Sunday afternoon I found my film buff.
His name, according to Phil Fielding’s records, was Arnold Leveque, and he lived on Columbus Avenue half a dozen blocks north of the video store. His building was a tenement that had thus far escaped gentrification. Two men sat on the stoop drinking beer out of cans in brown paper bags. One of them had a little girl on his lap. She was drinking orange juice out of a baby bottle.
None of the doorbells had Leveque’s name on it. I went out and asked the two men on the stoop if Arnold Leveque lived there. They shrugged and shook their heads. I went inside and couldn’t find a bell for the super, so I rang bells on the first floor until someone buzzed me in.
The hallway smelled of mice and urine. At the far end a door opened and a man stuck his head out. I walked toward him, and he said, “What do you want? Don’t come too close now.”
“Easy,” I said.
“You take it easy,” he said. “I got a knife.”
I held my hands at my sides, showing the palms. I told him I was looking for a man named Arnold Leveque.
He said, “Oh, yeah? I hope he don’t owe you money.”
“Why’s that?”
“’Cause he’s dead,” he said, and he laughed hard at his joke. He was an old man with wispy white hair and deep eye sockets, and he looked as though he’d be joining Leveque before too many months passed. His pants were loose and he held them up with suspenders. His flannel shirt hung on him, too. Either he got his clothes at a thrift shop or he’d lost a lot of weight recently.
Reading my mind, he said, “I been sick, but don’t worry. It ain’t catching.”
“I’m more afraid of the knife.”
“Ah, Jesus,” he said. He showed me a French chef’s knife with a wooden handle and a ten-inch carbon-steel blade. “Come on in,” he said. “I ain’t about to cut you, for Christ’s sake.” He led the way, setting the knife down on a little table near the door.
His apartment was tiny, two narrow little rooms. The only illumination came from a three-bulb ceiling fixture in the larger room. Two of the bulbs had burned out and the remaining one couldn’t have been more than forty watts. He kept the place tidy but it had a smell to it, an odor of age and illness.
“Arnie Leveque,” he said. “How’d you know him?”
“I didn’t.”
“No?” He yanked a handkerchief out of his back pocket and coughed into it. “Dammit,” he said. “The bastards cut me from asshole to appetite but it didn’t do no good. I waited too long. See, I was afraid of what they’d find.” He laughed harshly. “Well, I was right, wasn’t I?”
I didn’t say anything.
“He was okay, Leveque. French Canadian, but he musta been born here because he talked like anybody else.”
“Did he live here a long time?”
“What’s a long time? I been here forty-two years. Can you believe that? Forty-two years in this shithole. Be forty-three years in September, but I expect to be out of here by then. Moved to smaller quarters.” He laughed again and it turned into a coughing fit and he reached for the handkerchief. He got the cough under control and said, “Smaller quarters, like a box about six feet long, you know what I mean?”
“I guess it helps to joke about it.”
“Naw, it don’t help,” he said. “Nothing helps. I guess Arnie lived here about ten years. Give or take, you know? He kept to his room a lot. Of course the way he was you wouldn’t expect him to go tap-dancing down the street.” I must have looked puzzled, because he said, “Oh, I forgot, you didn’t know him. He was fat as a pig, Arnie was.” He put his hands out in front of him and drew them apart as he lowered them. “Pear-shaped. Waddled like a duck. He was up on three, too, so he had two flights of stairs to climb if he went anywhere.”
“How old was he?”
“I don’t know. Forty? It’s hard to tell when somebody’s fat like that.”
“What did he do?”
“For a living? I don’t know. Had a job he went to. Then he wasn’t going out so much.”
“I understand he liked movies.”
“Oh, he sure did. He had one of those things, what the hell do they call it, you watch movies on your TV set.”
“A VCR.”
“It woulda come to me in a minute.”
“What happened to him?”
“Leveque? Ain’t you paying attention? He died.”
“How?”
“They killed him,” he said. “What do you think?”
IT was a generic they, as it turned out. Arnold Leveque had died on the street, presumably the victim of a mugging. It was getting worse every year, the old man told me, what with people smoking crack and living on the street. They would kill you for subway fare, he said, and think nothing of it.
I asked when all this had happened, and he said it must have been a year ago. I said that Leveque had still been alive in April—Fielding’s records indicated his most recent transaction had been on the nineteenth of that month—and he said he didn’t have that good a head for dates anymore.
He told me how to find the super. “She don’t do much,” he said. “She collects the rents, that’s about all.” When I asked his name he said it was Gus, and when I asked his last name a sly look came over his face. “Just Gus is good enough. Why tell you my name when you ain’t told me yours?”
