I shook my head. ‘That was a joke from when … Sammy and I went to the Newport Folk Festival when we were teenagers and he fell in love with Spider John Koerner. So when we got back to Brooklyn, he made everyone call him Spider Cohen for about six weeks until he fell in love with Bob Dylan, at which point all bets were off.’

  ‘Good story, but my point is: where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He’s a material witness at the very least, you have to tell me where he is.’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ I insisted, and silently thanked my mother for not telling me where she was sending Sammy.

  ‘Well, find him, Mr Fancy Detective. And when you’re not doing that, figure out who poisoned Emory Taylor. And how. And why.’

  I downed my drink. ‘Anything else? Want me to take a crack at a unified field theory?’

  She sat back and snarled. ‘Look at you, knowing science stuff. But no, just fetch me the real perpetrator, and make it snappy.’

  She slapped down a check on the bar top in front of me. Right next to my empty glass.

  ‘This hires you as my legally authorized operative. I registered you as my investigator. I know you have a P.I. license in Florida; I fixed the paperwork for the State of New York. It’s not entirely legit until all the paperwork is done, but it gets you working, like, now. Tonight. Also, here’s your New York City card.’

  I stared at the card. ‘I was thinking of going back to Florida tomorrow.’

  She slid off the bar stool. ‘If you’ve found the killer by then, be my guest. Otherwise …’

  She grabbed her briefcase and her coat.

  ‘I don’t have to do this, you know,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she agreed, ‘but you’ll do it anyway. Because you’re a good guy.’

  I didn’t want to argue with her, even though that wasn’t true.

  What I couldn’t figure out was why she hadn’t brought up my outstanding warrant. Because if she’d checked up on me enough to talk to Betty, she’d also run me through the system enough to find it. I didn’t want that over my head.

  ‘Ms Baker,’ I said just as she was about to leave, ‘you probably know I’ve got paper from a couple of years back. Isn’t that going to be kind of a problem for you in this whole business?’

  She sighed. ‘I did find an arrest warrant in Brooklyn in my search, but it was for a Fiver Moskovitz. With a k and a v. That’s not you, is it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They got your name wrong, genius. Both names, actually. The warrant is useless. Besides, it was only for stealing a car. Geez.’ And with that, she was gone.

  I couldn’t say what I looked like then, because there wasn’t a mirror anywhere around, but was almost certain that the word stupefied would have described it. Years of worrying about the long arm of the law were slowly melting away.

  Turned out there had never really been anything to worry about at all, because the brain attached to said long arm, it didn’t know how to spell.

  TWELVE

  After Ms Baker left, I availed myself of five or thirteen more gin and tonics. Gins and tonic. What’s the plural? Doesn’t matter. What mattered was figuring out my next move.

  My choices were as follows. Go back to Florida. Go to Atlanta. Go to Brooklyn. Go to bed.

  I chose option D. I went upstairs and fell on to the bed, seersucker suit and all, and dropped down a deep dark hole until the crack of dawn the next day.

  When dawn shoved its way through the hotel blinds, I tried to sit up, but it didn’t take. I rolled away from the window, but the sun was very insistent.

  I examined my suit from my prone position, and it was obvious that it needed a cleaner. Or maybe a mortician.

  So.

  Up. Shower. Shave. Shake.

  I had to shake myself a couple of times to focus. And it took all that focus to call room service and get eggs, bacon, cheese, and wheat toast, with two pots of coffee. I had to say it three times. Yes. Two pots of coffee. Good.

  And then all I could do was sit there in the very white bathrobe provided by the hotel and wait for the rescue.

  Which came eventually. Could have been ten minutes, could have been a month. No idea. The point was, there was a knock on the door. Then there was a guy. Then there were two pots of coffee and the heaven of scrambled eggs.

  I doubled what was on the ticket for a tip, and the guy stared at it for a minute before he said, ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Is there a dry-cleaner nearby?’ I asked him, pouring my first cup.

  ‘We can clean that suit here on the premises, Mr Moscowitz, if you like.’

  He was staring at what had once been my lovely seersucker suit, now in ruins on the floor.

