Eight Million Ways to Die

Chapter 3

I got up around ten-thirty, surprisingly well rested after six hours of skimming the surface of sleep. I showered and shaved, had coffee and a roll for breakfast, and went over to St. Paul 's. Not to the basement this time but to the church proper, where I sat in a pew for ten minutes or so before lighting a couple of candles and slipping fifty dollars into the poor box. At the post office on Sixtieth Street I bought a two-hundred-dollar money order and an envelope with the stamp embossed. I mailed the money order to my ex-wife in Syosset. I tried to write a note to enclose but it came out apologetic. The money was too little and too late but she would know that without my having to tell her. I wrapped the money order in a blank sheet of paper and mailed it that way.

It was a gray day, on the cool side, with the threat of more rain. There was a raw wind blowing and it cut around corners like a scatback. In front of the Coliseum a man was chasing his hat and cursing, and I reached up reflexively and gave a tug to the brim of mine.

I walked most of the way to my bank before deciding I didn't have enough of Kim's advance left to necessitate formal financial transactions. I went to my hotel instead and paid half of the coming month's rent on account. By then I had only one of the hundreds intact and I cracked that into tens and twenties while I was at it.

Why hadn't I taken the full thousand in front? I remembered what I'd said about an incentive. Well, I had one.

My mail was routine- a couple of circulars, a letter from my congressman. Nothing I had to read.

No message from Chance. Not that I'd expected one.

I called his service and left another message just for the hell of it.

I got out of there and stayed out all afternoon. I took the subway a couple of times but mostly walked. It kept threatening to rain but it kept not raining, and the wind got even more of an edge to it but never did get my hat. I hit two police precinct houses and a few coffee shops and half a dozen gin mills. I drank coffee in the coffee shops and Coca-Cola in the bars, and I talked to a few people and made a couple of notes. I called my hotel desk a few times. I wasn't expecting a call from Chance but I wanted to be in touch in case Kim called. But no one had called me. I tried Kim's number twice and both times her machine answered. Everybody's got one of those machines and someday all the machines will start dialing and talk to each other. I didn't leave any messages.

Toward the end of the afternoon I ducked into a Times Square theater. They had two Clint Eastwood movies paired, ones where he's a rogue cop who settles things by shooting the bad guys. The audience looked to be composed almost entirely of the sort of people he was shooting. They cheered wildly every time he blew somebody away.

I had pork fried rice and vegetables at a Cuban Chinese place on Eighth Avenue, checked my hotel desk again, stopped at Armstrong's and had a cup of coffee. I got into a conversation at the bar and thought I'd stay there awhile, but by eight-thirty I'd managed to get out the door and across the street and down the stairs to the meeting.

The speaker was a housewife who used to drink herself into a stupor while her husband was at his office and the kids were at school. She told how her kid would find her passed out on the kitchen floor and she convinced him it was a yoga exercise to help her back. Everybody laughed.

When it was my turn I said, "My name is Matt. I'll just listen tonight."

Kelvin Small's is on Lenox Avenue at 127th Street. It's a long narrow room with a bar running the length of it and a row of banquette tables opposite the bar. There's a small bandstand all the way at the back, and on it two dark-skinned blacks with close-cropped hair and horn-rimmed sunglasses and Brooks Brothers suits played quiet jazz, one on a small upright piano, the other using brushes on cymbals. They looked and sounded like half of the old Modern Jazz Quartet.

It was easy for me to hear them because the rest of the room went silent when I cleared the threshold. I was the only white man in the room and everybody stopped for a long look at me. There were a couple of white women, seated with black men at the banquette tables, and there were two black women sharing a table, and there must have been two dozen men in every shade but mine.

I walked the length of the room and went into the men's room. A man almost tall enough for pro basketball was combing his straightened hair. The scent of his pomade vied with the sharp reek of marijuana. I washed my hands and rubbed them together under one of those hot-air dryers. The tall man was still working on his hair when I left.

