Sammy Two Shoes, page 12
‘Because I asked around about you.’ She finished her martini. ‘You’ve got a rep that anybody would envy.’
‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,’ I said.
‘What?’ She swiveled toward me.
‘That’s a quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,’ I explained. ‘That movie. I think maybe a lot of what you heard is my legend. Not my fact.’
‘Oh. Well. Nevertheless.’
Our food came. We ate it.
Before long we were in a cab headed for the precinct house on West 10th. Once we were there, Ms Baker led the way, and in a shockingly short amount of time, we were in a room sitting across a table from Phoebe Peabody.
‘I’ll get right to the point,’ I began. ‘I need to know about Emory’s outside interests. Outside of the scope of your play.’
Phoebe stared. ‘Where’s Sammy?’
‘Brooklyn,’ I said, glancing sideways at Ms Baker. ‘He may have thought you poisoned Phoebe, so he stabbed her in the neck.’
‘What?’ Her eyes got about as big as they could get.
‘He did it so that he would take the rap,’ I explained, ‘and then he left town to avoid the police. He loves you.’
‘I didn’t poison Phoebe,’ she rasped. ‘And Sammy didn’t stab her in the neck.’
‘He did, in fact,’ I assured her. ‘He told me so.’
‘And his fingerprints are on the pencil,’ Ms Baker confirmed. ‘So now the district attorney thinks you both did it. Killed Phoebe. A folie à deux.’
‘A what?’ Phoebe asked.
‘Emory was involved in something,’ I interrupted. ‘Something that maybe had to do with Sammy. I mean, Emory introduced you to Sammy, right?’
‘She did.’ Phoebe sat back. ‘But you’re really asking me about Emory’s boyfriend. He was extremely bad news. Sammy knew him. Didn’t like him.’
‘What’s his name?’ I asked.
‘Sammy always called him Tanner,’ she told me. ‘I guess that’s his last name.’
I slumped a little in my chair. It was no wonder that Sammy hadn’t mentioned this little detail. If he had, I’d definitely have gone back to Florida and done my best to forget I’d ever come to New York at all.
Ms Baker noticed my concern.
‘You know this Tanner?’ Ms Baker asked.
I nodded. ‘It’s not his last name.’
Tanner Brookmeyer was the kind of hood that other hoods were afraid of because he was crazy, coked-up all the time, and involved in the darkest part of the underworld of pornography. Everybody knew him. Nobody liked him. My family had always done their best to steer clear. A well-dressed man in his early fifties, his legend was deliberately scary. His real first name was Eugene, but he acquired his street name because of how many hides he’d tanned in the process of getting his work done. Usually with a blowtorch. And he regularly beat people and filmed it for entertainment purposes. Sometimes he beat them so bad that they left town. Sometimes in a hearse. And those were his good qualities. In the old days I didn’t know anybody who wasn’t terrified of him. If he was Emory’s boyfriend, no wonder she was edgy all the time.
But the thing was, if Tanner wanted to kill her, he wouldn’t put poison in her fancy water bottle. He’d use a belt buckle.
‘I didn’t know he was still around,’ I went on. ‘But this verifies my idea that Emory was into coke, as I was telling Ms Baker earlier. I mean, Tanner Brookmeyer is a significantly wrong guy.’
And it occurred to me that maybe Sammy was involved with Tanner. That would be a very troubling association. Though it might help to explain Sammy’s transformation from a nice little two-bit hustler to a genuine ice machine.
‘So, you know the guy,’ Ms Baker confirmed.
‘I know about him,’ I said.
‘He’s the guy to talk to.’ Phoebe stared into my eyes. ‘Sammy can be so sweet. He didn’t kill Emory any more than I did.’
I took a breath. I didn’t want to mess up the kid’s delusion.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘So what do you think Tanner and Emory were into?’
‘Seemed like coke,’ Phoebe said. ‘They were both pretty hyped up when they were together. Tanner’s older, like fifty, maybe. But Emory was all over him. I mean, it could have been love, but it smelled like coke.’
‘The two are easily confused,’ I agreed.
‘I should have a look for paper on this guy,’ Ms Baker said. ‘This Tanner guy. What’s his last name?’
‘Brookmeyer,’ I told her, ‘but you probably won’t find anything on him. He’s not the kind to get caught.’
