The Long Good Boy (3 page)

3

Hey, Baby

When LaDonna, Chi Chi, and Jasmine left for work, I headed home with so much cash, all in fives, tens, and twenties, I had to divide it in half to fit it into my jacket pockets, wondering all the time how they got their hands on so much money, and if they'd all soon turn up dead because of it. They'd insisted they hadn't held out on their pimp to pay me. Yeah, yeah. Maybe the money was from rent collected on some of their properties, book royalties, or winning the lottery. Again and again, they'd said that this was what they wanted, shoving the money at me, telling me they had to know who did the killing. When I told them I didn't need this much up front, that half of it would have been too much, they insisted I take it anyway. “We don't do layaway,” Jasmine had said. “We pay in advance.” I had the feeling that if I didn't take the money, someone else would. One way or another, they wouldn't be able to hold on to it.

When they started out of the park, Chi Chi hung back, fussing with her dog, letting him down for a pee, adjusting the strap on his coat. She gave me her cell phone number, reminding me she already had mine, my house number as well. Who the fuck was going to believe this? I thought, and then I got one more surprise, Chi Chi leaning forward and giving me a kiss on the cheek before running off to catch up to the others, already on the corner, waiting for the light to turn green.

It wasn't quite ten, and the restaurants along Hudson Street were still crowded with middle-class people eating ricotta ravioli or swordfish steak with capers and white wine. The video store was just closing, the last two customers leaving with rented movies to slip into their VCRs after they slipped into bed with snack food and soda at the ready. The Golden Rabbit had taken in the cut flowers and put them in the window, parchment-colored roses and tiny purple violets, red carnations with sprigs of white baby's breath, too cold to leave them out at night this time of year. And a few blocks north and west, where my clients had headed, the corners were dotted with working girls, girls who shaved their faces even more carefully than their legs, at least those who hadn't gone through the pain and expense of electrolysis. Rosalinda had just finished hers, Chi Chi had said, thirty-two sessions. It cost a fortune, but it was an investment in your future, she'd told me. I'd wondered how much of a future any of them had. While I was safe at home starting my research, they'd be leaning into the cars that stopped to shop the merchandise, making deals, risking their lives.

You never know when you get in a car, you going to come out again, Chi Chi had said right before they left. Oh, you come out, LaDonna said. The question is, you step out or you dumped out.

They'd given me six thousand dollars. The way I lived, that was enough to pay the bills for several months. I tried not to think about what they'd had to do to earn it, nor what they were figuring I was going to have to do to keep it. They didn't know the secrets of my trade any more than I knew theirs, and that was exactly how I thought things would stay. I had no way of knowing then how wrong I was.

On the way to Abingdon Square, I'd put out all the old newspapers and magazines for recycling. When I got to where I lived, I picked up the package by the string to bring it back in. This time, I held the stack as far away from my body as I could. Without checking carefully, I was pretty sure most of the neighborhood dogs had added to all the news the
Times
saw fit to print. In fact, I'd just stopped Dashiell from filing his own story.

In the yard, I opened the cord and pulled out the first two sections of the papers for the end of October and the beginning of November, leaving the rest piled up near the stairs. Once inside, I took them up to my desk and began to look for any mention of the murder of Rosalinda a week and a half earlier. There'd been nothing the last few days of last month, but when I got to the first of this month, I found something else of interest.

It was an article on the first page of the Metro section reporting the gangland-style execution of the manager of one of the meat plants, a Kevin Mulrooney, thirty-eight, who'd been found, bound and gagged with silver duct tape, hanging from one of the meat hooks. He'd been shot once in the heart, and again in the back of the head. Better safe than sorry. Mulrooney, it said, had been the manager of Keller's since the retirement of the previous manager two months earlier, and fellow workers said he was making “innovative changes” in the way Keller's operated.

I skimmed the rest quickly—Mulrooney was survived by his wife and kid, yadda, yadda—left it to the side, and began paging through the next days' papers until I found a follow-up piece, just a paragraph near the end of the Metro section saying that two men, Andrew Capelli and Joseph Maraccio, had been arrested and charged with the murder of Kevin Mulrooney three nights earlier. Both Capelli and Maraccio—who were employed by the CityWide Carting Company, which had, until a week prior to the murder, carted the trash from Keller's—denied any knowledge of the crime.

