Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time (8 page)

Loretta gave me a sultry wink before walking over to my bedside. She stood for a moment, looking at me, her heady perfume going head to head against the overwhelming medicinal scent of the fiery jack before dropping a familiar-looking brown envelope in my lap.

“I found this in your coat pocket. I’m taking your wet clothes back with me to wash. I’ll drop ’em off fo’ you in the morning. You sleep on some more now and take no notice o’ these two fools, you hear me.”

She picked up her fake-fur coat from the edge of my bed and turned to her husband, jabbing at his foot with the toe of her high heel.

“Carnell, git your fat ass outta that chair and take me home, you been sat on that ting fo’ hours like you got your butt glued to it!”

Vic let out a roar of laughter at Loretta’s damning gibe as Carnell sluggishly got up, rubbing the top of his balding head.

“OK, cherub, you got everyting?” Carnell asked Loretta, barely masking his indolence.

“Oh yeah, I got everyting I need, including a big lazy-assed fuckin’ excuse fo’ a husband!”

“Loretta, girl, you got the body and looks of a goddess and the mout’ of a whore, you know that?” Vic was desperately trying to keep his face straight as he spoke.

“Yeah, is that so? Well, from what I been hearing the only whore been in this pit is the one he been calling out fo’ while he been sleeping all this time.”

Her words echoed around in my head as I watched her saunter out of my bedroom with Carnell in tow like a medieval serf holding the trailing robes of his magisterial sovereign.

*

I was dead to the world for the rest of Tuesday night and woke the next morning just before eight thirty to the sound of Vic clanking about in my kitchen, where he was cooking eggs and bacon. He had pulled the armchair from out of my lounge and into the bedroom, then slept by my side through the night, using his overcoat as a blanket.

He’d heard me as I was getting out of bed and stuck his head around the opened door. He looked as rough as I felt.

“Sit your ass down, man. You know you need to git yourself some decent fuckin’ furniture in this dump. My back feels like I had Carnell’s big ass sitting on it all night.”

As he spoke, he waved around in his hand a rusty metal spatula, the grease flying off of the end of it, hitting the walls and leaving a series of small oil stains across them.

“You ain’t got a damn ting a bit o’ use in that kitchen out there. Chipped plates, nasty old cups, knives and forks that are all bent outta shape, and you got fuck all in that fridge o’ yours too. I even had to drag my butt down the street in the snow to buy you fuckin’ breakfast this marnin’.”

“I’ve been limited on funds lately.” It was all I could manage in reply.

“Shit, man, that’s seriously limited out there. You need to git your ass down to a soup kitchen an’ git fed, if tings are that bad.”

“Well, I might not need the soup kitchen fo’ a while. Take a look in there.”

I grabbed up the brown Manila envelope that Earl Linney had given to me on Monday evening from off of the bed and threw it over towards Vic. It landed at his feet. He bent down, picked it up, opened it and pulled out the folded five-pound notes and began counting them.

“You got yourself fifty pounds in here, man. Where’d you git it? You been selling ganja?” Vic asked suspiciously.

While we ate breakfast, I told Vic about my meeting with Linney on Monday evening, the money, and being followed by the guy I got into the fight with. I sat with a mug of strong coffee, warming my hands while my cousin listened in silence to the details I recanted.

“So, let me git this straight. Some big honky follows your ass from Clifton then beats you with a sap. Then you’re kicked across the street by a police car, and the fifty notes in your pocket they don’t touch. Someting stinks ’bout it all, brother.”

Vic was on a roll and he had a point.

“JT, the ting you need to be asking yourself is why the Babylon are interested in you meeting up with that old Jamaican bastard. You think on ’bout that befo’ you start worrying ’bout anyting else.”

Vic ran me a hot bath and I soaked my aching body before shaving myself with an unsteady hand. I stretched out in the tub and enjoyed the soothing heat of the water on my limbs. Getting cleaned up had made me feel a little more human again. I put my towel round my waist and returned to my bedroom with Loretta Harris’s comment last night about Stella Hopkins being a whore rolling round in my head.

After slowly changing into a fresh shirt and jeans, I sat in my armchair in the bedroom and struggled to bend over to put on my socks, my beat-up body smarting with each movement I made. Loretta arrived just after eleven with my clothes from last night washed and ironed. Carnell had taken my shoes with him, dried them out and polished them within an inch of their life, buffing away the white tidemarks that the snow had created and leaving a shining gleam on them.

