I could remember when old Bellevue was a nest of mid-Victorian buildings as gray as this rainy day. It had a nasty reputation, too, but that was a long time ago. The brick-and-stone buildings were put up in the late '30s and still seemed modern.
Norman Brix really rated. He had a private room and a uniformed cop seated outside. If you break the law in New York and get hurt doing it, try to get almost killed if you want the best in medical attention.
The young cop recognized me, scrambling to his feet and saying, "Morning, Mr. Hammer," and his little metal nametag allowed me to say, "Morning, Officer Wilson," as if I knew who the hell he was, too.
I nodded toward the closed door. "I need to pay the patient a visit."
He had dark hair, blue eyes, and a boyish look, like he'd gone right from the Cub Scouts to the NYPD. "I can't let you do that, Mr. Hammer. There's no visitors."
"It's official business, son. You can check with Captain Chambers."
"Well, I can't leave my post...."
"Damn." I put on disappointment, not irritation. "That means I wasted a trip. And I know Captain Chambers wanted me to see what I could get out of this clown. He is awake, isn't he?"
"Oh, he's awake, all right. He isn't very talkative, though."
I figured I could change that. "How about it, son?"
Officer Wilson looked right and looked left, like he was checking to see if maybe the police commissioner was among the doctors, nurses, and patients walking the corridor. "I guess ... I guess it would be all right, Mr. Hammer."
The kid even opened the door for me.
Feeling just a little guilty, I said, "I'll put in the good word for you with Captain Chambers."
"Thanks, Mr. Hammer!"
The kid would need it.
They had given Brix a butch haircut, possibly to attend better to his minor head injuries, and he was hooked up to a hanging plastic bag of clear liquid. He was as pale as death, but he was breathing, all right, a skinny, battered-looking guy in a blue gown with the covers pulled way up. He was watching a game show on a wall-mounted TV, and I went over and clicked the remote on his bed stand.
He gave me a half-lidded look of non-recognition. His enunciation not up to snuff, thanks to the wired jaw, he demanded, "Who the hell are you?"
"The guy who de-balled you."
Now the eyes popped wide. They were dark blue and bloodshot and scared as hell. He reached for the little white doohickey with the button that called for the nurse, but I got there first, and dropped the thing to the floor, letting it dangle on its cord.
His consonants were sketchy, and his vowels droned, but the wired jaw didn't keep the hate in: "You... Hammer ... you bastard ... you bastard.... You castrated me!"
"Yeah, that's what de-balled means. Hey, you've still got your prick, at least. It'll still work, stand up and say howdy and everything. Where you're going, being able to make babies is kind of a moot point."
"Get out of here! I'll scream bloody—"
I clamped my hand over his steel-reinforced mouth and his eyes bulged. "That's no way to talk, Norm. I come around to pay my respects, and you treat me like this? I'm just here to ask you a few questions, pal. Then I'll leave you to enjoy whatever kind of junk they're pumping into you. Got it?"
Under my hand, he nodded, though the eyes remained big and terrified.
I let go of him. "Why did you and your buddies jump Billy Blue? The truth, Norm."
He didn't scream, I'll give him that.
And he had the balls, metaphorically speaking, to say, "Go fuck yourself, Hammer."
I nodded toward the hanging plastic bag of clear liquid hooked into his arm. "What is this? Methadone? Morphine? Good shit, Norm? How's the staff here at Bellevue—they get it right? Or do they sometimes have a screwup?" I clutched the bag and squeezed it. "I suppose even the tightest ship has the occasional O.D., huh?"
"Don't! Shit! Don't!"
I let go of it. "Billy Blue, Norm. What's the score? The real one."
He shook his head. With his hippie hair sheared off, he looked like a boot-camp recruit, the type that would wash out the first day.
"Herm and me, we knew Billy from years ago, from school. If he wanted to, he could get us stuff from the hospital—Saxony? And they got a pretty decent supply at that medical college, too."
"Why fool with such piddling product, Norm?"
"Man, ain't you heard, the streets are bone dry. We needed some kind of shit, something to tide us over. Our customers are climbing the walls, and I mean, really climbing. And Billy, selfish goddamn son-of-a-bitch bastard, wouldn't help ... so we figured, teach the little pussy a lesson."
"You were going after him with a bicycle chain, Norm. That could've killed his ass. What kind of 'lesson' is that?"
He shook his head. "We wasn't gonna kill him. But after how he reacted, when we hit him up for a source? We didn't figure, no matter what we did, he'd ever play along. There's others at that hospital who might, though ... and, you know, if they saw what could happen to somebody who messed with me and Herm, then they'd think twice about saying no to us."
I asked, "No other reason for the takedown?"
"No! What other reason could there be?"
"Word could have come down from the Snowbird to—"
"Hell no! The Snowbird don't know Billy Blue from Little Boy Blue."
I believed him. I wished I didn't, I wished I'd got a new lead here, but this sick kid wasn't lying. He was too scared and too stupid.
I pressed on, anyway. "Whose idea was it?"
"What idea?"
"Teaching Billy this lesson."
"It was Hem's idea, strictly Herm. This is all his damn fault. I'd like to wring his stupid neck."
"When you get out," I said, "why don't you dig him up and do that?"
He was stupid, but not stupid enough to reply. He just lay there, mute, watching me go, praying for me to go, and I did.
The uniformed cop got to his feet. "Everything okay, Mr. Hammer?"
"Yeah. Swell."
"Get what you needed?"
I nodded to him, and the kid called after me, "Don't forget to put in a good word with Captain Chambers!"
"You bet," I said, knowing it would probably be, Don't fire the little twerp on my account, buddy.
The Village serves up a pizza slice of Little Italy, south of Washington Square and all the way to Spring Street. At the pushcart market on Bleecker between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, you can get the best fruits and vegetables in the city—all the usual suspects from peppers to bananas, but also more exotic items like zucchini and finocchio. Locals mingle with tourists, who dig the occasional street fairs with their singing and dancing, and their ices and candies.
What the tourists really want to see are the Mafiosi. And the many cafés and restaurants offer plenty of opportunities for that kind of negative star-gazing, though the mobsters dress like businessmen and are only identifiable by their bodyguards, who also dress Madison Avenue but physically run to type.
Also, some of the bigger bosses avoid the times of day when out-of-towners come around asking who got shot at what table.
Which is why I didn't go to Salvatore's—a brick-fronted street-level ristorante—until after two o'clock. With the rain still tommy-gunning down, the place should be free of tourists, and the guy I wanted to see might have taken an earlier lunch, knowing that.