I stayed where I was while he made a call from a booth on the corner. He'd left the motor idling. I looked at my notes and tried to see a pattern in the wisps and fragments I'd been given.
Chance returned to the car, checked the mirror, swung us around in a deft if illegal U-turn. 'Just checking with my service,' he said. 'Just keeping in touch.'
'You ought to have a phone in the car.'
'Too complicated.'
He drove downtown and east, pulling up next to a fire hydrant in front of a white brick apartment house on Seventeenth between Second and Third. 'Collection time,' he told me. Once again he left the motor idling, but this time fifteen minutes elapsed before he reappeared, striding jauntily past the liveried doorman, sliding nimbly behind the wheel.
'That's Donna's place,' he said. 'I told you about Donna.'
'The poet.'
'She's all excited. She got two poems accepted by this magazine in San Francisco. She'll get six free copies of the issue the poems appear in. That's as much pay as she'll get, just copies of the magazine.'
A light turned red in front of us. He braked for it, looked left and right, then coasted through the light.
'Couple times,' he said, 'she's had poems in magazines that pay you for them. Once she got twenty-five dollars. That's the best she ever did.'
'It sounds like a hard way to make a living.'
'A poet can't make any money. Whores are lazy but this one's not lazy when it comes to her poems. She'll sit for six or eight hours to get the words right, and she's always got a dozen batches of poems in the mail. They come back from one place and she sends 'em out someplace else. She spends more on postage than they'll ever pay her for the poems.' He fell silent for a moment, then laughed softly. 'You know how much money I just took off of Donna? Eight hundred dollars, and that's just for the past two days. Of course there's days when her phone won't ring once.'
'But it averages out pretty well.'
'Pays better than poems.' He looked at me. 'Want to go for a ride?'
'Isn't that what we've been doing?'
'We been going around in circles,' he said. 'Now I'm gonna take you to a whole nother world.'
We drove down Second Avenue, through the Lower East Side, and over the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Coming off the bridge we took enough turns to throw off my sense of direction, and the street signs didn't help much. I didn't recognize the names. But I watched the neighborhood change from Jewish to Italian to Polish and had a fair idea of where we were.
On a dark, silent street of two-family frame houses, Chance slowed in front of a three-story brick structure with a garage door in the middle. He used a remote-control unit to raise the door, then closed it after we had driven in. I followed him up a flight of stairs and into a spacious high-ceilinged room.
He asked if I knew where we were. I guessed Greenpoint. 'Very good,' he said. 'I guess you know Brooklyn.'
'I don't know this part of it very well. The meat market signs advertising kielbasa were a tip-off.'
'I guess. Know whose house we're in? Ever hear of a Dr. Casimir Levandowski?'
'No.'
'No reason why you should have. He's an old fellow. Retired, confined to a wheelchair. Eccentric, too. Keeps himself to himself. This place used to be a firehouse.'
'I thought it must have been something like that.'
'Two architects bought it some years ago and converted it. They pretty much gutted the interior and started from scratch. They must have had a few dollars to play with because they didn't cut many corners. Look at the floors. Look at the window moldings.' He pointed out details, commented on them. 'Then they got tired of the place or each other, I don't know what, and they sold out to old Dr. Levandowski.'
'And he lives here?'
'He don't exist,' he said. His speech patterns kept shifting, from ghetto to university and back again. 'The neighbors never see the old doc. They just see his faithful black servant and all they see him do is drive in and drive out. This is my house, Matthew. Can I give you the ten-cent tour?'
It was quite a place. There was a gym on the top floor, fully equipped with weights and exercise machines and furnished with sauna and Jacuzzi. His bedroom was on the same floor, and the bed, covered with a fur spread, was centered beneath a skylight. A library on the second floor contained one whole wall of books and an eight-foot pool table.
There were African masks all over the place, and occasional groups of free-standing African sculpture. Chance pointed out a piece from time to time, naming the tribe that had produced it. I mentioned having seen African masks at Kim's apartment.
'Poro Society masks,' he said. 'From the Dan tribe. I keep one or two African things in all my girls' apartments. Not the most valuable things, of course, but not junk, either. I don't own any junk.'
He took a rather crudely fashioned mask from the wall and presented it for my inspection. The eye openings were square, the features all geometrically precise, the overall effect powerful in its primitiveness. 'This is Dogon,' he said. 'Take hold of it. You can't appreciate sculpture with your eyes alone. The hands have to participate. Go ahead, handle it.'
I took the mask from him. Its weight was greater than I anticipated. The wood that composed it must have been very dense.
He lifted a telephone from a low teakwood table and dialed a number. He said, 'Hey, darlin'. Any messages?' He listened for a moment, then put the phone down. 'Peace and quiet,' he said, 'Shall I make some coffee?'
'Not if it's any trouble.'
