by Ed Kurtz
He shambled in a black funk a couple blocks down to the first IRT station he came across and rode it down to Forty-Second and Broadway. He devoured a stale cruller at Tycoon Donuts & Pastries when he got off the subway and then climbed the steps up to the Square, where the nightmare began. He might have gone back to Haskett’s building, but that was hardly a safe and viable option. There was Drina’s in Queens, but that joint had to be crawling with blue uniforms that would have cleaned the place out of any usable evidence by then. So Charley went back to the Deuce, where he always gravitated when there was no place else to go.
He wandered down the block, his hands stuffed into his jacket pockets, and blew warm steam out of his nostrils, a raging bull. Less than two weeks had passed since Elizabeth’s murder at the Harris, and to Charley the entire damn world looked different ever since, but the Deuce had not changed at all. The same desperate faces floated by, either hurrying through with a bit of anxiety or slowly shuffling along, shopping for vices. Teenage boys, some younger, cruised in and out of the arcade, the main gateway to it all, picking pockets and hustling for chump change. One of them, a dead-eyed kid shivering against the cold in little more than a sleeveless denim jacket, perked up when he caught Charley looking at him.
“Speed, blow, suck your cock,” the boy intoned. Charley scowled. The kid could not have been older than fourteen. Things did not change.
That was the world. Chewed you up, spit you out, like that. Kid like that, he could not be saved. Everybody else needed saving, too. Elizabeth Hewlett had needed somebody to save her, and she’d chosen Charley for the job. Two weeks dead and gone, and he was still trying.
He walked up to the kid, who averted his eyes to the gum-spotted sidewalk rather than risk eye contact with a potential john.
“Whatchoo need, man?”
“A knife,” Charley said.
The kid blew a raspberry.
“Whatchoo talking bout, man? You crazy. Get the hell outta here.”
“Don’t fleece me, kid. Maybe you don’t got one but you know where I need to go.”
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”
Charley shoved his right hand into his pants pocket and let out a yelp. Then he reached around himself with his left hand and tried that, instead.
“What’s a matter with you, man?” the kid asked, sneering.
“Broke my hand.”
He slipped a five in the boy’s hand. The boy’s eyes opened up at it.
“You gonna cut the guy did that to you?”
“The knife,” Charley reminded him.
The boy pocketed the five and wiped his nose on his arm. He looked hesitant, shifting his weight from one leg to the other and then back again. Charley raised his eyebrows, and eventually the kid gestured with his head to a couple of black dudes across the street. Both men were decked out in fur coats and wingtip shoes.
“Talk to the short one. Name’s Huddie.”
“Huddie,” Charley repeated to himself.
He parted ways with the boy and lingered on the edge of the sidewalk until it was clear to cross. Then he boldly waltzed right up to the two mean-looking guys loitering under the Cine 42 marquee. Young Dragon and Five Fingers of Death this week. The second one looked good—Charley had seen the trailer. Dismissing kung fu for the time being, he strode up to the short man.
“You Huddie?”
“Talk a walk, officer,” Huddie said.
“I’m not a cop. I just need a knife. Kid over there said to talk to you.”
“Don’t know that kid.”
“Then I better get my five bucks back,” Charley said. He turned to cross back over.
“Whatchoo need a knife for?” Huddie called to him.
“What do people normally do with knives?”
Huddie laughed; a low, cruel and knowing laugh.
“You got another fiver in your pocket, white boy?”
“That what it costs?”
“Yeah,” Huddie said. “That what it cost.”
One minute and five dollars later, Charley owned a black handled switchblade, the first he had ever touched in his life. The switch took the place of the ten bucks he’d had a few minutes ago in his pocket, and Charley ambled back down Forty-Two as if it did not matter that it was there. It was illegal as hell, of course, but hardly uncommon. He guessed there were nearly as many switchblades as people on the Deuce at any given time, especially at night, which was now approaching. He was just fitting in.
