“We don’t have to worry about that, Kit. Lett is representing some angry ex-boyfriend and he got mad that I sucker punched him, that’s all. We got bigger things to talk about.”
“Like what?”
“You know anything about a guy named Jones got a whole bunch’a kids doin’ crimes for him?”
It was a rare moment to catch Kit off guard; he blinked — twice. He was small and delicate as far as the physical goes, but his will had a steel jacket. Any breach in that armor was a major achievement.
“What do you know about him?”
“Twill got himself mixed up with the dude tryin’ to help a girl lost her heart to one’a Jones’s men.”
“Put Twill on a plane and send him to Pakistan,” Kit said. “I doubt if even Jones got clout there.”
“Who is he?”
“The question is what is he? Child molesting, kidnapping, forced prostitution, blackmail, murder, extortion, smuggling, and sadism. I got a file with forty-six persons either missing or dead, and we think Jones killed ’em all.”
“Then why not arrest him?”
“I don’t even know what he looks like. No one does. He wears disguises and only makes himself known to the orphans and runaways he controls. Every time we arrest somebody that might know something, either a power from on high lets them go or they die. I’m surprised that Twill even got in without having his throat cut. Jones is bad business. He’s never been arrested. There’s no photo or fingerprint, not a signature or single strand of hair on him.”
“What’s he got on people?”
“What did Lucky Luciano have on J. Edgar Hoover?”
With that sentence Kit was telling me that he would do anything to bring down Jones.
“What would you give to get at him?” I asked.
“I’d lay off your ass for a month of Sundays.”
“Is that a February month or August?”
Kit’s smile was anything but friendly. “If you bring this man down I’ll even lay off the Hiram Stent business.”
I think I must’ve blinked then. Kit smiled as I wondered how he could have possibly linked me with the homeless dead man.
“Who?” I finally managed to utter.
“Hiram Stent. Homeless guy. He was murdered a couple of days ago in Brooklyn.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“I don’t know,” Kit admitted. “When he was being murdered I was at your office trying to keep you from coming to blows with my sergeant.”
“And?”
“Stent was killed in a mugging, at least that’s the way it looks. But he had your address and phone number written on a piece of paper that he’d hidden in his shoe.”
“That doesn’t mean I know him.”
“I don’t care, LT. You bring me Jones and I’ll send Stent to potter’s field.”
“Why you hate this guy so much?”
“I got my reasons.”
“Like what?”
“Like a dozen children murdered and tossed off in alleys and abandoned buildings,” he said. “Like judges, city hall officials, and senior cops getting in the way of every case related to him. I’m a cop, LT. I put people like you behind bars. Either I succeed or I don’t but the people on my side should never block my investigations.”
I gave that minor soliloquy a moment to settle. There was real passion in the angry cop. Whenever a man as dangerous as Kit expressed rage, you needed to give it a moment to breathe.
That moment gone, I asked, “You got a private cell?”
“Why?”
35
Four years ago that block on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx wasn’t even a “neighborhood in transition.” Most of the houses and small apartment buildings were abandoned or lived in by squatters. Back then the four-story house I was going to had two residents: Luke Nye, who passed for a black man but who actually looked to be a direct descendant of the moray eel, and Johnny Nightly, a midnight-colored enforcer who might have at one time been mistaken for Nat King Cole’s younger, more handsome brother.
That was then.
Today Luke’s building houses eight apartments, six of which are inhabited by Hispanic ladies and their children, and maybe a temporary man or two; one unit for Luke and another for Johnny.
The basement of Luke’s place was his main source of income: a huge room that housed three regulation-sized pool tables. It was here that the best players in the world came to compete. Johnny rented the room for anything from ten thousand to one hundred thousand dollars a night, and also ran book for people around the world who both watched and bet on the contests.
But now Luke’s neighborhood was becoming gentrified. The billionaires’ and multimillionaires’ colonization of the island of Manhattan had driven the middle classes out to Brooklyn, Queens, and even to the Grand Concourse. Luke bought buildings up and down the block, selling to would-be homeowners who wouldn’t cause him trouble.
Other than real estate, Luke’s side business was information. He would, for a thousand-dollar fee, answer solitary questions for people he trusted. Luke knew a great deal about the underworld from New York to New Mexico and all the way to New Delhi.
I was one of those special customers to whom Luke deigned to sell.
The building had a front door but I rarely approached it. My usual route was a concrete path that led around the back, arriving at a weatherworn door that was four steps down from ground level. I could have knocked but, as at Evangeline Sidney-Gray’s door in Boston, there was no need. I waited for maybe a minute and the door opened inward.
Asha Graham stood there. Slender and brown, disdainful and quite lovely, Asha wore an emerald dress that came down around her calves. She had run with half a dozen gangsters, gamblers, and gunmen over the past ten or twelve years; she’d outlived them one at a time. After a while bad men would avoid Asha whenever she came around. They could face a beating or bullet because there was some chance they might survive those encounters, but Asha was a death sentence and no sex in the world was worth that.
The thirty-something beauty might have become an old maid if not for Luke. He had seen everyone around him perish before their time. He believed in curses of course, all gamblers did, but he felt that his juju was at least as strong as Ms. Graham’s.
“Mr. McGill,” she said. It wasn’t quite a friendly greeting. Asha wasn’t the kind of woman to smile and fawn; she came from the guffaw and fuck, drink yourself senseless and die finishing school for young women.
“Asha.”
“You here for Luke or Johnny?”
“Can I have both?”
Asha let go of the slightest of smiles and stood to the side. I went past her, going down twelve more steps into one of the most important pool rooms in the world. Past the three tables was a sitting area with three red sofas set in a triangle about a circular table with a top made from a single piece of lapis lazuli. The room was bright because there was no game. There was a bottle of gin and a teapot on the blue table.
“LT,” Luke said, rising up from a sofa. He spent most of his time in the pool room. That was his life now that he had given up pimping, stealing, dealing, and murder-for-hire.
“Luke,” I said, shaking the hand he offered.
“Leonid,” Johnny Nightly said. He also rose and shook my hand.
When we were all seated Luke asked, “Who can do what for you today, LT?”
“The who is you,” I said, “and the what is two names. An underground Fagin wannabe named Jones and a guy who’s probably in the life named Paulie DeGeorges.”
That was one of the few times I saw a moment of hesitation in Luke’s face.
“DeGeorges,” he said, pondering. “What’s his thing?”
“I’m not sure. There’s a girl way out of her depth that has stolen something that’s very valuable and maybe important for other reasons. She’s probably hoping to use this guy to help her work it through. But I really don’t know anything about him except for the name and that the one time anybody saw him he was wearing a bow tie.”