False Allegations (4 page)

But the freaks are always easy. Real easy. I sell them promises. And it’s not just their money I collect.

Oh, I do other stings too. I work as a mercenary recruiter, do S&M and B&D intros, traffic in credit cards, move counterfeit— only bearer bonds and certificates, never cash. And I sell guns.

And if I get paid, I find things out. Sometimes, I find kids. Mostly, I find what’s left of them.

So I guess I’m an investigator. But I don’t have a license. I don’t have an address. I don’t even have a name. I gave all that up, whatever it was. I live in a loft building, on a small piece of the top floor that doesn’t appear on the building charts. The landlord knows I’m there. I know things about him too. I don’t pay rent.

I don’t have a phone, just a line connected to the trust–fund hippies who don’t know they have an upstairs neighbor. I can make calls— real early in the morning while they’re still sleeping off last night’s soft dope and stupid music— but nobody can call me there. Anyone who wants me, there’s a number to call. It rings over in Brooklyn, gets bounced a couple of times until it ends up at the last pay phone in the bank of three on the back wall next to Mama’s kitchen. She takes messages.

Mama gets my mail too. Over at one of her joints in Jersey. A driver picks it up every couple of weeks, drops it at the warehouse where Max lives with his woman Immaculata and their little girl. He has his dojo upstairs, but he doesn’t teach anymore.

Unless you’re stupid enough to try him in the street. And nobody ever comes back for a second lesson.

I own a small junk yard in the Bronx, but I’m not on the papers. The guy who’s listed as the owner, he pays me a salary, like I work there. Pays Juan Rodriguez, actually. That’s me, the name I use. Juan pays taxes, all that stuff. Even has a Social Security number. IRS wants to know how I survive, I got a story for them.

I live small. I have no real expenses. I can go a long time between scores. And I have. But I never put away enough to retire.

Mama came from the same place as the Prof. Different parts of the world, maybe, but the same place. That’s why she raised her eyebrows when I said I wasn’t working. Arguing with her was like waiting for Congress to vote itself a pay cut, so I told her I was going to check out some stuff and took off.

I
found a pay phone in the street. The air had a sharp edge of cold coming on, but the sun was strong and I didn’t mind standing out there for a while. I ran through the loops, looking for the Prof. Came up empty. What the hell, I decided to roll down to Boot’s, see if he had any new Judy Henske tapes.

“Boot” is short for bootlegger. That’s what he does, mostly from live performances, but he also steals from archives, vacuums off the radio, whatever. I heard he found a way to slip a recorder into the Library of Congress— I don’t know if that part’s true.

He runs a shop in the basement of a narrow building in the West Village, a couple of blocks off Houston. Boot deals only in cassette tapes: no 45s, no CDs, no 8–tracks. Whatever you want, he’ll find it and put it on tape, but that’s the whole deal. You can order a mix from him too, but he won’t label it or break it down. Only way to crack the code is bring it back to him and play it on one of his machines. Then he’ll tell you whatever you want to know. That’s how I found a sweet, controlled harp version of “Trouble in Mind” by Big Walter Horton. And a different, much rougher take on Paul Butterfield’s trademark “Born in Chicago.” Not a studio edition, you could tell Mike Bloomfield wasn’t there that night. Boot doesn’t do Top 40, and he thinks rap should be against the law. But he’s got the biggest collection of blues and doo–wop on the planet, so he pulls a wide crowd— anytime you visit his joint, you can find Army Surplus side–by–side with Armani.

There’s no headphones— everything sounds like it was coming out of a radio speaker in the fifties.

I hit the long shot. The Prof was there, standing on a milk crate, treating a half–dozen guys and one Swedish–looking girl in floor–to–ceiling black to one of his lectures, holding forth like he used to do on the prison yard. He acknowledged me with a quick, sharp movement of his head. I got the message— he was having fun, not working.

“Hey Boot!” he yelled. “Here’s Schoolboy. You know what my man wants, right?”

“I got a new one,” Boot said, looking out from under the green eyeshade he always wears. “Live. From Dupree’s, in San Diego. Not even a month old.”

