Lady Yesterday (12 page)

“Old customer, pimp, what?”

“Husband.”

The man in the homburg was standing in front of the painting next to ours. We moved over one. It was a portrait of a slouch-hatted Negro with a cigarette burning between his fingers.

“Ex, actually,” she said. “We were married about a week.”

“I’m surprised it lasted that long.”

“He was this fat little spick flat off the banana boat, knew about six words in English and three of them were ‘mama.’ He picked me up in a dive on the river and we went across the street to this roach trap of a hotel. They’re gone now, both buildings; towers five and six of the RenCen ate ’em up. He offered me five hundred to marry him for six weeks. I looked at his roll and I looked at him and I said make it a thousand and we’ll get divorced in the morning.”

“I’m starting to see.”

“We settled on six hundred and a week. He wasn’t sure about how long it would take to be considered valid but he hoped that would do it. We got the license and he brought in some greasy little minister with beer breath and a mail-order divinity degree, all legal, and we did it right there in the room. I guess we had a honeymoon for a couple of hours. I was high as taxes.”

“That’s what it would take.”

“I never thought about him after the divorce went through until you mentioned him just now,” she said. “I never saw him again after that night. Our wedding night.”

“When did all this happen?”

“Before I got straight. Three, four years ago.”

“You should’ve stuck with him. You’d be in furs now, provided he didn’t get miffed and turn them into pillow stuffing. You too.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Your ex-husband is pulling a long shadow these days. He’s got a trade and a maroon suit. Blowing his nose in rose-colored silk.”

“You said dope?”

“You’d think he invented it. He also owns the garage where you picked up the car you’re using. The attendant who brought it around remembered you. Did you sign for it with your own name?”

“Yes. I forgot about that.”

“You wouldn’t have if I’d remembered to ask. Either Mozo saw your signature or someone did who knew about your arrangement and told him. Half an hour after I spoke to the attendant, the man himself was waiting for me outside my building with a Korean killer and a driver named Felipe. That’s when he gave me the message.”

“He’s the one who’s after me?”

“I didn’t ask. There didn’t seem to be any point.”

“What’s he got against me? He paid me and I delivered. I don’t—”

The room was filling up. I closed a hand around her upper arm and took her through the arch into the next room, which was nearly deserted. We swept past the man in the homburg, who was admiring a porcelain vase on a marble stand with his hands folded behind his back. We found an empty corner.

“Mozo married an American citizen so he could stay in this country,” I said. “You. Only if the feds can prove it was a marriage of convenience they can revoke his new citizenship and deport him in a hot Colombian minute. Three years ago they wouldn’t have bothered, but he’s festered some since then. He’s trafficking big and he probably killed Jackie Acardo for the green light. Say you’re Sam Mozo and you find out that the weekend wife who can put you on the next plane to Bogotá is suddenly back in town. What would you do?”

“You’re crushing my arm.”

I’d forgotten I was still gripping it. I let go. A lip got bitten.

“If I’m such a threat, how come he’s playing games? If he or one of his people could get into my motel room, why’d they pick a time when I wasn’t there and leave a note instead of just doing me? Why put a bullet in my car when I’m not in it?”

“I didn’t think to ask him,” I said. “I had a building at my back and Number One Son waving an Arkansas toothpick under my nose. Maybe he doesn’t kill women. Maybe his mother was one and he’s got a jelly spot for them. More likely the heat’s still too high from the Acardo job and if he can flush you out of town instead of killing you he will. With position comes diplomacy.”

“That doesn’t figure if he killed Mr. Charm.”

“I didn’t say I had it all worked out.”

She said, “I had a seventy-five-dollar-a-day habit. It was six hundred dollars for a couple of hours’ work.”

“Nobody’s blaming you for surviving. Question is, how do we keep it up? Mozo’s running out of car seats to slash.”

“I’m not leaving Mary M’s.”

“There’s a rat in the woodwork there.”

“It’s woodwork I know.”

“Would the world fall off its axis if you went back to Jamaica until Mozo gets dusted off by the law, or more likely by his own kind?”

Her face took on the fired hardness of an Egyptian sculpture. “I came here to find my father. I can’t do that from Kingston if you’re going to give it up.”

