I felt like I was in a box, and the box felt like solid steel. I tore open another bag, cooked it up methodically and shot it into the collapsing vein. I waited for the inevitable feeling, the sunlight behind my eyes. My body walked slowly out of its living grave, only to fall back numb into the hole of sleep. The cops were looking for a black ski mask. I’d burned that as soon as I came in. I’d looked at the cash, paid lavish and loving attention to it for a long moment before stuffing it behind a frozen chunk of mystery meat in the freezer. The cops didn’t know where I’d gone, the old Jew wouldn’t be revealing too much besides his weak temperature. I heard the sounds of the street from my bedroom window; from there they filled the whole apartment with whining sirens and tires, radios squawking.

 I turned on the television in a spurt of movement, let my gaze linger until darkness settled over it. The news reported the robbery, made it sound fabulous, like the Brinks Job or something. The newscaster evoked just that job and mentioned Jesse James, John Dillinger and Willie Sutton. I was in good company for a junky on the nod. The night passed fitfully. I kept waking up dope sick, did more dope, nodded and startled myself into a sweat again. I did that until the sun cracked the sky.

 The detective assigned the case was a Pakistani. They called him Phil. Saying his real name took up valuable time. Phil had to discuss several matters with the man’s family. He had to know if anything other than money was taken. He met with the Jew’s daughter who mistook him for an Arab and copped an attitude with him. Explaining himself carefully, he tempered his disdain with strong dislike.

 “I’m not the criminal, miss. I’m only here to help. It’s my duty,” he said, flatly like cold cheese.

 She sneered, her fat nose twitching with sensual derision.

 “Your duty? You don’t care about my father. Why aren’t you going after his murderer instead of harassing his children?” she spouted.

 “Miss, if you will cooperate with some questions I have,” he pressed on.

 “Am I a suspect now?”

 Her dialogue was literally taken from television, I’d say deliberately. She had more to hide than her sorrow. Phil looked stupid, but he wasn’t. He recognized the rehearsed speech, noted the tearless eyes. She would only retort in indignation, doing her best imitation of the wrong tree. He left the spacious old townhouse, noting framed documents and mementoes on the way out, jeweler’s certificates and photos with celebrities. Phil couldn’t spell ‘suspect’ but he could smell one. He was hopeless when it came to ‘perpetrator’. That was me.

 Sharon called me soon after the cop was through with her, she told me. I had slept most of the day and woke up in the evening sicker and unnourished. The phone rang like depth charges and I answered before my head exploded like a bomb underwater.

 “Hello,” I said speedily.

 “You got what you wanted,” she bitched.

 “And you got what you wanted,” I said blandly.

 “No I didn’t. There’s a cop all over me,” she whined sinisterly. I was amused.

 “How long has it been?”

 “Fuck you. This isn’t a joke. If he keeps pushing me, I’ll—,” she thought about how stupid it sounded for her to do anything. I played with that.

 “You’ll what? Rat me out? That’d be fine.” I laughed though it hurt my gut like knives.

 “Meet me at the coffee shop on Lex and 23^rd and don’t look like a bum! God, talk about suspicious.”

 “Fuck you,” I said mildly. “What time?”

 “As soon as possible. We have to talk.”

 I hung up without rejoinder.

 Sharon Shuman was the daughter of Benjamin Shuman, his eldest and spoiled for life. She had a fat nose, puffy cheeks and rodent eyes. I’d used her on occasion like a mattress with a hole in it. Her father had thrown everything after her, but nature made her cheap and easy. Benjamin had been an antiques dealer and collector of rare objects d’art including a few gems valued at prices unheard of at flea markets. He trade with Sotheby’s often, getting a good deal on once in a lifetime and seldom seen baubles and novelties. He had plenty of cash on hand, which I now had, but Sharon had wanted only one thing, which she got, but with her attitude it wasn’t what she deserved.

 I dressed coolly in clean khakis, combat boots and flannel shirt. I’d combed my hair and spritzed on a little aftershave. I wouldn’t call myself a lady-killer. She met me within the hour. She was a mess, a collection of junk jewelry dangling from her carcass like a discarded Christmas display. Her long ugly scarves were scented with BO hardly concealed by too much Chanel No.19. She wore high heel sandals and a black skirt as shapeless as the body underneath it. She still had a body, pounds of flesh encasing a personality of pure spleen. She looked me hard in the face and sat beside me at the counter.

