Robert Tanenbaum: Reversible Error

Booth put the envelope in his belt under his sweater.

"And what the fuck took you so long?" the man asked. "I almost got a hernia scrooched up like that."

"Man had to get his last fuck in, blow some coke. I figure there's no rush. He was feeling pretty good anyway. He ask me if I want a job."

"Yeah? You take it?"

"I was thinking about it. This where you want to go?"

The man looked out the window. "Yeah, pull over here. OK, take this load of shit down under the highway, like we said. Make it look like somebody roughed him off. Take the watch and the chains. And don't fuckin let me see you with any of that shit on you, understand?"

"Shit. What you think, I'm a fool?" answered Booth, insulted.

"And this." The shooter held out the empty revolver. He had wrapped it in a piece of rag. "In the river. Ditch the car where we said. Take the subway after. Anybody know you was with him?"

"Just the ho."

"She don't count," said the shooter.

Booth nodded and put the gun next to him on the seat. The shooter slid out of the car without another word and walked a few yards to where a tan Plymouth waited at the curb, its engine running. The shooter got in and the car took off.

Obediently Booth drove east on 96th Street, then north on First to 120th Street, where he turned right and drove until he was under the humming FDR Drive. These truncated streets, which lie in perpetual shadow and endure the stench and noise of a major elevated highway, constitute a sort of grease trap, catching the lumps of urban detritus no longer wanted in the lighted zones. In the especially dark area in which Booth chose now to stash the great automobile, there were, for example, a burned sofa, two cars stripped of everything merchantable, their hoods and trunks gaping like starving seagulls, a coil of rusted mesh fencing, a wooden cable spool, half a dozen fifty-five-gallon drums, windows of corrugated cardboard and paper trash, and any number of dead dogs, cats, pigeons, and rats, slowly decomposing into gritty city humus. All this lay on a surface of crushed glass glittering in the scant light.

Booth now began the distasteful task of stripping Larue Clarry's corpse of its valuables. Wallet from the inside jacket pocket, vial of traveling coke from the side jacket pocket, gold watch, four finger rings. The neck chains were embedded in a thick mass of congealed blood, and rather than fumble with the catches and get all messy, Booth cut them off with the efficient pliers supplied by the Mercedes-Benz Corporation. After pocketing the cocaine and the money from the wallet, Booth tied the rest of the swag in Clarry's handkerchief.

He was just about to back out of the car's rear compartment when he heard the unmistakable sound of a man clearing his throat. The weird acoustics of the underfreeway made it seem to come from directly behind him, as if a passing stranger were about to ask him directions or politely offer help; it froze his blood and brought his head up sharply, cracking it against the door frame. Stunned, he fell back, landing on the filthy pavement, with his feet still in the car.

He stifled a curse and rose shakily to stand, glancing about wildly, vainly attempting to read the darkness. Under the traffic sounds, silence. He waited a long minute. Another.

Then he realized that he was still holding in his hand the things he had taken off Clarry. He looked dumbly at the bundle as if for the first time, a lumpy white package slowly turning pink. Street instinct kicked in and he began to run, south and east toward a little park under the highway, toward the river.

It was only after he had flung the heavy package as far toward the lights of Randall's Island as he could manage that he realized that he had forgotten the little pistol. It was still wrapped in its rag on the front seat of the car.

As Booth walked out of the park toward the subway, he tried to figure if he was in any real trouble over this. Going back was out-no way was he going to get anywhere near that car this night. For all he knew, somebody had spotted him and called the cops. If the cops found the gun, he would be in trouble, but the shooter would be in worse trouble and would probably leave him alone for the foreseeable future, which in Booth's case amounted to about four days.

But the likelier outcome was that a big expensive car abandoned in that neighborhood would be stripped that night, the gun scarfed up by some street kid. It might as well be in the river. He walked on, relieved. He had nearly a thousand dollars and two grams of prime cocaine. Time to party. The face that peered in through the window of the Mercedes was a junkie's face; yellow and thin, with a twisted scar over one eye and an expression of deep pain and profound fatigue. A heroin addict of long standing, the man couldn't recognize the bullet-riddled face of the man in the back seat, but he knew the car. Making the logical jump that he was looking at its late owner was easy.

The man's name was Enrico Laxton, known as Po'boy. Like many aging junkies, he made a modest living as a snitch, trading bits of information to the police for small sums, or better yet, bags of smack.

He saw Larue Garry's end as Tecumseh Booth had seen it-as a business opportunity. Laxton was debilitated and shaky, but there was nothing wrong with his eyes. In his yellow sweater and pale slacks Booth had shone like neon and Laxton had got a good look at his face as he ran by the pile of cardboard and rags on which Laxton had nodded out, as invisible as city grime.

Three months out of law school, Peter Schick sat in the outer office of the Criminal Courts Bureau, of the New York District Attorney's Office, watching the action and waiting to be called into his third job interview of the day. He crossed his legs and glanced at his watch and then at the round clock on the wall. His watch was running but the clock had stopped. At the two Wall Street firms where he had interviewed that morning, the clocks worked, the secretaries were cool and competent, and the furniture was polished wood and real leather, not painted metal and cracked vinyl. The office staff here looked toughened and tired, and drawn from the less prestigious minorities of the city.

He discovered he had been picking nervously at a crack in the covering of the tan couch and stopped. There were no magazines to read. He went back to staring at the woman sitting on the edge of a desk across a narrow aisle. She was making call after call on the desk phone. She kept the receiver crooked against her shoulder and made an occasional note on a yellow pad, afterward shoving the pencil into the thick mass of lustrous black hair that, from Schick's location, concealed her face from view. She was wearing a black skirt of some rustling material; it was slit and rode entrancingly up her thigh when she crossed her legs. The legs were marvelous, tapering without fragility, wrapped in shimmering mist-colored stockings. She wore a black kid glove on her left hand, like a gunfighter.

Schick adjusted his position slightly, so as to improve his view of inner thigh for the next leg cross. But something must have lit up the invisible radar that is the secret possession of the girls; she snapped her head around and gave him the stare.

He felt his jaw drop and a blush rising up his jaw. The woman was a classic cover-girl beauty-large black eyes over razor-sharp cheekbones, a wide lush mouth, the skin a delicate pink bisque. Schick took in that there was something wrong with one of her eyes, a crazy light in it, or perhaps it was slightly, but fetchingly, crossed. He felt the blush rising to his cheeks and pointedly looked away from her at the unmoving clock.

Just then, the door to the bureau director's office opened and Schick's interview walked out. Schick was over six feet tall, but the bureau director rose nearly four inches higher than that. He extended a big hand and Schick took it. Schick looked him in the eyes, which were a strange deep gray with little yellow flecks. They slanted slightly above broad cheekbones. Karp's nose was fleshy, his mouth full, his chin bold and knobby, his hair neatly cut, medium length, and ash-brown.