A Cool Breeze on the Underground (7 page)

“Somewhere around here,” Scott said, pointing toward the lower third of the first page.

“Good. Now was it the name of an agency, or just a couple of girls?”

“Just girls.”

“Good.”

Good, not great. But it was progress. Something to work from.

Scott sank back in his chair and let out a long sigh. He was an exhausted kid. He looked at Neal and smiled.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” he said.

Neal went for the brass ring.

“Hey, Scott. Did you take any pictures of these girls?”

Neal watched the kid’s spine stiffen.

“You mean dirty pictures?”

“No, I mean you tell your friends what you did and they say ‘Bullshit,’ and you whip out a couple of Polaroids of the girls.”

Scott looked him right in the eye and told him the God’s honest truth.

“No way.”

“Just a thought. When’s your test?”

“First period.”

Neal whipped through a few of the big themes in the old Scottish play, discoursed on how many times the word man was used, and for extra credit threw in a few notes on the uses of color in the imagery. Then he sent Scott on his way and phoned Joe Graham.

Neal was at scott’s school bright and early, first period. The kid’s dorm-room door was a breeze, one of those spring-bolt locks that yodel, “Come on in, pardner.”

The room was your typical boys’ school hovel with a sort of dirty laundry Cristo effect. Neal found Scott’s desk and went straight to the top right drawer, the locked one. It was a little less friendly than the door lock, but opened up after a little persuasion.

The usual collection of bullshit was in there. A bunch of letters from a girl named Marsha, another bunch from a Debbie. Lots of pictures: Marsha or Debbie with Scott on a beach; Marsha or Debbie with Scott at a dance; just Marsha or Debbie on a boat; just Scott on the boat, taken by Marsha or Debbie; Marsha or Debbie posed romantically under a willow tree. Neal didn’t see any of Marsha and Debbie pounding the crap out of Scott. He leafed through a couple of
Penthouse
magazines, a passport, and a brochure on Brown University before he came to a thin packet of pictures secured by a rubber band. Bingo. Scott and a friend with arms around two girls who were neither Marsha nor Debbie—in a hotel room. Hello, Ginger. Greetings, Yvonne.

Neal took the best picture and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He locked the desk drawer and walked out of the room, whistling a happy tune, wondering how Scott was doing in class.

Joe Graham, listening from the stairway, heard the whistling and left by a side door.

They met in the parking lot of the post office. Neal slid into the passenger seat of Graham’s car.

“So what do you have so important I have to come to Connecticut to hold your hand for?”

“I have Allie hooked up to a dealer, name unknown, naturally, who has friends in the ‘love for rent’ business. I have two working girls, names unknown, naturally, but narrowed down to about twelve phone numbers, who know the aforementioned dealer. I have skit.”

“You’re doing okay.”

“Yeah, right. Do you want to lay the odds on our finding Allie Chase in London?”

“About the same as Jackie O peeling my banana at Lincoln Center.”

Neal laid the photo on the dashboard.

“Visual aids, very nice,” Graham said.

“I’ve been thinking about something.”

“Hard to believe.”

“Allie Chase ran before.”

“So?”

“Twice to New York.”

Graham pretended to study the picture.

“If I’d have picked her up, I would have told you about it,” he said.

“So you didn’t, and I didn’t, and—”

“There’s nothing about it in the file.”

“At least not in the file we’ve seen.”

Graham perused the picture some more. “Nice-looking girls.”

“What’s going on, Dad?”

“Son, I don’t know.”

I hope you don’t, Dad. Goddamn, I hope you don’t.

6

A few weeks and a few jobs after Neal had started working for Graham, he answered a knock on the door, to find the gremlin standing there, his arms full of packages and a brand-new mop and broom clutched in one hand.

“What’s this?” Neal asked.

“I’m fine, thank you. How are you? Your mother home?”

“Not lately.”

Graham brushed him aside and stepped in.

“You live in a toilet. A toilet.”

“It’s the maid’s year off.”

Graham swept off some garbage from the kitchen counter and set the packages down. “We’re going to fix that.”

“You buy me this stuff?”