Loretta kissed Vic on the cheek before coming in and sitting down next to me on the edge of the bed, running her red-nailed fingers across my scalp and rubbing my neck before speaking.

“How you feelin’, JT? You sure looking better than you did, lover.”

“I’m good, Loretta, good. Thanks fo’ cleaning up my stuff.”

The humility in my voice caused her cheeks to flush.

“You needn’t thank me, JT. I know you’d do it fo’ me an’ Carnell.”

She smiled and took my hand in hers as she spoke. I looked up towards her and lightly squeezed her fingers. It was a simple gesture of gratitude, which was all I could muster at that moment.

“Loretta, what you said last night ’bout that missing girl, Stella Hopkins, being a whore. What you mean by it?”

“What’s to mean, JT? Last weekend I was with Jocelyn Charles in the Prince o’ Wales. She’s one of Papa Anansi’s girls.” Loretta grimaced as she spoke the pimp’s name. “Anyhow, we git to talking ’bout how that Stella girl had gone missing and that Jocelyn had seen her at a party she was working at.”

“You happen to know where I can find Jocelyn?” I asked.

“Baby, if you wanting somebody to hook up with to keep you warm at night, I can think o’ somebody a little more righteous than Jocelyn.”

“I’m sure you can, Mrs Harris, but I kinda need to speak to her urgently.”

“You can try the Speed Bird club, she normally in there most nights filling herself with rum when she ain’t selling her pokey.”

She got up to leave and turned towards me. The sensual beauty was gone from her face, replaced by worry and fear. Her eyes were telling me what her lips could not. If she had spoken, she’d have told me to stay well clear of Papa Anansi and his girls.

I sat and listened as Loretta spoke to Vic in hushed tones out in the kitchen.

After a short while she called out her farewell to me from the hallway and said that Carnell would be coming around later to collect my bloodied sheets and bedding so that she could launder them. I felt I had given a good friend the unnecessary burden of having to worry about me and that my decision to enter a nocturnal domain where only iniquity resided had been the most unwise of choices.

Vic returned to my room. I had my head in my hands and was lost in my thoughts.

“Hey man, you OK? Look, I’m gonna split, git myself a shave and a few hours’ sleep. I overheard from Pearl you had a dinner date with ’em tonight. I’ll let her and Gabe know you been on the hooch and you ain’t well enough to head over fo’ supper later. You don’t want either of ’em seeing you all busted up like that.”

“Thanks, man, you—”

Vic butted in, not giving me chance to thank him for all that he had done for me these past twenty-four hours.

“Now Loretta says to tell you that if you’re going looking fo’ that cock-rat Jocelyn Charles, that you’ll recognise her by the mangy old fox-fur stole she wears round her neck. So we gonna pay us a visit to the Speed Bird later tonight then?” he asked enthusiastically.

The playful look on his face gave me little chance to reject his enthusiastic proposition.

Otis Grey was the stuff of nightmares. He was the kind of man we know exists but we’d rather not think about. At over six feet tall, the powerfully built Jamaican possessed a pockmarked and scarred face that resembled the kind of gothic creatures you would normally find hanging off the inside pillars of a church. Otis inhabited a world of prostitution, drugs and violence, the last brutally meted out to those stupid enough to cross him. The street girls he controlled lived in fear of his cruel wrath and his tendency to inflict physical pain with a large butcher’s knife that he kept hidden in a sheath sewn into the long black leather greatcoat he always wore. Only his mother had ever called him Otis; to everyone else he was simply known as Papa Anansi.

I had grown up around men like Papa Anansi all my life. As a child I had witnessed the violence and the fear these men elicited when they applied unwanted protection to local store-owners and publicans, and in later life as a police officer I’d see at first hand their rancorous acts of savagery as they waged gang war against each other. They built wealthy empires on misery and then one day would lose all they had to other monsters with equally, if not more, inhuman criminal behaviour than their predecessors had.