Charley approached the intersection of Forty-Two and Eighth Avenue and glanced over at the Anco. Rosey had put a one-sheet up for Andy’s movie, just inside the frosted glass doors.
Crazed Men and Women, Beings of the Night, Their Only Desire—Their Mad Lust for Carnage!
A red splotch that was supposed to be blood splashed across the poster, the title in the middle: Bloody Birthright, in Explicit, Cranium-Cleaving Color! That was Rosey’s touch; Andy certainly had nothing to do with the one-sheet. Exploitation was all in the sell. Marketing was more important that the product marketed. Andy was going to have an aneurysm when he saw the poster.
Charley checked the date—Exclusive Engagement Starts Thursday. Whether or not Andy would be out of the hospital and Charley alive and free to roam by then remained up in the air. Whatever the case, it was far from likely that it would still be playing come Sunday. Rosey had all but promised as much. Charley sighed miserably and turned the corner up Eighth.
In no time at all the world of Z-grade horror, exploitation and kung fu transformed into a closely parallel universe of hardcore porn, as was perfectly evident on all the marquees and in all of the shop windows. Charley dug it well enough, about as well as any other guy on the street, and he’d even been in most of the shops along this way. But it was no leering sexual craving that drove him here now. His new switchblade felt hot in his pocket as he slipped into the first store around the corner, the unimaginatively named XXX Video.
The dented bell over the door emitted a dull jingle as he entered the store. The clerk behind the counter did not bother to look up from the paperback book he was perusing. The Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County, Charley noticed. The cover featured a Frazetta painting of a cowboy shooting down another cowboy over a desert campfire. Music quietly droned from a single speaker behind the guy; a Top Forty station, the kind of thing shopkeepers put on to keep out the silence but never really listened to. A small color television played a skin flick with the volume turned off. Marilyn Chambers was in a swimming pool, doing what she did best. Charley was surprised to recognize the film: Insatiable. He saw it at the Bryant last April.
There was one other customer in the place, a dumpy dark-skinned guy with a bad comb-over who was intently studying the big cardboard boxes that contained the Betamax cassettes at the back of the store. Charley casually strolled over to the VHS half of the joint and made like he was just as studious while he waited for the guy to leave. It took ten minutes, but the guy finally took a small stack of tapes to the counter, paid for them and left without a single word ever exchanged between himself and the clerk.
He let out a long breath and took the switch out of his pocket. When it clicked open the clerk took notice. He slammed the western down on the counter and puffed himself up, ready to make a threat concerning whatever superior weapon he had at his disposal, but Charley had the blade to his throat by then.
“Let’s have a chat,” he said.
Chapter 26
The clerk locked the door at Charley’s behest and switched off the glowing red neon sign that indicated the store was open. Charley then directed him toward the back of the store and through a door that was plastered with ads for forthcoming triple X videos and a few raunchy centerfolds. Beyond the door was a small, cluttered office that smelled like antiseptic and rotting Chinese food. Charley had half-expected someone else to be back there, a manager or owner perhaps, but it was just him and the clerk.
“I’ll make this fast,” Charley told him. “I want to know about loop
s.”
“What loops?” the clerk nervously ventured.
“The nasty kind. Dogs, piss, real S and M, the kind that really makes em bleed.”
“You…you mean, like, the illegal stuff?”
“That’s what I mean. Where does somebody get that kind of crap?”
“Look, man,” the clerk stammered, “I dunno about any of that shit. This is a legitimate business…”
“Forget that bullshit. Films like that, they get around. I know that. Some Serbs up in Queens finance some of them; there was a cat in the Bowery name of Price shot a load of them. All I wanna know is where and how they get sold.”
“I swear to you I don’t deal in shit like that…”
Charley arched an eyebrow and cocked his head to one side, keeping the blade close enough to cut.
“Maybe that’s true,” he said, “but I’m of the opinion that you can give me a lead on who does.”
