speed bag, one heavy bag, and a jump rope pressed into a narrow corner by the steady spread of steam rooms and sauna and eucalyptus inhalant rooms and sun-tanning rooms and juice bars and a heated pool and an overgrowth of hanging plants that made the place look like a Henri Rousseau painting. Hawk was there to add to the illusion. His shaved black head gleamed among the potted ferns as he walked toward the Nautilus room. He was wearing a magenta tank top and white satin warm-up pants and a white terry sweatband with a thin magenta stripe in it.
'Christ,' I said. 'Designer sweats.'
Hawk grinned. 'Clothes make the man, babe.'
'Don't people call you a sissy when they see you dressed like that?'
Hawk's grin widened slightly. 'No,' he said. He took the handles at the pull-up station and began to do pull-ups with his legs held parallel to the ground. The muscles in his arms and shoulders swelled and relaxed as he went up and down as if they were separately alive. People, as they always did, peeked at him when they thought he wasn't looking, glancing out of the corners of eyes and in reflections in the glass. Hawk knew it. He always knew everything that went on around him. It made no impression on him. Almost nothing did. He didn't enjoy it. He didn't mind it.
I was doing curls. Hawk said, 'How you and Susan doing?'
'Love is lovelier,' I said, 'the second time around.'
'Worth the scramble,' Hawk said.
'Yes.'
Hawk shifted from pull-ups to dips. He whistled to himself through his teeth, his lips together so one barely heard the small internal melody. He was whistling 'On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.' We both finished on the Nautilus equipment and went to the boxing room. I jumped rope, Hawk played games on the speed bag. Now he was whistling 'Sweet Georgia Brown.'
I said, 'You still on good terms with Tony Marcus?'
Hawk said, 'Sure.'
I said, 'I think I need some help from him.'
'Nothing Tony like better,' Hawk said, 'than to do favors for some honkie who punched him in the mouth the only time he met him.'
'It's why I asked about your terms,' I said. 'If he liked me I wouldn't need you.'
'If you need me 'cause people don't like you, babe, you need me bad. What you want from Tony?'
I crossed and uncrossed the rope as I jumped. 'I'm looking for a guy named Art Floyd. He recruited a kid for a whorehouse in Boston.'
'You looking for the kid?'
'No. I'm looking for him. The kid's dead.'
'Well, Tony the man,' Hawk said. 'Nothing much happens in the whore business that Tony don't follow. Floyd kill the kid?'
'No, I doubt it. I'm looking for April Kyle again.'
'The little blond kid from Smithfield.'
'Un huh.'
'Man,' Hawk said, 'you do hang in there. Tell me about it, maybe we work something out with Tony.'
I told him about April and about Ginger Buckey.
'So you figure you find out what happened to Ginger Buckey you maybe find out what happened to April,' Hawk said.
'April's gone, Ginger's dead, and Rambeaux is scared. There's got to be a connection.'
'Well, I see what I can do. But Tony don't remember you fondly.'
'I'm not asking him to dance.'
'Good to know,' Hawk said. 'What Tony get out of this?'
I shrugged. 'A favor to me?'
'Besides that,' Hawk said.
'A favor to you?'
'Tony usually looking to get favors more than he looking to give them,' Hawk said.
'Okay, we'll owe him one,' I said.
'What this `we' shit, white man?'
17
Hawk and I met Tony Marcus at a Chinese restaurant called Ming Garden on Route 9 across from the Chestnut Hill Mall. Marcus was maybe my age with a modified Afro and a thick mustache. The mustache had some gray in it, but his face was smooth and unlined. He sat in a booth alone toward the far end of the restaurant. At a table next to him four other black men sat with menus closed in front of them. All of them wore suits. One of the guys sitting with his back toward us was too heavy for the suit and where it pulled tight across his back I could see the faint line of a shoulder-holster strap.
