Dirty Words - страница 3

"Convince me with a number," I said.

"Five grand," Johnnie said, hopefully.

"Six." I tried to keep my feet from fidgeting in my shoes. Jail gives me the heebie-jeebies. Probably because something deep inside told me that I would end up in one eventually.

"Why six?"

"Jeannie Giammarino told me to remind you that you owe her a grand off the last Klitchko fight."

"What, she think I was gonna welsh?" Johnnie puffed his chest out in a pose of dignified disbelief.

"The fight was in January. She's been waiting five months."

"I was getting the money together."

"Yeah. And the check's in the mail." He spoke to me as if I didn't know him and his history. The nickname "scumbag" wasn't put on people known for their high standards of integrity.

Johnnie didn't like my attitude. "Then maybe you should help me because I know what you really do, T.C." He flashed a smirk that I wanted to peel off with a lemon zester.

I let his words hang for a bit. I felt a smile play across my own mouth. "You threatening me, Johnnie?" My words were ice. My look was colder.

Johnnie quickly reconsidered his tactic. "No, no T.C., I…I mean…I know you can help me." Beads of sweat popped out on his face. "That little bastard Tino's setting me up."

I sucked in my upper lip. "Tino's girlfriend is dead. Seems to me like a damned stupid way to be setting you up."

"The guy gets robbed, see? He lives on Sullivan Street, for chrissakes. There's a junkie every ten feet since they got shoo-flyed out of Washington Square. He tells the cops it was me and here I am."

Truth was, despite everything else that made him a piece of shit, Johnnie was no killer.

Fuck it. I needed income.

"Give me the names."

The deal.

Tino, one of the last people in the Tri-State area who had any faith in Johnnie, let him stay with him a bit while he was "between apartments." I'd be more likely to believe that if Johnnie ever had an address for more than a couple months at a time. He'd attach himself like a tick to someone until they wizened up and changed their locks. Problem was, Johnnie's few possessions were still in Tino's after his keys stopped working. Up to that point, everyone else had returned Johnnie's stuff if only to guarantee his absence from their lives. Tino thought differently. Johnnie was going to pay him back all of the money he owed or else his stuff would hit the furnace. Then Tino comes home one night to find his girlfriend Nina dead on the floor, the apartment robbed down to the hardwood.

Nina was four months pregnant.

Johnnie claimed that he'd been playing poker in Williamsburg the whole night. Problem was, the game was illegal and nobody wanted to admit having been there. Even if they were, fewer were willing to step up to the plate for Johnnie Scumbag.

My first stop was Paulie D's Barbershop. It was a nice day, so I took the L train into Brooklyn and walked up Metropolitan to Paulie's.

A tin bell tinkled as I walked in. "How's things Paulie?"

Paulie didn't bother looking up. He was busy sweeping up a mess of curly blonde hair off the floor. Paulie looked like a shaved ferret, only slightly taller. A shaved ferret with a horrible personality. In the dingy back room of the dingier barbershop, he ran illegal poker games on weekends for the gambling junkies who didn't want to bother getting a bus to Atlantic City.

Paulie just grunted at me. The fresh hair told me that somebody new was in the neighborhood. Anybody who'd lived there more than a week knew that the barbershop was a front and wouldn't trust Paulie to shear a sheep, much less cut their hair-not unless they wanted to look like Patti LaBelle after she'd stuck her head in a thresher. Most people of reasonable intelligence just had to look at the magazine rack to figure it out. His most recent copy of Sports Illustrated featured Johnnie Bench on the cover.

"Hey Paulie, was Johnnie Scumbag at poker on Saturday?"

"Polka? I don't know nothin' about no Polack dancing."

I could see I was going to be on the receiving end of Paulie's legendary talent for playing dumb. "The poker game. P-O-K-E-R."