It had no signage, not even numbers to indicate the address. There was a door. It was like the portico of a humble house in a neighborhood that was part of a larger county but had no city affiliation. A wood door with a round iron doorknob. There was no buzzer or doorbell, no knocker.
Standing at that pedestrian brown plank, I thought about Amethystine. It was like she went everywhere with me, hanging on my arm, elated by my adventures and decisions. Without her I would have given up on the Santangelo Burris case. She filled me with an excess of life, something I hadn’t experienced since I was a boy, surviving vicissitudes that would have defeated most grown men.
So I knocked on that very ordinary door, expecting no answer, hoping that no one came to see what was happening outside. But if wishes were fishes...
I waited for one minute, counting the seconds off in my mind. When time was up, I lifted a clenched hand to knock once more. But before my knuckles could reached their destination, the portal door was jerked inward. It was a violent action. And there I was without even a pistol to defend myself from the big bunker before me.
“Yeah?” he drawled.
I don’t know what I expected the person who answered my knock to look like, but this man was the only one it could have been.
At least six six, he was stooped just a little, as if maybe there was too much trunk for him to stand upright. His forward-tilting chest was massive, and his hairless chin gave the impression that it needed a shave. His forehead was too wide and his cheekbones too close to each other. He probably thought of himself as a white man, though I doubted if many others would. His skin was dark the way some southern Caucasians can be. The whites of his eyes were pinkish with flecks of butter-like fat here and there. The pupils were as dark as gray could get. He wore a sports jacket comprised of square yellow and black patches, the costume of a demon out of Santangelo’s and little Gigi’s nightmares.
“Waynesmith Von Crudock,” was my reply to his one-word question.
“What about him?”
“I’d like to talk with him.”
“Who’s askin’?”
“Opportunity.”
His expression, a big-toothed grimace, probably worked for laughter, pain, and the pleasure of seeing his victims bleed or cry out or die.
“You a smart nigger, huh?” he said.
There was no reason to answer.
“That all you got to say?” he threatened.
“Are you Waynesmith?” I asked.
“I am not,” he averred proudly.
“Then I’m not here for you, brother.”
“What kinda opportunity?”
“The kind that can be rigged in a land deed.”
The giant’s unhealthy eyes squinted down to slits; his long-fingered, big-knuckled hands curled into fists.
“Come on in,” he commanded.
Before taking a forward step, I had to suppress the desire to run.
The checkerboard ogre led me down one hall, turned left, and walked until getting to an elevator that was made for three normal humans or for me and my guiding troll.
The sixth floor had no halls, no rooms. It was a huge, cavernous space littered with boxes, furniture, and tables that supported everything from caches of jewelry to empty pizza boxes, half-read books to piles of disassembled electronics.
Leaned up into one corner there teetered a large safe that had been yanked out of some wall, broken open, and left to be discarded, like an old beer can on a tenement roof.
In the far corner of the space where all things lost ended up, there was an enormous chair supporting the weight of a man who, at that moment, one could have easily believed was intent on devouring the entire world.
He was tall and fat, with long hair, a grizzled beard, and a face, though mostly hidden behind hair, that blazed with hunger. This prime example of uncrowned royalty wore a black T-shirt and dirty white jeans. His feet were bulbous and bare. The toenails needed clipping. Standing there before him, I could smell that he needed two or three baths.
The first sound from him was a loud, moist fart.
“Who’s this?” he growled.
“Says he knows something about a deed,” the wolfish doorman replied.
A light beyond the run-of-the-mill, endless appetite dawned in the master’s eyes.
Before the sovereign throne, which was made of some kind of metal and cushioned with pillows and carpeting, there sat a small TV tray with a very large hunting knife upon it, reminding me of the man-hating desk clerk from the Orchid SRO, Gina Lima. I wondered what he used that knife for. If I were to answer that question without thinking, I would have said, For cutting raw meat.
“You here for Hannibal Lee?” he asked me.
“Why wouldn’t I be here for Santangelo Burris, or Lutisha James for that matter?”
“What do you want?” He had no interest in my banter.
“To know the value of a deed,” I said like some warrior poet on a lost page of the Bard.
Von Crudock grinned, his teeth the color of aged copper pennies turning green at the bottom of a wishing well.
“Ten thousand dollars,” he said.
“Hey,” I said, smiling like Jackson Blue used to when he spied a dollar he could steal.
“Do you have it?” the farting monarch asked.
“I know where I can get it.”
“Where?” he commanded.
“I can bring it to you.”
“Why didn’t you bring it now?”
“’Cause Lurch here might’a made me drop it on one’a these tables. Shit. Mothahfuckah look like he could hold me upside down and shake it outta my pocket.”
My humor was lost on Crudock.
“This one was at Solomon’s Mountain,” the ugly servant said then.
“You killed five of my men,” Crudock said to me.
“Do you care?”
That was a Kodak Moment. Crudock gazed at me quizzically, not able even to understand the question. Did he care? He struggled with the concept for a moment or two and then said, “Bring me the deed and I won’t have you killed.”
“You won’t have me killed but you will pay me that ten thousand.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I’ll have it for you by ten a.m. day after tomorrow.”
“Why not today?”
“Because I say so,” I said, speaking words that I knew Crudock could understand.
He gazed at me from underneath the tangled hair, behind the wiry gate of his beard. His lips pressed against each other as if he were about to spit.
“Day after tomorrow at nine,” he said with a nod.
I considered haggling about the time but decided that no benefit could come from it.
Lurch stayed with me on the elevator and then kept me company toward the pedestrian entrance. He pulled the door open. Before stepping out into a world where no one wanted me dead, I stopped.
“Let me ask you a question,” I said.
“What’s that?” he replied, looking down into my eyes.
“Why’d you kill those people up at the LaCraig house?”
Lurch had a hard face. You imagined that his entire life had been trying to survive a continuous rockslide that broke his body, over and over. He had a hard face, but my question brought a beatific smile to his lips. His eyes went up behind the lids and he moved his head from side to side as if listening to lovely music.
“Sometimes,” he said dreamily. “Sometimes you got to squash some bugs.”
It was the most beautiful, terrifying confession that I’d ever witnessed. But still I said, “That don’t make one bit’a sense.”
That sublime smile turned into a boyish grin.