“Guess you’re right.” The black accepted a cigarette and bent over Stubb’s match. “Here.” He tossed the badge case into the small man’s lap. “Keep it. I’m goin’ to get a blanket.”
He reemerged from the rear of the house in a minute or so, a plain, dark green blanket wrapped about his shoulders. “How about this? Look at superman. I got me a nice, warm robe a while back, but I spilled somethin’ on it. My woman’s been soakin’ it. Now, what you here for, wakin’ me up an’ botherin’ me?”
Stubb told him about the car.
“Didn’t see it. I don’t never pay much mind to what neighbors is doin’ anyway. If you do an’ they’re doin’ bad, they’ll get you for it. If they’re not doin’ bad, what’s the good of it?”
“Will you keep your eyes open for me anyhow? I’ll check with you on the weekend when you don’t have to sleep.”
“Man, weekends I sleep till noon.”
“I’ll check in the afternoon, then.” Stubb stood up.
“You don’t even know my name. I’m Buster Johnson.”
“Jim Stubb. Somebody told me about you once—I think it was the lady down at the all-night grocery. She said you were a tough dude.”
“She told you right. I does my share.”
“You look it.”
“See that scar?” Johnson touched his face with one finger. “That’s a busted beer bottle. You put that scar on you, man, and the little children would run off out the street. On a black man they don’t show so much.”
Stubb nodded. “It’s a shame.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Depends on whether you want to scare the men or cuddle up the women. I believe I’d just as soon cuddle up.”
“There were two women in that car I told you about. If you’ve got an eye for the ladies, you might use it to keep a lookout for them.”
“I might at that. Specially if there was somethin’ in it for Buster.”
“I haven’t got money to toss around on this one,” Stubb said. “But there might be some later. If you see something let me know, and we’ll see what we can do.”
As he went down the icy steps to the sidewalk, Johnson called behind him, “Man, you really got heat?”
A clown opened the next door. His nose was a red rubber ball; the rest of his long, smoothly ovoid face was of a white so pure as to be nearly luminous. Scarlet tears shaped like inverted hearts fell from his eyes. His collar was a wide ruff that would have honored an Elizabethan gentleman, and the buttons of his white blouse were pompoms.
“Yes?” he said.
“I’m a detective. I’d like to talk to you.”
The clown nodded. It was hard for Stubb to tell what expression, if any, he wore under his sad greasepaint. “The neighbors have been complaining, I suppose,” the clown said.
“What do you think they have to complain about?” Stubb asked, stepping inside.
The room was not a living room, a sitting room, a parlor, or even a bedroom. It seemed half warehouse and half shop; there were stacks of queer clothing, masks hanging from the ceiling, and painted tubs, cabinets, and chests.
With startling agility, the clown sprang to the top of a coffin too theatrically coffin-like to be real. “I’m sorry there’s no place for you to sit,” he said. “Perhaps you can find somewhere.”
“I’ll stand,” Stubb told him. “I’ve been sitting down a lot lately.”
“What do they say?”
“Your neighbors? I think you know.”
“Of course. Get that clown out of here! Dissolve him like a dream! He’s a menace to society.” The clown pulled out a red handkerchief and pretended to blow his rubber nose. A paper butterfly propelled by a rubber band fluttered from the handkerchief and circled the room, blundering into woolen sausages and gargantuan shoes painted to look like feet.
“What’s your name?” Stubb asked.
“Nimo. Nimo the Clown.”
“Swell, Nimo. What do people call you when you’re not wearing that makeup?”
“You understand, don’t you? At least a little bit. They call me Richard A. Chester—that’s my name when I’m asleep.”
“Sure, I understand, Nimo. What does Richard A. Chester do for a living? If you don’t mind telling me.”
“Nothing,” the clown said. He used his thumbs and forefingers to make a circle. “Nothing at all.”
“He just sort of hangs around?”
“That’s right!” The clown smiled broadly and clapped his hands, delighted. “And he shops for me, and sometimes he eats for me. And he sleeps for me.”
“I don’t suppose he was hanging around out on the street last night, was he? Say, sometime between six and nine?”
“I doubt it—it was too cold. But you’d have to ask him.”
“Ask Dick?”
“Ask Richard. He doesn’t like being called Dick.”
“I’m for him. I never liked it much either. I guess if I was to come back later today I might be able to talk to him?”
“You might.”
“Maybe I will, but while I got you here, Nimo, there’s something I want to ask you. You know the house four doors down, the one they’re wrecking?”
The clown nodded.
“Is there anything you can tell me about it?”
The clown nodded again. “They don’t have any children.”
And Now The News
The newsstand was so narrow it scarcely seemed a store at all. It squeezed between a snack bar and a dry cleaner’s as though someone ignorant of the ways of commerce had set out, given a trifle of waste space and a little money, to imitate an actual store. One felt that only very thin magazines, magazines filled entirely with pictures of thin, naked brunettes in the arms of hairy men, could be sold there, that only the thin papers (dated two months back) of little, one-horse towns and the thin, foreign-language weeklies of obscure Eastern European nationalities could ever be hung from the clips of its festoons of picture wire, hung beside the lavender and rose tip sheets for the horse races, the fly-spotted Gypsy Dream Keys for the numbers game. It smelled of coal smoke, printers ink, and mold.
Majewski sidled in, shoulders turned so he would not scrape the magazines from the walls, not overturn the thick stacks of the New York Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times. “He in there?” he asked the old man who sat in the back of the store.
“Is who in there?”
“You know damn well who I mean. Barney. I want to see him.”
The old man shook his head. “He’s got somebody with him.”
The newsstand grew darker as it crept away from the street, illuminated at first with bare bulbs hanging from bare wires and then with nothing, so that the rearmost wall, where the old man sat tilted in his chair, seemed black as ink. A voice came from the blackness now, hearty but muffled. “Let him in. It’s okay.”
Resignedly, the old man moved his chair to one side. Majewski turned the knob and stepped through.
The room was no wider than the newsstand, but brightly lit. It held an old wooden desk with an old wooden swivel chair behind it, a single, hard-looking, straight-backed chair, a small safe, and two men.
The larger of these leaned against the wall. He had a round, ruddy, freckled face, and he wore a police uniform. The smaller sat behind the desk. His face was dark, and he had a darker mustache mixed of black and gray.
“Nothing to worry about,” the policeman said. “We’ve done our business, and I was just going. What’s your name, son?” He was no older than Majewski.
Majewski looked at the man behind the desk, who nodded. “Joe Majewski,” Majewski said.
“And you’re already a bellhop at the Consort.” The policeman looked at the red uniform cap Majewski wore with his overcoat and nodded approvingly. “You live around here, Joe?”
Majewski shook his head. The dark man behind the desk said, “I knew where he lives.”
“I bet you do. What do you need the money for, Joe? Pay off your bookie?”