by Ed Kurtz
“You want some waffles or something?”
“No. I thought I was hungry, but I guess I was wrong.”
“You’re getting me worried about you now.”
“Don’t be. I’m not your problem, Jackie. Not anymore.”
Jackie screwed up her face. Charley couldn’t tell if she was blue because what he said was true or if he’d hurt her feelings. Probably equal measures of both. He faked a smile to try and cut the fog. Then he dug a buck out of his pocket and dropped in on the Formica tabletop.
“Thanks for the coffee,” he said as he slid out of the booth. “And sorry to have bothered you with this crap. I don’t think I should have come here tonight.”
“You need somebody to talk to.”
“I can talk to Franz,” Charley lied.
“Okay,” Jackie sadly relented. “Go talk to Franz. And give the lazy jerk a hug for me, will you?”
“Yeah.” He envisioned himself embracing Franz and stifled a laugh. He figured he could just pass on the sentiment verbally.
Nothing else was said between them, but Jackie gave him a little peck on the cheek before she let him leave. He felt like crying. He couldn’t figure out how he could have let that go sour.
He descended back down into the bowels of the Canal Street station and sucked up into his own mind while he waited for the train. He was deep into his back-and-forth over whether or not he should phone up Walker when the Q roared out of the station, bound for Union Square. It was another quarter of an hour before the N line rolled in, its front end emblazoned with DITMARS BLVD—ASTORIA. Charley boarded and squeezed in between an elderly black lady and a guy with a beard down to his sternum who smelled like bleach. There was a patch of what looked like dried blood on his frayed jeans, and once Charley saw it he could not stop staring at it. Blood was everywhere now. It probably always was, but ever since he saw the sticky, gelatinous puddle of the stuff that had been properly coursing through veins and arteries less than an hour before, he seemed to see it everywhere he went. He thought about it constantly. He had its phantom smell in his nose, a memory smell that he couldn’t shake most of the time. Charley almost wondered if he could smell his own blood now.
The subway whipped into the Union Square Station and Charley almost kept on riding, caught up in his morbid thoughts and still unversed in the unfathomable garble of the conductors’ voices on the intercom speakers. Everyone else always seemed to get it. Or maybe they just ignored it. In any case, it was no language Charley had ever heard before he first rode one of the city’s subways. Maybe only the MTA could decipher it; some secret code like they used in World War II.
After the sweaty hot minutes he’d spent underground with the masses, the frigid December air hit Charley like a fist in the mouth when he reemerged at street level. It could not have been warmer than thirty-five and it stung his skin a little. At least it wasn’t snowing. Charley grew up in snow and was sick to death of it by the time he was old enough to shovel the crap, and it was even worse when it came down here. Before long it was all gray and piled seven feet high on the sidewalks and in alleys, and even the city grime that Charley found strangely charming became too awful to bear. For now, he had only to trek through the frozen air that snapped at his face like a yappy dog.
No one followed Charley when he reached Thirteenth. No hassles, no gorillas with menacing glares. He made it up to his place with no trouble at all, for once.
Franz was dead to the world, fast asleep on the sofa with the TV on but the volume turned all the way down. William Powell was flickering in shades of blue, charming the hell out of some society dame and melting her ice with his sly grin and slick hair. Charley pulled the wool knitted blanket off the back of the sofa and draped it over Franz. Shiftless as hell, but the nicest guy in the world.
He switched off the set and ambled into his bedroom. In a minute or two the lights were all out and he was buried under a mass of blankets, and then the phone rang crankily from the kitchenette. He swore under his breath and quickly ran through all the possibilities—Andy calling to complain; Jackie calling to see if he was all right; Carla calling for a spur of the moment lay. Or, Charley considered, it could be Detective Walker, calling for any reason at all, but more importantly giving Charley an excuse to check up on the case. He leapt out of bed and hurried into the kitchenette, fully convinced that it was Walker by the time he got there and wondering if he should tell the cop about the girl from the strip joint.
