“Have you considered taking a long vacation?” I asked Eli, proposing another solution. “It seems, given the circumstances, that might be your best course of action.”
“He can't,” Manuel answered before Eli could. “He's got these courses that won't come around again till next spring. He'd be wasting a whole year if he did that.”
“That's better than losing a couple of fingers.”
Manuel held out his right hand and regarded it “You know, I knew this guy once who was born with his thumb and his pinky and that was all. Actually, he got along okay.”
Eli took a step toward him. “Fuck you, man. Just fuck you.”
Manuel took a step back. “Hey. I was just trying to make you feel better.”
“Well, don't.”
Manuel shrugged. “S-ORRY ”
“Okay.” Eli addressed me. “I'll go if I have to. But I'm hoping it won't come down to that.”
Pickles, the store cat, jumped up on the counter and meowed for her dinner.
“Will you help me?” Eli repeated as I poured some cat food into her dish and set it on the floor. “Please.” His voice quavered. “I'm beggin' you here.”
Of course I said yes. I said yes because I'm a sucker for stray animals and people who do things they know they shouldn't. It's a major weakness of mine. What's worse, Manuel knows it. I remember thinking, as I caught a glint of satisfaction in his eyes, that he'd probably told Eli to feed me this particular line.
“Thanks, man.” Eli clasped my hands with both of his. Then he gave me the envelope. “If you get me out of this, I swear I'll never do anything like this again. Ever.”
He probably even believed what he was saying. I know I did when I was his age.
I arranged to meet Eli in his apartment after work. I'd just finished writing down the address when Manuel asked to speak to me in the back room. “It'll just take a second,” he promised his cousin.
“So,” he said when we'd walked through the door, Manuel holding it open for me, an action that made me wonder what he was going to hit me up for. “I've been thinking about the twelve hundred dollars Eli is paying you.”
I corrected him. “May be paying me.”
“I figure you could, like, maybe, see your way clear to giving me three hundred of it. You know, like a finder's fee. You don't have to pay it all now,” he said quickly. “Half would be good. You can give me the rest of it later.”
I snorted. “This is what you dragged me back here for? Try getting a job, Manuel. You might find the experience useful.”
“But I do have a job,” he protested, putting his arm around my shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “I'm your agent.”
I moved away. “If you ever went back to school and put the same energy into studying that you do into hustling you'd do very well.”
“I really need the money.”
“For what?”
Manuel looked at the floor. “Gambling debt.”
“I told you, I'm broke.”
“Please, Robin,” Manuel cried. “I'm going to get hurt if I don't pay up.”
“It looks as if you and Eli should get together.”
Manuel put his hands on his hips. “You don't believe me, do you?” he demanded, reading the expression on my face.
“Not one word. Now get out of here before I change my mind about Eli.”
Manuel stomped out of my office. A minute later, I heard the front door slam. The truth was, I did have some money. I was just tired of lending it to him and never getting it back. I went out front and slipped the envelope with Eli's money into my backpack. Then I lit a cigarette and studied the notes I'd taken. There weren't many of them. Four words to be exact.
But that wasn't what worried me.
What worried me was that Manuel hadn't been able to locate Nestor.
If he couldn't, with all his contacts, I wondered how on earth I would be able to.
Chapter 3
O
ne good thing about visiting Eli: It was convenient. His flat was located on Westcott Street, which was a little over a mile from my house. In fact, after the original Noah's Ark had burned down, I'd toyed with the idea of relocating the store there. I could walk to work, the mix of residential, student housing, and small businesses was appealing, and, more importantly, there wasn't another pet store for eight miles around. Unfortunately, at the time I'd been looking there hadn't been any space available. Now there were lots of spaces, but even if I could get out of my lease, which I was pretty certain I couldn't, I wasn't sure I would want to move here.
The intervening years hadn't been kind to the area. My favorite bar had closed, as had a bookstore, a supermarket, a hardware store, a restaurant, and a writers' cooperative. Despite all attempts to rent the spaces, they remained empty, their windows gathering layers of posters, a visible testament to a lack of faith in the area.
Other signs of erosion were apparent. Welfare families were coming in, owners were going out. For Sale signs were sprouting like mushrooms on a wet fall day. Every community group in the area had a plan. None of them were working. Which was too bad. Not only did I like Westcott, but on a strictly selfish level, if the street went down, so would the value of my house, which was close enough to be vulnerable.
It was ten in the evening by the time I arrived at 226. A group of kids who, by the looks of them, should have been home in bed by now, were hanging out in front of the convenience store across the way. The bass from the rap music they were playing crept into my car and seeped into my brain as I pulled alongside the curb. I cranked up the radio and blasted them with the 1812 Overture. Zsa Zsa whimpered. I apologized to her, turned the radio back down, and opened the carton of Chinese takeout I'd bought on my way across town.
