The Long Good Boy Read online

  “A pimp? Setting an example for the rest of his girls?”

  I waited.

  “No? Not a pimp? They’re nurturing, gentle, like the good mothers none of us had? That’s what I’ve always heard, so no way, if that’s what you tell me, I’m going to feel you’re being less than honest.”

  Pregnant pause.

  “I take it you’re not going to set the record straight for me.”

  Nothing.

  “Okay, so you don’t think it was her pimp?” I looked from one to the next. Mount Rushmore was more expressive, a bit less terrified, too. “If you don’t tell me the truth, how am I going to help you?” Wondering if they were capable of doing that, even as I asked.

  Clint sneezed.

  “Whatever you tell me, it stops with me. Client privilege. You know what that is? So, Rosalinda, did she do something to piss off her pimp? Hold out money? Sass him? Someone, anyone? The pimp, he decided to put the fear of God—”

  “We don’t know. That’s why we hiring you,” Chi Chi said in a voice so low I had to lean closer to hear her.

  “It could be it was a wife,” LaDonna said, “didn’t take to her husband’s little habit.”

  I looked up at her.

  “They’s all married.”

  “Not all,” Chi Chi said. “Maybe most.”

  Jasmine shook her head. “A lot of them aren’t. Sometimes they say they are, even when they’re not. They complain about a wife they may or may not have. This guy, he says, my wife, she wouldn’t do that you put a fucking gun to her head. Who knows, he’s really got a wife or not? This ain’t exactly St. Patrick’s Cathedral, people coming around to confess the truth, ask for forgiveness.”

  LaDonna nodded. “You work undercover, right? At least, that’s what we was told.”

  I looked up at her, down at Jasmine, sideways at Chi Chi.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  They shook their heads.

  “We’ll take care of you. Don’t you worry,” Jasmine said.

  “You’ll be with me,” LaDonna said. “I’ll never let you out of my sight for one minute.”

  I looked back up, thinking for the moment of something my sister had once said, about how I seemed to be looking for better and better ways to get myself killed.

  “So you think it was family?” I asked.

  “Or another hooker,” Chi Chi said. “They’s some out there, they’re crazy. Desperate. Kill you soon as look at you.”

  “Could be something else entirely,” LaDonna added, “something we ain’t thought of.”

  “Hence we hired you.” That Jasmine was one smart-ass broad.

  “Right. What about the meat market? Is there any chance—”

  “The meat market’s not even open when we work,” she said. “Case closed.”

  “Right,” I said, “and anyway, there’s all that rich tradition behind you, of hookers working in the same area as the wholesale markets, here, Hunts Point—”

  “What about the pig man?” LaDonna whispered out of one side of her mouth, ignoring me, bending so that she was talking right into Jasmine’s ear.

  “The pig man?” I asked.

  “He’s just a customer, some butcher Rosalinda did once or twice. That don’t have nothing to do with anythin’,” Jasmine said.

  “So what’s his name, this pig man?”

  “I already said, it don’ have nothin’—”

  “We don’t kiss and tell,” Chi Chi said.

  “Truth is,” Jasmine said, leaning forward, “we don’t kiss, period. It’s unsanitary. You never know where someone’s mouth’s been.”

  “So she never mentioned the name? Not even just his first name? The place of business? Nothing? She just referred to him as—”

  “The pig man.” All of them together, Tranny Hookers Local 101, my new employers.

  They were a sad-looking group. Despite the quick repartee, the fancy outfits with matching shoes, tattoo covers, press-on nails, glitter, the pancake makeup, rouged cheeks, painted mouths, misery was shining in their eyes, to a man. And something else, too, perhaps more than just a hint of the craziness they accused others of. I know I should have been scared, sitting with them the way I was, no one else around. But somehow I wasn’t. At least, not enough. For some reason I can’t explain, something in Chi Chi’s voice had touched me, and I knew before I met her that whatever it was she needed, I’d be with her all the way, in a straight line, right up until the end.

  “So he sells pork,” I said. “This we know.”

