by David Grand
“You mind if I sit down, Freddy?” Victor asked, pointing at the seat.
“No,” Freddy said with an edge in his voice.
As Victor sat, his hair arched forward a little over his eyes. He combed it back with his fingers and then looked Freddy over. “Listen,” he said, a reluctance in his voice, “regardless of what’s happened, you and I know each other, right?”
“If I recall correctly,” Freddy said, more welcoming, “you saved my life at least once or twice. . . . It’s good to see you’re out.”
“Thanks.”
“I heard you were paroled.”
“Who would have thought,” Victor said, cracking the slightest of smiles. He started scratching at his thumb and slowly turned his head to the bar, to the two men, who both drew their glasses to their lips at the same time.
“I’m sorry I was never up to visit you,” Freddy said, “but Evelyn, she didn’t like the idea. She didn’t like it at all, and, well, I wasn’t good at arguing with her about it.”
“How is she, Evelyn?”
“I don’t really know, to tell you the truth,” Freddy said.
“What happened?”
“She broke things off last year, moved downtown.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Don’t be. She’s happy. She remarried and had a baby.”
“The two of you always seemed happy together,” Victor managed.
Freddy shrugged his shoulders. “I got what I deserved,” he said mournfully.
“Anyway, Evelyn was right to be bothered about you coming to see me. I wasn’t good to the two of you when I’d get strung out. You had good reason to stay away.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Maybe you’ve just forgotten.”
“Maybe I have,” Freddy mused. “But, look, whatever it was then, it’s bygones now.”
“If that’s the way you want it.”
“Yeah, that’s the way I want it.” Freddy finished off his drink, and as he looked over at the two men at the bar looking him over, his strong thirst started growing stronger. “Where you staying?”
“Downtown at Fuller House. Until I can get on my feet.”
“What brings you up here?”
Victor looked over his shoulder, then back at Freddy. “You ever seen these two before?”
“No, never. Why?”
“I just got a bad feeling.”
“Yeah,” Freddy said, “I know what you mean.” Freddy looked at his empty glass, looked at the two up at the bar, at Victor. “What do you say we walk over to my place. I’ve got a full bottle. We can have a few drinks and catch up.”
“Yeah,” he said, “why don’t we.”
Freddy and Victor stood up, put their coats on, and started walking out. However, before they got to the front door, the two men at the bar stepped in front of them.
“Victor Ribe,” the one with the mustache stated. Before Victor could answer, the two men walked on either side of him, and the one with the carnation in his buttonhole gently eased Freddy back toward the sipping room with a hand on his chest. Once he had placed Freddy a good distance away, the man with the carnation quickly plucked the flower from the buttonhole of his coat and placed it on the bar. If Victor even tried to struggle as the two men took him by the arms, it was invisible. He was overpowered by the two giants. They easily dragged him out of Jack’s, up the stairs, and onto the street.
“Who are they?” Freddy asked Jack when the door closed.
Jack’s hard face looked indifferent. “Narcotics.”
“What you think they’ll do to him?” Freddy asked, suddenly feeling relieved it wasn’t him.
Jack didn’t bother to answer.
Freddy walked over to the window but couldn’t see anything. “Should I try to get a cop?”
“They are the cops.”
Freddy stood by anxiously, waiting for a sign that it was over.
After a few minutes, the big men walked back down the stairs rubbing their hands over their knuckles and straightening out their coats. When they entered the bar, the carnation man stuck his flower back into his buttonhole while the other dropped a few coins into Jack’s fist. The two of them were breathing heavily on their way out, and even though they looked calm and untouched, they were both wide-eyed and shaking a little.
Freddy started following them out.
“Freddy,” Jack said.
Freddy turned around.
“Take one of these.” Jack threw Freddy a rag from behind the bar.
“Thanks.”
Freddy walked up to the street, into the haze of early-winter twilight, where he found Victor’s legs sprawled out from behind a huddle of trash cans.
GLOBE METRO REPORT, MAY 23, 192–
VICTOR RIBE
SPEAKS HIS PIECE
A SAM RAPAPORT
Exclusive
Farnsworth—One month into serving his sentence of 25 years to life at Farnsworth Penitentiary, Victor Ribe, who was convicted in April for the double homicide of Alcohol and Narcotics Bureau Investigator Maurice Klempt and dope peddler Boris Lardner, looked none too worse for wear. When he finally got his chance to speak his piece, his eyes were clear, his speech lucid, his attention focused. He was in the pink.
This was far from the case last month when Ribe’s attorney, Lenny Shapiro, refused to let Ribe testify. And who could blame the counselor? The strung-out Ribe, suffering from a cold-turkey dope withdrawal, couldn’t speak a word of sense. Today, however, he seemed full of it.
According to Victor Ribe, the bloody events that took place underneath the shadow of the el on the corner of Proctor and Shrine streets started when Victor’s eyes just happened to wander up to the tracks above. At that very moment he looked up, he found flying through the sky, in his white lab coat, his old war buddy and personal druggist, Boris Lardner.