  ‘You can?’ I sipped.

  ‘Have it back to you by early evening.’ He scooped it up.

  He was gone before I finished that first sip of coffee.

  The breakfast was every bit as invigorating as the shower had been, and by 8:30 I was dressed in my best dark blue suit and my favorite black tie, looking very much like a mortician myself. Seemed appropriate. I was going to have to do something about a corpse.

  By 9:15 I was tapping softly on my mother’s apartment door. That particular Brooklyn neighborhood was always an early riser. Plenty of people in the streets, lots of hustle to go along with the bustle.

  I could see the peephole in the door darken a split second before the door flew open.

  Shayna stood there beaming in her red bathrobe, curlers in her hair.

  My aunt Shayna had looked the same to me since I was five. She’d taken to putting henna in her hair and she always had a ginger candy in her mouth. For health reasons, she said, without any other explanation.

  ‘Hello, kiddo,’ she said. ‘I knew you couldn’t stay away.’

  Then there was a lot of hugging and face patting.

  ‘Your mother’s still asleep,’ Shayna said softly. ‘She was up all hours with a migraine.’

  ‘Oh.’ I guess I didn’t know that my mother had migraines.

  ‘Coffee?’ she offered.

  ‘Already had too much,’ I said, eyeing the hallway bathroom. ‘Be right back.’

  I went into the bathroom; Shayna went to the kitchen.

  Within moments we were sitting at the kitchen table and she was staring at her cup. She knew I was there for a reason and she was just waiting until I told her what it was.

  ‘So,’ I began, ‘there’s new information. It’s a little convoluted, but it comes down to something important. Sammy didn’t do it.’

  ‘He didn’t stab the actor?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘he did that. But I think the actor was already dead at that point. Poison.’

  She smiled. ‘Poisoned actor in a dressing room. What is this, an Agatha Christie?’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ I told her.

  ‘So why did Sammy feel the need to poke a pencil in the poor thing?’

  ‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ I said.

  She lifted her head. ‘Oh. You want me to tell you where he is. So you can ask him.’

  ‘Well, for one thing, he’s innocent so he didn’t have to abscond,’ I said. ‘And for another thing, the cops would like an answer to the question you just posed, to wit, why jab somebody who’s already dead?’

  ‘How did you find out about all this?’ she asked.

  ‘Got it from the public defender lawyer person who’s on Phoebe’s case.’

  ‘Phoebe?’

  ‘The stage manager person that Sammy’s in love with, the one who’s in jail for the crime she didn’t commit,’ I said. ‘Like we told you.’

  ‘Didn’t remember her name.’ She nodded. ‘But look, if I tell you where he is, you can’t say you don’t know where he is anymore.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I already got off the hook once by not knowing where he was, so thanks for that. But at this point, I think I have to get him back here.’

  ‘Well, you can’t just call him and get him on a plane,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have to go down there to Atlanta and get him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Where he’s staying, they got no phone. And it’s not even an address, strictly speaking. It’s very, like, sequestered. Like a monastery, this place. No phone calls, no letters, no visitors unless you know the right things to say. I mean, I thought you wanted him safe and sound.’

  ‘I did. I do. Only, now I have to get him back. So.’

  She stared back at her coffee. I could almost hear the gears in her head grinding. After what seemed like ten hours, she nodded.

  ‘Got it.’ She reached into the pocket of her robe and produced a small spiral notebook and a pencil.

  I’d seen that notebook, or others like it, a hundred times when I was young. They should all have been in some kind of safe deposit box because of all the highly prosecutable information in them. But I knew for a fact that they were in a dozen-or-so shoe boxes underneath her bed. Wrapped with a big rubber band. Half the hoodlum element in Brooklyn could probably be put away forever by what was in those boxes.

  She scribbled a few lines on a sheet and ripped it out, slid it across the tabletop in my direction.

  I looked down at it. ‘Dickson Place, off 11th, ask for Benetta McKinnon. Say that Tree is your friend.’

  Maybe that’s why her notebooks were safe where they were. Maybe everything in them was that vague.

