The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  Andy looked bemused, his eyes rolling off to the left and his lips pursed tightly.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “the tapes can run a good twenty apiece, but gourmet black-market porno is something the sickos will pay for and big.”

  “And where do you buy something like that?”

  “I don’t know. Anywhere, practically. Probably any video store in Times Square’s got something for the connoisseur. But they wouldn’t sell them to just anybody, not if there’s risk involved.”

  “Risk?”

  “Sure. Most of that sort of crap is illegal as hell and believe you me, baby, Big Brother is watching. There’s never any shortage of so-called moralists who want to wipe Times Square off the map and build an amusement park in its place. Capitalists, really. Nonsense like that never gets very far, but nobody wants to be the guy who knocked over the first domino, you know what I mean?”

  “I guess I do,” Charley muttered, his mind reeling.

  Andy sighed deeply.

  “No party lasts forever, though.”

  Charley frowned. Ever since he first stepped into the wild neon riot of Forty-Second Street he felt like an invisible observer, uninvited but unnoticed by the partygoers. But it had become the crux of his existence in the city, his raison d’être above and beyond all other callings. He slept, he worked for Sol, he did just about anything Andy told him to do. Yet all of it was just filling up dead time until the arcades lit up on the Deuce. For the past week that had been tainted terribly by the blood of Elizabeth Hewlett. Now the party got sourer still knowing that films like the awful loop on Andy’s kitchen table were selling to clientele in the know. It was not that Charley was such a sucker that he could not imagine such goings-on in the back rooms and alleys of his beloved scumtropolis, he just never paid any attention to it. It had never hit home. After watching the loop he pilfered from Eve’s closet that changed irrevocably. Now he worried that Forty-Two could never be the same again.

  He worried that he wouldn’t, either.

  Eve wouldn’t come home from work until the wee hours of the morning, and even then she wouldn’t necessarily expect Charley to be there. He knew he had to return that reel of eight-millimeter film sooner than later, at least before she realized it was missing, but for the time being he figured he was safe crashing at Andy’s for the night. So he sprawled out on the couch—the divan—and spent most of the dwindling hours thinking that it wasn’t over at all and wondering what that meant for him. Eventually he dropped off into something like sleep and fragments of dreams came and went in fits and bursts.

  When he woke up in the morning, around eight o’clock, he thought his nose was bleeding. He shot up and slapped his hand to his face, but it came away clean. There wasn’t any blood at all, even though the distinct odor of it was so strong in the room.

  Chapter 15

  Eve’s building had a landlady that lived in a first-floor apartment, the door to which was emblazoned with gold letters that spelled Superintendent. Charley noticed it on every occasion he visited Eve, if for other reason because he wished someone was looking after his own building. But of course now that no longer mattered to him—he didn’t have a building to worry about. The only thing that worried him now was burned into a coiled strip of film in his jacket pocket, a film he did not want Eve to know he was aware of. When he apprehensively approached the door in the late afternoon after his illuminating chat with Andy, he only hoped he could maintain his unpracticed poker face in order to maintain Eve’s ignorance of that fact.

  The super was a heavy woman of about forty, her dark hair streaked white here and there and all of it wrapped up in curlers. She did not recognize the young man at her door so she scrunched her face into an unpleasant scowl, the mask she donned for strangers, apparently. Charley went on the defensive and combated her scowl with a wide, phony grin.

  “Hi there,” he dumbly began. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but I’ve locked myself out, and my girlfriend’s at work and I really need to get into our place.”

  “You don’t live here,” the super grouchily remarked.

  “I just moved in with her,” he lied. “We’re engaged.”

  “Uh-huh.” The super was not impressed. “Got any proof of that? I don’t see no ring.”

  “Well, I don’t have an affidavit or anything. Just my undying love for the girl in 8E.”

  “8E, you say? Wait a minute…8E…”

  She scratched at a space between rollers, pulling a long, greasy strand of peppered hair free from its coil.

  “Eve Hewlett,” he said.

