City Of Lies

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘You waited outside and then followed me in here?’

  Duchaunak shook his head. ‘I came to see Lenny—’

  ‘Why the fuck are you calling him that? Lenny? What the fuck is that? His name is Edward Bernstein, right? Edward fucking Bernstein, not Lenny—’

  ‘It’s his nickname—’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck what it is. It’s not his name okay? Not his proper fucking name. If you’re going to talk about him then at least use his proper fucking name eh?’

  ‘You’re upset, Mr Harper—’

  ‘Oh fuck off, I’m upset. What the fuck would you know? I don’t even know why you’re here—’

  ‘Because I’ve spent much of the past seven years following that man, and I want to know what happens to him.’

  Harper stood motionless. He felt anger welling inside him. He clenched his fists and stared at Duchaunak.

  Duchaunak raised his hands. ‘This isn’t a confrontation, Mr Harper.’

  ‘Get the fuck out of here.’

  Duchaunak lowered his hands and smiled. ‘I can see that you’re having difficulty with this.’

  ‘I said get the fuck out of here, Detective . . . you have no right coming here and saying these things to me.’

  ‘And your father has no right stealing money from people and killing—’

  Harper started towards him, raised his fist, looked like he was going to let fly at Duchaunak.

  Duchaunak backed up, tried to turn, seemed to lose his balance and leaned against the wall.

  Harper reached Duchaunak before he had a chance to gather himself, raised his hand and gripped his coat lapel. ‘Just get the fuck away from me!’ he snapped, the anger and frustration evident in his voice. ‘Go away! Leave me the fuck alone!’

  Duchaunak twisted away from Harper, and then suddenly twisted back. Harper’s grip was lost, and Duchaunak ducked sideways and tried to push Harper away.

  Harper, incensed beyond anything he’d felt before, raised his fist again and took a swing at Duchaunak.

  Duchaunak ducked but Harper’s fist caught his shoulder and sent him sprawling to the ground with some force.

  Harper stepped back, stopped dead, looked down at Duchaunak and realized what he’d done.

  Duchaunak didn’t speak. He looked embarrassed.

  Harper turned and started to walk away.

  ‘I’m not here to harass you, Mr Harper,’ Duchaunak said as he started to get up.

  Harper slowed and turned. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘I will,’ Duchaunak said. ‘I will leave you alone, but you have to understand that I’m here to help you with this . . . I’m not trying to make this thing any worse than it already is.’ Duchaunak was on his feet, brushing down his clothes.

  ‘What the fuck do you want with me?’ Harper asked. ‘Really?’

  Duchaunak shook his head, straightened his tie. ‘I came here to see what I could do.’

  Harper didn’t reply.

  ‘And I came here to see whether you took my advice.’

  Harper shook his head. ‘I didn’t go back to Miami, Detective.’

  ‘I can see that Mr Harper.’

  ‘And this thing with Cathy Hollander? What the fuck is that?’

  ‘Cathy Hollander isn’t her real name.’

  Harper nodded. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘And what is her real name?’

  Duchaunak looked directly at Harper. His gaze was unflinching. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe it’s Cathy Hollander.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because there is no-one called Cathy Hollander anywhere in New York who looks like her.’

  Harper laughed awkwardly. ‘Maybe she came from somewhere outside New York.’

  ‘She has no Social Security number, Mr Harper. She has no job, no car, nothing registered in her name except the hotel room you happen to be staying in—’

  ‘You’re checking up on me—’

  ‘No, I’m checking up on Walt Freiberg and Cathy Hollander, and you just happen to be on the edges of this thing because of your association with them.’

  ‘And now it’s a felony to use another name?’

  ‘No, Mr Harper, it’s not a felony to use another name. I’m not interested in her because she uses an alias.’

  ‘You’re interested in her because?’

  ‘Because she’s spent the better part of the last six months living with your father, and now she spends all her time with Walt Freiberg as far as I can tell, and before she met your father she used to hang around with Ben Marcus, and anyone who has anything at all to do with Ben Marcus becomes a subject of intense curiosity for me almost immediately.’

