Manhattan Is My Beat (Rune 1)

Rune gave the clerk another ten.

"Look, kid. The going rate's fifty for information. That's the way it is all over the city. It's like a union."

Fifty? Shit.

She handed him a twenty. "That's all I got."

He took the money. "I don't know nothing--"

"You bastard! I want my money back."

"--except one thing. About your client Kelly. This priest or minister, Father so-and-so, called, I don't know, a couple days ago. He said Kelly'd dropped off a suitcase for safekeeping. He couldn't get him at his apartment and had this as his only other number. This priest figured I might know where Kelly was. He didn't know what to do with the suitcase."

Yes! Rune thought. Remembering the scene in Manhattan Is My Beat where Roy buried the money in a cemetery next to a church!

"Excellent, that's great! You know where the church was? You have any idea?"

"I didn't write nothing down. But I think he said he was in Brooklyn."

"Brooklyn!" Rune's hands were up against the grimy Plexiglas. She leaned forward, bouncing on her toes. "This's awesome!"

The man slipped her money into his pocket. "Well, happy day." He opened the magazine again and began reading an article about penguins.

Outside, she found a pay phone and called Amanda LeClerc.

"Amanda, it's Rune. How are you?"

"Been better. Missing him, you know? Robert ... Only knew him for a little while but I miss him more than some people I knew for years and years. I was thinking about it. And you know what I thought?"

"What's that?"

"That maybe because we weren't so young no more we got to be more closer faster. Sort of like there wasn't a lot of time ahead of us."

"I miss him too, Amanda," Rune said.

"Haven't heard nothing about Mr. Symington."

"He hasn't been back?"

"No. Nobody's seen him. I was asking around."

"Well, I've got good news." She told her about the church and the suitcase.

The woman didn't answer for a moment. "Rune, you really thinking there maybe's some money? They keep coming after me for the rent. I'm trying to find a job. But it's tough. Nobody hires old ladies like me."

"I think we're on the right track."

"Well, what do you want me to do?"

"Start calling churches in Brooklyn. See if Mr. Kelly left a suitcase there. You can go to the library and get a Brooklyn phone book. We've got one at the video store. I'll take A through L. You take M through Z."

"Z? Do any churches start with a Z?"

"I don't know. St. Zabar's?"

"Okay. I'ma start calling first thing in the morning."

Rune hung up. She looked around her. The sun was down now and in this part of the city the bleakness was wrenching. But what she felt was only partly the sorrow of the landscape; the rest was fear. She was vulnerable. Low buildings--a lot of them burned-out or in various stages of demolition--a few auto repair shops, an abandoned diner, a couple of parked cars. Nobody on the street who'd help her if she was attacked. A few kids in gang colors, sitting on steps, sharing a bottle of Colt .45 or a crack pipe. A hooker, a tall black woman on nosebleed-high heels, leaned against a chain-link fence, arms crossed. Some bums shoring on grates or in doorways.