We were still standing there when a tired-looking guy with a little mustache, a beret on his unnaturally dark hair, showed up, pulling a handcart. Vinnie nodded to him and bellowed to someone inside.
“Carl, bring out Charlie’s order.”
Charlie looked at Chip and shrugged. “I tell him Charles.” He pronounced it Sharl. “He calls me Charlie.”
Chip opened his mouth. Vinnie looked annoyed. “He’s buying for a restaurant. Hotels and restaurants, that’s what we do. We don’t sell to individuals.”
“This is so interesting,” I said. “Okay if we take a peek inside?”
Vinnie turned back to the truck to check off the next eight boxes. I took that as a yes and stepped closer to the door, careful to keep out of the way of the truckers. That’s when I saw it, a small flap of heavy black rubber to the left of the door, hidden by the truck from where we stood. There was a trash can in front of it, to conceal it when the truck wasn’t there, not something they wanted to advertise.
The cold air from inside rolled out like the waves at high tide. I shivered, then turned when I heard a noise behind me. The big guy with the thick neck was headed my way, a scowl on his face.
“Are you the manager?” I asked him in my sweetest voice. Then, before giving him a chance to answer, I made my plea again. “Do you ever make exceptions?” I whispered. “We could even come back later.”
“Lady, you’re going to have to step back. Insurance regulations. Hard-hat area.” T. McCoy tapped his with his knuckles. “You could get hurt, hanging around here.”
I nodded and backed away, taking one last look at the building before picking my way back to where Chip was standing. I took his arm and pulled him toward the street.
“There’s a pet door. I’d bet big money it’s for a cat. I can just about guarantee they need one. Could also be a way for me to get in there.”
“Excuse me. You’re going to fit through a cat port?”
“Uh-uh.”
“You’re thinking of hiring on a midget?”
“Uh-uh.”
He was heading toward Washington Street, and I pulled him the other way.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to check out the building next door. When I was here last night, it looked vacant.”
We walked a few steps past Keller’s to the identical building next door, the one with the broken window on the second floor.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“Looks deserted.”
“That’s what I thought last night, but I couldn’t be sure, even with the broken window. Hell, for all I could tell in the dark, it could have been broken ten minutes before I got here. But if it were operating, it would be open now.”
“There’s not even a sign.”
“Of life?”
“No, a sign saying their name and what they sell.”
We walked across the parking area to take a closer look, the door padlocked, trash and papers blown up against it.
“Perfect,” I said.
“For what?”
“You said you didn’t want me to take Chi Chi’s place for a night, right? Anyway, even if I did, I couldn’t check out Keller’s paperwork with Vinnie there watching me.”
“That was Vinnie, the guy we spoke to?”
“Unless there’s more than one Vinnie working there.”
“So, go on. What’s the deal with this place?”
“I thought I might ask Chi Chi to see if there’s any way Clint could get me into Keller’s, like a sliding back door held closed with a stick, I should be so lucky, or a window on the second floor he could unlatch. Look at the little one up there to the right. Doesn’t that look like a push-out window, maybe in a bathroom?”
Chip looked up at the small window I had indicated.
“Could be.”
“Well.”
“Well, what?”
“I’m sure I can get in this building. Probably not much in it to protect at this point. Even if I have to climb up and break a window—”
“Are you crazy? You could go to jail for that.”
“You worry too much. Listen, if I can figure out how to get in here, and if Chi Chi will let me work with Clint—”
“Back-chaining.”
“Right. I’ll teach him what to do in this building, then when he’s got it, I’ll send him into Keller’s when it’s closed, through the cat port. He can unlatch the window for me, and I can get in, check the paperwork, satisfy my curiosity, and both of us will be out of there long before Vinnie shows in the early morning.”
“How did you say you were going to get up to that window he’ll open for you?”
“I’m starving,” I told him. “How about some breakfast?”
