Kockroach (19 page)

“Where can I find him?” I says.

The barkeep snorts. “Where do you think you find winos like that?”

It didn’t take long. I had picked up a new line of work in Chicago. It was all part of that strange feeling I had that I
wanted to lend a hand to those what needed it. Not as a charity, that wasn’t my way, but in a manner what fit my talents and proclivities and could earn me an almost honest dime. I had done such a job detecting that thing between the Boss and J. Jackie Moonstone, I thought maybe I could actually make a go of the detection racket. So I stripped some leaves off my wad from Uncle Rufus and rented an office, set up a phone, hired a dame with attitude to answer it, and just like that I had my new line.

Mickey Pimelia, P.I., licensed and all.

Fallon wasn’t hard to find for a licensed gumshoe. He was holed up in a sad sagging flophouse on the Bowery, a fleabag called the Sunshine. I bought him a sandwich, what kind didn’t matter, he probably couldn’t taste the difference no more, and a jug of rotgut wine, anything harder he wouldn’t be able to stomach, and Champ and me, we walked past the suspicious eyes of the night clerk and climbed the hotel’s stairs to pay our respects.

The stench was enough to stagger you, piss and puke and crap like it was rubbed along the walls, the rot of ages. Cockroaches climbed the banisters and clung to the ceiling.

“Go away,” was the response to our banging from the other side of the door.

“I’m looking for Fallon,” I said, “Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice.”

Pause. “He’s dead.”

“I’m an old friend.”

“He doesn’t have any.”

“I got some food and some wine for him.”

“Keep it,” says the voice, but then we hears the sag of bedsprings and the shuffle of feet and the door it opens.

“Mite,” says Nick Fallon when he gets a good look at me out of his rheumy eyes. “You look like dick.”

“But you, Lieutenant, you’re the goddamn queen of England.”

He glances at Champ, back at me, raises his eyebrows, takes the wine out of my hand.

“You don’t wants the sandwich?” I says.

“What do you take me for?” he says.

Think of a balloon, all pumped up and proud, its belly sticking out with the authority of the inflated, that was Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice, when I knew him when. He was inflated by his position, by his arrogance, by his secret ambition to out-Broderick Johnny Broderick and become a legend hisself. But then the air leaks out as it always leaks out until the balloon is only a ghost of what it was. That was Fallon now, in his ragged suit pants, his filthy undershirt, the sockers with his toes sticking out. He had aged a quarter of a century in the eight years I was away, disheveled hair white beneath the grease, bristly gray beard, skin a haggard sack of wrinkly white rubber hanging off his bones. A deflating balloon with only the final desperate hope that if it drinks enough it will shrink all the way to nothing.

“Oh, Mite, it was something it was, when that warehouse blew into the sky.” We weren’t so much in a room as in a closet, with only a bed, a locker, and one bare bulb hanging through a chicken-wire ceiling. Fallon was lying on his side
on the stinking mattress, gay almost under the influence of the wine, half-empty bottle in his hand, cackling at the grand old times when the Square it was his oyster waiting to be slurped and swallowed. “You should have seen it.”

“I seen it all right.”

“It lit up the night sky like a second sun.”

“I said I seen it.”

“The greatest piece of crime fighting ever to hit this town. Wiping out four crime organizations at once. Front page of every tabloid. ‘Fallon’s War,’ they called it. But it wasn’t just mine, was it, Mite? Have a drink with me.”

“No thanks.”

“Old times.”

“Get that out of my face.”

“Afraid of my little germs?”

“Your germs they the size of small dogs. I can hear them barking.”

He smiles, takes another long pull of the wine.

“You find all the bodies?” I ask.

“Most.”

“You find Blatta’s?”

“I said most.”

“But not Blatta’s?”

Fallon shrugs. “Gone. Disappeared. Poof. Maybe incinerated, maybe not, who knows? Who could know? Except it wasn’t just his body that disappeared.”

“Talk to me.”

“Where’d you go off to anyways?”

“Fiji.”

“Fiji, huh? That where you found Queequeg over there?”

“Watch your mouth.”

“Don’t be sore, Mite. I just see you found your game after all.”

“Talk to me about Blatta.”

