by Robert White
“Yeah? Anything happens to that one, and you’re really fucked.”
“I’ve given that some thought on long winter nights back in Ohio.”
“Good. Because I was beginning to wonder if anything I’ve been saying for the last twenty minutes has been getting through.”
“I’m listening.”
“All right. So I hope you understand this. That shaved-head street fuck is a very dangerous person. We’ll pick him up tonight or tomorrow, but it won’t mean shit. There are no witnesses, so we’ve got less than nothing on him, but that I assume you do know . . . besides, we don’t really want to louse up a federal case amounting to maybe sixty, seventy murders just to give you a little justice.”
“So what can you do for me?”
“We know this much on your boy, he hangs with two knuckleheads, a couple brothers from South Boston. Tarvarius and VonShae Holley. Street names “Bones” and “Psycho.” Stone killers. They’ll pop you just as soon as look at you. They work for a major dealer, call themselves Best Friends.”
Best Friends. The blowjob photo, the writing on the back.
“These characters blow away rival dope dealers the way you step on bugs. We got dead gang members all over the city. They took out a whole gang on the east side run by a dude name of “White Boy Rick” Wershe, Ed “Big Ed” Hanserd, couple others named “Hollywood” and “Big James.” Got two of them in a house and two in a taxi a week afterward. Not that we care all that much about these guys, of course. Killed the taxi driver too, as if that meant shit. Your boy Craft is one of the real shooters. They’ll do anybody, anywhere for about $10,000 to $30,000. A low price of $5,000 if you’re just a street yo, not a player. These guys are murder-for-hire.”
“So why don’t you do society a favor and get them off the streets before they kill more people?”
“You know what AVANHI means, Haftmann?”
“Yeah.” Cop slang: Asshole Versus Asshole, No Human Involved.
He had his back to me and he was thumbing through a copy of the complimentary autobiography of the self-made millionaire founder of the Marriott dynasty. He tossed it on the desk top near the window overlooking Cambridge.
I glimpsed a metallic sheen between high-rises and brownstones—the Charles River.
“Bragging sonofabitch, ain’t he?”
I assumed he meant the hotel founder, not Nathaniel Craft.
“We need one of these shitbirds looking at serious prison time to roll over,” Cooney said. “You know how it goes. We’re squeezing one right now, in fact. Need a little more juice on him is all.”
“Obviously, you’re not looking for my help.”
“As a matter of fact, no. I’m only being a little extra courteous to you because you were homicide once. Normally we’d be having this conversation downtown. I don’t give a shit about private eyes, as a rule. Mostly jerkoffs, window peepers.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Mister Haftmann. By the way, we did pick up your girlfriend for questioning.”
“Serreta?”
“Yeah, only the name is William Wilkes. He dances under the name Serreta. A tranny. Good-looking she-male.
Serreta, a transvestite. A knot of hot bile rose in my gorge.
“You do know what those are, right, being from Ohio and all?”
I was concentrating hard on holding down the urge to vomit, but I heard Cooney’s words from the doorway clearly enough.
“Have a safe trip home and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”
I didn’t have the energy to get up and close the drapes. I don’t know how long I stared at the smudge of gray light coming into the room, but I must have fallen asleep. I dreamed of Micah. She was pregnant, standing in the living room of her house watching me stumble drunkenly about the room. I kept falling into things and knocking over furniture. Her face creased in a look familiar to me, she guided me by the hand upstairs and put me to bed. I told her my face was burning so she brought me a cool washcloth and covered it. I knew she was gone when I heard a noise from the next room, bed springs going wild, and her honeysoft moaning came through the wall, followed by a man’s voicing cooing, “Take it, ooooh, take it, take it.”
One side of my face was wet with tears, the only socket able to produce them, and I knew just before coming fully awake in my room in a yellow twilight that Micah was straddling him, her belly jutting out and her breasts exposed, the tips swelled with blood. Betraying me. I could visualize that glistening snail-track of sweat coursing down her back and disappearing into her buttock cleft. I put the edge of the pillow into my mouth so that no one down the hallway could hear me scream.
