Eight Million Ways to Die Read online

Page 14

 

  It struck me later that I could have stayed for the end. St. Pauls was only five minutes from my hotel. Chance would have waited.

  Maybe I wanted an excuse to leave before it was my turn to talk.

  I was in the lobby at ten oclock. I saw his car pull up and I went out the door and crossed the sidewalk to the curb. I opened the door, got in, swung it shut.

  He looked at me.

  "That job still open?"

  He nodded. "If you want it. "

  "I want it. "

  He nodded again, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb.

  Chapter 11

  The circular drive in Central Park is almost exactly six miles around. We were on our fourth counterclockwise lap, the Cadillac cruising effortlessly. Chance did most of the talking. I had my notebook out, and now and then I wrote something in it.

  At first he talked about Kim. Her parents were Finnish immigrants who had settled on a farm in western Wisconsin. The nearest city of any size was Eau Claire. Kim had been named Kiraa and grew up milking cows and weeding the vegetable garden. When she was nine years old her older brother began abusing her sexually, coming into her room every night, doing things to her, making her do things to him.

  "Except one time she told the story and it was her uncle on her mothers side, and another time it was her father, so maybe it never happened at all outside of her mind. Or maybe it did and she changed it to keep it from being so real. "

  During her junior year in high school she had an affair with a middle-aged realtor. He told her he was going to leave his wife for her. She packed a suitcase and they drove to Chicago, where they stayed for three days at the Palmer House, ordering all their meals from room service. The realtor got maudlin drunk the second day and kept telling her he was ruining her life. He was in better spirits the third day, but the following morning she awoke to find him gone. A note explained that he had returned to his wife, that the room was paid for four more days, and that he would never forget Kim. Along with the note he left six hundred dollars in a hotel envelope.

  She stayed out the week, had a look at Chicago, and slept with several men. Two of them gave her money without being asked. Shed intended to ask the others but couldnt bring herself to do so. She thought about going back to the farm. Then, on her final night at the Palmer House, she picked up a fellow hotel guest, a Nigerian delegate to some sort of trade conference.

  "That burned her bridges," Chance said. "Sleeping with a black man meant she couldnt go back to the farm. First thing the next morning she went and caught a bus for New York. "

  Shed been all wrong for the life until he took her away from Duffy and put her in her own apartment. She had the looks and the bearing for the carriage trade, and that was good because she hadnt had the hustle to make it on the street.

  "She was lazy," he said, and thought for a moment. "Whores are lazy. "

  Hed had six women working for him. Now, with Kim dead, he had five. He talked about them for a few moments in general terms, then got down to cases, supplying names and addresses and phone numbers and personal data. I made a lot of notes. We finished our fourth circuit of the park and he pulled off to the right, exited at West Seventy-second Street, drove two blocks and pulled over to the curb.

  "Be a minute," he said.

  I stayed where I was while he made a call from a booth on the corner. Hed left the motor idling. I looked at my notes and tried to see a pattern in the wisps and fragments Id been given.

  Chance returned to the car, checked the mirror, swung us around in a deft if illegal U-turn. "Just checking with my service," he said. "Just keeping in touch. "

  "You ought to have a phone in the car. "

  "Too complicated. "

  He drove downtown and east, pulling up next to a fire hydrant in front of a white brick apartment house on Seventeenth between Second and Third. "Collection time," he told me. Once again he left the motor idling, but this time fifteen minutes elapsed before he reappeared, striding jauntily past the liveried doorman, sliding nimbly behind the wheel.

  "Thats Donnas place," he said. "I told you about Donna. "

  "The poet. "

  "Shes all excited. She got two poems accepted by this magazine in San Francisco. Shell get six free copies of the issue the poems appear in. Thats as much pay as shell get, just copies of the magazine. "

  A light turned red in front of us. He braked for it, looked left and right, then coasted through the light.

  "Couple times," he said, "shes had poems in magazines that pay you for them. Once she got twenty-five dollars. Thats the best she ever did. "

  "It sounds like a hard way to make a living. "

  "A poet cant make any money. Whores are lazy but this ones not lazy when it comes to her poems. Shell sit for six or eight hours to get the words right, and shes always got a dozen batches of poems in the mail. They come back from one place and she sends em out someplace else. She spends more on postage than theyll ever pay her for the poems. " He fell silent for a moment, then laughed softly. "You know how much money I just took off of Donna? Eight hundred dollars, and thats just for the past two days. Of course theres days when her phone wont ring once. "

  "But it averages out pretty well. "

  "Pays better than poems. " He looked at me. "Want to go for a ride?"

  "Isnt that what weve been doing?"

  "We been going around in circles," he said. "Now Im gonna take you to a whole nother world. "

  We drove down Second Avenue, through the Lower East Side, and over the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Coming off the bridge we took enough turns to throw off my sense of direction, and the street signs didnt help much. I didnt recognize the names. But I watched the neighborhood change from Jewish to Italian to Polish and had a fair idea of where we were.

