by Norman Green
Mac stared at me for a moment, then nodded. “I agree.”
“Good. Next item, you need bodyguards. Right now. Today.”
“The Reverend Stillman told me that yesterday. He wants to send me a couple of his guys.”
“Well, he’s right, but I think we should hire local.”
“Just because they’re born again don’t mean they forgot how to shoot. Stillman’s guys will be bad enough to get the job done.” He grimaced, looked like I’d told him he had to drink a quart of cod liver oil.
“What?”
He sighed again. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of buzzkill these guys are. I’d rather tour with Attila the Nun.”
“Sorry, Mac. You’re gonna have to put up with it for a while. Take one for the team. Maybe they’ll be a good influence on you.”
He gave me a withering look. “Yeah? Want me to ask for a couple extra? They could follow you around, too. See how you like it.”
“Can’t do it,” I told him.
“Why not?”
“We don’t wanna scare off our guy.”
“So where are we with this?”
“Well, there’s your theory, some guy that you stung, mad because you took his money. That one ain’t looking too good.” Mac grimaced and shook his head, he was that sure. From his way of thinking, it had to be about the dough. “And there’s Annabel’s thing about the tong trying to settle an old score. I’m not in love with that one, either.”
“What else you got?”
I told him about the building on Tenth, of Melanie’s work with the street girls. “Maybe the pimps just got sick of her hanging around, asking questions. I’m still trying to get someone inside there to talk to me.”
“Good luck with that one,” he said. “Better make sure they don’t get sick of you hanging around, asking questions.”
Maybe they already had . . . It occurred to me that they could have been behind Annabel’s murder, and the attempt to set me up for it. But it didn’t seem like the kind of thing a pimp would know how to do.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Well, the fourth scenario is the worst, at least for us. It could have been a random thing. Just some stray cat, and we’ll never catch him.”
“It can’t be that,” Mac said. “Can’t be. What’s your gut tell you?”
“It was a cop.”
“What?” he said, shocked. “What? I mean I know you don’t like policemen, but . . .”
“In the past two years, five women, apart from Melanie and Annabel, have been murdered, all with the same MO. Very similar to the way Mel and her mother were murdered, but there were enough small differences to make the cops think they have a copycat.” I told him about the postmortem sex, and the hep C.
“Okay,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean a cop killed . . .”
“Yes it does,” I told him. “Nobody knows about the first five murders yet, except for cops.”
“The guy with hep C,” Mac said.
“That’s right. So nobody would know to stage copycat murder scenes except a cop.”
“This just keeps getting worse,” Mac said. “I was so sure. ‘For the love of money is the root of all evil.’ I woulda bet my house on it, if I had one. Do you have any idea what to do next?”
“Yeah.”
“You know who the bad cop is?”
“No. But I think I know what trees to shake.”
Chapter Ten
I saw a bunch of people dressed in black; they were walking up Avenue C when I came back to the Hotel Los Paraíso. The gang kids seemed to be a couple members short, and they backed off, wary of the clump of newcomers.
Groups make me nervous. Sometimes they can, like this one did, reignite a lot of my old resentments about always being the new kid. The outsider. It is because groups are hermetic, they are self-referential. The insiders cannot be strange or out of balance, no matter how they look or how out of sync they are with the rest of the world because their metric is the group, the only opinions that matter come from those others they surround themselves with, the ones who look like they do and talk like them. There may not have been any Hasidim in the trailer parks of my youth but I saw plenty of the same dynamic, always from the outside: If you dress like us, if you spend all your free time in our company, you have our assurance that God has your name inscribed in stone somewhere, right next to ours. But if you don’t, we don’t want to know you, we don’t even want to see you. The funny thing is, that’s not what hooks you, because in the human animal, immediate gratification always trumps long-term good. What draws you in, even when you know better, is acceptance. Be with us, stand with us and we’ll like you, we might even love you.
It was how Mac had hooked me.
Appalling, now that I thought about it, how easily he’d reeled me in.
The Hasidim posse stopped on the sidewalk right out in front of the Hotel Los Paraíso, and tension radiated off them like heat from an August sidewalk. They were coming for Shmuley, the orange-haired Orthodox kid who worked behind the desk, don’t ask me how but I knew it. Kid wasn’t even old enough to drink yet, his group was all he’d ever known. It came back to me in a rush: He was risking expulsion and alienation from his family and his religion by committing the mortal sin of trying to learn something real about how the universe worked. I could not wrap my skull around the extent of that kind of intellect, that kind of curiosity, and that kind of courage. Bad enough, when you’re a kid, if no one is much interested in helping you learn, but when the people who are supposed to be on your side take an active interest in keeping you down in the dark with them, that was just too wrong, that was the kind of thing that brought my resentments roaring back to pulsating, venom-dripping life.
They stopped outside the entrance to the hotel, rehearsing, I suppose, five men and one woman, dressed in the manner of one of the more radical Jewish orthodoxies. Intentionally rude, I elbowed my way through. “Excuse me. You mind? Get out of the fucking way, for crissake . . .” I went up the stairs two at a time, hoping I’d delayed them enough. “Gelman!” I hissed, when I got up to his cubicle, trying to rouse him without alerting them. “They’re coming for you! Gimme your math books! Gimme all your shit. Hurry!” His eyes went wide and he froze for a second, and then he sprang into palsied life, piling books and papers up with shaking hands and shoving them at me.
