by Norman Green
“Yeah,” I said. “I heard that theory. A cop told me the guy will keep it up until his number comes up.”
Li Fat spread his hands out, palms up, eloquently expressing his agreement. “Which don’t make either one of us happy.”
“Do you think it would be a waste of time for me to try to talk to Peter Kwok?”
He laughed at me. “You sure you wanna stick your neck out that far? Kwok’s a fuckin’ head case.” He scratched his chin. “Thing about the guy is this,” he said. “The man’s got his hands full right about now. Having a hard time keepin’ his kids in line. You don’t want him comin’ down on you just to show them all what a hardass he can be when he wants to. I tell you what, I’ll make a call for you. Tell my man Brian to give you his number, I’ll have him back you up.” He grinned. It was a predator’s smile. “Just to keep everybody honest.”
“Brian the one with the piece?”
Li Fat nodded. “Good luck,” he said. “Whoever the guy is, I hope you get him. Give me a couple days to set it up with Kwok.”
Chapter Thirteen
Gelman was in his cubicle. I got the impression he was pissed off but I went on by, climbed those creaking stairs up to my floor. As usual, Hector was doing his lonely sentry duty outside his mother’s door. I tried to smile at him on the way past but it was asking a lot and I don’t think I pulled it off. Eyes on your own paper, I told myself. Quit worrying about the kid, you can’t help him.
Inside my room, I sat down, powered up the laptop, and scanned through the new video feeds. The only thing of interest that I found was some footage of the Worm and his two Chinese pals having an argument. The sound was too degraded for me to tell what they were fighting about but it seemed clear that none of them could agree with either of the other two. And right in the middle of it all, one of the Chinese dudes made a phone call, and whoever answered, they all argued with him, too. It was the first time I was seeing the Chinese guys without the shades and hoodies, and maybe it was me getting old, I didn’t know, but they both seemed way too young to be doing this. There was some footage of Heather, too, the girl I’d met in the hotel in midtown. It appeared that she might be the one I’d seen on my first night at Los Paraíso, the one I saw passed out in bed from my perch on the fire escape. It wasn’t easy to tell for sure but it looked like she swallowed a couple of capsules and went off to lie down. Maybe she was less at ease with her career choices than she wanted me to believe. And maybe I should have used better equipment, too, so I could hear and see clearly what was going on instead of merely guessing at it, but then again the whole enterprise was starting to look like a waste of my time and Mac’s money, anyhow. It took me a couple of hours to finish going through the new files, and when I was done, I dumped them all.
I thought back to that first assault, back when the two kids had followed me up onto the rooftops. I’d figured that it meant something at the time, but now I was beginning to think it was nothing more than a lame attempt by the Worm and his buddies to run me off. I made them uncomfortable and they wanted me to go away, but I get that a lot. It didn’t mean they had anything to do with Melanie’s death. Besides, the goons they’d sent after me weren’t exactly varsity.
The setup at Annabel’s building, though, that felt like it came from an entirely different kind of douchebag. As I sat there thinking about it, I remembered feeling something brush against my face as I entered the hallway behind her security door. Probably a trip wire of some kind, but it had been so fine and I had been so distracted that I hadn’t thought to stop and look for it. And they got my prints on a water glass in her kitchen sink. A water glass had gone missing out of my bathroom. Planted evidence, a bad cop’s best friend . . .
I felt confident that both Li Fat and the Green Pang Tribe had the money and the smarts to put something like that together, and I was equally sure that both of them had cops on their payroll, but Li Fat hadn’t really shown a lot of interest in what I was doing. I had a sinking feeling that Peter Kwok would be essentially the same, focused on his own business interests and not all that concerned with another casualty of the street. You know, Too bad about the girl, really. We done here? I tried to push that thought out of my head. Don’t prejudge the guy, I told myself. Wait until you see him face to face, if that actually happens.
When it was finally time to go I walked across the room and stood still for a moment facing the inside of the door, wishing I could see through it so I would know if that goddamn kid was still out there in the hallway. Why are you so afraid of the kid, I asked myself.
