Ladyfingers

by Shepard Rifkin

  I joined the upper row of dots on another trimmed piece of the filter paper. I joined the lower row. I stared at my drawing. I felt the skin crawl at the back of my neck. It was probably the most interesting drawing I had ever seen in my life.

  I had drawn a snake with a forked tongue.

  11

  SOMETIMES I THINK WELL STANDING UP. That's when I'm not sleepy. My hand had kept me awake and I hadn't eaten intelligently in a while. At this point it would be better to sit down. The reference library used by the lab people had a leather armchair. I sank into it and looked at my drawing.

  For a while nothing happened. Then my brain began to warm up. I went back into the lab, took the ring, and came back to my chair.

  I held the ring on top of the snake. At no point did the tattoo extend beyond the width of the ring.

  I dropped that observation into my skull and let it range back and forth like a bird dog. I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. I waited for my bird dog to retrieve some data or idea or hunch or intuition. Or anything. Anything. I would have been grateful for anything.

  If I had no stoolie to phone for information I could phone myself. If the ring were wide enough to cover the tattoo, it could have been bought that width to cover the tattoo.

  Then why have a tattoo done in the first place?

  If the lady were a silly kid, tattooing herself and then regretting it, it would be understandable. But it was not the finger of a kid.

  I heaved myself up. I went back into the lab.

  "Kelsey."

  He said patiently, "Yes."

  "Can you tell if this is an old tattoo?"

  He took the magnifying glass. He bent over it. He reached out for a tiny scalpel. He made a probe at one of the black specks. He straightened up and took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  "Ink relatively thick and bright where the indigotin didn't get at the bottom layer. Probably less than a year old."

  I went back to the library and homed in on my chair. Do mature ladies impulsively tattoo themselves? No. Men do if they're drunk. Ladies, no. Tough little whores, yes. A mature woman would have to be seriously eccentric to tattoo herself. But if she were eccentric she wouldn't buy a ring in order to cover the tattoo later. Therefore, she was not an eccentric.

  My bird dog came back. Well? I said.

  My bird dog sat down and scratched at a flea. I would have to do better. And, no sooner thought than done. I got up and phoned Jesus.

  Jesus Romero, that is. Two years ago he stole a car- grand larceny. Aggravated assault when the owner caught up with him at the first light. Jesus needed the usual serious fix and knew he wouldn't get it in jail.

  I had the aggravated assault reduced to simple assault by asking the car owner to drop the charges. I had the grand larceny charge dropped by persuading the assistant D.A., Weber, to lower his sights somewhat. He was just out of Columbia Law and wanted to make a big political career out of this poor little junkie. When Weber indignantly protested against this coddling of criminals I pointed out that Jesus would be grateful and some day he might lead me to some heroin importers whose arrest would result in wild applause for the governor-to-be. Weber went along.

  Jesus was in. I used my undercover name. "Mr. Romero," I said. "This is Eddie Santiago. I just blew into town."

  That meant I wanted to talk. If he had people around he would say, "You got the wrong Romero, buddy." I would then say "Excuse me," and he would phone me later. But now he said, "Que pasa?" We could talk in the clear.

  Jesus was tattooed. On his left biceps he had a skull with Death Before Dishonor underneath. Like a lot of criminals he was patriotic. On the right biceps, two roses interwoven with Mother. When I first arrested him we stripped him to see if he had a trained nurse with him. A trained nurse is a shirt or T-shirt that has been soaked in a heroin solution and then dried. Enough for one fix if you wind up in jail. He respected me for checking that out. He did have a trained nurse. There were no capsules in the rectum. However, he did have a tattoo there-a wolf's head with open jaws emerging from down there. He told me it was a warning for the fags in the can to lay off.

  Now I said, "Jesus, you know any good tattoo artists around?"

  "Geez, Mr. Sanch-I mean Santiago-you know, like ever since they found a lot of guys were gettin' hepa- hepa-"

  "What?"

