The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  Cioci gave a strained chuckle at the memory.

  “Did Rosenthal ever deal in films like that?”

  “Rosey? Oh Jesus, no. I doubt that fat son of a bitch even knows there’s different ways to do besides missionary. His stuff was pure vanilla. Barely even X rated by today’s standards.”

  “Okay,” Charley said with sigh. “So who does deal in it? Who’s making the barnyard films, stuff like that?”

  “Anybody,” Cioci answered plainly with a shrug.

  Charley frowned.

  “Look, how much is a super eight camera? It’s nothing. You’d spend more on the junk that makes the girl agreeable than the whole damn movie, I promise you.”

  Charley screwed up his face, remembering the vacant, dead-eyed look on Elizabeth’s face in that appalling film. She had been junked out but plenty, whether by choice or by force. The salami in his stomach did a back flip that showed on Charley’s face. He placed a hand over his nose and mouth and stopped breathing until the nausea went away.

  Cioci grunted.

  Charley said, “You don’t seem too cut up about it.”

  The bearded Italian narrowed his eyes.

  “You know what I hate? I mean really hate? Cigarettes. Disgusting, awful things, cigarettes. They smell like shit, they give you cancer, people are dying horribly by the truckload for sucking on the damn things ten or twenty times a day. Them idiots drop, what, eighty-five cents a pack? Probably the only product sold legally in the United States that don’t do nothing but kill you.

  “But if that peanut farmer was to come right up to me and say, ‘Louie, I’m leaving it up to you. Should I make em illegal?’ I’d say no, sir. Let em make up their own mind on account of this is a free country with a free, open market. Let em drink bleach right out of the bottle and pop their own eyeballs out with spoons if they want. The commies can tell the poor bastards in Russia what they can and can’t do, and that’s communism. But here men do whatever the hell they feel like.”

  “Including forcing horse into some girl’s arm and then making her make it with a goddamn dog?”

  Cioci smirked.

  “Who is she?”

  Charley shot a sharp look at him.

  “Who is who?”

  “The girl in the nasty loop. The one you want revenge for.”

  “My girl’s sister,” Charley said. It was an oversimplified answer that did not quite tell the story, but Charley did not figure Cioci needed his whole biography.

  “What happened to her?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Junk?”

  “Knifed.”

  Cioci made a face like he smelled something awful.

  “Tell you what,” he said at length. “Me, I’m not in that line anymore. And you can tell Rosey I don’t much appreciate his spreading my name all over town like leaflets for the goddamn League of Women Voters. But I’ll tell you what.”

  He leaned in close to Charley like he did not want Phil to hear what he had to say.

  “There was a guy—this was maybe four or five years ago—real scummy character started going round peddling the kind of crap you’re talking about. There was a time when nobody peddled smut in this city without sanction from our people. Of course it ain’t like that anymore, but in those days, when this bastard popped out of the slime, things were just changing, like. This guy, he figures he’s going to boost his revenue if he’s got access to our client base, so he comes round with a box filled up to the top with his own private home movies. Repulsive stuff, every frame of it. He’s lucky as hell he walked away from that on his own two legs, I’m telling you.”

  “So he stayed independent, so to speak,” Charley inferred.

  “Sure, if you want to call it that. Silent agreement that he does his thing and we do ours, you know? But that was back in Tricky Dick’s days, I don’t know about now.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Charley said as he withdrew a nub of a pencil from his shirt pocket. He dragged a clean paper napkin across the table to write on and looked solicitously at Cioci. “What’s this cat’s name?”

  “Price,” Cioci said. “Chester Price.”

  Charley dropped the pencil nub on the table and hissed, “Goddamnit.”

  Cioci cocked his head to one side and squinted.

  “You know him?”

  “Sort of,” Charley answered through clenched teeth.

  “It’s a small world, after all. Guess we’re through here, then. Go get him, tiger.”

