Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time (4 page)

I left my uncle feeling lower than Judas Iscariot in the garden at Gethsemane. And like that ancient traitor who had hidden in the darkness while he betrayed those he professed to love, the shadow of my deception followed me as I left the room and cruelly clung at my heels as I said goodbye to my upright, vexed relations.

“Git together my ass!” Gabe shouted back to me from his armchair, his angry words ringing in my ears after I walked out the door.

Back on the street, snow had started to fall again and was settling on top of what had already fallen. Large flakes floated from the thick grey sky and fell onto the back of my neck, the icy droplets melting as they hit the warmth of my skin. I drew my collar up around me and headed for Perry’s gym, the chill of the day making me shudder.

My cousin Vic spent much of his time in parts of the city that other people would steer well clear of. Most like to deny the existence of such areas. And while respectable folk entertained their families and dinner party guests in the chic three-storey townhouses of Clifton and Kingsdown, men like Vic felt at home in the run-down terraced streets, clip joints and whorehouses of those less inviting suburbs. If I had been stealing cigarettes from Wills, then Vic would’ve been the man to take ’em off me and get ’em distributed. Vic dealt in most contraband and just about anything else if there was a favourable end profit in it for him. He was a couple of years younger than me, and we had been close as kids. Vic had never distanced himself from me when I joined the police service. He didn’t like it, but we were family and our mutual respect for each other was undiminished.

When Gabe had told me that Vic had left early for Perry’s gymnasium, I knew he had a score going down, something good enough to get him outta his bed at the crack of dawn. Vic was well known and liked in the community and had a reputation as a hard fighter and the sort of guy you kept on the right side of. Despite his illegal activities, he never brought trouble to Gabe and Pearl’s door. They both knew their son sailed pretty close to the wind, but he was too clever to bring trouble to anybody’s door, especially his own.

Perry’s gym was only a short walk from Gabe and Pearl’s. At such an early time on a Sunday morning there’d be nobody training in the place, and the only way in was via the iron fire escape at the rear of the three-storey building. I climbed up the old metal stairs three steps at a time, knowing Vic would’ve gone in the same way and that the gym’s owner, “Cut Man” Perry, would keep the door unlocked for his break-of-day, cockcrow guests to get in. I walked through a series of unlit corridors that led to the shower room, which stank of testosterone and three-day-old sweat.

I found Cut Man in his tatty office, staring at a huge pair of white breasts in the centre pages of a dirty magazine. He had not realised that I was watching him. He was sitting in an off-white grubby string vest and wide red braces that held up a pair of creased pinstripe trousers. His feet lay across his desk, and he was smoking one of his usual stinky Woodbines, which hung out of the corner of his mouth, held tight by huge purple-tinged lips. Hung on the walls were yellowing boxing posters and an array of old photographs, mainly of Cut Man standing at gala events or ringside with local dignitaries and the odd rare contender out of the aging gym who had done good. Cut Man, originally from Jamaica, was around sixty-five years old, balding, and at least twenty-two stone in weight. Over the years he’d made quite a lot of cash in various shady businesses and was known as being a real penny-pincher. Apart from the gym, he owned a number of letting properties, betting shops and off-licences, and a shuttered-up backstreet clip joint that rolled out over-the-hill strippers. He was a bad-tempered, greedy, untrustworthy bastard who treated those who worked for him like something that he’d scraped off the bottom of his shoe, but in typical two-faced Cut Man fashion, he sucked up to money and power and was often to be found in the presence of the criminal underclass of the city. He truly believed he was the epitome of entrepreneurial black style and most hadn’t the courage to tell him different.

But Cut Man’s notoriety was all bluff and bluster, and he was nothing without the protection of the thugs who frequented his establishment.

I wasn’t fazed by his gangland associations and neither was Vic. My cousin was equally, if not better, connected to every villain and shylock around. His dealings with Cut Man were kept on a strictly professional level. Cut Man feared Vic and he didn’t trust me, and that’s just how I liked it.

I stood at his open office door, watching him leer over the pale naked flesh of the centrefold. A thin trickle of saliva dribbled from his mouth, slid down his chin and plopped onto the saucy nude picture below.

“Am I interrupting you?”

Cut Man, startled, dragged his legs off of his desk and, as quickly as his massive bulk would allow, drew his chair underneath it. Closing the titty magazine, he attempted to hide the cover with his fat hairy arms. He then tried to give himself an air of businesslike respectability. He failed.