“Hello,” Charley said breathlessly when he picked up the receiver.
A nasty voice, male and wholly unpleasant, said, “You lock your door at night, Charles McCormick?”
Charley blanched.
“What? Who is this?”
“Because when I came by tonight, the door wasn’t locked at all. Why, just about anybody could have gone right in.”
Charley scrambled to get his brain in order, thinking hard about the door. It was locked when he came home just then. It had to have been—he used his key.
Charley said, “Fuck off, man.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” the nasty voice said, ignoring Charley’s profanity. “I locked it for you, just so’s you’ll be safe. I found your boy’s key and I locked it up tight.”
Charley took in a sharp breath. The voice replied by way of a raspy little laugh.
“Still got the key, a’ course. I’ll bring that by for you. Real soon.”
He rang off and the line went dead. Charley just stood there, the buzzing receiver in his hand, staring off into space. After a while, he snapped out of it and went in search of Franz’s keys. He always dropped them on the card table just outside of the kitchenette.
They weren’t there. In fact, they were nowhere to be seen.
What Charley did find, however, was Walker’s card. He rushed back to the phone but reconsidered halfway through dialing the detective’s number. Whoever it was, he claimed to have walked into their apartment, probably not long before Charley had come home, and it looked to be true. It was a threat, or rather a kind of warning, Charley thought.
Keep your goddamn nose out of that killing or you’ll get killed, too.
Charley hung the phone up and said out loud, “Like hell.”
Chapter 8
Late in the morning, Charley was sitting at a lunch counter off Fifty-Second in the middle of town. He had picked up a little spiral notebook with lined paper at a stationary store along the way, and now he made a few notes while he sipped black coffee and poked at an undercooked burger that was fenced in with sickly looking French fries. At the top of the page he scrawled a name: Eve. That was the name the gorilla had let slip in the alley behind the Amsterdam. The name of the phantom girl he’d tailed from the strip joint who looked exactly like the victim at the Harris.
Elizabeth.
He assigned the name the number one and then continued on with number two—the gorilla. In the alley he was just some overprotective meathead, but when he showed up on Charley’s street he became something more. What that was, he didn’t know yet. But he was clearly connected with the whole thing. He went on to number three. The caller. There had only been a second during which Charley considered that the caller might actually be the gorilla, but that was impossible. The voices were entirely different and easily distinguishable from one another. Besides, Charley didn’t figure on the gorilla going to that kind of extreme. For him, the silent warning on Thirteenth Street would have been enough until further notice. There was no need for further action on his part. Whoever had come into Charley’s pad and then called to boast about it was someone else altogether. Someone new. How closely connected he was with Eve and the gorilla was an unknown variable, but all three of them had something to do with Elizabeth Anne Hewlett. And all three of them wanted Charley to keep the hell out of it.
Maybe, he thought as he idly traced circles around the trio of names on the paper, one of them had plunged the knife through the seat and into Elizabeth’s back. For Charley that was more than enou
gh to ensure he stayed in it, regardless of what a bunch of potential cold-blooded murderers thought. His nose was still full of the acrid stink of blood, and ignoring it wasn’t going to clear it out.
After he gave up on the burger, he crossed the street to a drugstore on the corner and slipped into the phone booth there to call Sol. Charley put on a big act and said he was too sick to work that night and promised to bring in a doctor’s note, knowing damn well that Sol would never ask for one. He didn’t.
He then wandered down to a newsstand and picked up a copy of the Post to peruse on his way across to Times Square. He thought he might as well drop in on a movie while he was poking his nose where it most assuredly did not belong.
On the corner behind the newsstand a black guy was blowing a sax. Giant Steps. It sounded good and made Charley wish he’d seen Fifty-Second in its heyday, back when Birdland was there instead of banks and offices. He supposed this guy was all that was left of it. At least he was there. Someday, Charley inwardly mused, they were going to do that to the Deuce, too. And, perhaps, Charley would still be there, a lone living remnant of a bygone era like the old man playing Coltrane on Fifty-Second Street.