“You could go to the feds. When they find out what you’ve got you’ll have more bodyguards than you ever had johns.”

“You said yourself bodyguards are just nightlights.”

“They beat total darkness.”

“True. And after I testify they’ll change my name and give me a wheat field in Nebraska to hide in. Feds are just cops with tailors.”

I peered into a glass case full of medieval knives. The blades didn’t look much more drawn than my reflection. “If I keep on looking, will you go home?”

“I’ll go back to Mary M’s and wait to hear something.”

“That isn’t the deal.”

“You can keep it then. People my father’s age die while people my age are trying to book seats on airplanes to the States.”

“You’ll stay put. I mean grow roots.”

She thought about it a second, then nodded.

“I hate bargaining with ex-hookers.”

She laughed. I’d forgotten the sound of it.

“I’ll follow you back.” I touched her elbow and we turned toward the exit. The man in the gray homburg was standing in front of it.

He swept off the hat with a gesture that the novelists call courtly and inclined his head a fraction of an inch. He was my height and bald to the crown, from where his hair hung straight and snow-white down the back of his head to his collar. The moustache was waxed lightly so that the tips turned up and there were deep humor lines around his faded brown eyes. He looked like a Mediterranean Buffalo Bill. “Mr. Walker?” His voice was pleasantly deep with the accent set in it like a precious stone.

I said nothing and waited for the other shoe to drop. Iris’ arm tightened, trapping my hand between it and her ribcage.

“I am Tomaso Acardo,” the man said. “My nephew would like some words with you if you have time.”

“W
HAT WORDS?”

“That’s entirely up to Francisco. I am not actively involved in the family enterprise. It was my brother’s wish.”

At this point we were sharing the room with the young couple who had argued about the mural and a workman in gray coveralls replacing a lightbulb in one of the display cases. Our voices carried. I lowered mine.

“Last I heard Frankie Acardo was doing a nickel in Jackson on a stolen credit card rap.”

“One to three,” corrected Tomaso. “He was released in December after fourteen months. The entire affair was a miscarriage of justice.”

“It miscarries a lot. Look at the shape it’s in. Where is he now?”

“The Adelaide Hotel. Do you know it?”

“What’s Frankie A doing in a dump like the Adelaide?”

“His father owned it. Owns it. He worked—works out of the eighth floor. Francisco is using it until he returns.”

“It doesn’t sound like you think he’s going to.”

“There comes a point after which you must force yourself to hope. A car is waiting.”

“Mine too. Acardo back seats have a bad habit of coming back empty.”

The moustache bent down slightly, but the eyes remained humorous. They had the look of eyes that had seen most of what they had seen from outside. “The invitation is extended in good faith. The lady is welcome as well.”

“The lady’s on her way home.” I squeezed her elbow for silence; she had started to squirm. “I’ll see her there. Maybe I’ll come around after that. These are working hours.”

“Francisco requested me to tell you that you won’t be out anything for the inconvenience.”

“I laugh at money. How much am I laughing at?”

He laughed himself. It was a deep, quiet rumble that turned all of the heads in the room not engraved in marble. It must have been something to hear when he took the lid off at weddings and wakes. “You’re impertinent,” he said. “I was known for that myself when I was younger.”

“Is that why you’re not actively involved in the family enterprise?”

“As I recall it had a very great deal to do with the decision.” He stopped laughing. “I own quarries, Mr. Walker. Our father, Giovanni’s and mine, gave me my first and now I have twenty. Undoubtedly a number of the sculptures in this room came from my stone. That first quarry was intended as an insult, a symbol of my father’s disappointment, rather in the way that parents of my generation used to leave lumps of coal in the stockings of ill-behaved children. Have you checked the price of coal lately, Mr. Walker?”

“So how come you’re running errands?”

“My name is still Acardo. My nephew is new to authority and a mistake on his part would brand me as thoroughly. There has been at least one federal agent parked outside my house since I was forty.”

“Did he follow me here too?”

“I think I will leave that to Francisco to explain.” He put on his homburg, cocking it an eighth of an inch over his right eye. “Shall I tell him to expect you?”

“I get down to that neighborhood sometimes.”

“Sometime today would be to your advantage.”

