“I’ll call later,” I said.
She popped out from the side of the desk and said, “Ortiz, and it won’t go the distance.”
I was out the door and into the hallway outside our office. Still plenty of time, though I couldn’t check it on a reliable watch. Six floors below, the voices of two men were echoing loud and dirty. I moved along the railing toward the stairs and looked down. The bald head and the burly body told me that one of the three men below was the Farraday’s owner, Jeremy Butler. I didn’t recognize the two men with him, at least not from this angle, but they were big and standing close to Jeremy.
I started down the stairs, unable to sort the words of anger from their echo.
Jeremy is pushing sixty-five, or maybe pulling it. He’s an ex-wrestler who saved his money and wound up with a second-rate office building and some scattered third-rate apartment buildings. He was now a landlord with time to devote to his passion-poetry-and to his family, which included his wife, the former Alice Pallis, who nearly matched Jeremy in size and strength, and their one-year-old daughter, Natasha, a curly-haired beauty who bore no resemblance to either of her parents.
By the time I made it down to the lobby, I could see the two men shouting in Jeremy’s face. One was young, no more than thirty. Giving him the benefit of the doubt he looked a little like a crazed John Garfield. The other was in his forties and looked a little like a pig. The pig held something in his right hand, something metal.
“You’ll pay,” the older one was saying. “You hear me?”
Jeremy didn’t answer. He looked from one to the other with his hands at his sides.
“Everybody’s paying, up and down the street,” the younger one shouted.
“I will advise them not to do so,” Jeremy said softly.
“There are bad people around the city,” the older one said. “Vandals. People who destroy other people’s property for no reason. They break windows and. . I’ve told you this already. You’re not listening.”
I paused at the bottom step, fairly sure they couldn’t see me. Then I saw that the object in the older guy’s hand was a small crowbar. I took a step out of the shadows. The younger one spotted me and nudged his partner, who looked toward me.
“You a cop?” he asked cautiously.
“No,” I said.
“Then stay out of this,” he warned, holding up the crowbar. “This is a business discussion with the old man.”
“I was just going to ask for the time,” I said.
“It’s eleven-twenty, Toby,” Jeremy said.
The crowbar came up in a streak. So did Jeremy’s left hand. He grabbed the older guy’s wrist and twisted. The one who looked like John Garfield started to throw a punch. Jeremy swooped the arm he was holding right at the younger guy, and the crowbar, still in the hand of the pig, hit John Garfield in the face. The younger guy staggered back with a yell, his hands covering his eyes. Jeremy let go of the wrist of the other man, who went down on his knees in agony. The crowbar clattered to the floor and the man’s wrist hung limp and possibly broken.
I watched while Jeremy advanced on the man who had taken the crowbar across his face, now backed up against the wall. He took his hands down, blood streaming from his nose, a look of panic in his eyes.
“Don’t touch your nose,” Jeremy said, reaching up for the man’s face. “This will hurt but the bone will be back in place, and if you don’t touch it, it will heal and look quite natural.”
Before the man could mount a protest, Jeremy put his left hand behind the man’s head and pinched his nose between the thumb and fingers of his right hand. The man squirmed, let out an anguished “Ahhhhhh,” and sank to the floor.
Jeremy turned to the man with the injured wrist, who was trying to stand.
“Hey, enough,” the man said. “Me and Twines are just trying to make a living here.”
Jeremy moved toward him.
“The truth is nobody on the block gave us money,” the man said. “The truth is we’re no damn good at this and getting pretty goddamn frustrated. Twines is my sister’s kid. How am I gonna explain his broken nose?”
Jeremy didn’t answer. He grabbed the man’s shoulder and held up the damaged arm. The man tried to pull away.
“It’s not broken,” Jeremy said. “Sprained wrist. Go.”
“I want my crowbar.”
“I suggest you listen to the man,” I said.
The man with the sprained wrist winced his way to his nephew, who was trying to get up from his knees. He put his good arm around Twines and said, “This is a goddamn hard life, let me tell you.”
“Go, now,” Jeremy said gently.
The two men slouched to the door, went into the outer lobby, and out onto Hoover in search of a new line of work.
“This is no longer a safe neighborhood,” Jeremy said as he bent to pick up the crowbar.
“It’s not a safe world,” I added.
“I have a wife and child,” he said, looking around the vast lobby of his office building and up toward the offices on the eighth floor he had converted to a rambling apartment for his family.
“Might be a good idea to. . I’m on my way to a realestate dealer I know. You want me to?. .”
“No, thank you, Toby,” he said, surveying the trail of blood from Twines’s nose. “I have other property.”
“I’m late, Jeremy,” I said.
“If you have some time later, I have a new poem.”
“Later, promise,” I said, en route to the door.
It was still a good day.
I went out the rear exit of the Farraday and headed for my car. The open lot was covered with gravel; trash, which Jeremy cleaned up once a week, thrown from the windows of the Farraday; and the wreckage of two abandoned cars in which, depending on the season, a homeless alcoholic or two resided. This season’s resident of the alley was Vince. Vince was standing in front of my Crosley. I had paid Vince a quarter, the going rate, for watching my car. The possible dangers to my car were theft, stolen tires or hubcaps, broken windows, and Vince.
Vince looked somewhere near sixty but was probably closer to forty-five. He had a reasonably clean-shaven face with a few nicks and healing cuts. I had given him a Gillette razor, a pack of Blue blades, two of my old shirts, an antique pair of pants I found in the back of my closet, and a pair of university oxfords that had always pinched my toes. I had also suggested to him that he put on the clothes, shave, and make the rounds of the local restaurants in search of a pearldiving job.
It had worked for the last keeper of the alley.
Vince had solemnly promised he would make the rounds, but when it came to actually going into a diner and asking to see the boss, it was too much for him, or so he had told me with a shrug.
“A man’s nature is a man’s nature,” Vince had said with a sigh.
Vince said he had been a history teacher in a high school in Chicago until he fell or was pushed down a school stairway between classes. The world had gone blurry, and only a drink or twenty could make it seem clear again. He had been fired in the middle of a semester and, since he had no family, Vince had packed his bag, got into his car, and driven out in search of a cave or hole to hide in. That, Vince said, was “five or six or eight years ago, certainly long before this war and long after the last one.”
I handed Vince two quarters and said thanks.
He looked at the two quarters and handed one back to me.
“My fee was a quarter,” he said. “This is business, not charity.”
“You might want to raise your rates a little,” I suggested, opening the Crosley’s door. “Prices are going up everywhere. I think your customers would understand.”
“You are my only customer,” Vince said, pocketing the quarter in what used to be my pants. “Now, if you want to put me on an exclusive retainer and continue to pay at the current rate. .”
I turned awkwardly in my seat, fished a dollar bill from my wallet, and handed it to him. It followed the quarter into his pocket.
“We should have a written contract,” Vince said.