I washed down the Percodan with coffee, ordered a cab because I didn’t trust myself to drive in the organized mayhem of Boston traffic. and headed for the elevator. I planned to check out, relocate to East Boston, a flophouse near the bar if possible, and then stake out the place all day until she showed up.
I would speak to her and tell her what I had to tell her. I had some options in mind if she were to show up with Marcus, or whoever it was, in tow. If the latter case, then Plan B: follow them both after closing, see where we wound up, stake out the place, and wait for him to leave. I had three years’ vice experience that comes in handy now and then. If I had to, a little B & E was another and remoter possibility. I had fake ID’s for insurance and bill collecting that would not be amiss in that neighborhood. Lots of ways to get people out of places with phony messages and lures, so I was pretty sure that isolating her for a few minutes wouldn’t be impossible.
My cab driver talked continually at me, except for periods of throat-clearing that sounded like a horse nickering, all the way to East Boston. He had the Boston cabby’s homegrown expertise on a variety of subjects, such as crime in the streets, the Bosox chances in the AL East, niggers, right-hander Daisuke’s chances of bouncing back, politics, the cost of living—especially gasoline (thanks to those “fuckin’ towelheads in Libya”)—the best pussy, and Bill Belichik and the Pats’ glory years.
Once in East Boston, he careered down one-ways and blew past stop signs as if they were symbols in an alien tongue. Apparently I had punctuated his monologue at the right intervals with sufficient nods and grunts because he kept the chatter up.
I found myself dumped in front of a corner store off Chelsea, a dented red Coca Cola sign with Arabic lettering down its pockmarked side. His patter beat sounds inside my concussed brain like raindrops on a tin roof. I fought bile rising as I watched him speed off, my suitcase rocking on the sidewalk, and I could see his mouth still moving in the rearview mirror.
I spent an hour checking out the neighborhood, circling the block. I stopped in a couple small markets and gas stations and showed my photo of Annaliese to a few proprietors. A neighborhood kid thought he had seen her around, remembered her because she was white and “hangin’ with a black dude.”
“Did you ever see her in a car?”
“Nope.”
That was good because I had no options if they bolted in a vehicle. I would make my pitch for her father, and then I was going home.
I found a motel by asking around. I wound up in a brick hotel in a section of East Boston with a lot of PRs, illegals from the DR and Mexico; the place didn’t have much of a descent to go before it found its level as a flophouse.
I walked in past those old-fashioned swinging glass doors. The glass was smeared from top to bottom with hand prints. I saw a flyer on the front desk that said one of the local Irish churches was sponsoring a boxing event in the gymnasium next to the church. Several young men with chiseled physiques were hanging around the lobby who might have been boxers. Some local boys wearing starter jackets and reversed baseball caps were in attendance. I was three blocks from the Gryphon, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I were across the street. Too far to see anything, even with two good eyes, but it gave me reason to be in the neighborhood. There were young mothers strolling down the street with infa
nts.
The sun was bright but not enough to take the chill out of the air. The Percodan made me woozy and nauseated, so I cut the dosage. I walked to the corner store with the Arabic lettering and bought some sandwiches and coffee to take back to the room.
Haftmann’s rulebook says eat when you can on a surveillance job. I got one sandwich down, but the coffee made me vomit it all up. That exertion left me with a ragged pain and a ringing in my ears; it felt as though someone were teeing off behind my left eye socket, so I lay on the bed for a few minutes to get my bearings.
What I thought was a few minutes turned out to be three hours, and when I finally found the strength to hoist myself from the bed, I knew that the neighborhood had changed with the dying of the light. Slingers and their white customers (Jack used to call them city goats) and young men with muscled torsos wearing bandannas or corn rows met and dispersed in threes and fives all over the street. The women and children were off the sidewalks.