  “Oh,” the super groaned. “That one.”

  “Yeah. That one. We’re getting married. After that we’ll be out of your hair, but for now I’d really like to change before work. Haven’t you got a spare key?”

  “Sure, I got a key. I got lots of keys. But I don’t hand em out to every Tom, Dick or Harry comes along asking.”

  “Well you’re in luck, pretty lady,” Charley beamed. “I’m neither Tom, Dick nor Harry. Charley, as it happens. Charley McCormick.”

  He extended his hand, which the lady reluctantly accepted. She was mildly charmed, he could tell, but not yet entirely won over.

  “And you’re getting hitched to that Hewlett girl?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’d you say you do?”

  “I didn’t. I work for a computer firm,” Charley said. “We go around to a lot of big firms in the city, converting all their old paper records to computer data. It’s safer, takes up a heck of a lot less space. Wave of the future in the business world. It’s a real crackerjack industry.”

  “Computers, huh?”

  Now she looked impressed. Charley might as well have said he was an astronaut.

  “That’s right. Real high end stuff.”

  “You don’t say…”

  The super hobbled off around a corner, and when she came back she had a key in her hand. It had a diamond-shaped plastic bit on the ring that had 8E written on it. She slapped it in Charley’s palm and mixed a smile with a furrowed brow.

  “No funny business,” she admonished him.

  Charley broadened his grin and drew an X over his chest with his free forefinger.

  “Cross my heart.”

  Fortunately for him, Eve was not at home. Where she was and when she might possibly return were variables he could not calculate, but he did not plan to stick around for coffee or anything. He rushed to the bedroom closet, found the appropriate box on the shelf and returned the loop in his jacket pocket to its point of origin. Once that was done, he went for the eighth and final box, the only one he had not investigated the day before.

  He sat down on the edge of the unmade bed and opened the box to reveal two stacks of eight-millimeter loops, identical to every other box on the shelf except for one salient feature—none of the labels on these had been vandalized at all. Like their siblings in the other seven boxes, these all bore dates from the last few years, but as Charley sorted through them he discovered that they also bore the same name as the one he watched at Andy’s house.

  Liz.

  He gaped at the discovery and contemplated the possibility that all ninety-six reels in Eve’s closet contained footage of her sister engaged in some bizarre and appalling sex act or another. It was almost too much for him to fathom.

  Beads of sweat formed on his brow, and he wiped them away with the sleeve of his jacket. He was at an impasse; he could leave it alone forever now that he’d returned the loop or he could delve in deeper by examining more of them. But for what? He had to admit to himself that Elizabeth’s activities on film did nothing to deflect guilt from Chester Price. For all intents and purposes, the dead skid row junkie was still the likely suspect. Still, Charley was wary of appearances. Nothing was as it seemed anymore, and if Price seemed to be Liz and Franz’s murderer then he was starting to look strangely innocent.

  Meanwhile, Eve was starting to look pretty damned suspicious herself, altho
ugh to what end he could not determine. He harbored strong feelings for the beautiful blonde, but he couldn’t overlook the curious collection she was keeping in her closet.

  A tiny, faint voice of reason extolled him to forget it and walk away.

  But he ignored it entirely and left 8E with a shoebox full of loops under his arm.

  The box sat on a dusty shelf under the front desk of the New Rose Hotel, taunting Charley for hours with wild notions of what horrors it might contain. Occasional distractions surfaced throughout the night—a drunk bum he had to toss out onto the street, a queen with a switchblade whom he begged to take her argument elsewhere, a grinning scumbag with a greasy comb-over and a pencil thin moustache who rubbed himself with one hand while he paid for the room with the other—but these were brief, minor diversions that passed as quickly as they started. Then he was left alone again, staring through the Formica desktop with X-Ray eyes at the mysterious shoebox beneath.

