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  Arbor Hill

  (A Jack ‘Keeper’ Marconi Novel)

  Vincent Zandri

  “Lots of drugs, some muggings and fights, and lots of property crime. Gun violence too. It's a gunshot while walking down the street sort of place.”

  —Former resident of Albany, New York speaking under condition of anonymity

  1

  I was standing by the window in my second-floor Sherman Street office. There wasn’t a whole lot to look at in this, the Arbor Hill section of the city. Like the city name suggests, there must have been plenty of trees and green plant life to grace the cityscape a hundred or more years ago. Hard to believe if you look at it now. But then, scientists are always going on about how Mars was once covered in lush greenery. Times change, things deteriorate and collapse.

  In my mind, I pictured horse drawn carriages roaming up and down cobblestone streets. Black tuxedo-wearing men in top hats escorting their lovely brides dressed in long gowns. The men would politely tip their hats to other passersby, and the women would casually smile or offer a quick wave with their gloved hands.

  The townhouses that graced both sides of Clinton Avenue, the main road in Arbor Hill, would be covered in brownstone or freshly painted wood siding, with stone and in some cases, adorned with sculpted black wrought iron staircases that accessed wood and glass doors. The lamp lighting on the clean, slate sidewalks would be powered by gas, and the aroma of fresh cooking meats from the Polish meat vendors on the corners would pervade the air. Back in those days, Arbor Hill—and even Sherman Street—were the most attractive places to live and work in New York State’s capital city.

  But today, any resemblance to Arbor Hill of the past was a long-forgotten memory. Case and point. My eyes were focused on a woman standing on a patch of broken macadam. She appeared to be Hispanic. She was wearing a long black leather coat to warm herself against the early spring winds of a cold March. She was holding out her hand, palm up, the expression on her long face intense. She was demanding something from the black man standing before her.

  He was wearing baggy blue jeans that rode half way down his ass exposing red and black checkered boxer shorts. Instead of a top hat, he wore a New York Yankees baseball cap, the brim of which was extra wide and flat. He wasn’t really wearing the cap so much as it was sitting precariously on the side of his head. It was a balancing act. He was also sporting a black leather coat, and when he reached inside it and pulled out a semi-automatic, I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

  Her once hard-ass expression softened while she handed him a plastic bag filled with whatever drug de jour he was trying to score. He stuffed the bag into his coat pocket, then dug way down into his jeans pocket and came back out with a roll of pretty green. He handed it to her along with a few choice words. Even though I couldn’t hear what he said to her, I had to assume it was something like, “Go ahead and count it, bitch.”

  But she just took the money, about-faced, got into the driver’s side seat of a beat-up and battered 1980’s era Impala and drove away.

  “Arbor Hill,” I whispered to myself, crossing my arms over my chest, the thumb on my right hand tickling the hammer on my 1911, “may you rest in peace.”

  A heavy silence consumed me until a knock on the office door broke me out of my spell.

  “Hello,” called out a voice. A man’s voice. “Are you Mr. Marconi?”

  I turned. My instincts were right on, as usual. He was a man, all right. A little man with curly black salt and pepper hair and a matching mustache way too overgrown for such thin lips. He had black horn-rimmed glasses on, and the pocket on his wool blazer was filled with a white plastic pocket protector. The pocket protector was filled with a variety of pens. Mostly cheap Bics by the looks of it.

  I put on my best Marconi smile.

  “Can I help you?”

  He too smiled—nervously.

  “The door was open,” he said, stating the obvious. “This a bad time? Because if it is I—”

  “This is a splendid time,” I said, unfolding my arms, gesturing for him to come forward and take a seat.

  He took my advice, crossed over the old rough wood textile factory floor, sat himself down, crossing his legs. Again—nervously.

  I took a seat behind my desk, folded my hands, locked my eyes on his, but his eyes were distracted. They seemed to be occupied with my 1911. Pulling the piece from the shoulder holster, I released the magazine, set it on the desk. Pulling back the slide, the chambered round came popping out. I snatched the round out of mid-air with my free hand. The maneuver made me look badass.

  “Would you like to hold it?” I said.

  His sad eyes lit up.

  “Pardon me?” he asked.

  “Would you like to hold my gun?” I clarified. “You seem fascinated with it.”

  He assumed a grin.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. Then, shaking his head, holding up his hand. “No thanks. Guns frighten me.”

  “You believe in the second amendment, Mister ummm . . .”

  “McNamee,” he said. “Jason McNamee. That’s a small C, big N, two ees.”

  “Thanks for clarifying, Mr. McNamee,” I said, slapping the magazine back into the .45 and reholstering it. The extra bullet I left standing on the desktop. It looked badass.