 “Why aren’t you at a table?” she said nastily.

 “You want a table, we’ll take a table.”

 I had shot up before leaving my apartment, had put shades on to walk the populous streets, took them off when the only thing I had to look at was her thankfully sobering face. We sat at a table. The waitress brought menus. I knew what I wanted and she read the thin board like she was studying the Talmud. She finally looked back into my eyes.

 “I’ll have ham and eggs. What about you?”

 “Pancakes,” I said, “Bring extra jelly. Grape, not strawberry.”

 We handed the menus back to the girl who nodded and left. “Ham and eggs, eh, and a big glass of milk,” I chided the fallen Jew. She took the comment as humorous.

 “Shut up,” she grinned despite herself, then smiled weakly and withdrew any frivolity into the soulless pit that she was and whispered gratingly, “What about the fuzz?”

 “Get a lint brush. I’m only the vacuum cleaner,” I said, swaying and resting my across the back of the seat.

 “You bastard,” she spoke as softly as she could so that I had to listen carefully. “If you let them get me—,” she stopped when two small cups of OJ came to the table.

 The waitress left again and I started, “You act guiltier than you really are. You’re a Jew after all,” I said, mocking her again.

 “You son of a bitch,” she said.

 “Make up your mind. Am I a bastard or a son of a bitch?”

 “Both!”

 She swilled her juice hastily.

 “Stop that cop!” she pleaded in near silence for discretion’s sake.

 “That’s not my job.”

 “Your job was to—,” she stopped, abrupt and embarrassed. Crime dare not speak its name. Her lips pursed and her eyes squinted. She was thinking the most obvious thing. “What if I—”

 “A-hem, “ I coughed.

 The waitress brought the food and we glared at each other while we ate. After, we jumped in a cab and headed back to my place. She kept talking, stupidly, so that anything I said had to seem ridiculous.

 “You’ll stick your dick in me but you won’t keep me out of jail.”

 “Its not exactly an honor.”

 “You,” she snarled.

 “I don’t owe you anything. I’ve already been paid,’ I said, halfheartedly.

 “But what about my ass?”

 “Let’s talk about things that really matter.”

 I rested back in the seat for the remainder of the ride. She made the duration endurable by knowing enough not to say any words that might take wings of their own. We got to the walk-up, she paid the fare and we departed the cab. It sped out of sight as we walked to the stoop with quick almost skipping steps. I went in and she followed. She followed me up the flights to my apartment. I unlocked the deadbolt and we went inside. She started groping at my shirt with the finesse of a chainsaw. I had to take off or she’d have torn it off my back. “Okay, okay!” I said. “You wanna get laid, you uptight horny bitch?”

 “Yes!” she gasped from her throat.

 The simple proposition couched in vulgarities was enough to keep her motor running while I retreated into the bathroom where I took a rubber from the medicine chest and snorted a hit of coke from the nondescript yellow pill bottle. I never touched pharmaceuticals. The reaction to them was too unpredictable. When I needed drugs, I got them on the street from people I could trust. One never knows what some multinational pharmaceutical company is dispensing in the name of health. I wasn’t looking for health anyway. I came from the john wired to explode, my hard-on popping the buttons off my khakis.

 “You’re hung like a horse!” she cried emphatically, which made me think that somewhere there might be a horse hung like a lowlife junky.

 Phil’s typed report of the robbery looked like someone had let a maniac loose in an alphabet soup factory. His captain treated the paper like scrap and tossed it away. He looked at the detective, wondering how old the shit was that the guy was using for brains.

 “You’re an American, ain’t ya, Phil?” the captain asked, anxious to get onto something, anything, else.

 “Yes, sir,” the plainclothes cop replied without guile.

 “That explains everything!” the captain threw his hands up startling the little detective with the sudden bluster. “I’m going to assume that you’re not illiterate, just that you can’t type.”

 Phil gulped audibly; his olive cheeks flushed a perceptible pale green.

 “Can you just tell me what happened to the loot?” the captain continued.

 “No, sir,” Phil reported truthfully.

 The reply earned a look of tragic disillusion from his superior officer.

 “No, huh?”

 The snoop didn’t mention the daughter because the captain hadn’t asked about her. She had harangued the dick to the size of a mouse, intimidating him with her wide ostentatious mouth. Phil left the captain’s office dejected, the captain calling behind him, “Go talk to Murphy! He types 120 words a minute! He’ll give you a few pointers, brush up your hunt and peck!”

