The Long Good Boy (7 page)

“What makes you so sure?” I asked.

“Well, I'm not sure. But from what you told me, she needs to know who did this. They all do, don't they? Before another one of them gets killed. Why would she hire you, lay all that money on you, and then not cooperate?”

I shrugged. “Who knows? I can't presume to understand her, or any of them.”

“They're just people, Rach.”

“Get real. Yeah, they're people. But they're also drug addicts. I mean, think of how you are in the morning before you get that first cup of coffee. Think of how badly you want it. Now multiply that by ten thousand, and figure every day you have to earn enough money so that you can have what your body is screaming for, and every day you might not, you might get arrested, you might get beaten up, you might get your money stolen, you might get your throat cut. You ever talk to a tranny hooker?”

He nodded.

“You did?”

“Yeah. At Hunts Point. I was protection-training a Shepherd for one of the plants out there. I used to take him by their walk sometimes, see how he'd react to people on drugs, get him to be steady with it when it had nothing to do with him. Great dog. He was a Vinnie, too, by the way, a German import.”

“With an Italian name?”

He nodded.

“I thought those were straight hookers at Hunts Point.”

“Mostly. But there were a couple didn't look like women to me.”

“Too tall?”

He nodded. The waiter filled his cup. Chip thanked him.

“No hips?”

He nodded again.

“Feet too big?”

“Way too big.”

“Still, you can't be sure.”

“I didn't have to be sure. I wasn't buying.”

“Who do you think does?”

He took a sip of coffee, put the cup down, and took my hand. “How would I know that, Rachel?”

“Oh, I figured when you were there, working Vinnie, maybe you saw some of the johns, got some idea.”

He shrugged. “Sure. It's a busy place. I saw lots of them.”

“And?”

“How can I make a judgment, looking at some guy behind the wheel of a car in the dark? What could I know about him, just from that?”

This time I shrugged. “Old, young, fat, thin, good-looking, ugly, messy, neat?”

“Yes.”

“All those things?”

“Except neat. And good-looking.” He took a sip of coffee. “Most of them were pretty seedy looking, unkempt, you know what I mean?”

“Chi Chi tells me a lot of the johns are fooled. She says they don't know—”

“That the women they're hiring are men?”

I nodded.

Chip shook his head.

“You don't think it's possible to be fooled?”

“I didn't say that.”

“Well?”

“I think the people who are fooled want to be fooled.”

I turned and watched our waiter heading toward the pass-through to the kitchen, the stiffness of his legs, the way his narrow hips moved, the way Chi Chi walked, only not quite so over-the-top. A moment later he was back with our check. He put it in the middle of the table. It's no longer PC to give it to the man, even if you're absolutely certain who's a he and who's a she.

When I got home, I tried to sleep but couldn't. I kept thinking about how I say one thing when I'm thinking something entirely different, something unrelated to the conversation, something a thousand times more urgent, more real than the words coming out of my mouth.

Was my sister right, saying this work was changing me, and not for the better? Isn't that what happens to cops after a while, that they look at the whole world as a crime scene, that they become so paranoid they shoot an innocent person reaching for his wallet or the keys to his house, all the faster if that person happens to be black?

And then I thought about the hookers, trying to find out who had killed Rosalinda. Was it to protect themselves? Or was it to get a little justice, one of the many things absent from their pathetic, lonely lives? There'd be no family to help, and the cops didn't care. They only had each other. And for now, they had me. I stayed awake a long time, thinking about the people who say they care, and the ones who actually do. Then, at last, pressed tight against Dashiell's back, I was able to sleep.

8

You'd Be Real Popular

Walking Dashiell along the river in the late afternoon, watching the way the last light of the day turned the color of the water nearest to us silver and a deep aqua on the Jersey side, I tried to figure out the best way to get into the building next door to Keller's and, in particular, what I would need to take with me. Of course, this was New York City. I could carry an aluminum ladder through the streets without getting a second glance. A ladder would be nice. I could climb up to the second story, break the bathroom window with a rock, open it, crawl in, and plot out the path Clint would have to take to open the latch at Keller's.