He assured me it wasn't. While the coffee brewed he told me about his African sculpture, how the craftsmen who produced it did not think of their work as art. 'Everything they make has a specific function,' he explained. 'It's to guard your house or keep off spirits or to use in a particular tribal rite. If a mask doesn't have the power in it anymore they'll throw it away and somebody'll carve a new one. The old one's trash, you burn it up or toss it away cause it's no good.'
He laughed. 'Then the Europeans came and discovered African art. Some of those French painters got their inspiration from tribal masks. Now you've got a situation where there are carvers in Africa spending all their time making masks and statues for export to Europe and America. They follow the old forms because that's what their customers want, but it's a funny thing. Their work's no good. It doesn't have any feeling in it. It's not real. You look at it and you take it in your hand, and you do the same with the real thing, and you can tell the difference right away. If you have any feeling at all for the stuff. Funny, isn't it?'
'It's interesting.'
'If I had any of the junk around I'd show you, but I don't own any. I bought some when I was starting out. You have to make mistakes to develop a feel for it. But I got rid of that stuff, burned it in the fireplace there.' He smiled. 'The very first piece I bought, I still have it. It's hanging in the bedroom. A Dan mask. Poro Society. I didn't know shit about African art but I saw it in an antique shop and I responded to the mask's artistic integrity.' He stopped, shook his head. 'Hell I did. What happened was I looked at that piece of smooth black wood and I was looking in a mirror. I saw myself, I saw my father, I was looking back through the damned ages. You know what I'm talking about?'
'I'm not sure.'
'Hell. Maybe I don't know either.' He gave his head a shake. 'What do you figure one of those old carvers'd make of this? He'd say, 'Shit, what's this crazy nigger want with all these old masks? Why'd he go and hang 'em all over the damn wall?' That coffee's ready. You take yours black, right?'
He said, 'How's a detective go about detecting, anyway? Where do you start?'
'By going around and talking to people. Unless Kim got killed coincidentally by a maniac, her death grew out of her life.' I tapped my notebook. 'There's a lot you don't know about her life.'
'I guess.'
'I'll talk to people and see what they can tell me. Maybe it'll fit together and point somewhere. Maybe not.'
'My girls'll know it's cool to talk to yo
u.'
'That'll help.'
'Not that they necessarily know anything, but if they do.'
'Sometimes people know things without knowing they know them.'
'And sometimes they tell without knowing they told.'
'That's true, too.'
He stood up, put his hands on his hips. 'You know,' he said, 'I didn't figure to bring you here. I didn't figure you needed to know about this house. And I brought you without you even asking.'
'It's quite a house.'
'Thank you.'
'Was Kim impressed with it?'
'She never saw it. None of 'em ever did. There's an old German woman comes here once a week to clean. Makes the whole place shine. She's the only woman's ever been inside of this house. Since I owned it, anyway, and the architects who used to live here didn't have much use for women. Here's the last of the coffee.'
It was awfully good coffee. I'd had too much of it already but it was too good to pass up. When I complimented it earlier he'd told me it was a mixture of Jamaica Blue Mountain and a dark roast Colombian bean. He'd offered me a pound of it, and I'd told him it wouldn't be much use to me in a hotel room.
I sipped the coffee while he made yet another call to his service. When he hung up I said, 'You want to give me the number here? Or is that one secret you want to keep?'
He laughed. 'I'm not here that much. It's easier if you just call the service.'
'All right.'
'And this number wouldn't do you much. I don't know it myself. I'd have to look at an old phone bill to make sure I got it right. And if you dialed it, nothing would happen.'
'Why's that?'
'Because the bells won't ring. The phones are to make calls out. When I set this place up I got telephone service and I put in extensions so I'd never be far from a phone, but I never gave the number to anybody. Not even my service, not anybody.'
'And?'
'And I was here one night, I think I was playing pool, and the damn phone rang. I like to jumped. It was somebody wanted to know did I want a subscription to the New York Times. Then two days later I got another call and it was a wrong number, and I realized the only calls I was ever going to get were wrong numbers and somebody selling something, and I took a screwdriver and went around and opened up each of the phones, and there's this little clapper that rings the bell when a current passes through a particular wire, and I just took the little clapper off each of the phones. I dialed the number once from another phone, and you think it rings because there's no telling the clapper's gone, but there's no bell going off in this house.'
'Clever.'
'No doorbell, either. There's a thing you ring by the door outside, but it's not connected to anything. That door's never been opened since I moved in, and you can't see in the windows, and there's burglar alarms on everything. Not that you get much burglary in Greenpoint, a nice settled Polish neighborhood like this, but old Dr. Levandowski, he likes his security and he likes his privacy.'
'I guess he does.'
'I'm not here much, Matthew, but when that garage door closes behind me it keeps the whole world out. Nothing touches me here. Nothing.'
'I'm surprised you brought me here.'
