“Mothahfuckah tried to kill me,” he said.
“Who?”
“I nevah saw him before. White dude. They had to transfer his ass, ’cause my homies woulda killed him daid.”
“When did this happen?”
“Day before yesterday.”
Damn.
“You didn’t do anything to him?” I asked.
“I nevah even seen ’im. He just come ‹€ He justoutta nowhere and went for my heart. What the fuck you care, anyway?”
Toolie smoked his cigarette in a very particular way. He’d take the smoke into his mouth and then, folding his lower lip over the upper, express the fumes into his nostrils while inhaling.
I asked him about the three friends of his youth.
“B-Brain split when he was still in high school,” Toolie said. “His mama an’ them thought we was a bad influence. I used to see Jumpah an’ Big Jim from time to time, but Big Jim took a shot of pure H and killed his ass.”
“Jumper was killed a few days ago,” I said. “Roger Brown, too.”
“Both of ’em?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn.”
“And now there’s you.”
“Me? I ain’t daid.”
“Come on, Mr. Nilson,” I said. “You got some dude you never knew tryin’ to cut you open. That’s too much of a coincidence.”
“Who wanna kill three niggahs like us?” Toolie complained. “I ain’t seen Roger in seventeen years at least, and I didn’t have nuthin’ to do with Jumpah—not really.”
“Maybe it was something from back when you all four ran together,” I suggested.
“Like what?”
Suspicion was reemerging in the fat convict’s eyes. The news I was bearing was tough even for a hardened criminal. The fact that a hit had been arranged in prison made him vulnerable. If the price was high enough even one of his homies might stick a knife in his back.
“I could put in a good word to protect you,” I said.
“Why you wanna do that?”
“Tell me about Thom Paxton.”
“Who?”
“You used to call him Smiles.”
The fat around Nilson’s eyes contracted down to a puffy squint. He maintained that stare for nearly a minute.
“That was a accident,” he said at last. “Even the cops said so.”
“What happened?”
Toolie swiveled his head before speaking. He’d lived long enough to know the truth of Anything you say can and will be used against you.
“If I walk out of here without the story, someone is gonna kill you,” I promised.
“I ain’t done nuthin’.”
“Neither did the others.”
“What I do, man?” he whined.
“What happened to Smiles?”
“Well, you know,” Toolie said, unconsciously raising a defensive shoulder. “Me an’ them used to go to this construction site to get high.”
“Smiles, too?”
“Yeah. Back then that white boy was our nigga. Smiles could hang. But you know, in the summer he’d go upstate to be wit’ his father an’ them. But then he’d come back down in the fall ’cause he had a scholarship to this private school.”
“He lived with his father?”
“Yeah.”
“What about his mother?”
“She was sick or sumpin’. Maybe she was daid, I don’t know.”
“What school?”
“I’on’t know, man. But Georgie Girl’s brother worked there an’ she met Smiles through him.”
“You mean Georgiana Pineyman?” I asked.
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“Was she there at the construction site?”
“Naw, man. It was just us. Jumpah had some blunts and we was gettin’ high. That’s all.”
“How did Smiles die?”
Toolie gave me a sharp glance. He knew that he couldn’t push the truth too far out of shape.
“Can you really help me, like you said?” he asked.
I nodded. “Now tell me what happened.”
“That was Big Jim’s fault. I mean, it was a accident, but if Big Jim didn’t keep on runnin’ his mouf it wouldn’ta been no accident.”
“What did Jim say?”
“He kep’ sayin’ how B-Brain was keepin’ Georgie Girl company in the summah when Smiles was upstate. He kep’ sayin’ it an’ Smiles got hot. He was white an’ all, but that boy was tough. Roger tried to laugh it off but Smiles was high an’ wanted a fight. He came at B-Brain but that niggah runned.” Toolie laughed at the memory. “He ru‹€memory. nned up a ladder and climbed out on one’a them—what you call ’em—them girders. Roger could move. But Smiles was mad an’ so he went after him. So Roger went higher an’ higher an’ then when he was about six floors up he jumped on this elevator platform one floor down. Smiles tried to do it, too, but he fell. Broke his neck.
