CHAPTER 5

Little rootie toot

The kitchen in the house where I grew up is as pure with light as a day in St. Paul de Vence. And it is invariably spotless. There is an explanation for this: Mom can’t cook.

My mother is a child of convenience foods. No homemade cornbread or peach cobbler ever drew breath in that kitchen. We were strictly Colonel Sanders and Mrs. Paul; spinach pie at the Greeks on Metropolitan Avenue, corned beef at the deli in Sunnyside; Sunday trips in to Manhattan for the biscuits at Sylvia’s in Harlem or, on a really special occasion, dinner in the theater district before some musical my father was taking us to.

It had nothing to do with my mother’s lousy cooking, but Daddy left her about eight years ago. He is a department head at one of those high schools for gifted assholes, and he fell in love with a colleague—a young white teacher nearly half his age. The feeling, apparently, was mutual and so they were wed. Like something out of the Greeks, my mother has not spoken his name since. Mom is going on fifty-five. She is still pretty. I don’t look a thing like her.

I placed a roll of bills in the pocket of her mauve shirtwaist with a simple “Happy birthday, Mom.”

“Nanette, what is this?”

“It’s for you, Mom. Your birthday present.”

“Nanette, you already gave me a birthday present—three months ago.”

“Right. That was part one. This is part two.”

She removed the rubber band from the roll and counted the bills. “Nanette, this is five thousand dollars.”

“Yes ma’am, I know.”

“Where did this come from?”

“From NYU. It’s a bonus.”

“Bonus for what?”

“Well, not exactly a bonus. It’s more like a prize. For some, uh, books that I translated.”

“Well, that’s just wonderful. But what would I look like taking your whole fee for that work? You’re not supporting me, Nanette.”

“It’s not my whole fee. It’s only half. And I wanted to give it to you now because I’ll probably forget your next six birthdays. It’s a kind of insurance. And besides, haven’t you been talking about repainting the house or something for months now?”

“I want aluminum siding, I said. As if you were listening.”

“Well, that’s what I mean. It’s yours.”

In the end she did take the money. After pinning me to the wall with a couple of those patented Mom looks. You know, those looks that can mean anything from who’s going to be wearing pajamas at this pajama party? to prison is probably too good for you. I had seen the full panoply of her looks and now, after nearly thirty years, could all but ignore them.

Mom kissed me and put the bills back in her pocket.

She keeps saying that one day she’ll take a vacation someplace nice—maybe even go to Europe. But she never will. She keeps promising to visit me and see my apartment, too, at least to meet me midtown for lunch. But I don’t count on that one either. I don’t think she even remembers the last time she was in Manhattan.

Mom told me all about aluminum siding. We had tea, Lipton’s, which is very hard to get wrong.

She asked after Aubrey, and inquired whether she still had “that beautiful mink jacket that she saved up for” out of her earnings as a restaurant hostess. I knew that her suspicions about what Aubrey really did for a living were probably much worse than the reality. A go go dancer isn’t a whore, I wanted to tell her. But it was a little late for that. See, the old folks do have a point—once you tell a lie, you have to go on lying; it just works that way.

A few minutes before it was time for me to go, I went into my old room and called Aubrey. I had to confirm the appointment we’d made. I needed someone there with me when I faced Leman Sweet, and Aubrey had agreed to accompany me; to watch my back, so to speak, since I feared Detective Sweet might get physical again when I told him what I’d done. When I told him even half of what I’d done.

“So … you really gone do it, huh Nan?” Aubrey asked wearily.

“Yeah, I really am.”

“You be better off taking Walter back.”

We had taken over a corner of the immense lobby of her apartment building and fashioned an island of sofas and glass tables and easy chairs. I took a cigarette from Aubrey’s pack. As I was striking the match I noticed Leman Sweet swing in through the plate glass doors. As he barrelled along, he was being dogged by an irate doorman who had not been responded to in the manner to which he was accustomed. Sweet finally wheeled on the man and flipped open his badge. The doorman removed his hat and wiped his forehead.

“That’s him?” Aubrey stage whispered to me.

“Oh yeah. That is most definitely him.”

“He doesn’t look that mean.”

She was right.

It was Leman Sweet, all right, but not the same one who had cursed and assaulted me in my own home. He still had the Fu Manchu moustache but he was now dressed in a dark business suit. High polished Florsheims. Good Presbyterian tie. Good haircut. The quietly competent look. Best of all, he wasn’t carrying a musical instrument that might end up smashed to bits against the nearest available surface.