OK, I thought, time to check out the nightlife.
I made my way unhurried and as unnoticeable as any white man can, and headed straight to the Gryphon. I scoped out a walk-by routine that should keep me well-hidden from passersby. Any threats from the neighborhood’s rogue males should be visible, and I had a mental map of danger points where harm could come and, if worse did come to worst, then I had a few escape routes. I had no gun. Truth is I could-n’t hit a building, and I never intended to bring one with me. Ninety percent of my job is attitude. Just then I had a sickening dread of taking another beating. I had my nose broken in an alley fight once, and I distinctly remember the pain as well as that voice in my head that told me to flee, don’t take another shot on top of that. The better part of valor, from my viewpoint, is not discretion but coward’s wisdom to know when to get the hell out of Dodge.
I made a dozen passes from across the street and saw clearly three out of every four people entering the Gryphon. It was almost ten thirty by now and the wind had a bite to it. My nose leaked and my legs knees were stiffening. I had not seen any white women enter yet, but six or seven white males did. The distance and clothing made it difficult to be sure. No sign of the giant bouncer.
Then she came around the corner. The hair and eyes convinced me. She was with a black male who could have been the Marcus that Brenda Holbacher described: about five-nine, 150 pounds, light-skinned. I wondered: what is Marcus’s connection to Best Friends? Was he pimping Annaliese?
She seemed in a hurry compared to his casual stroll about five yards behind her. As the door opened, I noted that angry rap had replaced the Caribbean lilt of reggae I heard in my earlier passes.
It would be a long wait until closing. I had to make a decision: stay or go? There was no place to settle in nearby and stay out of sight. I was no TV private eye who would have hidden between dumpsters or disguised himself as a homeless man in an alley. I had neither youth nor courage for it.
I had to walk five blocks to hail a cab. Back in my room, I peeled off my clothes and lay on top of the bed. I set my internal alarm clock. My body ached. My vision was still blurred; the wind now piercing in this blighted cityscape of grime and poverty made dustdevils with the city’s debris. I wondered, too, if I might be interfering to no purpose in a young woman’s life.
I awoke in time to hit the shower, dress in my darkest clothing. I checked my money and made my way down the stairs. Someone off the lobby was hacking out his lungs in a smoker’s cough. Before I was old enough to do it, a man my grandmother hired used to come over to start a fire in the furnace; he smoked Pall Mall’s, “plain ends,” and on those blue-black February mornings his hacking would resound throughout the house from the ductwork.
I shortened my walk this time and leaned into shadows whenever cars passed; the city was shrill with noises and occasionally topped with the hi-lo of cop cruisers, the Nazi bleat of urban ambos and their occupants, the tough EMTs making their runs for the city’s dead and wounded. The sounds of human catastrophe.
There was a spot between two parked cars directly across from the bar where I planned to be at closing time. At 1:30 in the morning, I was stamping my feet from the cold and waiting for the neon sign in the window to go out; by 1:40 the bar had emptied its last customers. One or two dancers and the bartender who served me the champagne cocktail followed them twenty minutes later. It was 2:15 by the time she came out with Marcus—whether it was he or not. I followed them from across the street, my stiff muscles slowly coming back to life.
If they made a move to get into a car, I was going to confront them on the run and hope that I could stall them with enough patter to keep him indecisive and immobile. The man would be the one to deal with, so I had to get my hook into him somehow, smile big, mention money—whatever it took to keep the man glued to the spot. I worked my jaw around to get the smile ready and began to close the distance. I was angling at them so that we would arrive at the corner and be under the streetlight and within sight of any passing cars.
He made me before I got close, whirled, and put his right hand under his leather coat. “Who the fuck you following?”
He was wearing shades at three o’clock in the morning. The wings of his nostrils were the only part of him moving. His hair was done in “twigs,” each spiky tendril wrapped in a rubber band in the latest gangster style. I resisted the temptation to look at her.
