Blue Eyes Read Free Page A

his red hair sticky with sugar from all the napoleons he’d consumed. He couldn’t decide whether to go uptown or downtown, to meet up with Zorro, Odette, or Coen. He hogged the booth, scattering men and women who wanted to make a call. Finally he trailed a stocking from the top of the booth and walked away from The Dwarf.

2 DeFalco, Rosenheim, and Brown despised Coen because he wouldn’t live out on the Island with them. He had no family. Only an uncle in a nursing home on Riverside Drive. Coen’s wife left him for a Manhattan dentist. She had a pair of new children, not Coen’s. He ate at Cuban restaurants. He was a ping-pong freak. He wouldn’t allow any of the auxiliary policewomen near his flies. He bought chocolates for Isobel, the portorriqueña , and made their own offerings of cupcakes and lemon balls seem contemptible to them. He was the boyhood friend of César Guzmann, the gambler and whorehouse entrepreneur, and they knew that the Guzmanns owed him a favor. After the flop-out at Bummy’s, the three bulls drove home to Islip, Freeport, and Massapequa Park, and Coen gobbled black beans and drank Cuban coffee on Columbus Avenue with Arnold the Spic.
    The waiters, who couldn’t warm to most norteamericanos , enjoyed Coen and his ten words of Spanish. They sat him in a privileged spot along the counter. They filled his cup with hot milk. They fed him extra portions of beans. Although they were proud of Arnold’s handcuffs, they didn’t dwell on the gun at Coen’s hip. They accepted him as Arnold’s patrón without the politeness and fraudulent grins they used on cops and sanitation chiefs. They protected his long periods of silence, and discouraged negligible people from going near him. He sat over his cup for an hour. Arnold read his comic books. Then Coen said, “Leave the Chinaman to me.” Deep in his comic, Arnold couldn’t hear.
    Coen lived in a five-story walkup on Seventieth and Columbus, over a Spanish grocery. He had broken panes in two of his windows. Apples grew warts in Coen’s refrigerator. The First Deputy’s office woke him at three in the morning. They expected him downtown by four. In the past Coen would have changed his underwear and picked at his teeth with dental floss. But he was tired of their kidnappings. Brodsky, a chauffeur from the office, drove him down. Brodsky was a first-grade detective, like Coen. He earned his gold shield driving inspectors’ wives around and grooming undercover agents. Years ago he could buy his friends into a detective squad for a few hundred dollars. He had to discontinue the practice with younger chiefs in power. He rode through Central Park frowning at Coen. “They’ll burn you this time.” Coen yawned. He was wearing a pale tie over his pajama tops.
    â€œWho wants me?”
    â€œPimloe. He’s a Harvard boy. He won’t eat your shit.”
    â€œAnother mutt,” Coen said.
    He couldn’t get clear of the First Dep’s office. They stuck to him since his rookie days. Isaac Sidel, a new deputy inspector in the office, pulled him out of the academy because he needed a kid, a blue-eyed kid, to infiltrate a ring of Polish loft burglars who were fleecing the garment area with the approval of certain detectives from the safe and loft squad. Coen wore cheap corduroy for Isaac, and grew a ducktail in the style of a young Polish hood. He hauled coat racks on Thirty-ninth Street for a dummy firm and ate in a workingman’s dive until an obscure member of the ring recruited him over a dish of blood salami. Coen took no part in burglaries. He hauled racks for the ring. One day two men in business suits stole Coen’s racks and banged him in the shins. Isaac told him these men were county detectives from the District Attorney’s office, who were conducting their own investigation of the burglaries and were trying to shake off Coen. “Manfred, how did they