Slow Burn

by Terrence McCauley

  I knew that look well. I should. I saw it in the mirror as I shaved every morning. I drove down to Jack Van Dorn’s apartment: 70 Perry Street, apartment 3A. The heart of Greenwich Village — Oddball Capital of New York City, which put it in the running for Odd-ball Capital of the World.

  The Village was a strange world of stately brownstones, tenements and railroad flats, crooked streets and parks and narrow alleys. For some reason, it had always been a hotbed for the fringes of society: Commies, Marxists, musicians, writers, poets, actors, big thinkers and general flakes of every stripe. I guess they were drawn to the little playhouses, theaters and coffee houses, and dusty little bookshops with too many books about stuff you couldn’t pay me to read, much less get me to buy.

  Despite Prohibition, there was still plenty of drugs and drinking, too, but it was mostly self-contained. There was cocaine and opium, of course, but marijuana was their drug of choice. It was cheaper than the other drugs on the market and it kept them all mellow for the most part, so the department let it go.

  The Village always seemed more like a state of mind than just a neighborhood on a map. It was a place where the Lost Generation types had found a home. The people who lived there didn’t seem to be able to fit in anywhere else, but then again, they didn’t seem to try very hard. If anyone could appreciate that, I sure as hell could. I parked across from 70 Perry on the north side of the street. It was one of the nicer buildings in the area: a three-story townhouse, stone stairs out front. A nice, clean place. The kind of digs I’d expect a brat like Jack Van Dorn to live.

  Close enough to the grit and grime without getting his hands dirty. This place was about as bohemian as I was Chinese.

  An old woman I took for the landlady was sweeping the stoop. She wore a moth-eaten housedress that looked nearly as old as she was. Her fleshy arms swayed as she swiped at the dirt in short, spiteful strokes, as if she hated the broom as much as the mess. The heat bounced off the pavement as I stepped out of the car. I should’ve put on my suit jacket to hide my gun, but I left it behind. Jack’s picture in my back pocket was all I needed.

  The landlady saw me coming and stopped in midsweep. She eyeballed my shoulder holster as I crossed the street. I already had my badge out of my pocket. I even tried a smile.

  “Don’t worry, ma’am. Police business.” Neither the badge nor the smile worked. If anything, she looked even more miserable now that she’d seen the badge.

  “I didn’t see nothin’ and I didn’t hear nothin’, mister, so best be on your way.”

  “Jesus, lady. I didn’t even ask you anything yet.”

  “But you will,” she said. “Never saw a copper come around who didn’t have a lot of damned fool questions. Sniffing around, arresting their own kind.” She hawked and spat on a small clean spot on the stoop. “I hate goddamned cops.”

  “That makes two of us.” I put my badge back in my pocket. “Now that we’ve got so much in common, how about telling me about the man who lives in 3A.” I fished out his picture from my back pocket and showed it to her. “This man.”

  She leaned on her broom handle and scowled up at me. She didn’t even look at Jack’s picture. “Why the hell should I?”

  “Because I’m not coming at you hard like most cops would. And if you tell me what I want to know, there might be some money in it for you. Real money, in the near term.”

  She hawked and spat again. “Oh, that’s a good one, mister. Where have I heard that one before?”

  “But you haven’t heard it from me. Money doesn’t mean much to some people, so they don’t mind being generous with it. And the kid who lives in 3A comes from such people.” I raised the picture again so she could see it. “But I’ll bet you already knew that.”

  She looked at the picture, then at me. She crossed her arms in front of her, making her fleshy arms look even bigger.

  “Didn’t say I did, and I didn’t say I didn’t.” I put the picture away. Once again, charm wasn’t working.

  “The longer you stall, the less money you get. Tell me about the man in 3A.”

  She looked up and down the street before she said anything. I half expected the old bitch to spit again, but she didn’t. “Name’s Jack. Don’t know his last name ‘cause I didn’t rent the place to him. The landlord did. Called here one day and told me to show the place to him. I did and he rented it. That was about three months back.”

  That fit with what Soames had told me. “Who’s the landlord?”