“What the fuck you doin’, man? Scaring the shit outta me like that.”

“So how’s tings, Cut Man?” I tried not to laugh as I asked the question.

“I was fine till you showed up,” Cut Man snapped back at me. “How the hell did you git in here?” Cut Man was acting like his usual cagey self. He was naturally distrustful of most people, and especially those who’d just caught him ogling naked women in a top-shelf dirty skin rag.

“How’d you think, Cut Man? I ain’t crawled through your nasty bathroom window. Your back door’s off the latch.”

“That muthafucka Vic. I told him to lock it when he came in. I could git turned over, him leaving doors wide open at this time o’ the morning.”

“Who’s gonna steal from you, Cut Man? You too cheap to keep anyting in this rathole that’s worth pinching. So where’s my cousin at?”

“He been doin’ some bidness with Carnell out back.”

Cut Man was trying to be casual with his answer. But the sweat running off his head and down his brow and the stink coming from under his arms gave him away. Cut Man was the only black man I knew who could sweat like a pig in the ice cold of winter.

“You know, Cut Man, I never have understood why you’re always on edge when I’m around you. I ain’t the law, you know, brother.”

“No, no you ain’t. But I hear you used be.” His reply to me had the wary intonation as a condemned man on the gallows being told he was free to go while he still had the noose tight round his neck.

“Hey, Cut Man, where’s my cousin? I ain’t got all day, brother,” I asked impatiently. I was getting queasy at the cheesy pong coming off of Cut Man’s hide and wanted out of his rank office.

“He’s in the locker room; bottom left as you head on down the hall. Been real good seeing you, man.”

He sneered back at me with an insincere gesture of farewell.

“Thanks, Cut Man. Good to see you too,” I lied. “Say, anybody tell you you’re looking real sharp in that vest, brother?”

“Fuck you, Ellington!” Cut Man shouted as I began to close his office door, sealing him into his smelly workplace with his rancid personal-hygiene problem and grubby skin publication.

I found Vic standing over around sixty boxes of stolen imported Mount Gay rum, a pencil behind his ear. He was pointing at each box while he counted them out loud. He was shirtless, his powerfully built body covered in beads of sweat from shifting the heavy cargo from Carnell’s van to Cut Man’s locker room. He was darker skinned than I, with short-cropped tightly curled hair, and he was well over six feet tall. His voice was deep, and as smooth as the knock-off rum at his feet.

“You send all that booze off to the Salvation Army, Vic?”

My cousin turned quickly, surprised that I had crept up on him.

“Jesus, JT, you scared the shit outta me creeping up like that. How the hell you know to find me here?”

“I just had breakfast with Gabe an’ Pearl. Your old man told me you’d be here. I think he was hoping that you might be putting in some time on punching those bags out there,” I said, nodding towards the gym. “I just left Cut Man’s office. I was getting real high from the scent of his foul perspiration. It ain’t much better in here, brother. Damn!”

“Hey, that’s pure hard work you’re smelling there, my man, and I keep it tight in the ring, you know that, JT.” He laughed as he clenched his enormous hands into fists and punched the air with a series of skilled uppercuts and jabs.

“So this is what Cut Man meant by some bidness?” I said as I slid my hand across the top of the dusty liquor boxes.

“Man’s gotta make a livin’, JT. I’m just working my way in the world. You know how it is?”

“I sure do, a man’s gonna be living pretty well after a couple o’ bottles of this inside his belly.”

“Taste o’ home, JT, it’s a taste o’ home.” Vic smiled as he took a pearl-handled penknife from his back pocket, sliced open the tape securing the box and pulled out a couple of bottles of the amber-coloured spirit and passed them to me.

“Here, these gonna keep you warm at night, my man.” He grinned at me as he handed them over. I thanked him and stood the bottles on the table behind me.

“Where’s Carnell, Vic?”

I didn’t want to start up a conversation about Stella Hopkins and the councillor’s job offer only to have to cut it short if we were interrupted. Carnell was a good guy, but I needed to keep a lid on what I was up to for now. Vic was a lot of things, but a blabbermouth he was not.

