Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5

by Lawrence Block

  "Ashanti gold weights," Chance explained. "From the land the British called the Gold Coast. It's Ghana now. You see plated reproductions in the shops. Fakes. These are the real thing."

  "Are you planning to buy them?"

  He shook his head. "They don't speak to me. I try to buy things that do. I'll show you something."

  We crossed the room. A bronze head of a woman stood mounted on a four-foot pedestal. Her nose was broad and flattened, her cheekbones pronounced. Her throat was so thickly ringed by bronze necklaces that the overall appearance of the head was conical.

  "A bronze sculpture of the lost Kingdom of Benin," he announced. "The head of a queen. You can tell her rank by the number of necklaces she's wearing. Does she speak to you, Matt? She does to me."

  I read strength in the bronze features, cold strength and a merciless will.

  "Know what she says? She says, 'Nigger, why you be lookin' at me dat way? You know you ain't got de money to take me home.' " He laughed. "The presale estimate is forty to sixty thousand dollars."

  "You won't be bidding?"

  "I don't know what I'll be doing. There are a few pieces I wouldn't mind owning. But sometimes I come to auctions the way some people go to the track even when they don't feel like betting. Just to sit in the sun and watch the horses run. I like the way an auction room feels. I like to hear the hammer drop. You seen enough? Let's go."

  His car was parked at a garage on Seventy-eighth Street. We rode over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and through Long Island City. Here and there street prostitutes stood along the curb singly or in pairs.

  "Not many out last night," he said. "I guess they feel safer in daylight."

  "You were here last night?"

  "Just driving around. He picked up Cookie around here, then drove out Queens Boulevard. Or did he take the expressway? I don't guess it matters."

  "No."

  We took Queens Boulevard. "Want to thank you for coming to the funeral," he said.

  "I wanted to come."

  "Fine-looking woman with you."

  "Thank you."

  "Jan, you say her name was?"

  "That's right."

  "You go with her or-"

  "We're friends."

  "Uh-huh." He braked for a light. "Ruby didn't come."

  "I know."

  "What I told you was a bunch of shit. I didn't want to contradict what I told the others. Ruby split, she packed up and went."

  "When did this happen?"

  "Sometime yesterday, I guess. Last night I had a message on my service. I was running around all yesterday, trying to get this funeral organized. I thought it went okay, didn't you?"

  "It was a nice service."

  "That's what I thought. Anyway, there's a message to call Ruby and a 415 area code. That's San Francisco. I thought, huh? And I called, and she said she had decided to move on. I thought it was some kind of a joke, you know? Then I went over there and checked her apartment, and all her things were gone. Her clothes. She left the furniture. That makes three empty apartments I got, man. Big housing shortage, nobody can find a place to live, and I'm sitting on three empty apartments. Something, huh?"

  "You sure it was her you spoke to?"

  "Positive."

  "And she was in San Francisco?"

  "Had to be. Or Berkeley or Oakland or some such place. I dialed the number, area code and all. She had to be out there to have that kind of number, didn't she?"

  "Did she say why she left?"

  "Said it was time to move on. Doing her inscrutable oriental number."

  "You think she was afraid of getting killed?"

  "Powhattan Motel," he said, pointing. "That's the place, isn't it?"

  "That's the place."

  "And you were out here to find the body."

  "It had already been found. But I was out here before they moved it."

  "Must have been some sight."

  "It wasn't pretty."

  "That Cookie worked alone. No pimp."

  "That's what the police said."

  "Well, she coulda had a pimp that they didn't know about. But I talked to some people. She worked alone, and if she ever knew Duffy Green, nobody ever heard tell of it." He turned right at the corner. "We'll head back to my house, okay?"

  "All right."

  "I'll make us some coffee. You liked that coffee I fixed last time, didn't you?"

  "It was good."

  "Well, I'll fix us some more."

