Sidewalk Saint, page 7
‘Who would bully someone like that?’ Etta whispered.
‘They used to make fun of his name,’ I began.
‘Philip.’ She nodded. ‘Derived from the Greek; means lover of horses.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Some of the mean boys in his camp suggested a lewd interpretation of that meaning.’
Etta looked back up at me. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘She’s eleven, Foggy. Geez,’ Philip admonished. ‘She doesn’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh.’ I thought about it for a second. ‘Right.’
Philip sighed like I was the biggest idiot in the state. ‘Come on,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘John Horse is waiting for you.’
Etta whispered, ‘I think he smells nice.’
I shook my head, she shut up, and we followed Philip into the swamp.
Now, when you first got to John Horse’s house, you wondered if maybe it was an abandoned shack. Concrete blocks, tin roof, no heat. And he wasn’t much for decor. A couple of ratty items of furniture that a junkyard wouldn’t take, a hot plate, and some weird stuff on shelves that I was always afraid to ask him about.
Still, when you walked in the front door, there was an eerie sense of well-being. Like the room was filled up with calm. As a bonus that particular night: child and dog were reunited.
‘Den!’ Etta screamed when she saw the pooch at John Horse’s feet.
The dog scrambled to his feet and shot over to Etta like an arrow. He knocked her to the dirt floor and the two of them rolled around laughing and yelping for what must have been five minutes. John Horse watched and smiled. I was less patient.
I sidled up to the man and said, ‘Are you going to tell me what the hell is going on, or not?’
His eyes were still on dog and kid. ‘You’re not delighted by this?’
‘Why is the entire world after this little girl?’ I demanded.
His eyes darted my way. ‘Well, that’s an exaggeration, don’t you think? Can’t be more than a couple hundred people after Etta.’
I shook my head. ‘Stop trying to be funny.’
He turned to me, suddenly very concerned. ‘I may be wrong about the reason they’re after her. I thought it was about the gambling. It might not be. I’ve been having a conversation with the dog, and he’s been trying to explain it to me. I’m just not as good at speaking dog as I used to be. I don’t understand him. Yet.’
You could never tell with John Horse if he was pulling your leg with that kind of talk. ‘Indian Schtick’ he called it. Something for the rubes.
But in this case, I knew what he meant.
‘You understand – that’s why I brought Etta here,’ I said softly. ‘I want you to watch out for her while I go back into the belly of the beast and find out what’s really going on.’
He nodded, returning his attention to the dog-and-child show.
I went over to Etta. She sat up and the dog gave me his full attention.
‘Would you mind staying here for a while,’ I asked her, ‘while I go back into town and find your father?’
She looked around the smudgy room. ‘Seriously?’
Den barked twice.
‘See?’ John Horse said. ‘The dog wants to stay.’
‘And Philip’s mother is a really good cook,’ I added.
Etta stood up. ‘You misunderstand. I meant, like, “Seriously, I get to stay in an Ind— in a Seminole village? Unbelievably cool.’
I turned to John Horse. ‘She says she’s eleven, but I don’t believe it.’
‘Yes,’ he told me, ‘her spirit is much older than that.’
So, it was settled. I bid a brief farewell and made it back to my car. Only got lost twice, a personal record. But as I put the T-Bird in reverse and started to ease a turn-around, a Seminole woman appeared on the road. Someone I’d never seen before. Dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. She was holding a deer antler in one hand and a bone knife in the other. She was scraping the knife on the antler and making a cricket sound. I stopped the car and stared at her. She smiled back. Just as I was about to say something to her, I heard Philip’s voice.
‘Foggy! Wait!’
I turned and there was Philip loping out of the undergrowth with a mason jar in his hand.
‘You almost left without taking some of my mother’s turtle soup,’ he scolded me, arriving at the driver’s-side window.
He held the jar out.
I took it. ‘Man, I can’t believe I almost missed this. You know it’s the best soup I ever tasted.’
‘I know.’ He smiled. ‘My mother made it just for you.’