For a moment, stopping while Dashiell found something particularly interesting to investigate, I wondered how much I'd have to teach the little dog before I started his work in the empty building. If he was only housebroken and hadn't even been taught to sit on command, he wouldn't know how to listen to human language, let alone how to work.

Not only that, Chi Chi might not want to give him up for a few days. But no way, if she didn't, was Dashiell going to fit through that cat door. If Chi Chi turned me down, I'd have to come up with a whole new plan.

We headed north again, and as we got closer to the meat district, I thought about my night's work again. The door to the closed plant had been padlocked. Even if I could cut the padlock, that wouldn't be a good idea. It would be too visible. A broken window, that happened in a deserted building, especially in cold weather, but a cut padlock could bring police to check out the building. I'd been cavalier with Chip, but I surely didn't want to get arrested. Nor did I care to explain that I was there preparing a dog to help me break into the market next door so that I could look through their files.

The small window seemed my best bet. I hadn't checked the back of the building, but since the lower floor of all the markets were refrigerated, there surely wasn't going to be a window there. The next question was, short of carrying a ladder to Little West Twelfth Street, how was I going to get up to the second floor?

We crossed the highway at Gansevoort Street, running to avoid getting mowed down by traffic. Even starting out as soon as the light turns green, you need to move pretty fast to get all the way across before the light changes and the traffic peels out. Once safely on the other side, we headed north again, then east when we got to Little West Twelfth Street.

In the fading light of afternoon, I noticed something I hadn't seen before. The name of the business had been painted across the top part of the building, over the second-floor windows. It was faded almost to nothing by now, and in fact, I had to stand slightly to the side to see the words—Jeffrey's Fine Poultry, established 19-something-something, the last two numbers of the date gone completely, as was Jeffrey himself. Of course, this wasn't Jeffrey Kalinsky, who owned the fabulously expensive shop on Fourteenth Street. This place wasn't for the sensibility of folks who went to his shop for two-hundred-dollar T-shirts and twenty-two-hundred-dollar Gucci leather jackets. Even in its heyday, this Jeffrey's wasn't a place for the overly sensitive. While the animals weren't slaughtered here, the scent of fear and the rank odor of blood permeated the buildings, despite the high-pressure hoses and steam-cleaning machines that were used daily. Fourteenth Street was fast becoming a place for people who didn't contemplate the source of the sauce-covered delicacy on their plates, at least not what happened prior to the time when their own butcher took a delicate, pink piece of veal, pounded it flat, and wrapped it carefully in brown paper. They didn't imagine the food they were eating when it was part of a living, breathing creature. Who does? But on Little West Twelfth Street, you couldn't escape the knowledge that what you were eating for dinner had once eaten dinner itself.

The small window I'd assumed was a bathroom was off to the right. On the left side of the building there was a tree, one of those hardy plants that survives against all odds, cracking the sidewalk to make room for its trunk as it grows, its roots snaking their way around rocks and shale as they burrow deep into the ground in search of water. We walked over to it, and Dashiell gave it one more obstacle to overcome for survival. I hadn't spent a lot of time climbing trees since I was a kid, but I had the feeling I could do this one. In fact, standing there charting my path from branch to branch and then to the roof of the old chicken market, if I wanted to get inside, this looked like my only real shot. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed.

“Who wants Chi Chi?”

“I do. It's me, Rachel.”

“Yeah? You found out something already?”

“No, not yet. But I need your help.”

“I give you anything you need. What's up?”

