by Ed Kurtz
“She’s not home,” she barked.
“You’re sure? I mean, there weren’t any lights on or sounds coming from inside?”
“What, you want I should climb out on the fire escape and peek inside now?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not. Thank you, ma’am. I’m sorry I troubled you.”
She just groaned and the line went dead. Charley stood there for a moment, phone in hand. He was beginning to panic, and he had no idea what to do next. He considered heading clear up to her building on Eighteenth, but that would waste a lot of time if she really wasn’t there. And if she was not home, she might as well have been anywhere between the Deuce and Timbuktu. Charley realized he needed help, someone with a clearer mind than his was at the moment; a realization that was immediately followed by his recognition that he was fresh out of allies. Andy was laid up in a hospital bed a borough away, Franz was dead, Walker was a cop and cops Charley did not need. He felt like crying, just breaking down right there in the middle of the street and blubbering like a toddler who got lost in the supermarket.
Beginning to tremble all over, he gazed vacantly down Forty-Second like he was trying to see the East River from there. That was when a raspy voice startled him from behind.
“You waiting on a date, sweet thing?”
Charley turned around to see a young woman twirling her false platinum hair around a false fingernail and flashing a cherry red lipstick smile. She had on a tight leather skirt and fishnet stockings that terminated at her six-inch stiletto heels. Far from an unusual spectacle on the Deuce, Charley was getting propositioned by a hooker on the make.
“I can be your date if you’re lonely,” she mewed with a put-on lilt.
Charley gasped and bolted around the corner, pushing past the throng of mystified bystanders as he raced toward the Carver Hotel.
• • •
“Why is it guys like you always come back around?”
Ursula was laying all of her clothes out on the bed before folding them up into two cardboard suitcases.
“I’m out of friends and I need one tonight,” Charley said with self-loathing written all over his face.
“Last and least. Story of my life.”
Charley said, “Come on, Ursula. It’s not like that.”
Even though it was exactly like that. Ursula made a clicking sound with her tongue and shook her head.
“Don’t fleece me, baby. You can’t give me piss and tell me it’s wine. I know the score on this game and I know when it’s time to pack up and leave.”
She slammed a folded-up dress into one of the suitcases.
“Because of me?”
“You’re rich, boy. I mean, you really think highly of yourself, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t. I swear to Christ I don’t. I’m a shit-heel and I know it. But just listen to me, please—my girlfriend is missing. I think she maybe got kidnapped. We’re into some…well, some trouble.”
“Sorry to hear that. Tell it to the cops.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Why the hell not?”
“It’s complicated.”
Ursula laughed and rested her wrists on her hips as she swung around to give Charley a cold stare.
“Everything’s complicated. I’m complicated, you’re complicated. What do you want me to do about it?”
“I don’t have any idea. I just need a cooler head than mine to help me out here, for Jesus’ sakes.”
Charley locked his elbows at his sides and balled up his fists. He was fit to explode and he looked like it. Ursula groaned softly and lowered herself down on the edge of the bed. She looked out the window and sighed miserably.
“What kind of trouble?” she asked.
“Not sure. Syndicate trouble, maybe.”
Her head snapped around.
“Oh-ho! You got in bad with mob guys so you come to me? I’m flattered, Charley, but very, very confused.”
“I think,” Charley mumbled as he let himself fold up on the floor, “I think maybe I should start at the beginning.”
Ursula twisted her face up into an expression of total skepticism and lit a long, skinny cigarette as Charley told his story. She listened attentively and did not interrupt him, reacting only by way of her of astoundingly expressive eyebrows. Charley told about Elizabeth’s murder and how he got himself mixed up with it, about Eve and Stanley and why he was knocked out in the alley when he and Ursula first met. He went into chilling details about the life and death of Chester Price and how he discovered Price’s complicity in it all, and explained every incriminating facet of the night the gunmen busted into Andy’s house in Tottenville when Eve killed a man and Charley buried him in the landfill. All told the telling of Charley’s woes took him the better part of an hour—about six chain-smoked one-twenties with flowers on the filter for Ursula. They made Charley think of an ad he’d seen for them on the subway. Every inch the lady. Having personally seen this lady’s inches, Charley begged to differ.