  ‘No address?’ I asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Who’s Tree?’ I asked. ‘Is that a person?’

  ‘Tree is a well-respected member of the Atlanta Outlaws, kind of a Hell’s Angels type of organization.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to be his friend?’

  ‘Well.’ She laughed. ‘You certainly don’t want to be his enemy.’

  ‘OK, but, I mean, what if they check with Tree and he’s never heard of me?’

  ‘He has,’ she assured me.

  ‘He has?’ I stared.

  She patted my face again. ‘You don’t seem to realize that your rep is gargantuan.’

  In the first place, I never heard my aunt use the word gargantuan, and in the second place, it was about as inaccurate a description of my reputation as you could get, in my opinion.

  ‘You think that Tree has heard anything about me?’

  ‘I know he has because I let it be known that you were righteous.’ She sat back. ‘All over town. The town, in this case, being Atlanta.’

  And I knew the look on her face. It was also something I’d seen plenty of times before. It said that she had hidden depths, connections beyond connections, and influence in circles where angels feared to tread. I believed all of that.

  So I said, ‘Right, I’m on the next plane to Atlanta.’

  I stood up.

  ‘You’re not going to say hello to your mother?’ she asked me.

  I looked in the direction of my mother’s bedroom. ‘Should I? I mean, what with the migraine and all.’

  ‘I can’t tell her that you were here and didn’t pop in to see her,’ Shayna said firmly.

  I nodded and headed down the hall.

  I tapped very gently on the door. ‘Um, Mother?’

  There was a beat of silence and then a hearty, ‘Foggy?’

  I poked my head in. ‘Shayna said you had a bad headache, but I wanted to say hello anyway. Is that OK?’

  ‘OK?’ She sat up. ‘Get in here.’

  The room was dim. What little light there was came in through the closed blinds. Otherwise, it was as it had always been: neat as a pin, minimally furnished, a little stuffy, and smelling of lavender.

  She patted the bed and I sat down.

  ‘I guess you’re going back to Florida now,’ she began. ‘You came to say goodbye?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Look, Fyvush,’ she said softly, ‘maybe I wasn’t the greatest mother in the world. And maybe your father was gone too soon, and it made me too lonely to take care of you so good. And maybe you like Shayna better than me. Who could blame you? But none of that matters, really. What matters is that you’re a person. You’re a person who does good things. Helping children. I want you to know that. I want you to know that I know that.’

  I shifted on the bed. ‘I really just came in to check on your migraine. I’m coming back. Like, soon. You’re talking to me like I’m never going to see you again. But you should realize by now, you don’t get rid of me so easy, right?’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked around like she’d lost something for a second. ‘OK, then. Can you do something about these blinds? They’re closed, but it’s still too much light.’

  I stood. ‘Yeah. You have to close them going up instead of going down, it makes it darker.’

  I made the adjustment, and the room was almost black.

  ‘Oh, my God.’ She sighed. ‘That’s so much better.’

  ‘Good. So. See you in a couple of days.’

  I turned and headed out. Just as I was about to close the door behind me, I heard her say, ‘While you’re in Atlanta, you should stop by the art museum. I hear they got a Monet down there that’ll knock your socks off.’

  All I could do was laugh. I tried to do it quietly, but I’m sure she heard me.

  THIRTEEN

  I couldn’t get a flight to Atlanta until the next day, and to make matters worse, it was rough. Some kind of storm over the Carolinas. I hadn’t brought any luggage because I didn’t think I’d be in Atlanta more than a couple of hours. I’d go get Sammy, tell him the news, and we’d be right back at the airport.

  The Atlanta airport was named after a guy called William B. Hartsfield, who was the longest-serving governor in the state of Georgia. Sounded like a great honor to have a busy airport named after you, until you heard that the Atlanta Zoo also named a big gorilla Willy B after the guy. I guess politics is a rough game.

  The airport was huge and crazy. Must have taken me a half-hour to find my way out and into a cab. Then the cab ride into town was weird. Wasn’t right, somehow. I couldn’t explain it except that it was nothing like a cab in New York. The driver had no idea where Dickson Place was. He knew 11th Street, so we just drove up and down it until we hit Dickson, second time by. The sign was turned funny.

