Lawrence Block - A Ticket To The Boneyard

"I'll find it. You said midnight? How will I know you?"

"Look for me at the bar. Long legs and auburn hair, and I'll be drinking a Rob Roy straight up." A throaty chuckle. "You could buy me a refill."

Ridge Street runs south from Houston Street seven or eight blocks east of First Avenue. It's not a good neighborhood, but then it never was. Over a century ago the narrow streets began filling up with mean tenements, thrown up in a hurry to house the mob of immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe. The buildings left a lot to be desired when they were new, and the years have not been good to them.

Many of them are gone. Stretches of the Lower East Side have seen the tenements give way to low-income housing projects, which have arguably become worse places to live than the hovels they replaced. Ridge Street, though, remained an unbroken double row of five-story tenements, with an occasional gap in the form of a rubble-strewn lot where someone had torn down a building after someone else had burned it out.

My cab dropped me at the corner of Ridge and Houston a few minutes before twelve. I stood there while the driver made a quick U-turn and looked for greener pastures. The streets were empty, and of course all of the shops on Houston were dark, and most of them shuttered, their corrugated-steel shutters black with undecipherable graffiti.

I walked south on Ridge. On the other side of the street a woman was berating a child in Spanish. A few houses further on, a trio of youths in leather jackets looked me over and evidently decided I was more trouble than I was worth.

I crossed Stanton Street. The Garden Grill, not all that hard to find if you were looking for it, was in the fourth building from the corner. A scrap of neon in an otherwise opaque window announced its name. I walked a dozen yards past it and checked to see if I was attracting any attention. I didn't seem to be.

I retraced my steps and descended a half-flight of stairs to a heavy door with steel mesh over its window. The glass itself was darkened, but through it I could see the interior of a barroom. I opened the door and walked into a real bucket of blood.

A bar ran the length of a long narrow room. There were twelve or fifteen people standing or occupying backed stools, and a few heads turned at my entrance but no one took an undue interest. A dozen tables ranged across from the bar, and perhaps half of them were occupied. The lighting was dim, and the air was thick with smoke, most of it tobacco but some of it marijuana. At one of the tables a man and woman were sharing a joint, passing it back and forth, holding it in an elaborate roach clip. They didn't look in fear of arrest, and no wonder; busting someone in here for possession of marijuana would be like handing out jaywalking summonses in the middle of a race riot.

One woman sat alone at the bar, drinking something out of a stemmed glass. Her shoulder-length hair was chestnut, and the red highlights were like bloodstains in the subdued lighting. She wore red hot pants over black mesh tights.

I went over and stood at the bar, leaving an empty stool between us. When the bartender came over I turned and caught her eye. I asked her what she was drinking.

"A Rob Roy," she said.

It was the voice I'd heard over the phone, low and throaty. I told the bartender to give her another, and ordered a Coke for myself. He brought the drinks and I took a sip of mine and made a face.

"The Coke's flat here," she said. "I should have said something."

"It doesn't matter."

"You must be Scudder."

"You didn't tell me your name."

She considered this and I took a moment to look at her. She was tall, with a broad forehead and a sharply defined widow's peak. She was wearing a short bolero jacket over a halter the same color as her hot pants. Her midriff was bare. She had a full-lipped mouth with bright red lipstick, and she had large hands with bright red polish on her nails.

She looked for all the world like a whore, and I didn't see how she could possibly be anything else. She also looked like a woman, unless you paid attention to the timbre of the voice, the size of the hands, the contour of the throat.

"You can call me Candy," she said.

"All right."

"If he finds out I called you—"

"He won't find out from me, Candy."

"Because he'd kill me. He wouldn't have to think long and hard to do it, either."

"Who else has he killed?"

She pursed her lips, blew out a soundless whistle. "I'm not saying," she said.

"All right."

"What I can do, I can take you around, show you where he's staying."

"Is he there now?"

" 'Course not. He's somewhere uptown. Man, if he was anywheres this side of Fourteenth Street, I wouldn't be here talking to you." She raised a hand to her mouth, blew on her fingernails as if they were freshly painted and she wanted to speed their drying. "I ought to get something for this," she said.

"What do you want?"

"I don't know. What's anybody always want? Money, I guess. Afterward, when you get him. Something."

"There'll be something for you, Candy."

"Money's not why I'm doing this," she said. "But you do something like this, you ought to get something for it."

"You will."

She nodded shortly, got to her feet. Her glass was still half-full, and she knocked it back and swallowed, her Adam's apple bobbing as she did so. She was a male, or at least she'd been born one.

In some parts of town a majority of the street girls are men in drag. Most of them are getting hormones, and quite a few have had silicone breast implants; like Candy, they're equipped with more impressive chests than most of their genuinely female competitors. Some have had sex-change surgery, but most of the ones on the street aren't that far along yet, and they may have hit the pavement in order to save up for their operations. For some of them, the surgery will eventually include a procedure to shave the Adam's apple. I don't think there's anything available yet to reduce the size of hands and feet, but there's probably a doctor somewhere working on it.

"Give me five minutes," she said. "Then come along to the corner of Stanton and Attorney. I'll be walking slow. Catch up with me as I get to the corner and we'll go from there."

"Where will we be going?"

"It's not but a couple blocks."

I sipped my flat Coke and gave her the head start she'd asked for. Then I picked up my change and left a buck on the bar. I went out the door, up the stairs to the street.

The cold air was bracing after the warm fug inside the Garden Grill. I took a good look around before I walked to the corner of Stanton and looked east toward Attorney. She had covered half the block already, walking in that hip-rolling stroll that's as good as a neon sign. I picked up my own pace and caught her a few yards before the corner.

She didn't look at me. "We turn here," she said, and hung a left at Attorney. It looked a lot like Ridge Street, the same crumbling tenements, the same air of unquiet desperation. Under a streetlamp, a Ford a few years old sat low on the ground, all four of its wheels removed. The streetlamp across the way was out, and so was another further down the block.

I said, "I haven't got much money with me. Under fifty dollars."

"I said you could pay me later."

"I know. But if this was a setup, there's not enough money to make it worthwhile."

She looked at me, a pained expression on her face. "You think that's what this is about? Man, I make more in a half hour than I could ever roll you for, and the men I make it from are all smiles when they give it to me."

"Whatever you say. Where are we going?"

"Next block. You'll see. Say, that picture of him? Somebody drew it, right?"

"That's right."

"Looks just like him. Got the eyes just right, too. Man, he looks at you, those eyes just go right on through you, you know what I mean?"