“I know this woman,” Manny said. “Regina Carstairs. Oh, such a fine house in the Gold Coast. I went to her place for a function once, raising money for the mayor. The house where no junkie is allowed. But I didn’t enjoy myself because she had somebody watch me all the time like I was going to steal something.” Manny indicated with his fingers that he wanted more.
There’s not much more, Caesar said. Sherman had traveled out on a far limb one night with just a one-way ticket. Regina thought he was dead or near-dead and had people dump him in a tree box on a street blocks and blocks from her house. (“Another satisfied customer,” Manny interjected. “One million and counting.”) Caesar did not tell Manny that in the hospital he and Sandra, Sherman’s woman, had argued, with Sandra accusing him of dumping Sherman at death’s door. He had looked to Sherman for support, but in the end Sherman had raised the arm without the IV and begged Caesar to go. “I’ll call you,” Sherman had said.
“I got some pictures here you might be interested in, heh, heh,” Manny said. “Got some nice pictures. Oh, do I got the nice pictures. Bet a million you didn’t know he was on that heroin shit, did you?”
Caesar said no.
“Well, I did. It’s hard to tell with some fools, but I knew.” He was leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed. He was thin enough for Caesar to see the edges of the chair on either side of him. “That’s the thing with that heroin shit. You see, with your average crackhead, they’re climbing the walls and everything. You ask them the time and they’re ready to kill you cause you ain’t got your own watch. But with heroin, you ask them the time, and they’re ready to give you the watch. And Sherman was the mellowest man I knew.” He leaned forward. “You wanna see my pictures, heh, heh? The proof from our man Polaroid that our man from Sixteenth Street has come up in the world.”
Caesar was curious, but he did not want to see. It was as if someone had asked if he wanted to see pictures of his naked father. “We can take him,” Caesar had said once about Manny. “We can take him. Come in wearin masks and shit. We can clean his ass out and live like kings.” “And then where we gonna live?” Sherman had said. “Even if we got a million dollars from him, where in the fuckin world would we live? Stop bein such a hothead all the time, man. Manny still payin people back for some small thing they probably did to him when he was five years old.”
“Come on,” Manny said. “Peek on the wild side.” In fall and winter, Manny’s Hawaiian shirts had two pockets, and he took a set of photographs out of the left pocket.
The pictures were of a security guard standing with folded arms between two paintings in what was clearly a museum. The man seemed to stand with an air of importance and authority, but the more Caesar studied the first pictures the more he saw that the man would never be anything more than a guard whose job was simply to stand between two paintings. The man’s expression changed but slightly in the series of photographs, but in the last one, as if he was finally aware that he was the photographer’s real subject, he was turning his head away and the camera caught only a blur. The guard, in a dark blue uniform, wore a dark blue hat with a shiny shield in the front, and though the hat was pulled down low over his forehead, Caesar could see that the mouth and chin were Sherman’s. “My father gave me my eyes and nose, but I got my mouth and chin from my old lady.” Sherman had been on his own since he was ten, but he always spoke of his parents as if he had had a full life with them.
“They were taken in the Smithsonian,” Manny was saying. “Not the one with that big elephant — that’s my favorite — but the art museum, the one with the paintings. When I heard he was working there, I just had to see it. So I had this guy and his whore that owed me a favor: Act like tourists and go down there and pretend they were Bamas in town to see the pictures, heh, heh.” Manny tapped his forehead. “Smart. Real smart.”
Caesar got up. “I gotta be movin. Be back at seven, okay?”
“Seven’s fine,” Manny said, kissing the pictures and putting them back in his pocket. “Any later and you’ll be late.”
III
He felt suddenly exhausted and afraid and considered returning to the apartment, but Carol was not there and an empty place brought down the soul. Then he thought of the retarded woman and things brightened a bit. He took a bus downtown to see the woman for what would be the last time before Friday.
He had been following her for all of two months, since a week or so after he saw Sherman in the hospital. He had first come upon her waiting for the bus with three of her housemates. They were all adults, all at least thirty years old, but they talked as if they were new to the world and excited about being in it. The two men talked very loudly, as if they were not afraid to share whatever they were saying. Caesar figured from the beginning that the larger of the two women was the weakest, would be the easiest to pick off.
He had stood a few feet from them, pretending he too was waiting for the bus. Days later he learned that the retarded woman lived only two blocks from the bus stop in a house with perhaps six other retarded people of various ages and with a woman in her fifties. He figured the older woman was there to look after the seven. Except for the older woman, he learned, all of them worked, or at least did something that took them out of the house each morning. The retarded woman he was interested in worked in a French restaurant on Connecticut Avenue near Lafayette Park.
And so for two months he had secretly placed himself in her life, doing all the scoping out, the drudgery that had once been left up to Sherman. “You’d fuck it up,” Sherman had said once. “I know you.” “Have some faith in me,” Caesar would laugh. “Have a little faith.” “I know you, mothafucka.”
Week after week, Caesar had followed the retarded woman as she made her way to work, sitting in the back of the bus so he could see when she got off. At K Street, she always walked the block and a half to the restaurant. He hung around near the restaurant, sometimes for the entire day, learning her schedule. He often saw her sweeping up the alley in the back where the employees entered and where deliveries were made. About two thirty or so most afternoons, after they had probably eaten lunch, the retarded woman and a much older woman would walk to Lafayette Park and stay for up to thirty minutes. After they went back to work, he would not see the girl again until about five, when she left work and took the bus home.
On Saturdays, she came to work at noon and stayed until eight or nine in the evening. But it was only the Fridays that concerned him now. For on Fridays, each Friday evening, she left work and walked up Connecticut Avenue to Dupont Circle, where she deposited her paycheck at American Security. He would stand beside her on most Fridays over those months as she took forever to fill out the deposit slip, making first one mistake, then another, then dropping the crossed-out slips into the wastebasket beside the table. After she got on line, he would pick up every slip she had dropped. Then he would stand behind her until she had completed things with the teller.
It was a little before two when he got to the restaurant. The retarded woman and her friend soon came out to Connecticut, heading for Lafayette Park. Not quite two thirty, but close enough to the times of other days not to worry. As the women often did, they walked holding hands. They wore green uniforms and though they seemed to polish their white shoes every day, he had noticed that they were scuffed plenty by midday. He knew their first and last names, he knew where the old woman lived, having followed her home one evening, he knew the retarded woman’s favorite candy, he even knew the station the old woman had her radio tuned to.