Jimmy had certainly delivered the girl I’d asked for.
“What you want him for?” Seraphina asked.
“He hired me to do a job and then didn’t pay me.”
“Oh. I see.”
“I went to a bar looking for this Ambrose guy and a big white dude started a fight with me. I gave him better’n he gave me, but I still need to find this man.”
“Where he hit you?” she asked.
I gestured at the left side of my jaw.
The child leaned over and touched my cheek with four fingers. My heart started thumping. I could feel my nostrils widen.
“Skin is hot but it ain’t swole,” she said.
The last time I’d had sex was about three months before, the night Katrina came back. There was nothing enjoyable about that evening. I had to take a pill to make it. It was the kind of pill that made you hard but not happy. I would have liked to get naked with Seraphina. She was young and I’d already paid for it. I wanted her and there would have been nothing wrong with it, at least not that time. But sex with that child would have been the first step away from the man I intended to be.
“You have a boyfriend, Seraphina?”
“Of course I do.”
“You and him know a lotta people in the clubs and stuff?”
“Yeah?”
“You see,” I said, “I think that this guy I’m lookin’ for might know people. You know, dealers and gamblers, like that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I was wonderin’ if maybe there was somebody somewhere who might know a lot of what’s goin’ on with the gamblers and hustlers around here.”
I was being very careful. Seraphina was a young prostitute. She might not have even been legal. She was still sensitive and therefore, very possibly, on the alert for insults. I couldn’t mention pimps or whores, but I needed a whore’s connections.
“There’s Big Mouth Jones down at Tinker’s Bar and Grill,” she said. “He know ev’rybody, an’ he got big mouth, too.”
“Black guy?”
“Uh-huh. But you better not get in any fight wit’ him. He got a crew down there kill a man just like that.”
I smiled as I almost always do when people suggest that they or someone else might kill me.
“You ain’t scared?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“You want me to take off my clothes?”
“Truth is, Seraphina, when a man is making love to a woman, he’s also makin’ love to himself.”
“What do that mean?” she asked with barely a sneer.
“That he imagines himself powerful and manly next to her beauty.”
“So?”
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“You are beautiful. I can see that. But I’m old and chubby, not like some young man that a woman like you would want to see naked and straining.”
“How you know what I wanna see?”
“Is your boyfriend strong and well built?”
“Yeah.”
“And do you like that?”
“Yeah,” she said with a slight smile. “But that don’t mean nuthin’. I might like you anyway.”
“It’s kind of you to say, child. But I know better than to embarrass myself like that.”
“I could make you feel good.” She took my hand.
The words made me dizzy. My tongue went dry.
“You breathin’ hard, Mr. Carter,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t be with you, girl.” I pulled away, gently.
“If you afraida disease I could just use my hands.”
“I’m more afraida you than I am of any bug.”
“Me? I’m just a girl.”
I stood up.
“Thank you, Seraphina. You’ve been a lot of help.”
I handed her a fifty-dollar tip, then took her by the wrist to bring her to her feet. She put her hands flat against my chest and I flinched.
“You haven’t been with a woman in a long time, huh?” she said. “It’s okay, you know. Like ridin’ a bicycle. You don’t have to win no race to have a good time.”
She paused a moment to see if I had changed my mind. Seeing that I hadn’t she kissed me on the cheek, opened the door, and walked away.
If I was another kind of man I might have cried.
AFTER MY SECOND SHOWER I sat down to the phone book, which was both residential and yellow pages combined into one. It was nine years old but that didn’t matter.
I looked up Ambrose Thurman. He wasn’t listed. I turned to the yellow pages and searched for Tinker’s Bar and Grill under restaurants. It was right there on South Street, not six blocks away. My watch said 10:37. Big Mouth would probably‹ woear be holding court. Maybe, if I was lucky, Seraphina would show up after a while. She was right—I hadn’t been with a woman in a long time. I needed some kind of release.
The idea of going to the bar oppressed me. Finding Thurman might cause more trouble than it settled; not finding him would leave me without a paddle.
My resistance to the only avenue open to me, combined with the hope of seeing the young Seraphina again, caused a line of thought that brought me back to the baseless vanity of Ambrose Thurman. I turned to the yellow pages’ section of private investigators. Many of them had ads. Some of these sported illustrations; a few had photographs. Norman Fell’s pear-shaped face was smiling from the page just as it beamed off the yellow card I had in my pocket.
Ê€„
17
You got a screwdriver?” I called into Jimmy’s clear cage.