'So am I.'
We saved the money for last. He asked how much I wanted. I told him I wanted twenty-five hundred dollars.
He asked what that bought.
'I don't know,' I said. 'I don't charge by the hour and I don't keep track of my expenses. If I wind up laying out a lot of money or if the thing goes on too long, I might wind up asking you for more money. But I'm not going to send you a bill and I'm not going to sue you if you don't pay.'
'You keep it all very informal.'
'That's right.'
'I like that. Cash on the line and no receipts. I don't mind paying a price. The women bring in a lot of money, but there's a lot that has to go out, too. Rent. Operating costs. Payoffs. You got a whore installed in a building, you pay off the building. You can't give the doorman twenty dollars for Christmas and let it go at that, same as any other tenant. It's more like twenty a month and a hundred for Christmas, and it's the same for all the building employees. It adds up.'
'It must.'
'But there's a lot left. And I don't blow it on coke or waste it gambling. You said what? Twenty-five hundred? I paid more than twice that for the Dogon mask I gave you to hold. I paid $6,200, plus the auction galleries charge buyers a 10 percent commission these days. Comes to what? $6,820. And then there's sales tax.'
I didn't say anything. He said, 'Shit, I don't know what I'm proving. That I'm nigger-rich, I guess. Wait here a minute.' He came back with a sheaf of hundreds and counted out twenty-five of them. Used bills, out of sequence. I wondered how much cash he kept around the house, how much he habitually carried on his person. Years ago I'd known a loan shark who made it a rule never to walk out his door with less than ten thousand dollars in his pocket. He didn't keep it a secret, and everybody who knew him knew about the roll he carried.
Nobody ever tried to take it off him, either.
He drove me home. We took a different route back, over the Pulaski Bridge into Queens and through the tunnel to Manhattan. Neither of us talked much, and somewhere along the way I must have dozed off because he had to put a hand on my shoulder to waken me.
I blinked, straightened up in my seat. We were at the curb in front of my hotel.
'Door-to-door delivery service,' he said.
I got out and stood on the curb. He waited for a couple of cabs to pass, then made his U-turn. I watched until the Cadillac was out of sight.
Thoughts struggled in my brain like exhausted swimmers. I was far too tired to think. I went up to bed.
TWELVE
'I didn't know her all that well. I met her a year or so ago at the beauty parlor and we had a cup of coffee together, and reading between the lines of her conversation I figured out she wasn't the Avon lady. We exchanged numbers and we would talk now and then over the phone, but we never got close. Then whenever it was, a couple weeks ago, she called and wanted to get together. I was surprised. We'd been out of touch for months.'
We were in Elaine Mardell's apartment on Fifty-first between First and Second. White shag carpet on the floor, bold abstract oils on the walls, something inoffensive on the stereo. I had a cup of coffee. Elaine was drinking a diet soda.
'What did she want?'
'She told me she was leaving her pimp. She wanted to make the break without getting hurt. Which is where you came in, remember?'
I nodded. 'Why'd she come to you?'
'I don't know. I had the feeling she didn't have too many friends. It wasn't the sort of thing she could talk over with one of Chance's other girls, and she probably wouldn't have wanted to discuss it with someone who was out of the life altogether. And she was young, you know, compared to me. She may have seen me as a sort of wise old aunt.'
'That's you, all right.'
'Isn't it just? What was she, about twenty-five?'
'She said twenty-three. I think it said twenty-four in the papers.'
'Jesus, that's young.'
'I know.'
'More coffee, Matt?'
'I'm fine.'
'You know why I think she picked me to have that little conversation with? I think it's because I don't have a pimp.' She settled herself in her seat, uncrossed and recrossed her legs. I remembered other times in this apartment, one of us on the couch, the other on the Eames chair, the same sort of unobtrusive music softening the room's hard edges.
I said, 'You never had one, did you?'
'No.'
'Do most girls?'
'The ones she knew did. I think you pretty much have to on the street. Somebody's got to defend your right to a particular corner and bail you out when you get arrested. When you work out of an apartment like this, well, that's different. But even so, most of the hookers I know have boyfriends.'
'Is that the same thing as a pimp?'
'Oh, no. A boyfriend isn
't running a batch of girls. He just happens to be your boyfriend. And you don't turn your money over to him. But you buy him a lot of things, just because you want to, and you help out with cash when he hits a rough spot in life, or if there's some business opportunity he wants to take advantage of, or because he needs a little loan and, gee, it's not like you were giving him the money. That's what a boyfriend is.'
'Sort of a one-woman pimp.'
'Sort of, except every girl swears her boyfriend's different, her relationship's different, and what never changes is who earns the money and who spends it.'
'And you never had a pimp, did you? Or a boyfriend?'
Lawrence Block - Scudder 1982 - Eight Million Ways To Die Page 10