  Around two in the morning a burly guy in an oily blue polyester suit appeared in Charley’s lobby, swaggering like a gangster from an MGM musical. His hands were stuffed into his extra deep coat pockets, and his dark eyes were almost completely obscured by the shaggy black eyebrows that draped over them like curtains. His face was all shiny, and his nose was covered in a network of pink acne scars. This dude would have looked like trouble almost anywhere else, but in the New Rose Hotel he just looked like a tenant. Charley took one look at him and spun the register around on the desktop. As the guy stepped up to the desk, a blinding mist of drugstore aftershave burned Charley’s eyes and nose. He smelled like he had bathed in the stuff.

  The guy said, “Need a room.”

  “How long?”

  “How long. I dunno. Maybe a day or two, I dunno.”

  Charley arched an eyebrow and pointed at the first empty line on the register.

  “Sign here. Forty-five up front for the first night, pay by four PM tomorrow if you want to stick around another night, okay?”

  Charley turned around to hunt down a room key. The guy grunted.

  “Whatchoo need my name for?”

  “It’s a formality, man. Make up a name if you want. Write Cornwallis Hogswallow, I don’t care.”

  The oily guy gave a laugh at that. Fifty times Charley had used that line and this was the first time anybody ever laughed at it. He found a key and set it down next to the register. Sure enough, the guy had signed it Cornwallis Hogswallow, except with only one L in each. Charley smirked.

  “Room two-twelve,” he instructed. “Top of the steps and around the corner to your left, just past the no smoking sign. It’s in Spanish. No fumar, all right?”

  “Are you saying I can’t smoke?”

  “I don’t care if you smoke or not, I’m just telling you where the room is.”

  “Oh,” the guy said, his face registering total puzzlement. “All right.”

  Charley nodded and said, “See you.” The guy chuckled to himself as he ascended the steps. Charley figured he must have liked the joke.

  When the sun let its first bit of light leak over the East River and, eventually, allowed it to spill into the streets as well, Sol shuffled into the lobby to relieve Charley of his duty. Charley was glad to see him after having spent the last couple of hours fighting like hell to stay awake. But now that he was off he realized that he was too tired to make it clear out to Staten Island.

  “Hey Sol,” he mumbled when the old German swung around the desk. “Give me a room for a few hours, will you? I’d dead beat, man.”

  “Sure, Chahley,” Sol said genially. “Sure, okay. But doan mess it all up or nothing like dat. You leave it clean, okay Chahley?”

  “You bet, Sol,” he agreed, thinking that none of Sol’s rooms were particularly tidy to begin with. “It’ll be like I was never there.”

  He took two-twenty, four rooms down from the guy in the greasy suit, and never bothered to turn the lights on—he was dead to the world in five minutes. The television in two-eighteen was blaring when he got up there, but nothing short of an atomic bomb was likely to disturb Charley at that point. He slept hard and deeply for a few hours, and after that his consciousness ebbed and flowed so that he was never quite certain if the noises coming from the neighboring rooms or the street below were real or dreamed. He was quite comfortable that way, like he was floating on a rubber raft in the ocean without a care in the world.

  At some point the payphone in the hallway gave a startling jangle, and his eyes popped open. Realizing what it was, he dismissed the sound and rolled over. Somebody answered it and bellowed her half of the conversation in an earsplitting high-pitched squeal. This he blocked out, but then there came a scratching, metallic noise that caught his attention. It was emanating from the door to his room.

  Someone was trying to jimmy the lock.

  Charley leapt up. He was wide awake now, and his heart was beating twice as fast as it ought to have. The lock clicked and he realized that he had not affixed the chain. Charley looked out the window. He was only two stories up, but he did not trust fate to assure him that he wouldn’t end up with two broken legs if he tried to jump. Instead he bolted for the bathroom, just as the door to two-twenty creaked open.

  The intruder breathed heavily; a whistling, smoker’s wheeze. The door swayed shut and there were soft, padding steps across the soiled carpet. As the intruder moved into the center of the room, the strong, astringent scent of cheap aftershave wafted into the bathroom, stinging Charley’s nose and throat. He knew who it was seconds before he caught a glimpse of the guy—it was the oily guy in the blue polyester suit to whom Charley had given room two-twelve. Charley wiggled his nose, trying to shake the penetrating odor out of his nostrils, but to not avail. The scent all but clung to the hairs in his nose. Before he was prepared to squelch it, Charley’s face exploded in a loud sneeze.