When he was done talking, Ursula stubbed out her most recent cigarette and pulled her soft face into a frown. Silence reigned for several minutes while she mulled over everything she had just heard. Finally, she sat up straight and sucked in a deep breath.
“Okay,” she said as she exhaled. “First off, that ain’t the mob. Not the Italian guys you see in the movies, anyways. Dragović is a Slavic name, probably Serbian, which means what you’ve likely got on your hands is some sort of small-time Eastern European syndicate.”
Charley’s jaw dropped.
“How do you figure all that?”
“I don’t want to shock you but my parents didn’t name me Ursula. Their pick was Mihovil but I went by Mikey all through school. Mikey Jovanović.”
Dumbfounded, Charley said, “Hell.”
“Drago mi je,” Ursula said with a smile in an exaggerated masculine baritone. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Hell.”
“My folks came over from Belgrade at the start of the war, right after the Nazis marched into Yugoslavia. We lived out in Ridgewood, but Dad had a little shoe repair kiosk down in Soho and my mom cleaned toilets in Queens. Just a nice, quiet Orthodox Serbian family.” Looking wistful, she seized her breasts and firmly lifted them. “’Til I got these, anyway.”
“You amaze me, Ursula Jovanović.”
“Hvala, prijateljiu.”
Charley shrugged and she smiled.
“I said thanks, friend.”
“Oh.”
“Well,” she went on after lighting another one-twenty, “I’d say these naughty Serb boys were the ones bankrolling that hophead’s dirty movies, or at least taking their ninety percent or whatever it is those crooks take. And since the Cecil B. DeMille of bestiality porn was already Kentucky fried before she went off into the ether, my guess is your sweetie-pie is in their hands at this very moment, kiddo.”
“Shit,” Charley said.
“I still don’t see why you don’t just call that policeman.”
“You must have zoned out when I got to the whole hiding the body part.”
“No, I got it. But maybe he’d understand?”
“You mean given the context? I doubt it. I’m pretty much an accessory to killing a syndicate killer and definitely guilty of tampering with the evidence and, I don’t know, mistreatment of a dead Serb or something. They’re going to close in on me from all sides if I don’t do something and do it now.”
“You got any ideas?”
“I was hoping you would.”
“Me? Can you really imagine lil’ ol’ me storming the castle with a gun in each hand, blasting the bad guys like some kind of transsexual Dirty Harry?”
Charley wrinkled his nose and groaned. Ursula rolled her eyes off to one side and wagged a thin index finger his way.
“When I was a teenager, there was this boy at our church named Nicky. Nicky Dorić.” Ursula hummed plaintively. “Nicky was a bad boy, black leather jacket and grease in his hair, all that jazz. And boy was I hot for
him. So when he invited me to hang around with him and his little gang of troublemakers, I played the part and tagged along just to be close to him.”
“This is all very interesting, Ursula, but…”
“Patience, baby. Nicky had this older brother, a real tough egg who’d done some time in stir for holding up a beauty parlor and cutting some girl’s cheek with his switchblade. Nicky idolized this loser and followed him around like a goddamn puppy dog. And since I followed Nicky around like an even more pathetic dog, I got to know some of the worst people in Ridgewood and where they hung out when they weren’t sticking up shops or beating the hell out of somebody.”
“Are you talking about Serbian gangs?”
She touched the tip of her finger to her nose.
“If I had a kewpie doll you’d have won it.”
“Okay. Great. Where are we going?”
“We? Who’s we?”
“Oh, come on—I can’t walk into enemy territory alone. I need a guide, Ursula. Someone to get me in.”
