by Ed Gorman
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Are you going to help her?”
“She’s vanished.”
“How can that be?”
“My kids tell me she hasn’t been seen on the street for the last day and a half.” In case she missed the point, I made it more specific. “She might have slipped through the cracks, but nobody’s noticed her since you came and asked me whether I could get chummy with her.”
“This isn’t good, Mickey,” she said.
“You’re telling me?”
Dede ducked her head. “I’m telling you,” she said.
The runaway truck flattened me about an hour later, when it came full dark, eight o’clock that night, say.
It was my own damn fault.
I’d seen her home, from a discreet distance, of course; she never knew I was there.
Then from Beekman and Sutton, I’d walked over to the UN construction site. Why it conjured much up, I couldn’t say. It was still a morass.
There were cops all over the place. I should have walked away, and I started to, but O’Toole caught me looking.
First he cuffed me. Then, with my hands behind my back, he cracked me across the face.
“Give over that,” a voice said. It was Gallagher.
I was leaking blood and snot, and I could do no better than wipe my nose on the upper part of my sleeve.
“You were asking about this girl,” Gallagher said.
I hawked up a gob. My face hurt. “Which girl?” I asked.
“The dead one,” he said. “What reason did you have to kill her?”
I was behind in the pitch count.
“Aw, now, Mickey,” Gallagher said, leaning in close, “you’d be the last one to have seen her alive, I don’t miss my guess.”
“When would that have been?” I asked.
“Last hour or so,” he said. “Back of her body’s still warm to the touch.”
I couldn’t very well use Dede for an alibi, although she’d have been eager to give it, in spite of the embarrassment. “How do you mean, the back of her body?” I asked him
“After the rape, you drowned her in three inches of water,” he said. “Held her facedown until she choked.”
“You’re telling me she’s not even stiff yet?”
He shrugged. “There’s no rigor to speak of. You ready to come clean with me?”
“You’re sucking air, Pat,” I said. “You’ve got no gas in the carburetor. I had no motive to kill the girl, for one, and if she died in the last two hours, I’ve got witnesses who’ll place me elsewhere, and I don’t mean the kind of witnesses I can buy. Now get over yourself. Take off the cuffs.”
“It was worth a shot,” he said, and signaled to O’Toole.
O’Toole unlocked the handcuffs and left my hands free.
“Get lost,” Gallagher said, turning away.
I massaged my wrists. “Tell fat boy not to do that again,” I said.
Gallagher swung around. I felt O’Toole’s whiskey breath on the nape of my neck.
“Fat boy, is it?” Gallagher inquired, dangerously.
“I’ll take the gun back too,” I said. O’Toole had frisked me and taken the .38 Super autoloader.
There was a moment where it could have gone either way, but pride gave way to the practical. Indecision, or loss of nerve? I couldn’t say. Gallagher knew I had a Sullivan Act card, which meant I could legally carry a firearm concealed. He raised his chin. O’Toole handed me the .38, butt first. I reversed it and tucked it inside my waistband at the small of my back.
“All right, then,” Gallagher said, dismissively.
“Show me the victim,” I said.
He hesitated, and then shrugged. “Why not?” he agreed.
We made our way down into the enormous trench. The soil was loose and the footing treacherous. Banks of emergency lights cast deep pools of shadow. Up on more solid ground, a diesel generator hammered. Gallagher and I stumbled through the muck, earth sucking at our shoes.
The dead girl was at the bottom of the slope, her clothes disordered, her limbs splayed out akimbo, the exposed skin pale and clammy, tinged with a bluish cast. Skin and bones, Dede had said. The body looked to weigh no more than eighty pounds. I glanced upslope toward the lip of the trench. There were footprints everywhere. Whatever might have been there to see, once upon a time, had been trampled across, twice over. I knelt down beside the corpse. Her hair was dark, stringy and matted, clotted with mud. I lifted a strand away from her face. Her eyes were still open, but without depth or reflection. The dead are like that, their eyes lightless. I grunted to my feet.
