CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (12 page)

Snake, who hadn’t stopped grinning, gestured at Skeletor. Skeletor waited what must have been a second or two too long for Snake; to me it was an hour. Snake cut him a sharp look. Skeletor ambled forward, took the basketball away, flipped it to one of the other guys. He patted me down. I lifted my arms to help him; otherwise I didn’t move. When he was through with me, Skeletor did Carter. I heard Carter hiss, “Shit!” but he didn’t protest.

When Skeletor moved back, though, Carter said angrily, “Wha’s up with that shit, Snake? You think I be coming at you with a joint?”

Snake’s face grew hard. “Rev, nothing you do gonna surprise me. Yesterday this white boy be porking out at me, today you call me, say, can he talk. You not who you was. Can’t trust ’em, bust ’em.”

A cold wind swept the playground, scraping leaves before it. Snake picked up the eight-ball jacket from the asphalt, dusted it off and put it on. He pulled a gold neck chain from the pocket, slipped it over his head. A three-inch gold cobra dangled against his chest.

He stepped close to me, leaned in my face. I stayed still. “So I be asking myself, Snake, how come a limp-dick white fool be ready to buck you one day, next day want to talk to you?” He looked
around at his crew, spread his hands. “And I don’t hear no answer. So only thing to do, ask the fool hisself. So, fool. How ’bout it? What up with that shit?”

I could smell his sweat, and the new leather of his coat. I wanted a few more inches between us, but that was the game. I didn’t move, spoke calmly. “Did you kill Mike Downey?”

“ ‘Did you kill Mike Downey?’ ” Snake whined, broadly sarcastic. He laughed. A few of his crew laughed with him. Snake stopped abruptly. “No, I ain’t smoked the fuckin’ dude! Wish I did, so sick of hearing his name!”

“You know who did?” My voice was as level and low as the one I would have used in a church.

“Man, why you coming like this? What you care? He your homeboy?”

“White folks ain’t got no homeboys,” Skeletor said.

The crew snickered; one guy slapped another’s palm.

“Word,” Snake agreed. His grin spread. “Hey, I got it. They faggots. Ain’t that right, fool? He used to suck your ol’ shriveled dick, and now you lonely? We take care of that for you, bitch!”

Carter’s low voice came from beside me. “Yo, no call for that, Snake. My man ain’t dissin’ you. I ask you can he talk to you, you say yes. You don’t want to talk, we go.”

“What the fuck he care?” Snake faced Carter. “What do he care who killed that fucking white boy? He five-o? Why?”

“Five-o?” I looked to Carter.

“A cop,” Carter said, his eyes on Snake.

“Am I a cop? No,” I said to Snake. “Not a cop. A private detective.”

“Say what?”

“A private eye,” I said wearily. Suddenly I was bone tired, tired of posturing, tired of parrying, tired of these vicious, ruined children and their brutal world.

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t give a shit about you, Snake. If you didn’t kill Mike, if you didn’t kill Henry Howe, then you don’t mean shit to me.”

“Bullshit, man.” Snake poked me in the chest. “You want my ass, bitch, same as the rest of the heat. You want my ass ’cause me and my homeboys, we too fine for you. We gettin’, and niggers not suppose to get.”

“I’m not the heat. I wouldn’t mind seeing you go down, but it’s not what I’m here for.”

“So why the fuck you here? Why you here, white meat?”

“Tell them to lower the guns, Snake.”

The three guys with the automatics trained on me hadn’t moved. Snake beamed at them, pleased and proud, like a father whose children were behaving perfectly in front of ill-mannered strangers.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, okay, homies. Slack off, don’t back off.”

The arms holding the guns lowered slowly. Two of the guys stood motionless, the guns loose in their hands, pointing at the pavement. The third, the young one, started to tuck his into his belt. Then he glanced at the others. He stopped and straightened, glared at me, let his gun hang loose in his hand, too.

The playground was silent. The sky was dark now, and starless; in the cold wind I suppressed a shiver. I wanted to zip my jacket, but I knew better than to move.