 Phil walked fast to get away from the man and the feeling that he was an unmitigated fuck up. He had all of the facts but couldn’t put them together any more than he could put solve the New York Times crossword puzzle in one sitting, no matter how long that sitting happened to be. He wandered the corridors of the 11^th precinct thinking he had overlooked something, had missed something crucial, but unfortunately nothing came to mind. He was for all intentions, clueless. He passed a gaggle of rookies who pointed, sneered and sniggered at the poor dress and bad posture of the swarthy soul. Phil felt like he wanted to return to the famine and drought ridden dustbowl that was now his native Pakistan, though his entire family had been wiped out in successions of monsoons, floods and plagues, drowned and vanished, leaving him alone in a world that seemed to move faster every day. He came to America more to save his life than for any heralded opportunities. He became a cop, knew the streets from his days as a cabdriver, could relate to the growing immigrant masses of the city, especially those of Little Asia, most of whom were like himself, alone, orphaned with no ground to stand on back home. The captain had made him feel like the king of the idiots. It was apparently a crown he wore uncontested.

 Even with my dick in her mouth, the loud kike tried to nag me. I had to slap her in the head like an old Motorola set to get proper reception. “That’s my dick, not a teething ring! Suck it before I piss down your throat!” I hollered.

 She withdrew the sword, tears in her eyes from gagging, caught breath in the lungs behind the big naked tits.

 “How dare you talk to me that way!” she protested on her knees. I snatched a fistful of her black curly hair and twisted until it blistered her scalp.

 “Shut up and suck my dick! That’s what you came here for!”

 “Ow!”

 She wrung her head and hurt herself more. I jerked the hair and pushed the fat mouth back onto my fat cock. I didn’t let her burbling distract me from the prolonged duty of fucking her hard in the face. She drooled over her hanging lower lip and coughed through her flaring nostrils.

 “Just like that, you bitch. Suck that big black cock. Oh, yeah!”

 She sucked just fine once she got used to not breathing and patiently waited to exhale. Beneath noisy slurps she still tried to talk. She was talking when I pushed her onto her fat ass and painted a white mask of cum over her features. Her eyes and nostrils disappeared, her mouth hung open and her tongue wagged. There was cum everywhere, in her hair, her ear, running down her collarbone. She took it and licked my balls for good measure.

 We were sitting on the flea-infested sofa in my living room when her words became intelligible.

 “What about that cop?” she squeaked, spitting a cold gray cloud of icy dust.

 “What about him?”

 I took the hot stem from her charred fingers, lit it up again and burned my lungs with the cocaine’s fumes. My question hung in the air beside her eyes until she had the stem back in her hands.

 “He’s going to arrest me!” she squawked, the high note contradicting her attempts at breathing and smoking.

 “For what?”

 I watched the short glass tube fill with smoky residue, enjoyed watching that as much as smoking the stuff.

 “Sus—suspicion.”

 She swallowed smoke and exhaled very little of what went down.

 “If you keep acting suspicious,” I said.

 I got the pipe but she was the one getting all burned up. She wagged an ugly frosted tipped finger at me. I’d had enough.

 “If they get me I’m going to make sure they get you, so you better make sure they don’t get me!”

 If my neighbors had been cops, her shrill screeching would have been as good as a confession. I tallied that with the enough I’d already had and it came out to be not much. I wasn’t thinking because I’d already thought, considered that Sharon’s big mouth on her big head was the size of a two-car garage with both car alarms blaring.

 “I’ll make a phone call. I have a friend who specializes in just this sort of thing.”

 “Can’t you take care of it yourself?” she said with belated innocence.

 I balked. “Beating down an old Jew is one thing, a cop is another.”

 “But he’s a goddamned dothead!”

 “A cop is a cop. They got plug-in chairs for cases like that and I’m not talking about a tanning bed.”

 She acknowledged my meaning with a grave nod.

 “When can we meet your friend?” she asked with no particular urgency, considering the particular subject.

 “Let me make that call,” I said, put the stem on the coffee table, rose from the sofa and went into the bedroom closing the door. She was puffing another rock by the time I left the room.

