Concourse, p.14
Concourse, page 14
part #2 of Bill Smith & Lydia Chin Series
“I call you,” I said, “because you’re good.” I wanted to add, and because I love you, and I love you because you’re good. Instead, I went on, “And I can’t believe you don’t think you belong in this business. You’re perfect for it. For one thing, you’re unbelievably nosy. For another, you have billions of Chinese relations who among them work in every profession in America and they all owe you. And for another, your mother hates what you do.”
“Those are the prerequisites?”
“Uh-huh.” I drank some beer.
“Did your mother hate it when you started?” she asked suddenly.
My eyes avoided hers, wandered the room, the paneled walls, the L-shaped bar with the bottles behind, the tin ceiling I’d put in for Shorty before I’d even moved in upstairs. There had been times over the last three years when I’d thought I might tell Lydia about my family, about all of it; but tonight, at the end of this long, long day, all I said was, “I don’t know.”
We were silent with each other for a while, just a short time while the regulars murmured their soft conversations and Shorty mixed up drinks behind the bar.
Lydia suddenly said, “I’m seeing someone.”
I put my beer down, looked from it to her. “I know.”
She frowned. Before she could speak I said, “Well, I am a detective.”
Her frown lasted a second longer; then she smiled, relaxed. “His name is Paul Kao. He’s a friend of my brother Andrew’s. A photographer.” She added, in a tone whose meaning I couldn’t quite decipher, “He’s Chinese.”
I lit another cigarette, smoked a little of it before I spoke again. “You never promised me anything,” I said. “You’ve always told me I was wasting my time. That’s been my choice. This doesn’t change anything, unless you want it to.”
“No.” She leaned forward. “That’s what I’m saying. I don’t want it to.”
“Then it won’t.”
She smiled, that glowing smile. I smiled too, the best smile I had, and looked away.
We didn’t speak again until Kay came over carrying dinner. I poured ketchup on my burger, ordered another beer.
Lydia stuck her fork into her salad, pulled out a spinach leaf, did something elegant with her fork and knife that left the leaf folded small. “Well,” she said, “should we talk about the case?”
“What case is that?” I asked, working my way around my burger.
“It’s a homicide case. Up in the Bronx.”
“Did you find out who did it?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Damn.”
“But I found out something that might be interesting. That is, I’m sure it’s interesting. I just don’t know what it means.”
“Right now I’ll take meaningless, as long as it’s interesting.”
She grinned. “I was hoping you’d feel that way.” Our eyes met, just for a second. I pulled mine away to look around for Kay, or anything.
Lydia’s look may have become a little unsure, or maybe I was just wishing it would. She went on in a normal voice. “Well, it’s a real estate thing. I’m only just beginning to dig into it, and I don’t really understand this stuff. I had to call my brother Ted’s friend the realtor and have him explain it to me, what it could mean. And of course it could mean nothing.”
“Uh-huh.” I poured more ketchup onto my plate, dipped the edge of the burger in it. “Except your hunches rarely mean nothing.”
“I just never tell you about the ones that don’t work out.” She chased some chick peas around her bowl. “Well, anyway. Remember I told you Helping Hands owns nine properties in the Bronx? There seems to be a pattern to what happens when they buy one.”
“You mean to how they build, or renovate?”
“No, to what happens before that. First of all, they’ve never bought a property from an individual. It’s always a holding corporation. And the thing is, these corporations are all owned by other corporations. I’ve found fourteen of them so far. Nine of them own one property each, and the other five own those.”
“Which makes it really hard to trace who’s behind them.”
“Well, yes.” She grinned. “But not impossible.”
“Oh, goody.”
“There were some names I didn’t recognize on the ones I’ve been able to trace, which isn’t all of them yet,” she said. “And one I did. That guy you told me to add to the list. Andy Hill.”
“Oh,” I said slowly. I finished my beer, waited for everything to fall into place. Nothing did.
“Okay,” I said. “Andy Hill sets up corporations, buys properties, and sells them to Helping Hands. Does he sell them for huge inflated prices or something?”
“No. They’re sold for more than he paid for them, but not more than you might expect as a normal profit.”
“That doesn’t sound illegal. It also doesn’t sound like something you can get rich from.”
“I said I didn’t understand it. But there’s a little more. The corporations—never the same ones as sold a particular property, but others of them—in seven of the nine cases they own properties in the immediate vicinity of the one that was sold to Helping Hands.”
“Andy Hill is buying up the Bronx?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“God. Why would you do that?”
“To make a fortune?”
“How?”
She didn’t answer. I didn’t expect her to.
Kay brought my second beer. I knew it wouldn’t help the soft confusion in my mind, but probably nothing would. I took a sip.
“How about you?” Lydia said. “Did you find out anything interesting today?”
“I did. I found out all sorts of interesting things, and I don’t know what they mean either.”
“Tell me,” she said. So I did.
I worked my way through last night, Howe’s body, Robinson, Lindfors. I told her what Ida Goldstein had told me, what Sheila Downey had said as we sat on her porch with the wind chimes tinkling in the October breeze. I told her about the money and my note that came and went in Howe’s locker. I bit an onion ring, crisp and salty, and told Lydia about getting X-rayed at Samaritan Hospital. At that part concern clouded her face.
