I clipped the holster on my belt and shrugged into the brown corduroy jacket that was draped on the back of my chair. The jacket felt a little tight around the shoulders. I wasn’t back to my old weight but my rehab, which included lifting iron, was redistributing muscle. I’d have to get my clothes altered soon. Or, assuming I got some clients, buy some new threads. But the jacket still fell nicely, even if it didn’t quite cover the paint smudges on my jeans, and there was no gun bulge.
I walked down the stairs to the building lobby. The docs at the V.A. hospital said it would help strengthen my leg and it seemed to be working. The limp was barely noticeable. I stopped at the security station by the elevators and told the guard that I’d left my office unlocked because the cable company was scheduled to install my high-speed Internet and phone system sometime in the afternoon.
“You’re the private eye on eight,” she said. “Rhode.” Her name tag said “H. Jones” and she was sturdily stout without being fat. Her skin color was only slightly darker than her tan uniform. “What time they give you?”
“Sometime between 1 PM and the next ice age,” I said.
“I hear you.” She wrote something in a large cloth-bound ledger, the kind that used to sit on hotel check-in counters and private eyes were able to read upside down in noir movies. I never could read upside down, so the move to hotel computers made no difference to me. “You coming back?”
“Yeah. Just running out to pick up some lunch.”
“Where you headed?”
“Red Lantern, in Rosebank. You know it?”
“Oh, man. Best eggplant hero in the borough.”
“Can I bring one back for you?”
“Sure.”
She bent to get her purse.
“Forget it. My treat. What’s the ‘H’ stand for?”
“Habika. It means ‘sweetheart,’ in some African language I have no clue about. My folks had just seen Roots when I was born. Coulda been worse, I guess.”
“Alton,” I said, extending my hand.
“Like I said, it coulda been worse,” she said. “You can call me ‘Abby’. Everyone else does. Abby Jones.”
“Why not sweetheart, or sweetie?”
“Cause then I hit you upside your head. Listen, my brother works at the cable company. I’ll give him a call to make sure they don’t forget about you.”
A Rhode rule: It never hurts to buy an eggplant hero for a security guard.
There was a bank branch in the lobby. It had an ATM but the daily limit was $400 and I had a bar tab to square. I was working off the cash from a dwindling home equity line of credit inexplicably approved by the same bank. I wondered if I could be nailed for trading on inside information if I shorted its stock because it lent me the money.
The branch manager came out of his cubbyhole to shake my hand, smiling effusively. He led me over to a cute little redhead teller who thanked me before, during and after the transaction. If I’d wanted a toaster, she would have gone home and taken one from her own kitchen. The banks had a lot of PR ground to make up.
I now had a grand in my pocket. Flush and hungry; a combination that always works for me. I planned to walk the mile or so along Bay Street to the Red Lantern. But it was drizzling, with the imminent promise of something heavier. With a corduroy jacket I’d weigh as much as Donald Trump’s hairdo by the time I arrived. I don’t use an umbrella unless animals are lining up two-by-two on the ark ramp.
My three-year old light blue Chevy Malibu is distinguished only by several round indentations on its trunk and rear panels. I’d bought it at Honest Al Lambert’s Used Car Lot in Tottenville. Al had acquired six almost-pristine Malibus at auction from a rental fleet, but hadn’t counted on the car carrier transporting them from Denver running into a vicious hail storm in Indiana. The vehicles on top had their windshields smashed and their bodywork turned into the far side of the moon. Undaunted, Al tried to sell me one of those. But even the dimmest suspect might notice being followed by a car with more dimples than a golf ball. So I opted for one of the Malibus on the carrier’s first level, which sustained little damage but were still heavily discounted. It looked like every third car on the road. Still, I made a few modifications, including a passenger-side ejector seat activated by a red button hidden in the gear shift. I didn’t actually do that.
At the Red Lantern all the parking spots, including those next to fire hydrants, bus stops and “No Parking” signs, were filled with cars that had official stickers or emblems: police, fire, sanitation, court officers, judges, Borough Hall, Coast Guard. Coast Guard? The NFL season was in full swing. It was Friday and the regular lunchtime crowd was inflated by dozens of people dropping off betting slips for Sunday’s games in the bar’s huge football pool. My glove compartment was full of phony decals and emblems that I would have used in an illegal spot if one was available, but I couldn’t chance double parking and blocking in some Supreme Court judge. I settled for a spot two blocks away.
