by Ed Gorman
O’Toole stood back, watching me with vengeful eyes.
“You keep turning up, boyo, like a bad penny,” Gallagher said. “How d’ye come to be here? Better question yet, why were you in the subway tunnels in the first place?”
“Same as you, Pat,” I said. “Chasing runaways.”
“You don’t turn your kids out, Mickey,” he said. “What are you about?”
“Answering to my own conscience,” I said.
Gallagher stepped in close, so we were standing shoulder to shoulder. “The girl died of a broken neck,” he murmured.
I nodded. “One of her clients?”
“Most like,” he said.
I looked past him. August van Rensellaer stood ten yards away, at the edge of the incline, but in the shadows, not in the light. Gallagher didn’t have to follow my gaze.
“I’d be guessing, mind you,” Gallagher said, still speaking under his breath. “Yank my Doodle, it’s a dandy.”
“My first question would be how he came to be here, Pat,” I said. “How much is he paying for your protection?”
“Well, now, Mickey, those kids have proved to be a nuisance and an eyesore, and a detriment to the neighborhood.”
“So a complaint from a concerned and well-connected citizen would encourage you to clean house.”
“We serve at the public’s pleasure,” he said.
“You feed at the public trough,” I told him.
“Hell,” Gallagher said. He waved a hand at van Rensellaer. “You can’t pin the killing on him. Could have been anybody.”
“Not just anybody was scared enough to call in his markers, and get a bent cop on the case.”
He smiled. “Which isn’t evidence. It’s simple dislike for the man, on your part.”
“I doubt if he’s a likeable man,” I said.
Gallagher stepped back. “You’re welcome to talk to him,” he said. “Be circumspect, if it’s in your nature.” He grinned. “But the more threatened he is, the better I like it.”
The more money in his pocket, he meant. I walked over to van Rensellaer, the loose earth sucking at my shoes. He glanced at me, recognized that I was of no importance, and looked away.
“The kids in the tunnels,” I said. “They live there because they have nowhere else, and they work the streets out of necessity. They’re victims almost by design.”
He didn’t give me a second glance “I don’t believe I know you,” he said, dismissively.
“No,” I said. I started to turn away, discouraged, but I thought about the look Judy might give me later, and turned around again. “I know your wife,” I said. “I knew her when she was a whore.”
“She’s still a whore,” he said. “But her price went up.”
A vein began throbbing in my temple. “Her price is her own dignity,” I said to him.
He condescended to make eye contact with me. “Were you the lowest bidder?” he asked.
I blinked back my anger. My temples were about to burst.
“Or did you offer rescue?” van Rensellaer asked, smiling.
I shifted my weight and kicked the earth out from under his left foot. Off-balance, he tumbled over the edge. I threw myself after him into the trench, dirt and loose stones getting up my sleeves. “Goddamn it,” Gallagher shouted, waving O’Toole and the uniforms in.
I rolled over on top of van Rensellaer, straddling his lower body, and hit him once hard, on the bridge of the nose. I felt the bones in his face break, and the knuckles in my hand.
I lifted him off the ground, shaking him by his shirtfront “You bastard,” I said. “You’re not safe from me.”
His eyes were wide and frightened, but uncomprehending
I shook him again. “I’ll kill you, Augie,” I said, my face inches from his. “That’s a promise you can take to the bank.”
O’Toole scrambled down the slope and hauled me back.
The uniforms picked van Rensellaer up and dusted him off. He was staring at me, blood leaking out his nose, but he didn’t say anything. I took it to mean he understood I’d meant exactly what I told him.
I shrugged out of O’Toole’s grip.
He stayed behind me, oddly passive, and made no move to cuff me. I looked up at Gallagher, standing at the edge of the trench. He shook his head, but it wasn’t in disappointment. He was a man who knew the usefulness of hate.
