A Ticket to the Boneyard (13 page)

“I think so.”

“My mind was excited at the prospect. Then you told me I was beautiful and all of a sudden I’m standing there with wet panties.”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah, instant arousal. Like magic.”

“The way to a woman’s heart—”

“Is through her panties. Can’t you see new worlds opening up for you? All you have to do is tell us we’re beautiful.” She put her hand on my arm. “I think the reason it worked is you made me believe it. Not that I am, but that you think I am.”

“You are.”

“That’s your story,” she said, “and you stick to it. You know that story about Pinocchio? The girl sits on his face and says, ‘Lie to me, lie to me.’ “

“When did I ever lie to you?”

“Ah, baby,” she said, “I figured it’d be fun to do this, and I knew it was going to happen one of these days, but who would have guessed we’d be so hot for each other?”

“I know.”

“When was the last time we were together like this? The last time you were over here was three years ago, but we didn’t go to bed then.”

“No, it was a few years before then.”

“So it could have been seven years ago?”

“Maybe even eight.”

“Well, that explains it. The cells in your body change completely every seven years. Isn’t that what they say?”

“That’s what they say.”

“So your cells and my cells had never met before. I never understood that, the cells changing every seven years. What the hell does it mean? If you get a scar you’ve still got it several years later.”

“Or a tattoo. The cells change but the ink stays between them.”

“How does it know how to do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s what I can’t figure out. How does it know? You don’t have any tattoos, do you?”

“No.”

“And you call yourself an alcoholic. Isn’t that when people get them, when they’re tanked?”

“Well, it never struck me as the reasoned act of a sober man.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so. I read somewhere that a high percentage of murderers are heavily tattooed. Have you ever heard that?”

“It sounds familiar.”

“I wonder why that would be. Something to do with self-image?”

“Maybe.”

“Did Motley have any?”

“Self-image?”

“Tattoos, you dimwit.”

“Sorry. Did he have any tattoos? I don’t remember. You ought to know, you saw more of his body than I did.”

“Thanks for reminding me. I don’t remember any tattoos. He had scars on his back. Did I tell you about that?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Bands of scar tissue across his back. He was probably physically abused in childhood.”

“It happens.”

“Uh-huh. Are you sleepy?”

“Sort of.”

“And I’m not letting you doze off. That’s the thing about fucking, it wakes women up and puts men to sleep. You’re an old bear and I won’t let you hibernate.”

“Ummmmm.”

“I’m glad you don’t have any tattoos. I’ll let you alone now. Good night, baby.”

I slept, and sometime during the night I awoke. I was dreaming, and then the dream had slipped away beyond recall and I was awake. Her body was drawn close to mine and I could feel her heat, and I was breathing her smell. I ran a hand along her flank, feeling the wonderful smoothness of her skin, and the suddenness of my own physical response surprised me.

I filled my hands with her and stroked her, and after a moment she made a sound not unlike a cat’s purr and rolled onto her back, shifting to accommodate me. I eased onto her and into her and our bodies found their rhythm and labored together, endlessly rocking.

Afterward she laughed softly, in the darkness. I asked her what was so funny.

“ ‘Repeatedly,’ “ she said.

In the morning I slipped out of bed and showered and dressed, then woke her to let me out and lock up after me. She wanted to make sure I had the sketch. I held up the cardboard core from a roll of paper towels, Galindez’s effort coiled within.

“Don’t forget I want it back,” she said.

I told her I’d take good care of it.

“And of yourself,” she said. “Promise?”

I promised.

I walked back to my hotel. On the way I found a copy shop that hadn’t closed for the weekend and got them to run a hundred copies of the sketch. I dropped most of them in my room, along with the original, which I’d rolled and reinserted in its cardboard sleeve. I kept a dozen or so copies and took along a batch of business cards, the ones Jim Faber had printed up for me, not the ones from Reliable. These had my name and phone number, nothing else.

