A Twist of the Knife

by Stephen Solomita

  Epstein took the glass offered by the barmaid and sipped thoughtfully, just as if the brown liquid was ambrosia for whatever demon drove his ulcer. “The thing is, if I fix the problem, the pain goes away. It’s as simple as that. Fix the problem and the ulcer goes away.”

  Moodrow pulled on his cigarette, inhaling deeply, then turned quickly toward the captain. “So what am I, Captain? The problem or the solution?”

  Epstein laughed for the first time that day. “You’re the solution, baby. The solution. Unless you don’t solve the problem, then the solution becomes the problem all over again. But don’t take it too seriously. Right now it’s just a little, baby problem. It might never amount to anything. Correction. It probably won’t amount to anything. Still, I want to be ready, Stanley, whichever way it goes.”

  There was a silence then. Both men looked around the bar as if noticing it for the first time. There were dozens of Killarney Harp bars in the city, each with a long steam table loaded with roast meats. The toilets all smelled of urine, even the women’s toilets, though Killarney Harps were not places commonly patronized by women. The long wooden bars were scarred and stained and the bartenders spoke with thick brogues. The barmaids wore black trousers and white blouses and were usually moving into middle age. Rita Melengic, the waitress taking care of Moodrow and his captain, noticed the gap in their conversation and paused in her rounds to slide into the booth next to the sergeant. “Make room, make room,” she commanded, slapping him with her hip. “Say Captain,” she asked, “what kind of name is Stanley Moodrow? I mean it ain’t no guinea name. It ain’t no Jewish name. It ain’t no Irish name. It don’t even sound Polish, for Christ’s sake.” She stopped suddenly, out of breath.

  To Allen Epstein, married twenty-five years, Rita Melengic had all the character of a generic aspirin. “How am I supposed to know?” he replied.

  “Don’t ya see his official record?” She threw him her best smile.

  The detective broke in gently. “This is business, Rita. Go back to work.”

  “Sure, baby.” But she held onto him. “You’re still gonna take me home tonight, OK, Stan?” She looked closely at his face, but his features, small and efficient in his enormous skull, showed nothing. “I don’t feel like sleeping alone.”

  Moodrow flashed the captain a defiant look. “Didn’t I say I would? There’s nothing happening that can’t wait until tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Stanley,” she said, turning to the captain. “I just don’t feel like going home alone.” She scrambled from behind the table without waiting for a reply and returned to the wars.

  The sergeant looked back at Epstein, his face once again expressionless. He straightened in his seat and the captain was impressed, as always, by the sheer bulk of the man. It did not seem possible for a man so heavily muscled to have such an ugly body. For a minute, he entertained the image of Rita Melengic lying under that great bulk—paralyzed, motionless.

  “OK,” Moodrow said suddenly. “I’ll be the fish. Let’s hear the problem.”

  “You remember Ronald Jefferson Chadwick?”

  “Sure.”

  “The grenade was manufactured in Russia.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “The FBI says the grenade was manufactured in the Soviet Union. Something about the metal. The alloy. There’s no doubt.”

  Sergeant Moodrow sipped his drink studiously, drawing his eyebrows into the center of his forehead, a gesture designed to make people think he was concentrating. He looked up at the captain, and replied solemnly. “So who gives a fuck?”

  “What gives a fuck? I’ll tell you who gives a fuck.”

  “No.” Moodrow rose up, towering over the captain. “Don’t tell me nothin’. A junkie buys a hand grenade and kills a pusher. He gets away with a bundle and he don’t give a fuck either. We see it all the time.”

  “But not with a hand grenade,” Epstein patiently explained. “We don’t see any hand grenades at all. This is a Saturday night special part of town.” He paused to let his message sink in. “All right, so nobody right this minute cares about a Russian hand grenade and some mutilated junkies. But let a hand grenade go off in a white department store any time within the next two years and the press’ll be all over us. Not to mention the department. What I say is, let’s check it out. Let’s do our job. Go to the FBI. See what’s doing with terrorists in this area. This is nut heaven, remember? Maybe it’s some kind of Puerto Rican radicals. I want that nobody can say. ‘How come you didn’t do this? How come you didn’t do that.’”

