The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  Some weeks she was flush, while others had her shoplifting Mars bars and grabbing her ankles for a bump of blow. That was just life. Sometimes you couldn’t do anything but wait for better times.

  Charley, on the other hand, could not wait. There would be no later time when things were better, not if she didn’t get her ass in gear.

  She tramped down the sidewalk in her blue leopard pumps feeling a bit like a man on stilts at the circus. Despite her precarious balance, she raced by the sparkling porticos and burning neon signs, ignoring the peep show barkers, rough trade boys and dealers per usual. The Harris Theater was across the street when she came to it. She very vividly recalled Charley saying that this was the place that girl got killed. Women’s intuition may not have come with the hormones and surgery, but something deep inside her told Ursula that this was the place she needed to be right now.

  She narrowed her eyes at the marquee and portico. Blocky black capital letters advertised the double bill as Tiger Jungle and Terminal Island. It looked like just the sort of the thing dudes like Charley would flock to, but the theater looked conspicuously empty from where she stood.

  The two tough looking men lingering menacingly under the network of small yellow bulbs in front seemed to be the answer why. Ursula watched as a skinny black dude with an enormous afro and superfluous aviator sunglasses glided up the Harris’ front doors. One of the threatening men said something to him, but the skinny man wasn’t having any of it. He’d come to see a flick and he meant to do just that.

  The shorter of the two bruisers rapidly punched the black guy right in the throat. He went down, clutching desperately at his neck as he sprawled out on the sidewalk. And, because it was this street in this Square and in this particular city, nobody gave the poor guy a second look as they drifted by from both directions.

  Ursula was now positive that her intuition had not failed her. Getting in, however, was an altogether different ball of shit.

  Charley sat with his legs crossed on the Harris’ stage. He remembered sitting this way on the tiny school stage in grammar school whenever they were rehearsing for the Christmas play. But then nobody ever sprayed blood out of a severed jugular in the middle of “Jingle Bells.”

  The Harris had been a live theater first, just like every other theater in Times Square, since way back in the Teens when it was called the Candler. No less a theatrical dignitary than John Barrymore himself portrayed Hamlet more than a hundred times on this same stage, long before the Deuce descended into the grubby, scummy slum it had since become. Back in those days, Charley had heard, the grand ceiling had a series of ornate Art Noveau chandeliers ringing the dome, and majestic arabesques hung all over the place which illustrated scenes from Shakespearian plays. Charley seriously doubted Barrymore could ever have imagined a snuff film being made where once he lamented the death of poor Yorick, if he could have imagined a snuff film at all. His gorge, Charley thought, would have risen at it.

  Stanley continued to fidget with the camera while Eve silently prodded at her heavily bandaged thigh with one hand while keeping Stanley’s revolver pointed at Charley in the other. His chest felt tight, his breath constricted. He swallowed a mouthful of saliva, and it went down his dry throat painfully.

  “Why kill Haskett?” he asked at length.

  Eve pursed her lips but remained silent.

  “Greed? More for you, then?”

  She snorted a quick laugh. Shaking her head, she said, “You’re an idiot, Charley. Fred Haskett didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “That right? Then how come his brains are all over the projection booth?”

  “That’s pretty overdramatic, isn’t it?”

  Charley shrugged.

  “You’re a shitty detective. You know what his real name was?”

  “Who? Haskett?”

  “No, Annie fucking Sprinkles. The hell you think?”

  “Tell me.”

  She grinned.

  “Hadžić. Frederick Hadžić.”

  Charley knitted his brow. “So?”

  “Chrissakes,” she said, turning to Stanley. “He might actually be as retarded as you.”

  “Shut up, Eve,” Stanley grunted.

  “It’s fucking Serbian, dipshit. Hadžić. What do you think of that?”

  “I think there’s a lot of Serbs in this city.”

  “Yeah, sure. No coincidences, right?”

  “Okay. So he’s in with Marko and Dragović and all those guys, is that it?”

