The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  “Whatchoo want?”

  “To do a little business. That’s all.”

  Charley sat down on a ratty armchair that smelled like cats and motioned for Weemer to follow suit. Weemer made for the chair behind his desk, but Charley made a disapproving clucking noise with his tongue and pointed to his chair’s twin, the one right beside him.

  “I’d rather you didn’t have access to the gun in your desk just now,” Charley said.

  “What are you—”

  “Cut it out,” Charley interrupted. “Let’s just talk and be done with it and you can get your clerk to a doctor before the wound gets too infected. Sound all right to you?”

  Weemer slumped in the chair and scowled.

  “Whatchoo want?” he asked again.

  “I want loops.”

  “Loops? What, the old eight mil kind?”

  “That’s it.”

  “The hell for? I got Betamax and VHS tapes stacked to the goddamn ceiling in here. Hi-Fi, full color, a helluva lot better than them shitty old reels.”

  “But I’m looking for a particular variety, Mr. Weemer. The sort you’d get in trouble for if the wrong people knew you had them.”

  Weemer narrowed his eyes.

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Yeah you do. I’m talking about loops where Dobermans ball girls and that sort of thing. I’ve seen em, and word is you sell them. Are you saying I got bad information?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. This is a totally legit outfit here, you sonofabitch. I don’t got nothin to hide from nobody. And I sure as shit don’t mess around with disgusting crap like you’re talkin bout.”

  “That a fact?” Charley grinned meanly.

  “You’re goddamn right it is.”

  “Then you wouldn’t mind if I had a look around.”

  Charley stood up and Weemer shot up after him.

  “That’s all right,” Charley said, pushing the big man back down into the chair, “I can do it myself.”

  Weemer raged, his face darkening to a deep shade of purple.

  “You a cop or what?”

  Charley whipped out Walker’s badge by way of reply. The blood started to drain back out of Weemer’s jowly face.

  “Oh, goddamnit,” he said.

  “That going to shut you up?”

  “I wanna lawyer.”

  “I want a million dollars,” Charley said. “But I’m not likely to get it.”

  Weemer simmered down, but his outrage was bald-faced. Charley commenced his search of the office.

  Unlike Rosey Rosenthal’s office on the Deuce, Weemer kept his working space relatively clean and organized. There were four tall black file cabinets lined up against the wall behind the desk, three drawers to each of them, all of them locked. There was also what looked like a supply closet, and it, too, was locked.

  “Keys?” Charley asked.

  “Top drawer.”

  Charley retrieved a ring with ten or twelve keys jangling on it from the desk drawer, right next to a thirty-eight revolver.

  “This loaded?”

  “Yeah, it’s loaded.”

  “You got a permit?”

  “Suck a dick, pig.”

  “Nice talk.”

  After three aborted attempts to unlock the first file cabinet, the fourth key turned all the way and clicked. Charley began to sort through the neat manila folders lined up in each drawer.

  “You won’t find nothing,” Weemer growled.

  Charley was beginning to think he was right. There were tax receipts, shipping records, order forms, and the bottom drawer held nothing but cancelled checks addressed to what looked like perfectly legitimate creditors. The second and third cabinets yielded much of the same. Weemer chuckled.

  Charley unlocked the fourth file cabinet, keeping the supply closet in mind should this one turn up worthless, too.

  It didn’t.

  When he opened the top drawer of the last cabinet, a familiar acidic vapor wafted into his nose. Newsprint—five folders were stuffed to capacity with magazine-sized bundles of it, stapled twice on the spine, with markings on the tabs indicating publication periods: Fall 1978, Winter 1979, Spring 1979, Fall 1979. A fifth folder, Winter 1980, was empty. Charley delved into the first folder and extracted one of the magazines.

  It was not a magazine at all, as it turned out, but a catalogue. Of what was not immediately evident. Charley furrowed his brow at the thing, carefully examining the cover that had no pictures and no title, only two densely packed columns of coded listings followed by ellipses that terminated in numbers. His eyes bulged at the utter impenetrability of it all, so he shook it off and began at the beginning.

