later, but I have the feeling it wouldn’t be as terrific in actuality as it is in fantasy, because it would be hard to concentrate and you wouldn’t know which way to turn. At any rate, I was fairly certain I wouldn’t get to try it with Maeve and Jan. I had the feeling they were less than crazy about one another.
Then Maeve went back to her tables and Jan said, “I guess I’ll be there tomorrow, Chip. But there’s really nothing I know. Nothing that would help.”
“You were right here when she got killed,” I said “Didn’t you see anything at all?”
“The police asked me all that.”
“Well, maybe you saw something and didn’t know you saw it. I mean, you know, it didn’t seem important at the time.”
“I didn’t even see it,” she said. “I was pouring a drink. The first I knew something was wrong was when everybody took a deep breath all at once. Then I turned around and Cherry was lying on the stage and that was the first I saw of it.”
“Well, I think you should come tomorrow anyway.”
“I will.”
I finished most of my beer and decided I could live without the rest of it. I left some change on the bar for Jan, decided it was a puny tip and added a dollar bill. I nodded a sort of collective goodnight on the chance that someone was looking my way and I walked to the door and out onto Seventh Avenue.
I thought about a cab and decided I would take the subway instead. The AA train stops at Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth, so I started uptown, and I walked about ten steps and felt a pair of hands take hold of my right arm. I was just getting ready to find out who owned them when two more hands took hold of my left arm and a voice said, “Easy does it, kid.”
I said, “Oh, come on. It’s the middle of Times Square and there are cops all over the place.”
“Oh, yeah? I don’t see no cops around, kid. Where are all the cops?”
Collecting graft, I decided. Sleeping in their cars. Because I couldn’t see a single cop anywhere. I heard a calypso verse once that maintained that policemen, women, and taxi cabs are never there when you want them. It’s the God’s honest truth.
“We’re just gonna take a nice ride,” the voice said. They were walking me along and they had my arms in a disturbingly effective grip.
“Suppose I don’t want to go?”
“That would be silly.”
“Getting in a car would be sillier.”
“Now what you got to do is use your head,” said another voice, the one on my left. “A man wants to talk to you. That’s all there is to it. He says not to hurt you long as you cooperate. What the hell, you’re cooperating, aren’t you? There’s the car right around the comer, and you’re walking to it like a nice reasonable kid. So what’s the problem?”
“Who’s the boss?”
“The guy we’re going to see.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. We walked up to the car, a long low Lincoln with a black man behind the wheel. He was wearing sunglasses, his head was shaved, there was a gold earring in his ear, and he had a little gold spoon on a gold chain around his neck. That’s either a sign that you use cocaine or that you want people to think you do.
I said, “Look, tell me who the boss is or I don’t get in the car.”
“If we want you to get in the car, kid, there’s not a hell of a lot you can do about it.”
“I can make it easier,” I said. “Just tell me who we’re going to see.”
One of them let go of my arms and stepped around to where I could see him. He wasn’t much to look at, but he didn’t have to be to do his job. He looked like a hood, which stood to reason, because that was evidently what he was.
He said, “What the hell, you’ll know in ten minutes anyway. The boss is Mr. Danzig. You gonna get in the car now?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “I mean, why not? I was supposed to see him anyway.”
Twelve
I DON’T KNOW what I expected exactly. He had already surprised me. I’d had the impression that he was very small-time, not important enough to have a couple of musclemen and a driver working for him. Of course he could have hired them for the occasion from Hertz Rent-a-Hood, but somehow I doubted this.
But whatever I had expected, he wasn’t it. He was waiting for me in a penthouse apartment on top of a high-rise on York Avenue in the Eighties. One whole wall of the living room was glass, and you could look out across the East River and gaze at more of the Borough of Queens than anyone in his right mind would want to see. He was doing just that when we walked in, all dolled up in a black mohair suit and holding a glass of something-on-the- rocks in his hand. When he turned to look at me I got the feeling he was disappointed that it was only me and not the photographer from
But he wasn’t disappointed at all. He flashed me a smile that showed almost as many teeth as Haskell Henderson’s without looking half as phony. “You must be Mr. Harrison,” he said. “I’m so glad to see you.”
He crossed the room. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds because there was a lot of room to cross and all of it was covered by a light blue carpet deep enough to make walking a tricky proposition. He transferred his drink to his left hand and held out his right hand. I took it, and we shook hands briskly, and he let me have the smile again.
“I hope these gentlemen behaved properly,” he said, indicating the two muscle types. The driver had stayed with the car. “And let me apologize for the manner in which I had you brought here. In my field, the direct approach is often the only possible approach. You weren’t abused, I hope?”
“No.”
“That’s good to know,” he said. He smiled past me at the two heavies. “That’s all for tonight,” he said. “And thanks very much.”
There was something about the way he talked that made his sentences go on ringing in my head after he was done saying them. You just knew that he hadn’t talked like this years ago, and that he wouldn’t speak the same words or use the same accent if, say, you woke him up suddenly in the middle of the night. He was all dressed up in a suit as good as one of Gregorio’s, and he had at least as good a barber, and his teeth were capped by the world’s greatest dentist, and underneath it all you had a hard tough monkey who could beat a man to death with a baseball bat and then go home and tuck himself in for a good eight hours’ sleep.
I had met the type before. Haig has a good friend named John LiCastro who spends a lot of his time sipping espresso in a neighborhood social club on Mulberry Street, making little executive decisions, such as who lives and who dies. LiCastro raises tropical fish, mostly cichlids, and when his fish die he practically puts on a black arm band. Leonard Danzig was an up-to-date version of the same type.
“You’ll want something to drink,” he said to me now. “I believe you generally drink beer. I have Heineken’s and Lowenbrau.”
There’s nothing wrong with either, but I’d had enough beer. I asked if he happened to have Irish whiskey. He didn’t, and he seemed genuinely apologetic. He gave me my choice of three different brands of expensive scotch. I took Dewar’s Ancestor, which turned out to be what he was drinking, too. He made a drink for me and freshened his own and motioned me to a pair of chairs near the wall of glass. He took one and I took the other and we both sipped whiskey.
He said, “I have a problem. It started last night when Cherry was murdered. It’s not getting simpler. It’s getting more difficult.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re with Leo Haig. He’s a private detective. I also understand he’s something of an oddball.”
I admitted that some people probably thought so. I didn’t bother to add that I was one of them.
“But I also understand he gets results.”
“Well, he’s a genius,” I said. “And the only way to prove he’s a genius is by solving impossible crimes, so
