“So,” Meyers finally, casually said, “Kid was with Cynthia, huh.”
“Yeah.” Bulbitch’s fingers had just scissored on the cigarette, but stopped. He scowled with the realization that he’d been played, and he stared up at Meyers without lifting his head. “And you have now got all the information you’re getting, Mr. Meyers.” He rose up, his head even with Meyers’s neck. “You listen to me now. Leave it. This isn’t Montgomery versus Mouzon at Shibe Park. Ain’t any rules here. This is somebody did something so awful we’re gonna have to invent a new word to call it. And anyway, Kid Willette ruined you in the fight biz, so what in hell is it you think you owe his ghost?”
Meyers pulled the newspaper to himself. The picture on the front page was of a pile of trash beside what might have been a body under a sheet. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a goddamned thing. I was just curious, was all.” He took the paper and left.
——
The following night, whenever he had a fare that dropped anywhere close to Third and Race Streets, Meyers trolled over to the DR Bridge and drove the Crawl. He had no idea where Cynthia lived, but he knew where she worked when she hadn’t been hired for a night and hauled out to Paoli.
The third time through the Crawl that night, one of the working girls hailed him and told him to take her to Spruce and Twenty-Second. On the way he asked if she’d happened to see Cynthia.
She told him, “Not tonight, I ain’t, on account of her pimp dragged her over to South and Second till things settle down. And you didn’t hear that from me.”
After dropping her off, Meyers cut over to South and then drove straight down toward the Delaware; about the time he crossed Broad he remembered to turn off his light.
He parked the cab and got out, then strolled north along Second. This was the turf of old money, and a hooker had to blend a bit. He knew he might not find her—she might have scored a john already. But he got lucky.
Cynthia had a little dog on a string, a Pekinese, and she was walking it up and down the sidewalk between South and Lombard. Her platinum hair all but glowed under the streetlights. Meyers wondered what she did with the dog.
As he came nearer, she paused and made a show of taking out a cigarette. He shook his head in the darkness as he drew up. “You know, I still don’t smoke,” he told her.
Her pose relaxed, and she stared hard at him. “Oh, you. I mighta known.” She pulled out a lighter and torched her own smoke. Her hand might have been shaking. “You looking for a tumble tonight, Pants-on-Fire?”
“Not really.” He held out his hand as if inviting her to dance. Between two fingers was a folded ten-dollar bill. “I need to talk to you, Cyn.”
“You think so?” Her jaw clicked, and she shifted it from side to side. Cynthia had suffered at the hands of a boyfriend, a psychopathic fighter, back in the days Meyers had been training Willette. The boyfriend had dislocated her jaw, and whoever had fixed it hadn’t set it right, with the result that it clicked sometimes when she spoke. If it hurt, she never said. Meyers had been on hand the night the boyfriend had tried to murder his opponent in the ring, and the opponent’s trainer had taken a three-legged stool to him. One leg had driven right into his brain, almost immediately making the world a significantly better place. Somehow, Cynthia had ended up going home with Meyers that night. She’d stayed till morning. Mostly, they’d gotten drunk while she tried to figure out why she was crying her eyes out over “a rotten dead bastard,” and Meyers had insisted on paying her like any john. It was some strange matter of protocol and respect that made sense only to him. In the end, as a compromise, she’d charged him for an hour of her time. He still didn’t know what to call what had happened between them.
He said, “You gotta talk to me a little bit. You were with Kid.”
She flicked the cigarette away and lit another. “I didn’t think this was no social call.”
“Who did it, Cyn?”
“Jesus, Meyers.” She drew herself up, and for a moment he felt like she was bigger than he was. “Do you know, I got bounced to three different cells in three different station houses last night? Wasn’t allowed to sleep and damn near not to take a piss, and they just asked and asked and asked, but they got nothing for their trouble. Ten-dollar bill buys you the same as they got, but it’s your money, honey.” She snatched it from between his fingers.
“Well, at least tell me the way it happened. I know you liked Willette.”
She took a deep drag. The dog pulled her a couple of feet along the sidewalk so that he could sniff around a skinny tree. “Yeah, he was nice, for a handsome boy with a wad of bills and no sense.” The dog whimpered then, and she said, “Come on, Johnny, I gotta walk.”
They strolled side by side, like two old friends in no hurry to get anywhere. “What happened is, I don’t know what happened. They was three back rooms made up that suite—suite, like they’s a big luxury hotel and not a hole you could raise pigs in. I was, you know, doing Kid. And then all of a sudden, somebody’s screaming, and I mean screaming like their legs was being sawed off. It was Cody. Kid pushed me off him, snapped up his braces and charged right outten that room. No shirt, and he was stuffin’ himself back in his trousers with one hand and picking up his gun with the other.”
“He had a gun?”
“They all had guns, honey. Anyway, he charged out of that room like a bull, and the screaming, it stopped just for a second. Couple of doors slammed. And then it was back, but it was some other voice, and some shots, and then even more screaming. Kid that time. You got no idea how awful it was. I crawled under the bed with the cockroaches and the condoms and the mouse shit, and I stayed there.
“And then it just stopped, ya know? Everything went quiet. Some time passed. I got up and put on Kid’s jacket and snuck out to see. I woulda bolted, but Dottie come out of the next room. She’d been with both of Cody’s other guys, and I don’t know whose turn it was, so don’t ask. You probably know Dottie. She stayed home tonight like I shoulda.”
“What about the third girl?”
“Her.” She shook her head at some memory. “Cody had her with him already. She just got off the boat. Acted like she only spoke enough English to order a sandwich maybe.”
“Off the boat from where?”
“Estonia—is that a place?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then.”
The dog wrapped himself around a light pole. Meyers asked, “What are you not saying here, Cyn?”
She pulled the dog backwards to untangle him. “Dunno what. You’d seen her, you’d understand. Big, shiny eyes. Crazy eyes. Course, we all had ’em right about then, didn’t we?” She met his gaze as if his calm perplexity could answer for everything. “Cody said her name was Yuliya, like Julia but with a Y. He was gonna hand her over to Mr. Drozdov later.”
“Cody pimping for the boss?”
She shrugged. “Hey, it’s a business, isn’t it? You get paid and go where you go, same as a cabbie.” He ignored that. “And maybe with Drozdov’s reputation, ya gotta go all the way to Estonia to find somebody who don’t know any better.”
He chewed on that. “So she was with Cody the whole time?”
“Me and Dottie found her sprawled in a chair, covered in blood. Didn’t have a stitch on.”
“Then she saw what happened.”
Cynthia waved one hand around in a little circle. “What she told the cops was, the two of them was playing, you know, the way Cody liked it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’d tied her to the chair. I been with him once or twice. It’s like he’s tryin’ it out ’cause the boss does it. Only nobody’s afraid of being tied up by Cody, ya know?”