"Where?"
"I forget where exactly. It was in Astoria… Pixie Parking. Yeah, yeah… Pixie Parking."
"What else did the note say?"
"That there'd be another letter with another three hundred if I did what they said. I needed to make the delivery because I already owed out the money they gave me. You see?" he said. "I really don't know nuthin'."
"If you don't know anything then what are you afraid to tell the feds?"
Sharkey swayed away from me for a moment there. I reached over and pulled him back.
"I asked Wilma if she saw who put the letter there and she looked worried," he said. "I know when she gets that look, so I pressed her. She said that she saw Joe Fleming out on the street walking away right after she found the letter."
"Who's Joe Fleming?"
"He's like a private bank in the neighborhood."
"Does he deal in guns?"
"I never heard about it."
"Does he know that you owed three hundred?"
"I always owe somebody somethin'. Joe stopped lending to me a year ago… right after he broke my arm."
I considered the information Ron had given me. It was a crazy story. In my experience crazy stories were too often true.
"When can I see Irma?" he asked.
"Soon."
"How soon?"
"As soon as I can find a way to get you out of here without getting you killed."
I could hear, and smell, Ron's ragged breath.
"How long can you hold out?" I asked him.
"I'm okay."
"When are you going to need the pipe again?"
"I'm off the crack, man," Ron Sharkey said.
"Bullshit."
"No. I started usin' H 'bout seven months ago. I used that to ease off the speed. And then I slowed up on the H. I'm just, I'm just chippin' now. I can go three days and not hardly even sweat."
The best and worst lies are when we lie to ourselves. My father told me that three days before he was gone for good.
"Hold on, Ron," I said. "I'll be back in under forty-eight hours."
"WHAT WAS THAT SHIT?" Jake Plumb asked me outside the visitors' room.
"What?"
"You weren't supposed to be neckin' in there."
"I don't like microphones."
"Oh no? How do you feel about prison cells? I could throw you in one right now," the agent said. "I could lock you in a room where even a runt like you couldn't stand up straight. I got a dozen judges on my speed-dial wouldn't even blink before signin' the warrant."
It was all true. The government my father railed against had those powers, had been honing them for nearly a century. I was nothing more than a stalk of wheat against Plumb's scythe of justice.
"Make up your mind, then," I said, while sending up a small prayer to the not-God of my father's pantheon. "Because I got places to be-or not."
37
Agent Plumb took no more than a minute to decide to let me go, but it felt like hours. It was stubbornness and not courage that kept me from falling to my knees, begging him not to imprison me.
I was shivering by the time I'd made it back to the waiting room of that human warehouse. Plumb and Galsworthy ran what an adman might call an "instant prison." At any moment almost any American (barring movie stars, publicly acknowledged billionaires, and sitting members of Congress) could be whisked away to that nameless building, en route to one of our satellite Siberias, and kept there until a botched water torture or the shrug of some judge sent them home.
In the waiting room I went straight for the exit, and then stopped.
Any chance you get to risk your life for the cause is as close to a blessing as a modern man can come. My father's words had no political meaning to me, but their truth outshone their intent.
"Excuse me, ma'am," I said to the Arab woman slumped in the chair.
She looked up at me but didn't say anything. Her children-an older girl and two toddler boys-also stared.
"Your husband has been moved to the Federal Detention Center in Miami. You'd probably do well to call down there."
ON THE STREET I went over the talk I'd had with Ron. I always do that-replay the words and gestures of an interrogation. Usually I find something that I'd overlooked; often that something has nothing to do with the information I was after.
In this situation I remembered comparing the innocence of criminals to an algebraic equation. That reminded me of the famous x, the unknown factor.
In the case of Angie Lear the unknown factor was the black man with no labels in his clothes. The metaphor worked, as far as an intellectual concept was concerned, but it changed drastically when I tried to make it a concrete action in the material world.
The killer was a dangerous man, possibly a hired assassin in league with others of his kind. Delving deeply enough to uncover his name might also set in motion those who would like the questioner silenced.
But time was passing, and someone, maybe even Alphonse Rinaldo, was stalking my client. So I took the A train to the High Street stop and walked over to Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights.
IT WAS ALMOST SIX o'clock by the time I got there, but I was pretty sure that he'd be in.
Randolph Peel's office was just above a bakery and across the street from a bank that was both new and (according to The New York Times) failing. I walked up the stairs and knocked on his door, enjoying the smells of bread baking and sugared delights.
A buzzer sounded and I pushed my way into the ex-cop's lair.
It was an odd room; taller than it was deep or wide, it gave the impression of having been turned on its side by an earthquake, or maybe some kind of explosion. The shelving was askew, layered with papers and books that communicated no sense of order. There were manila folders and magazines piled on their sides, books leaning one way and then the other, and appliances, like an old-fashioned iron, various staplers, an espresso machine, and even a.38 pistol thrown haphazardly into the mix.
Peel's oak desk was also out of the Apocalypse. It wasn't even on a level plane. There were newspapers, empty beer bottles, a half-eaten sandwich on a paper plate, and piles of papers that seemed to have been thrown there just for serendipity's sake.
The buildings across the street did not right the room. Looking out of the murky panes you might have thought that the whole world had been turned on its side in order to fit the office of the private investigator Randolph Proteus Peel.
"LT," THE SLOPPY EX-COP said. "How's it goin' down in the gutter?"
Randy was big, with equal parts pink and gray skin making up his porcine face. Needing a shave, he was leaning back in an office chair, diddling around with a pencil in his left hand.
The slob, I knew, was ambidextrous.
"Just chippin' at it nowadays," I said in deference to Ron Sharkey.
"That's what they been tellin' me," he said. "Somethin' like you're reformed or somethin'."
"Something like that," I said.
I took a seat on the worn red velvet hassock he used for a visitor's chair. A night bird whizzed past his window. A car honked in the street.
"I see you've cleaned the place up," I said.
"Fuck you."
"I thought that was your mother's job."
He sat up straight.
"What the fuck do you want, McGill?"
Many people liked Randy in spite of his slovenly ways and dishonorable discharge. Most white cops still included him in their picnics and at their kids' Communions. With a little help from these friends he'd wrangled himself a PI's license and started to deal in intelligence.
If you wanted to short-circuit the system and get information outside of official channels, you went to Randy. Given enough time, he could get a copy of a handwritten memo page off the desk of the chief of police.
I put a fold of seven hundred dollars down between the hardening sandwich and a calendar called Beaver Shot of the Week. Randy picked up the money and thumbed through the wad.