No Colder Place (23 page)
Chuck, standing, caught the bartender’s eye, pointed at me. “It’s on my tab,” Chuck said. “Business expense. Drink whatever you want, buddy, as long as it’s deductible.”
He clapped me on the shoulder, turned, and left. I watched him shove open the huge steel door, watched him move, sharply outlined but obscured, down the dark street. The heavy sound of the door closing was lost in the noise of the crowd.
i
sat at the black-glass table by the black-glass window, finishing my third cigarette and my second beer. The crowd was as lively and predatory as when I’d first gotten here, circling each other, smiling and talking and glancing over each other’s shoulders to make sure someone better hadn’t just come in. The chilled air smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, liquor, and sweat. The crashing-surf roar of ten dozen cruising people almost drowned out the electronic call from my beeper, when it came.
I cursed the thing indifferently, lifted it from my hip, and checked it. I didn’t recognize the number, but the need to find a phone was a good excuse to get away from the hammering chatter and ricochet of appraising glances around me. I slipped a few dollars under my beer bottle for a tip, and left, almost welcoming the damp-laden heat rising from the sidewalk because of the sudden quiet that came with it.
From the street-corner phone, I called the number from my beeper. The phone was answered, after the fourth ring, by Denise Armstrong.
“I thought this might be you,” she said.
“I didn’t think it would be you,” I told her. “I had the feeling you wouldn’t be calling me.”
“I wasn’t sure, either. But I thought I’d see if I could find the answer to your question first and then decide whether to share it with you.”
“And?”
“I found it—found who that coordinator was—and it makes me think you might have been right. There might be more to what happened than it looks like. If you want the address I have it.”
“What do you mean, ‘more to what happened’?”
“I’m not sure. This man has a certain reputation.”
“Reputation?”
“For being involved in things. Do you want his name or not?”
“What kinds of things?”
“I’m not sure,” she said again, sounding impatient. “Crimes for hire, I was told, and that’s all I know. Are you willing to talk to him?”
“That was the idea.”
“Then … ?”
“Go ahead.”
“Chester Hamilton is his name. He lives at 157 West 142nd Street, in the rear of the storefront where his office is. I understand he’s usually found there about this time of the evening.”
“His office?”
“‘Strength Through Jobs/Jobs Through Strength.’ That’s the name of his organization.”
“Catchy.”
“In my experience,” she told me, “a catchy name usually means energy is being wasted on trivial things.”
“You don’t cut anybody any slack, do you?” I asked, leaning against the cool steel of the phone enclosure.
“Is there a reason I should?”
“Not one I’m up to explaining. Did you give this information to the police?”
“No.”
“Why not? You know they’re looking.”
“You,” she said, “are working for people who work for me. That gives my interests at least a chance of being weighed before any action is taken. The police are only interested in clearing cases, not necessarily in a good outcome.”
“What’s a good outcome?”
“That would depend on what the problem is and what solutions are available. I’ve done what you asked and now this is what I ask: I want you to go see Chester Hamilton and I want you to report back to me before the police get involved.”
“I don’t work for you.”
“And I don’t work for you! But you asked me to do something for you and I’ve done it.”
That was true. “I’ll go see him,” I said. “I’ll decide from there.”
“I’ll be waiting to hear from you,” she said pointedly, and hung up.
I replaced the receiver and watched the cars rolling up the avenue, watched the light change, some cars stop and others go. I reached for the phone again, almost called Lydia, put the receiver back. I wasn’t sure what I would say, wasn’t sure what I had that needed to be talked over right now instead of tomorrow. I wasn’t sure what I was thinking.
No, that wasn’t true. I knew what I was thinking, but I didn’t know where it would lead. I was tired of trying to fit the puzzle together, taking the same pieces, the ones that looked right, and pushing them over and over into the same places, where they wouldn’t go. I didn’t like the pieces spread out in front of me, and I didn’t think I was going to like the picture they made when I finally saw it.
But I had a new piece now: Chester Hamilton, coordinator of the Strength Through Jobs/Jobs Through Strength full-employment coalition. I lit a cigarette, hailed a cab, and headed for Harlem.
