“Fine.”
“No money issues? No debt?”
“I don’t understand what these questions have to do with what happened this afternoon.”
“I know you’re upset, Chris. But I’m just trying to help.”
She rose from her seat. “I’m tired. And I have a headache.”
Dropping the napkin in the chair she disappeared down the dark corridor again.
NOAH OFFERED to drive me home, but I said no. As I was about to step through the door, he remembered that he had the number for Ronan’s ex–personal assistant. Her name was Marjorie Madden. I took the piece of paper with the number on it and left.
It was freezing outside but I felt like walking. Buttoning my jacket up to the neck I stepped out into the crackling cold. The sharp wind set my ears sparking. It was a classic winter evening, the wind blasting with the hint of snow. I traded hellos with an Asian youth with a long angelic face heading in the opposite direction. I wished I could photograph the evening. It was that beautiful.
EIGHTEEN
t he wind howled like a woman in labor. I reached the corner where the two Mormons I’d witnessed earlier facing off with the man impersonating a dog at the lamppost were deep in a debate with a dreadlocked youth. The light was red, but traffic was sparse so I decided to jaywalk. Before I could move off a black SUV pulled up next to me. I glanced over and saw the window slowly moving downward and I immediately hunched down clutching at my Glock.
“Blades.” A voice echoed from the SUV.
I stood up. The window was all the way down and I recognized the driver. Special Agent Sallie Kraw.
“Come here,” she shouted.
I strolled over and leaned into the window.
“Get in,” she ordered.
“Do you get a kick out of ordering people into cars?”
“Just folks with pleasing smiles. Get in. I want to talk to you.”
I got into the car. The traffic light turned green and she drove off.
“Nice ride. Is this what the FBI is doing with my taxes? Hooking up agents with hot rides?”
“This doesn’t belong to the Bureau.”
“Yours?”
“A friend’s.”
“So you’re not on official business?”
She glanced at me quickly, the brightness of her smile caroming off my face.
“Where’re we going?” I said.
“For a drink.”
“Did you think you might want to ask me first if I have the time?”
We stopped at a light and she turned to me, her smile still as radiant as sun-baked stone, but there was now a distinctly condescending clear gleam in her eyes. Her bigboned body seemed unduly passive this time around. Perhaps it was her clothes, the gray heather shirt and brown pants. Could’ve been the way her thick ginger-colored hair settled about her soft pale face.
“Can I buy you a drink, Mr. Overstreet?”
I don’t know why I didn’t say no. I just didn’t. “How did you know where I was?” I said.
“First, will you let me buy you a drink or not?”
“I suppose.”
She hiccupped a laugh. “You’re a strange man, Blades.”
“That doesn’t explain how you found me.”
“Your wife.”
“You spoke to my wife?”
“Yes. A very beautiful woman. You’ve got great taste.”
“Yes, I like to think so.”
She chuckled. “And little modesty.”
“There’s enough of that in the world.”
“You can never be too polite or modest for me,” she said.
“I’ll remember that.”
“Have you recovered from your amnesia yet?”
“Didn’t know I had that affliction.”
“River Paris. Your manager? Do you remember where she is?”
“Nothing to remember. I don’t know where she is.”
“Somebody is going to find her, Blades. It might not be us. And that could be very unfortunate for her.”
“That’s her problem. Not mine.”
“Do you know what Saizen is?”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s a human growth hormone.”
“I’m pretty grown as you can see.”
“It’s been touted as a fountain of youth. Legally it’s given to people over fifty to replace hormones. Illegally, it’s used by athletes to boost performance. A week ago we foiled a plot by some Russian crime figures to steal a shipment of Saizen worth about a million dollars. We arrested about five men, one of whom did some whistling. He told us about a shipment stolen about two weeks before in Arizona worth about one-point-five mil on the black market. With the information he gave us we set up a sting to bag some other mobsters trying to sell off that shipment. First they wanted us to buy the entire shipment. We couldn’t float that kinda cash. We settled on half the load for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The sting went bad. The suspects got away with the money and the growth hormones. They also killed one of our agents.
“The next day the man who was cooperating with us was kidnapped and killed. Dropped from the roof of a building. Very messy. He was a young kid. Nineteen years old. His name was Serge Konstantin. Arrived one year ago from Russia.”
“So you’re sympathetic to young Russians. Is that the point to this story?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute.”
We’d reached Park Slope without my taking notice. I didn’t like that I’d lost track of where I was. She parked the SUV behind a yellow Ryder truck and killed the engine.
We both got out. We were on Seventh Avenue amid a flurry of young couples heading to bars and restaurants. At nightfall there was a beauty to New York’s bustle even in winter that was stunning. Youths drunk on their own beauty, ticking with sexual power, nuzzling on the aphrodisiac of the city’s reputation for self-indulgence. Sometimes I wish I was twenty again.
We waited for a car to pass, then skipped across the street in front of a bus. A minute later we entered Pinter’s Pub at the corner of Ninth Street, not the kind of joint I’d expect a woman like Agent Kraw to go for a drink. But what do I know?
