I lifted my head to get a better look but then the dizziness from seven or maybe eleven shots of brandy pushed me down into unconsciousness.
Ê€„
12
I didn’t sleep long. Frank Tork kept entering my dreams, asking me for twenty dollars or maybe a lifeline.
“I ain’t got no idea where B-Brain is, man,” he’d said in the visitor’s cubicle, and also in the dream. “Georgie Girl said that she seen ’im that one time but he could be dead for all I know.”
That phrase roused me at 5:34. My body wanted either to be sick or allowed to return to sleep—I didn’t give in to either urge.
AN ICE-COLD SHOWER numbers among the most painful experiences I’ve ever willingly experienced, but it does wonders for hangovers and fear. I came out of the stall shivering like a wet dog and ready for the hunt.
ON BROADWAY AT Ninety-first at a few minutes shy of seven I was smoking Ambrose Thurman’s last cigarette and reading about Frank Tork’s demise. He didn’t make the New York Times, or even the Daily News, but they had Frankie on page eight of the Post.
Bail was filed in the early afternoon through an online system from a bail bondsman in the Bronx. Along with the article there was a shadowy digital picture of a man with a wide-brimmed hat taken from above. This allegedly bearded man paid ten percent of Frank’s bail in cash: thirty-seven hundred, fifty-nine dollars, and thirty-two cents, including fees.
The body was found at ten in the evening (three hours and twenty-two minutes after his release) by a homeless woman rummaging through trash cans in an alleyway off of Maiden Lane. The young man was badly beaten before being strangled. The man in the hat had given the name Alan Rogers. He was required to show a valid ID with a picture, but the system, the bondsman said, had somehow broken down; either that or the benefactor had used a fake ID.
I stopped by the Coffee Nook on Eighty-first to get some caffeine. I bought a new pack of Camels on the way there. After my fifth cup I pulled out my wallet and rooted around, coming up with the card that Ambrose Thurman had given me the first time we met.
It was a yellow card with a high gloss, a little smaller than regulation size. There, smiling brightly, was Thurman’s pear-shaped mug. It was a younger Ambrose, an Ambrose with a little more hair and a little less sag. Vain men irritate me.
I noticed for the first time that the address given was a post office box. It was printed in blocky address fashion in exceptionally small characters.
Using the pink phone I’d gotten from Bug I called Thurman’s number—it was no longer valid. Next I tried Albany information. There was no Ambrose Thurman listed in the city, either as a residence or a business. The same was true for the outlying areas.
No Ambrose Thurman had ever been registered at the Crenshaw Hotel. I tried to sweet-talk the operator into remembering the chubby guy in the three-piece suit but she told me that they didn’t give out information on their guests.
I called Roger Brown’s office and got the automatic system. It guided me to the young man’s answering machine, but I didn’t leave a message.
Thurman had played me like a drum. It was my fault. I could feel that there was something wrong in looking for those four men. Who paid that kind of money to find drug add k filt.icts and low-class career criminals? Who would take on a job like that? Me. And I did it just to pay last month’s bills.
I WALKED DOWN Broadway until getting to Forty-second Street and then cut over to Sixth. The police could find out about my visit to Tork in the Tombs. They could wonder, but there was nothing they could prove. The guy who bailed Frank out was white. I might get questioned but they couldn’t pin anything on me.
I was clean in the eyes of the law, but the problem was that I had promised myself not to do this kind of work anymore. I had been made to betray my pledge by a man who had disappeared completely.
It was a nice touch showing me a business card with a picture on it. That way I felt that he’d given me a way to contact him if I ever needed it. It was a trick that I might have used myself if I were doing work in another city.
I called Roger’s office again.
“Berg, Lewis & Takayama,” a young woman’s bright voice sang.
“Roger Brown, please.”
The phone went silent as if a mute button had been pressed and then, out of electronic nowhere, a young man’s voice said, “Mr. Brown’s line.”
“Arnold DuBois for him,” I said.
“Mr. Brown isn’t in at the moment, Mr. DuBois. Would you like his answering machine?”
“Um . . . wow. He’s not in?”
“No, sir.”
“Roger told me that he always got in to work early.” He hadn’t told me any such thing but it was possible that a kid from the hood worked harder to make sure that he kept up with the rest.
“That’s right. He’s usually here by seven-thirty, but not today. I guess he had a meeting or something.”
“Really?” I said putting feeling into my voice. “Did he have a meeting scheduled? I mean, I’m not trying to get into his business but I had a morning phone conference set up with him from last night.”
“I don’t have anything written down,” the helpful boy said. “Maybe he forgot.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Have him call me, will you?”
“What’s the number?”
“He has it.”
