inside, an ill wind was indeed blowing as whiffs of crack smoke that had leaked out the sides of careless mouths rode into oblivion. In the lobby, the white marble floor and decorative pilasters were chipped and broken and defeated. A chubby Hispanic girl sat in a chair, ignoring me and rubbing the belly of a one-eyed cat. The chair wobbled on legs as sturdy as a junkie’s veins.

“Whaddaya want?” A man’s voice bounced around the marble and landed on my ear.

I didn’t look at the front desk, just held up my old badge. “Tripoli!” I barked.

“Three F.” I took a step. “Elevator don’t work,” he said.

What a fucking surprise! “Thanks.”

Cops may look back on their careers with a rose filter, but no cop misses places like the Mistral Arms. It’s hard to muster up fond memories of stepping in shit. I knocked on Rico’s door.

“Yeah, what the fuck?”

I saw an eye in the peephole, listened to locks clicking, a chain unlatch. The door pulled back. Framed by the empty jamb, a virtual stranger stood before me in a haze of blue smoke. If I had passed him on the street or stood next to him on a subway platform, I wouldn’t have recognized him as the man I had once loved above all others. Back when we first started on the job, Rico was sort of a better looking, more solidly built version of Tony Bennett. Rico could sing, too, but his heart hadn’t gotten as far as San Francisco. He had ridden the first wave of “white flight” upstate to Dutchess County. He’d lost that house to his second wife.

This man, the man in the blue smoke with a wasted skeletal physique and loose, yellowy skin, his hair thin and gray and lifeless, looked nothing like Tony Bennett. He barely looked human, more a twisted root grown vaguely into human form. He tried not to smile. I didn’t have to try.

“Moe! Jesus, come in.” He offered me his hand. I took it, if not out of friendship, then out of pity. He scrambled about, tossing dirty laundry onto his cot and chucking empty beer bottles into a D’Agastino’s bag. “Can I get you a beer or something?”

“No, thanks.”

He lit another cigarette, but didn’t smoke it with quite the same gusto as Larry. I surveyed the room. Old cop habits die hard. It was what you’d expect, only more so: peeling paint, splintered floorboards, junkyard furniture, a coffin-sized bathroom. Above his cot was his only memento, a picture of the Three Stooges in our dress blues. Choked me up, that. In the next room, a headboard was being pounded against the wall.

“Ay, conjo! ” a woman screamed.

The pounding stopped.

“Twenty bucks or four vials of crack and she’ll do just about anything you want,” Rico said, tilting his head at the now silent wall. “Marisa’s still pretty new at the game. She tries to enjoy it. I let her suck my cock once in a while. You see the little fat girl downstairs? That’s her kid.”

I needed a shower.

“So to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” he asked, the inevitable bitterness leaking into his voice. “Wanna talk old times, buddy?”

“In a way, I guess, maybe I do.”

He wasn’t ready for that, seemed to stumble reaching for an empty bottle to use as an ashtray.

“Don’t fuck with me, Moe. You don’t have that much credit with me to fuck with my head.”

“So I’ve got some? That’s good to know.”

“Was you who gave up on me, brother. Not the other way around. You were a big part of my life and the next day. . pfffft! I was cut out like a tumor.”

“Your metaphor, Rico, not mine. And it’s not like you had no part in that. You tried playing me. You-”

“Yeah, I used you. Blah, blah, blah. You’re like a broken fucking record, man. What’s it been, like ten years since you seen me? In the hospital, right, when your father-in-law had that stroke?”

“Eight years. 1981, I think.”

“Eight fucking years and you still can’t let it go. Well, you can stop playing that tune. I’m bored with it. I played it over and over again in my head when I was inside. We’re not friends anymore. Okay, I get that. So what is it you’re doing here?”

“Larry Mac.”

“What about him?”

“No one can find him.”

He burst out laughing. It was wild, manic laughter. His sluggish brown eyes came to life, darting madly. His lips curled back, exposing his stained teeth and thick, grayish tongue. The laughter took its toll and he launched into a coughing fit that seemed to last for hours. These were coughs from down deep, coughs so raw and raspy they hurt my throat. When the coughing finally died down, Rico made smooching sounds.

“Mmmhhhh! Mmmhhhh! Larry, where are you?” he looked under the dirty laundry on his bed. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

“Very funny.”

“He ain’t here.”

“I didn’t think he was.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“I gave up wanting that in 1978.”

He winced. I knew the tough guy shit was an act. He missed me as much as I missed him. Only difference was I’d had a life to fall back on. He’d pissed his away.

“I thought you might know where he is,” I said, not interested in inflicting any more pain. “I know you two are still close and that you keep in touch.”

He was thinking that one over. It was an opening he chose not to take. I guess he’d had enough hard feelings, too.

“Haven’t heard from him since last week. He did tell me you and that asshole brother of yours opened another store.”

I let it go. He never liked Aaron much, especially because my big brother refused to let Rico invest in the business when we were first starting out. Aaron was smart that way.

“Yeah,” I said, “out in Brookville.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. So did Larry sound okay? Did he seem like the ambitious prick we both know him to be?”

Rico thought about that, dragging his fingers and palm across a week’s worth of beard. I could read the answer in his expression, but I let him say it anyway.

“Nah, something was up with him. He was quiet-like, you know, sorta thoughtful and philosophical almost. That ain’t Larry. Ferguson May, maybe, but not Larry Mac.”

“Anything else? Did he actually say anything out of the ordinary? Do anything out of the ordinary?”

Rico hesitated, a veil of genuine concern on his face. “Yeah, well. . he. . he threw me an extra hundred bucks. But he did that sometimes.”

“This time was different, right? I can see it in your face.”

“Different, yeah, but I can’t say how. An extra C-note is an extra C-note is an extra C-note. I can’t afford to be too. . You know how it is.”

I didn’t, but I could guess. He noticed the pity on my face as I stared at the appalling condition of his room.

“Better to live in a shitbag room like this than in a fucking cell, Moe. A cell’s no place for a man. Once you go in, you never really get out.”

The conversation was going in a direction I wasn’t willing to follow.

“Can I use the head?”

“Sure,” he said.

I closed the door behind me. After I pissed, I ran the water a little and took five twenties out of my wallet. I slipped them under Rico’s disposable razor and closed the medicine cabinet. When I came out, I handed him a business card and asked if he needed a few bucks to hold him over.

“No thanks, Moe.”

“Okay. You hear anything from Larry, you call me.”

“I’ll call.”

This time I put my hand out to him. He took it, but not too eagerly. Ten years of hard feelings and hurt weren’t going to disappear in ten minutes.

“I didn’t ask about Katy and Sarah because Larry tells me about them,” he said, embarrassed.

“That’s okay, Rico. Let’s just worry about Larry for now.”

As I walked down the hall I heard the locks clicking shut. When I reached the stairs I nearly ran into the chubby girl who had since shed the one-eyed cat. Her impassive expression had been replaced by one of loathing and disgust. Her near-black eyes cut deep. I thought she might spit at me, but she moved on. I understood. She had mistaken