“What do you know about this, Mickey?” Gallagher asked.
“No more than you,” I said. “Probably less.” I looked up, studying the slope again. “But she didn’t die down here.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Educated guess,” I said. “I’d imagine you could gain access to the site through a break in the boardings.” I pointed up at the plywood barrier at street level. “Ease through the fencing, you’d be in darkness, have some privacy. Enough to get your business done and not be interrupted.”
“Her business was on her knees,” Gallagher said.
I nodded “A man your size, or mine, how much trouble would it be to strangle her with your thumbs?” I asked him. “Or break her neck? As easily as a pigeon’s.”
“Or a soiled dove,” he remarked.
“There’s bruising on her throat, Pat,” I said.
“Dirt,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Black-and-blue marks.”
He looked at his feet. “You figure he killed her up there and then slid her over the edge.”
“Take her to Bellevue,” I said. “Have a coroner examine the body. I doubt that she drowned or suffocated. I’d say she died before she got to the bottom of the hole.”
“Waste of time,” he said. “She’s just another runaway.”
Discarded. It put me in mind of Judy. “I’ll make it worth your while,” I said.
“Will you?” He looked at me, his interest rekindled “Why would you do that?”
I looked down again at the dead girl at our feet, her white limbs spilled crossways in the dirt. “A debt,” I said.
“What do you owe a dead whore?” he asked me.
“The future she never had,” I told him.
So there it was, for all to see. Mickey Counihan, a fool for sentiment. I didn’t much care how it looked, and it might even play to my advantage. Pat Gallagher was a man who’d be quick to probe an imagined weakness.
I held a war conference. My troops were battle hardened, after a fashion, wise in the ways of grown-up perfidy, but green where politics were concerned, which I feared they might be.
The captains I chose were Judy and her Artful Roger. “It’s the same assignment,” I told them, “but the stakes are higher. We’re fudging with a homicide investigation, and the cops won’t welcome our attention. Don’t tangle with either Gallagher or O’Toole. They’re dangerous men. Gallagher because he’s crafty and smart, but O’Toole because he’s cunning and stupid.”
They were both very solemn.
“Why did she die?” Judy asked me.
“I’m thinking she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it could happen to any of you,” I said.
“But it won’t,” she said.
“Not if I can help it,” I told her, “but you’re going in harm’s way, and I admit I’m putting you there.”
“Is this about her, or us?” she asked.
Fair question, I thought.
“I mean, isn’t this personal with you, Mickey?” she asked.
“Ach, it’s all personal, Judy,” I said. “She stands in for the rest of you.”
“But she got thrown away.”
Wise beyond her years. “Somebody threw her away,” I said.
“And you want us to find out who.”
“Find out who she was, first,” I said.
&n
bsp; “Maggie, that was her name on the street.”
“You can call her that, then.”
“We called her that.”
I took a breath. “Judy, a girl was killed. You can decide on the name. It doesn’t matter to her.”
She gazed at me evenly. “Matters to us,” she said.
There were too many variables.
I’d been drawn in on the oblique. Dede. And now her husband. And why was Gallagher so ready to paper it over? He was a man with an eye for the main chance, which meant it was political, in the narrow sense, that of self — interest-but all politics is about self-interest, so perhaps it boiled down to whoever, or what, Gallagher was protecting. Turf, or an investment, which probably led back to one or another of the Mafia families, but that seemed too generalized. Bid-rigging on construction, short pours for concrete, mob influence in the building unions. The UN project, for one, was an enormous undertaking, with plenty of wiggle room to inflate costs, but that in itself was either too large, or altogether insufficient, to explain Gallagher’s proprietary attitude. He had something more specific in mind. It strikes me funny, now, looking back on it, that he’d been so ready to let me off the hook. The murder charge wouldn’t have stuck, but he could have taken me off the streets for seventy-two hours on suspicion, or as a material witness, and he’d held his fire, he’d held his temper, he’d kept O’Toole on a short leash. I had the uncomfortable feeling he was only giving me enough rope, and the phrase that came to mind was stalking horse.
