The Long Good Boy (8 page)

Testing the roof first with my hands, then gingerly with one foot, I carefully walked across to the other side, knelt down, and looked over the front. Even though it was only a two-story building, everything swirled in a most unpleasant way, starting with my stomach. From the roof, the bathroom window seemed much farther away than it had from below, and with my problem with heights, I didn't think there was any way I could lower myself to where it was, break the glass, undo the lock, and get inside by this route.

I backed up and stood. That's when I saw it, way in the back of the roof, the moonlight reflecting off something. Crouching again so that I'd be less obvious, even on the dark deserted street, I duckwalked to the back of the roof and found a small skylight. I could see from there that the building abutted the one behind it. A skylight would be the only way to get natural light or ventilation for a room in the back of the building, a way to make an inhabitable space more user-friendly. The glass part of the skylight had screening in it, like the windows next door. But the frame looked old and rusty. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket and took out my pocketknife, wedging it under the frame and jiggling it around.

9

He's My Right-Hand Man

“Look at you!” Chi Chi chided. “You was absent the day they taught personal hygiene? You don' even know to take the dust bunnies out of your hair before you meet up with a friend?” She reached forward, bent my head down, and began plucking things out of my hair, as if we were chimps reinforcing our social status.

“Chi Chi,” I said, my chin on my chest as she picked and brushed at my hair.

“Ssh. I'm not finished. Whatever you got to say, it could wait till you look proper.” Her hand slipped under my chin and lifted it, the way a mother does to a child who may not be telling the truth. “Better,” she said, but she looked scared, and when I opened my mouth, she put one finger to her lips and then began on my jacket, thoroughly absorbed in the task at hand, or so it seemed. “I got friends coming soon, and I don't want you to embarrass me, have them ask me all kinds of questions.” She shook her head. “Where you get so dirty? Where you been?” Afraid of what my answer would be, but asking anyway.

“That's why I called you. That's what I have to tell you about. Next door.”

“Um-hmm.” She brushed something off my cheek.

“Next door to Keller's.”

“The rabbit place? What you doing there?”

“Other side.”

“But—”

“Exactly. It's closed down. Kaput. Gone and all but forgotten. But it's exactly the layout you described, for Keller's.” When she looked confused, I added, “They're twins, Chi Chi. They're all but identical.”

“So? They don't got identical files, do they?” Despite the fact that we were alone, no one else anywhere near the corner of Hudson and Fourteenth Streets, she looked around for applause. Everyone's a wit.

“No—but here's the thing. I thought I was going to have to ask you to lend me Clint so that I could use the deserted building to teach him how to get me into Keller's, but now I don't have to do that.”

“Say what?”

“There's a skylight. In fact, I can get to Keller's roof from the roof next door, jimmy the skylight, get into the office at Keller's, and—”

She was shaking her head.

“Slow down, sugar. There's no skylight at Keller's.”

“Yes, there is. In the back. To give the back room light and air. I saw it. I was on their roof, just a little while ago.”

She was shaking her head again, the wind pulling that near-white hair across her face. She brushed some out of her mouth, checking to see if it had lipstick on it before letting it go.

“Now, listen carefully. Whatever's behind the offices, you know, where you said, in the back of the building, it's locked up tight. I tried that door once, the first time I was there, thinking it was the bathroom.” I opened my mouth, but she kept right on going. “No, honest. It's not like there's a sign on the head. They just got one. Unisex, Vinnie said. I see where you at, but you wrong. I didn't steal nothing. You think I'm a hooker, makes me a thief.” She shrugged, sighed, and looked away. “Fine. I'm a thief, a liar, too. But I'm telling you this, you fall into the room in the back, that's where you be stayin', bitch. That door's locked. You don't take my word for it, try it and see. And I sure hope you can get back
up
to that skylight, because that's the only way you're getting
out
of whatever's there.”

“Shit.”

“You can say that again, my own client acting like I'm—”

“Can it,” I said. “That's your paranoia. I never said you were a thief. And I never thought that.”