  “He was, before we killed them all. I guess your fag boyfriend helped, so I’ll suffer him some credit. What’s it like, by the way?”

  Charley just snarled at her, refusing to address the question.

  “Having some dude’s cock up your ass, I mean. Honest to Christ I’ve never tried it. I’m just curious.”

  “I’m sure Stanley here’d be glad to show you.”

  “Fuck, no,” Stanley barked. “That’s sodomy. It’s a sin.”

  Charley gaped. Here was a guy who was definitely an accomplice to rape and murder, likely a rapist and killer himself, and he was worried about what God would think if he indulged in a little anal sex.

  “Priorities are good,” he said sullenly.

  Stanley vigorously nodded in agreement. He truly was moronic.

  “All right,” Charley said with a sigh, “so Haskett or Hadžić or whatever the hell his name is…was…this cat’s in with the local Serbian mob guys.”

  “You’re catching on,” she said dryly.

  “But I thought Chester Price was making his little classics for those guys.”

  “Right again.”

  “Just about ready, Eve,” Stanley interrupted. She ignored him.

  “So where does the animosity come in?”

  “Difference of opinion.”

  “On what?”

  “Artistic expression.”

  Charley made a clicking sound with his tongue and smiled knowingly.

  “Of course. They were fine with the gross stuff, dogs and peeing on people and all that nasty shit. But you and Price stumbled into a new market and Marko’s gang didn’t want any part of that.”

  “Men are pigs,” Eve said. “I swear to God they’ll jack off to literally anything.”

  “Even girls getting carved up and butchered like animals.”

  “Even that, yeah.”

  “Whatever happened to subtle eroticism?”

  “It’s the eighties now, babe. Subtlety is dead.”

  “And so’s your sister,” Charley said fiercely. “Elizabeth.”

  She lunged forward, like she was about to launch herself out of her wheelchair, stopping herself only when the pain from her wound stung into her. She scrunched up her face and bared her teeth.

  “The fuck do you know, Charley? Huh? The fuck do you know?”

  “I know that girl needed you. I know that you fed her to the wolves. I know that’s she’s dead because of you.”

  “And what if she is? She was my sister, goddamnit. You never even knew her.”

  I smelled her blood, he thought dismally. I smelled her freshly spilled blood and it bound me to her.

  “You’re a piece of shit, Eve,” he hissed. “Worse than that. You are just a broken person, incomplete and damaged beyond repair. You’re no damn good at all.”

  “Careful, lover,” she teased as she lit up a Newport and took a long drag. “You might hurt my feelings.”

  “I don’t mind. I don’t expect I’m going to live long enough to regret it.”

  “Bullshit. You’ll live to a hundred. Hell, you don’t even smoke.”

  He wrinkled his nose, perplexed.

  “Get the bitch out here, Stanley. It’s getting late.”

  “Right,” Stanley said.

  Charley made to stand up, but Eve brandished the revolver at him and froze him where he sat.

  “Chill out, Charley. We’re almost done here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I told you.
We’re making a movie.”

  “I thought…”

  Eve gave a throaty chuckle.

  “You thought I was going to murder you and film it. Don’t be an idiot. Nobody wants to look at your ugly face, man. My customers like girls. And when they want to see somebody cut open, they want it to be a pretty little chick, you dig?”

  “Then why…”

  Charley trailed off as Stanley returned from wherever he’d gone with a struggling body held tightly to his broad chest. It was dim and shadowy in the auditorium, too dark to make out any distinctive features at first, but the bucking figures yelping cries suggested that it was definitely a woman. That bitch.

  “Why am I keeping you here? Is that what you were going to say?”

  Charley lazily nodded, most of his attention focused on the girl in Stanley’s arms. They were drawing nearer to the footlights, rounding the stage to the steps at the right side.

  “I’m going to make you famous, that’s why.”

  “Please,” the girl moaned. “Please let me go. Please don’t do this.”