“I didn’t realize you were that badly hurt.”
“I wasn’t. I’ve had broken ribs. These aren’t even close.”
“Then why did the doctor send you? Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I don’t know. And yes. And another thing. Have you ever been to an emergency room?”
“No. Why? Do you think it’s an experience I shouldn’t miss?”
“Definitely right up your alley. The standard thing is to wait four or five hours, unless you’re actually bleeding, sometimes even then. Where I was was the Diagnostic Clinic, not the emergency room, but it’s the same X-ray department. I was in and out in under an hour. There was an old couple waiting when I came in; they were still waiting when I left.”
“Maybe they’re not real busy at that hospital.”
“Maybe not. They’re not all that close to the Bronx Home, either. There are two bigger hospitals closer.”
“Hmmm.”
“Right.” I went on with my report, gave her a quick account of my meeting with the Cobras.
“God,” she said, when I was through. “It sounds like you’re lucky you came out in one piece.”
“In one piece,” I said, “and not a damn bit smarter than when I went in.”
“Well.” She pulled a set of files from the leather bag beside her. “I can fill you in on some of those guys, anyway. Maybe that will help.” She sorted through the folders. “We owe Mary a big one for this, by the way.”
Mary Kee was a childhood friend of Lydia’s, now a Fifth Precinct detective. I had my own sources, people I’d have gone to in the NYPD to ask a favor like this, but when Lydia and I are working different ends of a case we keep out of each other’s way.
“Tell her I appreciate it.”
“Actually, I think she did it mostly for Mr. Moran. Because he used to be a cop. They get like that, cops. Like family.”
I finished off my second beer. Lydia opened a file.
“This Anthony LeMoyne, a.k.a. Snake. He’s quite a guy.” She scanned a striped computer printout. “A sealed youth record, then robbery, robbery, assault, burglary, assault, controlled substance, grant theft auto—you get the idea. Lots of arrests, but not a lot of convictions. A few months here and there, no serious time. His friend Skeletor’s pretty much the same. I have some others here, people the Youth Gang Task Force identifies as Cobras.”
“You have a sheet on Martin Carter?”
“Your friend? The one you were with?” Her tone was surprised.
“They call him the Rev.”
“Who does?”
“The Cobras. And the cops.”
She searched my face briefly, then glanced down at her printout. “He’s here, but not current.”
“Retired?”
“Uh-huh. Former member. Someone to keep an eye on, but not active with the crew. In his case, with good reason.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s on parole. Two years more. Being seen with some of these guys is enough to get him sent back to finish his time upstate.”
My mind went back to Carter’s jumpiness at meeting Snake in the schoolyard. He’d broken parole because I’d asked him to.
“What’d he do?”
“The conviction is second-degree manslaughter. He served eighteen months, and he’s been out a little over a year. You want me to look into it?”
“Yes.”
“Bill, he’s a friend of yours.”
“I know.” I lit a cigarette, leaned back in the booth. A sudden exhaustion overcame me, as though a plug had been pulled and all my substance drained out, leaving me empty, and cold.
Lydia gestured at the files. “Do you want to go over the rest of this now?”
“I don’t think I can. I’m falling asleep. Leave them with me, okay?”
“Okay. You want me to just keep on with this tomorrow?”
I thought. It got me nowhere. “I’ll call you in the morning. I have a feeling I had a good idea, something for you to do, but I’ll be damned if I know what it was. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
She laughed. “You have to be kidding. You expect me to get into a car with you? I’ve been thinking I’d have to take you upstairs.”
A wise-guy come-on sprang to mind, the kind of thing I’d have said to Lydia any other time, had said many other times. I waved Kay over, told her to put our meal on my tab. Lydia handed me the gathered-up files and we went out together through Shorty’s etched-glass doors.
The night air was crisp, not really cold, but I shivered a little in it as Lydia and I walked silently to Hudson Street. I waited while she got a cab, kissed her before she got in, and turned away, back toward my place, before the cab drove off. The night air, I thought, smelled gently of freesia, but I knew that wasn’t true.
TWENTY-TWO
I slept until ten, awoke groggy and disoriented. Coffee helped, and so did a shower and a shave and clean clothes that were mine, not a uniform. I read through Lydia’s files, learned not much I saw any use for, but you never know. I made a call from a number Information gave me; then I called Lydia.
“Hi,” she said. “Feeling better?”
“Much. How about you?”
“I wasn’t feeling bad.”
“Be grateful.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“Don’t tell your mother that. She’ll have a fit.”
“She wouldn’t believe me. What are you going to do?”
“About your mother not believing you? That’s your problem.”
“About the case. The homicide? Up in the Bronx?”
“Oh,” I said. “That. Don’t you think the day will come when your mother might need a nursing home?”
“Not as long as my brothers have wives. And Chinese don’t—Oh,” she said. “Oh, oh, oh. Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to look into it. She doesn’t like Elliot’s wife anyway.”
“Good. I’ll call you later.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked again.
“I’m going to see a man about a truck.”