I began to walk, heading back to Washington Street for my third visit to Florent in the same day, though in truth it seemed like ages since I’d been there, sitting with Chi Chi, listening to her spin the truth until neither one of us knew what was real and what wasn’t.
But didn’t I do that, too, I thought, stopping and waiting for Chip to catch up, even when I wasn’t on the job?
7
You Don’t Think It’s Possible to Be Fooled?
I don’t know why I was hungry. I’d had a steak, green beans, and thin, crisp French fries in the middle of the night, part of a bowl of soup a few hours after that, then a small, sweet clementine in the morning, which I’d peeled and eaten on the way to Keller’s while Chip sipped his coffee and ate a croissant, the flakes of pastry floating from his mouth to the front of his jacket like snow. But when my bacon and eggs came, I felt I’d become Dashiell, the smells filling my senses separately and together, so that even the odor of the butter on my toast seemed to saturate my mouth and I longed to dip my head, as he would have, and eat until everything was gone, licking the plate until it was clean, then, my forehead pleated with wrinkles of concern, beg for more. Had Chi Chi slipped something into my soup when I wasn’t looking? No, it couldn’t be that. Her little trip to the bathroom had had the opposite effect on her. She’d lost her appetite.
“What does this Clint dog know?” Chip asked, lifting a hand to get the waiter’s attention, then pointing to his coffee cup.
“He’s housebroken.”
“How long do you think it will take you to teach him what he needs to know?”
“Don’t know. All I’ve seen him do so far is ride around in Chi Chi’s jacket. And possibly take a leak on command.”
“That’s a good sign. At least she taught him something.”
“The thing is, I won’t know how complicated the job will be until I get inside the building next to Keller’s. Assuming the layout inside is the same, that’ll tell me how far he’ll have to go, what’s involved in opening the latch, if that’s what turns out to be best. At this point, I’m not even sure there’s a way he can let me in.”
“Wouldn’t it be infinitely simpler to have Chi Chi leave the latch open for you, right before she leaves?”
“She could. But I doubt it would stay open. I’m sure they do a walk-through before closing up. Anyway, if it’s always locked, and they find it open, Vinnie will know who did it, and it could cause a lot of grief for her. That’s the last thing I want.”
“What about a night watchman? Wouldn’t that put a kink in the plan?”
“Can’t be one. Vinnie wouldn’t be able to have a tranny hooker visit him if there was a watchman on duty. And if, say, there was one, but he left when Vinnie came, I would have seen him. And I would have seen lights on somewhere. But there weren’t any. Not a one.”
“When will you try the empty building?”
“Tonight. If it looks good, maybe I can start Clint tonight, too, assuming Chi Chi lets me.”
“She will.”
I looked at him, doubt I’d tried so hard to quash creeping back. What was wrong with me? Any one of a dozen of my old trainer friends could have given Chi Chi my number.
“What makes you so sure?” I asked.
&
nbsp; “Well, I’m not sure. But from what you told me, she needs to know who did this. They all do, don’t they? Before another one of them gets killed. Why would she hire you, lay all that money on you, and then not cooperate?”
I shrugged. “Who knows? I can’t presume to understand her, or any of them.”
“They’re just people, Rach.”
“Get real. Yeah, they’re people. But they’re also drug addicts. I mean, think of how you are in the morning before you get that first cup of coffee. Think of how badly you want it. Now multiply that by ten thousand, and figure every day you have to earn enough money so that you can have what your body is screaming for, and every day you might not, you might get arrested, you might get beaten up, you might get your money stolen, you might get your throat cut. You ever talk to a tranny hooker?”
He nodded.
“You did?”
“Yeah. At Hunts Point. I was protection-training a Shepherd for one of the plants out there. I used to take him by their walk sometimes, see how he’d react to people on drugs, get him to be steady with it when it had nothing to do with him. Great dog. He was a Vinnie, too, by the way, a German import.”
“With an Italian name?”
He nodded.
“I thought those were straight hookers at Hunts Point.”
