Maxie collapsed to the marble floor like somebody cut his strings.
Minthorn took Wick in his arms. “Muriel?”
She told him she was okay, and the color rushed back to her face.
Puckett holstered his gun and pushed back the swinging door.
Maxie’s blood was spreading fast.
Minthorn said, “Muriel, let’s get the girls into my office.” Looking at the ex-cop, “Frank, don’t trip the alarm. Just keep the front door locked and wait for them outside. I’ll make the call.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Minthorn,” he said as he turned, started toward the piano bench, the revolving door on Eighth, steam still rising from his coffee container.
Minthorn shepherded Wick and the quaking tellers, and then they were all inside, grateful they no longer had to see Maxie, the nasty bastard, with the side of his skull blown off, his blue, blue eyes rolled up into his head.
Minthorn pulled the blinds all around his office, cutting the light until he reached the desk lamp.
On cue, Maria took Maxie’s empty duffel bag from her drawer and went to the open vault, as Minthorn had agreed.
Minthorn, spent and on his side last night at the Hotel Martinique, and Maria, naked beneath his shirt on the chaise, telling him about Cuba. After a stopover in Miami, she said, they’d lounge on golden beaches, rum concoctions in their hands, and there wasn’t a banker on the entire island who would fail to believe he’d won the $202,000 at the casinos.
She stretched out her long legs, giving him a peek at the dark patch under the shirt front, and Minthorn quivered at the thought of her on white sheets after a day in the sun.
Referencing Maxie, she said, “He won’t know what to do when he has to face a man like you, Morris.”
There was no counting how many ways a line like that would work on a dope like Minthorn.
* * *
The 9:18 to Baltimore lurched forward, jostling the last of the passengers to board. Mitzi turned one last time to the rear. Maxie’s valise sat next to her atop the empty seat on the aisle.
She’s not coming, Mitzi thought, as she wrapped her kerchief around her finger, unwrapped it, all but tied it in knots. I’m sent off, again, only this time it’s to Baltimore with two dollars and change in my purse.
Ain’t it always the way?
She started thinking she’d get off in Newark, grab a couple of bucks on a refund, figuring they had a subway or some kind of ferry would take her back to Hell’s Kitchen, knowing Maxie was paid up until New Year’s.
As the clattering train began to find its pace, she thought, maybe there’s a guy in Baltimore. There’s got to be. A real nice guy, and she’s new in town, and he can see she’s had it rough. He’s got a job, something regular, and he’s kind. Buys her a drink, then the blue-plate special, a refill on the coffee, and everybody in the diner says he’s kind, a gentleman—
“Excuse me, miss. I can have this seat?”
Maria smiled, looking down.
She seemed awfully composed, considering.
“I can put your valise with mine,” she said.
Brand new, brown leather, and without a single scratch.
Mitzi figured the money was locked inside.
“Okay,” Mitzi said, and she watched Maria allow the porter to hoist the two pieces, and her coat, into the overhead compartment.
“Your coat now, miss?” asked the colored porter, sharp in a black bow tie and vest.
“No,” Mitzi said, as Maria nestled next to her. “If you don’t mind, I’ll keep it.”
They met sunlight in Jersey, and Mitzi leaned over, whispered, “Did you hurt him?”
Maria looked at the red trim on the seat in front of them. “No, chica, I did not.”
“The money …”
Outside, miles of tracks on all sides, maybe twenty ways to come and go.
Maria tapped Mitzi’s hand. She’d booked a sleeper for the overnight to Birmingham, and they’d count the dough on the bed, if the girl insisted.
Maria figured it was $200,000, seeing that she left the coins.
Minthorn thought she was waiting at the Hotel Martinique. He said he’d arrive around noon, passport in his pocket.
She told him she had a brother in Camagüey.
Her turn to whisper, Maria said, “The next tunnel I’m going to kiss you, Margarita. I’m going to kiss you until you no can breathe.”
Mitzi blushed.
“There is no one between us now, baby,” Maria added. “Now you are mine alone.”
They rode in silence for a stretch, pulling into Newark, pulling out. “Trenton next,” bellowed the roly-poly man.
Factories on either side, most of the way. Mitzi wondering if they had an ocean in Baltimore. Be nice to swim in an ocean.
