Poppy started to lift his head but felt the gun. " 'Cause I was messing up the field!"
"So he said let me get up there on the tractor? This ain't makin' any sense. I ain't getting any of this."
I remembered that the tractor had been found on the sea cliff set in reverse. "Poppy," I asked. "You let him get on the Cat?"
"I didn't let him do anything. He's bigger than me."
"He got on the Cat."
"Yeah."
H.J. removed the gun, interested in this sequence. "Then what?"
"He asked what I was doing and I was so mad I told him, I told him the truth."
"Then what?"
Poppy lifted his eyes. He was a sad guy, and he didn't have time for any more lies. "He had a heart attack. He grabbed his chest and fell back."
"You told him and he fuckin' had a heart attack?" H.J. shook his head at the seeming absurdity of this tale. "You gotta do much better than that, old man."
"Is it a straight shot from wherever you were working with the bulldozer to the sea cliff?"
Poppy looked at me. "Yes, but-"
The problem, I realized, was that H.J. still did not know that the bulldozer and Herschel had been recovered from the sea cliff and moved to a barn on the adjoining property.
"Why you ask that?" said H.J. "They didn't find him in no field!"
But before I could answer, Poppy pushed himself to his feet. "I'm leaving," he announced. "I told you enough." He gestured at Allison. "Give that napkin to Jay. I can't do it."
"You ain't goin' nowhere!" said H.J. "Get back there." He waved at his bodyguard to stand in front of the door. "Lamont?"
"I'm going out to my truck-"
H.J. straightened out his arm, the gun three feet from Poppy. "You know who I am?"
"No, and I don't care," slurred Poppy. "I'm going to Florida."
"You're stayin' till I get my satisfaction."
"Nope."
"Sit down, Poppy," I warned. "These guys are serious."
"You got no reason to hurt me." Poppy held out his hands.
"Get back, old man!"
"I can't take no more," cried Poppy, unsteady on his feet. "I'm tired, my head hurts." He lurched toward the door. "I ain't been to Florida in-"
"Get back!"
"Come on, fuck you, I'm just-"
Lamont shoved Poppy backward. He hit the wall. It didn't appear to scare him, and he measured the distance to the doorway.
"Sit down, old man," said Lamont, sticking his gun out. "I don't want to hurt you."
"I'm walking out of here," said Poppy, and he did- or started to, when there was a terrible noise, and his neck exploded in blood. Allison screamed. Poppy fell over, head loose.
"Get back!" yelled Lamont, swinging the gun around at us.
Poppy lay hunched to the floor, blood spraying over the black-and-white tiles. His face grew pale, followed by a sucking sound from the neck wound, and then he went soft and died before us.
H.J. looked at his gun. It hadn't fired. He looked at Lamont, who was holding a pistol. "Shit, Lamont," said H.J. "What you do that for?"
"He was getting too close to you, boss."
"Oh God," moaned Allison as smoke drifted above us. "He's an old man! Do something."
But there was nothing to do. H.J. held us in place. "Y'all stand back," he ordered, looking around. "Fuck, Lamont! Now we got a problem, nigga!"
He certainly did, three people not his own- Allison, Ha, and mewho'd seen what his bodyguard had done. We were the problem. He looked at Allison. "You know where Rainey lives?"
Allison shook her head.
"You?" he asked me.
"Yes," I said. "But I doubt he's there. He didn't answer before."
"You know where he lives?" asked Allison.
H.J. looked at Ha and Allison. "Yo, people! You got to tell me what's goin' to get this guy to come here and give me my money, and tell me what I need to know, because otherwise we got a even bigger problem, you know what I'm sayin'?"
The room seemed hot, wheeled with a dark feeling. Four people could kill three easily enough. Things happened like this in the city from time to time. You read about it in the metro section of the paper with your coffee, shake your head at the strange carnage, then check the stock tables. The men could pull a truck up to the sidewalk doors and load out anything and no one would ever know.
"I want some answers to my question!" bellowed H.J. "I want to know what happened to my uncle and I want money for my aunt! We live in a fuckin' country where every college and university over a hundred and fifty years old, all those railroads and banks, got slave money in 'em, slave money built 'em up. Martin Luther King only got it half done. Jesse Jackson, he sold the fuck out, Clarence Thomas, he no good. White man still makin' money off the black man every day. Who owns those companies buildin' prisons, who owns the fuckin' NFL? It ain't my uncle, you see what I'm saying? Now I want to find out why he died, why he have a heart attack!"
I sat in the booth stunned, Ha next to me, his head bowed in submission.
"Boss," said Gabriel finally, his tone pacifying, "I think Lamont shot the man who could help you with that question."
H.J. told his men to clean up. Gabriel and Denny found some garbage bags and laid them out a few feet away from Poppy. Whatever had been in his lower intestines had started to seep out of him and we could smell it. They lifted him, feet and armpits, onto the bags in one motion. The blood had traveled to the grout between the tiles. Gabriel hunted around behind the bar and found some twine, which Denny used to bag up Poppy. Then the men laid him behind the bar. They found the closet behind the bar and wet-mopped the tiles. "Use the cleanser," ordered H.J., keeping his gun on me. "Not one speck. And clean the wall, too, clean it good."
They did. Fifteen minutes later, it was as if nothing had happened. The floor gleamed. Ha watched, his eyelids low, face without expression.
"What we going to do now?"
"We's goin' to think, is what we's goin' to do." H.J. straightened his shirt. "Hey," he asked me, "how we going to get this boy?"
"I really don't know."
Gabriel put his gun to Allison's head. "Talk to the man. Tell us how to find your boyfriend."
"He's not my boyfriend!"
"Whatever you call him, miss, your penile escort, I don't care, tell my boss where to find him!"
"I don't know, I don't know!"
Gabriel made a pinched face. "Nothing comes of nothing, miss."
"I don't know. He used to come over to my apartment in the afternoon."
"Sounds romantic," prompted Gabriel.
"It was," said Allison softly, to herself.
"Pity," noted Gabriel, voice droll. "Please continue with your emotionally charged testimony."
With that, Allison lifted her head, eyes angry, mood defiant. "So yes, he came over to- well, it certainly wasn't to be with me, I see that now, it was to see-" She glanced at me, including me in her fury. "Well, there's a girl who lives across-"
"Don't!" I yelled.
"— the street. She'll be walking home in forty-five minutes along Eighty-sixth Street. She comes home at 2 p.m. from school. That's why he used to meet me at my apartment! That's the time! His daughter. If you can get his daughter you can get him," said Allison. "She'll be wearing a blue-and-white school uniform and probably be carrying some kind of backpack. She's about fourteen or fifteen and dark-haired and quite pretty."
"That's wrong," I said quickly. "The girl's in basketball practice all afternoon."
Gabriel looked at H.J.
"See?" Allison said bitterly, pointing her finger at me. "He knows. He's in on it. He knows who she is."
"You?" said H.J.
I shook my head. "She's got nothing to do with all this. She's just some kid."
"Get her," said H.J. to Gabriel.
"I'll tell you where Rainey lives," I said. "That's better."
"We know where he lives," Gabriel said.
"You do?"
"Sure. Brooklyn, Seventeenth Street. We followed you. Watched it some. Broke in, fished around. Bit of a creepy setup, no?"