Part One
Louis Shalako
Duke was nowhere
around when he got home.
He’d tried Amy’s
number from a phone booth not far from the cop-shop. Getting no response, he
tried again after getting off the bus, at the booth down the street. This time
her room-mate Sandy answered, but didn’t know where she was or when she would
be back. Taking a message, she was cool and a bit short with Mark. He had the
impression that her and Amy weren’t exactly the best of friends, they were
merely splitting the rent. The apartment was rent-controlled, otherwise they
never would have been able to afford it. They’d sublet it from someone going overseas
but planning to return. The lady might have been busy or had someone with her,
he conceded. She didn’t owe him
anything, that was clear.
Amy didn’t owe him
anything either.
The front room
smelled a bit like dry rot or something, and he opened the windows to let some
air in. He was lucky to find a couple of beers in the fridge and there was
bacon and eggs. A nice, simple meal, he put four strips of bacon in his
cast-iron frying pan and set the heat low. Adding chopped onion, he quickly
sliced a small potato very thin and put that in the pan beside the bacon. He
would have to watch it. Without a kitchen table he was just hanging about, beer
in hand, checking out his rooms and wondering what the hell came next in his
sorry little life.
He stood at the windows,
watching life on the street below.
The cops would have
spoken to everyone in the building, anyone who would open the door,
essentially. They would have no way of knowing who Amy was. The thoughts of
them giving her a rough time were not pleasant. Duke didn’t know her last name
as far as Mark knew, although it might have came up in conversation when he was
out. Duke, on the other hand, would be avoiding the cops like the plague. Mark
had this terrible feeling, the feeling that he really ought to be doing something.
He’d always hated
being pushed.
Pushing back,
especially when it was cops, might not be a very good idea. In fact, it was a
very bad idea.
It was a good
question, as to whether beer would dampen that spark of anger or fan it higher.
There was only one
way to find out. Tipping the bottle back, he had a good swig as the bacon began
to hiss and then to crackle.
It was going to be a
while yet.
***
Mark was just
standing at the kitchen counter, forking the first bite of scrambled eggs into
his gaping maw when there was a quick rap at the door and then Duke tried the
handle and came in.
“Holy, shit, man. You
are one hot property.”
Mark gagged a bit, as
he’d put a lot of ketchup and vinegar on his golden-brown home fries.
“What do you mean by
that?” Mark had bigger problems right about now, including his stomach, and
there was, unfortunately, only one beer left in the fridge.
“Huh.”
Duke stood there in
the kitchen doorway, watching Mark, methodically and in a determined fashion,
desperately trying to get a meal into his gut before something else bad
happened to him.
He was standing,
eating off of a plate sitting on the counter beside the kitchen sink.
“Okay.”
Mark rolled his eyes
over and gave him a long look.
“I’ll, uh, just wait
in the living room. Oh.” Duke pulled a bottle of what looking like glue out of
the back pocket of his jeans. “You’ll have to find another stick for the front
window.”
Turning, he left Mark
to eat in peace.
After a minute, his
voice came from the outer room.
“Mark.”
“Yeah.”
“A buddy of mine has
an old TV. He’s getting a new one, a big colour set. He says you can have it.”
Mark snorted.
There had to be more
to it than that. A kitchen table would have really been something, but he could
live without it for a little while longer. A dresser for the bedroom, a couple
of rugs or some carpeting would be nice. These were bad thoughts when you were
already down.
Everything just seemed so impossible.
A free TV.
Sure.
All you have to do is
carry it five miles across the city and then lug it up the stairs. Plug it in
and see if it works.
Any minute now,
they’d trip over another body and then he’d just be in a whole heap of trouble.
“I’ve got your
laundry, incidentally. It’s upstairs.”
Oh, yeah—the laundry.
Mark sagged a bit at
the knees. He hadn’t been eating well, he hadn’t been sleeping well, and he’d
been wound up for quite some time. Sooner or later a man had to crash and
burn...three more bites and he was done.
“Thanks, Duke.”
***
That was the funny
thing about food. It took a while to kick in. The beer, on the other hand,
seemed to work instantly.
Mark came out after
washing up. He sat on the far window ledge, watching as Duke glued the joints
of the second chair. Mark had decided on using a wooden spoon to hold up the
window, and a warm breeze promised much for the season to come. What it might
be like up here in mid-July was another question.
“So. As you can
imagine, I’ve got one or two things on my plate.”
Duke nodded, pleased
with his handiwork. The chair he was on was a little more solid. He set the
repaired chair down on a few spread-out newspapers, watching to see how much
glue might ooze out of the joints. With a stool, he could have put it properly
upside-down. Chairs with backs, they would be laying on an extreme angle.
So for, so good...
Duke looked up.
“Your number one
priority is you and Amy.”
Mark wondered about
that. The week-old newspaper gave him an idea though.
“What was the name of
that dead hooker?”
Duke shrugged.
“How the hell would I
know?”
Mark nodded. It might
not have even made the papers. While everyone in the building would have talked
about it, no one would know anything at all—which never seemed to stop the
gossip.
If it had been in the
paper, the lady’s name might have been withheld pending notification of next of
kin.
Mark couldn’t help
but to think all of this was connected. Duke was right about one thing—Amy must
have been wondering about him, and his part in all of this. His heart sank.
Of
course—she’s avoiding me.
Dead hookers, dead
landlords, dead building superintendents.
And it’s all connected to me?
Really?
But how?
There was that spark
of anger again.
Like fuck it is, you stupid bastards...
“There must be a
news-stand that keeps older editions for a few days.” He told Duke what he had
in mind—information, any sort of information at all, might be helpful.
“Why don’t you try
the library?” Duke had the other, better chair up-ended, judiciously squeezing
out glue and letting it suck itself into the loose joints.