Kung Fu—The Punch of Death was the middle show in a martial arts triple bill at the Empire that week. The sprawling movie house sat right next to the dreaded Anco, but it normally attracted a slightly better crowd. It was the Deuce’s mainstay for blaxploitation hits, but the same audience was more than happy to settle in for a bunch of skinny little Asian guys beating the hell out of one another.
There were several hours until the show started, so Charley just hung around Times Square. He popped into Nathan’s for a hot dog and munched on it as he ambled over to Blackjack Books where he perused dirty books and magazines and shuffled off hopped-up male hustlers looking for a score. Then he slowly walked up and down Eighth just to check out the one-sheets for the pornos. They were always amazing in that they really made the movies look like they were worth seeing. Of course, they almost never were. But that was the beauty of exploitation.
Eventually the sun beat it and the lowlifes came crawling out of their holes and onto Forty-Two. Charley got hungry again and picked up a burger at the Grand Luncheonette while he waited for the only part of the Empire’s triple feature he felt like sitting through.
It was a pretty run of the mill chop socky flick with Fei Meng in his usual role as Fang Shi Yu, who somehow had to learn kung fu in every movie. In this one a rival school comprised primarily of thieves and murderers kills Shi Yu’s father, so he has to learn better skills from his mother before he can defeat them. The dubbing was a little above average, but the punches never looked like they connected and the whole auditorium sounded like a hundred guys slapping sides of beef with open hands for the better part of ninety minutes. Charley couldn’t recall the bad guy’s name (he was terrible with difficult sounding Asian names), but he was a pretty common Japanese bad guy in Hong Kong cheapies and had shown up in a couple Sonny Chiba flicks that had played big at the Cine 42. It killed the time well enough and the crowd went wild for the fight scenes and they booed and hissed whenever Shi Yu’s feeble girlfriend started to whine. But what Charley liked best was how it managed to be pretty violent without very much blood at all. He didn’t think he could handle the sight of it just yet.
It was a quarter to eleven when the second feature ended. The speakers crackled and the Pointer Sisters popped and hissed through them in the first of what would undoubtedly be a string of chart-toppers before the last show got underway. Charley split after that, uninterested in the third feature. Besides, he wanted to be certain he made it to Love Connection at about the same time of night as his last visit.
Sunday night didn’t mean much there, not like it did other places, normal places. Just about anywhere else the nightlife would have wound down by then, most of the party goers having already headed back to their respective hovels to sleep it off before they had to report to work in the morning. On Forty-Second and its immediate environs, however, just about everyone Charley saw was at work. They were hard at work hustling, hooking, pick-pocketing, chain-snatching, and barking at the passers-by from dimly lit doorways and from beneath erratically illuminated marquees. If there were fewer denizens among the throbbing, stinking throng on the Deuce tonight than there were the night before, he couldn’t tell. Everybody knew they called it the city that never sleeps. He knew it was because if it fell asleep somebody would stick a knife in its ribs and take its goddamn wallet.
The same Hispanic man with the infrequent teeth jutting out of his grinning pink gums lingered in front of the door that led upstairs to Love Connection. Charley gave him a nod of acknowledgement as the guy opened the door for him, but no words were exchanged. Once he arrived in the sweaty hallway, he passed by the door to the floorshow and advanced directly to the peepshow booths. The same attendant with the creepy facial hair was perched behind the counter. Next to him the televisions competed with one another for pornographic supremacy. Charley stuffed a fiver in the guy’s fist and said, “I might be a while.”
The girl dancing beyond the mail slot peep hole was not Eve. She was a husky Mediterranean woman with thick eyebrows and massive breasts who looked more than a little angry despite her otherwise enthusiastic gyrations. Charley watched her indifferently, but he tipped her a dollar through the slot whenever she came jiggling up to his booth. By the time she’d danced her way through three painfully unpleasant space-disco tracks, he was out another four bucks. After that the surly attendant called into the booth.
