A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  I smiled unhappily. “I know.”

  Eileen patted his arm. “That’s enough shop for now. Victoria, who is it who’s coming tonight?”

  Max rang the bell just then, arriving with both Lotty and his music expert. A short skinny brunette, she looked like a street urchin in her jeans and outsize sweater. Max introduced her as Isabel Thompson, an authority on rare music from the Newberry Library.

  “I hope we haven’t kept dinner waiting—Lotty was late getting out of surgery,” Max added.

  “Let’s eat later,” I said. “Enough suspense. What have I been lugging unknowing around Chicago all this time?”

  “She wouldn’t tell us anything until you were here to listen,” Max said. “So we are as impatient as you.”

  Ms. Thompson grinned. “Of course, this is only a preliminary opinion, but it looks like a concerto by Marianne Martines.”

  “But the insertions, the writing at the end,” Max began, when Bobby demanded to known who Marianne Martines was.

  “She was an eighteenth-century Viennese composer. She was known to have written over four hundred compositions, but only about sixty have survived, so it’s exciting to find a new one.” She folded her hands in her lap, a look of mischief in her eyes.

  “And the writing, Isabel?” Max demanded.

  She grinned. “You were right, Max: it is Mozart’s. A suggestion for changes in the horn line. He started to describe them, then decided just to write them in above her original notation. He added a reminder that the two were going to play together the following Monday—they often played piano duets, sometimes privately, sometimes for an audience.”

  “Hah! I knew it! I was sure!” Max was almost dancing in ecstasy. “So I put some Krugs down to chill. Liquid gold to toast the moment I held in my hand a manuscript that Mozart held.”

  He pulled a couple of bottles of champagne from his briefcase. I fetched my mother’s Venetian glasses from the dining room. Only five remained whole of the eight she had transported so carefully. One had shattered in the fire that destroyed my old apartment, and another when some thugs broke into it one night. A third had been repaired and could still be used. How could I have been so careless with my little legacy.

  “But whose is it now?” Lotty asked, when we’d all drunk and exclaimed enough to calm down.

  “That’s a good question,” I said. “I’ve been making some inquiries through the Italian government. Francesca Salvini died in 1943 and she didn’t leave any heirs. She wanted Gabriella to dispose of it in the event of her death. In the absence of a formal will the Italian government might make a claim, but her intention as expressed in Gabriella’s letter might give me the right to it, as long as I didn’t keep it or sell it just for my own gain.”

  “We’d be glad to house it,” Ms. Thompson offered.

  “Seems to me your ma would have wanted someone in trouble to benefit.” Bobby was speaking gruffly to hide his embarrassment. “What’s something like this worth?”

  Ms. Thompson pursed her lips. “A private collector might pay a quarter of a million. We couldn’t match that, but we’d probably go to a hundred or hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “So what mattered most to your ma, Vicki, besides you? Music. Music and victims of injustice. You probably can’t do much about the second, but you ought to be able to help some kids learn some music.”

  Barbara Carmichael nodded in approval. “A scholarship fund to provide Chicago kids with music lessons. It’s a great idea, Vic.”

  We launched the Gabriella-Salvini program some months later with a concert at the Newberry. Mr. Fortieri attended, fully recovered from his wounds. He told me that Gabriella had come to consult him the summer before she died, but she hadn’t brought the score with her. Since she’d never mentioned it to him before he thought her illness and medications had made her delusional.

  “I’m sorry, Victoria: it was the last time she was well enough to travel to the northwest side, and I’m sorry that I disappointed her. It’s been troubling me ever since Barbara told me the news.”

  I longed to ask him whether he’d been my mother’s lover. But did I want to know? What if he, too, had moved the sun and all the other stars for her—I’d hate to know that. I sent him to a front-row chair and went to sit next to Lotty.

  In Gabriella’s honor the Cellini Wind Ensemble had come from London to play the benefit. They played the Martines score first as the composer had written it, and then as Mozart revised it. I have to confess I liked the original better, but as Gabriella often told me, I’m no musician.

