Walter Mosley - Known to Evil

"Where's your truck?" the man asked. He would have been tall except for the slouch. His hair was gray and his white skin stained from many years of working with dust and dirt.

"They got us two to a truck nowadays," I said, pretending to harbor resentment. "Trying to cut costs. Merwin's gone to a place down on Sixth Street."

"You have to understand, Mr. Dolan," the man who had given me no name said. "I didn't call, and so I'm hesitant to let you in."

"Hey," I replied, hunching my shoulders with nonchalance. "It's nuthin' to me. I'm just gonna shut off the gas and electric and you can work it out with my supervisor when she wants to turn it back on."

"What? Turn off our power?"

"There has been a gas leak reported," I explained patiently. "If I can't tell my boss yea or nay I have to shut you down. I mean, they could be sued for millions if there's an explosion or a fire."

"But why the gas and electricity?"

"When people refuse to let us in we shut ' em down. That way we got a reason to come back… one day."

I reached into my breast pocket and handed him an official-looking business card. It had my alias and a few phone numbers printed in dark-blue ink.

"My boss is Janey Markus," I said. "Her number's at the bottom but you can get to her through any of these. She'll tell you the same thing I'm saying."

The number actually went to a machine I kept at Zephyra Ximenez's apartment. If he called he'd get one of a dozen specially designed recordings telling him that Ms. Markus was not in but that she would return the call as soon as possible.

"This is crazy," the nameless super said.

"Are there any good Indian restaurants around here?" I replied.

Anger flinched in the super's face.

"Go on up," he said. "If the tenants let you in then I guess you can do what you want. But I will tell you right now that there isn't any leak."

I smiled.

He grimaced.

I went up to the locked front door and pressed a buzzer at random.

"Yes?" a tremulous woman's voice inquired.

"Con Ed."

Regular as clockwork," Isabella Katinski told me as I pretended to study the back of her stove.

After a pleasant conversation concerning the history of the building, I had asked her about the absent upstairs neighbor, Miss Lear, on the pretext of needing to check out her gas line.

I'd already cleaned the pilot lights on the stove.

"… she's out her door at eight-ten every morning and back at six on Mondays and Wednesdays, eight on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and nine on Fridays unless she doesn't come home that night."

"Fridays are for the boyfriend, huh?"

The diminutive septuagenarian smiled at me with pearl-gray teeth. Her dress was hippie vintage turquoise-and-plum-colored flannel that had her covered from shoulder to ankle.

"She's out late if there is no boyfriend," Isabella told me. "When there is one, she's on the clock there, too."

"How so?" I asked.

"Can I get you some ice water, Mr. Dolan? I only have tap and cubes. If you're one'a them that needs your water from a plastic bottle I can't help you."

"WHAT WAS I TELLING you?" she asked when we were seated at the small triangular table that took up a good part of her Lilliputian kitchen.

"You were saying how your neighbor's got some kind of pattern with men."

The window we perched near looked down on the cavernous area between the buildings north of Twelfth and south of Thirteenth. There were fire escapes and tiny little sun-starved gardens, clotheslines strung between the buildings, and tatters from nameless things left outside too long.

Angelique's building was one of the smallest structures among its huge brick tenement brothers.

"When she first meets a boy you can hear 'em from ten to about two every Friday for the first month," Ms. Katinski said. "After that there's a couple'a months of creaking from ten to midnight. Then there's only footsteps for a month or so more. After that the boyfriend moves on and she stays out all night now and then again."

"She's a wild one, huh?" I said.

"Don't get me wrong, Mr. Dolan," Ms. Katinski proclaimed. "She's a very nice girl. When I had trouble with the noise downstairs she took care of it for me."

"SHE COMPLAINED ABOUT MY music even though Mrs. Katinski's apartment is between me and her," Seth Martindale told me while I drained the rusty water from his decades-old radiator. "Said that the old lady was hard of hearing or something."

"I was just in Katinski's apartment," I said. "She seemed to hear me all right."

"You see?" the sixty-something retired insurance adjuster said. "And here she almost got me evicted from my apartment. I've been living in this place for thirty-eight years, longer than she's been breathing."

"She almost got you evicted? How'd she do that?"

"City marshal came over with papers. I didn't even know we had a city marshal, but there they were, all dressed up in uniform. Told me that I had gone over the allowed decibel level and if they got another complaint the city was going to evict me."

"SHE'S A GODSEND," NYLA Winetraub, on the second floor, told me.

Nyla was Isabella's age but a bit more shaky. Her eyesight was going, nearly gone, and she liked to be near a wall to grab on to if she started to fall. She wore dark clothes and only had a single lamp on in the living room. I didn't know if she was trying to save money on utility bills or if maybe it was just that electric light no longer did much to illuminate her world.

"She helps me fill out all of my forms and answer correspondences," Nyla was saying. She was a dark-skinned white woman with lots of ageless character in her thin face. "She writes checks for me and even put in an answering machine so I can tell who's calling. You know, there's so many salesmen on the phones nowadays."

She paused and cocked her head, as if listening to faraway soft murmuring.

"You aren't really a Con Ed man, are you, Mr. Dolan?" she said.

"No, ma'am."

I wasn't surprised that it was the blind woman who saw through my disguise. Winetraub, I would have bet, was almost as perceptive as my new receptionist.

"Why are you here?" the old woman asked.

"I'm surprised that you don't just ask me to leave," I said.

"Why would I do that?"

"Well, I am a stranger in your house under false pretenses."

"If you were going to hurt me or steal from me I couldn't stop you," Nyla said reasonably. "And if I cried out you might hit me. Anyway, you're here to find out about Angelique, and I'm worried about her. She's been gone for over a week. Do you have any news?"

"No, ma'am. But I am here looking for her… for a friend of hers."

"John Prince?"

"No."

"John's a nice boy. He called here looking for her a few days ago. But I couldn't help him."

"Do you have his phone number?" I asked.

"No. I forgot to ask," she said. "Sorry."

"Do you have any idea of what happened to Angelique?" I asked.

Nyla turned her gaze, such as it was, toward my voice. We were sitting across from each other in front of a window that was completely covered, ceiling to floor, by dark-brown drapes. It was clear to me that her nearly sightless eyes were struggling to make sure of my intentions. Her hands reached out toward me and so I took them gently in my paws.

"You have strong hands," she told me.

"My father was a union organizer," I said. "Before that he was a sharecropper's son."

Nyla smiled. "You have your father's hands."

For some reason my throat closed up a moment. Nyla seemed to intuit this physical response and squeezed.

"Angelique came down to me just before she left," the elderly woman said. "She told me that she was in trouble and would be gone for a while."

"Did she say what kind of trouble?"