“What can I do for you?”
“Just did three on a nickel in Joliet,” he said, as if this was somehow an answer to my question. “My second conviction and my last.”
The man was the opposite of his suit. He was lean and dangerous-looking, with olive skin, short brown hair, and dark eyes that women must have adored. His hands were heavily muscled.
“You bought a suicide pill or something?” I asked.
“Guy shot me in the back when we were through with a bank job,” Mel said. “Shot me right there in the bank for sixteen percent divided by five.” He shook his head in disgust.
“And he’s out here somewhere?”
“No.” Melquarth Frost just twisted his lips and I felt a twinge of fear. “He hooked up with a girlfriend’a mine after the job.”
“So maybe it wasn’t just the one-fifth of sixteen percent.”
Mel smiled and then grinned. “He was supposed to meet her at the Carving Table in North Chicago one night and someone shot him in the eye.”
“All that public knowledge?”
Instead of answering me he went on. “Cops saved my life and then did this pissant job of framing me. They shoved money from the bank in my pocket, but my lawyer proved it wasn’t me put it there.
“I had an illegal firearm on me. If they had let it alone I’d’a gotten twelve years. But they had to deal it down if the cops didn’t want to be caught doin’ what they do.”
Another thing I noticed about my visitor was the way he sat. His legs were spread wide. He pulled over an empty chair and laid his left wrist on top of the backrest. His right hand lay on his knee. It was as if he was at home, enjoying life more than a billionaire.
He gazed at the space above my head, thinking about a hard life with a sense of élan and maybe even a little whimsy.
“So?” I said before he tried to move in.
“I got five years, and from the first day they had me in solitary confinement.”
I must have winced, because a smile flitted across the career criminal’s lips. He nodded slightly.
“It almost broke me,” he continued. “Almost did. I remember shouting for days. Then I cried. And finally one morning—I guess it was morning because that’s when I woke up. On that morning I found the peace to think about my life. I went over the whole thing from grade school to solitary, and you know what I figured?”
“Not in the least.”
“That in all that time you were the only one treated me fair.”
“What the fuck? I arrested you for bank robbery.”
“You coulda shot me. You coulda hit me in the head with a lead pipe. You sure as shit coulda testified that I had somehow mentioned the bank job. I know your bosses were mad when you didn’t lie.”
Mel leaned forward, now with both hands on his thighs.
“So you came here from Illinois to thank me?” I asked.
“I already told you,” he said. “I’m not goin’ back to prison. I came out here to ply my old trade and to tell you that if you ever need a good turn I owe you a few.”
That was a very important nexus for me. It was rare for anyone to see in me what I saw in the mirror. Melquarth might have been a villain, but he was a villain with my number in his pocket.
I wasn’t about to share that intelligence with him.
“What kind of trade?” I asked.
“Watchmaker.”
“Really?”
“When I was fourteen they wanted to put me in juvie for assault and battery. The judge gave me a choice of enrolling in an after-school program or being locked up. I chose watchmaking with a little Jew named Harry Slatkin who did watch repair on Cherry Lane. He taught me a lot. Later on I applied that knowledge to bomb making, but in my spare time I studied watches.”
“You know,” I said, “that even though I’m no longer a cop I’m still on the other side of the line from you.”
He laid a small white business card on the desk and said, “I hear you play chess.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Chessboard is a neutral place. I go to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village most Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. I play there. Number’s on the card. If you ever wanna match wits across that line, just gimme some warning and I’ll have the board set up.”
He rose from his chair with ease. He nodded instead of holding out a hand. I nodded back and he left.
I looked up the name Melquarth on the Internet soon after he left. He’d been a patron god to Hannibal before the general attacked Europe. He was also associated with Ba’al, considered by Western religion to be a manifestation of Satan.
Over the next two years since then, we’ve played about a dozen games. After the third, which he won, we got a drink together. After the fifth, which he also won, we had a meal.
10.
It wasn’t yet 7:00 a.m. when I climbed the concrete stairs to the raised pedestrian walkway across the Brooklyn Bridge.
There was a chill in the morning air, but I had my windbreaker on, a sweater beneath that. Pedestrian traffic was still pretty light at that time of day and the breezes can get a little stiff. The combination of solitude and cold somehow imparted the feeling of freedom; so much so that I was on the brink of laughter. I knew these emotions indicated an instability of mind, but I didn’t care. A man can live his whole life following the rules set down by happenstance and the cash-coated bait of security-cosseted morality; an entire lifetime and in the end he wouldn’t have done one thing to be proud of.
It was a forty-nine-minute walk from Montague Street to Manhattan. Once in the rich man’s borough I went past city hall all the way to the West Side, where I turned left on Hudson.
Three blocks down, there was a diner called Dinah’s across the street from Stonemason’s Rest Home.
“Mr. Oliver,” Dinah Hawkins said in greeting when I sat down at the counter. “I haven’t seen you in three months.”
“I usually go straight over, D. But today I wanted to stretch my legs and think.”
“You didn’t walk here all the way from Brooklyn, did you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s not good for your health to overdo, Mr. Oliver.”
Dinah was a good-size woman who worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Well past sixty, she had biceps bigger than mine, and I was sure that she could work alongside most longshoremen with no great strain.
“It’s the only exercise I get,” I lied.
“You’re looking good enough without it.” Her Irish-green eyes sparkled, and I knew that she was what her father would have called a hellion when she was younger.
“Got any interesting cases?” she asked, putting a mug of black coffee at my station.
I discussed my job with certain people who had nothing to do with law enforcement. But when it came to my new cases I couldn’t be quiet enough.
“I had this public figure liked to do threesomes with T-girls,” I said.
“What’s that mean? Tiger girl?”
“I think the street term is chicks with dicks.”
The bell to the door behind me sounded. In the mirror I saw a young man wearing a suit designed for an older, and probably more successful, banker. The young man—he was somewhere in his mid-twenties—looked at us for a few moments, then walked over to stand at the cash register.
“Oh!” Dinah had rosy cheeks and a mouth that could become a perfect circle. “There was one of those lived in the apartment across the hall from me and Dan. Miss Figueroa we used to call her. She was the cleanest creature I ever knew. Dan was the one had to tell me she was a he. I swear I couldn’t tell at all.”
“How is Dan?” I asked.
Dinah beamed at me. “Thank you for askin’, Mr. Oliver. Him and me take a walk every evening along the Hudson. He tells me the same stories over and over and I love him more every time he does.”
“Excuse me,” the young/old white banker-boy said.
“He always remembers you,” Dinah continued, ignoring the young man. “He says, ‘How’s that nice colored boy helped Arnold?’ I know he shouldn’t say it that way, but he can’t remember to learn.”
“Excuse me,” said the banker.
“What do you want?” Dinah snapped.