Ribe at first didn’t believe what he saw. He’d been waiting for Lardner, in bad need of a fix. For a second Victor thought the whole thing was a hallucination that would go away with a rub of the temples.
No dice. Victor blinked his eyes a few times, but Boris Lardner’s flying body didn’t disappear. It continued plummeting through the air, spiraling toward Victor in an arc until it sailed over his head and crashed into the plate-glass window of Schweitzer’s Piano Shop.
Splinters of glass stuck out of Boris’s body. Growing puddles of blood shimmered in the light breaking through the train tracks.
Victor walked into the piano store through the busted window and bent over his old friend’s jittering body. Clutched in Lardner’s fist was a brown leather wallet.
“This one,” Lardner painfully exhaled with one bloody eye focused on the wallet. “Find this one.”
Victor nearly had to pry open Boris’s fingers in order to take the wallet from his hand. Then he began searching through Boris’s pockets for his fix.
“Where did you put it?” Ribe shouted.
But Victor hadn’t noticed that Boris was no longer breathing to answer. Nor did Victor notice that a group of women from the Glory Be Temperance Alliance, who had been demonstrating outside a row of speakeasies just down the block, had gathered round and were watching him. Their mouths gaped open as Victor’s bloody hands rummaged through Boris’s pockets.
“Where did you put it?” Victor continued aloud. “Where did you put it?”
Everything he found in Boris’s pockets—a set of keys, an empty vial, a silver flask—he stuck into his pockets until his shabby tweed coat was stained with streaks of blood.
After Victor had searched Boris’s last pocket, he finally looked up to notice the gaping mouths of the temperance women. There was a long silence as Victor’s large puffy eyes beheld all the faces. And then all of a sudden, one of the women at the window pointed a finger at Victor and screamed, “Murderer!”
She happened to have a whistle around her neck and started blowing it. All the women had whistles around their necks. And as the first one blew into her wh
istle, the rest whistled along with her.
An alarm of whistles rang through the piano store and up and down the block. Some drunks staggered out of the speakeasies to see what was to be seen. Victor could feel the posse of curiosity-seekers bounding toward him. He looked at Boris Lardner’s lifeless body and then jumped through the broken window straight at the ladies.
He ran right through them. He ran down the middle of the street, under the train platform. He could see the shadow of the downtown express curving around the bend in the near distance. He frantically ran to the staircase leading to the embankment, cursing his dead friend.
“Where did you put it?” he kept saying aloud. “Where did you put it?”
When he reached the top of the stairs, Ribe stopped running and took off his jacket. He folded it over his arms so the blood was concealed from view and then he slowly walked into the small crowd waiting for the train.
He removed from his pocket the wallet Lardner had been clutching and looked through its contents. He found a few dollars and an old photograph of a broad, bulky, earnest-faced man with a flapper on his arm.
As he looked at the photo a little more closely, he realized that the earnest-looking man presently walking toward him, about two steps away, was the man in the picture.
“What did you do with it?” Victor said to the man. “What did you do to him?”
As the man reached under his coat, he said something to Victor, but Victor didn’t hear him. The train was nearly at the station. When Victor didn’t respond to whatever it was the man was saying, the man pulled out a pistol and leaned forward to hit Victor in the temple with its butt.
Victor blindly fell back and knocked his head against a steel grate. When his vision cleared, he saw the man bending over his body, the gun pointing at his face. Thinking the man was going to shoot him, Victor lifted his knees and kicked him in the chest, sending him reeling backward.
Victor leaned up on his elbow and helplessly watched the man fall back onto the tracks as the train pulled into the station.
All the people on the platform began to shrill as the conductor slammed on the brakes, but to no avail. The man’s head was severed clean. It fell through an opening in the tracks, and because it had so much momentum from the train, it spun out of control and bounced all the way down Proctor Street until it landed at the door of Lovey’s Smoke Shop, known to the locals as Lovey’s Juice Joint.
Victor was off again. He ran down the stairs, down the middle of the street, once again through the pack of temperance women. This time he ran into a dusty alley and didn’t stop running until he reached Boris Lardner’s apartment on the other side of town.
Victor nearly knocked down the door before he could slip the key into the lock. He went straight into the back room, to a small metal box, from which he took a large vial of morphine.
He sat himself down at Boris’s desk and shot himself full. He fell over on top of a photo of himself and Boris standing in front of a brothel just days before they were shipped to the front.
The next thing Victor knew, he woke up in jail facing a couple of sweating Chinese who’d just been hauled in from an opium den. It turned out he was in a downtown cell awaiting his arraignment for the double homicide of Boris Lardner and ANB Investigator Maurice Klempt.
Chapter 13
Harry Shortz returned to the Central Boulevard station as the sun was going down. With deafening gusts of wind to his face, he walked in lockstep with the rush-hour crowd down Central Boulevard to the Beekman Hotel for Women.