I needed to talk to Jocelyn Charles without Papa knowing. But that was easier said than done. Papa had a never-ending string of lackeys who were prepared to offer up the most meagre information for the price of a ropey joint. On top of that, if Jocelyn was found to be talking to me about his business affairs or the other girls in his pox-ridden harem, she would most probably say goodbye to a couple of fingers, or worse.

The Speed Bird club was on Grosvenor Road and only a short walk from Cut Man’s gym. I’d arranged to meet Vic in the Prince of Wales pub at ten that evening, hang around till last orders, then move on to the Speed Bird. I took the only suit I owned from my wardrobe. The navy-blue worsted fabric was wearing thin, but I still looked pretty sharp in it. I picked out a light-blue shirt and a dark knitted tie. I smarted from pain every now and then as I dressed. Loretta had made a fine job of cleaning down my overcoat and hat. I put ’em on, took a couple of aspirin to hold the stinging in my shoulder at bay, then headed out.

I opened my front door and the cold air hit my face, taking my breath away. Coal-fire smoke ran up the chimneys and billowed out into the night, mixing with the freezing fog that was dropping down in the streets as I walked carefully over the frozen, compacted snow and ice on the pavement.

It was just before ten by the time I pulled open the door to the Prince of Wales pub to meet Vic. A heavy mist of cigarette smoke floated across the lounge, where my cousin stood at the polished oak bar talking to the barmaid, his eyes staring downwards towards the low-cut top she was wearing and the ample cleavage on display. The juke box was playing the Rolling Stones’ “Little Red Rooster” to a small, unappreciative audience of mainly elderly men whose only interest was the liquor that sloshed around in their beer glasses.

Vic was clean-shaven and dressed in a black velvet jacket with a purple paisley shirt, its top three buttons opened, and around his neck he wore a thin silk scarf held by a gold hoop. His tight dark-grey flares were held up by a wide black leather belt, its diamanté buckle hanging suggestively above his crotch. I called out to him and he turned and walked towards me, a massive grin on his face. He greeted me with all the exuberance of a man who permanently lived his life to the full.

“Brother, you see the titties on her?” he asked. He gave a gentle nod backwards with his head towards the heavyset barmaid. “She carrying more milk in there than on the back o’ a Unigate float.” He gave out a loud belly laugh at his own remark. “What you drinking? No, wait. I’ll git you a rum, you looks like you freezing ya ass off!” He rubbed his hands together excitedly as he returned to the bar.

We found a table that over looked the entrance to the pub and drank in silence. I knew that Vic wasn’t happy with my decision to keep searching for Stella, but he’d go along with me, right or wrong. The way he saw it, you didn’t run out on your family when they needed you the most – it was as simple as that. He looked around the room before knocking back the rest of his rum. He slammed the glass down hard on the table, breathing in deeply through his nose before he spoke.

“Man, this place is giving me the shits. It’s like some nasty honky morgue. Let’s git the hell outta here.”

The Speed Bird club was a brothers and sisters kind of place. That’s not to say that white folk weren’t welcome. It’s just that they chose to stay away. It was run by Elrod Haddon, a one-time heavyweight boxer and now small-time gambler who’d bought a stake in the bar. He’d earned the nickname “Hurps” during the Second World War on account of how many times he had caught the clap off of the hookers that he’d bedded as he made his way across bombed-out France.

“I had me a rifle in one hand and a tube o’ medicated dick cream in the other,” he would joke to those who enquired after his moniker. His character was as large as his ego. Hurps was well known in St Pauls. He was a no-nonsense kind of guy who didn’t take any shit from his customers and expected none back. I liked him.

The Speed Bird was a cellar club that rarely required a doorman. You went in to drink, smoke and dance. You took a fight out in the street, and if you pushed your luck at the bar you’d end up with your ass kicked out on the road. Vic would feel right at home. The effects of the aspirin were wearing off and I just wanted to find out what Jocelyn knew and head back to my bed.

The place reeked of patchouli oil and three-day-old reefer, and like the Prince of Wales, it was practically empty. On the far wall overlooking a small dance floor was a series of American-diner-style booths, each with leather seating on either side of grey Formica-topped tables. We chose the last booth, and Vic slid across the seat and rested his back in the corner, one leg propped up on the cracked leather cushion. He took his hip flask out of his jacket pocket, unscrewing the cap.

“I got no need to ask what you drinking,” I said sarcastically.