Eileen figured it’d be best to come in through the back door. Bust it open with a battering ram, surprise them at the table testing the dope and handing over the money. Rosita Washington wouldn’t be coming here alone, that was for sure, not if the story about the Miami boys ripping her off was true. Her people would be armed. And so might the three grifters buying the stuff. She planned to ask Byrnes for a full-force raiding party, Kevlar vests and assault rifles, never mind any heroics Parker might have in mind.
She walked over to the back door, confirmed that a Mickey Mouse lock was on it, looked around the room one last time, and then pulled the chain on the hanging overhead light bulb. In the scant daylight spilling from the narrow street level windows, she found her way to the steps, and climbed them to the ground floor. She listened at the door there before letting herself into the building. A woman carrying two bags of groceries and climbing the steps to the first floor gave her only a backward glance. Eileen walked to the entrance foyer and let herself out into the street.
A young Hispanic male and an Irish-looking female were just approaching the building. The male stopped dead in his tracks. His mouth fell open. He looked directly into Eileen’s face and said, “Livvie?”
“Sorry,” Eileen said, smiling, and walked on past him.
Emilio turned to Aine and said, “It was her, wasn’t it?”
Or even she.
THE GIRLSusually started their stroll at nine, nine-thirty, sometimes even later. They’d learned from experience that nobody wanted to get laid too soon after dinnertime. These men were different from the ones who frequented the massage parlors. Those guys went upstairs at any time of day, whenever the urge hit them, some of them for quickies on their way to the train station before going home to their sweet little wives in the burbs. The johns here in Ho Alley were different.
You rarely saw a man on foot here. First off, it was too dangerous, and secondly you had to accommodate somebody like that with a room, and a room cost money, not to mention all the bother of finding one, it just didn’t pay. The men looking for tail here usually cruised by in automobiles, casing the merchandise, and then drove up to the curb and parked, and waited for a girl to come over, and lean into the window, and talk business. The price of a handjob was fifty bucks. A blowjob cost a hundred. Nowadays, you couldn’t get laid for less than three, and most girls didn’t want to bother with intercourse at all. Most girls found intercourse too complicated, what with having to take off their panties and lift their skirts and place themselves in a vulnerable position on the back seat of a car in case the law showed. A handjob or a blowjob, you could perform on the front seat, sitting like a lady, fully clothed. Besides, most girls found intercourse too intimate. It wasn’t any different on the street than in high school. Nowadays, in high school, a blowjob was the equivalent of a goodnight kiss.
Except for cops they knew, who were on the take and who would look the other way in return for any quick sex they could get, the girls were ever on the alert for the law. You got some jackass uniformed cop who didn’t know how the system worked, he’d come around like some dumb preacher spouting hellfire and damnation, and next thing you knew you were in a holding cell waiting for night court. Or sometimes even a detective, although most of them knew better, they’d been around a long while, they knew how it worked, they couldn’t care less if you blew the Mayor in broad daylight on the steps of City Hall. It was the young cops you had to watch out for. The ones who still believed.
The girls on stroll that night spotted Ollie for a cop the moment he entered the street. Maybe it was the arrogant stride, or the know-it-all look on his face. Or maybe it was because, first of all, he was on foot, and next he didn’t seem to be seriously looking for a piece of ass. The hungry, desperate, guilty appearance of a bona fide john just wasn’t there. In ten seconds flat, half the girls on the street disappeared into doorways, or walked around the corner, or simply went home for the night, they didn’t need trouble from a fat flatfoot. The other half were otherwise engaged in parked automobiles all up and down the street. Ollie floated up Ho Alley like an aircraft carrier steaming into the Persian Gulf. He was looking for a blond Puerto Rican cross-dressing hooker named Emilio Herrera.
The first girl he talked to was just coming out of a parked Caddy near the closed Korean nail place up the block. She swung her legs out of the car, adjusted her short skirt, waggled her fingers goodbye to the white man behind the wheel, and turned to find a person who weighed perhaps a ton and a half standing there in her path, oh shit, she thought, a cop. The Caddy pulled away from the curb in a wink.
“Hi,” she said cheerily. “You lost?”
“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” Ollie said.
“Oh?” the girl said, and looked him up and down. “Maybe I can help instead.”
Maybe he wasn’t a cop after all. Though a quick glance up the street revealed an amazing lack of pulchritude on display, a sure sign that the other girls on stroll had made him for what he was and had split the scene toot sweet.
“I’m really looking for this one particular person,” Ollie said.
Still hadn’t flashed the tin, though, so who could tell? And if he was merely here looking for sex, why hand him over to anyone else?
“What’s her name?” she asked. “Though, you know, maybe I can help you.”
“She’s a he,” Ollie said, and grinned like a hyena. “Emilio Herrera, you know her? Him?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t,” the girl said at once, and then, “In fact, I was on my way home, so if you’ll excuse me…”
“Hold it just a second,” Ollie said. He was still smiling. The girl was thinking he was either a fat pig of a john who dug boys, in which case she didn’t want to have anything to do with him, or else he was a fat pig of a cop looking to bust Emilio for narcotics use or breaking and entry, both of which pursuits Emilio was pretty good at. In which case shestilldidn’t want to have anything to do with him.
“Emmy?” he said. “He goes by the name Emmy?”
“Never heard of himorher,” the girl said.
“And what’s your name?”
“Why is that important to you?”
“Because we like to know who’s impeding the progress of a police investigation,” he said, and out came the tin, all blue and gold, Detective/First Grade it said on it. Oh shit, she thought again.
“I’m Talu,” she said.
“Talu indeed,” he said, “ah yes.”
She wondered who he was imitating.
He sounded like Al Pacino in some movie she saw ages ago, before she got in the life.
She was wondering, too, how she could get him off her back about Emilio, whom she knew only as a transvestite junkie who catered to faggots who didn’t know they were faggots. She didn’t want trouble here tonight. A minute ago, she’d told him she was on her way home. Right now, that’s all she wanted to do, go home, fast.
“And what may your last name be, m’little chickadee?”
“Diaz,” she said.
“In which case, you might be familiar with this Herrera girl or boy, as the case may be, who is yet another person of the Hispanic persuasion, not to mention the profession you both share.”
“I don’t know what profession that is you’re talking about,” Talu said.
“Ah me, a poor innocent adrift on the night,” Ollie said.
“If you don’t mind, Detective, I’d really like to go home now.”
“Ah, but I thought I detected a faint glimmer in your eye when I mentioned the name Herrera,” Ollie said.
“No, I don’t know the man.”
“Then I must have been mistaken, Talu.”
“Yes, you surely were.”
“In which case, do go home. And may God bless you,” he said.
She couldn’t believe her own ears.
She turned and was out of there in a Taliban minute.
Ollie was thinking he’d hit the files when he got back to the office, see if they had anything that might connect little Miss Talu Diaz here, with her twitchy little ass and mile-high heels, to Mr. Emilio Herrera, with his blond wig and big tits, who had not showed up on the computer, and who so far was—
