Dope (3 page)

“
Underworld
connections,” Mrs. Nelson explained.

“What we mean is, we need someone who knows about drug addicts, and girl drug addicts in particular. What concerns us the most is that Nadine doesn't have any money.”

“This man, Nick the Greek, he said that you would know where people like that go, how they make money and where they buy drugs and that sort of thing. You see, Nadine doesn't have any money—”

“We'd rather have her home, even as a drug addict, where we can keep our eyes on her and know that she's safe.”

“We think you can find her,” Mrs. Nelson said, looking at me. “We'd like to have her at home.”

“We think you can find her, Miss Flannigan,” Mr.

Nelson repeated. “If you start looking today I'll give you a thousand dollars, cash, right now. And a thousand more if you find her. But that's to include all of your expenses, gasoline and meals and anything else you might incur—even travel.”

A thousand dollars. Cash.

I looked from one to the other. They looked anxious and eager and hopeful. I knew they weren't telling me everything. Like I said, I'd never met a dope addict from a nice home. Maybe Mrs. Nelson hit the bottle, or maybe Mr. Nelson had a girl on the side, or five or ten girls. Maybe they spanked Nadine too much when she was a kid, or still did it, or gave her hell over her grades or were trying to get her to marry the guy from next door. Maybe the girl wasn't on drugs at all and just thought Westchester was a boring place to be and didn't want to go back there.

It didn't matter. With a thousand dollars up front, it didn't matter if I found her at all. If and when I found her I would worry about what to do with her.

I was walking out with a thousand dollars. That was what mattered.

“I have to be honest with you,” I said. They already seemed ready to hand over the money but I figured it couldn't hurt to tighten the screws. “I've never done anything like this before. I'm not sure if I'm the right person for the job.”

“I'm not sure, either,” Mr. Nelson said. “Frankly, Miss Flannigan, all I know about you is that you live in New York City, you're . . . that you're in the same line of work as Mr. Paganas, and that you used to be a drug addict. But for now, you're our only hope.”

I wasn't in the same line of work as Mr. Paganas, whoever he was, if he was selling real estate to Mr. Nelson. Not really. We'd probably started off in the same line of work, years ago, and while he moved up to selling real estate to people like Mr. Nelson, I'd moved down to boosting jewelry and pickpocketing. I figured he had recommended me because he didn't know any other dope addicts, and the whole business was probably not enough dough for anyone else he knew. I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, looking from one to the other, like I was thinking.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll do it.”

They both looked like a weight had fallen off their shoulders. I told them the thousand would buy them a month. After that, if they wanted me to keep looking, they'd need to cough up more. I'd call them right away if I found anything, and if I didn't find anything I'd call them at the end of the week to check in. They agreed. Mr. Nelson handed me an envelope with ten hundred-dollar bills inside.

“So you'll call,” Mrs. Nelson said again before I left, her eyes begging me. “You'll call right away if you find out anything at all.”

“Of course,” I told her. “You can trust me.”

I
'd never been to the campus of Barnard before, and after spending the morning there I didn't plan on ever going again. The buildings looked like courthouses, and the place was so far uptown I thought I was in Boston. The closest I'd been to it before was up to 103rd Street, where a fellow I knew sold junk in a cafeteria. When the subway had stopped there I'd almost gotten off the train out of habit.

It'd taken me most of the afternoon the day before to get an appointment with the dean of students. Now we were in his office, in one of the buildings that looked like a courthouse, a messy room with books everywhere and no fresh air. The dean was a skinny man in a cheap suit past middle age, with small narrow eyes and limp hands. It was hard to imagine anyone taking a look at this fellow and thinking,
Now
here's
a man I trust around a bunch of college coeds.
He remembered Nadine all right.

“A lovely girl,” he said, more than once. “Really lovely.”

“Right. I know. I've seen her picture. So you knew her well?”

“Not well,” he said. “I don't get a chance to know any of the individual girls that well, unfortunately. But of course when she began having her problems, that was brought to my attention, and I spoke with her a few times.”

