by Ed Kurtz
“Crystal, Detective.”
Walker said, “Funny guy.” There was a click and then a long buzzing tone. Charley went back to kill off that Rheingold.
Price’s piece of Canal was infinitely seedier under the cover of night than it could ever be in daylight. Charley even went so far as to walk with a feigned jitteriness and mumble to himself, hoping if he appeared crazy the likelihood of his victimization would diminish to some degree. Whether or not this act contributed to the fact that nobody attacked him on his way into Price’s building was anyone’s guess.
He could not enter through the front because there was a blatantly obvious unmarked squad car double-parked in front of the building. Walker had not been blowing smoke; he really did send some boys to pick up Price. There was even a middle-aged white guy in a trench coat and Kojak hat lingering by the door. He might as well have worn a sandwich board declaring that he was a cop. Charley ducked into the alley and looked for another way in.
Behind a rusty dumpster that contained the rotting waste of the global bazaar inside, there was a small broken window which was flush with the ground. Beyond its jagged edges was total darkness and hollow white noise. Charley’s brain sped through every horror flick he had ever seen that involved a cellar, none of them concluding well for the parties involved. For some reason Grant Williams in The Incredible Shrinking Man loomed large in his mind. Charley saw it years ago at the Mohawk Drive-In in Gardner, Mass with his dad, and he’d been terrified of spiders ever since, giant or otherwise. He swallowed and sighed, and then he kicked in the largest shards to provide safe ingress into the terrifying cellar of a skid row tenement. Spiders were surely the least of his worries now.
Empty paint cans rattled and a shelf collapsed under Charley’s tumbling weight as he dropped into the cellar. He remained perfectly still until the metallic echo of his graceless entrance wound down, ready to bolt in case he upset whatever blown out transient psychotics that might be squatting in there. Now his memory conjured up images of the hungry zombie child in Night of the Living Dead and the terrible stone door Richard Crenna desecrated in The Evil. Without any light to see by, his brain was filling in the blanks. The cellar was full of horrors—humongous hairy black spiders and ancient demons and knife wielding maniacs hell bent for murder—all them waiting for the most opportune moment to pounce on Charley and tear him to bloody shreds. Quickly he staggered to a standing position and thrust his hands out in front of him, flailing them blindly like Audrey Hepburn at the end of Wait Until Dark.
Terrific, Charley thought. Now I’ve got Alan fucking Arkin after me, too.
Momentarily his left hand scraped across the splintery surface of a crude wooden banister. Charley withdrew his hand as if from a flame but recognized the boon for what it was; he’d found the stairs. He found the first step and bound upwards until he crashed against the closed door. He tried to knob. Naturally, it was locked.
“Goddamnit,” he whispered.
But he was not about to give up now. Charley stepped down a stair and then threw himself at the door, shoulder first. He felt the wood give a little and heard it cracking along the jamb. He repeated this twice more, and on the third blow the door finally gave all the way, swinging forward and permitting the smallest, dimmest hint of light to see by. It was the first floor, and the light from the streetlamps outside was leaking in through the frosted glass on the front doors. Charley could see the vague silhouette of the cop in the Kojak hat bobbing in the light. He hurried past the doors and into the familiar stairwell on the other side of the narrow shotgun hall.
The fourth floor hallway was darker than before and it smelled just as bad. Charley saw the yellow police tape forming an X over 4B from the stairwell doorway, as well as the bored uniformed officer pacing in front of it. Charley felt certain that as far as the police were concerned Elizabeth was just another piece of dead gutter trash; another anonymous victim of Forty-Two’s rough allure. In other words, nothing worth breaking a sweat over. The cop was drawing on a cigarette, its tiny red glow the most significant source of light apart from the frosted window behind Charley. He waited in the doorway, watching the cop and waiting for something to come to him. After a long minute, the cop dropped his smoke on the floor and crushed it under the heel of his shoe. Then he patted down his pockets and came back with a crumpled cigarette package. Empty.
The cop said, “Damn.”
