by Ed Gorman
The back door was open and probably had been most of the night. The kitchen heat was numbing. So you open a door and a derelict wanders in and—
But you don't beat him this way.
I hit Ken as hard as I could just above the ear. I had the pleasure of hearing his skull crack against the wall on the other side of the door.
The freaky man got up from his crouch. He wore just a white T-shirt, stained now with his own blood, gray wrinkled work pants, and green high-top tennis shoes. I wondered how badly he'd been hurt. Blood flowed from the side of his mouth. He managed to look both terrified and indifferent. I pointed to the screen door behind him. "Get the hell out of here. Now."
I caught the flick of his eyes in the shadows—just soon enough to duck the roundhouse Ken aimed at me.
Ken's fist landed squarely against the wall. I could hear the knuckles pop and shatter. He looked almost silly, a bulky guy in an expensive black dinner jacket, with baby fine blond hair combed neatly like a 1959 fraternity boy and this big gorilla torso, waggling a big painful hand.
But you should not underestimate 1959 fraternity boys.
I was moving in for one last punch—we definitely did not like each other—when I saw and heard, more or less simultaneously, a switchblade appear in his left hand. The blade flashed out.
I was scared. I shouted, "Call the police!"
But he wasn't going to give me time. He forced me back against the door frame and started moving the knife in ever closer swipes past my windpipe.
I considered talking to him, saying Hey, pal, the most either of us are going to get out of this is a fine for assault. But a knife, my friend—
But he wasn't my friend, of course, and as he lunged for me, I rolled away, scrambling back up the short corridor to the kitchen proper.
The people in white jackets moved out of my way, all the time, yelling "Watch it!"
I wasn't sure what they were talking about until I felt his foot crash against my ankle and knock my own feet out from under me, sending me into a kind of swan dive for the red tiled floor that was all dirty from winter footprints.
Before I could find my feet again, he kicked me twice in the ribs and once in the stomach. He must have been a fullback at one time or the other.
When the help started yelling, "Watch it!" again I started yelling back. "Hit him with something for Christ's sake!" A single glance had told me that he'd gone crazy in some irredeemable way. Thorazine was about the only thing that was going to bring this guy back.
The knife blade got the shoulder of my blazer and tore it halfway down my sleeve. Fortunately, he'd managed to tear jacket and shirt without getting my flesh.
I dove for his knees, startling him enough to back him up against a stainless steel refrigerator. I brought a punch straight up to his groin. While he was dealing with the pain of that, I got to my feet.
Feeling I was in the clear, I started to move away from him but the onlookers started yelling again. This time I wasn't so lucky. His knife blade caught me right across the back of the neck. The pain was overwhelming, dizzying. I staggered against the stainless steel refrigerator door, trying to make sure that I stayed on my feet.
The yelling got intense again.
I turned back to him and saw him lunging at me. At that moment he looked bigger than he ever had. His madness was palpable now, a madness particular to the male of the species, the sort that leads men to open fire on twenty SWAT-team members, knowing that they have no more than ten seconds to live and not giving one damn at all.
This time he brought the knife up in an arc and then back down. He was aiming for the area of my heart. He meant to do fatal damage.
Moving away from the refrigerator, I trailed a hand behind me. I felt the edge of something very hot. When I glanced backward with one eye, I saw two bays in a wide deep-fat fryer. The foot-deep grease was boiling.
He didn't see it in time.
I let him come in waving the blade, holding still as long as my nerve would last, and then at the final moment I stepped aside and grabbed his knife hand and pushed it deep into the fryer.
I'd thought I might take some pleasure in the noise of his scream. But there was just fear and useless rage and pain in his voice and I knew these things too well to take any genuine pleasure in inflicting them on anyone else.
I shouted in his ear, "I'll pull your hand out if you leave the knife down there. If you don't, I'll put your face in the grease next time. Do you understand?"
But he was in too much pain to say anything coherent.
