A Ticket to the Boneyard (19 page)

“Who is?”

“You ought to know. Your name is Scudder, isn’t it? Aren’t you the man’s been showing his picture all over the street?”

“I’m the man.”

There was a stretch of silence. I could tell she hadn’t hung up, but I wondered if she might have set the phone down and walked away. Then, her voice little more than a whisper, she said, “I can’t talk now. Stay where you are. I’ll call back in ten minutes.”

It was more like fifteen. This time she said, “I’m scared, man. He’d kill me in a hot second.”

“Then why call me?”

“ ’Cause he might kill me anyway.”

“Just tell me where I can find him. It won’t get back to you.”

“Yeah?” She considered this. “You got to meet me,” she said.

“All right.”

“We got to talk, you know? Before I tell you anything.”

“All right. Pick a time and a place.”

“Shit. What time is it now? Close to eleven. Meet me at midnight. Can you do that?”

“Where?”

“You know the Lower East Side?”

“I can find my way around.”

“Meet me at—shit, I’m crazy to do this.” I waited her out. “Place called the Garden Grill. That’s on Ridge Street just below Stanton. You know where that is?”

“I’ll find it.”

“It’s on the right-hand side of the street if you’re going downtown. And there’s steps leading down from the street. If you’re not looking for it you could miss it.”

“I’ll find it. You said midnight? How will I know you?”

“Look for me at the bar. Long legs and auburn hair, and I’ll be drinking a Rob Roy straight up.” A throaty chuckle. “You could buy me a refill.”

Ridge Street runs south from Houston Street seven or eight blocks east of First Avenue. It’s not a good neighborhood, but then it never was. Over a century ago the narrow streets began filling up with mean tenements, thrown up in a hurry to house the mob of immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe. The buildings left a lot to be desired when they were new, and the years have not been good to them.

Many of them are gone. Stretches of the Lower East Side have seen the tenements give way to low-income housing projects, which have arguably become worse places to live than the hovels they replaced. Ridge Street, though, remained an unbroken double row of five-story tenements, with an occasional gap in the form of a rubble-strewn lot where someone had torn down a building after someone else had burned it out.

My cab dropped me at the corner of Ridge and Houston a few minutes before twelve. I stood there while the driver made a quick U-turn and looked for greener pastures. The streets were empty, and of course all of the shops on Houston were dark, and most of them shuttered, their corrugated-steel shutters black with undecipherable graffiti.

I walked south on Ridge. On the other side of the street a woman was berating a child in Spanish. A few houses further on, a trio of youths in leather jackets looked me over and evidently decided I was more trouble than I was worth.

I crossed Stanton Street. The Garden Grill, not all that hard to find if you were looking for it, was in the fourth building from the corner. A scrap of neon in an otherwise opaque window announced its name. I walked a dozen yards past it and checked to see if I was attracting any attention. I didn’t seem to be.

I retraced my steps and descended a half-flight of stairs to a heavy door with steel mesh over its window. The glass itself was darkened, but through it I could see the interior of a barroom. I opened the door and walked into a real bucket of blood.

A bar ran the length of a long narrow room. There were twelve or fifteen people standing or occupying backed stools, and a few heads turned at my entrance but no one took an undue interest. A dozen tables ranged across from the bar, and perhaps half of them were occupied. The lighting was dim, and the air was thick with smoke, most of it tobacco but some of it marijuana. At one of the tables a man and woman were sharing a joint, passing it back and forth, holding it in an elaborate roach clip. They didn’t look in fear of arrest, and no wonder; busting someone in here for possession of marijuana would be like handing out jaywalking summonses in the middle of a race riot.

One woman sat alone at the bar, drinking something out of a stemmed glass. Her shoulder-length hair was chestnut, and the red highlights were like bloodstains in the subdued lighting. She wore red hot pants over black mesh tights.

I went over and stood at the bar, leaving an empty stool between us. When the bartender came over I turned and caught her eye. I asked her what she was drinking.

“A Rob Roy,” she said.

