Choice of Evil (7 page)

“What Vincent said,” he continued, like he hadn’t heard me, “was that you just plain didn’t give a fuck. One way or the other.”

“That hasn’t changed,” I told him. “So what? You got something to say, let me hear it. And it better end in cash.”

“To maintain your wardrobe?” some little twerp in a Godfather-movie gangster suit threw in.

I looked over at him, still patting Pansy. “No, pal. To feed my dog. She eats a lot. And she’s not the only bitch in this room, I see. Look, I don’t do dish, okay? Show me some cash or show me the door.”

“That’s enough, Sean,” Lincoln told the twerp in the gangster suit. “Mr. Burke, what Vincent told us was that we needed to. . . practice violence. Deliberate violence, not self-defense. That we needed to patrol our own streets and. . . interdict the enemy.”

“Sounds smart to me,” I told him.

“Maybe it was,” Lincoln said. “But none of us would go for it. It sounded too. . . ugly. We didn’t want to turn the other cheek or”—some fool cackled far in the back, but I couldn’t make out what he said—“anything, but we’re just not. . . like that.”

I guess Vincent hadn’t told them everything about our past dealings. One of his friends had ended up with a steel plate in his head after a night in the Ramble. Vincent convinced the guy to go to the cops. They caught the perps easy enough—the little freaks were trophy-takers, and one of them still had the gold chain he’d pulled off the guy whose skull they’d bashed in. And the DA even prosecuted. But only one of them got time, and he didn’t get much of it. That’s when Vincent first came to me. Later, I was working a job and I needed a place to meet a guy. A place I could haul him out of against his will, if it came to that. Vincent set that one up for me. He was glad to do it. He hated baby-rapers worse than fag-bashers, and that was a lot of hate.

“Who’s ‘we’?” The brunette challenged the silence Lincoln’s little speech had produced. “If I had been there, I would have—”

“Sure, Nadine, we know. We heard it all from you, a thousand times,” Lincoln told her without taking his eyes from me. “Anyway, we took a vote. And Vincent lost. That was the end of it.”

“So?” I asked him.

“I mean, it was the end of. . . ‘us,’ I guess. Vincent said he didn’t want anything to do with us. He. . . mocked us. He said, when we traded in our leather drag for lavender bullets he’d be back.”

“So?” I asked again.

“So he. . . died. From a heart attack. But now it’s like he’s. . . back.”

“You think it’s
Vincent
taking out all these freaks?” I asked him. “You should’ve gone to Ghostbusters, chump.”

The brunette laughed again, more harshly this time. Her body went along for the ride—quite a sight, and she knew it. When she caught my eye, she shrugged her shoulders to write that in italics.

“Look,” Lincoln said, “you’re not making this any easier. But I. . . we didn’t expect you would. We don’t want you to do anything illegal, all right? There’s nothing against the law in looking for somebody. Or solving crimes either.”

“You said a lot more than that,” I reminded him.

“Lincoln
always
says more than he has to,” the brunette he’d called Nadine said, snorting. She got to her feet, walked over to stand next to him. She was shorter than I’d thought she’d be, legs as heavily developed as her arms. “What we want you to do is find him,” she went on. “That’s all. Just find him, and tell us where we can find him too.”

“Vincent said—” Lincoln started, but Nadine chopped him down quick with: “Nobody fucking
cares,
okay, Lincoln?” She turned to face me, hip-shot, her eyes asking me if I liked her as much from the waist down. “
Vincent
told them you had contacts outside the country. That you’d been a mercenary, and that there was a. . . ‘pipeline’ or something you could send somebody down if they wanted to disappear.”

I let my eyes tell her she was, in fact, just as fine from the waist down. “Now you
are
talking about committing a crime,” I said. “Whole bunch of crimes if I remember my legal training.”

“You’re a lawyer?” she asked.

“No,” I told her truthfully, “but I’ve been in plenty of courtrooms.”

“So you’re not interested?” she asked, a quick lick of her lips telling me she knew how double-edged her words were.

“In what? Solving some crimes? Or committing some?”

“Right now, I’ll settle for either.”

“I might be. . . in the first. If the money was right.”

“What makes you think you
could
solve. . . I mean, find him?” Lincoln asked.

“I don’t know, pal. What makes
you
think I can? Vincent?”

