Reggie Nadelson - Londongrad

And he knew the Russkis out there as well as anyone in the city, including me. Also, his mother, who ran a little export-import business from the house-Russian embroidery, varnished boxes, cheap porcelain, that kind of shit-went back and forth a lot, so he had a handle on what was doing over there. Bobo had cousins every place: LA, London, Miami, Los Angeles, Moscow, Tel Aviv.

At six four, with the kind of long springy muscles you get if you work out right, he played good basketball. He had an accent, but he was a handsome kid with nice manners, and when I needed a favor, he was always ready.

I had worked with Bobo Leven a few times. And once, I took him out drinking with a couple of the guys, and he loved the tribal aspect of it, the fact you could say things you couldn’t say to anyone else in language you could never divulge to civilians. He knew there were things that only other guys on the job understood. They liked him okay. But one of my oldest friends said to me, “He looks nice, he acts respectful, but I don’t trust him much.”

A couple of hazmat guys, white paper suits, yellow rubber boots, showed up and started working over the playground, taking samples of dirt, looking at their Geiger counters, whispering to each other through their masks, and Bobo, seeing them, looked nervous.

“What are they here for?”

One of the guys removed his mask and I recognized him from a job I did once. Couldn’t remember his name, and he was older and heavier, but the face was the same. I went over and talked to him out of Bobo’s hearing. I didn’t want him getting in the way. The wind puffed out the papery white hazmat suit.

“What’s going on?”

“Somebody thought the scene could be hot,” said Tom Alvin, name on his badge. “They always think a scene is hot, you know, man, I mean, it’s an obsession, they find a case, they send us in, and what the fuck difference does it make, you know? They’re consumed, man, with the idea of a dirty bomb. They read too much shit in the papers, you know, like that spy thing over in England, what was his name, the Russian dude that got poisoned? You heard about that? Some kind of radiation shit, but it was like a couple of years ago. Man, we better all pray McCain gets elected, he’s like a regular fucking war hero and if we get trouble, he’s the guy.” He paused. “You wanna know what they should do?”

“What’s that?”

“They should stop seeing movies that got nothing to do with what’s going on, all them big thrillers with nuclear shit in them, and worth nothing, nada, zero. They should spend some money inspecting container ships, and the baggage holds of all those aircraft from crazy places, how about hospital waste, how about them nuke plants that got no controls? But we don’t got no money for that, right, man? It’s coming, but not like this in some fucking playground, or in somebody’s sushi like the guy in London. One day, it’ll just come outta the sky, bang, like the Trade Center, bing bang boom!” He snorted, threw his smoke on the ground, crushed it with his foot and put his mask back on. “Artie, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You working this?”

“No, just passing by.”

“Didn’t you work a nuke case way back in the day, out by Brighton Beach? You tracked some nuke mule who carried stuff out of Russia in his suitcase? I remember that. With some of those fucking Russkis, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So you think you got something here?” I gestured at the swing.

“I’m not sure. You want me to give you a call?”

I nodded in Bobo’s direction. “Call him, if you want.”

“What did the hazmat guy say?” Bobo asked.

“Give him your number, he’ll call you.”

“So would you work this with me, Artie?”

I told him I was seriously on vacation.

“I can call you for some advice?” He was polite, but I didn’t feel comfortable with this guy. Maybe all he wanted was to do the case right, but there was something I couldn’t explain. I wanted to get away.

“Or maybe we could have a beer together once in a while and I could talk through it with you?”

“Sure,” I said, and headed for the street, Bobo following me, scribbling in his notebook fast as he could write.

Outside the playground, I leaned against Bobo’s red Audi TT and wondered how he could afford it.

“Nice car,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“So what do you think?” said Bobo, dragging in smoke the way only a Russian guy can do it.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Me either. I mean, Artie, you been on the job all this time, and who the fuck tapes up some poor girl and leaves her to suffocate in this shitty place?”

“I don’t know, Bobo, I don’t know who likes making people feel pain.”

“You’re wondering if they taped her up before she was dead?” said Bobo.

“I have to go,” I said. “Keep in touch.”

“A guy once told me once you get close to a case, you can’t let go, isn’t that right? Artie?”

“He was probably drunk,” I said. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Stacks of pink cold cuts lay on trays, little mountains of cubed cheese, orange, yellow, white, carrot sticks, candy bars, bagels, rolls, pastries that glistened, shiny under the lights, were arranged on platters, and NYPD guys in uniform were gobbling up food as fast as they could, as if they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, shoving food into their mouths, piling it high on paper plates. The long tables were set up outside the sound stage.

“Craft Services, they call it,” said Sonny Lippert, my ex-boss, when I found him at the Steiner Movie Studios where the old Brooklyn Shipyards had been.

He picked up his plate and sauntered out into the courtyard, and I followed him. He sat on a canvas directors’ chair and gestured to another one. I sat next to him.

I wanted his advice before I saw Bobo Leven again. The dead girl wasn’t my case, it was Leven’s, but I couldn’t let it go. The image of the girl on the swing stayed with me like floaters that stick in your eye, float on the surface of your brain, clog your vision. Some guy had told Leven when I got close to a case I couldn’t let it go, but that was crap. I was happy to turn it over to Leven. I was curious was all. I had seen the girl on the swing first and I was curious.

Or was I fooling myself? Had I become some kind of obsessive, one of those cops who can’t get the smell of a homicide out of his nose?

It wasn’t that I planned to work the case, I only wanted advice. Any information I got I’d pass on. Anyhow, I owed Sonny Lippert a visit. I hadn’t seen much of him lately.

“So, Artie, good to see you, it’s been a while,” said Sonny, who was wearing a captain’s uniform, the kind of dress blues guys wore to funerals. I had never in my life seen Lippert dressed as a cop. Almost all the years I’d known him, it was after he left the police force to work as a US attorney.

“What’s with the outfit?” I said to Lippert who had been my boss on and off for years until he retired.

“Nifty, right,” said Sonny, smoothing his navy blue jacket. “Fits me nice, right? I sucked up to the wardrobe lady, man. These people are cool. Listen, man, you want to go hear Ahmad Jamal with me in the fall, one of the last of the greats, man?” he said.

Long ago Sonny and me had started listening to music together. He still calls everyone “man”, a leftover from his younger years when he hung out with jazz guys. He still listened to the music with real love.

When I was still a rookie and broke, he sometimes invited me to concerts at Carnegie Hall and sometimes to the Vanguard. It was with Sonny I first heard Miles Davis in person, and Stan Getz, and Ella.