I turned to Gita who seemed to be oblivious to the situation. "Well, here we are Champ. She should meet us here in a couple minutes." Gita was busy going over her case notes and I was as invisible to her as a blue suit in a boardroom. She circled something in red then flipped back a few pages. Here she underlined something and made a note in the margin. Then she flipped forward again, reread a paragraph and nodded to herself. I was glad that we weren't going to have a quiz on it later because she would certainly ruin the curve for me.
I got out of the car and looked around a little more. I leaned up against the hood of the car and tried to look a little homey, but for a middle class white boy with chinos, tassle weejuns, a pinpoint oxford shirt and a club tie, it just wasn't going to happen. A bum was staggering toward me making vile accusations. Why didn't I leave him alone? Why didn't I go back where I came from? I fought the urge to explain myself until he finally turned away and continued the accusations to some entity that only he saw. As he turned, a pungent odor, slightly reminiscent of sour milk and old dirty laundry wafted toward me. It occurred to me that we could have met Mrs. Oxenstein at my office instead.
Gita got out of the car and brought the report she was looking at with her. "I see that you have had previous dealings with Oxenstein." She said.
"Yeah. It was sometime in the last year or so. He came to me with some bizarre story about going legit. He said he had met someone who he really cared about and wanted to get out of his current business into something legal and respectable. The problem was that he had all of his illegal profits in cash and didn't know how to convert the cash into legal investments. I was a well know expert in money laundering so he wanted me to explain 'hypothetically' how money laundering worked. He even offered to donate money to the school so we could build a lab, if we would take the donation in cash. I told him that he must have plenty of contacts in the underworld to launder money, but he complained that they would only return ten cents on the dollar so he wanted to find a better way. He told me about this woman that he met and tried to convince me that he was sincere in wanting to get out of illegal markets. The weird thing is that I didn't believe a word of it, but now it looks like he might have been telling the truth. In fact, as you can see from my scant notes, I wrote very little of what he said and dismissed the meeting as some kind of con. I had forgotten all about it until Fred Barnard called me this morning and told me that Mrs. Oxenstein had hired us. Since then I've been trying to piece together what he said, but it was two years ago and my memory is pretty vague."
"What have you managed to recall so far?" Gita asked as she turned to a fresh sheet of paper ready to take notes.
"The woman we're meeting is D.J. Calahan. That squares with what Oxenstein said. D.J. stands for Daisy Jane. She was an exotic dancer at one of those places they used to have on 14th street. They advertised her as D.J. 'Da Jugs' Calahan. I think she had a 99 double Z cup."
Gita looked up from her notes. "Is that a fact, a guess or a fantasy?" she asked, the corner of her mouth turning up in a sly smile.
"Well, maybe I don't remember the exact size." I shrugged. "But it was something off the scale."
Gita scratched out something, wrote something else and then waited. I looked at her notes. Reading handwriting upside down isn't easy, but it didn't look like she had written 'fantasy' so I continued.
"Oxenstein seemed to think that he had found the perfect woman. He wanted to take her away from exotic dancing and he wanted to get out of his rackets. He sounded like he wanted buy a house in the suburbs with Daisy Jane and open up a hardware store. But his money was dirty and he wanted me to help him clean it. Like I said, I didn't believe a word of it."
I looked up and saw a woman coming out of the diner. She had reddish blond hair and ample blue mascara. She was wearing flamingo pink spandex pants with platform shoes and a pullover V-neck cashmere sweater. She balanced on those platforms like a deer on a frozen pond. The sweater appeared a couple sizes too large and was still stretched to capacity by two enormous breasts, somewhere between muskmelons and sugar baby watermelons. As she walked on those platforms, her breasts bounced around under that sweater like two groundhogs fighting in a sleeping bag. I nudged Gita. "Here come Da Jugs." I said. Gita failed to see the wit in my remark.
As she approached I thought about that black velvet painting in Oxenstein's apartment that I had seen in the crime scene photos. I stepped away from the car and into her path. I put out my hand. "Hello. You must be D.J."
At first glance, she looked at me with suspicion. Her face was a montage of blue mascara, anger and low self-esteem. She was wearing perfume that was probably sold by the half gallon and as its essence reached my nose I wanted to wretch. Yet behind all those sacrifices to survival was the hint of dignity from days gone by. She reminded me of one of those grand beach houses from the twenties that badly needed a paint job and today sported a pinball arcade and a pizza stand. Her voice had a husky timbre brought on by too many cigarettes and too many shouted ordered in a noisy bar. "You Wentworth?" she rasped.
