The Double Vice: The 1st Hidden Gotham Novel

by Chris Holcombe

  Dash turned away from the body, bile rising in his throat. He thought he was going to vomit, but thankfully he didn’t. He waited for the spasms in his throat and stomach to stop. Then he turned his attention to the rest of the apartment. The front room was a mess. Furniture toppled over, books and papers scattered across the floor. There had been an immense struggle.

  A horrible thought occurred to Dash. Walter could still be in the apartment. Dash wished he had taken Atty’s gun when offered. Now here he was, standing next to a dead body, and her killer was armed while he had nothing with which to defend himself.

  He backed away and closed the door. Poor Marjorie. Her only sin was curiosity. Damn that evil Walter.

  As Dash walked down the hallway, he thought about where Walter would go next. If Paul didn’t have what he was looking for, then he’d go to Pru.

  “Oh no,” Dash moaned.

  He ran down the stairs and out into the rain. It took another ten minutes to find an empty cab in this weather. Time was ticking, and Walter was cleaning up all the loose ends from his brother’s betrayal.

  “Please, please,” Dash kept repeating to himself in the back of the cab.

  The cab driver glanced back at him with uneasiness, but Dash barely registered the movement. He kept thinking, please let me be ahead of Walter Müller for once.

  The cab roared up to Tammany Hall. Dash paid the driver and ran through the downpour to the offices of Meyers, Powers & Napier. The flashing neon of the Olympic and the Central Hotel felt mocking and absurd given the tragedies of the night.

  At the law firm, the door hung open, nearly ripped off its hinges. The wrath of Walter Müller. Dash waited a moment outside. If he saw another mangled body, he didn’t think he’d be able to withstand it.

  He took a deep breath. His only hope was that Pru wasn’t here; that Walter had just found the ledger in Pru’s safe. And he had no doubt that’s where it was.

  If any one of us could open it, it would be him.

  Dash wouldn’t have been surprised if the German used dynamite. Walter was beyond stealth at this point. He was a blunt battering ram, leaving destruction and debris in his wake.

  Dash stepped through the law firm’s doorway. The storm continued to rage outside but inside the office, the noise level dropped by half. Dash kept the door open in the hopes a good citizen would come along and report a break-in.

  The front room was dark. The air was still. Only loud, ragged breaths could be heard. Dash looked around, trying to find their source.

  Pru? Where are you, Pru?

  It took half a minute for him to realize the breaths were his own.

  “Thank the Lord,” Dash muttered to himself.

  “The Lord is not here.”

  Dash froze in place. At the end of the hallway that stretched behind the secretarial desk stood the shadowy figure of Walter Müller. He had been searching Pru’s office. A gun was aimed at Dash’s chest.

  Dash’s hands rose up slowly. “Mr. Müller. Fancy meeting you here.”

  Walter raised his other hand. The missing ledger was in it.

  “I found my ledger. So strange seeing one’s work like this. Filed and documented.”

  “Where is Pru?”

  “I’ve spent the last few days wondering how I got here.” The shadowy figure started toward Dash, inching its way down the hall. “I’ve had a lot of time for self-reflection, as they say.”

  Walter entered the front room. He gestured with his gun for Dash to move to the side. Dash did as instructed, carefully sidestepping, never taking his eyes off the German. Something inside Dash told him to keep Walter talking. Talking was time.

  And I may not have much of it left.

  Dash focused on keeping his voice steady and strong despite the fear flowing throughout his body. “I know everything, Walter.”

  The two men had circled until Dash was on the other side of the room with the secretary’s desk behind him and Walter ahead of him, blocking the front door.

  Walter smirked. Lightning flashed behind him. “Do you, Mr. Parker? I told you not to go snooping into my business.”

  “Your business was quite clever. Using your brother to find pansy and bulldagger speaks so you can have them raided and the occupants blackmailed. Quite inventive.”

  Dash looked around for a weapon. He could grab the desk lamp and hit Walter over the head with it. Yet he doubted he could move faster than Walter’s bullet.

  Walter’s voice was slick with derision. “Those so-called men and women would pay anything to keep their secrets hid.”

