by David Black
The front door was unlocked. She entered. The late afternoon sun slanted through the dirty lace curtains, casting reptile scales across the doorsill.
“Jack,” Caroline said, “there are a few cases I thought maybe you could help me with—”
She stopped, staring at Jack who stood in the midst of devastation. The cabin was torn apart. Furniture, lanterns, smashed. Everything that could be destroyed had been.
“Either someone decided I needed to redecorate,” Jack said, “or someone’s trying to warn me off looking into Frank’s murder.”
2
Jack fixed a broken table leg as Caroline swept up shattered glass. The night was humid. Jack wore a T-shirt and jeans. Where Caroline’s dress was sweaty, it clung to her body.
“Maybe you should get a gun?” Caroline said.
“I’ve got one,” Jack said. “I keep it unloaded. That way things don’t get messy.”
Caroline approached Jack, drawn to him.
“Neatness,” Caroline said, “is an overrated virtue.”
“All virtues are overrated,” Jack said.
They stood so close, Jack could feel the heat coming off her body.
“Why’d you come here?” he asked. “What do you want?”
“To help you.”
“I usually handle things by myself.”
“Even big jobs?”
“All my jobs are big.”
“What about this one?”
“Biggest I’ve ever had.”
There was a moment when they could have ended in each other’s arms, but Jack broke the tension.
“And,” Jack said, “the most dangerous.”
“I’ve got a stack of what Robert calls fix-me cases…”
“Which you’re going to toss my way?”
“I can use the help. You can use the money.”
“You know I can’t practice law.”
“You can do research.”
“I’m not an investigator.”
Caroline nodded toward the files, which lay in a small stack on a side table.
“There’s one,” she said, “a client’s convinced his wife is sleeping with his brother.”
“I thought you wanted me to go after whoever killed Frank.”
Caroline picked up one of the files.
“There’s a girl who got a speeding ticket.”
“Screw the files.”
“She claims she was five miles below the limit.”
“I was raised to do anything, even steal, rather than take charity, Five Spot.”
“You spend a night going over these cases, you won’t think it’s charity.”
“When I was a kid,” Jack said, “payday was Friday. By Thursday, we’d be broke. I’d go with my dad to the market and watch him shoplift cans of sardines for dinner. My mother wanted more for me. Kept telling me, fly, fly higher. I got a scholarship, CCNY, then Fordham Law School.… And, when I started flying, she stood there below me, looking angry, because she couldn’t fly, too. Every morning, she’d start with an eight-ounce glass full of gin. One day, it turned out to be Clorox.”
“Jack,” Caroline said, “whoever trashed your place…”
“Is more afraid of me than I am of him.”
“You want help?”
“It’s not your kind of work, Five Spot.”
“I’m a quick study under the right teacher.”
“How are you on top?”
“Even quicker.”
“You’re not going to like everything you see.”
“Jack, after working with you, I’m used to that.”
Caroline put her arms around Jack’s neck and kissed him. Jack put his arms around her, pressed her damp body toward him. Caroline ran her hands up and down Jack’s body.
“This is why I don’t carry a gun.”
“Yeah, it might go off unexpectedly.”
Jack untwined her hands and gently, kindly pushed her away.
“Even twelve-speeds have to put on the brakes going downhill,” Jack said. “And where we’re going to find Frank’s killer is all downhill.”
3
Jack and Caroline crossed the street toward Empire State Florists.
“The girl who was with Frank,” Jack said, “when she was in the hospital, someone sent her a bouquet. With a flower in it I’ve never seen before. We find out where it came from, Five Spot, maybe we find out who sent it.”
A bell rang as they entered the shop.
The florist, a young woman with a crest of dyed white hair that made her look like an egret, studied the book of flowers Jack had brought in.
“You’re sure the bouquet included this?” the egret asked.
Jack nodded.
“White fringed orchid,” the egret said. “We don’t see that in bouquets that often. If at all. Not around here anyway. There’s a specialty shop in town might handle it. Afton Florists.”