  “So, what is it I can do for you, Mr. McNamee with two ees?” I smiled, as wide as possible. It’s what I call a shit-or-get-off-the-throne kind of smile.

  The little disheveled man looked at me quizzically through his thick eyeglasses.

  “Your kind of a kidder, aren’t you?” he said. “I was warned about that.”

  “By whom?” I said.

  “By the people who recommended you to me.”

  “And they would be?”

  “The police.”

  “How nice for them. That tells me you wish for me to solve something they cannot.”

  “Sort of. I guess you could say that.”

  “That segue now established,” I said, “what seems to be the problem?”

  He joined his hands at the knuckles, rested them in his lap, stared dow
n at them. I guess he was ashamed of what he was about to tell me and therefore wanted to avoid eye contact.

  “I’ve been ripped off,” he said.

  I abruptly sat back in my swivel chair, eyes wide, mouth agape.

  “You don’t say,” I said.

  “It’s the truth, Mr. Marconi,” he admitted, bobbing his head.

  “And who, pray tell, did the ripping off? Or are you not privy to say?”

  “A girl.”

  I exhaled a loud breath.

  “Heart be still,” I said. “A girl ripping you off. Is there no justice?”

  “Seriously, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “It’s a rather embarrassing scenario.”

  Slowly, I sat up, cathedralled my hands, set them on the desktop.

  “Assuming you wish me to do something about it,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what’s happened.”

  He nodded once more and began to talk.

  2

  Five long minutes later, I had the gist of the Mr. McNamee with two ees rip-off. Seemed the little guy was lonely. By that, I mean he needed a little loving in his life. That fact firmly established, he ventured out to a bar a couple of nights before and logged onto Tinder, which I’m told is a dating application that allows you to view potential dates who are located within eye and earshot. McNamee found just such a girl who was also drinking alone at the bar. He then worked up the courage to invite her to join him.

  He described her as a little younger than him. Maybe in her late thirties. Not too tall, not too short. Nice build, long blonde hair, blue eyes. Or, in Mr. McNamee’s words, “The sweetest bluest eyes you’ll ever see.” Clearly, Mr. McNamee didn’t date much. They got along swimmingly, he said, and they stayed at the bar long enough to have a few more drinks and even some Buffalo chicken wings. “Three alarm hot,” he added, not without a smile.

  “Then what happened?” I asked.

  “She asked me to walk her home.”

  I gave him a wink like I knew where this was going. That’s also when I decided to pull out a yellow legal pad and a pen, just to make it look like I knew what I was doing.

  “Did you get her name?” I asked.

  “Missy,” he said. “Missy Smith.”

  “Smith,” I repeated while writing it down. “Sounds suspicious. Or convenient anyway. Did you ask to see proof? Like a driver’s license?”

  “Really, Mr. Marconi,” McNamee said. “On a first date?”

  “You can never be too careful, these days.”

  He made a smirk.

  “I just trusted her, I guess,” he said. “Which is why I’m here now.”

  “So, what happened between you and Missy?”

  “We went up to her apartment,” he continued.

  “And where is said apartment located?”

  “On Clinton Avenue right around the corner,” he said. It was more of a mumble like it pained him to repeat the address aloud.

  “Ouch,” I said. “Bad neighborhood. Arbor Hill.”

  He nodded. “I know, I know,” he concurred. “The worst, in fact. You’ve got to be broke or a drug dealer to be living there. It made me nervous walking the streets with her.”

  “Gangbangers thrive there,” I said. “Trust me. They’re right outside my front door.”

  “Well, we went upstairs, and we had another drink. I told her about my job at the New York State Department of Civil Engineering. Told her it was a nice, safe job, with good benefits and a hell of a retirement pension.” He smiled. “That seemed to impress her.”

  “What else did you tell her?”

  “That I never married or had children, so I was able to save up a lot.”

  “You divulged all that right away?” I questioned.

  “I didn’t know what else to talk about?”

  I wrote something else down. Or, that’s not right. Actually, I drew a circle, put two eyes inside the circle, and a smiley face. I smiled back at it.

  “Missy,” I said. “Her apartment clean?”

  He cocked his head to the side, like he had to think about it.

  “I guess so,” he said. “I don’t pay attention to such things.”

  “She live alone?”

  “This is where it gets complicated,” he said. “She has a little boy. A toddler. Teddy. He was asleep.”

  “She left the kid alone? That’s illegal.”

  “Kid downstairs, a black girl, checks on him, takes care of him when Missy is gone.”

  “I see. Did you meet the black girl in question, confirm her existence?”

  He shook his head. “No, sir. I did not.”

  Once more I pretended to jot down a note. The action made him nervous.