  “Too late,” Charley croaked. “He’s dead, too.”

  “And it keeps getting smaller,” Cioci said dryly.

  Charley walked down Forty-Sixth under the gray, leafless branches of the pear trees in a daze. He had been beating the pavement for a week and all he’d done was walk in a great big circle. If what Cioci had told him was true and correct, then Price had been the culprit all along, or at least neck-deep in the situation overall. But that did not necessarily make him the killer, especially when Branko Dragović and company were figured into the equation. Ultimately this left Charley with nothing he did not already have other than assurance that a dead man had probably shot Elizabeth’s porn loops. That, and the likelihood that there were still people somewhere in the city who would rest better if Charley were to just stop breathing altogether.

  He stopped somewhere west of Madison and perched on a fire hydrant. His eyes bounced from the shopping women to the lunching businessmen while he considered the possibility of skipping town. He could just scoop Eve up and hop a train up to Boston or even clear out to the West Coast. Andy was talking about going out that way, Los Angeles, which didn’t sound too bad to Charley now that he thought about it. L.A. had grindhouses, didn’t it? And Eve could surely do what she did just as well in decent weather as she did in the freezing cold up there. He had all but made up his mind to inform Eve that they were going and that was that when he felt a firm touch on his shoulder. He looked up and behind where a uniformed cop was standing and giving him the greasy eyeball.

  “Move along, pal,” the cop growled.

  Goddamn cops, Charley thought. They can chase you off a fireplug but they can’t catch any real goddamn criminals.

  He sneered at the cop and moved along.

  By the time he passed Sixth, he ran right into the middle of an anti-smut protest. There were twenty or so concerned citizens, most of them white and in their forties, who were impeding traffic and holding homemade signs aloft with slogans like Porn is ruining our city and What if it was your daughter? They all seemed to be convening in front of the Bryant Theater, directly beneath a grubby marquee advertising a live sex show complete with “sextacular acts” and a “dominatrix fantasy.” They managed to block the entrances to the triple X video store on the Bryant’s right as well as the dirty bookstore on the left. From the sidewalk, a small gaggle of Deuce regulars shouted at the protesters with the added bonus of an obscene gesture or two. Among these were a couple of young women in short vinyl skirts with hairsprayed dos in rainbow colors who could not have been a day older than nineteen.

  “Just cause you queers hate sex don’t mean we have to!” one of them screeched.

  Charley did not think that helped the debate much, but the do-gooders screamed back at them anyway.

  “Hey, our kids gotta live here!”

  Charley sincerely doubted any of those people had kids who actually lived on the Deuce, and even if they did it was a free country. He curled his lip into a half sneer, half grin. He thought he was beginning to think a little too much like Louie Cioci. He pushed past a bundle of angry moralists and hurried toward Broadway to get away from them, despite the fact that the Buick was parked right there; he would be too tempted to back up and run a few of them over. So instead he ducked into a storefront luncheonette and ordered a steak and onion sandwich that came with French fries so tough they hurt to bite into. He gave up trying before he broke a tooth.

  He noticed a phone at the back of the joint, so when he finished eating he
paid the dour woman at the register and dialed Eve. He hung up after nine rings. The oily clock on the wall above the grill read three o’clock. Charley was beginning to wonder where a woman who worked at night spent her days since she never seemed to be at home. Given the bomb she dropped at Andy’s house the night the gunmen busted in, he presumed she had to make contact with her P.O. every once in a while. But that should be something like once a month, not every day. At any rate, any discussion concerning fleeing the city in the middle of the night for greener pastures would have to wait.

  He shrugged it off and hoofed it back to the car. By then the protesters had diminished to half their previous number, although they still managed to make the same amount of noise. One of them, a middle aged guy with wide, wild eyes, wedged himself between Charley and the open door of the Buick. Charley almost hit him.

  “Do you want this filth to take over the whole city?” he demanded.

  Charley gently pushed the guy out of the way and got into the car.

