New York City Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  The damnedest thing was how they didn’t even hesitate. I promised I would pay it back as soon as possible, thinking maybe I could in five years, and right after work hurried down to Chelsea prepared to meet Richard’s insane price with an extra ten thousand to beat the offer I just knew he must have gotten.

  Richard was sitting on his front step, leaning against a pillar that was topped with a welcoming wrought-iron pineapple he’d had recreated by Spanish craftsmen to match one stolen. The front door closed behind him and I could hear somebody creaking up the steps.

  I said, “I got the money. I can meet your price.”

  “Too late. A woman’s buying it right now.”

  “I can top it by ten thousand.”

  “Top what by ten thousand?”

  “The extra forty you wanted.”

  Richard laughed. “She’s already topped that. I’ve got seven hundred thousand on the table.”

  “Seven hundred thousand? Sight unseen?”

  “She saw it this afternoon. Woman looking for a pied-àterre for her boyfriend.”

  “Seven hundred thousand?”

  “This woman is so in love she’d have paid a million.”

  Richard shook his head. Even he seemed awed and it made him seem more human as he asked, “You know how when somebody is really happy after being unhappy for a long time?

  How they glow? This woman is glowing like Venus on a dark night.”

  “How’d she find out about it?”

  “Your friend Tommy showed it to her broker. Tommy was so excited he was red in the face. He really is a greedy prick.”

  “Is Tommy up there?”

  “No, he and the broker were here earlier.”

  “Did you actually see Tommy King leave?”

  “No.”

  I thought to myself, Tommy wouldn’t kill her up there.

  Richard knew he had set it up with her broker. He’d get caught. Except he didn’t care about getting caught. He thought he was right.

  I hesitated for longer than I should have. I knew exactly what would happen, and when it did, the price of that apartment was going to plummet. A bloody murder would knock the price lower than a ghost. All I had to do was walk away from a crime about to happen. Or better yet, just stand innocently chatting with Richard who, as usual, was talking up a storm. All I had to do was listen and wait.

  “Hey, Richard,” a woman called down from the front window of the apartment. “Where is that air shaft for the kitchen exhaust?”

  She was not the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in New York, but she came close—a perfectly lovely blonde, slim, not boney, sky-blue eyes set wide in a heart-shaped face, and a mouth that wanted to smile. Quite a few years older than Tommy, I thought. I wasn’t surprised they had gotten divorced; what I couldn’t figure out was how they had hooked up in the first place. She just seemed better than Tommy, who while handsome enough to squire a beauty like her around town, had an empty mind and soul even when he wasn’t threatening bloody murder.

  She looked down at me gaping up at her, and her smile erased every line that hinted at age. As Richard had said, she glowed. “Hi. I’m Samantha King. Do you live in the building too?”

  Before I could answer, she disappeared—like a reverse jack-in-the-box—and the window slammed shut. I ran up the front stoop. The door had swung closed and locked. “Open it,” I yelled. “Unlock the door!”

  Richard located the key on the crowded ring on his belt, inserted it, and unlocked the door. I pounded up the stairs.

  Halfway up the flight I heard her scream. When I reached the landing something heavy slammed against a wall. The old house had thin paneled wood doors and I ran full tilt into the nearest, splintering it open with my shoulder.

  Tommy had chased her into a corner, bent her backwards over a radiator, and was hacking at her chest with his scalpel. He looked up at me crashing into the room. His face was covered in her blood.

  “Stop!” I shouted, too late to do any good.

  Tommy let the poor woman go and her body slipped off the radiator onto the floor. “I can’t get it out,” he said.

  “Should’ve brought a fucking saw.” He reached down and tried to close her staring eyes, but the lids popped open again and all he did was leave bloody prints on her cheeks. He gave up trying, pressed the scalpel to the left side of his neck, and gouged deep.

  I got what I deserved.