“I want to know who killed those men,” I said. “And why. If you didn’t I want to know why it’s being made to look as though you did.”

“Well, don’t that make you large. Yo, you a detective, go find out.”

“How much does the Home pay you?”

“What shit is that?”

“For protection. How much?”

Snake looked from me to Carter, hesitated. Then he grinned and shrugged. “Thou.”

“A month?”

“Yeah.”

“Steep.”

“They got it.”

“Why’d you hit the trucker?”

“Say what?”

“A few weeks ago, you hit a trucker making a delivery there. Don’t bullshit me, it was you.” I almost said, “you punks,” but I bit off the word. “If the Home makes their payments, why’d you do that?”

“Oh, that.” He spoke as an executive who’d had to be reminded
of an unimportant decision. Spreading his hands, he explained the obvious: “Night’s extra.”

“Extra?”

“Dangerous ’round here at night. Take more work keep people safe.”

“They wouldn’t pay the extra?”

“Guess not.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Fuckin’ truckers, man! What the hell is this? I’m sick of you, fool!” Snake suddenly erupted, threw his hands in the air, brought them down on his hips. “You makin’ me mad, I be makin’ you sad. Don’t want to talk to you no more, my brother.”

Before I could answer, Carter spoke from beside me. “Okay, Snake. Chill. We going now. My man got no more questions.”

“That true, fool?” Snake’s eyes were bright and hard, glittering like glass. Something nagged at my memory, but on that cold, wide playground I wasn’t sure what.

“For now,” I said.

“Hey, Snake, man! Let me smoke the motherfucker!” The fourteen-year-old whipped his gun up, held it level. “Lemme smoke ’em both! You say it, Snake, I do it! Gettin’ in our business. We the Cobras, dogshit! Who the fuck you?”

I looked at him evenly, at Snake again. “Smith,” I said. “If you want me, Carter knows where to find me.” I turned, at the same time Carter did. We started together across the asphalt.

Snake’s voice, loud, came from behind us. “Was a time the Rev wouldn’t turn his back on no Cobra.”

Carter stopped walking, but didn’t turn around. I stopped when he did, half-turned, just because I had to see, though I knew it would do no good. Carter, facing away from Snake, said in a voice that carried as Snake’s had, “Was a time a Cobra wouldn’t shoot no man in the back.”

He started forward again. Together we walked toward the open gate, a hundred miles away. Cold sweat inched down my back. Adrenaline burned my veins; I could feel the fast, hard pounding of my heart. I forced my hands to hang loosely, my legs to step slowly.

“Don’t say nothing, don’t look back.” Carter’s voice was cold and low.

I kept my eyes fixed on the gate hanging twisted on its hinges,
kept walking. The cold wind brought only city sounds, sharp and clear: a horn honking, a steady bass radio beat, the hiss of traffic. I strained beyond them to hear a rustle, a click, a sound I’d never hear from this distance. I heard only the leaves blowing on the pavement and, from somewhere, the slamming of a door.

Then we were outside the gate. I tried to swallow, but my mouth was too dry. We moved up the sidewalk, Carter and I, crossed the street to where the smell of dinner frying lingered in the cold air. The Cobras’ sentry was still a shadowy form at the top of the block.

Something moved at the edge of my vision and I jerked around to have a look, but it was only an alley cat, skinny and furtive, scuttling across the street. A woman walked a dog past us on the sidewalk, and a ten-year-old called Speedo sat reading comic books on the hood of my car.

T
WENTY
-O
NE

I
gave Speedo a ten-dollar bill, watched him bad-walk down the now empty street. Carter stared wordlessly after him.

I climbed in the car and lit a Kent the minute I was behind the wheel. I leaned my head back, filled my lungs with the comfort of nicotine. Carter lifted the pack from the dash, took one for himself. We smoked together in silence while I dug the car keys out of my pocket.

When we were moving through traffic I spoke. “Thanks,” I said.

