Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5 Read online

  "I guess so."

  It seemed to me as though everybody was staring at me. Some people said hello to me and I found myself reading implications into their greetings. Others didn't say anything and I decided they were avoiding me because my drunkenness had offended them. I was so maddeningly self-conscious I wanted to jump out of my own skin.

  I couldn't stay in my seat during the qualification. I kept going back to the coffee urn. I was sure my constant visits to the urn were drawing disapproval but I seemed irresistibly drawn to it.

  My mind kept going off on tangents of its own. The speaker was a Brooklyn fireman and he had a very lively story but I couldn't keep my mind on it. He told how everyone in his firehouse had been a heavy drinker and how anyone who didn't drink that way got transferred out. "The captain was an alcoholic and he wanted to surround himself with other alcoholics," he explained. "He used to say, 'Give me enough drunken firemen and I'll put out any fire there is.' And he was right. Man, we would do anything, we would go in anywhere, take any crazy goddamned chances. Because we were too drunk to know better."

  It was such a goddamned puzzle. I'd been controlling my drinking and it had worked fine. Except when it didn't.

  On the break I put a buck in the basket and went to the urn for still another cup of coffee. This time I managed to make myself eat an oatmeal cookie. I was back in my seat when the discussion started.

  I kept losing the thread but it didn't seem to matter. I listened as well as I could and I stayed there as long as I could. At a quarter of ten I got up and slipped out the door as unobtrusively as possible. I had the feeling every eye in the place was on me and I wanted to assure them all that I wasn't going for a drink, that I had to meet somebody, that it was a business matter.

  It struck me later that I could have stayed for the end. St. Paul's 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 o'clock. 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 mother's 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. She'd intended to ask the others but couldn't 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 couldn't go back to the farm. First thing the next morning she went and caught a bus for New York."

  She'd 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 hadn't had the hustle to make it on the street.

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

  He'd 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. He'd left the motor idling. I looked at my notes and tried to see a pattern in the wisps and fragments I'd 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.

  "That's Donna's place," he said. "I told you about Donna."

  "The poet."

  "She's all excited. She got two poems accepted by this magazine in San Francisco. She'll get six free copies of the issue the poems appear in. That's as much pay as she'll 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, "she's had poems in magazines that pay you for them. Once she got twenty-five dollars. That's the best she ever did."

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

  "A poet can't make any money. Whores are lazy but this one's not lazy when it comes to her poems. She'll sit for six or eight hours to get the words right, and she's 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 they'll 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 that's just for the past two days. Of course there's days when her phone won't ring once."

  "But it averages out pretty well."

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

  "Isn't that what we've been doing?"

  "We been going around in circles," he said. "Now I'm 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 didn't help much. I didn't 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 don't know thi
s part of it very well. The meat market signs advertising kielbasa were a tip-off."

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

  "No."

  "No reason why you should have. He's 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 didn't 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 don't know what, and they sold out to old Dr. Levandowski."

  "And he lives here?"

  "He don't 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 Kim's apartment.

  "Poro Society masks," he said. "From the Dan tribe. I keep one or two African things in all my girls' apartments. Not the most valuable things, of course, but not junk, either. I don't 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 can't 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 it's any trouble."

  He assured me it wasn't. 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. "It's to guard your house or keep off spirits or to use in a particular tribal rite. If a mask doesn't have the power in it anymore they'll throw it away and somebody'll carve a new one. The old one's trash, you burn it up or toss it away cause it's no good."

  He laughed. "Then the Europeans came and discovered African art. Some of those French painters got their inspiration from tribal masks. Now you've 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 that's what their customers want, but it's a funny thing. Their work's no good. It doesn't have any feeling in it. It's 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, isn't it?"

  "It's interesting."

  "If I had any of the junk around I'd show you, but I don't 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. It's hanging in the bedroom. A Dan mask. Poro Society. I didn't know shit about African art but I saw it in an antique shop and I responded to the mask's 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 I'm talking about?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "Hell. Maybe I don't know either." He gave his head a shake. "What do you figure one of those old carvers'd make of this? He'd say, 'Shit, what's this crazy nigger want with all these old masks? Why'd he go and hang 'em all over the damn wall?' That coffee's ready. You take yours black, right?"

  He said, "How's 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. "There's a lot you don't know about her life."

  "I guess."

  "I'll talk to people and see what they can tell me. Maybe it'll fit together and point somewhere. Maybe not."

