“Listen, Arletta,” I said, putting my hand on her bare upper arm. “You don’t have to tell me. But you know I need to talk to the man for a minute.”
Arletta was the kind of woman that you wanted to touch. She was older than I, maybe fifty. I wasn’t trying to get over with her by caressing her skin. I wasn’t trying to but I did just the same.
“Well,” she said. “He’s out here in the kitchen.”
Arletta walked through a swinging door into the kitchen. I followed. There we found a large bald man who held a meat cleaver in his left hand. A once-white apron barely covered his large middle. The apron was stained with thick patches of pocked cow’s blood. Behind him hung what was left of a whole side of beef.
“William,” Arletta said a little loudly as if the cow-chopper was hard of hearing.
“Yeah?” The sharp voice came from behind the side of beef.
A small, gold-colored man came out from behind the slab of meat. He also wore an apron but he was so slim that it fit him like a wraparound dress.
When I saw his face I knew that I was in trouble deep. Up until that moment I knew that I had to be cautious; that there was trouble just waiting to rub off on me. But I had thought that it was other people’s troubles—not mine. What did I know about crazy mulatto brothers or swinging math teachers? What did I know about international smuggling, extortion, or murder?
Nothing.
I didn’t know a thing up until that moment. But I did know Idabell’s friend’s face. I’d seen it in a three-year-old Sojourner Truth yearbook. He was William the butcher at Whitehead’s but he was the blackmailer Bill Bartlett to me.
William carried a small knife and had no blood on him even though there was a rough cut of meat dangling from his other hand.
“This man need to ax you sumpin’,” Arletta said.
“Arletta, I cain’t work wit’ this shit,” the big, bald, and bloody cook interrupted. “I need William if we gonna prepare this meat an’ get the food out on the tables too.”
I walked quickly over to William with my hand outstretched. “Brad Koogan.”
William held up his knife and flesh to show that he couldn’t shake.
“Pee-dro!” the bald butcher shouted.
A Mexican man with mean eyes came from somewhere in back of the kitchen.
“What?” He was as large as the butcher.
“Get over here and help me with this meat.”
“I got six orders up,” Pedro replied.
“Com’on,” William said to me.
He turned and went through a back door. In the moment it took me to follow he’d put the knife and meat down on a plate, removed his rubber gloves, got a cigarette between his lips, and was ready to strike a match.
The speed he showed sent a chill through me.
“What you want, brother?” the little man asked.
I was noticing how large his head was in comparison to his body.
“What you said your name was again?” he asked.
“Brad Koogan.”
“Sound like a white man’s name.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, man. Every time I send in a application for’a job, and call about it, they always say on the phone, ‘Yeah, come on in, we got a openin’.’ But just as soon as they see my face the position has been filled.”
“Dig it,” the chef’s helper said.
“But the reason I’m here,” I continued, “is because this woman said that she saw you here an’ I need to get in touch wit’ her.”
“Who is that?” William spoke in short sentences and quick bursts, like a burp gun.
“Idabell Turner,” I said as he inhaled the smoke from his cigarette.
He held the breath a little too long and then, instead of saying anything, he took the pack of Winstons from his pocket and shook it at me.
I took the cigarette.
I took a light.
“What you want Idabell for?” he asked.
“She send a friend’a hers over to drop her dog off with me. He said that she’d come by today to take Pharaoh back but she ain’t showed an’ I already had to clean up shit twice.”
“How you know Ida?”
“Met her. At a party. Her an’ her hus’bun. Brother-in-law too, I guess. Damn! Look like twins t’me.”
I was saying one thing and thinking something similar. Did Bartlett know Roman and Holland? Was he involved
