The Informant (18 page)

“You don’t give a rat’s ass about law enforcement. Not you or anybody else here. We’re garbage men. Long as you don’t have to look at the garbage, you don’t care what happens to it.” Neil’s glass was empty. He forgot what he’d been drinking. Lydia. Her name sped across his brain.

“You feeling sorry for yourself?” Robin wanted him on the defensive again. The party was less than a total thrill, and she had to do something besides eat cheese dip.

“Isn’t it time for your guitar lessons or something?” Neil looked at the ice cubes and lemon twist in his glass.

Robin took the glass from him. “I’ll get you another.”

“You do that.”

She did, returning quickly. She was twenty-six, divorced, always looking for something or somebody, without knowing what or whom. But wasn’t that the New York disease? Besides, how often does one get to talk to a real live narc? A defender of the American way. In our midst tonight, in living color.

“I’m interested in what you do,” she said, her eyes bright with the challenge of trying to make something occur. “Tell me about it.”

“What do you do, besides sew patches on your skirt?” Scotch and water with a twist. Had he been drinking that all evening? That mobile on the ceiling was getting on his nerves. He wanted to throw up on it. Maybe he would before the evening was over.

“I work with children. I also do children’s books. Well, I try. Haven’t sold any yet.”

“Everybody here either works with children or hasn’t sold a book. Don’t people in New York do anything else?”

He was interesting. Men who fought back always interested Robin.

She eased up. “Didn’t mean to come on dumb or anything. Forgive me?” She smiled.

“Yeah. Sure.” Neil looked around the room. Nothing but never-would-bes in here. You could sense it. Talking literature, theater, politics, dope, sex. Talking, talking, talking. At least on the street it was real out there.

He heard himself talking to Robin. How long had
that
been going on?

“You say nothing’s being done, that nobody’s going to jail. Look, we pop guys—”

“Pop?”

“Bust. Arrest.”

“Oh.”

“We arrest them, and what happens? You got plea bargaining, you got charges being dropped, you got every technicality you can think of. You got judges who only work an hour a day, literally one goddamn hour. You got prosecutors and district attorneys who don’t want to go into court with cases they’re going to lose, because it’s gonna look bad on their record. So where does that leave us? We make the arrests. We can’t do it all, lady.”

Robin seemed more subdued. “So why do you stay?”

Neil shrugged, eyes on the mobile. “Why do I stay? Tell you why.” He looked at her. His eyes were red-rimmed, and beads of liquor shone on his mustache.

“You got eleven-year-old girls whoring. Not just here, but in all big cities. All because of dope. They’re tricking because they’re junkies. You got guys who kill, who cripple, who do anything to get their dope out on the street. People die, starve to death, get raped, get their brains beat out with a pipe. But these guys got to make their money, they don’t care.”

“You do.”

“Yeah. Sounds funny, but I do. And I’m not the only one. Now, here’s something else.” Neil burped. “Sorry. You take this bastard who’s dealing. He’s laughing at me, ’cause he thinks I’m never going to get him. He knows the law, knows his rights. He knows I got to have a goddamn good case before I can even ring his doorbell, let alone book his ass. So he’s laughing, and he’s dealing, and he’s making money. He’s got cars, women, diamonds, and trips to Europe, and I got nothing.”

Neil put both hands on Robin’s shoulders, staring into her eyes and grinning. “Now, here’s the joy. The joy is in following that bastard around, sneaking up on his whole life. Piece by piece, I put together a case, see. Inch by inch. Then, one day …”

Neil leaned back against the wall, snapping his fingers. “I got him! That sucker is mine. I got him. He’s under my control now, ’cause I made my case. Took me a long time, but I did it. Now I own him, from the part in his hair down to his shiny new boots. He belongs to me.
That’s
what you live for in enforcement, the day you get this asshole who laughed at you, who doesn’t care for anything but money. Now he’s mine, see? He’s sitting in the next room, and he’s got to come in to me to ask me for a cup of water or for permission to go pee. The thrill of bringing him down and controlling him is better than an orgasm.”

Neil exhaled.

Robin was silent, her eyes bright as buttons on a child’s doll.

She was impressed without knowing why, without wanting to be.

