station. I asked him about the $500 club and he was easy enough.
“Sure,” the copper-haired fifty year old said. “I’ve spent more on girls give me less in a week than she did in one night. That girl was sex-crazy. When’s the last time you had a twenty year old beggin’ you for sex?”
“Seventeen,” I said.
“What?”
“Seventeen years old.”
“I didn’t know that.” Bob Henry sat up in his swivel chair. “Any judge in the world look at her and he’d know that she looks twenty.”
“She looks dead.”
“What?” It was the same question but it took on a whole new tone.
“Murdered. Three days ago. In an alley off of Central.”
It’s a strange thing seeing a white man go white.
“Who is she to you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s a complex girl. I didn’t know about her until after she was dead but even still she’s full’a surprises. Did she start paying you five dollars a week?”
“Yeah. How did you know?”
“Jackie was a very organized young lady. It seems that she paid all of her gentleman friends five dollars a week for a long-term loan.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Easy.”
“And what do you have to do with this?”
“I’m looking into it—for the family.”
“Isn’t this a police job?”
“You’d think so, but I haven’t seen one cop looking into it and I bet you haven’t either. Look, you didn’t even know the girl was dead.”
The red-headed man took in my claim with a certain amount of bewilderment.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“Do you know who might have killed her?”
“No.”
“No enemies? No jilted lovers?”
“Jackie had a lot of boyfriends,” Bob said. “Sure she did. She never hid that. No. Nobody had any reason to kill her.”
TED DURGEN’S HARDWARE STORE was closed by the time I got there. I could wait a day to talk to him. I drove down to a Thrifty’s Drug Store on 54th Street and made a call from a phone booth near the ice cream counter.
“Hello,” Bonnie said in a musical voice.
“Hey, honey,” I said.
“Where are you, Easy? You said that you were just going to get a pair of shoes.”
There was a time, when we first got together, that neither one of us would have asked that question. But another man had crossed her path, and though she swore that her love for him was that of a friend, we still asked questions where once there would have been only trust.
“Theodore said if I did something for him that he’d let me have the shoes for free.”
“What did he want you to do?”
“Ain’t nuthin’, honey,” I said. “Nuthin’ at all. How’s the kids?”
“Jesus is sewing his sail and Feather is helping him. Really she’s just drinking chocolate milk and talking.”
“I got to go out to the Palisades to see this friend of Theodore’s,” I said. “I’ll be back before ten.”
“Raymond called. He said if you needed him to call at this number.”
I wrote down the number and we hung up.
THE PHONE BOOK TOLD ME that Rita Longtree lived on Defiance Avenue. It was an orange stucco building in the middle of the block. Her door was nestled in a third-floor nook that had a small palm growing in a terra cotta pot right outside.
She was surprised to see me standing there. The orange had been wiped from her lips. Her eyes seemed different.
“Yeah?” It was the same word she used when we first met, only this time the edge was gone.
