“That’s a white man,” she said, handing it back to me. “I cain’t tell ’em apart. Sometimes, if they ask for me more than once, I could tell you about how they smell. But that’s about it.”
She was looking around the room, sneering at what she saw.
Jimmy had certainly delivered the girl I’d asked for.
“What you want him for?” Seraphina asked.
“He hired me to do a job and then didn’t pay me.”
“Oh. I see.”
“I went to a bar looking for this Ambrose guy and a big white dude started a fight with me. I gave him better’n he gave me, but I still need to find this man.”
“Where he hit you?” she asked.
I gestured at the left side of my jaw.
The child leaned over and touched my cheek with four fingers. My heart started thumping. I could feel my nostrils widen.
“Skin is hot but it ain’t swole,” she said.
The last time I’d had sex was about three months before, the night Katrina came back. There was nothing enjoyable about that evening. I had to take a pill to make it. It was the kind of pill that made you hard but not happy. I would have liked to get naked with Seraphina. She was young and I’d already paid for it. I wanted her and there would have been nothing wrong with it, at least not that time. But sex with that child would have been the first step away from the man I intended to be.
“You have a boyfriend, Seraphina?”
“Of course I do.”
“You and him know a lotta people in the clubs and stuff?”
“Yeah?”
“You see,” I said, “I think that this guy I’m lookin’ for might know people. You know, dealers and gamblers, like that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I was wonderin’ if maybe there was somebody somewhere who might know a lot of what’s goin’ on with the gamblers and hustlers around here.”
I was being very careful. Seraphina was a young prostitute. She might not have even been legal. She was still sensitive and therefore, very possibly, on the alert for insults. I couldn’t mention pimps or whores, but I needed a whore’s connections.
“There’s Big Mouth Jones down at Tinker’s Bar and Grill,” she said. “He know ev’rybody, an’ he got big mouth, too.”
“Black guy?”
“Uh-huh. But you better not get in any fight wit’ him. He got a crew down there kill a man just like that.”
I smiled as I almost always do when people suggest that they or someone else might kill me.
“You ain’t scared?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“You want me to take off my clothes?”
“Truth is, Seraphina, when a man is making love to a woman, he’s also makin’ love to himself.”
“What do that mean?” she asked with barely a sneer.
“That he imagines himself powerful and manly next to her beauty.”
“So?”
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“You are beautiful. I can see that. But I’m old and chubby, not like some young man that a woman like you would want to see naked and straining.”
“How you know what I wanna see?”
“Is your boyfriend strong and well built?”
“Yeah.”
“And do you like that?”
“Yeah,” she said with a slight smile. “But that don’t mean nuthin’. I might like you anyway.”
“It’s kind of you to say, child. But I know better than to embarrass myself like that.”
“I could make you feel good.” She took my hand.
The words made me dizzy. My tongue went dry.
“You breathin’ hard, Mr. Carter,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t be with you, girl.” I pulled away, gently.
“If you afraida disease I could just use my hands.”
“I’m more afraida you than I am of any bug.”
“Me? I’m just a girl.”
I stood up.
“Thank you, Seraphina. You’ve been a lot of help.”
I handed her a fifty-dollar tip, then took her by the wrist to bring her to her feet. She put her hands flat against my chest and I flinched.
“You haven’t been with a woman in a long time, huh?” she said. “It’s okay, you know. Like ridin’ a bicycle. You don’t have to win no race to have a good time.”
She paused a moment to see if I had changed my mind. Seeing that I hadn’t she kissed me on the cheek, opened the door, and walked away.
If I was another kind of man I might have cried.
AFTER MY SECOND SHOWER I sat down to the phone book, which was both residential and yellow pages combined into one. It was nine years old but that didn’t matter.
I looked up Ambrose Thurman. He wasn’t listed. I turned to the yellow pages and searched for Tinker’s Bar and Grill under restaurants. It was right there on South Street, not six blocks away. My watch said 10:37. Big Mouth would probably‹ woear be holding court. Maybe, if I was lucky, Seraphina would show up after a while. She was right—I hadn’t been with a woman in a long time. I needed some kind of release.
The idea of going to the bar oppressed me. Finding Thurman might cause more trouble than it settled; not finding him would leave me without a paddle.
My resistance to the only avenue open to me, combined with the hope of seeing the young Seraphina again, caused a line of thought that brought me back to the baseless vanity of Ambrose Thurman. I turned to the yellow pages’ section of private investigators. Many of them had ads. Some of these sported illustrations; a few had photographs. Norman Fell’s pear-shaped face was smiling from the page just as it beamed off the yellow card I had in my pocket.
Ê€„
17
You got a screwdriver?” I called into Jimmy’s clear cage.
“Supposed to stay here in case the porter has to use it,” he replied, not bothering to rise from the swivel stool.
“You have a porter?”
“I’m the porter,” he said.
“I just wanna borrow it. Twenty bucks?”
He turned his profile to me, opened a short door in the wall, and rummaged around until he came out with a screwdriver that had a translucent yellow plastic handle. It was eighteen inches long with a blue metal shaft that was a good eighth of an inch thick.
We traded cash for tool and I went out into the Albany night.
That was a standard round after eleven.
DECKER AVENUE WAS a drab block of old-fashioned brick office buildings. There were six streetlamps but only two of them worked. The traffic was sporadic and not one pedestrian passed by in the seventeen minutes I sat there.
The label with Norman Fell’s buzzer next to it said that he was on the third floor: 3E.
I went around back, down a slender concrete pathway between Fell’s building and the one next to it. The lock on the back door was reinforced with a thick metal guard but the entrance to the basement, five steps down, might have been blown open by a strong wind. I jimmied the lock and made my way up the back utility stairs.
Norman Fell’s door was next to the exit. There was no light shining under the crack. I checked the rest of the offices down the hall. They were all lifeless and dark.