Eight Million Ways to Die

by Lawrence Block

Page 4

 

  "Youre looking prosperous, Royal. "

  He preened a little. His name was Royal Waldron and I once knew a black cop with a bullet head who rang changes through Royal Flush to Flush Toilet and called him The Crapper. He said, "Well, I buy and sell. You know. "

  "I know. "

  "Give the folks an honest deal and you will never miss a meal. Thats a rhyme my mama taught me. How come you uptown, Matthew?"

  "Im looking for a guy. "

  "Maybe you found him. You off the force these days?"

  "For some years now. "

  "And you lookin to buy something? What do you want and what can you spend?"

  "What are you selling?"

  "Most anything. "

  "Business still good with all these Colombians?"

  "Shit," he said, and one hand brushed the front of his pants. I suppose he had a gun in the waistband of the lime green pants. There were probably as many handguns as people in Kelvin Smalls. "Them Colombians be all right," he said. "You just dont ever want to cheat them is all. You didnt come up here to buy stuff. "

  "No. "

  "What you want, man?"

  "Im looking for a pimp. "

  "Shit, you just walked past twenty of em. And six, seven hoes. "

  "Im looking for a pimp named Chance. "

  "Chance. "

  "You know him?"

  "I might know who he is. "

  I waited. A man in a long coat was walking along the block, stopping at each storefront. He might have been looking in the windows except that you couldnt; every shop had steel shutters that descended like garage doors at the close of business. The man stopped in front of each closed store and studied the shutters as if they held meaning for him.

  "Window shopping," Royal said.

  A blue-and-white police car cruised by, slowed. The two uniformed officers within looked us over. Royal wished them a good evening. I didnt say anything and neither did they. When the car drove off he said, "Chance dont come here much. "

  "Where would I find him?"

  "Hard to say. Hell turn up anyplace but it might be the last place you would look. He dont hang out. "

  "So they tell me. "

  "Where you been lookin?"

  Id been to a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, a piano bar in the Village, a pair of bars in the West Forties. Royal took all this in and nodded thoughtfully.

  "He wouldnt be at Muffin-Burger," he said, "on account he dont run no girls on the street. That I know of. All the same, he might be there anyway, you dig? Just to be there. What I say, hell turn up anywhere, but he dont hang out. "

  "Where should I look for him, Royal?"

  He named a couple of places. Id been to one of them already and had forgotten to mention it. I made a note of the others. I said, "Whats he like, Royal?"

  "Well, shit," he said, "He a pimp, man. "

  "You dont like him. "

  "He aint to like or not like. My friends is business friends, Matthew, and Chance and I got no business with each other. We dont neither of us buy what the other be sellin. He dont want to buy no stuff and I dont want to buy no pussy. " His teeth showed in a nasty little smile. "When you the man with all the candy, you dont never have to pay for no pussy. "

  One of the places Royal mentioned was in Harlem, on St. Nicholas Avenue. I walked over to 125th Street. It was wide and busy and well lit, but I was starting to feel the not entirely irrational paranoia of a white man on a black street.

  I turned north at St. Nicholas and walked a couple of blocks to the Club Cameroon. It was a low-rent version of Kelvin Smalls with a jukebox instead of live music. The mens room was filthy, and in the stall toilet someone was inhaling briskly. Snorting cocaine, I suppose.

  I didnt recognize anyone at the bar. I stood there and drank a glass of club soda and looked at fifteen or twenty black faces reflected in the mirrored back bar. It struck me, not for the first time that evening, that I could be looking at Chance and not knowing it. The description I had for him would fit a third of the men present and stretch to cover half of those remaining. I hadnt been able to see a picture of him. My cop contacts didnt recognize the name, and if it was his last name he didnt have a yellow sheet in the files.

  The men on either side had turned away from me. I caught sight of myself in the mirror, a pale man in a colorless suit and a gray topcoat. My suit could have stood pressing and my hat would have looked no worse if the wind had taken it, and here I stood, isolated between these two fashion plates with their wide shoulders and exaggerated lapels and fabric-covered buttons. The pimps used to line up at Phil Kronfelds Broadway store for suits like that, but Kronfelds was closed and I had no idea where they went these days. Maybe I should find out, maybe Chance had a charge account and I could trace him that way.

  Except people in the life didnt have charges because they did everything with cash. Theyd even buy cars with cash, bop into Potamkins and count out hundred dollar bills and take home a Cadillac.

  The man on my right crooked a finger at the bartender. "Put it right in the same glass," he said. "Let it build up a taste. " The bartender filled his glass with a jigger of Hennessy and four or five ounces of cold milk. They used to call that combination a White Cadillac. Maybe they still do.

  Maybe I should have tried Potamkins.

  Or maybe I should have stayed home. My presence was creating tension and I could feel it thickening the air in the little room. Sooner or later someone would come over and ask me what the fuck I thought I was doing there and it was going to be hard to come up with an answer.