"Yes, I am" I replied.
"Who's the little trick?" she asked, gesturing at Gita.
Gita smiled and offered her hand with the warmth of a bank president greeting a wealthy client. "My name is Gita Ramana. I'm Dr. Wentworth's partner on this assignment."
Daisy looked as us both with more suspicion then shook Gita's hand. "I'll have to remind her to disinfect that hand," I thought, "wouldn't want my little trick to get cooties."
I hadn't noticed it but a taxicab had pulled up in the space behind my car. D.J. gestured at the taxi and we walked back to it to get in. D.J. got in the front seat. Gita and I got in the back. The cabby glanced at D.J. who simply nodded at him. Without a word he pulled away from the curb. We proceeded down 4th street and turned about four blocks later onto a street with a missing street sign. In the next thirty minutes we took so many left and right turns that I wasn't even sure in which compass direction we were heading. For all I knew we could have landed up a block away from where we started, but I didn't think so. The neighborhood where we stopped looked more like working poor than street vice. We got out of the cab and walked into a bar called "Bar". Apparently, these places didn't care much about catchy names.
D.J. nodded at the bartender as we walked in, and took us to a dark booth around the corner from the bar. Gita and D.J. sat across from me with Gita on the inside.
"Nobody will see us here," D.J. said leaning forward and confiding in me.
A waitress with a pad came over to take our orders. She was mid thirties going on sixty and had likely already seen all the good times was she was going to see. "What'll you have?" she asked in a voice almost as raspy as D.J.'s. I wondered what it was with these women and their husky voices.
"Do you have anything interesting on tap?" I asked, always hopeful.
"People don't come here for interesting," she growled, "we got the usual."
I ordered a draft. Gita ordered the same. D.J. ordered a double scotch on the rocks and told the waitress to put it all on her tab. The waitress shuffled away and came back with the drinks in less than a minute. My glass had a big greasy thumb print on the side and rim was chipped. I looked at Gita. She smiled like it was my idea to go there and I was going to get what I deserved. D.J. took a gulp of her scotch and lit a cigarette. I decided not to ask if we were sitting in the smoking section. In the background, the jukebox was playing Sammy Davis Jr. singing 'My Way'. I tucked my club tie into my shirt and tried to just live in the moment, but my shoe kept sticking to the floor.
"You guys are working for me, right?" she asked not waiting for an answer. "So anything I tell you is confidential, right?"
"Well, we're not attorneys," I said, "so this discussion is not privileged. However, everything you tell us is confidential."
"Privileged, confidential, what's the difference?" she rasped impatiently.
"Anything you tell us is confidential, which means that we won't tell anybody. However, it is not privileged so if we are called into court and have to testify, then we have to tell the court what was said."
"I don't care about the courts," she said, "I ain't never done anything illegal. Well, at least not recently. I just don't want anything to get out because I don't want no retaliation from Gershom's associates."
She took another gulp of scotch and a drag off her cigarette. As she leaned forward to use the ashtray, I was sure those jugs would knock over her scotch. But it had been placed just out of reach. I guess you get used to those things.
"Why don't you just start at the beginning," I said sounding a little too much like a cheap detective story.
Over the next few hours she told us the story of two people living four lives - she the exotic dance, he the local hustler. Then the two of them found each other and wanted to leave their dark lives in the past. But the past didn't want to let them go. So they lived their new lives in each other's hearts and spare moments. In a desperate attempt to break free, Gershom had called in a cheap con artist. His name was Ryan or Brian or something like that. It wasn't much to go on. But I felt that I had to help. Gershom had come to me in an honest attempt to clean up his life and I hadn't believed him. Instead he turned to his shady friends for help and landed up with his brains splattered all over his apartment. I felt responsible somehow.
D.J. told the story. Gita took the notes. I made sure the scotch didn't get knocked over, and somehow, in the process, my beer disappeared. Gita's beer had gone flat. I don't think she had even touched it. When the story was finished, I told D.J. that we would help.
"Here's my home number. Now you know why I keep things private."
"Is that why the taxi ride took a half an hour to get here?"
