by Norman Green
She threw herself back down in the chair. I was already learning something about Klaudia, that she had too much energy, she was like a pot on the stove, too full of boiling water. “A real professional,” she said, leaning forward, planting her elbows on the table and staring at me. “How are you with computers, Saul?”
“I’m okay . . .”
“Well, I’m better than okay. I cut my teeth on databases and I am fucking phenomenal. I tell you what, you give me McClendon’s list. I will find everything there is to find on these guys, and if I need to talk to them I’ll be a reporter working on a story about McClendon. I’ll call you in a day or so and by then I’ll know whether or not any of these assholes hate McClendon enough to do him dirty.” She threw herself back up out of the chair, took the two strides to reach her kitchen, pulled a tea candle and a book of matches out of a drawer. She lit the candle, turned and plopped it down in front of the statue. “Save me Lord, but not tonight.”
“Wait. That wasn’t her, that was some other guy . . .”
“Augustine,” she said. “But it was hardly an original thought, even back then. And I have this feeling that Our Lady of Charity was probably more human than she gets credit for. If murdering an innocent like Melanie and throwing her in the river doesn’t piss her off, then nothing will.” I saw it again, that sidelong glance, that quarter smile, that maddening air of superiority. “Doesn’t hurt to have the Lady on your side, Saul.”
“I’ll take all the help I can get. Do you have something to write with?”
She walked off, bent down to fish through a drawer. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “Okay,” she said, coming back. “Give ’em to me.”
I started out. “Boyd, William C. CEO of Midwest Power and Light.” I went all the way through the list, giving her everything McClendon had given me.
“Got ’em,” she said, after I finished. “Where did you learn how to do that? Remember all that data?”
“ ‘’Twas in another lifetime,’ ” I told her, quoting Dylan. “ ‘One of toil and blood . . .’ ”
“I go crazy when men sing to me,” she said. “Give me a day or two. You got a phone number?”
As I gave it to her I got the feeling I was wasting my time. The bead on the wire shivered a little farther away from Mac and the money, a little closer to Annabel and the tongs.
Late that night I placed another call to McClendon. He tried to answer the phone but he dropped it with a clunk. I heard him say “Oh shit,” and he came on the line. “Goddammit . . . Do you know what . . . What time is it?”
“Hi, Mac, it’s me. I got a question.”
“You got a pair of balls, that’s what you got. No, honey, not you. Go back to sleep. It ain’t nothing.”
“Why, Reverend. I am shocked.”
“Saul, if I could reach through this phone . . . Why you gotta call in the middle of the night?”
Because the only times you tell the truth are when you’re drunk or half asleep. “Whelen and Ives. Where did you come up with those guys?”
“Unnnnh . . . Jesus Christ, I can’t even think. It was the guy. The cop. Shit, what was his name . . .”
“One of the detectives working the case?”
“No, no, the guy in the precinct house. Desk sergeant. I was mouthing off, because they weren’t giving me much. The guy at the desk says, call this guy, he used to be the man in this precinct and he knows all the players. Had one of their cards in his wallet.”
“So you called them, they didn’t call you.”
“Yeah. I mean, the desk sergeant was an old-timer, you gotta know how these things work. The retired dick is probably his buddy, okay, so the guy at the desk gets a bogie for every customer he refers. But the PI, Whelen, he seemed to know what he was doing. And the other one, the tall skinny guy, he was sharp as shit. Maybe not a guy you’d wanna have a beer with, but sharp. Good guy to know, long as he’s on your side.”
“Okay, so the way it works, the guy at the desk gets paid, the investigator gets paid, you get jerked off, everybody’s happy.”
“You suck, you know that? No, not you, baby, go back to sleep. Did you get anywhere with my list? Those names I gave you. My unhappy customer list.”
“Your victims, you mean.”
“Yeah, them.”
“I’m getting there. Do you remember the tall guy’s name? The guy who actually did the footwork for Whelen on your case.”