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  Then he drove away, leaving the moral crusader standing on the side of the street with a bewildered look on his face.

  Chapter 20

  An enormous sign with sweeping neon letters towered over the expressway in Willowbrook with promises of cheap gas, clean restrooms, and a car wash. The Buick had half a tank and Charley did not need to pee, but he was suddenly reminded of the stench in the trunk. He took the exit and pulled up into the first available bay. Some wiseass in the next bay was belting out a rusty rendition of the appropriate Rose Royce song for the occasion while he hosed off his Impala. He even filled in for the horn section, making the racket that much more annoying. Charley tried to ignore him as he fed a couple of nickels into the machine on the wall.

  The job took a considerable amount of sweat and elbow grease, not to mention quite a few more nickels, but by the time it was done Andy’s trunk smelled like a trunk and not a landfill. Charley then piloted the car back down to Tottenville, left it in Andy’s garage, and took the Staten Island Railroad up to Old Town where he caught a bus back to Manhattan.

  He rode the Express until it rolled into the Port Authority bus station. It was past nine and he expected Eve would be reporting to work sooner than later. In the meantime he killed time drinking black coffee out of a polystyrene cup at the Westernberger and disinterestedly observing the coke deal openly transpiring at the grimy front counter. Charley shook his head, recalling the protesters from that afternoon who were so anxious about pictures of naked people and their injurious effect on the minds of their youth. They’re fucking sheep, Louie Cioci would have said. Charley could not disagree.

  When ten o’clock rolled around and Charley could not possibly ingest any more caffeine, he split Westernberger and pressed through the ambling crowd on Forty-Two until he came upon Love Connection. It occurred to him as he ascended the dark, musky stairwell that this was the first time he had ever gone into the place as somebody close to Eve and not just another random creep. The revelation bestowed a weird air of authority on him, false and empty as it was. He strode confidently down the dingy hallway and into the peep booth wing.

  Every curtain was drawn when he came into the room, signifying that Eve had a full house at the moment. The sound system pulsed to the beat of Foreigner’s “Double Vision,” hardly a favorite for Charley and his dislike of rock music but preferable to the normative disco tunes places like Love Connection tended to favor. There were days before Charley’s time when strip joints had live bands that played palatable jazz renditions between the striptease acts and the lousy comedians and magicians. Per usual, he pined for the days that he never had as he leaned up against the grubby wall and waited for a booth to open up. His eyes darted over to the guy at the counter, and he wondered if that guy ever left or if he just lived there.

  The rock faded out and some funky Parliament track took its place as the curtain on the far right slid open. A disheveled guy with uneven cornrows and a shaggy beard staggered out. Charley made eye contact with him, which was a major faux pas in joints like that; the guy flashed murderous eyes at Charley as he exited into the hallway. Shrugging it off, Charley advanced into the booth with a devious trick playing out in his mind. When Eve sauntered over to his slot, he decided he was going to act the pervert and hiss something outrageous. She’d balk at first but then she’d realize who it was and have to keep a straight face until her dance was done. Afterward she would probably punch him pretty hard in the chest or shoulder, call him an asshole and then give him a lingering kiss in forgiveness. Charley grinned at his master plan as he drew the curtain closed and took his place in front of the slot.

  Gyrating her hips on the other side of it was a husky black chick with a killer afro in nothing but baby blue leggings and a sparkly pair of oversized sunglasses. Beside the fact that her lack of a g-string could get the place shut down faster than LaGuardia stomped on Minsky’s, Charley was shocked to find himself peeping at a complete stranger rather than his own paramour. When the girl jiggled her way over to his end of the place Charley slipped her a dollar and slipped back out. He crossed directly over to the guy at the video counter, who was bent over a comic book and looking bored.

  “Say man, can I ask you a question?” Charley piped up.

  “Shoot,” the guy said without taking his eyes off the funny book.