God, I could hardly carry it all. How could one twenty-year-old kid be reading this much shit at once? Really? I could almost hear the goonas howling with amusement as I clomped up the stairs to my floor carrying all that stuff.
Hector was there, rigid and attentive. “Hello, kid.”
His black eyes were wide. “Books,” he said.
“Yeah, you want one?”
He shook his head once. Probably figured he had enough trouble already. “You’re pretty smart for a guy your size,” I told him. I had to put the pile down on the floor so I could unlock my door. I dumped them on the desk once I got inside, right next to the laptop, which was, miraculously, still there. I kicked the door shut, sat down in front of the laptop, and started to run through the program that would connect my laptop to the cameras upstairs. While it spooled up I went into the bathroom to take a leak and I noticed that the water glass that had been sitting on the sink was missing.
Son of a bitch. That’s how he’d done it, that was how he put me at Annabel’s murder scene. Snuck into my room and stole a glass.
I sat with that for a little while, then I got to work.
Gelman knocked on my door about an hour later.
“Come in,” I told him. “Want your stuff back?”
“Maybe I should leave it with you.” His stutter was gone. From that moment on, Shmuley Gelman and I were brothers. “For safekeeping.”
“Come on in.”
He did, and he sat down on that disgusting mattress. But then, you know, he was just a kid, kids are immortal and they don’t think germs are real, and besides, he had other things on his mind.
He didn’t give the laptop a second glance.
“You figure they’ll be back?” I asked him.
“Maybe.” The kid looked miserable. “Probably. Yes.” He gestured at the pile of books. “Those would have been a felony, but they already got me on a misdemeanor.”
“What do you mean?”
He got up, yanked a book out of the stack. It was trade paper, the title was gobbledygook, and when Shmuley opened it, what I saw on the pages was worse, some insane and indecipherable stew of numbers, letters and symbols that would never make any sense to me. He’d scribbled a lot more of the same right on the pages, in pencil. “I had questions,” he said, “particularly when it comes to the relationship between . . .”
“Yo, Gelman.”
He looked up. “What?”
“I ain’t gonna understand your questions.”
“Oh.” He closed the book, alone again with no one to talk to, at least on that level. “Anyway. The author is at NYU. Right across town. The man who wrote this.” He tossed the book back on the pile, sat down on the bed, and put his face in his hands. After a moment he looked up at me. “I wrote him a letter. Stupid, right? But why can’t I ask?”
“I don’t think I can help you with this.”
He stood up long enough to grab his book again, the one he apparently did not completely understand. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” he said. He opened the book to a random page and held it out so I could see it. “You are the only person I’ve ever talked to about it. This is not what they think! Do you want to know what this really is? Past all the formulas, past all the equations, it means one simple thing. I’ll tell you what it means, okay? I can tell you everything you really need to know about this in one sentence.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“When God makes the world, okay, this is the language he speaks.”
Yeah. All right. Goonas, if you’re listening, this kid is trying really hard, and I got nothing. You got to give me a clue . . . I inhaled, hoping some more oxygen would spark my brain into thinking something smart. “So what happened to your letter?”
“I am an idiot,” he said. “I meant to put the hotel as the return address, but I didn’t do it.”
“Oh shit. So the guy answers you but someone at your house gets his letter.”
Gelman looked disgusted. “Correct. My mother. And she didn’t even let me read his answer.”
“I know this is big for you, but it sounds to me like you might have to give up on arithmetic for a while.”
“Arithmetic, he calls it.” He stared at me for a good thirty seconds. “No,” he finally said, shaking his head. “I won’t do it.”
I thought back to the stuff I couldn’t quit doing when I was his age. “I suppose it’s out of the question, sitting down with them and explaining.”
“Really,” he said after a minute. “You don’t get it. They’re going to hold a funeral. They’ll put a headstone in the cemetery with my name on it. I’ll be dead to them.”
“That’s pretty cold.” Not even the goonas could think this one was funny.
“It’s coming,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“So when it comes, what do you do?”
He looked at me. “I’m not the first person this happens to, you know. I know a guy.”
“A former, ahh, you mean, someone who got away? Before you?” Call me Mr. Smoove.
He nodded. “Yes. But it won’t happen today. Thanks for your help.” He finally noticed the laptop. A file was running, a feed from one of my cameras upstairs. The Worm occupied most of the screen, but there was a young girl there, too, down on her knees. “What?” Gelman said, pointing. “What in the world? Is that, um, upstairs?” He looked at me, wheels turning. He pointed at the screen. “That’s why you’re here.”
“Yeah.”
“But . . . You put cameras? You went up there? How?”
“Even bad guys gotta sleep sometime. These are wireless, and motion activated. Batteries are good for about a month before I have to go back and change ’em.”
“Can I ask?” Gelman said. “What did they do, to bring you here? Those guys upstairs.”