WALKING USUALLY HELPS me work out difficult problems, but that day nothing came. I was in my office by 8:45, but Frankie Tork was still dead and Roger Brown unaccounted for. Ambrose Thurman had vanished, k ha I as had my new leaf.
I gave it another hour, searching the Internet for Ambrose Thurman, Albany detective, while calling Roger’s office twice more. Once I tried to disguise my voice but I think Bobby, his assistant, knew it was me.
Finally I called Zephyra Ximenez on my dedicated “800” line. Zephyra was an exotic young woman—Dominican mother, Moroccan father—who lived somewhere in Queens. I met her one night at the Naked Ear. She was at the bar, waiting for her girlfriends. Zephyra was tall and coal-colored. Her face wasn’t exactly beautiful but it certainly put pretty to shame. I’d had a few drinks and tried to convince her to ditch her friends and have dinner with me. She said no but kept talking.
Zephyra told me that she was a TCPA, a telephonic and computer personal assistant.
“What’s that?”
“I try to maintain ten to twelve clients,” she said, “who need services I can provide pretty much exclusively over the phone and Internet. I make reservations, answer calls, order anything from takeout to a new washer-dryer, or take care of bookkeeping and data-file maintenance. I charge fifteen hundred a month, plus expenses, and I’m available on a twenty-four hour basis in case of emergencies.”
“What if somebody were to call you right now?” I asked.
“I have a cell phone and an OQO minicomputer in my purse,” she said. “It’s my office away from the office.”
“Wow.”
“What do you do?”
I told the young woman a little about my services.
“I never had a private dick before,” she said. I think I might have blushed a little. “Do you need someone like me?”
“ZEPHYRA,” SHE ANSWERED on the third ring. “Leonid Mr. McGill’s office.”
“Hey, Z.”
“Oh, hi, Mr. McGill. What can I do for you?”
“I need a flight to Albany by mid-afternoon. Sooner if you can do it.”
“Only puddle jumpers this time of day,” she said in a friendly tone. “You told me you had claustrophobia issues.”
“You haven’t heard from issues.”
“I see.” There was a pause, and then she said. “I can get you on a flight from LaGuardia at three sixteen.”
“Book it,” I said.
“You have some voice mail on the machine here,” kach="1she said before I could hang up.
For her other clients Zephyra listened to the messages, typed them up, and delivered them as a kind of ru
nning narrative of their phone life. We decided rather early on that she should probably leave my messages alone, that she shouldn’t even listen unless I asked her to.
“I’ll get to ’em later.”
“Do you need a limo to the airport?” she asked.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Your usual?”
“No. I don’t need Hush for something so simple. Anybody cheap’ll do.”
“Answer your phone while you’re gone?”
“Might as well.” When people spoke to an actual person they were less likely to say something incriminating. “I’ll forward the calls from the office and the cell.”
Getting off the phone, I felt like I needed another cold shower. Hell, I needed a dip in the Arctic Ocean.
Ê€„
13
A dinged-up dark-green Lincoln limo met me in front of the Tesla Building at 1:47. As the young Russian driver wound his way slowly toward the Midtown Tunnel, I stared through my reflection, wondering why I couldn’t do right. This was not wallowing in self-pity. I didn’t feel guilty—not exactly. I felt bad that Tork had died, and to some degree I felt responsible, but mostly I had the sensation of slipping further down into the sandpit of my own sins.
While I sat there in the long queue, waiting to get into the tunnel, Katrina and the kids entered my reverie. Not for the first time I thought that if it wasn’t for them I could cut all ties and move to Hawaii with Aura. There she would get into real estate, and I might find a job selling surfboards, or training young amateur boxers.
The reason I kept veering off course was New York and the people who knew me there. Tony the Suit and dozens of others like him had my name and number. For a hundred-dollar bill or a chit or to pay off some minor favor they’d pass that number to a man like Thurman. And then that man would come to me, and what could I do? I had to make a living. I couldn’t blame the kids for their parentage. I couldn’t even blame Katrina for her desire to be loved in a way I didn’t, I couldn’t, understand.
And, anyway, there was the question of Roger Brown. Roger had climbed out of the sandpit. His mother had stuck with him and given him a chance. In her last dying months she propelled him to safety. The fear in his voice should have made me keep his whereabouts a secret. There was a chance that he was still alive, and even though I would have been better served to keep my head down I had to go to Albany because Albany and a match-book were the only clues I had.
I WAS SE n/diLECTED for extra security measures at the airport checkpoint and studied by a series of dogs, machines, and Homeland Security experts with six weeks’ training. They sniffed me for bombs and scanned for metals, they even frisked me; probably because of something in my attitude. Maybe they could sense the rage in me. I don’t know.
