by A. E. Roman
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“What’re you doing here?”
I forced a smile. “I live here?”
Ramona did not smile.
“I have a case. My own case. I wanted to talk. Didn’t know where else to go. A girl is dead. Just twenty-two years old.”
“Did you sleep with her yet?”
“That’s a rotten thing to say.”
Ramona looked away. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said, the lump in my throat.
“Really?”
“Roof over my head, job, plenty of Irish Spring soap.”
“Good.”
“Jesus, it’s good to see you.”
“We have to make this quick. I have a used book sale at the library in the morning and a signing Monday night and I’m moving.”
“Why?”
“I can’t live here anymore,” she said. “Too many old ghosts.”
“It’s rent-controlled.”
“You want it?”
“No,” I said.
Suddenly I grabbed her and kissed her. I couldn’t help myself. She smelled of mango and coconut shampoo. I pulled her close and ran my hands along her thighs, grabbed her bottom, thick and trembling under my touch, her heavy breasts against me, and she didn’t resist. She touched and kissed me and pulled at the waistband of my pants. Then she stopped.
“Wait.”
“What’s wrong?”
Ramona was silent but I knew.
She sat on a large brown moving box. “I can’t.”
I sat down on the red rocking chair next to her in sudden exhaustion. A chill came over me. My teeth chattered and all my limbs were shaking.
Ramona groaned and repeated, “I can’t.”
I leaned back in the rocking chair. “What is it you once loved about me?”
“You were a free spirit, Mr. Ramona.”
“So why did you stop loving me, Mrs. Chico?”
“You were too free, Mr. Ramona.”
“At least I’m consistent. Gimme a second chance, mamita.”
“You never should’ve slept with those girls. You never should’ve done that.”
“I was wrong. I’m changing. I’m making some real money on this case.”
I dug into my coat pocket to show her the two grand I had recently gotten from Atlas. Ramona looked away.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nada. You shouldn’t be walking around with that much money in your pocket. And you should go.”
She wanted change, and I wouldn’t change, and now I’m back and I’m changing, and I got money, too. Why is this so hard?
Ramona sighed deeply. “I’ve had enough, Chico. I’ve had enough struggle with you. Oye, ten years is enough.”
“I have money.”
“It’s not the money. It’s you.”
I got up and moved toward Ramona.
I placed my hand gently on Ramona’s breast.
Ramona put her hand over mine and said, “What’re you doing little pig?”
“Doing what little pigs do.”
“That’s all you want, isn’t it?”
“No. I’d also like some corn bread.”
“Well,” Ramona said, taking my hand away. “I don’t want it anymore. Not with you. I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I don’t want to.”
I pulled the Zippo lighter out of my pocket and began to fiddle with it.
“If you’ve changed, why do you still have a lighter?”
“I do a lot of reading in bed?” I gave Ramona a guilty look.
“So who killed your girl?”
“I don’t know, yet,” I said.
She bent over an open box and tried to hand me a stack of battered old books.
“I don’t want your old books.”
“You hungry?”
I looked at her from head to toe. “Very.”
Ramona shook her head as if to say that I was hopeless and went to the kitchen to cut me up some of her sweet homemade corn bread. I watched her fleshy legs moving across the kitchen. The two silver cat bowls were still on the floor. The refrigerator still supported a gang of magnets—Human Rights Watch, United Homeless Organization, Meals on Wheels, and my mother’s old sofrito recipe, written in my mother’s hand:
Cut green peppers, orange peppers, garlic, onions, olives and other ingredients into small pieces. Place ingredients in blender. Fill blender with half an inch of water. Put blender on CHOP. Place into small plastic containers. Keep what you are going to use in fridge. Freeze the rest for the future.
For the future. Poor mami, I thought, and then I imagined Ramona as a child growing up in Santo Domingo, and I remembered the kisses we shared that first night on the Columbia campus (on the steps of the Loeb Library) and the love and the sex and how we promised it would never end. And now Ramona placed my sweet corn bread and two cold beers, Sam Adams, on the kitchen table as Billie Holiday sang, “. . . He beats me too.”
And we sat under a framed print of Frida Kahlo’s two nude women in a forest and everything felt unbearably sad and lost.
“Listen,” I said, fighting that stupid lump in my throat again by changing tracks. “Do you still know that girl who works in administration at Columbia?”
“Woman,” snapped Ramona.
“Woman,” I repeated. “Do you still know that woman who works in administration at Columbia?”
“Cynthia?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Could you have Cynthia check and see if she can dig up anything written by a student there named Irving Goldberg Jones?”
“Oh my God!” said Ramona, her eyes wide, jaw dropped.
“What?”
“Is that why you’re here, Chico? You need help with your case?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not. Never mind.”
But the truth was that she was partly wrong and partly right. Killing two birds with one piedra. That was my modus operandi. After ten years, Ramona knew exactly how I rolled.
She shook her head and said, “Hopeless.”
