I shined the dusty tops against the back of my pantlegs. A fine dust remained in the creases, highlighting spidery lines in the leather like wrinkles in an old man’s face. Crow’s feet. Owl’s eyes.
I spit and tried shining them again against my pantleg, but the impression continued to linger like Marley’s ghost.
With my head high, I crossed the street and walked to the spiked iron fence of St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie church. The back gate was open and I entered the churchyard and found a flat surface to unload the papers I’d culled from Owl’s pockets. It was a cracked marble slab, a vault stone with most of the lettering worn away by centuries. I could only make out part of a name: PHILIP HOAP—. I spread out the papers.
At first, it didn’t look like much, except for a worn $20 bill, paper soft as felt. Which equaled 24 minutes of my time. Or 96 at the pro rate I’d quoted Owl.
The hard, flat, flexible thing wasn’t a credit card but a magnetic card key for a hotel room, the Bowery Plaza at Third Avenue and St. Marks Place. It was four blocks above the Bowery and three degrees below a Plaza, but the receipt for the room quoted a reasonable rate and had the room number printed across the top and the date— 9/2/08—when George Rowell had checked in.
The other papers were two leaflets—sale handbills, one for a men’s discount clothing store and one for a Persian rug wholesaler, both in Chelsea on West 21st—a pink pasteboard receipt for a parking garage, and an empty chewing gum wrapper. Wintergreen. I turned them all over, but he hadn’t jotted anything on the backs.
The only other thing was a business card, one of mine. The card stock was flimsy; I’d printed it up on my own computer. My first set of cards from the year I opened the office. So long ago, I hadn’t begun to include my e-mail address or the 212 on my number. Back then there was no other Manhattan area code.
I’d given a stack to Matt and a few other operatives at Metro, to hand out if anything came within my line. For all the work it got me. Matt probably used most of them to pick gristle from his teeth, but he’d given one at least to Owl.
I refolded the papers and stuck them in my back pocket. The twenty I put in my front right pocket with the card key. I brushed off my knees and left the churchyard by the front gate, onto the cobblestoned triangle of Abe Lebewohl Park.
Across Second at the southeast corner of Tenth was where Abe’s Second Avenue Deli used to be. Gone now, replaced by a glass- and neon-fronted bank, with rows of ATMs looking like exposed public urinals.
The deli had been at that location since the days of Yiddish Theater but couldn’t survive there into the new century. Change is part of the city, its one constant—I accepted that—but the old businesses weren’t being replaced by new ones starting a new tradition. Instead, commercial rents had bloated out of proportion, squeezing out longtime occupants; rents so high only banks and cell phone stores could afford the inflated leases.
The people who moved into the neighborhood now didn’t even know the Second Avenue Deli had been there, didn’t know what they were missing. Why did they move here now? Would I even want to move here now? I only stayed because…because…
I shelved the thought, a problem for another day. Today had its own problems. One was just rolling up behind me.
I heard a grinding sound like a ballpoint pen drawing endless circles on a glass tabletop.
He slid up alongside. The blond kid on his skateboard. He
He rode parallel. Standing on his board, he came up to about my chin. Grinning ear-to-ear, he had angular, pointy features like a Bali devil-mask.
“Nice kicks, dude.”
“Thanks,” I said, not turning my head, giving him my profile like Lincoln on the penny.
He cackled, laughing so hard I thought he was going to fall off his board. See, it’s all in the delivery.
Getting himself under control, he said, “You…you look …like a clown.”
I said nothing, wondering what his game was and if it was one I played. My sweaty feet made squishy noises in the alien shoes. He mimicked the sound with his mouth and it got him cackling all over again.
When we got to East Ninth Street I stopped. The light was against us. But the kid swept on like Mr. Magoo, sailing out into the middle of the road without looking either way.
A taxi cab racing through the intersection to beat a changing yellow slammed on its brakes in a screech of smoking rubber. Its front grille stopped barely a foot from the kid. The cabbie leaned on his horn, but since he had a fare in the back, drove on without making any more of it.
The kid waited placidly on the other side of the street for me.
None of my business if he wanted to play grab-ass with death, but I told him, “You almost got it, junior.”
“Got what?” His blue eyes all bright innocence.
“Squashed.”
He shook his head. “Never happen.”
“Happens all the time, an old guy just got killed a couple of blocks back.”
His eyes gleamed.
“What did you take off him?”
“How’s that?”
“The old man, what chew get? I saw it. I saw you.”
He had a put-on street accent and a knock-off attitude, which told me nothing about him except that he flipped through magazines and channel-surfed. His face was tanned, freckles clustered around his nose. Blue eyes flashed behind his veil of dirty-blond hair.
“Money, what? C’mon, tell me,” he whined. “I could go back, y’know, and tell ’em what I saw.”
I stopped.
“You saw it, the accident?”
He cackled.
“Accident? Right.” His voice turned level and cold. “I saw what you did.”
“Then that makes you a witness. You should go back and tell them.”
He said, “I could say I saw more.”
“Uh-huh? Like?”
“Like you shoved the old guy in front of that car. I could tell them I seen that.”
That plank slap sound I’d heard beneath my window.
I said, “Were you practicing your ollies on the corner when it happened?”
“Ha, practicing? I got it down—I kill ’em every time.”
He stopped briefly to demonstrate, making his board jump up by stepping hard on the back end. He had my interest now but not for his SK8R moves.
I kept pace with his smooth, even glide.
I asked, “So…what
“I saw you…going through the old guy’s pockets,” he said, deliberately raising his voice, “so ya better tell me what you got, or—”
One of the few upsides of having nothing left to lose was calling people’s bluffs. I called his. I stopped in my tracks.
“All right, let’s go back.” I looked back toward Twelfth Street, lights of the EMS van and a cruiser’s blue strobe still flashing.
The kid laughed harshly. “No way.”
He spun on his back wheels and stopped beside a row of free-newspaper dispensers, clustered by the street corner like giant, multi-colored building blocks.
Used to be only one or two of these bins could be found on every other street corner, but over time more formed, sprouting up like mushrooms all over the city. Eight in this row: the
The blond kid reached into a Velcro-sealed pocket by his knee and pulled out a magic marker, an extra-large black Sharpie the size and shape of a store-bought hot dog. He uncapped it and shook hair out of his eyes.