You know why, an inner voice said.
I can’t help him, I thought.
The voice did not reply and I stood there motionless, accused by the silence.
Really, I thought. Whatever he needs, I don’t have it.
This is stupid, I thought, and after another minute I opened the door, rattled the outside doorknob to make sure it was locked, and stepped out into the hall.
No Hector.
I felt a wave of relief wash over me, followed swiftly by a subtle whiff of dismay. Am I so hollow, I wondered, that I can’t even bear to look at the kid? But the truth was, Hector needed an answer and I didn’t have one for him. I looked up at the dirty skylight far above my head. What do you want from me, I asked it. What am I supposed to do? And all of those voices, goonas, gods, the editorial committee, angels, spirits or demons, they were all silent. The earth spun on her axis, the solar system whirred like the guts of an ancient pocket watch, and the Milky Way, unseen by me, was just a small eddy in an unfathomably enormous stream. I tried to put Hector out of my head and I went down the creaking stairs.
Shmuley Gelman had gotten a haircut.
I’d missed it on the way up. He’d shaved, too, somewhat inexpertly; his face looked like it lost a fight with his razor. He was wearing a purple shirt, which clashed magnificently with his reddish hair, even in the dim light of the lobby of the Hotel Los Paraíso. I walked over and let myself into his cubicle. “Holy shit, Gelman. What happened?”
He turned to look at me, and he did not seem at all surprised that I’d gotten through his locked door. “You noticed,” he said, scowling. “So far, you’re only the second one.”
“You expected the world to be different.” I sat down in his soft chair. “You turn your life upside down, but when you step outside your front door, everything is just like it was. You thought the world would be shocked but then it goes about its business without giving you a second glance. Who else noticed?”
“Aniri,” he said, looking at the floor. “One of the girls from upstairs. She didn’t say anything, but I saw her looking at me, and she smiled. I think she knew.”
“So what happened?”
He seemed to think about it for a moment, and then he hitched his chair around so that he was facing me instead of his window. He leaned over, put his elbows on his knees, and went back to staring at the floor. “He sent me another letter,” he said.
“The arithmetic guy? The guy from NYU, that wrote the book?”
“Yes.” Gelman nodded miserably. “But I got the letter this time. Before she did.”
“She?”
“My mother.” He infused the word with bitterness. “But she caught me reading it.”
“Oh-oh.”
He looked up at me, his face a study in pain. “I thought she would understand,” he said. “Isn’t she supposed to be on my side? She’s my mother . . .”
“Because she’s your mother, you think she’s gonna look out for you?” I wasn’t able to keep my face entirely neutral, but then again, Gelman had broadsided me. I realized, sitting there in his cubicle, that I hadn’t ever talked about it, either. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
Gelman stared at me with an odd expression on his face. “Really? Was your mother as nuts as mine?” he said. “Tell me about her.”
Man, I wasn’t prepared for that. And the truth was, I had done my best to forget about her.
“I’m sorry,” Ge
lman said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, it’s all right.” I stretched out in his chair, stuck my feet way out in front, leaned my head back. “She was very pretty when I was young. I remember brown curls in her hair, and white skin. She was very thin, back then. Still had all her own teeth.”
“What happened?”
I swallowed. “She was a paranoid schizophrenic. She heard voices in the dark. And whenever the voices convinced her that someone was after her, you know, she’d pull me out of school and we’d wind up on another bus, on our way to some new town, someplace where nobody knew who she was, and she could start over again.” I glanced over at him. I had Gelman’s complete attention. “I mean, she probably did the best she could, but . . . So anyway, I was always the weird new kid in school. And I think the biggest thing I ever learned in school was how to take a punch.”
“Came up short in arithmetic, though,” Gelman said, and he managed a weak smile.
“Well, yeah, that and a few other things, too. I guess. But she taught me. Read to me when she could. Although you had to be careful what kind of book it was. I mean, if it was sci-fi or fantasy or whatever, I’d lose her, she’d wig right out. But she tried to teach me what she knew.”