  BILL PRONZINI

  The Nameless books by Bill Pronzini (1943– ) will someday be regarded as the major body of noir work they are. And they will be taken seriously as novels, too, because they form nothing less than the autobiography of a man of our times, sometimes likeable, sometimes not, but always interesting.

  In recent years, Pronzini has also turned to mainstream suspense novels. In books such as Blue Lonesome, he has brought serious concerns to the clichéd standard-issue suspense books that crowd the bookstands. Of our time and about our time, he is.

  And he is a powerful short story writer, as well. One senses in his shorter work a restless literary sensibility that finds its ultimate freedom in these stories, no longer confined by the severe limitations put on most writers by bottom-line-oriented publishers today.

  One Night at Dolores Park

  A “Nameless Detective” Story

  Dolores Park used to be the hub of one of the better residential neighborhoods in San Francisco: acres of tall palms and steeply rolling lawns in the Western Mission, a gentrifying area up until a few years ago. Well-off Yuppies, lured by scenic views and an easy commute to downtown, bought and renovated many of the old Victorians that rim the park. Singles and couples, straights and gays, moved into duplexes that sold for $300,000 and apartments that rented for upwards of a grand a month. WASPs, Latinos, Asian Americans . . . an eclectic mix that lived pretty much in harmony and were dedicated to preserving as much of the urban good life as was left these days.

  Then the drug dealers moved in.

  Marijuana sellers at first, aiming their wares at students at nearby Mission High School. The vanguard’s success brought in a scruffier variety and their equally scruffy customers. As many as forty dealers allegedly had been doing business in Dolores Park on recent weekends, according to published reports. The cops couldn’t do much; marijuana selling and buying is a low-priority crime in the city. But the lack of control, the wide-open open-air market, brought in fresh troops: heroin and crack dealers. And where you’ve got hard drugs, you also have high stakes and violence. Eight shootings and two homicides in and around Dolores Park so far this year. The firebombing of the home of a young couple who tried to form an activist group to fight the dealers. Muggings, burglaries, intimidation of residents. The result was bitterly predictable: frightened people moving out, real estate values dropping, and as the dealers widened their territory to include Mission Playground down on 19th Street, the entire neighborhood beginning to decline. The police had stepped up patrols, were making arrests, but it was too little too late: they didn’t have the manpower or the funds, and there was so damned much of the same thing happening elsewhere in the city. . . .

  “It’s like Armageddon,” one veteran cop was quoted as saying. “And the forces of evil are winning.”

  They were winning tonight, no question of that. It was a warm October night and I had been staked out on the west side of the park, nosed downhill near the intersection of Church and 19th, since a few minutes before six o’clock. Until it got dark I had counted seven drug transactions within the limited range of my vision—and no police presence other than a couple of cruising patrol cars. Once darkness closed down, the park had emptied fast. Now, at nine-ten, the lawns and paths appeared deserted. But I wouldn’t have wanted to walk around over there, as early as it was. If there were men lurking in the shadows—and there probably were—they were dealers armed to
the teeth and/or desperate junkies hunting prey. Only damned fools wandered through Dolores Park after nightfall.

  Drugs, drug dealers, and the rape of a fine old neighborhood had nothing to do with why I was here; all of those things were a depressing by-product. I was here to serve a subpoena on a man named Thurmond, as a favor to a lawyer I knew. Thurmond was being sought for testimony in a huge stock fraud case. He didn’t want to testify because he was afraid of being indicted himself, and he had been hiding out as a result. It had taken me three days to find out he was holed up with an old college buddy. The college buddy owned the blue-and-white Stick Victorian two doors down Church Street from where I was sitting. He was home—I’d seen him arrive, and there were lights on now behind the curtained bay windows—but there was still no sign of Thurmond. I was bored as well as depressed, and irritated, and frustrated. If Thurmond gave me any trouble when he finally put in an appearance, he was going to be sorry for it.