Carter smiled, inspected the burning tip of his cigarette. “Oh, my pleasure. Any time at all.”

I grinned, felt the adrenaline rush begin to subside.

Carter shook his head. “On the serious tip: stay out their way, you dig?”

“Yeah,” I said, turning onto the Concourse. “I dig.”

“Snake down at the cop house all day behind this,” he went on.
“He don’t feel kindly disposed toward The Man right at the moment.”

“I’m not The Man.”

He looked at me. “No, you wrong,” he said. “You not the law. But you The Man.”

We stopped for a light. I heard a grinding noise as a merchant rolled a steel shutter down, locked it across the front of his store. “Tell me about the Rev.”

Carter didn’t answer right away. “Nothing to tell,” he finally said, in a more distant voice.

“You and Snake used to be pretty tight, I hear.”

“We used to hang.”

“And now?”

“Now we don’t.” He took a last draw, put out his cigarette.

Traffic in the express lanes of the wide Concourse was flowing easily, commuters on their way to the highway, to the northern suburbs. In the local lanes, where we were, double-parked cars outside fast-food restaurants narrowed the street to one lane in places, and traffic backed up behind gypsy cabs disgorging customers. Our progress, though we didn’t have far to go, was slow.

I said, “I heard the Rev went to jail.”

“Everybody done time.” Carter gestured toward the next stoplight. “This my street.”

“I know.” I pulled over to the curb. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to put you on the spot. But there’s a lot going on here I don’t understand. I’m trying to put it together.”

“Who tell you you got to understand everything?”

“Christ, it’s my business. It’s what I do.”

He looked out of the window, into the city night. When he turned back to me, there was a wariness and, I thought, a warning in his eyes. “Look. You want to find out who done your friend, I try to help you. But the ’hood, it ain’t like your world. Rules is all different here. You lose, you lose big. And you can’t win.”

“Because I’m white?”

He shook his head. “Because you here. Ain’t no winners here.”

He left my car, walked down the street into the tired brick building. I watched the door close behind him, and watched a little while after that, though the sidewalk was empty.

Then I started the car, swung around into the express lanes. I headed downtown, for dinner with Lydia.

* * *

I got to my place with half an hour to spare, enough to shave, change my shirt, and give myself a few minutes to try to sort out the day. Because of the night before, and because I was so tired, things were beginning to run together. I was afraid there were things I was losing, maybe things I’d already lost.

I stood at the big front windows, smoking. The streetlights made deep shadows in the silent loading docks, shadows in which anything—people, or fears, or memories—could move unseen. The difficult, antagonistic sounds of Elliot Carter’s piano concerto flooded the room, the piano and the orchestra straining futilely toward each other, unable to find common ground.

I thought about Bobby, his helpless anger over what someone had done to Mike, over what his own disloyal body had done to him; about Sheila, who through the days to come would be betrayed, over and over, by small, surprising things that would bring the stab of loss again, each time as numbing and hopeless as the first time; and about Ida Goldstein, facing now a different loss, a darkness with no guide.

I wondered about Carter, and about Howe, and Snake; and I wondered what truth would really be served when I finally found out what had happened on the night Mike died.

The cigarette was gone, and so was the inch of bourbon I’d poured. It was time to go downstairs, and I felt a little lighter when I thought of Lydia, her dark eyes, her freesia-scented hair, the solid warmth of her athlete’s body. She saw so many things differently from the way I did. Together maybe we could separate what meant something from what didn’t, decide where to move next. Talking to Lydia would help; it always did.

In the street below a car pulled up, idled. The streetlights gave me a clear view through the windshield. The driver was a young Asian man I didn’t know. The passenger was Lydia.

They talked, he with his hands still on the wheel; she tossed her head, ran a hand through her hair in a gesture I knew well. She leaned toward him. He slid his arms around her.

They kissed for a long time; then she got out of the car, closed the door, leaned into the window and spoke. Standing back, she watched him drive off.

