Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [53]
“You still haven’t joined the NYPD,” he said. “I’ve been checking.” He shook his finger at me.
“I’m not old enough yet. You have to be twenty-one.”
“Oh. Right.” He shrugged. “The time thing, you know?”
“You’ve been watching me?”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m supposed to do.”
“Like a guardian angel, you mean?”
He gave me a funny half-smile. “Something like that.”
“So, do you see everything I do?” I worried about whether he observed me in the shower.
“Not everything, don’t worry. But the important things.”
I decided to test him. “Like what?”
He looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, I know about you and Julio Marquez down the block.”
I blushed hard. I had experienced my first French kiss with Julio. I knew it was a sin, but I did it anyway. Then I went to Confession.
“Do you know other things, too?” I asked. “Like what horse is going to win?”
“Sometimes, yeah.” He squirmed. “But don’t ask me to tell you. I’m not supposed to.”
I immediately thought of what I could do with the winnings from OTB. Get my family out of Washington Heights and away from the drug dealers, for one thing. “Please? Could you just tell me the winner for one race? I’d never ask you again, I promise.”
“I’m really not supposed to,” he said.
I rose. “Isn’t there any way I could persuade you?”
He eyed me at chest level. “Um, I suppose just once wouldn’t hurt.” He beckoned me closer. I could feel his hot breath in my ear, but when I reached out to touch him, my hand hit the wall. “Okay, Broken Nose in the seventh at Aqueduct.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you!” I clapped my hands together. I was already spending the money.
“Yeah, well.” He cleared his throat. “You still need to become a police officer, okay?”
“I don’t see why,” I said. “It’s not like it’s what I really want to do or anything.”
“What would you rather do?”
“I want to be an actress. I’m even going to Performing Arts High School, just like you did.” I couldn’t keep the pride from my voice.
“Hey, kid, why do you wanna do that? No, no. It’s not in the cards for you. You join the NYPD like I told you, okay?”
“I guess. But I thought that if I could have a TV show like yours …”
“That’s not what’s right for you, believe me. Now, I got something else to tell you, so listen up, ’cause I gotta go soon,” he said.
“All right.” I was disappointed about the acting. I still wanted to follow in his footsteps.
“Come on, don’t sulk. This is important, so remember it, okay?”
I nodded to assure him that I was all ears.
“You’re gonna meet someone called Jumbo. He’s going to make you an offer, and it’ll sound real good to you. Don’t take it. If you do, you’ll get into really bad trouble. You understand?”
“Don’t accept Jumbo’s offer,” I repeated. “Who’s Jumbo and what’s he going to offer me?”
“No more time now. I gotta go.” He began to fade.
“Wait! Will you come back again?”
“Count on it, mami,” he said as he disappeared.
I broke open my piggy bank and counted the money. Not enough to bet on Broken Nose. On my way to the party, I picked up a copy of the Post, hoping to find the odds. Broken Nose wasn’t listed, but a horse named Jumbo was running in the seventh. It reminded me of Freddie’s warning, and I wondered about it again.
At the party, I tried to talk Julio and a few of my girl-friends into putting some money down on Broken Nose. I’d had a hot tip, I told them. Nobody believed me, especially when I couldn’t tell them when the race was, just that it was the seventh.
I checked the paper the next day. Jumbo was the winner in the seventh race. If I had put down fifty bucks, I would have been so rich … I didn’t even want to think about it. Why did Freddie give me the wrong tip? Maybe it was to keep me from gambling. He wasn’t supposed to tell me, and if he did, I wasn’t supposed to act on his tip. It must have been like a test. But for which one of us?
After I graduated from high school, I went to City College on a partial scholarship. I was so busy with my new life that I hardly ever thought about Freddie anymore. The first two years, I flew through the Rosary on the anniversary