Looker by Michael Kilian

Author:Michael Kilian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

If Bad Bobby Darcy had been smart, which he wasn’t, he’d have been out of New York within minutes of the shootout in that apartment up near Lenox Avenue. He might have tarried just a little to pick up some traveling money from one or two of his ladies, but then he’d have been long gone to the first big city that could swallow him up—Miami, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, any place with enough black people to make his just another black face—until he went into business again, got busted, and had his prints turn up in the cross reference.

Lanham, knowing Bobby was dumb, expected him to hang around. He was a little king in the vast New York scheme of things, but the powers of kingship were not transportable. Lanham was sure he’d holed up among his subjects, depending on the fear of most of them and the love of a few to hide him and see him through. It was what people like Bobby almost always did and it was why they almost always were caught. There would always be someone who didn’t fear him enough or love him enough. Lanham had expected to hear from one of them at any time—someone Bobby had beaten up or cut or humiliated, someone looking for a reduced charge from the district attorney’s office or for the police to “lose” or “mislay” a file. Someone who just wanted the pressure to ease on the Deuce.

Instead, Bobby had done something both smart and dumb. He’d had his hair cut properly, found himself a courtroom suit, and gone to a rich white man’s hotel down near Wall Street and the Battery, a brand new gleaming four-star high-rise palace of a hotel where the police wouldn’t have looked for him if he’d shot the mayor in the lobby in front of a hundred witnesses.

In a courtroom suit, especially the pin-striped kind he might have seen on one of his lawyers, Bobby would likely have been given a room without question. The hotel was used by money men from all over the world. It accepted rich white men who happened to be black as easily as it did rich white men who happened to be Japanese or Arab. If Bobby had minded his manners and been reasonably blasé about using one of the credit cards his ladies from time to time lifted from their more inebriated customers, he might have been able to camp out in the hotel for days or weeks, while the police plodded pointlessly through garbage-stewn alleys and urine-soaked unlit hallways all over the city.

But Bobby had been dumb as well as smart. Instead of checking into the hotel, he’d had one of his girls acquire a john and accompany him to his room. Then Bobby had joined them in midtryst and established a temporary ménage à trois. He hadn’t been content to heist the man’s cash, watch, and cufflinks—as he and his ladies had done to many a visitor to the city. He was apparently interested in serious travel money.

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