The Long Good Boy (18 page)

I hadn't seen Grace since we headed west. I thought she might be waiting for Devon, having a last smoke before she went to work. But now there she was, right in my face.

“How they going to bury
you?
” she asked.

This time I pulled my arm free. “They're not,” I told her. “I don't plan to end up dead. I plan to end up in Palm Beach, where if you leave your butt hanging out in the weather, you don't get frostbite, you get a tan.”

“Palm Beach—la-di-dah. Keep dreaming, girl,” she said.

“How'd she die?” I asked Ebony. “Was it a work-related accident?”

LaDonna mouthed, You aksing too many questions.

Ebony shook her head. “They didn't say. They only said how they fix her up, make her look good one last time.”

“What did I tell you?” LaDonna asked. “Come on now.”

We weren't on Washington Street for two minutes when the car pulled up, a pillow man driving, big soft chunks of flesh going every which way, sticking out of his short-sleeved shirt, pushing out over his belt, made you feel like taking a nap, if not for the odor that hit us the moment he rolled down the window, as if he kept dead cats in his car.

“How much?” he asked. You had to give it to him, he wasn't a looker, but he sure had the gift of gab.

“We worth twice what everyone else aksing,” LaDonna said, backing up so that he could see more of her, dancing around a little, shaking whatever would move.

“You mean I get both of you?”

“You got it, sweet lips. Ain't no other way. We Siamese twins. So it's two for the price of one.” Then she looked thoughtful and went right up to the car window, leaning her arms right into the stink. “Well, it's not exactly two for the price of one. It's two for the price of one and a half, still the best deal you gonna get, isn't it?”

“But what about him?” Pointing at Dashiell, who was as far away as the leash allowed, facing the other way. He didn't like the smell either.

“We take care of her. You don't gots to pay one dime extra for her.”

“Her? With those testicles?”

“She saving up for her change. Matter of fact, you want to pay a little something toward that, she wouldn't turn it down.”

“What's her name?” Stalling. Thinking about whether or not he wanted a pit bull in his car. The pit bull may have had similar thoughts. I know the pit bull's owner did.

“She call herself Peaches,” LaDonna said. “Now, don't you say nothing, you hear? She sensitive. You'll hurt her feelings, you make fun of her.”

“Okay, okay, but sixty's as high as I can go.”

LaDonna opened the car door, bent as if to get in, but turned to me instead. “Don't let him touch you. He'll beat the shit out of you if he find the wrong kind of genitalia between your—” She stopped, touched her hair, inhaled through her nose. “Never mind.” She slid into the front seat and reached behind her to unlock the back door for me and Dashiell, but before she got the chance to do it, the car made a loud noise and sped away, leaving me standing there alone with my dog, the mural of leering pigs behind us. Truth is, I hadn't planned on getting into that car anyway. But instead of feeling only relief as I watched it turn left on Horatio Street and disappear, I was scared, scared for LaDonna and for the rest of the girls, taking the kind of chances they did ten, twelve times a night.

Could the pillow man be the killer? Sure, he might have accidentally gotten an appendage of the wrong gender in his big, fat hand, but how did that explain Mulrooney's death? And that's what I was thinking when the next car pulled up and stopped, that somehow these deaths had to be connected, wishing like hell I could see how.

“How much?” he said. Another sweet talker.

“Two hundred,” I told him. “White meat costs more.”

“Two hundred? Are you nuts?”

I noticed he'd stopped to talk to Grace first, that she'd leaned into the car, the way LaDonna always did, her derriere sticking out behind, waving around in the wind. Guess he didn't like her price either.

But he was still here. He hadn't driven away. And he didn't smell bad, at least not so bad it hit me where I was standing, outside the car. I couldn't keep sending johns away all night, not if I wanted credibility with the competition, not if I wanted to live until the end of the week.

“Oh, what the hell,” I said, all smiles now. “I was thinking tonight would be perfect for a fire sale. How's fifty bucks, sweet lips, just for you?”

He leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door for me. Dashiell hopped in first and went straight to the back.

“He okay?”

“He's perfect,” I said, sliding into the front seat and pulling the door closed behind me.

“He don't bite?”

I ignored his question. There, shivering on the corner outside the closed dry cleaner on Gansevoort Street, was Ebony, watching the car go by. The timing couldn't have been better. I leaned my head against the cold glass of the window and sighed.

“Do with me what you will,” I told him. The car lurched forward as he pressed down hard on the gas.

23

He Was Nearly Bald

I told my john to turn right on Bethune Street. I'd seen a lot of condoms there, in the tree pits and dotting the sidewalk, especially after the weekends, people practicing safe sex alfresco. I figured this would be as good a place as any. He pulled over to the curb and reached for his zipper.

“Uh-uh. Cash in advance,” I told him, and when he grunted and reached for his wallet, I opened the door and stepped out, Dashiell right behind me. If I hurried, I could get a decent night's sleep before I was due at Saks.

Dressed in a way that my own mother might not have recognized me—hell, she never would have expected me of all people to be looking like a lady—I sat on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral waiting for Frances Mulrooney to meet me for lunch. I saw her coming out of the side door and heading for the corner. No jaywalking for this lady. She seemed to do everything by the book, and I would need to use that to get her to open up about her husband and what he may have done that hastened his trip along the River Styx.

I stood, happy to remove my butt from the cold stone and from everyone else sitting there, all tourists with cameras, resting up after taking shots of each other in front of the cathedral. Frances and I headed over to Madison Avenue, to a little coffee shop called Nick's.

“It's terrible,” she said. “But the portions are huge.” She laughed, a nice laugh. I didn't think I'd seen her do that before. “And most important for you, it's dirt cheap.”

“Anything safe?”

“The water. At least it's predictable. It comes from a reservoir upstate, and there's bound to be a little fleck or two of something or other floating in the glass, but nothing that'll kill you. You've only got a part-time job, and temporary at that. We don't want to spend your entire paycheck on lunch, just to get some clean water and a bit of tasty food, do we?”

I shook my head, though I was sure it was a rhetorical question.

“You still need an outfit for that date, don't you?”

“I backed out.” I had, in a way, dumping that john across the street from Westbeth last night, the money already in his hand when I'd slammed the car door. Hey, who could blame me, the rude fuck talking about money right from the get-go, not even giving me the chance to ask if he wanted a date, after all my practice with LaDonna.

“You don't feel ready yet, do you?”

I shook my head, glancing at the menu, trying to figure out what would do the least harm.

“I understand. Sometimes I think I'd just like to have someone to go out to dinner with, not that I did that a lot when Patrick was alive. He worked such terrible long hours. Sometimes he didn't come home from one day to the next. Double shifts,” she whispered, leaning across the table. “And then when he did get home, it was a quick meal and off to bed.”

Double shifts? In the meat market?

A waitress came with a pot of coffee. Frances said yes. I said no. She ordered a salad with fruit and cottage cheese. I ordered bacon and eggs. In a joint like this, they were sure to come with orange-hued home fries. What with the potatoes, the onions, and the grease, I'd have all the major food groups of the day.

“It's so cheerful, getting out in the evening once in a while. The nights are so long now. Sometimes I go to an early movie with a neighbor friend. She's also alone. Two years now. Heart attack. He was only forty-four.” She shook her head. “There's a Chinese place we go to. They give you so much, you have enough left over for dinner the next night. Usually, I eat sitting in front of the TV set so I can hear another human voice.”

“Me, too.” Actually, that sounded pretty good compared to the way I usually ate, grabbing something on the fly or eating at my desk.

She picked up her cup and sipped some coffee, making a face. “Places like this, at least the coffee's usually good. But here, they don't have the knack for that either. It tastes as if they never clean the pot. Sometimes I eat in the employee's cafeteria. The food's not bad, and it's very inexpensive, but there are no windows and it makes me blue not to get out and see the sky a little. The atmosphere in the store is very confined, but they have a very good benefits package. Of course, I don't really need it. I'm still covered, because of Patrick's job.” She shrugged. Yet another person not living out her dream.

