LOSERS LIVE LONGER (Hard Case Crime Book 59) Page 3

  “Ha, practicing? I got it down—I kill ’em every time.”

  He stopped briefly to demonstrate, making his board jump up by stepping hard on the back end. He had my interest now but not for his SK8R moves.

  I kept pace with his smooth, even glide.

  I asked, “So…what did you see?”

  “I saw you…going through the old guy’s pockets,” he said, deliberately raising his voice, “so ya better tell me what you got, or—”

  One of the few upsides of having nothing left to lose was calling people’s bluffs. I called his. I stopped in my tracks.

  “All right, let’s go back.” I looked back toward Twelfth Street, lights of the EMS van and a cruiser’s blue strobe still flashing.

  The kid laughed harshly. “No way.”

  He spun on his back wheels and stopped beside a row of free-newspaper dispensers, clustered by the street corner like giant, multi-colored building blocks.

  Used to be only one or two of these bins could be found on every other street corner, but over time more formed, sprouting up like mushrooms all over the city. Eight in this row: the Voice, the New York Press, L magazine, Real Estate Market, The Villager, Our Town, and the two free dailies, AM NY and Metro.

  The blond kid reached into a Velcro-sealed pocket by his knee and pulled out a magic marker, an extra-large black Sharpie the size and shape of a store-bought hot dog. He uncapped it and shook hair out of his eyes.

  “Like I’m goin’ tell cops. For free? You’re wacked. If I tell anyone, it’ll be the TV news. And if I don’t tell, cash only. I’m not wasting it. I’m going to be somebody. Be fucking famous one day, you’ll see.”

  “Famous for what?”

  He took instant offense, like it was a trick question people were always testing him with. He let his bangs settle back over his eyes.

  “Famous!” he said, as if it was self-evident. “People lining up to get my autograph. Girls, shit. You’ll see. The whole world’ll see.”

  Picking the newest newspaper bin—an unmarked bright yellow one—he began to scribble on it with his marker.

  “Lot of kids with boards and Sharpies,” I said. “That’s not going to make you famous.”

  Tip of his tongue sticking out in concentration, he drew a long flowing stroke with the marker, adding a slash, then a dot.

  “That’s what you know, ha!”

  “What, got yourself a sugar daddy?”

  “Sugar mama, dude,” he said to show me up, but his face went cross, like he’d said too much.

  Something occurred to me and I asked him, “Why aren’t you in school today, kid?”

  “School? What for? Half the millionaires in America never finished high school.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “What, I bet you went to school, huh? And look at you, you’re picking in the garbage for shoes. School’s for fools. Shit, you’re wasting my time, dude. Good luck with your dumpster-diving.”

  He re-capped his marker and put it back in its pocket. He mounted his skateboard, dipped down and shoved off with one foot, propelling himself west on Ninth Street.

  I wasn’t sure what that was all about, but was glad to see him go.

  I read the tag he’d scrawled on the yellow bin. In big rounded letters like bloated black intestines: FL!P

  A shout of “Hey!” made me turn round.

  The kid had stopped only twenty feet away and was holding something out in front of him aimed at me. His cell phone.

  “Say cheese,” he shouted, snapping my picture. Pocketing the phone, he took off again on a glide.

  I wondered had he snapped a shot of me digging into Owl’s pockets? And what else?

  I watched his retreat, an irrational urge in me to chase after him and smash his phone. Like an uncivilized native who’d just had his soul swiped.

  But nothing worth chasing after for.

  Not in these shoes.

  Chapter Three: THE BRIEF CASE

  Walking fast or slowly made no difference, the shoes still cut into me. After a while the pain dulled. Not much farther. Next street down was St. Marks. Owl’s hotel was an avenue over.

  At the corner, a white-haired guy with glasses, a tan Labrador lying beside him, was sitting cross-legged at the base of a lamppost cementing bits of broken china to its base. Jim the Mosaic Man retouching one of his pieces of art. I’d read an article the week before about the campaign to complete his mosaic trail through the East Village.