For good measure I slapped him once very hard across the mouth with my free hand, just the way he'd been slapping the homeless man around.
"You hear what I said about the knife?"
"Please," he said, "please." He could barely talk. His eyes ran with tears. His plump pink mouth trembled.
I took his hand out.
To the chef I said, "Tell the cops I'll file a complaint against this jerk sometime tonight. Right now I'm going to try and find somebody."
I grabbed a clean towel from the chef's hand, sopped it against my neck, fixing it like a collar, and took off running.
Chapter 16
Moonlight threw the tops of the alley buildings into black relief against the dark blue sky. Somewhere, ahead of me I heard a human mewling, and ice crunched under the weight of stumbling feet. I pushed on into the gloom, still hearing him perhaps a hundred yards ahead but unable to make out even his silhouette. Only when he reached the mouth of the alley and turned right was I able to glimpse him at all.
I ran, sliding on the ice, keeping my arms out straight for balance. On either side of me the aged backsides of the buildings brought back other eras, recalling those days when I'd pedaled my Schwinn down just such fascinating alleys as these where contraband Lucky Strikes could be smoked without your parents knowing, and nude women could be glimpsed in the photography magazine stolen from somebody's older brother, and you could sit smelling the sweet scents of the bakery a couple hundred feet away and pore leisurely through the newest issue of Amazing Stories or Manhunt.
When I reached the head of the alley, I, too, turned right, only I didn't see him. Ahead of me stretched a deserted back street, the nearest part dimly lighted from a streetlight but the rest of it lost in darkness. I stopped, panting, listening. At first I heard the expected city sounds—cars, a distant ambulance, chatter. But then I heard the odd mewling sound he'd been making. The sound was close by.
Ahead of me, on my right, was a vast four-story warehouse. Vandals had smashed all the windows and graffiti artists had covered it with their ironies and rage. It sat sprawling and dead, a testament to the days when Rust Belt buildings such as these had pounded with the energy and purpose of American industry. This was long before the Germans and the Japanese decided to take over America by stealth rather than violence, and we decided to let them.
I walked toward him carefully. I wanted to talk to him. I was afraid he'd bolt like a terrified animal. It didn't help that I couldn't see him. He was somewhere on the side of the building in the shadows. I gave him plenty of warning, my breath still pitching ragged, my feet snapping ice underfoot.
I saw his eyes first. Even in the shadows they retained their mad clarity. He was huddled next to a door holding his stomach from the beating Ken had given him. Every few seconds, seeming timed to every other exhalation or so, he made the mewling sound.
"You should go back to St. Mark's," I said. "Have them check you."
He drew up tighter to the doorway.
"I'm not going to hurt you, all right?"
He said nothing. Just watched me.
"A few weeks ago the restaurant had trouble with somebody coming in the back door. I need to know if that was you." My voice had a loud, ridiculous ring to it. Neither of us were dressed for winter, yet here we were, conversing. Or rather, here I was trying to converse.
"You can hear me all right, can't you?"
The eyes widened. A little whiter. Af
ter a moment, he nodded.
"Why have you been sneaking into the restaurant?"
He said, "Smiley was my friend. They beat him up." He spoke slowly haltingly, as if with great pain. "Smiley" was the derelict Gwen Daily had mentioned as disappearing. I wondered why he'd mentioned Smiley. He said nothing else.
"I'm not going to tell the police anything. I just want to know. A man was murdered the other night and I have the feeling that you can help me find out who killed him."
I started blowing on my hands and rubbing my arms to stay warm. "I'm sorry Ken beat you. You didn't deserve that, even if you did sneak in."
He continued to stare. His eyes gave the impression that he was listening, evaluating.
"I want to ask you a question and I'd appreciate an answer, all right?"
He said nothing, of course.
"The man who was killed the other night—did you kill him?" He said nothing, of course.
"Why have you been sneaking into the restaurant?"
He said, "Behold, the Lord God helps me; who will declare me guilty?"