  Charley lifted himself up to his feet, suddenly oblivious to Eve’s gun.

  “You two,” Eve said giddily, “are going to make a nice little scene for me. My first videotaped production. It’s a new milestone, I guess. You should be glad to be a part of it.”

  “A part of it?”

  “Stop being so goddamned stupid, Charley. You’re dynamite in the sack, but Jesus creeping Christ you’re a retard.”

  Stanley stamped up the steps, crossed the stage to where Eve sat in her wheelchair, and roughly hurled the girl down on the roughshod, splintered wood. Charley glared at the girl with disbelief through the tears that welled up in his eyes. She was weeping, too.

  “Charley!” she sobbed. “What is this, Charley?”

  “First you’re going to fuck her,” Eve said matter-of-factly. “Then you’re going to slit her throat. Get ready.”

  “Oh Jesus, I’m sorry,” Charley groaned. “Christ, I’m so sorry, Jackie.”

  • • •

  Ursula was well seasoned in the unpleasant art of anonymous sex in nasty places. She’d blown them in the men’s room at Tad’s, administered handies in the Anco’s balcony, she’d even lay down flat on her stomach in the grime and filth in more than a couple alleys in her time. Most recently, she had followed a trick—the kid couldn’t have been older than twenty—out the back door of the Cine 42 to the dark and foreboding alley in the back. They went hand-in-hand, like the kid wasn’t actually paying for her time, and fumbled around in the most awkward way imaginable for fifteen or twenty minutes before he dropped a tenner in her paw and skedaddled. It was just after that she stumbled across what she took for a bum passed out on the ground. That bum later introduced himself as Charley.

  She could not remember what movies were playing at the 42 when she’d gone in with that boy, but it was a double bill of Starcrash and Death Machines she paid for now. She accepted her ticket stub from the surly schlub in the box office and advanced into the lobby, all the while reflecting on how odd it was that she’d been in this theater fifty times and never seen a movie in it.

  Cine 42 was a twin, and the show Ursula paid for was in Theater II, not that it much mattered which one she entered. She aimed to merely repeat the same journey she almost always made in that place, only this time without the trick—straight across the back row and out the banged-up steel door.

  Up on the screen, across the auditorium from where she skulked in the darkness, Ursula saw a gorgeous girl in a damn near microscopic black bikini firing beams of light from the barrel of her laser gun at a hulking robot. She could not help but feel a pang of envy that she would never look that good, not after a thousand surgeries, even if she had the jack for it. She also wondered if Charley had seen this one, if he liked it, and what were his thoughts on that stunning girl? She tried to push these irrelevant questions out of her mind. Because if she didn’t get inside the Harris soon enough, Charley might not think about anything ever again.

  She quickened her pace, bumping a hip or a knee against the hard plastic frame of a seat a few times along the way. Then she threw her shoulder into the heavy door and pushed her way out into the dark, cold alley.

  The door swung shut with a deafening clang, leaving her standing alone in near total darkness. Or, perhaps not alone. It was impossible to tell. A shiver worked its way from the crack of her ass to the nape of her neck; everything in between trembling in the chill of the night. She could have sworn it hadn’t been this cold in front of the theater, but that was most likely due to the abundance of hot lights burning up and down both sides of Forty-Two. Back there, conversely, there was nothing but dampness and darkness and the stark cold of January. Ursula rapidly rubbed her hands up and down her arms and shoulders. Then she cautiously moved forward, patting at the grimy, slippery wall with her hands as she went along.

  The next door she came across would be from the 42’s Theater I. The one after that would lead out of the Harris. Then the only thing left to worry about was getting in. That, and whatever awaited her inside.

  “Your little black book is pretty damn pathetic, you know.”

  Eve tipped her head back, staring Charley down as if she were wearing bifocals.

  “Seven numbers? I mean, seriously?”

