A Long Line of Dead Men

10

There was a message from Wally Donn at the hotel desk. "I'll be here for the next hour," he said when I called. "I've got those credit reports for you, and something else you'll like."

First I called TJ on his beeper. He must have been close to a phone; he called me back in well under five minutes. "Who wants TJ?" he demanded.

"No one with any sense," I said. "How come you have to ask? If you don't recognize my voice, you still ought to know the number by now."

" 'Course I do, Boo. 'Who wants TJ' just be a trademark. Part of my rap, like."

"Well, I can see where a fellow like you would need a trademark," I said. "Something to set you apart from the faceless masses."

"If we was on one of them video phones," he said, "you could see me rollin' my eyes."

"I'm sorry to miss that. You want to meet me? I might have some work."

"Say where and when." I named a coffee shop on Twenty-third Street half a block from the Flatiron Building. "Let's shoot for a quarter to twelve," I said, "but I might be a few minutes late."

"Not me," he said. "We meetin' in a restaurant, I'm gonna be there on time."

"The client," Wally said, "turned out to be a cheap fuck."

"Not unheard of."

"Christ, no. The world is full of cheap fucks. How it went, I told him what a job you did, how you ought to be down for a bonus. I said we as an agency didn't expect anything over and above our standard fees, which we don't, but that when a guy working per diem comes through like you did he ought to see something extra for his troubles.

"So he asked me what was reasonable. You know what went through my mind? The old expression, a picture is worth a thousand words. So okay, figure a buck a word, and I said a thousand dollars struck me as a reasonable amount. Which it did."

"Thanks, Wally."

"Well, it wasn't coming out of my pocket, so I could afford the gesture. And what's a thousand dollars to this fuck anyway, five hours of his lawyer's time? If that. So here's his check. Five hundred dollars."

"Did he say he thought a thousand was too high?"

"He didn't say shit. He just went and cut a check for half of the recommended figure. Oh, and here's the letter of commendation, thanks for your efforts on our behalf, et cetera, et cetera. Look it over, see if it's all right."

I scanned a glowing testimonial on the client's letterhead. "This is great," I said.

"He's got a pretty nice prose style, wouldn't you say?"

"You wrote it?"

"Dictated it," he said. "How else are you going to get this sort of thing the way you want it? At least the son of a bitch wrote it down word for word. He could have figured words are money and kept half of them for himself." He shook his head. "You know, I think he was just going to give me half of whatever I said. If I asked for two grand I'd have got one, and if I'd asked for five hundred I'd have got two and a half. I thought about sending this back to him, telling him to pay the whole shot or forget it. I'll still do that if you say so."

I shook my head. "The five's fine. Let it go."

"Anyway," he said, "it evens out. I got those credit reports for you, fourteen of them, and our company rate as Class B subscribers is thirty-five bucks a pop. Which totals out at four-ninety."

"Suppose I give you the check back," I said, "and we call it a wash."

He shook his head. "You don't want to do that, kiddo. Keep the check and take the reports and sustain yourself with the knowledge that being a cheap fuck never pays. The reports aren't costing you a cent, Matt. I billed them to the client."

"How did you manage that?"

"We did a ton of shit on his behalf, and five hundred dollars' worth of credit reports won't seem out of line to anybody. Hey, fuck him, you know? What's he ask me my advice for if he's gonna take my figure and cut it in fucking half? You see what cheapness does, Matt? It's costing him the same thousand dollars and he's got us hating his guts."

"Not me," I said. "I love everybody."

I was a couple of minutes early for my lunch with TJ, but he was already seated at a window table, working on a pair of cheeseburgers and a plate of onion rings. I told him about Eldoniah Mims, doing twenty-to-life upstate.

He said, "Sounds like he be in the right place, Ace. Killin' folks for chump change, dude like that got no cause to be walkin' around." I explained that they might have hung one more killing on Mims than he had in fact committed.

"He carrying any extra weight for it?"