  B-DG-0001-5…….10.

  Utterly meaningless. Charley wished he had an Ovaltine decoder ring.

  The next line was equally incomprehensible:

  B-DG-0002-4…….10.

  He flipped the pages, smearing the ink and turning his fingertips black. Each page followed exactly the same format. K-MG-0034-4…P-GG-0009-8…Sc-MM-0005-5. Most of them trailed the periods after them and then a number ten, though some ended with a fifteen or a twenty. This, Charley concluded, was the cost of whatever items the codes represented. And, if his growing assumption was correct, they represented illegal porn loops.

  “I presume your customers know the codes,” he said without looking up from the catalogue.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The numbers at the end are the dollar amount, the cost, I get that. And I’m thinking the numbers at the end of each sequence are just volumes of a series of sorts, right?”

  Weemer just growled.

  “It’s just the letters that throw me. One, followed by two—but, okay, I see. Always the same couple of letters in the second part. M or G or B, looks like.”

  Weemer grunted, “Whatever you say, pig.”

  “Man, girl and boy? Is that what that is? So, does girl encompass both adult women and underage girls, you sick shit?”

  “Man, I don’t know nothing bout no underage girls. Don’t even talk like that around here…”

  “But it’s right here in black and white, Weemer,” Charley said, slapping the back of his hand on the catalogue for emphasis. “In your file cabinet, pal.”

  “That’s bullshit. That could mean anything. That don’t say nothing bout no underage nothing.”

  “Could mean anything? All right, then. What does it mean?”

  “No idea. Came with the furniture.”

  “File cabinets that come with their own files. Neat.”

  Charley rolled up the catalogue and stuffed the newsprint tube in his pants pocket. Then he returned to Weemer’s desk drawer and pocketed the gun, too. When he rounded the desk, Weemer suddenly got up from the chair.

  “Where you going?” Charley demanded.

  “With you, dumbass. Ain’t I under arrest?”

  Charley laughed and, for the second time, shoved the pudgy porn peddler back into the chair.

  “You ever seen a cop fight with a switchblade?”

  Weemer’s mouth hung open, and he shook his jowls back and forth in bewilderment as Charley walked out of the office, through the store and back out onto the street.

  He had what he’d been looking for, he was sure of that much, a lead toward the end of the thing. If only he could make sense of it all.

  After he left Playtown, Charley wandered down Broadway in a daze, shuffling his feet like the bombed-out bums with whom he shared the sidewalk or the shambling Italian grandmothers he sometimes observed at the supermarket, still in their house shoes. When he reached Forty-Two his autopilot switched on and guided him through the arcade and down the north side of the street until he hit the Grand Luncheonette. Charley could not remember precisely when was the last time he ate, and the aroma of Pops’ burgers on the grill hit him in the face like a sledgehammer. He went in, ordered a cheeseburger, sat in the back for once, and flattened Weemer’s catalogue out on the tabletop.r />
  Carefully, he scrutinized each individual page of the catalogue, scanning the columns for anything that might hint at the solution to the nightmare his life had become. Finally, when he reached the exact midpoint of the booklet, a rectangle appeared on the right hand page, bordered by a dotted line. It was an order form, complete with ten blank lines for the prospective buyer to fill in with the desired units and, naturally, a mailing address. It was a post office box, but the closest he had come in this charade of amateur sleuthing.

  “Yes, goddamn you,” he said aloud, drawing stares from a number of the joint’s patrons.

  But he did not care who did or did not stare at him. He only anxiously bounced one knee under the table until his burger came up, wolfed it down without ever really tasting it, and then hurried out of the place in search of P.O. Box 238, 10013, which, Charley realized with a wince and a sneer, meant he was heading back to the Bowery.

  Chapter 27

  On the subway bound for Canal, it occurred to Charley that whoever rented that box at the 10013 P.O. probably avoided checking the mail in the cold light of day. He would not particularly want to be seen, Charley reasoned, and in all likelihood he had a regular pick-up and drop-off time. The odds of Charley popping in right at that time were close to nil, and he was not planning on staking the place out all night, but it was a start.