Conversation died again when I emerged from the men's room. I walked toward the front again, walked slowly and let my shoulders roll. I couldn't be sure about the musicians, but aside from them I figured there wasn't a man in the room who hadn't taken at least one felony bust. Pimps, drug dealers, gamblers, policy men. Nature's noblemen.

A man on the fifth stool from the front caught my eye. It took a second to place him because when I knew him years ago he had straight hair, but now he was wearing it in a modified Afro. His suit was lime green and his shoes were the skin of some reptile, probably an endangered species.

I moved my head toward the door and walked on past him and out. I walked two doors south on Lenox and stood next to a streetlamp. Two or three minutes went by and he came on out, walking loose-limbed and easy. "Hey, Matthew," he said, and extended his hand for a slap. "How's my man?"

I didn't slap his hand. He looked down at it, up at me, rolled his eyes, gave his head an exaggerated shake, clapped his hands together, dusted them against his trouser legs, then placed them on his slim hips. "Been some time," he said. "They run out of your brand downtown? Or do you just come to Harlem to use the little boy's room?"

"You're looking prosperous, Royal."

He preened a little. His name was Royal Waldron and I once knew a black cop with a bullet head who rang changes through Royal Flush to Flush Toilet and called him The Crapper. He said, "Well, I buy and sell. You know."

"I know."

"Give the folks an honest deal and you will never miss a meal. That's a rhyme my mama taught me. How come you uptown, Matthew?"

"I'm looking for a guy."

"Maybe you found him. You off the force these days?"

"For some years now."

"And you lookin' to buy something? What do you want and what can you spend?"

"What are you selling?"

"Most anything."

"Business still good with all these Colombians?"

"Shit," he said, and one hand brushed the front of his pants. I suppose he had a gun in the waistband of the lime green pants. There were probably as many handguns as people in Kelvin Small's. "Them Colombians be all right," he said. "You just don't ever want to cheat them is all. You didn't come up here to buy stuff."

"No."

"What you want, man?"

"I'm looking for a pimp."

"Shit, you just walked past twenty of 'em. And six, seven hoes."

"I'm looking for a pimp named Chance."

"Chance."

"You know him?"

"I might know who he is."

I waited. A man in a long coat was walking along the block, stopping at each storefront. He might have been looking in the windows except that you couldn't; every shop had steel shutters that descended like garage doors at the close of business. The man stopped in front of each closed store and studied the shutters as if they held meaning for him.

"Window shopping," Royal said.

A blue-and-white police car cruised by, slowed. The two uniformed officers within looked us over. Royal wished them a good evening. I didn't say anything and neither did they. When the car drove off he said, "Chance don't come here much."

"Where would I find him?"

"Hard to say. He'll turn up anyplace but it might be the last place you would look. He don't hang out."

"So they tell me."

"Where you been lookin'?"

I'd been to a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, a piano bar in the Village, a pair of bars in the West Forties. Royal took all this in and nodded thoughtfully.

"He wouldn't be at Muffin-Burger," he said, "on account he don't run no girls on the street. That I know of. All the same, he might be there anyway, you dig? Just to be there. What I say, he'll turn up anywhere, but he don't hang out."

"Where should I look for him, Royal?"

He named a couple of places. I'd been to one of them already and had forgotten to mention it. I made a note of the others. I said, "What's he like, Royal?"

"Well, shit," he said, "He a pimp, man."

"You don't like him."

"He ain't to like or not like. My friends is business friends, Matthew, and Chance and I got no business with each other. We don't neither of us buy what the other be sellin'. He don't want to buy no stuff and I don't want to buy no pussy." His teeth showed in a nasty little smile. "When you the man with all the candy, you don't never have to pay for no pussy."

One of the places Royal mentioned was in Harlem, on St. Nicholas Avenue. I walked over to 125th Street. It was wide and busy and well lit, but I was starting to feel the not entirely irrational paranoia of a white man on a black street.

I turned north at St. Nicholas and walked a couple of blocks to the Club Cameroon. It was a low-rent version of Kelvin Small's with a jukebox instead of live music. The men's room was filthy, and in the stall toilet someone was inhaling briskly. Snorting cocaine, I suppose.