  I nodded a hello as I turned right, but he was engrossed in his work. I walked down the block. On this stretch of St. Marks Place all the buildings were fronted with shops aimed at the tourist trade. T-shirts and souvenirs, used CDs & DVDs, sandwich shops, acupressure and shiatsu, leather goods, consignment clothing. At this hour most weren’t open yet. Young Latin men in soiled kitchen whites scrubbed and hosed down the sidewalks in front of the eateries.

  The Bowery Plaza’s entrance was a single glass door on Third Avenue between a pizzeria on the corner and a hair salon. Easy to miss if you weren’t looking for the hotel.

  I hadn’t been inside for years—last time tracking a runaway—and couldn’t remember if hotel guests had to pass the front desk or not to get to the elevator or stairs.

  Expense account item one: two cups of coffee bought out of Owl’s twenty. At the corner, I grabbed one of the free dailies from a red bin. I went back to the Bowery Plaza and walked in.

  The essence of disguise is to be easily classified. The goal isn’t to be invisible, but to be seen and then disregarded.

  I walked through the door of the hotel with Owl’s card key in one hand and the two coffees balanced in the other. Walking on the balls of my feet to minimize the shoes’ squishy sound.

  The lobby was the size of a freight elevator and the elevator the size of a broom closet. The clerk, a salt-and-pepper-haired blur in a blue blazer behind the counter, didn’t even look up as I cruised by.

  I pushed three and ascended at a sluggish crawl, scanning the newspaper’s headlines: GOP VP’s PREGNANT TEEN; FORMER SITCOM STAR, 19, DIES IN O.D.; FASHION WEEK PREVIEW. By the time I reached the third floor, I’d finished one of the coffees.

  The anonymous corridor was as lively as a sun-shrunken condom. Crooked wall sconces with lampshades apparently made from recycled nicotine filters.

  Outside the door marked 3-E, I stopped and listened before swiping the card key. Hoping for silence, but instead I heard a woman shouting, “No! Now!…I don’t care.”

  I took a sip of overflow from the lid of the other cup, and waited. The voice wasn’t from TV, none of the vacuous joviality, bright appeals, or musical bridges. Just the woman. And no other voice—her gaps in speech weren’t answered, unless in whisper, but more likely she was on the phone.

  I checked the receipt. The right room number. I inserted the card key and got the lock’s green light.

  Turned the knob, inched the door open a crack.

  The woman continued to spew ire. A clear gravelly timbre to her voice.

  “Listen you fucking shit, you owe me…I don’t care, just get it…and not that same…what? No, now!”

  I pushed the door open all the way. A single low-ceilinged room with a narrow bed, the bedspread ruffled but unslept-in. The woman was seated on it with her back to me, a cell phone to her ear, her legs crossed, one foot spastically tapping the air.

  I walked in. The carpeting was the color of spaghetti sauce. The wallpaper was peeling, dog-eared in its high corners. To my left a dusty window with gauzy curtains. Two chairs, a TV—switched on, but mute—a nightstand with a lamp, a digital clock, a full ashtray, a scratchpad, pen, and the telephone. To my right, a mirrored dresser with a closed brown-leather briefcase on top, and beyond that the bathroom, its door partly shut.

  “No, I don’t have to listen—you do. In half a—”

  Must’ve caught my motion, because she whipped round.

  “Call you back.” She closed her phone and stood up.

  She
was a tanless white with straight short hair dyed the purplish-red of beets. In her late twenties, five-eight and too thin. Eyes with that sunken-skull look associated with eating disorders and substance abuse.

  But what eyes. A strange sparkling color, neither green nor grey, but like emeralds with an embedded diamond swirl. She had a too-wide mouth and long nose, but it didn’t matter, not with those eyes. She was dressed in a clinging green silk blouse and black knit skirt revealing shapely legs.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Morning to you, too, bright eyes.”

  I’d left the door wide open on my way in, for a clear exit. She shoved past me and slammed it shut.

  I crossed to one of the chairs and sat down, my tortured feet singing hallelujah.

  A wastebasket beside me. Empty pack of cigarettes and crumpled tissues at the bottom along with something else. A plastic wristband like the kind you get when admitted to a hospital. I dropped my empty cup on it.

  The woman came back from the door.

