CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (11 page)

T
WENTY

M
artin Carter was waiting for me at the gate to the Bronx Home parking lot. He’d changed the blue coveralls for a sweatshirt and jeans. I pulled up across the street, leaned over to open the door while he dodged traffic.

“Man, you a hard dude to find,” he grumbled, climbing in the car.

“I am?”

“You didn’t leave me no number, nothin’.”

“I couldn’t find you before I left. I’d’ve called you if you hadn’t called me.”

He was still unsatisfied. “Well, I had to ask the new guy. He call your boss. Boss don’t answer. So he call your super. Dayton? Dayton got to hunt around, find your answering service number. Shit. I be ’bout ready to forget it. Plus, standing here like a damn fool and you don’t show up.”

“Am I late? I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Just, I like to get away from here soon’s my shift’s over. Stay outta trouble that way.”

“What kind of trouble?” I glanced at him.

“Any kind at all.”

“Well,” I said, “where to?”

He didn’t answer right away. Looking out the window, he said, “Man, you being straight with me?”

“Straight how?”

“You tell me you just crazy, just wanna talk to Snake. Snake, he got his reasons to talk to you. I don’t know, maybe he crazy too. But I gotta wonder, man. You setting me up?”

“Setting you up? For what?”

He seemed about to say something; then he shook his head. “Nah, forget it.”

“I wouldn’t set you up, even if I knew what the hell you were talking about,” I said. “But it’s true I haven’t told you the whole thing.” I turned the car off, shifted to face him. “I said I knew Mike Downey, and I did. And his family. But this security-guard business, this isn’t what I usually do. I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired to find out who killed Mike.”

He stared. “Private cop? Oh, shit!” He threw the car door open, started to get out.

I grabbed his arm. “Wait, goddammit!”

He sat back down, but he didn’t close the door. “Man, what you tryin’ to do, get me fuckin’ killed? If Snake find out—”

“Snake’s going to find out, because I’m going to tell him. I’m going to be straight with Snake, too. If he killed Mike—or any of his crew did—I’m going to want his ass on a platter, and I’m going to get it. But if he didn’t, then I want the guys who did, and I want Snake to help me get them.”

“Help,” Carter snorted. “Yeah, Snake know all about help.”

I took out my Kents, offered the pack to him. He shook his head. “How come you didn’t tell me this before?” he said. “Why you come fronting this security guard shit?”

“When I started here I didn’t know who anyone was, who I could trust.”

“You still don’t.” He looked directly at me.

“No. No, I don’t. But I’ll take my chances.”

For a moment, no reaction. Then he grinned. He closed the door, settled in the seat. “Okay. You crazy, Snake crazy. Might as well be crazy too.”

I grinned back, started the car. “So, crazy man. Where to?”

“First we gotta make a stop,” he said. “Snake expecting us at six. I figured you had a car, we could make it.”

“Make what?”

“Errand.”

I pulled out into the street, circled back to the Concourse, went north as Carter directed me until he had me stop.

“Be right back.” He disappeared into a brick building with heavy mesh grilles on the ground-floor windows. In a minute he
came out, but he wasn’t alone. One arm cradled a toddler, who rested his head on Carter’s shoulder. By the hand he held a tall, long-limbed girl of maybe five, who was looking up at him, talking and giggling. He smiled as he answered; I didn’t hear what he said.

I got out of the car and opened the passenger door. The girl stopped talking when she saw me, leaned a little closer to Carter.

“Who’s him, Martin?”

“This my friend Bill. Bill, this Vanessa, and this Rashid.”

“Hi, Vanessa. Neat lunchbox.” She looked down at the Bart Simpson: Rasta Dude lunchbox she was carrying. “Hi, Rashid.” The baby shifted his eyes to me when he heard his name.

“He don’t know how to talk much,” Vanessa offered. “He just a baby.”

“I know,” I said. “But when he grows up he’ll be big and smart like you. Well, if he’s lucky, maybe.”

She giggled. Carter said, “Get in the car, Nessie.”

“We gonna ride in his car?”

“Uh-huh. Bill gonna take us home.”

She climbed into the back seat. Carter sat in the front, the baby in his lap. I switched on the tape deck, clicked on the rear speakers.

“Hey!” Vanessa said, as we were surrounded by the Brahms piano quintet. “Hey, it play ballerina music!”

“You like it?” I asked her.

“Yeah! Decent!”