  “I got a lot of cases right now, Captain.”

  “Just do this for two weeks. Let the other stuff slide. I want a complete report. For the files.”

  Moodrow, staring at the inch of bourbon remaining in his glass, sat down heavily. It happened more and more often lately. It was like losing a fight in the ring. No matter how determined you were, you couldn’t make your hands go faster and you faced the inevitable end with tears in your eyes. The detective wished he was lying in bed with Rita and that they had finished making love—if they were going to make love—and that he was asleep and that he wouldn’t wake up. “Sure, Captain,” he said. “You picked the right man.”

  In spite of his best and most earnest intentions, Stanley Moodrow did awaken on the following morning, though he had, in fact, forgotten his wish entirely. The sergeant, finished with the bathroom, sat at a blue Formica table in Rita Melengic’s kitchen, pad and pencil in hand. If asked, he would assert his sense of well-being aggressively. Rita had seen this mood before. When given a problem, a solvable problem, he became so engrossed that he forgot to be miserable. Rita bustled about the kitchen, preparing for the coming day (or night, it being nearly 2 PM) while the detective played with his ideas. Lovers for three months, they seemed nearly married, although, within a day or two, if Moodrow stayed that long, Rita would be sick of the policeman, of the way he sat at the table, waiting to be fed. As if that was his right.

  “OK,” Moodrow said, scratching at the thick stubble under his jowls. “What do we know?”

  “Is that a philosophy question?” Rita asked, pouring out the coffee. “It’s too early for philosophy.”

  “What are you talking about?” He glanced at his watch. “Jesus Christ. It’s after two o’clock.”

  Rita spooned butter into the frying pan. “Omelettes or fried with bacon?” She used her most businesslike tones. There were times when she simply could not resist the urge to bust his chops.

  “Shit,” Moodrow growled. “You’re making me lose my train of thought. This is too important. We got five bodies in that house.”

  “Rye or white?”

  Moodrow sipped at his coffee, holding his anger down. He looked Rita over calmly. A little broad in the butt. A little gray, but that was all right; at least that was more natural than hair dyes. Even the wrinkles on her face (and there weren’t that many) ran up along the lines of her smile. She was what he called ‘handsome’ and, best of all, he didn’t have to risk a damn thing. Whenever she wanted him she said so, and for his part, he enjoyed being with her and didn’t miss her when he wasn’t. “Listen,” he said. “I need a little help with this hand grenade thing. Just let me bounce a few ideas, OK?”

  Rita shrugged her shoulders. “We did the whole thing last night. One criminal kills another criminal. Who cares?”

  “You’re making a big mistake, Rita. A number one, fundamental error. Last night I was drunk. That’s my excuse, but today I’m awake and sober. You get a job, you don’t think about whether it’s worthwhile or not, because that just takes away from the energy you need to do the job. You put all that aside and deal only with the problem. So, what do we know?”

  Rita broke four eggs into a bowl and began to stir them with a spoon. “Somebody got onto the fifth floor of a dope factory, shot two men, killed three more with a hand grenade and wounded another. Then he got away with a suitcase full of something. Probably money. That’s it.”

  “Not completely.
It’s possible someone else—one of the bodyguards most likely—but it could even be one of the cops investigating the blast took that suitcase. It’s not likely, but it could be. Couple more things. We got two dead dogs and two padlocks picked off a window gate. We know the guy got in the apartment at least two hours before the shooting started. The footprints on the rug were dry, but the chair where he sat was still wet, soaked through. And he went out over the roofs, because the streets filled up right after the explosion. He used a 9mm automatic and a commie hand grenade.”

  “There’s something else that’s bothering me,” Rita said. “Why didn’t he shoot those dogs? He kills two dogs with a knife when he could just as easily have shot them.” She broke the omelettes in half, scraping them onto two plates and began to butter the toast absentmindedly. “I think he likes contact. I think he likes twisting the knife.”