  Chi Chi nodded. “We’re pretty sure that’s so.” She looked around, shifted her feet, twitched one shoulder, checked to see if Clint was okay. “He sells pork,” she repeated, forcing a laugh, as if to say, Sense of humor like mine, I was ready for Late Night.

  Jasmine pointed to her head. Well, truth be told, to her hair. “Smart,” she said.

  “Like we was told,” Chi Chi added. Too loud.

  “By whom?”

  I could hear soot falling. I waited a bit longer, but no one had anything to say.

  “Chi Chi, last night you mentioned that someone recommended me. I need to know—”

  “You don’t need to know. You dying to know,” Jasmine said, more to them than to me. “Don’t you know the old saying, Curiosity killed the cat?”

  “I had some trouble with Clint. He was going in the house, and I called this dog trainer. We got, you know, pretty friendly, and when I told him what happened, he was real sympathetic, you know, about the possible danger to the rest of us, and he said, You have to find out who did this, and I know just the perfect person for the job.”

  I felt as if I’d swallowed a cake of ice. Dashiell began to whine.

  “What was his—”

  “Like we already tol’ you,” LaDonna said, lifting her big hand like a stop sign, “that part of the discussion’s over. We don’t kiss and tell. Our lips,” she said, pursing hers for just a moment, “are sealed.” To emphasize the point, she turned a tiny, imaginary key, then tossed it into the dark night.

  3

  Hey, Baby

  When LaDonna, Chi Chi, and Jasmine left for work, I headed home with so much cash, all in fives, tens, and twenties, I had to divide it in half to fit it into my jacket pockets, wondering all the time how they got their hands on so much money, and if they’d all soon turn up dead because of it. They’d insisted they hadn’t held out on their pimp to pay me. Yeah, yeah. Maybe the money was from rent collected on some of their properties, book royalties, or winning the lottery. Again and again, they’d said that this was what they wanted, shoving the money at me, telling me they had to know who did the killing. When I told them I didn’t need this much up front, that half of it would have been too much, they insisted I take it anyway. “We don’t do layaway,” Jasmine had said. “We pay in advance.” I had the feeling that if I didn’t take the money, someone else would. One way or another, they wouldn’t be able to hold on to it.

  When they started out of the park, Chi Chi hung back, fussing with her dog, letting him down for a pee, adjusting the strap on his coat. She gave me her cell phone number, reminding me she already had mine, my house number as well. Who the fuck was going to believe this? I thought, and then I got one more surprise, Chi Chi leaning forward and giving me a kiss on the cheek before running off to catch up to the others, already on the corner, waiting for the light to turn green.

  It wasn’t quite ten, and the restaurants along Hudson Street were still crowded with middle-class people eating ricotta ravioli or swordfish steak with capers and white wine. The video store was just closing, the last two customers leaving with rented movies to slip into their VCRs after they slipped into bed with snack food and soda at the ready. The Golden Rabbit had taken in the cut flowers and put them in the window, parchment-colored roses and tiny purple violets, red carnations with sprigs of white baby’s breath, too cold to leave them out at night this time of year. And a few blocks north and west, where my clients had headed, the c
orners were dotted with working girls, girls who shaved their faces even more carefully than their legs, at least those who hadn’t gone through the pain and expense of electrolysis. Rosalinda had just finished hers, Chi Chi had said, thirty-two sessions. It cost a fortune, but it was an investment in your future, she’d told me. I’d wondered how much of a future any of them had. While I was safe at home starting my research, they’d be leaning into the cars that stopped to shop the merchandise, making deals, risking their lives.

  You never know when you get in a car, you going to come out again, Chi Chi had said right before they left. Oh, you come out, LaDonna said. The question is, you step out or you dumped out.

  They’d given me six thousand dollars. The way I lived, that was enough to pay the bills for several months. I tried not to think about what they’d had to do to earn it, nor what they were figuring I was going to have to do to keep it. They didn’t know the secrets of my trade any more than I knew theirs, and that was exactly how I thought things would stay. I had no way of knowing then how wrong I was.