“Well.”

“Then it seems I will need Clint.”

Chi Chi put her arms around herself, squeezing so tight that Clint began to growl.

“It's just for a few days. I'll give him back.”

“He my signature,” she said, looking away from me, trying to make me disappear.

I touched her arm. “He won't get hurt, Chi Chi. I promise.”

“He's my right-hand man. I can't.”

“No, Chi Chi. For the time being, I'm your right-hand man. I'm the one you're counting on, to find out what I can, to keep you and your friends alive.”

“What you need him for? You got your own dog.”

“There's a cat port at Keller's,” I began, telling her how Chip and I showed up to buy two pork chops. She stepped closer and leaned toward me. “My dog's way too big to fit through it. But yours, he's perfect. I bet he's smaller than the cat that uses it. What I'm going to do is start at the bathroom window next door to Keller's, and as fast as I can, I'm going to teach Clint to open the lock so I can get in the window—”

“But you already got in, by the skylight.”

“Just listen. After he knows the lock, I back him up, say to the door of the bathroom, and teach him to go from there, close the toilet seat, hop up on top of it, nudge the lock open, see? Then we back up some more, to the stairs, then, eventually, to the place where the cat port is in Keller's. The place next door doesn't have one, so I'm going to have to teach him to go through one at home.”

Chi Chi looked confused. “You have a cat?”

“No, but I can approximate a port for him and teach him to go back and forth.”

She nodded, looking down at Clint, then back up at me. “You know how to do all that stuff?”

I nodded.

“I thought you was a detective, a private eye is what we was tol'.”

“I am. But I used to be a dog trainer, before I got married.”

“You liked it, dog training?”

I nodded. “Very much.”

“Then why you stop doing it? Your husband rather you do this, run around with hookers in the middle of the night with dust bunnies in your hair?”

“No. No more husband. And I don't know why I didn't go back to dog training. I just didn't. But now I can use what I know to teach Clint how to unlock the window for me.”

“Then one evening when they're closed, he goes in and follows the route you taught him, lets you in, right?”

“Exactly.”

“Then how you going to get into that window, once he opens it for you?”

“I haven't decided yet. There are a number of possibilities.”

“You afraid of heights, am I correct?”

I nodded.

“I thought so. Not exactly a plus in your line of work.”

“No one's perfect,” I said.

“Speak for yourself, bitch.”

I was worried about that very hole in my plan myself, but even if Clint were a genius, it would still take time to teach him everything he had to do. So I had a few days to figure out how to get myself into Keller's via that small bathroom window.

“I could give you something,” she said, as if she'd been reading my mind.

“What do you mean?”

“I could give you something, you could climb down from the roof into the window, you wouldn't feel no fear.”

“I don't think so.”

She looked confused again. “Something out there to help you, you don't want it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The only something I want is him.”

“When?” she said.

“The sooner the better.”

Chi Chi unzipped her jacket and lifted Clint out, handing him to me.

“He likes chicken,” she said, “but only the white meat. And no cheese. It gives him gas.”

“I'll take good care of him,” I told her.

“He eats grapes,” she said, “but you gots to take the skin off first.”

We could hear them before we saw them, two hookers, arm in arm, coming around the corner.

“Hold on to your wallet,” Chi Chi said. “The one on the left, the redhead, that's Alice. She goes to the gym every day.” Chi Chi rolled her eyes. “She says, you work the streets, you better be able to protect yourself. Only,
she
the one you need protection from. She a klepto. She steal easy as you breathe.”

“What about the other one?”

But the way their big feet ate up the distance between us, it was Alice, staring at me, who spoke next, not Chi Chi.

“Who she?” Her wrist bent, one long, mahogany finger pointed in my direction. There was maroon polish on her nails, a white daisy painted near the tip.

“Dog groomer,” Chi Chi said. “She taking Clint, giving him the works, shampoo, plucking, nails. You got a problem with that?”

Alice shrugged, pulled out a cigarette, fired it up with an expensive-looking lighter. “You got money for stuff like that, I got no problem with it. But I'm not the one you got to worry about, girl. Am I?”

