'Is that right?'
'That's how I started drinking. There's always a drink on a piano, did you ever notice? A drink and a cigarette. I'm lucky I didn't get throat cancer. You play piano, you drink and you smoke, that's it. I guess I drank a little too much, huh?'
'I guess so. Where'd you conduct this transaction with your mysterious black-haired lady?'
'She wasn't mysterious at all. It was down near the Temple Street Shelter. She came over to me and asked would I like to make fifty bucks. So I said yes.'
'Who wouldn't?' Frick said.
'Sure. So what did I do wrong, can you please tell me?'
'Did she tell you her name?'
'No. I didn't tell her mine, either.'
'How'd you get uptown here, all the way from Temple?'
'We took a taxi. She dropped me off on Fourth, said she'd be watching. I believed her.'
'Why's that?'
'She looked like I'd better do what she said.' 'How's that?'
'Her eyes. There was a look in her eyes.' 'What color?' Frick asked. 'The eyes.' 'Brown,' Freddie said. 'How tall?'
'Five-seven, five-eight?' 'White?'
'Sure.' Freddie paused. 'Her eyes said she'd kill me if she had to.'
Byrnes looked at the captain again. 'Okay, go home,' Frick told Freddie. 'Home?' Freddie said.
SHE HAD WATCHED from the park across the street, and had seen the uniformed cop on the front steps first challenge and next detain the wino she'd enlisted. But that was okay because she knew the letter would now be delivered one way or another, and she didn't much care if they later locked the bum up, or hanged him by his thumbs from a lamppost, or whatever.
She now knew that whoever she might recruit to deliver all the remaining letters would also be stopped, but this didn't bother her, either. The letters would get inside the precinct, they would be read, the messengers would protest, 'Hey, I'm only the messenger!', and that would be that. In this city, there had to be two million girls with shoulder-length black hair and bangs. Or feather-cut red hair, for that matter. Well, maybe a million, the redheads.
The problem was rounding up two more guys today, and however many more she'd need for every day next
week, Monday through Saturday, the twelfth of June, which was the date Adam had announced for whatever it was, she didn't know. His caper? His escapade? His prank, his practical joke, his whatever it was that would add seven figures to the coffers, whatever they might be, coffers. She sometimes wished she was smarter than she was.
But she was smart enough to know that she couldn't keep running back and forth between all the way downtown and up here to secure new messengers all the time. That would be both exhausting and time-consuming. So whereas she didn't like to cut anyone else in on the thirty-five grand Adam had allotted for the project, she knew that she needed a middleman here. And the only middleman she could think of was the first pimp she'd had, or vice versa, when she arrived in this rotten city five years ago.
AMBROSE CARTER WAS a black man who still ran a stable of eleven whores, four of them white, and he was very happy to see little Mela Sammarone again because he thought she might be coming back to work for him again. As it turned out, she wanted him to work for her.
'Now juss lemme get this straight,' he said, putting on a baffled black man look. In truth, nothing ever baffled him. He was too damn smart to ever be baffled.
They were sitting in a bar in what was called the Overlook section of Diamondback, appropriately named in that a lot of drug and prostitution shit was conveniently overlooked by the police here. Ambrose was nursing a Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola. Melissa was drinking a Coke without the bourbon. The two wigs she'd purchased were in her tote bag. Sitting there au naturelle, more or less, as it were, she looked as blond and as pert and as pretty as a young Meg Ryan. Ambrose really
regretted not representing her any longer. He thought of himself as not a pimp but a representative.
He still considered her the one who'd got away. Partially because he hadn't been able to hook her on any kind of controlled substance, she'd been too smart for that, but primarily because she'd been socking away bit by bit, piece by piece, what came to a total of fifty-five grand over a period of five years, which she'd offered him in exchange for her freedom. Well, figure it out, man. He wasn't holding her passport or no shit like that, and fifty-five in the here-and-now was worth grabbing on the spot, you never knew how fast these girls would age and become worthless. So he'd said So long, darlin, and kissed her off. But here she was, back again. And asking him to represent her again in a different sort of way.
'You want me to fine however many people it is you'll need in the next however many days . . .'
'That's right.'
'. . . screen them for you befo'hand so you'll be sure they willin to march into apo-lice station
'Yes, Ame.'
'. . . and then senn 'em to way'ever you be waitin for 'em, so you can pay 'em a hunnerd bucks each to deliver an envelope, separate envelopes actually . . .'
'Separate envelopes, yes.'
'. . . into this po-lice station, whichever one it may be.'
'That's exactly right.'
'And what's in this for me, may I be so bold? What do I get for fine-in' these people for you?'
'A thousand bucks today, and a grand a day starting Monday.'
'Till when?'
'Last one'll be next Saturday.'
'That's a total of seven large.'
'Seven, correct.'
Carter thought this over.
'How do I know this won't come back on me?' he asked. 'These people marchin up to a po-lice station, they sure to be stopped, Mel.'
'I know that. They tell the cops they got the money from me. You're out of this completely. I'm the one pays them, I'm the one they describe.'
You don't mine bein' made?'
'Not at all.'
Carter thought this over for another moment.
'Make it an even ten K,' he said.
You've got it,' she said. 'I'll need two people today. I'll tell you where they can meet me.'
'Male or female? Or do it matter?'
'As suits you,' Melissa said. 'I wouldn't send me one of your whores, though.
'Now do I look stupid, Mel?' he asked.
'No one could ever say that about you, Ame,' she said, and grinned.
'How do I get paid?' he asked.
'Three now,' she said. 'Two grand Monday morning, a grand every morning after that, straight through the twelfth.'
'You trust me that far, huh?'
'Got no reason not to, Ame.'
'That when it's going down?' he asked. 'The twelfth? Whatever this thing may be?'
'Now do / look stupid, Ame?' she asked.
THE SECOND NOTE that Saturday morning was addressed to Miss Honey Blair at Channel Four News. It read:
DEAR HONEY:
PLEASE FORGIVE ME AS I DID NOT KNOW
YOU WERE IN THAT AUTOMOBILE.
It was unsigned.
THE DEAF MAN'S second note was delivered to the 87th Precinct at a little past noon that day by a man who admitted under intense questioning that a pretty redhead had paid him a hundred dollars to take it over here. Before he'd met her at a bar called the Lucky Diamond down on Lewis and Ninth, he'd never seen her in his life. Did this mean they would take the money from him? 'That's Macbeth,' Genero said.
To be or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing, end them?
Even Parker knew this was definitely not Macbeth.
'It's Romeo and Juliet,' he said.
Eileen did not think the quote on the lieutenant's desk was from Romeo and Juliet. She knew that play virtually by heart, or at least she knew the Baz Luhrmann movie version, which she'd seen seven times when it was first released, falling in love with Leonardo di Caprio, who now seemed rather pudgy and middle-aged to her. But this was definitely not Romeo and Juliet.