  On the way to Abingdon Square, I’d put out all the old newspapers and magazines for recycling. When I got to where I lived, I picked up the package by the string to bring it back in. This time, I held the stack as far away from my body as I could. Without checking carefully, I was pretty sure most of the neighborhood dogs had added to all the news the Times saw fit to print. In fact, I’d just stopped Dashiell from filing his own story.

  In the yard, I opened the cord and pulled out the first two sections of the papers for the end of October and the beginning of November, leaving the rest piled up near the stairs. Once inside, I took them up to my desk and began to look for any mention of the murder of Rosalinda a week and a half earlier. There’d been nothing the last few days of last month, but when I got to the first of this month, I found something else of interest.

  It was an article on the first page of the Metro section reporting the gangland-style execution of the manager of one of the meat plants, a Kevin Mulrooney, thirty-eight, who’d been found, bound and gagged with silver duct tape, hanging from one of the meat hooks. He’d been shot once in the heart, and again in the back of the head. Better safe than sorry. Mulrooney, it said, had been the manager of Keller’s since the retirement of the previous manager two months earlier, and fellow workers said he was making “innovative changes” in the way Keller’s operated.

  I skimmed the rest quickly—Mulrooney was survived by his wife and kid, yadda, yadda—left it to the side, and began paging through the next days’ papers until I found a follow-up piece, just a paragraph near the end of the Metro section saying that two men, Andrew Capelli and Joseph Maraccio, had been arrested and charged with the murder of Kevin Mulrooney three nights earlier. Both Capelli and Maraccio—who were employed by the CityWide Carting Company, which had, until a week prior to the murder, carted the trash from Keller’s—denied any knowledge of the crime.

  There was a short quote from the mayor calling the crime a throwback to the days when the mob ran the carting industry, saying he had reiterated his vow to make the Gansevoort and Hunts Point markets as squeaky-clean as he had made the Fulton Fish Market. Yeah, yeah.

  I cut out the articles and put them aside, going back to the last week in October and starting again to look for mention of the death of a transvestite hooker. Fat fucking chance.

  And found yet another piece of interest. The day after the report of Mulrooney’s murder, there was a short piece near the back of the B section in an article called “Metro News Briefs.”

  COSTUMED MAN FOUND DEAD AT WATERFRONT

  Sanitation workers, beginning the massive cleanup following the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, found the body of Angel Rodriguez, 26, dressed in a long white gown and holding a small wand, sitting up against the chain-link fence where their vehicles are parked, at Gansevoort Street and the river, a spokesperson said. Mr. Rodriguez, who had lived in the Bronx, died of a wound to his throat. Police said no weapon had been recovered and that no suspect was in custody.

  I thumbed through the B to B phone book, found the address for Keller’s, grabbed my sheepskin coat and Dashiell’s leash, and headed for the meat market. Dashiell was thrilled with the extra walk, pulling out in front as if he knew exactly where we were going and had to get there yesterday.

  Keller’s was off the main drag, on Little West Twelfth Street. You might think, since I lived on Tenth Street, that it would be only a few blocks away. But that’s not how the Village works. Going north from Tenth Street, you run into Charles Street, where the Sixth Precinct used to be, then Perry, where there used to be a garage that fixed Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. After that there’s Eleventh Street, but before you get to West Twelfth Street, you hit Bank and Bethune. Farther east, to make things even more difficult, West Twelfth Street runs into West Fourth Street, and a street called Waverly runs into itself. In addition to that, West Twelfth Street stretches all the way across town, nearly from river to river, but Little West Twelfth Street is another story. It runs for only two blocks, bisected by Washington Street, where the transvestite hookers stroll. I passed a few of them on the way to Keller’s—two on the corner near the deli on Gansevoort and Washington, a lone one across the street near the now-closed dry-cleaning shop—but didn’t see my hookers, which at this point was fine with me.