“Mostly. But there were a couple didn’t look like women to me.”
“Too tall?”
He nodded. The waiter filled his cup. Chip thanked him.
“No hips?”
He nodded again.
“Feet too big?”
“Way too big.”
“Still, you can’t be sure.”
“I didn’t have to be sure. I wasn’t buying.”
“Who do you think does?”
He took a sip of coffee, put the cup down, and took my hand. “How would I know that, Rachel?”
“Oh, I figured when you were there, working Vinnie, maybe you saw some of the johns, got some idea.”
He shrugged. “Sure. It’s a busy place. I saw lots of them.”
“And?”
“How can I make a judgment, looking at some guy behind the wheel of a car in the dark? What could I know about him, just from that?”
This time I shrugged. “Old, young, fat, thin, good-looking, ugly, messy, neat?”
“Yes.”
“All those things?”
“Except neat. And good-looking.” He took a sip of coffee. “Most of them were pretty seedy looking, unkempt, you know what I mean?”
“Chi Chi tells me a lot of the johns are fooled. She says they don’t know—”
“That the women they’re hiring are men?”
I nodded.
Chip shook his head.
“You don’t think it’s possible to be fooled?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well?”
“I think the people who are fooled want to be fooled.”
I turned and watched our waiter heading toward the pass-through to the kitchen, the stiffness of his legs, the way his narrow hips moved, the way Chi Chi walked, only not quite so over-the-top. A moment later he was back with our check. He put it in the middle of the table. It’s no longer PC to give it to the man, even if you’re absolutely certain who’s a he and who’s a she.
When I got home, I tried to sleep but couldn’t. I kept thinking about how I say one thing when I’m thinking something entirely different, something unrelated to the conversation, something a thousand times more urgent, more real than the words coming out of my mouth.
Was my sister right, saying this work was changing me, and not for the better? Isn’t that what happens to cops after a while, that they look at the whole world as a crime scene, that they become so paranoid they shoot an innocent person reaching for his wallet or the keys to his house, all the faster if that person happens to be black?
And then I thought about the hookers, trying to find out who had killed Rosalinda. Was it to protect themselves? Or was it to get a little justice, one of the many things absent from their pathetic, lonely lives? There’d be no family to help, and the cops didn’t care. They only had each other. And for now, they had me. I stayed awake a long time, thinking about the people who say they care, and the ones who actually do. Then, at last, pressed tight against Dashiell’s back, I was able to sleep.
8
You’d Be Real Popular
Walking Dashiell along the river in the late afternoon, watching the way the last light of the day turned the color of the water nearest to us silver and a deep aqua on the Jersey side, I tried to figure out the best way to get into the building next door to Keller’s and, in particular, what I would need to take with me. Of course, this was New York City. I could carry an aluminum ladder through the streets without getting a second glance. A ladder would be nice. I could climb up to the second story, break the bathroom window with a rock, open it, crawl in, and plot out the path Clint would have to take to open the latch at Keller’s.
For a moment, stopping while Dashiell found something particularly interesting to investigate, I wondered how much I’d have to teach the little dog before I started his work in the empty building. If he was only housebroken and hadn’t even been taught to sit on command, he wouldn’t know how to listen to human language, let alone how to work.
Not only that, Chi Chi might not want to give him up for a few days. But no way, if she didn’t, was Dashiell going to fit through that cat door. If Chi Chi turned me down, I’d have to come up with a whole new plan.
We headed north again, and as we got closer to the meat district, I thought about my night’s work again. The door to the closed plant had been padlocked. Even if I could cut the padlock, that wouldn’t be a good idea. It would be too visible. A broken window, that happened in a deserted building, especially in cold weather, but a cut padlock could bring police to check out the building. I’d been cavalier with Chip, but I surely didn’t want to get arrested. Nor did I care to explain that I was there preparing a dog to help me break into the market next door so that I could look through their files.
