I watched her and listened to the music and we sat that way for what seemed a long time.
“Did you hire me to find Danes, or to find dirt on him for this custody thing?” I asked finally.
Nina let out an exasperated breath. “I told you, I don’t give a shit about the custody case. There isn’t going to be a goddamn custody case.” She took a long drag on her cigarette and shook her head. “Look, the sad fact is Greg’s still my main source of income. If something has… if that’s going to change, I need to know. I hired you to find him; that’s it. Now, are you coming or going on this?”
“Will you call the cops?”
“Jesus, you don’t let up.” Nina sighed. “Is that a requirement for you to keep working?”
“The requirement is that you don’t lie to me, Nina, and that you don’t hold out. Calling the cops is just good advice.”
She looked down at her sketch and nodded. “I’m not lying to you, and I’ll think about the cops,” she said softly. She picked up a stick of charcoal and moved her arm in broad strokes.
I looked at the top of her auburn head. “Okay,” I said. I left her apartment and made for the street.
I went past the gallery, rounded the corner, and collided with Billy Danes. He was leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette. He staggered backward and embers went flying.
“Goddammit,” he whined, and turned his mother’s irritated look on his broken cigarette and then on me. I brushed ash off my sleeve and Billy recognized me. “Oh, shit,” he said.
“Hey, no need to apologize, Bill,” I said.
He snorted. “Apologize? You’re the one that crashed into me, in case you didn’t notice.”
I laughed. “And saved you from an early death by doing it.”
Billy rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right,” he said. He was wearing baggy fatigue pants and a baseball jersey with a mournful-looking manga character on it. He fished in his pants pockets for another smoke, found one, and looked up at me defiantly. “Got the lecture ready?” He looked maybe ten.
I shrugged. “Not me.” He snorted again, and lit the cigarette with a yellow plastic lighter. I gestured at his T-shirt. “Cowboy Bebop?” I asked.
He nodded, grudgingly. “So, what- you’re some kind of comic freak? Kind of old, aren’t you? What do you do, hang in the stores and check out the little boys?”
“Not exactly. How about you, do you collect?” Billy shrugged. “Anything in particular?” I asked.
He puffed on the cigarette, suppressed a cough, and shrugged again. “Horror, mostly- old school stuff. House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Dark Mansion- that kind of thing.”
I nodded. “How about The Unexpected or Vault of Evil?” I asked. Billy’s face lit for a second and then regained its indifferent faA§ade.
“Yeah, like that,” he said, and coughed again.
He was staring out across the water and I stared with him.
“She take a chunk out of your ass too?” he asked after a while. His voice was softer and there was weary knowledge in with the levity.
“Just a small one- not so I can’t walk or anything,” I said.
Billy laughed. “Probably ’cause she’d already eaten,” he said.
I chuckled, and we both were quiet again.
“She’s not always this way,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“She’s got shit on her mind. A show coming up and… shit with my dad.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You looking for him?”
“I am.”
“You find him yet?”
“Not yet.” There were footsteps on the pavement. Ines Icasa came around the corner and stopped. She looked at Billy and he sent the cigarette arcing into the darkness with a practiced flick. He backed up a little.
“What are you doing, Guillermo?” she said. Her voice was tight with anger.
“Nothing- just talking to him.” The whine was back in his voice.
Ines shook her head. “Never mind. I know what you are doing, and we will talk about it later. Now get back inside and finish your schoolworks, please.” Billy started to speak, but Ines cut him off. Her voice was sharp. “Now, Guillermo.” Billy snorted and muttered and shuffled around the corner.
Ines looked at me. Her lithe body was tense, and her smooth face looked harder than stone. “What are you doing?” she asked. Her dark eyes were hot.
I felt like backing up too, but I didn’t. “We were talking,” I said, “mostly about comic books. I considered lecturing him on the evils of smoking, but I thought better of it.”
Ines looked at me for a while, and the tension seemed to drain from her face and her body. She sighed and leaned against the building. “I apologize, detective,” she said. She reached into a hip pocket and brought out a crumpled pack of Gitanes and a slim gold lighter. She inhaled deeply and breathed smoke into the sky. “I am a hypocrite, no?” The wind kicked up and she wrapped her arms across her chest. “It has been a trying evening.”
“So I gather. What was the fight about?”
Ines sighed, and ran the toe of her shoe across the uneven pavement. A gypsy cab passed. It dropped a loud group in front of the club on the next block. Ines watched it pull away.
“About his school,” she said. “He goes to a private school in the Heights, a very good one, but he is not happy there. It is difficult for him- not the schoolworks but socially. There are many gifted students there, but Guillermo is one of the youngest. He is young in many ways and… a little angry. He does not make friends easily.” She took another pull on the cigarette and exhaled with a quavering sigh.
“He thinks he would prefer a different school, perhaps a boarding school. Nina does not agree. She would like him to remain close to home. It is an old argument.”
“And what do you think?”
“I also would like him close to home. But I am not certain we can give him all that he needs. We try, but I think that Guillermo is looking for a life more… predictable than what he has. More conventional, perhaps.” Another puff, another sigh. “He is at an age where that has become important to him.”
“What does his father think?”
Ines stiffened beside me. “I would have no idea of that, detective,” she said. She stubbed her cigarette on the side of the building and walked around the corner.
Jane bought me dinner that night at Viva!, a high-end Mexican place in Chelsea with mango-colored walls and a pretty, peripatetic clientele. At nine-thirty it was filled with music and clatter and a thousand chirping conversations. We sat beneath a mural of grinning skulls and feathered snakes and ominous sunflowers and ate- salmon roasted with fennel for me and chicken mole for Jane. Ours was the quietest table in the place.
Jane was pale and there were shadows beneath her large black eyes. The little she said about her day and her deal was punctuated by pauses and yawns.
“Am I keeping you up?” I asked.
“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m getting tired of those guys. I’ll be glad when this job is done.” She drank some water and picked at her chicken. “Bad time in Brooklyn?”
“More weird than bad,” I said, and I told her about my talk with Nina Sachs, and with Billy and Ines afterward. There was a little frown on her bow-shaped mouth the whole time I spoke and her eyes never left me.
“The kid sounds like a character,” she said when I’d finished.
“He’s that.”
“You feel bad for him.” It wasn’t a question.
“It’s a bad age, caught between childhood and whatever comes next. You want to fit in but you don’t know with what. You want to jump right out of your skin a lot of the time, and maybe there’s some part of you that knows it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
“And Billy’s got problems on top of that. He’s smarter than the other kids, and smaller, and his parents have been trading him like a poker chip for who knows how long. As far as I can tell, Ines is the closest thing he has to a grown-up in his life- the closest thing he’s got to a parent.”
Jane nodded. Her frown deepened a little and a small line appeared between her eyes. “Do you like him?” she asked.