“Supposed to stay here in case the porter has to use it,” he replied, not bothering to rise from the swivel stool.
“You have a porter?”
“I’m the porter,” he said.
“I just wanna borrow it. Twenty bucks?”
He turned his profile to me, opened a short door in the wall, and rummaged around until he came out with a screwdriver that had a translucent yellow plastic handle. It was eighteen inches long with a blue metal shaft that was a good eighth of an inch thick.
We traded cash for tool and I went out into the Albany night.
That was a standard round after eleven.
DECKER AVENUE WAS a drab block of old-fashioned brick office buildings. There were six streetlamps but only two of them worked. The traffic was sporadic and not one pedestrian passed by in the seventeen minutes I sat there.
The label with Norman Fell’s buzzer next to it said that he was on the third floor: 3E.
I went around back, down a slender concrete pathway between Fell’s building and the one next to it. The lock on the back door was reinforced with a thick metal guard but the entrance to the basement, five steps down, might have been blown open by a strong wind. I jimmied the lock and made my way up the back utility stairs.
Norman Fell’s door was next to the exit. There was no light shining under the crack. I checked the rest of the offices down the hall. They were all lifeless and dark.
A knock on Fell’s door brought no answer.
His lock gave me more trouble than the one downstairs, but nothing challenging.
His rooms were at the back of the building, so I chanced turning on the light.
It was a big room with a pine desk set in the exact center. There were bookcases behind and to the right of the blond desk, and a solitary green metal file cabinet to the left, next to a broad oak door. The door opened onto a huge white tile bathroom that had a big, footed iron bathtub standing upon what could only be called a dais, ten inches or so above the floor. It was an odd design. The building had always been for offices but maybe, I thought, the man who drew up the plans for this suite also had lived here.
I gave up my architectural conjectures and got down to the business at hand.
I was already wearing cotton gloves, had been since before I got out of my car.
There were two deep file drawers. But they were useless. Not in any kind of order, there were mostl
y printed forms, manuals, and things like tools and wires in the hanging folders. I went through everything, looking for some reference to the names I knew. No Frank Tork or Roger Brown, no Leonid Trotter McGill for that matter; nothing about the case, or any other job, that I could see.
The desk revealed little more than a pair of small shoes that sat under it. Norman Fell (aka Ambrose Thurman) didn’t keep information written down. There was no computer, or even a typewriter, in evidence. The only thing he had was a recent phone bill on the desk and a handwritten bookkeeping ledger in a locked bottom drawer. I tore out ledger sheets as far back as a month before Fell had gotten in touch with me, then pocketed them along with the phone bill.
“A MAN’S BOOKCASE will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him,” my father had told me more than once. “A business-man has business books and a dreamer has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.”
I don’t know where my father got all that stuff. He was raised just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, born to parents who could neither read nor write. He said that he became a revolutionary at the age of thirteen when his parents were being evicted from their sharecropper’s hovel and one of the white marshals spit on his mother. Soon after that he changed his name from Clarence to Tolstoy.
For all his humble beginnings my father was smart. But I think that even he would have been amazed at what Fell’s library had to say.
There were volumes in Greek and Spanish, English and French; old books of poetry shoved up right next to modern popular novels. Many had been shelved upside down and they covered every obscure subject under the sun. There was a Chinese tome that, from the illustrations, I assumed was about sewing machine repair. There were other manuals and textbooks along with sultry potboilers and children’s fairy tales.
In the end I “">Iultdecided that Fell must be functionally illiterate, though he loved the idea of reading and wanted to be seen as smart. That’s why there was no casework in his files, no computer, not one sentence anywhere written by his hand. I guess he knew his numbers well enough to write them down along with codes and simple names that he probably transcribed or worked out phonetically.
I’d have to come after Fell in a more straightforward fashion.
I would either wait in my car outside or stay where I was, seated behind his desk, to greet him when he showed up in the morning.
He wouldn’t want to call the police any more than I did. The problem was that he might be armed and shoot me where I sat. It was always better to come up behind your enemy. My father never told me that, but I learned it early.
Deciding on discretion over comfort, I went to the toilet to relieve myself before going back to the red SUV. I could sleep in the backseat and wake up with the sun. It had been a while since I had done anything like that.
Standing at the high commode, I sniffed at a sour tickle way back in my nasal passage.
I knew that tickle.