And, later, alone, outside Ramona’s, standing on the stoop, looking off at the trees of Prospect Park, I lit up a cigarette. I took the smoke into my mouth and I inhaled as deeply as I could, and it hurt, it hurt like a boy shot in an argument over dice, it hurt like a woman attacked in a park, it hurt like a dead man on the stairs. It hurt something like home.
TWELVE
We’re dropping Samuel Rivera for now.” It was Saturday and I sat in Kirk Atlas’s Hummer 2, a bloated white whale of a car with tinted glass windows. We drove across the Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx.
“Do you know how many male chauvinists it takes to screw in a light bulb?” Kirk asked, not responding to my statement, since every minute of the day was just another excuse for the Kirk Atlas Show. And away we go. . . .
“How many?”
“None,” he said. “Let the bitch work in the dark.”
Atlas laughed like I was the one telling the joke and he had heard it for the first time.
“That’s a good one,” Atlas said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Good one.”
Detecting crime, like life, is a chess game. Okay, checkers. I don’t know how to play chess. But in either game, at some point, you gotta make your big moves. So far, I was making small moves. Going forward, becoming one of the guys in Atlas’s book, trying on his beliefs, opinions, ideas, jokes, no matter how putrid.
Being a private investigator sometimes means you gotta play against your better self if that’s what it takes, charge into your opponents’ vulnerability, revealing compassion for them even if you have none, jive if you got to. Jive’s a big seller. Jive gets you information, confidence, confession.
You play to come out of every rap session even closer to the suspect than when you came in. You could lose, make a false move; a little too much jive could wipe you off the board. But there’s no other way sometimes.
“I want to look at a kid, a part-time messenger at HMD.”
“Who?” asked Atlas.
“Irving Goldberg Jones,” I said.
“Again with Irving?” said Atlas. “I told you already. He’s a waste. He’s a socialist poet, for God’s sake.”
“A socialist poet?” I said. “Sounds contagious. I have reason to believe that this kid Irving knows where Tiffany is. I need you to trust me and take my word for it. I need you to put in a call to your inside man at HMD. Have me transferred from the dining room to the mail room so I can have some intimate chats with this Irving Goldberg Jones.”
“But why? Where are you getting your info from?”
“I’m telling you I think he knows where Tiffany is. I might catch them together.”
Atlas looked at me skeptically. Then I heard the joy in his voice. “Deep cover?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Deep cover.”
“Fine,” said Atlas. “Brilliant!”
“What are you going to tell them at HMD about my transfer on Monday?”
“I’ll tell them you’re allergic to butter,” Atlas said. “Who gives a fuck?”
“I do,” I said. “People talk. Tell you what, I’ll get myself fired.”
“Why fired? Why not just have you transferred?”
“I need Irving to trust me. I wanna build sympathy with the socialist poet community at HMD.”
“You’ll need a reason for them to fire you.”
“I’ll think of something. You just have your man call the executive dining room on Monday. Have them call around seven A.M. with a job opening in the mail room. I’ll do the rest.”
“You still wanna check Tiffany’s apartment tonight?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Olga’s still at my mother’s,” said Atlas. “Uncle Dee suspect anything at HMD?”
Uncle Dee was a good guy. I felt bad lying to him.
“As far as Uncle Dee knows,” I told Atlas, “I’m just Albert’s old childhood friend and a professional waiter.”
“Okay,” said Atlas, driving, one hand on the steering wheel.
“The key will be waiting for you tonight at the Arcadia West. Monday, you work on Irving. And if you find Tiffany soon, I’ll get you gigs in Los Angeles.”
“Los Angeles?” I asked.
“Dude,” said Atlas, after checking his teeth in the rearview.
“I already talked to some people about you. People with big money and big problems. People who like privacy. If you do good on this Tiffany thing, sky’s the limit.”
“That’s pretty high,” I said.
Atlas spit out the window of the moving Hummer 2. I gave him a disgusted look. He smiled.
The Arcadia West, a luxury building over thirty stories, complete with crystal chandeliers, was just behind Lincoln Center and across from a housing project. It was freezing outside. I entered at a large back door marked EMPLOYEES and approached this white guy, an iron-faced guard in a uniform and matching hat, sitting at a desk.
“Morning,” I said. “I was told to report here. I work for Marcos Rivera. My name is Chico Santana.”
The guard looked at his visitor list and then at me with a scowl and puckered lips.
“Identification and sign in,” said the guard.
I flashed my driver’s license and signed the smudged and tattered white sheet of paper filled with rows of names and destinations attached to a brown clipboard.
“Take the elevator to the basement.”
I walked to a freight elevator. In the basement, I was greeted by a tall, skinny, black kid with curly hair that glistened with gobs of gel. He was wearing a clean gray maintenance uniform a size too big for him.
“Watchu want?”
“I’m here to pick up some keys,” I said. “I work for Marcos Rivera.”
The kid smirked.
“Go to the back. Into the laundry room. That’s where they keep the maintenance office.”
I pointed down the hall. “Back there?”
“Yeah, genius. Back there.”
I stared at the kid. The world is ruined by killers and creeps.
