“Prescott Mimer. I used to tend bar for a friend of Prescott’s on the weekends—for some extra cash.”
“Who’s the friend?”
“What does all this have to do with what I’m asking for, Mr. McGill?”
“Answer my questions, all of my questions,” I said, “or walk out the same way you came in.”
“Karl Zebriski,” he said. “His bar used to be at Fortieth and Second, but now he has a place in the Lamont Towers near Columbus Circle.”
I was nervous listening to the poorly put-together man. On the one hand, he seemed to have real feelings, but on the other someone had tried to kill me once already that week.
Everything he said was reasonable. It could have well been the truth.
My life was on the line, more than one line, but that wasn’t going to give me a break on the rent; only prison did that, because even in death your plot is only leased.
“Give me a number where I can reach you,” I said, pushing a notepad across the desk. “I’ll call you in a few hours.”
“But I’ve got the money right here,” he said, holding up the briefcase.
“Keep it. I’ll call you later and we will see what we shall see at that time.”
There was an argument in his eyes but he could see that there was a brick wall behind mine. He scribbled down a number, nodded, and rose to his feet.
“I really need the help, brother,” he said.
“And I really will call you,” I replied.
Ê€„
42
Crow and Williams,” a young man answered. “How can I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Timothy Moore, please.”
“Mr. Moore is out on personal business. Do you want to leave a message?”
I hung up.
I’d met Prescott Mimer before. He was a construction foreman who liked to hang out in wise-guy bars. I doubted that he’d recognize my voice, so I called him saying that I was a headhunter for office managers and was considering doing some work setting Timothy Moore up with a positioÖ€…n.
“He’s all right,” Mimer told me. “I never worked with him or anything. But he seems like a good guy. Did he give you my number for a reference?”
“No. Your name came up in a discussion with a gentleman named Luke Nye. I’m sorry to bother you.”
“That’s okay. It’s just that I can’t help you with his work habits or anything.”
“Is he married?”
“What’s that got to do with a job?”
“It’s an organic grain and cereal company from the Midwest,” I said. “Family business. They like a wholesome picture.”
“Yeah,” Mimer said. “He’s crazy over that woman.
Margaret, I think her name is . . .”
I skipped Zebriski and went straight to Luke Nye. Nye was a pool hustler who played in private tournaments around the city and up and down the East Coast. If you gave a moray eel a couple of hundred million years he would evolve into Luke Nye.
“Hey, LT,” Nye said over the line. “Haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“Tryin’ to clean up my act.”
“You callin’ about Tim?”
“Yeah. How’d you guess?”
“He came to me yesterday and asked if I knew a detective could help him with somethin’ that wasn’t quite on the up and up. I heard you weren’t in the life anymore, but then I figured you could always say no.”
“Was my name the only one you gave him?”
“You’re one of a kind, LT.”
I COULDN’T SEE a flaw, only smell one. And the smell was all physical.
“Hello?” Tim Moore said through the phone.
“How many numbers in the lock on your briefcase?”
“Three.”
“There’s a variety store a block or so north of Bleecker on the east side of Hudson,” I said. “It’s called Iko’s. Set the lock to six-six-seven and leave it there for a Joan Ligget.”
“Should I put your money in it, too?”
“Yeah. Do that,” I said. “Now give me what you got.”
Fifteen minutes later I was entering Zephyra Ximenez’s number.
“Yes, Mr. McGill?”
“Have somebody pick up a briefcase at Iko’s and leave it with the guys at the front desk of my office building, ASAP.”
SHELLY AND DIMITRI were sitting down to dinner with their mother when I came in. I had called again, and so Katrina made the service coincide with my ETA. I was carrying the briefcase, less my five-thousand-dollar fee.
“Hi, Daddy,” my daughter said just a bit too loudly.
Dimitri grunted and I nodded to him.
Katrina is the best cook I’ve ever met—bar none. She can make anything. That night she’d prepared red beans and rice with a spicy tomato sauce and filled with andouille and chorizo sausage. In little dishes arranged in the middle of the dining table she had set out grated white cheese, chopped Bermuda onions, green olives, and diced jalapeños—seeds and all.
I pulled up my chair at the head of the table, setting the briefcase beside me. I like a good meal. Katrina beamed from the opposite end and for a brief span I forgot our differences and disconnections.
“Smells great, honey,” I said. “How you doin’, D?”
“Okay, I guess,” Dimitri mumbled.
“How’s school?”
“Fine.”
“You need anything there?”
He shook his head. That meant that he wasn’t going to talk anymore.
But I didn’t care. I was thinking about the young woman of Scandinavian descent whom I had loved passionately for nine months, with sporadic recurrences for a year or two after.
What had Tim compared it to? A forty-eight-hour bug. Our love was more like a couple of years of consumption on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. It took us that long to recover. Though the symptoms were gone, I was often reminded of them at dinner.
“I’m going to take a special course in African-American history, Dad,” Shelly said happily, still a bit too loud. “I met with Professor Hill about an independent study he suggested for the fall. We’ll be covering the black relationship to communism . . .”
She went on to regale me about the political commitment and supposed naïveté of Paul Robeson. It seemed that everything Shelly did was intended to make me happy. Sometimes I wondered if it might be a mercy to tell her that I wasn’t her real father.
She was still talking when Twill entered the dining room. AccomÛ€ng room.panying him was a skinny, teenaged, white waif-child with ash-blond hair and the saddest pale eyes. I had only seen pictures of her as a prepubescent girl but I would have recognized Mardi Bitterman if she were retirement age.
“Mom, Pop,” Twill said brightly. “Sis, Bulldog,” he said to his siblings. “This is Mardi, a friend of mine from school.”
“Hi,” the girl said. Her voice was so soft that it was almost inaudible.
“Late for dinner,” Katrina chided. “Now sit, both of you.”
I could tell by her expression that Katrina wasn’t happy with an unannounced guest. But she knew from past experience that if she complained Twill would leave—which would turn my mood sour.