  There was a dump of a little diner on the southwest corner of Little West Twelfth and Washington, Hector’s Place, Inc., where the butchers could snag a greasy burger or some take-out coffee. They probably had sweet rolls, a breakfast special, “homemade” soup, but I wasn’t about to check the menu. I turned left and started checking the numbers, though it was difficult to see them in the dark. Walking under a sidewalk bridge at one point, the street strewn with trash, I saw something dark moving quickly from across the street and disappearing into one of the buildings on the side I was on. Sure enough, when I got to where it had vanished, the sign said Keller’s. And under that, Fine Pork Products.

  I stood there for a moment just looking at the place where Kevin Mulrooney had been found, executed, and refrigerated, wondering if I’d found the pig man that easily, and if I had, if his death had anything at all to do with Rosalinda’s death.

  I dialed Chi Chi’s cell phone.

  “Chi Chi?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Rachel.”

  “I can’t talk now. I’ll call you back.”

  “Hey, baby,” I heard her say, the phone no longer close to her mouth. Then: “Come on, honey, give me jus’a minute, an’ I’m going send you right to heaven. This here’s real important.” I heard a car door open. “You home?” she asked.

  “No. Call my cell phone.”

  I crossed the street, moving around to keep warm, understanding why the hookers did those little dances, that it wasn’t only to attract attention but also to keep from freezing. I wanted to put a little distance between me and Keller’s so that I could see the whole building and also distance myself from whatever ran across my path moments earlier, as if whatever it had been was the only one of its kind.

  It was a smallish building, two stories high, made of wood, an anachronism if ever there was one. The windowless ground floor was probably all refrigerated, and upstairs, where there were three small windows, that would be where the offices were, where the manager did his paperwork and made innovative changes.

  Was that also where the pig man met with Rosalinda once or twice?

  I shivered, pulling up my collar and jumping around in place, glad I was off the main drag and hoping no one would drive around the corner and ask me, “How much?”

  I looked around for a grate in the sidewalk, which is where a lot of the homeless slept, trying to keep warm on whatever heat escapes the basement where gigantic transformers step the electricity down from 1,000 to 110 volts to make it usable in big buildings’ lines, a process that gives off tremendous heat. But I was kidding myself. There were no skyscrapers here. I was in the wrong neighborh
ood for sidewalk grates, and anyway, if there were any here, there would probably be hordes of rodents streaming in and out of them.

  Twenty minutes later, my cell phone rang. I fumbled it open without taking off my warm gloves.

  “What?” she said.

  Time is money.

  “Angel Rodriguez,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Chi Chi?”

  “Where’d you get that name?”

  “The New York Times. November 2. Small piece in the Metro section. Just a paragraph about a twenty-six-year-old male in a white gown, carrying a wand—”

  “She was twenty-eight.”

  “I’m just telling you what I read in the paper.”

  “And it said her name?”

  “No, Chi Chi. It said his name.”

  “And you—”

  “Put two and two together.”

  “Which is like what you do, right?”

  “Right. It’s like why you and LaDonna and Jasmine hired me.”

  “No need to be sarcastic. Just because I’m a hooker don’t mean you shouldn’t treat me with respect. What do you want me to do, get a job in retail? You think I could be on the floor at Jeffrey, or at Bloomingdale? You think someone wants me out front anywhere?”

  “Sorry—I’m just cold standing out here in the street.”

  “Honey, you don’t know from cold. You just a beginner.” I heard her light a cigarette. “Gave these up last week.” She stopped to exhale. I could hear her blowing the smoke out, hear her sighing. “And the week before that. I ain’t go no willpower.”

  “There was a butcher killed the same night, Halloween night. Worked at Keller’s. You know Keller’s?”

  “I mighta passed it once or twice. It’s around here, right? What, on Thirteenth Street, or somethin’?”

  “Little West Twelfth. So, was he the pig man you all tried so hard not to mention tonight?”

  “Was who?”

  “The dead butcher. Kevin Mulrooney. Was he the pig man?”

  “No. No way.”

  “How can you be sure? You said you didn’t know his name.”