“How many cuts?” I asked him.

“A full cylinder,” he said. “Six beauties. Clear like you was right there too.”

“Boot,” the Prof put in, a teasing tone to his rich voice, “you get many calls for that Henske broad?”

“Yeah, we get
lotsa
calls,” Boot said, jumping to my defense. “She got many fans, man, all over the world. They call her Magic Judy. That’s why it’s only a half for the tape.”

“Half” was half a yard, fifty bucks. The usual tariff for one of Boot’s tapes was a hundred— you got a discount if the artist was popular enough to justify him running off a decent number of copies. I handed over the money, declining the offer to listen to it first. I knew Boot’s stuff was always perfect. Besides, I only listen to Judy when I’m alone— what we’ve got, it’s just between me and her.

“Do you have a No Smoking section?” a guy in a denim shirt asked, frowning at the Prof lighting up.

“Yeah,” Boot told him. “It’s right out front. Under the lamppost.”

I
stayed there a couple of hours, just listening. To the music and to the Prof getting it on with anyone who wanted to try him. Nice to be in a place where you could play the dozens without it ending up in blood.

A young guy with a Jewish Afro and granny glasses got into it about who was the strongest bass in all doo–wop. “Herman?” the Prof mocked. “Man, Herman didn’t have no bottom. Herman’s bass was Mosley’s
falsetto
, chump!”

The music took over. The Mystics blending on “You’re Driving Me Crazy,” Son Seals wailing his pain about the loss of his spot–labor job, the Coasters with Doc Pomus’ immortal “Young Blood,” a crew calling themselves the Magic Touch doing all
a capella
stuff from the fifties, a nice soft blend. Charley Musselwhite’s “Early in the Morning,” Ronnie Hawkins and the Nighthawks with “Mary Lou,” Koko B. Taylor, Marcia Ball, Elmore James, Janis, Big Mama…

Boot didn’t just hold yesterday’s treasures, he carried tomorrow’s crop too. A back–country hard–edged band with a lead singer who knew all about pain pounded over the speakers. “That’s Paw,” a busty young woman in a white T–shirt with “DON’T! BUY! THAI!” blazed across the front in red letters said to me. “Mark Hennessy’s singing. Don’t you think he’s amazing? That’s where I got this shirt— at one of his concerts.”

I nodded my head in agreement with whatever the hell she was saying, watching her chest hyper–pneumatize the “DON’T! BUY! THAI!” message every time she took a breath. Somebody called her name and she turned in that direction. On the back of her T–shirt, in the same red letters, it said “ASK ME WHY!” I was planning to do just that when a ska–blues singer I didn’t recognize came on, singing about someone named Ghost, a Badger Game man tracking a woman he called Shella. “Who’s that?” I asked Boot.

“Kid named Bazza,” Boot said. Works with a crew called the Portland Robins. “I pirated it off Miss Roberta’s show in Seattle. Pretty fine, huh?”

“Sure is,” I said, handing over some cash— the only way you vote in Boot’s country.

“If he’s any good, he’ll be on the charts,” a black guy in a khaki jumpsuit and a blue cut–down fez said. “Sooner or later, cream comes to the top.”

The guy with the Jewish Afro lunged forward, but the Prof arm–barred him, saying, “Let me have this one, brother,” like they’d both been challenged to a bar–fight. “Boot!” the little man commanded in a tone a maestro would use to his orchestra, “put on Number One.”

Boot was too reverent to interrupt the Fascinators’ version of “Chapel Bells.” He waited until the last chord vibrated, then hit some switches and threw the place into silence. He rifled through his shelves, found the tape the Prof wanted, and slammed it into a slot.

“Give me some silence now, people,” the Prof commanded.

