Dirty Words

So Long, Johnnie Scumbag

Johnnie sat behind the glass partition in his prison oranges, huffing a Newport. Obese, pale and tired-looking, jail hadn't been kind to him. Not that it's particularly kind to anybody. His dyed black hair was starting to show its brown roots, giving his head a layered chocolate cake look. Johnnie smelled bad to begin with, but the stint in lock-up wasn't doing his hygiene any favors. It might have been my imagination, but I could have sworn that I could smell him through the inch and a half of plexiglass. I tried to cover his stink of garlic mixed with wet dog by chain smoking, until the guard informed me of the no smoking policy.

Christ. Can't even smoke in jail. I wondered what the hell passed for currency on the yard since 2003.

I'd just have to breathe through my mouth then. What I needed was a drink. As it was, I interrupted my day's barflying to see Johnnie in the first place.

"T.C., I need you on this, man," he said. Not that he didn't cut a pathetic picture to begin with, but his blubbering only made him seem fatter. Maybe it was my own word association with blubber.

"Tell me why I should, Johnnie."

"'Cause I didn't do this!"

"Again Johnnie, tell me why I should give a shit." I wanted an answer and I wanted it fast. I didn't enjoy being at Riker's, even if it was a friend in there. And in case you didn't have it figured out by now, I'm not a big fan of Johnnie Scumbag's. Nobody really is. The people who like him call him Johnnie Scumbag.

"Because I don't have a lot of time and you're the only person who can do it."

I wasn't, but I was probably the only one who'd shown up when Johnnie called. My services, no matter how mundane, don't come cheap. In the sudden economic slide in New York City, jobs had been so scarce lately that I was even willing to show up for Johnnie Scumbag. Most people who would've been clients a year ago tried to do their own work instead in order to save a few bucks. Most of them wound up on Johnnie's side of the glass. If they were lucky.

"Convince me with a number," I said.

"Five grand," Johnnie said, hopefully.

"Six." I tried to keep my feet from fidgeting in my shoes. Jail gives me the heebie-jeebies. Probably because something deep inside told me that I would end up in one eventually.

"Why six?"

"Jeannie Giammarino told me to remind you that you owe her a grand off the last Klitchko fight."

"What, she think I was gonna welsh?" Johnnie puffed his chest out in a pose of dignified disbelief.

"The fight was in January. She's been waiting five months."

"I was getting the money together."

"Yeah. And the check's in the mail." He spoke to me as if I didn't know him and his history. The nickname "scumbag" wasn't put on people known for their high standards of integrity.

Johnnie didn't like my attitude. "Then maybe you should help me because I know what you really do, T.C." He flashed a smirk that I wanted to peel off with a lemon zester.

I let his words hang for a bit. I felt a smile play across my own mouth. "You threatening me, Johnnie?" My words were ice. My look was colder.

Johnnie quickly reconsidered his tactic. "No, no T.C., I…I mean…I know you can help me." Beads of sweat popped out on his face. "That little bastard Tino's setting me up."

I sucked in my upper lip. "Tino's girlfriend is dead. Seems to me like a damned stupid way to be setting you up."

"The guy gets robbed, see? He lives on Sullivan Street, for chrissakes. There's a junkie every ten feet since they got shoo-flyed out of Washington Square. He tells the cops it was me and here I am."

Truth was, despite everything else that made him a piece of shit, Johnnie was no killer.

Fuck it. I needed income.

"Give me the names."

The deal.

Tino, one of the last people in the Tri-State area who had any faith in Johnnie, let him stay with him a bit while he was "between apartments." I'd be more likely to believe that if Johnnie ever had an address for more than a couple months at a time. He'd attach himself like a tick to someone until they wizened up and changed their locks. Problem was, Johnnie's few possessions were still in Tino's after his keys stopped working. Up to that point, everyone else had returned Johnnie's stuff if only to guarantee his absence from their lives. Tino thought differently. Johnnie was going to pay him back all of the money he owed or else his stuff would hit the furnace. Then Tino comes home one night to find his girlfriend Nina dead on the floor, the apartment robbed down to the hardwood.

Nina was four months pregnant.

Johnnie claimed that he'd been playing poker in Williamsburg the whole night. Problem was, the game was illegal and nobody wanted to admit having been there. Even if they were, fewer were willing to step up to the plate for Johnnie Scumbag.

My first stop was Paulie D's Barbershop. It was a nice day, so I took the L train into Brooklyn and walked up Metropolitan to Paulie's.

