Meanwhile, he stood there, hands still in his pockets, rocking forwards and back. There was something going on in that apartment, but it was hard for me to figure out quite what. He had much power over her, that was for sure. But why did she take it? And why be so sad about washing up? Surely, it was the kind of task you’d do every day. What straw broke the camel’s back this evening? I could only imagine.
Perhaps, over their evening meal, he had told his wife he’d met someone else and that he’d be leaving her. They had spent hours talking it over, about what they would do, when it was going to happen. And that was why it took so long for the washing up to get done. And that would explain why he was doing nothing but staring and why she found the dinner plates so miserable.
Or perhaps this was the first evening they’d spent after they left the hospital as they witnessed their son die in front of their eyes. And neither was able to talk any more. It had all been too much.
Leftwards to the next apartment on my travels, making me immediately below the one I was meant to be surveying.
23
FLORAL WALLPAPER IN the living room showed I was looking at a totally different kind of place and a different situation. On this occasion, there was a single person, sat down, watching the TV. Although the TV was facing the wrong way for me - hardly surprising as that would have meant it was facing out of the apartment - it was switched on, because there was a constant flickering of projected images onto the woman’s face.
With one blink, I spotted the fact, which I hadn’t noticed until this point. She was sitting in a wheelchair with a rug flopped onto her lap. Although the light wasn’t great, in between the penumbra of the shadows, I saw she was in her late thirties or early forties.
That begged the question why she was in the wheelchair in the first place. Was it a childhood disease that crippled her? An innocent casualty in a shootout outside a bank? A spinal injury caused by a drunk driving accident. All were possible and anything might be possible. I had no idea.
But that didn’t stop me from wondering whether it was self-inflicted or otherwise. Perhaps she’d thrown herself off the top of a building, high enough to cause herself permanent damage but not sufficient to kill herself.
She’d recently been to her mother’s funeral and had visited her sister in hospital, in a coma with less than a five per cent chance of ever gaining consciousness again.
That was the least of her problems, because while she was in the hospital, she was mistaken for a witness to a mob hit. Her hit man bungled the job and the bullet from his silencer embedded itself in her spine and not her heart - for reasons that are irrelevant right now.
After that, things got tough for her. In the ICU next to her sister, once she regained consciousness, she turned her head sufficiently to watch her sister escape from the coma, only to heave a massive exhalation, have a single drop of blood trickle out her nose and hear the sister’s last breath to exit her lungs.
Now she was able to speak, she told the doctors how she was shot at for no reason and they figured that the best thing to do was to move her to another room, especially as her vitals were surprisingly strong.
Her spinal cord shot to hell, quite literally, she discovered over the next few days the exact meaning of those words. She worked on her upper body strength so she was able to push herself around in her own wheelchair, but from that day she was haunted by the memories of being shot and watching her sister die. And the grief from her mother’s loss never left her.
Or she might have been like that from birth and was in the apartment because it was the only one in the area to have an elevator, for the money.
THEN I MOVED leftwards so I was diagonally below and to the left of Christina’s sex pad. All the lights were out apart from a single bulb hanging over a table in the living room. There was a green baize cloth covering the round table and, as you might have guessed, there were playing cards littering the table.
Four guys sat there, each holding a set of cards tightly to their chests or firmly face down on the table.
The first thing I wanted to figure out was what game they were playing: poker, rummy, gin, blackjack. Endless possibilities. The only game I was certain they were not playing was bridge, because none of them guys looked like noses-in-the-air bridge types. This was a dollar ante game and nothing more, although it was hard to tell because they used chips and not cash for their bets.
Admittedly that made it more upmarket than I’d first imagined, but hey even chimps can have a tea party.
Took me a while, but I reckoned it was poker. Five cards dealt a hand, three rounds of betting, made sense. Also, let’s face it, how many times do a bunch of young guys get together for a weekly game of gin. Nah, it was poker.
Unfortunately for me, I only saw one hand - the guy who had his back to me. The two on his side were at right angles to him so I had no chance with them and the dude sat opposite was completely the wrong way round because he faced me and the first dude. My guy seemed a cunning player. He liked to bluff.
The first hand I properly watched he had a pair of threes and won the pot beating two-pair by having a good poker face, not that I could see it, mind you. There was at least one hundred dollars in that pot. So maybe this game was for more than chump change after all.
The next hand he quit early and the following one too. Then he started betting up a storm. I saw he had an ace and king of hearts but there didn’t appear to be anything else interesting in his hand. And I was right. What became obvious was that there was a mirror facing my man and the window, which meant he had a clear line of sight on the cards of the guy opposite him.
So once I’d noticed this discrepancy, I too understood much better what he was up to. He had the smarts to only play his advantage every so often, otherwise he would have cleaned up far too quickly and far too obviously.
Instead, he took his time and slowly squeezed their money out of them. He wasn’t so much a bluffer as a card cheat. One day, he’d be thrown out of the window, but tonight continued to be his lucky night.