  “How the hell should I know? Some company bought the place from my brother-in-law a year ago. Company keeps changing names so much, I can’t keep track of it anymore.” That made sense. Landlords were always changing names of their companies to confuse the tax collectors. I decided to stick to why I was here in the first place. “Tell me about Jack from 3A.”

  “Not much to tell. Pays his rent on time. Comes in the late afternoon and goes back out late evenings or early mornings. Always quiet. Respectful, near as I can tell.”

  “He ever have company?”

  The old lady jerked her chin up at me. “I’m not one for spyin’ on my tenants, Mister.”

  I pushed my hat further back on my head and smiled. “Then that makes you the first landlady in history who doesn’t.”

  She looked up and down the street again. “Jack’s got lots of friends. A lady friend in particular who’s here with him all the time.” Her eyes narrowed. “Not that I condone that sort of thing, mind you, but the bastard who owns this place told me to keep my mouth shut. He said so long as Jack’s money is green and on time, he can do what he likes short of burning the place down.”

  I pulled out my notebook from my back pocket and began writing this down.

  “Tell me about the lady friend.”

  “Young,” she said. “Younger than Jack, but not by much. Long, stringy black hair that could use a good combing. Never saw a speck of powder or paint on her. Never looks you in the eye, either. Scuttles about like a meek little mouse, always looking at the ground. Could be a pretty little thing if she gave it half a chance. Kind of smarmy, if you ask me.”

  I wrote most of it down. The description didn’t match Jessica Van Dorn. Sounded more like it could be the girlfriend Soames had told me about. Rachel. But that didn’t make it so.

  “This mouse got a name?”

  The landlady hawked again and spat. “The girl ain’t exactly the type who’s got what you might call manners.”

  I turned and watched the spit clear the curb and land in the gutter. Impressive as hell. “Kids today. Think anyone’s up in Jack’s place now?”

  “Don’t think so,” she said, “but like I told you…”

  “You’re not one to spy on your tenants.” I smiled. “Got a key?”

  The landlady took a step back from me. “Why? Jack in some kind of trouble?”

  “Not at all,” I lied. I knew that one word from her to the landlord and news about Jack’s kidnapping would be all over town. That’d happen soon enough once Loomis called it in. Leads from every wacko in the city would come pouring in soon after. “Jack’s father hasn’t seen him in a week or so and he’s looking for him. He’s asked me to check in on him to make sure he’s okay.”

  She waived me off. “Aw, hell, he’s fine. Saw him the mornin’ before last. He was in fine form. Not a care in the world.”

  That didn’t help me much. The morning before last was the day he’d been kidnapped. At least I knew they hadn’t grabbed him here at his apartment. But then again, I didn’t think they had. Someone probably would’ve called it in if they’d seen something. “Mind if I go up and take a look at his place myself?”

  “I don’t know, mister. I wouldn’t…”

  “His father would be awfully grateful.”

  “Oh yeah?” She jerked her chins up at me again. “How grateful?”

  “You’ll find out after I find the kid. That’s a promise.” She laughed and was about to spit again, when I added, “If I have to go up there and kick the
door in, you get nothing. That’s a promise, too.”

  She grumbled as she fished a key ring out of her housecoat, flipped through several keys until she found one and held it out to me. “Top of the stairs on the left.”

  She muttered about lousy goddamned coppers and spit again as I headed inside.

  NOBODY’S SWEETHEART

  I TOOK my time walking up the stairs. Slow and steady, I did my best to keep the stairs from creaking. Since I didn’t know what I was walking into, the quieter the better. At the top of the stairs, I stopped and listened. There were five doors around the small hallway. All I heard was apartment building sounds. A man and woman talking. Running water. Dishes clinking. Some clown on a radio crooning, “Let’s Misbehave.”

  But not a sound from 3A.

  I pulled my .38 from my holster and walked toward the door. A foot away, a floorboard in the hallway creaked and the door swung in slowly on its own. I brought up my gun and aimed it at the space between the door and the doorframe.

  But there was nothing to aim at. No outline, no head. Nothing but sunlight pouring into the apartment through a pale yellow window shade.