“We tried to run but somebody musta called the cops so they arrested us. We was in jail two days but they called it a accident an’ let us go.”
“You know his mother’s name?” I asked.
“Roger’s?”
“Smiles’.”
“Naw, man. Smiles lived with his old man, like I said. Upstate.”
“Albany?”
“How the fuck I know? So you gonna help me?”
“Do you know his father’s name?”
“Naw, man.”
“Yeah,” I said to the big wheezing convict, “I’ll help you.”
I was thinking that the best thing I could do for him was to hide his knife and fork.
Ê€„
33
On the drive back home I called Christian and asked him to tell his boss to put out the word to protect Toolie.
“Tell him that it might come in handy somewhere soon,” I added.
Christian hung up when I said these last few words and the phone vibrated in my hand. TTS, standing for Tony the Suit, appeared on the display. I thought about it for two full throbs before pressing the ignore button. I then entered my own number at Zephyra Ximenez’s office.
“Hello, Mr. McGill,” my telephonic and computer personal assistant answered cheerily. “How are you?”
“I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat.”
“How can I help you?”
“Albany,” I said, “and this time make me a reservation in a good hotel.”
“The Minerva’s the best,” she said.
“How do you know that?”
“One of my clients is a plastic surgeon who works there two days a week. He always stays at the Minerva.”
I WAS GETTING USED to the flight. I just brought along my MP3 pŽ€…layer and a blindfold. Norah Jones sang to me in darkness. I think I might have even fallen asleep for a moment there.
THE MINERVA WAS an old-fashioned place with a real desk where you sat down to check in. The young woman receptionist didn’t frown at my shoes or knuckles.
There was a wide stairway covered with red-and-blue carpeting that led to the first stage of the upper floors. It was so inviting that I shunned the elevator for the climb.
The room was large, much like a room that an upstate relative might keep for guests. I intended to take a bath but the tub was very close to the design of the one that I found Norman Fell in, so I stripped down and washed at the sink before taking my rental down to Tinker’s Bar and Grill in the South End.
It was a pretty empty block in a part of town that might once have had an identity, expressed by old-fashioned dark-brownstone architecture. But now the neighborhood had gotten old and forgetful. Many of the buildings were abandoned. The only life was in the broad and gaudy bar-restaurant. It took up almost half the block, and the whole front was glass so you could see in at the tables filled with people from every race and element of society. There was a long bar at the back of Tinker’s and a stage on the north side of the big room.
A group of young black men dressed in bulky suits loitered around the entrance. One of them was making rhymes extolling his fearlessness and sexual prowess. He kicked that bitch and flipped that shit, sent out a something, and then broke it down. His fellows seemed to approve of the words and their brooding execution.
As I approached the front door the largest of these men stood up to block my way. He was wearing a double-breasted cream-colored cashmere suit with a hot-pink dress shirt and at least the chain of a pocket watch. His coloring was a greenish medium brown and he had a round scar on his right cheekbone that might have been made by a small-caliber bullet. There was something wrong with one of his eyes but I tried not to stare.
“How you doin’?” the gangster-child said to me.
As he spoke, his friends moved toward him as if in the pull of a certain kind of magnetism, the kind that draws gawkers to the site of a bloody demise.
I couldn’t have fought my way past them. Even if I had a gun, they were probably all armed, too.
“Here to see Big Mouth,” I said, smiling falsely.
“So what?” the one-eyed man-child replied.
“Is he here?”
“Are you?” the kid answered, making me wonder if he was an existentialist or a rapping fool.
I’m told that hard exercise keeps up the testosterone levels in men my age. I could feel it right then. The rage growing in my shoulder“€in my shs was in response to this kid’s belief that he might be my better. I took a deep breath in through my nostrils.
“My friend Seraphina told me to drop by if I wanted to talk to Jones.”
