C H A P T E R • 23
After brunch, it had stopped raining and I stepped across the street to the Kit Kat. Stevie was on the jukebox singing “Isn’t She Lovely” and I didn’t recognize the bartender. Deliverymen were moving things in and out. I ordered a Heineken.
“Vy’s bartenders are all kind of special these days,” I offered by way of conversation.
He didn’t answer me. Reticence is a tricky thing in a bartender in front of a drinker who wants to talk. Then again, maybe he didn’t have to be a talker with those defined muscles in his brown arms below the sleeves of his Rick James t-shirt.
He came back with my Heineken. “You’re Pearl Washington the actress, aren’t you?”
“Yes. And I’ll call you Rick.”
He had a killer smile on him.
I sat and watched him and the deliveries long enough to be in the way.
When I got outside, I decided to get the establishing shot of the stately sisters of connected sandstones that included the damaged building two doors away from Viola’s house. It was still being secured and protected by tarps. But whoever was doing the work had left after erecting some scaffolding and posting danger signs.
I walked across the street and stepped around a police barrier and then stepped inside. It wasn’t easy to navigate the site, but I took several pictures of the piece of brass with the house number that had shaken loose from the façade. The camera was as good as Karl promised and I could imagine a cluster of photos in a spread in the newspaper about this address where some of the fake companies on Ceel’s list were supposed to be doing business.
Not wanting to broadcast my trespassing, I stopped before I stepped out, and I was careful to peek up and down the sidewalk. Then I flattened against the wooden support for cover and from there I watched Al, the newspaper’s production manager, walking with Bobby Bop, the jazz man. As they reached the area where I was hiding, I held my breath until I heard their footsteps moving away. I saw them walk into the building next door.
Odd. Playing music at the Kit Kat Klub must have brought them together after the fight I witnessed out the window just before Cecelia was killed.
I walked around to the alley to get some pictures of the back of the stricken building. I noticed the back window was open in the building where Bobby and Al went in. Obie had identified the house as the site of the black-market factory which is probably why they needed the extra power of the generator that sat under a large 3-sided box. I left my bag with the newspapers beside the box, pulled over a milk crate and climbed up with my camera in my tote.
That’s how I found myself standing, looking in the window at two rooms of a parlor floor apartment, which were stuffed with equipment and boxes. I recognized enough to figure out I was looking at audiocassette recorders and color photocopiers and the stuff you need to make hundreds of fake tapes at a time with fake packaging.
I thought the junk hid me because it kept me from seeing all the way into the front room. I took some pictures and was getting ready to climb down when the music stopped and I could hear their voices through the open window.
“I’m going to keep my two large to pay for what you stole yesterday off my table.” I recognized Al’s voice.
“We’ll call that loan even,” Bobby said. “But that includes the next movie. The deal is we’ll buy your product and distribute it.”
“I’m not doing a freelance business with you,” Al said. “And that’s not nearly enough money if I was. We’re not talking about a tray of dance mixes or some crap shot in a movie theater with a camera in a backpack.”
“Freelance is the only business you’re going to do,” Bobby said. “I don’t have partners.”
I took another picture of the scene, but then I had to include Al as he got bigger in the next shot when he covered the distance from the front to the back.
Al said, “Give me that camera.”
“I don’t think so,” I told him.
He frowned. “This ain’t no Hollywood movie, Pearl. You’re going to get us killed.”
“Got yourself a little problem?” Bobby Bop said as he walked from the front room.
“We’ve both got ourselves a little problem,” Al told him. “This is Pearl Washington from the newspaper.”
“Sounds like she needs to be persuaded to give up her camera.”
When he got to us, I could see he had a 9 millimeter in his hand. Not good.
He was an understated crowd pleaser in a Zegna suit and a big gold Rolex watch. Although he’d probably never been called Red because he was a deep dark brown, there was red in his skin.
He got close and looked into my face. “I saw you in the movies. You look better in the movies. I almost hate to shoot you.”
Al intervened. “You can’t shoot her.”
“Actually, I can,” he said. “Give me the camera. And know you can’t put any of this in your newspaper. You know that?”
I didn’t know that, but it wasn’t something to say. And I thought about what might buy me an exit from an impetuous action gone very bad. It was somewhat shameful to do it, but I decided to expose and therefore enlist the troops.
“This isn’t a good place to make mischief,” I said. “The movie police from L.A. have been watching this location and several others. You won’t get away.”
“I know about that. That’s why there’s no work happening and we have this space to ourselves today. But my people inside tell me we have a couple of weeks. We can get a lot done in two weeks.”
Some noise might have warned me that the cops had arrived if I hadn’t been so engrossed in the business on the other side of the window. Instead, the knocking at the street door downstairs made us all jump. It got louder, and then it turned into a battering sound that was not about permission.
The Hollywood P.I.s were breaking through the heavy reinforced front door downstairs.
Bobby ran toward the front. Al climbed out the window and we both climbed down from the wooden box. That’s why the New York police people caught us on the ground in the alley.
“Put your hands in the air,” was the first I heard from my police woman. I turned. She was probably in better shape than she seemed in the chunky bulletproof vest.
“I said put your hands up. Now!” she said to me.
That was a surprise. “Me?” I sounded shrill even to my own ears. Since when did the police make me nervous?
Al was not having a conversation with the New York City policemen who were pushing him toward the alley opening.
“You were maybe crawling into that window? Maybe you forgot your keys?” she said to me.
Sarcasm wasn’t one of the things the sister was good at. But she was armed, so it probably didn’t matter. The thing that disturbed me was that I couldn’t tell whether she was serious about me being a suspect. I decided I’d better play it straight.
“I was eavesdropping on the conversation they were having inside from the top of the generator outside. You saw me climbing down.”
“We’ll see about that.”