Shadow of a Thief

by Norman Green

  “It won’t come to that,” I told her. “Just talking.”

  Her eyes narrowed and she hefted the bag again. “All right,” she said.

  The money first, naturally. We sat down at a table in a quiet corner of the hotel lobby and I passed over five crisp new hundreds. She stuck them in her bag and looked pointedly at where her watch would have been if she’d worn one. “Meter’s running,” she said.

  “What do I call you?”

  Her look was halfway between a sneer and a grimace. “Heather,” she said.

  “Did you know Melanie Wing?” I asked her.

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of person was she?”

  She shrugged. “Do-gooder. Do this, don’t do that, blah blah blah blah.”

  “Sounds like you didn’t like her much.”

  She shrugged again. “She was all right. I didn’t have no problems with her.”

  “How about your bosses? The Haitian and the two Chinese guys. They have any problems with her?”

  “At first, yeah, they were like, what’s your deal, what are you doing here, and all like that. After that, no. She didn’t have no attitudes or nothing, you get what I’m saying. Just did her little nursey thing. Talked a couple of the girls into going home, or wherever.”

  “That didn’t piss off the management?”

  She shrugged. “Ain’t that big a deal.”

  “If she had any problems with anyone on the street . . .”

  “The Worm would have kicked their ass,” she said flatly.

  “Really.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She sleep with him?”

  She shook her head. “Nah.”

  “How about the Chinese guys? She go with either of them?”

  “Far as I know, she didn’t crack that thing open for nobody.”

  Not what I expected, but that’s why you ask the questions. “Do you live at Los Paraíso?”

  “No.”

  “No? So where do you live? Can I ask?”

  “You just did,” she said. “I live in Delaware.”

  “No kidding. So, what, you drive in . . .”

  She looked at me and sneered again, as if she found my interest in her life, as opposed to her ass, inexplicable, if not distasteful. “I usually work one week, take two off. So, yeah, I’ll sleep at Los P six, seven nights, and then I go home.”

  “Your bosses okay with that?”

  “Why would they give a shit?”

  “So, you weren’t forced into this, then.”

  She glared at me. “Whaddaya want? You want a sob story? You wanna hear how my old man molested me? How neglected I was and shit? What?”

  “I’m not looking for stories. I just assumed, forgive me, that there’s usually a certain amount of coercion in these situations.”

  She shrugged again. “Well, you would be wrong about that,” she said. “But it ain’t a union gig. Everybody has to make their own deal.”

  “So if the Worm and his bosses aren’t holding you hostage, what’s their function?”

  “Make sure I don’t get hurt. Make sure I get my money. Keep the cops happy.”

  Again, not exactly what I was expecting. “So they take care of you. They’re not ‘holding’ your money for you, they’re not pretending to be a bank.”

  “I get mine,” she said. “Don’t you worry. Heather’s coming up on retirement pretty soon, baby.”

  “How much does it take to retire?”

  “Two mil,” she said, without hesitation.

  “Wow. Okay. So everybody makes his own deal, nobody’s there against their will . . .”

  “That ain’t what I said.”

  “Okay, maybe I heard you wrong. Talk to me.”

  “I’m an American,” she said. “I do what I want. Some of the other girls, like the Ukrainians or whatever, they got expenses they gotta work off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked like she was starting to burn. “Okay. Say you live in Crotchnia or some shit, you got too many kids, you can’t feed ’em all. One a your daughters, okay, let’s say she’s eleven or twelve, she’s old enough so you know she’s gonna be tall and not hard to look at, so you take her to town and you sell her. Now you got money to put gas in your tractor or some fucking shit. You starting to get it?” She was getting hotter. “And the buyer, okay, maybe he uses her, maybe he puts her to work or maybe he sells her up the line. Some of them wind up here.”

  “Nice. So some of the girls you work with . . .”

  “I don’t work with nobody.”

  “Some of the other girls at Los Paraíso, then.”