I gave him one of my cards. He held it at arm’s length and squinted at it, reading my name aloud. He asked if he could keep the card and I said he could.
“When I meet up with Arnie,” he said, “I’ll tell him you was looking for him.” And he laughed and laughed.
GUS’s last name was Giesekind. I found that out by checking his mailbox, which shows I’m no slouch as a detective. The super’s name was Herta Eigen, and I found her two doors up the street where she had a basement apartment. She was a small woman, barely five feet tall, with a Central European accent and a wary, suspicious little face. She flexed her fingers as she talked. They were misshapen by arthritis but moved nimbly enough.
“The cops came,” she said. “Took me downtown somewhere, made me look at him.”
“To identify him?”
She nodded. “ ‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘That’s Leveque.’ They bring me back here and I got to let them into his room. They walked in and I walked in after them. ‘You can go now, Mrs. Eigen.’ ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay.’ Because some of them are all right but some of them would steal the money off a dead man’s eyes. Is that the expression?”
“Yes.”
“The pennies off a dead man’s eyes. Pennies, not money.” She sighed. “So they finish poking around and I let them out and lock up after them, and I ask what do I do now, will somebody come for his things, and they say they’ll be in touch. Which they never were.”
“You never heard from them?”
“Nothing. Nobody tells me if his people are coming for his belongings, or what I’m supposed to do. When I didn’t hear from them I called the precinct. They don’t know what I’m talking about. I guess so many people get murdered nobody can bother to keep track.” She shrugged. “Me, I got an apartment, I got to rent it, you know? I left the furniture, I brought everything else down here. When nobody came I got rid of it.”
“You sold the videocassettes.”
“The movies? I took them over on Broadway, he gave me a few dollars. Was that wrong?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I wasn’t stealing. If he had family I would give it all to them, but he had nobody. He lived here for many years, Mr. Leveque. He was here already when I got this job.”
“When was that?”
“Six years ago. Wait a minute, I’m wrong, seven years.”
“You’re just the superintendent?”
“What else should I be, the queen of England?”
“I knew a woman who was a landlady but she let on to the tenants that she was only the super.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I own the building, that’s why I live in the basement. I’m a rich woman, I just have this love for living in the ground like a mole.”
“Who does own the building?”
“I don’t know.” I looked at her and she said, “Sue me, I don’t know. Who knows? There’s a management company that hired me. I collect the rent, I give it to them, they do whatever they want with it. The landlord I never met. Does it matter who it is?”
I couldn’t see how. I asked when Arnold Leveque had died.
“Last spring,” she said. “Closer than that I couldn’t tell you.”
* * *
I went back to my hotel room and turned on the TV. Three different channels had college basketball games. It was too frenzied and I couldn’t bear to watch. I found a tennis match on one of the cable channels and it was restful by comparison. I don’t know that it would be accurate to say that I watched it, but I did sit in front of the set with my eyes open while they hit the ball back and forth over the net.
I met Jim for dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Ninth Avenue. We often had Sunday dinner there. The place never filled up and they didn’t care how long we sat there or how many times they had to refill our teapot. The food’s not bad, and I don’t know why they don’t do more business.
He said, “Did you happen to read the Times today? There was an article, an interview with this Catholic priest who writes hot novels. I can’t think of his name.”
“I know who you mean.”
“He had this telephone poll to back him up, and he said how only ten percent of the married population of this country have ever committed adultery. Nobody cheats, that’s his contention, and he can prove it because somebody called a bunch of people on the phone and that’s what they told him.”
“I guess we’re in the grip of a moral renaissance.”
“That’s his point.” He picked up his chopsticks, mimed a drumroll. “I wonder if he called my house.”
“Oh?”
Avoiding my eyes, he said, “I think Beverly’s seeing somebody.”
“Somebody in particular?”
“A guy she met in Al-Anon.”
“Maybe they’re just friends.”
“No, I don’t think so.” He poured tea for both of us. “You know, I screwed around a lot before I got sober. Whenever I went to a bar I told myself I was looking to meet somebody. Generally all I got was drunk, but now and then I got lucky. Sometimes I even remembered it.”
“And sometimes you’d rather you didn’t.”
“Well, sure. The point is I didn’t give that up completely when I first came into the program. The marriage almost ended during the worst of the drinking, but I bottomed out and sobered up and we worked things out. She started going to Al-Anon, started dealing with her own issues, and we hung together. I would still have something going on the side, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“No?” He thought about it. “Well, I guess that was before I knew you, before you got sober. Because I stopped fooling around after a couple of years. It was no great moral decision to reform. I just didn’t seem to be doing that anymore. I don’t know, the health thing may have been a factor, first herpes and then AIDS, but I don’t think I got scared off. I think I lost interest.” He took a sip of tea. “And now I’m one of Father Feeney’s ninety percent, and she’s out there.”