He touched his hat and left us then, his custom shoes making no noise at all on the carpeted floor.

“What was that all about?” Iris asked.

“Jackie Acardo’s brother.” I let go of her elbow. “Looks like son Frank agrees with the cops about Sam Mozo dusting his old man. So far I haven’t had anything to do with the Acardos, just with your ex.”

“I wish you’d stop calling him that. It isn’t as if we picked out a silver pattern together. You’re not going.”

“It isn’t every day you get an Acardo invitation without guns.”

“Our deal’s not even dry yet. You’re supposed to be looking for my father.”

“You won’t need a father if you’re dead. Sam Mozo wants you that way if he can’t have you out of town, and the Acardos want Sam Mozo. It’s a question of priorities.”

“You don’t know they want any part of him. His name didn’t even come up.”

“I’ll know after I talk to Frank.”

Her eyes were large on me, coffee brown with the pupils wide. “There’s more to it. You’re up to something.”

I put on an innocent look. It went over like the two-dollar bill. Rivera wouldn’t have painted it and the DIA wouldn’t have hung it. I saw her back home. All that art was making me feel out of my depth.

Automobile money had put up the Adelaide, back when taxes were a democratic joke and red brick came five dollars the hundredweight. The brick was stained now, the canopy out front pigeon-striped and fraying, but the vaulted lobby was big enough to park a fleet of trucks inside and the old leather chairs and sofa had been redone recently in dark green Naugahyde. The ferns had fronds as big as Volkswagens. A wet snow was falling outside; as I paused to wipe my feet six pairs of eyes watched me above newspapers. Among the men seated in the chairs, the FBI agents were easy to distinguish from the local muscle. The local muscle wore hats.

The clerk behind the marble reservation desk was a big shale-eyed man who looked like a bartender. The shale eyes moved behind me when I asked for the number of Frank Acardo’s room and two of the men who had been reading when I came in joined me. They had on narrow-brimmed hats and light topcoats open over three-piece suits and striped neckties, one red and silver, the other gray and white. Gray-and-White was a redhead with freckles on his face and hands and an upswung Irish nose. He was my height. The other was a shade shorter with ears that stuck out from hairless temples and I knew from them that from there on up he was as bald as a bearing. His eyebrows were thin and so fair that at first they looked as if he’d shaved them too. His mouth was a straight lipless line like a coin slot.

They were killers. You’ll hear that it’s in their eyes, but eyes don’t kill people; the redhead’s were merry-looking, in fact. It was in their plumb-steady posture and in the way their neat clean short-nailed hands hung in front of their thighs with the fingers bent slightly, and it was in the way you looked at them and were glad you’d left your gun behind. The odds were better carrying a club into a rockslide.

“Name?”

The clerk’s tone wasn’t entirely impolite. I told him and he lifted a flesh-colored receiver off a cradle behind the desk without dialing and waited and then repeated my name into the mouthpiece. After a second he replaced the receiver and nodded at the two men. Without actually touching me they steered me to the right and around a corner to the elevators. We stepped into an open car and when the doors were closed I stood for the frisk by the redhead while the shaven-headed one watched and then the redhead stepped back and his companion patted me down again. Finally he took off my hat and ran a finger around inside the sweatband.

“Do I get to do you now?” I asked when he returned it.

Neither of them said anything. A button got pushed and I had the quietest ride ever, watching the numbers light up in orange along the top of the car. It stopped on eight with a tiny sigh and the doors slid open on the biggest hotel room in the world.

They had removed all the partitions from that floor, including those defining the hallway, so that we stepped directly into a city-block of room carpeted in midnight blue with brushed-aluminum panels on the walls—the effect was of a room lined in dull silver—and track lighting in the suspended ceiling and a stately row of green-draped windows like the arches at Versailles. The office and the living area blended into each other in such a way that the tenant could rise in the morning from the rumpled king-size bed in the far left corner and go through the door at the rear for a shower in what was presumably the bathroom and put on one of the couple of dozen suits hanging in the walk-in closet with its doors folded open by the bed and take a leisurely breakfast at the table between two of the windows and then go to work at the big no-nonsense slab oak desk with a tufted leather swivel behind it inside an L of wooden file cabinets in the near right corner. The place had everything but a doghouse.