It was the voice I’d heard over the phone, low and throaty. I told the bartender to give her another, and ordered a Coke for myself. He brought the drinks and I took a sip of mine and made a face.

“The Coke’s flat here,” she said. “I should have said something.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You must be Scudder.”

“You didn’t tell me your name.”

She considered this and I took a moment to look at her. She was tall, with a broad forehead and a sharply defined widow’s peak. She was wearing a short bolero jacket over a halter the same color as her hot pants. Her midriff was bare. She had a full-lipped mouth with bright red lipstick, and she had large hands with bright red polish on her nails.

She looked for all the world like a whore, and I didn’t see how she could possibly be anything else. She also looked like a woman, unless you paid attention to the timbre of the voice, the size of the hands, the contour of the throat.

“You can call me Candy,” she said.

“All right.”

“If he finds out I called you—”

“He won’t find out from me, Candy.”

“Because he’d kill me. He wouldn’t have to think long and hard to do it, either.”

“Who else has he killed?”

She pursed her lips, blew out a soundless whistle. “I’m not saying,” she said.

“All right.”

“What I can do, I can take you around, show you where he’s staying.”

“Is he there now?”

“ ‘Course not. He’s somewhere uptown. Man, if he was anywheres this side of Fourteenth Street, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.” She raised a hand to her mouth, blew on her fingernails as if they were freshly painted and she wanted to speed their drying. “I ought to get something for this,” she said.

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know. What’s anybody always want? Money, I guess. Afterward, when you get him. Something.”

“There’ll be something for you, Candy.”

“Money’s not why I’m doing this,” she said. “But you do something like this, you ought to get something for it.”

“You will.”

She nodded shortly, got to her feet. Her glass was still half-full, and she knocked it back and swallowed, her Adam’s apple bobbing as she did so. She was a male, or at least she’d been born one.

In some parts of town a majority of the street girls are men in drag. Most of them are getting hormones, and quite a few have had silicone breast implants; like Candy, they’re equipped with more impressive chests than most of their genuinely female competitors. Some have had sex-change surgery, but most of the ones on the street aren’t that far along yet, and they may have hit the pavement in order to save up for their operations. For some of them, the surgery will eventually include a procedure to shave the Adam’s apple. I don’t think there’s anything available yet to reduce the size of hands and feet, but there’s probably a doctor somewhere working on it.

“Give me five minutes,” she said. “Then come along to the corner of Stanton and Attorney. I’ll be walking slow. Catch up with me as I get to the corner and we’ll go from there.”

“Where will we be going?”

“It’s not but a couple blocks.”

I sipped my flat Coke and gave her the head start she’d asked for. Then I picked up my change and left a buck on the bar. I went out the door, up the stairs to the street.

The cold air was bracing after the warm fug inside the Garden Grill. I took a good look around before I walked to the corner of Stanton and looked east toward Attorney. She had covered half the block already, walking in that hip-rolling stroll that’s as good as a neon sign. I picked up my own pace and caught her a few yards before the corner.

She didn’t look at me. “We turn here,” she said, and hung a left at Attorney. It looked a lot like Ridge Street, the same crumbling tenements, the same air of unquiet desperation. Under a streetlamp, a Ford a few years old sat low on the ground, all four of its wheels removed. The streetlamp across the way was out, and so was another further down the block.

I said, “I haven’t got much money with me. Under fifty dollars.”

“I said you could pay me later.”

“I know. But if this was a setup, there’s not enough money to make it worthwhile.”

She looked at me, a pained expression on her face. “You think that’s what this is about? Man, I make more in a half hour than I could ever roll you for, and the men I make it from are all smiles when they give it to me.”

“Whatever you say. Where are we going?”

“Next block. You’ll see. Say, that picture of him? Somebody drew it, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Looks just like him. Got the eyes just right, too. Man, he looks at you, those eyes just go right on through you, you know what I mean?”