Gelman nodded at his cubicle door. “She teach you how to open locks?”
“No. I picked that up that later on. But you know what, Shmuley, she did what she could. She gave me what she had to give. You know what I mean? If you really need a buck from your mother but all she’s got is a quarter, the quarter is all you get. You ain’t gonna do no better. Your mother is probably about the same. Maybe she gave you her quarter, and that’s all there is.”
“Yes, but . . .” He shook his head, decided not to say what he’d been thinking. “You’re no dummy. How’d you get your education?”
“She gave me away once, and I got most of it then, I think. And I read a lot.”
“Whoa. Wait. She gave you away? You mean she left you with relatives or whatever?”
“No. It was more like what happens when your dog has puppies. ‘Hey, mister, you want a puppy? Your kids will love him.’ Like that. So I got through a couple years of high school, for what it was worth. But mostly I got my education the way you got yours.” I pointed at his pile of math tomes. “On my own. But during my stretch in high school, I felt like I was getting close, you know what I mean? I felt like I had almost figured out what I was supposed to be doing, but then she came back and got me and we were off and running again.”
“What kind of stuff did you read?” he said.
“Not a lot of math,” I told him. “I seemed to gravitate to what-the-fuck books.”
“What? You read what kind of books?”
I nodded. “What-the-fuck books. Isn’t that the real question? Like, what’s the real point? Yeah, so I worked my way through guys like Alan Watts, Suzuki, Thomas Merton, Stephen Hawking, Sun Tzu, Karen Armstrong, Harris, Peck, and on and on, anyone who was trying to answer the question. Does it matter what you do? Are we missing something? Is it all gonna make sense, one of these days?”
“You’re asking the wrong question,” Gelman said, and he stared at me. “The right one is, are we simply biochemical phenomena, or are we something more? Everything else is inferred.”
“I think that’s just the smart person way of saying it.”
“Those books you read,” he said. “Did any of them teach you anything?”
“Malcolm X.”
“Really? What’d he say?”
“To be honest with you, I can’t remember what he said, I only remember what I heard.”
“Which was . . .”
“There’s nobody looking out for you. Nobody’s gonna take care of you. If you sit around and wait for a handout, or even a hand up, you’re gonna be sitting there a long fucking time. If you want something, if there’s something out there that you wanna do with yourself, better get up off your ass and get after it. And, like I said, I don’t know if that’s what he said, but that’s what I heard.”
Gelman thought about that for a while. He looked up, eventually. “What happened to your mother?”
“Crack. She got to where she’d take anything that would make the voices go away for a while, but when she wasn’t high her paranoia got a lot worse. I mean, a lot worse. She tried to kill me once, and she came a little too close so I took off. And not too long after I was gone, she did kill someone. Some john picked her up, I guess she’d been too long between rocks and she thought he was trying to take over her mind, so she cut him. She’s locked away now, she’s in a prison hospital up outside of Boston.”
“Do you ever go to see her? Does she know who you are?”
“Oh, she knows who I am all right. She thinks her whole life is all my fault. Wasn’t for me, she’da got everything she ever wanted. What did your professor say, the math guy that wrote to you?”
“Why didn’t I answer his first letter,” Gelman said. “Can I come to see him. Actually, I have an appointment to go by his office on Saturday.”
“Wow. Really? Saturday? Are you serious?” That was a hell of a step for a so-recently Orthodox kid.
“Yes,” he said, staring at me with his jaw clenched. “And I’m going. I don’t want to blow this on account of some bullshit superstition.” It was the first time I ever heard him swear. “Of course, that’s assuming I have the courage to actually go, when Saturday comes. You think God will hate me for this?”
He was overreacting, and I got why, I understood. If he lived long enough, he might have the chance to revisit the whole mess, but for the time being he was going to be pissed off. “Can’t imagine why she would,” I told him. “But you still have a job?”
