The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash

Author:Tom Barbash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2018-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

20

“You sat on the edge of the bed didn’t ya?” Alex said. “You put your fingers between your toes, you picked your feet, didn’t ya!”

“Nice,” Randy said.

“He’s an actor,” Rachel said.

It was Oscar night and my mother ordered ten large pizzas and Buddy mixed cocktails and we had a small awards party with Harry Abrams and his wife, Judith, a dozen or so neighbors, Alex, and my sister’s new boyfriend, Randy the cop.

The subject at hand was our favorite movie cops and Alex’s was Popeye Doyle in The French Connection.

Randy said his was Steve McQueen in Bullitt.

“Look, you work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine,” Alex said, squinting McQueen-style.

“Not as good,” Rachel told him.

“He lives in the building,” I said.

“Steve McQueen?” asked Randy.

“No, Peter Yates, the guy who directed Bullitt. He’s up for an Oscar tonight.”

“For what?”

“Breaking Away, the bike-racing movie.”

Rachel’s favorite was Serpico, which she’d seen four times and was, she joked, a big part of why she was dating Randy.

“Is the police department as corrupt as people think?” Alex asked.

“Yes and no. We’ve got problems for sure. But there are a lot of good cops out there.”

He said it was easy to slip into bad habits.

“Such as.”

“Taking free stuff, free meals at restaurants, tickets to the Knicks, and then you start looking the other way when you’re supposed to be handing out citations.”

“You do stuff like that?” Alex said.

“I don’t actually.”

“Have you done any big drug busts?” Kip asked him.

“I think those days are over, the big shipments arriving in the panels of cars. Most of the heroin these days comes in by mail, in letter-sized envelopes if you can believe it.”

“Seriously?” Alex said.

“They send out dealers on bikes to make drops at scattered mailboxes to throw us off. And it isn’t coming from Marseilles. They closed down those refineries. It’s coming from Burma and Thailand, Laos. The Golden Triangle.”

“And they’re using mules. Do you know what a mule is, Anton?” Rachel asked me.

“Yes, Rachel, I know what a mule is.”

“Middle-class families,” Rachel said, “and kids from Choate and Exeter are paying for their three-week vacations to Thailand with drug money from smuggling.”

“Your friends and neighbors,” Randy said.

“I so admire you guys,” said our fourth-floor neighbor Geoffrey Knudsen, a tax attorney who wore a shiny blue ascot under a starched white dress shirt. “You’re really undermanned out there, aren’t you?”

It was a relief to have the conversation revolve around something other than Buddy’s fortunes. Nights like this were particularly hard, because six years ago Buddy had hosted the Emmys and was talked about as a potential Oscars host. He might be hosting them tonight instead if he hadn’t screwed the pooch, he told me as we shopped for party provisions that afternoon. “Now here I am making sure Geoffrey Knudsen has enough brie to spread on his Wheat Thins.”

Nothing had gone our way, and whatever bump up we thought we’d get from Donahue hadn’t yet materialized.

“At least they have the vests now,” said Carol Overton, a frizzy-haired Broadway set designer.

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