“Sure, Mite. Don’t be so touchy. Was a time you’d eat any crap I’d serve.”

“It’s a new day, palsy.”

“You don’t need to tell me. When the Square was still my territory, I kept a file on every hood whose name I even heard whispered. Had a file on you inches thick and a file on your boy Blatta too. There wasn’t much there, no one talked about him, it was mostly rumor and a stray piece from a snitch here or a whore there. He was more like a ghost than anything else, with the way you were protecting him. Some in the department even thought he was someone you made up on your own to project some authority. But I had seen him coming out of that hotel of his, heading to his car, I knew he wasn’t a ghost. And then, after my victory, he disappeared like the rest of them. No body, but no Blatta either. Case closed, right? File sent to storage and life moves on.

“So one day I’m out of the territory, me and a dame are celebrating, a real special dame, a high-priced hooker doing a pal a favor, which was why I was where I was. This is three or four years after, understand. I’m on the Upper East Side, strange place the Upper East Side, and I was heading down to the El Morocco, and I see this big brown limo slip up the street. The driver has an eye patch and he looks familiar and that’s what draws my attention first. And then I notice the
back window is open and there’s a face looking at me and I’m looking back and son of a bitch if it’s not who I think it is.”

“Who?”

“Blatta.”

“Go on.”

“So the next day what I do is send a request to the dead-file room, the morgue, to pull his file and word comes back there isn’t a file. How can that be? I made it myself. I send a request to the morgue for yours, since you two were so tight, and yours isn’t there either. So I pull the whole Abagados file, the whole thing. My desk is covered with paper, and I go through it page by page, the first time anyone’s looked at it since it all went down, but it wasn’t the first time anyone’s looked at it since it all went down. See, someone else had combed through it with a razor blade and every mention of Blatta or you had been sliced out so neat you wouldn’t have known it had ever been there unless you were the guy that put it there in the first place, understand? Far as the department knew, you and Blatta, the two of you never existed.”

“Who could do something like that?”

“Someone with the pull of an elephant. It takes pull to get hold of a file from the morgue and take it to a place where you got time to razor it clean. The same kind of pull it takes to haul my ass before the Police Corruption Commission, to get six witnesses to testify to everything I ever done which was hunky and not dory, and then to strip me of my rank, my job, my pension, my life. That kind of pull. Which is how I ended up here, in this lovely abode. Sure you don’t want a drink?”

“Revenge for what you did at the warehouse.”

“No,” said Fallon. “You’re not getting it, are you? I didn’t end up on Bowery Row because of what I did at the warehouse. I ended up here because I happened to glimpse a face in a window.”

“Jesus.”

“And if he could do that to me, Mite, for just glimpsing his face, imagine what fun he’s going to have with you.”

Yonkers in the twilight.

Sounds like a swing-band ballad, don’t it?
Yonkers in the twilight, dancing cheek to cheek
. What’s the matter, missy, you don’t like my chops? As if Louis Armstrong’s got a voice of velvet.

We was parked on a hill, Central Avenue down to our left, the Bronx River down to our right, and we was waiting. In front of us sat a lovely white house with a picket fence. Cooney’s old house. My old house, except it wasn’t really my old house, first because it wasn’t really never my house since I never lived there, and second it wasn’t my old house, like in something that had passed away long ago, because my name, imagine that, was still on the deed. A life estate, the clerk said, which meant it was mine until I died. But I hadn’t paid no taxes on it, had I? And yet the taxes they was paid. And I hadn’t been up on the ladder painting that siding, had I? Yet the house it was still all nice and white.

“So who paid them taxes?” I asks the property clerk, a tenner slipped along with the question to grease the wheels of information.

“The reversionary party,” he says.

“What the hell does that mean?” I asks.

“The party to whom the property reverts after the death of this Mickey Pimelia listed on the deed.”

“And who might that be?” I asks.

“Mickey Pimelia? Never heard of him.”

“No, the other thing, the reverberating party.”

“Reversionary party. It looks like a corporation.”

“Go ahead, holding it in is bad for the kidneys.”

“Something called Brownside Enterprises,” he says. “In the city. With an address in the Empire State Building.”

