The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  “Take your word for it? Why, does this sort of thing happen to you often?”

  “No, not really. But often enough.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” she said sharply.

  “Eve…”

  “It doesn’t mean anything, man. Drop it.”

  Charley narrowed his eyes and took a deep breath. A green sign loomed on the side of the L.I.E. that indicated Queens was forty-six miles away.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Eve?”

  “What you know already,” she said. “That we’ve participated in the killings of a bunch of these dudes, hidden a body, stolen a car. Not exactly the kind of track record makes a policeman want to go out of his way to help you.”

  “No, there’s more to it than that,” he said morosely. “There’s something else.”

  “Goddamnit, Charley. I just got kidnapped, you know, and by the same sons of bitches probably knifed my sister. Lay off, will you?”

  He made a sour face and nodded.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  The conversation was killed right then, and they rode in awkward silence for three quarters of an hour until signs started cropping up with instructions on entering Queens. Eve took the Woodhaven Boulevard exit and piloted the stolen station wagon around a few corners that eventually dropped them on Fresh Pond Road. They were back in Ridgewood.

  Charley was puzzled. According to Eve’s account, she had been taken from her apartment on Eighteenth directly to the Skid Row tenement on Mott. She never said anything about Ridgewood at all. For the time being, however, he decided to leave it alone. One question already almost blew her top. It would hold.

  The sky was hazy and gray; a typical winter morning for the city. Eve parked almost exactly where Ivo’s Olds had been when Charley left Drina’s only hours ago and hurried around to the front of the building. He followed wearily, wondering what had brought them back to that bar but too exhausted to make any inquiries. He had been awake for more than twenty-four hours, and it was showing. When he reached the front of the place, he found Eve standing there, smoking and peering through the frosted glass window.

  “Guess we’ll have to bust in,” she said plainly.

  “Breaking and entering,” he said. “I should be writing these down so I know which charges to plead guilty to. There’s so many.”

  “Stuff that. Those goddamn loops are probably somewhere inside. Far as I can tell damn near anyone with an interest in this place is dead by now, don’t you think?”

  Marko and his bartender certainly were, and neither of those any fault of Eve’s. Charley nodded grimly.

  “Then waiting around for opening time wouldn’t make very much sense, would it?” she continued.

  He shook his head.

  “All right. So help me out here, will you?”

  He slumped his shoulders and suppressed a sigh.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  A sixteen-wheeler roared by on Fresh Pond, spewing exhaust. Eve waited for it to pass and then said, “Give me your jacket.”

  He shrugged out of it and handed it over to her without any questions. She wrapped it around her right hand like a denim boxing glove and then punched the window. The chilled glass shattered and the unlit neon sign crashed down on the table Charley and Ursula had quietly occupied before everything went to hell. He glanced nervously around for witnesses to their latest misdeed; there were people on the sidewalks and cars on the street, but somehow no one seemed to notice what Eve was up to. All of them were consummate city folk—rushing single-mindedly to their next destination and overeager to get out of the freezing cold. Eve knocked out the remaining shards that jutted out of the window frame and shook out the jacket before returning it to its owner. He hurried back into it while she climbed through the window and over the table.

  In a moment, the deadbolt clanked and the door cracked open. Eve poked her head out and said, “Come on.”

  He slid through the crack and gently shut the door behind him. Despite the gaping window beside the door, the interior was dark—Charley squinted and waited for his eyes to adjust to the lack of light.

  “Can’t see anything,” she muttered from somewhere deeper in the room.

  Some glass clinked, bottles or pint glasses, and in another moment a handful of track lights came on over the bar. Eve was back there, fumbling with switches. Charley blinked rapidly and allowed his eyes to scan the bar. Everything was more or less how it looked the night before, all but the slumped body in the middle of the floor with the rapidly expanding pool of blood oozing out from beneath it.

  Charley jumped and let out a frightened gasp.