She shrugged without answering. No answer was needed. She put us back in the waiting cab and ten minutes later we were back at my car. A kid was leaning on the hood. When we pulled up, he nodded at the cab driver and left. We got out of the cab and walked over to the car. It was dusk and the neighborhood was transitioning from impoverished to dangerous. A couple of 'ladies' were standing on the corner under a street light that had just come on. They were wearing large colorful beads and the shortest, tightest skirts I had even seen. I couldn't imagine how that could be attractive to anyone. But I came from a different world.
I leaned against the side of car taking a moment to sort things out. "What do you think, Champ?" I asked, stalling for time so I could come up with a better question.
"I think she's telling the truth," she said. "At least it squares with the information that I've gotten about some con men being involved."
"Yeah, but it gives us precious little to go on," I said. "Some guy named Brian or Ryan or something like that."
I liked working computer fraud because you could create a net of logic and eventually catch your thief. Money laundering was similar because you could systematically narrow the focus of your investigation until you zeroed in on the culprit. But this was turning into a Marlowe style gumshoe investigation. It was too loose, too unstructured and I didn't like it. I was balancing my guilt and responsibility against all my other obligations. I was even thinking about calling Barnard and dropping the case when I spotted a threatening looking black kid heading directly toward me. He was well over six feet tall and wore baggy jeans with a gray sweatshirt. The cut off sleeves showed his muscular arms to great advantage. There was a kelloid scar on his shoulder, but I couldn't quite make out what it was. His eyes were focused on me and he was walking with great purpose. There was a slight bounce in his step, no doubt following a tune heard only by him.
"Yo, Mister. You got to pay to park there."
"There's no head on the meter or I would have paid." I replied. I knew that wasn't a good answer, but I wanted to get him to the point as quickly as possible.
"You pay me." He said. "This is my block."
It really didn't matter to me who I paid for the parking so I decided to take the easy way out. "No problem. How much to I owe you?"
"You been there for several hours. I figure you owe me an even hundred."
"A hundred bucks for a few hours parking!" I blurted out. "You cost more than valet service in the middle of downtown."
"You gonna pay one way or the other." He threatened, standing up straighter and trying to look even more menacing.
"Be careful." I warned. "You don't know who you're up against."
He laughed a short chuckle. "You think you gonna protek da lady?" he asked looking like he was enjoying the humor of the situation.
"No," I said daringly. "She gonna protek me."
He chuckled again and reached out to push Gita. When his hand got within a foot of her, she grabbed the hand, pulled it over her right shoulder and kicked her left foot up under his arm. The toe of her shoe connected hard on the underside of his arm. She then stepped back and let go of his arm. It swung down and hung limp at his side.
"What you do to my arm?" he cried in outrage.
"There is a nerve that runs under your arm." Gita informed him, as though she were explaining a store discount to dim witted clerk. "When it is pinched you loose the use of your arm until the nerve recovers. It will take an hour or so, so I suggest you be on your way now."
"You think I'm gonna let a little hump like you do this to me?" he asked. There was anger in his eyes and outrage in his voice.
Gita's eyes focused into black pinpoints and she met his glare without flinching. "That was a warning. If you try to touch me again, I will tear your other arm right out of the socket and throw it down the street so you'll have to run after it."
I guess the imagery of running down the street with one arm limp and the other rolling down the sidewalk in front of him was more that he cared to risk. He murmured a few suggestions for enhancing our sex lives, then turned and left. I figured we were going get free parking.
"Well, I'm glad you didn't kill him," I joked as we got into the car.
"Me, too." She replied. "Too much paperwork."
I looked to see if she was kidding. If she was, it didn't show on her face. So I decided not to pursue it.
"How do you do that?" I asked, once again in awe of her discipline and self-control.
"It isn't really that hard." She said as though she was going to explain the store discount to me. "There are two factors - leverage and planning. First, you always use the opponent's strength and movements against him. I could not have made that move if he had not tried to push me. His attempt to push me made him off balance and I leveraged that motion to pull his arm over my shoulder. Second, always follow a practiced plan. If you simply react, you loose a lot the advantage. I knew he might try something and for each possibility I have a well-practiced move. Of course, once you begin a planned sequence you have to carry it out completely. That move was a fairly short sequence so I didn't have much to carry out."
I pulled away from the curb and drove away. I had forgotten about D.J. and was now dwelling on what Gita had said.
About three blocks later we were sitting at a traffic light. I turned to her and said, "So you always plan everything?"
"Not everything." She said coyly, and winked at me.
I wasn't exactly sure what that wink meant, but I wasn't about to risk my life to find out.