Two Trains Running

by Andrew Vachss

  “You’re some piece of work, Mr. Walker. One minute, you’re all tongue-tied; the next, you’ve got a line as slick as that boy’s hair oil,” she said, tilting her head in the direction of the man in the sharkskin suit.

  “It’s not Mister Walker,” Dett said. “Walker is my first name. My name is Walker Dett.”

  “Uh-huh . . .” she said, but her lips were beginning to turn into a smile.

  “If I start eating, you’re going to go away?”

  “Well, I have to—”

  “Oh, I know, you must have a lot to do, being the manager here and all.”

  “Manager? Me? Managers don’t wear uniforms like this.”

  “I’m sorry. I just thought, with you paying the landlord, this must either be your place or you’re running it for someone.”

  “Oh! That guy, he’s not the landlord. He just collects rent for the jukebox.”

  “Rent? I thought you bought those things.”

  “Well, you do. But you have to pay for the space. It’s . . . a little complicated.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be nosy. I was just . . . interested, I guess.”

  “You better eat that pie!” she said, sternly, and went back to the kitchen.

  * * *

  1959 September 30 Wednesday 23:09

  * * *

  By the time Dett was done with his pie, the man in the sharkskin suit had been gone for over a half-hour. The waitress had removed his cup and saucer, plucking a single bill from underneath. As she walked back toward Dett, she held up the five-dollar bill for him to see.

  “Big shot,” she said.

  “He always tips like that?”

  “Meg—she works the same shift as me; we take turns behind the counter—Meg says he does, but it’s always a dollar, not a five. This, this is ridiculous.”

  “It made you mad?”

  “Mad? Why would you think . . . Oh, damn! I’m blushing, right?”

  “You’re a little pink.”

  “You mean I’m a lobster! I know what I look like when I get mad. You don’t have to be nice.”

  “Why did it make you mad, what he did?”

  “Some of the girls, if they know a guy’s a big tipper, they’ll give him a little . . . extra. You know what I mean. Meg knows you’re a big spender, you get a real floor show!”

  “And you think that’s what he expected?”

  “I don’t know what he expected, but . . . whatever it is, he’d better come around when Meg’s behind the counter.”

  “The pie was perfect. It was the best I ever had.”

  “You’re very nice to say that.”

  “It’s the truth. But now I don’t know what to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not like . . . him,” Dett said, tilting his head in the direction of the register. “I wouldn’t want you to think I’m trying to be a big shot. Or that I thought I could buy anything—from you, I mean.”

  “I already know that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. You’re a man with manners. Nicky, he’s a pig.”

  “Nicky, that’s the guy who gave you the—?”

  “Yes. He walks around like he’s some kind of gangster. Did you see those clothes? Hah! He’s nothing but an errand boy, and everybody knows it. If Armand ever stopped paying the rent, it wouldn’t be Nicky they’d send around.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Never mind. It’s not important.”

  Dett looked down at the empty counter.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to . . . snap at you like that. It’s just that I’ve been here since three this afternoon, and I kind of run out of gas. Let me get you another cup of coffee.”

  “Thank you,” Dett said.

  * * *

  1959 September 30 Wednesday 23:54

  * * *

  Probably has it laid out so he can get it done the quickest, like a kid with a paper route, Dett thought, glancing down at the red-penciled marks on the street map Beaumont had given him. He drove slowly past a two-tone blue ’58 Mercury hardtop splayed arrogantly across two parking spaces directly in front of Penny’s Show Bar. Dett found a pocket of shadow between streetlights, positioned his side mirror so he could watch the door, and settled in.

  As he waited, Dett added up what he had learned so far. As a collector, Nicky Perrini was an amateur. He spent too much time in each place, talked too much, drove a car easy to spot, called attention to himself. Somebody’s nephew, Dett thought.