  That was what I was thinking when I saw the woman.

  She came down 19th, alone, walking fast and hard. The stride and the drawn-back set of her body said she was angry about something. There was a streetlight on the corner, and when she passed under it I could see that she was thirtyish, dark-haired, slender. Wearing a light sweater over a blouse and slacks. She waited for a car to roll by—it didn’t slow—and then crossed the street toward the park.

  Not smart, lady, I thought. Even if she was a junkie looking to make a connection, it wasn’t smart. I had been slouched down on my spine; I sat up straighter, to get a better squint at where she was headed. Not into the park, at least. Away from me on the sidewalk, downhill toward Cumberland. Moving at the same hard, angry pace.

  I had a fleeting impulse to chase after her, tell her to get her tail off the street. Latent paternal instinct. Hell, if she wanted to risk her life, that was her prerogative; the world is full of what the newspeakers call “cerebrally challenged individuals.” It was none of my business what happened to her—

  Yes, it was.

  Right then it became my business.

  A line of trees and shrubs flanked the sidewalk where she was, with a separating strip of lawn about twenty yards wide. The tall figure of a man came jerkily out of the tree-shadow as she passed. There was enough starlight and other light for me to make out something extended in one hand and that his face was covered except for the eyes and mouth. Gun and ski mask. Mugger.

  I hit the door handle with my left hand, jammed my right up under the dash and yanked loose the .38 I keep clipped there. He was ten yards from her and closing as I came out of the car; she’d heard him and was turning toward him. He lunged forward, clawing for her purse.

  There were no cars on the street. I charged across at an angle, yelling at the top of my voice, the only words that can have an effect in a situation like this: “Hold it, police officer!” Not this time. His head swiveled in my direction, swiveled back to the woman as she pulled away from him. She made a keening noise and turned to run.

  He shot her.

  No compunction: Just threw the gun up and fired point blank.

  She went down, skidding on her side, as I cut between two parked cars onto the sidewalk. Rage made me pull up and I would have fired at him except that he pumped a round at me first. I saw the muzzle flash, heard the whine of the bullet and the low, flat crack of the gun, and in reflex I dodged sideways onto the lawn. Mistake, because the grass was slippery and my feet went out from under me. I stayed down, squirming around on my belly so I could bring the .38 into firing position. But he wasn’t going to stick around for a shootout; he was already running splayfooted toward the trees. He disappeared into them before I could get lined up for a shot.

  I’d banged my knee in the fall; it sent out twinges as I hauled myself erect, ran toward the woman. She was still down but not hurt as badly as I’d feared: sitting up on one hip now, holding her left arm cradled in against her breast. She heard me, looked up with fright shining on the pale oval of her face. I said quickly, “It’s all right, I’m a detective, he’s gone now,” and shoved the .38 into my jacket pocket. There was no sign of the mugger. The park was empty as far as I could see, no movement anywhere in the warm dark.

  She said, “He shot me,” in a dazed voice.

  “Where? Where are you hurt?”

  “My arm . . .”

  “Shoulder area?”

  “No, above the elbow.”

  “Can you move the arm?”

  “I don’t . . . yes, I can move it.”

  Not too bad then. “Can you stand up, walk?”

  “If you help me . . .”

  I put an arm around her waist, lifted her. The blood was visible then, gleaming wetly on the sleeve of her sweater.

  “My purse,” she said.

  It was lying on the sidewalk nearby. I let go of her long enough to pick it up. When I gave it to her she clutched it tightly: something solid and familiar to hang onto.

  The street was still empty; so were the sidewalks on both sides. Somebody was standing behind a lighted window in one of the buildings across Church, peering through a set of drapes. No one else seemed to have heard the shots, or to want to know what had happened if they did. Just the woman and me out here at the edge of the light. And the predators—one predator, anyway—hiding somewhere in the dark.

  Her name was Andrea Hull, she said, and she lived a few doors up 19th Street. I took her home, walking with my arm around her and her body braced against mine as if we were a pair of lovers. Get her off the street as quickly as possible, to where she would feel safe. I could report the shooting from there. You have to go through the motions even when there’s not much chance of results.

