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Ten minutes later I was done. So I picked up my cell phone and dialed the locksmith over on Atlantic Avenue. She picked up.

I says, “Gloria? It’s me, Tommy.”

So she says, “I don’t know nothing about it, Tommy, as God is my judge.”

“Relax, Gloria.”

“I knew you’d call me about Sunday night’s gig at the Whitbread.”

Two years before, Gloria had settled a few paintings from the Whitbread through me. She and her brother took advantage of the construction scaffolding for the flying saucer by feeding a guard dog a slumburger and climbing to the museum roof.

A slumburger is hamburger meat with over-the-counter sleeping pills in it and makes guard dogs, no matter how vicious, pretty useless. Repo guys use them all the time. Inside, they lifted four small Robert Henris—little scenes of Paris in oil on small wood panels.

“Gloria, would it make you feel better if I asked you whether you did Sunday night?”

I could hear her taking a long, deep drag on a cigarette. Then she exhaled. “No, Tommy, it would not. I know you still don’t trust me about the Henris.”

“I trust you on that one, Gloria. You’re too smart to have tried to pull something like that. The museum was somehow mistaken.”

A kink in the story about her fetching the four small Robert Henri cityscapes is that the museum claimed there were seven Henris missing. This discrepancy was never resolved, and the museum and the insurer weren’t happy that I was only able to recover four. Max was real unhappy and pressuring me to tell him who the goofballs were, but my sources have to be one hundred percent confidential. That’s an important rule in my business. Gloria swore she wasn’t holding out on me, and I can’t imagine what incentive she would have had to do that. Why would she sell only four back to me? Unless she was shopping, but then why sell any back to me at all? It didn’t make sense. Like I said before, about that guy who had an apartment filled with boosted art that nobody was missing? It could have been a clerical error bythe museum, though they showed me spots where all seven had been hanging. I still was sort of scratching my head over that one.

“I called about a lock, Gloria. My apartment door, someone broke it. I want you to fix up this door so Godzilla and his big brother couldn’t get in. Metal plates, steel reinforced doorjambs, the works. Can you do that?”

“I thought you rented?”

“I do.”

“Your landlord paying for this?”

“My dime. She doesn’t need to know. Today is Tuesday, the day she goes to see her son in Staten Island.”

“You want this today?”

“Personal favor?”

She laughed, and then coughed, and then laughed.

“OK, baby. You were pretty white with me over the Henris.”

“I have to go out. Want me to drop the keys by?”

“I make keys. I don’t need them.”

“Right. I’m on Degraw. Parlor floor.”

“We’ll fix you up and leave the new key under the mat. Ciao, baby.”

It’s one thing to take a man’s cats when they’re not his. It’s another thing to bust in his door and make free use of his place. If Gustav didn’t hear from Yvette, he might come back at me to get to her. I wasn’t going to live with the anxiety of maybe finding him waiting for me in my own apartment one night. Having the love note translated was an option, but whatever he said in there, I didn’t feel it would be instructions on exactly where he could be found.

I dialed my cell again.

“Blaise, it’s Tommy.”

“Heh.”

“What you got for me?”

“No report from the field yet, Tomsy. Want me to e-mail it to you?”

“Got my e-mail?”

“Heh. Got it, my man. Have you down as Big Tomsy. By noon OK?”

“Good.”

“Peace out.”

So that was two items off my list.

I flicked off Cugat in the middle of “Besame Mucho” and made for the street.

LIKE I SAID, I NEEDED
money, which is why I needed those paintings.

It was Tuesday, the day I had to make my next payment to Vince Scanlon.

Vince didn’t like me being late with the payment, so I made a point of making it early in the day to keep him from getting nervous. He was up on Court Street and owned a toy store more or less across the street from Donut House. His shop was jammed with brightly colored action figures, squirt guns, Wiffle bats, the whole gamut. It was getting on toward Halloween, so there was a gamut of plastic pumpkins, costumes, and masks, too.

