A Ticket to the Boneyard

by Lawrence Block

Page 19

 

  "Im not. "

  "The hell youre not. And why am I defending myself, thats the real question. Why the hell should I have to defend myself?"

  "I dont know. " I picked up my coffee cup, but it was empty. I put it down again and picked up a piece of cheese and put that down, too. I said, "So you already had your B-12 today. "

  For a moment she didnt say anything, and I had time to regret the line. Then she said, "No as a matter of fact I didnt, because thats not what we did. Why? Would you like to know what we did?"

  "No. "

  "Ill tell you anyway. We did what we always do. I sat on his face and he ate me while he jerked himself off. Thats what he likes, thats what we always do when he comes over here. "

  "Stop it. "

  "Why the hell should I? What else would you like to know? Did I come? No, but I faked it, thats what gets him over the edge. Anything else youd like for me to tell you? You want to know how big his cock was? And dont you dare hit me, Matt Scudder!"

  "I wasnt going to hit you. "

  "You wanted to. "

  "I never even raised my hand, for Gods sake. "

  "You wanted to. "

  "No. "

  "Yes. And I wanted you to. Not to hit me, but to want to. " Her eyes were huge, brimming with tears at their corners. Softly, wonderingly, she said, "Whats the matter with us? Why are we doing this to each other?"

  "I dont know. "

  "I do," she said. "Were mad, thats why. Youre mad at me because Im still a whore. And Im pissed off at you because you didnt send me flowers. "

  She said, "I think I know what happened. Weve been under a strain, both of us. I think its made us more vulnerable than we realized. And we wound up casting each other in roles we couldnt play. I thought you were Sir Galahad and I dont know who you got me mixed up with. "

  "I dont know either. Maybe the Lady of Shalott. "

  She looked at me.

  "How does the poem go? Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat. "

  "Stop it. "

  The sky had gone dark outside her window. Above the lights of Queens I saw the winking red lights of an airplane making its approach to land at La Guardia.

  After a moment she said, "We read that in high school. Tennyson. I used to pretend it was about me. "

  "You told me once. "

  "Did I?" Her gaze turned inward as she took a long look at an old memory. Then, crisply, she said, "Well, Im no lily maid, baby, and your armors lost its shine. And it was Sir Lancelot the Lady of Shalott was hung up on, not Sir Galahad, and were not either of them. All we are is two people who always liked each other and always did each other some good. Thats not the worst thing in the world, is it?"

  "I never thought so. "

  "And now weve got a crazy man who wants to kill us, so its the wrong time for either of us to get kinky. Agreed?"

  "Agreed. "

  "So lets get the money part handled. Can we do that?"

  We could and did. I figured out my expenses to date and she reminded me of some Id forgotten, then rounded the figure upward and cut off my arguments with a sharp glance. She went into the bedroom and came back with a handful of fifties and hundreds. I watched as she counted out two thousand dollars and shoved the stack across the table at me.

  I didnt reach for it. "Thats not the number you mentioned," I said.

  "I know. Matt, you really shouldnt have to keep track of what you lay out, and you shouldnt have to come back to ask me for more money. Take this, and when it starts running thin tell me and Ill give you more. Please dont argue. Moneys what Ive got, and I damn well earned it, and if you cant use it at a time like this, whats the point of having it. "

  I picked up the money.

  "Good," she said. "Thats settled. I dont know about the emotional part. I was always better at the business side. I think well just have to play it by ear and take it a day at a time. What do you think?"

  I got to my feet. "I think Ill have one more cup of coffee," I said, "and then Ill get out of here. "

  "You dont have to. "

  "Yes I do. I want to go play detective and spend some of the money you gave me. I think youre right, I think well play it by ear. Im sorry about before. "

  "So am I. "

  When I came back with the coffee she said, "Jesus, Ive got six messages on my machine. "

  "When did the calls come? When we were in bed?"

  "Must have. Is it all right if I play them back?"

  "Why shouldnt it be?"

  She shrugged and pressed the appropriate button. There was a whirring sound, some background noise, then a click. "A hang-up," she said. "Thats what I get most of the time. A lot of people dont like to leave a message. "

  There was another hang-up. Then a man said, very crisply and confidently, "Elaine, this is Jerry Pines, Ill give you a call in a day or so. " Then another hang-up, and then a caller who cleared his throat forcefully, took a long moment trying to think of something to say, and rang off without a word.

  Then the sixth caller. A fairly long pause, with the tape running and only background noise audible. Then a whisper:

  "Hello, Elaine. Did you like the flowers?"

  Another pause, as long as the first. Throughout it the background noise, actually quite low in volume, sounded like the roar of a subway train.

  And then, in the same forceful whisper, he said, "I was thinking of you earlier. But its not your turn yet. You have to wait your turn, you know. Im saving you for last. " A pause, but a brief one. "I mean second-last. Hell be the last. "

  That was all he had to say, but the tape ran another twenty or thirty seconds before he broke the connection. Then the answering machine clicked and whirred and readied itself to handle incoming calls again, and we sat there in a silence that hung in the air like smoke.