I gave up a long time ago trying to figure out how his mother knew I was going to be in the camp. But she always did. And always with the soup, which was, in fact, the greatest soup in the world.
I set the jar on the seat beside me. ‘Look, who’s that woman?’ I asked him.
He tilted his head. ‘What woman?’
I turned to see her. ‘The one with the …’
She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.
‘There was a woman in the road,’ I began. ‘Doing a weird antler thing.’
Philip interrupted. ‘Was she scraping a knife on an antler?’
‘Yeah, that’s the one. Made a kind of cricket sound.’
‘Get out of the car!’ he shouted. ‘Get out of the car right now; back to the camp!’
And then he disappeared.
I sat there for a second with the motor running. I’d never seen Philip panic. But that was panic.
I switched off the engine and climbed out of the car.
TWELVE
The camp was chaos. I heard the gunshots when I was still in the underbrush. I got out my Colt, and like an idiot I just went running into the open. I saw three guys in suits with M3 submachine guns, what they called ‘grease guns’. Easy to use and impossible to dodge.
Running low, I ducked behind the nearest cinderblock house. I got sight of one of the guys and managed to pop him in the leg with the Colt. He looked around like someone had tapped him on the shoulder, then just kept firing. Someone was throwing rocks at him. One of the rocks connected and hit him square in the forehead. That had more effect. He lowered his gun and rubbed his head. It was all red there too.
I used that moment to get closer to him. Ran around the house, up behind the guy. I stuck the muzzle of my pistol in his ear, hard.
‘You won’t be so able to shake it off if I put a bullet through your brain,’ I said.
He agreed and dropped his gun.
‘Which gang are you from?’ I asked him.
There was a short pause. Then: ‘Foggy?’
I kept the gun in his ear, but I moved around to the side a little. It was Tony Tedeschi, from my old neighborhood in Brooklyn.
‘Tony? What the hell?’
He grinned. ‘You look good,’ he said. ‘Florida must agree with you.’
‘We have our arguments,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here, shooting up a peaceful Seminole housing project?’
‘Oh. That.’ He nodded. ‘I got a gig with the Delanys.’
He was clearly embarrassed.
‘Can you get your other guys to stop shooting for a minute?’ I asked him. ‘I can help. You’re looking for the little girl, right?’
‘Hey!’ he shouted immediately. ‘Stop shooting! Come over here, see who I got talking to me with a gun to my head!’
The shooting stopped. The two other guys wandered over. I didn’t recognize them.
‘It’s Foggy Moscowitz!’ Tony said affably.
The two guys stared.
‘You’re looking for Etta Roan, am I right?’ I asked everyone.
‘Yes,’ Tony said. ‘Could you move your gun, it’s making my ear itch.’
‘Oh, Jesus, sorry, Tony.’ I put my gun away. ‘But why in the world you want to come in here shooting things up? You didn’t ask anybody about the kid first?’
‘Ask?’ one of the strangers exploded.
He had the look of a Delany. And his face certainly displayed a certain disposition to the violence-before-reason creed of that family. He was dressed in a suit he bought on sale at Woolworth’s and his eyes were redder than Tony’s forehead. Heavy drinker.
‘The kid’s not here,’ I said. ‘That’s what you would have found out if you’d asked.’
Tony looked at his shoes. ‘We followed you here, Foggy. We saw you bring the kid. I mean, I wasn’t sure it was you. We kept our distance. But we got pictures of the kid. She’s here all right.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I brought her here, but this guy, John Horse, already took her into the swamp.’
I didn’t know that for a fact, but it was something John Horse would do. My hope was that Den and Etta and John Horse had all vanished into the weirder part of the swamp.
‘I’ll show you,’ I said.
It was a bold move, but I guessed that keeping these guys occupied would give Philip and his cohorts a chance to organize.
I led the out-of-towners to John Horse’s house, opened the door, peeked in, and sighed a little when I saw it was empty.
