I picked up the money.
'Good,' she said. 'That's settled. I don't know about the emotional part. I was always better at the business side. I think we'll just have to play it by ear and take it a day at a time. What do you think?'
I got to my feet. 'I think I'll have one more cup of coffee,' I said,
'and then I'll get out of here.'
'You don't have to.'
'Yes I do. I want to go play detective and spend some of the money you gave me. I think you're right, I think we'll play it by ear. I'm sorry about before.'
'So am I.'
When I came back with the coffee she said, 'Jesus, I've got six messages on my machine.'
'When did the calls come? When we were in bed?'
'Must have. Is it all right if I play them back?'
'Why shouldn't it be?'
She shrugged and pressed the appropriate button. There was a whirring sound, some background noise, then a click. 'A hang-up,' she said. 'That's what I get most of the time. A lot of people don't like to leave a message.'
There was another hang-up. Then a man said, very crisply and confidently, 'Elaine, this is Jerry Pines, I'll give you a call in a day or so.' Then another hang-up, and then a caller who cleared his throat forcefully, took a long moment trying to think of something to say, and rang off without a word.
Then the sixth caller. A fairly long pause, with the tape running and only background noise audible. Then a whisper:
'Hello, Elaine. Did you like the flowers?'
Another pause, as long as the first. Throughout it the background noise, actually quite low in volume, sounded like the roar of a subway train.
And then, in the same forceful whisper, he said, 'I was thinking of you earlier. But it's not your turn yet.
You have to wait your turn, you know. I'm saving you for last.' A pause, but a brief one. 'I mean second-last. He'll be the last.'
That was all he had to say, but the tape ran another twenty or thirty seconds before he broke the connection. Then the answering machine clicked and whirred and readied itself to handle incoming calls again, and we sat there in a silence that hung in the air like smoke.
I was back in my hotel room before dawn, but I didn't beat the sun by much. It was well past four by the time I got there, and I'd spent the whole night running all over the city, going places I hadn't been in years.
Some of them were long gone, and some of the people I was looking for were gone, too, dead or in jail or in some other world. But there were new places and new people, and I found my way to enough of them to keep busy.
I found Danny Boy Bell in Poogan's. He is a short albino Negro, precise in his gestures and polite in his manners. He has always worn conservatively cut three-piece suits and he has always kept vampire's hours, never leaving his house between sunrise and sunset. His habits hadn't changed, and he still drank Russian vodka straight up and ice-cold. The bars that were home to him, Poogan's Pub and the Top Knot, always kept a bottle on ice for him. The Top Knot's gone now.
'There's a French restaurant there now,' he told me. 'High-priced and not very good. I'm here a lot these days. Or I'll be at Mother Goose on Amsterdam . They got a nice little trio, plays there six nights a week.
The drummer uses the brushes and he never takes a solo. And they keep the lights right.'
Right meant dimmed way down. Danny Boy wears dark glasses all the time, and he'd probably wear them at the bottom of a coal mine. 'The world's too loud and too bright,' I'd heard him say more than once.
'They should put in a dimmer switch. They should turn the volume down.'
He didn't recognize the sketch, but Motley's name struck a chord with him. I started to fill him in and he remembered the case. 'So he's coming back at you,' he said. 'Why don't you just grab a plane, go someplace warm while he cools off? Guy like that, give him a few weeks and he'll step on his cock and wind up back in slam. You won't have to worry about him for another ten years.'
'I think he's gotten pretty shrewd.'
'Went up for one-to-ten and served twelve, how much of a genius can he be?' He finished his drink and moved his hand a few inches, which was all he had to do to get the waitress's attention. After she'd filled
his glass and assured herself that I was still all right, he said, 'I'll pass the word and keep my ears open, Matt. All I can do.'
'I appreciate it.'
'Hard to know where he might hang out, or who he might rub up against. Still, there's places you could check.'
He gave me some leads and I went out and chased them around the city. I went to a chicken-and-ribs joint onLenox Avenue and a bar down the street from it where a lot of the uptown players did their drinking. I caught a cab downtown to a place called Patchwork on Third Avenue in the Twenties, where Early American quilts hung on the exposed brick walls. I told the bartender I was there to see a man named Tommy Vincent. 'He's not in just now,' I was told, 'but he usually comes in around this time, if you'd care to wait for him.'
I ordered a Coke and waited at the bar. The back-bar mirror let me keep an eye on the door without turning around. I watched some people come in and some others leave, and by the time I had nothing in my glass but ice