 When Phil, passing the captain’s office on his way to his locker, overheard the man saying, “I’d bust him down to Traffic, but the poor bastard’s probably colorblind.” He knew his days as a detective were numbered. He hadn’t been promoted on any merit but simply to fill a departmental quota, technically unqualified to conduct this kind of investigation Phil was in over his head, sinking fast and about to hit rock bottom. He was in a funk as he came off duty, stayed morose on his way home and utterly depressed when he arrived there. He stayed alone all night except or his cat and tried to ask himself hard questions. Failing that, he thought he’d skip straight to the answers. The blank his mind drew made the gibberish he’d typed seem like virtuosity. He slept in the secondhand recliner in the living room and dreamed of swallowing his nine, an occupational hazard he supposed.

 Sharon Shuman’s body was pulled from the river, her mouth still wide open.

 “There’s a hellava lot more important things than the eternal struggle between good and evil,” Ernesto said.

 “Like what?” I replied.

 “Like finding a really good burrito.”

 “Ah, all burritos are the same.”

 “Nah!”

 The food was crap and spilled into puddles of viscous grease. I was treating Ernesto to a meal at an expensive restaurant. We had their version of pizza. It came with a salad and bottle of wine. The check came to seventy-five dollars and that was cool.

 Phil sat his desk nervously, with the words ‘bust him down to Traffic’ going through his head. He had the lined sheet of paper in the roller of his Smith-Corona; afraid he couldn’t compose anything more than a perfect symphony of misspelled facts. He began slowly, hunting then a carefully considered peck, then another, going on to ferret out the next consonant from among the mix of stiff keys. The door to the room was open but circulation consisted of hot dust. Sergeant Murphy came in leafing through the typed pages of his version of the report. He sat them on Phil’s desk, lit a cigarette and stood watching the former hack exhaust the limits of his secretarial skills.

 “Say, Phil,” Murphy drawled in a friendly cadence, the 13^th pulled a stiff out of the river. They’re callin’ it a suicide but you may be interested to know that it’s been identified as Sharon Shuman. Boys recognized the face from the news.”

 Phil looked up as the words slowly leaked into his brainpan.

 “You don’t say?” Phil queried with a hint of sparkle.

 “They’ll toss the case back over here if you’ll do the investigation. The captain says it’ll work towards you’re gettin’ off the shit list.”

 “Yes, the shit list,” Phil commented taking a thick notepad from his desk drawer and flipping the heavy leather lid and scanned pages written in a foreign alphabet. “Sharon Shuman was very rude to me,” he said in passing.

 “Aw, did she hurt your widdle feewings?”

 “Yes, she hurt my wi—,” he caught the officer grinning and focused more intently on his task. “She has a younger brother.”

 “Maybe he has a better disposition.”

 Phil picked up the receiver after pinning his finger to a crowded page. He dialed after a moment’s study.

 “Hello, I’d like to speak to mister Isaac Shuman. My name is—,” he glanced at Murphy. “Just call me Phil. I’m a detective with the 11^th precinct. I’d like to ask him a few questions about Sharon, Sharon, yes. Yes, I know, that’s why—I know.

 That’s—that’s—,” he hung up the phone. He looked Murphy in the eye. “I think I’ll go see Shuman in person.”

 “Attaboy, Phil. Get in their faces. Make ‘em confess to whatever,” Murphy prodded. Phil left the office.

 “Mister Shuman, I’m a detective. I’d like to ask you some questions,” Phil started in.

 “About my sister? Sure.”

 “Was she depressed over your father’s murder?”

 “Depressed? No, but I’d say she was angry.”

 “Angry?”

 “Our father always treated Sharon like gold, but she only appreciated the pay off. Sharon wasn’t very emotionally available.”

 “Emotionally available?”

 “Wasn’t.”

 “Meaning?”

 “She was a bitch.”

 The man moved busily, preparing himself to leave, checking his pockets for car keys. “Will that be all, detective—?”

 “Phil. For now. Have you got an appointment?” the cop queried absently.

 The man flicked his head, and said, “No. No. I was going over to her place to put things in order.”

 Phil stood with a straight-backed gesture that stopped the man’s fidgeting.

 “I’d like to go with you. There might be some clues to her reason.”

 The man nodded. He looked at Phil glassy-eyed.

 The cop was sure a big piece was missing from the puzzle, but he didn’t say anything about his suspicions. He was a cop. He was supposed to be suspicious.

