Lund was wearing jeans and a windbreaker, further proof that he was the man who bombed my classroom. I let him take two steps before pressing the gun barrel against the back of his neck.
“Hold it right there, man,” I said in a husky, threatening tone.
Lund grunted and spun around, pushing my gun hand to the side. While he was concentrated on trying to disarm me, I hit him in the head with the bat. It was glancing blow and merely slowed him down. I hit him on the nose with the butt of my pistol, and he slowed a bit more. Fear was working its way into my gut because I realized that even though I was using Raymond’s name, I’d never be able to inflict the kind of pain that he dished out. I pushed the angry gangster and he fell hard.
“Hold still, fool,” I said.
But he ignored me and reached under the windbreaker. He was disoriented, so it was easy for me to kick the pistol out of his hand. He tried to crawl toward the gun, so I kicked him in the ribs. By this time I was getting sick. Nothing seemed to stop Lund. He struggled up to his knees and spat as if that would hold me off long enough for him to get his bearings. Blood was cascading from his nostrils, a high wheeze coming from his throat.
“Stop!” I yelled, but he got up on one foot.
I realized that I could either kill this man or run from him, but that I’d never subdue his spirit. He reminded me of a welterweight I’d seen, Carmen Basilio. That man would take punishment for twelve rounds or more, but he’d always come back, and in the last minutes he’d always win because his opponent was exhausted from waling away at the Italian boxer.
I unleashed a right uppercut that lifted Lund to his feet. Then I hit him with a straight left hand. Mouse would have hit him with the bat, repeatedly. I knew then that I would have to honor my friend in some other way.
Lund was unconscious, or nearly so. His eyes were half open and he was muttering something. I searched him and came up with his black book. I didn’t think that it would help me much, but it was all I could get from him.
As I was going out of the door, Lund had gained his feet. He was still wobbly, searching the floor for his gun. I hurried out to the street.
DRIVING UP CENTRAL, I pondered my foolish actions. I thought that I’d just flash a gun at the gangster and he’d give me anything I wanted. I forgot about the dark alleys I’d once traveled. Hard men didn’t get that way by turning over. Lund would have died before he bowed down to me.
I SAT UP IN MY LIVING ROOM, flipping through the pages of Lund’s journal. There were multiple entries on every page. Each entry consisted of a name and a two-or three-letter code. At the bottom of each entry there was a date and a dollar amount. Roke Williams had several entries. He was paying Lund at least fifteen hundred dollars a month. Roke must have been making three times that amount. I knew that the gambler lived in a one-room apartment with the toilet down the hall. He made more in a month than most workingmen made in a year, and still he lived like a hermit crab.
One man, Vren Lassiter, had a special notation. In parentheses under his name were the initials “SchP.” Lassiter had a minus sign next to his dollar amount. He owed over six thousand dollars.
It wasn’t until I was undressed and in the bed, under the covers and almost asleep, that the initials made sense to me.
That was three A.M.
THE DRIVE FROM MY HOUSE near Fairfax and Pico down to Truth was only twenty-five minutes at three in the morning. Before four I was in the registrar’s office looking up the faculty records.
HE WAS LIVING in an apartment building on San Pedro. It was a turquoise and plaster affair, designed to be ugly so that the tenants would know that they were poor.
I knocked on the door of apartment 3 G. No one answered. I jiggled the knob and it turned.
He had lied about the furniture. He didn’t use it for the new place. His big ebony desk wouldn’t have fit through the front door. Hiram Newgate sold everything to pay Vren Lassiter’s debt and now he was dead, slumped over on the thin cushions of a cheap couch, a .22-caliber bullet in his left temple, the pistol still in his hand.
I looked around the house. Photographs were spread across the card table in a nook that was supposed to be a dinette. The pictures were of two men, Hiram and a younger, sandy-headed man. They were arm-in-arm, holding hands. In one picture Hiram was laughing out loud.
I searched around for some kind of note, but there was none. I did find a letter though. It was from Lassiter. In it Vren beseeched his good friend to understand that he couldn’t help making bets. He tried to kick the habit but he couldn’t. And if Hiram didn’t help, they’d probably kill him.
I figured that Newgate went to Lund and took on the debt, that Lund threatened the school because he figured out that Truth was more important to Hiram than his own life. Newgate had earned his own private abbreviation: SchP, School Principal.
I put the letter back into the desk and went to the front door. I turned to look one last time, to make sure that there was nothing I left behind. His eyes glittered as if they had moved. I came up to him and stared into those orbs. He was still alive. Paralyzed, but still alive. He saw me, knew me.
“It’s gonna be all right, Principal Newgate,” I said. I touched his cheek and nodded.
I made the anonymous call to the police from his phone and left. I was out of the neighborhood before the sirens came.
I WAITED TWO WEEKS before going to the 77th Precinct.
“Where’d you get this?” Andre Brown asked me at Leah’s Doughnut and Coffee Shop three blocks down from the precinct. In his hand he held Emile Lund’s notebook.
“Found it.”
“If you found it, how would you know who it belongs to? His name’s not in it anywhere.”
“I guessed. I’m a good guesser, Officer.”
“These are his clients?” Brown asked. He was becoming wary of me.