I had the cab drop me a block south of the address I was looking for. The Pakistani cabbie had argued with the idea of coming up here in the first place, but I wouldn’t get out of his cab. He burned rubber leaving, racing by a man and woman trying to flag him to a stop.
I stood on the corner, looking up Broadway, where the fire escape—draped fronts of five-story brick apartment buildings stared each other down across the dry brown dirt of the traffic islands in the center of the street. Here and there, a wizened bush or tree or patch of ivy too cussed to die stood defiantly in one of those islands, waving in the slipstream of the passing cars.
The aroma of frying fish from a Jamaican fast-food place reminded me of how long it had been since I’d eaten. I stopped at the sidewalk window, bought a fried-haddock sandwich and a ginger beer, ate and drank leaning on the counter. Then I walked north, threading my way along the hot, crowded sidewalk.
Everyone in the neighborhood seemed to be on the street, talking, playing cards, trying to find some relief from the heat. Women in cotton housedresses fanned themselves with folded newspapers as they sat on stoops, watching little boys race by on bicycles and little girls skip rope. Three middle-aged men in sweat-soaked T-shirts smoked cigars and played a slow game of dominoes to a Latin beat from a tinny radio. On the corner, as I turned down 142nd Street, a bigger, booming radio was surrounded by five young men and a red-lipped young woman. She was giving one of the young men hell in rapid-fire Spanish, poking him in the chest with a crimson fingernail while he pretended he didn’t care and his buddies smirked.
Not many stoop-sitters seemed to have chosen 142nd Street over the avenues that crossed it, and it was easy to see why. The block was dotted with abandoned buildings, dented tin covering their windows, front steps crumbling. In the center of the block, four tenements had been knocked down. The empty lot was knee-deep with garbage I could smell from across the street, outside the storefront at number 157.
The storefront glass was painted with a red, black, and green flag below an arch of gold letters reading,
STRENGTH THROUGH JOBS/JOBS THROUGH STRENGTH
. I still thought it was catchy. The pale streetlight in front of the empty lot across the street wasn’t close enough to illuminate the storefront, only to help whatever was inside cast deeper shadows into the darkness. I couldn’t see anything; I knocked anyway.
I waited; nothing happened; I knocked harder.
A light came on as I lifted my fist to pound again. It glowed grudgingly, uninterested, like the man who emerged through a door in the shadowed rear wall and ambled unhurriedly toward me.
The door swung open, but not far. A black man about my own height, with a sharp nose and a short beard, held it open about a foot, stared at me. “Who the hell you?”
“You’re Chester Hamilton?” I asked.
“Yeah, and I already knew that. Who the hell you?”
“I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“Well, seeing as I already asked you the same one twice and I ain’t heard no answer, you can take yours and shove ’em.” He started to close the door.
I planted my foot on his side of the threshhold, said, “Bill Smith.”
Hamilton looked down at my foot, then up at my face again. “Well, whoop-dee-damn-doo. What you want with me?”
“I have a situation I think you can help me with.”
He made a show of looking behind me, up and down the street. “Hmmm,” he said. “You was a cop, you’d come here in a car. With another cop. I mean, this bein’ a bad neighborhood and all. So whatever your problem be, it ain’t on behalf of the NYPD.”
“That’s true.”
“So why the fuck I’m supposed to care?”
“I have a proposition for you.”
He paused, tilted his head a fraction of an inch, as though to see me differently. “What kind of proposition?”
“One that could make you some money. But I don’t want to discuss it out here on the street.”
He stared at me in silence for a few moments, greed battling wariness in his eyes.
Greed won.
Hamilton stepped back, pulled the door half open, just enough for me to move past him into the room.
The Strength Through Jobs/Jobs Through Strength office consisted of a battered desk, a phone, and six mismatched chairs around a card table, an arrangement that suggested strategy sessions, or poker. The peeling paint on the walls was partly obscured by posters: a large tattered one of Malcolm X and a faded four-color glossy proclaiming a Pan-Africa Day Rally on a Sunday in 1993. Bugs had laid down and died inside the globe of the weak overhead light, and the soft, heavy smell of years of grime and take-out food was so thick it was almost visible.
