Double Deuce (7 page)

My office door opened, and there, radiant in a white raincoat and matching hat with a lot of blue polka dot showing at her neck, was Marge Eagen herself, the host of the number-one-rated local show in the country. My heart beat faster.

“Hello,” I said.

“I wasn’t sure whether to knock or not,” Marge Eagen said. She smiled beautifully. “I thought you might have a receptionist.”

“I did,” I said, “but she returned to her first love, neurosurgery, a while back and I haven’t bothered to replace her.”

Marge Eagen laughed delightedly. “I heard you were funny,” she said.

“Lot of people say that.”

“May I sit down?”

“Of course,” I said.

I nodded at the chair. She sat and glanced around my office.

“Great location,” she said. I didn’t comment.

“Is it as fascinating as it seems,” Marge Eagen said, “being a private detective?”

“Better than working,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sure,” she said, “that you work pretty damned hard.”

“So what can I do for you?” I said.

“My, my,” she said. “So businesslike.”

She had unbuttoned her shiny white raincoat and let it fall off her shoulders over the back of the chair. She had on a dark blue dress with big white polka dots. When she crossed her legs, she showed me a lot of thigh. I remained calm.

“I really need to know what the problem is,” Marge Eagen said.

I nodded encouragingly.

“Just what is the issue with your black friend,” Marge said. “We’re out there trying to do a story that should help his people, and, frankly, he seems to have a real attitude.”

“Hawk?” I said. “An attitude?”

“Oh, come now, don’t be coy, Mr. Spenser. What is his problem?”

“Why not consult with him?” I said.

“Well, I don’t know where to find him, and in truth I’m more comfortable talking with you.”

“Is it because I’m so cuddlesome?” I said.

She smiled the smile that launched a thousand commercials.

“Well, that’s certainly part of it,” she said.

“And I’m not a surly nigger,” I said. “That’s probably appealing too.”

“There’s no need to be coarse,” Marge Eagen said. “The stations are really behind this. We believe in the project. We care.”

“Hawk probably thinks you are a self-important ninny who is looking for television ratings and using the problems of the ghetto to that end. Hawk probably thinks that your coverage will do no good, and will make people think it’s doing good, thus making things, if possible, worse.” Marge Eagen’s face got red.

“You arrogant fucking prick,” she said.

“Everyone says that,” I said.

She stood, and turned, angrily shrugging her coat back on.

“Of course maybe he just doesn’t like having his picture taken,” I said. “With Hawk you never know.”

She didn’t answer. Without looking back she stalked out my door and slammed it shut behind her.

No business like show business.

The Hobarts came down the alley from the back end of the project in single file. They all had on Raiders caps and Adidas sneakers. Most of them were in sweatsuits. Major had on a leather jacket with padded shoulders and a lot of zippers. As they came Hawk and I got out of the car to face them. I had the shotgun.

The Hobarts fanned out in a semicircle around us. I didn’t see John Porter. I took a look along the rooftops and saw nothing. Major stood inside the half-circle opposite us. He had the same half-amused, half-tense quality I had seen before.

“How you doing,” Major said. Hawk nodded slightly.

“Thought I should introduce you to the crew,” Major said.

Hawk waited.

“Figure you suppose to be scrambling with us, you ought to see who you gonna have to hass.” There was still no movement on the roofline. The rain misted down softly, and no one seemed to mind it. The boys stood arrayed.

“This here is Shoe,” Major said, “and Honk, Goodyear, Moon-man, Halfway, Hose.”

At each name Hawk would shift his eyes onto the person introduced. He made no other sign. Shoe was the kid I’d yanked out of the van. Goodyear looked like he’d been named for the Blimp. Honk was very light. Halfway was very short. Major moved slowly around the semicircle.

“This here is X, and Bobby High.”

I kept watching the roof, alternating glances at the street. The rain came a little harder.

“… and Junior,” Major said. “And Ray… ” There were maybe twenty kids in all. Major was around twenty. The youngest looked to be twelve or thirteen.

“Where’s John Porter?” Hawk said.

Major shrugged. “He ain’t here,” Major said. “I think maybe he soaking his hose.” He grinned. “John Porter heavy on soaking it. Say he need to soak it every day since he got out of rails, you know? Say his slut spend most of her time looking at the ceiling.”

“You come to tell me about John Porter’s sex life?” Hawk said.

“Come to see you, Fro. Come to intro the Homes. You ever been in rails, Fro?”

Hawk said, “It’s raining. You want to stand around in the rain?”