  I was back in my hotel room before dawn, but I didnt beat the sun by much. It was well past four by the time I got there, and Id spent the whole night running all over the city, going places I hadnt been in years. Some of them were long gone, and some of the people I was looking for were gone, too, dead or in jail or in some other world. But there were new places and new people, and I found my way to enough of them to keep busy.

  I found Danny Boy Bell in Poogans. He is a short albino Negro, precise in his gestures and polite in his manners. He has always worn conservatively cut three-piece suits and he has always kept vampires hours, never leaving his house between sunrise and sunset. His habits hadnt changed, and he still drank Russian vodka straight up and ice-cold. The bars that were home to him, Poogans Pub and the Top Knot, always kept a bottle on ice for him. The Top Knots gone now.

  "Theres a French restaurant there now," he told me. "High-priced and not very good. Im here a lot these days. Or Ill be at Mother Goose on Amsterdam. They got a nice little trio, plays there six nights a week. The drummer uses the brushes and he never takes a solo. And they keep the lights right. "

  Right meant dimmed way down. Danny Boy wears dark glasses all the time, and hed probably wear them at the bottom of a coal mine. "The worlds too loud and too bright," Id heard him say more than once. "They should put in a dimmer switch. They should turn the volume down. "

  He didnt recognize the sketch, but Motleys name struck a chord with him. I started to fill him in and he remembered the case. "So hes coming back at you," he said. "Why dont you just grab a plane, go someplace warm while he cools off? Guy like that, give him a few weeks and hell step on his cock and wind up back in slam. You wont have to worry about him for another ten years. "

  "I think hes gotten pretty shrewd. "

  "Went up for one-to-ten and served twelve, how much of a genius can he be?" He finished his drink and moved his hand a few inches, which was all he had to do to get the waitresss attention. After shed filled his glass and assured herself that I was still all right, he said, "Ill pass the word and keep my ears open, Matt. All I can do. "

  "I appreciate it. "
r />   "Hard to know where he might hang out, or who he might rub up against. Still, theres places you could check. "

  He gave me some leads and I went out and chased them around the city. I went to a chicken-and-ribs joint on Lenox Avenue and a bar down the street from it where a lot of the uptown players did their drinking. I caught a cab downtown to a place called Patchwork on Third Avenue in the Twenties, where Early American quilts hung on the exposed brick walls. I told the bartender I was there to see a man named Tommy Vincent. "Hes not in just now," I was told, "but he usually comes in around this time, if youd care to wait for him. "

  I ordered a Coke and waited at the bar. The back-bar mirror let me keep an eye on the door without turning around. I watched some people come in and some others leave, and by the time I had nothing in my glass but ice cubes, a fat man two stools down from me came over and put an arm around me as if we were old friends. "Im Tommy V. ," he said. "Something I can do for you?"

  I walked on Park Avenue in the Twenties, Third just below Fourteenth Street, Broadway in the high Eighties, Lexington between Forty-seventh and Fiftieth. Thats where the street girls were hard at it, decorously turned out in hot pants and peekaboo halters and orange wigs. I talked to dozens of them, and I let them think I was a cop; they wouldnt have believed a denial anyway. I showed Motleys picture around and said he was a man who liked to hurt working girls, and a likely killer. I said he might be a john, or at least play the part of one, but that he fancied himself a pimp and might try to corral an outlaw girl.

  A sallow blonde on Third, her dark roots giving her a two-tone hairdo, thought she recognized him. "Saw him a time ago," she said. "Looks but dont buy. One time hes got these questions. What will I do, what wont I do, what do I like, what dont I like. " She made a fist, held it at her crotch, moved it in a pumping motion. "Jerking me around. Got no time for that, you know? Time I see him after that, I just walk on by. "

  A girl on Broadway, with an overblown body and a Deep South accent, said shed seen him around, but not lately. Last shed seen of him hed gone off with a girl named Bunny. And where was Bunny? Shed gone off somewhere, disappeared, hadnt been around in weeks. "On some other stroll," she said. "Or maybe something happened. " Like what? She shrugged. "Anything," she said. "You see somebody," she said, "and then you dont. And you dont miss them right away, and then you say, Hey, what happened to that person? And nobody knows. " Had she seen Bunny again since shed gone off with Motley? She thought it over and couldnt say one way or the other. And maybe it hadnt been Motley that Bunny had gone with. The more she thought about it, the vaguer she seemed to get.

  Somewhere along the way I managed to get to the midnight meeting at Alanon House, a sort of clubhouse occupying a suite of offices on the third floor of a decaying building on West Forty-sixth Street. They get a young crowd at that meeting, many of them newly and shakily sober, and a majority having a history of heavy drug use along with alcoholism. The crowd that night was a lot like the people outside, the biggest single difference being the direction they were headed. The ones at the meeting were staying clean and sober, or trying to. The ones out there on the street were slipping off the edge of the world.