happened like this in the city from time to time. You read about it in the metro section of the paper with your coffee, shake your head at the strange carnage, then check the stock tables. The men could pull a truck up to the sidewalk doors and load out anything and no one would ever know.
'I want some answers to my question!' bellowed H.J. 'I want to know what happened to my uncle and I want money for my aunt! We live in a fuckin' country where every college and university over a hundred and fifty years old, all those railroads and banks, got slave money in 'em, slave money built 'em up. Martin Luther King only got it half done. Jesse Jackson, he sold the fuck out, Clarence Thomas, he no good. White man still makin' money off the black man every day. Who owns those companies buildin' prisons, who owns the fuckin' NFL? It ain't my uncle, you see what I'm saying? Now I want to find out why he died, why he have a heart attack!'
I sat in the booth stunned, Ha next to me, his head bowed in submission.
'Boss,' said Gabriel finally, his tone pacifying, 'I think Lamont shot the man who could help you with that question.'
H.J. told his men to clean up. Gabriel and Denny found some garbage bags and laid them out a few feet away from Poppy. Whatever had been in his lower intestines had started to seep out of him and we could smell it. They lifted him, feet and armpits, onto the bags in one motion. The blood had traveled to the grout between the tiles. Gabriel hunted around behind the bar and found some twine, which Denny used to bag up Poppy. Then the men laid him behind the bar. They found the closet behind the bar and wet-mopped the tiles. 'Use the cleanser,' ordered H.J., keeping his gun on me. 'Not one speck. And clean the wall, too, clean it good.'
They did. Fifteen minutes later, it was as if nothing had happened. The floor gleamed. Ha watched, his eyelids low, face without expression.
'What we going to do now?'
'We's goin' to think, is what we's goin' to do.' H.J. straightened his shirt. 'Hey,' he asked me, 'how we going to get this boy?'
'I really don't know.'
Gabriel put his gun to Allison's head. 'Talk to the man. Tell us how to find your boyfriend.'
'He's not my boyfriend!'
'Whatever you call him, miss, your penile escort, I don't care, tell my boss where to find him!'
'I don't know, I don't know!'
Gabriel made a pinched face. 'Nothing comes of nothing, miss.'
'I don't know. He used to come over to my apartment in the afternoon.'
'Sounds romantic,' prompted Gabriel.
'It was,' said Allison softly, to herself.
'Pity,' noted Gabriel, voice droll. 'Please continue with your emotionally charged testimony.'
With that, Allison lifted her head, eyes angry, mood defiant. 'So yes, he came over to- well, it certainly wasn't to be with me, I see that now, it was to see-' She glanced at me, including me in her fury. 'Well, there's a girl who lives across-'
'Don't!' I yelled.
'— the street. She'll be walking home in forty-five minutes along Eighty-sixth Street. She comes home at 2 p.m. from school. That's why he used to meet me at my apartment! That's the time! His daughter. If you can get his daughter you can get him,' said Allison. 'She'll be wearing a blue-and-white school uniform and probably be carrying some kind of backpack. She's about fourteen or fifteen and dark-haired and quite pretty.'
'That's wrong,' I said quickly. 'The girl's in basketball practice all afternoon.'
Gabriel looked at H.J.
'See?' Allison said bitterly, pointing her finger at me. 'He knows. He's in on it. He knows who she is.'
'You?' said H.J.
I shook my head. 'She's got nothing to do with all this. She's just some kid.'
'Get her,' said H.J. to Gabriel.
'I'll tell you where Rainey lives,' I said. 'That's better.'
'We know where he lives,' Gabriel said.
'You do?'
'Sure. Brooklyn, Seventeenth Street. We followed you. Watched it some. Broke in, fished around. Bit of a creepy setup, no?'
I was trying to think of a way to avoid involving Sally Cowles. 'Did you find the box of cash he has?'
H.J. swung his gun at Gabriel suspiciously. 'Answer the man.'
'No, no, we didn't find a box of cash.'
'He had cash there. You were inside.'
'What?' said H.J., studying Gabriel. 'What's the man talking about?'
'I helped Rainey with a deal,' I said quickly, 'there was cash. Two hundred and something thousand. He put it in a box and took it home. I know that. I was there a few days ago and the box was empty. Your guys just admitted they were inside. I guess they didn't tell you they found the cash-'
'That's a fucking lie, Mr. Wyeth, and I'll gladly shoot your face off to prove it,' said Gabriel.
H.J. was inclined to believe Gabriel, I could see, but with a margin of doubt. Which was good, because I was lying. If I'd really led Denny and Gabriel to Jay's apartment, then they couldn't have been the cause of the empty cashbox I'd found. 'You ever go in that building downtown, that place my aunt talked with him?' he asked his men.
'We did once,' answered Denny.
H.J., I could see, was plainly worried. The crazed aggressor who'd confronted me in the hip-hop club was absent; this H.J. was taciturn and analytical, watching each of us, then studying his cell phone on the table before him, then watching us again. Was he expecting a call from someone? Did he need to make a call? Why he was forcing this game toward whatever conclusion awaited us was not clear to me. 'No, get his daughter,' he ordered, looking at his watch. 'We got her, then we got him. Then he has to deal with me. He has to talk to me, he gots to give me my money. And if he don't have it, then you boys got a problem.'
A minute later they had bundled me into the white limousine waiting outside. It was the same one as before, late model, spotless, smoked glass. Denny and Gabriel sat across from me, each with a gun drawn. The car rolled smoothly through traffic. The heater was on, the row of little floor lights elegant. I was worried about Ha and Allison, despite her betrayal of Sally Cowles.
'Stop thinking,' Gabriel said.
'I'll try,' I answered.
'If it was up to me,' he announced, 'I'd put a wee fucking bullet in your head right now.'
I didn't doubt him. 'You guys are insane for doing this,' I said. 'Just in case you didn't know that.'
They didn't listen. The driver turned on a smooth jazz station. We glided up Sixth Avenue, past Bryant Park, past Forty-second Street, past the dense corporate cliff-dwellings, offices piled into the sky, every third person on the sidewalk talking into a phone, past Radio City Music Hall, then east at Central Park, past the Plaza Hotel, and on up toward the Upper East Side.
Where could Jay be, I wondered, dreading our arrival at Sally Cowles's school. If we could go to Jay directly, then we could bypass Sally Cowles. There was still time to turn around. Where would he be? Not in his sad apartment. What interested him most? Sally Cowles. But when she was in school what did he do? He didn't work. Did he hang around outside the school? Looking in the windows? That was not a good idea and probably didn't satisfy his needs. He needed to be near oxygen, of course, needed to have access to it. Yet he was secretive about this, too. There had to be an answer, but I didn't have it.
We slid up Park Avenue, drawing closer. I wondered if I could somehow jump to the door, scramble out. Not likely. Gabriel and Denny remembered the school from the basketball game and told the driver to pull over across from the main gate.
'She'll be coming out right here,' Gabriel said.
So we waited. Several mothers congregated to one side, each dressed for the occasion, if not every occasion, their lipstick perfect, sunglasses darkly aloof, hair fabuloso. I was reminded of Judith, picking up Timothy from school.
'Couple of these yummy-mummies look insufficiently serviced,' noted Gabriel.