“No, you bought you this stuff. I took it out of your pay for the last job.”

“You better be kidding me, man.”

“This,” said Graham with an appropriate flourish, “is a mop. You use it to clean floors.”

“Just give me the money.”

“This is a broom. You also use it to clean floors,” Graham said, looking around, “although maybe I should have brought some dynamite.”

That morning, Neal discovered that Graham was a first-class neatnik, a psychopathic cleaner of the highest order. Out of the bags came sponges, dishrags, dish towels, Brillo pads, bug spray, disinfectant, lemon oil, Windex, paper towels, detergent, Comet cleanser (“The best, don’t let anybody kid you.”), toilet-bowl cleaner, and a package of bright yellow rubber gloves.

“I like things to be neat and clean,” Graham explained, “at work, and at home.”

They cleaned. They crammed months of accumulated trash into plastic garbage bags and carried it downstairs. Then they swept—like your mother never did. (“The broom’s not going to get everything, you see, so you have to get down on your hands and knees with this brush, and use the dustpan.”) Then they mopped, with Graham showing Neal not only the correct ratio of cleanser to water but also the proper way to swing the mop “so you’re not just shoving the dirt around.” This was followed by scrubbing, waxing, polishing, disinfecting, and scraping until Neal Carey was tired, irritable, aching, sore, and living in an immaculate apartment.

“And how long you think it’s gonna stay this way once my mother gets home?” Neal demanded.

“You keep it this way. Another thing, you eat like shit.”

“I eat okay.”

“Candy bars, Sugar Pops—”

“I like candy bars and Sugar Pops.”

“There’s another bag in the hall. Get it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Neal returned with the bag and asked, “What is all this stuff?”

Graham removed the contents. “A frying pan, a pot, a pot holder, two plates, two forks, two spoons, two knives, one can opener—”

“I got a can opener.”

“A spatula, eggs, bread, butter, Dinty Moore beef stew, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of grape jelly, some spaghetti … these things are called vegetables, you will learn to like them—”

“No way.”

“Or I will break your face. I will bring more next week. Every Thursday, we are going to have a cooking lesson.”

“You’re talking ‘we,’ you better bring a friend.”

“Or you’re fired. You think you’re the only underage, undersized sneak thief in New York?”

“Not the only, just the best.”

“Then you had better get yourself some pride, kid. Because you live like an animal. Your mother doesn’t take care of you, so you’d better learn to take care of yourself. Or you can’t work for me.”

He worked. And learned. Easy stuff at first, like tailing someone from a distance; how to keep an eye on the guy without looking as if he was looking.

“First thing you look at are the shoes, Neal, the shoes,” Graham told him during one of the many sidewalk lectures. “Two reasons. One, you can always spot him in a crowd. Two, the guy turns around and spots you, you’re looking down, not right into his baby blues.”

They practiced that for a week, Neal following Graham down Broadway, on the subway, on the bus, down crowded streets, down nearly empty ones. One day tailing Graham east on Fifty-seventh, Neal was concentrating so hard on Graham’s shoes, he bumped right into his back.

“Now, why did that happen?” Graham asked him.

“I dunno.”

“Good answer. Exactly. You don’t know. The pace, Neal, you have to watch the pace. Everybody has a different stride—long, short, slow, fast…. I shortened my steps. I kept walking just as fast, but I shortened my stride. I took smaller steps. I made you bump into me. The first block or so you’re tailing, measure the guy’s step against the cracks in the sidewalk. What is it? Step, step and a half to each crack? Count it off. Is it slow or fast? It’s like music, so sing to yourself if you have to. Keep time.

“Another good reason to match his step is he can’t hear you so easy. A guy who knows how to shake a tail is going to listen as well as look. He’ll hear the difference in walking sounds, and if he hears one sound too long, he’ll know he’s pulling a caboose. So it’s like you imagine he’s got paint on his shoes, and you walk in his footprints.”

So they spent a week with Neal following Graham and matching his pace and his stride. Graham would take the kid along crowded streets and then suddenly down empty ones, where the boy’s every footfall would echo in his own ears.

