by Robert White
I took a cab to Chinatown and ate in a McDonald’s. Then, with a map of downtown Boston and a small roll of twenties, I marked out the route I would take. The first two on my list were close enough to the business district to justify a cover charge. The first one advertised nude dancing in neon letters across the window.
I paid the five-dollar cover and walked in. I stepped away from the door and let my one good eye box the room. A dingy place which once must have had pretensions to being a sports bar before it settled to its current strip-joint status. The girls were young, looked fifteen, both white, and alternated dancing and serving duties. I spoke to each without results, declined a table dance for twenty dollars, and chatted with the bartender, a tough hillbilly woman with a cigarette dangling from her mouth. One of the girls, Traci, mounted the stage and, baby-fat jelloing in a white teddy cum garter and bridal veil, drew modest hoots from the crowd of five black males and six whites. The song was by Lady Gaga, and it was some drivel about love taking you to the edge of glory, hardly wedding song material but there seemed to be no music critics in the house to protest. She pushed the veil aside from time to time, but not as if she were interested in the crowd’s reaction.
I thanked her, left her a twenty and headed for the next place with an old Bon Jovi tune booting me in the ass.
My luck was no better at the Queen of Hearts, a dingier place with a more raucous crowd helping out the joint’s hi-fi system with some impromptu basing in rap time. This time there was no cover and three girls were alternating dances.
The drinks were watered to a pastel shade and my soda cost me as much as a shot and a beer. I asked the bartender, a black man with a bullet head and a gold earring, if I could show my photo to a few of the customers. He grunted, I laid a twenty on the bar, and he walked away with it crumpled in his big fist. When I had the urge to piss, I found a filthy urinal showing encrypted gang graffiti on all the walls and a myriad of crude art depicting organs of both genders. The mindless and obscene chortling below the pictures suggested a primitive form of blogging. None of it helpful. No Annaliese here either.
I headed for the third place on my list of watering holes, a place called Peaches off Utica down by the Fort Point Channel.
Her name was Lorraine and she was the only brunette among the dancers. She had a cage off to the side instead of the ramp where three girls were dancing simultaneously. All were blondes, one genuine if the tawny thatch, shaved to a kind of upswirl cowlick between her meaty thighs was any indication. I took a table and watched the brunette for an hour until she made eye contact. All beverages were seven dollars. They even served food. I was hungry, so I ordered a BLT.
The girls on the ramp were gyrating in an old-fashioned bumpand-grind to the music, whereas the brunette used her long legs to advantage by bending at the waist and feeling along both right to her ankles. It was during one of these caressing moves that I caught her eye and semaphored an invitation to my table. She showed me nothing, and went on with her routine in a practiced manner oblivious to anyone looking, and I wondered if she were used to ignoring all such gestures as the occupational hazard of her trade with loutish males.
She recognized Annaliese. It was like a shot of adrenalin to a fading heart. Unlike the others, she didn’t cut her eyes away the instant she saw the photo. According to Lorraine, Annaliese showed up with a black male companion, fitting Marcus’s description, who attempted to get her a job in the place. She looked a little spaced, not interested in the conversation between the black dude and Benny, had a cute shape, though. Lorraine recalled it easily because the boyfriend became obnoxious when the manager refused to take her on. She had no experience dancing, and Benny, the lame-o prick, didn’t care that she was willing to show her twat.
“That’s when Benny made a grab at me, the fucking creep, because I happened to be walking by at the time,” she said. “They were sitting right at the table over there.” I asked how long ago. “Two, three weeks.”
Close now.
“Do you know the black guy’s name?”
“He, like, her pimp?”
“I’m just trying to find her. Her family’s worried about her.”
“They oughta be, man. I’ve been dancing in joints like this for five years, the owner’s keep finding new ways to take your money. Most of the girls doing this start tricking to pay for the nose candy.”
“Any idea where they might have gone from here?”
“Fuck no. Try the Gryphon in East Boston. Lots of girls start out and some of them end up there too, come to think of it. Look for a guy named Tyreese Washington. He’s always around sniffing out fresh talent.”
I gave her my business card and wrote the Marriott’s phone and room number on the back. “Call me, please, if you see her around.”
“Any money in it?”
“Sure. I’ll take care of you. Just call me.”
“Hey, man, fuck it, I’ll call you if I see her and it won’t cost you nothing.”
I put the ballpoint away in my jacket. “Thanks, Lorraine,” I said and tucked three twenties into her garter belt. A small rivulet of sweat was worming its way between the cleavage of her small breasts. “Fuck, man,” she said, this time with a little girl’s lilt in her voice. “I had family once too.”
The cab to East Boston cost me $15.05, twenty including tip. My
driver spoke enough English to ask me how much I wanted back from the bill.
It was ten o’clock and the Gryphon was doing good business if the figures moving in and out of the place were an indication. There was a 300-pound bouncer in the doorway who took a long time before stepping aside. He wore gold chains, yellow pants and a pullover shirt. The clientele looked all-black. Half the girls were white.