  "My girls'll know it's cool to talk to you."

  "That'll help."

  "Not that they necessarily know anything, but if they do."

  "Sometimes people know things without knowing they know them."

  "And sometimes they tell without knowing they told."

  "That's true, too."

  He stood up, put his hands on his hips. "You know," he said, "I didn't figure to bring you here. I didn't figure you needed to know about this house. And I brought you without you even asking."

  "It's quite a house."

  "Thank you."

  "Was Kim impressed with it?"

  "She never saw it. None of 'em ever did. There's an old German woman comes here once a week to clean. Makes the whole place shine. She's the only woman's ever been inside of this house. Since I owned it, anyway, and the architects who used to live here didn't have much use for women. Here's the last of the coffee."

  It was awfully good coffee. I'd had too much of it already but it was too good to pass up. When I complimented it earlier he'd told me it was a mixture of Jamaica Blue Mountain and a dark roast Colombian bean. He'd offered me a pound of it, and I'd told him it wouldn't be much use to me in a hotel room.

  I sipped the coffee while he made yet another call to his service. When he hung up I said, "You want to give me the number here? Or is that one secret you want to keep?"

  He laughed. "I'm not here that much. It's easier if you just call the service."

  "All right."

  "And this number wouldn't do you much. I don't know it myself. I'd have to look at an old phone bill to make sure I got it right. And if you dialed it, nothing would happen."

  "Why's that?"

  "Because the bells won't ring. The phones are to make calls out. When I set this place up I got telephone service and I put in extensions so I'd never be far from a phone, but I never gave the number to anybody. Not even my service, not anybody."

  "And?"

  "And I was here one night, I think I was playing pool, and the damn phone rang. I like to jumped. It was somebody wanted to know did I want a subscription to the New York Times. Then two days later I got another call and it was a wrong number, and I realized the only calls I was ever going to get were wrong numbers and somebody selling something, and I took a screwdriver and went around and opened up each of the phones, and there's this little clapper that rings the bell when a current passes through a particular wire, and I just took the little clapper off each of the phones. I dialed the number once from another phone, and you think it rings because there's no telling the clapper's gone, but there's no bell going off in this house."

  "Clever."

  "No doorbell, either. There's a thing you ring by the door outside, but it's not connected to anything. That door's never been opened since I moved in, and you can't see in the windows, and there's burglar alarms on everything. Not that you get much burglary in Greenpoint, a nice settled Polish neighborhood like this, but old Dr. Levandowski, he likes his se
curity and he likes his privacy."

  "I guess he does."

  "I'm not here much, Matthew, but when that garage door closes behind me it keeps the whole world out. Nothing touches me here. Nothing."

  "I'm surprised you brought me here."

  "So am I."

  We saved the money for last. He asked how much I wanted. I told him I wanted twenty-five hundred dollars.

  He asked what that bought.

  "I don't know," I said. "I don't charge by the hour and I don't keep track of my expenses. If I wind up laying out a lot of money or if the thing goes on too long, I might wind up asking you for more money. But I'm not going to send you a bill and I'm not going to sue you if you don't pay."

  "You keep it all very informal."

  "That's right."

  "I like that. Cash on the line and no receipts. I don't mind paying a price. The women bring in a lot of money, but there's a lot that has to go out, too. Rent. Operating costs. Payoffs. You got a whore installed in a building, you pay off the building. You can't give the doorman twenty dollars for Christmas and let it go at that, same as any other tenant. It's more like twenty a month and a hundred for Christmas, and it's the same for all the building employees. It adds up."

  "It must."

  "But there's a lot left. And I don't blow it on coke or waste it gambling. You said what? Twenty-five hundred? I paid more than twice that for the Dogon mask I gave you to hold. I paid $6,200, plus the auction galleries charge buyers a 10 percent commission these days. Comes to what? $6,820. And then there's sales tax."

  I didn't say anything. He said, "Shit, I don't know what I'm proving. That I'm nigger-rich, I guess. Wait here a minute." He came back with a sheaf of hundreds and counted out twenty-five of them. Used bills, out of sequence. I wondered how much cash he kept around the house, how much he habitually carried on his person. Years ago I'd known a loan shark who made it a rule never to walk out his door with less than ten thousand dollars in his pocket. He didn't keep it a secret, and everybody who knew him knew about the roll he carried.