I took the Broadway local uptown and got off at Eighty-sixth. My first stop was the Bretton Hall, Motley’s last known address at the time of his arrest. I already knew he wasn’t registered there under his own name, but I tried his picture on the man behind the desk. He studied it solemnly and shook his head. I left the picture with him, along with one of my cards. “Be something in it for you,” I said. “If you can help me out.”

I worked my way up the east side of Broadway to 110th Street, hitting the residential hotels on Broadway itself and on the side streets. Then I crossed to the other side and did the same thing, working my way back down to Eighty-sixth and continuing on down to around Seventy-second Street. I stopped for a plate of black beans and yellow rice at a Cuban-Chinese lunch counter, then worked the east side of Broadway back up to where I’d started. I passed out more business cards than pictures, but I still managed to get rid of all but one of the copies of the sketch and wished I’d brought more. They’d only cost me a nickel apiece, and at that rate I could have afforded to paper the city with them.

A couple of people told me Motley looked familiar. At one welfare hotel, the Benjamin Davis on Ninety-fourth, the clerk knew him immediately.

“He was here,” he said. “Man stayed here this summer.”

“What dates?”

“I don’t know as I could say. He was here more than a couple weeks, but I couldn’t tell you when he came or when he moved out.”

“Could you check your records?”

“I might could, if I recollected his name.”

“His real name’s James Leo Motley.”

“You don’t always get real names here. I don’t suppose I have to tell you that.” He flipped to the front of the register, but the volume only went back to early September. He went into a back room and came back with the preceding volume in hand. “Motley,” he said to himself, and started paging through the entries. “I don’t see it here. I got to say I don’t think that was the name he used. I disremember his name, but I would know it if I heard it, you know what I’m saying? And when I hear Motley it don’t ring no bells.”

He went through the book all the same, running his finger down the pages slowly, moving his lips slightly as he scanned the names of lodgers. The whole process drew some attention, and a couple of others, tenants or hangers-on, drifted over to see what was occupying us.

“You know this man,” the clerk said to one of them. “Stayed here over the summer. What was the name he called hisself?”

The man he’d asked took the sketch and held it so the light fell on it. “This ain’t a photograph,” he said. “This is like a picture somebody drawn of him.”

“That’s right.”

“Yeah, I know him,” he said. “Looks just like him. What name was you calling him?”

“Motley. James Leo Motley.”

He shook his head. “Wasn’t no Motley. Wasn’t no James anything.” He turned to his friend. “Rydell, what was this dude’s name? You remember him.”

“Oh, yeah,” Rydell said.

“So what was his name?”

“Looks just like him,” Rydell said. “On’y his hair was different.”

“How?”

“Short,” Rydell told me. “Short on top, on the sides, short all over.”

“Real short,” his friend agreed. “Like maybe he used to be someplace where they give you a real short haircut.”

“Where they just use that old clippers,” Rydell said, “and all’s they do is buzz you up one side of your head and down the other. I swear I’d know his name. If I was to hear it I’d know it.”

“So would I,” the other man said.

“Coleman,” Rydell said.

“Wasn’t Coleman.”

“No, but it was like Coleman. Colton? Copeland!”

“Think you’re right.”

“Ronald Copeland,” Rydell said triumphantly. “Reason I said Coleman, you know that actor, used to be, name of Ronald Colman? Dude here was Ronald Copeland.”

And, amazingly, his name was in the book, with a check-in date of July 27, twelve days after he cleared the gate at Dannemora. For previous address he’d put Mason City, Iowa. I couldn’t imagine why, but I dutifully noted it in my notebook.

They had an odd system of record-keeping at the Benjamin Davis, and there was no indication in the book of his date of departure. The clerk had to consult a card file to find that out. It turned out he’d been there exactly four weeks, checking out on the twenty-fourth of August. He had not left a forwarding address, and the desk clerk couldn’t recall that there’d been anything that needed forwarding, or that he’d received any mail during his stay, or had any callers.

None of them could recall a conversation with him. “Man kept to hisself,” Rydell said. “Time you’d see him, he’d be going to his room or out to the street. What I’m saying, he was never just standing around talking to you.”