There was a short quote from the mayor calling the crime a throwback to the days when the mob ran the carting industry, saying he had reiterated his vow to make the Gansevoort and Hunts Point markets as squeaky-clean as he had made the Fulton Fish Market. Yeah, yeah.

I cut out the articles and put them aside, going back to the last week in October and starting again to look for mention of the death of a transvestite hooker. Fat fucking chance.

And found yet another piece of interest. The day after the report of Mulrooney's murder, there was a short piece near the back of the B section in an article called “Metro News Briefs.”

C
OSTUMED
M
AN
F
OUND
D
EAD AT
W
ATERFRONT

Sanitation workers, beginning the massive cleanup following the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, found the body of Angel Rodriguez, 26, dressed in a long white gown and holding a small wand, sitting up against the chain-link fence where their vehicles are parked, at Gansevoort Street and the river, a spokesperson said. Mr. Rodriguez, who had lived in the Bronx, died of a wound to his throat. Police said no weapon had been recovered and that no suspect was in custody.

I thumbed through the B to B phone book, found the address for Keller's, grabbed my sheepskin coat and Dashiell's leash, and headed for the meat market. Dashiell was thrilled with the extra walk, pulling out in front as if he knew exactly where we were going and had to get there yesterday.

Keller's was off the main drag, on Little West Twelfth Street. You might think, since I lived on Tenth Street, that it would be only a few blocks away. But that's not how the Village works. Going north from Tenth Street, you run into Charles Street, where the Sixth Precinct used to be, then Perry, where there used to be a garage that fixed Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. After that there's Eleventh Street, but before you get to West Twelfth Street, you hit Bank and Bethune. Farther east, to make things even more difficult, West Twelfth Street runs into West Fourth Street, and a street called Waverly runs into itself. In addition to that, West Twelfth Street stretches all the way across town, nearly from river to river, but Little West Twelfth Street is another story. It runs for only two blocks, bisected by Washington Street, where the transvestite hookers stroll. I passed a few of them on the way to Keller's—two on the corner near the deli on Gansevoort and Washington, a lone one across the street near the now-closed dry-cleaning shop—but didn't see
my
hookers, which at this point was fine with me.

There was a dump of a little diner on the southwest corner of Little West Twelfth and Washington, Hector's Place, Inc., where the butchers could snag a greasy burger or some take-out coffee. They probably had sweet rolls, a breakfast special, “homemade” soup, but I wasn't about to check the menu. I turned left and started checking the numbers, though it was difficult to see them in the dark. Walking under a sidewalk bridge at one point, the street strewn with trash, I saw something dark moving quickly from across the street and disappearing into one of the buildings on the side I was on. Sure enough, when I got to where it had vanished, the sign said Keller's. And under that, Fine Pork Products.

I stood there for a moment just looking at the place where Kevin Mulrooney had been found, executed, and refrigerated, wondering if I'd found the pig man that easily, and if I had, if his death had anything at all to do with Rosalinda's death.

I dialed Chi Chi's cell phone.

“Chi Chi?”

“Who's this?”

“Rachel.”

“I can't talk now. I'll call you back.”

“Hey, baby,” I heard her say, the phone no longer close to her mouth. Then: “Come on, honey, give me jus'a minute, an' I'm going send you right to heaven. This here's real important.” I heard a car door open. “You home?” she asked.

“No. Call my cell phone.”

I crossed the street, moving around to keep warm, understanding why the hookers did those little dances, that it wasn't only to attract attention but also to keep from freezing. I wanted to put a little distance between me and Keller's so that I could see the whole building and also distance myself from whatever ran across my path moments earlier, as if whatever it had been was the only one of its kind.

It was a smallish building, two stories high, made of wood, an anachronism if ever there was one. The windowless ground floor was probably all refrigerated, and upstairs, where there were three small windows, that would be where the offices were, where the manager did his paperwork and made innovative changes.