I didn't recognize anyone at the bar. I stood there and drank a glass of club soda and looked at fifteen or twenty black faces reflected in the mirrored back bar. It struck me, not for the first time that evening, that I could be looking at Chance and not knowing it. The description I had for him would fit a third of the men present and stretch to cover half of those remaining. I hadn't been able to see a picture of him. My cop contacts didn't recognize the name, and if it was his last name he didn't have a yellow sheet in the files.

The men on either side had turned away from me. I caught sight of myself in the mirror, a pale man in a colorless suit and a gray topcoat. My suit could have stood pressing and my hat would have looked no worse if the wind had taken it, and here I stood, isolated between these two fashion plates with their wide shoulders and exaggerated lapels and fabric-covered buttons. The pimps used to line up at Phil Kronfeld's Broadway store for suits like that, but Kronfeld's was closed and I had no idea where they went these days. Maybe I should find out, maybe Chance had a charge account and I could trace him that way.

Except people in the life didn't have charges because they did everything with cash. They'd even buy cars with cash, bop into Potamkin's and count out hundred dollar bills and take home a Cadillac.

The man on my right crooked a finger at the bartender. "Put it right in the same glass," he said. "Let it build up a taste." The bartender filled his glass with a jigger of Hennessy and four or five ounces of cold milk. They used to call that combination a White Cadillac. Maybe they still do.

Maybe I should have tried Potamkin's.

Or maybe I should have stayed home. My presence was creating tension and I could feel it thickening the air in the little room. Sooner or later someone would come over and ask me what the fuck I thought I was doing there and it was going to be hard to come up with an answer.

I left before it could happen. A gypsy cab was waiting for the light to change. The door on my side was dented and one fender was crumpled, and I wasn't sure what that said about the driver's ability. I got in anyway.

* * *

Royal had mentioned another place on West Ninety-sixth and I let the cab drop me there. It was after two by this time and I was starting to tire. I went into yet another bar where yet another black man was playing piano. This particular piano sounded out of tune, but it might have been me. The crowd was a fairly even mix of black and white. There were a lot of interracial couples, but the white women who were paired with black men looked more like girlfriends than hookers. A few of the men were dressed flashily, but nobody sported the full pimp regalia I'd seen a mile and a half to the north. If the room carried an air of fast living and cash transactions, it was nevertheless subtler and more muted than the Harlem clubs, or the ones around Times Square.

I put a dime in the phone and called my hotel. No messages. The desk clerk that night was a mulatto with a cough-syrup habit that never seemed to keep him from functioning. He could still do the Times crossword puzzle with a fountain pen. I said, "Jacob, do me a favor. Call this number and ask to speak to Chance."

I gave him the number. He read it back and asked if that was Mr. Chance. I said just Chance.

"And if he comes to the phone?"

"Just hang up."

I went to the bar and almost ordered a beer but made it a Coke instead. A minute later the phone rang and a kid answered it. He looked like a college student. He called out, asking if there was anyone there named Chance. Nobody responded. I kept an eye on the bartender. If he recognized the name he didn't show it. I'm not even certain he was paying attention.

I could have played that little game at every bar I'd been to, and maybe it would have been worth the effort. But it had taken me three hours to think of it.

I was some detective. I was drinking all the Coca-Cola in Manhattan and I couldn't find a goddamned pimp. My teeth would rot before I got hold of the son of a bitch.

There was a jukebox, and one record ended and another began, something by Sinatra, and it triggered something, made some mental connection for me. I left my Coke on the bar and caught a cab going downtown on Columbus Avenue. I got off at the corner of Seventy-second Street and walked half a block west to Poogan's Pub. The clientele was a little less Superspade and a little more Young Godfather but I wasn't really looking for Chance anyway. I was looking for Danny Boy Bell.

He wasn't there. The bartender said, "Danny Boy? He was in earlier. Try the Top Knot, that's just across Columbus. He's there when he's not here."

And he was there, all right, on a bar stool all the way at the back. I hadn't seen him in years but he was no mean trick to recognize. He hadn't grown and he wasn't any darker.