‘This is where I brought the girl,’ I told Tony. ‘See? All gone.’
He peered in.
‘What a dump,’ he mumbled.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You should have someone look at your leg. You’re bleeding.’
He looked down. His pants were red.
Before he could look up again, we were surrounded by twenty Seminole men and women. They all had guns. And all the guns were pointed at us.
‘All they have to do,’ I explained slowly, ‘is put about fifty slugs in each of you guys, and then drag your bodies to the edge of the water over there. Gators would have you in five minutes.’
‘And they don’t just eat your body,’ Philip said solemnly. ‘They eat your memory.’
‘It’s true,’ I said, playing along. ‘Once they’re done, no one on earth will remember you ever existed.’
‘Your spirit is just … gone,’ Philip said softly.
It was hard to keep from smiling, because we both knew it was schtick, but the boys from New York City didn’t know that. It sounded really spooky under the circumstances.
Tony whispered, ‘So, what’s the move here, Foggy?’
‘My advice?’ I said. ‘Drop the guns, apologize, and back away. I mean all the way to downtown Manhattan.’
‘Apologize?’ the loudmouth screamed.
His gun arm twitched about a quarter of an inch before a younger woman in the crowd shot him in that very arm. Three times. He dropped his gun then. And he might have been trying to apologize. It was hard to tell with all the whimpering.
Tony and the other guy let go of their guns so fast that the guns bounced on the hard dirt in front of John Horse’s house.
The woman who’d shot Loudmouth handed her pellet gun to someone, took a kerchief from around her neck, and started dabbing the blood on Loudmouth’s arm. He just stared at her.
‘He should go to a hospital,’ she said to no one in particular.
‘That’s what I was just saying to Tony,’ I said. ‘Before I was so rudely interrupted by you guys, I was on my way back to town. You come with me, the other guys can follow. I’ll take you to the hospital. Although you should probably know that Mordecai is there.’
I said it just to see what the reaction would be. It was worth it. Loudmouth went completely silent and his face turned even whiter than it was naturally. The other guy swallowed and couldn’t stop blinking.
Tony had a more practical approach. ‘I quit,’ he said to his cohorts.
I looked at Philip. ‘Can we leave?’
‘After I make sure no one in the village was hurt,’ he said quietly.
‘They broke my window,’ said the girl tending Loudmouth’s arm.
‘Twenty bucks,’ Philip said.
Tony had a Franklin in his hand before anyone else moved. He held it out in Philip’s direction.
‘For the inconvenience,’ he said.
Philip looked at me. ‘I like this one.’
I nodded.
‘Should we just feed these other two to the gators?’ he went on.
I shrugged. ‘OK by me.’
‘I’m good with that,’ Tony agreed.
‘Gee,’ I said to the goons from Manhattan. ‘Gators in the swamp or Mordecai in the hospital?’
They both thought about it for a minute.
Loudmouth drew in a breath and looked at the girl tending to his arm.
‘Nobody ever did nothing nice to me before,’ he said to her, almost whispering. ‘I’d like to stay here.’
‘I need to get the pellets out of your arm,’ she said. ‘They didn’t do too much harm, but they have to come out.’
‘I can do that myself,’ he told her. ‘I done it plenty of times. You got tweezers somewhere?’
She looked at Philip. ‘Can I take him to your mother’s house? She’s got tweezers.’
‘John Horse told me a story about a lion with a thorn in his paw,’ Philip said.
Without another word, the girl took Loudmouth by his good hand and led him away.
The other goon said, ‘This means I ain’t gotta go to where Mordecai is, right?’
I nodded.
‘Then I think I’m gonna go to Hialeah,’ he said. ‘Make a little vacation out of it. I got a pal there that bets on the dogs.’
And without further comment, he turned and headed for his car somewhere in the swamp. He left his grease gun on the ground.
I turned to Tony. ‘And now you’re coming back to town with me.’
‘Not to see Mordecai, I’m not.’
‘No, I mean – I gotta find a guy. If you’re truly quit from the Delany clan, you could help. But we’ve got to get your leg looked at.’
