And Sometimes I Wonder About You (18 page)

F
rom time to time there’s a Rembrandt on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, twenty inches wide and maybe two feet high. It’s an oil rendering of a peasant girl who is looking beyond you into a history of pain and loss. She’s beautiful and you could tell that the artist and many others had fooled themselves that they could love her and that that love would be a good thing. But the longer you sit watching those haunted and haunting eyes, the more concepts like love and beauty drain away; all that’s left, if you look at that painting long enough, is the awareness of the hopelessness that eats at the human soul.

The curators bring that piece out only once every dozen years or so; something to do with anomalies in the medium and their exposure to light. It’s on display for six weeks and then brought back to its dark closet in the lower levels. I have a friend, an old guard named Franz Jester, who tells me whenever that painting is on display.

I sat there in front of the dead but still dangerous peasant girl, looking at her between bouts of reading and rereading the information I’d received on Paulie DeGeorges.

Whoever sent the pages on Paulie was probably a highly placed bureaucrat in some government office. There were six hazy black-and-white photographs of DeGeorges from his teen years up until near his current age, which was forty-three. Four of the pictures were taken by police photographers after an arrest. One picture was taken by a surveillance lens when Paulie was coming out of a restaurant on the Lower East Side. He was standing next to a platinum blonde who would have been beautiful if she could have just gotten the hatred out of her smile.

Paulie was naturally slender, even skinny, with randomly placed prominent bones about his face. He always wore a sports jacket and bow tie, even as a teenager, and he was pale and freckled. He was the kind of thief that stole your car and then offered to sell it back. Sometimes, oftentimes, he worked in collusion with the victim. He’d been arrested a dozen times and convicted four. Six and a half years in prison were behind him and he would definitely be sent up again; his last stint ended five weeks ago.

There were no violent offenses in his jacket. His stats told me that his hair was light brown and his eyes blue. His wife was named Violet Henrys. His mother, Bea Trammel, lived in a retirement home on the West Side about twelve blocks north of the Financial District.

No Violet Henrys in the phone book or on the smartphone Internet. No Bea Trammel either but there was a listing for the Oak Village Retirement Home on Hudson Street. There was a phone number but I didn’t see any reason to call.

It was a very modern, very nice place to die. The ground floor was surrounded by walls made of glass that allowed sun in at any time of day. To the right was a broad platform, a few feet lower than the entrance, where three or four dozen retirement home denizens sat and spoke, wandered and babbled, or simply stood staring out through the wall, or not. To my left was a wide counter behind which stood two women and one man. These attendants wore clothes that could have been civilian wear except for the fact that they were all cut from the same cloth and dyed the same unlikely color green. The women wore skirts and jackets of that color. The man was allowed to wear pants.

“May I help you?” he asked when I approached the desk.

“Ms. Bea Trammel.”

He tapped around on an electronic tablet until coming to a page of data.

“Yes,” he said, “are you a relative?”

“Bradford Littles,” I said. “I was her son’s fourth-grade math teacher. I ran into Paul quite by accident the other day and he told me that his mother was here. He was always in trouble and so his mother and I met pretty often. He said that she might like a visitor. I have a meeting not far from here this afternoon and thought I might see her.”

“Did you make an appointment?” The man was the color of aged ivory, in his thirties, and officious in a reserved way. He was also a little suspicious.

“Is she really that much in demand?” I said.

“So you taught Mr. Paul Trammel at a New York public school?” said the man, keeping our string of interrogatives alive. He wore a badge that read
SHAW
.

“Paul DeGeorges went to school in Columbus, Ohio, where I lived until I retired.”

Shaw pursed his lips while pretending that he could read into my intentions. Finally he shrugged, thinking to himself that he’d done his due diligence. He reached under the gray plastic counter and came out with a plastic badge that held a card with a big red V on it. He handed the general identification to me.

“You understand, Mr. Littles, we have to make sure our residents are protected.”

“From what?” I asked as I clipped the yellow-and-red badge to my blue lapel.