The hotel’s lobby was serenely quiet. All Harry could hear was the trickle of water emanating from around the replicated feet of a Venus de Milo standing over a small marble fountain in the waiting area. He removed his hat, patted down his hair, and walked around the circular fountain to the concierge—a young woman, thin, with a long neck and straight black hair that wound into a cylindrical bun on the crown of her head. She sat poised like a blue-eyed hieroglyph, her head positioned in half-profile. She wore horn-rimmed glasses on a silver chain and a charcoal-gray sweater set, and had a tidy compact bust that hovered over the hotel’s directory. When Harry reached her, she slowly turned her head and lifted it, and when she had lifted her chin so that the skin of her throat had stretched out from the cover of her blouse, she removed her glasses and batted her lashes.
“Would you please ring Katrina Lowenstein’s room and tell her that she has a visitor.”
“Lowenstein?” The young woman skimmed through the directory’s names with her finger. “I’m afraid not,” she said, shaking her head. “No one’s registered under that name.”
Harry removed the piece of paper with Katrina’s address on it. “I was told she was in room nine F,” he said, showing the piece of paper to the woman.
A look that was subtly indistinguishable between suspicion and intrigue came over the woman’s face. “No,” she said, trying to remember, “I’m almost positive that wasn’t her name.” She quickly glanced back down at the directory. She shook her head again. “No, nine F was Janice Gould.” She turned the directory around so that Harry could see the name next to the room number. “And a good thing, too,” she added, “that is, if Miss Lowenstein is anyone you care about.”
“Why’s that?”
“Miss Gould was reported murdered early this morning.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Apparently a man in the building next door witnessed her being strangled from his office window, but . . .”
“But . . .”
“But when the police arrived, they couldn’t corroborate the report because Miss Gould was nowhere to be found.”
Harry looked noticeably affected. The taut flesh on his face appeared to lose hold of its musculature.
“Are you all right?” the concierge asked.
Harry’s mind disappeared for a moment and then returned. “Would you happen to know the names of the officers who were assigned to the case?” Harry took out his badge and identification to show the woman who he was.
“No,” she said. She carefully looked at Harry’s badge and ID, appearing less suspicious and more curious about what was happening. “Harry Shortz? The Harry Shortz running for the Senate?”
Harry nodded his head.
The woman smiled and looked Harry over a little more as she spoke. “I’m afraid I don’t remember the officers’ names, but I’m pretty certain they were from the Third Precinct.”
“Did you talk to them?”
“Yes, briefly. They seemed to think the whole thing was some kind of a put-on.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did they exactly. They suggested there was something a little off about the man who called them over. . . . If you like I can leave word for them to get in touch with you if they should come around again.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Harry said, ruminating. “However, it would be helpful if you could give me the key to nine F, so that I can make my own report.”
“Yes, all right,” she said. “But I’m afraid there won’t be much to look at.”
“Why’s that?”
The concierge removed a key from a wooden box below the desk and pointed Harry in the direction of the elevator. “The odd thing about it was,” she said as they walked, “Miss Gould left word with the front desk early this morning that she would be moving out immediately and that she had hired a moving company to take care of her belongings. The movers arrived sometime in the late morning, shortly after the officers came.”
The concierge placed her hand on the sleeve of Harry’s coat and turned to the elevator operator. “Ninth floor,” she said and turned back to Harry, leaving her hand on his sleeve. Harry glanced out the corner of his eye to the burgundy polish on the woman’s nails; it nearly vanished into the dark wool of his overcoat.
“You wouldn’t happen to know the name of the moving company, would you?” Harry asked, still looking at the young woman’s hand.
The concierge slowly ran
her fingers down the length of Harry’s coat sleeve. “I can check at the desk if you like, before you leave,” she said with a little flirtation in her voice.
“Thank you. You’re very kind.” Harry, feeling his heart rate quicken, looked away from the concierge to the black wand above the door and watched as it turned clockwise toward number 9.
The elevator swayed and bucked as it came to a stop. The elevator operator pulled open the gate and pushed open the door, and Harry and the concierge walked down the hall, over a navy carpet with a tangle of yellow-and-green vines along the borders. When they reached 9F the concierge produced the room key from a small waist pocket in her sweater and opened the door. The two of them walked inside, into an open and empty apartment. Harry immediately started looking through cupboards and closets and drawers, not sure what he was looking for.
The woman silently followed Harry around and watched him scrutinize the few mundane objects remaining—a crushed lightbulb, a few loose scraps of paper, a stretched pair of silk stockings laid out on the floor inside the bathroom. When she saw Harry making for the open Murphy bed in the bedroom, she walked ahead of him and took a seat. She hitched up her skirt a little, crossed her legs, and watched as Harry ran his fingers under the edges of the bed’s mattress, which smelled strongly of too-sweet perfume.
Harry occasionally glanced up at the woman as he examined the seams of the mattress to see if by any chance anything could have been slipped inside. The sight of the woman sitting on the dirty mattress suddenly made Harry feel sick. As he reached the part of the bed she was sitting on, the concierge stood up and walked to the window. Harry’s eyes followed her, and as they did, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a man moving about, outside, through the window, across the air shaft.
Harry politely stepped around the concierge and walked over to the window, where he saw a thin balding man with a lopsided face sitting at his desk, sorting through a pile of papers.