“No. I don’t think so. I only met the guy a couple times, I mostly dealt with Whelen.”
“Well, what do you remember about him? You must have some impression of the guy.”
“Old, as in seen-too-much-bad-shit old. You got to hang on to some of your illusions, you know what I’m saying? His name will come back to me. I’ll call you when I think of it.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me something, Saul. What was she like? Melanie. I mean . . . you know.”
“She had some friends. Some people loved her. She worked at her job, and she did some volunteer work. Angel of mercy. Had a nice Jewish boyfriend. I’m thinking she was probably okay.”
“Do you think it was me?” His voice was quiet. “Do you think it was one of those guys, from the names I gave you.”
“That might be the most plausible explanation, Mac, and it still might turn out to be the right one, but I don’t see anything that points that way. Think about it. I’m in town a couple days, okay, I talk to a few people. One, Whelen the cop. Ex-cop. Two, Annabel. Three, Melanie’s landlady, and what happens? Three goons try to jump me. How the hell were they on to me so quick? How did they know who I was? Whelen could probably have found out if he really wanted, but he didn’t seem very interested, and I haven’t seen him since. And if your theory about the money is right, I haven’t seen much of that, either. Other than yours.”
“You got jumped? By who? You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Two Chinese guys, had a black guy backing them up.”
“Wow, that’s interesting. Integration. Be careful, Saul.”
Chapter Six
On Tenth Street, steps away from Avenue C, a short awning hung over the sidewalk, sheltering the doorway to the Hotel Los Paraíso; it was the joint Whelen’s office manager had told me about. The building that housed the hotel differed only a little from her neighbors, principally by being a taller pile of shit than they were. The front door was held open by a cinder block, and through the doorway I saw only steps going up, nothing more. I walked on past, headed up to the bodega on the far side of the avenue and bought myself a cup of coffee. It was Puerto Rican coffee, strong and somewhat harsh, cut with a dollop of condensed milk. I went back outside, leaned on the insulated box where they stored their ice, and watched.
There were kids out in front of Los Paraíso, sitting on the hood of a parked car. They were too young to be jaded, too old to be innocent, and they watched each car that came down Tenth.
Marketing at its most basic level, and no need for a sign.
A woman came out of the hotel doorway, she was tall, thin, with long black hair. The kids left off what they were doing to watch her, but none of them moved or said anything. She was NYC postmodern cool and she carried a large handbag, the strap over one shoulder. She strolled up to the corner right across from where I waited. She did not favor me with a glance. She held one hand out, fingers spread gracefully, and cabs dueled like hungry fish, each wanting to be the one. I finished my coffee after she left, watched as several more people exited the hotel doorway. None of them seemed remarkable, but maybe they only suffered by comparison.
A young black kid bounced down the steps of the building across Tenth from the hotel. He was younger than the gang kids. Too young for sales, maybe, but still too old for innocence, although I had to wonder if that concept had much relevance in a place like Alphabet City. The gang kids hooted and yelled at the younger kid and one of them threw an empty plastic juice container at him, but he ignored them, walked up to the avenue and headed north.
I tossed my coffee cup in the trash can that was chained to the light pole on the corner and followed the kid. I waited for a block before I called to him.
“Hey, kid.”
He turned, walking backward, wary. “What?”
I had a twenty in my hand and I let him see it. I stopped and so did he, he sauntered back and we slapped hands, and then the kid stuck the bill in his pants pocket. “Walk,” I told him. We continued north, up toward the red bricks of Sty-town, up on the far side of Fourteenth. “That building you came out of,” I said. “You live there?”
“Uh-huh.” He wasn’t sure about me, he kept his distance. “You a cop?”
“No. Inside front door locked?”
“Nah-ah, busted. You could go right up.”
“I bet you know everybody that lives in there.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. On the front side, looking down at the street. Who’s the craziest person living there who’s got a window looking down at Tenth?”
“Luisa,” he said, without hesitation. “She be up on five. You gonna go mess wit’ her?”