“Were you married long?” I asked.

“Twenty-three years,” she said.

“Then you married very young?”

“Right off the boat.”

“Really?”

“Met him at a party the first week I was here. And that was that. Oh, what a handsome man he was, so elegant.” She went off into her memories for a moment, but then the food arrived. Frances looked at the cottage cheese and sighed, then pulled a tiny paper napkin from the dispenser on the table, smoothed it open, and laid it across her lap. I wondered what she thought it would protect her from.

“And you? Where did you meet …?”

“Ted,” I said. I reached for my wallet and pulled out his picture, the only one I had of him without my sister hanging on his arm, gazing lovingly at his face, without their surly kids looking annoyed at whoever held the camera. I handed it across the table. Why had I chosen Ted to be my dead spouse? Wasn't there a chance of sending him bad karma, doing that? Was I really as hard-hearted as Lili claimed?

“Oh. He looks much older than you.” Handing it back. “Patrick and I were the same age. Both of us kids when we fell in love.”

“How did you manage?” I asked, figuring it might lead to what he did for a living, the place I needed desperately to go.

She was fishing for her wallet as she spoke. “He drove a truck for the first two years, but then when the baby came, we needed more security, so that's when he applied for the academy. I was against it myself. If you think about security, well, it's one of the last things you'd want your husband—”

I'd already stopped eating. If Dashiell were here, he'd be up on his feet. “The academy?”

“The police academy.” She pulled the picture out of her wallet and extended it across the table, careful to keep her sleeve out of the cottage cheese. “He said it was steady work, good benefits, and”—she dabbed at the corners of her mouth, then smiled—“appropriate work for an Irishman. He had a wonderful way about him, a wonderful, self-deprecating sense of humor.”

“And so that's what he did, he was a cop?” Holding the picture. Not looking at it.

Now she put her fork down. “Yes.” Indignant. “A fine one, too. He had his gold shield in only five years.”

“Oh, I didn't mean any disrespect. It's a noble calling.” Almost a lilt in my voice, I was sounding that Irish.

“'Tis.” She speared a piece of canned peach, holding it aloft.

“Was he killed on the job, Frances?” Trying like hell to soften my attitude, to hide what I was feeling, everything spinning so fast I couldn't grab hold of any one fact. Mulrooney was a cop? Then he must have been working undercover at Keller's. That changed everything. But how? And how did it connect to Rosalinda's murder?

She ate the peach before responding, putting the fork down, picking it up again. “He was,” she said. Then she did a funny thing. She began to poke at her salad, talking at the same time but no longer looking at me. I knew a story would be coming my way before she even began. “It was a drug bust,” she said, “in the Bronx. A big shoot-out. Patrick was first in, and”—she shook her head—“he caught the first shots before the backup could …”

“How tragic,” I said, thinking this lady needed to polish up her weaving if she was going to lie to someone as experienced in the art as myself. But why? Sure, she couldn't talk about his work while he was alive, but what difference could it make now?

I looked at the picture in my hand, expecting to see a full-faced Irishman, red hair cut short like the dos the other butchers wore, a dour face. Cops—they see it all, everything the rest of us want to pretend doesn't exist, and what they see, it's written all over them. But his face was lean, almost gaunt, not round at all. He had a clownish nose, round and red, and a broom of a mustache. He was nearly bald. And he was smiling. But if his mouth was carefree, his eyes weren't. They were the eyes of a heartbroken man. I looked back at Frances, wondering if it was business or personal, whatever it was that had put that look in Mulrooney's eyes.

“He took out two of them, the two with the guns, protecting the rest of his men. He was quite the hero.” Frances sat straighter now. “So young, too. Only forty-one.”

I thought the
Times
had said thirty-something. Thirty-eight is what I remembered. I'd have to go back and look at the articles again.