  His block in Greenpoint was almost as quiet by day as it had been by night. The garage door ascended at the touch of a button. He lowered it with a second touch of the button and we got out of the car and walked on into the house. "I want to work out some," he said. "Do a little lifting. You like to work out with weights?"

  "I haven't in years."

  "Want to go through the motions?"

  "I think I'll pass."

  My name is Matt and I pass.

  "Be a minute," he said.

  He went into a room, came out wearing a pair of scarlet gym shorts and carrying a hooded terry-cloth robe. We went to the room he'd fitted out as a gym, and for fifteen or twenty minutes he worked out with loose weights and on the Universal machine. His skin became glossy with perspiration as he worked and his heavy muscles rippled beneath it.

  "Now I want ten minutes in the sauna," he said. "You didn't earn the sauna by pumping the iron, but we could grant a special dispensation in your case."

  "No thanks."

  "Want to wait downstairs then? Be more comfortable."

  I waited while he took a sauna and shower. I studied some of his African sculpture, thumbed through a couple of magazines. He emerged in due course wearing light blue jeans and a navy pullover and rope sandals. He asked if I was ready for coffee. I told him I'd been ready for half an hour.

  "Won't be long," he said. He started it brewing, then came back and perched on a leather hassock. He said, "You want to know something? I make a lousy pimp."

  "I thought you were a class act. Restraint, dignity, all of that."

  "I had six girls and I got three. And Mary Lou'll be leaving soon."

  "You think so?"

  "I know it. She's a tourist, man. You ever hear how I turned her out?"

  "She told me."

  "First tricks she did, she got to tell herself she was a reporter, a journalist, this was all research. Then she decided she was really into it. Now she's finding out a couple of things."

  "Like what?"

  "Like you can get killed, or kill yourself. Like when you die there's twelve people at your funeral. Not much of a turnout for Sunny, was there?"

  "It was on the small side."

  "You could say that. You know something? I could have filled that fucking room three times over."

  "Probably."

  "Not just probably. Definitely." He stood up, clasped his hands behind his back, paced the floor. "I thought about that. I could have taken their biggest suite and filled it. Uptown people, pimps and whores, and the ringside crowd. Could have mentioned it to people in her building. Might be she had some neighbors who would have wanted to come. But see, I didn't want too many people."

  "I see."

  "It was really for the girls. The four of them. I didn't know they'd be down to three when I organized the thing. Then I thought, shit, it might be pretty grim, just me and the four girls. So I told a couple of other people. It was nice of Kid Bascomb to come, wasn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "I'll get that coffee."

  He came back with two cups. I took a sip, nodded my approval.

  "You'll take a couple pounds home with you."

  "I told you last time. It's no good to me in a hotel room."

  "So you give it to your lady friend. Let her make you a cup of the best."

  "Thanks."

  "You just drink coffee, right? You don't drink booze?"

  "Not these days."

  "But you used to."

  And probably will again, I thought. Bu
t not today.

  "Same as me," he said. "I don't drink, don't smoke dope, don't do any of that shit. Used to."

  "Why'd you stop?"

  "Didn't go with the image."

  "Which image? The pimp image?"

  "The connoisseur," he said. "The art collector."

  "How'd you learn so much about African art?"

  "Self-taught," he said. "I read everything I could find, went around to the dealers and talked to them. And I had a feel for it." He smiled at something. "Long time ago I went to college."

  "Where was that?"

  "Hofstra. I grew up in Hempstead. Born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, but my folks bought a house when I was two, three years old. I don't even remember Bed-Stuy." He had returned to the hassock and he was leaning back, his hands clasped around his knees for balance. "Middle-class house, lawn to mow and leaves to rake and a driveway to shovel. I can slip in and out of the ghetto talk, but it's mostly a shuck. We weren't rich but we lived decent. And there was enough money to send me to Hofstra."

  "What did you study?"