Which brought my thoughts around to Dede again. Unworthy thoughts, yes, but she was no unsoiled dove, and our history was such that I could be manipulated.
On the other hand, if I took Dede at face value, gave her the benefit of the doubt, and further, if I considered the very real possibility that Pat Gallagher might be fishing on an empty hook, trawling dark waters without any bait, then the situation presented itself in a different light. They were none the wiser than I was.
Something missing, then. A different actor, off-stage, or a different play completely. We’d come to rehearse one drama, and been given the wrong script. Somebody else had all the good lines. We were only extras.
Judah Benjamin, the Negro doorman at the Sutton Place address, wasn’t on duty when I dropped by the next morning. The guy working the shift, also colored, but a younger man, was less than forthcoming about when Judah would be there, so I left it alone. I didn’t want to give him reason to remember me, or draw too much attention to my movements.
Call me overcautious, but the whole business seemed to be getting too deep, and Maggie’s death was in itself an object lesson. It could have been, of course, an unhappy accident, one of the hazards of her trade. I imagined otherwise.
Russians, Arabs, and Jews. Judah had meant the remark as generic shorthand, I thought. He might as well have said Danes or Canadians, but Denmark wasn’t fighting a war with Canada. In late 1948, the United Nations had recognized the partition of Palestine, the establishment of Israel, and the neighboring Arab states had attacked. They got their ass handed to them, much to everybody’s surprise. Or perhaps not. My own benighted people had been underwriting the IRA since before the Troubles, and why shouldn’t American Jews help smuggle guns into Haifa?
The problem with this scenario was that it was too damn general, like the UN construction project. What did it have to do with the murder of a fourteen-year-old street kid? How could she have put any of it, or anybody, at risk?
The wrong place at the wrong time, I’d said to Judy. Which meant I should be looking at it through the other end of the telescope. Who and where. Opportunity first, motive after.
Dede’s husband. Not the avenue I wanted to pursue, but where was I going to go next? Even a van Rensellaer needs his ashes hauled, I’d said to her. He never felt the lack, Dede had said to me. I had to wonder. What lack had he felt?
I decided to ask. Not that it proved easy.
He was a man with no visible means of support. He was a creature of inherited money. Which didn’t dispose him in my favor, but neither did it condemn him. The world is as it is, or how we find it, and if we’re not disposed to change it, then we’ve got no beef. I’m no Communist. A man takes the advantage he has, and fortune favors the brave.
I wanted to catch van Rensellaer at a disadvantage.
How otherwise? You might well ask.
Most of us are creatures of habit. Even if we don’t report to work on an assembly line, or go to an office, we develop a routine. Tinker to Evers to Chance. August van Rensellaer was cut from the same cloth as any commoner. He rose early and went for a walk along the river, taking a small, well-mannered dog. She was, I believe, a Bichon. He went back to the apartment house, dropped the dog off with his doorman, and headed inland, to Second Avenue, where he visited a hotel barber shop to get a facial of hot towels and his morning shave. The hotel was the Mont Royal, an old-fashioned kind of place, where half the rooms were let to long-time residents, and it had a cafeteria, where van Rensellaer took a breakfast of dry cereal and coffee, black. The problem lay not in opportunity, but in my approach.
And there was a further complication.
He was under surveillance by somebody else.
I was simply trawling his wake when I noticed. I broke off immediately.
They weren’t private detectives, and they weren’t NYPD. Hanging back, I made a team of three, working fore and aft, one ahead of him, one behind, one working laterally, from across the street. Their discipline seemed almost military. They treated the urban environment as hostile territory, like infantry, going house-to-house. And they were too furtive to be in van Rensellaer’s employ. If he’d felt in need of personal security, they would have stayed closer, where he’d recognize their presence, but they kept their distance. Van Rensellaer was the kind of man who imagined himself safe in any circumstance, insulated from harm because of money and position. He wasn’t a man to watch his back. He had no need.