  “Ursula…”

  Chapter 24

  The blood was seeping from a gaping slit in her neck that started below the angle of her jaw and terminated over the throat where Ursula’s thyroid bulged. Bisected by the deep cut, it was not protruding so much now. Her heavily shadowed eyes were calmly closed as though she were merely sleeping. The only movement Charley could detect was the slow crawl of her life-fluid escaping the wound. He ran to her, his heart pounding a desperate tattoo against his aching ribs, and gathered her limp form into his arms. Wine-dark blood spotted his shirt and jacket, stains that would never come out. Worse yet, the strong, familiarly metallic smell of human blood filled his nose again. It was like a curse, an interminable blood curse that would follow him for the remainder of his days.

  With hot tears streaming down his cheeks and burning the back of his throat, Charley clamped his right hand over the wound in a feeble endeavor to staunch the flow of blood. As he squeezed at Ursula’s neck, she suddenly jerked. Charley gasped, unsure if it had been some sort of cadaveric spasm or a death throe. If the latter, he realized, then she was still alive, if only barely.

  “Call an ambulance!” he cried without taking his eyes away from Ursula’s still face.

  “I can’t find a phone!” Eve called back frantically.

  “Look in the back!”

  Charley heard Eve’s quick steps across the bar and into the storage room. It was only when she screamed that he remembered that there were still two dead bodies back there. He silently offered up a prayer that they would not delay her long.

  Long minutes dragged on during which he made quick work of shredding his shirt into strips that he tied around Ursula’s neck. The blood flow was successfully staunched, but the bleeder did not look any better for it. Eve tramped out of the back room after a painfully long time and announced that she had found Marko’s office where she made the call. In a short while, sirens whined in the distance, growing louder and shriller as they came nearer.

  Before Charley’s addled brain could make sense of the chaos all around him the bar was filled with activity, from the scrambling paramedics to the intrusive policemen. For the first ten or fifteen minutes he could think of nothing other than Ursula; specifically, whether or not she was going to pull through. But when the policemen started to get more aggressive in their questioning, he was sharply reminded of the fairly fresh corpses presently stored in the back room.

  He wanted to ride in the ambulance to the hospital, he tried to, but a rail-thin cop in an immaculate uniform with skin so pale it was nearly translucent put a stop to that. The little brass plate on the little cop’s chest read WHITEMAN. Charley snorted.

  “You can see her later,” Officer Whiteman said sternly. Guys his size were always hard-asses, Charley thought. Napoleon complex. “Right now I’d like to ask some questions.”

  Charley inhaled and it came in short bursts. A couple of blue boys were presently turning their combined attention toward the door to the storage room. Hot sweat pearled at Charley’s hairline; the proverbial shit was seconds away from the inevitable fan. Whiteman did not appear to notice Charley’s rapidly increasing nervousness as he removed his hat and ran skinny, opaque fingers through wispy hair so blonde it was almost as cadaverously white as his skin.

  “What’s your name, ki
d?”

  Kid again.

  Damnit.

  “Charley McCormick.”

  Whiteman scribbled that down. “Whatcha doin in a bar at this hour, Charley?”

  Charley considered saying I got thirsty, but decided against it. Instead, he said, “It’s sort of complicated. A long story, I mean.”

  “I’ll bet,” the cop said. “But it’s early and I’m sure we can round up some java someplace for you. There’s time to go through it.”

  Charley’s eyes drifted back over to the storage room, displaying nothing but vein-infused whites to Whiteman. The two curious uniforms had already gone in and there were still back there, undoubtedly bewildered by the bloody cadavers on the floor. Charley shuddered.

  “What do you say, Charley? Wanna get started?”