“The hell I know? I look like a connected guy to you? I sell fuckin porno tapes for crissakes.”
The clerk looked more put out than afraid. Charley saw that as a perfectly good reason to step up his approach. He dug the point of the blade into the guy’s neck. The tip punctured the skin and a fat droplet of dark red blood welled up at the small cut.
“Stop!” the clerk cried. “Just stop!”
“This ought to be a symbiotic relationship,” Charley explained academically. “You know what that means? That means you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Or, in this case, you give me something I can use and I don’t cut you anymore. How’s that sound, pal?”
“Jesus, man. Jesus Christ, man.”
“What have you got?”
“Me? Nothing, man. Shit, I tell you something you can’t let it come back on me, you understand? You can’t let that get around.”
“Sure,” Charley agreed. “I understand. So talk.”
“Cat called Weemer, runs a shop up Forty-Fifth, off Broadway, across and down from the Whirly-Girly.”
“Name of the place?”
“It’s…uh…”
Charley applied a modicum of force to the switch, pressing the tip into a new patch of uncut neck skin.
“Goddamnit!” the clerk squeaked. “Playtown! It’s called Playtown!”
Charley cracked a crooked smile.
“And, what—there’s a password, or something like that? How do you get the loops once you’re in there?”
“No idea, man, I swear to God.”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“I’m serious, I promise you. I only know what I heard, man.”
The crooked smile warped into a sort of snarl.
“What’s your name, by the way?” he asked.
“Je-Jeff.”
“Thanks, Jeff.”
Charley closed the switchblade, pocketed it, and patted Jeff on the top of the head like an obedient dog. And with that, he calmly went out of the office, shut the door behind him, and stepped back out to the street. He was armed with two names—Weemer and Playtown—and a vague address to which he then briskly walked.
The Whirly-Girly Revue faced Broadway, its tall, narrow signage a glittery Times Square mainstay. The grubby, poorly-lit front of Playtown, contrarily, was nestled away down Forty-Fifth, in the Square’s shadow, with only a listlessly blinking neon sign to suggest its existence.
Playtown…XXX…Playtown…XXX.
Charley sort of cased the joint first, feeling a little like a novice cat burglar without the trademark half-mask and beret. John Robie he was not.
The front was all window space, the light from inside only escaping through the cracks between the daringly explicit posters covering them. The glass-paned door was less obscured, but there was an image of a ludicrously busty woman with pink stars superimposed over her nipples pasted there at eye level. Charley lingered a moment longer before rounding the block to check out the back.
Behind Playtown was a dark alley that ran between the row of buildings on Forty-Fifth and those on the south side of Forty-Sixth. There was a reeking dumpster back there and the usual rats scurrying about, and the back of what Charley judged to be Playtown had only a jet-black steel door with a burned-out bulb doing nothing above it. He loitered there for a moment, curious to see if anybody went in or came out. No one did.
He started walking away when he startled himself by kicking something metal that clanged loudly on the ground. After he shook off the initial surprise, he bent down to investigate. It was nothing more than a rectangular chunk of aluminum, probably some scrap left over by builders ages ago. He picked it up, returned to the back door, and shoved it between the hinge and the jamb.
Charley returned to the front.
Had he been a smoker, he probably would have killed time and eased his nerves by lighting up. But he wasn’t, so with nothing left to do, Charley went inside.
He walked into a mesh cage with another door that went into the store. Barry White sang “I Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” through hidden speakers at a volume bordering on obnoxious. Still, he considered it preferable to the alternative noise from the sundry televisions propped up in every corner of the place, presently playing something with Samantha Fox in it on mute.
The racks of video boxes stretched from floor to ceiling, eight shelves each and covering the walls all the way to the back. The cash register was by the wire mesh cage, itself behind wire and bars and what was probably bulletproof glass. Weemer evidently kept himself well insulated.