“I’d like to speak to you for a minute. My name’s Thomas Haftmann. I’m a private investigator, and I’d like to talk to you both.”
“Fuck off, white boy.”
I’ve always found that one a little hard to come back on, so I just stood there in the chill wind of a pre-dawn Boston and smiled to appease him. I even held my hands in the air and waved them gently about. That worked like a rubber crutch.
“Stay the fuck away from me, motherfucker.” He said it in one breath so fast it sounded like “fuck” twice. He was holding the gun in his fist now, a blue-plated .25 automatic.
Worse and worse.
“Look, my name is Thomas—”
“I don’t give a fuck who you are, motherfucker. Move and I’ll put you down for the set, motherfucker.”
I was pulling all the stops on my appeasement shtick now; all systems oozing goodwill in his general direction. “Just let me speak to
Annaliese—”
“I’ll fuckin kill you, motherfucker.”
I believed him. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her moving closer to him. I was radiating fear by now.
“Marcus, is it Marcus? I’d like to just explain—”
The gun moved up to sight my face. “I know who you are. I know what you want, racist motherfucker. You got a message the other night but you didn’t listen to it.”
“That was a misunderstanding. No harm done.”
That brought the shades off with a single swipe of his free hand. “No harm done? You dumb motherfuckers don’t listen. I know you been stalking me. I’m gonna fix you so you don’t have no legs to stalk with.”
Christ, the knees. He’s going to shoot me in the kneecaps.
“Marcus, just listen to me for a minute. I’m only here because of Annaliese’s father. He just wants to know that she’s OK is all.”
He wasn’t listening. I could see him stiffening up his resolve. The gun was inching down my midsection. “Listen, Marcus, please, I’m just—”
“Marcus, don’t, baby.”
Annaliese was clutching his gun arm now but he shook her off. “Let him go.”
“Baby, get the fuck away from me.”
“Listen to her, Marcus. I’m just a private investigator working for Annaliese’s father. Nobody’s going to bother you.”
“You right about that, motherfucker.”
“Let me talk. Just a few minutes.”
I turned to Annaliese slowly and said, “Will you let me explain what I’m here for and then I’ll never bother either of you again? Take just a moment.”
“You can go to hell and you can take my father w
ith you. Leave us alone.”
Marcus smiled in a way that didn’t go all the way to his eyes. “You got your word now, motherfucker. I ever see you again, it won’t be a beating next time.” He stuck the gun in his pants and hustled her by the arm down the street. I watched them go until they disappeared around the corner.
That was it. My knees were still weak. I waited for my heartbeat to return to something like normal. Game over. Her father could take what solace he could from her parting words. I had found her but you don’t bring people back who don’t want to go. I’m not that crazy. I’m not that dedicated. I don’t need the money that badly.
Aw, fuck.
I could no more abandon this case than I could have flown to the moon. To be just a few feet away from her, to see the woman of the photos, and then go home with my tail between my legs and Cooney’s smirking jibe ringing in my ears?
No taxi would pick me up at that hour so I walked the way back to my hotel. I had a lot of thinking to do now. My size eleven shoes were pinching the hell out of my triple-E feet by the time I made it to the street where my hotel was. A patrol car on its way somewhere slowed down to beam me. I stood there in the blinding light and raised my hands in a hapless gesture of defeat, an actor with stage fright, when the light suddenly snapped off and the cruiser sped away, its turquoise and cherry lights flashing.
Round one was over. I had taken a thumping. Before round two commenced, I had to go home. I had some unfinished business at the office that could not wait. I even had to get out of a bench warrant for failing to appear for jury duty at the county courthouse in Jefferson. Most humiliating of all, the desk clerk at my fleabag hotel informed me that the charge for the room had been rejected and I would have to pay cash. He handed my card back as if it were radioactive. I paid him from the depleted funds of my fee from O’Reilly. Considering where I was sleeping lately, I wondered how much farther from grace a man can fall before he finally hits bottom.
Chapter 5