This section of Rosebank, once almost exclusively Italian, with a sprinkling of Jewish delis and bakeries, now had businesses run by more recent immigrants. I passed a Korean nail salon flanked by an Indian restaurant and a Pakistani convenience store. Across the street was something called the Somali-American Social Club, where a tall man in a white dashiki stood outside smoking. Probably didn’t want to light up inside near the explosives. Two doors down, Gottleib’s Bakery, a local institution for 80 years, still held the fort. If World War III broke out, I was pretty certain it would start here.
Inside the Red, patrons were two-deep at the rail keeping three bartenders hopping. All the tables in the front and back rooms were occupied and I pushed my way to the bar. The front room had dimpled tin ceilings that tended to amplify and redirect noise. In fact, because of an acoustic anomaly, something said at one end of the bar might be heard clearly at the other end. Of course, most conversations were lost in the mix of babble, but people still tended to be discreet. If you wanted to ask for a quick blow job in the car, or you were a city councilman asking five large in cash from a contractor who needed a zoning variance, you might as well put it on cable. The half-oval bar ran the length of the front room and had a dark green leather border matched by the upholstery of high-back swivel stools. A large silver trophy depicting a crouching man with his hand swept back occupied a place of honor next to the register. Its nameplate read “R. Kane.” Underneath that, “1973 Tri-State Handball Championships.” A third line said “Second Place.”
Roscoe Kane, 60 pounds past his handball prime, lumbered over. I reached in my pocket, counted off $500 and put it on the bar.
“Take me off the books.”
“Business picking up?”
“I’m being optimistic.”
Reaching behind the register, Roscoe pulled out a beat-up marble notebook of the type your mother bought for your first day of school. He laid it on the bar, flipped some pages, picked up a pencil and crossed something out. He took $420 from the pile and put it in the cash drawer. At the same time he reached down into a cooler, lifted out a bottle of Sam Adams Light, twisted off the cap with one hand and slid it down to me. Ex-handball champs don’t lack for manual dexterity. He put the notebook away. I knew that dozens, maybe hundreds, of similar notebooks had served the same purpose since the Red Lantern, one of the oldest taverns in the city, opened its doors back when the Kings Rifles garrisoned Staten Island.
Roscoe put some bar nuts in front of me and said, “Glass? Lunch?”
“No, and yes,” I said through a mouthful of nuts. “Two eggplant heroes to go.”
I took a long draw on my beer. It was ice cold. Not too many people drank Sam Adams in the Red, let alone Sam Adams Light, but Roscoe kept in a stash for me. It was the only light beer I’d ever had that didn’t taste light.
I said, “Is it true that the Algonquins ran a tab in here?”
“Never. Bastards stiffed us.”
“Yeah,” one of the regulars at the bar snorted, “and this place ha
sn’t bought back a drink since.”
As I sipped my beer, I turned to scan the opposite wall, which was covered floor to ceiling with tally sheets for the 1,400 people in the football pool. The alphabetically-listed entrants were a democratic cross section of the populace, including just about every elected and appointed official, several judges, a smattering of assistant district attorneys, college professors, scores of cops and half the hoods in the borough. The sheets were taken down after the Monday night games and updated by the three elderly Italian ladies who also ran the kitchen. No one questioned their cooking or their accuracy.
I felt a blast of chilly air. The bar’s cheerful hubbub eased a bit and one of the other bartenders said “shit” under his breath. I turned as Arman Rahm and a fire hydrant entered the bar. The fire hydrant’s name was Maks Kalugin and had more bullet holes in him than Emperor Maximilian.
If you would like to read all of CAPRIATI’S BLOOD, you can use this link:
CAPRIATI’S BLOOD
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ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES
JAKE SCARNE THRILLERS
COLE SUDDEN CIA THRILLERS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lawrence De Maria began his career as a general interest reporter (winning an Associated Press award for his crime reporting) and eventually became a Pulitzer-nominated senior editor and financial writer The New York Times, where he wrote hundreds of stories and features, often on Page 1. After he left the Times, De Maria became an Executive Director at Forbes. Following a stint in corporate America – during which he helped uncover the $7 billion Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme and was widely quoted in the national media – he returned to journalism as Managing Editor of the Naples Sun Times, a Florida weekly, until its sale to the Scripps chain in 2007. Since then, he has been a full-time fiction writer. De Maria is on the board of directors of the Washington Independent Review of Books, where, when he’s not killing people in his novels, he writes features, reviews and a column:
THE WRITE STUFF (MY BLOG)
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TURTLE DOVE (Alton Rhode Mysteries Book 7) Page 16