“We used to standing around,” Major said. “Stand around a lot. Stand around sell some sub. Stand around pick up some wiggle, stand around throat a little beverage. Maybe trace somebody.”

“Trace?” I said.

Major grinned. “You know, line somebody, haul out you nine and… ” With his thumb and forefinger he mimicked shooting a handgun.

“Ah,” I said. “Of course.”

“What kind of sub you sell?” Hawk said.

“Grain, glass, classic, Jock, motor, harp, what you need is what we got.”

Hawk looked at me. “Grass,” he said. “Rock cocaine, regular powdered coke, heroin.” He looked at Major. “What’s motor? Speed?”

“Un huh.”

“And PCP,” Hawk finished.

“You think I didn’t know that?” I said.

“What do you use?” Hawk said.

“We don’t use that shit, man. You think we use that? We see what it does to people, man. We ain’t stupid.”

“So what do you use?” Hawk said.

“Beverage, Fro. I already tol‘ you that. Some Mogen, some Juke, hot day maybe, some six. You use something?”

“I drink the blood of my enemies,” Hawk said and smiled his wide happy smile. His eyes never left Major.

“Whoa,” Major said. “That is dope, man!” He turned toward the others. “Is this a fresh dude? Did I tell you he was bad? The blood of the fucking enemies-shit!”

“How many people you lined?” Shoe asked Hawk.

Hawk looked at him as if he hadn’t spoken.

“I killed me a Jeek, last month,” Shoe said. “Motherfucker tried to stiff me on a buy and I nined him right there.” Shoe nodded toward the barren blacktop playground across the street. There were iron swing sets without swings, and a half-moon metal backboard with no hoop. The metal was shiny in the rain, and the blacktop gleamed with false promise.

“Doing much business since we here?” Hawk said.

“Do business when we want to,” Major said.

“Who’s your truck?” Hawk said.

Major looked at me for a minute and back at Hawk.

“Tony Marcus,” he said proudly. Hawk smiled even more widely.

“Really,” he said.

“You know him?” Major said.

“Un huh,” Hawk said. “My associate here once punched him in the mouth.”

The entire semicircle was silent for a moment. For all their ferocity they were kids. And a man who had punched Tony Marcus, and survived, got their attention.

“You do that?” Major said.

“He annoyed me,” I said.

“I don’t believe you done that,” Major said.

I shrugged.

We were quiet for a while standing in the rain. “Where the sly?” Major said. “She don’t like us no more?”

“Why should she be different?” Hawk said.

“This mean we not going to be on TV?”

Hawk was quiet for a moment. He looked at Major while he was being quiet.

“We need to talk,” Hawk said finally.

“What the fuck we doing, man?”

“Now, right now, you’re profiling,” Hawk said. “And I’m being bored.”

“You bored, man, whyn’t you put your motherfucking ass someplace else, then?”

“Why don’t you and me sit in the car, out of the rain, and we talk?” Hawk said.

You could tell that Major liked that-he and Hawk as equals, the two commanders conferring while the troops stood in the rain. Besides, it was a Jaguar sedan with leather upholstery.

“No reason to get wet,” Major said.

Hawk opened the back door and Major got in. Hawk got in after him. He grinned at me as he got in. I stayed outside the car, with the shotgun, staring at about nineteen hostile gangbangers, in the rain, which was coming harder.

Jackie was wearing a little black dress with pearls. She rested her forearm on the back of Hawk’s chair and traced small circles between his shoulder blades with her forefinger.

“You talked with the boy?” she said… “Actually talked?”

“Un huh.”

“And are you going to tell me what he said?”

“Background only,” Hawk said.

Jackie nodded.

“You notice,” I said to Susan, “that the Kingfish accent seems to go away when he talks to Jackie?”

Susan smiled, which is something to see. “Yes,” she said, “but I am far too delicate to mention it.”

“That is mostly for you honkies,” Hawk said in a kind of David Niven accent, “so as not to confound your expectations.”

“What did you and Major talk about?” Jackie said.

“Woman is not easily distracted,” Hawk said.

“As you have every reason to know,” Jackie said.

“I wasn’t talking about that,” Hawk said.

There was a moment of silence while Jackie smiled at him and Hawk gave her the same kindly look that he gave everyone.

“Major got in the car,” Hawk said, “and I said to him, `We can go two ways. We can talk, and work out an arrangement, or we can pop the cork on this thing.‘ Major looking mostly at the car while I’m talking. And when I say that, he sort of nod and keep looking at the car. And I say, `I will kill you if I need to.’ And he stop looking at the car and he sort of laugh.”