She turned to cross the street, and I stepped quickly away from
the window in case, on her way into Shorty’s she should glance up. She usually did.

The bar was close to empty when I walked in, just a few regulars scattered around, and Lydia in a booth facing the door. Dark wood drank up the light from low bulbs under green glass shades. I nodded to Shorty. The air smelled companionably of beer and burgers. Shorty’s was as familiar to me as the apartment upstairs where I’d lived for sixteen years, and to a point, as always, it comforted me.

Lydia smiled when she saw me come in. I slid onto the bench opposite; I grinned but I didn’t kiss her.

“Hi,” she said. She examined my face. “You look awful.”

“Thanks. You look gorgeous, as usual.”

Kay appeared with a glass of orange juice for Lydia. “Hi,” she greeted me. “How you doing? Get you a Maker’s Mark?”

“No, thanks. Just a beer. Harp.”

She went to get it. Lydia asked, “Does that mean you’re as tired as you look?”

“Tired doesn’t begin to describe it. Jesus.” I rubbed my hand across my face. “I’m too old to do this.”

“To do what?”

“Work all night. Get beat up on by punks. Ask questions I don’t know the reasons for, get answers I don’t understand.”

“Poor Bill.” Lydia smiled, covered my hand with her own. Hers was soft and warm and I let mine linger under it for a few moments before I squeezed her fingers lightly and pulled away to light a cigarette.

Kay brought my beer. Lydia ordered a spinach salad and I got a burger, though I wasn’t sure I wasn’t too tired to eat.

Lydia sipped at her orange juice. “Do you want to talk about the case first, or do you want to talk about what happened this morning?”

I thought back to this morning, to our phone conversation, so long ago.

“I want to explain why I reacted like that,” she said.

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” I said. “Ever.”

“That’s not true.” Her eyes, steady and clear, found mine. “And I want to.”

I drank some beer. “All right.”

“It’s this,” she said. “We’re working together, but when trouble
came, you didn’t call me. When you called me, you came on to me, the way you always do. The thing is, Bill, sometimes I think that’s why you work with me. That if you didn’t lust after me,” she half smiled, but her eyes were serious, “you wouldn’t bring me in on your cases the way you do. And if we … stopped playing that game, you wouldn’t work with me at all.”

I smoked silently for a while. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”

She didn’t answer.

“Lydia,” I finally said, stubbing my cigarette out, “what I do could get me killed. When I call someone in, I want brains and balls and the ability to go from zero to ninety in ten seconds. I’m crazy, but not crazy enough to sell that out for a chance to get in your pants.” In the dim light in Shorty’s she seemed to blush. I added, “Even those great leather ones. You know, with the red stitching on them, and the little zippers on the ankles—”

She laughed, shook her head. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” Her eyes got serious again. “Because I want us to keep working together, Bill. As a team.”

“The way we’ve always worked, since the day three years ago when I found you in the gutter—oh, wait, now I remember, that was your office. Why wouldn’t we, Lydia? What’s wrong?”

She ran her hand through her hair. “I don’t know. Lately I’ve been wondering if I really belong in this business. It’s a little crazy, isn’t it? Doing what we do? And then I thought, maybe Bill doesn’t even really think I’m any good …”

“I call you,” I said, “because you’re good.” I wanted to add, and because I love you, and I love you because you’re good. Instead, I went on, “And I can’t believe you don’t think you belong in this business. You’re perfect for it. For one thing, you’re unbelievably nosy. For another, you have billions of Chinese relations who among them work in every profession in America and they all owe you. And for another, your mother hates what you do.”

“Those are the prerequisites?”

“Uh-huh.” I drank some beer.

“Did your mother hate it when you started?” she asked suddenly.

My eyes avoided hers, wandered the room, the paneled walls, the L-shaped bar with the bottles behind, the tin ceiling I’d put in for Shorty before I’d even moved in upstairs. There had been times over
the last three years when I’d thought I might tell Lydia about my family, about all of it; but tonight, at the end of this long, long day, all I said was, “I don’t know.”