  Harper was silent for a few moments. He turned away, unable to hold Duchaunak’s gaze. When he looked back at the man he realized how utterly exhausted Duchaunak looked.

  ‘You look like you have ghosts following you, Detective . . . like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown.’

  Duchaunak smiled, his expression almost sardonic. ‘My captain, he says that.’

  ‘Maybe you should take some leave,’ Harper said. ‘Did he suggest that?’

  ‘No, he didn’t . . . he told me to leave Len—to leave Edward Bernstein alone.’

  ‘But you don’t pay any mind to what people tell you?’

  Duchaunak shook his head. ‘Not when it comes to Edward Bernstein, Walt Freiberg and the Marcus crew.’

  ‘The Marcus crew?’

  ‘Ben Marcus, Sol Neumann, the other people who work for them.’

  ‘And these people are what, Detective?’

  ‘Some of the worst people New York has to offer.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Duchaunak frowned, tilted his head to one side. ‘You ask me that question . . . why d’you ask me that question like that?’

  ‘What question?’

  ‘When you say that . . . is that so? You say “Is that so?” like you’re challenging me, like you don’t believe a word I’m saying.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that I didn’t believe a word you’re saying,’ Harper replied. ‘I believe some words, I don’t believe others.’

  ‘What don’t you believe, Mr Harper?’

  Harper smiled. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know what I believe, Detective. And with just as much certainty I don’t know what I don’t believe—’

  ‘Now you’re beginning to sound like a true New Yorker . . . obscure, Mr Harper, very obscure.’

  ‘So what are you here to tell me? You’ve come to tell me to go back to Miami again?’

  Duchaunak put his hands in his pockets. He looked down at his shoes, seemed to notice something, and then proceeded to clean the upper part of his right shoe against the back of his left leg. He inspected his shoe once more and then looked up at Harper once more.

  ‘Let’s go get some coffee, Mr Harper. Let’s get out of here and just go get a cup of coffee someplace, eh?’

  ‘And you will tell me what the fuck is going on here?’

  Duchaunak nodded. ‘Yes, Mr Harper, I’ll tell you what’s going on here.’

  ‘For real this time . . . not this back and forth bullshit okay? I go someplace with you, we sit down and you give me some straight answers about all these things.’

  ‘Okay, Mr Harper.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Duchaunak turned and started walking.

  Harper, glancing once more over his shoulder in the direction of his father, followed him.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jessica McCaffrey had made it out of the lower east side of New York and into college with nothing but sheer determination and a big heart. Just as her brother Darryl believed he could help the community with his social work, so Jessica possessed a vocation to nurse. Strictly speaking she should have wound up a hooker, maybe a crack mule, but she kept it together despite losing parents, despite her brother Thomas edging ever closer to the kind of people
she’d sworn she would never associate with. There was a point, a few years before, where she believed she could have saved Thomas from his own irresponsibility and greed, but Thomas didn’t walk with the Lord, Thomas didn’t see eye to eye with Jesus, and though she had pleaded with him to let God into his heart she had not succeeded.

  So she studied, she worked two jobs, she sat exams, she graduated, and in November of the previous year she’d been selected to serve her internship at St Clare’s in the theater district, right there on West Fifty-first, half a dozen blocks away from Carnegie Hall.

  When the two men appeared at the front door of Jessica McCaffrey’s house, a house she shared with a fellow nurse called Cassandra Wilson, she at first believed they might be police. A couple of times detectives had arrived to speak with her about Thomas’s whereabouts, and when they greeted her, smiled politely, told her they wanted to ask some questions about him, she wondered what trouble he had gotten himself into this time.

  She did not yet know, and would not know until Raymond Dietz told her, that her older brother, Darryl, was already dead.

  The men came into the house – not because she allowed them, but because they were a great deal stronger than she. One of them, a heavy-set man with penetrating eyes, a man who later said his name was Albert, held a gun in his hand. She’d seen such a gun before. It was a .38 caliber revolver.

  Once inside Albert searched the house and confirmed that noone else was there.

  Raymond Dietz sat Jessica McCaffrey down in the kitchen, sat right across from her at the plain deal table, and told her that they needed to speak with Thomas.

