Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery (11 page)

"He's a Golden Glove first baseman!" Her eyes filled with tears.

I apologized and excused myself.

I knocked on Dibbs's door. Charlie Parker was doing a wild riff on "I Got Rhythm." Dibbs turned it down, but not off. We assumed our places, he against the desk, I the wall. I told him about my talk with Billie's mother, and he nodded sadly. Then I asked, "Who brought her here, Mr. Dibbs?"

"Woody."

"Pardon me?"

"Woody. My name, alas, is Elwood, so call me Woody."

"Thank you."

"Her daughter did."

"How long has she been here?"

Woody computed on his fingers. "A year last February."

"A year?"

"A year and two months."

"I see. I like your music."

"Do you like jazz?"

"Yes, very much."

"Splendid." He turned it up louder than before. "'Relaxing at Camarillo' is next, I believe." He poured us a mug of rum with a splash of coffee, and there we sat, knee to knee in his closet office, listening to Bird, who wailed.

ELEVEN

I
T WASN'T QUITE dark when I returned from Staten Island, but a heavy mist brooded over the neighborhood. I took Jellyroll for his evening walk down by the Hudson River, where the mist had turned to genuine sea fog. Jellyroll chased a soggy squirrel, which when treed, chattered angrily down at him, and I felt guilty for letting him do it.

We were alone on the promenade that edged the river. I could hear evening commuter traffic, bumper to bumper on the West Side Highway, but I couldn't see any cars. New Jersey was gone. It seemed as if I were standing on the edge of a flat, sullen sea. Suddenly I felt isolated and anxious. Where was Jellyroll? I'd heard him ranging ahead only moments ago, but I couldn't see or hear him now. I whistled. He didn't respond. I whistled again.

"Hey, buddy," called a voice from the murk. "The dog's right up here."

I walked toward the voice until I saw a man leaning over Jellyroll. Something was wrong. Though in the fog it looked as if the man were petting him, Jellyroll was not happy. His tail was down, ears back. That's not how he responds when strangers fuss over him. I moved closer. Leon Palomino.

"We got to talk, pal. We gotta talk right now." He had Jellyroll by the collar, and in his other hand he held a knife blade against my dog's throat.

"We'll talk, Leon, but not until you let go of that dog."

"How'd you know my name?"

"I know a lot. If you hurt my dog, I'll bring it down on you like a ton of shit."

"Who are you?"

"No talking until you let him go." I made no move that might jeopardize my dog, even though that now-familiar flood of adrenaline was washing through me.

Leon was considering his alternatives. He released Jellyroll, who scurried over to hide behind my legs, and the adrenaline valve shut down, leaving me limp. Yet I still had to deal with this nut with a knife, who faced me across ten feet of wet concrete, about three steps before he was on me. But he made no move at all. We stood watching each other, and it dawned on me that he was frightened.

Leon Palomino was tall, loose and gangly, about forty, and he had a roughened, weathered look like a man who did real work. He wore jeans with a threadbare hole in the knee, pointy cowboy boots, an army fatigue jacket with the nametag torn off, and a Mets cap pulled low over his brows. "I seen you all over the lot," he said in a Queens accent. "I seen you at Billie's in a fuckin' Con Ed suit. After that you go over her studio. Then yesterday, I seen you at the Antiques in a hotshot suit. Who are you, pal? Who you with?"

I stood silently, because I had no idea what to say.

But Leon wasn't prepared to wait. "You in this with her? You thinkin' about pickin' up where she left off? You do, you end up just like her."

"Who did that, Leon?"

"I
felt
like doin' it. But I never did. She was a turncoat bitch, but I never hurt her. I loved her."

"Me too," I said.

"Yeah? That right? Then we got that in common." He twisted the knife around and around in his right hand, but it seemed an unconscious, nervous action, not a threatening one. "You were lookin' for the pictures, right?"

"Right."

"Find em?"

"No."

"You want to know what I think? I think they never existed. I think she made 'em up."

"Why would she do that?"

