“What do you mean, ‘not per se.’”
She shrugged as if the question wasn’t worth answering.
Billy hesitated, then, chalking up her truculent vagueness to a general case of whitey hatin’, moved on.
“Was he having any problems with anyone recently?”
“Well, he’s a talent promoter, you know?” Her voice softened for the first time. “Trying to help the community, but these kids he takes under his wing, they expect miracles.”
“Any kids in particular?”
“I’m just saying”—looking away—“in general.”
“All right.” He put down his pen. “I did a little research on your fiancé before I came here, it’s a crucial part of a job like this, and I need to ask you . . .” Billy back in her eyes. “Is he still slinging?”
She stared at him as if he were too thick to live. “I don’t want to talk out of my area of expertise.”
“Do you want me to find him or not?”
She continued to stare, Billy once again ready to call it a day.
“One last . . . I asked you before if you had any idea who this white guy was and you said, ‘Not per se.’ I need for you to elaborate on that ‘not per se.’”
“Not per se meaning, like, I don’t know who he is, per se.”
“But you know . . . what, his type?”
“Oh yeah.”
“From what, his tone of voice?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And what type would that be.”
“Your type.”
“My type . . .”
She fired up another Newport, took a drag, then exhaled in a slow steady stream.
“You know what Sweetpea always used to say NYPD stands for?” she said, tossing Billy’s bullshit business card on the table as she rose to her feet. “‘Not Your People, Dawg,’” having read him like a comic book from the door on in.
He was still sitting at the table when he got a call from home, the unexpected sound of his younger son’s plaintive voice making him knotty.
“Hey, buddy, what’s up?”
“I didn’t even do anything and Mom started yelling at me like I did,” Carlos said.
Billy exhaled with relief. “Well, she had an upsetting experience this morning, so don’t take it personal and just extra-behave today, all right? You and your brother both.”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“Carlos, just do me a favor, OK?”
“OK.”
Another incoming call flashed Pavlicek’s name across his screen, Billy ignoring it. “Everything else all right?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing right now?”
“Talking to you.”
“All right, I’ll be home for dinner, OK?”
“OK.”
“And everything’s OK?”
“Yeah.”
“Your brother’s OK?”
“Yeah.”
“Grandpa?”
“Yeah.”
“All right, buddy,” he said, as Pavlicek attempted to ring through again. “I’ll see you at home, OK?”
“You didn’t ask about Mom.”
“I’ll see her back home too.”
“Do you want to talk to her?”
“I’ll talk to her at home,” Billy said, knowing all too well that when things were tense between them the phone was not their friend.
He started to call Pavlicek back, hesitated, and instead called Elvis Perez at Midtown South to see if there was any kind of progress on the Bannion homicide. Perez was out, so Billy settled for leaving a message.
He sat there for a moment, thinking about Pavlicek’s afternoon flip-out over the Sweetpea poster, then looked over his interview notes, which yielded only two pieces of hard information: 502 Concord, three-fifteen a.m.
If he were so inclined he could do a canvass for possible witnesses. But it probably wouldn’t be too smart: a detective from outside the local precinct, on his own, knocking on doors in the middle of the night to ask about Sweetpea Harris, especially if Sweetpea turned out to be dead, Billy imagining the barrage of questions that would then come his way, none of which, at this point, he would be prepared to answer, especially after having come so close to stepping in it simply by entering Eric Cortez’s name into the system.
So, it had to be someone else, and not a cop. For a hot second he thought about hiring Sousa Security but then bagged the idea; there was something about his brother-in-law he didn’t quite trust. It wasn’t that he was a liar exactly—more like an omitter, as if the answers he gave you had to hold up in court.
So.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Hey,” Stacey’s voice high and on the shaky side.
“I have some work for you this week if you’re up for it.”
“Yeah, sure, absolutely,” once again sounding sunny but strained, as if someone was standing behind her with a knife.
“Are you OK?”
“Sure.”
Billy hesitated, then: “Where do you want to meet?”
“Can you come to my place?”
In all the years they had known each other, she had never invited him to her home.
“Yeah, no problem, what’s a good time?”
“Now.”
He began to smell the stale waft of old cigarette smoke coming from Stacey’s apartment midway in his wheezing climb to her floor. When he finally reached her landing, Billy took a moment to catch his breath, then followed his nose down the long hallway to 6B, where she greeted him in the open doorway with a smile so tense he thought her face would crack.
With its dim corridors, greasy slit of a kitchen, and small living room filled with indifferent furniture and overflowing ashtrays, the apartment reeked of resignation, and it made Billy ache to think what life could have been like for her right now if she had only looked elsewhere to make her journalistic bones.
Her boyfriend’s plaid bathrobe matched the fabric of the couch so well that Billy didn’t even realize the guy was in the room until he reached for his beer.
“Hey, how are you.” Billy couldn’t remember his name.
Lying flat on his back, the boyfriend made no effort to sit up or even turn to face him. “Superb.”
Stacey stood mutely between them, looking first at Billy, then her boyfriend, then back to Billy, her face still tense and expectant.
It was the collection of amber prescription bottles on the coffee table that first caught his eye. Then the edge of the butterfly bandage on the ridge above the boyfriend’s averted brow. Then the face full-on, as lumpy as a thumbed hunk of clay, his skin the color of overripe bananas, the sclera of one eye hemorrhaged to a neon red.
“Did you call the cops?” he asked Stacey.
“Of course.”
“And?”
“They came.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“What happened,” he asked the boyfriend.
“Some gentleman must have come into the vestibule right behind me last night and . . .” He shrugged.
“What did he look like, this gentleman.”
“He was behind me.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Race, hair, clothes . . .”
“Nothing.” Then: “It’s my own fault.”
“Why do you say that?”
The boyfriend turned his face away again.
“Why do you say that?” Billy’s voice sharper now.
Stacey touched Billy’s arm.
“What time was this,” asking both of them.
“About one in the morning,” the boyfriend answered.
“And where were you coming from.”
“The Jaunting Car.”
“What’s that.”
“The bar where he first met you,” she said.
“Were you there too?”
“I left about an hour and a half before he did,” sounding embarrassed about it. No, not embarrassed, he thought, more like defeated.
“Did anybody in there talk to you? Either of you?”
“People in there tend to talk to themselves,” the boyfriend said.
“Anybody giving you a hard time?”
“Not really.”
“What’s ‘not really’ mean?” Billy getting hot again.
“A seventy-five-year-old cirrhotic called me an asshole.”
“Anybody else?”
“Call me an asshole?”
“I’m trying to help you here.”
“I appreciate it,” the boyfriend said carefully.
“All right, let me make a call,” Billy said, this time by way of an apology. Gesturing to the opened beer, he said, “You have an extra one of those?”