THIRTY-FIVE

Pam believed the pictures of my smashed-up car and said she’d be down to take care of me. I didn’t even try telling her not to come. I wanted taking care of. I needed it. I’d been on an island by myself for too long and since that exile was self-imposed, I had only to look in the mirror to ascribe blame. I don’t suppose I ever forgave myself for Katy’s murder. It took seven years for Sarah to absolve me and the rest of the universe either didn’t know or didn’t care. If there was any persuasive argument for the existence of God, it wasn’t in the biology of things, but in emotion, in feelings. I couldn’t quite see how guilt and forgiveness had evolved from the primordial stew. I don’t know, maybe the “adult” relationship I’d been sharing with Pam over the last two years was just part of my self-inflicted exile. I let her in, but not inside. Suddenly, I wanted off the island and I didn’t care why.

When I refused treatment or to go to the ER, the EMTs told me to go home, rest, and to make an appointment with my regular physician if the pain in my neck didn’t clear up or if any new symptoms arose. It’d been weird, sitting there, talking to them, and not asking them questions about Alta and Maya. I wouldn’t have known what to ask, really. What could I have asked them, what could they have said to change the essential facts of the case? Maya Watson and Alta Conseco had simply stood by and let a man die. A month later, someone stuck a knife into Alta Conseco and killed her.

It truly was a fool’s errand I had taken on. Even if I stumbled upon all the right answers and found out every gory detail of how this tragedy had unfolded, so what? Neither Lazarus nor Lady Lazarus would be coming back from the dead. Justice would not be served because there is no justice for the dead, only for the living and sometimes not even then. Had every murderous Nazi son of a bitch been captured, convicted, and put to death, the innocent dead would not have risen. The dead are beyond the reach of justice. And the truth wasn’t going to bring justice. It was my experience that where tragedy was involved, the truth made things worse. Always. What naïve fool was it, I wondered, who had made the specious connection between truth and justice in the first place? One thing I knew about him, whoever he was, he wasn’t nearly as big a fool as me. If he had known what I knew, he would have closed up shop and gone home. Not me. I meant to get to the bottom of this if for no other reason than I was a curious bastard and didn’t want to leave loose ends behind me.

I called up one of those rental places that delivers the car to your door. My taste in cars ran to the small, sporty side, but this one time, I went big, really big. Given that someone, probably a crazy fireman, had just tried to run my ass off the road, I would have rented a city bus if I could have. A Chevy Suburban was the best the rental company could do on short notice. That suited me fine. I met the woman who delivered it downstairs and didn’t bother going back up. I wanted to leave before Pam got there. She had keys and I would let her take care of me when I got back, but I needed to finish what I started.

Kid Charlemagne’s wasn’t exactly a bucket of blood, but not for lack of trying. In the seventies, the East Village was a mess, a perch from which junkies, artists, punks, and pretenders could both watch the world go down the toilet and go along for the ride. Kid Charlemagne’s wrecked and dingy décor was meant to capture a sense of those long-ago times when Joey Ramone and Jean-Michel Basquiat roamed these self-same streets. It failed miserably. To begin with, naming a faux punk restaurant—whatever the fuck that was supposed to be—after a Steely Dan song was less than genius. Steely Dan was almost as antithetical to the ethos of punk as Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And as if to make the whole thing even a bigger farce, Lady Gaga was playing when I walked in. God, it was so self-consciously dreadful that it almost seemed to be the point. It didn’t hurt that the hostess wore a purple and magenta Mohawk wig and was dressed in a ripped Sex Pistols T-shirt, studded leather pants, and red Chuck Taylors. Her lipstick was black, her eye shadow a thin rectangle of red powder that was splashed across both eyes and the bridge of her nose.

“Oi! What can I do for ya, rude boy?” she said in an affected low-rent British accent.

I was tempted to bust her balls about her not having been born until New Wave was old hat and hair bands had gone bald, but I didn’t figure on that making much of an impression. Instead, I asked to see the boss or the manager.

“Get lost, granddad.”

“Oi, Siouxsie, go play with the Banshees and stop wasting my time. Granddad is a copper,” I said in a far better accent than hers, showed her my badge, and quickly put it away.

Her eyes got big. “Sorry, I was just—”

I cut her off. “Forget it. Just take me to the office.”

The fake punk hostess kept apologizing—her accent far more Bronx than Brixton now—as we cut past the bar and through the dinning room. Strangely enough, the crowd was much hipper than the place merited. There were even some faces among them I recognized: the novelist who’d dissed Oprah, some painter I remembered from when I was looking for Sashi Bluntstone, and an actress who’d spent more time in rehab than on her syndicated superhero show. Christ, I even saw Lou Reed coming out of the men’s room. I was at a loss to explain it. I felt like the one person at a comedy club who didn’t get the joke.

