“It’s my sentence,” I said. “It’s what I owe.”
“You don’t love her.”
“That’s what makes it a punishment.”
“She doesn’t care about you.”
“But I’m the evil she’s familiar with,” I said. “I’m the guy on the ground floor, so she knows I can’t let her down.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Aura said. “You’re a good man, and even if you weren’t, everyone should have some happiness in their lives.”
I stood up and handed her an envelope with thirty-seven hundred dollars in it: two months’ rent plus a hundred-dollar late fee.
Taking the money from me, she said, “I want you back.”
“Thanks for the coffee, Aura. It means a lot to me.”
Ê€„
10
I was behind my desk when the buzzer to the front door sounded. The image on the monitor in my desk drawer was confirmation of the rightness of my decision to stay out of Aura’s life.
Tony “The Suit” Towers was slouching there, loitering in the hall the same way he hung out on the stoops of Hell’s Kitchen when that area of Manhattan lived up to its name.
I made my way to the front door and opened up for the middle-management hood.
He was a tall white man of indeterminate middle age. Slim and green-eyed, Tony professed to own two hundred and forty-eight suits, and a different pair of shoes for each one. These outfits weren’t very fine or expensive, but few people ever saw him wear the same ensemble twice.
That morning he had on sky-blue rags with a black shirt and yellow tie. His shoes were bone-colored, his short-brimmed hat navy. When he saw me he dropped the cigarette he was smoking and crushed it underfoot.
His moderately straight teeth were tar stained and uninviting.
“Hello, LT,” he said. There was a torn quality to the habitual criminal’s voice, an unpleasant gruffness.
“Tone.”
It bothered me most that Towers came alone to my door. He usually traveled with two leg breakers named Lucas and Pittman. If they had come along I would have known that it was business as usual: a collection or maybe a simple interrogation. When Tony moved alone he was a shark on the hunt and that meant there was already blood in the water.
We shook hands and smiled politely.
I considered asking him his business right there in the hall, telling him without uttering the words that he was no longer welcome in my world. But pushing Tony Towers away would be like sweeping a rattlesnake under the bed before retiring. He wasn’t in the top echelon of the New York underworld, but since I had vacated my position as a PI for the various mobs and crews I had no natural defenses against men like him.
So I backed away, allowing him entrée. Once he was in I trundled back toward my office. Tony followed close behind. I barely cringed. After all, a bullet in the back of the head was probably t Vackhe best way to leave this world.
Tony didn’t shoot me, though. He followed me into my office and took a seat in the blue client’s chair, without an invitation.
As I made it around to my desk chair Tony was already conducting business.
“I got a problem, LT. It’s the kinda thing you’re good at, too.”
Sitting down was a good thing. It left me with nothing to do but pay close attention to the criminal sitting there before me.
Tony had a long face, and now that he’d doffed his hat you could see the double spikes of his receding hairline. He placed a cigarette between his lips, lit a match, and then asked, “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Burn away,” I replied.
My unwelcome guest didn’t like the answer but he lit his menthol and inhaled deeply.
“So I got this problem—”
“I’m not in the life anymore, Tony,” I said, cutting him off. “I don’t walk that side of the street.”
“That’s what they say. Benny told me that you’re a straight arrow now. You know what I told Benny?”
I sighed.
“I told Benny,” The Suit continued, “that LT knows that he’s a little fish in a big ocean. I told him that the only little fishes that survive are the ones eat the parasites off from where the big ones can’t reach.”
Tony smiled, showing off his soiled teeth.
“I’m out, man,” I said.
The smile dried up, which was both a relief and a worry.
“Don’t get all upset,” he said. “All I want from you is some legitimate private-detective work, not no criminal activity.”
Tony had lived so long because he was crafty if not smart. What he needed was more important than putting me in my place. I didn’t have the juice to turn down a legitimate request. If I refused to hear him out he would have to send Lucas and Pittman to talk to me.
“Let’s hear it,” I said.
The smile returned and Tony leaned forward in the chrome-and-cobalt-vinyl chair.
“There’s this guy I’m lookin’ for.”
“What guy?”
“A Mann.”
“What man?”
“That’s his name. A Mann.”
“What’s the A stand for?”
“No,” Tony said, waving his cigarette around. “His father named him A because he always wanted him to be at the head of the line.”
“But the line goes in alphabetical order by the last name,” I said consciously keeping my hands from becoming fists.
“His old man was a go-getter but nobody ever said he was smart.”
I wanted a cigarette but worried that lighting up would show Tony that I was nervous. So I sat back and stared.
“I need to find Mann,” Tony said.
“What for?”
“To talk to him.”
