Manhattan Noir 2

by Lawrence Block

  “He’s a very fine man,” Stryker said. “Your brother Ernest. A man with true ideals. I am very sorry to see what has happened to his character since … Is that them?”

  “No,” Charley said. “It’s two girls from the YWCA on the corner.”

  “He used to be a very merry man,” Stryker said, swallowing rapidly. “Always laughing. Always sure of what he was saying. Before he was married we used to go out together all the time and all the time the girls, my girl and his girl, no matter who they were, would give all their attention to him. All the time. I didn’t mind. I love your brother Ernest as if he was my young brother. I could cry when I see him sitting now, covering his eye and his teeth, not saying anything, just listening to what other people have to say.”

  “Yeah,” Charley said. “Yeah. Why don’t you keep quiet, Stryker?”

  “Excuse me,” Stryker said, talking fast and dry. “I don’t like to bother you. But I must talk. Otherwise, if I just stand here keeping still, I will suddenly start running and I’ll run right up to Forty-second Street. I can’t keep quiet at the moment, excuse me.”

  “Go ahead and talk, Stryker,” Charley said gently, patting him on the shoulder. “Shoot your mouth right off, all you want.”

  “I am only doing this because I think it will help Ernest,” Stryker said, leaning hard against the post, in the shadow, to keep his knees straight. “I have a theory. My theory is that when Ernest finds out what happens to this Lueger, he will pick up. It will be a kind of springboard to him. It is my private notion of the psychology of the situation. We should have brought an instrument with us, though. A club, a knife, brass knuckles.” Stryker put his hands in his pockets, holding them tight against the cloth to keep them from trembling. “It will be very bad if we mess this up. Won’t it be very bad, Charley? Say, Charley …”

  “Sssh,” said Charley.

  Stryker looked up the street. “That’s them. That’s Sally, that’s her coat. That’s the bastard. The lousy German bastard.” “Sssh, Stryker. Sssh.”

  “I feel very cold, Charley. Do you feel cold? It’s a warm night but I …”

  “For Christ’s sake, shut up!”

  “We’ll fix him,” Stryker whispered. “Yes, Charley, I’ll shut up, sure, I’ll shut up, depend on me, Charley …”

  Sally and Lueger walked slowly down Twelfth Street. Lueger had his arm around Sally’s waist and their hips rubbed as they walked.

  “That was a very fine film tonight,” Lueger was saying. “I enjoy Deanna Durbin. Very young, fresh, sweet. Like you.” He grinned at Sally in the dark and held tighter to her waist. “A small young maid. You are just the kind I like.” He tried to kiss her. Sally turned her head away.

  “Listen, Mr. Lueger,” she said, not because she liked him, but because he was a human being and thoughtless and unsuspecting and because her heart was softer than she had thought. “Listen, I think you’d better leave me here.”

  “I do not understand English,” Lueger said, enjoying this last coyness.

  “Thank you very much for a pleasant evening,” Sally said desperately, stopping in her tracks. “Thank you for taking me home. You can’t come up. I was lying to you. I don’t live alone …”

  Lueger laughed. “Little frightened girl. That’s nice. I love you for it.”

  “My brother,” Sally said. “I swear to God I live with my brother.”

  Lueger grabbed her and kissed her, hard, bruising her lips against her teeth, his hands pressing harshly into the flesh of her back. She sobbed into his mouth with the pain, helpless. He released her. He was laughing.

  “Come,” he said, holding her close. “I am anxious to meet your brother. Little liar.”

  “All right,” she said, watching Charley and Stryker move out from the L shadow. “All right. Let’s not wait. Let’s walk fast. Very fast. Let’s not waste time.”

  Lueger laughed happily. “That’s it. That’s the way a girl should talk.”

  They walked swiftly toward the elevated ramp, Lueger laughing, his hand on her hip in certainty and possession.

  “Pardon me,” Stryker said. “Could you direct me to Sheridan Square?”