Charley could read the cop’s mind as the guy looked down the hall one way and then the other, nervously shifting his weight from his left foot to his right. The guy wanted another smoke, but he was out. There wasn’t anything going on up there, nobody in sight. A few minutes to go bum a square off one of the boys down on the street wasn’t going to kill anyone. The cop sighed and started down the hall toward the stairwell. Toward Charley.
Charley improvised quickly and emerged from the doorway like he didn’t have a worry in the world. The policeman jumped a little, startled by Charley’s sudden appearance, but his surprise rapidly transformed into the stern demeanor of the cop-on-the-beat. For a hundredth of a second, Charley envisioned the guy twirling a baton and speaking with a thick Irish accent.
“Waitaminute,” the policeman barked in a distinctively non-Irish accent. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Home,” Charley lied. He fished his keys out his pocket and jingled them for effect.
“Yeah? Where do you live?”
“Right here,” Charley said, gesturing toward 4A.
“What’s your name?”
“Grant Williams,” Charley said, immediately wishing he hadn’t. It was the first name that came to him after reminiscing about that stupid drive-in. The cop didn’t worry about it, though.
“Awright, Williams,” he grunted. “Get inside and lock your door. And don’t go nowhere. We might need to talk to you later.”
“Sure thing, officer.”
The cop lingered for a second, watching Charley as he slowly advanced the door to 4A. Hot beads of sweat squeezed out of every pore in his face as he flipped through the keys on his key ring, taking his sweet time to select one. When he couldn’t fool around with that charade any longer, he extended one in particular—the key to the supply closet Sol had given him at the Rose Hotel—and slid it into the mismatching lock. Satisfied, the cop turned into the stairwell and tramped down into the darkness below.
Charley exhaled loudly as he withdrew the key. He was wiping the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his jacket when the door flew open to reveal an angry looking woman with a well-groomed afro in nothing but a pink negligee.
“The hell you think you doin?” she snarled.
“Sorry,” Charley said meekly. “Wrong door.”
“You goddamn right you got the wrong door!”
The woman slammed her door shut and Charley winced, hoping the cop had not heard the exchange. He did not wait to find out. Instead, he hurried across to 4B and squeezed his thin frame through the bright yellow X, into the lair of Chester Price.
Chapter 10
New Year’s was a joke. Every three hundred sixty-five days the whole stupid world decided to stop whatever mindless thing they were doing in order to put on idiotic paper hats and get loaded. And for what? An inconsequential change in the calendar. Franz cracked his knuckles and scoffed at the excitement droning out of the television.
“Morons,” he groused.
Still, he was not about to miss out on the opportunity to see the Ramones at the Palladium, even if the occasion was hardly worth celebrating. He slid his feet into his worn sneakers and began hunting around the tiny apartment for his leather jacket. He could not do without it—it was twenty degrees outside for one thing, but more to the point his ticket was in the jacket’s inside pocket.
Despite himself, Franz was growing more than a little excited to venture out into the world for once. He was even muttering a refrain from “Beat up the Brat” as he searched for the jacket, even if he was entirely unaware that he was doing so. But
when the bubbly blonde on TV announced her sheer delight at the crowd in Times Square, compounded by a few scripted words of fake enthusiasm from Paul Anka, live via Satellite from Vegas or L.A. or someplace, Franz sank right back down to unmasked revulsion. People were sheep. He could not stand to be around them for long, if he was going to be honest with himself, which was why he spent the preponderance of his time laid out on the couch in the dark like an agoraphobic. Only agoraphobics were afraid of the world. Franz just hated it.
Having turned what passed for their living room upside down, Franz advanced into the bedroom. He tossed Charley’s unmade bed, gave a cursory glance underneath it, and then moved on to the closet. Sure enough, his leather jacket was there, hung up on a wire hanger as though it belonged to Charley and not him. Franz grunted. Some nerve that little idiot had, hanging up another man’s jacket in his closet. He had probably been wearing it all over town, getting the stink of the freaks and degenerates he hung out with all over the damn thing. Franz yanked it free of the hanger and buried his face in it. It only smelled of cold leather. Still, it was the principle of the thing. He was going to have to have a word with that kid.