‘Is he the kind to kill his girlfriend?’ Ms Baker asked.
‘Oh, absolutely,’ I said.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Then go get him.’
‘Me? No.’ I shook my head. ‘You should send in, like, Godzilla to get this guy. He’s not human. I think he’s probably an evil spirit of some sort.’
‘Grow up, Nature Boy.’ Ms Baker laughed.
‘I’m not kidding,’ I assured her. ‘I can’t fetch him.’
‘Maybe you and Sammy could do it together?’ Phoebe suggested.
I sighed because I could see how things were lining up. I was going to have to go to Brooklyn and see why Sammy made my aunt Shayna cry. And then I was going to have to go to Sammy to see if I could talk him into dying for Phoebe. Because that was what we were both going to do when we went up against Tanner Brookmeyer.
‘I should be getting back to Florida,’ I announced. ‘I probably have a case or maybe even a couple of cases down there. Plus my rent is due, and I don’t like to be late. Also, there is this girl who works at the donut shop down there—’
‘The thing is,’ Ms Baker interrupted, ‘as a duly sworn officer of the law, it’s my obligation to correct the warrant that’s out on you. Fill in the right name. Contact the guys over in Brooklyn. Let them know where you live. In Florida. Fry’s Bay, right?’
‘You really looked me up.’ I glared.
‘I had to in order to make you my case investigator. Which you are, legally. But it’s up to you. Fulfill your obligation to me with regard to this case or go back to Florida and wait for some pissed-off detective from Brooklyn to come and get you. Your choice.’
‘Right.’ I nodded. ‘Some choice.’
‘Look,’ Phoebe said, ‘whatever else Sammy Cohen is, he’s in love with me, right? And I’m in love with him. So, you gotta help us. It’s some kind of law, somewhere.’
Threats from a lawyer and laws about love. The world was an impossibly complicated case, all right.
I stood up.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Ms Baker began.
‘I’m going to Brooklyn to get Sammy so we can collect Tanner Brookmeyer,’ I said. ‘Not because you threatened me – I thought we were friends, by the way – and not because of some star-crossed love between a hoodlum and a theatre type. I’m going because I love my aunt.’
And without further explanation, I left the room, went to the subway, and got on a train. And all the way to Brooklyn I thought about what a spectacular chump I probably was.
NINETEEN
Brooklyn had become an imaginary place to me during my Florida years, the way a childhood memory makes things bigger and brighter than they were in reality. But walking up the street to my mother’s place, even the garbage in the streets and the graffiti on the walls felt like home.
Up the stoop, up the stairs, knock twice on the door, and there was Shayna. Her eyes were rimmed in red, and she was wearing a blue chenille bathrobe.
I stood in the doorway. ‘It’s a little late in the day for the robe, don’t you think?’
She put a finger to her lips, then she motioned me in.
Sammy was sitting on the sofa in the front room. He had his Colt in his hand, but his hand was in his lap.
I looked at Shayna. ‘Was he here like this when I called you earlier?’
She nodded.
Sammy looked up, a little lost. ‘Oh, hi, Foggy. When did you get here?’
‘Just now,’ I told him. ‘What’s up, Sam?’
‘I,’ he began, and then seemed to lose his train of thought.
‘Sammy?’ I said softly.
‘I’ve made some … mistakes.’ He sighed and closed his eyes.
‘Yeah.’ I stepped into the apartment, but only a little. ‘In what regard?’
‘Cocaine,’ he began, a little philosophically, ‘is bad.’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘All it wants is more of itself. You get a little bump, but the second it drops below a hundred percent, you get desperate for a little more.’
‘It don’t do your judgment any favors either,’ he assured me.
‘I recall.’ I took one more step into the room. ‘So. What’s going on now?’
He looked up. ‘Now?’
‘You’re in my mother’s apartment with a gun in your hand, Sammy,’ I said quickly.
He looked around. ‘Oh. Yeah.’
‘I talked with Phoebe,’ I said, ‘and with Phoebe’s lawyer. The consensus is that you knew Emory pretty well. She introduced you to Phoebe. And Emory was Tanner Brookmeyer’s girlfriend.’
Sammy’s face contorted like he’d been shot in the guts. ‘I hate him.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘there’s a long line for that. What’s going on, Sam?’