  Trouble was, once he arrived at the post office, he found it locked up tighter than a drum. It was closed for the day, of course, but he had hoped that there would still have been access to the boxes. From the looks of things, a key was needed to get inside, not just one for the boxes themselves. He cupped his hands and peered in through the cold, grime-smeared glass. He felt like a hobo watching the televisions in the display window of an electronics shop.

  A quarter of an hour passed, and then that doubled. It was dark, and Charley was just standing around in one of the worst neighborhoods on the island, practically begging to get rolled or murdered. He screwed up his face and sneered at the world. I dare you, he almost said aloud. Come and get me, his purplish, grimacing face seemed to say. I’ll give as good as I get. He stuffed his hand in his jacket pocket and fondled the gun he found in there. Nobody was going to get the best of Charley McCormick tonight. He ground his molars together so hard tears formed at the corners of his eyes.

  By the time he reckoned an hour had crawled by, he gave up the ghost on the post office. The only living souls he’d seen the whole time he was standing there were bums and junkies and a couple of streetwalkers freezing their asses off in fishnets and ridiculously short vinyl skirts. But he was not quite ready to make tracks for a marginally safer part of town, not when there was still the Mott Street tenement to check out.

  And with the iron in his pocket keeping his hand warm, Charley did not feel too bad about walking the whole way.

  The apartment was cleared out, like no one had set foot in the place for years. Even the room where Chester Price had filmed at least a few of his masterworks was empty and dusty and gray. The bed was gone, and for some reason even the wallpaper had been torn off. It smelled musty and damp. Charley stood in the middle of the room, dark except for the shafts of light sluicing in from the streetlamps outside. He felt vaguely sad.

  Was this where Elizabeth unwittingly signed her own death warrant? If she had not been murdered at the Harris Theater, would she have been killed right here?

  In the final analysis, he figured it did not really matter. She was still dead, any way he looked at it, and he was still the kind-looking stranger she hoped might offer her some modicum of protection from an otherwise inescapable fate.

  And it was still true that while Elizabeth Ann Hewlett was dying of internal injuries, bleeding out all over the chair and floor, Charley was considering the likelihood of getting into her pants before the night was through. In a weird sort of way, that was the worst part of it for him. He felt obligated to avenge her because he failed to protect her, but he also suffered from his inability to apologize to her, to account for his behavior and his atrocious maleness. All she needed was one man in the world who could look at her and see a human being in need rather than attractively arranged flesh to use for kicks and profit. Charley was supposed to have been that man, but he blew it. Without access to a time machine he was never going to properly make amends for that. But that was not going to stop him from making somebody pay.

  Thus, when Charley was nearing the post office on his way back to the Canal Street IRT and saw a scummy-looking guy stuffing his hand in one of the myriad of P.O. Boxes that covered the wall, he curled his fingers around the handle of Weemer’s automatic.

  The guy was tall, rangy; so thin that he looked downright malnourished, but anybody could see it was just the junk from the way he twitched and trembled. His face was drawn and badly scarred by acne, cheekbones high and the flesh tight and concave underneath. For a minute Charley watched as the guy extracted a stack of envelopes from the box and, leaving the little metal door open, sorted through them with intense, narrow eyes. Then Charley knocked on the glass and the guy nearly jumped through the roof. Charley smiled, pointing to himself and then to the door. I lost my key, he mouthed. Let me in?

  He was like a vampire, Dracula using all his charm to convince Lucy to admit him into her bedroom. But the hophead inside did not appear to know much about that, because he just nodded and held the door open for Charley.

  “Thanks very much,” Charley mumbled as he scanned the numbers on the boxes. On one side of the open box was 237. The other side read 239.

  Charley had him.

  The rangy man stuffed the envelopes into the pocket of his oversized trench coat and carefully shut the door to the P.O. Box, locking it and pocketing the key. Charley was putting his hand in his own pocket at the same time. The long, yellow fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling buzzed loudly, the only sound in the place except for the junkie’s heavy breathing and the thumping heartbeat in Charley’s ears. The automatic was drawn, its bore bearing down on the guy, aimed at the general vicinity his head was presently occupying.