“Press the black button. It makes the window go up and down.”

She did, and giggled again. “Martin! Look!”

“Yeah.” Carter grinned back at her. “Ain’t that something?”

We went north until I found a legal U-turn, then headed back the way we’d come.

As Vanessa chased the window up and down in short bursts I manuevered the car through traffic. Pulling out around a double-parked jeep, I asked Carter quietly, “You know anybody with a tan Dodge?”

“Uh-uh. Should I?”

“I don’t know. But he’s been about half a block behind since we left the Home.”

“No shit.” Carter twisted in his seat, craned through my back window. “I see him. Can’t make him out, though. Yo, here’s my street. What you want to do?”

“I want to lose him.”

I went on past Carter’s street, waited for my chance. A few blocks later it came: an intersection where the light was changing. The Dodge was stuck two cars behind me as I sped up, ran the yellow as it turned to red. I swung left, up the quick hill away from the Concourse; then, over the crest and out of sight, I swung left again.

“Where we going, Martin?” came Vanessa’s interested voice from behind me.

“Shortcut,” Carter said.

I worked my way half a mile north of Carter’s street, then turned and came back, using parallel avenues instead of the Concourse. I half expected the tan Dodge, which had not reappeared since I left him at the stoplight, to be waiting for us in front of Carter’s building, but it wasn’t there.

“Looks like that worked,” I said. “But I’d sure like to know who he was.”

“Maybe we be lucky. Maybe he be back.”

Carter’s apartment building, like so many others on the side streets, was a tired red-brick affair, never as elegant as the Concourse buildings themselves, and now, like them, shabby and neglected. Two women, one middle-aged and stout, the other elderly and tiny, conversed on the sidewalk. “There’s Granny!” Vanessa bounced in her seat as I turned the car off. “Look, Granny!” she called out the window. “We riding in Martin’s friend car!”

Carter and I got out. Almost before Carter had the door open for her, Vanessa squeezed out and was on the sidewalk, tugging on the tiny woman’s hand.

“Look, Granny! You can run the windows up and down, and it play ballerina music from all around you—”

“That’s lovely, child. Now hush so I can meet Martin’s friend good and proper.”

“Oh—!” The child yanked on the old lady’s hand in frustration as Carter kissed her upturned cheek. He said, “Bill, this my grandmother, Miz Enna Carter. And this Miz Green, live underneath us. She studying on sainthood, don’t never complain how noisy these children is.”

“We ain’t!” protested Vanessa. “Least,
I
ain’t.”

“Oh. Must be Rashid wear his roller skates inside. Ladies, this Bill Smith, used to work with me.”

“Pleased to meet you.” I shook hands with them both. Mrs.
Green was powerfully built, with big, callused hands. Carter’s grandmother’s hands were callused too, but the woman herself, not large to begin with, was stooped and gnarled like a piece of driftwood. Her grip was firm, though, and her eyes sparkled.

“Pleasure be mine, Mr. Smith. It’s good of you give Martin and the children a ride.”

“Granny, we got to do something, Bill and me. I be back in about a hour. You want me to take Rashid inside?”

“I take him, Mother Carter,” Mrs. Green offered. Carter passed the sleepy Rashid to Mrs. Green as Enna Carter peered at him suspiciously. “What you mean, you got to do something? What thing you got to do?”

“Bill got a errand, need my help.”

“Bill got? Or you got?”

“I have, Mrs. Carter,” I said. “Martin’s doing me a favor. It won’t take long.”

The old woman seemed not entirely convinced. Carter kissed her again, and we got back in the car. As we drove away I could see in the rearview mirror Rashid resting on Mrs. Green’s wide bosom, and gangly Vanessa still explaining to her great-grandmother the wonders of my car.

“Your grandmother seems worried about you,” I said to Carter as we drove south on the Concourse. It was dusk now, the clear sky purply-blue, the lighted apartment-house windows glowing a gentle yellow.

“She know me.” He directed me to turn just north of the Bronx Home, and I did, heading first down the hill away from the Concourse, then turning left. There was no tan Dodge before or behind us.

“You didn’t tell me you had a family,” I said.

He looked at me with amazement. “And you didn’t tell me you was fuckin’ Magnum, P.I.! What you want, my rap sheet?”

“You have one?”

“You know anyone round here don’t?”

I downshifted at a grafitti-covered stop sign. “They’re good-looking kids.”

“Uh-huh.”

I took a chance. “Both yours?”

