“That the only reason?” Wanda asked, and snuggled a little closer to him.
“Guy’s a Puerto Rican switch-hitter,” Walsh told Flo. “Goes by Emmy on the street. His square handle is Emilio Herrera. Ever see him in here?”
“Oh, sure,” Flo said. “Emmy’s a darling.”
“You know Emmy, too?” Ollie asked Wanda, just as he reached clear up under her skirt and got the shock of his life.
• • •
“YOU SHOULD HAVEtold me she was a he,” he shouted at Walsh. The two men were striding up the street toward where Ollie had parked the car. One look at them, you’d know they were cops, that stride they had. Same way you took one look at a hooker, you knew she was a hooker, the strut on her.
“You were getting along so fine there,” Walsh said, grinning. “I didn’t want to…”
“And who the fuck is John Grisham?”
“…interrupt a beautiful…”
“Is the other one a man, too? Flo? Is she a man?”
“She is a man, yes, Ollie.” He grinned again, the fuckin Irish bastard. “I guess that rules out both of them, huh?” he said.
Ollie walked on ahead of him. He was at the car, unlocking the door, checking the windows to make sure some other faggot junkie hooker hadn’t smashed one of them, when Walsh caught up.
“You won’t be needing me anymore, will you?” he asked. “You got what you wanted, right?”
“I got alocationis all I got.”
“They told you he lives in Kingston Station,” Walsh said. “What more do you need?”
“Kingston Station is six blocks wide and a mile long,” Ollie said. “That’s a lot of territory to get lost in.”
“It’s also Jamaican,” Walsh said.
“So?”
“Your man’s Puerto Rican. He should stick out like a sore thumb.”
“I’ve been looking for the little fuck the past week,” Ollie said. “So far he ain’t sticking out so good.”
“What’s your book called?” Walsh asked.
“Fuck you,” Ollie said.
“Nice title,” Walsh said, and threw a finger at him and walked away from the car.
• • •
THE TRUE AND PROPER NAMEof the neighborhood now called Kingston Station was Westfield Station. Perhaps that was because when railroad tracks still ran along that side of the city, the station stop there was called Westfield. It was not until an overwhelmingly large number of Irish immigrants settled in Westfield Station that the neighborhood was familiarly dubbed Dublin Town. Russian Jews started pouring in at the turn of the century, and the place was popularly renamed Little Kiev. Upward mobility sent the Jews to the suburbs, ceding the area to Italians moving out of ghettos downtown. The area was still called Little Kiev, but the streets now resonated to cries of“Buon giorno”and“Ba fahn gool!”But not for long.
Prosperity led to migration. The Italians, too, followed the trail to the suburbs. Nature abhors a vacuum. The Puerto Ricans came next, and finally the Jamaicans. So many Jamaicans, in fact, that first the rest of the whitebread city, and then the residents themselves, began calling the area Kingston Station. An enterprising mayor, gunning for the Jamaican vote, even suggested that the name be legally changed to what everyone was calling it, anyway. Nobody but the Jamaicans liked that idea. In everyday conversation, then, Westfield Station was Kingston Station. But the name on the maps remained what it had been back in 1878, when the railroad opened its route along the river.
Everybody in Kingston Station—
Well, everybody along James Street, anyway.
—had heard of the transvestite hooker who called himself Emmy, but nobody knew where the hell he was. Ollie had been a detective for a very long time. He knew the word had gone out. Somehow, Emilio Herrera had learned that the law was looking for him.
So where the hell was he?
• • •
SHANAHAN’S BARat midnight was full of policemen who’d just come off duty. This made Emilio and Aine somewhat uncomfortable. But they were here to learn if this was, in fact, the bar Olivia Wesley Watts had mentioned in her report to the Commissioner, and it certainly looked as if it might be.
Emilio was convinced that the woman they’d seen coming out of the basement on Culver Av was indeed Livvie, who had somehow escaped her captors. Aine thought this was a very far-fetched notion.
“She fits the description exactly,” Emilio said, and quoted from the report, which by now he knew by heart because he’d read and reread it so many times, searching for clues. “‘I am a female police detective, twenty-nine years old, five feet, eight inches tall, and weighing one hundred and twenty-three pounds, which is slender.’”
“I weigh a hundred and six,” Aine said. “That’sslender.”
“That’sskinny,” Emilio said, and went on quoting from the report. “‘My hair is a sort of reddish brown, what my mother used to call auburn…’”
“My hair is red, too.”
“Your hair is not reddish brown.”
“But it’s red.”
“It’s carrot colored.”
“That’s still red,” Aine insisted.
“‘I wear it cut to just above the shoulders,’” Emilio quoted. “‘What my mother used to call a shag cut.’”
“I wear my hair short, too,” Aine said.
“And shaggy,” he agreed. “‘My eyes are green…’”
“So are mine.”
“‘I look very Irish…’”
“So do I.”
“Aine, what is yourpoint?” Emilio asked, truly irritated now.
“My point is, do you thinkI’mOlivia Watts-her-name?”
“Of course not.”
“So why do you think some Irish babe you ran into on the street is her?”
“Because she was coming out of the verybuilding!” Emilio said. “Otherwise it would be too much of a coincidence!”
“The world is full of coincidence,” Aine said wisely.
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Emilio said. “You believe in coincidence, then you don’t believe in God. It’s God makes things happen, not coincidence.”
“Oh okay. Then it was God made me a junkie and a whore, right?”
Emilio looked at her.
“Whatareyou?” he asked. “Some kind of atheist?”
“That’s what I am, yes,” Aine said.
“Since when?”
“Since I was twelve years old and a priest felt me up in the rectory.”
“That never happened.”
“Oh no?”
“And anyway, you can’t blame God for some horny priest.”
“WhatdoI blame him for? All these fucking lunatics fighting wars in his name? Killing each other in his name? I don’t know any atheists who kill people in God’s name. Not a single one. I don’t believe in a God who allows such things to happen. I believe in coincidence, is what makes things happen.”
Which was when Francisco Palacios walked in and took a stool beside them at the bar.
BECAUSE THE GAUCHOrecognized Emilio as a fellow Puerto Rican, and because he had an eye for the women, especially if they seemed not to be wearing either panties or a bra, he struck up a conversation with the young couple, directing his conversation at first directly to Emilio, entirely in Spanish, because he didn’t want the young Irish girl, was what she looked like, to think he was coming on to her, even though he was. This annoyed