“About what?”
“That’s my business,” the mobster said, an edge in his raspy voice, smoke rising up above his head.
“If it’s your business, then you go find him.” It struck me then that smoking Tony and his ilk were the fires that drove my dreams.
“What’s wrong with you, LT?” he asked. “I’m willing to pay you to find a missing person. That’s all. No cop could brace you over that.”
“I’m not lookin’ for somebody unless I know why, Tony. I’m just not doin’ it. You got some problem with this guy, then go out and settle it. I’m not on your payroll.”
“I could send Lucas and Pitts over here to convince you,” he said.
“Send ’em, then.”
“Just ’cause you’re friends with Hush don’t mean you can disrespect me, LT.”
That was Tony’s gauntlet. Uttering Hush’s name meant that he was serious. Everybody who was anybody in our world knew that the ex-assassin and I were acquainted. Just mentioning Hush sent serious men on long-term sabbaticals.
“Tell me why you want to see this guy or get outta here,” I said.
The gangster made a motion like he was going to crush his cigarette out on my desk. If he followed through I would have had to do something; neither of us wanted that.
Tony dropped the butt on the floor and stepped on it.
“Eight, nine years ago I had a small job with the button and cloth union,” he said, “handling disputes. The IRS is lookin’ into my [okininfinances from that time and they need records from back then. Mann was my personal accountant, provided by the union, and he’s the only one who’s got those records.”
“So you want the files?”
“I need to talk to the man himself,” Tony said. “The feds will want to interrogate me and I need to get up to speed. It’s been a long time.”
I didn’t believe a word of it but I couldn’t call him a liar straight out.
“So?” Tony asked.
“I got a full plate right now, Tone. There’s lotsa other PIs you could call.”
“I know you.”
“I’m busy.”
“Don’t make this a problem, LT. Find the guy for me. I swear to you it’s legit.”
Not for the first time d
id I think of my going straight like getting caught in an ant lion’s sand trap. I could get past Tony, maybe, but the more people I got mad the more likely I was to be taken down somewhere along the line. Every step I took upward, it seemed, brought me two rungs down.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“I could send Lucas and Pitts,” The Suit suggested again.
“I’ll think about that, too.”
“You want me to give you what I know?”
“I said I’ll think about it, Tony. Don’t press me.”
We were at an impasse. I wasn’t saying no but I wouldn’t say yes until I had a little time to consider my options. Tony saw all this.
“I’ll be calling,” he said.
Without another word he stood up and walked out of my office. I let a few minutes pass and then checked to make sure that he was gone. After that I got the .38 out of the old jeweler’s safe and made sure that it was clean and loaded.
Ê€„
11
One thing I’ve learned in fifty-three hard years of living is that there’s a different kind of death waiting for each and every one of us—each and every day of our lives. There’s drunk drivers behind the wheels of cars, subways, trains, planes, and boats; there’s banana peels, diseases and the cockeyed medicines that supposedly cure them; you got airborne viruses, indestructible microbes in the food you eat, jealous husbands and wives, and just plain bad luck.
I once knew a woman named Gert Longman. She had a place down in SoHo. I used to stay there sometimes. One morning, when she had alre ^ knady left for work, I was drinking coffee on her fire escape when a car came careening down the street. A mother and her young son were crossing and the car slammed into them. For a moment it seemed that the car was going to stop to help but then he, or she, stepped on the gas, ran over the bodies, and was gone. I climbed down the fire-escape ladder, but when I got to them I could see that they were dead, very much so. I called 911 and the ambulance came crying. The police arrived a few minutes later and I told them everything I could.
That was a tough day for me. I was so upset that I went home. Katrina had taken the kids to visit her parents in their Miami retirement condo, so I brooded alone in the apartment, worried about Death behind the wheel of a red car, rushing up on you out of nowhere and then hurrying away like a coward. I got in the bathtub with a book but forgot my drink on the sink. I got one foot on the floor and slipped, did a James Brown split, flew up in the air, and landed hard. My skull grazed the edge of the iron tub. And even though the pain in my head and hip was excruciating, I lay there laughing at myself. I had forgotten that Death was watching from all sides; that it comes at you from the place you least expect.
And so even though a gangster had me in his crosshairs, I still had a life to live just like every other doomed soul walking this earth, wondering if he could make it across the street.
I TOOK A bus downtown and got off three blocks from Tiny Bateman’s Charles Street address.
Charles was a narrow street of mostly four- to six-story apartment buildings built of brick and thickly coated with decades of city grime. Most had concrete stoops and little barred gates that led down to the basements. Tiny worked in an underground apartment half a block from Hudson Street. I descended the seven granite stairs and gave that week’s secret code. I felt like a fool with a magic decoder ring but Tiny would never answer unless I tattooed the right sequence on his buzzer.
