by Parnell Hall
What followed was one of the longest evenings of my life. That’s because what I really wanted to do was get down to my office and take a look at those video tapes. I’d dropped them off there on my way down to Richard’s. That’s because, though I may be dumb, I’m not stupid. With my luck, if I’d left them in the car it would have been burglarized, stolen, or towed. At any rate, the tapes were there, and I couldn’t go there because I couldn’t think of any legitimate excuse to get out of the house, and I wasn’t about to tell Alice the real reason. Marriage may be a partnership, but in my book that doesn’t include making your partner an accessory to suppressing evidence in a murder ease. Besides, Alice was standing in with Pamela, and I couldn’t trust her not to let the information slip.
I know I should have told Pamela I had the tapes. After all, she was vitally concerned, and she was the one who had asked me to get them in the first place. But if she knew I had them, she wouldn’t want me to see them, and she’d want to destroy them. And I couldn’t let her do that. The situation had changed materially since this morning. Before it was just blackmail. Now it was murder.
Besides, for all intents and purposes, my obligation to Pamela Berringer was over. Darryl Jackson’s death had left her sitting pretty. Unless she killed him—and I couldn’t discount the possibility—her troubles were over. Mine were just beginning.
So I couldn’t let her have the tapes. She’d have destroyed them to protect her reputation. That’s a hell of a good motivation, but my motivation for keeping them was slightly better. I just might need them to squirm out from under a murder rap.
Alice and I put Tommie to bed. Then Alice subjected me to an interrogation only ten times worse than the one I’d given Pamela Berringer. I told her everything except about the tapes, and about the address that didn’t match. I saw no reason to worry her about that. I mean, one hysterical paranoid person to a family is quite enough, thank you very much.
It was well after midnight when we finally got to bed. I lay down and turned out the light, because there was nothing else that I could do, but I knew it was going to be a long time before I’d be able to get to sleep.
14.
I READ THE NEW YORK POST on the subway on my way to the office the next morning. I was looking for the story of the murder of Darryl Jackson, but I couldn’t find it. Apparently the murder of a black pimp in Harlem didn’t even rate a headline. I was nearly to Times Square when I finally stumbled across it on the one page where I hadn’t even thought to look—the crack page. It was lumped together with two other murders, one in the Bronx and one in Queens. There were no details, just the name and address and the fact that he had been stabbed. The Post, one-up on Wendy/Cheryl, had gotten the address right. The assailant was described as, “Probably a crack addict.”
The brevity of the story allowed me to finish the article before the train pulled into Times Square. I kept my hand pressed firmly against my wallet in my front pants pocket, made my way through the station, and emerged on the corner of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street. I looked around for a video tape rental store. I found one a couple of blocks up the street. Alice and I had a VCR, but I couldn’t bring it down to the office without tipping her off to the situation, so I had to rent one.
Renting one, I discovered, was actually pretty cheap. They let me have it for $4.95. The only catch was, you had to put down a hundred dollar deposit. Fortunately, you could do it on your Master Charge, and it didn’t cost you anything, because they just filled out the slip, and then tore it up when you brought the machine back. They did check, however, to see if the card was good for a hundred dollars, which would have been a problem, seeing as how I’m always charged to the limit, except the Master Charge people, in their infinite greed, had just raised my limit again, up to twenty-five-hundred dollars.
The guy in the store seemed a little nonplussed that I wanted to rent a machine without a tape, but I assured him I had a tape.
“In fact, I’ve got six of them,” I told him.
At any rate, he let me do it.
I took the machine, went out, hunted up an electronics store, and bought the cheapest black and white television set I could find that could get a picture on any channel. The reception didn’t matter, of course, as I was only going to use it as a monitor.
I carried the whole mess up to 47th Street to the small office my father-in-law still carried on the books of the Cohen Bag Company, but let me use for my business. I took the elevator up to the third floor, and walked down the hall to the door with the plaque reading, STANLEY HASTINGS DETECTIVE AGENCY that had been given me by friends as a joke. I opened the door, carted the stuff inside, and put it down.
The mail had already arrived. It had been pushed through the slot and was lying just inside the door. It was all bills, so I let it lie. Instead, I picked up the bag of video tapes that was lying next to it. I’d been parked illegally downstairs when I’d left it there the night before, so I’d just flung it in the door and raced back to catch the elevator before it left the floor, and by some miracle had managed to get back to my car before it was either ticketed or towed.
I took the bag of video tapes and set it on my desk. I took out the TV and the VCR and set ’em up. When I turned the TV on all I got was loud static, but that’s all you get without a tape.
I opened the plastic bag and took out the six cassettes. I saw now what I hadn’t noticed before—one of them was slightly different. As I say, we have a VCR, so I knew something about video tapes. Five of them were of the cheapest quality you can buy. The sixth was of a higher grade. So I tried that one first.
I put it in the VCR and pushed play. There was the usual introductory static and flashing. Then the picture cleared up and I could see the camera was focused on a king-sized bed. It was well lit. Production values, as they say in the movie biz, were excellent.