One was dancing in an orange thong bikini at the end of the bar; one girl, a leggy black about twenty, was chatting with the bartender at my end. I took a seat at the bar about five stools down and allowed for a little adjustment time; finally, the few rubberneckers still looking my way made whatever calculations necessary about a white man in a black saloon and the volume picked up around me. The man sitting beside me got up and walked down the bar in a type of walk that involves pelvic thrust; cops call it a pimp roll. No bartender came over, and I could see two of them, one a dark-skinned Latino, busy washing glasses.
Well, to business.
I drew out my photo of Annaliese and prepared my story. I set a twenty on the bartop and waited. The black girl at the end of the bar gave me a long look and paused to adjust the top of her go-go outfit behind me. When I swiveled enough to take her in, she smiled at me, very relaxed and a little cocky. “Buy me a drink,” she said. It wasn’t a request. The bartender who had been maddogging me from twenty-five feet away a moment ago appeared at my elbow with a drink in his hand for her. “What can I get for you, sir?” was what he said to me.
“I’ll have what she’s drinking,” I said.
“Right,” he said, “another champagne.” He scooped my twenty away.
She spluttered a bit of the liquid, a few drops of which hit my sleeve, and she brushed at it with her fingertips. “That’ll wash off,” she said.
“I hope so,” I said. “They say that a fine vintage champagne will always leave a stain. I hope my coat isn’t ruined.”
Big teeth, eyes almost pinned from whatever drug she was on. “Baby, you for real or what? This shit about as close to champagne as you to Mars.”
“Really? But—” I sniffed at the drink in front of me in mock dismay, “I thought you ordered us champagne.”
She laughed again, her long arm resting lightly on her hip. “You are for real, I can see that now.”
“No, but I’m not a cop, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Baby, you was a cop, that boy over there, Nathaniel”—she nodded toward the giant bouncer— “he big enough to eat apples off your head. No way he let your narrow white ass by him. House rules, baby.”
“I can see that,” I said. “He’s a
big guy all right.”
“Better than that,” she said. “Nathaniel, he won one of those— whatchacallem things? Tough Man Contest.”
“My, my,” I said. “Well, now that we covered Nathaniel’s biography, I wonder if I might persuade you to have a seat next to me. Got a question for your lovely self. Maybe even—” I tapped my inside pocket suggestively, “make you a couple dollars for your kind help.”
She did. She looked all feline grace in repose. “Like what kinda questions?”
“Well,” I said, “I’m looking for this young lady. I wonder if you might have seen her around.” I dropped the photo between us.
“Mmmm, lemme see now. How much this information worth to you?”
“Well,” I said, “It really depends.”
“Depends? Like, say, on what?”
“Depends on how long we sit here negotiating. The longer the time, the less money it’s worth.”
“Then maybe you won’t ever see this, uh, young lady again.” She craned her neck to look at the photo and then turned her bright eyes and smile on full.
“May I ask what your name is?”
“Name’s Serreta. With two r’s.”
“Serreta with two r’s. That’s a pretty name. Here’s what I’m thinking, Serreta. There must be twenty guys in here who could use a twenty right now. But not one of them is going to talk to me in this place. So I figure if I go outside and wait, see who comes out, I just might get that information for all of twenty dollars. Might take a while.” I let that hang in the air.
“So, man. How’s about I give you some information—” she tapped the photo with a nail— “and you keep nice and warm, don’t have to go outside in the cold night air.”
She gave me a pouty face that was supposed to look sexy.
“OK. For that I’ll pay forty dollars.”
“Fifty.”
“Why?” I asked
“Cuz you disrespected me, motherfucker.”
The smile never dropped a notch.
“Sixty,” I said.
Then, if anything, her teeth got bigger and she laughed in my face; silvery notes bounced all around me.
“There she is, Mister Detective. She dancing at the end of the bar. But she got a boyfriend already.”
That long, painted fingernail pointed the way like a signpost.
I swiveled my neck very slowly to take in the dancer. Being myopic does has its disadvantages, but I could see well enough that the girl on the built-on platform abutting the bar could very well be Annaliese. Rather than stare, I turned back to Serreta and slipped three twenties into her hand.
“Another drink on me,” I said.
She had the money already folded and placed inside her G-string. The sound she made passing me was a whisper.
I kept my eyes dead and sipped at my drink. I put another twenty on the bartop to buy a little more time. I never expected to find her. Serendipity, the luck of the draw, I thought. Once in a while you just do get lucky. Trouble is, I’m never that lucky. The hairs on my neck were tingling like tiny alarm bells with a single message: notrightnotrightnotright.
There was a potential problem if Marcus, in fact, happened to be around. Could be difficult to do anything in this place, and I had just about decided to follow her after closing time when I felt a hand squeezing my shoulder. I turned around hoping there wouldn’t be a suckerpunch to go with it, and looked into the moon face of Nathaniel the bouncer.
He left his hand where it was and said, “Drink your drink and get the fuck out of here, motherfucker.”
Without looking at his hand, I said, “Fine. I’ll just toss this down and go.”
I stood up to leave. I heard laughter around me. I almost made it to the door too.