One of the posse, a youngster in a loose-fitting iridescent green suit, broke off from the group and wandered into the restaurant.
“How you know Seraphine?” the kid asked.
“Does it matter?”
“You got a smart mouf, you know that, man?”
“Yeah. That’s what they tell me.”
“I could stomp yo’ ass right here in the street,” he promised.
“If I had six dudes backin’ me up I wouldn’t be scared neither,” I responded.
“Say what?”
“You heard me.”
“Leave him alone, John-John,” a familiar female voice said.
Seraphina, wearing a pink slip, walked into the group of Scar-face pretenders.
She came to my side and even took my hand.
“Come on wit’ me, Mr. Carter,” my slender and dark-skinned savior said.
“YOU SURE DO KNOW how to get in trouble, don’t you, Mr. Carter?” Seraphina chided as we came into the bustling establishment.
“I just wanted to see Big Mouth.”
“You got to be polite to people like John-John,” she said as if she were the elder and I the child.
“I like you, girl.”
“You a fool.”
“You know many men who aren’t?”
The hardest thing I might have done that month was getting Seraphina to grin.
“Why did they give me trouble?” I asked. “I mean, there’s all kindsa people here.”
“John-John an’ them out there to make sure it’s safe for the people,” she said.
“I’m a people.”
“Maybe so,” she said. “But you look like trouble. When you meet Big Mouth, don’t call him Big Mouth. He don’t like that name. His real nam“€. His ree is Eddie Jones, but he don’t like people callin’ him that neither.”
“What do you call him?”
“Eddie.”
“I see.”
She brought me to a table fit for six behind a half-wall to the left of the crowded bar. There were eight or nine men gathered there but the only one I was interested in was the dolphin-faced black man sitting against the back wall. That, I was sure, was Big Mouth Jones.
“Hi, Eddie,” Seraphina said to Jones. “This here is Mr. Carter. He said he wanted to aks you sumpin’.”
“He your friend or customer?” Big Mouth Jones asked, ignoring me.
“Friend.”
I wondered if it was the tip or the fact that I didn’t want sex that made Seraphina like me. Maybe it was just because I made her almost laugh. My father, for all his left-wing idealism, had often told me, Leonid, you’ll find as you get older that some women are attracted to trouble. Whatever it was, Jones rapped his knuckles against the shoulder of a skinny walnut-colored man next to him. This fellow, who looked to be about half my age, stood up without a word and moved off. I pressed my way toward the back of the table, taking the vacant position.
“You heavy?” Jones asked when I was seated.
“No.” I looked around to see Seraphina walking away.
“How you know Seraphine?”
“We talk from time to time.”
Jones’s face was ageless and unfathomable. He could have been mistaken for thirty-five but he was closer to fifty-nine. He smelled of a little too much good cologne and stale cigarette smoke.
I was about to start in on my line of questioning when the houselights went down and a spotlight hit the stage.
“Frank,” Jones said to a blocky man on the other side of the table.
“Yeah?”
“Walk around with some guys and make sure the people quiet down.”
The man nodded and departed into the gloom.
I turned to ask Eddie my question but his attention was glued to the stage.
A brown woman made an entrance. She wore a tight-fitting dress of golden sequins. Her hair was perfect and the body looked as if it had been designed for just that night, just that stage. Without preamble, recorded music came up and she started to sing. It was perfectly good singing, “€good sinon key, strong, deeply felt. She was singing about a man she’d die for—from the look in his eye, I could tell that Eddie thought that man was him.
“Can I get you something to drink, sir?” a voice whispered from behind my right shoulder.
It was a small white man with a Jimmy Durante nose.
“You got a good brandy?”
“Yes sir. We have a wonderful Armagnac.”
“Bring me a triple shot.”
THE SINGER BELTED out four love songs before taking her bows; the dress was cut so low that I almost looked away. The whole restaurant broke out in applause. I couldn’t help wondering if Big Mouth had anything to do with that.
