“I’ll be fine.”
“Gonna catch yourself the pneumonia is what you’re gonna do.”
“Take care, Harriston.”
Crowe started down the stairs and Harriston said, “Oh, say, I almost forgot, hold up a minute there, Crowe.”
He took a last long drag of his cigarette, holding up his other hand in a ‘wait-a-minute’ gesture, stubbed the butt out in the standing ashtray by his door, and scurried off inside his apartment. Crowe heard him calling, “Hey, Luella, where the hell’s that envelope?” A mumbled response from a deeper room. “What do you mean,
what
envelope? The goddamn envelope for Mr. Crowe, woman! Can’t you get off that goddamn computer for two goddamn minutes?”
He came back out carrying the envelope in thin, nicotine-stained fingers. “This was in the vestibule door this morning.” He handed it to over. It was addressed in a fine, feminine scrawl.
Crowe shoved it in his pants pocket without opening it. He knew who it was from. “Thanks. And tell the missus I said Happy New Year.”
“Will do,” he said. “And if you come back here hacking and coughing with the pneumonia don’t come crying to me about it.”
In the vestibule downstairs Crowe pulled the envelope out of his pocket and crumpled it up. He tossed it in the trash can by the door.
Outside the building, the wind snapped down out of a slate sky, so bitter it stung his freshly-shaven cheeks. Traffic was light on the street and even the pedestrians had apparently taken a powder. He had a brief moment of disorientation, wondering where the hell all the people went, before he remembered it was a holiday. New Year’s Day. And ungodly weather to boot.
He had some eggs and bacon and a bowl of fresh fruit for breakfast at a diner just off Front. The local news was on the little flat screen television over the counter and the stiffly-smiling blonde broadcaster was talking about Peter Murke. Murke had been all over the news since Crowe had gotten back. He had a hearing coming up tomorrow to determine if he was of fit mind to stand trial for murder, and after the hearing he’d spend the night in a holding cell at Memphis P.D. before being shipped off to Jackson for evaluation.
Crowe watched with interest, thinking about what Paine had said the night before. Vitower wanted to hit Murke. No surprise, considering what had happened to Vitower’s wife. He’d need to find out more about Murke.
After breakfast, he hailed a taxi and started to look for Robert Radnovian.
The last couple days, Crowe had been digging around for him, checking some old haunts, looking for a possible lead on a safe place he could talk to him. In a pinch, he could’ve just called Radnovian’s office at the Sheriff’s Department, but that would’ve meant embarrassing questions. Not that Crowe was concerned about his comfort—but if Radnovian was squeezed, he wouldn’t be any good to Crowe.
Radnovian was a bad guy’s wet dream. He was a cop, very well-connected, who’d worked his way up from Vice to Internal Affairs over the course of twelve years, so he knew scores of people and had dirt on just about every single one of them. He was also that rarest of things—a functional heroin addict.
His addiction to smack made him very easy to work with.
Crowe had his old home address, and the address of a girl he saw on and off, depending on how available the drugs were. He also had the latest address for Jimmy the Hink’s place, where Rad spent a lot of time. It was sort of a private club for lowlifes and hopheads. That was where Crowe finally found him.
The house was on the north side, in the shadow of the freeway that wrapped itself around Memphis like a boa constrictor. A shabby place, even by that neighborhood’s questionable standards. Ice clung to the dead remnants of lawn, nudged around broken glass and rusty auto parts. Crowe told the driver to wait, gave him a twenty to hold his nerves at bay, and trotted up the rickety front porch.
The front door was wide open, letting in the cold. Crowe walked in.
Three men and two women lounged around the front room. One of the women had nodded off with a needle stuck in her arm, the back of her head slumped against a threadbare sofa. The others were in various states of oblivion, working with the tiny dose of heroin on the table in front of them. Also on the table were a couple of syringes, a spoon with a burnt-out middle, and two or three back issues of
People
magazine.
One of the men had a lighter and another spoon, doing it the old school way, and the others watched him, rapt. None of them paid any attention to Crowe.
When he was halfway into the room, one of the guys finally looked up and said, “Oh. Hey, brother. Can you close that door? It’s fuckin’ freezing, man.”
