The Dead Don't Bleed: A Novel

by David Krugler

  He responded with a deprecating chuckle and head-shake. He was whippet-thin, with quick dark eyes that scanned Miriam and me like searchlights. His suit fit him well, but it was off-the-rack, and the diamond in his tie tack was so small it barely reflected the overhead light.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked coldly.

  “The Excelsior has a dress code, sir. Jackets and ties are de rigueur for gentlemen.”

  “Not when I’m on assignment, they’re not.”

  “Pardon? Assignment?”

  “I’m in Washington from the New York office of Finnegan, Anderson, and Wake, and my inquiry into fraudulent workmen’s compensation claims requires me to pose as a supervising architect at a construction site—look, I’m not going to stand here and argue with you about my obviously uncustomary attire. If my assistant and I aren’t welcome here, then we’ll go elsewhere and I’ll pass on the details of our shabby treatment to Mister Finnegan.”

  Just as I wanted, a second reference to the law firm we’d just passed on K Street grabbed his attention.

  “You’re with Finnegan, Anderson, and Wake?”

  “Didn’t I just say that?” I snapped.

  “I suppose I could make an exception this one time, sir. The attorneys at Finnegan, Anderson, and Wake are good friends of the Excelsior, and while our dress requirements are—”

  “Just take us to our table, will you?”

  His wind-up for a tip having been swatted away, he huffed, “Right away, sir,” and took us to the corner.

  “Goddamned swish,” I muttered to Miriam after we were seated.

  “Gosh, that was awful impressive,” she said. “How’d you learn to do stuff like that?”

  “Stuffed shirts like dat, it’s easy-breezy to fool ’em—you just gotta act like you own da place.”

  She looked around trepidatiously. “Gosh, I don’t even know what to order in a place like this.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll order for you. Remember, yer my assistant.”

  “I am?”

  “Ain’t I a lawyer? Who’s treating his girl Friday ta a drink for distracting all dose construction workers with her pretty legs while I investigated fraud and all’a dat. Whatever it is shysters do, right?”

  “You think I have pretty legs?” With a coy smile.

  I smiled back and said, “You heard all dem boys whistling, didn’t you?”

  She giggled. “I applied to work in a law office before I started at H & H, but they didn’t hire me.”

  “Dare loss is our gain, hey, Miriam?”

  The cocktail waitress came up, decked out in a tight-fitting black skirt, bolero jacket with silvery piping, and a white blouse. The maître d’ had obviously told her to push us along, to get us out of there as soon as she could. Fine by me—pretty soon, an actual lawyer from Finnegan, Anderson, and Wake would stroll in, and the maître d’ would check on my story pronto. I ordered myself a scotch, Miriam a Singapore Sling.

  “I’ve never had one!” she exclaimed.

  “Yer gonna love it,” I said.

  The drinks came fast.

  “Here’s mud in yer eye,” I toasted.

  “Boy, you sure did stand up to Nadine today,” Miriam said after we drank, looking at me over the tiny umbrella in her tapered glass.

  “I hate bullies,” I said emphatically. “All my life, it’s just been one goddamned know-it-all after anudder, shoving me around, telling me what ta do.” Too strong, I rebuked myself. Easy does it.

  Fortunately, Miriam didn’t notice. “I know eggsactly what you mean.”

  “You wanna know sometin’, Miriam, just between you and me?”

  She nodded enthusiastically.

  “I was just gonna walk outta dare today, after Silva said dey wasn’t hiring, but when I heard her push you around like dat, I had ta do sometin’, you know?”

  “For real?”

  “You bet. Can’t let bullies like Silva trample all over you. Say, is she butch or what?”

  “Nadine? Oh no, not at all.”

  “She sure acts like it. But hey, maybe dat’s because she don’t like da competition.”

  “Whattya mean?”

  “Her boyfriends come in, see a dish like you, suddenly she don’t look so dreamy.”

  She giggled. Again. “Aw, now you’re teasing me.”

  “Yeah, but it’s fun, ain’t it?”