Charley approached the clerk behind the glass and bars. He was a pale, sweaty man of about forty, his head shaved to the skin with a tattoo of a skull on the side. A skull on his skull, Charley observed. He wondered if the guy planned on augmenting other parts of his anatomy with pictures of themselves.
The clerk glanced up at him with a bored, indifferent look on his drawn face.
“Yeah?”
“Looking for Weemer. He in?”
“This look like a fuckin information booth, pal? Buy something or piss off.”
Charley snarled at the guy. He was fingering the switchblade in his pocket, but it was not going to do him a lot of good from the other side of the clerk’s protective cage.
“There’s no need for that,” Charley said as calmly as he could. “I just want to have a word with the man.”
“We ain’t hiring.”
“Did I ask for a job? Come on, man. Give me a break, will you?”
The clerk’s face darkened as he leaned into the glass divider.
“You wanna break? I’ll give you a goddamn break. I’ll break your fuckin neck!”
He shouted the threat so loud that a couple of horny browsers made a beeline for the door, eager to avoid any hint of a coming fracas. Charley drew his eyebrows into a tight, angry knit and a gestured to the tattooed guy to make good on his threat.
“Come on, then,” he said. “See if you can break my neck.”
“Don’t tempt me, jackass…”
“Who’s tempting? I’m telling you. Come out here and break my neck, big man.”
“Awright,” the clerk growled, getting up and moving toward the locked door to his cage. “You asked for it, jerk-off.”
The mesh door clacked as the clerk unlocked it and creaked open. Half a second later the guy came around the cage at Charley, a metal baseball bat wagging at his side. Charley produced the switchblade and flicked it open. The rest of the porno shop’s patrons streamed out of there in a hurry, all but one, a wide-eyed little guy with carrot red hair who leered at the two men as though he were watching the dirty movies he’d come to look at. For a minute Charley and the tattooed clerk circled like coyotes, each of them crouched and crab-walking and waiting for the opportunity to strike. Charley thought it must have looked like something out of West Side Story, except nobody was singing or dancing, just wielding weapons meant to maim and murder. Then the clerk finally swung the bat at Charley, who leapt out of the way and crashed up against a rack on the wall. A hundred blue movie
s rained down all around him with a deafening clatter.
The red-haired freak chattered and applauded. The clerk shot him a furious glance, like he meant to go after him once he was through with Charley. Charley saw an opening in his opponent’s divided attention and lunged, knife out. The blade caught the clerk in the soft flesh just under the clavicle, sinking in a few inches before stopping dead at the scapula. The clerk screamed and sprayed saliva like a spitting snake. More importantly, Charley had stabbed the guy on the right side, causing him to drop the bat and flail around helplessly. The redhead giggled and chattered some more. Charley gave him a look and was disturbed to notice the little nutcase had a noticeable erection.
“Goddamn,” Charley hissed at him.
The clerk squeezed his eyes shut and made a pitiful moaning sound, grasping his wounded shoulder with his left hand and rocking back and forth like a mental patient. Charley crouched beside him and leaned into the clerk’s ear.
“We were talking about Weemer,” he whispered.
The guy called Weemer had been in his office in the back the whole time. He watched on a closed circuit security feed when Charley came into the store, and he observed the violent scuffle that broke out shortly thereafter. It was exciting at first, not altogether unlike an amateur fight night at Negra’s in Spanish Harlem, except with a bat and a knife instead of boxing gloves. But when his boy got cut and gave up, Weemer figured on ducking out through the back before the psycho with the switch came looking for him. Trouble was, the back door was stuck. Weemer was no small man, nearly six feet with an easy two seventy on the scales, but no matter how hard he threw himself into the push bar, that door would not budge.
That was when Charley came into the office, his hands empty and the look of murder in his dark eyes.
“The fuck are you?” Weemer groaned. His voice was like glass being ground between rusty metal gears.
“You Weemer?” Charley asked plainly, ignoring the other man’s impoliteness.