 Ernesto and I staked out the townhouse. I knew the place inside and out but we were both a little paranoid. I had Sharon’s house keys and we just waited. Night was lazy in coming. In the meantime, the red Mercedes pulled up to the building and the two men walked to the front door. The one, Shuman, was a broad shouldered blond guy in a gray suit, the other a short dark haired, dark skinned guy in an oversized overcoat. Shuman let them in using spare keys of his own. We waited, smoked a couple of rocks apiece, sat on the stoop across the street looking as at loose ends as we could. We weren’t particularly disheveled, in fact looked more stable than the cop who could’ve been an off-duty doorman in his big coat. We waited a long time. Ernesto got bored and restless, deciding to duck up to the window and peer past the tiled kitchen into the large sitting room the two men stood around talking in. Shuman had a brandy and drank thirstily. The cop was examining the bookshelves. I was watching Ernesto spy into the window, but when I bent my head to light a cigarette and looked up again he was gone. The townhouse was furnished with antiques, dusty and unbearably congested. Isaac had to drink just to stand being in the place, Phil thought it a goldmine for fingerprints and he was right, even as he streaked his own fingers across surfaces destroying potential evidence. He looked to Shuman who was drinking more or less too much in too short a time.

 “Your sister didn’t have many friends?” Phil asked inspector-like, still idly pushing dust aside on the antique’s surfaces. 

Shuman nodded as if his head had misplaced his neck. “I told you, she’s a bitch, was a bitch. Any friends she had, she bought with our father’s good money.”

 “Did she stand to inherit anything?”

 “Sure. Plenty.”

 Shuman was gulping now, not sipping. “It’s damned odd that she’d commit suicide, especially at a time like this.” He turned to the detective woefully and explained, “She was a bitch and she was greedy. Selfish and shallow as a painted hole.”

 The one room’s carpet was well worn with sleepless pacing. I wondered where Ernesto had gone and crept to the window myself. I saw the cop thinking. He was real obvious about it. He pointed his finger at something I couldn’t see, but I knew what it was. An ashtray overburdened with unfiltered butts held a stray glass tube.

 “She obviously had some personal problems,” the cop talked. Shuman shook his head.

 “I wouldn’t give her credit for an inner emotional life.”

 “Oh?” Phil noted.

 The man drank.

 “Not only was she lacking in humanity, other things such as imagination, heart, a soul and ambition were conspicuously absent from her nature. If she were a man, I’d say she was a first class scumbag with the prick still attached.”

 Phil picked up the glass tube, sniffed at the wrong end and smelled the residue.

 “I think your sister was hiding something,” Phil said.

 “No kidding, and here I thought it was her face.”

 The conversation was losing sense, the brandy going to Isaac’s head and his head felt like it was in his stomach.

 “I’m going to look upstairs.”

 “Be my guest,” Shuman slurred.

 Ernesto came from somewhere else in the house as the cop climbed the dark mahogany steps. He clocked Shuman soundly and sent him to sleep. I let myself in the front door with the key; taking advantage of the detective’s slow pace as he rooted around upstairs to snatch any stuff I knew the whereabouts of besides the stem in the ashtray. Several books on the shelves were hollowed out and contained vials of coke in Ziploc bags. The cop hadn’t bothered to look inside any of the erstwhile seeming tomes and I stuffed the stash into my pants pockets and rattled when I walked. Ernesto carried a wrought iron fire poker and waited unseen in the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. Phil reported to the big precinct in the sky rather than the good old eleventh.

 I took my time searching until I found something worth a lot more cash than just cash, old man Shuman’s private collection of gemstones. His loving daughter had used the murder and robbery as a smokescreen to get her fat greasy hands on them. Like the fable of the magic fish, she had made three wishes. The first was to see her overly generous papa dead as a canned mackerel. The second was to have the millions in jewels at her personal disposal. The third wish was that she never be implicated in any of the crimes. Her death was a suicide that nobody doubted or cared to look into any further.

 The jewels to all intents and purposes never existed and in court under cross-examination Isaac admitted that he must’ve brained the cop since his fingerprints were found on the fire poker. He only remembered drinking and passing out. He couldn’t answer any straight questions about anything else and the subject of rare gems never came up. Committed to death row, Isaac Shuman would spent the rest of his short life trying to figure out what went wrong with his family.

 For Ernesto’s and my part, we laughed long and loud, the ringing peal blending into the sounds of the streets.