“Oh yeah? What'd you talk about?” I wanted to get out of that stuffy room. Through the window I could see the sun shining outside. Green things were starting to grow all over the place and flowers were popping out every way you looked. The kids walking across campus were all smiling. It was hard to imagine the girl I'd seen in the photo here. She looked like another breed.

He took a long breath and let it out slowly. “Well, the nature of her problems, naturally. I mean, she was using drugs, and I advised her against it. I let her know the school's policy on that kind of thing.”

“I'm sure that was very helpful to her,” I said. “But did you try to get her into any kind of therapy? Get her into a hospital or anything like that?” None of those cures did a whole lot, but they were a little bit better then nothing. Especially for a young girl, not too far gone, like Nadine.

The dean of students looked at me with his small eyes. “Miss Flannigan, we have some problems we are ready to help our girls with. Homesickness, a little rebellion, trouble adjusting to the schoolwork—we even have a girl, occasionally, who drinks a little too much. But frankly, Nadine is the first drug addict I have ever met. It's not that I didn't want to help her. Of course I did. But that is simply beyond the scope of what we can deal with here.
That,
” he added firmly, as if he were convincing himself, “falls under the realm of what we would consider a family problem, not a problem for the school. I mean,
drugs.
On a college campus . . .” He lifted his hands up in the air and tried to look sympathetic.

“How about the one who actually found the drugs in her room, the dorm mother?” I asked. “Could I speak with her?”

Miss Duncan, the dorm mother, weighed about four hundred pounds, and she hated the girls she was supposed to be watching. She lived in a room in the dormitory a little bigger than the rest, but not quite big enough for all that weight. We sat on her sofa together while Miss Duncan told me all about Nadine.

“Well, I had never had any experience with that kind of thing,” she assured me. She wore a black dress that was very large, but still tight, and her eyebrows were drawn on in a high round arch, making her look surprised. “Not before I came here. But these girls . . .”

She let her voice trail off. I smiled. “College girls. I was certainly never one myself.”

“Me either,” Miss Duncan confided, in case I had any doubts. “I mean, what's the point? I mean, if you're going to
do something
with your education, sure. If you're going to do something. I mean, for someone like me, it would have been nice. I could have done something. But these girls—well, you know. They're all here getting their M-R-S degree. That's as far as it goes with them.”

“Oh I know,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. “Nadine's parents tell me she was interested in art. Did she spend a lot of time on that?”

Miss Duncan rolled her eyes. “Nadine was like the rest of them. Boys, parties, clothes—that was all she cared about.”

“Did you know anything about her condition before you found works in her room?”

She looked at me for a minute. “Oh,” she finally said. “You mean the syringe and all that.
Works.
No, I had no idea. Like I said, I didn't know anything about that kind of thing until I came here. These girls, they've given me quite an education, I can tell you that.”

“I can imagine. Did you know her parents?”

Miss Duncan nodded. “They came by once a month or so. They're in Westchester, it's not far. They're one of those . . . you know. Very
prominent
families. The father is a very
prominent
lawyer in Manhattan. Of course all the girls here are from that type of a family. You know, ship the girl off to Barnard, have her meet the right people, that whole nine yards.”

I asked her if I could speak to Nadine's roommate. It took some work, but she stood up and led me to a room on the second floor of the dorm, where the girl still lived by herself. Miss Duncan knocked once and then opened the door. It was a small, plain room with two single beds, two desks, and two dressers. One half of the room was obviously empty: no sheets on the bed, nothing on the desk, no knickknacks on top of the dresser. A young girl with red hair was sitting at the other desk writing in a notebook. She wore a plaid skirt with a white blouse and saddle shoes, and her skin was so white it almost blended in with the blouse.

Miss Duncan introduced us and explained that I was trying to find Nadine. The girl's name was Claudia. She smiled.

“Sure, anything I can do to help,” she said. She sounded like she came from a farm. I sat down on the empty twin bed and stared at Miss Duncan until she left.