A girl entered the frame. It was Pamela Berringer. She was dressed in a red satin sheath. She took it off. Underneath she had on black lace underwear. She took that off too.
She got on the bed and proceeded to disport herself in a variety of positions, all of which seemed to feature wide-spread legs. When she got up on all fours, arched her backside to the camera, reached back, pulled the cheeks of her ass open, and looked over her shoulder with an arch, aren’t-I-being-naughty look, I realized I was going to have a tough time meeting her eyes at our next detective/client conference.
I also realized I had a raging hard-on. What does Mike Hammer do in these situations? Beat off? Hire a hooker? I didn’t know.
I shut off the VCR, and walked around the office a bit. I took a page out of Woody Allen’s book, and thought about baseball players. I’m originally from Massachusetts, so I thought about Dwight Evans and Jim Rice. That seemed to do the trick.
I switched the tape back on. I used the fast-forward search to speed through the rest of Pamela’s performance.
A man joined her on the bed. I slowed back to normal speed to get a look at him. He didn’t seem particularly handsome, but he was certainly well-endowed. At any rate, Pamela seemed glad to see him. She took his cock and proceeded to suck on it. When it was good and ready, she lay on her back on the bed and he plunged it into her.
He fucked her like that for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, the camera moved around and zoomed in and out, to show every aspect of the operation to the best advantage.
Then he pulled out, flipped her over on her hands and knees, and stuck his cock up her ass. He fucked her up the ass while the camera went through the same business.
He pulled out, flipped her over again, straddled her, and rubbed his cock back and forth between her breasts. Finally he came in her face.
O.K....
It was hard to take, all right. I’d known she made the tape. I’d known what I was going to see. And I knew she’d been forced into it. I knew she’d really had no choice.
But still.
The tape ended. I switched it off, and put it on rewind. It was still rewinding when my beeper we
nt off. I went to the phone and called Rosenberg and Stone.
“Agent 005,” I said when they answered.
Wendy/Cheryl must have still been mad at me, because she didn’t call me by name. “I have a new case for you,” she said shortly.
I took out my notebook and wrote down the information, right after the entry about Darryl Jackson: a Matilda Mae Smith on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Jersey City, New Jersey. I knew one thing for sure. I was damn well gonna call and verify this address.
But I couldn’t. The client had no phone. Wendy/Cheryl had made the appointment for me for between 11:00 and 12:00.
I was getting fed up with the coldshoulder I was getting. After all, I hadn’t gotten Darryl Jackson’s address wrong. So I said, “If there’s no phone, I sure hope this address is correct.”
“It should be,” Wendy/Cheryl said acidly. “I had her repeat it three times. How many times would you like it?”
I settled for twice, along with me reading it back to her. I figured by then I had what she had, and if she had it wrong, there was nothing I could do about it anyway.
I hung up. I switched off the VCR, which had finished rewinding the tape, and the TV. I ejected the tape and put it back in its box. I would have liked to have checked out the other five, but it was nearly 10:30, and seeing as how the client had no phone, I had to get there.
I checked my answering machine for messages, which I’d neglected to do before, and was gratified to see there were none. I left it switched on. I grabbed my briefcase, and went out.
Jersey City is not far from midtown if you go through the Lincoln Tunnel, but, of course, I had left my car uptown rather than pay the 15 to 20 bucks it would have cost me to park near the office. Since some days I don’t make much more than that, midtown parking is one luxury I never afford.
I took the subway back uptown, picked up my car, and headed out. I got on the West Side Highway and headed uptown for the George Washington Bridge. It’s a little longer getting to Jersey City that way, but a hell of a lot easier than fighting my way back down to the Lincoln Tunnel through midtown traffic.
I got off the Jersey Pike and headed into Jersey City. I don’t have a Hagstrom Map of Jersey City, so I had to drive around a little before I found Martin Luther King Drive. When I did, I checked which way the numbers were running, checked Matilda Mae Smith’s address, and hung a left.
The closer I got to Matilda Mae Smith’s, the worse the neighborhood got. Abandoned, cinderblocked-up buildings, wooden-frame houses all but falling down, rubble-filled empty lots. Garbage everywhere. And I couldn’t help wondering, as I always did in these circumstances, why it was every time people had some great black leader they wanted to honor, they took some god-awful slum street and named it after him. The answer, as always, was both obvious and sad: because that’s where the black people live.
The address I wanted turned out to be a four-story frame house that appeared to be the only occupied building on the block, the others having been either gutted, boarded up, or knocked down. I pulled up in front of it, took my briefcase, and got out.
The front door was locked, and there was no buzzer or bell. Since the client had no phone, I had no recourse but to go back out in the street and shout her name at the windows above.
“Matilda Mae Smith,” I bellowed. I waited a few seconds, then bellowed again.
A couple of guys came down the street and looked at me as if I were something weird. I can’t say as I blamed them. I felt like a fool.
But the thing is, the motivation I’d told Daniels about only getting paid when a case was done happened to be true. And having driven all the way to Jersey, I was damned if I was going to wash the trip out and put it on a “pend” sheet. So I kept on shouting.
A window on the third floor opened and a skinny black kid about eight stuck his head out.
