Queens Noir

by Robert Knightly

  George and the Pole stood and watched me leave. They looked as if they were beginning to believe I'd done something bad. I felt I might be better behind bars for a while. I'd have time to think. It would force Sean to get serious, and reassure him that I was being punished for killing his mother, although I was still sure I hadn't.

  I got back again some hours later. The house was crawling with forensics people, plugging the causal breach. I wondered if they'd sort this one out. Why was the cellar locked, and how come Dad had the key? What if Dad was the killer?

  Soon they announced that the bodies had been down there for six months.

  I did a quick calculation. "That's when Mom skipped out and Dad lost the plot."

  "One of the bodies is your mother, Mr. Nulty, the other appears to be your Uncle Eddie, from Vancouver. Your mother was shot. We haven't found the weapon, but the bullet is an old-fashioned one."

  "Sunuvabitch!" said George. "And the uncle?"

  The cop ignored him and continued to address me. "Your uncle had his head smashed in by a blunt weapon."

  There was a lot of legal stuff to handle after that. Eddie's estate was protected by some Canadian legal thing. It looked like no one would get at it for a while, least of all the inheritance-hunters who had set the ball rolling. It also looked as if his remaining brothers and sisters would inherit. The Irish legend of the Canadian uncle would become a reality. The real estate people were slapped down by my lawyer. House and bar were declared private for the receptions and funerals. (I did wonder if the Armenian would consider himself in or out, and then I wondered why he hadn't showed up lately.)

  Sean began to throw his weight in and help with the arrangements.

  Noureddine and George got a private investigator to come up with some loose threads: "An out-of-work Yugoslav brute called Niko is throwing money around. Turns out he got it from the Armenian. We're trying to find out why."

  They got Niko up a dark alley one night. He admitted he'd found the door open and gone for it. He refused to admit anything else.

  They called the cops, who found out the Armenian was in some kind of smuggling thing with Russia. The Swamp Rat was either in, or else she never knew about it. No one could figure out what had happened to the money. The Pole had disappeared and was suspected of working for the Armenian, among other things.

  It didn't stop there. George and his pals found someone Niko'd boasted to about knifing my wife. It could never be proved that he'd done it for the Armenian, although the cops suspected this. They also suspected that Eddie had killed my mother, but couldn't prove that either. Nobody knew why, although she might have had something on him that she tried to use, or threatened to use. No gun was found. They reckoned my father had then killed Eddie, but couldn't prove that either. He might've hid the gun, but then why didn't he try to hide the bodies too?

  "He lawst his mind, remember?" said George.

  NaIma slept in the house until I found someone to replace the Pole. We got a clinic to take Dad for a week while the funerals were happening. The heat soared to over 100, and we mopped our brows and showered a lot and drank too much alcohol.

  When all the bodies were buried-we did it the same day, same time, three hearses and three coffins had never been seen before except after an accident-Naima and I went to see my father in the clinic.

  "How are things at home?" he asked me. "How is everyone? How's She?"

  I presumed he was talking about the Eternal Feminine, his mother, his wife, his daughter-in-law. Whatever.

  "What kind of work are they doin' on the farm?" he asked.

  "That's a great man for his age," said an Irish voice from the next bed. They keep 'em in twos so one keeps an eye on the other. Cuts down on staff.

  I couldn't see its owner due to a screen, but recognized it as a Monaghan accent. I wondered if this was an accident, or if someone had actually tried to group them.

  "Pray to Saint Theresa, she'll help you," the Monaghan voice said.

  "She cured Patsy Gibney," said my father.

  "It's 7 o'clock. Ye'd be doing the milkin' now," the voice continued.

  "What?"

  He repeated it four times before Dad got it.

  "Indeed, an' I wouldn't," Dad replied. "I'm finished with all that now. I'm a stickler."

  I tried to explain to Naima my ideas about the agricultural metaphor outliving its context. She looked at me funny.

  As we left, the two men thought they were preparing to dose an uncooperative beast from a bottle.

