“Nope, caught sight of you and had to wait for my beating heart to be still,” she said. “Thought I was gonna die, you’re so good-looking. Menus are on the table. I’ll be back with coffee.”

“Don’t count on it,” said Walter, as she vanished.

“Think you got some sarcasm on you there,” Dunne remarked to his partner.

“Yeah, it burns. Still, that lady looks like a million dollars.”

Walter and I exchanged glances. If that waitress looked like a million dollars, then it was all in used bills.

The pleasantries over, Walter brought us down to business.

“You got anything for us?” he asked.

“G-Mack: real name Tyrone Baylee,” said Dunne. He pretty much expectorated the name. “This guy was made to be a pimp, you catch my drift.”

I knew what he meant. Men who pimp women tend to be smarter than the average criminal. Their social skills are relatively good, which enables them to handle the prostitutes in their charge. They try to shy away from extreme violence, although most consider it their duty and their right to keep their women in place with a well-placed slap when circumstances require it. In short, they’re cowards, but cowards gifted with a degree of cunning, a capacity for emotional and psychological manipulation, and sometimes a self-deluding belief that theirs is a victimless crime since they are merely providing a service to both the whores and the men who patronize them.

“He’s got a prior for assault. He only served six months, but he did them in Otisville, and it wasn’t a happy time for him. His name came up during a narcotics investigation a year or two back, but he was pretty low down on the food chain, and a search of his place turned up nothing. Seems that experience encouraged him to find an alternative outlet for his talents. He got himself a small stable of women, but he’s been trying to build it up over the last couple of months. A pimp called Free Billy died awhile back-they called him Free Billy on account of the fact that he claimed his rates were so low he was practically giving his whores away for nothing-and his girls were divided up by the rest of the sharks out on the Point. G-Mack had to wait his turn, and by all accounts there wasn’t much left for him once the others had taken their pick.”

“The girl you’re asking after-Alice Temple, street name LaShan-she was one of Free Billy’s,” said Mackey, taking up the baton. “According to the cops who work the Point she was a good-looking woman once, but she was using, and using hard. She didn’t look like she was going to last much longer, even on the Point. G-Mack’s been telling people that he let her go cause she wasn’t worth anything to him. Said nobody was going to pay good money for a woman looked like she might be dying of the virus. Seems she was friendly with a whore named Sereta. Black Mexican. They came as a twofer. Looks like she dropped off the map about the same time as your girl, but unlike her friend, she didn’t appear again.”

I leaned forward.

“What do you mean by that?”

“This Alice was picked up close by Kings Highway about a week or so ago. Possession of a controlled substance. Looked like she’d just come out to score. Beat cops found her with the needle in her arm. She didn’t even have time to inject.”

“She was arrested?”

“It was a quiet night, so her bail was set before the sun came up. She made it within the hour.”

“Who paid it?”

“Bail bondsman named Eddie Tager. Her court date was set for the nineteenth, so she still has a couple of days left.”

“Is Eddie Tager G-Mack’s bondsman?”

Dunne shrugged. “He’s pretty low-end, so it’s possible, but most pimps tend to pay bail for their whores themselves. It’s mostly set low, and it allows them to get their hooks deeper into the girl. In Manhattan, first-timers usually just get compulsory health and safe-sex education, maybe community service if the judge is having a bad day, but the other boroughs don’t have court-based programs to meet the needs of prostitutes, so it goes harder on them over there. The cops who spoke to G-Mack say he denied just about everything except his birth.”

“Why were they talking to him?”

“He was questioned in connection with the murder of an antiques dealer named Winston Allen, along with most of the pimps over there. Allen had a taste for whores from the Point, and there was a rumor that maybe two of G-Mack’s girls might have been among them. G-Mack claimed that they had it all wrong, but the date would tie in with the disappearance of Alice and her friend from the streets. We didn’t know that when she was picked up, though, and her prints didn’t match the partials we got from Allen’s house when she was processed. Everything since has been a dead end.”

“Anyone talk with Tager?”

“He’s proving hard to find, and nobody has the time it takes to go looking under rocks for him. Let’s be straight here: if you and Walter hadn’t come along asking questions, Alice Temple would be struggling for attention, even with the death of Winston Allen. Women disappear from the Point. It happens.”

Something passed between Dunne and Mackey. Neither was about to put it into words, though, not without some pushing.

“Lately more than usual?” I asked.

It was a blind throw, but it hit home.

“Maybe. It’s just rumors, and talk from programs like GEMS and ECPAT, but there’s no pattern, which presents a problem, and the ones who are going missing are mostly homeless, or don’t have anyone to report them, and it’s not just women either. Basically, what we got is a spike in the Bronx figures over the past six months. It might be meaningless, or it might not, but unless we start turning up bodies, it’s going to stay a blip.”

It didn’t help us much, but it was good to know.

“So back to business,” said Mackey. “We figure that maybe if we feed you this information, you’ll help us by taking some of the pressure off and maybe find out something we can use on G-Mack along the way.”

“Such as?”

“He’s got a young girl working for him. He keeps her pretty close, but her name is Ellen. We’ve tried talking to her, but we’ve got nothing on her to justify pulling her in, and G-Mack has his women schooled halfway to Christmas on entrapment. Juvenile Crime hasn’t had any luck with her either. If you find out anything about her, maybe you’ll tell us.”

“We hear G-Mack called your girl a skank, a junkie skank,” said Mackey. “Thought you might like to know that, just in case you were planning on talking with him.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said. “What’s his territory?”

“His girls tend to work the lower end of Lafayette. He likes to keep an eye on them, so he usually parks on the street close by. I hear he’s driving a Cutlass Supreme on big-ass tires now, ’71, ’72, maybe, like he’s some kind of millionaire rapper.”

“How long has he been driving the Cutlass?”

“Not long.”

“Must be doing okay if he can afford a car like that.”

“I guess. We didn’t see no tax return, so I can’t say for sure, but he seems to have come into money recently.”

Mackey kept his eyes fixed on me as I spoke. I nodded once, letting him know that I understood what he was intimating: someone had paid him to keep quiet about the women.

“Does he have a place?”

“He lives over on Quimby. Couple of his women live with him. Seems he has a crib over in Brooklyn as well, down on Coney Island Avenue. He moves between them.”

“Weapons?”

“None of these guys are dumb enough to carry. The more established ones, they maybe keep one or two knuckle grazers that they can call on in case of trouble, but G-Mack ain’t in that league yet.”

The waitress returned. She looked a whole lot less happy to be coming back than she did when she came over the first time, and she hadn’t exactly been ecstatic then.

Dunne and Mackey ordered a tuna on rye and a turkey club. Dunne asked for a “side of sunshine” with his tuna. You had to admire his perseverance.