“He been gone around twenty minutes or so: that bitch of a wife, Loretta, gonna want his ass on a church pew this morning. I paid him his cut fo’ the use of his van and fo’ his help to lug this lot up here.”

“Vic, you hear anyting on the street ’bout that missing girl from round here, name’s Hopkins, Stella Hopkins?”

“The mute? Yeah, I heard she’s missin’, but I’m only hearing the same shit you probably have: that she’s simple, can’t talk and she’s gonna be found wanderin’ ’bout on the pier at Clevedon. Either that or her ass gets washed up on the beach. Why you bothered ’bout some piece of skirt like her anyhow?” Vic returned to box counting, irritated at having to start over again.

“I’ve been asked to see if I can try to find her. Do a little digging around in the neighbourhood, but nuttin’ heavy.” My answer was evasive. I was beginning to sound a lot like Cut Man.

“Tell me, who’s been askin’ you to find some stupid-minded skank, JT?”

Vic looked up from tallying the rum cases. His distrustful nature had started to kick in and I could tell he was already dubious about the person who had requested I undertake such dirty work on his behalf.

“It don’t matter who’s asking me, Vic. Look, I need you to keep this under your hat fo’ now, so don’t be spreading the word I’m lookin’ fo’ her. It ain’t gonna help me none. I need to take it easy fo’ now. I gotta be discreet.”

“Discreet? That’s cool, JT, it’s cool. I just got my cousin’s best interests at heart. Now you know I got your back if any shit goes down, brother?”

As he spoke, Vic gave the same look that he would give anybody fool enough to take him on when we were kids. It was the kind of look that said he wasn’t for messing with.

“Thanks, man. I appreciate it. You still own a set of lock picks, Vic?”

My question had surprised Vic: something I normally wasn’t able to achieve. He had one eyebrow raised and was staring over at me, his brain ticking over the unlawful implications of my request and no doubt thinking to himself, “What the hell am I about to git myself into?” I should have known better than to wander into Vic’s world of criminality and not arouse his suspicions of my own larcenous intentions.

“Yeah, I got ’em. You want me to come along and open a place up fo’ you?”

“Not this time, brother. I ain’t dragging you into trouble you got no place being.” I put my hand on his bulky shoulder, thinking about Uncle Gabe as I did so, and smiled. “But you know I’m real grateful fo’ the offer.”

“Yeah I know . . . Tell me, you ever been in the Hatchet Inn?” Vic quizzed me.

“You mean that old honky pub on Frogmore Street? I know it, but I’ve never put a foot inside of the place.”

“I’ll see you in there at nine thirty. And JT, when you git inside . . . you just try an’ be discreet fo’ me, brother; they know they ain’t too keen on black dudes hanging out in their pub, sets their teeth on edge.”

“So why the hell you wanna meet up in there?”

I wasn’t happy about Vic’s choice of venue. Most of the pubs in Bristol city centre didn’t welcome black men into them. You had to fight to get into most and while I wasn’t scared of a scrap I didn’t see the point in making life any harder for myself than it already was.

“Cos my man, no honky’s stopping me from drinking anywhere I wanna drink. And there’s a hot piece o’ skirt they’ve got working behind the bar that has a real ting fo’ me.”

Vic burst out laughing, and I could still hear his laughter as my feet hit the street.

I’d spent the best part of Sunday afternoon lying on my bed drinking a half-bottle of Vic’s stolen rum and wondering what the hell I was doin’ with my life. Later I’d made a corned beef sandwich, drunk a mug of coffee, then stuck my head into a sink full of cold water to shake the alcohol from inside of me. I changed into a light-blue shirt, brushed the creases out of my trousers, pushed my feet into damp brogues and splashed on a palmful of English Leather aftershave. I grabbed a small torch from my bedside table and put it into the inside pocket of my coat before leaving to meet Vic.

There was a real chill in the air as I walked out from my digs, and I started to wish I’d stayed on my bed and finished the other half of the bottle. I was still unsure if Linney had been straight with me and whether he had given me the whole story on Stella Hopkins and her vanishing into thin air like a conjurer’s assistant. Had I become so desperate to know I had cash in my hip pocket that I was prepared to take on what looked to be a fool’s errand? Like a knight errant, it appeared that I was.

“There ain’t no fool like an old fool,” my mama would say. I could be walking into a whole world of mess and all for five pounds a day. Was it worth it? Hell no, but I needed the money.