“You shut up,” Chi Chi told her. “You don't know as much as you think you do.”

She made a big production about kissing Clint good-bye.

“Other one's Grace,” she whispered, her face half buried in the dog's fur. “She new.” Then she turned her attention to Clint. “You be good,” she told him. “Don't you bark and get her into trouble, you hear me?” Then, quietly: “Alice, she thinks she's better than me, she on her own.” One look at my face, and she added, “She don't have a pimp, out there with no one to watch her back, make sure she's okay.” She shook her head, feeling sorry for poor Alice, then flapped the back of her hand at me, letting me know it was time for me to go. But I didn't take her suggestion. I had something else in mind.

10

I'm Saving Up, Grace Said

“What you get for doing that?” Alice asked. “I'm thinking, down the road a few years, I'll quit the life, do something else. It's not that I don't like the stroll. It's fast and easy.” She put her arms out and shook her tits. “Nothing to it. But my counselor, he says I should think ahead, invest in my future. He suggested I consider selling beauty products, you know, door to door, like the Avon lady. I told him, I don't know, I'm going to be on my feet all day, I might as well keep doing what I'm doing.” She poked at her hair, a puffy nest reaching skyward. “He says I need to get some job training, upgrade my skills.” This time she shook her ass and made obscene sounds with her mouth. “My skills among the best, I tell him. Don't need no upgrading. You don't believe me, try me out, I told him. If you think you can afford me on
your
salary.”

Chi Chi leaned close. “Once she gets started, she never shuts up.”

“That pay good, what you do?” Alice asked. “Shampooing dogs, plucking?” She looked at Grace for approval, but Grace was on another planet. Grace was on fucking Mars. So Alice turned to Dashiell, staring, not the best idea in the world with a dog you've barely said howdy-do to, especially if it's a male, all the more so if he's a big one, and definitely if he's sporting all the equipment the good Lord gave him in the first place.

“He bite?” She looked as if she'd been in more cars than Mario Andretti. “What you doing with him? He look pretty clean to me. He don't need no plucking, do he?” She turned to Grace, who was picking at the skin around her press-on nails. “He don't, don't mean you don't,” she said. “Look at your eyebrows, girlfriend, you growing a forest there, or what, the way they tryin' to meet in the middle? You never heard of no electrolysis?” She turned to me now. Her eyebrows, I now noticed, were thin and arched, and she had no blue shadow of a beard. “You do that, too?” Then back to Grace: “They take that out, right up the middle, it never comes back.” She shook her head. “Least that's what they tol' me, and for the kind of money they charge, shit, that better be the truth, no way I'm doing that twice, all that pain, and goin' without food sometimes to pay her bill.”

“I'm saving up,” Grace said. “What you think, I'm out here for my health? My boyfrien', every time I have two dimes saved, I find they gone. Gotta find a whole 'nother place to put my money, it stays put.” She stretched, and when her boa fell away, I saw an Adam's apple the size of an apricot pit and just as hard looking. She apparently hadn't had the money to take care of that, either. “‘I gots expenses,' he tells me. ‘Don't you go nagging me now, bitch, or you live to regret it.'” She had a tattoo circling her biceps, a blue-black chain, more on her fingers, but I couldn't make out the letters against her smoky gray skin in the dim light of evening.

“Where Devon?” Alice said, pronouncing it D-
von
. “He late.” She pulled out a cell phone and tried to make a call. “Shit, it dead. You lucky you get two days before they reports it's gone, then, boom, finished.” She shook it, banged it against her other hand, and tried once more, then tossed it into the street.

A patrol car, cruising under the speed limit, coming toward us the way it would in a dream, no one in a rush, caught everyone's attention, bam, bam, bam, Alice, Grace, me, Chi Chi. Alice and Grace, going in opposite directions, split faster than roaches when you snap on the kitchen light at three in the morning. I'd wanted to mention Rosalinda, see what I got for my trouble, but that would have to wait for another time.