I should have been watching mine.
They weren’t a team of three. They were a team of five. It was the woman who took me off guard. Late middle age, Jewish, enormous handbag, typical New York. She looked to be waiting for a bus. She swung back abruptly from the curb, into my path. I shifted course automatically, to slither past her. I was looking half a block ahead, and got jammed from behind. A kid stepped on my heels, I bumped into the woman, we all stood there looking at each other stupidly, and the apologetic Jewish mom stuck a .380 up against my belt buckle. The boy had another gun screwed into the base of my spine.
“Your dance, ma’am,” I said to her, hands down at my side.
“‘Bei mir bist du schön,’” she said, grinning.
I’ve known some tough Jews in my time. Benny Siegel, Meyer Lansky. They never shrank from the necessary. But this was the toughest bunch of Jews you’d ever want to meet.
They took me to a brownstone in the East Fifties, between Third and Lex, a leafy, upscale neighborhood, mostly residential, with the occasional discreet consulting surgeon’s office tucked into the ground floor. This was one such, with a brass plaque not so much advertising any particular medical service as announcing its exclusivity. There were no patients in the reception area. I was escorted into a small windowless examining room, where the frisk was thorough. Then they left me.
The room was perhaps twelve feet by eight, brightly lit. There were no cabinets or other built-in furnishings. There was a stainless steel table, on casters, big enough for a recumbent body, which I found a little sinister. There was a drain in the tiled floor. There was a single utilitarian folding chair, like something from a parochial school annex.
In my present circumstance, I was at the whim of somebody else’s schedule. I’d learn soon enough what was required of me. I sat down to wait.
Five minutes went by. Then ten. I allowed my metabolism to slow, lizard-like, and let my imagination cool. There was no point in making ill-educated guesses.
The door clicked open. I looked up.
The man in the doorway studied me for a moment. Then he stepped inside, closing the door behind him. He was short, thick through the upper body, with the heavy forearms of a boxer or a weight lifter. Lean in the hips, though, he walked on the balls of his feet, carrying himself almost like a dancer, but he had a specific gravity that kept him earthbound.
“My name is Wolf,” he said. He looked it, gray around the muzzle. I put him in his middle to late fifties. I disliked the fact that he’d told me his name, which suggested I might not live to repeat it. There was that drain in the floor.
“Mine is Mickey Counihan,” I said. “I work bare knuckles for the Hannah mob, on the West Side. You look like a man who’d know that line of endeavor. My guess is Irgun, or whatever you call yourselves these days, since Partition. Israeli hard boys with a recent grudge.”
“Not so recent,” he said, smiling. He hiked himself up on the steel table. The casters shifted under his weight. “I have a question for you, Mr. Counihan.”
“Only one?”
He shrugged. “It depends how you answer it,” he said.
“Van Rensellaer,” I said.
He lifted one hand, palm up. It was a gesture centuries old.
“I’ve got no reason to waste your time,” I said.
“Let’s not waste it, then,” he said.
“Why are you following him?” I asked.
He looked surprised, or disappointed in me.
“It’s going to waste less of our time,” I told him.
“Our time?”
“A girl was murdered last night. Her name was Maggie. She was all of fourteen years old. Van Rensellaer had, let’s say, made her professional acquaintance.”
“This girl in your stable?”
“I’m not a pimp.”
Wolf thought about it a beat. “What are you?” he asked.
“I’m muscle,” I said. “I run a numbers bank.”
He got down off the table. “Give me a minute,” he said.
“I’m on your clock,” I said.
He nodded, and left me in the room.
I put myself to sleep again.
The wait must have been a good twenty minutes this time.