"Hell, why would she go blackmailin' guys like that? You don't blackmail those guys."

"What? Blackmail?"

"You don't know about that? You just happenin' to be lookin' for some pictures, fill out your album, right? Let's talk straight, pal, or we gonna stand here in the wet like we don't have shit for brains?"

"Let's talk about who killed her? Then maybe why."

"Hell, coulda been anybody. Get in line. Coulda been you."

"No, I loved her."

"Yeah, get in line for that too. So maybe that puts you in the deep shit right beside me and Freddy."

"How do you mean?"

"How do I mean? I mean, maybe you shot your mouth off to her as loud as me."

What was he telling me? That he had told her something she used to blackmail somebody? Only the lower portion of his face was visible. It was pitted by old acne scars.

"You with Pine?" he asked.

"Pine?...Yeah," I ventured, "I'm with Pine."

"Maybe you are, maybe not. Let's pretend you are. You tell Pine something for me, you bein' so tight with him. You tell him me and Freddy never told her much. Nothin' important. Look, we're just delivery boys. We fucked up, sure, we know that, but we couldn'ta told her about clients. We don't know none. We just move the stock. Tell Pine to check out Jones. Did you know she was shaggin' Jones? Well, she was. Jones knew the clients. All Pine's got to do is think. He'll see me and Freddy don't mean a
thing." He paused to stare at me. I tried to look like I was with Pine. "We're in the wind, me and Freddy. Tell Pine we're gone. We just vanished."

"Jones?"

"I don't really know she was shaggin' Jones. He's pretty creepy. I'd like to think she'd draw the line at fucking Jones. Still, they were doing something. See what I mean about the crowd?" He chuckled ironically.

"What about Ricardo?"

"He's a tagalong, far as I know. Carries a gun, but who don't?"

"What about Sybel?"

"What about her?"

"Is she involved in this blackmail?"

"She don't know shit. Well, she might know, but she don't want to know. You know what I think? I think she shagged Sybel first."

"First?"

"For starters, yeah. As a way in. So you're with Pine, huh?"

"Look, Leon, I'll level with you. I'm not with anyone. I'm just a guy who loved her, and I want to know what happened to her. I don't know anything about blackmail. And I don't know any of these people."

"Let's say I believe you. Then you can't do me any good. But it's pretty hard to believe you're clean. I mean, I see you in all those fucking disguises. So let's say you're lying, you're really with someone. Pine, Jones, shit, anybody, the hoods."

"Hoods?"

"Yeah, hoods, damn right, hoods. Let's say you're an undercover dog walker for the Godfather. You tell 'em that same message. I just want to get my message out on the air. Me and Freddy, we're about to vanish. Norway or someplace, make pots. Never come back. That's what I'm trying to say. If you're with anybody, tell them that. Please. If you're just a dumb dog walker still hangin' off her bra straps like the rest of us, then keep your head down."

Leon turned and walked into the murk, but not far enough to disappear before I called his name, and he stopped.

"It's not only Billie," I said flatly. "They killed Freddy, too."

"Bullshit."

"I saw his body."

"No."

"Yes. In her studio. Somebody stuffed his body into that little refrigerator in the corner."

Leon stood statue-still for a while; then he drew three quick sucking breaths and squealed like an injured little animal.

A railing, bent and broken by time and the members of the community, runs along the walkway at the river's edge. Designed to resemble a ship's rail, it has a curved wooden cap bolted to the top and fitted along its length with neat scarf joints. Leon reared back and plunged his knife into the wood. The blade snapped beneath his hand and remained imbedded in the wood. When he dropped the handle, blood spurted from his palm. He didn't seem to notice he was cut. He grabbed his face in his hands. His Mets cap fell off the back of his head. When he removed his hands, his face was smeared with wet, glistening blood. He began to sob, his shoulders heaving and jerking. Blood and tears and rainwater streaked down his cheeks. I had never been in the presence of that kind of emotion.