  Moodrow held up his hand. “Stop right there. Stick with what we’re sure of. Speculation comes later. At 11:00, Ronald Jefferson Chadwick, who just happens to be the heroin king of the Lower East Side, comes home. He’s accompanied by his bodyguard, Parker Drabble, and he’s carrying a brown suitcase. He goes up to the fifth floor without talking to anyone. Parker goes with him. Ten seconds later, Chadwick’s body comes crashing down to the fourth floor which is the actual factory. All the soldiers run up from the second and third floors to gather round their fallen leader. Then a hand grenade follows the body and ka-boom, everybody’s dead. Or almost everybody.

  “Later on there’s no suitcase. And nobody heard any shots, so that indicates a silencer. Pretty sophisticated. A 9mm with silencer. A Russian hand grenade. Not everyday equipment. On the other hand, Ronald Chadwick ain’t your everyday pigeon.”

  “Now who’s speculating?” Rita sat down across from Moodrow. She looked at her plate, then back to the sergeant. “How do we know the place was a factory? Did they find chemicals?”

  “No, no. Not a factory like that. Chadwick’d buy a big piece, let’s say a half-kilo of sixty percent pure. Then he’d cut it, bag it and get it out on the streets. We got scales, razor blades, mirrors, nearly a tenth of an ounce of heroin dust. We got eighteen pounds of quinine. Eighteen fuckin’ pounds. That’s very big business. Really. Chadwick was Rockefeller in that ghetto. He was the ultimate success. Even his death was right.” Moodrow attacked his breakfast between sentences, stabbing at the soft eggs, then leaning forward to catch the food with his mouth before it could drop back onto the plate. “Something else, too. There was a booby trap on the fourth-floor fire escape, a trip wire attached to a shotgun. Very primitive. One of the soldiers warned us the minute we walked through the door. In the dark, that wire is invisible. If the killer went that way, he’d either have to know it was there or get his goddamn legs blown off. But that’s no big deal. Do you remember the Ghetto Rangers?”

  “The street gang?”

  “Much more than that. Two years ago, the Rangers fought a war with Chadwick for control of the heroin trade. Now these were basically black gangs with black customers. Later on, after the war was won, Chadwick added some Puerto Rican personnel to his staff and expanded his territory, but at that time both gangs were black. According to the cops who worked on the case, twenty-two deaths resulted directly from that war. And that means we actually found twenty-two bodies. Who knows how many more are buried in those bombed-out tenements? It could be any number. Now you know how many times that war made the papers? Exactly once. Because two Ghetto Rangers happened to get blown away in front of a downtown restaurant.

  “Sure, nobody cares if coloreds kill coloreds. People figure they deserve whatever misery they get. Only things’re heating up. Hand grenades are a definite escalation and the captain wants to take a closer look. He wants to make sure the killer is just another criminal and not some crazy terrorist who’s likely to take his action downtown.”

  Rita began to clear the dishes, piling one plate on top of another, but without thinking about it, Moodrow took them away from her and carried them to the sink. “Tell me, Stanley,” Rita asked, “if it turns out to be one criminal killing another criminal, are you going to forget about it?”

  “You mean a black junkie killing a colored pusher?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

  “The captain wants to make sure everything’s cool in his precinct. Business as usual. In order for me to make my captain comfortable, I have to find out who committed the crime. If I find out and I can prove it, I’ll nail the motherfucker to the wall.”

  Rita blew him a kiss and laughed out loud. “Stanley,” she said, “you’re my ideal.”

  “You know how I’m gonna do it? I’m gonna say this guy had information about Chadwick’s setup before he went to kill him. Exact, inside information. I’m gonna send two cops to check the alleyway for clothing or footprints. Anything to be able to say he got past the booby trap on the fourth floor. Also, I’d like to send two detectives to knock on every door in the neighborhood in case anyone saw anything, but this probably won’t happen. Not enough manpower. Not enough money. It’s what we call very low percentage. But, from my point of view, all that’s just so much bullshit, anyway. See, there’s this guinea-Puerto Rican over at St. Stephen’s named Paco Baquili. Now Paco’s in very big trouble. For one thing, his arm’s nearly torn off. For a second, he’s damn near blind, though that particular problem might get better. But the worst thing is all that equipment, all that quinine and all that heroin is gonna fall right on top of him. He’s the only one left. Now suppose I say that Paco knows who did this to him. I say it was an inside job and somebody wasn’t where he was supposed to be and Paco knows who this person is. Of course, Paco would like to take his own revenge and that’s natural. Very understandable. But still, if I can get him to tell me what that is, I’ll be one very big step closer to solving my problem. See what I’m gonna do is…” He walked up behind her and reached around to grip her breasts, pressing them back into her chest. “I’m gonna put the squeeze on him.”