As Franz reemerged from Charley’s room, sliding his arms into the heavy black jacket, the deadbolt clicked and the front door cracked open. Always coming and going, Charley was, like he was just a marionette with no control over his own mindless actions. Franz sneered. When he first met Charley the kid talked of nothing else but getting in good with the artsy-fartsy types, the bohemians and that lot, maybe try and ingratiate himself into Warhol’s bunch if he was lucky. He was going to make important movies someday, Charley claimed in those days, but now all he did was lurk on Forty-Two among the least important movies ever made. What an utter failure, Franz thought.
He checked his inside pocket to make sure the ticket to the Ramones show was still there—it was—and strode toward the door. He planned on giving Charley a look on his way out, no words, just a look that said Remember this jacket, asshole? That would be enough. But then again, Charley was not exactly the sharpest knife in the block. Maybe Franz was going to have to actually say it aloud for the kid to get it.
Franz curled both hands into tight fists as he neared the opening door.
But, as luck would have it, it was not Charley at all out there.
“Who the hell are you?” Franz demanded angrily.
The place was a wreck. At first it looked to Charley like the fuzz had really worked the joint over, looking for some manner of physical evidence that might stand in court. It became clear soon enough, however, that this was just the way Price lived day to day.
A dim bulb in the kitchenette provided the only illumination, but it was enough for Charley to take inventory of the unsanitary and thoroughly disgusting mess Chester Price had left behind. There must have been more than a hundred crumpled beer cans strewn around the filthy carpet and every available surface, and for every ten of them there was a spent liquor bottle discarded somewhere as well. Pizza boxes and soiled Chinese takeaway cartons littered the main room in the dozens, many of them filled to overflowing with cigarette butts and the occasional used syringe. Both a chain smoker and a junkie. Charley was not surprised.
Mountains of newspapers and dirty magazines took up every corner and were strewn across the broken table in the middle of the room. Charley took a peek at some of the magazines, careful not to touch them. He was not particularly concerned with leaving fingerprints; he just didn’t want to touch anything. Most of the magazines promised bizarre delights within their pages from standard bondage stuff to sex mixed with sundry bodily fluids not normally associated with the act. The entire apartment smelled of stale tobacco smoke and ammonia, vomit and body odor. Charley could hardly conceive of anybody being able to live like that. Even a cold-blooded murderer.
Carefully stepping over the piles of garbage and porno in long, gingerly strides, Charley moved across the main room and into the bedroom in the back. He ran his hand along the greasy wall until he found a light switch, which he flipped on before anxiously wiping his hand on his jeans. The bedroom was in a similar state of abysmal disarray. A bare mattress with no frame or box spring was stuffed into the corner, and a trio of full ashtrays were situated in an isosceles triangle on the floor beside it. Several centerfold layouts from Price’s extensive collection of peculiar pornography were tacked up on the wall above the mattress. The faces of half of them had been violently scratched out with something like a nail. Charley felt a chill looking at them. This guy liked to look at women, but he didn’t like for them to look back at him. Did Elizabeth Hewlett look at him? Was that why he put a knife in her?
Charley made a survey of hiding places in the room. There was a small closet with a sliding door and a worn out bureau that might have been nice five decades ago, but it totally belonged in Price’s world now. The closet revealed nothing but piles of foul smelling clothes, some of them women’s. The bureau drawers were mostly empty except for an empty box of shotgun shells and more despoiled cutouts from the porno magazines. It had been hard and reckless to get into the apartment, but Charley had learned little apart from Price’s evident need for serious psychotherapy. So he was a pervert, he didn’t much like women but wanted to leer at their bodies, and he shot junk between packs of Kools and six-packs of Stroh’s. None of that told Charley anything about Elizabeth’s murder or why Price would have done it. He didn’t even have a shred of proof that Price had anything to do with it in the first place. Just Eve’s presumption and no one else to seriously suspect.
