"Do I have to call an ambulance or something?" the sweet young thing asked.
"He can walk and talk all right," I said. "He might need an ice pack and a towel."
"Let his mother give him that," she said.
ON THE STREET I looked at the fancy phone that my self-titled telephonic and computer personal assistant (TCPA), Zephyra Ximenez, had provided me with. Breland Lewis had called four times.
I went into a chain coffee shop and ordered herbal tea. I needed something calming so that the violence coursing through me didn't overtake my good sense. Six sips after sitting at a small round table I inhaled deeply and sat back against the wall.
I missed smoking . . . very much. A cigarette calmed me down more than a quart of chamomile tea and thirty minutes of zazen sitting combined. But tobacco also cut down on my breath, and a good wind was a necessity in my line of work. The kind of situations I got into could run a regular guy ragged.
Twenty minutes or so after I bloodied Shad's face I entered my lawyer's ten digits.
"Breland Lewis, attorney at law," a mature female voice recited.
"It's Leonid, Shirley."
She didn't even say hello, just patched the call through.
"Leonid?"
"What's the big deal, Breland?"
"It's Sharkey. I think you better see him tonight, or at the latest by tomorrow morning."
"Why's that?"
"I need you to get some feel for what we're getting into. These new charges have a federal spin on them. He's expecting you."
"You told him about me?"
"I said your name was John Tooms. He thinks you work for me, that I'm sending you over to help out."
RON SHARKEY WAS PART of the past that I'd never shake.
The first time I heard of him was from a man named Bob Beam. Beam offered $7,500 to get his business partner in trouble with the law.
"All I need is for him to get fouled up on some charge that would make him have to come up with ten thousand dollars or so," he told me in my office--I was set up on an upper floor of the Chrysler Building at that time.
Beam was a squat, wide-faced white man. He smiled like a satrap sitting on a mound of silk pillows.
"Why?" I asked.
Beam was suggested to me by a technology smuggler named Frog Cornbluth. It was a valid reference but Frog's endorsement didn't come with any insurance and so I wanted specific details in case it blew up in my face.
"Ron and I own a company that imports chip boards," Beam told me. "The last time I did a run to Beijing I was told by a reliable source that a large company there was thinking of buying us out. That could mean millions. I'm still in deep debt from my last business and I'm only a junior partner in the company. My profit would be gone before I got the chance to count it."
"So how will getting Ron into trouble help that?" I wasn't outraged by the suggestion. This was business as usual for me.
"Just enough trouble to make him have to get a lawyer. I happen to know that money's tight for him. I'll offer to buy some of his stock at a cut-rate price and then enjoy the windfall when the company's sold to Wing Lee."
It turned out that Ron made regular trips to Toronto to visit a small computer company that they supplied. I wondered aloud if there might be a way to secrete an illegal substance in the toe of a shoe in his suitcase. Bob, smiling broadly, said that that would be no problem.
I had a friend who had a friend who worked a regular job in international airport security. A call was made and Ron Sharkey's bags were searched. The drug was discovered. But it was closer to a pound than the agreed-upon two grams.
Ron signed a power of attorney over to Irma, his wife. She attempted to make the deal with Bob but something about his financial status scotched the trade before the money made it into Irma's account.
Bob didn't tell me that he was having an affair with Ron's wife. Irma told Ron that she couldn't raise the money and that she didn't want to threaten their son's future by selling the only property they had--their house. Ron, being a good sort, said he understood and made a deal with the federal prosecutor to accept an eight-year sentence--with no chance for parole.
By that time I was out of the loop but I learned what happened after the fact.
Bob was hired by Wing Lee to stay on as president of the company, keeping his junior share. Irma divorced Ron and married Bob. Three years later Bob died of a heart attack and Irma remarried. This third husband embezzled from the thriving new chip-board company and ran down to Brazil.
In the meanwhile, Ron had been broken by a system that produced more hardened criminals than it ever took in. The one-time honest businessman had been the bitch of half a dozen lifelong criminals. The monotony and terror of incarceration had made him a drug addict. On the outside he became a low-level dealer and half-assed burglar.
After I saw the error of my ways I started keeping tabs on the innocents that I'd torn down. When Ron got out I hired Breland to go to him, give him a little money and his card. Whenever Ron got into trouble, Breland was there to represent him in court. I had spent over ten thousand dollars keeping Ron from going back to prison.
"WHAT'S HE INTO NOW?" I asked my lawyer as I sipped the lukewarm tea.
The headache was playing in the background like a Wagnerian intermezzo.
"I don't know all the details yet. I was busy and had one of my associates go down to bail him out. But it seems like he was caught driving a car with a small amount of drugs in his pocket and some serious guns in the trunk."
"Who would trust Sharkey with something like that?"
"He says that he found the car parked on the street with the key in the ignition. That he was going to pick up his girlfriend and drive to Cape Cod because she used to live out there."
"Did the car have any registration?"
"No. Nothing. It was NYPD that picked him up to begin with, but you can bet that the feds will be on the trail before too long. If he goes to court it will be long and drawn out. You'll spend a hundred thousand dollars and he'll go to prison anyway."
