Known to Evil

19

It was somewhere between five and six but the night had already come on under the domination of daylight savings. I definitely did not want to go home. And so a train ride down the East Side was called for.

I had never met nor had I even seen Ron Sharkey. I knew him by his picture and his predilections, his choices and mistakes. Ron Sharkey was a part of me, the man I had to save in order to look at myself in the mirror in the morning. He wasn't the only one, but he was certainly one of the squeakiest wheels.

WILMA SPYRES LIVED ON the top floor of an eight-story brick building that had been painted turquoise for no apparent reason. The buzzer was broken, as was the lock on the downstairs front door.

Some doors to apartments were open down the hall. TV shows, food smells, and voices assailed me as I made my way to the elevator. It was broken, too, and so I took the stairs. I ran across a young man and woman injecting each other with what I assumed to be some kind of opiate on the fourth-floor landing. She was dirty blond and probably white, while he had a New World Hispanic tint to his skin. They gauged me as either a threat or a mark and finally decided to ignore my passing.

Wilma's door was a dingy white. The paint upon it was thick and cracked. I imagined that every time it got too dirty the super just whitewashed over the filth.

"Who is it?" a woman said in answer to my knock.

"John Tooms. Breland Lewis sent me."

"Who?"

I repeated my words.

"Who is it?"

It felt as if I were in a Cheech and Chong skit.

"I'm here to speak to Ron Sharkey for his lawyer. My name is John Tooms."

Muted voices sounded from down the hall. Smells of cooking rose from the floors below. Four different kinds of music came from a dozen sound systems of varying quality, and now and then traffic sounds broke through from the street below.

The door opened.

A woefully frail and slender woman stood there before me. She wasn't a day over twenty-nine but her brown hair was already shot through with gray. Her breath came in laconic gasps and her green eyes hadn't been clear in a very long time. For all that, you could see that she was once quite fetching.

"Can't you people leave him alone?" she asked without much conviction.

"I'm here to help Ron, Ms. Spyres. I'm working for his lawyer."

The skin of Wilma's face pulled back, creating a scowl intended to express her disdain for lawyers and their toadies. I couldn't, in all conscience, disagree. The wordless grimace told me that no one had ever wanted to help her, or any man she laid claim to.

"May I come in?"

"What do you want?"

"I just need to go over a few details with Ron. That's all."

Her shoulders shook. The scowl was trying to obliterate me.

"Will," a man said.

Ron Sharkey came up from behind her.

He was on the short side but still two inches taller than Wilma and me. He wore gray slacks that were too big for him and green suspenders to hold them up. His grayish-white T-shirt was frayed, and his feet were bare, pale creatures.

He rested his hands on the woman's shoulders and said, "Lewis sent you?"

I nodded and maybe frowned some.

"What was your name again?"

"John Tooms."

"Come on in, Mr. Tunes. Don't worry about Will here. She doesn't bite."

The living room was furnished with mismatched couch and chair, both covered over with dark-colored and stained sheets. The coffee table was a rude wooden crate turned upside down. There was a bong and a hypodermic set on the makeshift piece of furniture.

"Give me and Mr. Tunes a few minutes, will you, honey?" Ron said to his woman.

She snorted and then lurched through a doorway that I supposed led to their bedroom.

Ron closed the door after her.

"Have a seat, Mr. Tunes," he offered.

There was a fold-up wooden chair leaning in the corner. Thinking about the apparent stains and hidden needles, I took that for my seat.

"Tooms," I said.

"Say what?"

"My name is Tooms, not Tunes."

"Sorry. How can I help you, Mr. Tunes?"

He tried to sit on the crate but it cracked a little and so he moved to the couch. There he sank deeply in the dark-maroon fabric.

"I do specialized work for Breland," I said. "He thinks you might need some help getting out of the trouble you're in."

"No. Naw. Not me. He got me out on bail. I'll just do a plea or something. I won't even get any time. I mean, it wasn't even my car."

"Whose car was it?" I asked.

"Listen, Mr. Tunes. I'm okay. Nobody's gonna worry about a little fish like me. All I have to do is tell the judge that I found that car with the keys inside and took it for a ride. That's the way it happened. I'm really okay."

"There was contraband in the trunk," I said.

"Not mine."

"But we can safely say that it belonged to someone," I replied.

"From what I understand, there was a lot of money wrapped up in that property."

Sharkey began pumping his left heel up and down like a sweatshop seamstress working a mechanical sewing machine.

"I didn't know about what was in the trunk."

"Somebody does," I said. "And the feds will want to get hold of that information. They're gonna lean on you… heavily."

Ron had a boy's face. It had aged many years past what it should have been but he still had that innocent, adolescent look.

"Look, man," he said, "somebody in my position can't worry about what might happen. I mean, look at me. Somethin's bound to get to me sooner or later anyway. I mean, I don't even know how I ended up like this. I was supposed to be an entrepreneur selling computer components and spending my summers in Bermuda or Bimini. Now I'm rolling my own cigarettes and lookin' up to Wilma because at least she can put the rent together almost every month."

I wanted to say something but had no words.

"You could do me a favor, though," Ron said.

"What's that?"

"My wife. My ex-wife. Irma."

"What about her?"

"I asked Breland to find her for me but he said he couldn't do it. You know, I'd really like to find her… to tell her how sorry I am for destroying her life. She has my son. I'd like to see Steven before I die."

How would it help, I wondered, to tell him that his loving Irma had betrayed him and put the drugs into his shoe?

"Her last name is Carson now," Ron was saying. "Her maiden name was Connors, then Sharkey, Beam, and finally Carson. I guess that's why it's so hard to find her."

"I can look into it, I guess." What else could I say?

"Hey, man," Ron said with deep feeling. "That would be great."