Speak of the Devil

by Richard Hawke

  “I’ve got the money,” I said.

  “We ain’t talked money yet.”

  “How much for three?”

  “Brittany” fell against the door as if she’d been shot. Her body shook with laughter. “Three? God damn, you’re an animal. What you gonna do with three girls? Don’t you go telling me you’re Mr. Super Stud.”

  “I like an audience,” I said.

  “I get it. That’s cool. We got a special kinky rate. Three hundred dollars.”

  “Fifty.”

  “Fifty?”

  “One hundred.”

  “For three girls?”

  “It’s a cold night, Brittany. I don’t exactly see the cars lining up.”

  “One-fifty.”

  “Okay.”

  “Show me the money.”

  I pulled a wad of cash from my pocket.

  She seemed satisfied. “Okay. I’m getting out of the car. Drive around the corner. Halfway down’s a streetlight that’s out. There’s a Dumpster. Stop there.”

  She got out of the car and crossed into one of the boarded-up buildings. I followed her instructions. A part of me wanted to just step on the gas and keep going. I was making this up as I went along. My thinking was that I probably had only one crack at trying to get information; why not gather together as many potential informants as I could? I hadn’t been waiting two minutes at the broken streetlight when the passenger door opened and a lithe black man slipped into the car, pulling the door shut behind him.

  “Give me the money.”

  I asked, “Who are you?”

  “I’m the man with the girls.”

  “I don’t see any girls.”

  “I got ’em.”

  “You’ve got three of them?”

  “You’re a hungry motherfucker, aren’t you?”

  I asked, “Is Donna one of the girls?”

  “What are you talking about, Donna?”

  “Donna Bia. I was told Donna Bia is worth three of anyone else. You say you’re the man, so I thought I’d ask.”

  “I ain’t got no fucking Donna for you, punk. This ain’t fucking pick-and-choose. You want these three or you want to get the hell gone? Two hundred dollars.”

  “Brittany said one-fifty.”

  “Well, fuck Brittany. It’s called inflation. Two hundred.” I gave him the money. He stuffed it into his pocket. “Flash your lights.”

  I did. A few seconds later, I could make out three figures crossing the street. One of them pulled back a piece of the fence and let the others inside, then followed. They moved to one of the vans, opened the back door and disappeared inside.

  “Showtime,” said the man next to me. “What you do is you don’t leave a mark on them, you got that? You hurt my girls, I hurt you. That’s the only rule. Otherwise, enjoy.”

  He left the car and slid into the shadows. I removed my shoulder holster and gun and stashed them under the seat. I figured I might have to withstand a caress or two to help set the mood, and nothing tanks a mood like a snub-nose.38.

  I got out of the car and found the place where the fence was unattached. I curled the fence back and slipped into the lot. I reached the van and jerked down on the rear door handle, pulling the door open.

  The women were arrayed on bags of linen, like a trio of farmer’s daughters in a hayloft. They were still dressed, which I was glad to see, though there seemed to be a heated contest as to which could hike her skirt up the highest. By an amazing coincidence, all three had forgotten to put on their panties when they’d gotten dressed that morning. Brittany spoke first. “We got us a party. Girls, meet Fritz.”

  One was wearing a platinum wig. The other reminded me of Mama Cass Elliott. I climbed into the van and pulled the door closed. Only the slightest light came through the front window. I sensed movement, and hands began poking and prodding me. “Whoa, whoa. Hold on.”

  The hands withdrew. Brittany’s voice sounded. “There a problem?”

  “I want the lights,” I said.

  “Lights? Oh, right. The man wants an audience.”

  I crawled over several soft bags and at least one bony thigh and stretched into the front seat, slapping around on the panel until I found the light knob. I twisted it and the overhead came on. I turned back around and leaned against a pile of the duffel bags. Six dull eyes settled on me.

  “Whatever split you get from your middleman, you’ve already earned it,” I said to them. “I’m not really in a frisky mood tonight, girls, thank you all just the same.” My announcement received no reaction. The one calling herself Brittany rubbed her index finger listlessly along her front teeth as if brushing them. I went on, “I’ve got three hundred dollars in my pocket. I’d like some information. If any of you can help me out, it’s a hundred dollars. And you don’t have to share it with whatever-his-name-is.”