A tin bell tinkled as I walked in. "How's things Paulie?"

Paulie didn't bother looking up. He was busy sweeping up a mess of curly blonde hair off the floor. Paulie looked like a shaved ferret, only slightly taller. A shaved ferret with a horrible personality. In the dingy back room of the dingier barbershop, he ran illegal poker games on weekends for the gambling junkies who didn't want to bother getting a bus to Atlantic City.

Paulie just grunted at me. The fresh hair told me that somebody new was in the neighborhood. Anybody who'd lived there more than a week knew that the barbershop was a front and wouldn't trust Paulie to shear a sheep, much less cut their hair-not unless they wanted to look like Patti LaBelle after she'd stuck her head in a thresher. Most people of reasonable intelligence just had to look at the magazine rack to figure it out. His most recent copy of Sports Illustrated featured Johnnie Bench on the cover.

"Hey Paulie, was Johnnie Scumbag at poker on Saturday?"

"Polka? I don't know nothin' about no Polack dancing."

I could see I was going to be on the receiving end of Paulie's legendary talent for playing dumb. "The poker game. P-O-K-E-R."

"What poker game?"

"The one on Saturday."

"What's poker?"

I sighed. I should have known better. If push came to shove, Paulie would wind up with his own ass in a sling if he gave Johnnie his alibi. "This is between you and me, Paulie. I just need to know whether or not he was here."

Paulie stopped sweeping and gave me the once over. "Why you wanna know?"

"He's in Riker's for something that went down on Saturday night and he needs somebody to say that he was elsewhere."

"It ain't gonna be me."

"Well, I need to know."

Paulie scratched his chin. "He came by Saturday night. Got his hair cut."

That was all I needed to hear. Johnnie wouldn't let Paulie touch his hair with a velvet glove, much less his scissors. "How long?"

"He was here all night. Man's got one helluva complicated haircut."

"Would you be willing to tell a cop that? Even on the DL"

"Nope." Paulie resumed his sweeping. I started to leave when the broom stopped. "Next time you see that fat turd, you tell him he dropped one of his cards under his chair when he left."

"His cards?"

"Wasn't one of mine. You tell him he comes back again, I'm gonna cut more than his hair."

I left Brooklyn and returned to Manhattan for stop number two over at Dino's bar.

Josh already had the bottle of Makers in his hand when I told him I was having coffee. The bottle hovered for a second in Josh's unbelieving hand.

"Seriously?"

"Seriously. I'm working."

"Whew! For a second I thought you were gonna say you were on the wagon. I don't think I make my rent, you stop drinking."

"Hardy har, Sheckie."

Josh poured me a cup that tasted like it was brewed around the time Paulie picked up that Johnnie Bench S.I.

Scumbag claimed that Josh was at the poker game with him. Or danced a polka with him. After my talk with Paulie, I wasn't so sure anymore. After my tongue stopped shitting in my mouth from that first sip of coffee, I said as much.

"What poker game?" Josh said innocently. Or as innocently as a man sleeved in tattoos with an old bottle scar across one cheek can say it.

"Don't start that shit with me, Josh. I just went through it with Paulie." Josh and I went back a-ways together, so I wasn't about to play verbal hide & seek with him. I'd been a semi-regular at Dino's for a decade and tip well for an alcoholic. The amount of money I'd dropped in the last year alone should have been enough to buy me some straight talk.

"Okay, okay. Yeah. I was there. So was Scumbag."

"He's gonna need somebody to alibi him then."

Josh shook his head. "I'm not doing it. My wife finds out I was gambling, she's gonna have my balls in her spaghetti sauce."

I accidentally slugged another mouthful of coffee. Josh reached for the pot to refill it and I almost pulled my gun. "So don't say you were gambling. Say you were at a bar with him. Say you were playing pool with him. Say you were dancing a goddamn cha-cha with him in Monte Carlo for all I fucking care."

Josh blushed a deep red all the way up to the tips of his ears. "I can't"

"Why the hell not?"

"Well…" The red deepened into crimson. "My wife doesn't know I was out. I kinda snuck out after she fell asleep. She takes an Ambien, she wouldn't notice if I had the poker game in the bed on top of her."

"Josh, an innocent man is in jail right now and you're willing to let him stay there because you're afraid of your wife?"

"You never met Janelle, have you?"

"No…"

"There you go."

"For the love of…"

"And you got a weird sense of humor calling Johnnie Scumbag innocent." Josh's face went hard when he said it.