I sighed. We were back to Bible quotations.
Abruptly, his head jerked. He heard them before I did. In the frozen night their pounding feet had the sound of terrible authority.
"They're looking for both of us," I said.
He scrambled to his feet but almost immediately doubled over and began mewling again. I went over to him and touched his shoulder. Even in the senses-numbing cold, he smelled sour.
Back at the restaurant he'd taken several hard shots to the belly. There could have been serious damage. "You'd better have somebody check you over soon," I said, when he straightened up again. "Do you understand?"
He nodded.
"Do you know a back way out of here?"
He nodded again.
"Then you'd better take it because they're going to be here in a minute or so."
He stared at me. "Happy is he who is kind to the poor."
I smiled. "I sure hope that's true, my friend. I sure hope that's true."
By now their shouts, close up, were loud and coarse. "Hurry up, now," I said.
Then he was gone, one with the shadows and the night, vanished. I suppose that's one of the many tricks street people learn to survive.
And then they were there. Two of them, beefy and shiny with sweat, wore dinner jackets with cute little bow ties. These, of course, were Ken's fellow bouncers. The third man surprised me it was Tom Anton. He was so languidly handsome you wouldn't have thought running was in him.
While Ken's friends glowered at me, Anton said, "Did you get him?"
"Get who?"
"The bastard who's been sneaking into the restaurant." He was out of breath and sounded vaguely as if he were going to be sick.
"No."
"No? What do you mean, no?" He'd started mistaking me for an employee again.
The four of us stood near the curb in the dirty street light. A Lincoln Continental went by on its quick crushing way out of the ghetto and the passengers, obviously recognizing Anton, gawked.
I said, "Anton, I don't have to put up with any more of your bullshit."
"I wasn't giving you any bullshit."
"I know. I guess you probably talk to everybody that way."
"I want you to find that man."
"Why?"
"Why? Why do you think why? Because he's been sneaking into the restaurant."
I studied his glistening face. "A man wanders in a few times from the street, probably to get food, and everybody at the restaurant gets violently upset. That seems pretty strange to me."
"It does? Then you wouldn't mind if somebody wandered around inside your business?"
I nodded to the tuxedo twins. "I wouldn't hire goons to beat him up."
He shrugged. "Apparently you don't know much about cocaine. Enough of our clientele use it that we have problems from time to time—psychotic episodes." He indicated the two men with his noble chin. "These men do a very good job of keeping things peaceful."
"Yeah, like beating up some poor bastard who can barely walk anyway."
"Ken gets carried away sometimes. And anyway, who're you to talk, Dwyer? You pushed his arm into the deep-fat fryer."
"Be sure to mention that in his hand he had a knife."
He shook his head. "Dwyer, this is a very confused time for me. Whether you believe it or not, Richie and I were good friends at one time. His death has upset me. I want to find out who killed him—if it wasn't Earle Tomkins." He shrugged. "Deirdre told me what she did—taking Earle's jacket and cap and pretending to be him—and I know that sounds suspicious but you didn't know Richie very well. He would have killed her if he'd caught her snooping around his car. He had a violent temper." He shuddered. The sweat was drying. He was getting cold.
"Ducky," I said. "Deirdre hires me to prove that Jackie did it. Jackie hints that Deirdre did it. Now who are you going to blame?"
The tuxedo twins looked angry that I'd talk to their boss in such a way.
Anton shook his head and said, "You're hopeless."
I half-expected him to say ciao.
They left, the three of them, the two in tuxedos glaring at me over their shoulders. Then I was alone in the ragged, rusted-out neighborhood, and another fancy car, this time a long gray Audi, passed by, the dowager in the driver's seat shaking her head at the sight of me. I probably looked disheveled and crazed but I still resented her glance.
In the alley again, the cost of my twenty-minute exposure to the cold beginning to take its toll, I heard a faint squeaking, almost the peeping you associate with little yellow chicks on Easter Sunday.