  “Lenny,” Platinum Wig said.

  Mama Cass snapped, “Shut up!”

  “I’m trying to get ahold of either Donna Bia or Angel Ramos,” I said. “If neither of these names means anything to any of you, we’re through here.”

  Platinum Wig spoke up. “What you want with them?”

  “That’s between me and them, but I’ll tell you this: if I don’t find them first, the police will. And it would be better if I do.”

  “You a cop? Shit. He’s a cop.”

  “I’m not a cop. I just need to find Angel or Donna. Money in the bank, girls. Who’s going to help me?”

  The three looked at me as if they had each been struck dumb. Then Mama Cass reached into a small purse and extracted a cell phone. It was already flipped open. She held it delicately between two fingers.

  I asked, “What’s that?”

  Brittany answered, “That’s Lenny.”

  The rear doors of the van flew open. Indeed, it was Lenny. He was holding a cell phone in one hand and something I couldn’t make out in the other. He flipped the phone closed and tossed it into the van. With a similar move of the other hand, a switchblade knife appeared.

  “Out.”

  The three women scrambled out of the van and took off running, or in Mama Cass’s case, galloping. Lenny gestured with the knife. “You, too.”

  “I’m pretty comfortable where I am,” I said.

  “You’re pretty fucked is what you are. Get out.”

  I came down slowly off the duffel bags. I slipped sideways, and when I did, my hand ran quickly into and back out of my pocket. Lenny missed the move. He gestured again with the knife. “You tried to fuck me over. You give me the rest of that money, or I’m going to fucking cut it out of you.” He backed away slightly to give me just enough room to get out of the van. As I did, he brought the knife up and shook it in my face. “Let’s have it.”

  So I gave it to him. I would have preferred a downward swing; you get the full fulcrum effect that way. But I had to swing upward. I landed the blackjack just under the pimp’s wrist. The knife fell instantly. My arm continued its upward swing, to a point just past my head. Lenny started to make a noise, but the sound never made it past his lips. I brought my arm back down, snapping my wrist sharply. Betty bounced off the pimp’s skull with the telltale crack. He lost his legs and dropped… like a sack of linen.

  Love that Betty.

  27

  I ALMOST RAN HER OVER. SHE STEPPED IN FRONT OF THE CAR AS I rounded the corner, and I hit the brakes. It was Brittany. She moved swiftly to the passenger door and hopped into the car. Her eyes were wide. “You kill him?”

  “I didn’t kill him. I just put him to sleep.”

  “He wakes up, he’s gonna kill you. You still got that money?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Gimme it.”

  “Is this a stickup?”

  “Drive. I show you where’s Donna Bia, you give me the money. That was the deal. You shoulda just asked me in the first place. You got a fucked-up way of doing things.”

  “I thought I was improving my odds,” I said.

  I followed her di
rections and in five minutes was driving past a wobbly-looking building with a small group of men milling about outside. A sign painted on the blackened window read: FLEA CLUB.

  “That’s it. You find Donna in there.”

  “In the Flea Club?”

  “That’s right. Gimme the money.”

  I pulled over in the next block. “If she’s not there, I’m out three hundred dollars,” I said.

  “She’s there. Bitch practically lives in that place.”

  “What about Angel Ramos?”

  “I don’t know. But if you got Donna, you got Angel. And I’m telling you, you got Donna.”

  I had an idea. I pulled out my phone and the piece of paper Donna Bia’s mother had given me. I punched in the number and handed over the phone. “If she answers, find out where she is.”

  Brittany put the phone to her ear. A few seconds later, she gave me a wink. “Donna? This is Keesha. Where you, girl? You at the Flea?” She listened, nodding a few times. “Uh-huh. No. Nothing. Lenny was just asking, that’s all. Says someone was trying to get hold of you.” She listened again, nodded again, said, “Shiiiiiiit,” then hung up.

  She handed me back the phone. “Pay up.”