She didn’t know what to call the feeling inside. No, but it was like it was all the other times at the start. She wondered if it could be different in the long run.
“Maria? Maria, will you be nasty?”
“Que? ”
“I mean, are you ever nasty?”
Maria looked at her with her black, black eyes.
“I told you, Margarita: Don’t think and don’t worry,” she said softly. “Leave everything to me.”
Mitzi studied her, trying to figure out how she could ignore the passing scenery, puffy smoke billowing from towering chimneys, a silver airplane growing bigger. Christmas lights, and little backyards with snowmen, coal buttons, carrots, corncob pipes.
TAKE THE MAN’S PAY
BY ROBERT KNIGHTLY
Garment District
Sergeant Thomas Cippolo, desk sergeant at Midtown South, peers over his half-moon reading glasses at Detective Morrie Goldstein and his handcuffed prisoner as they enter the precinct.
“What’s up wit’ Charlie Chang?” he asks.
“Chang?”
“Yeah.” Cippolo starts his various chins in motion with a vigorous shake of his head. “Charlie Chang. The dude made all those movies with Number One Son.”
“That’s Chan, ya moron,” Goldstein replies without relaxing his grip on the arm of his prisoner. “Charlie Chan.” Goldstein is a massive man, well over six feet tall with broad sloping shoulders that challenge the seams of an off-the-rack suit from the Big & Tall shop at Macy’s. “Anyway, he’s not Chinese. He’s a Nip. Hoshi Taiku.”
“A Nip?”
“Yeah, like Nipponese. From Japan.” Goldstein notes Cippolo’s blank stare, and sighs in disgust. “The Japanese people don’t call their country Japan. They call it Nippon. Ain’t that right, Hoshi?”
Taiku does not speak. Though he’s been in the United States for three days and has only the vaguest notion of the American criminal justice system, he’s heard about Abner Louima and wouldn’t be surprised if the giant policeman strung him up by his toes.
Goldstein steers Taiku around Cippolo’s desk and up a flight of stairs to a large room jammed with desks set back-to-back. A few of the desks are occupied by detectives who look up from their paperwork to watch Goldstein direct his prisoner to a small interview room. They do not speak. The windowless interview room contains a table and two metal chairs, one of which is bolted to the floor. The table and chairs are gray, the floor tiles brown, the walls a dull institutional yellow. All are glazed with decades of accumulated grime, even the small one-way mirror in the wall opposite the hump seat.
“That feel better?” Goldstein removes Taiku’s handcuffs, then flips them onto the table where they settle with an echoing clang. “Okay, that’s your chair.” He points to the bolted-down chair. “Take a seat.”
Hoshi Taiku is a short middle-aged man with a round face that complements his soft belly. From his seated position, looking up, Goldstein appears gigantic and menacing. Curiously, this effect remains undiminished when Goldstein draws his own chair close, then settles down with an appreciative sigh.
“My back,” he explains. “When I gotta stand around, it goes into spasm. I don’t know, maybe I should get myself on
e of those supports. I mean, standing around is all I ever fuckin’ do.” He removes a cheap ballpoint pen, a notebook, and a small tape recorder from his jacket pocket and sets them on the table.
“First thing I gotta do is explain your rights. Understand?”
Taiku does not reply. Instead, his gaze shifts to the wall on the other side of the room, a small act of defiance which elicits a triumphant smile from Goldstein. Goldstein has bet Sergeant Alex Mowrey $25 that Taiku will crack before 1 o’clock in the afternoon. It is now 10:30 in the morning.
Goldstein lays his hand on Hoshi’s shoulder, and notes a barely detectable shudder run along the man’s spine. “Hoshi, listen to me. You chatted up the desk clerk, the bartender in the Tiger Lounge, and a barmaid named Clara. I know you know how to speak English, so please don’t start me off with bullshit. It’s inconsiderate.”
After a moment, Hoshi bows, a short nod that Goldstein returns.
“Okay, like I already said, you got certain rights which I will now carefully enumerate. You don’t have to speak to me at all if you don’t want to, plus you can call a lawyer whenever you like. In fact, if you’re broke, which I doubt very much, the court will appoint a lawyer to represent you. But the main thing, which you should take into your heart, is that whatever you say here is on the record. Even though you haven’t been arrested and you might never be. You got it so far?”