So the Black Cardinal, Johnny’s father, went unsatisfied. He would have benefited from van Rensellaer’s embarrassment, if it had turned out to be financial, not personal. But the August van Rensellaers of this world have a habit of shrugging off scandal. It’s not simply the brute power of their money; it has more to do with the imperviousness their money breeds.
“So there’s no justice for her death?” Dede asked me.
“There’s no retribution,” I said.
I didn’t tell her she might be sleeping with the man who’d murdered Maggie. Justice has a way of seeking its own level. Dede had asked me to look after the girl, and I was only able to lay Maggie’s ghost to rest. An unresolved conclusion.
Judy was likewise less than happy. I was turning out to be unlucky with women.
“Social Services has the lot of them,” she said.
“They’ll be back on the streets in a week,” I said.
She eyed me leerily.
“Easy pickings, we recruit the ones with promise.”
Judy studied on it, and grinned. “Okay,” she agreed.
And a package came, a couple of days later. No return address, no card. It was a bottle of Canadian rye. I knew that the bank loans to Israel had been approved.
I cracked the bottle and poured myself a couple of fingers. I inhaled the scent. Good, smoky stuff.
Absent friends, I thought. I tipped back the glass.
DAVID EDGERLEY GATES lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Story, and A Matter Of Crime, and been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and World’s Finest Mystery And Crime. His previous work has been nominated for both the Shamus and Edgar awards, and “Skin and Bones” is a 2009 Edgar nominee for best mystery short story. “Mickey Counihan, like the bounty hunter Placido Geist, is pretty much a character who came out of nowhere; he was unrehearsed and unanticipated. The stories are essentially about his voice: think an old Harp at the far end of the bar, telling tall tales. Mickey is of course an invention, a narrative device, but no less real to me for that.”
La Vie En Rose
BY DOMINIQUE MAINARD TRANSLATED BY DAVID BALL
I.
On rue de Belleville, Japanese tourists who had come to see the steps on which Edith Piaf entered the world lingered under the April drizzle, protected by odd little hats of pink, translucent plastic with the logo of a travel agency on them. All the way to boulevard de Belleville, two hundred yards further down, the bright red signs in Chinese characters gleamed through the mist. Legendre turned left into the labyrinth of little cobblestone streets leading to the park, swung the wheel hard to avoid the kids playing soccer in the puddles. Anvaud was trying to drink out of the thermos of coffee his friend made when his radio had started crackling half an hour ago. They had gone to bed very late and he had a hard time waking up, but his heart jumped when he saw police cars stopped a few dozen yards up the street with their lights flashing.
Legendre parked the cat at the end of the street and winked at Arnaud.
“I have to be careful,” he said. “They’ve seen me hanging around the neighborhood too much, one of them threatened to give me a ticket for obstruction of justice. You coming?”
When Arnaud hesitated, Legendre held out the car keys with a theatrical gesture.
“Okay, you’d rather stay warm,” he said. “That’s your problem. You’ll find CDs in the glove compartment. But I’m telling you, man, if you want inspiration for your book, this is the place to find it.”
Arnaud shrugged with a forced smile.
He was almost sorry he’d told Legendre about it a few days ago, out of boredom, out of loneliness; but the truth is, even if he hadn’t seen the guy since college, there was no one else he could talk to about it. At the beginning of the winter, Arnaud had gone on unemployment insurance to start writing the novel he’d been thinking about for a long time; 181 days, he’d counted them, and he hadn’t even succeeded in finishing four chapters. All winter he’d paced through his apartment watching the leaves fall from the chestnut tree under his windows and onto the sidewalk, soon to become invisible. He’d felt himself sinking into the inertia and calm of his little town in the suburbs — what a cliché, he thought, a former Literature major, the ambitions, the powerlessness.