“Last month a man came in here saying that he was a resident’s nephew and managed to get her to sign over the rights to three very expensive properties. Thank God we were able to nullify the transaction. Otherwise Mrs. Dunn would have been forced to move out.”

“I see,” I said, wondering if Shaw heard his own acceptance of the venal code of his job while talking about protecting his elderly, dying charges.

Bea Trammel was on the seventeenth floor in room 21. The teal door was open. There was a clipboard in a little pouch hanging from the door.
ALL VISITORS MUST SIGN IN
was written on the paper pouch. I took up the clipboard and a ballpoint pen dangling by a string from the pouch and signed the name Bradford Littles while perusing the other signatories. I had enough information right then but I knocked on the open door anyway.

“Come in,” she said sweetly.

The room was very small with pink walls and a yellow desk, a single bed against the wall, and a love seat made for very small lovers or maybe one fat-bottomed solipsist. There was a well-used chrome walker in the far corner.

The window looked out over New Jersey. Bea Trammel stood there, her back to Hoboken, facing me.

“Yes?” she asked.

“I don’t expect you to remember me,” I said, approaching her and gently holding out a hand. “But my name is Bradford Littles and I was Paul’s fourth-grade math teacher.”

She took my hand, squinting at me.

“Of course,” she said. “Have a seat, Mr. Bradford.”

She gestured at the purple love seat and moved to sit on the bed.

Maybe five feet in height and weighing no more than ninety pounds, she wore turquoise-colored pants, a brown blouse, and a blood-orange sweater because of the air-conditioning.

“What brings you here?” she asked with the insincere smile that many old people adopt to protect themselves from the rampant and often unchecked powers of youth.

“I ran into Paul at a club on Fifty-fourth Street,” I said. “He told me that you were here and that he, that he had just gotten out of jail over some mistake about insurance and a stolen car.”

“He did? That must be some kind of mistake. Paulie was working for an Internet company in San Francisco for the past three years. He worked so much that he didn’t have time to come back east until the job was over—but he certainly wasn’t in any prison.”

“Oh?” I said. “Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe he was talking about some other student in our class.”

“That’s probably it,” Bea said. “There were a few of Paulie’s friends that were bad eggs. Maybe he was talking about Robert Hrotha, that kid from Panama.”

“Maybe so,” I replied, thinking that I had made a misstep.

Bea looked to be in her seventies. She’d moved slowly from the window to the bed. Her body was weak but her gaze was not.

“Is your name really Mr. Bradford?” she asked.

“Littles. I said my name was Bradford Littles.”

“Is that true?”

“No.”

“Are you after my son?”

“Looking for him,” I admitted, “but not after him. He knows a woman who has stolen a valuable book. It’s my job to find her.”

“You’re a cop?”

“No more than you are, Ms. Trammel.”

“Paulie’s a fool,” she said in a level, almost threatening tone. “But he’s my son first. And so whatever you want, you won’t get it from me.”

I considered leaving her my name but then thought better of it. Bea Trammel had been something in her early days; and I doubted if that something was a suburban housewife.

A
t an art store on Grand I spent two hundred sixty-four dollars and forty-seven cents for a beginner’s set of oil paints and brushes, an eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch canvas stretched on and stapled to a sturdy wooden frame, and a spindly easel made from uncured pine.

I set myself up on Ninth Street just past Avenue C at a spot down the block and across the street from a row of low-income housing bungalows, each of which had doors that opened onto the sidewalk. Instead of having screens, each of these doors was protected by a gate of heavy bars—each of these gates was equipped with a heavy-duty lock. The entrance of unit 4A was visible from where I stood in front of my future masterpiece. I had also purchased a folding blue-canvas stool that I could sit on to appreciate my work and keep an eye on the barred door.

Once I had read the only other name on Bea’s visitors’ list, I knew my next step. I couldn’t find a listing for Violet Henrys but Violet Trammel lived in 4A on that block of Ninth. I knew the units because Alphabet City is full of the lowlifes and grifters that are my stock-in-trade.

