"Because I don't have a lot of time and you're the only person who can do it."
I wasn't, but I was probably the only one who'd shown up when Johnnie called. My services, no matter how mundane, don't come cheap. In the sudden economic slide in New York City, jobs had been so scarce lately that I was even willing to show up for Johnnie Scumbag. Most people who would've been clients a year ago tried to do their own work instead in order to save a few bucks. Most of them wound up on Johnnie's side of the glass. If they were lucky.
"Convince me with a number," I said.
"Five grand," Johnnie said, hopefully.
"Six." I tried to keep my feet from fidgeting in my shoes. Jail gives me the heebie-jeebies. Probably because something deep inside told me that I would end up in one eventually.
"Why six?"
"Jeannie Giammarino told me to remind you that you owe her a grand off the last Klitchko fight."
"What, she think I was gonna welsh?" Johnnie puffed his chest out in a pose of dignified disbelief.
"The fight was in January. She's been waiting five months."
"I was getting the money together."
"Yeah. And the check's in the mail." He spoke to me as if I didn't know him and his history. The nickname "scumbag" wasn't put on people known for their high standards of integrity.
Johnnie didn't like my attitude. "Then maybe you should help me because I know what you really do, T.C." He flashed a smirk that I wanted to peel off with a lemon zester.
I let his words hang for a bit. I felt a smile play across my own mouth. "You threatening me, Johnnie?" My words were ice. My look was colder.
Johnnie quickly reconsidered his tactic. "No, no T.C., I…I mean…I know you can help me." Beads of sweat popped out on his face. "That little bastard Tino's setting me up."
I sucked in my upper lip. "Tino's girlfriend is dead. Seems to me like a damned stupid way to be setting you up."
"The guy gets robbed, see? He lives on Sullivan Street, for chrissakes. There's a junkie every ten feet since they got shoo-flyed out of Washington Square. He tells the cops it was me and here I am."
Truth was, despite everything else that made him a piece of shit, Johnnie was no killer.
Fuck it. I needed income.
"Give me the names."
The deal.
Tino, one of the last people in the Tri-State area who had any faith in Johnnie, let him stay with him a bit while he was "between apartments." I'd be more likely to believe that if Johnnie ever had an address for more than a couple months at a time. He'd attach himself like a tick to someone until they wizened up and changed their locks. Problem was, Johnnie's few possessions were still in Tino's after his keys stopped working. Up to that point, everyone else had returned Johnnie's stuff if only to guarantee his absence from their lives. Tino thought differently. Johnnie was going to pay him back all of the money he owed or else his stuff would hit the furnace. Then Tino comes home one night to find his girlfriend Nina dead on the floor, the apartment robbed down to the hardwood.
Nina was four months pregnant.
Johnnie claimed that he'd been playing poker in Williamsburg the whole night. Problem was, the game was illegal and nobody wanted to admit having been there. Even if they were, fewer were willing to step up to the plate for Johnnie Scumbag.
My first stop was Paulie D's Barbershop. It was a nice day, so I took the L train into Brooklyn and walked up Metropolitan to Paulie's.
A tin bell tinkled as I walked in. "How's things Paulie?"
Paulie didn't bother looking up. He was busy sweeping up a mess of curly blonde hair off the floor. Paulie looked like a shaved ferret, only slightly taller. A shaved ferret with a horrible personality. In the dingy back room of the dingier barbershop, he ran illegal poker games on weekends for the gambling junkies who didn't want to bother getting a bus to Atlantic City.
Paulie just grunted at me. The fresh hair told me that somebody new was in the neighborhood. Anybody who'd lived there more than a week knew that the barbershop was a front and wouldn't trust Paulie to shear a sheep, much less cut their hair-not unless they wanted to look like Patti LaBelle after she'd stuck her head in a thresher. Most people of reasonable intelligence just had to look at the magazine rack to figure it out. His most recent copy of Sports Illustrated featured Johnnie Bench on the cover.
"Hey Paulie, was Johnnie Scumbag at poker on Saturday?"
"Polka? I don't know nothin' about no Polack dancing."
I could see I was going to be on the receiving end of Paulie's legendary talent for playing dumb. "The poker game. P-O-K-E-R."
"What poker game?"
"The one on Saturday."
"What's poker?"
I sighed. I should have known better. If push came to shove, Paulie would wind up with his own ass in a sling if he gave Johnnie his alibi. "This is between you and me, Paulie. I just need to know whether or not he was here."
Paulie stopped sweeping and gave me the once over. "Why you wanna know?"
"He's in Riker's for something that went down on Saturday night and he needs somebody to say that he was elsewhere."
"It ain't gonna be me."
"Well, I need to know."
Paulie scratched his chin. "He came by Saturday night. Got his hair cut."
That was all I needed to hear. Johnnie wouldn't let Paulie touch his hair with a velvet glove, much less his scissors. "How long?"
"He was here all night. Man's got one helluva complicated haircut."
"Would you be willing to tell a cop that? Even on the DL"
"Nope." Paulie resumed his sweeping. I started to leave when the broom stopped. "Next time you see that fat turd, you tell him he dropped one of his cards under his chair when he left."
"His cards?"
"Wasn't one of mine. You tell him he comes back again, I'm gonna cut more than his hair."
I left Brooklyn and returned to Manhattan for stop number two over at Dino's bar.
Josh already had the bottle of Makers in his hand when I told him I was having coffee. The bottle hovered for a second in Josh's unbelieving hand.
"Seriously?"
"Seriously. I'm working."
"Whew! For a second I thought you were gonna say you were on the wagon. I don't think I make my rent, you stop drinking."
"Hardy har, Sheckie."
Josh poured me a cup that tasted like it was brewed around the time Paulie picked up that Johnnie Bench S.I.
Scumbag claimed that Josh was at the poker game with him. Or danced a polka with him. After my talk with Paulie, I wasn't so sure anymore. After my tongue stopped shitting in my mouth from that first sip of coffee, I said as much.
"What poker game?" Josh said innocently. Or as innocently as a man sleeved in tattoos with an old bottle scar across one cheek can say it.
"Don't start that shit with me, Josh. I just went through it with Paulie." Josh and I went back a-ways together, so I wasn't about to play verbal hide & seek with him. I'd been a semi-regular at Dino's for a decade and tip well for an alcoholic. The amount of money I'd dropped in the last year alone should have been enough to buy me some straight talk.
"Okay, okay. Yeah. I was there. So was Scumbag."
"He's gonna need somebody to alibi him then."
Josh shook his head. "I'm not doing it. My wife finds out I was gambling, she's gonna have my balls in her spaghetti sauce."
I accidentally slugged another mouthful of coffee. Josh reached for the pot to refill it and I almost pulled my gun. "So don't say you were gambling. Say you were at a bar with him. Say you were playing pool with him. Say you were dancing a goddamn cha-cha with him in Monte Carlo for all I fucking care."
Josh blushed a deep red all the way up to the tips of his ears. "I can't"