  She held her cell phone in a tight fist. There was a ring on her left hand’s fourth finger, a diamond-shaped diamond.

  “Who are you, what do you want?” she asked.

  Even with her voice pitched low, it still had that gravelly quality, like she’d spent her youth shrieking to be heard above house music.

  “Did the old man send you?” she asked.

  “Yeh. Owl sent me.”

  “Who?”

  Sounded like a joke, but neither of us laughed.

  “The old man,” I coughed up. “George Rowell.”

  “Well?”

  “He had an accident, can’t make the meeting.”

  “Fuck! What’m I supposed to—fuck! He dumps me here and tells me—FUCK!”

  She opened up her cell phone and stared at the screen. Maybe checking text messages, maybe considering her options.

  I considered my own. Owl had said he was returning a favor for a friend. But this woman had no reaction to his name or concern for his well-being. So if not the client, who was she?

  For a brief instant, I wondered if she might be a hooker. But Owl had been in his eighties… Maybe that was the secret to his longevity?

  But no, she was no hooker, not if that rock on her finger was real, and it looked just gaudy enough to be genuine.

  “What did he tell you?” I asked.

  She stared at me with those eerie sparkling green eyes, drilling into mine, like they were unearthing something.

  As they narrowed on me, the skin around them showed etched lines like dry papercuts. “What is this? Who are you?”

  “Question of the day.”

  I finished my other coffee and dropped the cup in the wastebasket, then stood up. I absently tossed the free newspaper I’d brought with me on the bed as I walked across the room. A small room, but she didn’t move an inch as I passed; her head was turned away, looking down at the bed.

  Passing by the dresser, I looked over at the briefcase on top. Old scuffed leather with reinforced brass corners. Initials G.R. engraved in gold below the handle. One of the latches was up.

  I continued on to the bathroom door, opened it, and peered in at a slant. It was empty. Toilet seat down. A lipstick-stained washcloth in the sink. No toothbrush.

  I turned back.

  She was fast, I was slow. The first I heard of her was from the shifting of contents in the briefcase she lifted up over her head.

  And brought crashing down on mine.

  It landed like a red-hot charcoal briquette. One corner hit my left temple and down I went, more from the blast of pain than the force behind her blow.

  And perfect pinball that I was, the other side of my head connected with the dresser’s edge on my way down, and that’s all I knew for a while.

  Time for a commercial break.

  Less a dream than a rerun from a long-ago Saturday morning TV fest flitted through my reeling skull. A pencil-drawn cartoon of a shaggy-haired boy approaching the tree where an owl wearing a professor’s mortarboard is perched. The boy poses the eternal enigma, “Oh wise Mr. Owl, you know everything. How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?”

  Mr. Owl grabs the lollipop in a talon more used to snatching voles in mid-flight, deftly unwraps it, and says, “Let’s see.” Lick. “Uh-one.” Lick. “Uh-two.” Lick. “Uh-three.” Crunch!

  I woke staring at the carpet. The nap of the tomato paste rug. A single loose fiber broken free from the ranks rode above the fray, no longer part of the carpeting, now something that had to be vacuumed up in order for the rest to look clean and orderly. I felt sorry for that lost little fiber, little curly-cutie.

  I raised my head and pain like a jagged wire suture joined my temple, left eye, and chin. Hit on head no good. Payton no like. Make go way pain.

  I crawled over to the bed and climbed up onto it.

  By the time I was on my feet again the woman was long gone.

  The briefcase was where she’d dropped it after dropping me. Open now, some of the contents spilled out.

  I walked around it to get a damp washcloth from the bathroom. I bathed my temple and drank water from the faucet. Took a piss while I was at it and noticed my front pockets were turned out. Both back pockets empty, too. Tsk, imagine going through someone’s pockets…

  I went back into the room and found most of my stuff scattered on the floor by the open briefcase. Something missing though. My head hurt too much to sort it out. Later. I pocketed what was left.

  I let out a low whistle and, with the washcloth pressed to my head, gave the room a quick once-over. Scratch pad by the phone was blank. I tilted it under the light, but no embedded impressions were revealed.

