I made a few sounds that were meant to express hesitation.
“I’m not used to giving out information on my clients,” I said. “That kind of breach in confidentiality is not looked upon kindly in my profession. But maybe if we got together you might convince me.”
“I already told you, man. No.”
Roger wasn’t going to trust me even though I was telling him the truth. I wanted to meet him face-to-face so that I could judge for myself if he was in some kind of fix that Ambrose had not informed me about.
“Frankie Tork,” I said and the line went so silent that for a moment I thought the connection had gone dead.
“S-say what?”
“Frank Tork. He’s in the Tombs right now awaiting trial on B and E. They caught him trying to burglarize a pawnshop on Second Avenue.”
“Frankie hired you?”
“I AIN’T SEEN B-Brain in years, brother,” Frankie Tork had told me through a Plexiglas window in the visitor’s area of the New York City jail. “His moms and them moved somewhere out in Brooklyn right before his last year in high school. She said that we was a bad influence.”
Jumper was small and wiry, brown like a walnut is brown, with tar-stained teeth and bloodshot eyes. He had the kind of smile that frightened children—and their mothers.
“What was his mother’s name?” I asked, trying to corroborate the sketchy information I’d gotten from ex-officer Peel. Roger, aka B-Brain, and the others had been arrested for trespassing in 1991.
“Mrs. Brown,” Frankie said.
“You don’t know her first name?”
“You still gonna gimme that twenty dollars, right?”
There was an account I could credit. I would have given him the money even if he wasn’t any help.
“What was B-Brain’s first name again?” I asked.
“Roger.”
“Yeah, I’ll give you twenty bucks.”
“Maybe I could ask aro="1could aund, about his mom’s name, I mean.”