  "Fuck him," muttered my dad. "Throw it all over him and let it soak in."

  "We're off now, Dad," I said.

  He eyed me for a moment, then he said: "The divine diarrhea of the dollar."

  I recognized the words of Salvador Dali, and wondered again just how senile my father really was, and if it might strike me too.

  But not yet, dear God, not yet. For the moment, me and Naima were going to make a team. We'd get my dad home and whip Sean into some kind of shape. Rectitude was on the march again.

  FIRST CALVARY

  BY ROBERT KNIGHTLY

  Blissville

  he little girl is playing there by herself. She's off in a corner of the yard by the alleyway where the girls come out of the Good Shepherd School at 3 o'clock when the bell rings and walk through to the street. But it's already late, getting dark, time for all little kids to be home with their mothers. Nobody can see her there in the alley, he knows, because he's been watching her awhile from behind the iron picket fence. She doesn't see him, nobody sees him. For about the hundredth time, she takes her baby out of the carriage, fixes its clothes, talks to it, and puts it down again. He's on the move now, out from behind the fence, walking quick on stubby legs down the alley. She can't see him coming, she's got her head in the carriage again.

  "Be good now, baby," he hears her say just as he reaches her and she straightens up and sees him. "Oh!" she says.

  He pushes her hard and she flops down like a doll on her behind. He's down the alley, out the gate, onto Greenpoint Avenue almost before she starts bawlin'.

  He crosses the avenue, pushing the carriage in front of him fast as he can along the high stone wall between himself and the dead people buried in First Calvary. He dares not look left for fear of the Stone Saints high up on their pedestals standing watch over the graves. Even though he knows they can't see him because their backs are turned to the street. He knows why this is so because his Nan has told him. Saints give fuck-all for the likes of the shanty Irish, Nan says. As he rolls across Bradley Avenue, he sneaks a look at the front door of the Cork Lounge, where Nan takes him and the dog on Saturday afternoons, after the stores for a growler of Shaeffer "to go."

  The carriage is big as him but he can push it all right. He hurtles past the people sitting on the front stoops of the houses, there like always, the mothers hanging out the windows in their parlors, resting big folded arms on windowsills all up and down the block, watching. He knows this, so he keeps his head down behind the carriage, pushing it up the block fast as he can, up and on his toes, leaning into it like the football team he's seen practicing in the vacant lots off Review Avenue alongside the Newtown Creek.

  Still, he feels the eyes on him, watching. He trips! Hits the pavement on hands and knees. The carriage rolls forward by itself, already two squares of sidewalk ahead, but he's up! After it! Tears stinging his eyes, he grabs the handlebars, just missing the cars parked at the curb. He rights his ship and sails on up the sidewalk. His hands are dirty, right knee scraped where his overalls ripped. They'll ask about that, he knows. He'll say: I fell, it don't hurt. At the corner, he wheels around onto Starr Avenue.

  For the only time he can ever remember, there's nobody on his stoop. Home free! He backs up the stoop, dragging the carriage by its handlebars up the four stone steps and into the vestibule of his tenement, then down the long, carpeted hallway to the door to the basement stairway, and parks it there in the dark. No one can see him reach in and take the doll
in its frilly dress into his arms.

  "Be good now, baby," he cautions, then lays it back down in the carriage, covering it, head and all, with the pink blanket so no one can see.

  He climbs the four flights of stairs, holding tight to the wooden banister worn smooth by generations of hands, all the way to the top where he lives with Nan and Aunt May. Nan's his grandmother and Aunt May's mother and his father's mother. He knows this because they told him, and his home will always be with them as long as he's a good boy, and his mother drinks and his father's a whoremaster. He does not remember his mother because she dropped him off when he was eight months and didn't come back. Nan keeps house and Aunt May goes to work at the phone company. And Aunt May is the boss of all of them, Nan says when Aunt May can't hear her. There's an old dog named Dinah lives with them, it's Aunt May's dog, it won't let him walk it. He reaches up for the doorknob and goes inside.

