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  “Any special treatment?”

  That was Blaise wanting to know if I wanted any of the guys rolled, their apartments searched, blinded with Liquid-Plumr, like that. I’d never asked for any of the extras, but he always asked anyway. To tell the truth, I found some comfort in the thought that I had that nasty card in my deck, that I could play really dirty if I had to. Like I said, though, I had four cats.

  “Not this time. Incriminating pictures would be nice. You on it?”

  “Heh.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  I HAD TO SEE JOHNNY One-Ball. Johnny is a fence. Someone tried to rip him off, shot him between the legs. So now he has only one.

  He lived on Smith Street, the restaurant row in Brooklyn not far from Ariel’s Bistro. It’s in a brownstone neighborhood called Carroll Gardens, which is next to Cobble Hill. The only way you can tell one neighborhood from the other is by a slight difference in elevation and real estate price tags. Cobble Hill is higher in both.

  The populace was basically comprised of the “neighborhood” people and the hipsters. A “neighborhood guy” was born in Brooklyn and probably went to PS 58. The older ones were once longshoremen, the younger ones in the trades, cops, or firemen. They ate pasta with red sauce that they called gravy, and only went to the traditional Italian restaurants and bakeries in the neighborhood. Many hadn’t been to Manhattan—called “the City”—in years. They are proud to be called neighborhood guys.

  Hipsters were the newcomers, gentrifiers, the ones who commuted to Manhattan and drove up the real estate prices. They patronized a booming business of new restaurants on Smith Street where they drank PBR and hand-rolled their cigarettes. Hipsters were easy to spot. The male versions wore porkpie hats, too-small sweaters, black plastic glasses, and old-school Chuck Taylor sneakers. The female version sported funky two-tone glasses, star tattoos, ’70s ski vests, and old-school Pumas. The hipsters had cornered the market in what was hip, as the name suggests, but disliked being called hipsters.

  Neighborhood guys and hipsters pretend the other group doesn’t exist. Like two groups of ghosts that can’t see each other.

  There was a third part of the population few knew existed. Like most of the trades in New York, art theft has its neighborhoods, and this was one of them. Many professional thieves—and by that I don’t mean stickup guys and sneak thieves feeling up glove boxes—keep gainful employment in the restaurant business. Like almost anybody else, they need a regular job, if nothing else to explain to curious police and the Internal Revenue where they derive their income. Waiting tables or cheffing also makes for a nice alibi. Most restaurants in New York close late. If you’re a waiter or chef, you may not leave your place of employment until real late. Or you could be prying open the bathroom window at a check-cashing place. Restaurant workers cover for each other.

  The neighborhood had a lot of restaurants where the tips were good and apartments rented out a little lower. Carroll Gardens was farther from most of the Manhattan places where the art or other goodies were stolen from but not too far. That the area was a haven for goofballs wasn’t common knowledge, and it wasn’t like every other person on the street was a goofball. Only those in the business knew.

  Jo-Ball was a maître d’ at Dominic’s, an Italian place farther down Smith Street. It was an old-school place, not hip. Italians from all over Brooklyn would come there for their Sunday pasta and red sauce. Jo-Ball was the man with the toupee and the suit who greeted everybody, flirted with the old fat broads from Bay Ridge, and made sure the customers felt special.

  His talents didn’t stop there. Johnny also moved goodies, liquidated them into cash. You might say we were competitors. He brokered a thief’s goods onto the art market, and I brokered a thief’s goods back to the insurance companies. There was no bad blood between us, just a little spirited competition now and again. We also used each other to keep a finger on the pulse of what was what, who had done what. Shop talk, key to any business, even between competitors. Maybe whoever took my goodies was trying to broker them to him, or someone else. Would this be a way of putting the goodies into my hands? Jo-Ball and I had an understanding that we wouldn’t undercut each other. If the paintings were mine first, I was pretty sure he’d hand them over, for a finder’s fee.