I edged a little closer to him, glaring at Shayna.
She nodded. ‘Want some coffee?’
‘Love some,’ I snapped.
And Shayna beat it to the kitchen.
‘Phoebe wasn’t supposed to get in the middle of this,’ Sammy said, and he sounded miserable. ‘I was trying to get at Tanner.’
One more step. ‘Maybe you should start at the beginning.’
And so he did.
Sammy Two Shoes Cohen had always felt lost. As a teenager, he’d wanted to be a folk singer, but everyone made fun of that. His only friends were criminals and his family didn’t want him. He wasn’t bad looking, though, and he was tall. So he managed to get by on the periphery of his world until he ran afoul of Tanner Brookmeyer. Tanner didn’t like Sammy. Maybe it was exactly because Sammy was taller and better looking, or maybe it was because of Emory Brewster.
Emory Brewster was a spoiled kid from the upper east side of Manhattan. Best schools, best clothes, best drugs. She met Tanner at a party with some of her spoiled rich friends, and she didn’t like him. She liked Sammy. Sammy had come with the caterer, his uncle, as part of the package: he was the entertainment. He played blues guitar and sang in a voice that he thought sounded like Sonny Boy Williamson. Under the name Spider Cohen. Lots of the girls were impressed, but no one more than Emory. She bought a hundred dollars’ worth of coke from Tanner that night and shared it all with Sammy. It made his playing wild. By the end of the evening, Emory and Sammy were making out in the shadows.
Until Emory wanted more coke.
She said she’d be right back and went to find Tanner. An hour later the caterer was cleaning up, most of the guests were gone, and Sammy felt stupid.
Emory had gone home with Tanner. Coke beats the blues every time.
But Tanner held a grudge because Sammy had kissed Emory first. So he went out of his way to hire Sammy for all manner of demeaning, humiliating, and dangerous gigs. And Sammy went along because that’s what you did, and because he needed the money.
Emory wasn’t entirely heartless. Just mostly. She introduced Phoebe to Sammy. Emory had worked with Phoebe on a couple of shows and had the idea that they’d like each other. Emory did a bit of encouraging, a little matchmaking, and it took. Sammy fell for Phoebe and vice versa.
But Sammy had grown to hate Tanner, hate the jobs that Tanner made Sammy do. So when Sammy was bolstered by love for the first time in his life, he suddenly had the confidence to stand up for himself.
Unfortunately, Sammy’s idea of getting even was severely on the gangster side of things. And to make matters worse, he went to Shayna, and Shayna organized things the gangster way.
They started by wrecking Tanner’s main contacts in the drug world. Sammy went to Atlanta, for example, and killed Tanner’s coke supplier, a little weasel who was also a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. And just recently Sammy had gone back to Atlanta to kill a guy in charge of Tanner’s Atlanta porn kingdom. So Tanner’s livelihood was in trouble.
And in between other such questionable acts of revenge, Sammy may have killed Emory Brewster.
‘I didn’t mean to ice her,’ Sammy concluded softly. ‘I just wanted to freak her out.’
I didn’t move, because he still had his gun in his hand, and I was severely worried about his state of mind. But I had to clarify.
‘What did you mean to do?’ I asked politely.
‘The show she was in before the Hamlet thing was this old Agatha Christie. And Then There Were None. She played the part of Emily Brent, some religious nut who was mean to her maid. In the play she gets it from cyanide poisoning, this Emily character. The thing is, the cast in that show hated Emory too, just like the Hamlet guys. Twice somebody in the Christie cast put cyanide in Emory’s water bottle. Not enough to kill her, just made her nauseous and confused; she forgot her lines a lot. They all thought it was a good joke. Emory thought it was the coke. Anyway, Emory got fired from that gig. I heard about it from Phoebe because Phoebe was the stage manager for the Christie. She thought it was a good joke too, so when Emory got to be such a pistol in the Hamlet thing, I figured to try the gag again. Only maybe Phoebe thought it was funny too, so Phoebe dosed Emory’s water and maybe things went too far, and it iced Emory, so I used the pencil bit in a moment of panic, as I may have indicated earlier, maybe.’
Sammy had more to say, but at exactly that moment the door to the apartment busted open and there were two guys with guns.