“Well, maybe it’s her turn. To have a little fling.”
“This isn’t the first time.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I don’t know how I feel about it.”
“Does she know that you know?”
“Who knows what she knows? Who knows what I know? I just wanted things to stay the way they were, you know? And they never do.”
“I know,” I said. “I was with Elaine last night and she said the M word.”
“What’s that, motherfucker?”
“Marriage.”
“Same thing,” he said. “Marriage is a motherfucker. She wants to get married?”
“She didn’t say that. She said if we were to get married, then she’d stop seeing clients.”
“Clients?”
“Johns.”
“Oh, right. That’s the condition? Marry me and I’ll stop?”
“No, nothing like that. Just speaking hypothetically, and then she apologized for saying the word and we both agreed we want things to stay the way they are.” I looked down into my teacup the way I used to look into a glass of whiskey. “I don’t know if that’s going to be possible. It seems to me that when two people want something to stay just the way it is, that’s when it changes.”
“Well,” he said, “you’ll have to see how it goes.”
“And take it a day at a time, and don’t drink.”
“I like that,” he said. “It has a nice ring to it.”
WE sat there a long while, talking about one thing and another. I talked about my cases, the legitimate one that I couldn’t seem to come to grips with and the other one that I couldn’t seem to leave alone. We talked about baseball and how spring training might be delayed by an owners’ lockout. We talked about a kid in our home group with a horrendous history of drugs and alcohol who’d gone out after four months of sobriety.
Around eight he said, “What I think I’ll do tonight, I think I’ll go to some meeting where I won’t run into anybody I know. I want to talk about all this shit with Bev at a meeting and I can’t do that around here.”
“You could.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to. I’m an old-timer, I’ve been sober since the Flood, I wouldn’t want the newcomers to realize I’m not a perfect model of serenity.” He grinned. “I’ll go downtown and give myself permission to sound as confused and fucked-up as I feel. And who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky, find some sweet young thing looking for a father figure.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Find out if she’s got a sister.”
I went to a meeting myself. There’s no meeting at St. Paul’s on Sundays, so I went to one at Roosevelt Hospital. A fair number of the people who showed up were in-patients from the detox ward. The speaker had started out as a heroin addict, kicked that in a twenty-eight-day residential program in Minnesota, and devoted the next fifteen years to alcoholic drinking. Now she was almost three years sober.
They went around the room after she was done, and most of the patients just said their names and passed. I decided I’d say something, if just to tell her I enjoyed her story and was glad she was sober, but when it got to me I said, “My name is Matt and I’m an alcoholic. I’ll just listen tonight.”
Afterward I went back to the hotel. No messages. I sat in my room reading for two hours. Someone had passed along a paperback volume called The Newgate Calendar, a case-by-case report on British crimes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I’d had it around for a month or so, and at night I would read a few pages before I went to sleep.
It was mostly interesting, although some cases were more interesting than others. What got to me some nights, though, was the way nothing changed. People back then killed each other for every reason and for no reason, and they did it with every means at their disposal and all the ingenuity they could bring to bear.
Sometimes it provided a good antidote for the morning paper, with its deadening daily chronicle of contemporary crime. It was easy to read the paper each day and conclude that humanity was infinitely worse than ever, that the world was going to hell and that hell was where we belonged. Then, when I read about men and women killing each other centuries ago for pennies or for love, I could tell myself that we weren’t getting worse after all, that we were as good as we’d ever been.
On other nights that same revelation brought not reassurance but despair. We had been ever thus. We were not getting better, we would never get better. Anyone along the way who’d died for our sins had died for nothing. We had more sins in reserve, we had a supply that would last for all eternity.
WHAT I read that night didn’t pick me up, and neither did it ready me for sleep. Around midnight I went out. It had turned colder, and there was a raw wind blowing off the Hudson. I walked over to Grogan’s Open House, the old Irish saloon Mick owns, although there’s another name than his on the license and ownership papers.
The place was almost empty. Two solitary drinkers sat well apart at the long bar, one drinking a bottle of beer, the other nursing a black pint of Guinness. Two old men in long thrift-shop overcoats shared a table along the wall. Burke was behind the bar. Before I could ask he volunteered that Mick hadn’t been in all evening. “He could come in any time,” he said, “but I don’t expect him.”
I ordered a Coke and sat at the bar. The TV was tuned to a cable channel that broadcasts old black-and-white films uninterrupted by commercials. They were showing Little Caesar, with Edward G. Robinson.
I watched for half an hour or so. Mick didn’t come in, and neither did anyone else. I finished my Coke and went home.