Irish Johnny’s Tavern is a gray frame house near the railroad tracks in Syracuse, New York. A beacon of red and blue neon through the mounded old snow in the dusk of another cold winter day too far from Chelsea. My missing left arm hurt in the cold, and one of the people I was meeting was a killer.
I’d been in Irish Johnny’s before, on my first day in Syracuse looking for why Alma Jean Brant was dead. Her mother had sent me.
“You go to Irish Johnny’s, Mr. Fortune,” Sada Patterson said. “They’ll tell you about my Alma Jean.”
“What can they tell me, Mrs. Patterson?” I said. I’d read the Syracuse Police Department’s report, made my voice as gentle as I could in the winter light of my office-apartment loft above Eighth Avenue.
“They can tell you my girl wasn’t walkin’ streets without she got a reason, and whatever that there reason was it got to be what killed her.”
“Every girl on the streets has a reason, Mrs. Patterson,” I said.
“I don’t mean no reason everyone got. I means a special reason. Somethin’ made her do what she never would do,” Sada Patterson said.
“Mrs. Patterson, listen—”
“No! You listen here to me.” She held her old black plastic handbag in both hands on the lap of her starched print dress and fixed me across the desk with unflinching eyes. “I did my time hookin’ when I was a girl. My man he couldn’t get no work, so one day he ain’t there no more, and I got two kids, and I hooked. A man got no work, he goes. A woman got no man, she hooks. But a woman got a man at home, she don’t go on no streets. Not a good woman like my Alma Jean. She been married to that Indian ten years, and she don’t turn no tricks less she got a powerful reason.”
“What do you want me to do, Mrs. Patterson?”
Ramrod straight, as thin and rock hard as any Yankee farmer, Sada Patterson studied me with her black eyes as if she could see every thought I’d ever had. She probably could. The ravages of sixty years of North Carolina dirt farms, the Syracuse ghetto, and New York sweatshops had left her nothing but bones and tendon, the flesh fossilized over the endless years.
“You go on up there ’n’ find out who killed my Alma Jean. I can pay. I got the money. You go to Irish Johnny’s and ask ’bout my Alma Jean. She ain’t been inside the place in ten years, or any place like it. You tell ’em Sada sent you and they talk to you even if you is a honkie.”
“It’s a police job, Mrs. Patterson. Save your money.”
“No cop’s gonna worry hard ’bout the killin’ of no black hooker. You go up there, Fortune. You find out.” She stood up, the worn plastic handbag in both hands out in front of her like a shield. A grandmother in a print dress. Until you looked at her eyes. “She was my last — Alma Jean. She come when we had some money, lived in a house up there. She almos’ got to finish grade school. I always dressed her so good. Like a real doll, you know? A little doll.”
Inside, Irish Johnny’s is a single large room with a bandstand at the far end. The bar is along the left wall, backed by bottles and fronted by red plastic stools. Tables fill the room around a small dance floor. Behind the bar and the rows of bottles is a long mirror. The rear wall over the bandstand is bare, except when it is hung with a banner proclaiming the band or artiste to perform that night.
On the remaining two walls there is a large mural in the manner of Orozco or maybe Rivera. Full of violent, struggling ghetto figures, it was painted long ago by some forgotten radical student from the university on the hill above the tavern.
The crowd had not yet arrived, only a few tables occupied as I came in. The professor and his wife sat at a table close to the dance floor. I crossed the empty room under the lost eyes of the red, blue, and yellow people in the mural.
I knew who the killer was, but I didn’t know how I was going to prove it. Someone was going to have to help me before I made the call to the police.
The police are always the first stop in a new town. Lieutenant Derrida of the Syracuse Police Department was an older man. He remembered Sada Patterson.
“Best-looking hooker ever walked a street in Syracuse.” His thin eyes were bright and sad at the same time, as if he wished he and Sada Patterson could be back there when she had been the best-looking hooker in Syracuse, but knew it was too late for both of them.
“What made Alma Jean go to the streets, Lieutenant?”
He shrugged. “What makes any of ’em?”
“What does?” I said.
“Don’t shit me, Fortune. A new car or a fur coat. Suburbs to Saskatchewan. It just happens more in the slums where the bucks ain’t so big or easy.”
“Sada says no way unless the girl had a large reason,” I said. “She didn’t mean a fur coat or a watch.”
“Sada Patterson’s a mother,” Derrida said.
“She’s also a client. Can I earn my fee?”
He opened a desk drawer, took out a skinny file. “Alma Jean was found a week ago below a street bridge over the tracks. Some kids going to school spotted her. The fall killed her. She died somewhere between midnight and four A.M., the snow and cold made it hard to be sure. It stopped snowing about two A.M., there was no snow on top of her, so she died after that.”
Derrida swiveled in his chair, looked out his single window at the gray sky and grayer city. “She could have fallen, jumped, or been pushed. There was no sign of a struggle, but she was a small woman; one push would have knocked her over that low parapet. M.E. says a bruise on her jaw could have come from a blow or from hitting a rock. No suicide note, but the snow showed someone had climbed up on the parapet. Only whoever it was didn’t get near the edge, held to a light pole, jumped off the other way back onto the street.”
“What’s her pimp say?”
“Looks like she was trying to work independent.”
I must have stared. Derrida nodded.
“I know,” he said, “we sweated the pimp in the neighborhood. Black as my captain, but tells everyone he’s a Polack. He says he didn’t even know Alma Jean, and we can’t prove he did or place him around her.”
“Who do you place around her?”
“That night, no one. She was out in the snow all by herself. No one saw her, heard her, or smelled her. If she turned any tricks that night, she used doorways; no Johns are talking. No cash in her handbag. A bad night.”
“What about other nights?”
“The husband, Joey Brant. He’s a Mohawk, works high steel like most Indians. They married ten years ago, no kids and lived good. High steel pays. With her hooking he was numero uno suspect, only he was drinking in Cherry Valley Tavern from nine till closing with fifty witnesses. Later, the bartender, him, and ten others sobered up in a sweat lodge until dawn.”
“Anyone else?”
“Mister Walter Ellis. Owns the numbers, runs a big book. He was an old boyfriend of Sada’s, seems to have had eyes for the daughter. She was seen visiting him a couple of times recently. Just friendly calls, he says, but he got no alibi.”
“That’s it?”
Derrida swiveled. “No, we got a college professor named Margon and his wife. Margon was doing ‘research’ with Alma Jean. Maybe the wrong kind of research. Maybe the wife got mad.”
I took a chair at the table with the Margons. In Irish Johnny’s anyone who opened a book in the university above the ghetto was a “professor.” Fred Margon was a thin, dark-haired young man in his mid-twenties. His wife, Dorothy, was a beauty-contest blonde with restless eyes.
“A temple,” Fred Margon said as I sat down. “The bartenders are the priests, that mural is the holy icon painted by a wandering disciple, the liquor is God.”