DISTRACTED AS I WAS by the security search I didn’t worry about the plane until they walked us out on the tarmac and I had to duck my head to enter the cabin. My seat was a single on the left side of the aisle and my butt was wider than the armrests designed to contain it. The arcing wall felt like it was closing in and there seemed to be too many people in the small compartment. I counted seventeen.
There were propellers on the wings.
The pilot slid the plastic partition open and turned his handsome gray head to address us.
“It’s a short flight today, folks,” he said. “I’m going to have Marie, your flight attendant, strap herself in because it’s gonna be choppy for a hundred and seven out of the eighty-two minutes we’ll be in the air.”
The stew, a forty-something bottle blonde with a penchant for exercise but not for dinner, smiled at us in a nauseated sort of way. I reached to undo the buckle of my seat belt but Marie closed the hatchlike door and folded her seat down. As she attached her safety belt, crossing her heart with thick nylon straps, I took in a deep breath and forgot how to let it out. I was no longer concerned with Frank Tork or Roger Brown, Ambrose Thurman or Tony the Suit. While the plane was taxiing out toward the runway I forgot about my conviction that Death would not come at me from someplace I expected.
I closed my eyes and sought a place of calm in my soul. I found it for a moment telling myself that it couldn’t be so bad, that this flight was a commonplace event that passed without incident thousands of times around the world every day.
I was wrong.
There was nothing ordinary about that flight. From the moment we took off the airship was buffeted like a dead leaf in white water. My head struck the window and only the seat belt prevented me from bouncing across the cabin. I kept my eyes closed but that wasn’t much help. The plane veered left and then suddenly went right. I knew that couldn’t have been the pilot’s intention. We bounced and shook for what seemed like a very long time, but when I peeked at my watch I saw that we were only nine minutes into the flight.
I looked around the cabin, expecting to see terror in the eyes of the other passengers. I was wrong there, too. Two ladies were having what seemed like a pleasant conversation. One guy was reading his newspaper, and the man next to him was sleeping.
The world outside my window was the same blue of the sky in my dream. For some reason the memory of the nightmare partially negated the terror of the flight.
At some point I was further distracted from my fear when an errant thought entered my mind. I remembere sd. ifyd that I didn’t even know what Roger Brown looked like. I had maybe doomed a man without ever seeing his face.
The flight banged on like an old truck without shock absorbers making its way down a rutted country road. But the tumult and roar receded in my mind. I’d never been in the armed forces, but I had been through a war or two. This ride, I came to feel, was little more than one of my cold showers, a prelude to a weeklong day of adversities. I grinned at the fear roiling inside me. I didn’t owe it anything but my company.
Ê€„
14
As soon as I got off the plane my hands began to tremble. The fear that I’d held down blossomed, forcing me to walk slowly so as not to stumble. It was a small airport with a magazine rack and a hot dog stand but it felt like nirvana to me.
Zephyra had reserved a car at the best rental service. Somehow she had pooled the various credit-card air miles and rent-a-car points of all her clients so that we usually got good deals on flights, rentals, and even some hotels.
A pleasant young man with pimples and big teeth gave me a map and the keys to a downsized red SUV. I sat in the driver’s seat for a long time, studying the city streets. I’d been to Albany many times before because that’s the state capital and a large percentage of your politicians are crooks. I’d done cover-ups and smears across the board up there but I didn’t know the city the way I knew New York, so I took the time to refamiliarize myself with the general lay of the town.
The car radio was playing “Smooth Operator” by Sade when I turned my attention from map to match-book. It was a wonder to me that with all the searching by security experts they couldn’t come up with a book of matches. Luck, more than anything else, is what saved you up in the air.
Oddfellows Pub, the matchbook’s advertiser, was on the north side of town. It seemed like a straightforward deal: I’d go to the bar, flash Ambrose’s card along with a story, and they would have some memory, allowing me to get that much closer to this pretender’s throat. But there again I was mistaken.
That stretch of North Pearl Street was lined with businesses that were slowly being crushed by mall culture. There was OK Hardware with its cracked glass door held in place by reinforcing wire, a dowdy chain convenience store, two dress shops, some squat brick office buildings, and Oddfellows Pub. The bar had a plaster façade pretending to be bricks that were too red and mortar that was toothpaste white. There was a small window with a blue-and-red neon beer stein that shivered as if it wanted to complete the circuit of some long forgotten animation. The front door had a regular knob on it, making it seem as if you were entering a private residence rather than a place of business; that was my first misgiving.
There was no Confederate flag hanging over the bar, but then again, neither was there any love lost in the eyes of the patrons. They became aware of me entering their dingy domain the way an owl suddenly no vthetices a snake moving in the grass below. The men, all of them white, had stopped their drinking and conversation to fix me on the pinboards of their minds. I counted eleven, including the bartender, and if it hadn’t been a matter of life and death I would have turned around and walked out immediately.
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