The first punch went to my kidneys. The second may have been a kick, I’m not sure. The third caught me on the neck, and the fourth, if it landed, snapped my head back but didn’t seem to have anything behind it. The reason, I knew, as I faded into black, was that I was losing consciousness and wasn’t able to feel much.
The lights came on, and I next remember feeling cold and then seeing a woman’s face above mine looking down at me. Serreta with two r’s, I remember thinking.
She was smiling with those enormous teeth and saying something with her mouth, but I couldn’t hear it because there was something, some urgent force pulling me up over the lip of something and pushing me down. Then I was falling. That was all I remembered until I awoke in the ambulance on my way to Beth Israel, with an oxygen mask over my mouth, and, of course, without wallet or papers to tell anybody who I was or what I was doing lying in a gutter at dawn in East Boston.
Chapter 4
The hospital they hauled me to had a sculpture of the Virgin Mother and seven arrows or swords piercing her heart. I was jabbed with sedatives and pain killers but coherent enough to tell the uniform beside my bed enough information to help him fill out his incident report.
I listened to two nurses behind the curtain speaking of a patient’s cancer. One said, “If it’s lymphatic now, like they say, she’ll be dead of brain cancer in a month. You watch.”
The officer spoke to me:
“What were you doing in East Boston, Mister, uh, Hoffman?”
“Looking for someone, officer. That’s Haftmann, with two n’s.”
“You know who beat you up?”
“No idea. I was hit from behind.”
“Were you inside the Gryphon that night?”
“I had one drink and left to look for a cab.”
“So you have no idea who gave you the beating?”
“No, officer. No idea at all.”
“What were you doing in that area at that time of night?”
“Looking for someone who asked me to look a person up.”
And so on and so forth. He wrote. I responded. Neither of us kidding the other, but I understand paperwork because I did my share of it. Police are a paramilitary organization and paperwork drives the system. I’d give him more information if he pressed, but he seemed uninterested in probing beyond the basics. I was a white man in a black area; obviously, my purpose could not be reputable and therefore what happened was a natural consequence of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—a cliché I have often emended mentally to read at the right time. I didn’t want him to see me as a victim.
He was around twenty-five, swarthy complected, muscular in the shoulders and biceps. He said, “You got yourself a first-class beating but nothing broken. The doc says a couple hairline fractures above the eyebrow and your cheek. The rest are lacerations and bruises from your fall, most likely.” He touched his right side for emphasis. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Hoffman, it looks like that wasn’t the first time somebody worked you over.”
I told him I didn’t mind his saying so.
“If you think of something else, call the precinct. Here’s a number and an extension; you can talk to the detective handling the case. Name’s Detective Cooney.”
I glanced at the card and put it on the table next to a plastic water jug.
“You don’t mind, I’d not go visiting that section of town after dark. It’s all dopers and drug dealers. You have a safe trip back to—where was it?—Iowa?”
“Ohio. Thank you, officer.”
I used to say the same thing to dumbass johns who got themselves into trouble looking for action away from the refurbished Warehouse District in Cleveland. Going on a toot in some darktown bar away from the lights downtown or the Flats, where the pubs catered to college kids, was a surefire way to wind up like me. I felt like telling him I thought I’d drop by Trinity Church as soon as I got out, say a prayer for the lost souls of Boston. He wouldn’t have appreciated it.
Trinity Church is one of the ten most architecturally beautiful buildings in America, they say. But I don’t waste my time praying to air in or out of buildings these days.
After that, I had time to think. I needed to get back to the Gryphon as soon as possible. I didn’
t know whether the beating was connected to my search for Annaliese or whether it happened because I had hung my ugly white face out in a black bar where Caucasian faces aren’t welcome. One thing I knew: there wasn’t time to lose now. I had Annaliese in my sights. I got lucky, despite the trimming last night, and when luck is good, you go with it as far as you can before the wheel of fate turns. As it always does.
“Let me explain something to you, Haftmann, so that you’re very clear in your mind. I want you to understand me,” said Detective Sean Cooney of the East Boston PD, precinct one-five. “We can’t even keep count on the number of people these guys have killed. We got about nine people who are going to plead down on these drug-related murders and about five more who could get the death penalty.”
“I know you’re busy as hell, Detective,” I said and tried on a humble-pie look .
He didn’t look impressed.
“You got plans to get this girl, this Annaliese O’Reilly, out of the Gryphon? That’s fine. That’s your job. But you do it fast and get out quick because there’s a whole long list of people this Nathaniel Craft has popped. I’ll bet even he don’t even know how many.”
Cooney was East Boston right down to his argyle socks. I’ll take an educated Mississippi accent as the zenith of spoken English, for the lilting beauty of its cadence, every time. Boston English, educated or otherwise, is the nadir—it grates on the ear like slow torture: Death from a Thousand Cuts, a murder of crows feasting on roadkill, fingernails on a blackboard.
I was deep in some depressing reverie at the moment, not eager for a lecture from someone I would have called a brother-in-arms once upon a time.
He walked over to my window and pulled the drapes aside. “How about some light in here?”
He must have noticed me wincing. “The light bother you?”
“Just a little. I’m down to one good eye, and right now it doesn’t feel particularly good.”