“Never. I just wanna see the street, that’s all.” I palmed another twenty and passed it over as before. “You never saw me.”
“Got it.” He pocketed the second bill, turned and walked away without looking back.
I went back and loitered for a while.
It was not yet spring, not quite yet, but the ladies were tired of winter and some of them had apparently decided to jump the season and get started on their warm-weather wardrobes. You had to wonder how they kept from freezing, dressed in such thin and insubstantial clothing, but some flowers, like daffodils, insist on going first, poking up through the snow before the sun is really ready for them. I thought of Klaudia for a moment, then forced that thought away so I could concentrate on what I was doing. I crossed the avenue and walked up Tenth. I ignored the kids sitting on the car, but they watched me as I climbed the steps to the building across the street from the hotel and went inside.
Tile floors at least a century old. Thick marble stair steps, equally ancient, worn concave by generations of feet. Railings made of cast iron, bolted together clamshell style. The layers of paint on the walls were peeled and chipped in changing and unrelated depths, leaving the stairwell and hallways dappled by time and color. Each landing informed on the people who lived behind the closed and locked doors there, smells of garlic, onion and cilantro, dogs barking, music, television, people arguing.
Life.
On the fifth floor, two doors led to apartments that fronted on Tenth. I folded a fifty up in my fist and knocked on one of them. A middle-aged woman with a tired face answered. “Luisa?”
“No,” she said, and bobbed her head at the neighboring door.
“Sorry.”
She had her door closed before I got the word out. I heard the security chain slide into place. I had to smile. We place our trust in such frail things . . . That which we believe shields us from the dark is mostly hot air and wishful thinking. Now, a door with an old-fashioned Fox lock where the iron bar clicks into a slot in the floor, that can be a bitch to get past. I moved along to the next door and raised my fist to knock but Luisa was faster than I was. She opened the door before I could touch it. “Sí, señor?”
The fifty stuck its head up between two of my fingers, and she stared at it, wide-eyed. “Luisa, I have a problem. I think you can help me.”
“Men always have prollem.” She opened the door wider, waiting for me to hand her the money.
Luisa was a vision . . .
She was dressed in what appeared to be layers of nightclothes, cotton, polyester, silk and lace, with worn furry slippers on her feet. She had white Spanish skin, eyelids painted in graduated shades of color, black eyeliner and red lipstick applied by an unsteady hand, hair jet black, unconvincingly black because Luisa appeared to be immensely old. I held out the bill. “Do you think you can help me?”
A tiny exhalation through the nose, the smallest expression of amusement, and that irritating, knowing quarter smile, there for the briefest interval of time and then it was gone, along with my fifty. “Help is my especiality,” she said, and she motioned me inside.
The hallway smelled of old perfume, old age and old dog, of incense and weed and tobacco, strong coffee and dust. Once she closed the door behind us it was too dim to make out much detail, which I took to be a good thing. A small dog stuck his head out of a doorway, saw me and retreated silently. A larger dog in the form of a stooped, gray-whiskered man wearing a pink flowered corduroy bathrobe stepped into the far end of the hallway, blinking, and he did not retreat. Large patches of the corduroy on his robe were worn away, leaving behind only the base material. “Raul, my cousin,” Luisa said, and she followed that up with a barrage of machine-gun Spanish. Raul retreated then, too, and Luisa ushered me the rest of the way down the hallway to the front room.
“Can we sit by the windows?” I asked her.
“Yes, sí,” she said. “Can I get you son-thing? Coffee? Water? Son-thing estronger?”
“No, Luisa, thank you. Sit down, please. Talk to me.”
She put me in a kitchen chair by one window, seated herself by another a few feet away. “What you wan’ to talk about? Politic? Giuliani getting berry berry old. His brother, too. Then you gonna see son-thing, maybe.” She shot me with a forefinger. “Money to make, down in Cuba. Firs the blood, then the money.”
“I’m more interested in the politics of that hotel across the street.”