  "Young man!" Aunt May calls from the parlor. He goes in to her. She's in her housecoat, sitting in the arthritis chair by the window. Nan calls it that because Aunt May has that, and sits in it all the time. Nan's not there, she went to the store. He sees the open window and pillow on the sill, the sheer curtain wafting in and out on the summer breeze, before dropping his eyes to the little fox terrier sitting alongside the chair, studying him, alert as if also waiting for him to account.

  "I found it," he says, staring at the dog who stares back, weighing his words with beady, angry eyes. Then, curling its upper lip to show fangs, growls from deep down in its little chest.

  "Where did you find it?" Aunt May snaps.

  "In the schoolyard."

  "Liar!"

  "She gave it to me."

  Aunt May makes him push it all the way back. As he runs the gauntlet, he again keeps his head down, eyes to the pavement. The little girl is still there, bawlin', with her mother and a bunch of little girls. The other little girls are bawlin' too; he has no idea why. When the little girl sees him, she stops, runs to the carriage, snatches up her doll and hugs it. But when Aunt May holds him by the scruff of the neck in front of the little girl and tells her to give him a good slap right across his face, she starts bawlin' again. Staked out by bloodthirsty hostiles, his face burns under their piteous stares. In sight of the Stone Saints across the street giving him the ass, he prays with all his might that all the windows in all the houses on every block be nailed shut.

  BOTTOM OF THE SIXTH

  BY ALAN GORDON

  Rego Park

  laster dust fell lazily through the air. He watched it idly, betting on which finger it would land. His right hand was dominating his field of vision at the moment. His right hand, and the dust that drifted down from the crappy plasterboard someone had once used to patch up the ceiling, so old and crumbled that a loud noise could loosen it.

  Like, say, a gunshot.

  The dust fell on his ring and middle fingers, which twitched slightly when it hit them. That was a good thing, he decided. He moved the other three fingers, then rotated his hand on the floor where it rested. Even better. He was falling very much in love with the plaster dust, with his working fingers, with the hand and the wrist that turned it. He did a quick inventory of the rest of his body. Everything seemed accounted for, or at least attached. Something hurt around the right side of his rib cage.

  Let's try breathing, he thought. Haven't done that for a while.

  He sucked in air, and started to cough violently. The thing that hurt in his rib cage, which apparently had only been kidding before, began to throb badly. He used the right hand that he still liked so much to poke cautiously at the spot. It was tender and painful. But it wasn't bleeding. Protruding slightly from the inside of the vest was the mashed tip of a bullet.

  Michaels pushed himself up from the floor, pointing his gun unsteadily in front of him.

  "You okay?" asked Carter, who was getting to his feet.

  "Basically, yeah," said Michaels. "Might have cracked a rib."

  Carter looked at Michaels's vest, which had a neat entry hole on the front.

  "Damn, those things actually work," he said. "Who knew?"

  "Not that guy," said Michaels, pointing in front of him.

  The man lying on the floor was groaning weakly, two bullet holes in his back and a pool of blood seeping out from under him.

  "Shot his own man in the back," observed Carter. "Just because he got in the way. That's cold."

  A pile of blue uniforms burst through the door, guns drawn.

  "Oh good, now you're here," wheezed Michaels. "Tell me you got him."

  "Got who?" asked one of the uniforms.

  "Wasn't someone supposed to be covering the fire escape?"

  "Yeah. Merck. He's still out there. He didn't see anything."

  Michaels and Carter looked at each other.

  "Two-bedroom apartment," said Michaels. "There's the door, which was us, and the fire escape, which is Merck. Where is the fucker?"

  One of the uniforms called for EMS. The two detectives and the other three fanned out across the living room. Carter took a deep breath, then kicked open a bedroom door. He waited two beats. Nothing happened.

  "Portillo, if you're in there, you know you ain't getting away," he called. "Make this easy. No one got hurt."

  "Wait a second," protested Michaels.

  "Shut up, I'm working," said Carter. He barged through the door, a uniform close behind.

  "Clear!" they called a second later.

  Carter came out and looked at the second bedroom.