The man who had introduced himself to me as Ambrose Thurman was crushed into the bottom of the deep iron tub, eyes wide and lips drawn back over the small rounded teeth. The fingers of his left hand had all been broken—probably by a single blow. I couldn’t tell if he died from strangulation or the broken neck, but there was no question that he had died violently. He was wearing a dark-green suit with a checkered black-and-red vest. His socks bore holes at the big toe of either foot. I considered searching him but thought better of it.
I gazed into his face for a good long time before deciding he had nothing to say.
JIMMY WAS STILL on his stool when I got back to the Gray Wolf a few minutes before two. I returned the screwdriver and he set the elevator to take me to the fourth floor of the landlocked cruise ship.
I didn’t sleep that night, knowing for certain there’d be plenty time enough for rest when I was dead.
Ê€„
18
I got off on the seventy-second floor of the Tesla Building four minutes past eight o’clock the next morning. The leftover nervousness from the flight was nothing compared to the growing possibility of spending a couple of decades behind bars. Men were dying and all I had gotten out of it was a paltry wad of cash.
I found the seven locks that secured the outer office undone and the door ajar. I hovered in the hall a full thirty seconds, wondering if I should turn around and run to Brazil. I had one offshore account that was inviolable, and Twill could secret himself, and his mother if she wanted to come, down to Mexico for a rendezvous . . .
It was the thought of Twill that anchored me that morning. I had to stay around long enough to save him from his own nature.
The locks weren’t broken so I pushed the door and walked in quickly.
Carson Kitteridge stood up from one of the golden chairs usually inhabited by phantoms visiting my non-existent secretary.
“Lieutenant,” I said.
The cop smiled but there was no mirth in his eye.
In his late forties, Kitteridge was short and balding, slim and very white—pale. His eyes were gray, as was his suit and machine-washable tie.
“LT,” he replied.
We’d known each other nearly twenty years and not once had we shaken hands.
“How can I help you?” I said, refusing to ask how he got in.
“Just stopping by.”
“What? You were investigating some kinda buggery on the fifty-fifth floor and said, ‘Hey, why don’t I drop in on old Leonid?’” By this time I was entering the combination to my inner door.
“Something like that,” he said.
We walked down the aisle of empty cubicles that led to my office.
“Why you got such a big place?” Carson asked as we went. “You never had anybody work for you in all these years.”
“It’s my imagination,” I said, moving behind the desk.
“What is?”
“My imagination,” I said again. “It fills up all these rooms. It’s the only way I can think.”
“Fatheaded, huh?”
Sometimes the policeman and I could go on like that for half an hour or more. We kidded each other to hide our hands. In reality I didn’t like him and he cared even less for me. But we were stuck with each other like coworkers on an assembly line. I’d punch out a hole in an iron plate and he’d sand down the edges, complaining that he had to work at all.
I don’t know how the NYPD works exactly, maybe nobody really does, but Kitteridge was on a list that got lit up every time the cops got a whiff of me. Usually when he appeared my name had been whispered and a few dollars had changed hands, or maybe a surveillance tape had caught my profile coming out of some bad guy’s lair. We hadn’t seen each other much since I’d been trying to straighten out, but once every few months or so he’d drop by just to let me know that I was still on their radar.
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For him to show up so soon after Frank Tork and Norman Fell had been murdered could not be a coincidence.
“I got work to do, Detective,” I said, unable to continue our banter. “What is it you want?”
“Can you fix the Lotto?”
With all the bile between us, Carson Kitteridge could still make me laugh.
“Naw, man. But I could score you enough crank to make you feel like you won it.”
His grin downgraded into a smile, and then that was gone.
“I don’t believe in coincidence, LT,” he said, echoing my own thoughts.
“Neither me.” I was hoping that he had gotten word on me going to visit Tork in jail. I was willing to give up Fell’s pseudonym. But if they had something on me up in Albany, things might get close.
The policeman sat back in the blue and chrome visitor’s chair. He put his elbows on the arms and laced his fingers. His gray eyes were like a hazy afternoon sky, they were so li
ght and distant.
“You remember me once asking you if you knew a fella named Arnold DuBois?” he asked.
Fear blossomed in my lungs.
“No.”
“You remember. There was that guy, Timmons I think his name was. Second-story man, lived across the street from a jewelry store got burglarized. We found some of the ice in his freezer. But the robbery division was sure it was some other guy. Pete the Finn. You remember. This DuBois guy was in Timmons’s building just the day before the tip came down. Said he was looking for clients.”
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