  She stared at me, almost as if she were daring me to have a human reaction. “Yeah.”

  “They’re stuck,” I said.

  “No more than you.”

  “You think? Some of the girls don’t have any choices, that’s what you just told me.”

  “No,” she said, some of the steam going out of her voice. “I guess they don’t.” A look crossed her face, it was almost like a spasm. I didn’t say anything, I waited to see where she’d take it. “There’s a girl from Seconal . . .”

  “Seconal?”

  “That’s somewhere in Africa.”

  Oh . . . “Oh.”

  “Her uncle sold her to an Italian syndicate. They took her to Milan, worked her there for a few years, and then they sold her here. She speaks Italian, English and French, she’s smart as shit. She’s fucking high-end, man, the gooks paid a fortune for her. They’ll never let her go. They might kill her, but they won’t ever let her walk.”

  “Why would they want to kill her?”

  “She’s breaking the rules.”

  “So?”

  “Client is just a client. Understand? He’s not your friend, he’s not your benefactor, he’s not your business partner and he sure as shit ain’t your fiancé.”

  “She fell in love.”

  “She fell all right.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Aniri.”

  “Must be tough to be her. Okay, almost done. The Worm and the other two, any of them have problems with women? Some kind of kink?”

  “What would you call a kink,” she said, but then she went on. “Nah. You know what, when you work in a candy store, after a while you get sick of it, you know what I’m saying. And I like what I do, don’t get me wrong, but I got no desire for any of those guys, so we’re all like, you know, don’t put yourself out none on my account.”

  “So you don’t know anyone who would’ve wanted to hurt Melanie Wing.”

  “No,” she said, looking down at her lap.

  “Any cops associated with the enterprise?”

  She glared at me. “You already got your money’s worth.”

  Aha. “Do I take that for a yes?”

  “Take it for whatever the fuck you want. That’s none of my business, I do my job, management does theirs. I don’t know nothing I don’t need to know.”

  All in all, aside from making the fat guy run away, I had to admit that I was disappointed in the whole transaction. “Thank you, Heather. Take care of yourself.”

  “Believe it,” she said, and I noticed that she had one hand inside her bag and that the thing was pointed in my general direction. “You mess with me and I will fill you fulla holes, right here and right now.”

  Yeah, sure. Easy enough to demonstrate the problems with that assumption, but I saw no profit in arguing the point. If a piece in her handbag made her feel safer . . . “Good luck on your retirement.”

  She stared at me for another second. She had this look on her face, it was almost as if she wanted to sneer at me again, but she couldn’t, because she didn’t know what I was. Maybe her opinions about men had gotten too set, too often reinforced by every new guy she did business with, and I didn’t fit her preconceptions. I suppose I found that comforting.

  She stood up and stalked out.

  It felt like I was running out of options, so I decided to give t
he Green Pang Tribe another go. Found out they upped their game.

  I was camped out just uphill from the bus garage, and four guys, none of them what you would call young, made their way in my direction. They didn’t seem overtly hostile, even though one of them had a pistol. He carried it discreetly in his jacket pocket but he made sure I saw it before he tucked it back out of sight. “Mr. Fowler,” he said. He stayed back out of range, which meant I would’t be able to attack his weapon unless he got close, and he seemed too smart for that. The other three kept their distance, as well.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’d like me to go away.”

  “My employer would like the opportunity to have a private word with you,” he said.

  “The bus company wants to talk to me?”

  He permitted himself a small smile. “I am not a bus driver, Mr. Fowler.”

  “Well, then we got a problem. See, out here on Willets Point Road, I ain’t afraid of your gun. In under cover, though, there’s too much chance of something bad happening. You know what I mean?”

  He gestured with his non-gun hand. “I didn’t come to fight.”

  “Really.”

  “Mr. Fowler. I was told you wanted to talk.” He nodded down the hill, in the general direction of the bus garage. “Your opportunity awaits.” He grinned. “You wanna do this, you’re gonna have to have some balls.”