Mr. Afton, an elderly man in a cream cardigan, tapped Jack’s book of flowers with his forefinger.
“The man who bought the bouquet asked for something special,” Mr. Afton said. “That’s why I included the white fringed orchid.”
“What did the man look like?” Jack asked.
“Ask me about flowers, I can describe plants I haven’t had in stock for a decade,” Mr. Afton said. “But people…?”
He shrugged.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1
The alley off Columbiaville Street was lined with peep shows and cheap shops selling drug paraphernalia and porno. A two-block red-light zone in upstate New York. For years, Mycenae had been the drug depot of the mid-Hudson, peddling dope from Albany and Troy to the west, to the Berkshires to the east. An area filled with the hopeless poor and college students with more money than sense.
A few hookers strolled, giving the come-on to the even fewer downstate weekenders, most of whom were male couples. In the 1980s, Mycenae had become a popular gay community with regular Thursday evening tea dances and a local transvestite coffee house, Coffee Grounds, where, early in the morning, men in 1940s dresses and spike heels shambled in, unshaved, for breakfast.
A bar blared recorded Zydeco music: Queen Ida and Clifton Chernier’s “Allons a Grand Coteau.” The bar light cast a paradoxically nursery glow on the surroundings, all pink and baby blue.
Caroline followed Jack. The music from the bar changed to Richard and Mimi Farina, Sixties head music. Jack stopped at the doorway of the town’s only topless joint, where an old man wearing electric blue polyester pants and a striped pajama top, Skinny Wecht, lounged. When he spotted Jack, he grinned, showing a mouthful of gold teeth.
“Hey, Jackie-boy,” Skinny said, “long time.”
“I’ve been busy, Skinny,” Jack said. “Mama Lucky in?”
“’Til she dies,” Skinny said.
2
Inside Mama Lucky’s Topless, three girls wearing not much more than a smile shuffled on top of the bar. In the corners, a few girls were lap dancing. A man sitting by himself patted Caroline’s ass as she passed. She glared at him and moved closer to Jack.
“You spend a lot of time here?” Caroline asked.
“Skinny taught me how to play pool,” Jack said.
“What else did he teach you?” Caroline asked.
“You notice his teeth?” Jack asked. “Got them all drilled and filled with gold. That’s where he carries his stake. Figures that way he’ll never get his pocket picked.”
“He bets the gold in his teeth?” Caroline asked. “What happens if he loses?”
“Skinny never loses,” Jack said.
A blond, six-and-a-half feet tall, stood against the wall. She gestured to Caroline.
“Honey,” the blond asked, “do I have anything on the back of my dress?”
Languidly, the blond turned around.
“A smudge?” she asked. “Some soot? Nothing? Could you just smooth it out in back?”
Uneasy at the request, Caroline glanced at Jack, who shrugged.
&
nbsp; “It gets so wrinkled in this heat,” the blond said.
Caroline straightened the back of the blond’s dress. The woman undulated under Caroline’s hand, like a cat arching. Caroline stepped back.
“You look uncomfortable,” Jack said.
“It was just so odd,” Caroline said, “having a woman react that way to my touch.”
“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “Tiny there isn’t a woman.”
Caroline took Jack’s arm. Jack glanced down at how she was clutching him and smiled as they passed other women and transvestites, who all greeted Jack: “Hey, there, Jackie … Hey, Jack … Jack, boy…!”
At the back of the room, two thugs flanked a door. When Jack and Caroline approached, the thug on the left murmured, “Where you been?” The thug on the right murmured, “Hey, you, Jack.…” They stood aside to let Jack and Caroline pass.
Through the door was a dark stairway. As they started climbing, Caroline pressed even closer to Jack.
“You’re popular around here,” Caroline said.
“I once did someone a favor,” Jack said.
“I shouldn’t ask, right?”
“Right.”
3
On the other side of a metal door at the top of the stairs was an office. Despite the desk and file cabinets, the place looked more like a bedroom. Dominating the space was a huge bed, and in the bed was the fattest woman Caroline had ever seen. Mama Lucky. Propped up on half-a-dozen pillows and sweating profusely despite the air conditioning and the five electric fans, which were arranged around her in a semicircle. Near her was a magnum of Jack Daniel’s.
