I heard the call but it didn’t move me. I was conducting business. When I was on the job I resisted any diversions. But Ambrose’s arm shot out and a new kind of smile, a grin actually, restructured his pear-shaped face.
“Ladies,” he said as Tru and Frankie joined us.
“Eleventh floor, please,” Tru replied in a surprisingly business-like tone.
The elevator car was stylish with lobster-pink velvet walls and an actual crystal chandelier hanging above. The metal fittings were gold-plated and brilliant, but the mechanism was clearly from the same era. The car climbed slowly as the not-so-subtle scent of the girls’ perfumes filled the space.
“You’re a boxer, huh?” brown-haired Frankie said to me somewhere around floor three.
“Say what?”
“I can tell by your hands. It’s those big knuckles and scars.” There was a severe cast to her topaz-brown eyes.
“I coulda got that from bar fights,” I speculated.
“Uh-uh,” Frankie said, dismissing my words as only a woman thinking she’s beautiful could. “You’ve got strong hands and a boxer’s shoulders. I could tell just by the way you stand there, so easy.”
With just those few words the child had gotten past half of my natural defenses. She had named me for what I was with a lazy kind of intensity.
“I had an old man was a boxer,” she said. “He had a middleweight belt for four months—twelve, thirteen years ago.”
“What’s your name?” Ambrose asked Tru.
She didn’t answer him. She was too busy watching her friend dissect me.
“He was the nicest boyfriend I ever had,” Frankie was saying. “He was real strong, but gentle as a girl.”
The machinery of the elevator hummed softly. I took the wallet out of my back pocket and handed the girl my card, my real card with a cell phone number that I actually answered sometimes.
“Here you go, Fran Ce ytimkie,” I said, saying her name just to show her that I paid attention too.
She took the stiff piece of paper and opened her tiny purse, which was made from an actual jumbo clamshell. She put my card in and took out a pink one.
“Oh my God,” Tru whispered.
I took the card and read the name printed in red letters on the pink paper—Frankee Tayer. There was a handwritten number across the bottom. The personal touch.
The elevator doors opened on the eighth floor and we left Tru and Frankee on their trek to the Coolidge Suite. My heart rate had increased and I was a little confused moving into the hall behind Ambrose.
“Are you going to call her?” he asked me as we got to room 808.
“No need,” I said, watching him fit the magnetic keycard into the slot of the lock.
“Why not?”
“The high point of our entire relationship was just now.”
The Albany detective smiled and pushed the door open. He gestured for me to enter, and I passed from one reality to another.
IT WAS WHAT they call a junior suite—a largish room with a small couch and a cushioned chair across from a queen- sized bed. Ambrose took the sofa and I sat in the chair. He didn’t offer me a drink or any more small talk. He was ready for business.
The scent of the girls’ perfume was still in my nose. I snorted once in order to get my head back into business. Ambrose was looking at me like a counterpuncher in the early rounds of a hard fight—waiting for me to make the first move.
I didn’t oblige him. Tru and Frankee had thrown me off balance. I needed more time for my head to clear.
“What about the twenty- five-hundred advance?” the prig feinted.
“What about it?” I jabbed.
“Shouldn’t that cover your expenses?”
“I told you that you had to give me the advance just for me to look into the case, that it was in no way against my fee or to cover expenses.”
After a moment or two of this face-off Thurman pulled a huge wallet from his breast pocket, producing a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. One at a time he began putting bills on the low coffee table before us. As he stacked the notes, we both counted. I was experiencing the lust for women and the need for money (or maybe it was the other way round). When Thurman reached one hundred twelve he stopped, put the rest of the stack back in his wallet, and returned the wallet to its pocket.
The heap of bills lay there before me, a come-on that was hard to resist. Through a supreme act of will I managed not to reach out for the cash.
“Just to know,” Ambrose said, “what were the expenses?”
“Those street names you gave me were for underage kids,” I said. “The law, as you know, tries to protect their identities. But I know a cop, got drummed out of the force for an injudicious liaison.”
Thurman smiled at the last two words. He liked pretentious language.
“My friend,” I continued, “has contacts that can get to information without bothering with judges and writs and all that nonsense.”
While paying close attention to my every word, the detective still had the concentration to take a cigarette from a pack in his vest pocket. He picked up a lighter from the table.
“What was this detective’s name?”
He set fire to the cigarette. My nostrils widened, pulling in the aroma. I hadn’t had a cigarette in ten months and I missed them every single day.
“No names,” I said, “remember?”
“Okay. What do you have?”
“Toolie’s real name is Theodore Nilson. He’s doing eighty-six years upstate for aggravated assault.”
“Eighty-six years?”
“Ain’t that a bitch? Poor kid gets his day in court with a defense attorney just outta college and the judge gives him triple-time just for being stupid.
“Jumper’s name is Frank Tork. Frankie’s in the Tombs right now awaiting trial on B and E.”
Thurman was staring hard at me, submitting my words to memory. I wasn’t worried about being cheated; the money was on the table. The only problem I had was finishing the list.
“Big Jim was born, and died, under the name James Wright. He succumbed to complications from a hot spike on the same day that we invaded Iraq for the second time. I don’t know if the two had anything to do with each other—the heroin could have come from Afghanistan.”
I stopped there, inhaling the secondhand smoke as best I could.
“And B-Brain?” the detective asked when he could see that I was stuck.
The question tightened my eyes.
“B-Brain was the hard part,” I said, stalling now with superfluous information. “He had no record and so didn’t have a floater file in the police records. The other three had other friends. There was a gu CTheHe y named Thom Paxton who they called Smiles, and a girl, there’s always a girl, named Georgiana Pineyman. She called B-Brain Pops for some reason. Georgiana was Smiles’ girlfriend from September to June, but she hung with Pops in the summer because Smiles went away with his family during school break.
“I got it all right here,” I said, taking a thick envelope from my jacket pocket.
“B- Brain’s real name is in there?” the upstate detective asked.
“Yeah.”
Ambrose put out his cigarette and smiled. He lit up another and, taking a deep breath, I sucked up as much of the smoke as I could.
“You know this is just a normal job, don’t you, Leonid?” he said. “It’s not cloak-and-dagger. The client is known to me.”
“Uh-huh.”
At that moment Thurman proved that he was a shrewd judge of human nature. He offered me a cigarette. I really needed one right then. He lit me up and I was genuinely grateful.
Handing me the pack, he said, “Keep ’em. There’s some matches in the cellophane.”
I traded the history of four troubled young men’s lives for nine filterless Camels and eight red-tipped matches.
E€„
8
I got back to my street, a block east of Riverside Drive, at a few minutes past eleven. Katrina was at the door before I could get my key out of the lock.
Her presence annoyed me. In all the years of our less than loving marriage Katrina never waited up. She didn’t want kisses or make overtures for sex. She never asked how I was doing or when I was coming back home. She maintained the house and looked after her children and mine. We had a balance, a home life that I could follow like a German train schedule.
“Leonid,” she said, putting her arms around me, kissing my cheek.
She was wearing a frilly pink nightgown and lime-green slippers. Katrina maintained most of the beauty that she’d generated for Zool. She’d put on a few pounds but didn’t look anywhere near her fifty-one years. Her green eyes were actually luminescent.
“I was worried,” she said. She had a slight Swedish accent, which was a little odd since she was born in Queens and, even though her parents were Scandinavian immigrants, they hailed from Minnesota.
“I come home late two nights out of three,” I said, moving away from the embrace. “What are you worried about?”
“You didn’t call.”
“I never call.”