His friend said, “Something about him, you didn’t start up no conversation with him.”

“Way he looked at you.”

“Hell, yes.”

“He could look at you,” Rydell said, “and it was like you’d get a chill. Not a hard look, neither, or a dirty look. Just cold.”

“Ice-cold.”

“Like he’d kill you for any reason at all. You want my opinion, man’s a stone killer. I didn’t never know nobody looked at you like that and wasn’t.”

“I knew a woman once had that kind of look,” his friend said.

“Shit, I don’t want to meet no woman like that.”

“You didn’t want to meet this one,” his friend said. “Not on the shortest day of your life.”

We talked some more, and I gave them each a card and told them it would be worth something to know where he was now, or if he turned up again in the neighborhood. Rydell offered the opinion that the conversation we’d just had ought to be worth something already, and I wasn’t inclined to argue the point. I gave ten dollars to each of them, him and his friend and the desk clerk. Rydell allowed as to how it might have been worth more than that, but he didn’t seem surprised when that was all he got.

“You see those dudes on the TV,” he said, “and they be passing out twenty dollars here, twenty dollars there, ‘fore nobody even tells ’em anything. Why is it you never see no dudes like that around here?”

“They spend all their money,” his friend said, “before they get this far uptown. This gentleman here, this gentleman’s a man knows how to pace hisself.”

I paced myself all up and down Broadway, and that was the only time I had occasion to hand out any money. It was also as close as I came to getting a lead, and I suppose it was progress of a sort. I could place him with certainty in New York for four weeks ending August 24. I had an alias for him, and had the inferential evidence that he was dirty. If he was clean, what did he need with an alias?

More important, I’d established that Galindez’s drawing was recognizably close to Motley’s present appearance. His hair had been shorter, but by now his prison haircut would have grown out. Then too, he might have sideburns or facial hair, but he very likely didn’t; he hadn’t had them before he went away, and he hadn’t started growing them by the time he checked out of the Davis, six weeks after they let him out of prison.

By the time I made the circle back to the Bretton Hall my legs were feeling the mileage. And that was the least of it. That kind of legwork takes its toll. You have the same conversation with dozens of people, and most of the time it’s like talking to plants. The only bright spot that day had come at the Benjamin Davis, with a long dry spell before it and a longer drier one after. That was typical. When you make rounds like that—knocking on doors, cops call it, but on this occasion I’d had no doors to knock on—when you do this, you know you’re wasting at a minimum ninety-five percent of your time and effort. There doesn’t seem to be any way around this, because you can’t do the useful five percent without the other. It’s like shooting birds with a scattergun. Most of the pellets miss, but you don’t mind as long as the bird falls. And you couldn’t expect to bring him down with a .22. He’s too small, and there’s too much sky around him.

Still, it takes it out of you. I took the bus and went back to my hotel room and turned on the television. There was a late college game underway, two Pac-10 teams, and one of them had a quarterback who was being hyped for the Heisman Trophy. I sat down and started watching, and I could understand what the fuss was about. He was a white boy, too, and big enough for pro ball. Something gave me the feeling that his income over the next ten years was going to be higher than mine.

I must have dozed off watching, because I was having some kind of dream when the phone rang. I opened my eyes, turned the sound down on the TV, and answered the phone.

It was Elaine. She said, “Hi, sweetie. I called earlier but they said you were out.”

“I didn’t get a message.”

“I didn’t leave one. I just wanted to thank you and I didn’t want to do that by message. You’re a sweet man, but I suppose everybody tells you that.”

“Not quite everybody,” I said. “I talked to dozens of people today and not one of them told me that. Most of them didn’t tell me a thing.”

“What were you doing?”

“Looking for our friend. I found a hotel where he spent a month after he got out of prison.”

“Where?”

“A flop in the West Nineties. The Benjamin Davis, but I don’t think you’d know it.”

“Would I want to?”

“Probably not. Our sketch is good, I managed to establish that much, and it may be the most important thing I learned today.”

“Did you get the original back?”

“You still want it, huh?”