“Nice as that looks, Rhonda,” he said, “I’ve got something else in mind.”
Rhonda had her eyes open now, the girl counting the money he was showing. “What that you lookin’ for den, mon,” she said.
“Tell you what. Why don’t I just ask you some questions,” he said. “Any answers you give sound true to me, I’ll pay you five or ten bucks. We’re done and I feel like you haven’t been making everything up, you get a fifty-dollar bonus. After that, I take you back to the bar and the albino comes and picks you up just like he did yesterday, and the day before that. Two or three weeks go by and I find out you can keep a secret, nobody knows we did anything but fuck like bunnies up in here, there’s another five hundred bucks coming your way free of all commissions to your pimp daddy bartender.”
She didn’t say anything, just stayed splayed out on the bed, lips moist and parted.
“How’s that sound, Rhonda,” Cooper said.
Rhonda shuffled her feet to push herself back up against the headboard. She pulled on the halter top, zipped up the miniskirt, brought her legs up against her body, and clasped her arms around her knees. Eyes no longer hiding under their lids, Rhonda looked at him, fully alert.
“Yeah, mon,” she said, “that sound pretty good to me.”
According to Rhonda, Jim had gone through two of the other girls in the bar-spend a few weeks tagging one, take another for the same price, switch back once in a while, depending on the mood. He always did it the same way-come in, get a drink or two, bring the girl back, pound away like a madman for something like five hours, this guy a sexual piston, sleep a couple hours, wake up, call a cab, kick the girl out. Rhonda told him there had been the occasional visit from a friend, sometimes expected, sometimes not, somebody swinging by once every two or three days. This Cooper knew: Jim’s supplier. He asked her what she thought he did to make his money; Rhonda said she knew he didn’t ever leave to go to any particular job, Jim having her stick around well into the day a few times, and all he ever did was buy more dope and come back inside and smoke it.
He asked if Jim kept anything around the house that had something to do with a career of any kind; Rhonda thought it over before saying there was nothing she could remember, except that she’d seen him fiddling with a chain.
“You know, mon,” she said, “pendant and chain, but the kind a man keep,” and Cooper thought of something and said, “You mean dog tags?” and she said that was it.
He asked if she knew where he kept them, and she said he had a jewelry box-she’d seen him taking it in and out of the top drawer of his dresser. Cooper asked about his real name, or at least the name he used with her, and she said he went only by Jim. He asked if she’d ever seen his full name on anything, maybe on a utility bill, and she told him he never left anything out for her to look at. When he asked whether she’d ever seen what it said on the dog tags, she said she hadn’t.
The only other interesting revelation, in which Rhonda made about a hundred bucks, was that whenever Jim was paged, he announced it was time for Rhonda to leave. It had happened twice, late at night both times, Jim pulling out of her, checking the pager, telling her it was time to go, let’s get you a cab, then walking out the door with her and driving off in that van of his before the cab arrived. When Cooper asked how late at night this was, she said it had happened sometime after 2 A.M. each time.
He took Rhonda back to the bar around eight-forty-five and hung around until Jim showed up. Cooper watched Jim sip some rum and Coke from a straw, reach over and do one of those brother-man handshakes with the bartender-pimp, the kind Cooper could never keep up with, always something new with these guys-then Jim took Rhonda by the hand and led her out to his van. It looked to Cooper as though Rhonda actually gave him a wink as she walked out the door, but with those swollen, bloodshot eyes it was hard to tell for sure.
Cooper stuck around for another half hour, left a five-dollar tip for the one-dollar beer he’d been sipping, and trudged out to the Taurus, thinking if he kept having to sit in that goddamned car he was going to have to get out and run a couple hundred laps on the quarter-mile beach when he got home.
27
The next time Jim left to pick up Rhonda for the night, Cooper climbed out of the Taurus and made his way up Jim’s porch. Seeing no visible sign of an alarm system, he went ahead and took the grave risk of breaking and entering a home in Kingston, Jamaica, and upon snapping open the lock was promptly assaulted by the smell of reefer. Coming in, Cooper thought that the guy had to be smoking morning, noon, and night with the odor as thick as it was in the house. Maybe he would grow dreadlocks by the time he left.
The house was poorly kept, with rumpled dirty laundry obscuring much of the floor in the front hall. Cooper moved into the kitchen, which told the same story, crumbs and half-eaten fast food on the counter, a couple weeks of crusty dishes stacked in the sink. There were no pictures on the fridge, and only American cheese, Wonder bread, peanut butter, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, whole milk, and three cans of Bud inside it. Working through a pair of closets, he found the usual Caribbean attire.
The bedroom was the center of Jim’s world, all the necessities packed in there-the weed spilling out of a plastic bag on the side table, some joints beside it, a Magnavox TV, a boom box, a full-length mirror angled against the wall. On the unmade bed he found a remote control, a dank towel, and a cigarette lighter. The dirty laundry scheme for this particular room included underwear, socks, and T-shirts; Cooper couldn’t find a single photograph of Jim, and nothing at all hung on the walls.
He went through the drawers: low on clothes, a few magazines, neatly stacked-Penthouse, Hustler, Oui-Cooper thinking the Oui must have been tough to get, living in Kingston. He found a pistol under a pair of jeans, a basic revolver, Smith & Wesson.38 Special. It was loaded. Another drawer had a box of bullets and a knife, a big serrated hunting knife in an olive green sheath. Military issue. He found no jewelry box, nor anything like one.
In the drawer of the side table, Cooper found some cash, a spare set of keys, a gold chain, some women’s hair clips, a scuffed Yankees cap-but still no jewelry box. It began to occur to Cooper that Jim didn’t use condoms, not unless he kept them hidden in one hell of a hiding place.
He opened the closet, where he found the other half of the various pairs of shoes that Jim kept distributed across the rest of the house. Sweat suits, shorts, belts, shirts, a rolled poster-Cooper unfurling it to find a Sports Illustrated photograph of Tyra Banks in a bikini-boxes stacked in the bottom of the closet, some of them shoe boxes, Cooper pulling out the most accessible one and opening it, finding the only sign of life yet, a short stack of old snapshots, mainly of Jim on the beach with different black girls. Cooper moved a pair of broken sunglasses out of the way and saw something he thought Rhonda might consider a jewelry box: a bare pine cube about six inches across, lid secured with a hook and eyelet.
Inside were some identification cards, all with Jim’s picture but under a variety of names-driver’s license, a couple U.S. passports, some local picture IDs Cooper didn’t recognize. The names on the cards were Allan Rodriguez, Robert Jackson, James Haggood-Cooper thinking that could be the real version of Jim.
He spotted the flimsy chain peeking out from under the identification cards and pulled. The U.S. Navy dog tags that came out of the rubble displayed the engraved name of TRAVIS JAMES MALLOY.
Cooper took a moment to memorize all the names and numbers on the cards and the tags. He replaced them in their original order and walked out, trying to decide whether to refer to the man as Jim the Redheaded Albino Black, or whether he should switch up and just call him by his real name of Travis.