  I STUCK MY.38 INTO MY BELT AND UNTUCKED MY SHIRT, PULLED MY watch cap from my coat pocket and put it on. Not much in the disguise department, but it was all I had to work with. I was going to stand out in the Flea Club no matter what. As I approached the building I reached into my pocket and gave Betty a little squeeze. The thump-thump-thump of dance music oozed from the building.

  I took several unfriendly glances as I entered the club and made my way to the small bar. There was a pool table in the rear. A cone-shaped lamp hung over the pool table; otherwise, the place was dark as a coal mine. The music was coming from overhead. I stood a moment to let my eyes adjust to the darkness, and when they did, they saw a half-dozen faces looking in my direction, none of them terribly impressed with what they were seeing. I asked for a beer. When it came, I imagined squeezing the bottle the way Popeye does with his spinach can, the beer leaping into the air and going in a neat hook-move right down my throat.

  Some might say I was jumpy.

  I affected a moody pose, drinking the beer slowly but steadily, staring at the bottle as if the two of us were discussing a breakup. I noticed people coming in and crossing to a ruby-colored curtain that hung over a doorway just behind the pool table. I deduced that the dance club was upstairs. I also deduced that Donna Bia must be up there, too. I quickly concluded that I should get myself upstairs. Brilliance like this should be packaged and sold at premium prices.

  I paid for my beer and went over to the curtain. The two guys playing pool watched me with interest but didn’t interfere as I pulled back the curtain and started up the narrow stairs behind it. The thump-thump-thump grew louder.

  The upstairs was packed. I’d say a hundred people were crammed into a room designed for half that number. The floor was elbow-to-elbow, with people either dancing or giving it their best shot. An obnoxious lighting system bathed the crowd in a rotation of colors, red then green then blue, followed by a ten-second white-light strobe, then back to the colors.

  I checked my watch. Ten-thirty.

  I thought of the image on Tommy Carroll’s computer screen. Philip Byron with his bloody bandaged hand, the Uzi pressed against his head. There’s a point in certain investigations-not all, but some of them-when you’re struck with the notion that you’ve gotten everything wrong. Investigating is a guessing game, after all, a matter of how much you trust a particular assumption and then the one that leads from that and the one after that and so on. You follow a path, but you need to remain mindful that it’s a path you helped create. Charlie used to warn me in the early days about what he called the intoxication factor: You can get yourself drunk on a single idea. You can go blind. That’s not good. A better idea might come lumbering along, as big as an elephant, and you won’t even see it. You’ve got to stay focused, but you’ve got to stay flexible.

  My problem was time. This wasn’t an investigation of leisure, where I could put my feet up in my office and gaze down at the human ants in Bryant Park and systematically gather together in my mind the various threads or puzzle pieces or whatever you want to call them and see how things were looking. These kinds of investigations are a luxury. The information percolates, and all the useless bits eventually burn off until you’re left with exactly and only what you need. But this was the other kind of investigation. I had a mutilated man with an Uzi to his head and the Jeopardy! theme song plinking away in the background. The thought that came to me as I stood at the entrance to the dance floor was that maybe I had allowed myself to become intoxicated with the unquestioned notion that Angel Ramos was the man of the hour and that maybe I was now standing gumshoed at the most ridiculous of all places, chasing after a nasty, degenerate, pale-eyed wild goose while time was tick-tick-ticking away. The thought was a hammer blow to the gut. Philip Byron couldn’t afford for me to be wrong.

  Then I spotted Donna Bia. She was dancing near the DJ’s station, twenty feet from where I was standing. Lance Jennings had painted a surprisingly accurate portrait with just a few words. Hellcat. Hot tamale. Also, I spotted the tattoo of a rose on the woman’s upper right arm.

  If I were to say that Donna Bia was wearing a little yellow number, I’d be underreporting. Miss Bia had hips like a Vespa motor scooter, high round breasts that were jostling each other for attention, and taut, dark woo-woo legs, all packed into a breathtakingly tight and skimpy taxi-yellow dress. The hem of the thing ran so high the woman could not have sat down without causing a minor riot. Her cell phone was clipped to her dress, next to her right breast, and she was dancing with her eyes closed and a self-satisfied sex smile on her face. Her clenched fists pumped the air in time with the music as her ample hips gave just the barest hint of swing to the otherwise grandiose pelvic thrusts. Imaginary sex at its best. As I watched the hot tamale sizzling out there on the floor, I knew this much: Her mother would not be proud.