  It was almost twenty-five minutes by Dett’s watch before his target finally emerged from the bar. As Perrini opened his car door, the interior light went on. Unless he had someone lying across the back seat, or crouched down in the front passenger compartment, the collector was alone.

  Perrini drove off, the Mercury’s distinctive canted-V taillights marking his trail. Dett followed, varying the distance every few blocks, checking his mirrors to make certain he wasn’t being boxed.

  After a few minutes, the Mercury slowed, and Dett pulled closer behind. Perrini drove past a single-story building with CLUB MIDNIGHT on its marquee. The street was lined with cars on both sides, every spot taken except for a large space directly in front of the entrance.

  The Mercury turned left at the next corner, and slowed to a crawl. Dett did the hunter’s math: He’s not collecting from that joint—he’s going there for fun. And he hasn’t got enough clout to use that VIP spot, so he’s looking for a parking place.

  Gambling, Dett brought his Ford to a halt, then backed it into a narrow alley. He quickly put a red felt cap with tied-at-the-top black earmuffs on his head, slipped on a pair of deerskin gloves, and left his car. He flattened his back against the alley wall, then cautiously peered in the direction Perrini had driven. He spotted the Merc’s taillights as it reversed into a spot between two cars, parallel-parking. Probably at a fire hydrant, Dett thought, stepping out of the alley and walking briskly in that direction.

  Dett watched as Perrini locked his car, adjusted the lapels of his camel’s-hair coat, and ran a comb through his hair. Perrini crossed the street, heading back toward the nightclub, moving with overcooked self-assurance.

  Approaching his target, Dett began walking with a limp, his right hand held stiffly at his side for balance. He looked down at the sidewalk, as if ashamed of his condition.

  The gap between the two men closed. Dett felt a familiar calmness radiate from his center. His heartbeat slowed, his blood pressure dropped, and his senses sharpened like a safecracker’s sandpapered fingertips. He unclenched his right fist; a length of lead pipe dropped into his gloved hand.

  As they were passing each other wordlessly, Dett pivoted on his left foot and slammed the lead pipe into the back of Perrini’s head.

  The motion of his strike carried Dett down to one knee. He quickly scanned the street, then smoothly rolled Perrini over onto his back. The man’s nose was flattened, and his front teeth had penetrated his upper lip—he had been unconscious before he fell, meeting the sidewalk face-first.

  A quick search produced an alligator wallet from Perrini’s inside pocket. Dett shifted position so he could check the street in both directions. Thirty seconds, he told himself, as he removed a driver’s license before replacing the wallet. Adjusting Perrini’s left hand so that it rested on the sidewalk, palm-down, Dett used the butt of the lead pipe to shatter the collector’s expensive wristwatch, and maybe his wrist.

  Dett walked back across the street, got into his car, and drove out of the alley. A few blocks away, he pulled over and tossed the lead pipe into a vacant lot. It didn’t make a sound.

  * * *

  1959 October 01 Thursday 01:02

  * * *

  The diner was too packed for Dett to see whether Tussy was still at work as he drove by. He moved on, through the darkened streets, learning the city. It took him almost two hours to return to the pawnshop. Dett left the Ford in the street, locked it, a
nd opened the trunk, where he traded in the denim jacket for his armed overcoat.

  The dull metal shim Dett had left in the side door of the hotel was still in place. He let himself in, made it to the stairs undetected, and was in bed before three-thirty.

  * * *

  1959 October 01 Thursday 07:07

  * * *

  “When do you think he might be able to tell us something, Doc?” Detective Sherman Layne asked the stoop-shouldered man in a white lab coat.

  “Maybe in ten minutes,” the doctor replied, looking down at the body of Nicholas Perrini, “maybe never. He’s in a coma.”

  “Yeah, I can see that for myself,” Layne said. He was a tall, heavyset man, a human mass of ever-encroaching bulk who gave the impression of standing very close to whoever he spoke to. His voice—patiently insistent—reflected his personality. “What I want to know is, what’s the odds?”

