I wasn’t even sure if Lopes still worked at Chrome. Or lived in New York. I could find nothing in a database I sometimes used.

I turned to the muttering homeless man. “Do you know anything about Lela Lopes?”

“Eat me.”

“‘The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.’”

He scowled and sipped his hot water. I watched Chrome through the window. As soon as I had something, I would head back to Boston. This was something. It was all there was right now to help Akira. I could sit in the Heywood house in Chestnut Hill drinking coffee and looking earnest with the staties and offering reassurances to Nicole and Kinjo. Or I could keep moving. Keep moving usually worked for me.

At nine, a very beautiful blonde in a tight black T-shirt opened up the front door to Chrome as honest-to-God velvet ropes were set along the sidewalks. I strolled across Washington to make a personal appearance.

17

Chrome was just as I had imagined. Low lighting, black velvet furniture, billowing white curtains, and lots of candles. The waitresses and bartenders were young and beautiful, while the music was pulsing and nauseating. I drank a cold Heineken at the circular bar until I could tune it out and asked the bartender if Lela Lopes still worked here.

“Lela?” he said. “Are you serving her with papers or something?”

“Why would I be serving her with papers?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You just look like that’s what you do.”

The bartender was in his early twenties, with muscular arms and hair spiked up high. He looked as if he’d just touched a live wire.

“I actually am a special envoy to the Cape Verdean tourist council,” I said. “She’s been selected to be our newest spokesmodel.”

“No shit,” he said. “That’s fucking awesome.”

“Somehow I knew you’d be impressed,” I said. “Is she here?”

“She quit in the spring,” he said.

“You know someone who keeps in touch?”

“Maybe.” He stood there and grinned.

“You mind asking?”

I left a fifty-dollar bill languishing on the wet bar. I recalled when a five-spot would’ve sufficed.

Spiky disappeared in the billowing white curtains and I continued to sip the beer. I was one of four people inside the bar, which was the size of a Super Target. Three women in short skirts and high heels sat in a velvety grouping, checking their phones. I thought perhaps they were texting about me and offered a smile. They looked back at their screens.

The dance music continued to pump into the empty club. The curtains kept billowing. The candles properly lit shadows. This looked to be the place if you happened to be an NFL rookie with a black American Express card. The drink menu showed cocktails starting at twenty bucks.

“Hellboy knows her,” he said. “He’ll be right up. You want another drink?”

“Hellboy?” I shook my head and paid with the fifty. I left him ten bucks. I better stay sober for Hellboy.

After a few minutes, a giant appeared from the curtain. He had a bald head and a goatee. I made sure he didn’t have but a single eye in the middle of his head. He was dressed as a bouncer, with black pants, black shoes, and a black T-shirt with the word SECURITY across the front.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“You must be Hellboy.”

“How do you know?”

“Working hypothesis.”

“Huh?”

“An educated guess.”

“You want to be smart here or out in the street?”

I stood up. I smiled. “Either way,” I said. “But I’m really just looking for Lela Lopes.”

He stared me up and down, realizing I was not Mister Rogers and too much trouble to start the night. I smiled to reassure him.

“Depends on who you are.”

“I’m a private cop from Boston looking into the shooting from two years ago.”

“Fuck that,” he said, putting up his hand as if about to turn away.

“Only have a few questions for her.”

“Sounds like a pain in the ass,” he said. “The guys who own this place, JoJo and Hani, are a class act. They put all their money into this place and now it’s about to tank.”

The three women who had been surreptitiously eyeing me filed out the front door. Hellboy sighed at the spiky-haired bartender. In defeat, Spiky leaned against the far wall of the bar and poured himself a shot of tequila.

“At first, everyone wanted to see this place,” he said. “When we opened, you would have had to give me a blowjob to get in the front door.”

“Glad business has cooled a bit.”

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Now we have to hand out flyers in Times Square to all the loser tourists and businessmen wanting to get laid. We got maybe two, three months, tops. JoJo and Hani will take a bath. Hani is thinking about opening up a strip club in Boca, anyway. That’s where he’s from.”

“Lela,” I said. “Sure would like to speak to her.”

“I get fired if I talk about that shooting,” he said. “People don’t even call this place Chrome anymore. You know what they call it?”

“Tarnished?”

“Freakin’ Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” he said. He made a firing motion with his hand. “You know?”

“Sure,” I said. “But Lela doesn’t work here anymore, and so she can’t get in trouble. I give you a card and a twenty and all you can do is pass it along.”

“I don’t know.”

One of the waitresses wheeled out a small fan to get the large white curtains to billow more noticeably. The music switched from up-tempo and annoying to pulsing and gut-wrenching. Somewhere above, a bubble machine began to rain on us. I wondered what Lennie Seltzer would think of a bubble machine at the Tennessee Tavern.

“Spenser, huh?” Hellboy said, studying the card in his stubby, muscular fingers. “Sure. Okay. Whatever. I just don’t want you messin’ with Lela. She’s been through enough shit.”

I handed him a twenty. I smiled, patted his arm, and thanked him. As an afterthought, as we walked to the door, I said, “Did you break up that fight?”

He nodded. I had noted a bouncer in the report, but he was listed under a real name I could not immediately recall.

“Was it bad?”

He scratched the top of his freshly shaven throat and tilted his head. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “All the papers made that guy Kinjo into some kind of nutjob like he was kicking apart that guy’s ass. But that’s not what happened.”

“What did?”

“A bullshit shoving match,” he said. “Nobody even spilled a drop.”

“Nothing to kill over.”

“Just people drunk and stupid.”

“You see a lot of that.”

Hellboy nodded, looking a bit like Rex Ingram, and reached for the door.

“Open sesame?” I said.

“I get that shit a lot,” Hellboy said, grinning. “Okay. Okay. I’ll shoot Lela a message.”

18

At ten after ten, I received a text from a 917 area code. Someone wanted to meet me at a place called Red Planet in Times Square. I texted back that that sounded dandy and slipped into my jacket and took a cab from the hotel.

When I arrived, Times Square was as garish as usual. Unless you happen to like fifty-foot billboards of superhero movies, all-night shops shilling the latest Japanese gizmos, or Broadway plays based on Disney cartoons. Wide-eyed tourists from Topeka and Cincinnati took pictures with their phones of costumed characters and street performers. One woman walked up and down the avenue in a white string bikini, attempting to play the guitar, with a donation bucket strapped to her hip.

After being jostled and elbowed, I finally asked a cop on horseback where to find the restaurant. He pointed north on Broadway and said it’s beneath street level. Soon I found out that the restaurant was beneath me, too. An extraterrestrial-themed burrito restaurant that took lucky “voyagers” into the world under Mars. Naturally, the place was packed.