“Seventy-nine,” I said.
“Paper don’t pay you enough to get some new wheels?”
“Like I said, I just started.” I turned to leave.
He said, “Forty bucks to find the man.”
“Thirty.”
“Thirty-five.” He stretched out a palm. With a pained expression, I took out the money and gave it to him.
Curling his fingers over it, he smiled.
“Okay,” I said, “where’s Sylvester?”
He gave a deep laugh and pointed across the table. “Say hello, Mr. Sylvester.”
The skinny man closed his eyes and laughed, rocking in his chair.
“Hello, hello, hello.” He held out his hand. “Hello from the star of the show.”
“Prove you’re Sylvester,” I said.
“A hundred bucks’ll prove it.”
“Fifty.”
“Ninety.”
“Sixty.”
“Eighty-eight.”
“Sixty-five, tops.”
He stopped smiling. His skin was as dry as his partner’s was moist. His eyes were two bits of charcoal. “Thirty-five for him just for fingering me, and I only get thirty more? That’s stupid, man.”
I said, “Seventy, if you’re really Sylvester. And that’s it, because it cleans me out.”
I took all the bills out of my wallet and fanned them.
Frowning, he reached behind and pulled out a mock-alligator billfold. Flipping it open, he showed me a soiled Social Security card made out to Edgely Nat Sylvester.
“Anything with a picture?”
“No need,” he said, but he flipped again to a driver’s license. It had expired three years ago, but the picture was of him and the name and address were right.
“Okay,” I said, giving him a twenty and putting the rest of the money back.
“Hey,” he said, rising out of his chair.
“When we’re finished.”
The heavy man said, “We got ourselves a dude here, Eddy. Street dude, knows what it is.”
Sylvester looked at the twenty as if it were tainted. “How do I know you’re righteous, man?”
“Because if you complain to the Times and my boss finds out I paid you, my ass is grass. I don’t want any hassles, okay? Just a story.”
“Fair is fair, Eddy,” said the heavy man, with glee. “He gotcha.”
“Fuck your mama,” said Sylvester.
The heavy man laughed and wheezed. “Why should I do that, Eddy, when I already fucked your mama and she squeezed all the juice outa me?”
Sylvester gave him a long dark stare, and for a second I thought there’d be violence. Then the heavy man flinched and winked and Sylvester laughed, too. Picking up a domino, he slapped it on the table.
“To be continued, Fatboy,” he said, standing.
“Where you goin, Eddy?”
“To talk to the man, stupid.”
“Talk here. I wanna hear what kind of seventy-dollar story you got.”
“Ha,” said Sylvester. “Ask my mama about it.” To me: “Let’s go someplace where the atmosphere ain’t stupid.”
We walked down the block, past other big subdivided houses. An occasional palm tree skyscraped from the breezeway. Most of the street was open and hot, even as evening approached. The air smelled like exhaust fumes.
When we got near the corner, Sylvester stopped and leaned against a lamppost. A brown-skinned woman in a brown-flowered dress walked past. Several small children trailed her, like goslings, laughing and speaking Spanish.
“They come here,” said Sylvester, “taking jobs for crap pay, don’t even wanna learn English. Whynchu write about that?”
He patted his empty shirt pocket and studied me. “Smoke?”
I shook my head.
“Figures. Now, what murder is it you wanna hear about?”
“Was there more than one at the Adventure Inn?”
“Could be.”
“Could be?”
“That place was no good—you know what it really was, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Whorehouse. Nasty one—tough girls. I only worked there ’cause I had to. My day job was cleaning gutters on houses and that’s irregular—know what I mean? When it rains, you get your clogged gutters and your leaks coming right through the window seams into the house, people start screaming, Help me, help me! No rain, people forget their gutters; real stupid.”
“The motel was your night job.”
“Yeah.”
“Tough place.”
“Real bad place. The people who owned it ran it stupid—didn’t give a damn.”
“The Advent Group.”
He gave me a blank look.
“Guys from Nevada,” I said. “That’s what it said in the original article.”