11
I was sitting at a table in Crema Coffee Company on Commercial when the man who called himself Shaky found me. It was just after nine in the morning, and while a steady stream of people kept the baristas busy, most of the tables remained empty. It was that time of day when folk wanted to order and go, which suited me just fine. I had a nice sun-dappled spot by the window, and copies of the New York Times and the Portland Press Herald. Crema had one of the best spaces in town, all bare boards and exposed brickwork. There were worse places to kill an hour. I had a meeting later in the morning with a prospective client: trouble with an ex-husband who hadn’t grasped the difference between keeping a protective eye on his former wife and stalking her. It was, depending upon whom you asked, a thin line. Neither did he appear to understand that, if he really cared about his wife, he should pay her the child support that he owed. On such misunderstandings were hourly rates earned.
Shaky wore black sneakers, only slightly frayed jeans, and an overcoat so big it was just one step away from being a tent. He looked self-conscious as he entered Crema, and I could see one or two of the staff watching him, but Shaky wasn’t about to be dissuaded from whatever purpose he had in mind. He made a beeline for my table.
It wasn’t just Shaky who called himself by that name, apparently everyone on the streets did. He had a palsied left hand that he kept close to his chest. I wondered how he slept with it. Maybe, like most things, you just got used to it if you had to endure it for long enough.
He hovered before me, the sunlight catching his face. He was clean-shaven, and smelled strongly of soap. I might have been mistaken, but it struck me that he’d tidied himself up and dressed in his best clothing to come here. I remembered him from the funeral. He was the only one present to shed a tear for Jude as he was lowered into the ground.
‘You mind if I sit down?’ he asked.
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Would you like a coffee?’
He licked his lips, and nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘Any preference?’
‘Whatever’s the biggest, and the warmest. Maybe sweet too.’
Since I was mainly a straight filter kind of guy, I had to rely on the girl behind the counter to guide me on warm and sweet. I came back with a maple latte and a couple of muffins. I wasn’t too hungry, but Shaky probably was. I picked at mine to be polite while Shaky went back to the counter and loaded up his latte with sugar. He tore into the muffin as soon as he resumed his seat, then seemed to realize that he was in respectable company and nobody was likely to try and steal the snack from him, so he slowed down.
‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘The coffee as well.’
‘You sure there’s enough sugar in there for you?’ The stirrer was pretty much standing up by itself in the coffee.
He grinned. His teeth weren’t great, but the smile somehow was.
‘I always did have a sweet tooth. I guess it’s still in there somewhere. I done lost most of the rest.’
He chewed some more muffin, holding it in his mouth for as long as he could to savor the taste.
‘Saw you at the cemetery,’ he said, ‘when they put Jude in the ground. You’re the detective, right?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘You knew Jude?’
‘A little.’
‘What I heard. Jude told me that he did some detecting for you, couple of times.’
I smiled. Jude always did get a kick out of being asked to help. I could hear some skepticism in Shaky’s voice, just a hint of doubt, but I think he wanted it to be true. He kept his head down as he stared up at me, one eyebrow raised in anticipation.
‘Yes, he did,’ I said. ‘Jude had a good eye, and he knew how to listen.’
Shaky almost sagged with relief. Jude hadn’t lied to him. This wasn’t a wasted errand.
‘Yeah, Jude was smart,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t nothing happened on the streets that Jude didn’t know about. He was kind, too. Kind to everyone. Kind to me.’
He stopped eating, and in an instant he looked terribly lonely. His mouth moved soundlessly as he tried to express emotions that he had never shared aloud before: his feelings for Jude, and about himself now that Jude was gone. He was trying to put loss into words, but loss is absence and will always defy expression. In the end, Shaky just gave up and slurped noisily at his latte to cover his pain.
‘You were friends?’
He nodded over the cup.
‘Did he have many friends?’
Shaky stopped drinking and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘No. He kept most people at a distance.’
‘But not you.’
‘No.’
I didn’t pursue it. It was none of my business.
‘When did you last see him alive?’
‘Couple of days before he was found in that basement. I was helping him to collect.’
‘Collect?’
‘Money. He was calling in the debts he was owed, and he asked me to help. Everyone knew that me and him was close, and if I said I was working on his behalf then it was no word of a lie. He put it all down on paper for me. As I’d find someone I’d cross the name off the list, and record how much they’d given me.’
He reached into one of his pockets and produced a sheet of paper, which he carefully unfolded and placed before me. On it was a list of names written neatly in pencil. Beside most of them, in a considerably messier hand, figures were scrawled: a couple of dollars, usually, and no sum more than two bucks.
‘Sometimes I’d get to a person after he did, and maybe they’d already have paid up, and maybe they wouldn’t have. Jude was soft, though. He believed every hard luck story because it was his way. Me, I knew some of them was lying. As long as they was breathing, they was lying. I made sure that if they could, they paid.’
I took the piece of paper and did a little rough addition on the numbers. The total didn’t come to much: $100, give or take some change. Then I realized that, while it wasn’t much to me, $100 could get a man beaten to a pulp if he fell in with the wrong company. It might even be enough to bring death upon him.
‘What did he want the money for?’ I said.
‘He was looking for his daughter. Told me she used to be a junkie, but she was straightening out. Last he heard she was up in Bangor looking for work, and seems like she found some. I think—’
He paused.
‘Go on.’
‘I think she’d come up here because she wanted to be near him, but not so near that it would be easy for him,’ said Shaky. ‘She wanted him to come find her. Jude had abandoned her momma and her way back, and he knew that the girl blamed him for everything that had gone wrong in her life since then. She was angry at him. She might even have hated him, but when there’s blood involved love and hate aren’t so different, or they get all mixed up so’s you can’t tell one from the other. I guess he was considering moving up to Bangor and having done with it. But Jude didn’t like Bangor. It’s not like here. They tore the heart out of that city when they built the mall, and it never recovered, not the way Portland did. It’s a bad place to be homeless, too – worse than here. But Jude wanted to make it up to the girl for what he’d done, and he couldn’t do it from Portland.’
‘How long did it take you and Jude to get the money together?’
‘A week. Would have taken him a month if he’d been working alone. I ought to get me a job as a debt collector.’
He used the forefinger of his right hand to pull the scrap of paper back to him.
‘So my question is—’ he began, but I finished it for him.