Before she could say anything, Elaine stepped up to them, cigarette holder in her mouth and between thumb and forefinger.

Her voice was low, probing. “Has he been telling you his reason for getting married? Usually he says he felt it was time to accept responsibility and be unhappy like everybody else.”

Robin cleared her throat and looked down at the floor. “He was telling me about his job.”

“Oh?” Elaine blew smoke at the mobile. “Did he tell you that he and Dracula both work at night? And speaking of bloodsuckers,
dear
…” She turned to Neil with frozen eyes. “The sitter’s just telephoned. For you. From Miami.”

Elaine looked at Robin. “My husband collects odd things.” She turned and walked away.

Robin shivered. “I feel a draft. Is that call part of your job?”

Neil shook his head and fought for a clear space in his brain.

Lydia.

“My job. Yeah. You could say that.” He grinned, breathing deeply.

Robin said, “Will you be coming back? I …” Her eyes said: Give me a sign. It’s up to you.

Neil saw the invitation in her eyes and passed on it. When something was going down in narcotics, he had all he would ever need from life. He wasn’t too juiced to know that.

He left the party without giving Robin an answer.

T
HREE WEEKS LATER.

In the dark, piss-smelling hallway, Lydia heard Neil inhale loudly, a sudden sound of anger and pain as the rifle was jammed hard against his spine. She flinched, then went rigid with fear, her small body tense against the expected roar of gunfire. As seconds squeezed her brain like the weight of hours, the thought suddenly exploded within her that the three black men with guns weren’t ripoff artists, that they were merely the guards in front of Lonnie Conquest’s mill.

Lydia swallowed, working spit into her dry mouth, breathing deeply, and now strongly aware that her heart was fluttering fast enough to shatter. Weak light from a grime-covered yellow bulb several feet away let her see that the black man holding the long-barreled hunting rifle was short and squat, wearing a purple fur hat with a wide brim and a white silk scarf wrapped around the crown and hanging down to his shoulders. His rifle had a new tan leather sling, and the squat little man, who wore dark brown woolen gloves with the fingers and thumbs cut off, spoke with a soft Southern drawl, maintaining a hard calm that knifed through Lydia with the force of an icicle driven into her throat.

“Cool out, this ain’t no rip. Y’all customers, y’all be expected. We pat y’all down fo’ a piece, fo’ some kinda wire. Man don’ wan’ nobody inside what’s carryin’.”

Lydia looked down at the thin black attaché case in Neil’s right hand, the case with fifteen thousand dollars in brand-new hundreds, money to buy half a key of fifty-percent-pure cocaine from Lonnie Conquest. Nothing for her to be nervous about; the man had just told her this wasn’t a rip, merely a security precaution. Meaning that Lonnie was still inside, that perhaps other customers were there as well, that maybe the women were still inside cutting the load.

What Lydia knew for certain was that this walkup apartment on the corner of 101st Street and Broadway wouldn’t be used as a mill again. Next to information on the arrival of a load, the location of a dealer’s mill was his most closely guarded secret, so Lonnie would never have allowed
anyone
here if he planned to use this place again. Lydia also knew that if the three armed blacks in the hallway found a wire recorder taped to Neil’s chest or back, both she and Neil would be killed immediately. A recorder meant the law.

Thank God Neil wasn’t wired tonight.
Gracias a Dios.

She watched Neil get patted down by a slim black wearing a red-and-green woolen cap and thick horn-rimmed glasses.

The little black with the rifle moved it away from Neil’s spine to tap the thin black attaché case Neil held in his right hand. “Lay that on the flo’, my man, and open it.” Neil squatted, opened the case, let the men see the money. When the little black with the rifle nodded his head twice. Neil shut the case and stood up, never taking his eyes off the rifle.

“Okay, mama, yo’ turn. Hand yo’ bag to blood here, he check it out. Might as well give him yo’ overcoat, too. Now, y’all stand still. It all be ovah in a minute. Bizness is bizness, y’all git where I’m comin’ from?”

Lydia froze, eyes closed, the hot flush of shame burning her face as she waited for hands to touch her body, but no hands touched her. Instead, the little black with the rifle lightly ran the tip of the barrel over her breasts in parallel lines, moving down to her stomach, thighs, bending over to stick his small hand in the top of her boots, finding no gun hidden there.

