“That’s nice,” I replied. “Only thing is, I don’t have any old stories for you, friend. You want to check me out, do what you have to do. Or maybe you already did that. But I don’t have a crystal ball. Or promises either.”
“But you could try, couldn’t you?”
“Sure. I could try. But I don’t do bounty hunting.”
“What does that mean?” Nadine asked.
“It means I don’t do COD, understand?” I said, holding her eyes. “I get paid for work, not for results. You want to pay me to look, I might do that. You want to pay me only if I turn him up—if it’s a ‘him’ at all—forget it.”
They all went silent again. Nadine turned and walked back to her little table, showing off what every man on the planet was missing. I could tell she’d had a lot of practice.
I went back to scratching behind Pansy’s ears. If they didn’t learn anything else from all this, they’d at least discover I could outwait a tree.
Lincoln went over to a far corner. A number of them clustered around. The skinny blonde at Nadine’s table started to get up, but Nadine grabbed her wrist and wrenched her back down.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Nadine and I played with each other across the distance. It was as good a way to pass the time as any.
Lincoln finally came back. “We. . . can’t decide,” he said. “But we will. Soon. If we agree to your. . . terms, we’ll reach out for you.”
“You don’t even know my terms,” I told him. “The money has to—”
“The money, the money,” he said dismissively. “Don’t worry about money. Your terms are that you’ll. . . work. Like you said. Yes?”
“Sure.”
“You can find your own way out?”
“Sure,” I said again, getting up. Pansy slowly got to her feet, then we walked toward the door. As we passed her table, Nadine shot out one hand, grabbed at my jacket.
“Ahhh,” she said, mock-sorrowfully, “you didn’t even ask for my number.”
“I already know it,” I told her. “And it’s a wrong one.”
I went through the door into the alley. It was empty. Pansy was the only one disappointed.
“I do not like them, mahn,” Clarence said, back inside Mama’s an hour later.
“Them?” Michelle’s voice, scorpion-under-glass if you knew how to read it.
Clarence did. And he wasn’t going anywhere near there. “No, my little sister, I do not mean their. . . sex. That is their business. I mean, I do not trust these people who come to Burke. Something is wrong with all. . . this.”
For Clarence, that was a long speech. And for him to start a conversation was rarer still. I exchanged a long look with the Prof. Max just waited, as always.
“You make the call, you got to tell it all,” the Prof finally said.
“Yes, Father, that is what I am saying,” Clarence agreed, not understanding that the Prof was talking about him, not about the crew I’d just visited. “Why don’t they. . . fight the ones who attack them?”
“Remember the Haitian guy over at the Seven-Oh in Brooklyn?” I asked Clarence.
I didn’t have to say anything more. A couple of cops supposedly took him in the back room and sodomized him with a nightstick. An ugly-filthy Tontons Macoutes–style power display. Ruptured his bladder. Told him if he screamed they’d kill his whole family, muttering about “teaching niggers a lesson.” There’s a big Haitian community here, and they sure aren’t all nonviolent. But they stayed with peaceful demonstrations, expressing confidence that the authorities would get the job done.
The young man nodded, his face unreadable.
“Maybe it’s the same thing,” I said. “Maybe they’re waiting for the public to fucking get it, I don’t know.”
“Mahn, they do not get it. The Haitian guy, it happened when the Mayor was running for re-election, yes? And it was on the front page of the papers. Every day. Big coverage. TV, radio. No place to hide. Most of the time, when the. . . homosexuals get attacked, it never even gets out, you know? They don’t even go to the cops. Those little demonstrations, they are nothing.”
I nodded, against my will, agreeing with him. Thinking of Crystal Beth. Dead and gone. Just because some freak who couldn’t face what was in himself had to go and. . .
“This ‘Avenger’ guy, he is speaking sense to me, mahn,” Clarence finished my thought. “They kill your people, you kill them.”
“Like the Israelis and the Arabs?” Michelle challenged, pink beginning to creep into her peaches-and-cream.
“Israel is still standing, Little Sister,” Clarence said. “Would it be so if she waited for the United Nations to protect her from her enemies?”
“That clue is true,” the Prof said. “Ain’t a motherfucker on the planet don’t know the Israeli bible.”
Michelle looked a question at the little man.
“Two eyes for an eye,” he answered her. Then he turned to the rest of us. “Been pretty quiet since this ‘Avenger’ guy started playing his number. . . .”
“And that is who they want you to find, mahn?” Clarence asked me.
“That’s what they say,” I told him.
“But. . . what?” Michelle asked.
“Clarence has got a point,” I said. “Why me? Sure, I was tight with Vincent, and he might have told them a few things. But they got beaucoup cash. Made that clear. Why not just. . .?”
“They told you that part, Schoolboy,” the Prof said. “I think they’re for real on it. The Man wants to stop him before he hits again. But these boys, they want you to stop him before he gets caught. Better than wasting their cash on a lawyer.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter for now,” I told everyone. “They’ll get back to me if they want to play.”
I didn’t want to play. I wanted to watch the slime who killed my woman die. I thought about that. A lot. Would Crystal Beth have wanted revenge? She was raised a hippie. Peace and love. But her father died protecting a runaway from a biker pack who said they owned her. And her mother followed him later, taking his killers along for the ride. Much later, Crystal Beth got into the business too. Running that safehouse for stalking victims. Until she became one herself. That’s when I came in. And by the time we were all done, the walls were splattered.
Would she have wanted it? I couldn’t puzzle it out. So I faced the truth. I did. Me.
But I didn’t have a clue. And if the cops did, they weren’t saying. So I thought I’d get myself an alibi and see if the Avenger would do some of his work while I was covered.
I hadn’t been in the basement poolroom for years, but the old man nodded like he’d seen me yesterday. My cue was still in the rack, held in place by a tiny little lock. I took it down, unscrewed it, checked the hollowed-out compartment in the heavily taped butt. Empty. Nobody’d left me a message there for a long time.
Been a long time since I’d played too, and it showed—only took ten minutes to attract one of the slowly circling sharks. I waved him off. I wanted witnesses, sure, but I wasn’t going to pay for them.
Hours slipped by. Toward the end, the cue ball was finally starting to obey orders. I spent the whole night working on my stroke, not paying any attention to pocketing the balls. It was after three in the morning when I settled my tab with the old man.
Nothing on the news next day. Maybe he’d really gone quiet. Or, like one of the tabloids speculated, taken his own life. Dying of AIDS, that was another rumor.
I didn’t buy any of it.
I went to the track that night. Been years since I’d been to Yonkers. The whole place had changed. NO SMOKING signs everywhere. Quiet. Damn near empty. The horses were a sorry collection of low-rent claimers and nonwinners, with a few burnt-out old campaigners thrown in. Purses were real low too. Handicapping wasn’t the same either. They’d added a flexible rail, so the short stretch wasn’t the big factor it used to be—horses could pass on the inside coming home. And they ran at a mile and a sixteenth for some stupid reason. I had no experience with any of that, but I invested a few bucks, making sure I went to the same window every time.