I met his eyes evenly. "He didn't rob Tino, Josh. If he was with you at the poker game, he didn't kill Nina either. Or the baby."

"Yeah. I know all about that. It's a tragedy. But Johnnie ain't no saint, either."

"I know that."

Josh nodded, solemnly. "You know about Geraldine?"

The name sounded familiar, but a face wouldn't appear in my mind. "I think so. What about her?"

"You mighta called her Sharkie."

"Oh yeah, Sharkie." Sharkie was a local hustler who fleeced the uptown boys whenever they played pool on the L.E.S. She wasn't a supremely skilled player, but was extremely gifted, nonetheless. Gifted by the way of 38-24-36, two inches of tits more than the Commodores granted. She played in a wifebeater t-shirt and a pair of bike shorts. Looking like she did, the best pool players in the world had trouble lining up a shot while staring at her womanly goodness. To top it all off, she possessed both a smile and nature so sweet, her marks would lose all of their money and then break out credit cards to buy her drinks when she was done. "What's this got to do with Sharkie?" I asked. "She hasn't been around in a while."

Josh made a face like he'd drank some of his own coffee. "You can thank Johnnie Scumbag."

"What are you talking about?"

"About a year and a half ago, she was in here and had a bit too much." Josh made the drinky-drinky motion. "She left with Scumbag."

"Sharkie left with Scumbag?" I couldn't keep the horror out of my voice.

"Yeah, I know. Some people are inclined to believe that she was slipped something a little harder than alcohol, if you know what I'm saying."

I didn't say anything.

"Anyway," Josh continued, "Six months pass and Sharkie's heavy with kid. Tells Scumbag he's the poppa. I mean, Sharkie was a standup broad. She didn't cry foul or nothin', just said to Scumbag that the baby was his. Scumbag pulls his innocent act and disappears on her. How much money do you think the kid's seen from him so far?"

I didn't say anything again. The answer was obvious. I knew Sharkie and I knew Scumbag. There was no defense. I felt like an armless boxer fighting for the heavyweight title.

"Exactly. So don't come preaching to me about poor, innocent Johnnie Scumbag." Josh clicked his tongue in disgust. "And if that don't beat all, the fucking kid's gotta look just like Scumbag. Couldn't look like Sharkie, could it? What a fucking world."

I was down to bare knuckles. Last resorting for a man I didn't even like. I already felt covered in the film of slime that Johnnie Scumbag seemed to leave wherever he went. But I did it anyway. I went to talk to Tino.

We met at a bar on the corner of Sullivan and Houston. I remembered the place as a biker bar twenty years ago. Now the place was a lounge. Progress, I suppose. Tino looked off into the south Manhattan skyline when I brought our drinks over. He swallowed hard twice before he seemed capable of drinking his beer. Tino was a small man made downright miniscule by pain. His grief was a palpable thing that he wore around his neck like an anchor in a world rapidly filling with water.

I broke the quiet moment. "Johnnie didn't do it, Tino."

Tino nodded. "Then I will find out who did." The last remaining touches of his Spanish accent flicked across his words like a feather.

"You can tell the cops that you found out. That he didn't do it."

He nodded again, more to himself than to me. "Don't care."

"Tino…" I didn't know how to finish the sentence, so I didn't.

"I wasn't home. I took an extra night at work to cover the money that cocksucker Johnnie took from us. I would have been home if not for him. I could have protected my wife. My baby."

"You don't know what would have happened, Tino."

"Or I could have died with them. Even that would have been better." Tino cleared his throat hard.

We sat in the leaded quiet for a time. Tino's watery eyes never left the darkening skyline. "Did you know it was a boy?"

Two days passed before I met up with Johnnie Scumbag again.

"You know what an all-region DVD player is?"

Johnnie gave me a look through the plexiglass like I'd lost my mind. "I know what a DVD player is."

I shook my head. "When they first started making the players, they made them all-region. Which means that if you wanted to watch a movie that was only available in French Polynesia, you could. Then the companies figured out that if they made machines that only played the region in which they were bought, that they could sell more. That way if anyone moved from one county to another, they'd not only have to buy a new player, but all new DVDs as well. Also, depending on what country makes what movie, different release dates, etc, etc… Sometimes a movie will already out on DVD in one country before it's in theaters in another."

Johnnie continued staring at me, puzzled. "And?"

"And, Tino had one of those models."

