“Hey, you’re the guy they fished out of the river the other day. Somebody up there must like you, brother. That’d been me, I’d be dead.” He bounced his hands off his substantial gut. “Sink like a rock. You’re one lucky guy.”
A lucky guy wouldn’t have ended up stabbed and tossed into the icy East River from a substantial height, but hey, context is everything. I pulled out one of the sketches that Megan Lamb had photocopied for me and handed it to the doorman. He studied it as if it were a logarithm.
“Nasty character,” he opined.
“Have you seen him before?”
“Him? No. Not me.”
It had occurred to me that when I’d been in pursuit of my attacker, his zigzags had led him directly to the Waterside Plaza complex as if maybe he knew exactly where he was headed. And after managing to flip me over the wall, he had disappeared instantly. No one had reported seeing a person fleeing from the scene. I’d wondered. Through the glass doors and up the elevator? With a nod and a wave to the friendly doorman? Given the lousy sketch that had made the earlier rounds, it was conceivable that the doorman had seen it and made no connection whatsoever with the man himself.
I asked, “There’s no one living in any of these buildings who looks like this?”
“Here? This guy? I don’t think so.”
“How about the super? Or a maintenance man?”
The doorman pursed his lips and tilted the sketch. Why people do that, I’ll never understand. What? You tilt the thing and suddenly recognize it’s your uncle Billy?
“Sorry, brother.” He tried to give me back the sketch.
“Keep it.” I handed him my card. “The police will probably be by sometime and run you through this whole routine again.”
He looked at the card. “Private investigation, huh? Hey, I’ve never met a private investigator before. So are you like those detectives on TV? Get hit on by all the ladies? Beautiful widows coming out of your ears? I lose a few pounds, I’d like to try that out. You must deal with a lot of cheating husbands. You carry a piece?”
I tapped the sketch in his hand. “I’d like to locate this guy. You help me out, maybe I’ll try to dig up a beautiful widow for you.”
He smiled. Big and toothy. “Don’t get me dreaming, brother.”
I left him to his dreams. Crossing back over First Avenue, I worked the shops and bars. There were plenty of both to keep me busy. At first no one recognized the face in the sketch, though more than a few sneered at it when they looked at it. “What’d he do? Kill his own mother?” But at a Laundromat on Twenty-seventh, I got a hit. An elderly Asian woman about the size of an eight-year-old told me that she recognized the face.
“He come here. He smoke. I tell him no. Clean clothes, clean clothes! No smoke!”
I asked if she knew anything about him. A name. Where he lived. She didn’t. I’ve been taking my laundry to the same place in Little Italy for ten years, and if someone told them my name was John Jacob Astor, they wouldn’t have any reason to say it wasn’t, except to wonder why someone so stinking rich couldn’t send his laundry in with the butler. I asked the woman if I could post the sketch on her bulletin board, next to the flyers for dog walking, yoga lessons, teaching guitar and all the rest. She didn’t like that idea but agreed to take the sketch and show it to customers, and if they knew anything, they could give me a call. At least I think that was the arrangement. My pidgin English isn’t all that good.
I concentrated on all the business establishments within a five-block radius of the Laundromat. I got a maybe at a food market on Twenty-first.
“Did he have kind of a beard before?”
“Could be,” I said.
“I couldn’t swear to it. You see a lot of faces in this city. This one might’ve come in here a few times. He does look sort of familiar.”
After several hours of footwork, my fuel cells were pretty drained. I tried to give them a charge with a pastrami sandwich from a reputable joint, but the results were mixed. I made a phone call. “Paddy Reilly’s in an hour. Can do?” The answer was in the affirmative. “Good.”
I worked the sketch for another sluggish hour, but I got no more hits. Still, I found myself imagining that along one of these streets I was going up and down, Ratface was there, maybe even sitting up in his goddamn Ratface apartment looking out the window at me. It was a powerful feeling and a little unnerving-as if his eyes were boring laser holes into the back of my head-and it was all I could do to keep from scanning the building windows as I moved about.
The stitches in my side weren’t real happy with all the activity, but they didn’t get much of a say in the matter. The sun was still off on vacation somewhere-the South, I suppose-and what with the raw cold and the colorless sky and the dingy heaps of snow, the life seemed sucked out of the city. Or maybe it was just sucked out of me. It took me a while before I realized that this was one of the things the doctors had cautioned me about. I was irritable, flirting with something along the lines of fury. I was impatient. A blast of cold air whipping around Twenty-fifth Street worked me over and I wanted to hit something. There was a dull throbbing just behind my eyes. I pulled off my watch cap and touched the stitches on the back of my head. They felt hard and grisly, like the whiskers of some savanna beast. I looked at the sketches of Ratface that were clutched in my other hand, and a ball of rage rose up in my chest. It snagged my breath, precisely as if the rage itself were a scramble of barbed wire lodged in my sternum. I brought my fingers away from the wound. They were splotched with blood. It was going to ooze, the doctors had warned me. I ran my fingers along one of the sketches, bloodying the man’s cheeks.
The bartender at Paddy Reilly’s was a giant with a shaved head, a neck tattoo and a tuft of carrot-red hair below his lower lip. We were nodding acquaintances. He wrote poetry, the kind with a notable paucity of flower imagery. I’d heard him read a few times at some poetry slams in Alphabet City. He was reading one of his poems to Jigs Dugan off a scrap of paper as I came over to the bar.
Got a hustler’s laugh and crowbar arms
And a Puerto Rican kid like a shadow
Won’t let him be, thinks he’s a god
And he finds a Coney Island mermaid
The one of his dreams
Rolls her in popcorn
In a room, with a view, of the sea
Streams of paper whipping off the wire fan
Cool breeze, cool breeze, cool breeze.
He folded the paper and stuck it in his T-shirt pocket. Jigs was playing with an unlit cigarette, looking thoughtful. He tapped the filter against the bar. “Yeah, I guess that’s good. So. He’s balling the mermaid. Am I hearing that right?”
I set one of the sketches on the bar. “Ever seen this most happy fella?”
The bartender did the doorman thing. Tilted the sketch and pursed his lips. “Can’t say it rings a bell.”
Jigs had a tumbler in front of him. It was either iced tea or whiskey, and who wants to pick? I asked the bartender for a cup of coffee. Jigs asked, “You want he should Irish that up for you?” I waved off the offer, and the bartender moved down the bar to slap the coffee machine around.
Jigs picked up his glass. “I hear you took a spill, friend.”
“You hear correctly.”
“Darkened my day to hear it.”
“I stuck around the hospital an extra day in case you were sending me flowers.”
“I don’t do hospitals well,” Jigs said.
“I’d have thought you might come fishing for a pretty nurse.”
“I went with a nurse once. A Janice. Or Janet. I can’t remember. She gave me a lovely sitz bath. This was when I had that little knee situation.”
Little knee situation. A lead pipe swung like a Ty Cobb bat at Jigs’s knees. He was off his feet for half a year.
The bartender returned with my coffee. The mischief came into Jigs’s eyes. “I’ve been thinking about this mermaid of yours, Kevin. It seems-”