Upwards went my binoculars so I was to the left of Christina’s special place. One guy on his own in the living room, sitting at a desk facing a wall to the right. There were all sorts of bits of paper stuck to the wall and a typewriter on the desk.
The man had black-and-gray shortish hair and looked around late forties or early fifties. His fingers jabbed at the keys in short, sharp bursts. Each paragraph hammered out of the ends of his fingertips.
I couldn’t quite see what he was writing but there was a big pile of paper neatly forming several inches of written words, so it was something way longer than a letter to the New York Times.
He sat there and typed, fingers a-blur as the ideas left his head and entered the paper. What was he writing about though? Maybe he recalled his adventures in Western Africa, where he’d gone to help his friend and lover discover her ancestry. Perhaps he’d come back from Saigon and captured his thoughts about this war that never seemed to end and Nixon promised to stop.
They’d gone up some river or other and found a tribe, almost unchanged since the slave ships last set sail and met a family that shared her original family name - before her slave name took over and created the lie at the foundation of her identity.
Or he’s writing a recipe book and what he’s really interested in is cookies and cakes. It’s a baking book for people allergic to eggs. Or mustard. I had no fucking clue what he was writing and, no matter how much I twisted the zoom wheel, I could not see the letters that appeared on the paper. He was typing too fast for me to focus on that small space. The letters flew along the page and then the page would shift up one line and I’d need to reset my focus again. By the time I’d done that, the damn thing shifted up and I was back at the beginning again. Infuriating.
He stood up and walked into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. Now was my chance. I stared at the sheet in the typewriter, all stationary and readable and zoomed in closely, hoping to discover wh
at it was:
The real problem is
And then he came back and started up again. God damn it!
SO I MOVED up to the last apartment surrounding the target one with Christina inside and found another guy on his own. Again, he was in his living room but that was where the similarity ended.
This guy was in his seventies and had a golfing putter in his hand. I couldn’t see it because of the furniture, but I guessed there was a ball. He practiced his swing several times and he’d stop, walk along the length of the apartment and bend down, presumably to collect the ball, and then walk back to the living room. And so on.
The repetitions were impressive and his concentration was focused, but I couldn’t believe he spent so much time doing the one same thing, over and over again. Mindless. Dull. You had to hope he learned a lot about his putting.
I was hardly a regular player, but even I knew he wasn’t following through enough, which would mean he missed the pin left or right - or fell short much of the time. He tried out different length putts and got the same result, one way or another, but I couldn’t see him altering his stance or stroke or anything. Swing, hit, stroll, collect. And repeat and repeat...
SOMEHOW I FELL asleep in the middle of the night and I woke with a start around seven. Everything was still, everything was quiet. There was a hotel letter pushed under my door, notifying me that a complimentary newspaper was awaiting me the other side of the door.
I settled back into my chair and looked across to the apartment block. All the people I’d watched were there apart from the poker game which had given up the ghost. Even the writer was continuing to hammer away at his prose.
Then the curtains in the bedroom, where Christina Almaguer had slept, were pulled open by the man. I decided to call him Juan, for no obvious reason at all.
He stood there bare ass naked and stretched, facing me, arms and legs making a starfish shape. His dick dangled between his legs. He went back and lay on the bed, facing away from me but towards Christina, still under the covers.
Then they kissed and cuddled and I aimed my camera and took a photo. Click, whir, snap as the shutter let in enough light onto the film to capture the moment forever.
Click, whir, snap again in case the first one didn’t come out so good. She stroked his ass and kissed his belly, so he rolled over and lay on his back. Her kissing carried on until she was much lower than his stomach, but much higher than his knees. Click, whir, snap. Click, whir, snap.
She stopped all that slobbering and sat astride him, moving upwards until her crotch approached his mouth. Click, whir, snap.
She let her head flop backwards so her spine arched, leaning her hands on the bed. She sure enjoyed his tongue. Click, whir, snap.
Christina pushed Juan’s head away from her and sidled back down his body, rubbing herself against his torso along the way. For a second, she lifted herself up and positioned herself so his dick could get inside her. Click, whir, snap. Pelvic thrusts ensued and no doubt some deep breathing. I kept my finger on the shutter, capturing every movement of their two bodies. I must admit the scene intrigued me and turned me on. They humped away like two tanned beetles and I watched them, my spare hand down my pants, until the film roll was spent - like them.
Juan and Christina both lay on the bed doing nothing, but recovering from their sex and I did the same with a helpful squeeze of my own hand.
To be honest, I had more than enough of what I needed. The first shot with Juan outstretched and Christina’s tits in the background was all I had required to get full payment from Lenny. The rest, you might say, was fun.
That was when I realized I needed to get out of this game. The tedium of the night was not something I especially wanted to experience too often again and the morning’s photo shoot showed I was more interested in imagining myself fucking the client’s wife than in getting the paid job done. That is the moment to hang up your hat and do something else instead. And this what I did.