  The Post and the Daily News exaggerated the blood, of course. Times and Sun readers learned that Tommy did not cut his ex-wife’s heart completely out, but had given up halfway and ripped the scalpel across his own throat in what the Sun writer had termed “a spasmodic mea culpa.” Still, there was blood enough.

  Marcy Stern, speaking for the real estate brokerage, swore that Tommy King had been “terminated for cause” before the attack. Asked what effect the crime would have on property values in Chelsea, West 20th Street, and Richard’s 1840 town house in particular, she fired back, “Don’t even think of lowballing us.”

  Unfortunately for her and Richard—and fortunately for me—no one thought of making any offers at all, lowball or otherwise. I got the apartment for the original asking price and didn’t have to tap my parents’ little nest egg. Richard, shaken, agreed to all my terms, especially a floor-to-ceiling cleaning by professionals before I moved in and a repainting of the room where most of the attack had occurred. I moved in the afternoon of the closing to a home smelling of fresh paint and floor wax.

  Samantha was waiting in the window, her heart-shaped face super-imposed on the Empire State Building. Her ghost? Or just my guilty imagination reflected in the glass? Didn’t matter which, I saw her clear as I saw the sunlit spire by day and the white iceberg at night. I tried moving around the room, shifting perspective. At angles, the nineteenth-century glass distorted the light, but she kept moving with me. Wispy hair, blue eyes, paler than in life, and a small, sad smile that grew sadder every day as the lines around her mouth deepened. “Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked one morning. And that night, “You knew he wanted to hurt me.”

  After a couple of weeks of her, I called in a broker for a hint of what I could get for the place. He liked it, at first. I didn’t have much furniture yet, but my piano made it look lived in and there were the fireplaces and the killer view from the front windows. All of a sudden he shivered.

  “Weird feeling in this place. Like something’s here? You ever notice? Hey, is this where that woman got killed?”

  He didn’t wait for my answer.

  Samantha was waiting in the window. She said, “The thing that makes me saddest is that I had finally found a great guy. My friends were asking me, does he have a brother?”

  I said, “I can’t sell this apartment. I can’t move. I can’t change what I did to you. So I guess I’ll have to get used to you. With a view like this I’ll get used to anything. If I have to live with you, I will. If you can stand it, I can too.”

  I awoke the next morning to a mind-shattering screaming roar echoing in the street, looked out the window, and saw a bunch of guys with chainsaws and a crane lopping branches off the plane tree.

  I raced downstairs in pants and socks. Across the street sawdust was flying from the main trunk. Marcy Stern was on the sidewalk, taking people’s business cards and handing out pictures of model apartments slated for a new twenty-story residential tower. Each had a wonderful view of the Empire State Building.

  “You can’t build here!” I and several panicked neighbors screamed. “The seminary is landmarked.”

  “Not this part.”

  “The whole block.”

  “Not the new part.”

  “But—”

  “We found the same loophole they did when they built the new part.”

  Steel rises quickly in New York. The last Samantha and I saw of my view was a hard-hatted iron worker silhouetted against the Empire State Building like King Kong.

  THE LAST ROUND

  BY C.J. SULLIVAN

/>   Inwood

  Danny Stone woke up angry. He sat up in his lumpy double bed and felt a rage tearing through him. His fists were clenched and he was breathing hard. He knew it was the dream. It was always the dream.

  He shook his head and tried to erase the images of his long night. He knew he threw punches in his sleep and that is why he slept alone. Since he lost his wife, every woman he went to bed with woke him yelling that he was hitting them while he was dreaming. Sleep boxing, he told them, he suffered from sleep boxing. He said it as a joke but none of the women found it funny. Or slept with him again. In his waking life he had never struck a woman, and even in his dreams it wasn’t a woman he was trying to hit.

  He got out of his bed and stretched his tight body. The cold linoleum felt good on his bare feet as he walked over and looked out his bedroom window down to Sherman Avenue. A cold blast of wind blew brown leaves around a fire pump. Danny watched an elderly man carrying a plastic black bag and rummaging through a garbage can looking for beer and soda cans for the nickel reward.

