“I was under a Buick and couldn’t get out before the goon got away.”
“Was he this Joe you thought I was working for?”
“No. The goon works for Joe Grosetto.”
Malone explained Grosetto was a local loan shark. I asked where I could locate this shark but neither knew for sure. Charley would.
Kaye and Donna were waiting for me in the foyer of my building. I brought them out to the DeSoto under the umbrella and drove straight to Charity Hospital, parking at an empty meter outside the emergency room.
Charley Rudabaugh was about five ten, thin, with curly light brown hair and green eyes. He smiled at Kaye and kissed Donna before finally noticing me standing behind them. His right arm in a fresh cast, Charley blinked and said, “Who are you?”
I let Kaye explain as she held his left hand, bouncing a gurgling Donna cradled in her free arm. He looked at me suspiciously, sizing me up, giving me that look a man gives another when he has just showed up with his woman. When Kaye finished, more nervous now, she asked Charley what had happened to him.
He turned to her and his eyes softened. He took in a deep breath and said, “Haney.” She became pale, and I pulled a chair over for her to sit, then went back to the doorway.
“He didn’t ask where I was?” asked Kaye.
Charley shook his head. “He just wanted the money.”
Kaye’s eyes teared up, and she pressed her face against his left arm and cried. Charley’s eyes filled too and he closed them, but the tears leaked out, down his lean face. Donna’s arms swung around in circles as she lay cradled. I waited until one of the adults looked at me.
It was Charley. I asked, “How much money are we talking about?”
“This doesn’t concern you.”
Kaye stopped crying now and wiped her face on the sheet before sitting up.
I tried a different tack. “What school didya’ go to?” The old New Orleans handshake. This was no public school kid. He told me he went to Jesuit. I told him I went to Holy Cross. Two Catholic school boys who’d gone to rival schools.
“Your parents can’t help?” Jesuit was expensive.
“They don’t live here anymore. And don’t even ask about Kaye’s parents. This is our problem.”
“Everyone needs help sometimes.”
“That’s what you do? Some kinda guardian angel?”
I shook my head, thought about it a second, and said, “Actually, it’s what I do most of the time. Help people figure things out.”
“We can’t afford a private eye.”
I tried still another tack. “How do I find this Grosetto? This Haney?”
Charley shook his head. Kaye wouldn’t meet my eyes, so I left them alone, went out into the waiting area. Ten minutes later a blond-headed doctor went in, then a nurse. I caught the doctor on the way out. It was a simple fracture of both bones, the radius and ulna between wrist and elbow.
“It was a blunt instrument, officer,” the doctor said. “Says he fell, but something struck that arm.”
I thanked the doc without correcting him that I wasn’t a cop. The nurse was finishing up, telling them how Charley had to move on soon as the cast was hard. Kaye turned her red eyes to me, and I took in a deep breath. “I’ll take you to the Ursulines, okay?”
Her shoulders sank. I turned to Charley. “So where have you been staying?”
“He’s been sleeping at the Gulf station,” Kaye said.
He shot her a worried look.
“They don’t know,” Kaye added. “He stays late to lock up and sleeps inside, opens in the morning.”
I put my proposition to them to use my apartment and stepped out for them to discuss it, gave them another ten minutes before walking back in. Kaye shot me a nervous smile, holding Donna up now, the baby smiling too as her mother jiggled her.
I looked at Charley, who asked, “I just wanna know why you’re doing this.”
“How old are you, Charley?”
“Twenty. And Kaye’s eighteen. We’re both adults now.”
I nodded slowly and said, “I watched a young mother and her baby spend three days in that playground, avoiding the kids when they came, keeping to themselves until the rain blew in. I’ve got two apartments, one converted into an office downstairs with a sofa bed, kitchen, and bath. I’ve slept down there before. You got a better offer?”
Charley and Kaye wouldn’t volunteer any information about Grosetto and Haney, and there was no way Malone and his tire-iron friend were going to be much help. But I knew who would. He was sitting behind a worn government-issue gray metal desk, in a government-issue gray desk chair, in a small office with gray walls lined with mug shots, wanted posters, and an electric clock that surprisingly had the correct time.
Detective Eddie Sullivan had lost more of his red hair, making up for it with an old-fashioned handlebar mustache. Grinning at me as I stepped up to his desk, he said, “I was about to get a bite.”
“Me too.”
So I bought him lunch around the corner from the First Precinct house on South Saratoga Street at Jilly’s Grill. Hamburgers, french fries, coffee, and a wedge of apple pie for my large friend. Sullivan was my height exactly, but he outweighed me by a hundred pounds, mostly flab.
Eddie Sullivan was the Bunco Squad for the First Precinct, since his partner retired without a replacement in sight. He handled con artists, forgers, loan sharks, and the pawn shop detail, checking lists of pawned items against the master list of stolen articles reported to police. I waited until he’d wolfed down his burger and fries and was starting in on his slab of pie before bringing up Grosetto and Haney. He nodded and told me he knew both.
“Grosetto’s a typical Guinea — short, olive-skinned, pencil-thin mustache, weighs about a hundred pounds soaking wet. Haney is black Irish — big, goofy-looking. Typical bully.” He stuffed another chunk of pie into his mouth.
“Grosetto? He mobbed up?”
Sullivan shook his head. “He wishes, but he ain’t Sicilian. I think he’s Napolitano or just some ordinary wop. You got someone willin’ to file charges against these bums?”
“Maybe. I need to know where they hang out.”
“Easy. Rooms above the Blue Gym. Canal and Galvez.”
I knew the place and hurried to finish my meal as Sullivan ordered a second wedge of pie. He managed to say, between mouthfuls, “I’d go with you but I gotta be in court at one o’clock. Drop me by the courthouse?”
As he climbed out of my DeSoto in front of the hulking, gray Criminal Courts Building at Tulane and Broad Avenues, he thanked me for lunch, adding, “See if you can talk your friend into pressing charges. I could use a good collar.”
“I’ll try.”
The Blue Gym was hard to miss, sitting on the downtown side of Canal and Galvez Streets. Painted bright blue, it stood three stories high, the bottom two stories an open gym with six boxing rings inside, smelling of sweat, blood, and cigar smoke. I weaved my way through a haze of smoke to the back stairs and went up to a narrow hall that smelled like cooked fish. A thin man in boxing shorts came rushing out of a door and almost bumped into me.
“Oh, ’scuse me,” he said.
“I’m looking for Grosetto.”
He pointed to the door he’d just exited and rushed off. I reached back and unsnapped the trigger guard on the holster of my Smith and Wesson, then stepped through the open door to spot a man behind a beat-up wooden desk. He glared at me with hard brown eyes, trying to look tough — hard to do when he stood up and topped off at maybe five three and was skinny as a stick man. He wore a sharkskin lime green suit.
“Who the hell are you?” he snarled from the right side of his tiny mouth.