Ruby picked her way neatly through the piles and
73
walked up the cracked concrete steps of the building. She had been in New York often enough to know that doorbells in places like this never worked, so she looked for the superintendent's apartment number, which was written on the wall with a magic marker, then slipped the inside lock with a credit card from a Wisconsin cheese-by-mail shop.
The sign outside the apartment door said "Mr. Ar-maducci." Ruby rang the superintendent's bell. She had been prepared to charm the super when he appeared, but a look at the hulk wearing a strapped undershirt with hair on the tops of his shoulders was too much, even for Ruby's well-defined sense of duty.
He growled at her, "Wotcha want?" and she fished in her pocketbook and came up with a laminated card that identified her as a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
He fingered the card with grease-stained fingers and she made a mental note to throw it away as soon as she got back outside.
"I want to see the Meadows apartment," she said. "Yeah?" he said in the clever patois that all New Yorkers learn, as a consequence of their school system being the most expensive to operate in the United States.
"Gee, you got it. First time too," Ruby said. "You got a warrant?" Mr. Armaducci said. That was the second thing New Yorkers learned to say. It gave them their world-wide reputation for sophistication.
"Do I need one?" Ruby asked. "You got no warrant, you don't get to see nuthinV
74
"If I have to go get a warrant, I won't come back alone," Ruby said.
"No?"
"I'll bring back half the health department," she said.
"Big deal. Wha they gonna do, fine the landlord? How the hell they fine him, I can't even find him."
"Fine the landlord, hell," Ruby said. "They take one look at this dump and they'll drag you out into the street and shoot you. Bang, bang."
"Very funny."
"Keys to the Meadows apartment."
"You wait here. I see I find dem."
It took five minutes for Mr. Armaducci to find the keys. From the looks of them, it was apparent that he had been keeping them hidden in a pot of boiling chicken grease on his stove.
"You see dat Meadows," the superintendent said, "you tell him I tron him out, he tree weeks behind da rent."
"And places like this aren't easy to find, either," Ruby said.
"Dat's right," the superintendent said. He scratched that sixty percent of his stomach that did not fit beneath his undershirt and he belched. Ruby walked away before he relieved himself in the hall which, judging from the smell, seemed to be the habit of the building's occupants.
"Which is his?" she asked.
"Tade flaw leff," the superintendent said.
As she walked up the creaking steps, Ruby wondered if there were perhaps a special subspecies of human who became New York City apartment superintendents. Surely, the preponderance among
75
them of Mr. Artnaduccis could not be explained away by the laws of probability.
Not the building or the hallway or the superintendent had prepared Ruby for the inside of Zack Meadows's apartment. It looked as if it had been used for the last ten years as a staging area for an army laundry. Clothes, all of them dirty, littered every corner of the two small rooms. The sink was filled with a lifetime supply of plastic plates and styro-foam cups. She sighed and thought to herself that white folks sure lived funny.
But the apartment would be easy to search. She merely had to drag her feet to turn over all the junk that was on the floor and the only two places where anything of value might have been hidden were a green enamel bedroom dresser and in a drawer under the sink. Ruby did not exactly know what she was looking for but there was nothing in either place that told anything about Zack Meadows except that he was a slob who didn't own any clean clothes.
Ruby spent an hour kicking about the apartment, but she found nothing. No phone numbers on the inside of the three-year-old telephone book, no addresses of friends or relatives. Just one old penny arcade photograph, presumably of Zack Meadows. She thought he looked stupid. She found a pile of old racing forms and skimmed them quickly. She noticed large x's drawn through the past performance charts of certain horses, as if they had automatically been eliminated from contention. All the horses so treated had jockeys with Italian-sounding names. Ruby was sure she had found her man. Finally, with a deep feeling of disgust, she turned
76
over the once-white plastic garbage pail. Stuffed into the bottom of it, along with a few small paper bags, were a fistful of napkins printed in bleeding red ink "Manny's Sandwich Shop." It gave an address around the corner on the Bowery.
Ruby locked the door behind her and stopped at Mr. Armaducci's apartment to return the keys.
"Did Meadows ever have any visitors?" she asked.
"Naaah, nobody come to see him."
"Thanks." She gave him the keys, avoiding skin contact with his hand.
"Hey," he called after her.
Ruby turned.
"You didden take nuttin' witcha, didja?"
"God, I hope not," Ruby said.
Manny's Sandwich Shop around the comer was just what the neighborhood deserved and Manny, the owner, seemed to have spent his life trying to live up to the quality of the restaurant.
He knew Zack Meadows well.
"Sure," Manny told Ruby. "He stops in here, two, three times a week. Likes my pastrami sandwiches."
"I bet they're wonderful," Ruby said. "I'm looking for him. You seen him around recently?"
Manny shrugged. "Let me think. No, maybe a couple weeks I ain't seen him."
"You have any idea where he hangs out?" Ruby asked. "Who his friends might be?"
Manny shook his head. "I never seen him with nobody. What you wanna know for?" he asked suspiciously.
Ruby winked. "My boss sent me down. I've got some money for him."
77