  Her building was a one-story, stucco-faced duplex. As we started up the front stoop, she drew a shuddering breath and said, “God, he could have killed me,” as if the realization had just struck her. “I could be dead right now.”

  I had nothing to say to that.

  “Peter was right, damn him,” she said.

  “Peter?”

  “My husband. He keeps telling me not to go out walking alone at night and I keep not listening. I’m so smart, I am. Nothing ever happened, I thought nothing ever would . . .”

  “You learned a lesson,” I said. “Don’t hurt yourself anymore than you already are.”

  “I hate it when he’s right.” We were in the vestibule now. She said, “It’s the door on the left,” and fumbled in her purse. “Where the hell did I put the damn keys?”

  “Your husband’s not home?”

  “No. He’s the reason I went out.”

  I found the keys for her, unlocked the door. Narrow hallway, a huge lighted room opening off of it. The room had been enlarged by knocking out a wall or two. There was furniture in it but it wasn’t a living room; most of it, with the aid of tall windows and a couple of skylights, had been turned into an artist’s studio. A cluttered one full of paintings and sculptures and the tools to create them. An unclean one populated by a tribe of dust mice.

  I took a better look at its owner as we entered the studio. Older than I’d first thought, at least thirty-five, maybe forty. A sharp featured brunette with bright, wise eyes and pale lips. The wound in her arm was still bleeding, the red splotch grown to the size of a small pancake.

  “Are you in much pain?” I asked her.

  “No. It’s mostly numb.”

  “You’d better get out of that sweater. Put some peroxide on the wound if you have it, then wrap a wet towel around it. That should do until the paramedics get here. Where’s your phone?”

  “Over by the windows.”

  “You go ahead. I’ll call the police.”

  “. . . I thought you were a policeman.”

  “Not quite. Private investigator.”

  “What were you doing down by the park?”

  “Waiting to serve a subpoena.”

  “Lord,” she said. Then she asked, “Do you have to report what happened? They’ll never catch the man, you
know they won’t.”

  “Maybe not, but yes, I have to report it. You want attention for that arm, don’t you?”

  “All right,” she said. “Actually, I suppose the publicity will do me some good.” She went away through a doorway at the rear.

  I made the call. The cop I spoke to asked half a dozen pertinent questions, then told me to stay put, paramedics and a team of inspectors would be out shortly. Half hour, maybe less, for the paramedics, I thought as I hung up. Longer for the inspectors. This wasn’t an A-priority shooting. Perp long gone, victim not seriously wounded, situation under control. We’d just have to wait our turn.

  I took a turn around the studio. The paintings were everywhere, finished and unfinished: covering the walls, propped in corners and on a pair of easels, stacked on the floor. They were all abstracts: bold lines and interlocking and overlapping squares, wedges, triangles in primary colors. Not to my taste, but they appeared to have been done by a talented artist. You couldn’t say the same for the forty or so bronze, clay, and metal sculptures. All of those struck me as amateurish, lopsided things that had no identity or meaning, like the stuff kids make free-form in grade school.

  “Do you like them? My paintings?”

  I turned. Andrea Hull had come back into the room, wearing a sleeveless blouse now, a thick towel wrapped around her arm.

  “Still bleeding?” I asked her.

  “Not so badly now. Do you like my paintings?”

  “I don’t know much about art but they seem very good.”

  “They are. Geometric abstraction. Not as good as Mondrian or Glarner or Burgoyne Diller, perhaps. Or Hofmann, of course. But not derivative, either. I have my own unique vision.”

  She might have been speaking a foreign language. I said, “Uh-huh,” and let it go at that.

  “I’ve had several showings, been praised by some of the most eminent critics in the art world. I’m starting to make a serious name for myself—finally, after years of struggle. Just last month one of my best works, ‘Tension and Emotion,’ sold for fifteen thousand dollars.”