Can you smell him, missy? Can you? I could, like I was a bloodhound. I was on his trail, I was getting closer, and the blood scent it was coursing through me like a drug. It was only a matter of time afore the Boss and me we was finally, after all these years, once again face to face.

“What are we doing here, Mick?” asked Champ.

“Just want to see who’s been living in my house.”

“I mean in this city, this state. Didn’t you hear what that wino said? He wasn’t jiving us, Mick. This Blatta of yours, he ruined that cop just for catching his face. Can’t imagine what he’s going to do with you once you track him down.”

“He’s going to give me a hug and wrap a mink round my shoulders.”

“Don’t you start getting all biblical on me, Mick. Had enough preaching when I was a boy to know life doesn’t work out like the stories. Lazarus isn’t rising, and those we betray, they don’t give us minks.”

“You singing the blues, Champ?”

“Who has the right if I don’t, Mick, tell me that. Who the hell more than me has the right?”

I first met Champ in an uptown Chicago joint when I was looking for some muscle in the new line I was trying. I asked him to tag along to some West Side motel one night and he came in mighty handy when the mark didn’t like me taking that flash picture of him and his secretary tied all in knots. The mark, he lunged, but afore he could get his mitts on the camera, Champ grabbed him by the neck so tight the mark’s yard near popped. Then I knew, Champ, he was just what I needed. See, most gumshoes carried a gun, but I never thought guns made much sense. You bring out a cannon and someone’s liable to start shooting. I had firsthand experience where that ended, with me on a roof watching the world go mushroom. Hell with that. Champ, he kept things clamped down cool. One look at Champ and even the most pissed-off Joes, they settled into reason.

After that first night, Champ he was by my side whenever I stepped into the night to do any detecting and I was in his corner in the dusty prairie arenas where his title dreams falled and rised and falled again. In Champ I suppose I had found more of the muscle on which I relied account of my size. My fate was ever my fate, by my lonesome I was not near enough, and it was the same in the Midwest as it was in the East, excepting with Champ it was different. First off, with Champ I was in charge, it was my name painted on the door. My name, my license, my line. I was the one making the decisions for once and I liked that, I liked that fine.

And second off, well, yeah it was different all right. It
wasn’t like the hard pure thing I felt for Celia. And it wasn’t like the desperate empty thing I felt with Hubert, which I got to tell you was a hell of a relief. What with my Uncle Rufus’s generosity and the day-to-day details of being a shamus, I just didn’t have the time for Hubert no more. No big breakup, like I would expect, just a sort of drifting apart. Funny how love fades, ain’t it? And then with Champ, I felt something I hadn’t felt before, which finally sent old Hubert packing. It was a little late to be discovering that meat and kidneys had their place, don’t you think, but better late than never.

So things was jake, with Uncle Rufus’s money and with Champ by my side, things was oh so jake. I had no reason to want to leave Chicago, no reason to heed the faint calls I was hearing from the past. Until, in the middle of a case, I found a kid with a strange welt on his arm and I looked at it closer and it was a burn, perfectly round like the tip of a cheap ten-cent cigar. Champ took care of the cigar smoker, worked him like the heavy bag hanging from the ceiling of the gym, whilst I stood back and watched it all with a satisfaction that was more personal than ever it should have been. But the cigar smoker turned out to be a cop, and the other cops they didn’t want to hear about no burns on some skinny waif ’s arm. So that was it, goodbye Chicago.

“Ever feel, Champ,” I said as twilight in Yonkers descended into evening in Yonkers, “like someone’s watching over you?”

“Over my shoulder, sure. The cops, waiting for one wrong move to bust me proper.”

“Well, someone’s been watching over me. You know that money I keep getting from my dead Uncle Rufus?”

“Good old Uncle Rufus.”

“I gots the suspicion, Champ, that he ain’t dead and he ain’t my uncle and his name it ain’t Rufus.”

“Whoa, Mick, looky there. Is that who we’re waiting on?”

I leans forward in the Packard. There are two figures heading down the sidewalk, hand in hand. I can’t see their faces, just their silhouettes, heading down the sidewalk and then turning up the little stone path that led to Cooney’s house. One is a child, a boy, stocky and thick, his arm raised up to hold the hand of the other. And the other, well the other there was no doubtsky aboutsky. It was that walk, who could ever mistake that walk.