New York City Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  “You know me, Victor. I never back down from a fight. You get it and I’ll give it my all.”

  “You always did, kid. You always did.”

  Danny jumped out of the ring and said his goodbyes. He left the gym feeling pretty good. He walked home singing a song from the 1970s. Johnny Nash. “I can see clearly now the rain is gone.”

  In his apartment he watched the evening news. A local TV reporter did a story on the missing jogger of Inwood Park. He heard her name. Sara Miller. Twenty. Blond. Pretty. Full of life. Honor student. All the things Danny never was.

  The news went on with the weather report and he got ready for his date with Rosa. He took a hot shower, and as he dried off he threw talcum powder on his body. He went to the closet and put on a crisp, white button-down shirt and new black jeans. He thought about a tie and knew that wasn’t him. He looked in the mirror. Not bad, he thought. Slim. Face not too banged up. Maybe Rosa saw something in him.

  He threw on a black leather jacket and walked out the door. He stopped at the corner florist and bought a rose. A Rose for Rosa, he said to himself and smiled. He walked with an easy stride and felt good in his body. Then he turned the corner on 207th Street and felt his gut tighten as he saw the Loco Diner.

  No time for doubt, he thought, and walked inside with a goofy smile. Rosa was standing there in a flower print dress with her black hair up.

  “God. You’re beautiful,” Danny said, handing her the rose.

  “A rose. How sweet. Shall we?”

  Danny helped her with her coat and then they walked out of the diner. On the street she put her arm in his and matched his stride down Broadway. Danny felt good and kept taking sideway glances at her and smiling.

  “We should have done this a long time ago. This …” he said, patting her arm with his hand, “feels good. Feels right.”

  “You asked when you did. Who knows? Maybe I wouldn’t have went if you asked in the past. It all happens when it is supposed to.”

  They walked down Broadway chatting about their days.

  They entered Benny’s and Rosa smiled as he led her to the bar.

  “They’ll get us a table in like fifteen minutes. The Times did a review last month. A good one. All the Manhattan people are coming up now.”

  “Danny, we are Manhattan people.”

  “Rosa, geographically Inwood might be in Manhattan, but it is more like the Bronx. We are Inwood people, not Manhattan people.”

  Rosa laughed at that. He ordered a red wine for her and water for him. Danny learned years ago that alcohol and staying in shape did not mix. As they finished their drinks a waiter took them to a back booth for privacy. Danny had called in a favor with Benny and they were treating him like the Champ he always wanted to be. He hoped Rosa was impressed.

  They each ordered a steak and it came fast, hot, and rare. They were both hungry and ate their food with passion.

  “Man, that was some good steak.”

  “I’ll say. We ate like we’ve never been out before,” Rosa laughed.

  Over coffee Danny started to talk about his past. He felt like he had to. Like she had to hear what made him the way he was. And if she didn’t run away screaming … then maybe . ..

  When he got to the part of his family’s murder, Rosa held his hand.

  “I know, Danny. I am sorry.”

  “You know about what happened?”

  “Well, yes, it was horrible. The whole neighborhood felt for you.”

  A tear fell down Danny’s face. He never talked about that night. He only dreamt of it. As he talked of the hurt, he felt something leave his body. Something bad and bitter. He just rambled about his broken heart and his eyes never left Rosa’s face. She sat in silence, just watching him with soft, brown eyes. Eyes like a healing light, he thought. She has a face like a saint on a church mural.

  Danny ordered Rosa another glass of wine while he had a coffee, black.

  “I just want to thank you for listening, Rosa. It was like taking bad air out of me. God, it felt good telling you all that.”

  “I’ll listen anytime, Danny.”

  He asked about her life and Rosa told him the sadness of a divorce and the ruined dreams of her youth. She was going to be a lawyer but a child and an angry husband made her put that on the back burner. Where it stayed simmering into a bitter stew.

  They left Benny’s, and on the corner Danny stopped and held Rosa’s face in his hands. He lightly kissed her lips and she caressed his neck.

  They walked up Seaman Avenue and Rosa pointed to a “Missing” poster on the light pole. “That’s the jogger in Inwood Park that went missing.”

