'Suppose you set up as a dealer?'
'Are you crazy, man? Me deal drugs? I can't even pimp no more, and pimping's cleaner'n dealing.'
'Not drugs.'
'What, then?'
'The African stuff. You seem to own a lot of it and I gather the quality's high.'
'I don't own any garbage.'
'So you told me. Could you use that as your stock to get you started? And do you know enough about the field to go into the business?'
He frowned, thinking. 'I was thinking about this earlier,' he said.
'And?'
'There's a lot I don't know. But there's a lot I do know, plus I got a feel for it and that's something you can't get in a classroom or out of a book. But shit, you need more'n that to be a dealer. You need a whole manner, a personality to go with it.'
'You invented Chance, didn't you?'
'So? Oh, I dig. I could invent some nigger art dealer same way I invented myself as a pimp.'
'Couldn't you?'
' 'Course I could.' He thought once more. 'It might work,' he said.
'I'll have to study it.'
'You got time.'
'Plenty of time.' He looked intently at me, the gold flecks glinting in his brown eyes. 'I don't know what made me hire you,' he said. 'I swear to God I don't. If I wanted to look good or what, the superpimp avenging his dead whore. If I knew where it was going to lead—'
'It probably saved a few lives,' I said. 'If that's any consolation.'
'Didn't save Kim or Sunny or Cookie.'
'Kim was already dead. And Sunny killed herself and that was her choice, and Cookie was going to be killed as soon as Marquez tracked her down. But he'd have gone on killing if I hadn't stopped him. The cops would have landed on him sooner or later but there'd have been more dead women by then. He never would have stopped. It was too much of a turn-on for him. When he came out of the bathroom with the machete, he had an erection.'
'You serious?'
'Absolutely.'
'He came at you with a hard-on?'
'Well, I was more afraid of the machete.'
'Well, yeah,' he said. 'I could see where you would be.'
He wanted to give me a bonus. I told him it wasn't necessary, that I'd been adequately paid for my time, but he insisted, and when people insist on giving me money I don't generally argue. I told him I'd taken the ivory bracelet from Kim's apartment. He laughed and said he'd forgotten all about it, that I was welcome to it and he hoped my lady would like it. It would be part of my bonus, he said, along with the cash and two pounds of his specially blended coffee.
'And if you like the coffee,' he said, 'I can tell you where to get more of it.'
He drove me back into the city. I'd have taken the subway but he insisted he had to go to Manhattan anyway to talk to Mary Lou and Donna and Fran and get things smoothed out. 'Might as well enjoy the Seville while I can,' he said. 'Might wind up selling it to raise cash for operating expenses. Might sell the house, too.' He shook his head. 'I swear it suits me, though. Living here.'
'Get the business started with a government loan.'
'You jiving?'
'You're a minority group member. There's agencies just waiting to lend you money.'
'What a notion,' he said.
In front of my hotel he said, 'That Colombian asshole, I still can't remember his name.'
'Pedro Marquez.'
'That's him. When he registered at your hotel, is that the name he used?'
'No, it was on his ID.'
'That's what I thought. Like he was C. O. Jones and M. A. Ricone, and I wondered what dirty word he used for you.'
'He was Mr. Starudo,' I said. 'Thomas Edward Starudo.'
'T. E. Starudo? Testarudo? That a curse in Spanish?'
'Not a curse. But it's a word.'
'What's it mean?'
'Stubborn,' I said. 'Stubborn or pig-headed.'