“Okay.” Hamilton closed the door behind me. He moved to the card table, sprawled himself in a chair. I sat across from him as he said, “Now tell me what the hell you talking about.”
“I want you to do for me what you did this morning,” I said.
“This morning,” he said with a smirk, “I got a haircut. Got my beard trimmed all nice, nice hot towels, too. That what you interested in?”
“I’m interested in fifty men rioting on a construction site.”
He shook his head. “Sound like a terrible thing.”
“Depends who you are. Could be a useful thing.”
“How’s that?”
“In the same way it was this morning.”
“You keep talking in riddles, we gonna get nowhere.”
“You keep pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s not going to be much better.”
“What the hell you want? You from some union, got a deal to make?”
“I want to make you the same deal you had this morning.”
“I can’t recall no deal I had this morning. You want to lay it out for me?”
All right, I thought. We’ll play Let’s Pretend. “I want a couple of busloads of men to shut down a construction site.”
His eyes widened theatrically. “You shittin’ me.”
“That idea never occurred to you before?”
“Well…” he said, with oratorical emphasis. “Well, naturally, a lot of peoples round here, they filled with righteous anger about the way they been treated, about the discrimination they suffered in they lives. Peoples got to have a outlet for expressin’ that anger. Sometime, when the system just ain’t respondin’ to peaceful means—”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I want.”
“Exactly what?”
“Exactly what you did this morning.”
“Man, you keep singing the same song, ‘this morning, this morning.’ Maybe—”
“Two thousand dollars.”
He stopped. “Say what?”
“That’s what he said he paid you.”
I had no idea who I was talking about, or even if I was right. I waited to see Hamilton’s response.
He waited too. Finally, he slowly said, “Who?”
“The man who hired you to come to the Armstrong site this morning. I don’t know his name; we met in a bar. I only know him as Lefty.”
A grin spread itself across Hamilton’s face. “Lefty?” He snorted with amused derision. “He callin’ hisself Lefty?”
Sure, I thought. And he was drinking with Sleepy and Dopey.
“Can we make a deal, then?” I said. “Like you had with him?”
Hamilton paused, then nodded. “I’ma tell you what: ’Cause you a friend of Lefty’s, here’s a idea—”
I never got to know what that idea might be.
The explosive rattle of the first round of shots was lost in the crash as glass from the storefront window blew across the room. I hit the ground. Shards rained down around me like razor-sharp rain. Plaster dust filled the air as bullets smashed into walls. The hammering roar of the second round came as I yanked my .38 from my side. I fired through the gaping, jagged hole where the window had been, the report jarring my elbow into the hard floor; but by then no one was there, no answering shots, just a screech of tires as a car tore down the street, away from here.
I rolled over, crawled to the door, yanked it open from a crouching position. Nothing. I looked up and down the street, across, then stood. Empty, everywhere. I stuck my gun into my shoulder rig and turned back into the room.
Chester Hamilton lay on his back on the grimy floor, a circle of blood on his chest, a spreading dark pool under him. His folding chair was tangled with his legs. I looked at him, his wide eyes and open mouth. I crouched and felt the artery at his neck. His body, the table, the floor, were covered with glittering splinters of broken glass. They crunched under my feet as I turned and left.
i
called 911 anonymously from a subway pay phone, in case no one else had done that yet. I called Lydia from my apartment after I’d poured a flood of Maker’s Mark over ice and gone through about half of it.
“Is everything okay?” she asked when she knew it was me. Behind her I heard the electronic chatter of the living-room TV fade as she closed her door. “It’s late for you to be calling.”
“No,” I said. “Just talk to me a little.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Give me a minute.” I took another drink.
“Bill?” When I didn’t answer, her words quickened. “Are you all right? Where are you?”
“I’m home,” I said. “I’m okay. I just … I’ll tell you in a minute.” I lit a cigarette, listened to her breathing softly on the other end of the phone, felt bourbon and the presence of Lydia slowing my racing blood. I drew in smoke, told her, “I went to see a guy. Someone shot him.”
