"Do I need one?" Ruby asked. "You got no warrant, you don't get to see nuthinV
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"If I have to go get a warrant, I won't come back alone," Ruby said.
"No?"
"I'll bring back half the health department," she said.
"Big deal. Wha they gonna do, fine the landlord? How the hell they fine him, I can't even find him."
"Fine the landlord, hell," Ruby said. "They take one look at this dump and they'll drag you out into the street and shoot you. Bang, bang."
"Very funny."
"Keys to the Meadows apartment."
"You wait here. I see I find dem."
It took five minutes for Mr. Armaducci to find the keys. From the looks of them, it was apparent that he had been keeping them hidden in a pot of boiling chicken grease on his stove.
"You see dat Meadows," the superintendent said, "you tell him I tron him out, he tree weeks behind da rent."
"And places like this aren't easy to find, either," Ruby said.
"Dat's right," the superintendent said. He scratched that sixty percent of his stomach that did not fit beneath his undershirt and he belched. Ruby walked away before he relieved himself in the hall which, judging from the smell, seemed to be the habit of the building's occupants.
"Which is his?" she asked.
"Tade flaw leff," the superintendent said.
As she walked up the creaking steps, Ruby wondered if there were perhaps a special subspecies of human who became New York City apartment superintendents. Surely, the preponderance among
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them of Mr. Artnaduccis could not be explained away by the laws of probability.
Not the building or the hallway or the superintendent had prepared Ruby for the inside of Zack Meadows's apartment. It looked as if it had been used for the last ten years as a staging area for an army laundry. Clothes, all of them dirty, littered every corner of the two small rooms. The sink was filled with a lifetime supply of plastic plates and styro-foam cups. She sighed and thought to herself that white folks sure lived funny.
But the apartment would be easy to search. She merely had to drag her feet to turn over all the junk that was on the floor and the only two places where anything of value might have been hidden were a green enamel bedroom dresser and in a drawer under the sink. Ruby did not exactly know what she was looking for but there was nothing in either place that told anything about Zack Meadows except that he was a slob who didn't own any clean clothes.
Ruby spent an hour kicking about the apartment, but she found nothing. No phone numbers on the inside of the three-year-old telephone book, no addresses of friends or relatives. Just one old penny arcade photograph, presumably of Zack Meadows. She thought he looked stupid. She found a pile of old racing forms and skimmed them quickly. She noticed large x's drawn through the past performance charts of certain horses, as if they had automatically been eliminated from contention. All the horses so treated had jockeys with Italian-sounding names. Ruby was sure she had found her man. Finally, with a deep feeling of disgust, she turned
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over the once-white plastic garbage pail. Stuffed into the bottom of it, along with a few small paper bags, were a fistful of napkins printed in bleeding red ink "Manny's Sandwich Shop." It gave an address around the corner on the Bowery.
Ruby locked the door behind her and stopped at Mr. Armaducci's apartment to return the keys.
"Did Meadows ever have any visitors?" she asked.
"Naaah, nobody come to see him."
"Thanks." She gave him the keys, avoiding skin contact with his hand.
"Hey," he called after her.
Ruby turned.
"You didden take nuttin' witcha, didja?"
"God, I hope not," Ruby said.
Manny's Sandwich Shop around the comer was just what the neighborhood deserved and Manny, the owner, seemed to have spent his life trying to live up to the quality of the restaurant.
He knew Zack Meadows well.
"Sure," Manny told Ruby. "He stops in here, two, three times a week. Likes my pastrami sandwiches."
"I bet they're wonderful," Ruby said. "I'm looking for him. You seen him around recently?"
Manny shrugged. "Let me think. No, maybe a couple weeks I ain't seen him."
"You have any idea where he hangs out?" Ruby asked. "Who his friends might be?"
Manny shook his head. "I never seen him with nobody. What you wanna know for?" he asked suspiciously.
Ruby winked. "My boss sent me down. I've got some money for him."
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"Money? For Meadows?" Manny wrinkled his nose in disbelief. "Yeah," Ruby said.
"Who's your boss?"
"You'd know him if I said it," Ruby said. "Meadows did some work on the big man's wife, if you know what I mean." She looked at him with a wise face that Manny searched for a few moments before nodding.
"Sometimes he used to hang out at the Bowery Bar," Manny said. "Maybe they seen him. Ernie there used to take Meadows's action," which meant, Ruby knew, that Ernie was the detective's bookie.
Ernie was sitting inside the door of the bar. He wore a blue pin-striped suit, had pink-tinted eyeglasses, and a pinkie ring with a tiger's eye stone that looked like a dinosaur egg with a crack in it. He kept looking over his shoulder at the street outside.
He made a pass at Ruby, seemed relieved when she sloughed it off, and then seemed happy to talk about Zack Meadows.
"A good dear friend," Ernie said. "You can tell him that and tell him to come and visit me. He ain't got nothing to be afraid of."
"I'm looking for him too," Ruby said.
"He owe you money too?" asked Ernie.
"No, but I've got some money for him."
Ernie looked up from his beer glass filled with red wine. "Yeah?" He seemed suddenly interested. "How much?"
"I don't actually have it on me. But it's five hundred dollars," Ruby said. "I've got to bring him to my boss to get it."
"Five hundred, huh? That's enough."
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"Enough for what?" "For him to pay up."
"So you got any idea where I can find him?" Ruby asked.
"If I knew, I woulda found him myself," said Ernie.
"You know anybody who was his friend?" "Naaah, he got no friends." Ernie sipped his wine. "Wait a minute. Up on Twenty-second Street, there's . . ." He paused. "You find him, you see that I get three hundred out of that five hundred?" "You got it," Ruby said. "When I find him, I'll take him to my boss for the money, then I'll personally drive him back here."
"All right. I guess I gotta trust you. There's this broad named Flossie. She hangs out on Twenty-second between Eighth and Ninth. In the saloons there. She used to be a hooker. Maybe she still is. Meadows hangs around with her. I think he lives with her sometimes." "Flossie?"
"Yeah. You see her, you know her. She's like five hundred pounds. Watch out she don't sit on you."
"Thanks, Ernie," Ruby said. "When I find him, I'll bring him back here."
When Ruby went outside, a New York City tow truck operator was attaching a chain to the bumper of her white Lincoln Continental.
"Hey, hold on," she yelled. "That's my car." The driver was a fat black man with a slicked-down hairdo that made him look hike a 1930s opening act at the Cotton Club.
"Illegally parked, honey," he said.
"How? Where?" Ruby said. "Where's the sign?"
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"Down there." The driver pointed vaguely down the block. When Ruby strained her eyes, she was able to see some sort of sign on a utility pole.
"What's that sign got to do with up here?" she said.
"I ain't in charge of signs," the driver said. "I just tow away the cars." • "What's this gonna cost me?" she asked.
"Seventy five dollars. Twenty five for the ticket. Fifty for the tow."
"Let's try coexisting," Ruby said. "I'll give you fifty now, and you let the car down."
The driver winked at her. "You give me eighty now and I'll let you down."