“Los Paraíso,” she said, grinning and looking at me through heavy-lidded eyes.
“What can you tell me about it?”
“Whorehouse on the top two floor,” she said, and her smile faded. “Thass what you want to hear about.” Distaste puckered her lined face. “Such an ogly word. Whore. That word use by a rich man, come to get a little son-thing on Saturday, go to church and repent with the wife on Sonday. To me you don’ look like this man.”
“Maybe not. If you don’t like the word, tell me a better one.”
She sighed. “Mujer. Mujer de la vida.”
I had her repeat it several times, trying to wrap my thick Anglo tongue around the musical Spanish phrase. “So what does it mean?”
“The life,” she said. “You know, the life, a lady of the life.” Her hand fluttered in the air, dancing in the dusty sunlight.
“A party girl,” I said.
“Exactamente,” she said. “Party girl. Is it such a terrible sin, to be party girl? A little dancing, a little drinking, a little fun . . . I don’ thin’ so God gonna burn you too much for this. A little bit, maybe, on the bottoms of the feet. Nothing more.”
I agreed with her. “There are worse things.”
“I was a dancer once, long time ago.” She shifted in her chair, her shoulders swaying to the beat of some long-forgotten music, audible now only to her. “I dance in the revue three time, at the Apollo,” she said. “And at all the clubs in Spanish Harlem. Back then, all the rich man come uptown, dance a little bit, listen to music, laugh and sing.” She raised her chin, waiting for me to disapprove. “Better then,” she said, “back when things were worse. Because the black, the white, the espanish, we all know each other then. Not like now. Now I live downtown, you don’t see me. You live uptown, I don’t see you. You live uptown, señor?”
“No,” I told her. “I live far away. Far up north, where there are no people, only the ocean.”
She eyed me speculatively. “Give me your hand,” she said, and she leaned forward and reached for me. She turned my hand over, explored the skin on my knuckles with her fingertips. “I don’ thin’ so you get these hands from working on your car,” she said.
“No.”
She hitched her chair closer, turned my hand palm side up, and again she explored the topography of my hand with her fingertips. I found myself wondering how much she could actually see. “Your lifeline is broken,” she said. “Two pieces, one here, one there. Cut in half.�
� She squinted at me. “You feel okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Good, good. You see?” She traced the line in my palm with a finger. “One life here, and stop. Young, maybe thirty, finito. T’hirty-five, no more. Dead. Now here, your second life. Different line.” She tilted her head back and stared at me. “You gonna die soon, but don’ worry. You get one more chance, different track. Sometime the old has to die before the new can live.”
“Well, that’s comforting.” Movement on the street caught my eye. Another tall woman walked out of Los Paraíso, dressed in the same way as the first. All the boys stopped to watch her, their silence a mark of their respect. She didn’t have to hail a cab, there was a limo waiting, a real one, whose driver got out and opened the door for her. “Mujer,” I said.
“De la vida,” Luisa said, glancing out the window. “But no club. No music. No dancing. Just a car, and a hotel room. So sad.”
“And the pimps. You forgot about them.”
“I forget nothing,” she said.
“Is ‘pimp’ the right word?”
She nodded. “In Spanish, chulo. Bad man.”
I pointed at Los Paraíso. “In that building over there, how many chulo? How many bad guys?”
She sighed. “In the upstair, three. Two Chinese, one Haitian, the Worm. He is the worst. And El Tuerto, he come for the money, he make four. Downstair, you know, on the other floors, they come and go. One woman moves in, one chulo follows her to take the money. Then they don’ pay the rent and they go. But they are not like the one you saw. They are tire, like old horses, and ogly, but with no time for resting.”
“Is that a real hotel? Could someone walk in there and get a room?”
“I thin’ maybe so. At the top of the stair you find a little room, like a cage. A man sits inside. A Jew.” Her fingers traced invisible curls next to her ears.
“Orthodox,” I said.
“Hasid,” she said. “I thin’ maybe his father own the building.”