“No.” But by the name I knew his kind.
“He was my protection on the street.”
“Was?”
“Then he fount out I had a bank account.”
“I see.”
“You don’t know him?”
“If I did what difference would it make?”
“I thought maybe you could talk to him... for me, you know?”
“He live around here?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know the best thing you could do is not be where he’s at.”
“I’ont know no place else.”
“You do anything stronger’n weed?”
“Nuh-uh. No.”
I took a disposable mechanical pencil from one pocket and my business card from another. On the back of the card I wrote Mimi Lord and a phone number I knew by heart.
“Call this woman and tell her that Joe O suggested you. She does business in Manhattan mainly. You get out there to her and she’ll set you up with something.”
“Tom got people all ovah round here. I wouldn’t even make it to the train.”
“I’ll ask Loopy to give you a ride.”
“He scary,” Toni said on a sneer.
“I know for a fact that he don’t bite.”
That got Toni to grin. She stole a look at Oliya and then asked me, “What I do for you?”
“Nothin’ right yet.”
With that my minder and I continued our journey upward.
No one answered the first or second knock on the seventh floor, number five.
“Not here?” Oliya suggested.
“Naw, he there.”
I knocked again, a little harder, and shouted, “Open up, Tesserat. It’s Joe.”
It took him maybe thirty seconds to screw up the courage to let us in.
He was a darker shadow of the investment banker he’d been a week before.
There was the beginning of a beard along the jawline and his hair was disheveled. He wore a strapped T-shirt and a pair of dark suit slacks. His feet were bare.
A small revolver was nestled in his left hand, finger on the trigger.
After Oliya and I had hustled in, I tugged the piece out of Coleman’s hand.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked.
“A guy down the hall.”
“How much?”
“I gave him my watch.”
“Your Rolex for this piece’a shit?”
“I got to protect myself.”
I had to hold back from slapping that little pistol across Coleman’s face. Instead I turned a chair he had for looking out the window and sat, heavily.
“You wanna sit?” I asked Oliya.
She looked around, saw the ruffled bed and a short dresser, then went to the stack of drawers and leaned back against it.
Coleman sat on the bed.
“Tema Popov, Yuri Fleganoff, or Yevgeny Gobulev?” I said to Coleman, repeating names Augustine Antrobus had given me.
His eyes registered a whole new kind of concern.
“What?”
“Come on, man,” I said. “You know what I’m talkin’ ’bout.”
Coleman’s hands clenched into fists, released, and then clenched again.
“The second one,” he said.
“Fleganoff. So that’s the one you called Alain Freeman?”
“How you find out his name?”
“It’s my job to know the players in the games I’m playin’. Monica asked me to look into it and that’s what I’m doin’. Was Fleganoff the only dude you worked with?”
“Pretty much. I mean sometimes, back when we started out, he’d bring some muscle, but they didn’t talk. Why?”
“They were keeping their vulnerability down to you and him,” I said.
“So the fuck what? Only thing I need is for Tomey to get the government off my ass.”
“Yeah. Right. How’d it work with Fleganoff?”
It was a rare event in Coleman’s life to have his ideas summarily dismissed. He wanted to curse me out, but thinking better of it he said, “I set up companies for him and worked them myself. I distributed cash and took care of taxes at year-end.”
“How much you make?”
“What business that of yours?”
I just stared.
“Hundred fifty thousand a month. It’s gone, though. Feds sittin’ on it like a hatching hen.”
“How long?”
“Two and a half years.”
I stood up and turned to Olo.
“Let’s get outta here.”
“Look, man,” Coleman said. “Look. He really used the name Freeman. I thought if you found him under that name then he couldn’t blame me for it.”
“This ain’t sixth grade, brother. This is serious.”
There were tears in the cheater’s eyes. I couldn’t blame him but, then again, I had nothing else to say.
When I turned toward the door he blurted, “What about my gun?”
“Loopy bringing you food and drink, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Stay in here. Look out the window. If you need muscle, just ring downstairs. Loopy or one’a his people be here in a short sixty.”
Mookie owned a garage two blocks away. She hadn’t been there in decades but Loopy spent every night there — working on his cars. When I asked if we could borrow one of his fleet he walked us over.
“I been workin’ on this beauty for six years now.” Loop was talking about a dark blue 1987 Mark VII Lincoln Continental. It was showcased at the middle of the garage. “This is my baby.”
“We don’t wanna take your best car, man,” I said. “Any old clunker’ll do.”
“I don’t have no beaters here, King. When I work on cars they all get a shine.”
Loop turned to Oliya, held out the car keys, and said, “You take it.”
Somehow my temporary partner was able to effect humility with a regal bearing. She took the keys saying, “Thank you, my friend.”
Since she had the keys Oliya drove us out of that double-gated garage.
“Where to?” she asked me.
“Upper West Side,” I said while entering a phone number.
After I finished the call Oliya asked, “How do you know all these people?”
“It’s my city.”
“No,” she said. “Most New Yorkers are completely lost twenty blocks from home.”
“I was a cop.”
“Cops have beats and precincts.”
“They bounced me and I had to make contacts if I wanted to make a living at this trade.”
“You’re alone?”
“Lone, maybe, but I have people like Loopy and Mookie all over.”
My words seemed to have a big impact on the coldblooded killer.
We made it all the way to the Museum of Natural History. Somewhere deep in the bowels of that place is a fiberglass replica of a blue whale — scaled to actual size. It hovered dozens of feet above the floor, arched like the real thing, master of the ocean.
“It’s amazing,” Oliya said.
“You never seen it before?”
“In my job there’s rarely time for sightseeing.”
“The guy we need to help us could meet anywhere,” I said. “Why not here?”
The question seemed novel in her furrowed brow. Yeah. Why not?
“Joe,” came a familiar voice.
“Mel.”
He emerged from the throng of museumgoers. His ocean-blue suit was loose-fitting on a lithe frame.
“Hey, brother,” he said, extending a hand.
We shook and I said, “I’d like to intro—”
“Oliya Ruez,” Melquarth said with a big smile on his face.
“Have we met?” she asked him.
“I hired you four times in the last six years. The Int-Op Agency is the best there is.”
“Maybe was,” Olo speculated.
A disturbed shadow passed across my friend’s face. Then he smiled and asked me, “Where to?”
“We take a jaunt out to Queens.”
24