  Dickson Place was a one-block dead-end street in midtown, or more like a cul-de-sac, really. It had a median, and maybe there had been grass in it once, maybe even plants. But it was scrawny and sad that day. The whole area had probably once been nice. But it had a look of former glory. Maybe it was hippies, maybe it was white flight, but something had given the whole area an aspect of quasi-abandonment.

  Before the driver let me out, I had to pay him a ridiculous amount of money. And he wouldn’t wait; took off the second he got my cash.

  The sky was overcast, and it was humid like you wouldn’t believe. It was nearing sunset. There was no one out, no one on the street. Desolation Row. After I stood there for a while, sweating, I considered just calling out Sammy’s name until something happened.

  Just as I was about to start throwing rocks, an older woman in a quilted housecoat came out of one of the little row houses with a sack of garbage to put in the can at her curb. She was about a hundred yards away.

  I waved. She stared.

  ‘I’m looking for Benetta McKinnon,’ I called out.

  She set down her garbage. ‘Passed away.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She pointed across the street from where she lived to an up-and-down duplex.

  ‘That was her place,’ she said. ‘Top’s for rent now, bottom’s got hooligans.’

  ‘Hooligans,’ I said.

  ‘How’d you know Benetta?’ she asked.

  ‘Friend of my mother’s,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

  The woman smiled. ‘She was a cut-up in her day. A flapper.’

  ‘You knew her that long ago?’

  ‘My sister,’ the woman said, and then she started coughing. Sounded bad. She headed back indoors without another word.

  I headed for the hooligans’ door.

  There was loud music coming from the place, a song called ‘Play that Funky Music, White Boy.’ I had to bang for a while.

  When the door opened it was clear that the hooligans were, in fact, junkies. The guy who came to the door had the look. He was sweaty, losing his teeth and his hair, and didn’t care that I saw a dozen needle marks in his left arm. His T-shirt was smeared with food and his short pants were about to fall down.

  ‘What?’ That’s all he said.

  ‘My friend Tree told me to stop by.’

  He blinked. Then he turned into the darkened room. ‘Turn down the goddam music, man!’

  It took a second, but the music softened.

  ‘Say it again,’ he went on, squinting. ‘What about Tree?’

  ‘Tree told me to come here,’ I said firmly. ‘I want to visit my friend. New arrival. Upstairs from you.’

  That was a guess on my part, but I was fairly sure I’d put together Shayna’s clues appropriately.

  The guy looked me over. ‘Yeah, you’re from out of town.’

  He shook his head, hiked up his shorts, and disappeared into the room, left the door open. The DJ on the radio asked us all if we believed in miracles, and then a song called ‘You Sexy Thing’ came on. Apparently, the singer did believe.

  After a very long moment of enduring disco torture, Dr Short Pants appeared again with a key.

  ‘Don’t nobody know about this guy upstairs,’ he told me, barely above a whisper. ‘But if Tree said …’

  He handed me the key. It was a padlock key. I started to ask, but he closed the door in my face.

  The stairs were right there, so I took them. Two doors at the top, no light. One door was slightly ajar, and when I peeked in it looked like attic storage. The other door had a padlock on it. I knocked. Seemed more polite than just using the key, although if the door was padlocked from the outside, there wasn’t much chance that Sammy was there. Unless the junkies had locked him in.

  I knocked again and then put my ear to the door. Not a sound. So I used the key, popped the lock; cracked the door.

  ‘Sammy?’ I said softly.

  Nothing.

  I went in. Three rooms. I stepped into the living room. There was an antique wicker sofa with red velvet cushions and a neat old Persian rug on the hardwood floor. To the left I could see the kitchen, a white stove, and a wooden table with bentwood chairs. To the right there was a small bedroom with a wrought-iron single bed and another door which was probably the bathroom. The place was neat as a pin, and I felt the sudden presence of Benetta McKinnon appreciating the fact that someone had kept her rooms so tidy.

 

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