After three minutes there was a loud click and I pushed open the reinforced steel door that was painted a fanciful shamrock green.
It was more of a compartment than an apartment. Each room, even the toilet, had worktables along the walls. These tables were crowded with wires and chip boards, computers without casings and cameras that looked like ceramic dolls, single-cigar humidors, a copy of The Old Man and the Sea, and other, less recognizable items. There were clusters of cell phones on the tables; some were wired to computers, others wired together. Tiny could do things with modern technology that even the inventors had not yet imagined. He supplied people like me with surveillance tools, hacked information, and general advice. Most of his work was done over the Internet but he allowed a select few into his dark and dusty domain.
I passed through three packed rooms before coming to Tiny’s office. This had once been the master bedroom of the subterranean abode. Huge light-gray, plastic-encased computers lined the southern wall. They were humming and throwing off a lot of heat, I was sure, but Tiny had enough air-conditioning running to freeze a penguin.
The fat young caramel-colored man was seated in a swive cted
“Hey, Tiny,” I said.
I didn’t sit because there was no visitor’s chair in Tiny’s laboratory. He once told me that he only ever had four visitors. I didn’t know the others’ names but it was a good bet that one of them was his father.
Simon Bateman had introduced me to his nerd-to-the-max son. I helped the elder Bateman once when he was in serious trouble, and he paid me by getting Bug to agree to work for me now and again.
“How’d that phone work out?” the thirty-something misanthrope asked in a high voice that seemed to want to get higher.
“Fine. Fine. I think I might need another couple soon.”
“The blue and pink ones near the front door,” he said.
Bug owned, and slept in, the apartment above his workplace. The people he did business with dropped their deliveries and picked up their orders in a sealed antechamber that he constructed up there. That way he didn’t have to see anyone for weeks at a time.
“I wanted to talk to you,” I said.
“ ’Bout what?”
I explained about the e-mails that Twill had sent and received.
“I’m worried about my son,” I said.
“Maybe he’s got a good reason,” Tiny said, removing the glasses that had earned him the insect nickname.
His eyes were small and his fleshy limbs chubby. He was both the technically smartest and physically unhealthiest person I’d ever known.
Tiny called himself a techno-anarchist. He believed that humanity would slowly separate into what he called monadic particulates : self-sufficient individuals who depended only upon technology and their relationship with it.
“I’m not gonna have my son out there murdering people, Tiny. No way.”
“Twill’s a smart kid,” the self-made scientist said. “Maybe he could get away with it.”
“I need to know everything about the person he’s communicating with,” I said, cutting off any further discussion.
Tiny drew up his shoulders and nodded, submitting to my demand. Despite his particulate aspirations, Tiny’s father was his lifeline, and Simon owed me big.
I WALKED FROM Tiny’s to a small bar on East Houston named the Naked Ear. It was a place where I used to drink with Gert before she was murdered. Back then it had been a neighborhood bar that sponsored poetry readings after ten but now it catered to twenty-something stockbrokers who made more in a week than I did in three months.
If I got there early enough I could get a corner table, away from the crowd of flirty children. There I would down my cognac, toasting a memory.
I DRANK UNTIL standing up was a serious challenge but still I managed to stumble out into the street and hail a cab.
That night I remembered to call Katrina, so she was in bed when I got home. I dropped my jacket in the hallway and kicked off my shoes in the dining room. On the way to our bedroom I looked in on Twill. I didn’t do that because he was my favorite (even though he is) but because Twill often went out at night when the rest of us were asleep. And when Twill was on the prowl there was no telling what mischief he’d get into.
But that evening he was sound asleep under a thin blanket. I smiled at him and staggered off to bed.
KATRINA WAS SNORING and the TV was on. My wife could not sleep without the drone of the television, so I dropped the rest of my clothes on the floor and rolled into my side of the bed.
I lay there in an alcoholic stupor, not really worried about anything. I had to do something about The Suit’s problem, and there was Twill to worry about. But there was nothing I could do right then and so I stared into the bright glare of the TV screen, hoping that sleep would ambush me.
“. . . murder in lower Manhattan this evening,” a woman reporter was saying. The image of a clean-cut and youngish black face appeared on the screen behind her. The face looked vaguely familiar. “Frank Tork, only hours out on bail from police custody, was found beaten and strangled to death in a small alley off of Maiden Lane this evening. Mr. Tork was awaiting sentencing on a burglary conviction. Police say that an investigation is under way . . .”
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