Free Shadow Roll by Ki Longfellow Page B

guy needed a rat hole to hide in.
    I learned all this at the library.  I really was a curious guy.
    Meanwhile, I couldn’t wait to have my time not wasted.
    Hat back on, ugly tie straightened, I was out the door half an hour after I walked in.
    33 Beekman Street was everything I expected it to be.  Even in nice towns, rich towns, special towns like Saratoga Springs where some of the most important, if not the smartest or most honest, people hang their hats, there’s always an area like the area Beekman ran through.  There had to be someplace for the hired help to live, for the drunks and the deadbeats and the family man with too much family and too little job.  The building I walked towards fit the bill perfectly.
    I rang the buzzer next to a crudely drawn 7 and was buzzed in as fast as everything else was happening.
    The guy behind the barely opened door was small.  Really small.  Jockey small.  The room behind the small guy had just enough furniture to suit someone who had nothing to do and thick enough curtains to make sure no one saw him not doing it.
    I got my sleeve grabbed and was in the room before I could get my gun out.  But since my gun was still in my suitcase back at my pretty pink palace, it didn’t much matter.
    “You wanna drink?” said the little man.
    Before I could answer, he was drinking straight from the bottle, a half full pint—or half empty if you’re one of those kind of people.  Whichever, I passed on his offer.
    “Sit down.  Sit down.  I can’t sit down.  Can’t sit still for that long.  Be nice to see someone else doin’ it.  What was I saying?”
    “Sit down.”
    “Nah.  Before that.”
    “I wasn’t here before that.”
    “You weren’t?”  He gave his bottle a look like it was up to no good, then took another pull.
    I sat on the only chair in the room, one never made to actually sit on.  Unless it was designed for slow torture.  That lasted maybe ten seconds and I was up and walking around with him.
    “Listen, shamus.”  And with that crack he was pointing one of his tiny fingers at me.  I had no idea why.  I just let him do it.  “Don’t ask how I know you’re a snoop, everyone knows you’re a snoop for the track bigwigs.  And everyone knows they want you to smooth things over and then beat it back to the hole you crawled out of.”
    I flicked something off my sleeve.  I thought it was a bug.  I hoped it was a bug.  “No need to get nasty, chum.  I am, after all, an invited guest in your lovely home.”
    One of his eyes focused.  “Sorry.  I’m jumpy is all.  Can you imagine?  I got a mount in the third and the fifth today.”
    All I could imagine, watching him put away the hard stuff, is what us poor saps at the betting windows never get to know.
    “Did I tell you my name?”
    “If so, I missed it.”
    “I’m Mash Mooney.”
    “Mooney!  I’ve bet on you.  More than once.”
    “You have?”  Mash said that like he’d just won the Belmont Stakes.  “Then I got no call to be doing you down.  But still I gotta know.  You in their pocket or you really lookin’?”
    “I don’t know where they think I am, but I’m really looking.”
    “How do I believe you?”
    “No idea.  You do or you don’t.  You wrote the note.”
    “Right.  The note.”  He pointed at me with his pint of rye or whatever it was.  Maybe a spoonful of it landed on the worn carpet between us.  “I wrote you so’s you’d come here and I could tell you what I know.”
    “What do you know?”
    “Manny Walker din’t drown.”
    “How’s that?”
    “He din’t drown.  He didn’t even go swimmin’.  I mean he usually went swimmin’, but that morning he din’t.”
    Right there, I could of asked him all kinds of questions but it seemed best to let him talk.  Especially since he was talking more to his bottle than to me and to some guys bottles make the best listeners.
    “Him and me, we was out all night at the Tin ‘N’ Lint, even with the