“You’re tailing an amateur, it doesn’t matter, Neal. Save your energy and just stay out of sight. But a pro, it’s like it’s a habit with him, to mix up his walk slow and fast and slow again…. He’s going to play Simon Says: Take one giant step, one baby step.” They went at it again. A solid month of tailing. After the first week, Graham knew that Neal was the most talented prospect he had ever seen—fast, canny, and the lucky owner of a set of looks that was quite literally unremarkable. Graham worked him hard, leading him on chases down the shopper’s paradise of Fifth Avenue, where every store window offered a reflection, onto subway trains, into coffee shops, movie theaters, and men’s rooms, through the parks and the alleys. At first, the kid was always easy to detect or to shake, but after a short time, Graham found himself working hard to lose the little bastard, and then hard even to see him.

“Find the blind spot,” Graham told the kid, “and stay in it for as long as you can.”

“What’s the blind spot?”

“The blind spot … the alley … the slipstream; a spot behind the guy where he just doesn’t see you. Usually, it’s behind him, slightly to his left side, about fifteen feet back. But it depends, you know, on his height and build. That’s why it’s good you’re a little shit, because it gives you a bigger blind spot to stay in.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Like when you’re following somebody, and you get into the rhythm, and then you feel like you’re invisible, like the guy can’t see you.”

So they practiced finding that spot, picking a stranger at random out of a crowd and following him. Neal got good at it, real good, and Graham marveled at the kid’s ability to fade back into a crowd, to disappear momentarily, and then reappear instantly back on the track. And a shadow made more noise than Neal Carey.

“Use the crowd,” Graham lectured. “Horizontal, too, not just vertical, because you can get beside your guy if you use the crowd right. Like try to find a woman with real big ones, and get beside her. Then when your guy turns around, he’s not even going to see you, he’s too busy checking out her Daisy Maes.”

Soon neal graduated to trickier stuff.

“Today,” Graham announced one time, “you’re going to follow me from the front.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s why it’s so beautiful. No one is going to be looking for a tail in front of him.” Graham showed him, crossing the street and then crossing back in front of a guy they picked at random. Graham used store windows and the mirrors of parked cars to follow his man, not missing a beat when the man turned into a bookstore off Fifty-seventh.

Neal tried and failed miserably, losing his mark after five minutes.

“Because you didn’t listen, Neal. Remember what I told you: Every step is different. Do the soles of his shoes slap the sidewalk? Do they click? If it’s a woman wearing high heels, that’s a different sound. Maybe the mark’s wearing sneakers.”

Back at it. Until “Front Following” became automatic. Then they moved on to “The East Side—West Side,” where the tail stays on the opposite side of the street. (“Why does the chicken cross the road?” Graham asked. “So the chicken he’s following doesn’t make him.”)

Then they went to the two-man stuff: relays, pass-offs, front and back doors, peekaboos (“Peekaboo. I see you. You see me. But you don’t see him.”), and the ever-tricky “Fake Burn,” in which you let the mark give you his best move and “lose” you, while your unseen partner stays on the mark’s relaxed ass.

Neal loved the “Fake Burn,” loved it with an intensity that inspired him to create his own variation: “The Solo Fake Burn,” known in the Carey household as “Neal’s Very Own Special Fake Burn.”

“You can’t have a one-man Fake Burn,’ ” Graham replied with disgust when Neal announced his invention. “The whole point is that you have two men.”

“Not necessarily,” replied Neal with a degree of preadolescent self-satisfaction that might have aggravated a man more sensitive than Graham.

“Okay,” Graham said, “I’m going to walk out this door and be back in two hours, and I want you to tell me where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.”

Graham polished off his beer and headed out into the street. He made Neal about twelve seconds later, because the dumb little bastard was wearing red socks that could have given Ray Charles a headache. Graham made a mental note to correct the kid on that, and settled into the not unpleasant task of teaching him a lesson. He crossed Broadway against the light but stopped in the island, noticing with pride that Neal hadn’t jumped after him. Then he crossed the rest of the street and ducked down the IRT entrance on the uptown side of Seventy-ninth, bought a token, and walked back up the downtown side. Sure enough, Ol’ Red Socks was still with him. So he stopped at a newsstand, looked at a paper, reached into his pocket for a coin, changed his mind, and headed straight back at Neal, forcing him to front follow for a good fifteen minutes.