Strollers were parked out front of Vinny’s Toyland like horses in front of a saloon. My neighborhood is known not only for art thieves but also for moms with strollers, at least during the day. They refer to these women as stroms, and by midmorning it’s like an army of them have invaded the streets. It can be hard to get around on foot. They not only push around tots but pretty big kids, too, ones that can walk, I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s just easier to get around with a restrained kid on wheels. That way the tykes don’t wander into traffic or stick a finger in a dog poop. I waded through half a dozen preschoolers and their moms on the way to the back counter.

Vince is maybe sixty, stooped, his hair dyed red to cover up the gray. The part in his hair was always straight and white, on the left, with the hair neatly pasted down on either side. For some reason he’d chosen to give up on regular clothes and wear jumpsuits. I guess it is easier to put on one piece of clothing than two, and you don’t need belts, either. That day’s jumpsuit was tan. He had a pink monkey puppet on his hand and was making it dance on the counter for a drooling toddler strapped to the front of a pageboy strom.

Vince was like the Mister Rogers of shylocks. You’d expect a Brooklyn leg breaker to be a goombah sipping espresso in a dark corner of an Italian pastry store, not doing
Sesame Street
. It’s been my experience, though, that people aren’t always what you expect them to be, and that likewise people don’t always do what you expect them to. Pop used to say people are like the moon—you only see one side but there’s another in shadow you never see.

Vince sees me, and the pink monkey looks my way and says, “Wowee, it’s Tommy! Hello, Tommy!” The pink monkey spoke in a high voice like you would expect. He was waving at me. The pageboy strom with the tot drifted back to her tribe.

So I says to the monkey, “Hello, Pink Monkey. I have something for Vince.”

The monkey clapped his hands. “You have the money? I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”

I tried looking at Vince. He was looking at the monkey, but messing with me. So I looked at the monkey. “Whoa, monkey, easy. I said I have the money.”

So the monkey puts his hands together like he’s praying. “Poor Johnny One-Ball got his head blown off. They’re saying you were there and that the shooter took a shot at you. Vince thought you might be in some kind of jam. If you take a bullet, he doesn’t get his money and bad things happen.”

“I’m really touched by your concern, Pink Monkey.” I slipped a white envelope from inside my overcoat and handed it to the monkey, who accepted it with open arms. Inside was thirty thousand bucks in hundreds, the last of my cash reserves except for the couple hundred spending money on me. I was tapped out.

The monkey made the envelope vanish under the counter and reappeared.

“Thank you, Tommy! I’ll see Vince gets the money. It better be all there. Don’t think you can get out of your obligation by dying, Tommy. Your friends and family will suffer even if they don’t know why.”

I don’t like threats, even from a pink monkey. They give off bad energy. Still, it doesn’t pay to beat up hand puppets, especially if they’re attached to a shylock. So instead of yanking Vince’s arm out of his torso and beating him to death with the pink monkey, I said, “You and me will be square next week, monkey.”

I pushed my way through the stroms and made for the door.

Outside, I crossed Court Street and went down the block to Donut House.

I stopped in front of the place, right where Jo-Ball had the top of his head exploded, and saw it all happen again. Kind of funny that the last thing he said to me was something about getting shot in the nuts, that he had a right to be nervous about being tweaked. I don’t think it’s possible to have illustrated his point better than by what happened next. He couldn’t have been more right, but I’d bet he wished he weren’t quite that right.

My tongue swelled with a bitter taste. I could picture Johnny One-Ball’s tongue waving around in the air, the top of the head missing. Then him falling against the car and the blood gushing into the gutter. Then the bloody toupee sliding down the town car windshield. Christ. There are things I wish I never saw, but that topped the list—first, second, and third. I made a mental note to pick up more brandy to make sure I went to sleep fast and hard that night.

You could see the sidewalk had been scrubbed, but dark blood splatter was still visible on the concrete. I turned. The dent was there in the light pole, the one the second bullet made.

Yeah, more brandy would be necessary.