Charley pursed his lips and sighed. He felt stupid for having snuck into the place like he was in some espionage film. At the very least he could have brought a tiny camera that looked like an ordinary ink pen and ransacked the place in search of the microfilm. Stupid. But just when Charley resolved to sneak right back out of there and let the whole thing alone once and for all, a thin, wiry arm snaked around his neck and squeezed like a boa constrictor.
“Your fault,” Price’s voice wheezed directly into Charley’s ear. “S’all your fault, you sonofabitch.”
Price took up about half as much space as Eve’s gorilla—Stanley—but he could crush a larynx just as well if not better. Strength, Charley presumed, had little to do with it. He gasped for air, but it did not do much good. The already dark apartment was getter darker and Price’s jeering voice got fainter. He was perilously teetering on the precipice of blacking out.
In a last ditch effort Charley swung an arm up and then jabbed his elbow into Price’s stomach as hard as he could. Price howled as he released Charley, who collapsed like a soufflé on the floor. But Chester Price was far from down for the count, so Charley scrambled to collect himself enough to kick him in the groin. Price emitted a long, anguished groan and toppled backward into the main room, landing on a pile of detritus and crushing a beer can with the back of his head. Charley stumbled forward, half crouching, and seized Price by the shirt.
“Kill you,” Price grumbled.
Charley delivered a quick punch to Price’s face. It was the first time he had ever hit anybody in his entire life.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in jail?” he said.
“Kill you,” Price repeated. He looked dazed. His eyelids were dark and heavy, his eyes pink and thoroughly bloodshot. Charley caught a glimpse of his sinewy arms, bare due to the sleeveless tee shirt he was wearing. Infected track marks dotted the flesh around the crooks of his elbows like scabby constellations. “I’ll kill you.”
“Look, man,” Charley said as he released his grip. “There’s a cop right outside your door. I don’t know how you slipped by him, but I think it’s about time you turned yourself in.”
In response to that, Price reached out and grabbed a big red ashtray that said Viva Tijuana on the side and slammed it down on the crown of Charley’s skull. The ashtray shattered on impact and spent butts rained down all over Charley’s head and shoulders. He crumpled up on the floor, his eyes filling up with the sparkling
white lights that characterized the searing pain in his head. He hadn’t seen it coming.
Price had managed to scrabble off toward the kitchenette where he was anxiously digging through the cabinets. All the while he mumbled to himself, most of it completely incoherent, but Charley made out something about the Bronx. Charley struggled against the throbbing agony of his skull, afraid that Price was going for a gun. The police had almost certainly confiscated the sawed-off shotgun, but there was no telling how many other weapons a bad dude like Price had lying around. When he muttered what he’d said a second time, it was much clearer.
“I’m gunna burn up the Bronx.”
Seconds after Price uttered this cryptic remark, his kitchenette went up in flames. Whatever it was that he’d been looking for in there, it was definitely flammable. And so, as it turned out, was Price. He burst out of the growing fire, his arms and back ablaze, screaming like a lunatic. Charley gaped—it was something he should be seeing on the Deuce, in the Harris, but on the screen. But no, this was really happening. There really was a flaming junkie barreling toward him, setting all of the accumulated waste of his life aflame as he went. Pizza boxes and Chinese takeaway cartons made for excellent kindling and went up easily. By the time Price was within four feet of Charley, most the apartment was burning. Charley screamed, hoping to attract the shiftless policeman who was supposed to be watching over apartment 4B.
“Officer! Goddamnit!”
Charley dove out of Price’s path, landing behind the tattered sofa. An errant spring jutted out of the sofa’s back and snagged Charley’s leg, tearing at both denim and flesh. He ignored it, intent on just getting the hell out of there. From the hallway he could hear stomping feet and screaming voices. It was not going to look particularly good for Charley if the cops found him in there. With his luck Price would blame the fire on him and find a way to make it stick. He was already beginning to look suspicious to Walker, who couldn’t get a handle on why Charley kept sticking his nose into this thing. His presence in the inferno that used to be Chester Price’s Skid Row shooting gallery was not going to do anything toward easing those suspicions. Now Charley had two objectives and no time at all in which to accomplish them: put Price out and escape.