“That you, Jack Slidell?” Mama Lucky said. “I won’t ask how the hell you been. You been up to your stubble in trouble, and you come to Mama Lucky like they always do for a little consolation and advice.” She nodded to a chair. “Put it down.”
Jack sat, gestured for Caroline to sit, which she did, primly. Mama Lucky stared at Caroline. Hard.
“Girl,” she said to Caroline, “you too good for him. Never been a girl that wasn’t.”
“You’re looking well, Mama Lucky,” Jack said.
“You always was a liar, Jack Slidell,” Mama Lucky said. “How much longer do I have? Five, ten more years. Sometimes I want to die just to get over the suspense.”
“You’re going to live forever, Mama Lucky,” Jack said.
“Don’t threaten me, Jack Slidell. I seen too much, heard too much.”
“What have you heard about a girl beaten up at the Dutch Village Motel?”
Mama said to Caroline, “That man always do come right to the point.” To Jack, she said, “You come right to the point with this gal, Jack Slidell?”
Mama Lucky took a swig from the big square bottle of Jack Black and handed it to Jack.
“Someone sent her a bouquet in the hospital,” Jack said.
“You want a fortune-teller, you go out Avondale way,” Mama Lucky said. “You know the place.”
“Mama Lucky knows more than any fortune-teller,” Jack said.
Mama Lucky wheezed a laugh.
“Ain’t that the lick that killed Dick,” Mama Lucky said. “Jack Slidell, you’re a bucketful.”
Jack took a swig from the whiskey bottle and handed it to Caroline, who looked at it as if Jack had just given her a live snake. Jack noticed and was amused by her hesitation to drink. He gestured for her to go ahead. Caroline wiped the mouth of the bottle. Twice. And using two hands to raise the heavy bottle took a hesitant swig.
“Ain’t no one taught this girl how to put down a thirst?” Mama Lucky said. “Aim it at the sky, girl.”
Caroline tilted the bottle higher, got a mouthful, and forced herself to swallow. Trying to suppress a gag, she handed the bottle back to Mama Lucky, who, gently mocking, wiped the bottle mouth just like Caroline had.
“No insult, girl,” Mama Lucky said, “but I don’t know where your lips have been.”
One-handed, Mama raised the bottle and took a few gulps.
“That stuff who was beat up,” Mama Lucky said. “She wasn’t no regular trade. A college student, they say.”
“You know what school?” Jack asked.
“Yale, Princeton,” Mama Lucky said. “Local talent, sent off for a proper education. What she learned, she’d be better off ignorant. Kicked out, they say. Chipping for nickel, dime bags, she was. At school, then down home.” To Caroline, she said, “Stuff like that give the good girls on the corner a bad reputation, don’t you say so, honey?”
Caroline stammered, “I … I…”
“Speak up, girl,” Mama Lucky said. “Didn’t your mama teach you nothing ’bout conversation?” To Jack, she said, “I’ll bet that gal knows how to dance. You always pick the dancers. But she don’t know how to sing.”
“The blow Frank was doing,” Jack said. “It had cyanide in it.”
“What folks won’t do these days to get high,” Mama Lucky said.
“Or dead,” Jack said.
“Come to the same in the end,” Mama Lucky said. “No, nothing on the street about that. But, Jack Slidell, you know people don’t get their highs just from the street. Your boss—you ask his clients, his friends about him?”
“That’s a long list, Mama Lucky,” Jack said. “Frank had a lot of friends.”
“Then,” Mama Lucky said, “I don’t care how he died. He was a lucky man!”
On her massive bed, Mama Lucky leaned forward and said, “You unwax your ears, Jack Slidell. About that bouquet. Go listen to Lafayette King, Gainsvoort Gardens.” To Caroline, Mama Lucky said, “That’s what they call an old folks’ home. Where I should be. A better waiting room for heaven than this dump.”
Jack stood.
