What I needed to do now was to visit Larry Skolnik. So I double-timed down to the lot, stuck the key in the ignition and held my breath. The engine caught and went into a quiet idle. I slowly exhaled, feeling my cynicism giving way to cautious optimism.
Larry Skolnik worked in his father’s dry cleaning store on lower Hamilton. Larry was behind the counter when I walked into the store. He’d blimped up by about a hundred pounds since high school, but it wasn’t all bad news—his hands were message free. He was an okay person, but if I’d have to take a winger on his social life, I’d say he probably talked to his tie a lot.
He smiled when he saw me. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said back.
“You got laundry here?”
“Nope. I came to see you. I wanted to ask you about Uncle Mo.”
“Moses Bedemier?” A flush crept into his cheeks. “What about him?”
Larry and I were alone in the store. No one else behind the counter. No one else in front of the counter. Just me and Larry and three hundred shirts.
I repeated the story Sue Ann had told me.
Larry fidgeted with a box of homeless shirt buttons that had been placed by the register. “I tried to tell people, but nobody believed me.”
“It’s true?”
More fidgeting. He chose a white pearl button and examined it more closely. He made a honking sound in his nose. His face flushed some more. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to honk.”
“That’s okay. A little stress-related honking never hurt anybody.”
“Well, I did it. The story is true,” Larry said. “And I’m proud of it. So there.”
If he said nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, I was going to smack him.
“I hung around the store a lot,” Larry said, looking down into the button box when he talked, poking at the buttons with his finger, making canals in the button collection. “And then when I was seventeen Mo gave me a job sweeping up and polishing the glass in the showcase. It was great. I mean, I was working for Uncle Mo. All the kids wanted a job working for Uncle Mo.
“The thing is, that’s how we got to sort of be buddies. And then one day he asked me to…um, you know. And I’d never done anything like that before, but I thought what the heck.”
He stopped talking and stared aimlessly at the buttons. I waited awhile but Larry just kept quietly looking at the buttons. And it occurred to me that maybe Larry wasn’t just weird. Maybe Larry wasn’t very smart.
“This is important to me,” I finally said. “I need to find Mo. I thought maybe you had some idea where he might be. I thought you might still be in touch.”
“Do you really think he killed all those people?”
“I’m not sure. I think he must have been involved.”
“I think so too,” Larry said. “And I have a theory. I don’t have it all put together. But maybe you can make something of it.” He forgot about the buttons and leaned forward on the counter. “One time I was paired up with a guy named Desmond, and we got to talking. Sort of one pro to another, if you know what I mean. And Desmond told me how Mo found him.
“See, it’s important that Mo can always be finding young guys, because that’s what Mo likes.”
By the time Larry finished telling me his theory I was just about dancing with excitement. I had a totally off- the-wall connection between Mo and the drug dealers. And I had renewed interest in the second-house idea. Mo had driven Larry to a house in the woods when he’d wanted Larry to do his thing.
There was no guarantee that Mo was still using the same house, but it was a place to start looking. Unfortunately, Larry had always gone to the house during evening hours, and even on a good day, Larry’s memory wasn’t top of the line. What he remembered was going south and then turning into a rural area.
I thanked Larry for his help and promised to come back with dry cleaning. I hopped into the truck and started it up. I wanted to talk to Vinnie, but Vinnie wouldn’t be in the office this early. That was okay. I’d visit the weak link in Mo’s chain while I waited for Vinnie.
I parked on the street, across from Lula’s apartment. All the row houses looked alike on this block, but Gail’s was easy to find. It was the one with the light on over the front stoop.
I went straight to the second floor and knocked on Gail’s door. She answered after the second series of knocks. Sleepy-eyed again. A doper.
“Yuh?” she said.
I introduced myself and asked if I could come in.
“Sure,” she said. Like who would care.
She sat on the edge of her bed. Hands folded in her lap, fingers occasionally escaping to pick at her skirt. The room was sparsely furnished. Clothes lay in heaps on the floor. A small wood table held a cache of groceries. A box of cereal, half a loaf of bread, peanut butter, a six-pack of Pepsi with two cans missing. A straight-backed chair had been pulled up to the table.
I took the chair for myself and edged it closer to Gail, so we could be friendly. “I need to talk to you about Harp.”
Gail grabbed a whole handful of skirt. “I don’t know nothin’.”
“I’m not a cop. This isn’t going to get you into trouble. This is just something I’ve got to know.”