“I need you to describe the inside of Keller's. I need you to tell me every last detail, first the layout in general, how many rooms there are and where they are, where the stairs are, where the bathroom is, okay? And then I need you to describe the windows, how they lock. Can you do that?” I asked, remembering how one of the detectives at the Sixth told me that sometimes, if they cleaned up well, hookers could be great on the witness stand because they were very good at noticing small details; like cabdrivers, they had to assess people very quickly to know if doing business seemed safe. Of course, to help me with the information I needed, Chi Chi wouldn't have to look middle-class, which was a damn good thing. But she would have to use that ability to remember details about a place rather than a person. I waited for her answer, listening to her blow her nose, cough, spit, light a cigarette. Then she walked me through, from the front door, through the refrigerated first floor, the bodies of the dead pigs hanging cold and silent in rows, as if they were waiting on line for something. “But they're not,” she said. “Shape they're in, their waiting days are over.” She took me up the narrow, wooden staircase to the office on the right, describing the messy desk, the row of files, the computer and printer, even the phone, “black, three lines.” And finally, Chi Chi described what she called “the ladies,” only there weren't any working there. In fact, in all my walks through the meat district, I'd never seen a female butcher, nor any other woman, other than a transvestite hooker picking her away around the clumps of fat, the occasional kidney, the barrels of bones.

“What about the windows?” I asked.

“None downstairs. Regular whatdoyoucall'ems in the two offices.”

“They look like double-hung windows from the outside. The ones that slide up and down.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“What about locks?”

“Those turn thingees on top of the lower window.”

“So it's possible, if I'm desperate, to break the glass, turn the lock, and get in that way.”

“Not possible.”

“How come?”

“The glass of those windows, it's got wire in it, like chicken wire. I don't think you can break that kind of glass so easy. 'Less you bring your hammer.”

“What about the bathroom window?”

“No wire. Just that kind of glass you can't see through.”

“Frosted glass?”

“Right.”

“What about the window? How does it work—like the others?”

“No. It opens out. You get what I mean? It doesn't slide up. It opens like a little door for a midget and it's got this hinge, locks up tight if you push it all the way open, you know the kind? So you want the window to stay open and not blow closed on you, like if the weather's warm, you push it all the way. Because it will.” Pause, inhale, exhale. “Blow closed.”

“Got it.”

But she wasn't finished. “Or if it stinks too bad. I got to tell you, in case you got to go, it's filthy, the sink, the toilet, the floor. Mens. They never think to spray a little Fantastik, wipe things up once in a while. But it beats the street. That's for sure.”

“And what about the lock, Chi Chi?”

“A latch. You know, like on a screen door. What's up?”

“I have to get in there, remember?”

“Oh, right. You wanna check out the paperwork.”

“Right. One more thing, the toilet?”

“Seat's always up.”

I laughed. “No, not that. But that's good you told me that. That helps a lot. What I want to know, is it next to the wall with the window?”

“Right there. Those butchers, they can sit on the pot and smoke, knock they's ashes out the window without getting up. Me, I'm an inch or two too short. You, too. But you don't smoke anyway, so no problem, and the way they keep the place, you could use the floor.”

“Chi Chi, you're fantastic. You ever want to quit hooking, I'll hire you on.”

“Same here, Rachel. You get dolled up right, honey, you'd be real popular on the stroll, especially if you go blond, like me. They's some of them, they come here, it's more convenient for them than the Bronx, but they got a yen for white meat. Hard to find on this stroll. Some pale PRs, you know, but that's about it. Your skin, your blue eyes, you go blond, you'd clean up.”

I laughed, and she did, too. “I'll keep that in mind.”

By now it was dark, and I could get to work. I told Dashiell to stay and reached for the first low branch on the tree, which was just a bit too high for me to get, the same inch or two that would prevent me from sitting on the toilet at Keller's and using the window as an ashtray. So I went back out to the sidewalk and found the box I'd used the night before to get up to the sidewalk bridge. With that, and one of the boards for an extra inch, I was able to reach the branch with both hands. Holding on, I walked myself far enough up the trunk that I could climb onto the first branch. From there, it was easy. I had the building on one side, the tree on the other, and braced one way or the other, found places to step until I was up on the old, flat roof of Jeffrey's Poultry Market.