  I had pegged Miriam as nice, but available—second-date score, easy. Boy, was I wrong. Let’s get outta here, I said around six, expecting her to say she needed to get home, or still try to meet her friend at Woodies; but no, she wanted to get another drink. Some place more our style, dontcha think? she said. Sure, you bet. I hinted I was pretty much tapped out, till I got paid at H & H; she hinted that was no problem. So I shrugged and off we went, jumping on a bus to Southwest D.C., where she lived. Southwest, tucked along the docks and warehouses of the city’s industrial waterfront, was a part of town I didn’t know well, but it was definitely Ted Barston’s kind of neighborhood, all ramshackle woodframe houses with leaning porches, corner taverns, secondhand stores, and rooming houses. Even the worst-looking flops—paint peeling from the clapboards, hand-wrung laundry hanging in the windows, privies out back—had No Lets signs nailed to the front doors. Till this war ended, D.C. was packed to the gills.

  We hit a couple different places, Miriam paying the whole way. Around eleven, we ended up at her local watering hole, Mavens, a sleepy joint with spindly wooden tables scattered across rough-hewn floorboards and a bartop ringed with stains. The mirror behind the cash register had silvered—our reflection looked like two people stepping out of a dense fog. The bartender was an impressive stump of a man with a head as big—and as weathered—as a Halloween pumpkin, his skin pitted and creased, his heavy lids giving him a sleepy look, a graying crew cut lost in the rolls of his nape. He nodded slowly when Miriam greeted him with a hearty Hiya, Leo! and immediately set us up with Old Grand-Dad and beer backs.

  We hadn’t had any dinner, but Miriam never once asked if I wanted to get a bite. Since we were riding on her dime, I chain-smoked to kill my gnawing hunger. The booze—bourbon and beer backs at every stop—was getting to me, though I was able to spit a few shots back into my mostly empty beer bottle. The alcohol hardly showed on Miriam, who could put it away like the sailor I was supposed to be and still prattle on about her life, such as she had had one so far. She was a native, two years out of Roosevelt High, her pop some kind of clerk for the Weather Bureau, her mom never out of an apron or the kitchen. She did let slip that she was their only natural-born, and that her mom, who loved kids (jus’ loves ’em to death, you know what I mean, Ted?), had taken in a succession of foster children. Interesting that Miriam was now living with one of these strays—Kenny, she called him. Like a brother, jus’ like a brother, love him to death. Kenny and his friends rented a house up the street, Miriam informed me, adding that her folks would never have let her move out except to live with Kenny.

  “Wanna meet him?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, eager to get out of there without pouring any more liquor into my very empty, and very unhappy, stomach. Leo was the kind of bartender who’d notice a joe dodging shots like I’d done at the other taverns, and I didn’t want him telling Miriam there was something fishy about me next time she was in.

  Kenny wasn’t around when Miriam led me through the unlocked front door of a two-story house that hadn’t been painted since the Harding administration. She flicked on a parlor light to expose a messy room with broken or improvised furniture: Sagging sofa with a brick for one leg, wooden chairs missing slats, apple crates for endtables. Dirty carpet, patches showing through to the boards. A skinny, disheveled young man was slumped in a chair with padding tufting from tears. He blinked at the sudden light—he’d been asleep—and ran a hand through tousled blond hair in need of a cut.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Miriam said.

  He didn’t reply, just stared at us vacantly.

  “Is Kenny
home?”

  His head shake was barely noticeable, and Miriam looked away suddenly, as if he had disappeared. She fixed me with a big smile. “Kenny’s not here.”

  “Maybe anudder time.”

  She swayed slightly—finally, the booze was showing—and I steadied her, drawing close.

  “Wanna see my room?” she murmured.

  “You bet.”

  But for the next hour, Ted Barston didn’t see much of her room, not with a stub of a candle the only light, and Miriam reaching up to press her lips to his, pulling at his belt and pressing her hips into his hands as he groped for her skirt’s zipper.