“Really intimidated,” I said.

“Yuh. He must know your reputation, too, ‘cause he say I be dead and the Mickey, which is you, be dead long time ago, except he says no.”

“We’ve had two encounters and come out first both times,” I said. “Doesn’t that tell him anything?”

“No shooting,” Hawk said. “Kids only impressed with shooting. Everybody got a gun. What you and I would punch somebody on the chops for, these kids shoot you.”

“Makes you nostalgic for street fighters,” I said.

Hawk nodded.

“Mickey?” Susan said.

“Irish,” Hawk said, “means white.”

“All whites?” Susan said.

“Un huh.”

“Would I be Irish?” she said.

“You’d be slut, or sly, or wiggle,” Hawk said. “Women’s race don’t matter.”

“Sexism again,” Susan said.

“You might be an Irish slut, though,” I said.

“Gee,” Susan said, “my chance to pass.”

“Make you an IAP,” I said.

“There’s no such thing,” Susan said.

Hawk had some champagne. He drank it the way people drink Pepsi-Cola. I had never seen it change him. Actually I had never seen anything change him.

“I ask him why he hasn’t given the word already, and he say he trying to give me some respect, ‘cause everybody know ’bout me.”

“Everybody?” Jackie said.

“He mean everybody on Hobart Street,” Hawk said.

“Which to him is everybody,” I said.

“Say everybody wondering why I am there with a flap,” Hawk said and nodded at me. “They trying to figure that out. And he say, why am I? And I tell him it seem like a good idea at the time. He doesn’t like the answer, so he sit a minute and he think about it. And then he say, `So what you going to do?‘ And I say they can do what they want to do somewhere else, not my problem. I say they can’t do it here, in this project. And he say if they just move someplace else and do it, what’s the point of moving them out, and I say the point is, I said I would. And he sit there awhile, and then he say, `I can dig it.’ And he sit awhile longer and he say, `But I can’t let you and the Mickey chase me out, you understand. I can’t let you dis me.‘ And I say, `You willing to die for that?’ And he say, `What else I got?‘ ”

We were all quiet. The waiter came silently by and poured champagne into our glasses and returned the bottle to the ice bucket. It was a quiet room. The tables were spaced so that everyone had space around them. The conversation was muted. There was thick carpeting on the floors so that the waiters in tuxedos moved as silently as assassins among the patrons, their shirtfronts gleaming in the soft light.

“I can dig it,” I said.

“Piece you gave us doesn’t check out,” he said.

“It didn’t kill the kid and her baby?”

“No.”

“Got a next of kin?” I said.

“No. Only way we ID’d her was that the kid was born at Boston City and they had a footprint.”

“Where’d she live?” I said.

“No address.”

“Baby’s father?”

“Don’t know.”

“Hot on the trail,” I said.

“You bet.”

“Well, she had to live somewhere.”

“Yeah.”

“And there had to be a father.”

“Yeah.”

“So I guess I’ll have to find him.”

“Sure,” Belson said and hung up the phone.

Susan was at the kitchen counter eating some kind of bran cereal with orange segments on it and drinking hot water with a wedge of lemon. Pearl sat on the floor, watching closely.

“The gun you took from the gang kids?”

“Yeah.” I put some cream in my coffee and two sugars. Susan was ready for the day. She had on a gray suit, and her thick black hair gleamed with ogalala nut oil or whatever she had washed it with.

“Full day?” I said.

She put her empty cereal bowl down for Pearl. “Patients all morning, and then I have my seminar at Tufts,” she said.

She stood up. I looked at her. I felt the same feeling I always felt when I looked at her. It was almost a way to monitor my existence. Like a pulse. If I looked at her and didn’t feel the feeling, I’d know I had died.

“Be home for supper?” she said.

“Depends,” I said. “If I find the guy who killed the kid and her baby, and Hawk and I get Double Deuce stabilized, I may be home by midafternoon.”

She leaned forward and kissed me. I patted her on the butt.

“You’ll not take it as a gesture of no-confidence should I go ahead and eat without you?” she said.

“You shrinks are a cynical lot,” I said.

Susan went downstairs to see patients. Pearl went to the door with her and then came back to supervise my breakfast. I was having a turkey cutlet sandwich on an onion roll with a lot of Heinz 57 sauce on it. I gave Pearl a bite.

“Hell of an improvement over bran and orange segments,” I said.

Pearl was too loyal to comment but I knew she agreed.