'Makes good sense.'
'I guess.'
'Moderation,' he said. 'I tell you, Matt, those old Greeks knew it all. Moderation.'
He drank half his drink. He was good for perhaps eight like it in the course of a day. Call it a quart a day, all in a body that couldn't go more than a hundred pounds, and I'd never seen him show the effects.
He never staggered, never slurred his words, just kept on keeping on.
So? What did that have to do with me?
I sipped my Coke.
We sat there and told each other stories. Danny Boy's business, if he had one, was information.
Everything you told him got filed away in his mind, and by putting bits of data together and moving them around he brought in enough dollars to keep his shoes shined and his glass full. He would bring people together, taking a slice of their action for his troubles. His own hands stayed clean while he held a limited partnership in a lot of short-term enterprises, most of them faintly illicit. When I was on the force he'd been one of my best sources, an unpaid snitch who took his recompense in information.
He said, 'You remember Lou Rudenko? Louie the Hat, they call him,' I said I did. 'You hear about his mother?'
'What about her?'
'Nice old Ukrainian lady, still lived in the old neighborhood on East Ninth or Tenth, wherever it was.
Been a widow for years. Must have been seventy, maybe closer to eighty. Lou's got to be what, fifty?'
'Maybe.'
'Doesn't matter. Point is this nice little old lady has a gentleman friend, a widower the same age as she is.
He's over there a couple nights a week and she cooks Ukrainian food for him and maybe they go to a movie if they can find one that doesn't have people fucking all over the screen. Anyway, he comes over one afternoon, he's all excited, he found a television set on the street.
Somebody put it out for the garbage. He says people are crazy, they throw perfectly good things away, and he's handy at fixing things and her own set's on the fritz and this one's a color set and twice the size of hers and maybe he can fix it for her.'
'And?'
'And he plugs it in and turns it on to see what happens, and what happens is it blows up. He loses an arm and an eye and Mrs. Rudenko, she's right in front of it when it goes, she's killed instantly.'
'What was it, a bomb?'
'You got it. You saw the story in the paper?'
'I must have missed it.'
'Well, it was five, six months ago. What they worked out was somebody rigged the set with a bomb and had it delivered to somebody else. Maybe it was a mob thing and maybe it wasn't, because all the old man knew was what block he picked the set up on, and what does that tell you? Thing is, whoever received the set was suspicious enough to put it right out with the garbage, and it wound up killing Mrs.
Rudenko. I saw Lou and it was a funny thing because he didn't know who to get mad at. 'It's this fucking city,' he told me. 'It's this goddamn fucking city.' But what sense does that make? You live in the middle of Kansas and a tornado comes and picks your house up and spreads it over Nebraska. That's an act of God, right?'
'That's what they say.'
'In Kansas God uses tornadoes. In New York he uses gaffed television sets. Whoever you are, God or anybody else, you work with the materials at hand. You want another Coke?'
'Not right now.'
'What can I do for you?'
'I'm looking for a pimp.'
'Diogenes was looking for an honest man. You have more of a field to choose from.'
'I'm looking for a particular pimp.'
'They're all particular. Some of them are downright finicky. Has he got a name?'
'Chance.'
'Oh, sure,' Danny Boy said. 'I know Chance.'
'You know how I can get in touch with him?'
He frowned, picked up his empty glass, put it down. 'He doesn't hang out anywhere,' he said.
'That's what I keep hearing.'
'It's the truth. I think a man should have a home base. I'm always here or at Poogan's. You're at Jimmy Armstrong's, or at least you were the last I heard.'
'I still am.'
'See? I keep tabs on you even when I don't see you. Chance. Let me think. What's today, Thursday?'