“They may have killed someone. Or at least they may have been there reason someone got killed. I’m not sure yet.”
Gelman shuddered. He looked at the image on the screen, then looked away. “Maybe it’s better I shouldn’t see,” he said. He stood up.
“You want your books back?”
He thought about that for a moment or two. “Yes,” he finally said, and it felt to me like he was deciding about a lot more than just books. “I do. Thank you.”
Everybody knew the Worm.
Tall guy, maybe six-seven or-eight, Haitian, pale brown, pocked face, skin stretched hard over a bony skull, ridges sheltering small brown eyes. Plus, the dude was ripped. He was even more impressive in person than he was on camera, and he walked through the hotel with the kind of Superman strut that told you he was pretty sure bullets would bounce off. He was coming down the stairs when I exited my room.
In certain situations, testosterone will mess with your head. If I stood aside to let him pass, would it be because the halls were narrow and I believed that basic consideration for the other guy was the last thing holding civilization together? I’d do it for anyone else, right? Or was it because I knew my punk ass was outclassed? I was delivered from too much angst by Hector, who stood in his usual spot outside his mother’s door.
The Worm stopped in front of the kid and held out a massive fist that was almost the size of Hector’s head. The kid was not afraid, and he bumped fists with the Haitian. Watching the two of them, it was hard to believe that they came from the same species. “Koman ou ye,” the Worm said.
Hector answered, “Mujen la.”
The Worm stood back up, rose up to his full height and looked down on me. “Hey, Pink,” he said, meaning me. “Why you here, man?”
It ain’t like I’ve never been called names before, and I was almost grown up enough for the opinion of a guy like the Worm not to mean a hell of a lot. Really, what irked was his unspoken certainty that he was better than me. “Hey, Taupe,” I said. “I sleep here. You got a problem with that?”
He was thinking about what to do with that when I noticed Hector, who all of a sudden looked terrified. The kid had flattened himself right up against his mother’s door. It wasn’t right and I knew it. Hector already had enough shit to deal with. I ignored the Worm and squatted down in front of the kid. “I’m sorry, Hector,” I said, and I meant it. “Everything’s okay. Nothing bad’s gonna happen. We’re all friends now, okay?”
He nodded once but he didn’t move.
I stood back up and looked at the Worm. “Not here, okay?”
He looked over my head, off into the distance. “Don’ get many Pinks here,” he said. “Let’s keep this simple. I tell you what I tell ’em all. Dis place is mine, you understand? Don’ mess with my ladies. Don’ bother my people. Don’ try an run no girls outa dis buildin’. Dis buildin’ is mine.”
“Got it,” I told him.
He stared at me. “Member what I tell you, vale.” It sounded like he’d called me a “valet,” but the pronunciation was a little off. He reached down then and rubbed the top of Hector’s head, barely ruffling the kid’s hair. “Adieu, mon ami,” he said. The kid watched him in wonder.
The Worm glanced back at me. “Later,” he said.
It was a tactical victory, but I didn’t know it at the time, I was too busy wondering what kind of a guy pimps out a bunch of girls and yet takes the time to teach some little kid how to say hi in Creole.
Big surprise, the lock on the door to the building across the street from the Hotel Los Paraíso was still broken, so I yielded to impulse and decided to go on up and knock on Luisa’s door. I heard her voice somewhere inside. “Ola . . .” A moment later I sensed movement at the spy hole, and then I heard her locks opening. She was, as before, layered in lace
and nightgowns, slathered in perfume. “Señor,” she said. “You come back.”
“Yes, ma’am. So sorry to bother you. I wonder if I could talk to you a little bit more.”
She didn’t smile but I got the impression she was not unhappy for the company. “Please,” she said, and she stood back, holding her door open. “Come inside. But I have to tell you, Ramon is berry mad with you.”
“Ramon? What’d I ever do to Ramon?”
“I don’t let him open the bottle I bought with the money you give me,” she said, as she slid by me in the dim hallway. “Because for Ramon, open is empty.”
I followed her to her front room and we sat in the same two chairs by the window. “Well, that’s what bottles are for. They’re for drinking.”
“No, no,” she said, wagging a finger. “Not for him to give me one lilla sip and then drink the rest and go sleeping the whole night and the next day. Too bad for him. Did you come for me to look at your palm again?”
“No thanks. I’m more interested in Ogun. What can you tell me about him?”
She rocked her head back, looked at me through half-lidded eyes, her chin held high. I thought I was beginning to understand Luisa, a little bit. This was her posture for threatened pride. She wasn’t sure if I was mocking her or not. “Male spirit,” she said, after a minute.
“Good male spirit? Bad male spirit?”
“Male,” she said, shrugging. “Sometime you find a woman who can be good without the bad, but never the man. Even when the man is good, is only because he tries so hard, but still he carries the bad with him.” She stared at me. “You know what I mean.”
I feigned outrage. “I think that was a shot.”
“Señor, please,” she said, and some of the tension went out of her. “You only try for being good because you think that is what your lady wants, but this is ignorance.”
“Okay, so Ogun is a male spirit. He wants to be good but he can’t always pull it off.”