"A young woman named Wanda Soa was shot dead in her apartment a few days ago," I said before he finished counting. "Her probable assailant was found next to her, also dead. I'd like to get the coroner's photo of his face."
"Come back tomorrow and I'll have it."
"I'll add eight hundred to that if you do it in the next fifteen minutes."
One thing I knew for sure about Randy was that he didn't like to be rushed. Luckily for me, more often than not, he needed cash more than he hated work. He picked up his black phone and entered a number.
"Hey," he said in a husky, almost sexy, voice. "It's me."
Another interesting aspect to the disgraced cop was that women loved him. You'd think that such a disheveled ne'er-do-well would chase any modern girl away. But they flocked around him, agreed to do shocking things for him on desktops, park benches, and in their own marital beds.
He asked for the photo and made an assignation for later in the week. They were talking about a problem with somebody, her husband or boyfriend, when the fax machine started up.
"It's comin' through, babe," he said. "I'll call you back in ten minutes."
I stood up, went around to the fax machine, and tore off the image of the dead man I had seen on Wanda Soa's floor.
I reached into another pocket and pulled out the next payment.
When I turned around Randy was pointing a 9mm pistol at my forehead.
"I could kill you right here and now, Leonid McGill."
I dropped the bundle on his desk.
"But you won't," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because you're a lazy fuck. Because I weigh one hundred eighty-seven pounds, and even if you had a silencer you'd have to get rid of the body or explain it to the cops. Either way you'd miss your evening cartoons."
Randy searched my eyes for fear but found none. I'd given up worrying about my mortality a long time before. The first good body shot I took in the ring cured me of that fear.
Anyway, I knew somebody would shoot me down one day. Why not Randy Peel in Brooklyn Heights?
Peel let out a false laugh and lowered his gun.
"I always wanted to see you flinch, LT," he said behind that empty grin. "I guess you're as tough as they say."
38
It was a long ride but all I had to do was catch the 4 train at Borough Hall and take it all the way to the 149th Street stop in the Bronx.
It was a pleasant ride that gave me time to think…
There's a four-story building a block and a half off the shabbiest part of the Grand Concourse. Whatever paint it once had is gone and most of the floors are unoccupied. Now and again a squatter comes in to inhabit one room or another, but a guy named Johnny Nightly finds them soon enough, batters them about the head and shoulders, and then offers them twenty dollars for the promise that they will never come back.
They never do.
The basement of the dilapidated building is a very modern, unregistered pool hall run and tenanted by my comrade Luke Nye. That was the man I was going to see.
I followed a lighted path around the back of the building and approached a cast-iron cage that was painted grass green. There was no button or brass knocker to announce visitors. All you had to do was stand there. Within a minute a buzzer sounded or it didn't.
That evening it did.
I pushed the gate open, walked through the weather-beaten door, and clambered down the dank wooden stairs into darkness. When I reached the bottom a door swung open before me. The world revealed was all yellow light and green relief.
Johnny Nightly was standing to the right, holding the door open.
Johnny was tall and slender, black as the darkness I had just come from, and able, it was rumored, to kill without question or remorse.
"Good afternoon, Mr. McGill," Johnny said. He was a very courteous man, pleasant, and a good conversationalist when he had to be.
"Hey, Johnny. What's up?"
"Everything is nice and peaceful," he said from within an aura of seemingly unshakable calm.
"LT!" Luke called from the third table in a line of three. "Come on over here."
The floor-through room was uninhabited except for the hustler and his bodyguard. The ceiling was high enough to hang three large dark-blue crystal chandeliers that were formed in an abstract symmetry like spiders' webs beaded with blue dew. The walls were shiny green with the sheen of lacquered metal.
Luke was of medium height with a face that resembled a water-going snake. His eyes were slits and his nose so wide that it didn't seem to stand out from his face. His brown skin had a greenish tinge and his head was shaved bald.
Luke Nye was an animator's dream of an alternate evolution of humanity.
"Hey, Luke," I said.
We shook hands and slapped shoulders.
"Must be somethin' important to have you come all the way out to the Bronx," he said.
I handed him the fax from Randolph Peel's machine.
Luke took the flimsy, grayish sheet, glanced at the image, and handed it back to me.
That was all the time he needed.
Crime revealed itself in different manifestations throughout the various terrain of New York and, probably, the rest of the world. Many groups had very organized systems of criminals: The Russians and Italians, Irish and Chinese had their mafias, gangs, and tongs. These were what you might call highly developed organisms like tigers or flies. There were such groups in the African-American community, gangs and blood brotherhoods that paid allegiance to some central figure or ideal. But the black community also had an impressive number of wildcards and jacks-of-all-trades. Luke Nye was one of these.
He was a born leader who also had a gift with the pool cue. He was tough, smart, and independent-minded. He didn't take orders and didn't expect people to bow before him. He'd been in and out of prison, had killed a man or two, dabbled in the sex trade, gambling, armed robbery, and even counterfeiting-all this before he settled down to high-stakes pool and the dissemination of information.
For a thousand dollars Luke might answer any question you had. He was friendly with bad men from up in his neighborhood all the way down to Wall Street. Information rose like chalk dust from the people who played in his little parlor, and sometimes he'd sell what he knew.
"You sure you want this, LT?" he asked.
"The only way I can answer that is for you to tell me his name."
"It's not in a name," he said with a smile. "It's what that name does and who he does it for."
"That mean I have to pay three thousand dollars?"
"Naw, man. I'll give you it all if you want it."
I nodded.
"The name he's been going by on Flatbush is Sam Bennett," Luke said. "But his given name is Adolph Pressman. He was born in Jamaica to a black Jamaican mother and a white German father. Still a citizen of the island there, I hear.
"He's what your friend Hush might call a mid-level hit man. I met him once when he was doing bodyguard work for a man named Pinky."
"Where can I find this Pinky?"
"He's been dead for three years. At least, nobody's seen 'im in that long."
"This Pressman's freelance?"
"No. He works for some group. I never knew who. But just 'cause I can't name 'em don't mean they can't nail you."
I took two thousand of Alphonse Rinaldo's dollars from my pocket and laid them on Luke's table. One for Pressman and the other for our previous conversation about the pimp Gustav.
"There's another thing," I said.
Luke's amphibian eyes glimmered a bit.
"Loan shark named Joe Fleming."
"What about him?"
"I'm wondering if he'd deal in automatic weapons."
"Maybe if the Russians invaded the East Coast and the Secretary of State asked him personally. Maybe then. But, you know, ole Joe is strictly small time. He's jittery as a baby deer, and, you know, guns are likely to go off."
I placed another wad of money on the table, wondering if I should bear the load myself or allow Rinaldo to treat me.