  Jackie whimpered. She was sprawled out on the stage, weakly flopping around like a suffocating fish. It was obvious to Charley that she was badly hurt in some way, although he could not detect any visible signs of damage. He supposed these were just the sort of people who could pretty much destroy a person without ever leaving a mark.

  “Let’s see,” Eve went on, counting on her fingers. “There was mom and dad, of course, but that only counts as one. That awful flophouse was in there. Oh! Man, you had your own number listed? Were you just trying to boost the quantity, or what?”

  “Make a fucking point, Eve,” he snarled.

  “Shit, man. Mellow out. Just thought you’d like to know how we found your old playmate here, that’s all.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “I think so. She’s not bad, you know? Shame I’m only going to be able to use her once.”

  Charley’s stomach churned. He was terrified, to be sure, but almost more than that he was utterly disgusted with himself for having slept with the sociopath in the wheelchair in front of him.

  He opened his eyes wide and stared her down.

  “What was it?” he said quietly, tonelessly. “Was she going to turn you in or something? Tell the cops? Or the feds?”

  A smile played at Eve’s lips. He was stalling and she knew it.

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not? I’ll answer your stupid question, then we’ll get down to brass tacks, like they say. My dear sister was an even bigger fuck-up than me, hard as that probably is for you to grasp, coming from middle class white bread hell. Christ, I’d bet my life she was trying to fleece you up there in the balcony that night. How about it, Chuck? Would you have dropped five bucks for a hand job from that bitch?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you believe. All I’ve got to say is that I wouldn’t put anything past a psycho broad who willingly fucked her own father since she got her first period.”

  The entire auditorium fell dead silent, as if every molecule of air had been sucked out of the building. Charley glared, his face an awkward combination of rage and confusion.

  He tried to repeat himself, to tell Eve again that he did not believe her, but the words failed to form.

  His throat was dry and scratchy. His eyes burned.

  His heart hammered against his chest.

  Then, before he was fully aware of what he was doing, he launched himself to his feet and charged at Eve, a low scream rising in his throat.

  A loud report cracked the air.

  The cold brick wall might have been smeared with anything, judging by its location and all the sordid things Ursula knew went on back there.
She’d participated in plenty of them herself, although she had the common courtesy to leave the wall alone. Some spots were wet, some slick and phlegmy, another disturbingly warm and viscous. She tried not to think about it, but each time the texture changed she was plunged straight back into full-fledged repulsion.

  She was certain the door she needed was only inches away. But before she could reach it, she collided with someone in the alley. The indiscernible shadow of a person let out a grunt as Ursula half-gasped and half-shrieked. She stumbled backward, tried to brace herself against the wall, slid across the broad smear of something slimy.

  A man in the dark rasped, “The hell?”

  Another voice, high-pitched and accented, squeaked, “Fuck this, honey.”

  Shuffling sounds and heavy, panicked breaths precipitated a loud, metallic crunch. The door cracked open and a shaft of dim, sallow light erupted from within. Her pupils contracted from the flash, just in time to make out the tiny dark-skinned queen slipping through the opening.

  It was the Harris, she was sure of it, and therefore no place for this little creature of the night. Ursula knew that half of the people who worked the Deuce had their ways of getting into the theaters through the back doors, but she’d never figured it out herself. How this one got the door open she did not know, but it was open now and that was all that mattered.

  Ursula roughly seized her by her bone-thin arm and yanked her back out into the alley. The queen gave a yelp.

  “Whashoo doin, bitch?”

  “You go in there, you’re gonna get killed.”

  With that, Ursula gave the diminutive drag hooker a hard shove, stole into the Harris’ auditorium, and pulled the door shut. The impact of the heavy steel door against the jamb, however, was drowned out by the piercing blast of a gunshot.

  She gasped, spun around on one heel and then immediately faltered and dropped on her ass. The last thing she saw before the seat row obscured her view of the stage was someone crumpling on the floor. Someone who was shot, probably.

  Could be Charley, she thought. Could be that right now he’s dying. Or already dead.