  "Portillo, I am not playing!" he shouted. "Don't get any stupider on me!"

  There was no response. Carter sighed, then kicked the door in.

  "Fuck me, it's empty," he said, peering inside. "Guy did a Houdini. Where'd he go?"

  "Hey, detective," called a uniform from the first bedroom. "Take a look at this."

  They all crowded in. There was a floorboard that wasn't quite flush with the rest. The uniform pulled, and a section of floor came up. The hole underneath was ringed by a dozen brick-sized packages wrapped in layers of plastic.

  "Crawl space," said Carter, shining a flashlight into it. "Looks like it goes all the way to the elevator shaft. He's probably gotten to the basement by now."

  "Not one of our finer days," said Michaels.

  The EMS crew came in and went to work on the wounded man. Michaels took his first deep breath, regretting it immediately. He pried the bullet out of his vest and tossed it to one of the uniforms.

  "Bag this," he ordered. "Bag the coke. Get Evidence Retrieval in here for prints. I'm gonna ride along with the Swiss guy."

  "I thought he was Latino," said the uniform. "How do you figure he's Swiss?"

  "'Cause of all the holes in him," said Michaels.

  The ambulance screeched up the ramp to the emergency room at Queens General, with Carter's Corvette pulling up right behind them, his bubble light flashing on top. Two RMPs brought up the rear.

  "I want him guarded 24/7," said Carter to the uniforms. "Two men at all times, and heads up. If this guy wants to finish the job, he'll come in blasting."

  They followed the gurney inside. There was a flurry of green scrubs and shouting, then the doors to the OR hissed shut, leaving the two detectives standing with a surgeon.

  "How long for the operation?" asked Michaels.

  "To take the bullets out, not long," said the surgeon. "But we got to get Neuro down to take a look at the spine. I don't think the guy walks again."

  "He wasn't going anywhere, anyways," said Michaels. "We'd like him alive and talking."

  "Don't worry, that's what we do," replied the surgeon. "Welcome to Gunshots 'R' Us."

  He vanished through the doors. Carter tugged on Michaels's arm.

  "What?"

  "I figure that adrenaline rush you've been coasting on is about to run out," said Carter. "Let's get you looked at before you crash and get all whiny with it."

  Cracked rib, said the ER nurse. Cracked rib, said the X-ray tech. By the tim
e an actual doctor came by and peremptorily taped him up, the formal diagnosis was an afterthought. The doctor pulled out a prescription pad, then looked at him quizzically.

  "How much do you want it to not hurt?" he asked.

  "What's the tradeoff?" asked Michaels.

  "You have any desire to be awake anytime in the near future?"

  "Actually, I do," said Michaels. "But give me something for when I need to sleep without screaming."

  The doctor scribbled something. "You're a lucky man today," he said as he handed it to him.

  "I guess I am," said Michaels. "Not really feeling it yet."

  He walked out of the ER. Carter was waiting for him.

  "They told me you got a cracked rib," he said.

  "So I heard," said Michaels. "How's our boy?"

  "Still in surgery," said Carter. "And Birnbaum's here."

  "He wants to debrief us?"

  "That's one way of putting it."

  Birnbaum's moods were measured on the Richter scale. From the looks of his complexion, which was veering into the deep-purple end of red, there was major activity happening along his faultline.

  "Routine execution of a search warrant, that's what you said," he fumed. "That is what you said, isn't it?"

  "Yes, captain," answered Carter.

  "And now I got an escaped cop-shooter with no description," said Birnbaum. "Wonderful. Let's call the Post and share our little victory."

  "I didn't really get shot," explained Michaels. "I got shot at. The bullet did not technically enter my body."

  "And my foot will not technically connect with your ass," retorted Birnbaum.

  "We did get twelve keys of coke off the street," pointed out Carter. "And one guy to charge them against."

  "Oh, that was good work," said Birnbaum. "Did he put up a struggle as you put the cuffs on, or was he too busy bleeding on the floor? Get Portillo, and then I can start sticking medals on someone.