“Give me a second, okay?” she said as we stopped outside an unmarked door on the other side of the restrooms. She knocked and the door buzzed open. Not smart, I thought, just buzzing someone in who might be armed with bad intentions and a gun. Then I noticed the closed circuit camera above me and to the right. She stuck her head in the office and then quickly back out. “The boss says for you to go right in.”

“Thanks,” I said, sliding past her, into the office, and closing the door behind me. When I turned around, I nearly shit.

“Hello, Moe,” he said, an embarrassed half-smile on his face. It was Nathan Martyr.

Nathan Martyr was a collapsed super nova: an artist who exploded on the New York art scene one day and then imploded in short order. After his fast fifteen minutes, he devoted his wretched life to making bad art, shooting heroin, and blogging about Sashi Bluntstone. Martyr was one of Sashi’s most ardent critics. It was on his blog that I found Photoshopped images of Sashi’s nude body being crucified, flayed, and tortured. In the end, Martyr’d had nothing to do with Sashi’s disappearance, but I loathed the asshole just the same. It was Martyr’s ex-cop doorman and toady who had tried, nearly successfully, to put me in the grave. If Pam hadn’t zapped the prick with her handy little Taser, my oncologist would have had one less patient to worry about now.

Still, Martyr seemed different somehow. He had been a twitchy bastard when we first met, but now his demeanor was calm, if not quite Zen-like. He’d been junkie-skinny back then. He’d put on a few pounds since and while he was by no means heavy, his face was fuller. He sported a tan. A tan! Jesus, talk about breaking the New York artist protocol. He was expensively and stylishly dressed. The last time I’d seen him, he smelled like he’d been wearing the same clothes for a week. Now he smelled of money.

“You clean these days?” I asked.

“Clean and healthy. I guess I owe some of that to you.”

“How’s that?”

“That thing with Sashi, it woke me up finally.”

“To what?”

“To the hole at the center of my being that I tried to fill in with hate and heroin,” he said, his voice cracked and brittle with emotion.

“Forgive me if I don’t get all choked up.”

“Hey, look, I understand that you’ve got no reason to care, but you asked.”

“I did. So, what happened?”

“Have you ever had something in your life that you thought defined you and you woke up one morning and it was gone, just totally gone and you couldn’t get it back?”

“Yeah, I know what that’s like.”

“That’s what happened to me. I was an artist one day and the next day I wasn’t and no matter how hard I tried to get my muse to dance with me again, she wouldn’t. I tried everything: all sorts of therapy, drinking—”

“—heroin.”

“That is how I got started, out of despair. I didn’t really hate Sashi Bluntstone. I hated myself.”

“Good to know I’m not alone.”

He laughed. “You are now. I don’t hate anyone anymore, least of all me. Just look at me. I’m healthy. I go to the gym every day. I eat well and I’ve got the muse back on my side.”

“Showing at the Brill Gallery again?”

“C’mon, Moe. You struck me as a bright guy when we met. You’re inside the art right now. You’re part of it today.”

“The restaurant?”

“Is it a restaurant?”

“Yes and no,” I said, catching on. “It’s staged.”

“Not staged, exactly, no. When I came out the other end of rehab, I had a vision. I saw how small and unambitious my earlier work had been, how by working in one medium at a time I was self-limiting. I also saw that the commerce of art is set up to fuck the artist. I produce a painting or a sculpture and depend on the largesse of some patron or decorator or collector or speculator to buy it. Then the gallery owner and the agent would feed on the money, leaving the scraps for me. Bullshit! I don’t know about you, Moe, but when I get fucked I want to enjoy it. Being an artist used to mean getting raped and then having to say thank you to the rapist. This place was my vision. It’s visual art, performance art, street art, participatory art. It’s living art that changes from second to second. It’s theater and chaos and it turns a big profit. Everything having to do with this place—from its seemingly inappropriate name to its kitsch and camp—was done on purpose with a purpose. Each decision was, at least to some degree, an artistic calculation. The only things left to chance are the people who walk through the doors to eat and drink.”

“Genius,” I said, not quite believing the word came out of my mouth. “You win both ways. The ones who get it get it, so it’s like knowing the secret handshake and being in an exclusive club. They get to enjoy the art and calculation. They get to feel superior, to laugh at the people who come here for a meal and are oblivious to the fact that they’re being messed about.”

He flinched. “No one’s being messed with here. If people come for a meal, they get a good meal. If they come because they think this is what the East Village was like in the time of punk, that’s what they get. I’m no more exploiting the people who walk into this restaurant than a photographer is exploiting the people behind the faces in a crowd shot. But somehow I don’t think you came here to talk old times or to discuss the philosophy of art. Why are you here?”

My answer was simple. “Robert Tillman.”

“Oh, everybody’s favorite stroke victim. Why do you want to know about him?”

“He’s my favorite too. I’m a fan.”