  “Well,” said Sally, stopping, “it’s …”

  Charley swung and Sally started running as soon as she heard the wooden little noise a fist makes on a man’s face. Charley held Lueger up with one hand and chopped the lolling head with the other. He carried Lueger back into the shadows against a high iron railing. He hung Lueger by his overcoat against one of the iron points, so he could use both hands on him. Stryker watched for a moment, then turned and looked toward Eighth Avenue.

  Charley worked very methodically, getting his two hundred pounds behind short, accurate, smashing blows that made Lueger’s head jump and loll and roll against the iron pikes. Charley hit him in the nose three times, squarely, using his fist the way a carpenter uses a hammer. Each time Charley heard the sound of bone breaking, cartilage tearing. When he got through with the nose, Charley went after the mouth, hooking along the side of the jaws with both hands, until teeth fell out and the jaw hung open, smashed, loose with the queer looseness of flesh that is no longer moored to solid bone. Charley started crying, the tears running down into his mouth, the sobs shaking him as he swung his fists. Even then Stryker didn’t turn around. He just put his hands to his ears and looked steadfastly at Eighth Avenue.

  When he started on Lueger’s eye, Charley talked. “You bastard. Oh, you lousy goddamn bastard,” came out with the sobs and the tears as he hit at the eye with his right hand, cutting it, smashing it, tearing it again and again, his hand coming away splattered with blood each time. “Oh, you dumb, mean, skirt-chasing sonofabitch, bastard.” And he kept hitting with fury and deliberation at the shattered eye….

  A car came up Twelfth Street from the waterfront and slowed down at the corner. Stryker jumped on the running board. “Keep moving,” he said, very tough, “if you know what’s good for you.”

  He jumped off the running board and watched the car speed away.

  Charley, still sobbing, pounded Lueger in the chest and belly. With each blow Lueger slammed against the iron fence with a noise like a carpet being beaten, until his coat ripped off the pike and he slid to the sidewalk.

  Charley stood back, his fists swaying, the tears still coming, the sweat running down his face inside his collar, his clothes stained with blood.

  “O.K.,” he said, “O.K., you bastard.”

  He walked swiftly up under the L in the shadows, and Stryker hurried after him.

  Much later, in the hospital, Preminger stood over the bed in which Lueger lay, unconscious, in splints and bandages.

  “Yes,” he said to the detective and the doctor. “That’s our man. Lueger. A steward. The papers on him are correct.”

  “Who do you think done it?” the detective asked in a routine voice. “Did he have any enemies?”

  “Not that I know of,” Preminger said. “He was a very popular boy. Especially with the ladies.”

  The detective started out of the ward. “Well,” he said, “he won’t be a very popular boy when he gets out of here.”

  Preminger shook his head. “You must be very careful in a strange city,” he said to the interne, and went back to the ship.

  NEW YORK BLUES

  BY CORNELL WOOLRICH

  East 37th Street

  (Originally published in 1970)

  It’s six o’clock; my drink is at the three-quarter mark—three-quarters down, not three-quarters up—and the night begins.

  Across the way from me sits a little transistor radio, up on end, simmering away like a teakettle on a stove. It’s been going steadily ever since I first came in here, two days, three nights ago; it chisels away the stony silence, takes the edge off the being alone. It came with the room, not with me.

  Now there’s a punctuation of three lush chords, and it goes into a traffic report. “Good evening. The New York Municipal Communications Service presents the 6:00 p.m. Traffic
Advisory. Traffic through the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and over the George Washington Bridge, heavy westbound, light eastbound. Traffic on the crosscut between the George Washington and Queens-Whitestone bridges, heavy in both directions. Traffic through the Battery Tunnel, heavy outbound, very light inbound. Traffic on the West Side Highway, bumper to bumper all the way. Radar units in operation there. Traffic over the Long Island Expressway is beginning to build, due to tonight’s game at Shea Stadium. West 70th Street between Amsterdam and West End avenues is closed due to a water-main break. A power failure on the East Side I.R.T. line between Grand Central and 125th Street is causing delays of up to forty-five minutes. Otherwise all subways and buses, the Staten Island Ferry, the Jersey Central, the Delaware and Lackawanna, and the Pennsylvania railroads, and all other commuter services, are operating normally. At the three airports, planes are arriving and departing on time. The next regularly scheduled traffic advisory will be given one-half hour from now—”

  The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out—everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We’re going to have the whole damned town to ourselves.