  I stepped forward and pushed the door all the way open. It was a small apartment, just like Soames had said. A wall bed, lots of books bowing the bookshelves, and a kitchen.

  And a pale girl in a white dress curled into a ball on the kitchen floor.

  Her long, stringy black hair was splayed out on the yellow floor tile around her head. She was pale and thin, and shaking. I figured she either had the dry heaves or was well into one hell of a crying jag. Either way, she was alive, but barely.

  I tucked my gun away and heeled the door shut. The sound made the girl realize she was no longer alone. She began to scream as though I’d startled her out of a bad dream.

  She went wide-eyed and scrambled away from me with her elbows and bare feet until her back was flat against the wall. She would’ve pushed her way through the wall if she could’ve.

  She was still panting when I crouched to show her my badge. “You’re safe, honey. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m a policeman and I’m here to help you.”

  She stayed wide-eyed and panting as she looked back and forth between me and my badge. Her face was gaunt and streaked with tears and sweat.

  “P… please,” she whispered. “I… I… I didn’t know. I swear. Don’t hurt me.”

  “Just calm down, honey.” I put my badge away nice and slow. “You’re not in any kind of trouble at all. I’m here to help you, and I’m here to help Jack. Can you…”

  I heard the door crash open behind me just before I was yanked up off the floor and thrown back out into the hallway. The girl shrieked again.

  I slammed into the door across the hall, back first, but I landed with my legs beneath me. I looked up in time to see a large man with curly black hair bull-rush me from the apartment.

  He telegraphed a roundhouse right aimed at my head. I ducked to my left and slid the beavertail sap from the small of my back. The bastard’s hand hit the door where my head had been. My sap caught him flush on the right side of the ribs. Right on the liver.

  I’d learned a long time ago that a liver shot turns even the toughest guy to mush if you knew how to hit it just right. And I knew how.

  The big bastard dropped to his knees and I brought the sap down twice on his kidneys to flatten him out for good measure. I found my cuffs and shackled his hands behind his back. It was a tight fit, but cuffs weren’t supposed to be comfortable.

  I was going in to check on the girl when she crashed right into me. She was crying and running blind, not caring where she went as long as it wasn’t 3A. I grabbed her and eased her back into the apartment.

  I heeled the door shut again and had her sit on the bed. She was the best lead I had on Jack Van Dorn at the moment, but she wasn’t necessarily my only lead. I wanted to check the apartment for others. The girl slumped over on the bed in another crying jag, so I decided to check the place over.

  I figured that ruckus in the hallway would make someone call the cops. I needed to find something more about Jack Van Dorn and I needed to find it fast before anyone came and complicated things by asking a lot of questions.

  Under the bed, I found nothing but a couple of dusty suitcases. They clearly hadn’t been pulled out recently, so I didn’t bother checking them. The bookshelves were next. They were tall, floor-toceiling shelves sagging beneath the weight of dozens of books. Just reading the titles made me want to yawn.

  Old-time thinkers like Homer and Socrates. Commie shit: Marx. Engles. Kant. Lenin. High-minded shit: Dickens. Wilde. O’Neill. Some titles in French. All of them over my head. None of them on my bedside table, but they should be. I bet they’d do wonders for my insomnia.

  Half a dozen matchbooks on the top of his dresser caught my eye because they were all the same kind: brown matchbooks with a golden VL on the cover. I’d picked up a lot of matchbooks from a lot of places in my time, but that VL design looked vaguely familiar. I couldn’t quite place where it was from, but I knew I’d seen it before. I turned one of the matchbooks over, hoping the name and address would be on the back, but no dice. Just another golden VL. I pocketed them all and decided I’d figure out where they came from later.

  I checked the top drawer of the dresser and found a small, black notebook tucked between a couple of shirts. I began flipping through it when I heard the door open behind me. I hoped that monster hadn’t gotten to his feet.

  I slipped the notebook into my pocket and brought up my sap as I turned to see Officer Liam O'Hara nudge the door open with his nightstick. Three other uniforms were tending to the big bastard I’d sapped in the hallway.