Crowe went back and closed the door and the guy said, “Cool, thanks, brother. You up?”
He indicated the heroin the other guy was cooking up, and Crowe shook his head. He passed through the room.
There was a filthy kitchen beyond that, stinking of the rank garbage overflowing from a little trash can, and two men who clearly weren’t junkies were lounging, one at the table and the other against the cabinets.
They both came to attention when Crowe strolled in. They were dressed in classic street thug attire—wife-beater tees, baggy pants with the boxers showing over the top, ball caps and gold chains and all that. They had training weight muscles and tattoos. No marks for originality.
The one who’d been leaning against the counter took a step toward Crowe, saying, “You lost, old man?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Yeah?” he said. He looked as if he expected his day to get really interesting, out of nowhere. “Who you looking for?”
“A guy named Radnovian.”
The other one didn’t get up from his chair. He said, “We don’t do names here. What’s your boy look like?”
Crowe said, “He looks a little like you. Except better dressed, and not so fucking ugly. You seen him?”
Both of them went all wide-eyed, and the one sitting down shot up and into Crowe’s face. He said, “I know you didn’t just say that. Tell me you didn’t just say what I thought you said.”
The other one pulled a gun out of the back of his waistband but kept it low, just so Crowe could see it.
The one in his face said again, “I know you didn’t say that.”
Crowe was long past the stage in his life where these sort of kids amused him. He said, “Where’s Jimmy the Hink?”
The one with the gun said, “You a pig?”
Crowe shook his head.
“What you want with the Hink?”
Crowe grinned at him. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you
make
me tell you?”
The gun-boy scowled, but the other one was starting to look a little uncertain. He said, “You got some guts, old man. Maybe we should see what they look like all over the fucking floor.”
Crowe had already decided on the fastest way to drop the two jokers—a fist in the throat would take down the closest one, and a heel just below the kneecap would cripple the other, followed up with a fist directly behind his left ear. Piece of cake.
But he didn’t have to do a thing. From the other side of the kitchen, a familiar voice said, “You ass-wipes better back off. Dat Crowe you fucking wit’.”
Jimmy the Hink filled up the doorway pretty thoroughly. He was a fat ugly man in an ugly orange blazer, his pale head patchy with psoriasis. He sucked on a peppermint. Crowe could smell it from across the room, even over the stink of the garbage.
“Heya, Crowe,” he said.
“Heya, Jimmy.”
The two thugs backed off. The one with the gun looked unsatisfied.
“I take it you here to see ole’ Rad.” He still spoke in that weird, pseudo-Cajun cadence of his, although as far as Crowe knew he’d never been anywhere near Louisiana.
Crowe nodded. Jimmy brushed dandruff off his shoulder, said, “C’mon, I take you up dere.”
The thug with the gun was standing in the way. Crowe looked at him, and, without breaking eye contact, the thug stepped back. Crowe walked by him.
He followed the Hink down a short hall to a staircase in back. They passed a couple of rooms with an assortment of junkie-types lounging around; old and young hippies, street bums, prostitutes, pretty much the whole catalogue. You had to sort of give it to the junkies, Crowe thought—these were people who’d given up on ambition. And who could blame them? Ambition is a bitch. It makes people do horrible things. People without ambition are the happiest people on earth.
The Hink spoke to him over his shoulder as he waddled up the steps. “You been gone a long time, ole’ Crowe. They got you all locked up in da big house, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. That change a man. I been dere too, you know.”
The Hink had been the Old Man’s operator for as long as Crowe could remember, and now he was working for Vitower, doing the same job—selling heroin, operating little fly-by-night ‘safe houses’ for addicts to crash in, as long as they had the cash. Not that he ever had the pleasure of meeting his employers face-to-face. The Old Man would never have allowed himself to be seen with someone as crass as the Hink, and Crowe could only imagine Vitower felt the same way.
At the first door at the top of the stairs, the Hink stopped. He jerked his head at the door, and dead skin sloughed off and floated away. “In dere,” he said. And then, “Listen. After you bidness done, come down and talk wif me? I gotta thing, could use you.”
“Some trouble?”
He frowned. “Some trouble, yeah.”
He trudged off, back down the stairs.