After a meal washed down with a lot of wine — he’d accepted the cigarette Legendre had offered him, and since he didn’t smoke very often he was dizzy and laughed as easily as if it had been a joint — he had dropped a few words, negligently, about this novel he’d given himself till spring to finish, adding that it was coming along, it was coming along nicely. Legendre had tried to get it out of him and finally he admitted it was a noir novel, but he didn’t want to say very much more. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t. He had only said his hero would be a private detective, his victim a woman, she’d live in Paris and work in the world of the night, a stripper or a prostitute. And who’ll be the murderer? Legendre had asked, and Arnaud had raised his eyebrows with an air of mystery. If I tell you, there won’t be any suspense, he’d answered; but the truth was, he didn’t know himself. He didn’t have a feel for crime, he hated to admit, and the five months he’d spent going through short news items in the newspapers hadn’t changed a thing. When he tried to understand what could drive a man to close his hands around a woman’s neck, he couldn’t imagine it and he told himself this was a terrible start for a novelist. Would his murderer be a pimp, a customer, a serial killer? It was absurd to already have the victim and the setting and be unable to find the murderer, as if a writer could be worse than a bad cop.
He knew Legendre worked for the newspapers and that’s what had led him to get back in touch with the guy: the confused hope that since his old friend had written stories about ordinary daily dramas, he had pierced this secret and could reveal it to him.
When he spoke to Legendre about his novel, his friend had slapped him on the shoulder, pointed to the radio on a shelf, and said: “Dig that: It’s a police transmitter. When something happens in the neighborhood, sometimes I manage to get there before they do and I sell my photos for five or six hundred euros. Come sleep over next weekend and if something happens, I’ll take you along. With a little luck you’ll get to see him, your ideal killer. Don’t kid yourself, though, there’s not much going down right now.”
But the transmitter had started crackling early in the morning, and hearing the code the police use, Legendre jumped to his feet and shook Arnaud, who was sleeping on the floor of the two-room apartment situated over an Asian produce store with its fetid stench of durian. Come on, he’d said, this is the real thing, and twenty minutes later they were turning onto rue Jouye-Rouve.
Several of the entrances to the Pare de Belleville hadn’t been closed off, so they got in without difficulty. They were not alone; onlookers were crowding the paths, teenagers especially, standing on tiptoe to peer over the metal fences and the yellow police tape stretched from one tree to another. Despite the gray sky you could see all of Paris, just slightly veiled in mist, even the Eiffel Tower to the west. The catalpa trees were in bloom, tulips were standing straight up in carefully spaded triangles of soil, and the park’s little waterfall was murmuring; but in the middle of the roped-off space there was a slight swelling under a gray tarp. The fine drizzle had almost stopped; only the smell of moss and undergrowth remained hanging in the wet air. The spectators crowded behind the yellow tape in a warm, motionless mass, and Arnaud almost felt good: It was the first time he had ever been so near a crime scene and he was discovering the silence interspersed with whispers, the strange complicity of the crowd, that morbid fascination, the almost superstitious fear — but also the hope that a corner of the gray tarp would be lifted to reveal a hand or a leg.
Legendre had gone off. Arnaud heard him murmuring a few yards away, moving from one bystander to another. After two or three minutes his friend came back, grabbed him by the arm, and led him away from the crowd.
“I got some information,” he said in a low voice. “It’s a kid, a mixed-race girl seventeen or eighteen years old, Layla M. She grew up here but she’d been living with a guy for a year. She danced in a nightclub in Pigalle and they say she also slept with the customers. She was strangled to death. See, you’ve got your story now! All you have to do is find out who did it and you’ve got your book.” He glanced at the gray tarpaulin and went on: “Got something to write with? Go question the neighbors, the people who live in the old building over there — the one with the Hotel Boutha sign, on it — they might’ve seen something. I’m gonna stay here and try to grill these guys — discreetly. Hurry up, you got to be the first to question them. If you go in after the cops they won’t want to say a thing.”
Reluctantly, Arnaud walked away from the crowd. He was cold in his light jacket and he would have liked to stay in the circle, the cocoon of onlookers. “But I can’t,” he protested, “I’ve never done that. What the hell gives me the right to question them?”
