Page 6 of Nobody's Fool

“Dark,” I say.

“Mark my words. Get right with the Lord now before that day.”

Down on the street below, I hear Debbie shout, “But Daddy, I’m carrying your child.”

Bingo.

“Can we talk about this later, Raymond?”

“Tell Debbie I’m waiting on that sandwich. And no mayo.”

“I’ll do that.”

I look through the camera lens and see Peyton in full business suit. My heart sinks when I see he’s alone. He gets in the driver’s side. I wait, hoping someone will join him. No one does. He starts up his car.

But he doesn’t back out.

I smile now as I watch through the lens. My man Peyton is waiting for someone. I know it.

Still looking through the lens, I hear Debbie shout “Daddy, why?” as a mustached guy in a business suit makes his way into the lot.

My phone rings. It’s Arthur, my young attorney-handler at White Shoe Law. “Are you on him?”

“I am.”

“Good. We sign the papers first thing tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“If we don’t get evidence he cheated, she can’t break the prenup.”

“I know.”

“Will you have something or not?”

Someone opens the passenger door of Peyton’s car and slips in. Peyton turns.

They start making out big-time.

But it’s not a chesty bottled blonde he is making out with.

It’s the mustached man in a business suit.

CHAPTER TWO

That night—a few minutes before it all went wrong yet again—I was teaching a night class at the vaguely yet fancifully named “Academy Night Adult School” on the Lower East Side. The school still advertises in those free magazines-cum-pamphlets you see on the streets and interior subway cards above the seats on the F and M lines. The pamphlet advertising my course calls me a “world renowned ex-police detective” alongside a headshot of me so unflattering the DMV is jealous.

My class runs from eight to ten p.m., and it’s pay-as-you-go. We charge sixteen bucks a class. Cash. I split that fifty-fifty with Chilton, “headmaster” of the Academy Night Adult School, which is why we make sure the amount is an even number. Chilton is also the sole custodian of the building, so I don’t know how legit the whole enterprise is. I don’t care much either.

We are situated in the shadows of the Baruch Houses, high-rises near the Williamsburg Bridge on Rivington Street, a street you may or may not find on a map. The building is more ruins than edifice, opened in 1901 as a public bathhouse, the first in the city. Upon hearing this, some people feel this locale will be exotic or glamorous. It’s not. Public baths were built for hygiene, not leisure.

I looked it up once. Back in the day, there was one bathtub for every seventy-nine families on the Lower East Side. You can almostgag on the stench of that statistic, can’t you? There are few signs of what this place used to be, though my classroom is cavernous concrete and has pretty good acoustics and sometimes I can see, if not smell, the ghosts from the past.

But I’m prone to that.

My class is on criminology. I decided to call it—get this—No Shit, Sherlock. Right, yeah, fair, but admit it’s catchy. At the start of every class, I write a different quote from Sherlock Holmes (from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for you literalists) on the roll-in whiteboard. We then discuss it. And we go from there. I started six weeks ago with two students. Tonight, I count twenty-three, twenty-one of whom paid for the class, and two—Debbie and Raymond—who are here gratis on a Sami Kierce scholarship. Debbie is enthralled and wide-eyed. Raymond clips his toenails the entire class, studying each nail before cutting them with the precision of my grandmother’s lunch group dividing a check.

The class makeup is eclectic. In the front of the room are three women in their seventies who call themselves the Pink Panthers. They are amateur detectives who love to watch true-crime shows or find a story in the paper and investigate it. I’ve seen some of what the Pink Panthers can do, and it’s pretty impressive. Weirdly enough, as though de-aging, there are three matching young women in the back, twenty-five-ish I’d guess, attractive, who, I’m told, are minor-league Instagram influencers who just started a true-crime podcast calledThree Dead Hots. There are several wannabe true-crime podcasters in the room, I suspect. There are also true-crime fanatics. A guy named Hex, who always wears gray sweatpants with matching hoodie, wants to solve his aunt’s murder from 1982. There is also Golfer Gary, who always wears an ironed golf polo with a logo from some ritzy club. I would say he’s a poser, down here in the Lower East Side with us, but I’m a trained detective, and something about his demeanor reeks of old money. I don’t know his deal, but I’m curious. Everyone is a story, but this class feels like a bit more than that.

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