  Charley swallowed and squeezed his eyes shut, forcing the mounting moisture out through the corners in two teary rivulets. There was only a matter of seconds before they would come rushing back into the bar, probably with their service revolvers drawn, to arrest Charley on suspicion of double murder. And even though he had never killed anybody in his entire life, they would have him dead to rights. The next thing Branko Dragović’s body would show up and somebody was bound to find the dead men in the woods back in Long Island—they had been left in the middle of the road. It was a hell of a trail, enough to make Berkowitz jealous as hell, and no amount of rationalizing or claims to honest-to-god heroics was going to make that look like anything less than a killing spree. All it was missing was a bunch of far out letters to Jimmy Breslin.

  “Charley? You with me, kid?”

  Charley snapped out of his waking nightmare to discover an impatient-looking man standing almost a foot beneath his own eye-level, pencil firmly in hand. The pale cop was ready to get it over with; “it” most likely being a confession to murder by now. But there had not been any shouting or motions to arrest anybody, no trigger-happy cops with guns out or rapid-fire recitals of Charley’s Miranda rights. Very much to the contrary, both of the policemen who had entered Marko’s storage room had since come back into the bar, looking bored. Charley crinkled his face and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

  They did not find anything.

  And, as the fog of fear cleared out of his brain, Charley realized that they did not find Eve, either. She was gone, and she’d been gone since before the paramedics arrived.

  He looked back down at the diminutive cop, who by now had assumed an expression of aggravated expectancy.

  “Kid? You about to pass out, or what?”

  “No, no I don’t think so. I’m fine.”

  “Fine is good. So, let’s get down to it, okay?”

  Charley nodded morosely and followed Whiteman over to the bar where the policeman gestured for him to park his rear on a stool. Perched thus, Charley began to spin his truncated and highly fictionalized tale of how he had left his friend, Ursula, at the bar the night before, and when she was nowhere to be found in the early hours of the morning he had come back to Drina’s in a sort of panic.

  “I realize how stupid it was now, breaking into the place, but I was right. She was here.”

  “And somebody tried to sever her carotid, to boot,” Whiteman weighed in.

  “I guess so. Don’t know why, though. I mean, there was this dude wouldn’t get off her case, you know how that goes. But…”

  Whiteman raised his almost imperceptible eyebrows.

  “But what?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. It was the last place I thought to look, a long shot, but here she was. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “All you can tell me,” the cop repeated with a sigh. “How about the dude bothering her last night? What’s his name?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. He was Serbian.”

  “That don’t help much. Everybody in this joint’s a Serb. You a Serb, Charley?”

  “Scots-Irish.”

  “How about your girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, she’s Serbian. A generation removed, at any rate. She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Okay, so why does anybody want to slit not-your-girlfriend’s throat?”

  “I wish I knew,” Charley lied. He knew why, he just didn’t know who. Not exactly, anyway.

  Whiteman said, “Why don’t you come down to the precinct, give a statement. Then we’ll take you over to Elmhurst, see your girl—well, your friend, I guess.”

  Charley agreed because he could not see an alternative. He supposed it would take up the rest of the morning, and it did; a good chunk of the early afternoon, too.

  The Eighty-Third precinct in Brooklyn presented the same drab olive green walls he had tried not to notice in the Fourteenth in Midtown Manhattan. He was almost afraid they might produce the one-eyed tentacle monsters from The Green Slime if he looked too long at them. The precinct stood in the midst of a nice enough neighborhood—for the most part residential, streets lined with well-maintained railroad flats—but there wasn’t an attractive police station anywhere in the world, no matter the neighborhood it was in.

  Whiteman directed Charley to an uncomfortable orange plastic chair and then disappeared for the better part of an hour. The waiting, he assumed, was all part of the process. When the cop eventually returned, he handed a small Styrofoam cup to Charley; the coffee he had promised earlier in the morning. It tasted terrible, a bit like pencil shavings, but it did the trick nonetheless. Charley was now slightly less exhausted, enough so that he was able to repeat his flagrantly false cover story again, and then again, and then once more before he was escorted outside to a police cruiser that took him to Elmhurst Hospital.