  The intruder spun around, revealing a small .25 semi-automatic in his bony right hand. Charley yelped and hit the floor as the guy’s huge arm sprung forth and he squeezed off a round into the bathroom. Porcelain tiles shattered in the mildewy shower stall, raining tiny white shards all over Charley. The guy grunted and stepped forward as he brought the short barrel down on him.

  Charley contracted into a crouch and then leapt forward, colliding with the odorous man’s legs and knocking him backward onto the bed. He growled something that sounded like a curse, but Charley did not think it was English. Greek maybe, or Russian. Dismissing that conundrum for the time being, Charley balled up his fist and socked the guy in the mouth, scraping his knuckles across big, uneven teeth. Both of them moaned, but Charley hit him again, square in the jaw this time, before the rest of the pain got transmitted to his brain. Blood trickled out of the corners of the guy’s lips, and when he opened his mouth again Charley could see that he’d broken a front tooth. But that did not stop him from raising his little black MP-25 so that the bore was flush with Charley’s temple.

  Charley took a gamble, figuring anything was worth betting against a bullet in his skull. He thrust his head forward and struck his forehead hard against the bridge of his attacker’s nose. There was an audible crunch as Charley felt the cartilage collapse beneath the weight and pressure of his own head. Dark red blood poured out of the man’s ruined proboscis and got smeared all over Charley’s face. The important thing was that he dropped his gun on the floor. Charley let it alone and seized the faux Tiffany Dragonfly lamp from the bedside table by its stem instead. This he slammed into the side of the oily man’s head, effectively demolishing the lamp and knocking the guy out.

  The quiet that overtook the room after that was deafening. Charley’s head throbbed painfully, and there were shreds of skin dangling from every knuckle on his right hand. He was spattered with blood, both the attacker’s and his own. And more than anything else, he was deeply confused.

  He moved away from the unconscious guy on the bed and tried to ignore the overwhelming odor of gunpowder and sickly sweet cologne that pervaded the room. When he c
ollected the small semi-automatic from under the bedside table, he wondered for a minute why no one had come to investigate the noise—there was a gunshot, after all. But then he remembered where he was, and he remembered what Eve had said to him. People in this city hear gunshots and they run the other way. He guessed she could not have been more right.

  He dropped the gun into his jacket pocket and rinsed his face and hands in the bathroom. The cold water stung his wounds. When he went out to the hall, he did not lock the door. It was pointless to make it difficult for the cops to get into the room when they got there.

  Sol was scrutinizing an issue of Screw with a pair of cracked reading glasses perched on the end of his nose when Charley came barreling down the stairs that terminated in the lobby.

  “Vass your hurry, Chahley?” Sol mumbled without taking his eyes off the busty brunette on the page he’d just turned to.

  “Call the police, Sol,” Charley managed between heaving breaths. “There’s a guy tried to shoot me in two-twenty.”

  He slammed the MP-25 on the desk and whipped around it to retrieve the box underneath. Sol let out a squeak of alarm.

  “Thass a gun, Chahley!”

  “It’s his. The guy in my room. Call Midtown South and ask for John Walker, okay?”

  Sol yelled, “Vat de hell, Chahley?”

  But Charley was already gone.

  Chapter 16

  Wiping off the sticky payphone handset with his shirt, Charley dropped a dime in the slot. The line rang eight or nine times before it finally clicked and a dejected female voice softly answered, “Hello?”

  “Eve, it’s me,” he said breathlessly. “Listen, some Guido thug just tried to knock me off at my hotel.”

  “What? Charley, is that you?”

  “Are you listening to me? A guy with a goddamn gun just tried to kill me. I don’t think this nightmare is over just yet, babe.”