  Danny turned away from the window. He felt a lump in his throat. He blocked that out with another long stretch. His muscles and bones popped and then he dropped to the floor to do one hundred sit-ups followed with fifty push-ups. Some men woke up to coffee, some to brushing their teeth. Danny Stone woke up and worked out. He did this every morning since he could remember. As a young boy he wanted to be a boxer and that is where it began. It took him through his fighting career and it would now take him into retirement.

  “Too old, boy … you too old.”

  He tensed up on his last ten push-ups as he heard those words in his mind. His trainer, Victor Garcia, had said that to him at Obert’s Gym yesterday when Danny floated the idea of one more fight.

  Too old? How is thirty-five too old? he thought. Thirty-five is the prime of life for most men. But for a boxer? He knew the dirty secret of his profession. You didn’t slowly lose your skills in the ring. They deserted you in seconds, and a contender for the middleweight crown—which is how Danny thought of himself, although Ring Magazine had never ranked him higher than number ten—could go from youthful potential to a washed-up bum in under three minutes. That is all it took. One bad round. You cannot hide in a boxing ring and all your weaknesses are eventually exposed. In his last fight, one of the best middleweights of all time, Roy Jones Jr., looked old at thirty-five, and Danny knew he was no Roy Jones Jr.

  “You too old.”

  Those words.

  Cutting and cruel.

  He knew there was something to them. Age for a boxer is deadly. It is like a door you pass through, and when it closes behind you there is no going back. A part of Danny Stone knew that was true, but like most boxers he thought he could go one more time. He figured he could get a $50,000 pay date as an under card at the Garden. Good enough for a stake.

  Start a business. Maybe use it as a down payment for a condo. Take on some rising young kid and drop him on his cocky ass with his still-powerful left hook.

  He could see it as he laced up his running shoes. The bright lights. The blood. The crowd yelling. The punch as Danny stood over the kid with his gloves raised. Danny smiled as he threw on his gray Champion sweat suit and burst out of his third floor apartment and ran down the stairs.

  “Hey, Champ, what are you doing? Lock your door!” Mr. Ruiz, the super, yelled at him as he swept the floor.

  “Nothing to steal,” Danny called back with a laugh.

  He ran out of the lobby and his legs tightened up as they pounded on the cement. The cold air hit his lungs like he had inhaled pipe tobacco. He put his head down and ran along the street toward Inwood Hill Park. The first ten minutes of every run was a killer for him. Even when he was young he hated the start of the run. But after ten minutes, even now, when he found his rhythm and groove, it got good. Real good. Running and boxing are what kept him sane all these years and he wasn’t ready to let go of them. If no one else believed in him, Danny thought, at least he did.

  At least he did. Those words comforted him as he ran up Dyckman Street. He passed the Alibi Inn and a white-haired man waved to him from the window. Danny smiled and waved back. Everyone in Inwood knew him as “Champ.” He thought not many knew anything about him other than he was a boxer. The furies that drove him. He passed Sherman Avenue and made a right to avoid Pitt Place.

  Danny knew that was where the ghosts lived. 209 Pitt Place. The last time he had seen his wife and baby daughter alive was in their tidy two-bedroom apartment there. He was deep in training out in the Poconos when the house was hit by a crew of home invaders. They came for the money they knew he had hidden in the closet. He had made some offhanded comment to a New York Post boxing writer about not trusting banks, and it cost his family their lives.

  That the men were arrested, tried, and convicted with life sentences never gave him peace. That he won the fight was no solace. The only time he felt good was when his fists were pounding another man.

  He shook his head to chase that ten-year-old memory away. He turned into the park and picked up his pace as he ran up the first hill. A mother pushing a baby carriage smiled at him when he huffed by. He kept going deeper into the park, deeper into his run. Away from the cruelty of life in New York City. Where the streets can snatch your whole life from you for a few thousand dollars. He went faster. His body felt good. He threw a few punches and let out a grunt.

