“Coincidences. Coincidences. Heh, heh,” Manny said. “Good minds think a lot, they say. I was just checking to be sure, heh, heh, to see if you might be available, heh, heh.” The inappropriate laughing was also why he didn’t like Manny calling.
“But listen: You heard what Sherman is doing now, heh, heh, heh?” Manny said. This time he obviously felt the whole thing was funny, and he asked Caesar again.
Caesar told him no, that he had last seen Sherman in Howard Hospital. “Two, three months ago,” he said.
“Well, since you last saw him, he’s gone up in the world. Or gone down, whichever the case may be, heh, heh.” He hung up without another word.
While dressing, Caesar found another note pinned to the collar of his shirt. He read it, crumbled it for effect, and propped it against a picture they had had taken together at a Southeast club. He would remind Carol of all the notes when he told her about the retarded woman. “Dancing with me don’t end that way,” were the first words she had ever spoken to him. “Try me and see.” He had gone to Manny’s place with Sherman Wheeler and Sherman’s old lady, Sandra Wallington, and, after a good bit of coaxing by Sandra, he had asked a woman sitting alone two tables away to dance. He and the woman had slow-dragged through one record, then another, and as the woman ground her body into his, she would bite and tug at his earlobe with her lips. When the second record ended, she unwound herself and went back without a word to her table. There was now a man at her table, and the man stood and pulled the woman’s chair away from the table for her. The man and the woman sat down. The woman’s back was to Caesar, who stood dumbly looking at the back of her neck and at the man. The man stood again, and he looked at Caesar with the patience of someone who had nothing better to do. “No one,” the man said finally, “gets more than two dances free.” He sat again and Caesar, after a few moments, found his way back to Sherman and Sandra.
“Dancing with me don’t end that way.” He had been about to sit when Carol tugged at his shirt sleeve. He allowed her to lead him away to the dance floor. “Try me and see.”
He decided that morning on the desert-brown leather jacket, a present from Carol for his twenty-second birthday two years ago. It was October, and in that month and in November before the days turned colder heading into December, he enjoyed wearing the jacket, enjoyed the opulent sound of leather with each move he made. He checked the jacket’s pockets to make certain he had his address book. There was not much in the book — a few names and telephone numbers of people he knew from Manny’s. But there were also the addresses and phone numbers of the three women — their names coded to read like male friends in case Carol saw them — he would go to when he and Carol argued, or when he simply wanted to spend the night with a woman whose body, whose responses, he could not easily anticipate.
He put the Beretta in one of the jacket’s pockets. The moment he touched it the memory of the times he had used it came back to him. He liked remembering. The last time had been eight months ago when they crossed into Maryland and he shot the 7-Eleven clerk in the face. A few miles from the store, back in D.C., Caesar was still laughing about how the man’s face had drained of blood as the gun came toward his face. A month before that he had placed the pistol beside the head of a man he and Sherman had caught far up New Hampshire Avenue near the Silver Spring line. The man had looked insulted to be robbed, and Caesar, dangling the man’s watch before his eyes, had pulled the trigger to scare him into the proper frame of mind. “I wasn’t gonna take this cheap-ass thing,” Caesar said about the watch, “but you just ain’t got the proper attitude.” The bullet had nicked the man’s ear, and so it didn’t count the way a blast in the face counted. The nice thing about the retarded woman was that he wouldn’t even have to take the pistol out of his pocket.
Sherman Wheeler had rarely carried a gun. “My daddy got his toe shot off tryin to quick-draw one a those things,” he said once. “Sides, my mind is the only gun I need.” Then he had made his hand into a gun, placed it against his temple, and pretended to pull a trigger. He hadn’t liked Caesar carrying a gun, and in their first months together he pulled rank and told him to leave the guns at home when they weren’t needed, but Caesar would sneak them out anyway. From the beginning, with the first cheap piece he had stolen during a burglary at a home in Arlington, Caesar had liked carrying a gun. And now, having to work alone without Sherman, he would not step outside the apartment without one.
II
In the vestibule of Manny’s Haven at Georgia Avenue and Ingraham Street, there was an impressive collection of Polaroid pictures displayed behind a locked glass case. In most of the dozens of photographs, Manny, always wearing a Hawaiian shirt, stood in the center, his arms around Washington politicians, two-bit celebrities, customers for whom he had a special affection, or wild-eyed, out-of-town relatives. At the very bottom of the display, in two and a half rows, there were also photographs of men who had, as Manny put it, “made irredeemable fools of themselves in my house,” as he called his bar. Most of these men, usually too drunk even to remember where they were, had refused to leave the bar when told, and Manny had had the bouncers toss them out. But throwing them out was never enough, and he would also have the bouncers beat them on the sidewalk. “Take his picture! Take his goddamn picture!” became his euphemism to the bouncers for throwing a man out and putting a hurting on him. The majority of the men were photographed leaning against the front of the bar just below the neon sign that blinked Manny’s Haven. They were alone in their pictures with their bloodied faces, except, now and again, for the hand of some unseen bouncer that kept the fellow from falling over.
Manny was reading the Post aloud at a table near the bar when Caesar arrived that morning. Manny was alone, which didn’t make Caesar happy. The whole place was dark, except for the tiny lamp on the table. Manny did not look up at first when Caesar sat down across from him and said, “Mornin.”
Manny finished the page and put the newspaper aside, took off his glasses and rubbed his closed eyes with his knuckles. “Young Blood,” he said, squinting. “Ain’t seen you in a month of Sundays. Thought you mighta gone away on vacation.” Manny dressed the way a very small child would without the help of an adult. “I always expect to look under the table and find him with his shoes on the wrong feet,” Sherman had said once, “with knots and shit in the shoelaces, insteada little bows.” Manny had hundreds of Hawaiian shirts, including some very expensive ones dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. He wore one every day of the year. This morning he had on a particularly loud silk and rayon thing with palm trees that looked not like trees but tiny green explosions. He was quite a thin man, and all his shirts hung loosely on him, the way they would hang on wire hangers.
“I’ll need you for tonight and two three more nights this week,” Manny said. “You got time for that?”
Caesar nodded. Bartending would tide him over until things were finished with the retarded woman. He could hear the rumblings of the men in the basement, sorting and cataloging the stolen stuff Manny had bought from thieves. Manny would send all of it on to an apartment on Florida Avenue where people came shopping to buy it for a little more than what Manny paid for it.
“What’s this about you not hearing about Sherman?” Manny said. “Thought you two was closer than dick and his two nuts.”
“We was once,” Caesar said. Manny blinked, waiting for more. He undoubtedly knew everything already, but Caesar knew that having to tell him was the price of doing business with him. Besides, there was nothing to betray. He told Manny what little Sherman had told him in the hospital the last time he saw him: Sherman had ODed at the home of a woman who catered to a small group of people with “functional habits,” people who could work and carry on their lives without the rest of the world knowing they needed special recreation in their off hours. A person could go to one of Regina’s houses on M Street and relax in one of her small rooms, and after a few hours of traveling, get up and go home.