A high–tension guitar opened it— just a few perfect, fluid notes. A soft, throbbing sax line came up underneath, a tenor with a baritone counterpoint. Then Little Richard walked on. But he wasn’t playing this time— no shrieking and shouting: he stood on the Vegas–gospel borderland, a deep blues taproot anchoring him to the ground. Richard used the girl singers’ background vocals like a trampoline, peacocking his way through his whole catalog: a pure–sweet lusty tenor, climbing the scale at will, comfortable inside himself only because he had no limits. The recipe was a rich gumbo: chain gang chants, church hallelujah, the gunfighter bars where nothing lasts long. He capped the upper–octave waves with his stylized hiccups, surrounding a talking centerpiece of blood poetry woven around sax riffs and that masterful muted guitar, driving off the black girls’ storefront–choir voices, lifted by the organ. Sad enough to make you cry. Beautiful enough to do the same thing.

Ah, maybe the lunatic was right— maybe Elvis
did
steal it all from him.

The last sounds faded to the stone silence of abject worship. Nobody in that room had ever heard better.

“Now who was that, Solly?” the Prof asked the guy with the Jewish Afro, setting up his pitch.

“Little Richard,” the guy answered, like he was in school. “I Don’t Know What You Got.”

“He was alive in Sixty–five, Lord!” the Prof intoned. “Open the door. Tell me more. Who’s that on guitar.”

“Jimi Hendrix,” the young guy said. “Sixteen years old. Before he— “

“It was a big hit?” the Prof asked, setting up his speech.

“No, not really. Made the Top Twenty on the Rhythm and Blues chart, but…”

The Prof turned to his audience. “You all just heard it. The best song ever done. And never made it to Number One. Even if you escape with your life, the shark always leaves his mark. Case fucking closed.”

We all bowed our heads, even the black guy in the fez.

“W
here’s Clarence?” I asked the Prof. We were standing on the curb outside of Boot’s joint— the Prof high–fiving a goodbye to Solly, me waiting patiently so I could talk to him alone.

“He’ll be along,” the Prof said. “What’s on your mind, ‘home?”

“Weird stuff. A girl. Client, I was told. She made a pitch, but I don’t— “

“Danger stranger?” the Prof interrupted.

“That’s just it,” I said. “I don’t know. And I don’t know if it’s worth a look to find out.”

“Run it,” the little man said, lighting a smoke.

T
he Prof listened close the way he always does. The way he taught me to. It only took a few minutes.

“Schoolboy, you know how some fighters, they just wave the right hand at you? Like they loading up, gonna drop the hammer? And all the time it’s the left hook that’s coming, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Some of them, the real good ones, it’s the
right
hand that’s coming. They one step ahead of where you
think
they gonna be, understand? Sugar Ray— I mean the
real
Sugar Ray now— he could do that, double–fake quicker’n a snake. Bite you twice as deep too.”

“So you mean…”

“Yeah. Whoever’s in it— and no way it’s just the broad— they got to be smarter than they showing. They got to figure you gonna come looking for answers.”

“Only place I can go is back to this Bondi girl.”

“The ho’ don’t know, bro. And a trick can’t play it slick.”

“Then who?”

“This accountant, right? Michelle’s pal?”

“He doesn’t know anything about me, Prof.”

“You believe that, you might just be as big a chump as that broad’s playing you for. You scan the plan, you know he’s the man. It don’t play no other way.”

M
ichelle was a vision as she walked purposefully past the stanchion with the tasteful lettering saying: ALL VISITORS MUST BE ANNOUNCED. The uniformed guy sitting behind a counter had been watching a propped–up little TV, but he snapped to attention when he heard the click of Michelle’s spike heels across the black–and–white tiles. And one look at Michelle was all that he needed— he was skewered. Michelle doesn’t do that swing–the–whole–thing, pelvis–out model’s walk— she moves like the sorceress she is, with that muted tick–tock that tells you the motor’s heavy on horsepower but not every key fits the ignition. I was a step behind, standing just to her right, but far as the uniformed guy was concerned, I wasn’t in the lobby at all.

“Can I help you?” he asked her hopefully, his eyes wobbling between Michelle’s perfect face and her slashed–silk pink blouse with its little white Peter Pan collar.

“I know you can, honey,” she purred at him, red–lacquered talons splayed on the countertop, big azure eyes holding his. Just in case he decided to look anywhere else, she took a deep breath, let it out in a faint shudder.