  He turned onto a path through the old woods and now ran on the dirt. As he came to the top of the hill, he saw a man standing in a thicket of bushes. The man looked up and Danny knew it was the guy he called the Mad Russian.

  The Mad Russian was a local character who once told Danny his name was Yuri and he was once a Soviet botanist, now reduced to manual labor by the cruel capitalistic system of America. He said he came to the park to study the flora and the fauna. Danny waved to the Russian, but the guy looked through Danny like he wasn’t even there.

  Just another New York psycho, Danny thought. The city was full of them, and if he kept it up, Danny Stone would join them. Lonely displaced people haunted by their past. The ghosts of your horrors were always chasing you.

  He came out of the park and leaned against a stone wall to stretch his legs. It was a good run. Five miles. Good pace.

  Good wind. He was still in shape.

  Danny walked down 207th Street and grabbed a newspaper and went into the Loco Diner. There, the waitress, Rosa, smiled at him and motioned him to a front table. She yelled to the cook to make an egg white omelet.

  “How was the run, Danny Boy?” Rosa said as she put a cup of coffee down in front of him.

  “Good. Five miles in twenty-eight minutes.”

  “Damn! You can run.”

  “You should come out with me sometime.”

  Rosa smacked her wide hips. “Not built for running, and I do enough running around here. Now, if you took me to dinner …”

  Danny blushed as Rosa smiled at him. They had been doing this for the last year. Two thirty-five-year-old people acting like school kids. Rosa was pretty enough. A little heavy, but she carried it with a Latin charm.

  Danny knew he needed something to change in his life. He was tired of being alone. He was ready. For anything. So he asked.

  “Hey, Rosa, so why not?’

  “Why not what?”

  “Why don’t me and you go out. Tonight. Benny’s Steak House on 194th is good. You want to come with me?”

  “You asking me out?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, it’s about time.”

  “I work slow.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “So we’ll go. I’ll meet you, like, 7.”

  “Yes, Danny, I would like that. I would like that very much. Seven. Now here …” She put his omelet down in front of him. “You better eat this. You might need your strength. You ever been with a Latin woman?”

  “Not one as pretty as you.”

  Nice line, Danny thought. Rosa smiled and went ove
r to a couple at a booth to take their order. Danny sipped on his coffee and picked at the eggs as he read the lead story:

  “Inwood Jogger Missing.”

  A twenty-year-old college student had been last seen running through Inwood Park and she never got home. A runaway, Danny thought, as he turned the page and read about a elderly jeweler stabbed on Sixth Avenue. Crime is down in New York, but there’s still enough mayhem to go around.

  Danny finished his eggs and gave Rosa a wave as he threw ten dollars down on the table.

  “Seven, Champ, I’ll be here,” she called after him.

  Danny walked down to Obert’s Gym and said hello to the regulars. He walked past Victor Garcia without saying a word. He put on some light gloves and worked the speed bag.

  He loved it when he got the rat-a-tat-tat sound as the bag hit the wood and then his glove with blinding speed.

  He walked over to a heavy bag and motioned Khalif Little to hold it. He slammed the bag for three minutes, then held it while Little pounded it. Kid is strong, Danny thought.

  The day dragged on. Danny trained a couple of local kids in the ring. He did foot work and shadowboxing with them.

  Good kids, but no real boxing talent. They were in the gym because they couldn’t play baseball or basketball. Boxing was their last shot out of Inwood, and it was a cancelled check they were holding.

  As Danny moved around the ring his mind kept going back to Rosa. That warm smile. Those big hips. He needed a woman and he needed a fresh start. Maybe she could be the one. That is, if he didn’t knock her out of bed.

  Danny decided to skip some rope. Victor Garcia leaned on the ropes and watched him.

  “You know, Danny, I was thinking about what you said. Maybe you’re right. You can still fight. I’ll look into it. We could both use a payday, and who knows.”