  "Hepatapatis. You know. They turn all yellow. From dirty needles, man. Well, since then the Health Department closed all them tattoo parlors."

  "Any still around?"

  "Well, they all took off for Norfolk or Boston, or wherever they got a Navy yard."

  "So?"

  "Well, all right. There's one still around. He runs like a tattoo speakeasy. Near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He's on Flushing Avenue, corner of Clinton. He's got a little candy store, you know, it's only a front. He does the stuff in back. Say I sent you."

  "O.K. Thanks."

  "That all you want?"

  "That's it."

  "You gettin' tattooed?"

  You can't let them get too chummy. Polite but firm is the road. "Thanks for the information, Jesus."

  He sighed with relief. Now that I didn't want any serious information with a possibility of feedback-that is, a bullet in his back-he wanted to chat.

  "Any time I can help, you know?"

  "Sure. Thanks."

  I hung up and drove over the Brooklyn Bridge. My favorite bridge. That spider-web pattern made me feel like a spider, but when I got into it I felt more like a fly on flypaper. I shook myself off the bridge. There was some traffic beginning to pile up, but I moved along easily. I swung off the bridge onto the maze of spaghetti that had replaced the blocks of the old houses. They may have been rat-infested but they were more refreshing for the eye to travel over than this stupid geometry of exit ramps and housing projects where the packs of purse snatchers and muggers were the natural result of removing all the small stores and stoops where people clustered and chatted. The rats had come back, infinitely more savage, and weighing anywhere from a hundred to a hundred and seventy pounds, and equipped with sneakers for a silent approach and a fast getaway.

  They existed because the people who designed the housing projects had never lived in them, just as the people who had designed the new buses had never contemplated traveling on them. Who the hell wanted to sit on those long plastic benches facing one another without being able to sit facing frontwards to enjoy the passing street?

  I chose to drive along the old waterfront. This had not been plasticized to anonymity. The cobblestoned streets and the railroad tracks sunk between the cobblestones, brought over as ballast from England, looked very inefficient and noncyberneticized. The old warehouses smelled of spices I couldn't place. Sometime in the years to come someone would figure out that the smell meant that the spices were losing several hundred molecules of essence of cinnamon or tumeric a year. A hyperefficient package would be developed. There would be no more exotic smells drifting from the old brick warehouses. The incredibly inefficient cobblestones-after all, they made my car drum its knee action like a kid bouncing a ball at blinding speeds-well, they would have to be ripped up and paved smooth. The old pier to the left, with its old oak beams-concrete would be better.

  Thank God I could look at it before the creeps got to improve it.

  After a few blocks I pulled to the right. I drove past the neat little houses with the neat little lawns where the Navy brass had lived. I turned left and ran north again past rows of old frame houses, shabby brick tenements, bars, shoe repair stores, and little grocery stores with overripe bananas and wilted lettuce. I parked on Clinton and walked into a dirty little candy store.

  A bored fat man of sixty-five or so sat behind the dusty soda fountain. I was thirsty, but one look at the glasses and the filthy towel used to mop the countertop stopped me.

  "Whaddya want, Mac?"

  "I'm a friend of Jesus Romero."

  "Yeah?"

  I nodded. He told me to wait and he disapp
eared into the back room. I heard him dialing the phone. There was a brief conversation. He hung up and came out.

  "He says you're O.K. Want some bubble gum?"

  I nodded.

  "Just step in the back. I ain't cheap, you might as well get that straight right now."

  He pulled aside a dirty curtain. I went in and sat down at a dirty kitchen table. I might not get hepatitis but I would certainly get blood poisoning. He opened the table drawer and pulled out several sheets of colored tattoo designs. None of them looked anything like what I was after. They were all pretty crude affairs-ships and anchors, hula dancers, the kind of stuff Jesus had.

  "Whaddya lookin' for? Anything special?"

  I took out my drawing and showed it to him.

  "I'd like one like this," I said.

  "A snake?"