  Dominic’s was still shuttered at that hour, but I knew Johnny got coffee and breakfast up on Court Street at Donut House. It’s a diner. White flecked counter with matching stools on the left wall, tables along the right wall, bathrooms rearward. I found Jo-Ball in a baby blue track suit, at the far back corner table facing out. He always sat that way, facing out, in back. He only had one ball left and meant to keep it.

  “Tommy!” One of his fat hairy hands waved me over to his table. “Siddown. You want something?” He gestured to Garrison, a thin black guy behind the counter. “Garry, sweetheart, can we get Tommy a cup? It’s good to see you, Tommy, siddown.”

  Ten minutes ago I’d been at a café table across from a nervous Frenchman with eyelashes. Now I was squeezed in at a Formica diner table across from a baby blue Italian in a wig.

  Jo-Ball pointed a wedge of bagel at me. “Tommy, why you wear a pinstripe suit all the time? The insurance guys make you do that? Is that scarf silk? You hear about last night?”

  I loosened my scarf as Garrison poured coffee into a cup next to me. “My pop used to say, why not look your best all the time? Thanks, Garrison.”

  Garrison says, “You having breakfast, Tommy?”

  So I says, “Nice of you to ask, but I’m good.”

  He nodded and went back behind the counter to serve someone else who’d just come in. I turned my attention to Jo-Ball.

  I dumped four sugars in my coffee. “So what happened last night?”

  Jo-Ball’s eyes were laughing at me. “Maybe, Tommy, you wear the tie ’cause no matter what you done you look like you ain’t done nothin’.” He didn’t know I was into anything more than brokering art back to the insurers. He shouldn’t have, anyway. So he says, “You’re serious, you telling me you didn’t hear about last night?”

  I shrugged, only it was small, not French.

  “So you didn’t hear?” His eyes were both laughing and searching. “The Whitbread Museum. Three guys. Three pips from the wall.”

  Now I caught myself overstirring my coffee—tink, tink, tink—so I took a sip. “No kidding?”

  “Kid you not,” he says. “That’s why you’re here, am I right? You wanna know did I pick up on it already or not.”

  “Did you?”

  “Why should I say?”

  “Nobody called me yet. If the three pips are already yours, then they’re yours. I don’t grudge you anything, Johnny, you know that. And if I spook the goofballs who took them, then they’ll just come to you all the faster.”

  I saw Johnny’s eyes focus beyond me, over my shoulder. Slowly, he settled his coffee cup into its saucer. His hand slid under the table. “Don’t turn around, Tommy.”

  “Johnny, you do this every time anybody comes into the diner. You’re a paranoid. Just see you don’t shoot me under the table by accident.” I knew he carried a little automatic in his waistband. “So, about the goodies?”

  Jo-Ball still looked over my shoulder, nervous. “I got a line on it, but indirectly, you might say.”

  I leaned across the table, my voice lowered, and I says, “Indirectly?”

  Jo-Ball nodded, his eyes finally meeting mine, the eyebrows wiggling. “A certain party came to see me here yesterday for breakfast.”

  “Sunday morning? Anybody I know?”

  “Could be.” He chuckled. “Wanted to know what I’d go on the three pips, in advance. So I says, ‘I don’t shop.’ And the party looks all smug and says, ‘Going to highest bidder. So you’re not bidding?’ I says, ‘Show me the swag, then we talk. I don’t shop.’ I’m like worried this whole time that somehow this is a setup, that I’m eating a bagel with a cop.”

  “So what happened?”

 
“‘Fair enough,’ she says, and makes for the door.”

  “So this is a woman?” There aren’t a boatload of women in the art theft world. Some, like Gloria the locksmith, but few.

  “She’s not exactly new to the art world. I know her provenance. C’mon.” Jo-Ball’s eyes laughed at my confusion. He slid out from behind the table and gestured toward the front door. “We can’t talk here. Let’s walkie talkie.”

  I headed for the sunlit glass front of Donut House, inspecting the line of customers at the counter. Which customer was making Jo-Ball nervous? There were three of them.

