"Who's your boss?"
"You'd know him if I said it," Ruby said. "Meadows did some work on the big man's wife, if you know what I mean." She looked at him with a wise face that Manny searched for a few moments before nodding.
"Sometimes he used to hang out at the Bowery Bar," Manny said. "Maybe they seen him. Ernie there used to take Meadows's action," which meant, Ruby knew, that Ernie was the detective's bookie.
Ernie was sitting inside the door of the bar. He wore a blue pin-striped suit, had pink-tinted eyeglasses, and a pinkie ring with a tiger's eye stone that looked like a dinosaur egg with a crack in it. He kept looking over his shoulder at the street outside.
He made a pass at Ruby, seemed relieved when she sloughed it off, and then seemed happy to talk about Zack Meadows.
"A good dear friend," Ernie said. "You can tell him that and tell him to come and visit me. He ain't got nothing to be afraid of."
"I'm looking for him too," Ruby said.
"He owe you money too?" asked Ernie.
"No, but I've got some money for him."
Ernie looked up from his beer glass filled with red wine. "Yeah?" He seemed suddenly interested. "How much?"
"I don't actually have it on me. But it's five hundred dollars," Ruby said. "I've got to bring him to my boss to get it."
"Five hundred, huh? That's enough."
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"Enough for what?" "For him to pay up."
"So you got any idea where I can find him?" Ruby asked.
"If I knew, I woulda found him myself," said Ernie.
"You know anybody who was his friend?" "Naaah, he got no friends." Ernie sipped his wine. "Wait a minute. Up on Twenty-second Street, there's . . ." He paused. "You find him, you see that I get three hundred out of that five hundred?" "You got it," Ruby said. "When I find him, I'll take him to my boss for the money, then I'll personally drive him back here."
"All right. I guess I gotta trust you. There's this broad named Flossie. She hangs out on Twenty-second between Eighth and Ninth. In the saloons there. She used to be a hooker. Maybe she still is. Meadows hangs around with her. I think he lives with her sometimes." "Flossie?"
"Yeah. You see her, you know her. She's like five hundred pounds. Watch out she don't sit on you."
"Thanks, Ernie," Ruby said. "When I find him, I'll bring him back here."
When Ruby went outside, a New York City tow truck operator was attaching a chain to the bumper of her white Lincoln Continental.
"Hey, hold on," she yelled. "That's my car." The driver was a fat black man with a slicked-down hairdo that made him look hike a 1930s opening act at the Cotton Club.
"Illegally parked, honey," he said.
"How? Where?" Ruby said. "Where's the sign?"
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"Down there." The driver pointed vaguely down the block. When Ruby strained her eyes, she was able to see some sort of sign on a utility pole.
"What's that sign got to do with up here?" she said.
"I ain't in charge of signs," the driver said. "I just tow away the cars." • "What's this gonna cost me?" she asked.
"Seventy five dollars. Twenty five for the ticket. Fifty for the tow."
"Let's try coexisting," Ruby said. "I'll give you fifty now, and you let the car down."
The driver winked at her. "You give me eighty now and I'll let you down."
"You know," Ruby said, "it ain't just that you're a turkey, you be greedy too."
"Ninety," the driver said.
"And you're ugly, to boot," Ruby said.
"Up to a hundred," the driver said. He bent under Ruby's bumper to fasten the chain.
Ruby walked to the front of the tow truck. She let the air out of the front left tire, then out of the right front tire. The heavy truck settled down onto its rims.
The driver heard the hiss and came to the front of his truck, just as a cab was stopping to pick up Ruby.
"Hey, you," the driver called. "What'm I gonna do now?"
"Call a tow truck," Ruby said. "And then when I got your ass in front of the license board next week, you better call youself a lawyer." She looked to the cab driver. "Twenty-second Street," she said.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
Randall Lippincott was whistling when he got back to his office at 2:15 p.m., an act so abnormal that his two secretaries looked at each other in disbelief.
"The next thing you know, he'll do a dance on the desk," one of the secretaries said.
"Yeah, and I'll be elected the new Pope," said Janie, the senior of the two secretaries by six months.
Being elected Pope might not have been as big a surprise for Janie as what happened when she answered the buzzer and walked into Lippincott's office at 2:30.
The banker had loosened his tie and opened his shirt collar. He was still whistling.
"Are you all right, sir?" she asked.
"Never better. Feel like a new man," he said. "Send out and get me a bottle of beer, will you? That's a good girl."
At 2:50, Lippincott was not so sure that he was feeling all that well. He took off his jacket and his tie. At 2:55, his shirt went and when Janie came back in with the beer, he was sitting behind his desk in a tee shirt. She almost dropped the beer when she sawihim.