  I nodded.

  "Where d'yuh want it?"

  I lifted my ring finger and drew a circle around it with my index finger.

  "You mean around it?"

  "Yeah, around it. What's so hard?"

  "What's so hard, he asks. I don't do work like that, fella. That looks like special work. I do big stuff, like hearts or Hawaiian dancers, or mottoes. That unusual stuff I can't do."

  "Where can I get it done?"

  "Only one place I know where they do that work. Japan."

  "Can't I get it done in Norfolk or Portsmouth?"

  "Nope. Not there. Not in Dago. That's for the Japs. I don't like to knock my own country, but the Japs, they do that better than any tattoo artist I ever met, and I met them all."

  "Anyone ever asked you to do a snake like that?"

  "What you gettin' at, mister?"

  He suddenly became cold. If I were to take out my badge I'd have a subservient citizen, but then I would blow any further use Romero might be to me. Not to mention that the word would get around that Romero was sending cops around.

  "I had a girlfriend once who said she had hers done near the Navy Yard."

  He relaxed. "Buddy, I been around the Yard for twenty-five years; no one been doin' tattoos as long as I have. I been doin' it long before they started this crap about infected needles, and none of 'em ever did work like that. You can tell your girlfriend she don't know her ass from a hole in the ground, nothin' personal intended."

  "Well, she was pretty high at the time."

  "I been here a long time." He was steamed up, he was really rolling. "No one ever got infected with my needles. I boil 'em ten minutes before I get to work. Once in nineteen forty-two there was a limey destroyer here in the Yard. She was gettin' a new bow after hers was chopped off by a torpedo up to her chain locker. They had this limey bosun's mate in the bar down the block, boastin' that the U.S. Navy was lousy, that they was chicken, and these three U.S. Navy men kept agreein' and feedin' him double shots till he passed out. They bring him to my place and I worked on him four hours.

  "When he wakes up next mornin' he found this American flag all the way acrost his chest an' from his neck to his belly button, with God Bless America! all acrost the top in letters two inches tall. The guys tole me the limey fair went nuts but he didn't get no infection. You can bet he didn't, not with the way I boiled my needles."

  I got up and said I was sorry I couldn't use any of his designs.

  "That's all right. You a friend of Romero's, I'm surprised you want a tattoo. He's sorry he got tattooed. It's all right for sailors or marines, but not for guys like Romero, you know what I mean?"

  "Yeah."

  "Anytime he steps outta line, the fuzz got him nailed fast."

  "I'm smarter than Romero."

  "I heard that before. Lemme give you some advice, kid. I'm thirty years older than you. You go the gun route, you don't get no marks."

  What the hell kind of build-up had Romero given me?

  "I'm losin' business with this advice. When you realize that, you'll realize I'm tellin' it to you straight, right?"

  "I appreciate that, pop. Thanks."

  "Yeah, thanks, and you're the snotty kind who's gonna go right out and get it done if you have to go to Japan, right?"

  I shrugged.

  "Don't say I didn't warn you." The old man put his patterns back in the drawer.

  "So long, pop." I walked out. An hour and a half wasted, travel time included.

  12

  I PARKED THE OLDS ON ONE OF THE OLD splintered piers sticking out into the river under Brooklyn Bridge. There was too much traffic on the bridge and I could wait it out.

  I lit a cigarette and slid down in the seat and smelled the cool salt air and closed my eyes.

  The car sagged suddenly. I opened my eyes. There were two kids sitting on each fender, all about sixteen or seventeen. They were grinning at my surprised look. They slid off and came crowding in at the window. They wore sneakers. The sneakers were not for basketball. Two of them were looking around to see who might be nearby. They were casing me for an easy mark.

  I took the .38 out of the shoulder holster, shook out all the shells, examined them, and then I inserted them carefully back into the cylinder. I did not look up once. When I finished I straightened up in the seat.

  The kids were all off the pier.