Now I’ve got him worn down, Graham thought, I’ll finish him off, and he checked to see the red socks back in a crowd at the cross-town bus stop. He got into the line to board the bus, and used the bus’s side mirror to see the red socks get into line about five old ladies back. When it came his turn to get on board, he stepped past the door and leaned against the front of the bus until he saw the red socks go up the steps.

Bye-bye, Neal, thought Graham as he stepped out across the street. See you later.

Graham ambled along the sidewalk, looking back to see whether maybe, just maybe, the kid had hung tough. But no red socks, no Neal, lesson administered. “The Solo Fake Burn” indeed.

An hour and a half later, Neal entered McKeegan’s to find Graham occupying his usual spot at the bar.

“You got your hair cut and had a BLT at The American. The bread was soggy. Next time, tell ’em take it easy on the mayo.”

Graham reached down and pulled up the boy’s pant leg. Plain old white socks.

“Reversible,” said Neal. “The key to The Solo Fake Burn’ is to make one man into two men. The first man had red socks. The second man didn’t. The rear doors of buses also help.”

“Neal Carey could follow you into the can and hand you the toilet paper,” a proud Graham told Ed Levine, “and you wouldn’t know he was there.”

Other subjects emerged, such as Photography 101. (“It
is
very hard,” Graham lectured, “to get the guy’s face and pecker in the same shot. But try, because if you just get the pecker, the guy will deny it’s his. Unless it’s humongous.”) Or Dirty Fighting. (“The basics of hand-to-hand combat, Neal, are simple. Forget this karate shit, like Levine goes in for. Just pick up something hard and heavy that’s not your pecker and hit the guy with it. And don’t always try to break his jaw, like on
Rawhide.
There’s time for that when he’s unconscious. Hit him in the knee, or across the shins. The elbow is always nice.”)

And thus the education of Neal Carey continued.

Neal‘s mother was home.

She looked like shit. Her eyes resembled blue marbles after a hard day’s play on the sidewalk. Greasy brown hair hung uncombed over her face, and her skin had the life and luster of chalk. She looked just like herself.

She was happy to see Neal. “Baby,” she said. “Baby, you look good. Mama’s missed you.”

“So where you been?” asked Neal, crossing over to the couch, where she sat slumped, to give her a peck on the cheek.

“Around and about, around and around.”

Neal heard soft sounds behind the closed bathroom door.

“Your pimp here?”

“He’s not my pimp, baby,” she said. “He’s my manager. Momma’s a little sick, baby, but she’s gonna be better soon.”

“Why don’t you stay this time? Get off that shit. I’ll help you.”

“Now isn’t that a touching scene?”

Neal turned toward the voice, to see Marco come through the door. The pimp wore a white linen suit and a sky blue shirt open at the collar. A single gold chain hung from his neck. His full black hair was greased and combed straight back. He was solid without seeming heavy. He held a syringe in his right hand.

“You’re Neal, right? Johnny, say hello to Neal.”

“Hello, Neal.”

Johnny was huge. He had both fat and muscle. You could land planes on his flattop. Make pancakes on his open palms.

Neal didn’t answer. He watched as his mother stretched out her arm. Johnny took off his belt and wrapped it around the woman’s arm until a vein stood out clearly. Marco squeezed the syringe until the tiniest drop glistened on the edge of the needle.

“Don’t do that,” Neal said.

“Quiet, Neal. The doctor is working.”

“I said don’t do that.”

“Yeah, and we all heard you. Now shut up.”

Neal slipped his hand into his right back pocket and pulled out a metal shoehorn. He slid the curl over his index finger and felt the cool metal settle firmly into his palm, the wide edge sticking out.

He waited for Marco to bend over to his mother’s arms and then he burst across the room. Lifting his arm over his head, he slammed the hard metal edge down right between the pimp’s eyes. Marco dropped to his knees as the blood pumped from his shattered nose onto the formerly white suit.