I didn’t like it. Something felt wrong, something hadn’t felt right since I walked down the dark stairwell and into the bar. I didn’t know how much of it was my own cop instinct and how much was contagious anxiety that I’d picked up from Candy. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it.

“This way,” she said, reaching for my arm. I jerked my arm free and she drew back and stared at me. “What’s the matter, you can’t stand to be touched?”

“Where are we going?”

“Right through there.”

We were at the mouth of an empty lot where a tenement had once stood. Now cyclone fence barred the way, topped with concertina wire, but someone had cut a gate into the fence. Beyond it I could see some discarded furniture, a burned-out sofa and some cast-off mattresses.

“There’s a back house to one of the buildings on the next block,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “Except it’s sealed off, you can’t get in from the other street. The only way’s through the lot here. You could live on this block and never know about it.”

“And that’s where he is?”

“That’s where he stays. Look, man, just come with me to where you can see the entrance. You’d never find it if I don’t point it out to you.”

I stood still for a moment, listening. I don’t know what I expected to hear. Candy stepped through the opening in the fence, not even looking back at me, and when she was a few yards ahead I started in after her. I knew better, but it didn’t seem to matter. I felt like Elaine. He’d told her to pick up the phone and turn off the answering machine, and knowing better didn’t help. She did what he told her.

I walked slowly, picking my way through the debris underfoot. The street had been dark to begin with, and it got darker with every step I took into the lot. I couldn’t have been more than ten yards in when I heard footsteps.

Before I could turn a voice said, “That’s just fine, Scudder. Hold it right there.”

I started to pivot around to my right. Before I’d moved any distance, before I’d even begun to move, his hand fastened on my left arm just above the elbow. His grip tightened and his fingers had found something—a nerve, a pressure point—because pain knifed through me and my arm went dead from the elbow on down. His other hand moved to grasp my right arm, but higher up, close to the shoulder, with his thumb probing the armpit. He bore down and I felt another stab of pain, along with a wave of nausea rolling up from the pit of my stomach.

I didn’t make a sound, or move a muscle. I heard more footsteps, and broken glass crunched underfoot as Candy returned to appear a few feet in front of me. A stray shaft of light glinted off one of her gold hoop earrings.

“Sorry,” she said. There was no mockery in her tone, but no apology either.

“Pat him down,” Motley said.

“He hasn’t got a gun, silly. He’s just glad to see me.”

“Pat him down.”

Her hands fluttered like little birds, patting at my chest and sides, circling my waist to grope for a gun tucked beneath my belt. She dropped to her knees before me to trace the outside of my legs to the ankle, then ran her hands up along the inside of the legs to the groin. There her hands lingered for a long moment, cupping, patting. The touch was at once a violation and a caress.

“Definitely pre-op,” she announced. “And no gun. Or would you like me to do a strip search, J.L.?”

“That’s enough.”

“Are you sure? He could have a weapon up his heinie, J.L. He could have a whole bazooka up there.”

“You can go now.”

“I’d be willing to look for it.”

“I said you could go now.”

She pouted, then dropped the attitude and settled her big hands on my shoulders. I could smell her perfume, heady and floral, overlaid upon a body scent of indeterminate gender. She raised up a little on her toes and leaned forward to kiss me flush on the mouth. Her lips were parted and her tongue flicked out. Then she let go of me and drew away. Her expression was clouded, unreadable in the dimness.

“I really am sorry,” she said. And then she slipped past me and was gone.

“I could kill you right now,” he said. His tone was flat, cold, unemphatic. “With my hands. I could paralyze you with pain. And then write you out a ticket to the boneyard.”

He was still holding me as before, one hand above the left elbow, the other at the right shoulder. The pressure he was exerting was painful but bearable.

“But I promised to save you for last. First all your women. And then you.”

“Why?”

“Ladies first. It’s only polite.”

“Why any of this?”

He laughed, but it didn’t come out sounding like laughter. He might have been reading a string of syllables off a cue card, ha ha ha ha ha. “You took twelve years of my life,” he said. “They locked me up. Do you know what it’s like to be locked up?’’