Triple-A Trucking—“Anything, Anywhere, Anytime”—was packed in behind lots of chain-link fence in the part of the Bronx where Gun Hill Road passes under the IRT. Graffiti glowed from every surface in the neighborhood: the bars, the auto-parts store, the cuchifritos place, and the steel columns holding up the subway tracks. And from Triple-A’s concrete-block garage, the razor wire topping the chain-link notwithstanding.
The gate in the fence was open wide. A yellow truck with its logo obliterated by spray paint had to stop backing out for me to drive in. Its red-faced driver leaned out his window, cursed me as I passed. He rumbled out, and so did his truck.
There was nothing organized about the Triple-A yard, cars and trucks and cargo sprawled in cramped disarray inside the chain-link borders. I settled for a place alongside the garage, about as far out of the way as I was likely to get.
Hunched next to the garage, as though it were trying to get out of the way too, was a trailer. A couple of guys in the yard watched me head toward it, but no one stopped work or showed a lot of interest. Maybe I was boring, now that I was shaved and clean. Maybe I was always boring.
I climbed three concrete steps, pulled open the trailer door. Right inside, a thin, rouged, blond woman sat at a desk piled high with a mess of phone messages and ledger books. Behind her a jowly, balding man sat at a bigger desk piled just as high with bulging manila envelopes and yellow pads and five-part multicolor bills of lading. Every remaining inch of the trailer was stuffed with mismatched file cabinets, some with their drawers half open. Files and phone books and a brown philodendron littered the cabinets’ tops.
The clack of the woman’s typewriter, which I’d heard from the yard, stopped as I walked in. The air was scented with cigars living and dead, and with the lethally sweet output of a pink air-freshener that clung desperately to a window waiting for a chance to escape.
“Yeah?” The heavy man pushed the word out around a thick green cigar. Oh, yeah. The woman smiled a slightly mischievous smile. I liked that, so I smiled back.
“I’m Smith,” I said to the man. “I called. You’re Burcynski?”
He grunted, “Yeah.” That must have been all he could say around the cigar, because he took it out then, rolled it between fingers that looked amazingly like it. “Two-day rental, right?”
“That’s what I said,” I told him. “I lied.”
“Huh?” He stuck the cigar in his mouth again, tongued it around. The woman’s eyes twinkled. Maybe I wasn’t boring after all.
“I wanted to make sure you’d talk to me. I didn’t want to risk your being suddenly called out of town when I got here.”
He took the cigar out again, looked at me. “I got my suitcases packed.”
“You won’t need them.” I leaned against a file cabinet. “Mind if I smoke?”
The woman laughed out loud.
I lit a cigarette, dropped the match in an ashtray where it had lots of company. “I’m a private investigator. A friend of mine got himself killed and I’m working the case. I have some questions for you. Outside the answers to them I don’t care what you do, with which or to whom. I’m blind, I’m stupid, and I have a short memory.”
Burcynski poked the cigar in my direction. He and the cigar considered me. “How do I know that’s true?”
“Just look at me.”
He snorted through thick lips. “Okay. We’ll do this. You ask. Maybe I’ll answer.”
“What happened to Leon Vega?”
Burcynski picked something off his tongue. “Some punks beat the shit out of him over by the Concourse a few weeks ago. I bet you knew that.”
“Uh-huh. I hear it was because you weren’t paying the road-use tax.”
“Listen,” he said. “In the first place, it wasn’t me. Leon’s an independent operator with a long-term lease. Second, no one ever sent a bill.”
“No one told you about the Cobras?”
“No one told me it was my fucking job. ’Scuse me, Leon’s fucking job. I pay protection over here to some other bunch of limp-dicks. Leon must’ve figured the receiver was paying over there. Matter of fact, when I called up that liaison guy, that’s what he told me.”
“What liaison guy? He told you what?”
Burcynski’s cigar, sulking at the lack of attention, had gone out. He coaxed it back to life. “The Borough President’s guy. Hill, his name is.”
“What do you mean, liaison?”
“Borough President’s Community Liaison. What the hell do you think that means?”
“I don’t know.”
“He helps you do business in the Bronx.”
“Including paying off the Cobras?”
“Including whatever.”
“And he told you the receiver was already paying? The Bronx Home?”
“Nah.” The word came out around the cigar again and the cigar puffed happily. “I told him that’s how I thought it was, and he said what did he know but it sounded right to him.”
“Then what?”
“I told him the message on the bill was, ‘Night’s extra.’ He said he didn’t know they got night deliveries over there, but he’d look into it.”
“Did he?”
Shrug from Burcynski, nothing from the cigar.
“What is it they deliver over there at night?”
Burcynski contemplated the cigar as though asking its advice. “Damned if I know. Ask Leon.”
“He’s still in a coma. I can’t talk to him.”
“That’s too bad.”
“So what happened?”
“So I started paying.”
“With Vega out of commission? Business must be profitable.”
“Leon’s business. His cousin’s driving for him now. I’m floating them the money. As a favor. I got absolutely no idea what business they’re in. Now,” he knocked the ash off the cigar into a waste-basket boiling over with papers, “beat it. I got a train to catch. I been called out of town.”
