There were also a lot of agency listings. Most used sophisticated names like Erotica and Exotica, and Neal yearned for an agency of frigid hookers called Antarctica. His personal favorite, though, was Around The World In Eighty Minutes. Of course, there was no listing for “Ginger and Yvonne: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll,” because nobody ever got that lucky.
“You said last time was it,” Scott Mackensen protested over the phone.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Will this really help Allie?”
“Could.”
There ensued one of those long, irritating silences Neal was getting used to on this gig. And not a grape in sight. He settled for a bite of his Hershey bar-the healthy kind, the one with almonds.
“I have a test tomorrow,” Scott said.
I know the feeling, kid. “On what?”
“Macbeth.” He sounded mournful.
“I’ll help you with it. I’ve taken a few exams on Macbeth myself.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. The witches did it.”
Scott stared at the ads laid out on the counter in Neal’s motel room. He moved his index finger slowly down the page, then shook his head.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Try again.”
“I can’t remember!”
“Jesus Christ! How many call girls have you been with?”
“I was drunk!”
Attaboy, Neal, he told himself, browbeat a witness who’s really trying. That’ll help.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re both tired. Try it this way. In your hotel room in London, where was the phone?”
Scott pointed to a spot on the counter. Neal moved the phone there and put a chair in front of it.
“Okay,” he said. “Sit down. Where was the paper? Okay. Which hand do you dial with? Good. Now look at the paper. Don’t think. Just point.”
“Somewhere around here,” Scott said, pointing toward the lower third of the first page.
“Good. Now was it the name of an agency, or just a couple of girls?”
“Just girls.”
“Good.”
Good, not great. But it was progress. Something to work from.
Scott sank back in his chair and let out a long sigh. He was an exhausted kid. He looked at Neal and smiled.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he said.
Neal went for the brass ring.
“Hey, Scott. Did you take any pictures of these girls?”
Neal watched the kid’s spine stiffen.
“You mean dirty pictures?”
“No, I mean you tell your friends what you did and they say ‘Bullshit,’ and you whip out a couple of Polaroids of the girls.”
Scott looked him right in the eye and told him the God’s honest truth.
“No way.”
“Just a thought. When’s your test?”
“First period.”
Neal whipped through a few of the big themes in the old Scottish play, discoursed on how many times the word man was used, and for extra credit threw in a few notes on the uses of color in the imagery. Then he sent Scott on his way and phoned Joe Graham.
Neal was at scott’s school bright and early, first period. The kid’s dorm-room door was a breeze, one of those spring-bolt locks that yodel, “Come on in, pardner.”
The room was your typical boys’ school hovel with a sort of dirty laundry Cristo effect. Neal found Scott’s desk and went straight to the top right drawer, the locked one. It was a little less friendly than the door lock, but opened up after a little persuasion.
The usual collection of bullshit was in there. A bunch of letters from a girl named Marsha, another bunch from a Debbie. Lots of pictures: Marsha or Debbie with Scott on a beach; Marsha or Debbie with Scott at a dance; just Marsha or Debbie on a boat; just Scott on the boat, taken by Marsha or Debbie; Marsha or Debbie posed romantically under a willow tree. Neal didn’t see any of Marsha and Debbie pounding the crap out of Scott. He leafed through a couple of Penthouse magazines, a passport, and a brochure on Brown University before he came to a thin packet of pictures secured by a rubber band. Bingo. Scott and a friend with arms around two girls who were neither Marsha nor Debbie-in a hotel room. Hello, Ginger. Greetings, Yvonne.
Neal took the best picture and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He locked the desk drawer and walked out of the room, whistling a happy tune, wondering how Scott was doing in class.
Joe Graham, listening from the stairway, heard the whistling and left by a side door.
They met in the parking lot of the post office. Neal slid into the passenger seat of Graham’s car.
“So what do you have so important I have to come to Connecticut to hold your hand for?”
“I have Allie hooked up to a dealer, name unknown, naturally, who has friends in the ‘love for rent’ business. I have two working girls, names unknown, naturally, but narrowed down to about twelve phone numbers, who know the aforementioned dealer. I have skit.”
“You’re doing okay.”
“Yeah, right. Do you want to lay the odds on our finding Allie Chase in London?”
“About the same as Jackie O peeling my banana at Lincoln Center.”
Neal laid the photo on the dashboard.
“Visual aids, very nice,” Graham said.
“I’ve been thinking about something.”
“Hard to believe.”
“Allie Chase ran before.”
“So?”
“Twice to New York.”
Graham pretended to study the picture.
“If I’d have picked her up, I would have told you about it,” he said.
“So you didn’t, and I didn’t, and-”
“There’s nothing about it in the file.”
“At least not in the file we’ve seen.”
Graham perused the picture some more. “Nice-looking girls.”
“What’s going on, Dad?”
“Son, I don’t know.”
I hope you don’t, Dad. Goddamn, I hope you don’t.
6
A few weeks and a few jobs after Neal had started working for Graham, he answered a knock on the door, to find the gremlin standing there, his arms full of packages and a brand-new mop and broom clutched in one hand.
“What’s this?” Neal asked.
“I’m fine, thank you. How are you? Your mother home?”
“Not lately.”
Graham brushed him aside and stepped in.
“You live in a toilet. A toilet.”
“It’s the maid’s year off.”
Graham swept off some garbage from the kitchen counter and set the packages down. “We’re going to fix that.”
“You buy me this stuff?”
“No, you bought you this stuff. I took it out of your pay for the last job.”
“You better be kidding me, man.”
“This,” said Graham with an appropriate flourish, “is a mop. You use it to clean floors.”
“Just give me the money.”
“This is a broom. You also use it to clean floors,” Graham said, looking around, “although maybe I should have brought some dynamite.”
That morning, Neal discovered that Graham was a first-class neatnik, a psychopathic cleaner of the highest order. Out of the bags came sponges, dishrags, dish towels, Brillo pads, bug spray, disinfectant, lemon oil, Windex, paper towels, detergent, Comet cleanser (“The best, don’t let anybody kid you.”), toilet-bowl cleaner, and a package of bright yellow rubber gloves.
“I like things to be neat and clean,” Graham explained, “at work, and at home.”
They cleaned. They crammed months of accumulated trash into plastic garbage bags and carried it downstairs. Then they swept-like your mother never did. (“The broom’s not going to get everything, you see, so you have to get down on your hands and knees with this brush, and use the dustpan.”) Then they mopped, with Graham showing Neal not only the correct ratio of cleanser to water but also the proper way to swing the mop “so you’re not just shoving the dirt around.” This was followed by scrubbing, waxing, polishing, disinfecting, and scraping until Neal Carey was tired, irritable, aching, sore, and living in an immaculate apartment.