  Margo drags me out onto the dance floor now and then, and my general act is to shuffle in place while Margo runs vivacious rings around me, sort of like I’m a maypole. Something told me that where Miss Bia was concerned, I should keep my dance moves under wraps. It was clear that I couldn’t attempt to speak with her here and expect anything other than a game of What? What? I considered stepping forward and just muttering “Police,” flashing my PI license in the strobe lights and dragging her off the dance floor and out of the club under the guise of an arrest. But the backfire potential was too high. Besides, Lady Bia might simply slap her trap shut and demand to see a lawyer.

  So I played dirty. Or rather, dirtier. Hell, it had worked so far. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone, along with a fistful of twenties. I hit the redial button and put the phone to my ear. A few seconds later, the woman in the yellow afterthought plucked her phone from her elastic hem. I saw her mouth move and heard the words shouted in my ear: “Is Donna!”

  “I’m over here!” I shouted back. “I’m waving my arm!”

  I waved my arm. Donna continued dancing-or at any rate, her hips kept stirring the air-and she looked around until she spotted me. She frowned and yelled into the phone, “Who’re you? What do you want?”

  I held up the fistful of twenties. “I want to give you a lot of money!” I shouted into the phone. “All this! It’s for you!”

  I didn’t wait for her response. I turned my back on her, pocketing the cash and the phone, and retreated down the stairs, through the curtain and back outside to the street. The shops across from the club were all shuttered. One of them-a Laundromat-had a blue plastic pony out front, the kind you feed a quarter to give a kid a ride. I crossed the street and waited next to the pony, arms crossed, leaning against the Laundromat’s metal gate. When Donna emerged from the club half a minute later, pulling a flimsy sweater around her shoulders, I gave a sharp whistle. “Over here!”

&n
bsp; As she stepped across the street, slipping the strap of a pillbox purse over her shoulder, I pulled the watch cap off my head. The perfect gentleman. She came up onto the curb and I inclined my head to the right. “You want to ride the pony?”

  She gave me the look I deserved. “What do you want? Where’d you get my number?”

  “I thought maybe we could talk.”

  “Talk fast, mister. It’s fucking cold out here.”

  “We could go someplace warm.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What’s this about? You trying to fuck with me? I got a boyfriend’ll slice your eyes out, you try to fuck with me.”

  “What I’m trying to do is give you some money in exchange for a little of your time.”

  “I could slap you, talking to me that way,” she said. She took a beat. “How much money you talking?”

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  “Shit. What you think you’re going to get for that money? I told you, I got a boyfriend.”

  I gave her a long, deliberate up-and-down. “Look, I can give my money to someone else. You’re a piece of work, but you’re not the last woman on the planet. If you want to sneeze at five hundred bucks, that’s up to you.”

  Something passed over the woman; I could see it in the relaxing of her facial muscles. She moved a step closer, fingering the collar of her sweater. Her nails were hooked like talons. “You like how I dance? That it? I dance good, don’t I?”

  “Yes. You dance good.”

  “Uh-huh.” She stepped closer. “You want to give a girl some money to watch her dance? A little private dancing? How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I know someplace warm.”

  “I’ve got a car. It’s just down on the next block.”

  She lowered her voice. “You go in front of me. You get in, and you get comfortable. And you get the five hundred ready. I’ll be right behind you.”

  She had me pegged for a sucker. I could see it in her expression. She tried flashing her eyes to give out the pretense that she was suddenly all excited about what was to come, but it didn’t really work. I headed for the car, and she followed about twenty steps back. I caught some looks from the people outside the Flea Club, but no one said anything. I reached the car and got in and leaned over to open the passenger door. Donna got in. I thought her dress was going to snap in two. She set her tiny purse on her lap. The contrived smile on her face froze, then vanished altogether. I was holding my.38 loosely in my hand, aimed roughly at her waist.