Dangerous Women

“Tomorrow-”

“That’s right, Richard. Van Der Zee Enterprises will give me control over the whole Manhattan operation if I’m the first one to bring in a lobby.”

“So I get to keep the money?”

“With twelve hundred more coming to you at eight this evening if you have the lobby set for me.”

“Eight? Why eight?”

“You think you’re the only guy I’m talking to, Richard? I have four other meetings set up this afternoon. Whoever gets to me when it’s all done, at eight o’clock, will get at least part of the prize. Maybe he’ll get the whole thing.”

“But I have a date tonight-”

“Just call me on the phone, Richard. Tell me where you are and I’ll bring you the money and the letter confirming to the super that Arlene can set up her table.”

“What letter?”

“I hope you don’t think I’m going to be handing you fifteen hundred dollars a week in cash without getting a letter for the super to show my boss,” Leonid said blandly. “Don’t worry, we won’t mention the money, just that Van Der Zee Enterprises can set up in the lobby offering our services.”

“But what if somebody complains?”

“You can always tell your bosses that you were thinking on your own, trying to offer a service. They won’t know about the money changing hands. At the very least we’ll be thrown out, but that’ll take a couple’a days, and Arlene is very good at handing out those brochures.”

“That’s fifteen hundred in cash a week?”

“Twice that if we can find another Arlene and you can hook us up like I been told.”

“But I’m going to be out tonight,” Mallory complained.

“So? Just call me. Give me the address. And I’ll drop by with the form. We’re talkin’ ten minutes for twelve hundred dollars.”

Richard fingered the money. Then he tentatively picked it up.

“I can just take this?”

“Take it. And take the rest tonight and then that much again once a week for the next four or five months.” Leonid gri

Richard folded the money and put it in his pocket.

“What’s your phone number, Mr. DuBois?”

Leonid called his wife and told her to have his brown suit ready and pressed by the time he got home.

“Am I your maid now?” she asked.

“I got the rent and the expenses here in my pocket,” Leonid growled. “All I’m asking from you is a little cooperation.”

The private eye then called his cell phone service. When the voice on the line said to record a new message, Leonid said, “Hello. This is Arnold DuBois, employment agent for Van Der Zee Enterprises. At the tone leave me what you got.”

When he got home he found the suit folded on the bed and Katrina gone. Alone in the house, he drew a bath and poured himself a glass of ice water. He wanted a cigarette but the doctors had told him his lungs could barely take New York air.

He sat back in the old-fashioned tub, turning the hot water on and off with his toes. His jaw ached and he was almost broke again. But still he had a line on Richard Mallory and that made the detective happy.

“At least I’m good at what I do,” he said to no one. “At least that.”

After the bath Leonid called Gert again. This time the phone rang and rang with no interruption. That was very odd. Gert had it set up so that her service picked up when she was on the line.

Sometimes he didn’t talk to Gert for months at a time. She had made it clear that they could never be intimate again. But he still felt something for her. And he wanted to make sure that she was okay.

When Leonid got to Gert’s near four he found the downstairs door had been wedged open.

Her front door was crisscrossed with yellow police ribbon.

“You know her?” a voice asked.

It was a small woman standing at a doorway down the hall. She was old and gray and wore gray clothes. She had watery eyes and mismatched slippers. There was a low-grade emerald ring on the index finger of her right hand and the left side of her mouth lagged just a bit.

Leonid noticed all of this in a vain attempt to work away from the fear growing in his stomach.

“What happened?”

“They say he must’a come in last night,” the woman said. “It was past midnight, the super says. He just killed her. Didn’t steal anything. Just shot her with a gun no louder than a cap pistol, that’s what they said. You know you’re not safe in your own bed anymore. People out here just get some crazy idea in their head and you find yourself dead with no rhyme or reason.”

Leonid’s tongue went dry. He stared at the woman so intensely that she stopped rambling, backed into her apartment, and closed the door. He leaned against the doorjamb, dry-eyed but stu

Leonid had never cried. Not when his father left home for the revolution. Not when his mother went to bed and never came out again. Never.

There was a different bartender serving drinks at Barney’s Clover that afternoon. A woman with faded blue-green tattoos on her wrists. She was thin and brown-eyed, white and past forty.

“What you have, mister?”

“ Rye whiskey. Keep ‘em comin’.”

He was on the sixth shot when his cell phone sounded. The ring had been programmed by his son Twill. It started with the sound of a lion’s roar.

‘“lo?”

“Mr. DuBois? Is that you?”

“Who is this?”

“Richard Mallory. Are you sick, Mr. DuBois?”

“Hey, Dick. Sorry I didn’t recognize you. I got some bad news today. An old friend of mine died.”

“I’m so sorry. What happened?”

“It was a long illness,” Leonid said, finishing one shot and gesturing for another.

“Should I call you later?”

“You got me a lobby, Dick?”

“Um, well yes. A fairly large building on Sutton Place South. The super is a friend of mine and I promised him five hundred.”

“That’s the way to do business, Dick. Share the wealth. That’s what I’ve always done. Where are you?”

“It’s a Brazilian place on West Twenty-six. Umberto’s. On the second floor, between Sixth and Broadway. I don’t know the exact address.”

“That’s okay. I’ll get it from information. See you about nine. Looks like we’re go

“Okay, um, all right. I’m sorry about your loss, Mr. DuBois. But please don’t call me Dick. I hate that name.”

Umberto’s was an upscale restaurant on a street filled with wholesalers of Indian trinkets, foods, and clothing. Leonid sat across the street in his 1963 Peugeot.

It was after ten and the fat detective was drinking from a pint bottle of bourbon in the front seat. He was thinking about the first time he had met Gert, about how she knew just what to say.

“You’re not such a bad man,” the sultry New Yorker had said. “It’s just that you been making your own rules for so long that you got a little confused.”

They spent that night together. He really didn’t know that she’d be upset about Katrina. Katrina was his wife but there was no juice there. He remembered the hurt look on Gert’s face when she finally found out. After that came the cold anger she treated him with from then on.

They’d remained friends but she would never kiss him again. She would never let him into her heart.

But they worked well together. Gert had been in private security for a dozen years before they met. She enjoyed his shady cases, as she called them. Gert didn’t believe that the law was fair and she didn’t mind getting around the system if that was the right thing to do.