“Okay, man, either keep paying or fuck off outta here.”
Charley slipped him another five. He hadn’t much left.
The crummy little stage area went dark after the Mediterranean girl made her exit. Charley could hear a couple of dudes shuffling out of their respective booths and out the door. No one came in to replace them. Then Sylvia Love’s “Extraterrestrial Lover” faded up to an intolerable volume, the harsh overhead lights snapped back on, and Eve was standing in the middle of the stage area in a sparkling brassiere. She was striking a dramatic pose with her arms in the air and her hands hanging limp at the wrists. Eventually she began to move, the feline stalking Charley had seen her do before. She investigated the other booths and, finding them unoccupied, slinked over to Charley’s peering eyes.
“Hello, baby,” she purred.
Charley slipped a buck through the slot and took a deep breath as she bit down on it.
“I need to talk to you,” he said.
Eve just winked and retreated back to the middle of the stage area to continue her dance. Charley wasn’t sure she could hear him over the pulsing rhythm of the space-disco, so he tried shouting at the top of his lungs.
“I need to talk to you, Eve!”
Eve stripped off her brassiere in a single deft motion that greatly impressed him, but she gave no indication that she could hear him. He was beginning to get frustrated. She was just getting started.
Charley sighed as the harsh piano keys continued to pound against the backdrop of the spacey sound effects. Eve swung her hips in increasingly rapid arcs and whipped her hair, keeping her lips slightly parted and her eyes shut tight. She was fluid and sensual, entirely caught up in the music and apparently unaware of Charley’s helpless gaze. Unconsciously, he licked his lips. They tasted salty.
After several minutes the song finally began to fade out and Charlie seized the opportunity.
“Excuse me!” he lamely called through the slot. “I need to talk to you for a minute!”
Eve paced like a caged animal, regaining her breath and wiping her sweaty brow with the back of her hand.
“I don’t get paid to talk, honey. I strip. You watch.”
“Look, it’s sort of important. I’m not a creep. Really I’m not.”
“I don’t care if you’re the Pope. You still watch like everyone else. Quietly.”
She said that with a forefinger extended over her glistening red lips. Then the hidden
speakers started to hum; another Top 40 disco hit fading up to silence him for another five or six minutes. He spoke rapidly.
“Eve, did you know a girl named Elizabeth Hewlett?”
Eve froze, her back to Charley so that he could not see her face. He tried calling her name again, but “Le Freak” was already playing too loud for him to be heard. He hated disco before he ever set foot in Love Connection, but now it was becoming an obsessive loathing. When Eve finally turned around, her face was white and her eyes wide and wet. She looked shocked. She also looked afraid.
There was nothing that could be said between them, not with Chic blasting that loud. Instead, Eve simply swept her brassiere off the floor and whisked out the back door. From within a darkened booth across from him someone shouted. He raced out of the booth, out of the room, and across the long, grubby hallway. In the time he’d spent in the peepshow one of the bare bulbs had burned out. He pushed through the door at the end of the hall and took the steps two at a time down to the street.
He was sweating and out of breath and he didn’t know what to do. Eve went through the back door from the stage area, but he didn’t know where that led. Chances were that she was still up there. It was just as likely that he would be thrown out of the place if he tried going back up, if they didn’t beat the hell out of him first. Charley ground his teeth, sure that he had just annihilated his only chance to speak with Eve. As he stood in front of the red door, hunched over and grumbling a string of obscenities, the doorman materialized from the alleyway, a half-burned cigarette dangling from his lower lip. He was zipping up his fly and his eyes were sleepy.
“The fuck’s wrong with you, man?” he mumbled at Charley.
“Nothing,” Charley panted. Then he started slowly back down the sidewalk, crushed by his defeat. He did not make it very far before a high female voice shrieked behind him:
