Christopher Smith - Running of the bulls

Marty smiled up at her. “Sweet, Linda. Really, I’ll keep it in mind. But I’m a registered private investigator, and that also gives me rights. Before you leave, there’s something you should know. That check I gave you? It isn’t signed. I gave you an unsigned check. You did just what I knew you’d do. You only looked at the amount. You never even thought to look for a signature. Too greedy. Too predictable. Too much like the old Linda. So, unless you forge my name, which I wouldn’t suggest since it’s a crime, it looks like it’s you who’s just been nailed to the wall.”

“I don’t like that woman, Marty. She’s evil. She’s no good. And it’s not because she insulted my place. She’s got a darkness in her that even I won’t go near. Why do you hang around people like that? They sour your soul.”

Marty reached in his pocket for his cell and tapped out Hines’ number at the 19th. Roberta, busy making tea for the party of five that had just stepped in, shot him a sideways glance. “And I’ll tell you something else,” she said. “My prediction is right. That woman will be dead by fifty. Just you wait and see.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk that way, Roberta. You’ve got me on the list, too.”

“But you can do something about it,” Roberta said. “You can drop the case now, before it goes any further. You could listen to me.”

“Roberta, if I listened to you, I’d be penniless. Do you realize that every time I take a new case you’re telling me I’ll be dead.”

“This time you might be.”

“Whatever happened to optimism?”

“Oh, please,” she laughed. “Are you serious? When they legalize pot, I’ll be optimistic.”

Hines answered. “Can’t talk,” he said. “Just busted the perp on another case. Son of a bitch drove stakes through his wife and kids. Thought they were vampires. Admitted to all of it. Said Stephanie Myers told him to do it. In there smiling at me, like he’d do it again if he had the chance. Call me back later.”

“Two questions,” Marty said. “That’s it.”

“Make ‘em fast.”

“Where’s Wolfhagen?”

“Not at The Plaza,” Hines said. “Checked out this afternoon. Said the place gives him the creeps.”

“Where’s he staying?”

“With his wife.”

“With his wife?” Marty said. “Then his alibi checked? He was with her last night?”

“He was at a party of hers last night,” Hines said. “A big deal that lasted until two in the morning. Thirty people can and will vouch for his presence. I talked to Carra Wolfhagen myself and she confirmed everything. She says he spent the night with her and there’s nothing I can do about that. Now, I gotta go. Call me later. You know, when you’ve got something.”

The line went dead.

Marty hung up the phone and caught Roberta’s concerned glance. She was standing beside him, slicing a lemon, adding the curving yellow wedges to the steaming pot of tea.

Slice, slice, slice.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.

But Roberta, whose face now reflected a sadness he had never seen in it before, shook her head. “No, Marty, this time it isn’t.”

Spocatti stood between the heat of two double-parked vans, looking across to the grimy brick building Maggie Cain had just entered. He was in the roughest part of the South Bronx-Hunts Point-where the haze of poverty and decay was so strong here, it clung to his clothes and cut off his breath.

He knew this neighborhood.

When he was a boy, several family members lived here. At that time, his father owned a successful restaurant in Little Italy, and so, because they had money, it was Spocatti’s family who drove here on Sundays to visit the relatives. Then, Spocatti would sit next to his father and listen to his two uncles discuss their hopes and dreams to find better jobs and move their families out of this place.

It didn’t happen. Though they wished for a better future, his uncles’ alcoholism and drug abuse prevented them from having it.

That was thirty years ago. And while this place had seen a push in the ‘80s in an effort to revitalize it, the attempt failed. Looking around, Spocatti thought it looked worse than ever, particularly after the recession.

Even now, on the cusp of sunset, transvestites and prostitutes were working the streets and street corners, drug deals were being made in backrooms, private clubs were thriving in shadowy basements-and disease was running rampant.

With the Meatpacking District now bright with boutiques and trendy restaurants, the South Bronx, in a sense, had taken its place among those areas in the city where the fringe could thrive. Were you a trucker in need of a blowjob? Come to Hunts Point. Married businessman into a bit of kink? Come to Hunts Point. The area was morphing even deeper into the corrupt underworld some craved.

Spocatti was amused to find how comfortable he was here.

He looked at his watch. Cain had been inside three minutes. Whoever had dropped her here was gone. He looked across to the two scantily clad transvestites clicking toward the building and watched them walk down the narrow cement steps. They rapped on a door he couldn’t see, screamed something above the sudden roar of music, and were let inside.

Private party.

Password protected.

He’d seen it before. The people who threw these parties gave every queen and whore working these streets a password that allowed them entrance. If business was slow, they could come to a party, perform for the guests, earn that night’s dinner. Maybe even a taste of whatever drug was circulating that day.

So, why had Maggie Cain come here?

He left his shiny metal enclave and stepped into the street. Trucks rumbled past. At the street corner, four transvestites were leaning against a black Mercedes. They tapped on its hood, shook their asses in front of the darkened windows, bent down to blow kisses, circled and posed. One of them looked up at him and smiled.

Spocatti smiled back.

The easiest way inside that building was on her arm.

She said her name was Diva Divine.

She was taller than him and black, her platinum blonde hair worn in a teased flip. The long white gloves that stretched up her emaciated arms hid the veins she’d ruined with needles, but her makeup-heavy and smeared in the moist August heat-couldn’t conceal the day’s growth of beard that shadowed her face in a dusting of black. Spocatti thought she had the exhausted, sunken look of someone who had seen every rotten thing twice-and remembered it.

He led her behind a large truck and listened as she spoke.

“You got the fiercest queen in the city, baby. Fiercest. Diva’s gonna rock your world.”

Her drag was a tight white tube dress that was fraying at the hem, stained with food, blotched with sweat. Her four-inch heels-red as her lipstick but more even in color-were badly in need of repair. She snapped her fingers above her head and swayed slightly, as if she were drunk. But she wasn’t drunk. She was coming off a high. Her eyes were the same as his brother’s had been just before the high left him-bright brown panes of glass.

He pointed to the building Maggie Cain had entered. “I need to get inside that building,” he said. “As in now. Can you do it?”

Divine fluffed her wig with long, chipped-black nails. “You got enough cash, Diva D. can take your beautiful ass anywhere you want to go.”

“How much?” he said.

“Lots.”

“Be specific.”

She sank against the truck and reached up inside her tube dress, eyelids fluttering as she scratched something he couldn’t see.

A limousine swung in front of the building. Spocatti turned and watched a well-dressed couple leave the car and hurry down the cement steps. A rap on the door, a firestorm of music, silence.