“Vincent said you. . . do things for money. He said he. . . helped you with one, once.”

“That’s nice,” I replied. “Only thing is, I don’t have any old stories for you, friend. You want to check me out, do what you have to do. Or maybe you already did that. But I don’t have a crystal ball. Or promises either.”

“But you could
try,
couldn’t you?”

“Sure. I could try. But I don’t do bounty hunting.”

“What does that mean?” Nadine asked.

“It means I don’t do COD, understand?” I said, holding her eyes. “I get paid for work, not for results. You want to pay me to look, I might do that. You want to pay me only if I turn him up—if it’s a ‘him’ at all—forget it.”

They all went silent again. Nadine turned and walked back to her little table, showing off what every man on the planet was missing. I could tell she’d had a lot of practice.

I went back to scratching behind Pansy’s ears. If they didn’t learn anything else from all this, they’d at least discover I could outwait a tree.

Lincoln went over to a far corner. A number of them clustered around. The skinny blonde at Nadine’s table started to get up, but Nadine grabbed her wrist and wrenched her back down.

I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Nadine and I played with each other across the distance. It was as good a way to pass the time as any.

Lincoln finally came back. “We. . . can’t decide,” he said. “But we will. Soon. If we agree to your. . . terms, we’ll reach out for you.”

“You don’t even know my terms,” I told him. “The money has to—”

“The money, the money,” he said dismissively. “Don’t worry about money. Your terms are that you’ll. . . work. Like you said. Yes?”

“Sure.”

“You can find your own way out?”

“Sure,” I said again, getting up. Pansy slowly got to her feet, then we walked toward the door. As we passed her table, Nadine shot out one hand, grabbed at my jacket.

“Ahhh,” she said, mock-sorrowfully, “you didn’t even ask for my number.”

“I already know it,” I told her. “And it’s a wrong one.”

I went through the door into the alley. It was empty. Pansy was the only one disappointed.

“
I
do not like them, mahn,” Clarence said, back inside Mama’s an hour later.

“Them?” Michelle’s voice, scorpion-under-glass if you knew how to read it.

Clarence did. And he wasn’t going anywhere
near
there. “No, my little sister, I do not mean their. . . sex. That is their business. I mean, I do not trust these people who come to Burke. Something is wrong with all. . . this.”

For Clarence, that was a long speech. And for him to
start
a conversation was rarer still. I exchanged a long look with the Prof. Max just waited, as always.

“You make the call, you got to tell it all,” the Prof finally said.

“Yes, Father, that is what I am saying,” Clarence agreed, not understanding that the Prof was talking about him, not about the crew I’d just visited. “Why don’t they. . . fight the ones who attack them?”

“Remember the Haitian guy over at the Seven-Oh in Brooklyn?” I asked Clarence.

I didn’t have to say anything more. A couple of cops supposedly took him in the back room and sodomized him with a nightstick. An ugly-filthy Tontons Macoutes–style power display. Ruptured his bladder. Told him if he screamed they’d kill his whole family, muttering about “teaching niggers a lesson.” There’s a big Haitian community here, and they sure aren’t all nonviolent. But they stayed with peaceful demonstrations, expressing confidence that the authorities would get the job done.

The young man nodded, his face unreadable.

“Maybe it’s the same thing,” I said. “Maybe they’re waiting for the public to fucking
get
it, I don’t know.”

“Mahn, they do
not
get it. The Haitian guy, it happened when the Mayor was running for re-election, yes? And it was on the front page of the papers. Every day. Big coverage. TV, radio. No place to hide. Most of the time, when the. . . homosexuals get attacked, it never even gets out, you know? They don’t even go to the cops. Those little demonstrations, they are nothing.”

I nodded, against my will, agreeing with him. Thinking of Crystal Beth. Dead and gone. Just because some freak who couldn’t face what was in himself had to go and. . .

“This ‘Avenger’ guy, he is speaking sense to me, mahn,” Clarence finished my thought. “They kill your people, you kill them.”

“Like the Israelis and the Arabs?” Michelle challenged, pink beginning to creep into her peaches-and-cream.

“Israel is still standing, Little Sister,” Clarence said. “Would it be so if she waited for the United Nations to protect her from her enemies?”