“So far,” he said. “I don’t see anybody lining up outside to take it.”
“You got a place to sleep?”
He nodded at the chair I was sitting in.
“You got another key to my room upstairs? Use it if you need to, I ain’t sleeping here.”
“Thank you,” he said. “How long are you staying?”
“I’m not sure. But listen, if you need company on Saturday, I’ll walk across town with you. I’m not gonna say I know how you feel, but I do know what alone feels like.”
The tension bled out of him and he sort of deflated in his chair. For a second I thought he was going to cry, but he just wiped his nose on the sleeve of his purple shirt. “Thank you,” he said. “And for the use of your room, too. Those guys upstairs, did they do what you thought they did?”
“We’ll find out shortly.”
I watch for cops, pretty much all the time.
Maybe it’s a function of my profession, I don’t know, but I’d always assumed that any interaction between the police and myself carried too much potential for ill and too little for good, so I’ve always kept an eye out. I’d done it for so long that I suppose I’d stopped being conscious of it long ago, but I am rarely surprised by policemen, whether it be driving, walking around the city, or in the pursuit of my chosen profession. I walked through the front door of my hotel over on the West Side and I saw them before they saw me. I was back out through the hotel’s front door before they could react. One of them was Sal Edwards, the guy who came to talk to me in lockup.
I melted back into the New York City night.
I suppose a normal citizen would have been willing to talk. Although I don’t know this for a fact, I assume that a regular guy, comfortable in the knowledge that he hadn’t done much of anything wrong, would figure that he was safe enough. He might even think that the cops were on his side, and would treat him fairly.
I harbored no such delusions.
They’d already put me inside for something I hadn’t done, and they’d probably do it again if they could. It’s like a parent who beats his kid even when he’s not sure of the kid’s guilt, operating on the assumption that the kid must have done something, somewhere along the line, and so deserved to get his ass kicked either way. That had always been my mother�
��s working hypothesis.
No wonder I had problems with authority.
I sought refuge in the back corner of a coffee shop a block or so away. Something I’d heard years ago in a 12-step meeting somewhere came into my mind, you could call it an aphorism, although I’d always preferred to think of that stuff as new age bumper sticker psychobabble bullshit. ‘Nothing will change until it becomes what it is.’ I probably sneered at it at the time, but I finally understood, maybe, some of what the guy was saying. So long as I kept on pretending that I was okay, that I was coping with my situation, I would not be able to do much of anything to change it in any meaningful way. It came to me then that I needed to do what every successful enterprise must do from time to time. I needed to take inventory.
To begin with, I was still pretty shaky about who had murdered Melanie Wing. I had to admit that I’d zoned in on the Hotel Los Paraíso, specifically the Worm and his two Chinese pals. I mean, they looked so guilty . . . And yeah, they’d probably been behind that first halfhearted attempt to scare me away, but from their point of view that could be seen as nothing more than normal prudence. How they’d gotten on to me so quickly, though, that was still puzzling. It was like they knew I was coming before I even showed up.
Next, the ex-cop PI Josh Whelen and his tall, skinny, ex-detective pal hadn’t come up with much, either. Two guys who were, unlike myself, professional investigators, looked into Melanie’s murder and came up empty. On top of that, Whelen had what I had to admit was the likeliest take on what had happened to her, which was the Random Fruitcake Theory. Some guy with a twist had done her in, and he’d gotten away with it, and short of God coming down and pointing a finger at the bastard, that was that. And, okay, maybe the guy would get his somewhere along the line, because everybody pays in the end, but we weren’t gonna make him for killing Melanie.
Third, someone with strong connections to the NYPD, someone who knew what he was doing had, very carefully and very professionally, set me up to take the fall for Annabel’s death, and if it hadn’t been for the auspices of Dick Plover, who probably had more blood on his hands than the rest of us put together, I’d still be behind bars while I tried to explain myself. Bad enough I wound up owing a guy like Plover, but to make it worse I wasn’t sure I was in the clear on the murder charge.