  Jessica McCaffrey – unafraid to cry, believing that Jesus was truly on her side and thus all that happened was His will, that God moved in mysterious ways, that there was a sense of balance and divine justice in all things – told Raymond and Albert that she had not seen Thomas for more than a year.

  She told them the truth; it did not, however, appear to satisfy them.

  Even when Raymond held her right hand flat on the surface, even when Albert used the handle of the .38 to break two, perhaps three of her fingers, she continued to assert that she knew nothing of Thomas’s whereabouts.

  After another series of unresolved questions, Albert took her right arm by the wrist, and raising her hand above shoulder level he brought her elbow down swiftly onto the surface of the table. The elbow and much of her radius shattered in several places.

  Jessica McCaffrey remained conscious only long enough to tell them that once more she did not know where her brother was.

  Finally, seemingly satisfied that she was telling the truth, Ray Dietz and Albert Reiff left the house through the back door.

  They left nothing – no fingerprints, no hairs, no physical indication of their visit.

  They left nothing with Jessica McCaffrey, nothing but a vacant stare and a .38 caliber rose centering her forehead.

  Three blocks north-east. Man standing on the junction of West Fifteenth and Seventh. Cursing the snow which now falls with some sense of purpose. Pulls his overcoat collar up around his neck. Curses the latecomer who was supposed to meet him there fifteen minutes before. Bag he carries is heavy despite its minimal size. Brown paper bag, like a grocery kind of thing, but inside there are three .38s, a box of Glaser Safety shells, two cartons of double-aught shot. Kind of bag you don’t want someone to look inside unless they’re the buyer.

  Looks at his watch. Curses again. And then he sees his mark, standing there on the facing corner. Relieved. Can’t wait to hurry back inside and get some coffee, smoke a cigarette.

  Waits patiently until the traffic clears. Buyer hurries across towards him, hands in his pockets, and only when the buyer is within ten or twelve feet does he recognize him: Micky Levin.

  ‘Micky?’ the seller asks.

  Micky frowns, shakes his head. You don’t know me, don’t know my name, that gesture says.

  The seller is having second thoughts. If Micky Levin is buying then Micky Levin isn’t really buying. Micky Levin never bought anything for himself in his life. He’s a carrier, a gopher, a hired hand, a runner, a small-timer with high hopes and flexible loyalties. He’ll never be anything but someone’s boy.

  ‘Everything?’ Micky asks.

  The seller nods. ‘Everything,’ he says.

  ‘Do I need to check it?’

  The seller’s eyes widen. ‘When did you ever need to check anything from me?’

  Micky smiles. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘So we’re good then?’

  Micky shrugs. ‘I have to check . . . you understand this isn’t my gear, right? I’m just fetchin’ an’ carryin’, you know what I mean?’

  The seller nods. ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘And this is a taster, right? This stuff is good then we’re gonna need one helluva lot more. You make good on this and there’s a lot of money gonna change hands.’

  The seller nods, his mouth turned down at the edges thoughfully. ‘So you’re in on something—’

  ‘Hey, you know better than that,’ Levin says.

  The seller is irritated. Micky Levin is a two-bit piece of shit. He doesn’t have the right to share the same sidewalk, let alone speak like he’s hit the big time.

  Levin shakes his head. ‘I ain’t got nothing. I ain’t into anything, you get me?’

  Seller wants to slap Micky down the street and west three blocks, but he minds his fists and his mouth. Needs the trade.

  ‘Back there,’ Micky says, and indicates an alleyway fifteen or twenty feet down the sidewalk.

  ‘I’m walking,’ the seller says, and turns, starts in that direction, and Micky’s following on behind him, glancing back towards the other side of the street.

  The seller pauses at the entrance to the alley, glances back at Micky who is three or four steps behind him, and then turns and walks right on down there.

  Micky slows up. He turns and heads back the way he’s come. He waits on the sidewalk, blocks the alleyway from view with his body, and when two or three minutes have passed he backs into the darkness, turns, and hurries down there to the fence at the end.