  On a dark, silent street of two-family frame houses, Chance slowed in front of a three-story brick structure with a garage door in the middle. He used a remote-control unit to raise the door, then closed it after we had driven in. I followed him up a flight of stairs and into a spacious high-ceilinged room.

  He asked if I knew where we were. I guessed Greenpoint. "Very good," he said. "I guess you know Brooklyn. "

  "I dont know this part of it very well. The meat market signs advertising kielbasa were a tip-off. "

  "I guess. Know whose house were in? Ever hear of a Dr. Casimir Levandowski?"

  "No. "

  "No reason why you should have. Hes an old fellow. Retired, confined to a wheelchair. Eccentric, too. Keeps himself to himself. This place used to be a firehouse. "

  "I thought it must have been something like that. "

  "Two architects bought it some years ago and converted it. They pretty much gutted the interior and started from scratch. They must have had a few dollars to play with because they didnt cut many corners. Look at the floors. Look at the window moldings. " He pointed out details, commented on them. "Then they got tired of the place or each other, I dont know what, and they sold out to old Dr. Levandowski. "

  "And he lives here?"

  "He dont exist," he said. His speech patterns kept shifting, from ghetto to university and back again. "The neighbors never see the old doc. They just see his faithful black servant and all they see him do is drive in and drive out. This is my house, Matthew. Can I give you the ten-cent tour?"

  It was quite a place. There was a gym on the top floor, fully equipped with weights and exercise machines and furnished with sauna and Jacuzzi. His bedroom was on the same floor, and the bed, covered with a fur spread, was centered beneath a skylight. A library on the second floor contained one whole wall of books and an eight-foot pool table.

  There were African masks all over the place, and occasional groups of free-standing African sculpture. Chance pointed out a piece from time to time, naming the tribe that had produced it. I mentioned having seen African masks at Kims apartment.

  "Poro Society masks," he said. "From the Dan t
ribe. I keep one or two African things in all my girls apartments. Not the most valuable things, of course, but not junk, either. I dont own any junk. "

  He took a rather crudely fashioned mask from the wall and presented it for my inspection. The eye openings were square, the features all geometrically precise, the overall effect powerful in its primitiveness. "This is Dogon," he said. "Take hold of it. You cant appreciate sculpture with your eyes alone. The hands have to participate. Go ahead, handle it. "

  I took the mask from him. Its weight was greater than I anticipated. The wood that composed it must have been very dense.

  He lifted a telephone from a low teakwood table and dialed a number. He said, "Hey, darlin. Any messages?" He listened for a moment, then put the phone down. "Peace and quiet," he said, "Shall I make some coffee?"

  "Not if its any trouble. "

  He assured me it wasnt. While the coffee brewed he told me about his African sculpture, how the craftsmen who produced it did not think of their work as art. "Everything they make has a specific function," he explained. "Its to guard your house or keep off spirits or to use in a particular tribal rite. If a mask doesnt have the power in it anymore theyll throw it away and somebodyll carve a new one. The old ones trash, you burn it up or toss it away cause its no good. "

  He laughed. "Then the Europeans came and discovered African art. Some of those French painters got their inspiration from tribal masks. Now youve got a situation where there are carvers in Africa spending all their time making masks and statues for export to Europe and America. They follow the old forms because thats what their customers want, but its a funny thing. Their works no good. It doesnt have any feeling in it. Its not real. You look at it and you take it in your hand, and you do the same with the real thing, and you can tell the difference right away. If you have any feeling at all for the stuff. Funny, isnt it?"

  "Its interesting. "

  "If I had any of the junk around Id show you, but I dont own any. I bought some when I was starting out. You have to make mistakes to develop a feel for it. But I got rid of that stuff, burned it in the fireplace there. " He smiled. "The very first piece I bought, I still have it. Its hanging in the bedroom. A Dan mask. Poro Society. I didnt know shit about African art but I saw it in an antique shop and I responded to the masks artistic integrity. " He stopped, shook his head. "Hell I did. What happened was I looked at that piece of smooth black wood and I was looking in a mirror. I saw myself, I saw my father, I was looking back through the damned ages. You know what Im talking about?"

  "Im not sure. "

  "Hell. Maybe I dont know either. " He gave his head a shake. "What do you figure one of those old carversd make of this? Hed say, Shit, whats this crazy nigger want with all these old masks? Whyd he go and hang em all over the damn wall? That coffees ready. You take yours black, right?"

  He said, "Hows a detective go about detecting, anyway? Where do you start?"

  "By going around and talking to people. Unless Kim got killed coincidentally by a maniac, her death grew out of her life. " I tapped my notebook. "Theres a lot you dont know about her life. "