It was a dank musty place. Not too big. Just right for people who took their drinking to the limit. Black walls. Muted lighting and tables immersed in shadow. Circular bar with shiny aluminum top.
We headed for the back of the room away from the jukebox. I slung my jacket over the back of a chair and sat down. It was dark and I felt a trickle of guilt at being in such a dark place with a pretty woman whose name was not Anais.
A young woman dressed in black pants and white buttoned-down shirt took our order: bourbon for me; rye and tonic for the lady.
I felt a train rumble beneath us. We sat smiling at each other as if paralyzed by the gloominess of our surroundings. Perhaps she didn’t realize that Pinter’s was a place where people came to forget they were alive, to disappear into the placenta of nothingness.
She reached into her bag and pulled out an orange lollipop. At least I thought it was orange. I wasn’t trusting my ability to identify colors in this place.
“Want one?”
“No thanks.”
Our drinks came and I took a big gulp of mine. It clawed at my throat with a soothing fire. The agent sipped hers slowly. She put her glass on the table and leaned forward. Her face was clean, her simmering eyes limestone clear.
“The money left Arizona. And it’s here in New York.”
As if waiting for me to ask a question she sat up and slipped the lollipop into her mouth. I sat motionless, not really thinking about what she was saying. The alcohol was leading my mind in circles. I saw Anais floating on a cloud. Seeing the disinterest in my eyes the agent started speaking again.
“Maxwell Burns was the transporter. We believe he had the money when he was killed. We suspect that after Serge Konstantin began to cooperate with us this gang began trying to cover their tracks. That’s why Deputy Ambassador Burns was ki
lled. And I don’t think they’re done. We want the people who killed our agent and we want our money.”
“Don’t look at me.”
“We’d like to talk to your friend, River, about our money.”
“She’s no friend of mine. And I’d say seven hundred and fifty large would be a good reason to disappear.”
“She’s still in the city.”
“How do you know that?”
“A professional calculation.”
“You mean you’re guessing.” I finished my drink and stood up. “Thank you for the drink. But I gotta be getting home to my wife. The alcohol’s got me feeling kinda horny.”
“You’re not too bashful, are you?”
“It’s not a proposition, Miss Kraw.”
“You think because I’m from the Midwest you can shock me? If you were propositioning me you’d be very disappointed, Blades.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“I see the fire in your wife, too, if you know what I mean.”
I paused, trying to make my face as deadpan as possible. But inside I was feeling anything but calm. I took my coat from the back of the chair. “I’ll take a cab.”
“Blades, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about your wife. Not very professional of me.”
“You’re not working.”
“Still . . .”
“See you around, Sallie. You don’t mind if I call you Sallie, do you? I mean, we do have one thing in common.”
I left her staring expressionless into space. Outside I breathed New York; its gnarled black energy; its snarling wind; its dry smell of boiled cabbage. I looked up at the lights above and saw sparks fizzling through the white waves of light. I buttoned my jacket and hailed a cab.
NINETEEN
a bout two-thirty the next afternoon Marjorie Madden finally returned the three messages I’d left on her machine. We arranged to meet upstairs at Cane, a pretentious afterwork club in downtown Manhattan where players of all stripes and species convened to practice their charm and take-down techniques mingling with celebrities and wannabes in entertainment, a joint where jazz and comedy in the upstairs cafe lounge competed with booming hip-hop and reggae joints on the downstairs dance floor. I knew the place well. Great atmosphere for showing off new threads and snaring starry-eyed honeys, but I didn’t like its admission practices and had promised myself not to party there. But Marjorie insisted on that spot, saying she was meeting a stand-up comedian friend who was performing that night.
Wanting to stake out an area quiet enough where we might be able to speak without swapping globs of saliva, I got there ahead of her and had no trouble getting past the hue police at the door since I had that certain look this club craved. You know the look I mean. The one often projected in rap music videos, which begged the question of the asswipes who produced these celluloid gems: Aren’t there any dark-skinned black people left in America?
Perhaps one day color in America will be as benign a subject as horse racing. But today, it is still as frightening as the firing of a loaded gun in a crowded subway car, the report as deafening to whites as it is to blacks. The one-drop-equals-black equation still simplifies things for whites. For us, the equation is an exponential one that keeps growing, becoming more baffling as we try to incorporate variations and gradations of hue taken on through interracial mixing. My feelings are that we should just stop searching for a homogenous way to define ourselves. Why is it easier for me to get into a club like Cane than a dark-skinned brother who is not a celebrity? For all our fancy handshakes and superfluous ways of greeting each other we’re still mired in the color-coded muck created by whites. We may call each other brother and sister but our degree of intimacy and acceptance can change depending on the hue of our skin.
I found a quiet table and ordered bourbon to sip while I waited. I had gotten there at seven and had half an hour to kill. A group of men on the tiny stage were tuning up instruments but it was clear no performance would be taking place anytime soon.
Around seven-thirty Marjorie rolled into the club. I say rolled because her physical appearance was that of an inflated balloon, from her face to her ankles. She wore a long black dress and looked beautiful in it even in her advanced stage of pregnancy. It was hard to miss the sister standing at the top of the stairway looking around. I left my drink on the table I had corralled near a window and went over to introduce myself.