"I don't know what…"

"You see, Johnnie, Tino loves kung-fu movies. He's loved them since he was a kid. He collects them. Problem was, a lot of the movies he wanted were only made for the Chinese region. Are you following me?"

Johnnie nodded, mutely.

"So Tino goes out and he buys himself one of these all-region DVD players and orders the movies from Chinatown. Thing is, these machines are kinda rare nowadays. Only the hardcore guys own them and pay top dollar. So, a stolen one is easy to track."

"Uh-huh."

I pulled a cigarette out, placed it between my lips, feeling more than a little like Columbo. The guard "ahem"-med at me.

"Not lighting it," I said, a little pissed that my Columbo flow was now fucked up. "Where was I?"

"DVD player?"

"Ah, right. So, I hit the pawn shops. Sure enough, right on Sixth Avenue, less than a half mile from Tino's apartment, I find myself a pawn shop. Beginner's luck, I guess. Know what they had?"

Johnnie blinked at me, thinking it over and taking longer than he should. "Tino's DVD player?"

"Atta boy! You are following. Now, the pawn shop guy, he would never admit to buying stolen goods, much less give me a name or tell me that he buys the goods from the local junkies." I chewed the filter and smiled as I blew the pretend smoke slowly out my nostrils. "But it's amazing what they will tell you when you break out the cigar cutter and a can of Sterno."

Johnnie nodded silently as the color dropped out of his face between heartbeats.

I let him stew for a few seconds. "I found Chauncy, Johnnie."

"I didn't…"

"A couple of twenties passed into a junkie's hand and they'll tell you that they like to hump pumpkins, much less point a finger atanother junkie." I stubbed out the cigarette I never lit in the metal ashtray still bolted to the table.

"I didn't rob Tino, T.C. I didn't kill Nina," Johnnie's voice was starting to squeak with panic.

"No. No you didn't. You just paid Chauncey to break in and rob the place to get all your stuff back. Nina walked in and he killed her."

"I never meant…"

"You cut a path. Johnnie. Everywhere you go. Everything you touch leaves behind the stink of you. And I'm not just talking about that Fulton Fish Market at high noon aroma that comes out your pores, either."

Johnnie hung his head in…what? I don't know. Who knows if a person like him can feel shame. Or guilt. If I had the money to bet, I'd say that he hung his head in simple defeat at being found out. "What are you going to do?"

"Oh, there's a lot I could do. I could drop Chauncey off at the police station and let him confess, which at worst gets you an accessory charge."

Johnnie raised his head, hopeful.

"But that's not gonna happen since poor Chauncy is being sent to a few different states right now. All of them at the same time, if you catch my drift." I winked at him.

Johnnie went another shade whiter and his lower lip started to tremble. "But I didn't…"

"Yes you did, Johnnie. Yes you fucking did." I stabbed my finger at him. "Another option is Josh." I pulled a piece of paper out of my pocket. "The poor guy's conscience worked him over and at the risk of his horrible wife's fury, he wrote out a statement saying he was playing poker with you all Saturday night. Look." I held the paper up to the glass. "Even had it notarized." Johnnie's face pressed against the barrier, a sly smile pulling the corner of his mouth as he read Josh's words. The smile winked out when I tore the paper in two.

"No! NO!" he screamed, fat fingers trying to reach through the holes to get the shreds.

"Oops."

Deflated, Johnnie's face went slack, his eyes deadened at the realization that he wasn't going any-goddamn-where.

I turned to go and stopped, living out one last fine point of my Columbo fantasy. "One last thing," I said and turned back. "You remember Crazy Dennis? Used to run errands for the Westies way back?"

Johnnie tried to swallow and looked like he might vomit instead. "I think so. He got that teardrop tattoo on the corner of his eye?"

"Yup. That's him. He was supposedly the only guy crazy enough to actually give somebody a Columbian Necktie after he'd kill him. And if you were considered crazy in Hell's Kitchen mob back in those days… Anyway, funny thing. He got pulled over last week in Queens and the cops found an unregistered gun. He's getting two years in here on weapons possession. Strange when you think that's what they catch him for after all of the sick shit that Crazy Dennis pulled. Funny too, when you remember that his wife was Nina's sister." I savored the fear that fluttered in Johnnie's eyes. "Small world, ain't it, Johnnie?"

If Johnnie went any paler, he'd have gone invisible. He shook like an epileptic. His mouth moved, but no words came out. I turned to go, for real this time. I lifted my hand in farewell. "So long, Johnnie. Won't be seeing you."