I was beginning to like my satanic sidekick.
“So what’s your story, Mel? I mean the real deal.”
He looked at me. His eyes were truly dead, but regardless of that there was gratitude in his stare.
“Prison psychiatrist says that I have borderline personality disorder with intermittent psychotic breaks that both relieve the pressure of unconscious guilt and make me dangerous.”
“That sounds crazy.”
“Don’t it? I asked the woman, if I was that far gone why was I in prison and not in some mental facility?”
“What did she say?” I asked, looking up to see a trio of unlikely customers walk through the glass door. The big men all wore jeans, cotton sports jackets, and patterned shirts of various styles.
“That modern law in the United States was based on economic class and what the popular opinion classified as evil,” Mel said, answering my question. “She said in the modern world a man who beats his own head against the wall is crazy but the guy slams somebody else’s head is criminal.”
“Three guys walked in,” I said.
“I see ’em in the mirror.”
They were talking to the sweet-skinned freckled girl.
“The fat one in the light jacket is a guy named Porker,” Mel added. “I don’t think he knows me. I was supposed to kill him this one time, but his girlfriend decided that she felt sorry for his wife and gave me my fifty percent kill fee.”
The men were looking around. Finally they decided on the partially concealed table that Mel coveted.
When they were settled, shy-eyed Juan went over to take their orders.
“So your story is a prison psych putting a textbook diagnosis on your actions?” I asked, telling Mel that we were just going to watch and wait.
“No. I was just giving you the official answer. You know that’s how most people know everybody else. They read it in a newspaper ad or maybe a letter from home.”
“So what’s the real answer?”
“My mother was a Catholic girl. From the age of three she went with her mother to church every Wednesday and Sunday. When she was nine she pledged her life to Jesus Christ and each and every word in a single book.
“Then one night, when she thought she was alone in the cathedral, a man dragged her into the confession box and raped her. She was barely a teenager and right there in the church too. That shit warped her brain.
“Her mother and father ordered her to get an abortion, but she told them that that would be against God. They kicked her out the house and she lived in a Catholic dormitory, where she gave birth, named me after the demon, and never, ever showed me any love.
“I was a duty like Job’s trial for her. She housed me and fed me and told me every day that I was the son of evil.”
I looked into Mel’s dead eyes, thinking that my life might not have been as bad as I thought.
“You know Porker’s real name?” I asked.
“I forget, but I know where to get it.”
After that we dallied over our drinks and food. Mel had a vast range of knowledge that had nothing to do with crime. He knew quite a bit about evolution. He told me that his greatest wish, when he was a child, was to change into something different; like wolves had become dogs or dinosaurs birds.
When my watch said 10:37 the three thugs paid their bill, got up, and left. They hadn’t seen a man with a red flower in his lapel. Stuart Braun wasn’t there either.
“I guess we can go too,” I said maybe half an hour after Porker and his crew were gone.
Outside the restaurant Mel said, “I killed the motherfucker.”
The old me would have been on the alert for a confession, but I had already crossed over that line in the East Village.
“Who?”
“My father. I asked around until I heard about a guy from my mother’s old neighborhood who had gone down for rape a few times. I met him in a bar and, after a whole lotta rye, he told me about a thirteen-year-old girl he raped in a confession box. He said that was the sweetest nut he ever had.
“A little later on I made some excuse to get mad and hit him in the teeth. I wiped some’a the blood up with a handkerchief and left him on the street.
“The DNA lab identified him as my father and I met up with him again. He’d been so drunk that he didn’t remember gettin’ knocked out. I took him to this abandoned house in the Bronx and put all kinds of pain to his ass. When he was dead I poured seventeen gallons of sulfuric acid into a big ole bathtub and that motherfucker was gone from the world. It was like he never even existed.”
“Because he raped your mother?” I had to ask.
“Because he made me and made me what I am and didn’t even know it. And on top of that he wouldn’t have given a damn even if I told him.”
15.
I took a yellow taxi home.
Montague Street was empty. Coleman Tesserat might have been hiding in some doorway with a gun in his hand. Maybe the exposure of his crimes on Wall Street would have salted him away for twenty years—I didn’t know. I did know that I wasn’t afraid to die, that since deciding to go up against the men who took my life away, I had no fear.
“King-baby,” she said.
Turning my head to the left I saw Effy Stoller. Five three with fifteen pounds over what her physician would have called perfect weight, she had big lips and skin darker than mine. Her high, high heels might as well have been bare feet, she was so poised, and her hair had been done into the shape of a seashell that would exist in some far-flung future when humanity had devolved itself into geologic memory.
“I know I’m a little late,” I said as she walked up to me. “I thought you’d be gone.”
She kissed me full on the lips and said, “I knew you’d get here. If you e-mailed me it had to be something hard.”
Effy had been a prostitute in the old days when I had a beat. She’d was run by a pimp named Toof who came from somewhere in the Midwest. He worked her hard and beat her regularly. But she never complained or turned him in.
Then late one Wednesday night when I was on the street in Midtown, an older woman hobbled up to me and said that she’d heard a shot from a building I knew well.
On the top floor a door at the far end of the hall was ajar. There had been as many eyes on me as there were roaches in the wall, but nobody came out to tell me anything—it wasn’t that kind of building.
Inside the apartment, Toof was on the floor in his ivory-colored gabardine zoot suit; the left side of his skull and most of its contents were on the wall. Effy sat nine feet away at a dinette table in the tiny kitchen. She was drinking the good cognac from the bottleneck, something I was certain Toof would have never allowed her to do.
The gun was on the table. It was a huge six-shooter, .41 caliber. I picked up the piece and sat across from her.
“When I woke up this morning I knew he had to die,” she told the tabletop.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“He got a new girl. Pretty thing.”
“And you were jealous?”
“The first time I seen ’im hit her somethin’ changed. It was like I had died and the gatekeeper was showin’ me my life. He give me a chance to go back and fix it. All I had to do was get a good night’s sleep to figure how.”
Toof had done all kinds of bad things, and Effy had always been, more or less, easy to work with. If I busted her she took the arrest with style. She deserved better and he’d gotten exactly what was coming to him.
Toof had a back door to his tenement apartment. I helped Effy to her feet and told her where she could go for the night. Then I put the .41 at the back of my pants and called in the homicide dicks, as was my duty.
Effy was my fifth e-mail of the morning. I knew I’d be needing some comfort when it came to sleep.
She undressed and bathed me, gave me an oil massage all down my spine to the middle of the gluteus maximus. When that was through she turned me over. Her breasts and stomach glistened from the oil.
“You not hard, King-baby; don’t you like me no more?”
“I thought maybe we could try and talk for a while,” I said.