  “Yeah. That is weird. You know, I run every day through that park and never saw her. I see that psycho Yuri but not Sara Miller.”

  As they walked, Danny told Rosa how the Mad Russian looked right through him earlier that day in the park.

  “He creeps me out, that Yuri,” said Rosa. “About two months ago I saw him running down 207th Street after some young college girl, cursing at her. The girl got away but Yuri had this sick look in his eyes like if he had caught her he would have done something bad.”

  “Really? You think …”

  Rosa exhaled. “I don’t know, but I got a feeling about him. Show me where you saw him.”

  “Rosa. It’s dark out. That park is dangerous at night.”

  “Oh, come on. I go out with a boxer and he’s afraid of the dark. Here …” She reached into her purse and pulled out a small flashlight. “Come on, it will be romantic.”

  They walked up the street and followed Danny’s running route. As they entered the park, Danny’s body tightened. He looked everywhere and anywhere.

  The woods were empty and dark and Danny needed the flashlight to find the trail he took. He held Rosa’s hand as they headed up the hill.

  “There. He was standing right there.”

  Rosa walked into the thicket carefully and shined the light on the ground.

  “What are you looking for?” Danny asked as he looked around. Who knows what’s in here at night.

  “I don’t know. Anything.”

  Rosa took another step and hissed, “Oh my God.”

  Danny went over to her side and saw a body under a bush. Then he heard a low moan. Rosa shined the light into the bush and Danny reached in. He felt an arm and gently pulled it toward him.

  “That’s the jogger. That’s her. Sara Miller,” Rosa said, as they looked down on the young girl. She lay on the ground unconscious and barely breathing, but it was her. Her blond hair was a dirty mess and her face had cuts and bruises.

  “We got to get her to a hospital,” Danny said, as he bent down and picked her up by the torso and put her over his back.

  “Careful, Danny.”

  Rosa lit the way as he tried to gently carry Sara Miller. He could feel her body moving on his back like she was trying to get away. They got back on the path and Danny picked up his pace.

  “Memorial is like ten blocks. Call an ambulance. Have them meet us by the park entrance on 207th Street.”

  Rosa took out her cell phone and tried to keep pace with Danny’s long strides. As Danny walked down the path, he sensed something coming at him from his left side. He turned and saw Yuri charging out of the trees with a huge limb.

  “That is mine!” Yuri screamed, and swung the branch at Danny’s leg. Danny’s knees fell from under him. He was in a kneeling position and was able to lay Sara Miller down, when the branch hit his back, knocking him to the ground. His mouth tasted dirt. He saw Rosa swinging her purse at Yuri.

  “Get off him, you friggin’ psycho!”

  Yuri grabbed Rosa’s purse and punched her. She fell onto a park bench. Danny was on his feet now. Woozy. Unsteady.

  But ready for a round.

  “Hey. Fight me. Fight a man.”

  Yuri turned and came at Danny. Jesus, Danny thought, this guy is big and moves like a boxer. A heavyweight. He hit Danny a glancing blow, and Danny came up inside of him a
nd landed a body shot. Yuri gasped and punched Danny’s ribs.

  The punch hurt. Worse than anything he had felt in years. Like something went inside of him. Then he saw the knife in Yuri’s hand. Yuri lunged at Danny and missed.

  Danny pivoted, and with everything he had, he hit Yuri with a left hook to the temple. It was a career punch. Maybe the best one he ever threw.

  The Russian fell to the ground. Out. Danny jumped on top of him, beating Yuri’s face. He punched until his hands were a bloody mess and he felt Rosa tugging on his shoulders.

  “Danny, come on. Stop. He’s done. You’re hurt.”

  She helped Danny to his feet and he limped over to the bench. He put his hand on his ribs and felt the thick blood.

  It was like something was leaking out of him. Hate. Strength.

  Sadness. He felt like he could float away.

  Rosa wept as she looked at his white shirt stained with blood.

  “Just hold on, Danny. Just hold on.”

  “I’m cold, Rosa.”

  She embraced him, and in the distance an ambulance siren wailed. He leaned into her neck and smelled her. Then he kissed her neck and moaned.