  “Medical science isn’t a horse race,” the doctor said, haughtily, favoring the detective with his patrician-nosed profile.

  “Too bad it’s not. I could handicap a race a lot better than what you’re giving me now.”

  “Sorry,” the doctor said, making it clear he wasn’t—apology had deserted his language repertoire the moment he had finished his internship, more than thirty years ago.

  “Doc, I’m not trying to bust your chops, okay? In a case like this, there’s a dozen possibilities. If I thought it was even money this guy would wake up and tell us who slugged him, I could save myself a ton of work digging into his life.”

  “That’s important, saving work?” the doctor asked, archly. He had a high-domed forehead and thinning dark hair, carefully combed to minimize that fact.

  “You got any idea how overstretched we are for something like this? An assault investigation, most of the time, you don’t have to look any further than home, if you understand what I’m saying.”

  The doctor nodded absently, as he made some notations on the injured man’s medical chart.

  “Only, in this case,” the detective continued, “this guy’s home isn’t a place where we want to be asking a lot of questions. Not without more information.”

  “I don’t understand,” the doctor said, stifling a yawn.

  “He had his wallet on him. And the car was registered to him, too. Plenty of ID. We know who he is.”

  “So ask his—”

  “He’s got no family around here. No blood family, anyway. But we knew his name. He works for Dioguardi.”

  “I don’t know who that is,” the doctor said, his tone maintaining the distance between his world and the cop’s.

  “He’s a gangster, Doc. Set up shop here a while back. We’ve been watching him, but, so far, he hasn’t tried to move in on any of the local people.”

  “What does any of this have to do with—?”

  “Anytime we find a guy lying in the street with his head bashed in, first thing we do is check to see if he’s still got his wallet. That neighborhood, you have to figure he was rolled for his money. There’s a club a couple of blocks away. Guy staggers out of that joint, drunk, there’s men in this town would be on him like vultures on a corpse.”

  “But he still had his wallet . . .” the doctor said, drawn in despite himself.

  “An empty wallet,” the detective said.

  “So maybe he was robbed.”

  “Who’s going to brain a guy, snatch his wallet, remove all the money, and then put the wallet back?”

  “People do strange things,” the doctor said, returning to the disengaged distance he preferred.

  “Yeah. And one of those things is gamble. He wouldn’t be the first man to walk out of a club Tap City.”

  “Tap City?”

  “Broke.”

  “Yes. I understand there are a couple of places around here where it’s possible to gamble.”

  “Yeah. Just the way you want it,” the detective said, reacting to the doctor’s snide tone.

  “The way I want it?”

  “That’s right. You, the good citizens of Locke City. You want folks to be able to play cards, have a drink, have a good time with a girl who isn’t going to tell anyone about it. And what you want from us, from the police, what you want is for us to keep the animals in their cages. You don’t want them breaking into your houses, stealing your cars, raping your wives. And we do that. We do it good.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You know it is. Locke City’s a border town. If you were in my business, you’d know what that always means. There’s things people want to do, they’re going to do them. And they’re going to come to wherever they can do them. The factories closed up a long time ago. And they’re not coming back. But we’ve still got good roads to drive on. We’ve got nice schools for our kids. The crime rate—the real crime rate—is one of the lowest in the state.”

  “You sound like you should be running for office.”

  “People like you make me tired,” the detective said. “You like to pretend you don’t know what fuel this town runs on. But you’re happy enough that your taxes are so low.”

  The doctor raised an eyebrow theatrically. “So, if the tax rates were increased, then the sort of . . . vice you’re describing would all go away?”

  “Go away? No. Move away, maybe, but never disappear. Every time the government tries something like that, they just make things worse.”

  “Enforcing the laws would make things worse?” the doctor baited the detective, enjoying himself. This would make a wonderful story for his wife’s dinner party on Saturday.