  Dresser drawers empty, Owl hadn’t unpacked. I found his suitcase on the floor by the far side of the bed.

  Inside were a couple days’ worth of clothing, neatly packed: three white dress shirts, one yellow sports shirt, a pair of tan khaki pants, four pairs of boxer shorts, and five pairs of socks. Only other thing, a zippered toilet bag with a denture brush in it, tooth polish, an old fashioned razor, and a can of shaving cream.

  I helped myself to a pair of brown argyles before shutting it up again. Then sat on the bed, unlaced the shoes, and slid them off. The bottoms of my feet were streaked black like I’d been kicking Alice Cooper in the face. I wiped them on the bedspread before putting on the socks. My ankles were bleeding.

  I put the shoes back on. It was an improvement.

  I went over to the wastebasket and picked out that plastic wristband. It had been stretched apart, not cut. I turned it over looking for outpatient info, but both sides were blank. I pocketed it, I was a magpie for clues.

  Back to the bathroom to splash water on my face.

  I left the briefcase for last because I already saw what it contained. The contents were like the bottom left drawer of my own desk, full of red wires, black wires, white wires, and gray wires bound with rubberbands. None longer than three feet and each with a different end attachment, a phone jack, a microphone plug, an alligator clip, a suction-cup device, a USB connector—whatever a P.I. needed in the course of his work. A wafer-thin digital recorder. I switched it on, but it was blank.

  I sifted through the rest: stopwatch, pocket binoculars, magnifying glass with light attachment, brown work gloves, assorted batteries, a pack of blue Bic ballpoint pens, large and small paper clasps and paperclips, a disposable camera with 24exposures (none of them used), an old mercury oral thermometer, a clear plastic ruler, a compass, and a black plastic box for a .32 automatic with an extra full clip inside and a rag and brush for cleaning, but no gun. Great.

  A simple matter, he said. Soft work, he said. Nothing rough.

  Sticking out of a pocket sleeve under the lid was a bus ticket folder. Inside was a round-trip ticket, New Hampshire to New York City. He’d expected to go back Sunday morning.

  It was nothing I could use, though. What was I missing?

  I thought back to th
e indisputable techniques of investigation my old boss at Metro, Matt Chadinsky, tried to drum into me during some of his loftier harangues. Most of it bullshit on how no one ever rewarded you for doing the job better, that doing the job better was the reward. But one of his more useful axioms had been, “Never look just with your eyes.” Poke into every hollow, he’d say. Get dirty. People lose things all the time that drop into tight spots and corners, dirty places they don’t want to reach into.

  I slid my hand down into the pocket sleeve, dug to the bottom. It wasn’t dirty inside, it was smooth. At first I thought nothing was in it, until my fingertips snagged on a corner and I pulled out a color photograph.

  A 4x6 snapshot of Owl standing with a thin young girl about twelve years old with shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair, a flattish nose, and big ears. He was crouched so their heads were at the same level. Both mugged for the camera, teeth bared in fierce smiles. The girl’s nose was wrinkled-up in a snarl. The flash camera colored both of their eyes hellhound red.

  They were casually dressed, the girl in a pink t-shirt and blue jeans with swirly embroidered rhinestone designs.

  Owl wore a plaid sport coat, open-collar shirt, and gray slacks. Behind them was a large potted rubber-tree plant and a pale-blue wall with a partly visible sign, the word GATE in black letters.

  I turned the photo over. No date written on the back, only one word in blue block letters: ELENA. I pocketed it.

  Still hadn’t found what I was looking for, what I needed. A scrap of paper or anything with a local phone number or address that would lead me to Owl’s friend, the client he owed a favor, connecting me to the job he’d hired me for. But nothing.

  My force of purpose going down the drain, nothing left behind but the gurgle. No job, never was really hired anyway.

  I didn’t know what I’d been thinking, maybe couldn’t know. Do dogs think when chasing a squirrel? It’s just part of them, an impulse that defines what they are. Problem was, some chased their tails with equal enthusiasm.

  Practical matters came back into sharper focus. I had to get back into my office and only two people in the metro area had a spare set of my keys, and one of them I hadn’t spoken to in over five years.