  Another low growl of distant thunder and the tabloid flashbulb of lightning. Could Dash duck behind the secretary’s desk before the bullets would fly? Would the desk even stop the bullets?

  “A creative solution for being fired from the Committee,” Dash said. “I bet that anonymous phone call was a surprise.”

  “My brother’s indiscretion costed me my job. And so, I would punish him.”

  Now it was Dash’s turn to feel disgust. “You used your brother in the most horrible manner possible.”

  “I disciplined him.”

  “You tortured him!”

  “Sin is not to be rewarded, Mr. Parker. Our God is a vengeful God, and sometimes he uses one of us to carry out his judgment. That is what I was doing. Administering judgment. To my brother. To those despicable, disgusting sodomites.”

  “Really? I thought you profiteering.”

  “Enough!”

  “But something unexpected happened. Something that threw a wrench into your ‘judgment.’ Karl fell in love.”

  “He did not love him!” Walter’s face was red with anger. Veins protruded from the sides of his neck. “You people are incapable of love! What you do is not love! It is perversion! It is sickness! It is disgusting!”

  Dash waited for him to finish his tirade. When Walter finally quieted, he said, “What you didn’t count on was Karl asking Tyler—the man he loved—for help. Tyler went to Paul, who got Pru involved. They would document your blackmail, collect evidence, and have you put away.”

  Walter smirked again. “They thought they could stop me. How foolish were they?”

  “They must’ve been some threat to you. Otherwise, why have me track them down?”

  “Which you did beautifully. And now, I have my ledger.” He shook it once in his hand. “No more evidence. And soon, no more witnesses.”

  Dash stared down the barrel of the gun in Walter’s hand, the icy fingers of fear working their way down his spine.

  Death does not forgive. Death does not forget.

  The charcoal metal flashed brightly with the lightning outside. One of the flashes illuminated the figure of Prudence Meyers crouched just outside the doorway. In the next lightning flash, Dash saw her blue steel pistol clutched in her steady hand.

  Walter cocked the hammer of his own gun, the motion making a sick-inducing click. “Mr. Parker,” he said, his voice calm and serene.

  Dash hoped Walter hadn’t seen the surprise he felt on his face. He needed to stall until Pru made her next move—whatever that would be.

  “What about your brother?” Dash said. “We both know what your mother did.”

  Walter fake pouted. “Tsk tsk tsk. Do you think I’m that stupid? Do you think I’m that sentimental?”

  “You were blotto the night you had to move his body from your apartment to Central Park. Ever since, your mother’s been drinking herself to death. I think you both realize the horror of what she has done.”

  Walter shook his head from side to side. “No, Mr. Parker. That will not work.”

  “Oh?”

  Pru slowly raised up, using her other hand to shield the Remington from the rain.

  “You don’t feel any remorse over what you did to your brother? You don’t feel any shame over a mother murdering her own son?”

  Pru was now inching towards the entrance. How could Walter not sense her? He must’ve been too focused on Dash.

  Keep hi
s attention.

  “Carrying your brother’s lifeless corpse must’ve filled you with such rage. That’s how you and Mother did it, am I right? Carrying him as if he were a passed-out drunk.”

  Walter just grinned his sick grin.

  “But if you didn’t love your brother, why you were drunk the next night? Stumbling around West Fourth, shouting how I killed him.”

  “I was drunk because my one source of income was now dead. And it was because of men like you, who filled his head with nonsensical things. Of how he could live as he wanted. In sin.”

  Dash shook his head. “No. You actually cared for your brother.”

  Walter adjusted his shoulders. The heavy gun must’ve been difficult to keep steady, to keep still. “Let me show you how sentimental we Müllers are. You know about my father, yes? How he dressed as a woman in the underground cabarets of Berlin?”

  Dash nodded. “It was his nature, Walter.”

  “Ha! Nature? Nature would never allow that! No, it is sin; it is the Devil, Mr. Parker. And it must be banished, snuffed out, destroyed. My mother knew that. It was why she called the Nazis, told them about the club, told them about him.”

  Dash’s eyes widened.

