Terry Towers was a twelve-story Mitchell-Lama semi-dump in the West Twenties, one step up from a housing project, which meant a few less elevators chronically out of commission and hallway odors not quite as feral. Apartment 7G itself was small, stifling, and untidy, dinner dishes still on the dinette table at two forty-five in the morning. In the middle of the cramped living room, Horace Woody, deep into his sixties but DNA-blessed with the physique of a lanky teenager, stood hands on hips in his boxers, the taut skin across his flat chest the color of a good camel hair coat. But his eyes were maraschinos, and his liquored breath was sweet enough to curl Billy’s teeth.
“It’s not like I don’t have my suspicions as to who took the damn thing,” Woody slurred, glaring at his girlfriend, Carla Garrett, who leaned against an old TV console covered with esoterically molded liqueur bottles and dog-eared photos in Lucite frames. She was maybe half his age, on the heavy side, with steady, realistic eyes. The droll, resigned twist of her mouth confirmed Billy’s hunch about this one being a dummy of a run, at worst a slow-motion domestic, but he didn’t really mind, fascinated as he was by the older man’s uncanny youthfulness.
“Some people,” Woody said, “they just don’t want you to have no life in your life.”
There was a light rapping at the front door; then Alice Stupak, five-four but built like a bus, eased into the apartment, her chronic rosacea and brassy short bangs forever putting Billy in mind of a battle-scarred, alcoholic Peter Pan.
“How’s everybody doing tonight?” she blared with cheery authority. Then, zeroing in on the problem child: “How about you, sir? You having a good evening?”
Woody reared back with narrow-eyed disapproval, a look Billy had seen Alice get before, mainly, but not exclusively, from their suddenly off-balance male customers. But as fearsome as she was for some to behold, Billy knew her to be chronically lovelorn, forever pining after this detective or fireman, that bartender or doorman, endlessly driven to despair that all these potential boyfriends automatically assumed she was a dyke.
“Ma’am?” Stupak said, nodding to Woody’s girlfriend. “Why are we here?”
Carla Garrett pushed off the console and started camel-walking toward the back of the apartment, curling her finger for Billy to follow.
The halo-lit bathroom was a little too close, uncapped bottles and tubes of skin- and hair-care products rimming both the sink and the tub, used towels drooping from every knob, rod, and rack, stray hairs in places that made Billy look away. As Woody’s girlfriend began rooting around inside a full and ripe laundry hamper, Billy’s cell rang: Stacey Taylor for the third time in two days, his stomach giving up a little whoop of alarm as he killed this call from her like all the others.
“You got it in there?” Woody barked from the hallway. “I know you got it in there.”
“Just go back and watch your TV,” Stupak’s voice coming through the closed door.
When the girlfriend finally stood upright from the hamper, she held the silver medal in her hands, as big around as a coffee saucer.
“See, when he gets his drink on he wants to pawn it and start a new life. He did it already a few times, and how much you think he got for it?”
“A few grand?”
“A hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
“Can I hold it?”
Billy was disappointed in how light it was, but he felt a little buzzed nonetheless.
“See, Horace’s OK most of the time, I mean, I certainly been with worse, it’s just when he gets his hands on that Cherry Heering, you know? The man has got a alcoholic sweet tooth like a infant. I mean, you could get a good bottle of fifty-dollar cognac or Johnnie Walker Black, leave it on the table, he won’t even crack the seal. Something tastes like a purple candy bar? Watch out.”
“I want my damn medal back!” Woody yelled from farther away in the apartment.
“Sir, what did I just say to you?” Stupak’s voice flattening with anger.
“Start a new life . . .” the girlfriend muttered. “All the pawnshops around here got me on speed dial for when it comes in. Hell, he wants to take off? I’ll loan him the money, but this here is a piece of American history.”
Billy liked her, he just didn’t understand why a woman this lucid didn’t keep a cleaner house.
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry they sent you. Usually some uniform guys from the precinct come up, mainly just because he was a famous athlete, and we play Where’d she hide it this time, but you’re a detective, and I’m embarrassed they bothered you.”
When they opened the bathroom door, Woody was back in the living room, sprawled on the vinyl-covered couch watching MTV with the sound off, his jellied eyes dimming into slits.
Billy dropped the medal on his chest. “Case solved.”
Walking with Stupak to the elevators he checked the time: three-thirty. Ninety more minutes and the odds were he’d have gotten away with murder.
“What do you say?”
“You’re the boss, boss.”
“Finnerty’s?” Billy thinking, What the hell, you cannot not celebrate, thinking, Just a taste.
“I always wanted to go to Ireland,” Stupak shouted over the music to the dead-handsome young bartender. “Last year we had reservations and everything but, like, two days before the flight my girlfriend came down with appendicitis.”
“You can always get on a plane by yourself, you know,” he said politely enough, looking over her shoulder to wave at two women just coming through the door. “It’s a very friendly country.”
And that was that, the guy leaning across the wood to buss the new arrivals and leaving Stupak to blush into her beer.
“I’ve never been to Ireland myself,” Billy said. “I mean, what for, I’m around Micks all day as it is.”
“I never should’ve said ‘girlfriend,’” Stupak said.
His cell rang, not the Wheel, thank God, but his wife, Billy race-walking out onto the street so she wouldn’t hear the racket and start asking questions.
“Hey . . .” his voice downshifting as it always did when she rang him this deep into the night. “Can’t sleep?”
“Nope.”
“Did you take your Traz?”
“I think I forgot but I can’t now, I have to get up in three hours.”
“How about you take a half?”
“I can’t.”
“All right, just, you know, you’ve been here before, worse comes to worse, you’ll have a tough day tomorrow but it won’t kill you.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I’ll try and duck out early.”
“I hate this, Billy.”
“I know you do.” His cell began to vibrate again; Rollie Towers on line two. “Hang on a sec.”
“I really hate it.”
“Just hang on . . .” Then, switching over: “Hey, what’s up.”
“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”
“Fuck you, what do you got.”
“Happy St. Patrick’s Day,” said the Wheel.