  I left before it could happen. A gypsy cab was waiting for the light to change. The door on my side was dented and one fender was crumpled, and I wasnt sure what that said about the drivers ability. I got in anyway.

  * * *

  Royal had mentioned another place on West Ninety-sixth and I let the cab drop me there. It was after two by this time and I was starting to tire. I went into yet another bar where yet another black man was playing piano. This particular piano sounded out of tune, but it might have been me. The crowd was a fairly even mix of black and white. There were a lot of interracial couples, but the white women who were paired with black men looked more like girlfriends than hookers. A few of the men were dressed flashily, but nobody sported the full pimp regalia Id seen a mile and a half to the north. If the room carried an air of fast living and cash transactions, it was nevertheless subtler and more muted than the Harlem clubs, or the ones around Times Square.

  I put a dime in the phone and called my hotel. No messages. The desk clerk that night was a mulatto with a cough-syrup habit that never seemed to keep him from functioning. He could still do the Times crossword puzzle with a fountain pen. I said, "Jacob, do me a favor. Call this number and ask to speak to Chance. "

  I gave him the number. He read it back and asked if that was Mr. Chance. I said just Chance.

  "And if he comes to the phone?"

  "Just hang up. "

  I went to the bar and almost ordered a beer but made it a Coke instead. A minute later the phone rang and a kid answered it. He looked like a college student. He called out, asking if there was anyone there named Chance. Nobody responded. I kept an eye on the bartender. If he recognized the name he didnt show it. Im not even certain he was paying attention.

  I could have played that little game at every bar Id been to, and maybe it would have been worth the effort. But it had taken me three hours to think of it.

  I was some detective. I was drinking all the Coca-Cola in Manhattan and I couldnt find a goddamned pimp. My teeth would rot before I got hold of the son of a bitch.

  There was a jukebox, and one record ended and another began, something by Sinatra, and it triggered something, made some mental connection for me. I left my Coke on the bar and caught a cab going downtown on Columbus Avenue. I got off at the corner of Seventy-second Street and walked half a block west to Poogans Pub. The clientele was a littl
e less Superspade and a little more Young Godfather but I wasnt really looking for Chance anyway. I was looking for Danny Boy Bell.

  He wasnt there. The bartender said, "Danny Boy? He was in earlier. Try the Top Knot, thats just across Columbus. Hes there when hes not here. "

  And he was there, all right, on a bar stool all the way at the back. I hadnt seen him in years but he was no mean trick to recognize. He hadnt grown and he wasnt any darker.

  Danny Boys parents were both dark-skinned blacks. He had their features but not their color. He was an albino, as unpigmented as a white mouse. He was quite slender and very short. He claimed to be five two but Ive always figured he was lying by an inch and a half or so.

  He was wearing a three-piece bankers-stripe suit and the first white shirt Id seen in a long time. His tie showed muted red and black stripes. His black shoes were highly polished. I dont think Ive ever seen him without a suit and tie, or with scuffed shoes.

  He said, "Matt Scudder. By God, if you wait long enough everybody turns up. "

  "How are you, Danny?"

  "Older. Its been years. Youre less than a mile away and whens the last time we saw each other? It has been, if youll excuse the expression, a coons age. "

  "You havent changed much. "

  He studied me for a moment. "Neither have you," he said, but his voice lacked conviction. It was a surprisingly normal voice to issue from such an unusual person, of medium depth, unaccented. You expected him to sound like Johnny in the old Philip Morris commercials.

  He said, "You were just in the neighborhood? Or you came looking for me?"

  "I tried Poogans first. They told me you might be here. "

  "Im flattered. Purely a social visit, of course. "

  "Not exactly. "

  "Why dont we take a table? We can talk of old times and dead friends. And whatever mission brought you here. "

  The bars Danny Boy favored kept a bottle of Russian vodka in the freezer. That was what he drank and he liked it ice-cold but without any ice cubes rattling around in his glass and diluting his drink. We settled in at a booth in the back and a speedy little waitress brought his drink of choice and Coke for me. Danny Boy lowered his eyes to my glass, then raised them to my face.

  "Ive been cutting back some," I said.

  "Makes good sense. "

  "I guess. "

  "Moderation," he said. "I tell you, Matt, those old Greeks knew it all. Moderation. "

  He drank half his drink. He was good for perhaps eight like it in the course of a day. Call it a quart a day, all in a body that couldnt go more than a hundred pounds, and Id never seen him show the effects. He never staggered, never slurred his words, just kept on keeping on.

  So? What did that have to do with me?

  I sipped my Coke.

  We sat there and told each other stories. Danny Boys business, if he had one, was information. Everything you told him got filed away in his mind, and by putting bits of data together and moving them around he brought in enough dollars to keep his shoes shined and his glass full. He would bring people together, taking a slice of their action for his troubles. His own hands stayed clean while he held a limited partnership in a lot of short-term enterprises, most of them faintly illicit. When I was on the force hed been one of my best sources, an unpaid snitch who took his recompense in information.