“Turn ’round, mama.”

Lydia did, holding her breath, feeling the rifle tip move across her shoulders, down her spine, across her ass. When the rifle went between her legs, quickly brushing the inside of her thighs, she heard one of the blacks behind her snicker softly. Go to hell, she thought.

But the little man in the purple fur hat was all business, brisk and never lingering in his touch, finishing the search quickly and without personal interest. Thank God she wore pants tonight instead of a dress. The pants were new, one of two pairs she’d bought this week with money earned as an informant. In three months of informing, she’d made five thousand dollars, more than enough money for her and Olga, and the best part of it was that the money didn’t have to be shared with a man.

Every scheme and hustle Lydia had ever worked in her life had meant sharing the money with some dude, usually with him taking the largest share and Lydia ending up with next to nothing, just enough money to get over to tomorrow’s problems. As an informant, she was making better money than she had ever made in her life, and all of it was hers.

It was a shock to her to learn that she enjoyed being an informant. At first, the idea of betraying people had been disgusting. Not frightening, but disgusting, because that’s what she had believed all her life, that a person who betrayed his own was less than nothing. All that had changed.

Though forced to do it, she found being an informant to be an exciting, challenging experience. There was the money, of course, but there was also the pride of accomplishment, pride in arranging a good buy, in scoring good dope, in turning up good information. She glowed when Neil or his team complimented her on doing a good job. For the first lime in her life,
she
had power, self-respect, and the knowledge that she was doing something society respected and rewarded her for.

People with power, once her enemy, now respected
her,
now treated
her
with dignity and listened to her every word, writing down and taping her conversations with them, calling conferences to discuss the information she’d just given them. She was being listened to and taken seriously. Not only did they take her to dinner and buy presents for her daughter, Olga, but they lit her cigarettes, laughed at her jokes, and made her feel genuinely wanted for the first time in her life.

Even the dangerous prospect of being found out and killed by someone on the street was a high for Lydia, because every time that
didn’t
happen meant a triumph for Lydia. It also meant respect and money. And there was Neil. Neil was nice, thoughtful, and even if he was doing it because he needed her, it still felt wonderful to be treated that way for a change. Being an informant had not only kept her out of the joint, it had also given her a new life, better than she could ever have hoped for.

In the dark hallway, she looked at Neil, seeing him calm and relaxed, not blowing his cool at being searched at gunpoint. A stand-up guy, cool and together. Just watching him gave Lydia courage.

The black with the rifle and purple fur hat knocked on the door of apartment 3-C, two short, three long, two short again. Inside, a voice said, “Yeah?”

“Luther. People out here.”

“Yeah?”

“
Good people
.”

Inside the small, drab apartment, Lydia smiled and waved to Lonnie Conquest, who grinned back, touching the handle of his walking stick to his forehead in a salute, then returned to watching his partner, Julius Shelton, pay the four black women who had just finished cutting three kilos of cocaine. At the door behind Lydia and Neil, two black men with sawed-off shotguns cradled in their arms never took their eyes off the newcomers.

Lydia thought: Lonnie’s still using that old trick of paying the women in small bills, all ones and fives, to make the pay seem larger than it is. That was a scam dealers used on teenage girls the first time, conning them into thinking a lot of money could be made cutting dope in mills.

None of the four black women struggling into overcoats and scarves, while holding out one hand for their money, were teenagers. The youngest was over forty, with a small hard face and a turned-down mouth as thin and tough as wire. Lydia had worked mills in the past, fortunately never for Lonnie and Julius, who allowed their women to work with clothes on but at the end of the cutting ordered the women to strip naked so their clothes could be checked. Lonnie and Julius took no chances on a woman hiding dope in her bra, dress, underwear. The surgical masks, shower caps, and rubber gloves worn by the women to avoid an unwanted dope habit were also carefully searched.

The black women left quickly, saying nothing to Lydia or Neil. Julius Shelton, a slim, handsome black with six expensive diamond rings on his fingers, said hello to Lydia, nodding at Neil. His voice was soft, almost feminine, and he seemed reluctant to speak, painfully shy. Lydia had heard that shy Julius had killed ten men and ordered the death of several others. Julius was twenty-five and looked younger.