  The seller – a wiseass, no-good, two-faced motherfucker called Johnnie Hoy – sits against the fence, hands in his lap, snow turning him pale grey, face kind of pushed in to one side, switchblade jutting awkwardly from his right eye, left eye open and staring, expression kind of surprised but at the same time resigned to the fact that if he was going to go then it would be in such a way as this. People like Johnnie Hoy didn’t die of coronaries or strokes or diabetes or cancer; people like Johnnie Hoy were shot in the forehead or garrotted, stuck in the neck with a shiv down in Fulton Pen., or they took a long drop with a short rope off a fire escape someplace in Brooklyn Heights. It was part of the life, part of the world within which he had lived, the same world which now had killed him.

  ‘Cocksucker,’ Micky Levin says. It’s almost a whisper, nothing more than that. And then he takes one step forward and lets fly with an almighty kick to Johnnie Hoy’s head. The sound of the vertebrae shattering in his neck is like a firecracker. Blood jettisons across the toe of Levin’s shoe.

  Micky leans down and picks up the paper bag. Looks inside. Three .38s, a box of Glaser Safety shells, two cartons of double-aught shot. Bundles the top of the bag tight, tucks it under his arm.

  ‘Sol?’ Levin asks.

  Sol Neumann steps from the back right-hand corner of the alleyway.

  ‘So we’re good?’

  Neumann nods, clears his throat. ‘Good enough.’

  Levin buries his hands in his overcoat pockets. ‘Cold as fuck,’ he says.

  ‘Get outta here, go home,’ Neumann says, and nods his head towards the street-end of the alley.

  ‘I’m gone,’ Levin says, and starts walking.

  ‘Hey.’

  Levin turns back towards Neumann.

  ‘You keep your ears and eyes open for any sign of this McCaffrey guy, right?’

  Levin shakes his he
ad. ‘It’s all I hear about Sol. McCaffrey, McCaffrey . . . Jesus, who the fuck is this loser?’

  ‘He ain’t no-one,’ Sol Neumann replies.

  Levin smiles. ‘For someone who’s no-one he sure seems to have pissed off a lot of people.’

  Neumann raises his hand. ‘Enough already. Do what you’re asked. Keep your eyes and ears open, okay?’

  ‘Right, right. McCaffrey.’

  ‘Thomas McCaffrey. Black guy. You hear anything you let me know.’

  ‘Sure thing Sol, sure thing.’ Levin turns and starts to walk away. Tiny drops of blood remain at the toe of each footstep, stark red against the snow.

  Sol Neumann stands for a moment and watches until Levin has vanished out into the street. He lifts his left foot and places it against Johnnie Hoy’s chest. With his right hand he tugs the knife free, wipes it on Johnnie’s coat, and then folds it up. ‘Fucked you up, eh?’ Neumann says. ‘Dumbass piece of shit you are, so help me God.’ He pauses a second more, looks down at the collapsed form of the man against the fence, the blood covering his cheek, running down his neck, the way the snowflakes touch it and dissolve instantly. By the time someone finds him they’ll have to defrost the asshole.

  Neumann puts the switchblade in his pocket. He backs up one, two, three steps, and then he turns and hurries out onto West Fifteenth. The snow comes down faster as he walks. The mess of footprints in the alleyway will be gone within seconds. The lights from the storefronts reflect back at him. The feeling of Christmas is in the air, and Sol Neumann believes this Christmas will be one he remembers.

  He is right. Johnnie Hoy will not be found until late the following morning. By the time they get to identifying him word will already be out that Johnnie was out of the show for keeps, wouldn’t be clearing his tabs or making good at the track. Easy come, easy go.

  Sol Neumann heads back towards the Fourteenth Street subway station. He takes a train, stays on all the way down through West Village to Canal Street, walks back up Sixth to a small Cantonese restaurant. Inside it is warm, a welcome respite from the snow and bitter wind. He removes his overcoat, nods at the waiter, and then goes to the rear of the restaurant. He takes a chair facing Ben Marcus.

  Ben Marcus looks up, raises an eyebrow. ‘Mr Hoy won’t be joining us?’