  Kids like that needed a good scare by a good cop. Follow that up with a suspended sentence and maybe one or two out of the four would stay off police blotters in the future. No more than two. The psychopathic personality does not respond to leniency. It responds to permanent imprisonment.

  I shoved the .38 back. I sank down again. I summed up all I knew or assumed about the lady:

  She was probably between thirty and forty.

  She came from a comfortable or well-to-do background.

  She was married. Or had been. Or the person who was cutting her up wanted us to think so.

  She had probably been tattooed in Japan.

  She had tried to remove the tattoo.

  That failing, she had bought a wedding ring wide enough to cover the tattoo.

  She was involved with someone who was an expert in human anatomy, probably a doctor.

  She was being held prisoner in New York City, or within a hundred miles of the city.

  I could look for a well-to-do woman involved with a doctor. That could mean the entire female population of Park Avenue.

  "Hey, fella, you got permission to park on this pier?"

  A big blue uniform filled the window. For a second I thought the lads had come back and before my intelligence told me to relax I had slumped to the right, going for the .38 at the same time. My reflexes were faster than my intelligence. I had it half out of the holster before I blew the whistle on myself.

  I covered by taking out my wallet and flashing the badge.

  "You on the Waterfront Squad?"

  I told him, no, just killing time.

  "Don't do it around here, officer. There's a gang of kids hang out around here and they're lousy."

  "Don't say that. What they need is love."

  "Yeah, sure. They all went to Elmira after they'd had a chance. They blew it. They went to Elmira. They come out, they break into freight cars, they mug sailors, they steal from cars."

  Maybe I should have killed them all, and saved trouble for me and every other cop for the next thirty years. This is the kind of talk: that gets you marked lousy by everyone except most cops. I kept my mouth shut and advised the guard to come up on someone like me with his coat open and his hand on his gun butt.

  I told him if I were an escaped con or just nervous I could have had six bullets in his chest before he had finished his sentence.

  He said thanks and I drove off feeling smug about solving the problems of juvenile delinquency and the pier police.

  I could solve anything except my own problem.

  13

  JUST AS I DROVE OFF BROOKLYN BRIDGE AND was swinging down an exit ramp posted MAX SPEED 20 MPH my personal bird dog flushed an idea. It had all its feathers and it looked very tasty. I came off the ramp doing fifty.

  The cop on duty
at the bottom started to blow his whistle but I had fished out the portable red flasher and set it on the dash and I had the siren going.

  He got excited and flung up his hands in all directions even though the traffic was all one-way. I was doing sixty-five when I went by him.

  All that speed was stupid. There's usually some guy who doesn't see you or has his window shut tight, the radio going full blast, and is necking with a girl as well. This is the joker who will come out of a side street doing fifty because he has the light.

  I made it up to 240 Centre Street with a total saving of two minutes. I went into Communications and looked at the big map. I took all the phone directories for New York City as well as those for all the counties of New Jersey and Connecticut within a hundred mile radius of the city.

  I sat down at a table and wrote down the names of all the medical schools. I wrote down the names of all the hospitals. The medical journals. The pharmaceutical journals. The medical societies. I thought for a moment, shrugged, muttered, "Go for broke," and added the psychiatric institutes and the state mental hospitals. I looked at my list.

  There were over a hundred hospitals just for Manhattan and Queens. My wrist and fingers ached. I had opened the stitches as well and I was leaking a little blood. Beside each name I had copied the phone number.

  I phoned the secretary of the director of the Police Academy. I told her Inspector Hanrahan wanted the use of the auditorium from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. the next morning. Was it free?

  She checked. It was. She would check out the mike and the public address system. Would she instruct the patrolman at the information booth to direct the doctors who would show up to the auditorium? She would. She would also have a sign lettered at the booth telling them where the auditorium was.

  I thanked her and hung up. Everything I had asked for would be entered in her journal. Including the fact that it was Inspector Hanrahan's request. And that the request had been made in his name by Detective Sanchez.