  CHAPTER 13

  I FOUGHT THE URGE TO FALL ASLEEP, AS MIRIAM DID, AS SOON AS WE were done. The second time. The dim glow of my watch read 1:30. She seemed like a nice enough kid, Miriam—what the hell did she see in a loser like Barston? Some girls only had eyes for men who never treated them right. Barston had called Miriam “girlie” all night, ogled other women when he should have been listening to her, and he’d prodded her to keep paying for drinks even as he saw her cash dwindle away. I remembered how Logan Skerrill had boasted of spurning girls after he’d had them. Was that how Barston would turn out? S’all just an act, I reminded myself. I needed a source, had to know what went on behind the scenes at H & H, and Miriam was my best shot. Barston was a roughneck, I had to play that part, right down to the Joisey accent. Maybe, when it came time for me to resurface as Ellis Voigt, I could do something nice for Miriam, something unBarstonlike. Treat her to a classy night on the town, or get her a real nice present. I liked the last idea—I could have Hecht’s or Woodie’s or wherever I bought the gift wrap it up in expensive paper and mail it. With a note, something about how I had to leave town suddenly, about how a buddy from the Navy had called to offer me a job on the other side of the country.

  Enough noodling—I had a helluva lot to do before I put Barston out to pasture. I needed to wash up and change clothes, needed to wake up in my cot at the Jefferson Club Hotel. Silva was careful, Silva was suspicious; and she already hated my guts. If she was checking up on me, then I must look and live like Ted Barston. Which meant I couldn’t go back to Ellis Voigt’s flat for a hot shower, a sandwich, and a few hours sleep with Franklin D. nestled at my feet.

  I snuffed the flickering candle and crept down the stairs, leaving Miriam snoring gently, flat on her back. The mute housemate was nowhere to be seen. I caught a Mall-bound bus just a few blocks away. With so many tempos open around-the-clock, the buses ran all night. My last dime bought me a bologna sandwich and a banana at a brightly lit luncheonette. I was bone-tired, but my mind raced. What if I garbled some detail of Barston’s background, and Silva caught on? What if Greene had the party check up on me, and they caught something that Paslett’s boys in 7R had missed? How the hell was I supposed to determine if Logan Skerrill had been part of H & H’s communist cell and figure out if someone in it had wanted him dead? How reliable of a source would Miriam prove to be? She talked too much, which is why I needed her, but that also could be a big liability. Could I carry on an affair with this receptionist without losing my attraction for Liv? Vivid images of how much I’d enjoyed that night’s roll in the hay sure didn’t help answer this last question.

  I kept the banana for breakfast and dragged myself to the Jefferson. The clerk was rousting a joe trying to cadge a free flop in a lobby chair. The bum was pretending he couldn’t wake up, his eyes squinched shut as he twisted and shimmied to escape the clerk’s grip. I bypassed the struggle and climbed the stairs. Figuring there’d be a line to use the toilet come daylight, I washed up as best I could without a towel or comb. I would have paid a buck that very moment for a shot of Listerine. Or an alarm clock. Lacking both, I had no choice but to sleep light and ignore the ashy taste in my mouth.

  I DIDN’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT OVERSLEEPING. A LOUD ARGUMENT over a debt—a whopping fifty or seventy cents, depending on who you believed—woke me up at seven. I dressed and sat down on the cot to collect my thoughts. Even seated, the toes of my brogans touched the partition. My next-door neighbor was whistling off-key, but at least the debt discussion had moved on. Thankfully, the worries and anxieties that had vexed me the night before didn’t loom as large. They were Ellis Voigt’s problems, I realized. Today, and tomorrow, and the day after, I was just Ted Barston. As long as I played the part, as long as I kept my cover, all was well. Barston was no worrier, and neither the past nor the future concerned him. I smiled. Live free, and the rest will follow. Ellis Voigt hadn’t yet taken Liv’s wisdom to heart, but Ted Barston had. For all the danger, maybe being Barston would do me some good.

  I got some money out of my rucksack and locked the door, whistling. Ted Barston was one happy joe. A few weeks ago, he’d been in the brig. Just a day ago, he’d been broke, jobless, homeless. Now he had work and a place to rest his head. Hell, he’d even gotten a swell lay, and if he figured out how to tell Miriam why he’d skedaddled, he could probably help himself to more.

  Silva was waiting for me at the door of H & H, didn’t even let me greet Miriam. To judge by Miriam’s hangdog expression, she’d already gotten a dressing-down. It was too early for her to have made a mistake, but I had a feeling you didn’t have to do anything wrong to earn Silva’s wrath. I shot Miriam a warm smile and mouthed Hello! She brightened, a bit, and I ticked my chin to let her know we’d talk later. I followed Silva back to her office, a cubbyhole next to Himmel’s.