“Do I look like Mata Hari to you, bitch?”
Charley said, “Um.”
“Have you even checked to make sure she isn’t just sleeping off a bender at home or something?”
“Well…”
“Jeez, but you make for a shitty detective. You need to check out her pad first thing, and when that doesn’t turn anything up, then you can go play secret agent by your own damn self.”
“Myself? I can’t do that…”
“Look,” Ursula groaned impatiently, “alls you got to do is listen, right? You got names.”
“I got one name, of the dead guy.”
“Not the other one?”
“No.”
“Sounds to me like somebody needs to brush up on their research.”
“Great, I’ll just go ask the public librarian where my girlfriend is and we’ll be golden.”
“Well for God’s sakes, Charley. You don’t have to—wait a minute. That’s not such a bad idea.”
Charley furrowed his brow.
“What isn’t? What’d I say?”
“The library. Newspapers, like on microfiche. That guy Bragović—”
“Dragović.”
“—I’ll bet anything he’s got a record from here to Yonkers. There’s got to be dirt on him in some crime beat’s blotter.”
“Fantastic, except for the waiting until the library opens in the morning and the wading through stacks of aperture cards until I find something useful. By the time I’ll be done she’ll be dead for sure. Of old age.”
Ursula’s face fell.
“Oh, goddamnit,” she sadly whispered.
“What?”
Ursula sank into the mattress and moaned pitifully.
“I never wanted to go back to Ridgewood again,” she whined.
Chapter 21
Ursula reluctantly accompanied Charley up to Eighteenth and followed him upstairs to Eve’s door when they got there. He unlocked the door and discovered that the chain wasn’t drawn. The lights were all off, and when he switched one on he found the living room in the same condition as always. Messy, but not unusually so. The bedroom, conversely, was a different story.
Everything in sight had been upturned and pulled apart. The mattress slouched against the wall in a corner of the room, cut open in a broad X, all the springs and stuffing ripped out of it. The closet door was barely hanging on by one hinge, and all of Eve’s clothes were scattered across the room. A lava lamp lay shattered on the floor, and all the drawers in the bureau had been pulled out and thoroughly searched.
“Christ,” he said. “This doesn’t look good.”
“She destroyed all those films,” Ursula whispered, half to herself.
“They don’t know that.”
“They who?”
Charley scrunched up his face, imagining Eve sprawled out dead someplace with a knife in her back and a dark red pool of blood expanding all around her. He made a weak sound in his throat and pounded the carpet for the door.
“Let’s go find out,” he said.
• • •
Crammed into a too-small hard plastic seat on the subway bound for Coney Island, Charley and Ursula’s legs squashed together uncomfortably. It was only a ten-minute ride, after which they got off at Canal Street and waited for the M train (which was late) that would take them over the river and into Queens.
The train let them off on Fresh Pond Road, which was the main thoroughfare through Ridgewood. A stern, round sign immediately confronted them on the considerable island platform with the admonishment that Peddlers or Beggars Not Allowed. Charley wondered how they felt about Serbian hit men and underground pornographers, but there were no signs to that effect to satisfy his curiosity. The thought put a sneer on his face as they padded down the neighborhood’s primary artery.
Charley had never been this deep into the borough, and he found himself surprised at how nice everything seemed. From the way he imagined the area listening to Ursula’s account of rampant youth gangs and robberies, he anticipated to find it looking a lot more like South Bronx than Astoria Heights. Instead he discovered a perfectly normal main drag lined with turn of the century bay-front row houses and what appeared to be family businesses with German names that probably dated back at least a generation or two. Tall maples stretched their naked branches upward into the cold night air on either side of the street, their lack of foliage permitting a good view at the warm yellow bricks and ornate patterns that peppered the façades of the multi-family homes. It was a marked contrast from the filth and neon and vandalism of the Deuce, where all of this began. Charley watched a puff of steam trail out of his mouth and wondered if it was really going to end in this working class suburban wonderland.