“So,” I said to Claudia, once the dorm mother was gone. “You must have known Nadine pretty well. This is an awfully small room.”

Claudia shrugged. “We weren't that close. I mean, we lived together and all, but mostly Nadine kept to herself.”

“What was she like?”

Claudia wrinkled up her brow. “She was kind of moody. Kept to herself, like I said.”

“She didn't go out a lot? Have boyfriends, go dancing?”

The girl shook her head. “No, she really wasn't like that at all. She liked to stay in the room a lot when she wasn't out with her friends. She didn't join any clubs or go to football games or anything like that.”

“Who were her friends?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Claudia said. “I know she had some friends down in the Village who she saw, but I don't know who they were. I guess she'd spent some time there before she started school. And then she had a regular fellow. Jerry something-or-other. I think by the time all that stuff happened, she was pretty much only spending time with him, and not seeing any of her other friends anymore. When she wasn't out with him, she sat around the room, mostly. Drawing. Oh, look—” She pointed at a sketch above her desk. It was a sketch of Claudia. I didn't know anything about art, but it looked an awful lot like Claudia. More than a photograph would have. “Nadine did that. She gave it to me. To be honest, she kind of got on my nerves. I mean, she wasn't very friendly, seeing as we were roommates and all. She never invited me to go out with her, never introduced me to her boyfriend. And when she was here, she just sat in bed and drew pictures. We never talked much. Of course now, well, I just feel so bad. . . .”

I looked at her. She felt pretty bad. “Did you know about the drugs?”

“Oh, no,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Before I came here, I had never even had a drink! Honestly, I never thought . . . I mean, I didn't even know that kind of stuff existed. What happened was, one night she didn't come home. I got worried, so I talked to Miss Duncan. Well, she comes in and starts poking around, and right in the top drawer of Nadine's desk there was all this stuff. A needle and drugs and all that. I didn't even know what it was until Miss Duncan explained it to me. I thought Nadine was sick or something, that it was some kind of medicine. So of course they had a big talk with her and called her parents and everything like that. But it didn't seem to help. It just got worse until she was hardly ever here at all and when she was, well, she wasn't much fun to be around. Then they expelled her, and after that I never saw her again. She left the night before her parents were supposed to come get her.”

“You didn't see her leave?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I didn't even wake up.”

Neither of us said anything for a minute. I hadn't learned much.

“I guess how she was so moody and all,” Claudia said. “I guess that was the drugs, huh?” She looked at me. I nodded.

“I guess once you start,” she said slowly, as if she was just figuring everything out, “it's pretty hard to quit, isn't it?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I've heard that it is.”

T
hat evening I met Jim Cohen for dinner at Lenny's, a seafood house in Little Italy. It was Jim's favorite restaurant and we ate there three or four times a month. I liked Lenny's, but my favorite was Lorenzo's. Jim wouldn't step foot in the place—he said the waiters were too slow and the hard rolls were too hard.

Jim was particular like that about everything. His suits were made by a Jewish guy on Orchard Street and he wouldn't get a suit anywhere else, and his hats could only come from Belton's on Delancey Street. His whiskey had to be Bushmills, his handkerchiefs had to be ironed so that they'd fold perfectly into his pocket, his shoes had to be new, from Florsheim's, and polished at least once a day. But Jim could afford to be particular. Before the war he used to sell dope by the pound, but when he came back there was no dope to sell. He did a little of this and a little of that for a while and then he got a regular thing going working with Chicago Gary. Gary sold stock tips and racetrack tips and land in Florida and shares in oil wells, a con man of the old school. He lived in Chicago, so he did a lot of work in New York—the con men had an arrangement with the police not to work where they lived. If he was in town and he needed a shill or a banker or an extra inside man, he called Jim. It was good work but it wasn't steady. Jim always made enough when he worked with Gary to last him until the next time, if he was smart, but he wasn't, not with money, so in between Gary's trips to New York he'd do a little of this and a little of that again.