Her face flashed a passive smile as she took my hand. A faint trace of her flowery perfume slipped the short distance between us. Its hint of spice tickled my throat. Colorful streamers twirled above our heads as we walked back to my table and bodies weaved around us like choreographed criers in an Alvin Ailey ballet.
We settled into our seats; it took Marjorie awhile to get comfortable. Then she leaned over and touched my arm and smiled as if to reassure me she wasn’t quite ready to drop, her full dark face radiant as a moon.
“Would you like some coffee? Tea?” I said, a little surprised by her friendliness.
“A cup of hot chocolate would be nice. And a big fat brownie.” She giggled as if the thought of the brownie triggered some pleasurable memory.
I tried to get the attention of a waiter but the place was filling up fast and either they were short of staff or some of the waiters were hiding in the bathroom because there were only two people servicing the entire room.
“It’s probably quicker if I go get it myself,” I said.
“No, sit down. I’m sure somebody’ll be over in a minute.”
“It’s no problem,” I replied, and got up. I made my way over to the long shiny aluminum counter where I placed my order with one of the four people working there. I was back at my seat five minutes later with the brownie on a small plate and the hot chocolate in a thick white mug, which I set down in front of Marjorie.
She beamed. “Thank you.” Delicately, as if she was folding back the edge of an origami design, she broke off a piece of the brownie and her tongue extended to receive it. “Mmmm! I’ve wanted this all day.” She looked at me, chewing slowly. “So tell me, Mr. Overstreet, what terrible stories have you heard about me?”
“I’m always the last to hear things. What terrible stories are out there?”
“I thought that’s why you wanted to talk to me.”
“I’m talking to all the people who were close to Ronan. You were close to him, weren’t you?”
“Is that what you heard?” she said, her eyes becoming cagey.
“Is it true?”
She put her hand to her mouth and turned her head away as if she was about to sneeze. When she looked at me again her eyes were shiny with emotion. “I loved him.”
“Did he love you back?”
“Did he?” She gave a whimsical girlish laugh. “I don’t know if he loved me but he certainly took full advantage of my love.”
“Meaning?”
“You’re a man. What would you do if you were him?”
“But I’m not.”
“You would’ve done the same thing, Mr. Overstreet. What man wouldn’t?”
“You were having an affair?”
“Why am I here, Mr. Overstreet? So you can humiliate me, huh? I am carrying a child. And I can assure you his name wouldn’t be Jesus.”
“Are you saying you’re carrying Ronan’s baby?”
She rose from her seat too hurriedly, her bulk making it difficult. Her knee struck the table, which rocked, tipping the cup. Chocolate flashed onto the table.
“Shit!”
“Please, sit down,” I said.
“Why? So you can laugh at me some more? You don’t think Ronan could love somebody like me, is that it?”
I quickly mopped up the spilled chocolate with paper napkins. “I’m not trying to offend you. And for the record, I don’t see anything wrong with you. You’re a beautiful woman.”
She brushed something from her dress with the cotton napkin and sat down again. “We would’ve gotten married if he had lived.”
&nbs
p; “Did Ronan ask you to spy on Baron Spencer?”
“I wouldn’t call it spying.”
“What would you call it?”
She tilted her head contemptuously, as if annoyed by the question. “I met Spencer at NYU where he was delivering a speech on the role of the Panthers in the civil rights struggle. We went out for coffee and really hit it off. One thing led to another. It was nothing to me really. But it sorta never went away, you know. I don’t know why. I wasn’t in love with him. And it wasn’t the sex. There wasn’t much of that.” She giggled, took a sip of her chocolate, and continued talking. “He just was simply a very interesting man. He loved to talk. And I loved to listen to him. He wanted to buy me things. Real expensive stuff. Stuff I didn’t think he could afford. Diamonds. He even wanted to buy me a house. So I asked how he was gonna get this money. He’d laugh and say he could take me places. That he had the means. So I told Ronan and he spoke to some people he knew in the state attorney’s office.”
“When did Spencer find out about you and Ronan?”
“I don’t know.” She broke off another piece of her brownie.
“Have you talked to him since the election?”
“I called him to tell him I was sorry.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t want to repeat what he said.”
“Why did Ronan fire you?”
She chewed slowly. “Because that woman told him to.”
“Which woman?”
“That doctor he was seeing.”
“You mean Dr. Heat?”
“Dr. Liar would be a better name for that bitch. She was supposed to be helping him, but she had him all confused. Told him it would destroy his political career if people found out I was carrying his child. She offered me a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to leave New York. I refused. I loved him.”
“Why would she offer you money to leave?
“Because she wanted him for herself.”
“Are you saying she was having an affair with Ronan too?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“You know that for sure?”
“He didn’t have a dog, Mr. Overstreet. Many times he’d come to my house after seeing her and he’d have blond hair wrapped around his balls. It doesn’t take a degree to figure that one out. And I’ve got a degree.”
Love and Death in Brooklyn Page 14
