WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THEM after you’re done with them? Shaft pulled on a pair of black dungarees and padded out to the kitchen on bare feet. The floor was gritty. He wondered if he could work out some scheme with the chicks who woke up there to clean up part of the place before they left. The one in there on the bed could get the bathroom. There was a flood in there, water all over the place from the bouncing spray off the bouncing bodies. It had been her idea, hadn’t it?
“You’re crazy,” he said to himself. Aloud. He remembered one of them who was making coffee and cleaning house when he got out of bed one morning. It took three days to evict her. He went back to the bedroom while the coffee water was heating, plunged a hand into the shirt drawer looking for a black Tshirt, found one lurking in the scramble of underwear and socks, and pulled it over his head. He was not neat, he thought. That was one of the problems he had with living with himself. If he put everything in nice straight stacks, he’d know where everything was. Like, where the hell were two socks that resembled each other?
He looked at the sleeping girl. Spinners. She had turned the bathtub into a trampoline for the gymnastics of sex. That was all good. Different. He raised one foot, dusted off the sole with his hand and pulled on a sock, followed it with the other. He glanced at the luminous hands of his watch. Three, it glowed at him. She didn’t take up much of the bed. But her presence took up part of his life. He had a lot to do. The kettle was making noises in the kitchen and he answered the whistle.
Standing at the stove under the blue glimmer of the circular fluorescent tube in the ceiling, watching the first drops of water move through the grounds and drip out as coffee, Shaft thought out the next step. He could go up to the jail first. Anderozzi would turn the official back, while he kicked the shit out of the two punks from the bar. Would they say anything? Probably not. They would scream for lawyers and yell about brutality. They might not even know anything.
Or he could ask Anderozzi to put him onto a Mafiaoso don and offer a quick trade, his testimony against the pair for information about Beatrice. No, on two points. No Italian cop, not even Anderozzi, would admit to a Mafia connection and, two, nobody would trade anything for those two fools. They were expendable. That wasn’t a trade anybody would make because that wasn’t what they wanted.
Well, what did they want? The drug traffic in Spanish Harlem. If it was as simple as that, he could probably give it to them. But nothing was simple. He poured a cup of coffee, went back into the living room and set the cup on a table while he went into the bathroom and retrieved the pile of clothes from the corner. Soggy, mush. He might as well throw the gray suit away. The gun was damp. It was a fat, snub-nose revolver, blue-black and gleaming with a light coat of oil. Somebody must have taken care of it. Maybe the owner of the bar. He stuck it in his waistband, just to the center of his left hipbone. Twice now, attempts had been made to kill him. The steel in his belt was reassuring. He rethought the encounters with the gunmen. They wanted to kill him the first time for sure. But maybe not last night. Wouldn’t they have been more efficient? Or wouldn’t they have sent somebody more capable?
The coffee burned his tongue. He got the beans at a little shop called McNulty’s a few blocks away on Christopher Street. French Roast. You ground your own coffee, and it tasted like coffee. When he remembered to get the beans, it was all good. When he forgot, it was instant and awful. He flicked out
the light, opened the venetian-blind slats and looked out on the street while he drank it. He felt invisible. A black man in black pants and shirt with a black gun in his belt. The coffee cup was white. Disembodied in the blackness, it floated back and forth to his lips.
The money from the other back pocket of the gray pants was a wet and lumpy bundle. He had dropped the envelope on the small, circular wood table that stood between two windows in the kitchen. He needed a safety deposit box with night service. He picked up the envelope, turned to the refrigerator and pulled open the door. Shaft held the door with his elbow, pulled down the panel that sealed off the freezer. It needed defrosting badly. There were two or three cartons of vegetables, a couple half empty pints of ice cream, four trays of ice cubes. He slipped two one hundred dollar bills out of the envelope and stashed it behind the Seabrook Farms package of green peas and little white onions, then moved the ice cream in front of that. He’d have to thaw it before he spent any more of it.
One more cup of coffee. Shaft glanced at his watch again. Three-ten. He had about half an hour. Half an hour before the bars would close down, the unquenchably thirsty would stumble out onto the Village sidewalks for the mumbling meander home and everything except cops, freaks and all-night coffee shops would call it a night. Half an hour. It wasn’t much. It was all he had.
He padded back into the bedroom, looked at the girl again. She hadn’t moved. What do you do with them after you’re done with them? Let them sleep. Hopefully, she would get up and go home in time to change for work. Hopefully, she worked someplace. He felt a moment’s concern. What day was it? If last night was Friday, it was now Saturday and she’d want to sleep until noon. Shit! What day was it? He counted them on the fingers of his memory, one at a time, trying to move events into agreement with the calendar. It came out Thursday night into Friday morning. He felt relieved, so relieved that he leaned over and set the clock radio for seven o’clock. He usually woke up to an FM station, WBAI, where there was a chronic hitcher at the microphone each morning, playing unusual records and complaining about life and the world. He turned the dial to a hard-rock station and told himself he was doing the girl a favor, fixing it so she would get up in time to go home and change before she went to work. It was a lie. He knew it He turned the volume dial up. It would blow her out into Jane Street. Short romances were the best ones.
Shaft moved quietly from the radio to the closet, squatted to grope through the shoes in a rough line on the floor, until he found the black crepe-soled oxfords, then got the black oiled silk jacket off the hanger and thrust his arms into it. Was there anything else? He checked out the pockets one by one for keys, money, wallet, handkerchief, cigarettes. Cigarettes. Where were they? There was a pack on the bedside table. His or hers, he didn’t remember. Marlboros. Hers. He put the box in one of the slash pockets of the jacket and turned to leave.
Was there anything in the place the chick could steal? Unless she got behind the green peas and pearl onions to his stash in the freezer, there wasn’t anything worth the trouble of carting out of the place. He looked at the watch. Three-fifteen. Not much time. He looked at the girl. If he wanted her, he could always find her, he thought, and tiptoed out the door, zipping up the jacket over the bulk of the pistol and noting that it didn’t bulge enough to attract attention. There wasn’t much time for any of them and there was only one way to do this. The hard way.