Danny Boy's parents were both dark-skinned blacks. He had their features but not their color. He was an albino, as unpigmented as a white mouse. He was quite slender and very short. He claimed to be five two but I've always figured he was lying by an inch and a half or so.

He was wearing a three-piece banker's-stripe suit and the first white shirt I'd seen in a long time. His tie showed muted red and black stripes. His black shoes were highly polished. I don't think I've ever seen him without a suit and tie, or with scuffed shoes.

He said, "Matt Scudder. By God, if you wait long enough everybody turns up."

"How are you, Danny?"

"Older. It's been years. You're less than a mile away and when's the last time we saw each other? It has been, if you'll excuse the expression, a coon's age."

"You haven't changed much."

He studied me for a moment. "Neither have you," he said, but his voice lacked conviction. It was a surprisingly normal voice to issue from such an unusual person, of medium depth, unaccented. You expected him to sound like Johnny in the old Philip Morris commercials.

He said, "You were just in the neighborhood? Or you came looking for me?"

"I tried Poogan's first. They told me you might be here."

"I'm flattered. Purely a social visit, of course."

"Not exactly."

"Why don't we take a table? We can talk of old times and dead friends. And whatever mission brought you here."

The bars Danny Boy favored kept a bottle of Russian vodka in the freezer. That was what he drank and he liked it ice-cold but without any ice cubes rattling around in his glass and diluting his drink. We settled in at a booth in the back and a speedy little waitress brought his drink of choice and Coke for me. Danny Boy lowered his eyes to my glass, then raised them to my face.

"I've been cutting back some," I said.

"Makes good sense."

"I guess."

"Moderation," he said. "I tell you, Matt, those old Greeks knew it all. Moderation."

He drank half his drink. He was good for perhaps eight like it in the course of a day. Call it a quart a day, all in a body that couldn't go more than a hundred pounds, and I'd never seen him show the effects. He never staggered, never slurred his words, just kept on keeping on.

So? What did that have to do with me?

I sipped my Coke.

We sat there and told each other stories. Danny Boy's business, if he had one, was information. Everything you told him got filed away in his mind, and by putting bits of data together and moving them around he brought in enough dollars to keep his shoes shined and his glass full. He would bring people together, taking a slice of their action for his troubles. His own hands stayed clean while he held a limited partnership in a lot of short-term enterprises, most of them faintly illicit. When I was on the force he'd been one of my best sources, an unpaid snitch who took his recompense in information.

He said, "You remember Lou Rudenko? Louie the Hat, they call him," I said I did. "You hear about his mother?"

"What about her?"

"Nice old Ukrainian lady, still lived in the old neighborhood on East Ninth or Tenth, wherever it was. Been a widow for years. Must have been seventy, maybe closer to eighty. Lou's got to be what, fifty?"

"Maybe."

"Doesn't matter. Point is this nice little old lady has a gentleman friend, a widower the same age as she is. He's over there a couple nights a week and she cooks Ukrainian food for him and maybe they go to a movie if they can find one that doesn't have people fucking all over the screen. Anyway, he comes over one afternoon, he's all excited, he found a television set on the street. Somebody put it out for the garbage. He says people are crazy, they throw perfectly good things away, and he's handy at fixing things and her own set's on the fritz and this one's a color set and twice the size of hers and maybe he can fix it for her."

"And?"

"And he plugs it in and turns it on to see what happens, and what happens is it blows up. He loses an arm and an eye and Mrs. Rudenko, she's right in front of it when it goes, she's killed instantly."

"What was it, a bomb?"

"You got it. You saw the story in the paper?"

"I must have missed it."

"Well, it was five, six months ago. What they worked out was somebody rigged the set with a bomb and had it delivered to somebody else. Maybe it was a mob thing and maybe it wasn't, because all the old man knew was what block he picked the set up on, and what does that tell you? Thing is, whoever received the set was suspicious enough to put it right out with the garbage, and it wound up killing Mrs. Rudenko. I saw Lou and it was a funny thing because he didn't know who to get mad at. 'It's this fucking city,' he told me. 'It's this goddamn fucking city.' But what sense does that make? You live in the middle of Kansas and a tornado comes and picks your house up and spreads it over Nebraska. That's an act of God, right?"