But somehow I knew who and what it was.
"Well, I'll be damned," I said, leaning down and finding her scrawny little body in the darkness. "It's you again, isn't it, sweetie?"
It was the little tabby kitty I'd picked up my first day on the job at the restaurant. Then I'd put her trembling into the pocket of my topcoat. Now, I held her up in the moonlight and got a good look at her tiny sweet face, the huge grave eyes, the birdy little mouth that peeped every once in a while. I thought of what horrors she must go through minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, struggling against the elements and predators in an indifferent world. She'd never last the night. Not this subzero night.
"I'll bet you're as cold as I am, aren't you, hon?"
She peeped. I had to interpret that as an affirmative.
So I decided to do it. I eased her down in the pocket of my blazer and kept my hand in there to keep her as warm as possible.
When I got back inside the restaurant to pick up my topcoat, Jackie said, "The last time I saw you, I was headed for the ladies' room for a quick pit stop. I just assumed you'd wait for me. But Deirdre told me you've been busy."
"You're friends with Deirdre now?"
She frowned. "Death makes strange bedfellows. Deirdre and Tom and I have something in common now, I guess. We had a talk last night. Somebody we cared about very much has died."
My little friend made her peeping sound.
We were in the lobby of the restaurant. The maitre d's head snapped to attention when he heard the faint kitty noise.
"What've you got in there?" Jackie asked.
I let the kitty stick her head up. She looked around, marveling.
"A cat," Jackie said.
"Right."
"I hate cats."
"Ah."
"The whole idea of litter boxes disgusts me."
"I'm sorry."
The maitre d' was on his way over. He was probably going to report me to some senate committee on bad taste or something.
"See you," I said to Jackie.
I left.
At my apartment I put a towel inside a cardboard box and I heated a bowl of skim milk and set it inside the box and then I put the tabby inside on the towel. She lapped at the milk so heartily that she got tired every thousand slurps or so and would take a brief rest break. Then, sighing, she'd go back at it again.
I got in bed and lay in darkness. I couldn't sleep. For a time I stared at the way the streetlight made the frosted window golden. Wind rattled the window and snow-like grains of sand blew against the glass. I thought of Donna mostly and then I was thinking of my kids when I felt a tiny warm paw touch my cheek.
I picked her up and put her under the covers and she lay with her head on the edge of the pillow and went promptly to sleep.
Soon after, I joined her.
Chapter 17
In the morning I went to the 7-Eleven and got kitty litter and a kitty box and came back and fixed up my new friend. She spent the first five minutes timidly walking around inside the box, pawing at the litter but leaving it fresh. Finally, I gave her a kiss on top of the head and left.
The motel I wanted, the one where Richard Coburn supposedly spent so much time, was located on the northeast edge of the city, where planners expect the building boom to last well into the next century. Even in the overcast light of day, the place looked impressive, all natural woods and stone and glass. It looked like anything but a motel, the rooms hidden behind the set-like front of the place.
Inside, I had to pass by a wide blue pool that smelled of chlorine. In the lapping water a woman with a pretty face and wonderful middle-aged breasts played with two young kids while her husband sat in a lounge chair smoking a cigar and reading the Wall Street Journal.
At the desk a young man who appeared to have graduated from training school about twenty minutes ago made his voice deep as possible and said, "Good morning, sir. May I help you?" He sounded like a Marine recruit facing a psychotic drill instructor.
"The manager, please."
"Mr. Farnsworth?"
"If he's the manager."
"May I tell him who's calling?" All this time he kept a grin on his face. I wanted to give him a tranquilizer. I supposed my own son would be going through all this soon enough, the rough passage into the world of real jobs.
I handed over a card.
"You're a detective?" His voice cracked on the last word.
Two or three people who'd been standing around watching the woman with the nice face and the wonderful breasts now shifted their attention to me. The kid sure knew how to keep things quiet.