I didn’t want to knock on the door because Bea had probably warned Violet that I was looking for Paulie. So I decided to wait until either she came home or went out before settling on how to make contact. If I was lucky Paulie might be with her. If I was very lucky Celia would be there too.

My disguise consisted of a Red Sox baseball cap that I’d found in a trash can on St. Mark’s Place and the fact that I had doffed my jacket, folded it, and placed it under the stool. I had it in mind to try to re-create the haunting stare of the Rembrandt Girl I so loved. After maybe two hours I had a graded gray-blue background and one eye. A few people stopped to watch me but nobody said anything except for a homeless woman that looked familiar. She was older than she should have been, clad in a dress that was a step down from being rags.

“Got a cigarette, mister?”

“Sorry, honey, I quit.” I gave her a dollar. But now that cigarettes cost a baker’s dozen times that, I didn’t know what she’d do with it. Maybe she could buy a loosie from someone. The police had laid off killing men for selling loosies for the time being—bad publicity.

Watching her shamble off, I was reminded of Twill and the way he dressed down to join Jones’s crew.

“Hello?” he said, answering his private line.

“Where are you?”

“At Uncle Gordo’s.”

“Mardi?”

“Her and Marlene are here. I called Liza and she said that she and Fortune were okay but then Hush got on the line. He said that he saw some people walk past his place three times.” Hush had surveillance cameras all around the outside of his
house—professional
necessity.

“Did he want help?”

“He didn’t say so.”

“I want you to keep it close, Twilliam.”

“I know, Pops. I know.”

“I know you know,” I said. “What I want is for you to do.”

“Yes sir.”

I raised my head at that moment, relieved because Twill usually stuck to his word. There at the door of 4A stood a woman twenty years older, and quite a bit blonder, than the woman in the photograph with Paulie. There was still hatred woven into her expression but this time she wasn’t smiling.

Violet Henrys a.k.a. Violet Trammel.

“I got to go, son. They just called my number.”

“Talk to you later, Pops.”

In those few seconds Violet had unlocked, opened, passed through, and closed her barred gate and door.

She was Paulie’s wife pretending to be Paulie’s mother’s daughter so that she could take over Bea’s low-income home. It was part of a scam that a local contractor, who built that housing for the city and state, used to sell to qualified grifters. Crooks need a place to live too.

At any other time I would have played a waiting game. Sooner or later either Paulie would come to see Violet or she would lead me to him. I could spend a few days working on my painting, waiting for the fly to come to me. But on that particular day I had people from DC to Beantown wanting to kill either me or mine.

I needed to speed up the process, so, abandoning my art materials, I went to a local bodega and bought a small box of envelopes. I wrote a simple note on the front of one, sealed in a hundred-dollar bill, compliments of Josh Farth, and slipped the packet through the bars and under Violet’s front door; then I fast-walked down to the corner of D and waited.

Usually I would have charged that hundred dollars, plus the cost of my artist’s disguise, to my client; but my client was dead and so I spotted him.

It took seventeen minutes for her to call.

“Hello?” I said to what my phone told me was an unknown caller.

“Did you put this note under my door?” Violet Henrys-DeGeorges-Trammel asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’d really pay a thousand dollars just to talk to Paulie?”

“That’s what I wrote.”

“But you’d really do it?”

“I will.”

“Were you the man who went to Bea’s place today?” she asked.

“I sure was.”

“And did she tell you how to get to me?”

“No. You signed the visitors’ clipboard and I knew that Paulie is married to a woman whose first name is Violet.”

“
Were
married,” she corrected. “We cut the knot just before the last time he was sent up.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“No need,” she said; I could almost hear the sneer. “People get divorced because they want to.”

“And why do they marry?” I asked.

“Because they’re fools.”

“Nine hundred dollars for me and your ex to talk.” I had already started walking back toward her door.

“I thought you said a thousand.”

“You got a hundred of that in your hands.”

“That’s just for the call,” she said.

“How do we work this?” I asked. I was only a few steps from her address.

“You pay me and I get Paulie to call you.”

I was about to say that that was a bad deal for me when I noticed the man walking toward me.

I disconnected the call and said, “Hey, Paulie.”