Ursula strutted boldly on the sidewalk, the echo of her click-clacking heels disrupting the otherwise still winter night. Charley paused in front of a butcher’s shop and glanced through the glass at the delectable provisions within.
“How much farther?” he asked as he coveted a chain of Weisswurst hanging in the window.
“We’re gonna hang a left at the next street,” she said.
He pouted. He wished he hadn’t taken Andy’s car back to Tottenville.
The winding road they took off Fresh Pond snaked past sprawling warehouses with wide shuttered loading docks. Big rig cabs sat parked in the still, cold darkness, waiting for first light when the work of delivering or taking away would begin. Further on, residential roads extended diagonally across the street; their ramshackle corrugated garages were lined up at forty-five degree angles across from the warehouses. Viewed aerially they would have looked like jagged teeth. Ursula clopped across the macadam and turned down one of the darkened streets where the maples were planted more densely. Charley hustled to keep up and almost tripped over an aluminum trash can that clanged and wobbled when he struck it with his foot. Ursula shot him a sharp look.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
She kept on, passing the seemingly endless chain of identical row houses until coming to an abrupt halt in front of the only one on the block that was obscured by a tall conifer. For a moment she just stood there, frozen in front of the winter tree. Charley waited. He did not know what else to do.
The house had the same bay-front as every other house he had thus far seen in the neighborhood. Black iron fencing closed around a tiny square yard between the house’s stone steps and the neighboring house—it was here that the conifer stood. The steps led up to the front door, which was concealed in the shadows of a green canvas awning. Charley looked from Ursula’s expressionless face to the door and realized she wasn’t staring at the tree at all. She was making up her mind to knock on that door.
“It’s pretty late,” he said. “Who lives here, anyway?”
“I’m not really sure,” she said softly. “But Nicky Dorić used to.”
“Your childhood sweetheart?”
She gave a quick, bitter laugh.
“Doubt he’d see it th
at way.”
“Does he…uh…know…?”
Her face twitched. She shook her head.
“Well,” he said. “This should be fun.”
Ursula steeled herself and assumed an austere appearance as she ascended the front steps. Charley lingered on the penultimate step and quietly waited while she knocked on the door and his blood pressure increased. A yellow glow appeared in one of the second story windows, followed by a light switching on in the foyer beyond the door. A couple of locks clicked and turned, and a moment later Ursula was looking down at a small old woman in a hairnet. The old woman wore a tattered terrycloth robe, and she hugged herself in response to the cold air invading her home through the open door.
“Sranje,” she grumbled. Her voice was like sandpaper. “Vat you vant?”
“Mrs. Dorić?”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Ursula, I used to know Nicky…Nikola Dorić.”
“Niko,” the woman spat. “Govno yedno. Come in, come in. Is cold.”
Charley said, “Bingo.” Ursula discreetly smacked him on the neck.
“What was she muttering?” he asked, unfazed.
“She called Nicky a piece of shit.”
“Oh,” Charley said.
They advanced into the foyer and followed the tottering old lady past a dining room that was like a museum of chinaware and intricate religious icons. The house smelled strongly of mothballs and chemical cleaning solvents. She paused in the kitchen at the back of the house and gestured for them to sit down at the scarred wooden table. They obliged. Then the woman teetered over to a door in the hall, opened it and angrily screamed, “Niko! Gledaoci! Dođi da vidiš!”
“I think we’ve been formally announced,” Charley said.
Ursula shushed him.
A low voice echoed from beyond the door, likely a basement.
“Who is it?”
“Nemam pojma!” the woman shouted down.
With that the old woman ambled over to the staircase and gradually began her ascent, mumbling to herself in Serbian the whole way. Ursula raised her eyebrows at Charley and shrugged. He thought she looked nervous as hell, and that made him feel nervous as hell too. Neither of them quite knew what to expect.