I looked up the block toward where the bullet must have come from. I say “must” because the Jo-Ball splatter went the same direction the bullet was traveling. Unless you want to start getting into some weird whiplash theory like with the Kennedy assassination, which I don’t. The shooter wouldn’t have been out in the open, but the shot must have come from some distance because there was nobody standing nearby. It stood to reason that the shooter, then, had to brace the gun against something to make an accurate shot like that. There was only one stoop on that block of Court Street, and I counted thirty strides from the point of impact to the stoop. That’s about a hundred and twenty feet. Some marksmanship. Like I said, I’m not into guns, a little rule I had, but it doesn’t take an expert to realize that this must have been a difficult shot done with something more than a handgun. I looked from the stoop back to the point of impact, and at the light pole. I’m sure the police did the same thing. There was little doubt that the shooter was standing where I was, his rifle resting on the stoop. I was curious how he disguised the rifle so nobody passing looking that way would notice. Also why there was no gunshot. I didn’t hear any. Then again, Court Street was a commercial strip with all kinds of noises, anything from trash trucks and backfires to buses and construction work. Still, I thought I would have heard a gunshot.

I walked back to Donut House and pushed through the doors. The only customer there was the old man with no teeth. Only he had a cup of coffee in front of him, and didn’t seem in any hurry to finish it.

Garrison was behind the counter. Like I said, he was a thin black guy in his thirties with eyes that don’t exactly look the same direction. He’d poured me a cup of coffee the morning before.

He says, “Here’s a black cat!” He spat on the floor and crossed himself. “You come back here after what happened yesterday? Tom Davin, of all people?”

I sat at a stool. “You still serve coffee in your place, Garrison?”

He poured me a cup, carefully, like I was a pit bull. “You know, Jo-Ball may have just ruined my business.”

“I’m sure it was nothing personal, Garrison. Look, there was a woman here Sunday morning having breakfast with Johnny. Just before he got shot he told me about it. Did you see her?”

His eyes wandered around the room a little, like each was watching a different fly buzz the room.

“You shaved, Tom. You look almost friendly.”

“Know who she was?”

“I seen her, sure, with Jo-Ball.”

Garrison was not part of any crew, and not a goofball, and as far as I knew had no idea that Jo-Ball was anything other than maître d’ at Dominic’s.

I dumped four sugars in my coffee. “How often she and Jo-Ball have a sit-down?”

Garrison shrugged. “Hell, I dunno. I only seen her that once. Say, what do you care about this gal, anyway?”

“I have a special interest in what they were talking about.”

“You work for insurance companies, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“This for his life insurance or some shit?”

“Can you describe her?”

His eyes went looking for the flies in the room again. “I don’t think so.”

“Was she white or black or Hispanic or Chinese or—”

“White.” It almost sounded like he was guessing an answer on a game show.

“So she was white. Tall, small, fat, thin—”

“Medium.”

“Hair?”

“I think she was wearing a hat.”

“Red, white, black, pink—”

“Man, I dunno.”

“Eye color?”

“Man, I dunno.”

“Did she say anything to you?”

“Nuh uh. I think Jo-Ball ordered for both, the way he does. Did.”

“Can you at least tell me what she was like? Did she remind you of anybody?”

“Man, I dunno.”

As any cop will tell you, eyewitness accounts can be insanely screwy. I remember once in high school the NYPD came in and were trying to interest seniors in joining the force. We were in the auditorium, and they staged an incident in which a student ran through and stole the policeman’s cap and ran out. Then the cop called on us to describe what we saw, what the hat thief looked like. I got it a hundred percent right, and it made me think that maybe I had what it took to be a cop, except I wanted to be a painter. Anyhow, nobody else in the room could agree on what color hoodie the thief was wearing (purple) or if he was wearing a hat (he was, a white visor) or if the guy was ethnic (he was Bobby Chin from my English lit class—even with the sunglasses I recognized the lucky dragon ring on his left hand). It was kind of amazing nobody could even agree on how tall or short he was, though he did a little jump to snatch the hat off the cop. Witnesses are terrible witnesses. Garrison was worse.

So I says, “So you never seen her before anywhere, or since?”

He says, “Nope.”

We stared at each other. I looked at one of his eyes, and then the other. Neither was lying. Considering his eyesight may not have been that great, I could hardly bust his shoes much more on the girl.

“OK, but if you remember anything more, there’s twenty bucks in it for you.”