He didn’t crack a smile or even nod in thanks, but I didn’t mind.
ƒ
I’VE BEEN IN third-class cruise-ship cabins that were larger than that room. Just one big bed that ended a few inches from a sliding, hollow pine door that opened onto the toilet. Standing at the sink, my butt was in the shower stall. To look out the window I had to get on my knees on the bed.
On the bright side, Jonah’s two blows hadn’t even caused my jaw to swell. It really didn’t even hurt all that badly. I took two aspirin and a shower, lay down on the mattress, which felt hard like rolled canvas, and fell into a light doze.
The dream was oddly altered in that cubicle room. Fire blazed all around me but I wasn’t frantic. My flesh was burning but that was of no consequence. When I got to the smoky glass I just pushed it out, effortlessly. On the other side, standing in blue sky, was the kid from downstairs. He gave me a calculating look and I waited for his request. He opened his mouth but the sound that came out was not in words; it wasn’t even human. It was a kind of electronic static. This sound slowly transformed into an insect-like buzzing. I wondered if the alarm clock was going off, if it was morning and I had slept through the night. But I hadn’t set the alarm. When I sat up I realized that the noise was coming from a telephone that had been left on the window ledge next to my head.
The buzzing stopped and I wondered who could be calling. It started again and I answered, “Hello?”
“Mr. Carter?”
“Who is this?”
“Jimmy from downstairs, sir.”
Sir?
“What do you want, Jimmy?”
“I was just wondering if you needed some company.”
“What kind of company?”
“You know,” he continued, “a girl.”
A girl. Jimmy had called to offer me a girl. I realized that I had moved from a light nap into deep sleep. I was confused about the material world but quite lucid in my mind.
“How much?” I asked.
“Hundred bucks a half hour,” he said. “Five hundred for the night.”
“Who pays the ten bucks for the visitor?”
“The girl covers that fee.”
I was quiet for a moment or two, wondering about Jimmy being in the dream and at the same time on the phone interrupting tƒ inm" he dream.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“They’re all clean,” he protested. “I don’t let no junkies up in here.”
I could have asked how he knew if a girl didn’t have tracks between her toes but I didn’t. I didn’t care.
“Okay. All right. But I want someone young and black,” I said. “Pretty if it’s possible, but with a sharp tongue. And she has to be black.”
“I can do that, Mr. Carter,” Jimmy said eagerly. “Gimme twenty, twenty-five minutes.”
“Take your time, son.”
“You need anything else?”
“Yeah. You got an Albany phone book down there?”
“I think so. It might be from a couple’a years ago.”
“Send it up with the girl.”
“Yes, sir.”
The thought of Jimmy made me smile. He was an old, corrupt soul bunged into a young, inept body. The only thing that got his motor running was commerce. He didn’t even care about the money, only the method by which he got it. The tip was an insult, but providing me with female companionship made him feel like he was getting something accomplished. I liked that. It had the stink of humanity about it, something akin to the bouquet of Gorgonzola cheese.
I opened my duffel and took out a rolled-up navy-blue suit that was an exact replica of the one that got soiled in the alley. I liked Jimmy’s predictability, and anything else I could count on.
Ê€„
16
The room was barely large enough to accommodate the queen-size bed. I was sitting at the edge, still a little groggy, when a tapping came on the door. I didn’t have to stand up to open it but I did.
The child was young, and even darker-skinned than I. She wore a yellow party dress but no smile. Slender, she was wider below the waistline than above it. She was hugging a well-worn phone book against her chest.
“Come on in,” I said, moving to the side because the bed blocked a courteous retreat.
She walked in, leaving the door open.
“One hundred dollars up front,” were her first words.
I took a fold of four fifties from my shirt pocket and handed them to her. She traded the tattered phone book for the money.
“Two hundred fo†trar one hour,” I said.
She counted the bills twice, closed the door, then turned to look at me. Her gaze was clear but not innocent. Those big eyes weren’t worldly but neither were they inexperienced.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Seraphina,” she said.
“S-a-r-a-f ... ?” I asked.
“S-e-r-a-p-h-i-n-a,” she said like a third-grade teacher who had lost patience before her current crop of students were ever born.
“Beautiful name,” I said. “Beautiful dress, beautiful skin, beautiful girl. Have a seat.”
I sat on the south side of the bed while Seraphina took the east. If anything she was wary now. Compliments are often camouflage for hidden resentment, and I had just given out four tributes in quick order.
“What you want?” she asked.
“Talk.”
“You could go to a bar an’ buy a girl a drink if you just wanted to talk to somebody.”
“Not with my luck.”
“You unlucky?” she asked, allowing a little gruff friendliness to show.
I grunted a laugh and nodded.
“I’m from Newark,” I said. “And I came here looking for a guy.”
I handed her the business card and she studied it.
“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?”
ma"1em">
“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.
A knock on Fell’s door brought no answer.
His lock gave me more trouble than the one downstairs, but nothing challenging.
His rooms were at the back of the building, so I chanced turning on the light.
It was a big room with a pine desk set in the exact center. There were bookcases behind and to the right of the blond desk, and a solitary green metal file cabinet to the left, next to a broad oak door. The door opened onto a huge white tile bathroom that had a big, footed iron bathtub standing upon what could only be called a dais, ten inches or so above the floor. It was an odd design. The building had always been for offices but maybe, I thought, the man who drew up the plans for this suite also had lived here.
