Conveniently, since there was no rational response to his remarks, Pete and our landlady, Mrs. Sharpnick, chose that moment to enter the room from opposite sides. Pete came in from the kitchen with half a sandwich in his hand and the other half in his mouth. He was two steps into the living room when Sharpnick burst through the front door. She was a tall, skeletal woman with a terrible temper who dressed in men’s work clothes. Underneath it all, I’m sure she was a very nice woman. But it was way underneath. The only person I’d ever seen her be kind to was the street kid, Ozone Pacific, who she let camp in the house next door, which was too run-down to rent out. Pete wheeled and dodged back toward the kitchen as she came in, but she froze him with a harsh cry.
“Where’s my rent check, you son of a bitch?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sharpnick addressed her inquiry to Pete, but Budge got a stricken look on his face. He had been homeless several times and dreaded going back on the streets.
Pete turned around, gulped down the wad of white bread and bologna in his mouth, and counterfeited a smile with his thin lips.
“Ahoy, Mrs. Sharpnick, I didn’t see you come in. We’ll have that particular check for you by the close of business on Monday.” He handled the rent for the downstairs trio, keeping a portion of Budge’s and Candyman’s wages when they worked.
“It was due on the fifteenth,” Mrs. Sharpnick said in a cold, threatening tone. “I want the money now.”
“Negative,” Pete said. “No can do. Don’t have it. But you have my personal guarantee you’ll get it on Monday.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “I saw you going in Antonio’s yesterday at dinnertime. A meal in there costs twenty. If you got the money to eat there, you got the money to pay me my rent.”
Budge shifted his gaze from Sharpnick to Pete, his expression changing from fear to suspicion.
“I wasn’t eating in there,” Pete said, as if that was the most ridiculous suggestion he had ever heard. “I was talking to Gianni about some work he wants done. Reference to the rent you’re requesting, we’re still waiting to get paid for that demolition job we did last week. The man says he’ll have our money on Monday for sure.”
Mrs. Harriet Sharpnick did not answer. She had just noticed the mess in the living room and was swiveling her head slowly, taking in the details of the disarray with a furious expression on her face.
“What’s this?” she said. “You dirty bums had another party, didn’t you? What did I tell you about that?” She looked at Budge, who licked his lips and tried to grin.
“It whudn’t a party, Miss Sharpnick, just a couple of-”
“This is a respectable house,” she screamed, cutting him off. “And you bums have it looking like a pigsty. I’ve got the city on my back about this place twenty-four hours a day, complaining about the condition of the building, and you bindle stiffs go and make it worse.”
“I don’t know what they were thinking,” Pete said, shaking his head. “You two know Mrs. Sharpnick doesn’t allow any parties.”
“Wait a minute, now…” Candyman started to object.
“Come on,” Pete said, bustling around the room, picking up beer cans and empty wine bottles. “Let’s get this place shipshape. Budge, look alive and help me clear the deck.”
Pete’s identity centered chiefly on his concept of himself as no-nonsense businessman and his supposed service in the U.S. Navy. He told me when we met that he had retired as a chief petty officer after twenty years at sea, but Candyman later contradicted that in a stage whisper, telling me that Pete had been dishonorably discharged for selling government supplies on the black market during his second term of enlistment.
Budge lumbered into action, picking up a full ashtray and the newspaper he had just thrown down and heading for the kitchen.
“Everything’s under control, Mrs. Sharpnick,” Pete said briskly, giving her a series of quick nods meant to drive her out of the room. “I’ll have that check for you by seventeen hundred hours on Monday.”
“You better,” she said, then stalked out the front door, banging it shut behind her.
Pete went over to the front window and peeked through the curtains for a few seconds. When he turned around, the earnest expression he had used on the landlady was replaced by a contemptuous smirk. He dropped the beer can in his hand on the floor and walked over to the couch, where he flopped down, clasping his hands behind his head.
“That bag of bones is messing with the wrong seaman,” he said, nodding. “She’ll get what she’s got coming to her before long.”
“What do you mean by that?” I said.
“Nothing. It’s just business.”
“What kind of business?”
“Not yours,” Pete said.
His rude remark surprised me. During most of the six weeks Reggie and I had been in the house, Pete had been friendly and respectful, always trying to buddy up and find out where our cash came from. But in the past week or so he had become more careless and self-confident, taking a higher hand with the other two stooges and showing less deference to me and Reggie. Now he was being downright confrontational.
“Aw, come on, Pete,” Budge said. “She’ll have a shit fit if we don’t get it cleaned up before she comes back.”
“That bitch ain’t coming back,” Pete said. “She’s got three other houses to check on. We’ll clean up when we’re goddamn good and ready.”
“You sure that eye-talian hadn’t paid you yet?” Candyman said to Pete.
“What do you mean, am I sure? Didn’t you hear me tell Sharpnick he’s going to pay us on Monday?”
“I heard you all right. Like I heard you tell her me and Budge was the ones had a party you didn’t know nothing about, when it was you pulled a case of wine off a liquor truck and got the whole thing started. Where’d you get the money to eat in Antonio’s if you didn’t collect that check?”
Reggie’s nickname for our housemates caught the tricky blend of companionship and hostility that linked them. Like the original Stooges, Pete and his pals, while inseparable, were never far from bonking one another on the head with a monkey wrench or gouging an eye.
“I wasn’t eating in there,” Pete said. “I was conducting business, trying to keep you two swabbies off the streets. I only said that about the party to confuse the bitch. One of us has to stay on her good side or she might evict us.”
“You’re trying to confuse someone, all right,” Candyman said. “I’m going with you to get that check on Monday.”
“No problemo,” Pete said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I was thinking diamonds as I emerged into the sparkling seaside air. Where were they? Would we be able to find them in time? What was the next step if there was nothing about Baba Raba at the library?
I swung down to the boardwalk to get a Coke before heading inland, hoping the effervescent sugar and caffeine would give me some chemical inspiration. The boardwalk was not actually a walkway made of boards but an asphalt path lined with stalls and storefronts and old hotels on the inland side. Street performers and artisans set up booths and spread blankets to display their wares along the other side of the path, at the edge of the sand that stretched down to the ocean. Heading south, drinking from my twenty-ounce bottle of cola, I saw Ozone Pacific sitting cross-legged beneath his palm tree. It seemed like he was always around. I seldom went to the beach without seeing his blond head bobbing in the crowd. He was playing with his plastic gold coins, holding them in a stack in one hand and then dribbling them into the open palm of the other. He had nice hands, unusual for a homeless guy. They looked like a girl’s hands, with long shapely fingers and neatly trimmed nails. When he saw me, he waved and smiled.