  “Have a seat, Ted,” she said briskly, smoothing her skirt as she sat behind a small desk piled high with papers. She was pretty, no doubt about it, but her beauty had a sharp edge. Shapely legs, but they whisked like scissor blades when she walked. (And where the hell did she get black nylons—the real McCoy, not paint-ons—during wartime?) A rear end you could imagine cupping in your hands, until you noticed it didn’t roll easily, like it does on most lookers. Taut, sure, but coiled like a panther’s haunches. Her eyes—darting, watching, taking everything in—gave her otherwise attractive face a sinister cast. Her brilliantly white blouse perfectly complemented a midnight blue jacket with padded shoulders, her coiffed hair curling above the collar. A long silver necklace lay flat against her neck, and I resisted the urge to follow it down, into her blouse—she’d notice, for sure. A triple-A ball-buster, Terrance would have called her.

  “I’m going to go over your duties,” she announced.

  “Awright.”

  She picked up a silver case and tapped out a Viceroy, lit it with a slender gold lighter with crosshatched etching. She took a long drag and exhaled the smoke over the desk, letting it drift my way.

  “You may smoke, if you want.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Obvious ploys, on both our parts, but the game had to be played.

  “How well do you know Washington, Ted?”

  “Whattya mean?” I played dumb.

  “Do you know how to get around? Do you know the streets, the addresses, how the quadrants work?”

  “You mean like da difference between Northwest and Northeast?”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean.” Getting exasperated.

  “Well sure, any mope’s gonna know dat. But I gotta say, I don’t know my way around all dat good.”

  “You do understand why I’m asking you this question, don’t you, Ted?”

  Was she baiting me? Had she already learned why Ted Barston had spent the last two years in a naval brig? Was she hoping I’d lose my temper so she could fire me? If so, I had to admire her courage—if the real Ted Barston lost it, he could do some real damage to that pretty face before someone pulled him off her.

  “Sure, Miss Silva. M’gonna make deliveries, I gotta know where I’m going, don’t I?” I offered the same lopsided smile I’d given her the day before.

  No reaction.

  “We have deliveries that must be made this afternoon, Ted.”

  “Gimme a map, I’ll know it like da back’a my hand in a hour, easy. Scout’s honor.”

  She
didn’t look at my raised two fingers, just rolled ash off her cigarette. “I certainly hope so, Ted. Otherwise your employment here will end, immediately.”

  Her way of telling me I wasn’t iron-clad, that Himmel wasn’t my guardian angel.

  “Nobody’s gonna be disappointed,” I answered.

  “Let’s hope that’s true.”

  Nothing to say to that, so I waited for her to go on. For the next ten minutes, she briskly lectured me on the purposes and practices of a “respectable” clipping service, about how we did more than just gather information on various subjects of stated interest to our clients. According to Silva, we also “intuited and anticipated” our clients’ needs. Attentive “collectors” (her word for the clippers) also recognized related topics, collected news about them, and then the “account representatives” (her and Philip Greene) recommended that the client add them to their “portfolio” of subjects. The first time, this material was provided for free, but the fee increased if the client wanted to continue to get the additional coverage. For a Bolshevik, she sure talked like Jay Gould. She also sounded like a college professor, spinning long, convoluted sentences like so much yarn. But I grinned like an idiot, ignored the fancy phrasing, and committed the important details to memory. The last task wasn’t hard, thanks to my training at the Funhouse, where we’d been forced to listen to canned lectures on all sorts of topics—botany, lithography, Greek drama—and then take written tests. I’d been seated next to Logan Skerrill during one lecture. He’d made a show of closing his eyes and tilting his head back, claiming it helped sharpen his attention. To the immense satisfaction of the rest of us, our minder had slapped him on his noggin and ordered him to sit up straight, eyes forward.

  “Any questions, Ted?” Silva finished.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Very good. Philip will give you a map and show you where you can study it.”

  As I stood and turned to leave, desperate to light an Old Gold, she asked, “Why’d you leave the Navy, Ted?”