  “You’re bleeding, Rosa. He hit you. Your lip,” Danny whispered.

  Rosa licked the blood off. “I’m okay. Just a fat lip. You just hold on, Danny. Hold on! That ambulance is for you and Sara. You saved her, baby. You saved her.”

  Danny looked up and smiled at Rosa. He felt lighter than he had ever been. All the weight he carried for years was leaving.

  “I won, Rosa. I knocked him out.”

  “You did, Champ. You did.”

  Danny’s eyes shut as Rosa held him and cried.

  CRYING WITH AUDREY HEPBURN

  BY XU XI

  Times Square

  for William Warren

  Yeah, the ring’s for real. Why would I pretend about that?

  So what is it you want to know, kid? That I wouldn’t be “dancing” if not for Ron? That things might be different if he hadn’t pulled his vanishing act? Ron never introduced me to his family. Said they didn’t give two shits about him after his mom remarried, so why stay in touch? Guess I can’t blame him.

  Of course, I’m hardly one to talk.

  Still, though. Might have been nice to have some American in-laws, even if they’d never come to Manhattan.

  Okay, kid, write this down.

  Mother cried over Audrey Hepburn movies …

  * * *

  “She’s so elegant,” she sniffed, “and helpless. No wonder men look after her.”

  On television, Sabrina was approaching its illogical conclusion. It was Saturday, February 29, 1964, the night of my father’s fifty-ninth birthday. I was fourteen. A-Ba was at a dinner hosted by my three older brothers. We didn’t go because of Audrey, but also because Mother said fifty-nine wasn’t a big deal, and that my brothers and their wives were wasting time sucking up to A-Ba, hoping to get his money.

  “I don’t know what you’re crying about,” I said. “It’s just a movie. It isn’t real.”

  My mother dried her eyes with a silk handkerchief. “It wouldn’t hurt you to soften up a bit and be a little more elegant.”

  Mother was Eurasian, but if you looked at her face front, she passed for Chinese. Exotic perhaps, but Chinese. Her mother was an American missionary’s daughter who married a wealthy Cantonese trader against her parents’ wishes. My father was a Cantonese businessman who made and sold soy sauce—“Yangtze Soy”—when he wasn’t boozing. Whenever his commercial aired, the one where sauce cascades down cleavage to the opening of Grieg’s piano concerto, Mother switched off the television in disgust.

  “Here,” she said, handing me her crochet work. “Put this away, please.”

  I complied and escaped to my bedroom, grateful to surface above the vale of tears.

  Elegance. Facing the mirror in third position, I studied my feet. Six and a half and still growing; already, it was hard finding shoes my size. Mother would die if she knew I danced all the boys’ parts. “Ballet will help you be more graceful,” she insisted when she started me up nine years earlier. “It’s important for young ladies to be graceful because gentlemen like that.” Mother’s graceful. She had jet-black hair, large eyes, high cheekbones, and a figure like Audrey’s. I could imagine her in Humphrey Bogart’s arms, dancing to “Isn’t It Romantic.” Mother loved to dance, but A-Ba couldn’t foxtrot to save his life.

  Sabrina is such a silly story. Bogart and Holden are these unlikely brothers of a wealthy Long Island family. Audrey’s the chauffeur’s daughter who has a crush on Holden. She dis-appears off to cooking school in Paris, returns grown up and sophisticated, which is when he finally notices her. But the family doesn’t want her marrying Holden, so Bogart turns on the charm, intending to pay Audrey off. Instead, Bogart falls for her, and they end up getting married. The End.

  My hair’s limp and a faded mousy brown. I have Mother’s height and A-Ba’s frazzled eyebrows, beady eyes, and ugly mouth. I look pathetically Eurasian. My brothers inherited the best of my parents; they pass for Chinese and all made it over 5'8", a real asset among Hong Kong men. Leftover blood coursed through me, the accident, seventeen years after the last boy. Good thing I was a girl. That way, Mother fussed over me in her old age and didn’t even mind the way I looked.

  In the living room, Bogart and Audrey were sailing off to their Parisian honeymoon in black-and-white. Personally, I couldn’t see what she saw in him. I would have taken Holden any day, philanderer though he was. After all, there was no guarantee what Bogart would be like after Paris.