  Only the old man eating a soft-boiled egg was there when I came in. His chin came within an inch of his nose when he chewed: no teeth. The other two were an Arab buck in a trench coat dunking a tea bag, and a pug-nose woman in her thirties poking at her BlackBerry. She looked up at me, then Jo-Ball, then back down at her machine.

  We got outside and glanced back at the diner. Nobody following. “So, the old man with the soft-boiled egg, you figure him for a shooter?”

  “Hey, I’m the guy that’s been shot, so don’t make fun.” Jo-Ball was zipping up his jacket.

  His face exploded.

  Yeah, I mean exploded. Like an M-80 stuffed in a watermelon. He was facing the street, so the blood and meat and bone splattered all over a town car idling at the curb, the limo driver reading a paper inside.

  All that was left of Johnny One-Ball’s head was the bottom jaw. The bloody tongue was wiggling around in the air like it was looking for the roof of the mouth. A second later his body collapsed forward, denting the town car’s passenger door. Blood gushed from his neck into the gutter.

  Inside the limo, the driver was bouncing around in a panic, Jo-Ball’s bloody toupee sliding down his windshield.

  I stood there like an idiot, my mouth hanging open, trying to get a grip on what just happened. Shit like that goes down so fast, and is so screwy, it takes you a couple long seconds to deal with what you’ve just seen, and to do something about it.

  I remember my first reaction was to touch the roof of my mouth with my tongue, and be glad I felt something. That’s when my brain unfroze. There might be another bullet for me.

  Something like an angry bumblebee zipped past my cheek as I jumped back toward the diner.

  The second bullet thonked into the light pole. I scrambled my way through the glass doors into Donut House. I found myself on the floor in front of the counter with the woman and the Arab, both of them cursing in different languages about the mess outside. The old man was still eating his egg at the counter, smacking his rubbery lips.

  I hadn’t heard any shots.

  I hadn’t seen any shooter.

  Just the same, I knew it was a sniper’s bullet that took out Jo-Ball’s head.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  POP USED TO SAY THAT men are like rhinoceroses. They mostly stand alone, can’t see much farther than themselves, and can be grumpy. I am, anyway. Plus they have these little birds that stand around on them that they don’t know whether they should be concerned about or not.

  Every guy has his appetites. Some spend their whole lives trying to shake them off; others accept and indulge them. May the little birds of bacon, brandy, and broads forever roost on my shoulders.

  The way I see it, these appetites make life more than just tolerable. Hey, if you’re not going to live a little, you might as well be dead, am I right?

  This is all sort of a screwy way of explaining that after Jo-Ball’s head exploded, and after I spent hours waiting to be interviewed by police detectives, I headed directly for Delilah. She was my masseuse, like I think I mentioned.

  Delilah had an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, which is closer to Manhattan than Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. It’s across the river from downtown, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Funny thing, though, is that a lot of the best part of Brooklyn Heights, where the buildings have a view of the bridge and Lower Manhattan, is almost totally owned and occupied by the Watchtower Society. Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with almost no appetites at all. They live and work there. In the morning, you see them come out of their apartment buildings—happy, calm, and glassy-eyed. Two by two like animals from the ark, they exit their apartment buildings in their Sunday best. They’re walking a few blocks to the big-ass factory buildings where they make the religious pamphlets handed out at subway stops. At five, they file two by two out of the pamphlet factories the three blocks back into their apartments.

  Is it just me, or is this creepy? Like pod people or something. Normal people in the neighborhood call them “zooks.” I’m guessing that’s a combination of zombie and spook, but I don’t know for sure.

  Delilah’s apartment is in one of their buildings, right at the water on Columbia Place. How she manages this, since she is obviously not a zook, I’m not sure. Maybe one or more of the zooks let this bird rest on their shoulder.

  So when I go to see my masseuse, I have to pretend I am a zook so I don’t blow her cover at the front desk. When I pass a zook handing out pamphlets on the street, I always collect a recent one. It helps with the disguise. I go to the zook at the front desk of her building holding the pamphlet and smile like a brain-dead pod person. That’s right, I look like a moron, but to the zooks, this is normal. They ring Delilah’s apartment and let me go up.