  “What is this?” he rasped. “You sticking me up?”

  “Sort of,” Charley said quietly. “But no.”

  “I don’t get it, man.”

  “Where are you taking those envelopes? It’s cash in them, right?”

  The guy curled his lips into an unpleasant frown and just sort of bobbed back and forth for a minute. Charley stepped forward, keeping the barrel leveled at his quarry.

  “They go to Fred Haskett?” Charley continued. “Is that it?”

  “Who?”

  “Damnit, who do you report to?”

  “Look, brother,” the man stammered anxiously. “I—I’m just checking my mail, man.”

  Charley lunged at him, keeping him covered with the gun while he jammed his free hand into the guy’s pocket. His broken knuckle convulsed at the end of the gun’s handle, but he refused to show his discomfort on his face. He was doing a bang-up job of scaring this man half to death and he did not want to ruin it.

  The envelopes glowed in the phosphorous light, twenty-five or thirty of them in all. Charley shoved them at the trembling junky and barked, “Open them.”

  Without missing a beat the guy began tearing into the envelopes, extracting cash and the cut-out order form from Weemer’s catalogue in every instance.

  “Just checking your mail?”

  “Y—yeah…?”

  “How’s about I count to, let’s say two, at which point you tell me who you’re supposed to deliver those to. Then we’ll go see him together. Or, if you prefer, I’ll just shoot you in the forehead and splatter your goddamned brains all over the wall. One.”

  “Shit, man…”

  “Two.”

  Charley stabbed the man in the forehead with the barrel of the automatic, cutting the skin and eliciting a high-pitched shriek.

  The shriek ended with a name, spoken rapidly several times over in panicked repetition.

  Charley held his hand o
ut, and the man understood what that meant. He laid the envelopes down on Charley’s palm.

  Then Charley squeezed the trigger, firing a twenty-five caliber bullet into one of those high cheekbones. The junky’s face was a splash of wet crimson and gelatinous gray when he crumpled on the floor, where quickly he died.

  Charley did not look at him. He just pocketed the envelopes and scurried out of there before somebody saw him with the man he’d just killed. It only occurred to him when he was halfway to the subway that there may have been a security camera in the post office, and that maybe it had been pointed right at him just like the automatic he pointed at the greasy junky checking the mail.

  He made the subway just before the doors slammed shut in his face. The smell of cordite was overwhelming in his nose, and he wondered if everyone else on the train could smell it, too. Still, it beat the sour-sweet odor of blood. Anything but that.

  At Union Station he got off the Six train and waited a few minutes for the L with a freshly fired handgun burning up one pocket and a stack of cash-stuffed envelopes burning up the other. It was only about a five minute ride from there to the Eight Avenue/Fourteenth Street Station, from which he walked another five or six minutes north to a familiar building with a gullible landlady.

  Good thing for Charley, he still had a key to the place.

  Chapter 28

  Most everything in Eve’s bedroom had been straightened out and put away since the place was ransacked. It looked better than it did before then. Charley began there, carefully searching the room from under the bed to the drawers in her bureau and, naturally, the bedroom closet. There was nothing out of the ordinary to be found.

  From there he moved onto the living room, which was too sparsely furnished to hide much of anything at all, and then the kitchen, which did not conceal enough for a light snack. In total, the search only took forty-five minutes out of the night, at the end of which Charley collapsed on the couch and began looking through the contents of the envelopes in his pocket. The exact count of orders came to seventeen, although what that represented in terms of days or weeks or months he could not tell. In each of the seventeen envelopes was an order form, none of which requested fewer than five of the loops listed in the catalogue he still had in his back pocket. Accordingly, the cash in each package came to a minimum of fifty dollars and maxed out, in a single case, at two hundred and twenty. All told, Charley was now in possession of one thousand three hundred and sixty dollars in what was essentially stolen cash.