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It’s not a fortune, less than a thousand dollars, but he can find a use for it, and she manifestly cannot. He’s had expenses—$200 for the bronze paper knife, as much again for the erotic paraphernalia, plus the cost of the bottle and the bouquet. With her cash in his wallet, the night’s work becomes a self-liquidating enterprise. Except, of course, that hers is the self that’s been liquidated.
Next he wipes the place down for fingerprints. He hasn’t touched much, tonight or on previous visits. He wipes the bottle of Strega, and both of their glasses. He retrieves from her liquor cabinet the bottle of Glenmorangie Scotch she bought for him, pours and downs a drink, wipes and replaces the bottle. He leaves the vase of flowers on the mantel.
He never touched the vase, and flowers won’t hold a print.
But paper will, and he had his hands all over the paper they were wrapped in. He finds it in the kitchen wastebasket, adds it to one of his bags of trash.
Throughout this entire process he’s been naked. Now, the job done, he puts on the clothes he’d left on the chair in the bedroom. He gathers everything he means to take away with him and lines it up alongside the apartment’s front door. Is he done? Can he go now?
One more thing.
He picks up a manicure scissors from the top of her dresser, uses the wall-mounted magnifying mirror, and clips three hairs from his mustache. He leaves one on the bedsheet, alongside her right arm, and drops the other two into her nest of pubic hair.
Voila!
14
Mother Blue’s was either half full or half empty, depending I suppose on whether or not you had money in the joint. It’s a rarity these days, a jazz club away from Midtown and SoHo and the Village, and not many out-of- towners find their way to it. Its clientele is an even-up mix of people who come from all over the city for the music, and neighborhood locals who don’t object to the music, and find it a pleasant place to kick back and get a buzz. It was always a pretty even mix of black and white, but lately the mixture’s been liberally spiced with Asians.
Danny Boy’s there three or four nights a week, giving the rest of his custom to Poogan’s Pub, on West Seventy-second between Columbus and Amsterdam. There’s no music at Poogan’s, except what sneaks out of the jukebox, and if there’s any charm to it beyond a certain raffish straightforwardness, I’ve never spotted it. I only go to Poogan’s if I’m looking for Danny Boy, but I’ll go to Mother Blue’s just for the music.
Danny Boy was at a table close to the bandstand, and he saw us before we saw him. He was smiling when my eyes picked him up, and beckoning us to his table.
He said, “Matt and Elaine. Sit down, sit down. This is Jodie. Jodie, Matt and Elaine.”
Jodie was Chinese, with utterly straight shoulder-length black hair and small perfect features in an oval face. She looked privately amused during the introductions, and indeed throughout the evening.
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I couldn’t decide if everything amused her or it was just her natural expression.
“They’re on their break,” Danny said, with a nod at the bandstand.
“You’ve heard the rhythm section here.” He named the musicians.
“And there’s a tenor player with them, and he’s very current, but I swear there are moments when he reminds me of Ben Webster. He’s a kid, I don’t know if he ever even heard of Ben Webster, and he certainly never caught a live performance, but wait and see if he doesn’t sound just like him.”
I’ve never known anyone like Danny Boy Bell, but then neither has anybody else. He’s barely five feet tall, small enough to buy his clothes in the boys’ department at Barneys, although for the past twenty years he’s had his suits made by a visiting Hong Kong tailor, which doesn’t cost any more and spares him embarrassment, along with the nuisance of leaving the house before dark. He’s the albino son of black West Indian parents, and strong light is hard on his eyes and bad for his skin.
He spends the daylight hours in his apartment, reading or sleeping or on the phone, and his nights at Poogan’s or Mother Blue’s.
His business is information. Most of his contacts have yellow sheets, but an arrest record doesn’t necessarily make a criminal. They are, I suppose, of the underworld, though Elaine thinks the French word demimonde is more suitable, if only because it’s French. Players and working girls, gamblers and grifters, people working angles or being worked by them, they all tend to turn up at Danny Boy’s table or call him on the phone. Sometimes he pays out money for the information he’s furnished, but this doesn’t happen often, and the sums are generally small. More often he pays his sources in favors, or in other information, if at all, as many people tell him things just to get the word around.
He was a source of mine on the job, and our relationship continued after I gave back my badge. We’ve become good friends over the forty years I’ve known him, and I think I’ve already said that I met Elaine at his table.
Elaine told him he was looking well, and he shook his head sadly.
“The first time anybody said that to me,” he said, “is the day I first real-118
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ized I was getting older. You ever hear anybody tell a kid in his twenties he’s looking well? Take Jodie here, she looks positively gorgeous, and I’ll tell her that, but I wouldn’t think of telling her she’s looking well.
Look at her, she’s got skin like a China doll, you should pardon the expression. It’ll be twenty years before she has to hear somebody say she’s looking well.”
“I take it back, Danny.”
“No, don’t do that, Elaine. I’m an alter kocker, that’s no secret, and at my age it does my heart good to hear I’m looking well. Especially from a beautiful young thing like yourself.”