  I go over to the window and open up a crevice between two of the tightly flattened slats in one of the blinds, and a little parallelogram of a New York street scene, Murray Hill section, six-o’clock-evening hour, springs into view. Up in the sky the upper-echelon light tiers of the Pan Am Building are undulating and rippling in the humidity and carbon monoxide (“Air pollution index: normal, twelve percent; emergency level, fifty percent”).

  Down below, on the sidewalk, the glowing green blob of a street light, swollen to pumpkin size by foreshortened perspective, thrusts upward toward my window. And along the little slot that the parted slats make, lights keep passing along, like strung-up, shining, red and white beads. All going just one way, right to left, because 37th Street is westbound, and all going by twos, always by twos, headlights and tails, heads and tails, in a welter of slowed-down traffic and a paroxysm of vituperative horns. And directly under me I hear a taxi driver and would-be fares having an argument, the voices clearly audible, the participants unseen.

  “But it’s only to Fifty-ninth Street—”

  “I don’t ca-a-are, lady. Look, I already tolje. I’m not goin’ up that way. Can’tje get it into your head?”

  “Don’t let’s argue with him. Get inside. He can’t put you out.”

  “No, but I can refuse to move. Lady, if your husband gets in here, he’s gonna sit still in one place, ’cause I ain’t budgin’.”

  New York. The world’s most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying.

  I take away the little tire jack my fingers have made, and the slats snap together again.

  The first sign that the meal I phoned down for is approaching is the minor-key creak from a sharply swerved castor as the room-service waiter rounds a turn outside my door. I’m posted behind a high-backed wing chair, with my wrists crossed over the top of it and my hands dangling like loose claws, staring a little tensely at the door. Then there’s the waiter’s characteristically deferential knock. But I say “Who is it?” anyway, before I go over to open it.

  He’s an elderly man. He’s been up here twice before, and by now I know the way he sounds.

  “Room service,” comes through in that high-pitched voice his old age has given him.

  I release the double lock, then I turn the knob and open the door.

  He wheels the little white-clothed dinner cart forward into the room, and as the hall perspective clears behind him I get a blurred glimpse of a figure in motion, just passing from view, then gone, too quickly to be brought into focus.

  I stand there a moment, holding the door to a narrow slit, watching the hall. But it’s empty now.

  There’s an innocuous explanation for everything. Everything is a coin that has two sides to it, and one side is innocuous but the other can be ominous. The hall makes a right-angle turn opposite my door, and to get to the elevators, those whose rooms are back of this turn have to pass the little setback that leads to my door.

  On the other hand, if someone wanted to pinpoint me, to verify which room I was in, by sighting my face as I opened the door for the waiter, he would do just that: stand there an instant, then quickly step aside out of my line of vision. The optical snapshot I’d had was not of a figure in continuous motion going past my point of view, but of a figure that had first been static and then had flitted from sight.

  And if it’s that, now they know which room I’m in. Which room on which floor in which hotel.

  “Did you notice anyone out there in the hall just now when you came along?” I ask. I try to sound casual, which only makes me not sound casual.

  He answers with a question of his own. “Was there somebody out in the hall, sir?”

  “That’s what I asked you, did you see anyone?”

  He explains that years of experience in trundling these food-laden carts across the halls have taught him never to look up, never to take his eyes off them, because an unexpected bump on the floor under the carpet might splash ice water out of the glass and wet the tablecloth or spill consommé into its saucer.

