“Pay me,” he said.
“Why should I pay you? You keep telling me you don’t know anything,” I pointed out. He chuckled a little at that.
“Yeah, yeah, but since you’re not a cop, you can charge in some expenses, so you can pay me. Besides, maybe I know something.” He went back to his mopping.
“Tell me something, and I’ll pay you what it’s worth,” I suggested. I was smiling too.
“Okay, okay,” he said, laughing, “but no less than a hundred.”
“No less than fifty,” I offered. He stopped working and leaned on the mop.
“Okay. First off, you’d be surprised what people send from here. Long letters, big documents, local numbers, long distance. They do all kinds of things. I don’t keep records. But I remember about a week ago
… maybe the day you’re interested in… this bag lady comes in. She stinks to high heaven, got maybe fifty sweaters on, and these high-top sneakers that are five sizes too big. I’m thinking, she wants to sell me cans or something, and I’m about to ask her to leave. But she didn’t have cans. She had a long fax to send. I’m pretty sure it was to a local number. See, that’s different. I don’t usually get street people in here sending faxes.”
“You know who she is?” I asked. He wrinkled his brow elaborately, like I was crazy.
“You ever see her before? In the neighborhood?” I asked.
He thought about this. “Maybe yes,” he said. “Maybe in the park, across from the hospital, over by the playground. I walk by there most every day. I could’ve seen her around there, or maybe it was a different bag lady.”
“Besides the sweaters and the sneakers, what did she look like?”
He thought some more. “She was white. She was old. I mean, they all look old, but she really was old. Maybe sixty, older maybe. With a lot of frizzy gray hair sticking out.” He gestured with his hands out by the sides of his head. “She was pretty short, five foot one or two, but round. I don’t know how much of that was sweaters. What else? Her high-tops, they were blue… really dirty, but like electric blue.”
I was impressed, and I told him so. I gave him two fifties, plus seventy-five cents for a cup of the strong coffee he had just brewed, and left him to his cleaning.
Finding the bodega on Madison and 98th Street had been easy. One of the reverse directories on the Internet had taken the phone number on Pierro’s fax and given me an address on Madison. At nine a.m. I’d taken the Lexington Avenue subway up to 96th and walked west. It was a beautiful fall morning, clear and cold, yesterday’s rain not even a memory. I saw the corner storefront, and the English and Spanish signs in the window, advertising phone, fax, and copying services, and figured that was the place. I hadn’t expected much, really. Blackmailers don’t typically give their phone numbers out too freely. On the other hand, I try never to overestimate anyone’s intelligence, and it was a lead I had to follow.
Coffee in hand, I went around the corner to Fifth Avenue, walked north a couple of blocks to Mt. Sinai Hospital, crossed the street, and went into Central Park. I entered just above the East Meadow and near a small playground tucked up against Fifth. I was in a rectangle of the park that was bounded to the west by the Park Drive, to the north by the 102nd Street entrance to the drive, to the east by Fifth Avenue, and to the south by the 97th Street transverse. There were only a few miles of footpaths running through the area, but I was hoping not to have to cover them all. Based on what my friend at the bodega had said, I decided to work my way out from the playground.
Finding someone living on the streets is either pretty easy or nearly impossible. It’s a question of habit. There are some street people who, regardless of how disturbed or detached from reality, follow routines. They travel in defined territories, along consistent routes. They sleep in the same places and eat in the same places; they go to the same spots to bathe, to find clothes, to find money, and to get medication. If you know one of the stations along their route, and you have enough time to wait, they will often come to you. There are others, though, who follow no discernible pattern. They roam widely, sleeping and eating wherever and whenever opportunity presents itself. These people are almost impossible for one person to find without some luck or divine intervention. I hoped that the blue-sneaker lady was a creature of habit.
At this hour, the playground was almost empty, just a few moms bundled against the morning chill, watching their preschool kids, who were oblivious to it. No street people in the playground or on the benches nearby. I walked north. On the path that wound its way to 102nd Street, I met some runners, many dog walkers, and some more mothers with strollers, but no blue-sneaker lady. I walked west along the Park Drive access road, and picked up another path headed south. This one was quieter and less traveled. The traffic sounds from Fifth and from the transverse were muted to a background susurrus. I could hear the bare tree limbs rubbing in the small breeze, and the mangy gray squirrels were loud as they bounded through the fallen leaves. A few tough sparrows hopped around on the path just ahead of me, looking to mug me for breadcrumbs, and even the sound of their tiny talons on the pavement was distinct. Beneath the soot and the exhaust fumes, I could even make out, faintly, the loamy smell of autumn. I finished my coffee and wished I had another.
I rounded a bend and came upon two men picking carefully through a trash can. They each wore many layers of wrinkled clothes, in shades of dust. One was tall, with a graying beard; the other wore a brown knit watch cap. They were sifting through the garbage for cans, bottles, and other recyclables that could be exchanged for cash. They worked efficiently, without talking. When they realized that I wasn’t passing by, they paused and straightened up, looking me over warily. I was wearing jeans, a pair of beat-up paddock boots, and a leather jacket over a black turtleneck. I didn’t think I looked particularly threatening, but they might’ve taken me for a cop, or somebody who wanted to take something from them. I stopped while I was still about ten feet away, so as not to make them more nervous.
“I don’t want to bother you guys, but maybe you can help me. I’m looking for somebody. A woman who hangs out in the park around here. She might live on the street. Around sixty, short, kind of round. Has bright blue sneakers. You guys seen her around?” I asked.
The shorter guy stopped looking at me and bent to his work again. The taller one answered in a clipped, midwestern voice.
“We’re up here working is all. Don’t know anybody up here. Saw some people down that way. They might know.” He pointed down the path, to where it forked off to the west, and went back to work also. I thanked them and headed west.
I followed the footpath as it curved through a wooded area and led up a rise. I heard whoops and shrieks as I neared the top. I looked down toward the East Meadow and the source of the noise.
“Shit,” I said to myself.
About fifty yards down the path, near a curving row of benches, four teenage boys were hassling a group of street people. The street people were huddled together on a bench. There were five of them, and they all looked older. The boys circled and swooped around them, yelling, posturing, gesturing obscenely, and punctuating all this with kicks and tugs at the plastic bags and paper sacks that the older folks clung to desperately. A shopping cart was tipped on its side nearby, its cargo of canfilled plastic bags strewn around the benches. The largest of the boys was taking experimental jabs at the head of one of the old men, working himself up to something more serious. One of the old women wore dirty, electric blue high-tops.
“Shit.” As a rule, I dislike teenage boys. It’s a mean-spirited view, I know, and probably an artifact of being a cop. But too often they seem to come in only a few varieties: combinations of sullen, whiny, hostile, self-destructive, and whacked-out, or the ever-popular “all of the above.” And too many of them are armed. Unfortunately, I was not.