Mark’s mouth opened
and then closed again.
Of course.
Why didn’t I think of that?
They’d even had one
at Bellevue, an oasis of relative quiet, possibly even sanity, in an otherwise
barely-tolerable existence.
***
It struck Mark that
he must be a very stupid man. Leaving the apartment and Duke (still hiding from
Maude) to their own devices, he’d only gotten a few blocks before he realized
that the dead lady in his apartment had to have came from somewhere.
The trouble with
being in an institution, where every move was laid out for you and every fucking thing worked
according some strict clockwork routine, was that you quickly became mentally
lazy.
There were a limited
number of decisions to be made in each and every day, and once that was done
there wasn’t all that much to think about. People deadened their minds as best
they could, otherwise they simply couldn’t handle the lack of...stimulus. That was the word.
He slowed down,
taking a better look around, becoming more aware of his environment. He had to
let the denial go and really look. Somehow or other this had become his
problem. It wasn’t like the cops were ever going to solve it. He doubted if
they were looking very hard.
There was too much
crime. Not enough in the budget and not enough time in the day. That was just
the truth.
New Yorkers were
surrounded by crime, that much was evident from the daily news.
There were one or two
rather obvious hookers working a nearby street-corner. They usually had their
turf, their street-corners and alleyways, where they habitually worked the
world’s oldest trade. The point being was that they usually didn’t go too far.
Not streetwalkers, anyways. Call girls, that might be something else. They had
a place of their own or would make house calls
They had higher prices
and in order to sustain that price, they had to exhibit some modicum of class.
Or something like
that.
The woman in his
bathtub hadn’t impressed him as having any class at all. One of the ladies
caught his eye. She was fairly tall, with spiky blonde hair sticking straight
up, a shiny red leather dress cut a quarter-inch below the business end. The
shorter, younger girl was pretty, brunettte and yet hard-looking around the mouth
and eyes, which were still humorous though.
The torn fish-net stockings and
four-inch heels pretty much said it all. He wondered if there must be times
when the girls actually enjoyed their jobs. It was said that they hated men,
deep down inside. That was probably just, considering what Mark Jones knew
about men, and all the things they said, and all the things they did. The girls
would be seeing a lot of their customers at their worst, drunk, demanding and
cheating on their lawfully-wedded wives. If nothing else, it would impart a
certain cynicism over time.
Women didn’t know
their husbands as well as they thought they did.
Not that he knew much
about hookers, it was just an impression.
What would he tell
them? How to go about it was a good question, and then he had it, or had
something anyways. All he could do was try, and see how it went, and act
accordingly. There were always more prostitutes in the neighbourhood. It wasn’t
just these two.
Picking the older,
more hard-bitten looking lady, Mark caught her eye.
“Hey.”
“Hey, Mister, what
can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for
somebody.”
“Aren’t we all,
Honey. What did you have in mind?”
He grinned in spite
of himself.
“There’s this lady
and I kind of liked her.” Mark did his best to describe his dead hooker, not so
much the outfit, as the hair, the eyes, the style of makeup and the garish
colours.
The younger one
looked up at her friend.
“Hmn.”
Her eyes turned to
him.
The older one gave
him the bad news.
“That sounds like
Jackie.”
“Jackie?”
“Yeah, maybe. Sure
sounds like her. Where did you pick her up?”
“Oh, it was right
around here somewhere. I was pretty drunk at the time.” He tried a disarming
smile. “Yeah, uh, she had these streaks in her hair, and just the way it framed
her face...”
He lamely described
some kinky black shoes and stockings with lines up the back without getting too
specific.
The lady nodded
sharply.
“Well, I’m sorry. We
got bad news for you, Bud.”
“Oh, really?”
“If that’s her. If
it’s the one I’m thinking.”
A cop car cruised
slowly past, ignoring them as far as Mark could see, the car and his own image
reflected in the windows behind the girls. It struck him that it was a place of
business.
A restaurant, it was open and it was pretty public out there.
Somewhere in his release papers it said something about consorting with
criminals, if not whores specifically.
“So, ah, what are you
trying to say?”
“If it’s Jackie
you’re looking for, try the morgue.”
“Jackie? Yeah, that
might have been her...” His shoulders slumped. “Something like that, anyways.
So, she’s dead then?”
The lady nodded in
sympathy.
“Uh, hmn. Sorry,
lover.”
A car pulled in to
the curb and the younger girl went over, to bend in, talk to the guys and have
a quick look, a quick smell to gauge their alcohol consumption. They looked all
right and they wanted the pair. They had money and they were in the mood to
party. Mark couldn’t help but overhear some of it and then came a quick
whistle.
“I gotta go, Mister.”
“So what happened? Do
you know Jackie’s last name?”
“No last name. Not
too many of us do. She was found dead over on Easy Street, some shit-hole
little apartment.”
It was a like a quick
punch in the guts.
Yeah, that’s where I
live all right.
Her heavy scent
washed over Mark as she sashayed past him doing her best to be like Marilyn
Monroe, and for a lady her age, the rear view wasn’t bad at all. She bent over
and worked her way into the rear seat with a couple of young Puerto Ricans,
going by the look of it and the music on the car radio. The younger one was
still cute, and that was a kind of tragedy that he couldn’t do much about. Some
of them made a specialty of looking vulnerable. They all must have started off
that way.
Mark turned and kept
going to the library. If nothing else, he could check the back issues and then
maybe have a minute to himself just to think for a bit.
(End of Part
Fourteen.)
Thanks for reading.
Louis Shalako has ebooks and audiobooks available from Google Play.
Readers may like to
have a quick look at Louis Shalako in
paperback.
***
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