  He was pleased that he got there before dusk, but his enthusiasm waned when he was told that Ursula was still in surgery. That meant she was still alive, but it said nothing about how well it was going. He stuck around, though, lounging in a soul-sucking white waiting room littered with year-old magazines and miserable people who, like Charley, were bracing themselves for bad news.

  For the first stretch he only sat there, bouncing his knee and concentrating on his breathing. After that he leafed though some wrinkled old copies of National Geographic, looking only at the pictures and only lingering on one if it was a gorilla or a crocodile or a bare-breasted woman. As for the energy crisis, he could not have cared less. When Charley finally exhausted the waiting room’s magazine supply, he leaned back in his chair and nodded off. Normally he was not capable of sleeping in such a public and uncomfortable position, but these were trying times. He could barely remember the last time he had managed a full night’s sleep.

  While he slept, he dreamed of Andy and Ursula, and they were dead. He tried to convince Walker and Whitehall to arrest him, to execute him, but they could not even hear him. Charley was overwhelmed by an ominous future of loneliness and guilt.

  He awoke to someone jostling him with a sharp elbow, whisper-shouting in his ear to wake up. Charley popped his bloodshot eyes open to see Eve looming over him, a sad half-smile on her equally weary face.

  Charley croaked, “Hey.”

  “Good morning, tiger,” Eve said.

  “How is she?”

  “He’s recovering.”

  Charley straightened out and sat forward. The movement came with a groan.

  “What time is it?”

  “Late. Past ten.”

  “Shit,” Charley said.

  Eve lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Maybe they went ahead and lopped his pecker off while he was under,” Eve said with a malicious grin. “Just to save time.”

  “Is she awake?” he asked, ignoring the comment about the pecker.

  “Not with all the drugs they’ve got…uh…her on.”

  “But she’ll make it.”

  “Yeah,” Eve said. “Ursula’s going to be all right. Might sound like Froggy from the Little Rascals from here on out, but she’ll live.”

  Charley tried to stand up, faltered, and then tried ag
ain. He was successful on the second attempt.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Coffee,” he grunted. She nodded with understanding and followed him into the corridor. There were a couple of vending machines back there, one of which offered an array of various hot coffee concoctions. Charley bought one black and starting sipping at it instantly. Eve followed suit, hers with milk, and when Charley felt sufficiently invigorated by the caffeine dosage, he asked, “Where’d you go off to, anyway?”

  “Out the back. Took the station wagon and skedaddled.”

  “Oh. Stolen car. Right.”

  “And don’t forget my parole conditions. Despite any desire I may have had to stick around and support you, sweet thing, a room swarming with Brooklyn cops was not a place I needed to be.”

  The scalding coffee burned on the way down his gullet, but Charley relished it. He was feeling more alive than he had for a while.

  “I get that,” he said, fishing in his pockets for more change for more coffee. He came up short. “But I guess you scooped up the dead guys on the way? And mopped up the floor while you were at it?”

  “Make things a hell of a lot easier, babe.”

  “And adds to the charges for when this is all over.”

  “You didn’t do it. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Don’t worry about it, she says,” he complained to the audience at home. “I’ve got plenty to worry about, I’m getting used to being worried all the time. If I wasn’t worried I’d be dead.”

  “Don’t say that,” she cautioned. “You’ve come close enough already. And this thing ain’t hardly over yet.”

  “I think I realized that when I saw Ursula back at Drina’s, thanks.”

  “I should think so, and it looks pretty obvious who was responsible for the cutting.”

  He arched an eyebrow.

  “It does?”

  “Of course it does. The guy in the woods. The one who got away.”

  Charley crinkled his eyes and thought back to the incident in the park on Long Island. He hadn’t seen that much, or at least he wasn’t firing on all cylinders at the time. But he did remember the screeching tires and the absence of the Olds he’d ridden in. And the smarmy guy, the one in the gray cotton suit, the one without the accent.