"No."

"So what's it matter?"

The waitress came over and I ordered the spinach pie and a small Greek salad. When she moved off he said, "You spy the way she was scopin' us out? Like she wondering what fool put you and me at the same table. Then she realize we together, so she got to figure out why. Runs all the numbers through her mind, like you're a john and I'm a hustler, you're a cop and I'm some lowlife you're 'bout to bust."

I was wearing pleated gray slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar unbuttoned. TJ wore a shiny rayon vest striped vertically in black and scarlet, and nothing but brown skin under it. His pants were knee-length baggy black shorts. "I'm a cop on the take," I offered, "and you're a millionaire drug trafficker prepared to pay me off."

"You talkin'," he said. "The Excalibur's parked at the curb, Herb." He took a drink and wiped milk from his upper lip. "Say this Mims- what's his first name? El something."

"Eldoniah."

"Eldoniah. That from the Bible?"

"I don't know."

" 'I swear I don't know how those people come up with those names.' " He's a good mimic, and the line came out in a fairly accurate version of Long Island Lockjaw. In his own voice- or one of his voices, anyway- he said, "You clear Mims for this one killing, he still doin' the same twenty he doin' now."

I told him I wasn't interested in clearing Mims, who was clearly where he belonged. My food came, and while I ate I explained about the club of thirty-one.

He said, "Somebody be killing them."

"It looks that way."

"Who you figure doin' it, one of them or some other dude?"

"No way to tell."

"Have to be somebody with a reason, an' it ought to be more of a reason than killing a cabdriver for his coin bank." He finished his milk, wiped his mouth again. He said, "I been workin' some for Elaine. Mostly mindin' the store."

"She mentioned it."

"Kind of cool to watch people come in and take a look at me. Like they 'spect I'll grab something and go bookin' on out the door, an' then they catch on that I'm in charge."

"There are black people running stores all over the city," I said. "The antique store two doors up the street from Elaine is run by a black woman."

"Yeah, an' there's black receptionists in the big office buildings, and black folks at department-store information desks, all of 'em right out where you can see them. Thing is, they don't be lookin' like they just got in off the Deuce. They dressed for success, Bess."

"Has Elaine said anything?"

He shook his head. "She cool with it. But what I might do is keep some straight clothes on a hanger in her back room."

We talked about that some, and then he said, "I guess I could take a ride uptown, see what the brothers and sisters know about my uncle Eldoniah. Thing is, folks just be talkin' different types of trash. Dude's on the street, all he'll tell you is how bad he is, like he dusted six cops and robbed the Bank of England. Same dude's in prison, it's always for something he didn't do."

"I know," I said. "The prisons are all overcrowded, and none of those guys ever did what they went away for."

"I'll go up to the Bronx, see if anybody knows anything. All this is four years ago, that what you said?"

"It's been almost that long since Cloonan was killed. The murder Mims was tried for came later on, and the trial was postponed a couple of times. He's only been working on his twenty for the past year and a half."

"Makes it a little easier," he said. "Least there's a chance somebody'll remember who he was."

I got the check. While I was leaving the tip he said, "I was just thinking. These dudes in the club? How it's suspicious that half of 'em's dead after thirty years. Is that right, thirty years?"

"More like thirty-two."

"Thirty-two years," he said. "You couldn't start a club like that on the Deuce. Never mind no thirty-two years. 'Fore you knew it, you wouldn't have nobody left to have a meeting with. The ones that wasn't dead themselves, they most likely be locked up for killin' the other ones." He took a black Raiders cap from the back pocket of his shorts, tucked his hair into it, checked his reflection in the mirror. He said, "Group of dudes I knew four, five years ago, half of 'em's dead. Didn't take thirty-two years, neither. Dyin' must be easy, when I think of all the dudes caught on real quick how to do it."

"Try to be a slow learner," I said.

"Oh, I tryin'," he said. "I doin' the best I can."