  Prick. “Fine. All right.” I glanced at his compatriots. “Nobody behind me.”

  He looked at the other three and nodded, and they walked down the hill in front of us, then he and I followed. It was like a dance, almost, he and I each aware of every step the other took, each nuance of movement carrying its own message. I’m not sure what my body English was telling him but it was clear to me that his intention was to get me inside that garage without getting either of us jammed up. We did okay until we got right up to the building, but once I got close to the cavernous maw of roll-up doors fronting the comparatively gloomy interior, I became less comfortable with the whole idea. I still didn’t think he’d use the pistol, not out in the sunlight, but inside the garage it’d be another equation altogether. The other three were still keeping away from the two of us, if I wanted to try for the gun I might have had three or four seconds to disable him before any of them could interfere.

  The old man with the push broom limped out and stood blinking in the sun. My friend with the pistol nodded to him, then turned his back and walked off to lean on a parked car. I looked over at the old guy, he was wearing a janitor’s green uniform, with cotton work gloves and running shoes that looked a couple sizes too big for him. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  The old man shrugged. “Best place to hide something,” he said, “is out in plain sight.”

  “You’re Li Fat?”

  “I decline to answer that question, your honor, on account of it ain’t nobody’s fucking business. What can I do for you, Mr. Fowler?”

  I racked my brain, trying to remember if I’d told him my name when I met him last time. “You have good sources.”

  “Information is the lifeblood of all business,” he said. “Yeah, I know who you are. I just can’t figure out what the fuck you want.”

  I sighed. It bothered me, every time I had to go into this. “I had a half sister, I guess you might have known her after all. Melanie Wing.”

  “Yeah, Melanie. We knew her.” He kicked at a pebble on the ground. “She was your sister? Can we go inside and sit down? My back is killing me.”

  I hesitated.

  “Come on, Fowler, what the fuck. It’s us that ought to be worried about you. We got a lotta flammable shit up in here. I was told you blew up a fuel dump outside of Sarajevo. That true?”

  Sometimes the reason for an incursion isn’t to take something away, but to leave something behind . . . “I respectfully decline to answer your question, counselor,” I told him. “That was an accident. Lead the way.”

  The garage was relatively empty, almost all the buses being out on their appointed rounds. They had a ready room for the drivers, it had a couple of folding tables, a scattering of mismatched chairs, some vending machines, and a small kitchenette. A Hispanic kid was inside pretending to clean up. “Jimmy,” Li Fat said. “Give us a few minutes here, willya?” He fished in his pants pocket, came out with a five. “Go have a cup of coffee someplace.”

  The kid accepted the five. “Yes, boss.”

  “Coffee,” Li Fat said, pointing at the kid. “No beer. No ser vesa, pendejo.”

  “I promise, boss,” the kid said, and he departed in haste.

  “Fuckin’ kids,” Li Fat said. He gripped the edge of one of the tables and lowered himself into a chair. “Park it,” he said.

  I sat down across from him. Li Fat peered at me. “The guy who got Annabel in trouble,” he said. “He the connection here? He your father?”

  I sighed. “That’s my current misunderstanding.”

  Li shrugged. “These things happen. He do any better by you than he did for Melanie?”

  “No.”

  “I watched her grow up, you know.”

  “Melanie?”

  He glared at me. “Who the fuck we talking about? Anyway, she was our unofficial mascot for a while. Everybody loved her. The office people, all the drivers, you name it. Some a them desperadoes we had driving back then, they woulda walked on hot coals for that little girl. I still can’t believe anyone woulda wanted to hurt her.”

  “Annabel gave me the impression that she believed that one of you did it. Either one of your guys or someone from the Mott Street group.”

  Fat grimaced in discomfort and hitched himself up straighter in his chair. “If I thought one of mine killed her,” he said, “I’d have his fuckin’ cock nailed to the wall, I fuckin’ promise you that.” He sounded like he meant it. “Listen, when Annabel first come out here she asked us to watch her back, and we did it. Tell you the truth, nobody showed much interest.”

