the top of the market. Not right now, things were too dull. A few of the places on the street were empty, abandoned by owners who had made contract grade and won entitlement to a G.M.L. house. A kind of funny element was moving in; not the kind of people you talked to much. Bad for the children. He was sure that passing the abandoned Samuels place he had smelled something like the raw reek of alcohol and glimpsed shining copper pots and tubing through the ill-shuttered picture window. Sometimes police cars and copters descended on Belly Rave and left loaded—but that was on the outskirts, the neighborhood would pick up, the old man told himself sternly. And then he’d sell at the top of the market
Time passed. . . .
More than a century.
Chapter Six
four taxi drivers flatly refused to take Mundin to Belly Rave. The fifth was a devil-may-care youngster. “Just took this heah job waitin’ for the draft call,” he confided. “How can I lose? Anything goes wrong in this heah Belly Rave place, maybe Ah get beat up so bay-yud the oP army won’t take me.” He laughed. “But seriously, I figger it cain’t be as tough as they say.”
Mundin did not contradict him and away they went.
There was no sizable city which did not have the equivalent of Belly Rave. The festering slums of Long Island were another New York problem; Boston had its Springfield; Chicago its Evanston; Los Angeles its Greenville. None was worse than Belle Reve Estates. Mundin noticed that the battered streetlights of Belly Rave didn’t light; as they rolled past the first weed-grown yards and boarded-up houses he noticed ramshackle structures in the back. Occasionally they passed a burned-out area, but not often. The plots were generous enough in size to keep a normal fire from spreading from house to house. Unfortunately.
There was life in Belly Rave: a furtive, crepuscular life
called into being by the unpoliceable wilderness of tall weeds, endless miles of crumbling battered driveway unmarked by street signs or house numbers. The taxi wasn’t alone. Zooty little cars prowled along the crumbling concrete, occasionally pulling to the curb where a dim figure swung a phosphorescent handbag. They passed one block of houses that was ^ blaze of light and noise. The doorman trotted along beside the taxi urging: “Anything goes, mister. Spend the night for five bucks, all you can drink and smoke included. Why pay taxes, mister?”
Sometimes the Alcohol & Hemp Tax Unit’s men raided such joints. Not often.
The driver asked the doorman, “We anywheah close to 37598 Willowdale Crescent?” He stopped the cab.
“What you need is a guide,” the doorman said promptly. “Jimmy!” Somebody jelled out of the dark. Mundin heard a fumbling at the door of the cab.
“Step on it!” he yelled at the driver, snapping the door lock and running up the window. The driver stepped on it.
The ambush left behind, they cautiously approached bag-swingers for directions. In half an hour they were on the 37-thousand block of Willowdale Crescent, counting houses.
“This must be it,” said the driver, no longer devil-may-care.
“I guess so. Wait here, will you?” Mundin said.
“Nossir! How do I know you ain’t going to slip through a back door and stiff me? You pay me what’s on the clock an’ Ah’ll wait.”
The meter read a whopping eight dollars. Mundin handed over a ten and started up the crumbled walk.
Vroom! The taxi was on its way before he had taken half a dozen steps. Mundin cursed wearily and knocked on the door. He studied the boarded-up picture window while he waited. They were all broken, all boarded up. Inevitably in the years that had gone by since they were eased and puttied carefully into place, the rock had been flung, or the door had been slammed, or the drunk had lurched into the living room.
The man who came to the door was old and sick.
“Is this the Lavin place?” Mundin asked, blinking against a light haze of woodsmoke. “I’m Charles Mundin. She asked me to call in connection with a legal matter. I’m an attorney.”