"Where is he now?"
"At his girlfriend's place, way over on Avenue C."
I took down the address and stayed in my seat, wondering if there would ever come a time when life would get easier and I could relax.
19
It was somewhere between five and six but the night had already come on under the domination of daylight savings. I definitely did not want to go home. And so a train ride down the East Side was called for.
I had never met nor had I even seen Ron Sharkey. I knew him by his picture and his predilections, his choices and mistakes. Ron Sharkey was a part of me, the man I had to save in order to look at myself in the mirror in the morning. He wasn't the only one, but he was certainly one of the squeakiest wheels.
WILMA SPYRES LIVED ON the top floor of an eight-story brick building that had been painted turquoise for no apparent reason. The buzzer was broken, as was the lock on the downstairs front door.
Some doors to apartments were open down the hall. TV shows, food smells, and voices assailed me as I made my way to the elevator. It was broken, too, and so I took the stairs. I ran across a young man and woman injecting each other with what I assumed to be some kind of opiate on the fourth-floor landing. She was dirty blond and probably white, while he had a New World Hispanic tint to his skin. They gauged me as either a threat or a mark and finally decided to ignore my passing.
Wilma's door was a dingy white. The paint upon it was thick and cracked. I imagined that every time it got too dirty the super just whitewashed over the filth.
"Who is it?" a woman said in answer to my knock.
"John Tooms. Breland Lewis sent me."
"Who?"
I repeated my words.
"Who is it?"
It felt as if I were in a Cheech and Chong skit.
"I'm here to speak to Ron Sharkey for his lawyer. My name is John Tooms."
Muted voices sounded from down the hall. Smells of cooking
rose from the floors below. Four different kinds of music came from a dozen sound systems of varying quality, and now and then traffic sounds broke through from the street below.
The door opened.
A woefully frail and slender woman stood there before me. She wasn't a day over twenty-nine but her brown hair was already shot through with gray. Her breath came in laconic gasps and her green eyes hadn't been clear in a very long time. For all that, you could see that she was once quite fetching.
"Can't you people leave him alone?" she asked without much conviction.
"I'm here to help Ron, Ms. Spyres. I'm working for his lawyer."
The skin of Wilma's face pulled back, creating a scowl intended to express her disdain for lawyers and their toadies. I couldn't, in all conscience, disagree. The wordless grimace told me that no one had ever wanted to help her, or any man she laid claim to.
"May I come in?"
"What do you want?"
"I just need to go over a few details with Ron. That's all."
Her shoulders shook. The scowl was trying to obliterate me.
"Will," a man said.
Ron Sharkey came up from behind her.
He was on the short side but still two inches taller than Wilma and me. He wore gray slacks that were too big for him and green suspenders to hold them up. His grayish-white T-shirt was frayed, and his feet were bare, pale creatures.
He rested his hands on the woman's shoulders and said, "Lewis sent you?"
I nodded and maybe frowned some.
"What was your name again?"
"John Tooms."
"Come on in, Mr. Tunes. Don't worry about Will here. She doesn't bite."
The living room was furnished with mismatched couch and chair, both covered over with dark-colored and stained sheets. The coffee table was a rude wooden crate turned upside down. There was a bong and a hypodermic set on the makeshift piece of furniture.
"Give me and Mr. Tunes a few minutes, will you, honey?" Ron said to his woman.
She snorted and then lurched through a doorway that I supposed led to their bedroom.
Ron closed the door after her.
"Have a seat, Mr. Tunes," he offered.
There was a fold-up wooden chair leaning in the corner. Thinking about the apparent stains and hidden needles, I took that for my seat.
"Tooms," I said.
"Say what?"
"My name is Tooms, not Tunes."
"Sorry. How can I help you, Mr. Tunes?"
He tried to sit on the crate but it cracked a little and so he moved to the couch. There he sank deeply in the dark-maroon fabric.
"I do specialized work for Breland," I said. "He thinks you might need some help getting out of the trouble you're in."
"No. Naw. Not me. He got me out on bail. I'll just do a plea or something. I won't even get any time. I mean, it wasn't even my car."
"Whose car was it?" I asked.
"Listen, Mr. Tunes. I'm okay. Nobody's gonna worry about a little fish like me. All I have to do is tell the judge that I found that car with the keys inside and took it for a ride. That's the way it happened. I'm really okay."
"There was contraband in the trunk," I said.
"Not mine."
"But we can safely say that it belonged to someone," I replied.
"From what I understand, there was a lot of money wrapped up in that property."
Sharkey began pumping his left heel up and down like a sweatshop seamstress working a mechanical sewing machine.
"I didn't know about what was in the trunk."
"Somebody does," I said. "And the feds will want to get hold of that information. They're gonna lean on you . . . heavily."
Ron had a boy's face. It had aged many years past what it should have been but he still had that innocent, adolescent look.
"Look, man," he said, "somebody in my position can't worry about what might happen. I mean, look at me. Somethin's bound to get to me sooner or later anyway. I mean, I don't even know how I ended up like this. I was supposed to be an entrepreneur selling computer components and spending my summers in Bermuda or Bimini. Now I'm rolling my own cigarettes and lookin' up to Wilma because at least she can put the rent together almost every month."
