Dangerous Women

She sat on the southern end of the sofa.

“Did Nestor pay you yet?” Gert asked.

“You know I been missing you, Gertie,” Leonid said, thinking about her satin skin and the fortyish woman in the teenybopper dress from the French bistro.

“That’s done, Leo,” Gert said. “That was over a long time ago.”

“You must still have needs.”

“Not for you.”

“One time you told me you loved me,” Leonid replied.

“That was after you told me that you weren’t married.”

Leonid sat down a few inches away from her. He touched her knuckle with two fingers.

“No,” Gert said.

“Come on, baby. It’s hard as a boil down there.”

“And I’m dry to the bone.”

… but to a woman a man is life, Ella sang.

Leonid sat back and shoved his right hand into his pants pocket.

After Karmen Brown had left him at Barney’s Clover Leonid ducked into the John and counted out Gert’s three thousand from the twelve Craig Arman had laid on his lap. He took the wad from his pocket.

“You could at least give me a little kiss on my boil for all this,” he said.

“I could lance it too.”

Leonid chuckled and Gert gri

Maybe he should have left Katrina.

He handed her the roll of hundred-dollar bills and asked, “Could anybody find a trail from you to Joe Haller?”

“Uh-uh. No. I worked in a whole ‘nother office from him.”

“How did you find out about his record?”

“Ran off a list of likely employees for the company and did a background search on about twenty.”

“From your desk?”

“From the public library computer terminal.”

“Can’t they trace you back on that?” Leonid asked.

“No. I bought an account with a Visa number I got from Jackie P. It’s some poor slob from St. Louis. There’s no tracing that. What’s wrong, Leo?”

“Nuthin’,” the detective said. “I just want to be careful.”

“Haller’s a dog,” Gert added. “He’d been doin’ them girls around there for months. And when Cynthia Athol’s husband found out and came after him Joe beat him so bad that he had to go to the hospital. Broke his collarbone. He beat Chris Small with a strap just two weeks ago.”

When Nestor asked Leonid to find him a patsy for a midday crime Leonid came to Gert and she went to work as a temp for Amberson’s Financials. All she had to do was come up with a guy with a record who might have been part of the heist; a guy who no one could co

She did him one better. She came up with a guy that no one liked.

Haller had robbed a convenience store twelve years before, when he was eighteen. And now he was a gigolo with some kind of black belt in something. He liked to overwhelm the silly office secretaries with his muscles and his big thing. He didn’t mind if their significant others found out because he believed he could take on almost any man one on one.

Gert had been told that he once said, “Any woman with a real man wouldn’t let me take her like that.”

“Don’t worry,” Gert said. “He deserves whatever happens to him and they’ll never follow it back to me.”

“Okay,” Leonid said.

He touched her knuckle again.

“Don’t.”

He let his fingers trail up toward her wrist.

“Please, Leo. I don’t want to wrestle with you.”

Leonid’s breath was shallow and the erection was pressing against his pants. But he moved away.

“I better be going,” he said.

“Yeah,” Gert agreed. “Go home to your wife.”

It didn’t take long to get past security at the Empire State Building. Leonid worked late at least three nights a week.

He didn’t want to go home after Gert had turned him down.

He never knew why he took Kartrina back in.

He never knew why he did anything except if it had to do with the job.

Leonid became a P.I. because he was too short to qualify for the NYPD when he was eligible. They changed the requirements soon after that but by then he’d already been busted for unlawful entry.

He didn’t care. The private sector was more lucrative and he could work his own hours.

He found a Richard Mallory in the phone book that had the same address that Karmen Brown had typed out on her fiancé’s fact sheet. Leonid dialed the number. Someone answered on the third ring.

“Hello?” a tremulous man’s voice asked.

“BobbiA

“What?”

“BobbiA

“You have the wrong number.”

“Oh. All right,” Leonid said and then he hung up.

For a dozen minutes by the big clock on the wall Leonid thought about the voice of the man who might have been Richard Mallory. Leonid thought that he could tell the nature of anyone if he could talk to him just when he was roused out of a deep sleep.

It was 2:34 a.m. And Richard, if that was Richard, sounded like a straightforward guy, a working stiff, somebody who didn’t cross the line over into the Life.

This was important to Leonid. He didn’t want to get involved following some guy who might turn around and blow his head off.

At half past three he called Gert.

“Six-two-oh-nine,” the recording of her voice said after five rings. “I’m not available right now but if you leave a message I’ll be sure to call you back.”

“Gertie, it’s Leon. I’m sorry about before. I miss you, honey. Maybe we can have di

He didn’t hang up for a few seconds more, hoping that Gert was listening and would decide to pick up.

The buzzer woke him. The clock had it just past nine. The window was filled with cloud-just a pillowy white gauze that didn’t give three inches’ visibility.

The buzzer jangled his dull mind again. Another long ring. But this time Leonid wasn’t awake enough to have fear. He stumbled down the hall in the same suit he’d been wearing for over twenty-four hours.

When he opened the front door the two thugs pushed in.

One was black with a bald head and golden-rimmed glasses while the other was white with thick greasy hair.

They each had five inches on Leonid.

“The Wyants want forty-nine hundred,” the black man said. His mouth on the inside was the color of gingivitis. His eyes behind the lenses had a yellowy tint.

“Forty-six,” Leonid corrected groggily.

“That was yesterday, Leo. That interest is a motherfucker.” The black man closed the door and the white one moved to Leonid’s left.

The white hooligan gri

The white man had coarse chestnut hair that had been hacked rather than cut. His eyes were bisected between blue and brown and his lips were ragged, as if he had spent a portion of his earlier life soul-kissing a toothy leopard.

“We wake you up?” the black collector asked, just now remembering his ma

“Li’l bit,” Leonid said, stifling a yawn. “How you been, Bilko?”

“Okay, Leon. I hope you got the money, ‘cause if you don’t they told us to bust you up.”

The white man snickered in anticipation.

Leonid reached into his breast pocket and came out with the thick brown envelope he’d received the night before.

While counting out the forty-nine hundred-dollar bills Leonid had a familiar sensation: the feeling of never having as much money as he thought he did. After his debt and interest to the Wyants, this month’s rent and last on his apartment, after his wife’s household expenses and his own bills, he would be broke and still three months behind on his office rent.