  Walter laughed. “So you see, we do not cry over dead perverts such as yourself.”

  “It doesn’t explain why she’s drunk every day and every night, Walter. Perhaps the thought of losing two men in her family—a son and a husband—was more than she could bear.”

  “I will show you how much we can bear,” Walter snarled. “First, I will aim this pistol at your foot and shoot it. I will do the same to your elbows and to your hands.”

  Pru had just crossed the threshold and was a mere few feet away from Walter.

  Dash said, “That’s a lot of bullets, Walter.”

  The German patted his pockets. “Don’t worry. I have enough. I will keep you alive as I shatter every joint in your body, Mr. Parker, even if you are begging for death. For as long as possible, I will make you suffer.”

  The dreadful mix of fear and anticipation was almost more than Dash could bear. He swallowed, his tongue thick, his throat dry.

  Hurry, Pru, hurry!

  He said, “Did they teach you that in Germany?”

  Walter hummed a trill of a laugh. “We Germans are an incredible people filled with incredible strength. And it takes a lot of strength to pull the trigger.”

  Pru by that point was directly behind Walter. She brought the blue steel Remington up in one smooth motion and placed the barrel against his temple.

  “You got that right, mister,” she said.

  Then she fired.

  Epilogue

  Round white headlights barreled towards Dash. A cab cutting through Jones Street. He stayed on the south side of Jones Street until the cabbie roared past.

  It was Friday evening, August 27, and Dash was determined to return the bounce to his step. He breathed in deep, taking in the sounds of the city at night. He wanted these sights and sounds to replace the ones currently living behind his eyes.

  In the last few days, he’d barely gotten any sleep. The events of the previous Tuesday night kept playing in a loop. He saw Mother’s dreamy expression as she described the killing of her son and the moving of his body as taking him to the Park.

  Then the dead body of Marjorie Norton and the bullet passing through the temple of Walter Müller. He didn’t think the images would recede anytime soon.

  Shortly after Pru had fired her lethal shot, she picked up the ledger from Walter’s lifeless hand and grabbed Dash’s live but trembling one and led him down the hallway.

  “There’s a backdoor which leads to an alley,” she said.

  “How did you know to come here?”

  “He broke into my apartment. I figured he’d come here next, if he hadn’t been already.”

  Dash tried to look back at Walter’s corpse, but Pru’s forward momentum prevented him from doing so. “What do we do about him? About Walter?”

  They took a sharp turn at the end of the hallway.

  “Listen to me,” she said, her voice firm. “We don’t have much time. Someone’s going to report the shots. The cops will be here soon.”

  “We can’t just leave him there!”

  Another sharp turn. A triple-locked door. Pru set about undoing the bolts. “You were never here. Neither was I.”

  She wrenched open the door. “Go home!”

  He didn’t understand but by that point in the evening, after all he had seen and heard, his mind had begun to shut down. He simply nodded, went out the backway, ran down the alleyway, and grabbed the first cab he could find. He returned to the Cherry Lane Playhouse, where he couldn’t speak for hours. Not even to Joe or Finn.

  Dash awoke the next morning to newshawks reporting a sensational breaking-and-entering at the law firm of Meyers, Powers & Napier. An unidentified man was found shot dead on the premises, and the firm’s safe was found hanging open, its contents emptied. Police surmised the unidentified man had a partner who got greedy and decided to keep the safe’s treasures for himself.

  The newshawks went on to describe the novelty of an all-female law firm, with a quote from Prudence Meyers saying, “We women are just as strong and just as tough as our male colleagues. Possibly more so, because we have so much more to prove.” Dash hoped the publicity would send defendants in droves to their doors.

  He later learned from the afternoon paper editions of a sad suicide in the new Germantown. After Dash had left Mother Müller—whose real name was Helga—to go racing to Paul Avery’s apartment, she had taken a bunch of sleeping pills with several glasses of bootlegged vodka. She died before the sun rose the next morning.

  Too much death, Dash thought. Far too much death.