He clutched at the railing, and for an instant I thought he meant to hurl himself over the top into the slate water, but he didn't. He needed the support to stay on his feet. "I went back there! Christ, I
sat
on that thing!"

Blood puddled in the creased toe of his cowboy boot. He hung on the rail for a while before he turned to face me. When he pointed his hand at me, I saw the long cut flap open with a belch of blood. "I was in 'Nam, man, I know what killing means." And he backed away, fading to nothing in the fog.

I stood quivering. Why did I tell Leon his brother was murdered? Though I hadn't planned it, the reason became clear even
as I stood there, trying hard to gain control of my knees. I wanted to sic him on the killers like an attack dog. Good luck, Leon.

I picked up the bloody knife handle and used it to pry the blade out of the wood. Then I picked up his Mets cap and tossed those three things in the river. Then I asked myself why the hell I did that.

I realized I was being followed as I crossed Riverside Drive. He was a big black man, far bigger than Cobb. He carried a woman's umbrella, the collapsible kind, which barely covered his head. I walked right past the entrance to my building and gave Jellyroll a little jerk when he started to turn up the steps. He looked at me quizzically as we hurried on toward West End. Was I just imagining that the man was following me? I turned south on the avenue. He turned the corner as if attached to me by rope. I crossed West End and walked to Broadway, where I bought a newspaper. I pretended to be interested in the window of a secondhand bookstore. I glanced left and right, but he was gone.

I turned abruptly from the books and walked west on 104th, back toward West End. Mist hung around the streetlights, dimming them ominously. When I was halfway back to the Drive, I saw him over my shoulder, heading my way, a black glacier under an absurdly tiny umbrella. At Riverside, I turned right and began to run. Jellyroll thought that was good fun. I clenched Fidel's service entrance key tightly in my fist. I unlocked the spiked steel gate and slipped in before the glacier turned the corner. I lay down on the wet concrete steps and tried to look out under the gate for a glimpse of him. Jellyroll didn't make a sound as the footsteps approached.

I saw his feet, high-cut black basketball shoes; a child could have napped in one. He wore no socks, Bermuda shorts, legs like muscular filing cabinets. I put my face sideways in the gap at the bottom of the gate, but I could see only as high as his belt. He walked past. I lay with my cheek on the wet concrete and
imagined myself squashed like a Dixie cup beneath those size 16 PRO-Keds.

Sealed in my apartment behind about three hundred dollars worth of locks, I fed Jellyroll, then put on some thinking music. Bill Evans, the Vanguard Sessions on Milestone with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. I sat in my Morris chair and thought hard. I thought about what I knew and didn't know, what made sense and what didn't. Billie didn't. But thought shriveled without a chance against all that fear. Someone had come for me. He waited in the rain. Biding his time. I brooded thickly on vulnerability. Didn't Leon Palomino say hoods were involved? They probably had fuckers ready to kill me for a few loose joints and carfare. I'd be easy to kill. So would Jellyroll.

A tug, cheerily lighted, red, green, and white, pushed a barge upriver. Sluggishly, I realized that meant the fog had lifted out there, but not in here. It would be cozy and warm in that wheelhouse. Men in flannel shirts would be drinking coffee and talking about the observable, the measurable, the air temperature, current, manifold pressure. Only fear and dread were clear here.

I needed to go to the john, but I didn't want to. It was dark in there, and I was a boy after a scary movie. The sound of my own activity could cover their approach from behind. No killer could sneak up on me while I was in my Morris chair. I drew up my knees to my chest and gripped them. Would some firepower make me feel better? My neighbor Jerry kept guns. I could build a bunker around my Morris chair, pee through the gun ports.

There were problems with telling Cobb the truth. I had knowingly withheld evidence, but an indictment was better than a .22-caliber chunk of soft lead ricocheting around inside my brainpan. Maybe I could figure out a convincing lie as to how I'd acquired the photos. I had all night before Jellyroll had to go out and I'd need police protection. Perhaps Jellyroll would get the
Dracula
gig, and we could wash away grief and anger and fear in Samoan surf.