Goldstein acknowledges a second bow with a squeeze of Taiku’s bony shoulder, then releases his grip, leans back in the chair, and scratches his head. In contrast to his body, Goldstein’s oval skull is very small and rises to a definite point in the back, a sad truth made all the more apparent by a hairline the stops an inch or so above his ears.
“So it’s up to you, Hoshi,” he finally declares. “What you’re gonna do and all. You say the word, tell me you don’t wanna clear this up, I’ll put you under arrest, and that’ll be that.”
“No lawyer.” Despite a prodigious effort, the words come out, “‘No roy-uh.’”
“Okay, then you gotta sign this.” Goldstein takes a standard Miranda waiver from the inside pocket of his jacket, then spreads it on the table as if unrolling a precious scroll. “Right here, Yoshi. Right on the dotted line.”
A moment later, after Yoshi signs, a knock on the door precedes the entrance of Detective Vera Katakura.
“The lieutenant wants you in his office.”
“Now?” Goldstein is incredulous.
“Not now, Morris. Ten minutes ago.”
* * *
When he returns a few minutes later, Hoshi Taiku, though unattended, is sitting exactly as Goldstein left him, has not, in fact, moved at all.
“I’m gonna be a while,” the detective explains. “I gotta take you downstairs. Stand up.”
Re-cuffed, Hoshi is led across the squad room to a narrow stairway at the rear of the building, then down two flights to the holding cells in the basement.
“What you got here, Morrie?” Patrolman Brian O’Boyle asks when Goldstein approaches his desk. O’Boyle has been working lockup since he damaged his knee chasing a suspect ten years before. He sits with his feet on his desk, perusing a worn copy of Penthouse magazine.
“Gotta stash him for a while,” Goldstein explains. He lays his service automatic on O’Boyle’s desk, then grabs a set of keys. “Don’t get up.”
Goldstein leads Taiku through a locked door, then down a corridor to a pair of cells. The cells are constructed of steel bars, two cages side-by-side.
“Yo, Detective Goldstein, wha’chu doin’? You bringin’ me some candy?”
“That you, Speedo Brown? Again?”
“Yeah. Ah’m real popular these days.”
Taiku’s arm tightens beneath Goldstein’s grip and his steps shorten. Speedo Brown is every civilian’s nightmare, a bulked-up black giant with a prison-hard glare that overwhelms his bantering tone.
“Put your eyes back in your head, Speedo. I’m stashin’ Hoshi outta reach.”
“That the bitch cell,” Speedo protests as Goldstein unlocks the cell adjoining his. “Can’t put no man in the bitch cell lessen he a bitch. You a bitch, man? You some kinda Chinatown bitch? You Miss Saigon?”
Goldstein pushes Taiku into the cell, locks the door, then turns to leave. “C’mon, baby,” he hears Speedo coo as he walks off, “bring it on over here. Let Speedo bus’ yo cherry.”
* * *
Hoshi Taiku perches on the edge of a narrow shelf bolted to the wall at the rear of his cell. He stares out through the bars, his face composed as he studiously ignores the taunts of Speedo Brown. But he cannot compose his thoughts. He has disgraced his family and betrayed his nation. In the ordinary course of events, he would already have lost everything there is to lose. But not here in this land of barbarians. No, in the land of the barbarians there is a good deal more to lose, as Speedo Brown’s words make clear.
“You come to Rikers Island, ahm gonna own yo sorry ass. I got friends in Rikers, git you put up in my cell. You be shavin’ yo legs by sunrise.”
Taiku thinks of home, of Kyoto, of his wife and children. If he is arrested, they will be shunned by their neighbors, his disgrace falling on them as surely as if they’d committed the act themselves. But he has not been arrested, has not, in fact, even been questioned, a state of affairs he finds unfathomable. In Japan, in Kyoto, he would already have done what is expected of anyone arrested for a crime. He would have confessed, then formally apologized for upsetting the harmony of Japanese society. That was what you did when you were taken into custody: You accepted your unworthiness, took it upon yourself, the consequences falling across your shoulders like a yoke.