  “You know Eve? Girl who dances back there?”

  Charley jammed a thumb toward the peep booths to illustrate where he meant. For some reason that captured the guy’s attention. He looked up and narrowed his eyes with suspicion at Charley.

  “Look,” Charley said as earnestly as he could, “I’m not a stalker or anything like that.”

  The porn peddler’s face assumed a menacing, wide-eyed aspect.

  “Yeah? Well in that case let me write down her address and phone number for ya. You want her driver’s license number too, just in case? How’s about her bank account number?”

  “Funny,” Charley growled. He was trying to sound undaunted, which was the opposite of what he was. “You know her or don’t you?”

  “Could be. Who wants to know?”

  “She’s my chick, that’s all. I thought she was working tonight.”

  “She’s your chick, huh? She’s a lot a dudes’ chick. The fuck are you?”

  “Goddamnit, I’m serious here. She’s my girlfriend, okay? I’m just worried is all.”

  “Go worry someplace else, dirtbag. That flakey broad didn’t even show up tonight. Far as I’m concerned she don’t work here no more, dig?”

  “Didn’t show up?” His breath quickened. “Has this happened before?”

  “What are you, the FBI or something? Get lost before I get Chuck in here to bust you up, all right?”

  Charley’s jaw dropped like the hinge was busted, and suddenly the room felt a lot warmer to him. The guy at the counter grimaced and picked up the phone under the counter, holding it up as a warning that he was about to call Chuck, whoever that was. Charley did not know whether the guy had to authority to fire Eve or not, but it was beside the point. For all intents and purposes she was a missing person in his eyes, and just two days after she had put a bullet in a hit man’s brain.

  He broke into a sprint and landed back on the street three seconds later. Cattycorner on Eighth he saw a little newsstand; the sort of place that sold papers and magazines along with soda pops, beer, and lottery tickets. He hustled over to it and asked the clerk if they had a payphone. The surly news peddler gestured at the door and grumbled, “Outside.”

  Two hooded payphones were bolted into the bricks just outside the newsstand, one of which actually had a handset attached to it. Charley dropped a dime in the slot and called Eve’s apartment, but once again there was no answer. He jammed down the hook switch, fed the phone another ten cents and dialed the operator. When a woman came on the line he asked for the main number to Eve’s address, hoping against hope that her gullible super would answer. After five ri
ngs and another dime when the greedy click sounded in his ear, a groggy voice croaked, “Yeah?”

  “Ma’am,” Charley politely began, “this is Charley McCormick, Eve Hewlett’s, uh, fiancé?”

  “Ahh,” the superintendent droned. “The computer man.”

  “That’s right. Listen, I am terribly, terribly sorry to be calling at this hour…”

  “It’s nearly eleven,” she cut in.

  “I know, and I am sorry…”

  “I go to bed at ten o’clock, every night.”

  “It is late, and I apologize…”

  “Every night.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I really need your help. I’m a little worried about Eve, you see, and it’s a bit difficult for me to get up there just now…”

  “What are you worried about? She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself. Young men these days, I swear to God, you men always fretting like my grandmother.”

  “Yeah, okay, but I really am worried. I wonder if you wouldn’t just knock on her door, see if she’s home for me? I couldn’t get through on the phone.”

  “That girl works nights,” the super barked. “You should know that, if you’re her fiancé.” She pronounced it fee-ann-sea.

  He didn’t want to tell Eve’s landlady that she had not shown up for work lest the nosy woman get some bright idea about the state of Eve’s finances.

  “She doesn’t work tonight,” he quickly lied.

  “So you want I should get dressed, traipse up four flights of stairs and knock on that girl’s door?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  He flinched at the profound sigh that sounded in his ear.

  “Hang on,” she said miserably.

  He listened as she set her receiver down and shuffled away. Then he waited, feeding more dimes into the slot every time he was signaled to do so. Some ten minutes later the superintendent returned to the phone.