The streetlamp glare made the orange beef look like something you'd get at a school cafeteria. Not that it mattered. Zsa Zsa and I were both so hungry we would have eaten anything short of pickled cow dung at the moment. As I chewed, I contemplated the trees and the unkempt hedges surrounding the house Eli was living in. Now, with the leaves off the trees, the house was visible, but by summer it would be enveloped in a canopy of green, invisible to a passerby on the street.
The outside front light was on. It cast a dim, yellowish wash on the small, square porch. The more I studied the place the more familiar it seemed. And then, suddenly, I realized why. I'd visited the house a long time ago. My husband Murphy and I had looked at it when we'd moved up from New York City. We'd seen it at the end of a long, tiring day.
The house had been a pleasant, unremarkable, three-bedroom Colonial, owned, if I remembered correctly, by a retired high school teacher who was planning on relocating to Florida. Murphy had liked it. I hadn't. Even though the price had been right and the screen of greenery had been a plus, I'd seen the lack of a garage and the steps leading up to the house as two big negatives.
The steps were too steep, and the idea of having to trudge up and down them all the time, not to mention the amount of shoveling and salting you'd have to do to keep them clear, was less than inviting. I remember saying to the real-estate agent that if I was going to buy a house, at least I wanted one that was convenient. I also remember Murphy telling me I was a fucking idiot, storming out the door, and driving off, leaving me with an embarrassed real-estate agent who had looked everywhere but at me, while launching into a monologue about her cat's medical problems. It had been what they call in film circles a defining moment.
I licked the glop from the orange beef off my fingers. But, of course, I hadn't known that then. Who ever does except in hindsight? If I had, I would have gone back to the city. Instead, I'd stayed. After all, Murphy and I were starting a new life together. I sighed. That fantasy hadn't lasted too long. Four months to be exact. I wondered when the house had been converted? Probably awhile ago. Even when we were looking, the neighborhood had been changing from owner-owned to rental properties.
I opened the car door. Zsa Zsa jumped out. I followed. As I locked up, I caught a stirring of interest coming from the group of kids across the street. They leaned closer together, exchanging words, while their eyes raked me over, methodical, coolly, scanning for weaknesses. I turned, faced them full on, and stared them down. They returned the favor. Then the moment passed and I climbed the stairs. They were steep. A mat of leaves, leaves that should have been raked up in the fall and hadn't been, covered them.
In the intervening months, they'd been tramped down to a wet, sodden, slippery mass. The hand rail that had been installed to prevent falls had rusted out and was now lying across a patch of dead ivy. I'd been right about the steps after all, I thought pettily as I rang the bell. It was a good place to take a fall. Eli opened the door. Zsa Zsa raced in ahead of me. I followed. The house smelled of cheap beer and pine room freshener. He'd changed clothes since the afternoon. His paint-splattered jeans and a tight T-shirt underscored his soft belly.
Manuel emerged from the living room. He was carrying a CD jewel case by a well known rapper.
“Well,” I told him as I surveyed him for cuts and bruises. “It looks as if you've been able to escape injury so far.”
Manuel bristled. “No thanks to you.” He spun the case around between his fingers. “I've been staying off the streets.”
Eli hurriedly changed the topic. “I just hope Nestor hasn't gone home.”
“Where's home?” I asked.
“Down in the city.”
I rested my backpack on the floor and rubbed my shoulder. I really had to take some stuff out of it or I was going to start walking with a permanent slant. “The city's a big place. Do you think you could narrow the location down a bit?”
Eli flushed. “Nestor's family lives down in Chinatown.” He shifted his weight from his left to his right foot while he thought. “Or is it Flushing? I'll check. I've got it written down.”
“He's Chinese?”
The surprise must have showed in my voice because Eli asked me why it mattered.
“It doesn't. Nestor doesn't seem like a Chinese name is all.”
“Eli doesn't seem Spanish,” he observed.
“Except,” I told him, “your name is Elazaro.”
“Well, maybe his name is something else, too,” Eli pointed out. Then he went to get the address. Zsa Zsa trotted behind him. As she ran, tiny fragments of the leaves that had become stuck to the fur on her hind legs dislodged and drifted to the floor.
I hung my jacket up in the closet and looked around. The place was different than I remembered it being, but then, given the remodeling, it would have to be. The hallway was gone. The living room flowed into a dining alcove, which in turn led into a narrow galley of a kitchen.
I moved further in. Some waiting rooms I've been in have had more furniture than this place did. A large-screen TV took up one corner of the sparsely furnished living room, a tattered brown-and-green tweed sofa took up the other. Magazines, old newspapers, and piles of clothes lay on the beige carpet next to the sofa. Two white urn-shaped lamps sat on the floor. Batik tapestries hung on all four walls. A small bridge table and four folding metal chairs formed the sum of the dining alcove furnishings. It was piled high with books and papers.
“Nestor isn't big on furniture,” Eli observed when he returned a moment later. He was holding a piece of yellow paper in his hand. “Between school and work I'm never here anyway, so I don't care. I wasn't going to buy anything. I got all I need already. I'm not wasting my money on stuff like coffee tables when I gotta be putting it away for tuition.”
