"We'll see," I said.
The two guys by the door moved aside as we reached them and we went out onto Franklin Street.
34
In the morning Jacky Wax came to see me. He came into my office wearing a three-piece blue suit and a pink tie and carrying a paper bag with two cups of coffee in it. He gave me a cup, and sat down in my client chair and opened the coffee, peeling the lid off away from himself so if any spilled it wouldn't get on his suit. I opened my coffee and had a swallow. Jacky had a little of his.
"Okay," Jacky said. "We are running a business, and we try to do what's best for the business. If it's best for business to kill somebody, we kill him. If it's best to buy somebody, we buy him, you unnerstand?"
"Un huh."
"If it's best to deal, we deal."
"Un huh."
"We want you to unnerstand that. Mr. Milo himself said he wanted that crystal clear, that you ain't getting away with something you shouldn't."
I nodded. Variety is the spice of life. "So we like the deal," Jacky said.
"Which is?"
"Which is you get the bimbo back, and you leave everything else alone. Lehman, Whitfield. Everything else."
"Who takes the fall for Ginger Buckey?" I said.
"Who?"
"Ginger Buckey, the hooker got killed in New York. Somebody's got to go down for that."
"Why?"
"Christ, Jacky," I said, "I don't know. But somebody does. Nobody cared about her one day in her life."
"What fucking difference does it make to her now," Jacky said.
"I don't know that either, but somebody's got to pay the price. She's going to matter."
"You didn't say anything about this yesterday," Jacky said.
"I didn't know about this yesterday. Until just now I thought I was looking for April Kyle."
"And now you're not?"
"Her too, but we're going to get even for Ginger."
Jacky drank some more coffee. His long legs stretched out in front of him. His white shirt had French cuffs, I noticed. With sapphire cuff links. He swallowed a mouthful of coffee a little at a time and looked at me while he did it. He shook his head.
"You are a piece of fucking work," he said. "You know who you're dealing with. You've known it for a while. And you keep pushing anyway, and when you get lucky and we offer you a deal, you push more." Jacky shook his head.
"Kid's father was raping her when she was twelve. Then he sold her to a pimp, and he sold her to a pimp and so on and then somebody killed her."
"So her old man was a creep," Jacky said. "Don't matter anymore."
"I want somebody," I said. "Otherwise the whole thing goes down."
"You think you know what the whole thing is?" Jacky said.
"I know some, I guess some. I say Whitfield is washing money for you. I say he's got one of your dummy companies on an exempt list so that the cash transactions over ten grand don't get reported to the IRS. I say in return you have Perry Lehman supply him girls and a safe place to use them where his Boston Banker reputation doesn't get pecker tracks all over it. Maybe he gets a piece of what he washes, but I bet mostly it's women."
"And you figure we own Lehman?" Jacky said.
"Of course you do. He's operating highclass whorehouses all over the country. He never gets busted. Tony Marcus doesn't dare touch him. I annoy him and your guys appear."
"Makes sense," Jacky said.
"So I start looking for April Kyle, one day, and this is the part I don't get, and it trips some alarm someplace. I don't know why, but everybody starts panicking 'cause it's going to lead me to DePaul Federal. And somebody goes down to New York and starts closing doors."
"Sounds pretty fancy stuff for a simple laundry scheme," Jacky said.
"Scheme was simple enough, but it was worth saving. DePaul is the eighteenth biggest bank in the country," I said. "I looked it up. You run one of the biggest cash businesses in the country. Whitfield solves a lot of problems for you."
Jacky nodded and finished his coffee and looked around for the wastebasket.
"It's back here," I said. "Give it to me." Jacky handed me the cup and I dropped it in the wastebasket.
"Whitfield likes young women," Jacky said. "And he likes a lot of things that women don't. So we supply him broads that don't have much choice. Ginger Buckey was one, but she took off on him with the coon, and she had to be replaced."
"And April was her replacement."
Jacky nodded. "We took her from the pimp who took the other whore away from Whitfield," Jacky said. "Whitfield liked that."
"And I came looking for her and in the process found Ginger for you."
Jacky nodded again. He was smiling faintly. "And you didn't kill her to keep me from finding out about Whitfield. You killed her as an object lesson for April; or anyone else you might give Whitfield."
"Both," Jacky said. "We killed her for both reasons. We had the pimp do it."
"Rambeaux?"
"Yeah."
"And you beat him up for taking Ginger from Whitfield."
Jacky smiled wider. "Both," he said. "Teach him a lesson and make sure he don't say anything to you."
"And then when I kept at it you aced him to be sure."
"Yep. Been smarter to have aced you, way back at the beginning." Jacky stretched his neck as he talked, as if to loosen a kink in the right side. "But that's Monday morning. We decided to stay away from you if we could. People say you're hard to kill and you got friends that cause trouble. Bad for business. So we went the other way."
"Nobody's perfect," I said.
"So we already gave you somebody for Ginger Buckey. We gave you the guy that did her."
"Doesn't seem enough," I said.
"Better be," Jacky said. "That's all there is. Anything else would be bad business."
"You can't spare Lehman and you can't spare Whitfield," I said.
"That's right."
"Lehman thinks you tried to hit him," I said.
"I know."
"He's going to crack on you someday, Jacky."
Jacky shook his head. "You underestimate how scared he is." he said.
"Maybe," I said.
"You want the girl or not?" Jacky said.
"Yes," I said.
"We'll bring her here at noon. Keep something in mind, though. If anyone blows the whistle on Whitfield, there's no point to us not killing you then. Her too."
"I've thought of that," I said.
35
April Kyle showed up at noon. By herself. Carrying a small overnight bag. She wasn't dressed for work today. She had on jeans and a T-shirt and pale lemon jazz shoes. The T-shirt had a picture of a penguin on the front and the legend PENGUIN LUST underneath it. Her face was without makeup. She wore no lipstick. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and held partly in place by a pale yellow headband that matched her shoes.
She opened my office door and walked into the room and stopped in front of my desk and stood without moving, her head down, holding the overnight bag by the strap with both hands in front of her. She didn't speak. No one came in behind her.
"Long time no see," I said.
She nodded without looking up.
She hadn't closed the door when she came in and the corridor behind her remained empty. I got up and walked around my desk and out through the open door and looked up and down the corridor. No one was there. I closed the door and went back around the desk and sat down. April stood as she had, her eyes fixed on something near her feet.
"You okay?" I said.
She nodded again without looking up. Maybe I should try to think of a question without a nod-shake answer.
"What would you like to do now?" I said. A master of sparkling small talk.
She shook her head. "Had lunch?" I said. She shook her head.
I could feel the first trickle of sweat in the small of my back.
"Well," I said, smiling warmly, "when in doubt, eat."
Normally my warm smile does it. Women often undress when I've given them my warm smile. April had no reaction at all. Probably because she didn't see, because she was still eyeing the floor. I thought of other approaches. Look at me or I'll kill you? Probably too direct.