When I got back to town, I met up with Lenny and showed him one or two of the photos, explaining to him I had a bucket load more if he, or his lawyer, wanted or needed them. There were the usual tears, but nothing I wasn’t used to. Once all that was over and he’d handed over my money, I went back to my office and served notice on the lease and never looked back - until the call come from the Don, which got me chasing round the country to get to Dakila Valdez.
I played chess in Central Park with a guy I met there in the afternoons and I carried on hanging out in the cop bars just to enjoy their conversation and company. There’d be the odd fling with a woman I’d meet in a bar or whatever, but nothing lasted more than a few weeks or a couple of dates. That suited me fine, because I had no interest in being tied down by the responsibility of having to keep a relationship going for years and having to put up with someone else’s bullshit. I wanted to be myself and do my thing. No strings attached.
PART TEN
HOUSTON 1965
24
SOMETIMES YOU DO good, of sorts. A few years earlier, Edgar and Irene Phelps got in touch with me because their son, Brad was missing.
When I heard this news on the phone, I sighed, because my gut feel was that he’d gone off whoring with his college friends and would be back when his money or his dick ran out.
The more they spoke, the more I listened: this had more to it than most missing person cases and I invited them to my office to discuss the matter in more detail. The other reason the case intrigued me was that I could see the number of days this would take me to get sorted and that spelled moolah with a capital M.
“When was the last time you saw Brad, then?” I enquired once everyone had settled down and I’d made coffee for all those who wanted it.
“Three or four weeks,” said Mr. Phelps. These were classic New York upstate Democrat liberals, who believed all people should have a fair shake and Brad had caught that fever big time. Big enough to want to change the world. My New York office looked like something at that point; times got a lot tougher after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, but not then.
“And why, now, do you think he’s missing?”
“Well,” explained Mrs. Phelps, “he always phones us collect once a week. But last weekend, he didn’t. So we know something must have happened to him. He wouldn’t miss our weekly call.”
“And what was he doing?”
“He had gone south to help with the Negro situation.” Too many or too few, I wondered.
“How was he doing that?”
“Brad went to Texas to help protect the rights of the Negros there. They are being attacked and no-one is doing anything about it.”
“Apart from Brad, that is.”
“Yes, and his friends ... and the League for Equal Rights for All.”
“Haven’t come across them before. How do they operate? Was Brad a member?”
“Lera provides legal advice and financial support for black families. Brad went to Houston to give free legal advice - he is in his third year at Harvard after all - and to help in any other way he could.”
“Free legal advice doesn’t make you missing, does it?”
“No,” said Mr. Phelps, hesitating, “over the last week or so, Brad has become more deeply involved. He wouldn’t tell us all the details, but you are right, there was more to his activities than legal opinion to poor Negros.”
We were all silent for a spell, knowing the chances were Brad was embroiled in something very dangerous. So dangerous violent men might have applied some force. The best I could hope for was that Brad was in hiding somewhere and that I had to follow his trail until I got him and dragged his sorry liberal ass back home. Worst case was a lot worse and none of us wanted to imagine what that looked like right now.
The next day I flew down to Houston, checked into my motel and went to the local precinct house. Amazing to say, if someone is missing, ask a policeman and they often have the answer which can save a gumshoe a lot of leather.
The wonderful thing abou
t this job is how small the world is. About half an hour after I left the precinct, I’d returned to my motel and a knock on the door erupted from the silence. Nothing hurried, but firm and insistent. I opened it and a face from my past appeared; hadn’t seen him for over fifteen years. More gray on top and many more wrinkles on the side, especially near the eyes. But there stood FBI Agent Phil McNamara.
“HEY, JAKE.”
“Well I never ...”
“I hear you’re looking for the Phelps boy.”
“Sure am. What’re you doing in the south? I thought you were an East Seaboard kinda guy.”
“Left Baltimore over ten years ago. Been covering Texas since then. Better weather, bigger guns. Better pay.”
“That helps. Come on in.”
Phil sat in the room’s easy chair and I sat on the bed.
“So do you have any news about the boy?” I asked, hoping Phil had done all the work for me and I could have two days paid R ‘n’ R before returning home triumphant. But this was not the case.
“We’ve been monitoring Lera for a four or five months now. They are well-intentioned, but we think they might be funded by the Communist Party, hence our initial interest.
“But recently they’ve moved on from offering free legal advice to the local blacks to getting directly involved with fighting the local Nativists.”
I nodded and realized that Brad was in deep. Phil’s euphemism for the Klan was a peculiar one, although the new breed of Klansman was miles away from the pro-Catholic bunch of white hoods from my great grandfather’s day. The constant, though, were their tactics: intimidation of the poor and disenfranchised, looting, burning, lynching.
The Case Page 13