  "Majored in art history. And didn't learn shit about African art there, incidentally. Just that dudes like Braque and Picasso got a lot of inspiration from African masks, same as the Impressionists got turned on by Japanese prints. But I never took a look at an African carving until I got back from Nam."

  "When were you over there?"

  "After my third year of college. My father died, see. I could have finished all the same but, I don't know, I was crazy enough to drop out of school and enlist." His head was back and his eyes were closed. "Did a ton of drugs over there. We had everything. Reefer, hash, acid. What I liked, I liked heroin. They did it different there. You used to get it in cigarettes, used to smoke it."

  "I never heard of that."

  "Well, it's wasteful," he said. "But it was so cheap over there. They grew the opium in those countries and it was cheap. You get a real muzzy high that way, smoking skag in a cigarette. I was stoned that way when I got the news that my mother died. Her pressure was always high, you know, and she had a stroke and died. I wasn't nodding or anything but I was high from a skag joint and I got the news and I didn't feel anything, you know? And when it wore off and I was straight again I still didn't feel anything. First time I felt it was this afternoon, sitting there listening to some hired preacher reading Ralph Waldo Emerson over a dead whore." He straightened up and looked at me. "I sat there and wanted to cry for my mama," he said, "but I didn't. I don't guess I'll ever cry for her."

  He broke the mood by getting us both more coffee. When he came back he said, "I don't know why I pick you to tell things to. Like with a shrink, I suppose. You took my money and now you have to listen."

  "All part of the service. How did you decide to be a pimp?"

  "How did a nice boy like me get into a business like this?" He chuckled, then stopped and thought for a moment. "I had this friend," he said. "A white boy from Oak Park, Illinois. That's outside of Chicago."

  "I've heard of it."

  "I had this act for him, that I was from the ghetto, that I'd done it all, you know? Then he got killed. It was stupid, we weren't near the line, he got drunk and a jeep ran over him. But he was dead and I wasn't telling those stories anymore, and my mama was dead and I knew when I got home I wasn't going back to college."

  He walked over to the window. "And I had this girl over there," he said, his back to me. "Little bit of a thing, and I'd go over to her place and smoke skag and lay around. I'd give her money, and, you know, I found out she was taking my money and giving it to her boyfriend, and here I was having fantasies of marrying this woman, bringing her back Stateside. I wouldn't have done it, but I was thinking about it, and then I found out she wasn't but a whore. I don't know why I ever thought she was anything else, but a man'll do that, you know.

  "I thought about killing her, but shit, I didn't want to do that. I wasn't even that angry. What I did, I stopped smoking, I stopped drinking, I stopped all kinds of getting high."

  "Just like that?"

  "Just like that. And I asked myself, Okay, what do you want to be? And the picture filled in, you know, a few lines here and a few lines there. I was a good little soldier for the rest of my hitch. Then I came back and went into business."

  "You just taught yourself?"

  "Shit, I invented myself. Gave myself the name Chance. I started out in life with a first name and a middle name and a last name, and wasn't any of them Chance. I gave myself a name and created a style and the rest just fell into place. Pimping's easy to learn. The whole thing is power. You just act like you already got it and the women come and give it to you. That's all it really is."

  "Don't you have to have a purple hat?"

  "It's probably easiest if you look and dress the part. But if you go and play against the stereotype they think you're something special."

  "Were you?"

  "I was always fair with them. Never knocked them around, never threatened them. Kim wanted to quit me and what did I do? Told her to go ahead and God bless."

  "The pimp with the heart of gold."

  "You think you're joking. But I cared for them. And I had a heavenly dream for a life, man. I really did."

  "You still do."

  He shook his head. "No," he said. "It's slipping away. Whole thing's slipping away and I can't hold onto it."

  Chapter 31

  We left the converted firehouse with me in the back seat and Chance wearing a chauffeur's cap. A few blocks away he pulled over and returned the cap to the glove compartment while I joined him in front. The commuter traffic had pretty much thinned out by then and we made the trip into Manhattan quickly and in relative silence. We were a little aloof with each other, as if we'd already shared more than either of us had anticipated.

