The kid was incoherent, screaming, trying to pry his Nike fakes off his swelling foot. Inside, three boys between ten and fourteen were suddenly very quiet. One of them had taken the office chair from behind the space’s single desk and had been spinning around on it. Tallow watched him slowly rotate to a stop and then considered them all with a chilly study.
“It was an accident. I was trying to get past him and I accidentally hurt him. You understand what I’m telling you, don’t you?”
A big voice came from the back room. “What the fuck is going on out there?”
“Police,” Tallow said.
A wide man in his forties shouldered his way out of the back, one hand on his belt. He might have been a linebacker or a weight lifter once, but he’d gained some weight, probably in the past year or two, and his pants weren’t staying on his waist anymore. He wasn’t ready to change the way he dressed or start wearing suspenders, so he walked around with one hand on his belt to continually tug his pants up off his hips and over his belly. He took in the scene.
“What the fuck, man?”
Tallow showed him his badge. “Looking for Terence Carman.”
“That’s me. But what the fuck is this?”
“Your boy here fell over. Isn’t that right, kids?”
The children just stared.
Carman put his shoulders back and moved into the room, yelling. “You get the fuck out of here now, you little shits. Go on, move it, find some other blood to piss off. Del, stop that fucking noise and stand up, you sound like a piglet getting it up the ass from an angry horse, man. Help him the fuck up, go on, get out.”
There was moving and dawdling and bitching as they left. Carman turned to Tallow with a massive shrug. “My sister’s kids, man. What you gonna do, they’ve got to be someplace. Oh shit, would you look at that.”
Tallow followed his angry glance and bent to pick up the blunt from where it had been smoldering a small brown hole in the thin carpet.
Carman watched him. “You’re not going to make a thing out of that.”
“I don’t know yet. You own an apartment building on Pearl Street.”
“Yeah, I figured I’d be getting a visit. Just not so soon.” Carman reached for the blunt. Tallow jerked it back.
“I am in a bad mood. I’ve just had to dance with your relatives, and I’ve recently had to shoot one of your tenants dead while wearing my partner’s brains on my sleeve. So how about I get some open and friendly cooperation, so I don’t have to balance this little thing here on top of the mound of shit I could pour through your door.”
Carman looked at Tallow and gave up. He seemed to sag inside himself, the skin around his neck rucking up like a kicked rug.
“Okay, okay.”
Tallow held his gaze on Carman a few beats longer. Carman sank a bit more, trudged to the front door, and, with great theatrical effort, closed and locked it. “C’mon,” he said, wading through knee-deep misery toward the back room.
The room was a grimy box. Metal shelving stuffed with binders lined one side. Two ratty armchairs, a small table with two overfilled ashtrays, and a few stools stolen from unwary or uncaring drinking establishments filled it out. Carman took what was obviously his armchair and spilled into it, a hand on either arm, legs slightly apart and solidly planted. Tallow imagined that this was what passed for the patriarch’s chair in Carman’s world.
Tallow pressed the end of the blunt into the ashtray. Carman nodded. Tallow considered the nearest stool— the pink plastic seat covering split like an idiot grin, yellowed foam lolling out—and decided to risk the other armchair instead. Sitting, he discovered that some padding and probably a few of the springs were gone. He was lower down than Carman. Tallow wondered if Carman had cut the padding out himself.
“So you killed Bobby Tagg, then,” Carman eventually said.
“Was that his name?”
“You didn’t know his name?”
“It’s all a bit of a blur, to be honest. So, what, we called you, or…?”
“Hell no. My other fucking tenants called me. Pretty much all of them. Shit, they called me before they called you. Like I was going to do something about Bobby Tagg stripping bare-ass naked and waving a goddamn shotgun around. And then you can be damn sure they were all back on the phone when you wasted the crazy asshole.”
“All of them?”
“Every last one.”
“Good. Tell me about the tenant in apartment three A.”
“Never met him.”
Tallow looked meaningfully at the stupid weed-stuffed mint-and-chocolate-flavored cigar butt sticking out of the ashtray. “This is your friendly cooperation?”
“No, no, stay sat. I’m explaining. Because I don’t want any trouble, and you’re gonna see why. The rent on three A is paid annually. In cash. What happens is, sometime in March, someone calls me up and says, How much for another year on three A? And I’m like, tax time’s coming up, so I take the rent, add on twenty percent for my trouble, make it a nice round number, and give them that. Next day, there’ll be an envelope on the floor with the cash in. And I forget all about three A for another year.”
“And that didn’t smell like trouble to you?”
“Listen, people rent from me for all kinds of reasons. I got people paying me four grand a month just for somewhere to fuck three lunchtimes a week. My old dad always said, Asking too many questions gets in the way of doing business.”
“What business was your dad in?”
“This one. I inherited it. The Pearl Street place has been in the family since the fifties. Inherited the guy in three A too. His original deal was with my old dad, and that too passed down to me.”
“So your dad met him.”
“I guess.”
Tallow sank lower in the chair. “This is where you tell me that your dear old dad collected his last rent check a while back.”
“Yeah. Retired, went to Disney World, died on the It’s a Small World ride.” Carman glanced around his shitbox fiefdom with a mirthless grin. “Yeah, there wasn’t any compensation. There were hookers involved. And explosives. Anyway. No, my old dad’s long gone.”
Tallow took out his notebook and pen, feeling like he was about to try to screw fog but professionally compelled to log what little this meeting had given him. “So, Mr. Carman. You never met the tenant of three A. It was a long-standing arrangement with your father. How long do you think this arrangement has run?”
“Twenty years, easy. I, you know, I don’t have paperwork on it to refer to.”
“I figured. Have you ever been inside apartment three A?”
Carman rubbed the back of his neck. Smiled. A smaller smile, but a real one this time. “Tried once. Back when I first took over running that building, when my dad was still around. I was younger, and I hadn’t learned that one thing yet. So I wanted to know something about the invisible man, you know? Couldn’t get in. He’d jammed the lock somehow. Hadn’t
“What one thing? You said you hadn’t learned that one thing yet. What’s that?”
“Like I said, asking too many questions gets in the way of doing business. You got to learn not to ask questions all the time. That one thing is learning the right question to ask at the right time.”
“Is that right.”
“You’d know that, Detective. Right?” Carman sat proud in his back-room throne, having found a little epigram he’d probably heard on a TV show and offered it to his guest like an old subway token.
“Who are you selling the building to, Mr. Carman?”
“Some banking company. Vivicy. They’re, like, financial services, all that weird money stuff that no one