I wanted to say something but had no words.
"You could do me a favor, though," Ron said.
"What's that?"
"My wife. My ex-wife. Irma."
"What about her?"
"I asked Breland to find her for me but he said he couldn't do it. You know, I'd really like to find her . . . to tell her how sorry I am for destroying her life. She has my son. I'd like to see Steven before I die."
How would it help, I wondered, to tell him that his loving Irma had betrayed him and put the drugs into his shoe?
"Her last name is Carson now," Ron was saying. "Her maiden name was Connors, then Sharkey, Beam, and finally Carson. I guess that's why it's so hard to find her."
"I can look into it, I guess." What else could I say?
"Hey, man," Ron said with deep feeling. "That would be great."
20
I left Wilma's apartment in a foul mood. The young lovers were still on the fourth-floor landing. They were huddled in each other's arms, pressed into a corner. His eyes were closed as she watched me walk by. Looking into her distant eyes, I tasted blood.
I'd been biting my lower lip that hard.
ON THE STREET I looked at my watch. The blue iridescent hands told me that it was 7:07. I figured I was on a roll and so trundled over to a liquor store I knew on Bowery and picked up a pint of cheap scotch. When buying scotch I always looked for the lowest price. Why spend good money when you hate the taste? For me, bourbon was king, while scotch was a mere pretender to the throne.
I CAME TO A building a little farther down on C that was dark even for the buildings in that neighborhood. There was a buzzer, though.
"Yes?" a mature woman said through the speaker.
"Mrs. Lear?"
"Yes?"
"My name is Tooms. I'm looking for your daughter."
"What do you want with her?"
"A man named Spender asked me to find her," I said, using a name from Rinaldo's files. "She hasn't been to work in a few days and he's worried."
"Did you call her?"
I rattled off her home number. I had, of course called it; no answer, no answering machine.
"I also went by her place on Twelfth," I added. "So I'm here to ask you."
For a while silence ruled our conversation. In the heartland of our nation, I've been told, people are happy to meet you and sit and talk. But in New York, a stranger's voice is, at the very least, a potential threat--definitely possible.
"Why are you looking for her?" Mrs. Lear asked at last.
"May I come up, ma'am?"
"I don't know who you are."
"Tooms, ma'am. I'm working for Larry Spender . . . Angelique's boss."
"Yes," she said, "Spender." Her "S" got stuck for a second more than she intended.
A buzzer sounded and I pushed the door open.
It was a much tidier building than the one Ron Sharkey inhabited. The halls smelled of mold, but I found no people shooting up in the stairwells. On the fourth floor there were small welcome mats in front of each apartment door. When I got to 4C, a willowy woman in her middle forties was standing there, peering out, ready to slam the door at a moment's notice.
She was wearing an off-white dress that fit her slender form from habit--not intention. Her face had aged past the forty-six years that Rinaldo's records said she was, but you could see hints of the beauty that once was there.
"That's a nice gold suit you have," she said as I came to a stop.
"Thanks. My wife made me buy it." I glanced down at the sleeves to see if any of Shad Tandy's blood was there--none that I could see.
"She has good taste."
"In everything but men."
"Come on in," she said, charmed by a joke.
The living room
was small and well lived in. The furniture had been new when the deliverymen hefted it up the three flights, but it would be called secondhand now. There were small moth holes in the curtains, a lot of them, and three dead plants in as many pots.
The floor was swept and the walls had no dents, scars, or other markings. The once white paint had faded and darkened, but uniformly so.
There was no sofa or couch, just three stuffed chairs that faced each other across a small glass-topped table.
"Have a seat, Mr. . . . ?"
"Tooms."
"I wish I could offer you something to drink, Mr. T-Tooms. But my bar is empty."
Before sitting I pulled the pint bottle out of my pocket and set it on the glass table. This brought a light into the senior Lear's murky brown eyes.
"Oh," she said, straightening her shoulders. "I'll go get us a bucket of ice and some crystal."
She left the room, and I silently thanked Christian Latour for his diligence in collecting information on the people Rinaldo had him look into. It was the fruit of his research, I was sure, that had said Mrs. Lear was a heavy drinker who preferred scotch.
The lady's living room was filled with warm, dark color. It was like another time; not the past necessarily, but a period that only certain people inhabited--not my kind. My world smelled of sweat and smog, while Lizette Lear's was a world of potpourri, peach pie, and mothballs.
"Here you go," she said, bringing in two squat glasses and a white plastic bucket on a silver-plated tray.
She seemed to have some trouble with her left hip so I helped her set the platter down on the table.
"Ice, Mr. Tooms?" There was color in her cheek and the beauty that had shriveled over the years now seemed to be blossoming once more.
"A lot of it," I said. "Please."
The ice clinked and Lizette's smile threatened to become a laugh. She cracked the seal, poured my drink and hers. She drained her glass, sighed, and poured another.
Along with the relief flowed beauty. I had never seen anything like it. Lizette curled back in the chair and her body seemed to become young again, supple, even enticing. She looked into my eyes and for a moment I forgot why I was there.
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