But he is not at home, he reminds himself for the second time, and there are decisions to make, and make soon. Should he speak to the detective? If so, what should he say? Is it dishonorable to lie to the barbarians who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Who occupied Japan? Who humiliated the emperor? Taiku no longer believes that Goldstein will hurt him, not physically. That’s because Goldstein has made the nature of his true threat absolutely clear: Talk or face immediate arrest and Speedo Brown, or someone just like him. Well, talk is one thing, truth another …
Taiku’s thoughts are interrupted by the appearance of Patrolman O’Boyle. He is walking along the hallway, a prisoner in tow, a female prisoner.
“Up ya go, Taiku,” O’Boyle orders. “You’re movin’.”
“Thank you, Lord,” Speedo Brown cries.
O’Boyle cuffs his prisoner to the bars of Taiku’s cell, then unlocks the door and motions Taiku forward. Already on his feet, Taiku finds that his legs do not respond to his will, that his heart has dropped into his feet, that he has a pressing need to immediately void his bladder. He has never known such fear, has not, prior to this moment, known that human beings had the capacity to be this afraid.
“You wanna hustle it up, Tojo? I don’t got all day.”
Again, Taiku wills himself to move, again he fails.
“Lemme put it this way, Taiku. If I gotta call in backup and extract you from that cell, I’m gonna carve your little Jap ass into sushi. You comprende? ”
Taiku’s mouth curls into a little circle, then he finally speaks, “Man threaten me.”
The word “threaten” emerges as “fletta,” which only adds to the humiliation Taiku feels at that moment. He has begged an inferior, a foreigner, to protect him.
“What?”
“Man threaten me.”
“Who fletta, you? Speedo?” O’Boyle glances at Speedo Brown, then laughs before answering his own question. “Little Speedo? He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Would ya, Speedo?”
“Never hurt a fly in my life, but I’m hell on Japanese beetles.”
“I am Japanese citizen. You must … protect me.” Taiku chokes on his own demand. A shudder runs through his body. If he’d had the means, he would have killed himself before speaking those words.
“Whatta ya think, Speedo? Should I ploteck him?”
“You jus’ le
ave the boy in my hands, officer. Ain’ nobody gonna hurt him. Leastways, nobody but me.”
O’Boyle chuckles and shakes his head. “Awright, Tojo. You can wait for Goldstein out by the desk. Bein’ as you’re a Jap citizen and you ain’t been charged with a crime, I guess it’s my beholden duty to save you from the big bad wolf.”
* * *
“I’m really sorry,” Goldstein apologizes for the second time. “A couple of uniforms picked up a rapist I been after for six months. I hadda make sure he got hit with enough counts to catch a high bail. The asshole, he goes out on the streets, he’s gonna rape someone else.”
They are sitting in the interview room they left an hour before, on either side of the gray table. Goldstein’s pen, pad, and tape recorder are laid out in a neat row. “We’re goin’ on the record now.” Goldstein sets the tape recorder on end, starts it running, then suddenly shuts it off and pushes it to the side.
“Ya know something, Hoshi? I don’t think we need to get formal. For right now, let’s just keep this between the two of us. Whatta ya say?”
Goldstein acknowledges Hoshi Taiku’s nod with one of his own, then gets to work. “Okay, why don’t we start at the beginning. Why don’t you tell me, in your own words, exactly what happened at the hotel this morning.”
Taiku draws a breath and feels his command of English, modest at the best of times, slip away. He fears that when he speaks, he will appear a clown to the detective whose eyes never leave his own. Still, he knows he must speak.
“Girl jump,” he finally says. “She whore.”
“Whore?”
“She whore,” Taiku repeats.
“A prostitute? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“You devil. So, how’d you meet her?” Goldstein shakes his head and mock-punches Taiku’s arm. “And by the way, her name was Jane Denning. She was twenty-eight years old and had a kid in fourth grade at Holy Savior in Brooklyn.”
Bit by bit, with Goldstein in no seeming rush, Taiku’s story emerges. First, before leaving Japan, he was handed a business card from the Monroe Escort Service by a superior who’d been quick to explain that Monroe’s specialty was large-breasted, blond-all-over blondes. Taiku had accepted the business card, not because he wished to enjoy the favors of a blond-all-over blonde, but only because a refusal would result in his superior’s losing face. He’d bowed, put the card in his wallet, and had forgotten about it until a dinner meeting was canceled at the last second and he found himself consigned to a long evening in his room at the Martinique Hotel. Jane Denning (who’d called herself Inga Johannson) had arrived an hour later.
New York City Noir Page 41