‘It zipped me,’ he said. ‘Hurts a little, but the bullet did more damage to my pants than my leg. I’ll put something on it. When we get back to town.’
I looked at Philip. ‘OK?’
Philip waved the hundred-dollar bill in the air.
We both took that as a yes, Tony and me.
But just as we turned to leave, I thought to ask, ‘So, who exactly was the woman with the antler, Philip? Some kind of early-warning system you guys got here? She alerted you to trouble in the camp?’
He nodded. ‘She did. She’s my grandmother.’
‘Oh.’ I looked around. ‘I don’t think I ever met her.’
‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘She’s been dead for ten years.’
THIRTEEN
The ride back to Fry’s Bay was quiet. No idea what Tony was thinking about. I was thinking about the woman with the antler.
A lot of times, John Horse or someone in the Seminole Jokers Union would try to pull my leg about one thing or another. That’s because they thought it was amusing to mess with my non-Seminole perceptions of their world. Like how John Horse would pretend to read minds, or astral travel, or know the future.
The problem was he was always right when he read my mind or told me what was going to happen. Of course, the astral travelling thing was harder to set in stone.
About halfway back to town I gave up trying to suss the woman and turned my attention to the very confusing details of the previous thirty-six hours or so.
First, Etta was with John Horse, so she was safe as Fort Knox.
Second, this Mordecai character, who was supposed to be the most wicked hitman in the country, was neatly stuck in the hospital.
Third, the Delany boys were dissipated and out of the picture, at least for the moment, so that was reassuring.
But thereafter, in no particular order: crooked cops, Canadian Scarlatti, the Lamberts, and Etta’s missing father.
And behind everything was the King of Questions: why was everybody in the world after Etta Roan?
When we got back to town, I headed to my apartment.
‘You mind if I stop off at my place,’ I asked Tony, ‘before I take you to the hospital?’
‘I’m in no hurry to go to a hospital where Mordecai is,’ he said. ‘Just get me some hydrogen peroxide and a rag, I’ll be fine.’
‘OK, but you gotta wait in the car. I don’t want you getting blood all over my living room.’
I always changed my shoes after I’d been in the swamp because you could never tell what you’d stepped in. I also had to get the hydrogen peroxide and a rag for Tony’s leg. But mainly I got a little extra ammo for the Colt. Just for my peace of mind.
When I got back to him, I handed Tony the rag and the peroxide. He dabbed, hissed, and sat back.
‘That ought to do it,’ he said. ‘But I’m eventually gonna have to change these pants.’
And off we went.
I was hoping that even after Roan had seen everything that went down at Yudda’s, he’d still be close by because he wanted to see Etta. The siren scent of hot donuts was mighty, and he might be in the place. It worked with Etta. It was worth a shot with her father.
I parked around the corner, in front of what used to be the Kress store, a five and dime. Been closed for years. The downtown development group kept saying it was going to be a Macy’s one day. They’d been saying that since 1958.
We got out of the car and into the shop; Tony disappeared into the gents’ room. I sat at the counter. Bibi wasn’t around, which either meant she was on a smoke break, or at her tap class. She thought if she got good enough, she could beat it down to Orlando and get into some show at the new Disney franchise there.
Warren was the guy in the kitchen. Made the donuts, kept to himself, had a slow eye. He saw me, nodded, and a couple of seconds later he appeared with a coffee pot in his hand.
‘Cruller?’ He sniffed.
‘Yes, and my friend will have two cream-filled.’
He poured two cups and went back to the kitchen.
The place wasn’t nearly as crowded as it had been earlier. Getting near closing time. Maybe Bibi had just taken off early.
Tony joined me at the counter, sipped his coffee, and was content to wait for me to start the conversation.
‘Working for the Delanys,’ I said, eyes straight forward, shaking my head.
He set his cup down. ‘You got no idea how times are in Manhattan. You Brooklyn guys, you got it easy.’