“They is now.”

“Vanessa calls you ‘Martin’.”

Carter fixed his eyes on me. “What about it?”

“Nothing. Just making conversation.”

“Save it for Snake.”

“Listen, Carter, you don’t have to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Come with me. Just tell me where to go.”

“Park here. This where you go. They waiting for you in that playground there. And you think you gonna get outta here without me?”

I parked, turned off the car. Shadowy forms played a game of half-court on the other side of the schoolyard fence. As I watched, a very tall shadow burst away from the others, slammed the ball one-handed through the netless hoop.
Good, but nothing special
, I could hear Lindfors’s rough voice in my head.
An average kid
.

I said to Carter, “I couldn’t have gotten in here without you. I know that. But you’re edgy as a turkey the day before Thanksgiving. If you don’t want to see Snake, you don’t owe me anything.”

“You think I’m afraid of Snake? Man, you dumb even for a white guy.”

“What, then?”

He let his breath out between his teeth. “You strapped?”

“Armed? Yes.”

“Leave it here.”

Nobody wanted my gun around today. Maybe it had bad breath. Muzzle breath. You’re nervous too, Smith, I pointed out.

“I don’t want anyone breaking in the car, putting this gun on the street.”

“We fix that.” He got out of the car.

I took off the .38, shoved it under the seat. It seemed a better idea than the glove compartment. On the sidewalk, Carter surveyed the neighborhood. Down the block a group of kids tossed a football around. Carter stared that way for a few moments, then yelled, “Yo! Speedo!”

One of the kids, a slight boy of about ten, swiveled his head in our direction. He called something to the others, threw the football in a high, curving arc. Without looking to see if it had been caught he trotted over to where we stood.

“Yo, Rev,” he greeted Carter. “ ’S up?”

“ ’S up, Speedo?” Carter and the kid gave each other a handshake. “I got business with Snake,” Carter told the kid. “You think you could watch my man’s car for me, see it don’t have no accidents?”

“No problem.” The kid looked at my car with interest. “What kinda car’s this?”

“Acura,” I told him. “Two years old.”

“Ride good?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why you don’t get a new one?”

“Don’t need one. It rides good.”

“Yeah, but why you don’t get one? Get them dope spokes on your rims, get dark windows so no one can’t see your business. Like Snake got, in the Benz.”

“When you rich, you buy my man one,” Carter suggested. “Meanwhile, this the only one he got, so I don’t want nothing to happen to this one.”

“Yeah, okay, Rev, okay,” the kid grumbled.

Carter turned and I followed him toward the playground gate.

“Rev?” I said.

“Drop it.”

I dropped it, for now.

Carter walked lightly. His shoulders were relaxed, but his eyes roved the terrain. They covered the line of lighted windows in the school, where crayoned oak leaves were silhouetted behind heavy mesh screens; they took in the glistening shards of glass on the playground asphalt. Under a streetlight, three girls giggled. One of them, light-skinned, with blond in her hair, waved at Carter, then whispered something to her friends. They giggled some more.

In the corner of my eye I caught a dark figure a block up the hill, standing, watching. A sentry, an outrigger. The smell of someone’s dinner deep-frying drifted from the apartment house across the street, mingled with the autumn leaves you could smell even here, on this cracked-asphalt desert. I wondered if there was any other time in this place when you could smell the season. In the spring maybe, after the rain.

The half-court game had stopped when Carter and I entered the playground. Six figures stood waiting, motionless in the dusk.
Snake was there, shirtless, gleaming with sweat. I recognized Skeletor, a fat figure in a baseball cap. There were two other baseball caps, worn sideways by guys whose tension you could read in the tendons in their necks, the set of their shoulders. One of them couldn’t have been over fourteen. Heavy gold chains and four-finger rings glinted dully in the half-light.

Carter stopped and I stopped next to him, a few feet from the silent group.

“Yo, Snake,” Carter said evenly.

Snake grinned, showed a gleam of gold tooth. “Yo, my man Rev. Whassup?” He glanced at me; suddenly he snapped the basketball hard at my chest. I caught the movement just before he threw; so I caught the ball, too, held it where I caught it, against me. By that time, with swift, smooth motions, three of the kids had pulled guns from under their loose jackets. They held them on me, one-handed, shoulder-high. Right here on the playground, I thought. A fourteen-year-old and two kids not much older are ready to blow my head off and don’t even care why, and I’m not even surprised.