“And please. Offer a serving to every table here, could you? I’d like to do that for everybody.”
35
I NOTED THAT the faint scar running along Jigs Dugan’s jaw was picking up the blue from the neon Canadian beer sign in the window behind him. The man who had given Jigs that scar some fifteen years back had lived just long enough to regret it. Jigs shocked not a few people by attending the man’s viewing, at Campbell’s funeral home on the Upper East Side. His face half hidden in a sloppy bandage, Jigs had pulled out his knife while bowing his head at the casket and quietly run the blade along the polished mahogany. Gave it a three-inch cut. Just like his scar. Tit for tat, if you don’t take into account what Jigs had already done to the man.
Jigs was wearing a gray Irish sweater under a herringbone jacket. His cheeks were clean-shaven, and a comb seemed to have found a way into his hair. Argyle socks and black shoes that picked up the light. He handed me a slip of paper with an address jotted down on it.
“Our boy’s name is John Michael Pratt. He’s a painter, though not of the Rembrandt school. Mainly houses and apartments. That is, when he’s not enjoying the largesse of the state.”
“Largesse of the state. This would mean prison time?”
Jigs smiled across the table at me. “Maybe one day I’ll marry you, you’re such a smart fellow. Exactly. Our John Michael likes to steal things that don’t belong to him. Sometimes people try to stop him and he knocks them down. The last time he did this, he used an iron pipe. Two darling girls have a halfwit daddy as a result of that little maneuver.”
The address was on Nineteenth Street, near the FDR Drive. Jigs and I were at a bar on Twenty-first.
“I took a quick look,” Jigs said. “Door’s got a bit of a rattle. I wouldn’t want to be stashing the Hope Diamond or anything in there, if you see what I mean.”
I folded the piece of paper and put it in my shirt pocket. “You were fast on this.”
“I was. I gave you the full-court press. Belated Christmas gift.”
“I thank you.”
Jigs gave a two-fingered salute. “As the lady said to Bogie, if there’s anything else, just whistle.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Be sure you do. You’re not up to your hundred percent, that’s clear.”
“You’re looking sporty,” I said.
“It’s Saturday night, lad. Maybe you can’t remember anymore, it’s still the night for peacocks.”
“So what are your plans for the evening?”
Jigs ran a finger along his chin. “It’s the city that never sleeps. I suppose I’ll stay up and keep it company. Don’t you worry on my account. I can always put together a dance card.”
GETTING INTO Pratt’s building was a simple matter of leaning against the vestibule door and giving it a sharp shove. A sour smell greeted me in the hallway. A buzzing fluorescent tube sent a harsh white light down from the flaky ceiling. I took the stairs in front of me to the top floor. The sour smell was less pungent here than it was downstairs. The hallway was dimly lit by a half-dozen sad wall sconces that gave off a dull buttery glow.
I pulled my gun.
Pratt’s apartment was at the end of the hallway: 5C. A television was on in one of the apartments across the way. Chatter. Laughter. More chatter. More laughter. A nontelevised male voice called out something, and a woman’s voice answered, but I couldn’t make out what was being said.
I had a plastic bag with me. I set it down and put my ear to Pratt’s door. I heard nothing. I kept my ear there a full minute, picking up vibrations from the building, a few hums, a sound like distant ice breaking. Nothing else.
I tried the doorknob. It turned partway, but the door didn’t open. After another minute, I knocked on the door and called out, “John!”
No answer. I tried the doorknob again and pumped the door. It rattled. Just like Jigs had said. “John!”
I put away my gun and picked up the bag and took from it a hard rubber mallet Jigs had been kind enough to bring along when we met at the bar. Taking aim at the dead-bolt keyhole, I swung the mallet, using all the single-pointed focus I could muster, which proved sufficient. The doorjamb splintered, and the lock went askew under the mallet. When I turned the doorknob this time, the door swung easily open.
The man’s perversity was in his bedroom. Photographs and clippings-hundreds of them, all over the walls. Asian girls and women. Hardly a bare square inch to be found. Many of the pictures had been ripped from skin magazines and featured naked and semi-naked women rising up on their knees, bent over spread-eagle, cavorting on a bed wearing high heels, arching their backs on lounge chairs, peering dead-eyed from a hammock, on and on. Just as many had been pulled from regular magazines. Fashion models. Movie actresses. Asian teens dressed in retro American schoolgirl outfits. The pictures were taped onto all four walls of the small room. Many of them had been outlined in thick red Magic Marker. On some of them, the marker had been held on the picture to bleed splotches on the breasts or the crotches of the women. There were also Magic Marker phalluses drawn all over the place, disembodied torpedoes prodding at the images.
Moving farther into the room, I felt the eyes of the hundreds of girls and women on me, tracking me as I stepped over to the bed. Stacks of ravaged magazines and Asian-language newspapers were piled next to the bed. What interested me was a cluster of pictures taped together on the closet door just to the left of the bed. They were all the same picture. I counted seventeen of them. It was a color photograph that had been cut from the pages of a glossy magazine, maybe People or Us, from the look of it. One of those types. The photograph featured two women. One of them was wearing a pair of sunglasses and walking down a sidewalk with her head lowered, in evident distress. She was clearly trying to avoid having her picture taken. Next to her was a young Asian woman in calf-high leather boots and a short pink winter coat, her hair pulled back and tied with a bright yellow scarf. I noticed a scarf identical to the one in the picture knotted around Pratt’s closet doorknob. The Asian woman’s arm was around the other woman, and she was consoling her. In all seventeen of the pictures, the Asian woman had been outlined in thick red Magic Marker. The phalluses appeared on a few of the pictures.
The woman in the sunglasses was Robin Burrell.
The other woman was Michelle Poole.
I went back into the front room and closed the apartment door. I pulled a roll of duct tape from the bag and did what I could to tape the dead bolt on and the splintered door back into place. No one was going to be fooled; I just wanted to get things so that I could engage the lock again, even though a simple push would open the door. A very iffy alarm system.
I flipped over one of the cushions of the ratty couch and sat down to wait for him. Rats always return to their holes. I could practically feel the presence of all those hundreds of girls and women crowded onto the walls. They say everyone should have a hobby, but I was somewhat less than impressed by Pratt’s. No wonder Michelle Poole had felt creeped out. People don’t necessarily have to see someone to know that they’re being watched. The hair on the back of the neck. The unexplained fear that wants to become a panic. Lord only knows how many other women besides Michelle had sensed a pair of unwelcome eyes consuming them as they moved about the city. I thought of Pratt’s face. Ratface. Scurrying around the city like a oneman infestation, then coming home and going into his tiny room to encourage his infection. My hand tightened around the rubber mallet in my lap. My pistol sat right next to it. The pulsing in my temples wasn’t too bad, considering. Didn’t really matter, in fact. I welcomed it.