On the third floor, the scent of Zoner and despair leaked out of an apartment doorway. Eve watched a mouse streak across the hall and under another door.
On four, someone played depression music just loud enough for misery to coat the air. She walked down to 4-D, keeping a wary eye out for rodents.
“Record on,” she said, and sealed up. “Dallas and Peabody entering apartment of Robert Ren.”
She mastered in to the surprise of a man about the same age as the street thief and buck naked. He stood beside the rumpled sheets over the lumpy mattress of a sagging pullout.
They caught him in full yawn and stretch—and with his wake-up hard-on still in place.
“What the fuck!”
He tossed his head to clear most of the blue hair that covered his face.
“NYPSD.” Eve held up her badge.
“Okay, but what the fuck?” In a sudden swing to modesty, he crossed both hands over his crotch.
“Maybe you should put on your pants and we’ll talk about what the fuck. Got a name?”
“Jed.” He dragged on a pair of baggies way overdue for a wash. “Jed Jensson. Look, if Bobby got busted for something, I don’t have the scratch to bail him. I’m tapped until payday.”
“Do you live here, Jed?”
“Nah.” Now he grabbed a T-shirt off the floor, pulled it over his head. “Bobby lets me flop here some nights. He works nights, I work days. I give him ten when I use the bunk. What’d he do?”
“Got killed.”
Jed’s next yawn ended on a gasp. “What? For real? Man, that’s just down. All the way down.”
“How long have you known him?”
“I dunno. Awhile, a few months. Like I work the line at the all-day breakfast joint down the block, and he comes in most mornings after his stroll. I got booted from my place, and we made a deal about flopping some nights for ten.
“Are you sure he’s dead, because man!”
“Yes. Where’s his usual stroll?”
“He works the porn place—vids? On Seventh and, maybe Forty-Third? Around that. Bobby’s got a deal with the manager, he says. Like the john coughs it up for two tickets. Bobby gives the manager, I think, five percent of the sex fee, and Bobby doesn’t have to keep a separate flop for business, or pay the flop the going ten percent.
“Did one of the johns do him?”
“We’re investigating. Do you know any of his friends, associates?”
He started to scratch his balls, then remembered himself.
“Sometimes he’d come in with a couple other LCs. Ah, a woman. Little—I mean short woman. Luce something. And a guy, big guy, Ansel. He said I could make a lot more working the streets, but I got a couple hits, and they look at all that.”
“Yes, they do.”
“Look, I really gotta piss, then I’m out of here. I got work, and I need the job. I’m sorry about Bobby and all, it’s really down, but I just flop here some nights.”
“Go ahead.”
He hotfooted it to the bathroom, where Eve heard the stream through the paper-thin door, and had to admit. He’d really had to piss.
“Run him.”
“Doing that. He’s nineteen, got a juvie record. Illegals possession and intent, a car boost. Another illegals bust about three months ago. No fixed address. He is employed, the last seven months, at Breakfast Any Time.”