  But kid, I’m getting too old for this.

  What? You think Ron happened yesterday? Audrey Hepburn died, that’s what happened yesterday. Papers said cancer. Too bad Ron’s not here. We’d have honored her passing together.

  So you want to hear the rest of this story or not?

  On her way home from lunch with friends the next afternoon, my mother was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

  “She was running across the street again,” my father shouted.

  “Always running!”

  He had seldom been as angry. A-Ba’s an ugly man who was once better looking. Smashed his face against a cracked toilet bowl when he was drunk one night, and emergency did a lousy job on his jowl. In his fury, his gnarled, contorted face resembled a lion’s head in the dance—a shiny red and gold mask with fierce eyes.

  “It was an accident,” I said. “The police said so. Besides, the driver should have stopped.”

  “Always running,” he muttered.

  Can’t recall much about the funeral. My three brothers did the adult things and said very little to me. We were virtually strangers, since they were gone by the time I was born. I wanted to scream at everyone to shut up and stop crying. I didn’t cry. My thoughts zigzagged from the driver who left my mother on the road to die, to my father who never spent time with her, to Audrey, dancing in the moonlight in the arms of Bogart, the ugly industrialist, the man who would look after her for the rest of her life as Sabrina. Only in celluloid, not in Hong Kong.

  Hey kid, I’m on. We do five shows Friday night. You’re going to wait? Suit yourself. Back in fifteen, max.

  How did he get me started? Asked about the ring, that’s how. This one’s different. Got a little class. Been in a few times, always buys me a drink. Looks at me when he speaks. Most guys can’t. All they see is … well, you know.

  Ron couldn’t even watch me dance, never mind this act. But if it weren’t for my little specialty, I couldn’t keep this job, not now. Occasionally, he’d wait outside, even in the snow, before things got bad. “Times Square’s no place for a girl after dark,” he’d say, whenever he walked me home. Afterwards, we’d watch movies together till sunrise.

  I miss that.

  Vegetables? Funny? I suppose they are. There was the cigar, until some joker lit it. Scorched thighs hurt. Like the boss says, every act needs to change. Cucumbers taste better anyway.

&
nbsp; Oh, so now you want to know what happened next? You’re the funny one, kid.

  Six months later, A-Ba sent me away to an all-girls boarding school in Connecticut.

  “You’ve been begging to go to the States,” he said over my protests. “I’ve made all the arrangements. Besides, I can’t look after you.”

  He hadn’t touched any of Mother’s stuff since the funeral.

  I wanted to find a keepsake among her silks and jewelry, but didn’t dare without his permission. Being the only girl, it was my right to have the first go. Once I was gone, my sisters-in-law would ransack all her beautiful things and there’d be nothing left for me.

  I sulked my way to Connecticut.

  Didn’t like the school. We weren’t allowed late-night TV. Despite the rules, we sneaked out after dark to meet boys. My classmates were in competition to lose their virginity. I won on my sixteenth birthday, easy. You don’t have to be either graceful or beautiful in the backseat of a car. Being the only foreigner added to the freak factor. Anyway, it’s not like those boys would bring me home.

  I wrote home, dutifully, once a month. My brothers I never heard from. A-Ba only wrote brief notes with money, once each semester.

  Mother would have written me long, gossipy letters, full of movies and news of society friends. If she’d seen an Audrey, her words might have flown. Mother survived on sentiment. She used to say, “One day, I’m taking you to New York where we’ll do ‘breakfast’ at Tiffany’s. We’ll buy the diamonds for your wedding there.” When it all got too much, I’d shout, “Mother, don’t be silly! Who’d marry me?” And she would hold me tight, tears rolling down her cheeks, promising, “Trust me, my darling, someone will. Someone will.”

  I never wasted time crying.

  Fantasy home. That’s what this club is. Guys come in for escape or relief because they can’t make it. A-Ba wasn’t like them. He had Mother because he was successful. Problem was, she needed someone classier. Wasn’t his fault. Other than his temper, he wasn’t all bad. It’s just that you can’t manufacture class the way you can soy sauce.