“That clue is true,” the Prof said. “Ain’t a motherfucker on the planet don’t know the Israeli bible.”

Michelle looked a question at the little man.

“
Two
eyes for an eye,” he answered her. Then he turned to the rest of us. “Been pretty quiet since this ‘Avenger’ guy started playing his number. . . .”

“And
that
is who they want you to find, mahn?” Clarence asked me.

“That’s what they say,” I told him.

“But. . . what?” Michelle asked.

“Clarence has got a point,” I said. “Why me? Sure, I was tight with Vincent, and he might have told them a few things. But they got beaucoup cash. Made that clear. Why not just. . .?”

“They told you that part, Schoolboy,” the Prof said. “I think they’re for real on it. The Man wants to stop him before he hits again. But these boys, they want you to stop him before he gets
caught.
Better than wasting their cash on a lawyer.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter for now,” I told everyone. “They’ll get back to me if they want to play.”

I
didn’t want to play. I wanted to watch the slime who killed my woman die. I thought about that. A lot. Would Crystal Beth have wanted revenge? She was raised a hippie. Peace and love. But her father died protecting a runaway from a biker pack who said they owned her. And her mother followed him later, taking his killers along for the ride. Much later, Crystal Beth got into the business too. Running that safehouse for stalking victims. Until she became one herself. That’s when I came in. And by the time we were all done, the walls were splattered.

Would she have wanted it? I couldn’t puzzle it out. So I faced the truth.
I
did. Me.

But I didn’t have a clue. And if the cops did, they weren’t saying. So I thought I’d get myself an alibi and see if the Avenger would do some of his work while I was covered.

I
hadn’t been in the basement poolroom for years, but the old man nodded like he’d seen me yesterday. My cue was still in the rack, held in place by a tiny little lock. I took it down, unscrewed it, checked the hollowed-out compartment in the heavily taped butt. Empty. Nobody’d left me a message there for a long time.

Been a long time since I’d played too, and it showed—only took ten minutes to attract one of the slowly circling sharks. I waved him off. I wanted witnesses, sure, but I wasn’t going to pay for them.

Hours slipped by. Toward the end, the cue ball was finally starting to obey orders. I spent the whole night working on my stroke, not paying any attention to pocketing the balls. It was after three in the morning when I settled my tab with the old man.

N
othing on the news next day. Maybe he’d really gone quiet. Or, like one of the tabloids speculated, taken his own life. Dying of AIDS, that was another rumor.

I didn’t buy any of it.

I went to the track that night. Been years since I’d been to Yonkers. The whole place had changed. N
O
S
MOKING
signs everywhere. Quiet. Damn near empty. The horses were a sorry collection of low-rent claimers and nonwinners, with a few burnt-out old campaigners thrown in. Purses were real low too. Handicapping wasn’t the same either. They’d added a flexible rail, so the short stretch wasn’t the big factor it used to be—horses could pass on the inside coming home. And they ran at a mile and a sixteenth for some stupid reason. I had no experience with any of that, but I invested a few bucks, making sure I went to the same window every time.

I didn’t hit one all night.

Neither did he.

T
he way to establish an alibi is to be visible. But I’d spent my whole life being the opposite—even in prison, where profile maintenance can get you dead real quick—and when I made my list, I didn’t come up with much. I’m not known as a gambler, so making the rounds of the various games in town would get me
too
noticed.

If I wanted to play the slots, I could always go to one of the strip clubs, but those siliconed androids wouldn’t remember one john from another if the cops ever asked, and they sure don’t give receipts. Baseball interests me about as much as antique-collecting. And the movies are a good place to hide, not be seen. My crew would always stand up in court, but there wasn’t one of them that didn’t have a sheet or wasn’t known to be my partner. Not good.

I asked around. Got offered a sure-fire deal from a sleazoid lawyer I know. His client wanted some video of his wife in the sack. . . with anyone but him, he wasn’t particular. All I had to do was romance the woman—“She’s an ugly old pig,” the lawyer told me, “probably even go for a guy like you”—and they’d get me an alibi that’d pass anywhere. It was good money. I hated to let it slide. But I recouped a bit by going to see the woman and telling her what her husband had planned. She was real grateful. And she wasn’t anything like what the lawyer had described. I might have gone back to see her again if she hadn’t offered me major money to kill her husband.