  It sounds plausible enough. And whether it is or not, I know it’s all I’m going to get.

  I sign the check for the meal, add the tip, and tell him to put it on the bill. Then just as he turns to leave I remember something I want to do.

  “Just a second; that reminds me.” I shoot one of my cuffs forward and twist something out of it. Then the other one. And I hold out my hand to him with the two star-sapphire cuff links he admired so much last night. (Innocently, I’m sure, with no venal intent.)

  He says I’m not serious, I must be joking. He says he can’t take anything like that. He says all the things he’s expected to say, and I override them. Then, when he can’t come up with anything else, he comes up with, half-hopefully (hopeful for a yes answer): “You tired of them?”

  “No,” I say quite simply, “no—they’re tired of me.”

  He thanks me over and thanks me under and thanks me over again, and then he’s gone, and I’m glad he’s gone.

  Poor old man, wasting his life bringing people their meals up to their rooms for thirty-five, forty-odd years. He’ll die in peace, though. Not in terror and in throes of resistance. I almost envy him.

  I turn my head a little. The radio’s caroling “Tonight,” velvety smooth and young and filled with plaintive desire. Maria’s song from West Side Story. I remember one beautiful night long ago at the Winter Garden, with a beautiful someone beside me. I tilt my nose and breathe in, and I can still smell her perfume, the ghost of her perfume from long ago. But where is she now, where did she go, and what did I do with her?

  Our paths ran along so close together they were almost like one, the one they were eventually going to be. Then fear came along, fear entered into it somehow, and split them wide apart.

  Fear bred anxiety to justify. Anxiety to justify bred anger. The phone calls that wouldn’t be answered, the door rings that wouldn’t be opened. Anger bred sudden calamity.

  Now there aren’t two paths anymore; there’s only one, only mine. Running downhill into the ground, running downhill into its doom.

  Tonight, tonight—there will be no morning star—Right, kid, there won’t. Not for me, anyway.

  There’s a tap at the door, made with the tip of a key, not the tip of a finger. The voice doesn’t wait, but comes right through before the signal has a chance to freeze me stiff. A woman’s voice, soft-spoken, reassuring. “Night maid.”

  I wait a second to let a little of the white drain from my face before she sees me, and then I go over and let her in.

  Her name is Ginny. She told me last night. I asked her, that’s why she told
me. I wanted to hear the sound of somebody’s name, that’s why I asked her. I was frightened and lonely, that’s why I wanted to hear the sound of somebody’s name.

  On her face the beauty of two races blends, each contributing its individual hallmark. The golden-warm skin, the deep glowing eyes, the narrow-tipped nose, the economical underlip.

  While she’s turning back the bedcovers in a neat triangle over one corner, I remark, “I notice you go around the outside of the room to get to the bed, instead of cutting across the middle, which would be much shorter. Why do you?”

  She answers plausibly, “People are often watching their television sets at this time, when I come in, and I don’t want to block them off.”

  I point out, “But mine isn’t on, Ginny.”

  I see how the pupils of her eyes try to flee, to get as far away from looking at me as possible, all the way over into their outside corners. And that gives it away. She’s afraid of me. The rumors have already reached her. A hotel is like a beehive when it comes to gossip. He never leaves his room, has all his meals sent up to him, and keeps his door locked all the time.

  “I want to give you something,” I say to her. “For that little girl of yours you were telling me about.”

  I take a hundred-dollar bill out of the wallet on my hip. I fold the bill a few times so that the corner numerals disappear, then thrust it between two of her fingers.

  She sees the “1” first as the bill slowly uncoils. Her face is politely appreciative.

  She sees the first zero next—that makes it a ten. Her face is delighted, more than grateful.

  She sees the last zero. Suddenly her face is fearful, stunned into stone; in her eyes I can see steel filings of mistrust glittering. Her wrist flexes to shove the bill back to me, but I ward it off with my hand upended.