Relieved, so did Caroline.
“Nothing happens around here that you don’t know, Mama Lucky,” Jack said, leaning over and kissing her on the cheek.
“You get your paw out of the snare, now, Jack Slidell,” Mama Lucky said. “Then, keep your pants with a crease and your collar turned down, you hear.” To Caroline, she said, “Trouble with that boy, he wanted to get rich. And, in this world, there’s only two ways to make a fortune: Be born rich or be born brutal. Jack Slidell was neither. Never will be.”
CHAPTER NINE
1
As Jack and Caroline walked away from the red light district, Caroline glanced at Jack, looking at him in a new way.
“How come the police couldn’t get the information?” she asked. “If you know who to ask, why don’t they?”
“They know who,” Jack said. “But not how.”
“Mama Lucky reminds me of Santa Claus,” Caroline said.
“Yeah,” Jack said, “if Santa came down the chimney carrying a chain saw.”
A weathered blue-and-white historical marker at the beginning of the long drive up to Gainsvoort Gardens declared that Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands had once stayed there. Not, presumably, as a patient. Or resident, as the facility called its clients. In the distance, they heard a low roll of thunder.
The main house was a thirty-six-room castle with turrets, many chimneys, and a wraparound porch that gave it the look of an ocean liner aground on a rise, like a Catskill Noah’s Ark. The house had been built in the 1880s by Wallace Beach, a tin magnate, for his daughter and her new husband, an English lord who thought he was broke and found out six months after the wedding that he’d inherited a fortune from some collateral relative. Everyone assumed he’d married for money and, newly rich, would vanish. He had married for money, but discovered he enjoyed his pug-nosed bride’s sense of humor. They went off together to live on some property in Scotland, and Beach’s castle was closed up for ten years before it was sold to the first of a series of not-rich-enough owners, all of whom unloaded the pile after a couple of winters. Expensive to heat, more expensive to keep up the grounds. In the 1930s, the place was boarded up. Shingles flaked from the roof. Windows cracked. Mice nested in mattresses. Bats hung from the ceiling of the baronial dining room. Pipes burst and wa
ter cascaded down the grand staircase. For generations, in winter, the steep, sloping lawn in front of the abandoned house became a favorite spot for sledding. As night fell, the packed snow went from blue to purple to black. The moon reflecting on the icy surface gave the estate a fairy-tale look. Lights sometimes flickered from the broken windows as teenagers wandered through the echoing rooms, their flashlights searching out corners in which to make out.
In the late-1960s, Billy Livingston, a descendent of one of the oldest and richest Hudson River families, bought the Beach Castle, cleaned and repaired half a dozen rooms, and used it as a commune until a girl on LSD took a wedge of pizza from the cardboard box in which it had been delivered and, convinced an ever-thinning thread of cheese connected her slice to the box no matter how far away she walked, wandered up stairs and down corridors until in an attic room she stepped on a rotten floor board and plunged into a third-floor bathroom, breaking her neck.
Livingston abandoned the commune and the castle, which six years later was bought by some Boston investors who gutted and renovated the place and turned it into Gainsvoort Gardens, a very expensive retirement facility. They kept the high ceilings, the half-dozen unbroken Tiffany glass runners in the living room windows, and the massive fireplaces, big enough to stand in. But building fires in the fireplaces was forbidden.
A nurse in a crisp white uniform padded down a hall, leading Jack and Caroline past half-open doors, behind which ancient men and women lay in beds with half-opened mouths, dying fish.
“This late, visits are against the rules,” said the nurse, one of Jack’s old high school friends. “But these old ones, they don’t sleep much. It’ll help him pass the time.”
As she moved, the starched cloth of her uniform made a sound like ripping paper.
At a door, she stopped.
“He’s in here,” she said.
Jack and Caroline went into the small room. In the hospital bed, a wizened man was propped on pillows, wide awake. Lafayette King.
“Mr. King?” Jack said.
King blinked at Jack.
“My name’s Jack Slidell,” Jack said.
“I’m ninety-six years old,” King said. “July 6th.”