  “Missy got a job?” I asked.

  “Cleans houses in the rich neighborhoods.”

  “North Albany,” I said. “Loudonville.”

  I pretended to write that down too. Instead, I drew a neck for my smiley face.

  “So, what happened after that?” I asked.

  “We made out a little I guess,” he said somewhat under his breath, his face turning red like it would on a teenager. “Then, she suddenly looked at her watch, said she didn’t know where the time had gone. She had to go to bed because she had to get up early the next morning.”

  “And?”

  “I asked her for her number. She gave it to me, and I put it into my phone. Then I asked her if she was free the next night.”

  “Was she?”

  He smiled.

  “Yes,” he said. “She saw me to the door, and then . . .”

  The then dangled.

  “Then what?” I urged.

  “Then she asked me if she could borrow some money.”

  3

  I showed Mr. McNamee with two ees to the door, his advance check stuffed in my jeans pocket. I told him I’d be in touch soon. Thus far, anyway, the check didn’t feel like rubber. I then went back to the window behind my desk, looked out onto the street. No gangbangers or drugs deals to be seen, but that didn’t mean the deals weren’t going down behind closed doors. Arbor Hill was a bad place now. Without trees or arbors or God.

  I thought about McNamee. His predicament. About how he responded to Missy when she asked him for money. How irresponsibly he responded, I should say. He’d just gotten a new credit card in the mail. It had a ten-thousand-dollar limit. He looked into her beautiful blue eyes and swallowed her sweet smile. He wanted to swim in her thick blonde hair, and he just couldn’t help himself. He gave her the card.

  “I can’t take this,” she’d said. “It wouldn’t be right.”

  “I want you to have it, Missy,” he told her. “I don’t want you and little Teddy to worry.”

  She kissed him then, passionately. Maybe more passionately than he’d ever been kissed. Or maybe he’d never been kissed before. Maybe he was a forty-five-year-old virgin. Maybe he was the type of guy who had to marry a girl just because she smiled at him. But then, he’d never been married, or so he said. So, maybe he didn’t get a whole lot of smiles from a whole lot of women.

  Whatever the case, he bedded down with her. And when he asked her if she had any condoms handy, she said she didn’t like them—that they ruined the experience. He found this odd, but he didn’t want to spoil the moment. Moments like those were likely rare for him, although he didn’t come right out and say it like that.

  So, he slept with her, and then he walked home shaking in his boots from fear—fear of being mugged, fear of being stabbed, fear of being shot in the head. This was Arbor Hill, after all. Arbor Hill was the Albany killing fields.

  Three days later, she called him, told him she “sort of spent” eight thousand dollars on his credit card. “Oh, and another one thousand for Teddy.” Was that ok? Was he mad?

  “One more thing, Jason,” she added. “I’m pregnant.”

  I pulled the check back out of my pocket, stared down at it, at the zeros.

  I wasn’t working at present. I pictured McNamee with two ees, his scrawny stature, his b
ig brown eyes peering at me through his thick eyeglasses. The poor bastard got ripped off. The cops couldn’t do anything for him, but maybe I could. What exactly, I’m not sure, other than to watch Missy for a few days, find out precisely what her scheme was, who she was playing it with, if anyone, and maybe, just maybe, see if I couldn’t get any of his money back. As for the pregnancy, if there were such a thing happening inside her, he’d have to more or less handle that one on his own.

  “But do not, under any circumstance, give her more money,” I instructed.

  He crossed his heart, hoped to die.

  “You don’t really mean that,” I said.

  He left without answering me.

  4

  Val and I were seated at a picnic bench set inside a garage-like eatery that housed a dozen different takeaway restaurants. There was a Jewish deli that featured New York City style corned beef on rye and other sandwiches so thick it was impossible to fit it them into your mouth. A Chinese-slash-Japanese-slash-Korean eatery was dishing out moo goo gai pan and bowls of wanton soup, and of course, sushi. Then there was the seafood place that sold overstuffed lobster rolls and New England clam chowder so thick and creamy, you could stand a spoon up in it.

  While all these options were mouthwatering, especially for a light eater like me—that’s a joke—Val and I chose to share a wood-fired pizza from the Italian pizzeria located all the way in the back. We decided on a Margarita with a thin, almost crispy crusted pizza dough, topped with fresh mozzarella, basil, and for an added topping, prosciutto crudo imported directly from Tuscany.

  “We should go to Italy one of these days,” I said, lifting a triangular slice of pizza directly from the box. “You know, like we used to in the old days.”

  Val was cutting her pizza with a plastic knife and fork. She cut off a piece that might leave a mouse wanting, stabbed it with her fork.