  “You think medical school’s the only place they teach sarcasm?” the detective said, dropping the temperature of his voice. “It takes money to run a criminal organization. I don’t mean Bonnie and Clyde stuff, I mean a business. A business that owns a lot of busi-nesses. Did you watch the Kefauver hearings? A criminal organization can’t go to a bank for financing. And they can’t rob enough of them, either. Prohibition, that was their financing. And that was when they started to organize, branch out, take over things.”

  “We haven’t had Prohibition in this country for—”

  “Prohibition doesn’t have to be booze, Doc. It just means something you’re not allowed to do. See, there’s two kinds of crimes. There’s the ones everyone agrees you shouldn’t do: murder, rape, arson. . . . And there’s the ones everyone says you shouldn’t do, but they don’t mean it. I’m talking about fun, Doc. And not everybody’s got the same idea of what fun is. One guy spends his money deer-hunting, another spends it in whorehouses.”

  “And because of your limited resources . . .”

  “We have to concentrate on the crimes the citizens really care about, sure. But even if we had a force five times the size we’ve got now—”

  “A better-paid police force, I trust?”

  “You have a point you’re trying to make?” Sherman Layne said, his voice hardening perceptibly. “I must be missing it.”

  The doctor suddenly remembered some of the things he’d heard about Sherman Layne around the hospital. Buying time to craft his retreat, he took off his glasses and fussily polished the lenses on a monogrammed white handkerchief. “The only point that matters here is that there is no way to predict the course of an insult to the brain.”

  “Are you trying to—?”

  “An ‘insult,’ Detective,” the doctor said, twisting his upper lip. “As in ‘insult and injury.’ We can’t look inside this man’s head and determine the extent of damage to the brain, much less whether it will be permanent. He experienced extreme blunt-force trauma to the skull. This caused what is known as a contrecoup injury. The blow caused the brain to move forward at high speed, and impact the cranial wall. Some patients recover completely. Some recover physically, but they experience short-term memory loss. If that’s the case here, this man would recall who he is, but would have no memory for the period of time in which the attack occurred.”

  The doctor took a professional breath, then said, “Some never come
out of a coma. They remain in a persistent vegetative state, dependent on medical personnel and machines to keep them alive. Some die. Their internal systems simply shut down. This man is breathing on his own, which augurs in his favor. Beyond that, there is nothing I can tell you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have rounds to complete.”

  * * *

  1959 October 01 Thursday 15:33

  * * *

  “What are we supposed to do with this?” Beaumont asked Dett, holding up the driver’s license of Nicholas Carlo Perrini.

  “Not ‘we,’ me. I’m going to mail it to the people who’ve been sending that punk around to collect from your accounts.”

  “Why just the license?” Beaumont asked, genuinely interested.

  “A town like this one, the cops are going to say he was robbed anyway.”

  “Because his wallet—”

  “—will be empty, once they get done with it, right? That’s why I smashed his watch. If I hadn’t done that, the cops might have taken that, too.”

  Beaumont shifted position in his wheelchair, reached for his cigarette case. “When Dioguardi gets the license, what’s he going to think?”

  “He won’t know what to think,” Dett answered, “but he’ll know for sure it wasn’t any mugging. Getting the license in the mail, he’ll know it’s a message, from someone who knows what this Nicky boy was doing last night. And who he was doing it for.”

  “What’s the point of that? He already knows we’re on to him; you can’t keep collections a secret.”

  “Right. So, when he started edging in, that was sending you a message, wasn’t it?” Dett said.

  “You’d think so,” said Beaumont, “but you know what he’s tapping? Nickel-and-dime action. Armand’s, that diner where you saw him? They’re paying him twenty dollars a week. Some of the clubs, maybe a little more. Place like Fat Lucy’s—that’s a candy store, where the kids hang out—probably no more than a ten-spot. But then there’s that business with Hacker, I told you about it. If all that adds up to some kind of message, I can’t read it.”