Detective Sweet towered over us like the wish-granting, coal-black genie in my childhood affirmative action story book. I worked up enough courage to meet his eyes.

“Why’d you want to meet here?” he boomed.

“My friend Aubrey lives here,” I responded, a clumsy introduction if ever there was one.

But by then Leman had gotten a good look at Aubrey. He went into a kind of moony paralysis. Which was, as Stevie Wonder said, just like I pictured it.

He sat directly across from Aubrey, his legs spread wide, massive thighs outlined in navy blue gabardine, pinky ring flashing—a real prince of the city. “Well, it’s a good thing you wanted to meet uptown,” he said to me—ostensibly to me—while he was eating Aubrey up, “’cause that’s where I was today.”

I didn’t linger over his non sequitur. No use expecting a smitten man to make sense. Without further ado I merely placed a large, stuffed sweat sock on the little cigarette table in front of him.

“What is that?” he said.

“Money.”

“Whose money?”

That’s where Aubrey came in, as planned. “Look like it was your friend’s,” she said. “Officer Conlin. He put it in Nan’s sax that night before they killed him.”

Sweet, coming reluctantly back to earth, let out a long, low curse.

I allowed Aubrey to go on from there with her narration, describing how, after I’d discovered the money, I was terrified the police—namely Leman—would suspect me of something. How I’d been too scared to report it right away and had come to Aubrey seeking her advice.

At the end of the tale, Sweet took hold of the sock and shook it like a bull terrier with a backyard squirrel. The rolls came tumbling out.

“How much is here?”

“Thirty-five thousand,” I spoke up quickly. “About that.”

Leman looked at me. My body tensed, preparing for a lunge from him.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Sweet?” Aubrey asked and leaned toward him solicitously. “You don’t look too happy to find your friend’s stash.”

“Wasn’t his stash. Supposed to be the Department’s. Goddamn, this ain’t good,” he said solemnly. “Not good at all.”

“Why not?”

“There’s twenty-five thousand missing.”

“Oh my God! Oh, no!” Aubrey said. “What you figure happened to it, Mr. Sweet?”

Aubrey, crossing and uncrossing her legs, lighting his Newports, playing first the bumpkin and then the slut, got the story out of Leman Sweet. He told us about the failed under cover operation he and Charlie Conlin had been working on: It seems “the Dominicans” were starting to use street musicians and flower vendors to retail stolen tokens, money orders, passports and even lottery tickets. He and Conlin/Sig had been part of a huge sting that had gone bust. The fortune that Conlin left in my sax case was so-called buy money. And Leman didn’t know why Charlie had been carrying it around.

We all sat in silence for a few moments. Then Aubrey laughed obscenely. “Look like your partner was deep into something, Sweet.”

He nodded.

“But you know,” she continued, “a fella like that coulda spent sixty thousand just as quick as he spent that missing twenty-five. Your department probably figure the whole sixty already gone, right, Sweet? Right? I mean, ain’t they already kissed it good-bye, Sweet?”

He said nothing, just twisted the sock until the contents were secure, and then pocketed it. Sweet leaned back into the sofa and lit another Newport, holding on to the paper match long after its flame had died.

I looked at him while he drooled. I looked at Aubrey looking at him. What a nasty little dance. It would lead nowhere, of course.

I had an absurd vision of Leman Sweet in a tight-fitting French navy uniform, walking all lovey-dovey with Aubrey through Marseilles. Then I cast myself in the female role, hanging onto his arm while I chatted over my shoulder with the odd fishmonger about the novels of Marcel Pagnol. It was almost enough to make me pull out my notebook and dash off a few lines. Needless to say, that poem would have been squarely in the surrealist tradition.

All that aside, I could feel my chest expanding with the sweet rush of a righteous act. I had done what I was supposed to do—give back that money. It may have been a little short, it may have been a little late, but I’d done it! Sweet seemed to buy our version of events. And Sig—in all his incarnations—would be out of my life forever.

Thank the baby Jesus, Leman Sweet left us at last.

Aubrey leaned forward and consulted the mirrored top of the little cigarette table. She freshened her lipstick, all the while shaking her head in bemused contempt.

“What?” I asked.

“Country nigger,” she said low. “Where the fuck he get off hittin’ you?”