And Legendre threw open his arms, exasperated. “I thought you wanted to get involved. If you’d rather sit in front of your computer tearing your hair out, that’s your problem.”
Arnaud felt ashamed to have hidden his secret so poorly. “But what am I going to tell them?” he insisted, and Legendre answered with a wink before he turned away:
“Tell ‘em you’re a private detective. They should like that and it’ll give you something to think about.”
Arnaud waited until Legendre went away; then he groped around in the vest pocket of his jacket, took out the notebook and pen he always carried on him, and walked to the gates of the park. Hotel Boutha was a bit higher up, and Legendre had a point: It was the only building whose windows let you see out onto this part of the park. On the facade, a notice was nailed under the old hotel sign — Condemned Building — but the apartments were obviously inhabited. In the lobby, overflowing garbage cans almost prevented him from going in, and the mailboxes had been broken into so often that their doors were dangling from the hinges; the names on the boxes were all faded out, illegible. Arnaud wrote down these details in his notebook and even copied the red graffiti on a wall. He felt a vague sense of shame, taking advantage of the situation to get his hands on these fragments of reality, like a petty thief. Then he made his way between the garbage cans and walked up the stairs.
He rang the doorbells on the second and third floors hut nobody answered; a baby was crying behind one door, but no one opened it. A little girl in pajamas opened the door next to it. Her hair was made up in dozens of braids; she looked at him in silence, but before he had a chance to say a word, her mother appeared, with hair braided the same way, and as quietly as her daughter, pulled the child back and closed the door. He started up the stairs again. The stairway smelled of urine and vegetable soup but he didn’t have the heart to write it down any more than he’d had the heart to note the serious silence of the child and her mother. For a moment he thought of going back down and telling Legendre the building was empty, but then he heard a door open on the fourth floor and when he got up to the landing, he saw an old man watching him intently from the threshold of his apartment.
The man must have been waiting for him — or the police, more likely — because a plate of cookies was sitting on the kitchen table next to the entrance, as well as cups with coffee stains in them.
“Good morning, sir,” Arnaud said, holding out his hand, “I’m a private investigator looking into the crime that just occurred down there.” And the old man shook his hand with surprising gentleness.
He was wearin
g a big plaid jacket even though it was quite hot in the apartment, and a woolen cap he immediately took off with an embarrassed look: “I don’t even know when I’m wearing it anymore. Come in, come in.”
Arnaud remained in the doorway with his notebook in his hand, tapping the cover with his pen. “I don’t have much time, sir,” he said. “I have to question the whole building.”
But then the old man smiled knowingly, as if he was well aware that no one had opened their door for him on the lower floors, and simply repeated: “Please, come on in.”
Arnaud hesitated. Later, he wouldn’t be able to recall how he’d guessed the old man knew something; maybe because just as he was about to refuse again, the old man’s smile had hardened and he’d looked Arnaud straight in the eye. So he nodded and said, “Just five minutes,” and with two steps he was right there, in the kitchen. An old dog was sleeping under the radiator, stretched out on a plaid blanket the same colors as the old man’s jacket, and he didn’t even open his eyes when Arnaud pulled a chair over for himself.
As the old man puttered around in the kitchen, checking that the coffee was hot, putting the sugar bowl and a glass of milk on the table, he said: “She’s a kid, right?”
“Yes,” replied Arnaud, looking out the window at the trees in the park. Between their branches, blobs of color — the onlookers — were pressing against the yellow tape. “Layla M., seventeen or eighteen years old, they told me. She died from strangulation.” He was trying for the neutral voice of the private detective he claimed to be. “That means she was strangled, see.”
The old man had his back turned. His hands were in the sink; he was mechanically running spoons and knives under the faucet. He didn’t say a word.
“Seems she grew up near here,” Arnaud continued. “She hadn’t been living in the neighborhood for a few months, but I thought some people would be bound to remember her. You yourself — did you know her, by any chance?”