  As soon as I stepped through the door she could see I was pretty stressed out.

  She says, “Tom, what’s with you?”

  So I says, “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. But I will. Just not this second.”

  So she went to work on me straight away, and after I started to relax, I blurted out most of the story. I had already told her I was shopping and settling at the same time. I did that because she’s not the judgmental type.

  Delilah didn’t say anything, just listened and did her thing. She’s not a small woman, and by that I mean she’s tall like me and muscular. She doesn’t have much if any fat on her. I’m one of those Budweiser horses; she’s one of those horses at the track. Except she has a long brown braid and almond eyes, like she’s part Oriental. Maybe she is. She was wearing a kimono. But that didn’t mean anything. I was wearing one, too.

  When we were finished, she poured me a glass of pinot, and we sat across from each other at the Scrabble board. We played nine-tile Scrabble whenever I came over, for an hour at most. The game had been started the week before, and we were each five words into the game. My last word had been “furtive” and I attached it on the end of her last word, “spin,” to create “spine.” I scored eighty points on that play because I used seven letters and got a fifty-point bingo. That’s huge. During the week, she’d played “fecund” off of my f for thirty-six using the triple word space. Fecund means fertile, like soil, or a girl that gets pregnant real easy.

  Delilah still hadn’t said a word about what I’d told her, and waited for me to take my turn first, which didn’t take long because I already had a number of moves figured out in advance. Though I was relaxed, I was still emotionally numb as I clicked my tiles in place.

  I spelled out “deluxe” using her d and picked up a double word space for twenty-eight points.

  Her dark eyes looked up from the Scrabble board. “So have you heard from Yvette?”

  I didn’t expect that question. So I says, “I didn’t expect that question. No. Thank God.”

  “How long she been gone?”

  “Four weeks.”

  “Miss her?”

  “Good riddance.”

  “So what about the cats?”

  My eyes met hers, and she held up her hands. “I’m just asking, Tom. But I guess the question is why someone shot Johnny. What do you think?”

  So I says, “Jo-Ball had people pissed off at him all the time. No, I think the question is why the shooter took a shot at me. Was he just trying to tidy up? Or had he missed me with the first shot and hit Jo-Ball by accident?”

  Delilah’s eyes rolled back to her tiles as she moved
them around on her tile pew searching for a word. “What you’re telling me is you don’t have an answer to either question.”

  I finished my wine. “It’s early.”

  “Answers are sometimes more dangerous than the question, Tom.”

  “There’s not a lot of options here, Dee.” I went in search of the wine bottle, and when I got back with it, she says, “There are only as many options as you allow there to be.”

  I had to laugh at that. “Bullshit. Life is no different than the tiles you pick in Scrabble. Sometimes you pick all vowels. No seven-letter bingo with a pew of all vowels.”

  “You can at least be creative with the tiles you’re dealt.” She carefully laid out the word “extract” and batted those dark almond eyes at me.

  “Cute trick—and that’s all that is, a cute trick. My problem is this thing with Jo-Ball has put a lot of negative energy into my business. Him getting tweaked is going to make all the goofballs dive for cover, including the ones who took my goodies. I have to use all my positive energies to find out who took the paintings from me, try to recover those assets. My business was counting on that money. More important than that, other businesses are counting on that money.”

  Delilah fixed her eyes on me, head to one side, but I kept looking at my tiles.

  She says, “Other businesses?”

  I didn’t look up and didn’t say anything.

  I share a lot with Delilah, but there are certain things a man needs to keep to himself, especially things a man isn’t proud about. Or that make him feel like a sucker. The truth was that I was in for some serious money on account of Yvette. Like a moron, I bailed her out, and not just to a landlord, but to a kind of a bad Vegas dude who took over her debt to the landlord. So I had to take a short-term loan. A loan from an individual, not a bank, if you get my drift. A guy not too unlike the guy I had to pay off, but at least a Brooklyn shylock, name of Vince Scanlon.

  So she finally says, “I can lend you some money, Tom, if it will keep you from getting killed.”