He laughed again. “You’re pretty funny, but that’s not an answer.”

“I’m working a case and his name came up. He used to work here in the kitchen with a guy named Tino Escobar.”

“Did you do all your homework this well when you were in school?”

“And I gave my teacher a shiny apple every day. About Tillman, why did you hire him?”

“Tillman was handsome in a rough sort of way. His looks appealed to my aesthetics and he was the best prep cook we’ve ever had.”

“The eaters don’t see the kitchen staff, so why does it matter how they look?” I asked.

“Everything matters. The art doesn’t stop at the kitchen door.”

“Whatever. So, Tino recommended Tillman to you?”

“You are a thorough bastard.” Martyr said. “Yes, Tino recommended him.”

“And why did Tillman leave?”

For the first time since I walked into the office, Nathan Martyr looked uncomfortable, his posture defensive. I repeated the question, loudly.

“Some of the staff … some of the women who worked here said he made them uneasy.”

“That’s pretty vague, Nathan. Uneasy how?”

“He was inappropriate with them.”

“Inappropriate. God, for a junkie you sure are a squeamish motherfucker. What are we talking about here?”

“I don’t know the whole story, but Natasha Romaine, one of our hostesses, quit abruptly and Abigail Dawtry, our head bartender, came to me and said Robert had cornered her in the bathroom after closing one night. She got out, but she said he scared the shit out of her, so I had to let him go.”

“Abigail working tonight?”

He ran his finger along a schedule taped on the wall next to his desk. “Sorry. Abby is off tonight.”

“Can I get her contact info and the info for the hostess that quit?”

“After what happened between us with Sashi, I suppose I owe you that much,” he said, tapping at a keyboard. “It’s printing.”

“I don’t suppose you know where Tino Escobar might be working these days? He left the High Line Bistro after Tillman’s death.”

“Sure, I know where Tino is,” Martyr said, handing me the sheets that had come out of the printer. “I rehired him. He’s in the kitchen. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

I followed Martyr down the hall, back into the restaurant, and through the kitchen doors. No matter what Nathan Martyr had said about every decision in the restaurant being a calculation, the kitchen was a working kitchen and didn’t look much different than any other restaurant kitchen I’d seen. I did, however, have to confess, that the cooks and even the guy at the dishwasher station were really a pretty attractive bunch.

“He’s over there, at the grill station,” Martyr said, turning to me.

Tino was coffee-skinned, about five-five and sturdily built, eyes facing the grill. He was handsome enough, but there was a distinct blankness to his face. It displayed the kinds of sharp corners and hard edges that only a rough life carves out of a man. Maybe it was the dance of the spitting flames that bathed his face or his stone-cold expression that gave me a chill, but whatever the reason, there are times when the cover tells you everything you need to know about the book inside. And what Tino Escobar’s cover told me, what it screamed at me, was that there was only one soul between the two of us.

“Tino,” Martyr called to his grill man. “Someone would like to speak to you.”

He turned his eyes up. They were as black and empty as a shark’s. Then everything happened at once. His expression went from icy to feral. I swore he sniffed the air for my scent like a wild animal checking if a rival predator had stepped into his territory. I may not have looked like a cop anymore, but I guess I still smelled like one. Escobar bolted, plowing right over the kid working the grill with him. As he darted through the kitchen to the side door, he made sweeping motions with his arms, knocking bubbling pots and full plates, glasses, and silverware behind him and in my path.

“Stop!” I shouted after him.

He didn’t stop. Go figure. The surprise was that I ran after him, through the side door onto 7th Street heading west. For once, the cancer in my belly wasn’t at issue. My surgically butchered knee, the arthritis that had developed in it, and my age all trumped the tumor. I didn’t think about my knee much anymore. It was just another injury, another wound, some scar tissue picked up along the way. That’s what aging is about: wounds and scar tissue. There were times it seemed that my life was not much more than a collection of both. But it was the wounds no one could see, the scars on the inside that were worst of all. Sometimes wounds are like a cascade and so it was with me. It was injuring my knee all those years ago that started the flood.

Escobar put more distance between us with each stride. Time was I could have reached around behind me and come up with something to make him think a little harder about running away. Problem was that in spite of my scent, I wasn’t a cop and I wasn’t going to pull out my .38 on a busy Greenwich Village street. For all I knew, this was a misunderstanding, that Escobar might have been an illegal alien and thought I was an immigration agent. Half a block into the chase, I stopped running and watched Tino Escobar disappear into the crowd and the fallen darkness. Even without Escobar, I had made progress. Robert Tillman was now something more to me than an innocent corpse and I had the contact information for the two women who worked at Kid Charlemagne’s. I didn’t know how things would play out or if it would help explain why Alta and Maya had let Robert Tillman die. I didn’t know a lot of things, but for the first time since Carmella had asked for my help, I felt close to an answer. I felt it in my bones.