Page 7 of Hanging and Burning

“Use this on the top drawer of the side table,” he said.

Next to my chair was a white cabinet, made from metal. The top drawer needed the key.

There were only three items therein: a young woman’s photograph in a golden frame, a nearly full pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and a snub-nosed .38 pistol, which, I assumed, was loaded.

I took out the picture frame and locked the drawer back up.

The subject was a young woman. She wore a blue T-shirt that had the song title THRILLER printed across the chest in darker blue. Her long hair was composed of medium-size dreadlocks. Her eyes sought out the lens and her mouth tried resisting a smile but failed. She was pretty and also handsome, but the two things that struck me about her were, first, she had the kind of face that made you expect a strong character; and second, she was what passed for a Black woman in America, the color of light brown sugar.

“That was taken ten or twelve years ago,” he commented. “But she—she still pretty much looks the same.”

I handed him the key and said, “I’ll need to hold on to the picture for a while.”

“It’s the only one I got.”

“You’ll get it back.”

He wanted to say no, knowing that he’d have to agree.

“How much?” he asked.

“Ten thousand if I find her. Nothing if I don’t.”

“That’s a lotta money.”

“Not anymore it ain’t.”

Making Arman grin helped deal with the sadness permeating the place where rich people, and their middle-class servants, went to die.

“You need anything else?” he asked.

“What kind of insurance did you sell?”

2.

ARMAN BABYLON LEANED back on the mechanically raised mattress. His lips were smiling but his eyes were not.

“I wondered if you’d take the bait on that,” he said.

I waited.

In response he raised both big hands as if warding off criticism.

“It was protection,” he admitted. “Me and my friend Paulie Antonucci watched out for small businesses in run-down neighborhoods around Brooklyn. We were fair and honest—tough, too. We didn’t punish the people didn’t pay us. They usually became the best examples of why you could use the coverage.”

“You were connected?”

“No. We worked around the edges. If anybody tried to take away our policies, well, we dissuaded them.”

I was impressed. For a lifelong Cro-Magnon crime fighter like myself, it was like meeting Neanderthal Capone while passing through some wild valley in the middle of nowhere. It felt like, when he was young, he could have thrown me in the air like a baseball and then used his mastodon-bone club to knock me out of the park.

“Well?” Babylon asked.

“Where’s your partner now?”

“Paulie died back some years after I stopped sellin’ policy. We did okay against the Mafia guys. By that time, in the seventies and up into the nineties, they were into drugs and gamblin’, mainly. We did okay with them, but when the serious drugs took over, trouble got too much for us… for me, at least.”

“Drug gangs?” I asked.