Was that also where the pig man met with Rosalinda once or twice?

I shivered, pulling up my collar and jumping around in place, glad I was off the main drag and hoping no one would drive around the corner and ask me, “How much?”

I looked around for a grate in the sidewalk, which is where a lot of the homeless slept, trying to keep warm on whatever heat escapes the basement where gigantic transformers step the electricity down from 1,000 to 110 volts to make it usable in big buildings' lines, a process that gives off tremendous heat. But I was kidding myself. There were no skyscrapers here. I was in the wrong neighborhood for sidewalk grates, and anyway, if there were any here, there would probably be hordes of rodents streaming in and out of them.

Twenty minutes later, my cell phone rang. I fumbled it open without taking off my warm gloves.

“What?” she said.

Time is money.

“Angel Rodriguez,” I said.

Silence.

“Chi Chi?”

“Where'd you get that name?”

“The
New York Times
. November 2. Small piece in the Metro section. Just a paragraph about a twenty-six-year-old male in a white gown, carrying a wand—”

“She was twenty-eight.”

“I'm just telling you what I read in the paper.”

“And it said her name?”

“No, Chi Chi. It said
his
name.”

“And you—”

“Put two and two together.”

“Which is like what you do, right?”

“Right. It's like why you and LaDonna and Jasmine hired me.”

“No need to be sarcastic. Just because I'm a hooker don't mean you shouldn't treat me with respect. What do you want me to do, get a job in retail? You think I could be on the floor at Jeffrey, or at Bloomingdale? You think someone wants me out front anywhere?”

“Sorry—I'm just cold standing out here in the street.”

“Honey, you don't know from cold. You just a beginner.” I heard her light a cigarette. “Gave these up last week.” She stopped to exhale. I could hear her blowing the smoke out, hear her sighing. “And the week before that. I ain't go no willpower.”

“There was a butcher killed the same night, Halloween night. Worked at Keller's. You know Keller's?”

“I mighta passed it once or twice. It's around here, right? What, on Thirteenth Street, or somethin'?”

“Little West Twelfth. So, was he the pig man you all tried so hard not to mention tonight?”

“Was who?”

“The dead butcher. Kevin Mulrooney. Was he the pig man?”

“No. No way.”

“How can you be sure? You said you didn't know his name.”

“She might have mentioned a first name one time.”

“She might have?”

“Yeah. But I got a lot on my mind, you know? Shit.”

“What happened?”

“My smoke went out.”

“Yeah, well, Chi Chi, my friend, what was the first name Rosalinda might have mentioned? Can you help me out here? I'm working for
you
. I'm not the enemy.”

“I can't recall, but I know it wasn't Kevin. You said Kevin, din't you?”

“Right. Think, Chi Chi.” Whatever she was smoking was not helping the conversation one little bit.

“It was like a Polish name, far as I can remember. Kevin's Irish, right?”

“Try a little harder, Chi Chi. Try to remember.”

“I'll get back to you.”

“Chi Chi, if you want me to do this for you—”

“Hey, baby, you goin' out?”

“How much for the both of us?”

“Both of youse? What are you, crazy? What'd you think, just because I'm a prostitute, you could do anything you dream up, like I have no say in the matter, like I'm too stupid to know what's a good idea, what isn't? Get lost, two at a time.” Way too loud, one word eating the next.

I heard the car peel out.

“Wanda'll do 'em. Wanda, she don't care. She used to work with this girl Susan, but she's dead already. They called her black-eyed Susan, she got beat up so much. Mostly—”

“Chi Chi, I'm still here. Talk to me.”

“I
am
talking to you. I'm saying Grace,” she said. “He asked Grace to do them, she'd take off her size-thirteen-and-a-half shoe and give him two at a time on his stupid, bald head. Grace, she don't take shit from no one. Ebony, she a whole 'nother story. Ebony got a screw loose. Everybody says so. Had her face done, you know, like Rosalinda did, but Ebony, she didn't do her upper lip. Said it hurt too much. It was too sensitive. Can you imagine! She spend all that money, she still look like shit. What's a little pain matter? In this business, appearance is everything.”