  “What about the other side? What about Peter Kwok? Annabel thought he might have wanted to get back at her, and poke his thumb in your eye at the same time.”

  “Why would he bother? Because she was with us? I ain’t buyin’ it, Fowler. Vendetta is a Latin thing, it don’t translate into Chinese all that well. I ain’t in the Peter Kwok fan club, okay, but I can tell you one thing about him, and you can bet your fuckin’ house on it: Kwok is a capitalist. What he’s interested in is making money. You think he’s gonna put his whole business and all his money at risk to hit some chickadee because she crossed the river to go to school in his backyard? I don’t see it. Not even if you paid him. Too much risk, not enough payoff. Suppose you went to Kwok right now, today, told him you wanted to pay him to take out some guy for you. How much money do you think it would take? Half a million? Those guys clear that in a month. Why would he put his cash flow at risk for some stupid low-rent shit like that?”

  “Annabel seemed very sure.”

  “That ain’t about us,” he said. “That’s about her.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his chair again. “Old-fashioned girl,” he said. “She dishonored her family, so she thought. Once, by givin’ it up to a white guy. A second time, by gettin’ knocked up and having the kid, and a third time by movin’ over here. I mean, she didn’t work for us or nothin’, but in her mind she was a turncoat. She never got over being ashamed. But that was her thing, man, not ours. This is America, for crissake, who really gives a fuck about alla that old country shit? Not me, and not Peter Kwok, neither. Listen, her parents weren’t exactly right off the boat. Even if they were pissed, okay, alls she hadda do was take that baby over the house one time and let them see her. Her old lady woulda took one look at Mel, I’m tellin’ you right now, pissed or not, it woulda been over, right there. And I told Annabel what I’m tellin’ you, right when she got home from the hospital, and I wasn’t the only one.” He shook his head. “People are fucked up, man. She could never see any other way exc
ept what she knew. What she thought she knew. She was raised traditional, and she thought she was tainted. And she never had another guy, not since Mel’s father. As hot as she was? How fucked up is that? But she was a true believer. Do you know what that means?”

  “Yeah. Means logic doesn’t apply. Don’t confuse me with facts.”

  “That was Annabel, she knew what she knew and she didn’t wanna hear nothin’ different. Even if it didn’t make no fuckin’ sense to anyone else.”

  “What can you tell me about Melanie?”

  He looked away from me while he thought about it. “Earth shoes,” he finally said. “Vanilla chai with soy milk. Feed the fuckin’ pigeons. Walk to cure this, run to cure that. NPR. Eat the rich. Save the children, and the whales.” He stared at me then, his eyes two black holes in an empty face. “I ain’t talkin’ politics here. She didn’t mean nothin’ bad by it, that’s just who she was. I grew up on the street, Fowler. You see me right here? This is me, this is what I grew into. I don’t know where you grew up, but I see you sittin’ right here too, muthafucka, so you ain’t all that different from me. Okay? But Melanie grew up right on that street out there. And she managed to turn into a good person.” He stared at me a moment. “You on Facebook?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. ‘Ooh, be my friend, like me, like me . . .’ Mel was never all that hung up on whether or not you liked her, but she really wanted to like you. There’s a big fuckin’ difference there.”

  “I get it. She have any bad habits that you knew about?”

  “Yeah, givin’ her money to bums.” He sighed and shook his head. “I’m not sayin’ she was perfect. I kept waitin’ for her to break out, you know what I’m sayin’. Follow the Dead for a year, sleep with the horn section or some damn thing. I kept thinkin’ she’d come around, that eventually she’d wind up doing what me or you woulda done. But that’s not who she was.”

  “You must have a theory.”

  “Okay, you wanna know what I think, I think it was probably one a those random things. I think she was walkin’ home some night, some sick fuck seen her and he had to have her. And they’ll never make him for it.”