Eight Million Ways to Die (4 page)

One of the places Royal mentioned was inHarlem , onSt. Nicholas Avenue . I walked over to125th 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 aroundTimes 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 inManhattan 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 onColumbus Avenue . I got off at the corner ofSeventy-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 acrossColumbus . 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?"