I walked into a large, brightly lit room filled with washing machines. There was a tiny office in the corner of the room marked MAINTENANCE. I went inside.
It was empty except for some folding chairs, one desk, and a wastepaper basket. An old radio played Frank Sinatra:
“I can’t give you anything but love, baby.”
A fat man, another white dude, entered the room. He was wearing a shirt and tie with Wrangler jeans, and a Mets baseball cap. The fat man sat down at the desk. Holding his belly. He looked at me and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“Chico Santana.”
The fat man studied my face. “You the one Kirk Atlas called about?”
“Yeah.”
“You an actor, too?”
“No. But I dance a mean Bachata.”
The fat man frowned. “What did you do before you worked for Marcos as a messenger?”
“Me?”
“No. The guy sittin’ next to you.”
“Waiter.”
“You used to work as a waiter?”
“Variety is the spice of life,” I said.
“How old are you? Twenty?”
“Much older.”
“Bullshit.”
I handed him my driver’s license. The fat man checked it and said, “Baby-faced killer, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“So you work for Atlas?”
I nodded.
“The big shot!”
“Right,” I said. “The big shot.”
“So whatchu doin’ down here?”
“What goes up must come down,” I said. “I’m just here to check out an apartment.”
The fat man gave me a skeptical look, laughed. “Right. Well, I don’t need any more troublemakers down here. Are you a troublemaker?”
“No,” I said. “Can I have those keys now?”
The fat man smiled. “Why don’t you just sit your black ass down till I tell you what’s what? I’m the boss down here. I don’t need you. You need me. Understand?”
I glared at him.
“Down here, tough guy, I’m Kirk Atlas,” said the fat man.
“I run the company. I’m the big shot. Sit!”
It was zero below outside and midnight and I wasn’t about to drive all the way back to the Bronx empty-handed. I swallowed hard and sat.
The fat man held up my driver’s license. “That’s better.”
I didn’t know what kind of power trip he had on his menu but I had a job to do.
“First things first.” The fat man grinned and yelled, “Malik!”
The skinny black kid with too much gel in his hair entered on cue.
“What’s up, Danny?”
Danny, the fat man, placed one of the folding chairs in the middle of the room under the naked overhead bulb. He looked at me. “Go ahead, pretty boy.”
“Go ahead?” I said. “Pretty boy?”
Malik, the skinny kid looked at me and laughed.
“You need the keys?”
“Yeah,” I said.
The shit life puts you through.
“So stand on the chair, dummy,” said Malik.
I said with gritted teeth, “C’mon, brother, gimme a break.”
“I ain’t your brother,” Malik said.
Danny the fat man said, “It’s like a rite a’ passage. Everybody passes through here does it. Right, Malik?”
Malik nodded.
I got up on the wobbly chair.
Malik looked up at me. “Sing!”
I looked down at Malik. “’Scuse me?”
“Sing!”
“What should I sing?”
Malik smi
led from ear to ear. “I’m a Little Teapot.”
Slowly I sang like I was playing Amateur Night at the Apollo:
“I’m a little teapot, short and stout.
Here is my handle.
Here is my spout.”
Danny and Malik laughed, bent over and backslapping. I saw somebody out of the corner of my eye, come in through the door of the small office . . . applauding.
I turned my head. “Albert?”
Albert Garcia stared up at me, holding a Nikon camera, and snapping photos of my finest hour. Behind him were two maintenance men in gray uniforms, eyes searching. The shorter of the two also looked up at me, wearing an evil grin and a name tag over his heart.
I looked at his name tag: JOSÉ. He had blondish hair, thick and heavy with hair product, combed back from his pale white face, heavy lidded eyes like a frog. No, his name was not José. I know this guy and he’s no José.
Private Investigator Oscar Pena.
Standing at Oscar’s side was Salvatore Fiorelli, also wearing a maintenance uniform. Danny the fat man clapped me on the back and said, “I didn’t think you’d actually do it, kid!”
Malik doubled over with laughter. “Rite of passage! That’s a good one, Danny!”
“Okay, okay,” Albert said. “That’s enough, ladies.”
The maintenance men, including Oscar and Sal, filed out of the room. Albert closed the door behind him.
“What the hell is this about?”
“Easy.” Albert laughed. I need a soundtrack for Doomsday.
You got a great singing voice. You’re hired.”
“Is this Tiffany’s building?”
“Yeah,” Albert said. “And Olga’s.”
“Is this about Olga?” I asked, jumping down off the folding chair.
“No,” said Albert. “We were shooting some stuff in Central Park and Marcos told me about you coming here tonight and going to see Irving in the HMD mail room on Monday. Even after I told you that Irving and Olga don’t know anything. I thought it was funny. You’re stubborn. I brought you into this thing, remember? I know you.”
I nodded.
But I didn’t know what to think or who to trust.
“You don’t want me to search Tiffany’s apartment?” I asked. “You don’t want me to find Tiffany?”
“I don’t care,” said Albert. “I’m not trying to mess up your search, man. I’m serious. This was just a joke. We’re friends, Chico. No matter what happens, okay?”