We were silent with each other for a while, just a short time while the regulars murmured their soft conversations and Shorty mixed up drinks behind the bar.

Lydia suddenly said, “I’m seeing someone.”

I put my beer down, looked from it to her. “I know.”

She frowned. Before she could speak I said, “Well, I am a detective.”

Her frown lasted a second longer; then she smiled, relaxed. “His name is Paul Kao. He’s a friend of my brother Andrew’s. A photographer.” She added, in a tone whose meaning I couldn’t quite decipher, “He’s Chinese.”

I lit another cigarette, smoked a little of it before I spoke again. “You never promised me anything,” I said. “You’ve always told me I was wasting my time. That’s been my choice. This doesn’t change anything, unless you want it to.”

“No.” She leaned forward. “That’s what I’m saying. I don’t want it to.”

“Then it won’t.”

She smiled, that glowing smile. I smiled too, the best smile I had, and looked away.

We didn’t speak again until Kay came over carrying dinner. I poured ketchup on my burger, ordered another beer.

Lydia stuck her fork into her salad, pulled out a spinach leaf, did something elegant with her fork and knife that left the leaf folded small. “Well,” she said, “should we talk about the case?”

“What case is that?” I asked, working my way around my burger.

“It’s a homicide case. Up in the Bronx.”

“Did you find out who did it?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Damn.”

“But I found out something that might be interesting. That is, I’m sure it’s interesting. I just don’t know what it means.”

“Right now I’ll take meaningless, as long as it’s interesting.”

She grinned. “I was hoping you’d feel that way.” Our eyes met, just for a second. I pulled mine away to look around for Kay, or anything.

Lydia’s look may have become a little unsure, or maybe I was just wishing it would. She went on in a normal voice. “Well, it’s a real estate thing. I’m only just beginning to dig into it, and I don’t really understand this stuff. I had to call my brother Ted’s friend the realtor and have him explain it to me, what it could mean. And of course it could mean nothing.”

“Uh-huh.” I poured more ketchup onto my plate, dipped the edge of the burger in it. “Except your hunches rarely mean nothing.”

“I just never tell you about the ones that don’t work out.” She chased some chick peas around her bowl. “Well, anyway. Remember I told you Helping Hands owns nine properties in the Bronx? There seems to be a pattern to what happens when they buy one.”

“You mean to how they build, or renovate?”

“No, to what happens before that. First of all, they’ve never bought a property from an individual. It’s always a holding corporation. And the thing is, these corporations are all owned by other corporations. I’ve found fourteen of them so far. Nine of them own one property each, and the other five own those.”

“Which makes it really hard to trace who’s behind them.”

“Well, yes.” She grinned. “But not impossible.”

“Oh, goody.”

“There were some names I didn’t recognize on the ones I’ve been able to trace, which isn’t all of them yet,” she said. “And one I did. That guy you told me to add to the list. Andy Hill.”

“Oh,” I said slowly. I finished my beer, waited for everything to fall into place. Nothing did.

“Okay,” I said. “Andy Hill sets up corporations, buys properties, and sells them to Helping Hands. Does he sell them for huge inflated prices or something?”

“No. They’re sold for more than he paid for them, but not more than you might expect as a normal profit.”

“That doesn’t sound illegal. It also doesn’t sound like something you can get rich from.”

“I said I didn’t understand it. But there’s a little more. The corporations—never the same ones as sold a particular property, but others of them—in seven of the nine cases they own properties in the immediate vicinity of the one that was sold to Helping Hands.”

“Andy Hill is buying up the Bronx?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“God. Why would you do that?”

“To make a fortune?”

“How?”

She didn’t answer. I didn’t expect her to.

Kay brought my second beer. I knew it wouldn’t help the soft confusion in my mind, but probably nothing would. I took a sip.

“How about you?” Lydia said. “Did you find out anything interesting today?”

“I did. I found out all sorts of interesting things, and I don’t know what they mean either.”