One of them was Tanner Brookmeyer.
TWENTY
Tanner looked around the room.
‘This is Brooklyn?’ He shook his head. ‘It stinks.’
‘This is my mother’s place,’ I said quickly, ‘and it actually smells like lavender.’
He turned my way. ‘You’ve got to be Foggy Moscowitz.’
I nodded. ‘Whether I want to be or not.’
Without warning Tanner smiled, pointed his gun, and shot Sammy in the thigh.
Half a second later Shayna appeared in the hallway to the kitchen with a Colt Python in her hand. It was just like Sammy’s, only it looked bigger in her hand.
She fired, and the guy who’d come in with Tanner howled. He’d been shot in the foot. I moved the second Shayna’s gun went off. Ducking low, I plowed into the guy with the shot-up foot. He went down like he was taking a dive in a prize fight: reluctant but resigned. Hit the floor with a smack and conked his head on the oak leg of a table by the door. After that he didn’t move.
At the same time Tanner whirled and fired at Shayna, but she was already gone, zipped back into the kitchen. I was low enough to grab Foot Guy’s gun, but I lost my balance and fell on my backside just as Tanner turned his attention to me. I pointed the unfamiliar pistol, but before I could fire, somebody else did, and Tanner twitched backward. He leaned against the wall by the door. Blood began to bloom on his shoulder like he suddenly had a carnation in his lapel. I looked over at Sammy. He’d fired the shot at Tanner, and he was grinning. He thought his troubles were over.
But Tanner had other ideas. He lowered his pistol, pushed off from the wall, came to a solid stand, and sighed.
‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘We got that out of the way. Everybody got shot. Now. Let’s talk.’
‘I’m messing up Mrs Moscowitz’s sofa,’ Sammy said, watching the blood from his thing ooze on to the pale gold fabric.
Tanner looked around. ‘Yeah, the whole place is gonna need a good clean. Is Benny OK?’
I took a guess that the guy with the bullet in his foot was Benny, and another guess that the question was addressed to me.
‘He’s out,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘But he’s OK. Except, you know, for his foot.’
‘Right, right,’ Tanner said.
He was eyeing the gun in my hand. I looked down at it, then I set it slowly on the floor. ‘Let’s not have any more gunplay for the nonce, right? Let’s talk. Like you said.’
Tanner nodded and put his gun away. ‘Sammy?’
Sammy set his gun down on the coffee table, on top of the fanned-out Look magazines.
Shayna’s voice, strong, came from the kitchen. ‘I’m not putting my gun away, Tanner. This is my house. You shouldn’t be here.’
‘Well,’ Tanner said lazily, ‘it’s really your sister’s apartment, but you go ahead. Hold your little gun in your hand if you want.’
‘Listen,’ I began, ‘this is really something between you two boys. My mother’s sick and my aunt’s very emotional at the moment. Couldn’t you both take this somewhere else?’
‘Oh no,’ Tanner complained. ‘You’re in this as much as anybody. You’re working with that lawyer, you went to Atlanta and helped Sammy kill my guy, and your aunt Shayna has been messing with my enterprises here in this neighborhood for, like, five hundred years. I am exactly where I want to be.’
‘Well, in the first place,’ I began, ‘I did not help Sammy kill anybody. And in the second place, I swear to God I had no idea that you and my aunt were at war.’
‘Shayna hates me for personal reasons I don’t care to discuss at the moment,’ Tanner told me.
‘So why wouldn’t I just come in there and shoot you dead right now?’ Shayna called from the kitchen, her voice high and strained.
‘You might want to,’ Tanner answered, ‘but you won’t. Because you’re not the type. That was your brother-in-law, Foggy’s pop. Now there was a guy who knew how to do it. Did you know he killed a guy with a toothpick once? Swear to God.’
‘What is it you want, Tanner?’ I asked, mostly to stop him talking about my father.
‘Well, obviously, I want Sammy. He’s causing me a lot of trouble business-wise, plus I hear he killed my girlfriend.’
‘He didn’t,’ I began, mostly to keep Tanner from shooting Sammy.
‘Doesn’t really matter,’ Tanner said dismissively. ‘Girls come and go. Emory was itchy and I was tired of her anyway. Actors. What are you gonna do? But he did it to get my goat, and I don’t stand for that.’