  Paco Baquili did not count himself among the most fortunate of men, although, statistically, the chances of his being alive were very small. Only two feet away, he’d been staring directly at the falling grenade when it exploded and it was generally agreed by the staff of St. Stephen’s that, especially from a moral point of view, he really should have been killed immediately. Yet (they felt) he’d gotten off lucky. Shrapnel had torn through his right arm, severing tendons in his elbow and wrist, neither of which, although the tendons had been reattached by the surgeons, seemed to respond to his desires. And he was blind as well, his head wrapped in layers of gauze bandages. The doctors assured him this blindness was temporary, but to a man facing thirty years in prison, loss of vision is tantamount to loss of life. Paco himself was an adroit and lifelong liar, so it was understandable if he tended to believe that doctors might also be liars. Then, too, this was a prison ward, as securely locked as the city jail; the doctors were employees of the prison system and, as such, liable to any cruelty. Hadn’t they, just this minute, even though it was late at night and everyone else in the hospital asleep, allowed Sergeant Stanley Moodrow to enter his room, unaccompanied? Hadn’t the sergeant locked the door behind him, snapping the lock loudly to make sure Paco heard it closing? Paco felt his predicament drop down over his face like a wet pillow.

  “Jeez, Paco,” Moodrow sighed, “what a break. One day you’re up and the next you’re fuckin’ buried.”

  Paco’s desperate grin spread from ear to ear. “So good to hear from you again, Sergeant Moodrow.” He placed the policeman just off his left hand. “Long time, eh? How you been?”

  “I was doing good before, but it’s been pretty rough lately.” The voice began to move toward the foot of the bed. “My boss has an ulcer. You know, he likes to take it out on the men, so once in awhile he puts a bug up my ass. Say, what happened to you? You’re really a mess.”

  Paco instinctively rolled toward the sound, still smiling. “Some crazy bastard threw a hand grenade
at me.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “I guess I’m ungrateful.” Paco let his head drop back onto the pillow. “I don’t feel like no lucky guy. I mean, my boss is dead. I don’t even got no job.”

  The sudden, unexpected laughter made Paco jump, jarring his injured right arm, and his cry of pain, stifled almost before it emerged, blended nicely with the sergeant’s happiness. “I’m sorry, Paco,” Moodrow said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I keep forgetting that you’re blind. Really. I’m not putting you on. It’s just that, with all that time facing you. I mean all that quinine, eighteen fucking pounds. And five thousand little cellophane envelopes. And the scales. Do you have any idea how much powder we vacuumed off the rugs? What we pulled out from the little cracks in the floorboards? I could retire on this bust.”

  “But Sergeant,” Paco said, desperately trying to follow the sound of Moodrow’s voice as he wandered about the bed. “All that stuff belongs to Ronald Chadwick. Everybody knows who is the big boss in that district and it ain’t Paco Baquili.”

  “Wrong, Paco.” Somehow Moodrow had gotten behind the bed, his face directly over Paco’s. “All your clothes are in the building. We got suitcases with your initials engraved. We got letters, credit cards. Hey, don’t be modest. Ronald Chadwick’s dead. It’s all yours now.”

  Paco knew the silence that followed was meant to frighten him, but he was determined not to be the first to speak.

  “Say, Paco.” The policeman’s voice was flat, emotionless. “How do you think the guy got up to the fifth floor like that?”

  “Really, I don’t have no idea, Sergeant. All I seen was Chadwick come flying down the stairs and then this explosion right in my face.”