“You the lawyer?” he called down.
I wasn’t going to debate the point with an 8-year-old kid.
“Yes,” I yelled back.
“Just a minute,” he said. “I’ll throw you the key.”
His head disappeared and returned a minute later. His arm reached out and I could see a key ring gleaming in his hand. He tossed it to me. I reached for it, and it glanced off my hand and landed on the sidewalk. I picked it up, realizing I’d just plummeted in his estimation.
I opened the door and went in. The kid was waiting for me at the top of the stairs on the third floor.
“In here,” he said, and led me into the apartment.
It was a small two-room apartment, barely furnished at all. The room we entered was a living room-kitchen combination. Aside from an old worn easy chair, the kitchen appliances, which looked suspiciously as if they hadn’t functioned in years, were the only furnishings in the room. Through a door in the far wall I could see into the bedroom, where some mattresses and blankets on the floor seemed to be the only furnishings.
But the apartment was certainly occupied. There were so many kids of various ages that I couldn’t be sure how many there actually were. I threaded my way through them to where a woman sat in the lone chair. She was a plump, black woman about 40. She was obviously in some pain.
“Matilda Mae Smith?” I said.
“Yes?”
“I’m Mr. Hastings, from the lawyer’s office.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t get up. And there are no other chairs.”
“Don’t worry, that’s quite all right,” I told her. I sat on the floor next to her, and opened my briefcase. “Just let me get my papers out here a minute.” I took out a signup kit, and pulled out the fact sheet. Then I took out a clipboard, and rested the fact sheet on it. I pulled a pen out of my jacket pocket. “O.K.,” I said, as I do at the start of every signup. “How did this happen to you?”
“There was a fire,” she said.
I liked her for that. So many of my clients, when I ask that question say something like, “Well, I was at work, and then I got off work, and I was gonna go home, but I was kinda hungry, so I went to this pizza place for a slice of pizza, you know, and the thing is I had to meet my friend to go to the movies, so ...”, and I sit there with my pen poised over the fact sheet waiting to hear something I can write down and wanting to strangle them. But Matilda Mae Smith went right for it.
“A fire?” I said. “Tell me about it.”
She did. She and her children had been asleep in her old apartment. She had woken up about 2:00 in the morning and smelled smoke. She had run to the door and opened it. There was fire on the stairs. The whole building was going up. She was on the third floor and she couldn’t get out. She had no phone to call for help. She had woken the kids, gone to the window and yelled for help.
Two men passing by heard her and saw the fire. One ran to call the fire department. The other stayed to help. There was no time to wait for the firemen. Matilda Mae Smith had taken her kids, one at a time, and thrown them into the arms of the stranger down below. Then she had jumped.
The man had been able to catch the kids. But she was heavy. She knocked him down. He was all right, but she broke her hip.
I took it all down carefully, particularly the part about the firemen and the ambulance and the hospital and the broken hip. It was an excellent case for Richard, better than his usual trip and fall. And more deserving, too.
“Were there smoke alarms?” I asked.
She snorted. “Are you kidding?”
“And no fire escapes?”
“No.”
“Who owns the building, the City?”
“No. Slum landlord. Name of Gerald Baines.”
Better and better. A private landlord. The case wouldn’t have to go through the endless delays involved in suing the City. I took down the name and address of the landlord, then went back to the top of the fact sheet for the personal information that I always leave for last. I took down her name, address, age, date of birth, and social security number.
“Married or single?”
<
br /> “Single.”
“How many children do you have?”
“Eight.”
That was even more than I’d estimated. It turned out three of them were grown up and lived elsewhere. The five that lived with her ranged from two to ten. I took down all their names, birth dates, and social security numbers.
“Were you employed before this happened?” I asked her.
I expected a no. A single woman with five dependent kids would be on public assistance. But she surprised me.
“Yes, I was,” she said.
“Oh? What did you do?”
“I was the super in my building.”
Shit.
The thing about my job is, you can’t get involved. I learned that early on. You have to harden yourself. Not let it get to you. Or you’d go nuts.
Matilda Mae Smith was the super in her old building. I’d had similar cases before, so I knew that, technically, that made this a workman’s compensation case, which meant there was no personal injury liability. Richard wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.
The thing about the clients I deal with is that a lot of them are lazy, good-for-nothings trying to cash in on an injury, but some of them legitimately need help. And some of them, like Matilda Mae Smith, need real help, not the kind of help Richard or I could give her, even if the case had been legit. They don’t need some settlement eighteen to twenty-four months down the road. They need help now. They need somebody to fight for them, to work for them, to take their side. Not to offer the tiny services that I render. I mean, what the hell do I do for these people? Nothing. I sign ’em to retainers, turn in my time sheets, and collect my money. And that’s it. After the initial visit, I’m gone. And if the client should get a settlement some two years from now, I won’t even know it. But that’s the way it is. That’s the nature of the job. That’s all Richard and I can do.
And in this case, we couldn’t even do that. Because the law said we couldn’t. And the law’s fucked. And Richard’s fucked. And I’m fucked. And that’s just the way it is.