Manuel mimed, grabbing on to his love handles. “Or the gym;”
Eli patted his belly. It jiggled a little under his caress. “The way I see it, there ain't nothin' wrong with having some meat on your bones. I figure a woman would rather see a man with some money in his pocket and extra pounds around his middle than a skinny loser with nothing.”
Manuel stuck his neck out. “No, Mr. Pillsbury Dough Boy, what they like is someone who knows the moves.”
“The moves to the Public Safety Building?”
“That is enough,” I growled before Manuel could reply. I pointed to the piece of paper Eli was holding. “May I have the address.”
Eli handed it to me. I glanced down. Nestor's family resided on Canal Street. Probably in one of those old, six-story walkups. Well, I sure hoped he was still in Syracuse, because unless I spoke Chinese I'd have as much chance of finding him down there as I would finding a lump of coal on a dark night. Even if I did speak the language, nobody there would tell me anything anyway. They didn't take kindly to outsiders.
“We called,” Manuel added. “But there was no listing.”
I wasn't surprised. “Do you know if he's first generation Chinese-American?” I said, thinking gangs. There were a number down in Chinatown, mostly kids from Hong Kong looking for action.
“Nestor was born over here, if that's what you mean,” Eli answered. “But from the couple of things he said, I don't think his parents were.”
“How about his girlfriend? You have a residence for her?”
“Yeah, we know where Adelina lives,” Manuel said, giving the address to me. I wrote it down on the back of one of my business cards. “But nobody there will speak to you. Her momma run us off when we tried.”
“What did you say to her?”
“Nothing.” Manuel pointed to his head and twirled his finger in a circle. “She's just crazy.”
“Manuel ...”
“We didn't say anything.” Manuel repeated indignantly, his voice rising. “We just asked her where her daughter was and she threatened to shoot us.”
“Was she speaking literally or metaphorically?”
Manuel gave me a blank look.
“Did she have a gun?”
“Not that I seen. I think she was just talkin'.”
“Maybe I'll have better luck. How about his friends? Can I have their names?”
Eli hunched up his shoulders and blinked. “I don't know who they are. Well,” he continued in the face of my skepticism, “he always went out.”
“Where did he go?”
From the expression on Eli's face I could have been asking him to translate the Old Testament into Latin. “He didn't tell me.”
“And you never asked?”
“No. Why should I? I'm not his mother.”
“You two had to talk about something.”
Eli fidgeted. “We talked about stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” I asked while I moved my head in a circle, trying to work the crick in the back of my neck out. It didn't help. Unfortunately, what would helpâa shot of Scotch and one of George's back rubsâwas still a ways off.
“Stuff stuff. Who called. Who's gonna go out and get some more milk. That kind of thing,” Eli said. “Mostly we weren't home at the same time, and when we were, I was studying and he was watching TV.”
Manuel bent over and scratched Zsa Zsa behind her ears. “You ask me, the less you talk to that guy the better off you are. Wait until you see his room. He's got some seriously weird shit in it.”
“Weird as in how?”
He straightened up. “Weird as in seriously disturbed. I mean, I wouldn't live with that kind of crap. It would creep me out.” He turned to Eli. “I don't know how you can.”
“It's not like he was dancing around with it while I was trying to eat breakfast,” Eli snapped. “Anyway, I liked the guy. Okay? At least he liked to read. He always had something interesting to say.”
Before Manuel could reply, I gave him a little shove. “Come on. It's late. I want to get this done and get out of here.” I'd told George I'd meet him at his house by eleven-thirty, the latest.
We passed by Eli's room on the way to Nestor's. It was too small for the amount of furniture in it. The room must have measured nine by twelve at the most. Into it, Eli had managed to shoehorn his bed, a nightstand, a dresser, a computer table, and the five aquariums holding his lizards and snakes. A bookcase leaned against the wall opposite the doorway. Its three shelves overflowed with books and papers. The top, in contrast, was empty except for a number of carved wooden animals of the kind they sell in places like Haiti and Brazil to tourists off the cruise ships.
I pointed to a wooden tortoise. “Where did that come from?”
“Madagascar. My mother gave it to me.”
“And that?” I indicated a Japanese doll dressed in a kimono.
Eli gave an embarrassed little laugh. “That's from her, too. Every time she and my pops go somewhere, they send me something.”
“They must lead an interesting life.”
“I guess some people would say so. But me, I prefer being in one spot. You ready to see Nestor's room?”
I nodded. It was the last door in the corridor. Manuel clicked on the light as we went inside. “Is this what you were talking about?” I asked him, indicating the black walls and ceiling. A poster of every parent's nightmare, Marilyn Manson, was taped over the bed.
“Fuck, no.”
We took another step in. The place was a shambles. The dresser drawers were open. Clothes were strewn everywhere. The bedcovers and the pillows were on the floor.
I looked around. “Did you guys do this?” I asked. The place exuded a faint, but unmistakable odor of weed and incense. The smell brought back pleasant memories of rainy Saturday afternoons spent with friends.
Eli flushed. “I guess we should have been a little neater.”