  He pretended to go about his schedule as normal. Breakfast and lunch at the Greenwich Village Inn, where Emmett watched him with concern. “You’re as silent as The Ex-Pats,” he said Thursday morning, nodding to the traumatized former Wall Street traders.

  Dash only shrugged. “I think we’ve all seen some things we wished we hadn’t.”

  Soon the globe of Cullen McElroy walked into the Inn, leaning against the bar as Emmett paid his weekly bribe.

  “Thank you kindly,” the rotund officer said, pocketing Emmett’s hard-earned money.

  Dash was so exhausted, he couldn’t muster the energy to be disgusted by the man. He kept his eyes downcast.

  McElroy noticed. “Mr. Parker, are you well? You don’t seem your usual smart self.”

  “Late night,” he managed to say.

  McElroy chuckled. “You young ones. Never a dull minute.”

  You speak the truth.

  “Whatever happened to the blond kraut fella?”

  Dash’s eyes flashed up. He almost said “Walter?” but managed to stop himself. “I couldn’t say.”

  McElroy grinned. “You paid me to keep quiet about you.”

  “But you gave him my address anyway, didn’t you?”

  McElroy shrugged. “He paid me more. Did he find ya?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “What did he want?”

  “The name of an honest cop.”

  McElroy stared at him for a long moment. Then he laughed and shook his finger at Dash. “You young ones. You’ve got sass for days.” He looked at Dash once more, then nodded at Emmett. “I best be goin’. Thank you both for your contributions!”

  Emmett glared after him, muttering under his breath.

  “Easy, Emmett,” Dash said. “Last thing we need is him causing trouble.”

  Thursday night, Dash met with El at a Harlem speak after her set at the Oyster House. She said, “Les is still upset with you. Not sure when he’s going to let up.” She gave him a pointed look. “Not the smartest move accusing him of murder.”

  “The clues were pointing towards him.”

  “Uh huh. Clues have a way of pointing in the wrong direction sometimes. What ended up happening anyway? Did you fin
d out who did it?”

  Dash recounted for her the last few days.

  When he finished, El could only say, “Good Lord, Dash. You’ve been one cursed downtowner.”

  “That about sums it up,” Dash replied. “At least I fulfilled Zora’s favor, even if I didn’t pull the trigger.”

  Just like what happened to Leslie.

  El nodded. “Be thankful for that. You’re not a killer, Dash.”

  “I’m not so sure of that. My actions caused the deaths of several people, El. How am I going to live with that?”

  “Don’t make me slap some sense into your fool head,” El warned. “People will do what they’re going to do. Karl? He could’ve stayed put, could’ve done what you told him, and he’d be alive. Yeah, he overheard Les, but Les wouldn’t have done anything. He talks a big game but he’s no killer, same as you. He made a choice. A bad one. Then you were forced to make choices, some bad—like Zora Mae—and some good, like helping your friends. That’s all life is, making choices and hoping for the best. There’s no sense in reliving it because it doesn’t change anything. Are you listening to me?”

  Dash nodded. He knew what she was saying was right, but he couldn’t shake the regret pressing down on him like the August heat.

  Friday morning, Paul Avery was apprehended at the shipyards trying to board a boat to Europe. It turned out Pru had turned him in to the authorities. Under her advice, Paul confessed to the murder of Tyler Smith, claiming temporary insanity, for a reduced sentence.

  Now here it was, Friday night, and Dash wanted the swagger of his youth to return.

  My youth. Ha! Twenty-six and already a Father Time.

  He shrugged the thought aside and strolled up Jones Street, whistling a popular tune, trying to get into the mood. He decided to go inside Hartford & Sons to pick up a hat to replace his that was lost in the rainstorm of Tuesday.

  Look sharp, feel sharp.

  It wasn’t yet opening time for Pinstripes, so Atty wasn’t at his usual post. Dash unlocked the shop doors and went inside, turning on a lamp and opening the wardrobe. He pulled out a few options. Satisfied with a gray-blue one, he went to his desk to notate the inventory “loss.” Just as he sat down at his desk, there was a creak from the back of his shop. He froze. He turned his head to see Nicholas Fife exit the curtained-off changing area and walk towards him.