"That's what they say."

"In Kansas God uses tornadoes. In New York he uses gaffed television sets. Whoever you are, God or anybody else, you work with the materials at hand. You want another Coke?"

"Not right now."

"What can I do for you?"

"I'm looking for a pimp."

"Diogenes was looking for an honest man. You have more of a field to choose from."

"I'm looking for a particular pimp."

"They're all particular. Some of them are downright finicky. Has he got a name?"

"Chance."

"Oh, sure," Danny Boy said. "I know Chance."

"You know how I can get in touch with him?"

He frowned, picked up his empty glass, put it down. "He doesn't hang out anywhere," he said.

"That's what I keep hearing."

"It's the truth. I think a man should have a home base. I'm always here or at Poogan's. You're at Jimmy Armstrong's, or at least you were the last I heard."

"I still am."

"See? I keep tabs on you even when I don't see you. Chance. Let me think. What's today, Thursday?"

"Right. Well, Friday morning."

"Don't get technical. What do you want with him, if you don't mind the question?"

"I want to talk to him."

"I don't know where he is now but I might know where he'll be eighteen or twenty hours from now. Let me make a call. If that girl shows up, order me another drink, will you? And whatever you're having."

I managed to catch the waitress's eye and told her to bring Danny Boy another glass of vodka. She said, "Right. And another Coke for you?"

I'd been getting little drink urges off and on ever since I sat down and now I got a strong one. My gorge rose at the thought of another Coke. I told her to make it ginger ale this time. Danny Boy was still on the phone when she brought the drinks. She put the ginger ale in front of me and the vodka on his side of the table. I sat there and tried not to look at it and my eyes couldn't find anywhere else to go. I wished he would get back to the table and drink the damn thing.

I breathed in and breathed out and sipped my ginger ale and kept my hands off his vodka and eventually he came back to the table. "I was right," he said. "He'll be at the Garden tomorrow night."

"Are the Knicks back? I thought they were still on the road."

"Not the main arena. Matter of fact I think there's some rock concert. Chance'll be at the Felt Forum for the Friday night fights."

"He always goes?"

"Not always, but there's a welterweight named Kid Bascomb at the top of the prelim card and Chance has an interest in the young man."

"He owns a piece of him?"

"Could be, or maybe it's just an intellectual interest. What are you smiling at?"

"The idea of a pimp with an intellectual interest in a welter-weight."

"You never met Chance."

"No."

"He's not the usual run."

"That's the impression I'm getting."

"Point is, Kid Bascomb's definitely fighting, which doesn't mean Chance'll definitely be there, but I'd call it odds on. You want to talk to him, you can do it for the price of a ticket."

"How will I know him?"

"You never met him? No, you just said you didn't. You wouldn't recognize him if you saw him?"

"Not in a fight crowd. Not when half the house is pimps and players."

He thought about it. "This conversation you're going to have with Chance," he said. "Is it going to upset him a lot?"

"I hope not."

"What I'm getting at, is he likely to have a powerful resentment against whoever points him out?"

"I don't see why he should."

"Then what it's going to cost you, Matt, is the price of not one but two tickets. Be grateful it's an off-night at the Forum and not a title bout at the Main Garden. Ringside shouldn't be more than ten or twelve dollars, say fifteen at the outside. Thirty dollars at the most for our tickets."

"You're coming with me?"

"Why not? Thirty dollars for tickets and fifty for my time. I trust your budget can carry the weight?"

"It can if it has to."

"I'm sorry I have to ask you for money. If it were a track meet I wouldn't charge you a cent. But I've never cared for boxing. If it's any consolation, I'd want at least a hundred dollars to attend a hockey game."

"I guess that's something. You want to meet me there?"

"Out in front. At nine- that should give us plenty of leeway. How does that sound?"

"Fine."

"I'll see if I can't wear something distinctive," he said, "so that you'll have no trouble recognizing me."