  No messages at the desk. I went upstairs, changed my clothes, paused on the way out the door and got the.32 from my dresser drawer. Was there any point in carrying a gun I seemed unable to fire? I couldn't see any, but I put it in my pocket anyway.

  I went downstairs and bought a paper, and without thinking too much about it I walked around the corner and took a table in Armstrong's. My usual corner table. Trina came over, said it had been a long time, and took my order for a cheeseburger and a small salad and coffee.

  After she headed for the kitchen I got a sudden flash of a martini, straight up and bone dry and ice cold in a stemmed glass. I could see it, I could smell the odor of juniper and the tang of a lemon twist. I could feel the bite as it hit bottom.

  Jesus, I thought.

  The urge for a drink passed as suddenly as it had come on me. I decided it was a reflex, a reaction to the atmosphere of Armstrong's. I'd done so much drinking here for so long, I'd been eighty-sixed here after my last bender, and I hadn't crossed the threshold since. It was only natural that I'd think of a drink. It didn't mean I had to have one.

  I ate my meal, drank a second cup of coffee afterward. I read my newspaper, paid my check, left a tip. Then it was time to go over to St. Paul's.

  The qualification was an alcoholic version of the American Dream. The speaker was a poor boy from Worcester, Mass. who worked his way through college, rose to a vice-presidency at one of the television networks, then lost it all drinking. He went all the way down, wound up in Los Angeles drinking Sterno in Pershing Square, then found AA and got it all back.

  It would have been inspiring if I could have kept my mind on it. But my attention kept straying. I thought about Sunny's funeral, I thought about what Chance had told me, and I found my thoughts wandering all over the whole case, trying to make sense out of it.

  Damnit, it was all there. I just wasn't looking at it right.

  I left during the discussion, before it was my turn to speak. I didn't even feel like saying my name tonight. I walked back to my hotel, fighting the urge to stop in at Armstrong's for a minute or two.

  I called Durkin. He was out. I hung up without leaving a message and called Jan.

  No answer. W
ell, she was probably still at her meeting. And she'd go out for coffee afterward, probably wouldn't get home until after eleven.

  I could have stayed at my own meeting until it ended, then gone to coffee with some of the others. I could join them now, as far as that went. The Cobb's Corner where they hung out wasn't all that far away.

  I thought about it. And decided I didn't really want to go there.

  I picked up a book but couldn't make sense out of it. I tossed it down, got undressed, went into the bathroom and ran the shower. But I didn't need a shower, for Christ's sake, I just had a shower that morning, and the most strenuous activity I'd had all day was watching Chance working out with weights. What the hell did I need with a shower?

  I turned the water off and got dressed again.

  Jesus, I felt like a caged lion. I picked up the phone. I might have called Chance but you couldn't just call the son of a bitch, you had to call his service and wait for him to call back, and I didn't feel like doing that. I called Jan, who was still out, and I called Durkin. He wasn't there either, and once again I decided against leaving a message.

  Maybe he was at that place on Tenth Avenue, unwinding with a couple of belts. I thought about going over there and looking for him, and it struck me that it wasn't Durkin I'd be looking for, that all I wanted was an excuse to walk through the door of that bucket of blood and put my foot upon the brass rail.

  Did they even have a brass rail? I closed my eyes and tried to picture the place, and in an instant I was recalling everything about it, the smells of spilled booze and stale beer and urine, that dank tavern smell that welcomes you home.

  I thought, You've got nine days and you went to two meetings today, a noon meeting and an evening meeting, and you've never been closer to a drink. What the hell's the matter with you?

  If I went to Durkin's boozer I'd drink. If I went to Farrell's or Polly's or Armstrong's I would drink. If I stayed in my room I'd go crazy, and when I went crazy enough I'd get away from those four walls and what would I do? I'd go out, to one bar or another, and I'd drink.