Crowe watched him go, thinking about how quickly old patterns re-emerge in this life. Back in the day, he used to do odd, unpleasant jobs for the Hink, out of nothing but pure altruism—and, of course, the fact that he always enjoyed a good bit of ugliness. He opened the door without knocking and went in.
Rad was sprawled out lazily on an overstuffed sofa in the middle of a nearly bare room. There was a widescreen TV in front of him showing cartoons, and between that and the sofa a long, low coffee table. All his gear was spread out there. A candle was burning and the room smelled like synthetic apple pie.
He looked up at blandly. Crowe hardly recognized him.
He’d lost a good thirty pounds, and his off-the-rack suit hung on him comically. He’d lost a lot of hair, too. What was left clung haphazardly just above his ears and at the moment was ridiculously unkempt.
He was well-shaven, though. He always carried a portable electric razor with him, and used it four or five times a day.
He said, “Is that… is that Crowe?”
Crowe nodded, and Rad said, “No shit. Well I’ll be damned. Crowe is back.” And then, “That can’t be good.”
He didn’t stand up. From the way his gear was spread out, Crowe could tell he’d only just that moment shot up and was waiting for the bliss. Seeing Crowe walk in probably wasn’t what he had in mind.
He’d been on the Old Man’s hook back in the day, had managed to secure a steady line of smack in exchange for… well, whatever the Old Man needed. He’d picked up the habit back in the late ‘90’s, when he was still with Vice, working undercover. Posing as a heroin addict.
Eventually, we become what we pretend to be in this world.
There were a few officers with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department who suspected the truth about Radnovian, but the fact that he was with Internal Affairs now and could destroy them completely with one phone call kept them quiet.
Crowe said, “Catch you at a bad time, Rad?”
“Naw, man, not at all. Why don’t you, like, siddown or something, though. It hurts my neck to look up at you.”
Crowe sat down next to him. Rad looked at him with hooded eyes, and Crowe could see the drug starting to take effect. His facial muscles were slack and he sort of smiled weakly. “I heard you were out,” he said. “Good for you. Fresh start. Debt to society paid, and like that.”
“I’m a reformed man.”
Rad laughed, not so stoned that he would believe something like that. “I take it you’re here for something shapasic. Shpacific, I mean. Shit.” He shook his head sharply. “
Specific
. You’re here for something
specific
.”
“I need to know about Peter Murke.”
His mouth opened and closed a couple of times. He said, “Peter… Peter Murke. Ah, no, man. No, no, no, no, no.”
“Last I heard, he was about to face a competency hearing.”
“No, man, come on. Christ.”
“Rad,” Crowe said. “For the last few days, I haven’t done much. But as of today, I’m a very busy man. Stop wasting my time.”
Rad grumbled and slouched lower on the sofa. “Vitower sent you, right? Whassa crazy bastard gonna do?”
“I haven’t seen or talked to Vitower since I’ve been back.”
“No, man. No way.”
Crowe hit him in the teeth. Rad grunted once, clutching his mouth, said, “Shit! Ah, fuck, man!”
“Things are a little different this season, Rad. We ain’t buddies, you and me. And I’m not
asking
you to talk to me. You understand?”
Rad looked at him resentfully. Crowe gave him a minute to gather himself. Finally, he pulled his electric razor out of his coat pocket, flipped it on, and ran it over his face. It seemed to relax him. He said, “Yeah, okay. I reckon things are different, huh? Not that I ever thought we were buddies.”
“You’re trying my patience, Rad.”
“Okay, okay.” He seemed entirely straight now; the fist in his face had sort of dispelled the heroin rush a bit. He flipped off the razor and put it away. “Fine. You wanna know about Murke, fine. He got some good slimy attorneys, tryin’ to pass him off as crazy, sayin’ he’s not responsible for what he did. They’re trying to get an appeal on his conviction.”
Murke had been apprehended about two years before and charged with the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl named Patricia Welling. But he was the prime suspect in many more murders, possibly as many as sixteen in all. Every last victim a woman, but that was all they had in common. The D.A. went over every scrap of evidence they had, but, despite that they knew Murke was their man, they had nothing solid, nothing that would stick. Nothing except for Patricia Welling. There they had him with strong DNA evidence and a witness who’d seen him with the victim.