The small window seemed my best bet. I hadn’t checked the back of the building, but since the lower floor of all the markets were refrigerated, there surely wasn’t going to be a window there. The next question was, short of carrying a ladder to Little West Twelfth Street, how was I going to get up to the second floor?
We crossed the highway at Gansevoort Street, running to avoid getting mowed down by traffic. Even starting out as soon as the light turns green, you need to move pretty fast to get all the way across before the light changes and the traffic peels out. Once safely on the other side, we headed north again, then east when we got to Little West Twelfth Street.
In the fading light of afternoon, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. The name of the business had been painted across the top part of the building, over the second-floor windows. It was faded almost to nothing by now, and in fact, I had to stand slightly to the side to see the words—Jeffrey’s Fine Poultry, established 19-something-something, the last two numbers of the date gone completely, as was Jeffrey himself. Of course, this wasn’t Jeffrey Kalinsky, who owned the fabulously expensive shop on Fourteenth Street. This place wasn’t for the sensibility of folks who went to his shop for two-hundred-dollar T-shirts and twenty-two-hundred-dollar Gucci leather jackets. Even in its heyday, this Jeffrey’s wasn’t a place for the overly sensitive. While the animals weren’t slaughtered here, the scent of fear and the rank odor of blood permeated the buildings, despite the high-pressure hoses and steam-cleaning machines that were used daily. Fourteenth Street was fast becoming a place for people who didn’t contemplate the source of the sauce-covered delicacy on their plates, at least not what happened prior to the time when their own butcher took a delicate, pink piece of veal, pounded it flat, and wrapped it carefully in brown paper. They didn’t imagine the food they were eating when it was part of a living, breathing creature. Who does? But on Little West Twelfth Street, you co
uldn’t escape the knowledge that what you were eating for dinner had once eaten dinner itself.
The small window I’d assumed was a bathroom was off to the right. On the left side of the building there was a tree, one of those hardy plants that survives against all odds, cracking the sidewalk to make room for its trunk as it grows, its roots snaking their way around rocks and shale as they burrow deep into the ground in search of water. We walked over to it, and Dashiell gave it one more obstacle to overcome for survival. I hadn’t spent a lot of time climbing trees since I was a kid, but I had the feeling I could do this one. In fact, standing there charting my path from branch to branch and then to the roof of the old chicken market, if I wanted to get inside, this looked like my only real shot. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed.
“Who wants Chi Chi?”
“I do. It’s me, Rachel.”
“Yeah? You found out something already?”
“No, not yet. But I need your help.”
“I give you anything you need. What’s up?”
“I need you to describe the inside of Keller’s. I need you to tell me every last detail, first the layout in general, how many rooms there are and where they are, where the stairs are, where the bathroom is, okay? And then I need you to describe the windows, how they lock. Can you do that?” I asked, remembering how one of the detectives at the Sixth told me that sometimes, if they cleaned up well, hookers could be great on the witness stand because they were very good at noticing small details; like cabdrivers, they had to assess people very quickly to know if doing business seemed safe. Of course, to help me with the information I needed, Chi Chi wouldn’t have to look middle-class, which was a damn good thing. But she would have to use that ability to remember details about a place rather than a person. I waited for her answer, listening to her blow her nose, cough, spit, light a cigarette. Then she walked me through, from the front door, through the refrigerated first floor, the bodies of the dead pigs hanging cold and silent in rows, as if they were waiting on line for something. “But they’re not,” she said. “Shape they’re in, their waiting days are over.” She took me up the narrow, wooden staircase to the office on the right, describing the messy desk, the row of files, the computer and printer, even the phone, “black, three lines.” And finally, Chi Chi described what she called “the ladies,” only there weren’t any working there. In fact, in all my walks through the meat district, I’d never seen a female butcher, nor any other woman, other than a transvestite hooker picking her away around the clumps of fat, the occasional kidney, the barrels of bones.
The Long Good Boy Page 5