  “Well, well, well,” O’Hara beamed. “If it isn’t Charlie Doherty, himself, come south to pay us a visit. How’s tricks, boyo?” He looked at the girl lying on the bed and smiled. “Still quite the lady’s man, I see.”

  O’Hara was a fat, fleshy-faced Irishmen whose red moustache and booming laugh made him seem harmless enough at first. But he’d been a Doyle beneficiary and a Tammany man through and through, just like me. And like me, he’d been on the take. But he was just a patrolman and I was a detective. He was too low for the Goo- Goos to target, and the chiefs were too high. But detectives like me? We were just right.

  I tucked my sap back into the back of my pants. “Just running down leads on a case. What brings you up here?”

  “Official business,” O’Hara said. “Landlady downstairs got spooked when she saw that lummox bust in here. She called it in, but luckily, she didn’t have far to look. We were already on our way over to fetch you.”

  I didn’t want to know the answer, but I had to ask the question. “Why?”

  “No idea, but whatever you did, it must’ve been a doozie. Chief Carmichael himself sent me to fetch you with orders to bring you up to the Van Dorn house. And he wants you there immediately, if not sooner.”

  I noticed a small clock on one of the bookshelves. It was just after nine in the morning. It had been a long day already. And something told me it was about to get a hell of a lot longer.

  THE LONESOME ROAD

  O’HARA HAD his men take Rachel and the goon I’d knocked out back to the Twelfth Precinct for holding. I’d wanted to start questioning them right there in the apartment, but O’Hara was driving me uptown in my car instead, by orders of Chief Andrew J. Carmichael himself. O’Hara took Bleeker to Tenth Street, then Tenth over to Sixth Avenue for the long ride north.

  I’d known Officer Liam O’Hara for over a decade. He was just as crooked as the rest of us, but a capable beat cop. He was also one of the biggest gossip mongers in the department, which made him a favorite of Archie Doyle and Terry Quinn. Whatever O’Hara didn’t know, he’d find out. What he couldn’t find out, he made up. O’Hara lived by a single golden rule: never let the truth get in the way of a good story. It made him the worst possible man to have around now that I was trying to keep this thing under wraps.

  There w
as only one difference between Liam O’Hara and Wendell Bixby. Bixby didn’t spread every rumor he heard. I kept expecting O’Hara to pump me for information about why Carmichael wanted to see me, but he didn’t. He just concentrated on his driving and kept to himself.

  And if a man like O’Hara was this quiet, that meant only one thing: O’Hara already knew why Carmichael wanted to see me. And that meant the whole world knew about the kidnapping by now. The news hounds. The Feds. Everybody.

  That feeble advantage I’d had in this case was gone. That much was certain.

  What I didn’t know is if Loomis volunteered the information or if someone weaseled it out of him. Either way, the jig was up, and I was in a hell of a lot of trouble. I wanted to take a look at the notebook I’d found in Jack’s dresser, but I didn’t want O’Hara to know I had it. I didn’t know what might be in it. It could’ve been a list of his friend’s phone numbers, or it could’ve been a diary. It could’ve been anything.

  Since I couldn’t look at it in private, I put it out of my mind for the moment. I decided not to think about what Carmichael was going to do to me once we got to the mansion. I looked out the window and catch up on my people-watching instead.

  Thanks to the ongoing construction of the new Rockefeller Center project several blocks north, traffic along Sixth Avenue crawled. It gave me plenty of time to watch the throngs of wilted people who trudged along through another hot August morning in the city.

  Men and women of all shapes, sizes, and types. Some were headed to work. Many were on their way to soup kitchens or breadlines. Most of them had been somebody once, somebody they weren’t anymore and might never be again. Some of them had never amounted to much of anything at all. They were beat, and, worst of all, they knew it.

  Starting over just wasn’t in the cards for most of them. All of their tomorrows were yesterdays. All their dreams were dead and ruined, haunted by the ghosts of who they used to be. They were either too old or too tired, no matter what their age might be. Whatever they’d lost had taken too much out of them.