by Ed Kurtz
“That one! The punk in the white shirt! Get him!”
Charley swiveled around to find Eve’s gorilla barreling at him. Eve stood at the mouth of the alley, her hands covering her mouth.
Charley squeaked and tried to leap out of big bruiser’s path, but the guy threw a massive arm out and hooked Charley in as he passed. He then spun Charley around like a child and painfully twisted both of his arms behind his back. He let out a cry of pain, but he didn’t dare struggle and risk pulling his arms even further out of their sockets. He could feel the guy’s hot breath steaming down on the back of his neck.
Eve slowly approached from the mouth of the alley, her face still a heavily made-up doll’s face, her eyes still wide with apprehension.
“It’s okay,” the gorilla said to her. “He can’t move.”
Now Eve’s eyes narrowed and her brow caved into a tight, rumpled knit.
“All right, asshole. What the hell do you want with me?”
Charley groaned. There was no way for him to shift his position that could assuage the stinging pain in his shoulders. Eve moved closer and slapped him across the face. That stung, too. Some guy walking by saw it and whistled.
“I was there,” Charley croaked.
“Where?” Eve demanded.
“At the Harris. I was sitting right next to her when she got killed. Can you get this monster off of me, please? This really hurts.”
“It’s fucking supposed to,” she growled.
“Look,” Charley said, his face twisting from the pain, “am I crazy or do you look exactly like her? That’s the only reason I followed you. I didn’t mean to scare you or anything…”
“You think this is Southampton or something? You stalk a chick in this town—in this neighborhood—you’re going to scare her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sure you are.”
Eve regarded him silently for a minute, studying his face as though she was looking for something in particular. She seemed to find it, because after that she waved her hand dismissively at the gorilla and said, “Let him go.”
The gorilla complied. Charley stepped quickly away from the guy, rubbing his shoulders and looking offended. As Eve turned to head back into the dark alley, her guard dog followed dutifully. Disregarding the obvious risk, Charley hustled after her.
“Hey, can we talk?”
“Why?” Eve snarled. “What were you to her?”
“Nothing,” Charlie said. “Except the guy who held her hand while she died.”
She hesitated, half-masked in the shadows. Her guardian lingered close by, ever at the ready.
Then, after an interminable moment of silence between them, Eve slumped her shoulders and said, “She was my sister.”
Charley nodded solemnly. But inwardly he was overjoyed that he hadn’t just been following some strange girl for no reason at all.
The joint Eve picked for their powwow was a grungy little dive on Eighth and Eighteenth that was nestled between a dirty bookstore and a grimy joint with blacked out windows that advertised “models” that were available twenty-four hours a day. It was darker even than most bars inside and the walls were mostly covered with framed black and white photographs of people Charley could not identify. Despite his fervent protestations, Eve had sent her gorilla on his way. In so doing, Charley learned that his name was Stanley. He didn’t look like a Stanley to Charley.
She settled into a booth at the back of the place, a private little space with tall vinyl seats and a thick oak divider that hid them from most of the other patrons, who were few and far between. Charley almost mentioned the sparse population in there, but he figured it was immaterial and not worth bringing up. Besides, it was the night before Times Square and the rest of the city was going to burst at the seams with drunken revelers eager to watch some stupid ball of light slide down a pole. Probably the alcoholics were just taking the night off.
Eve ordered a bourbon and Coke and Charley took his without the cutter. She was stubbing out her second Newport in the ashtray before they managed anything other than hushed small talk.
“I don’t guess you have any right to this,” Eve said at length.
“Right?”
“It’s not like you actually knew her, right? I mean, you were just there.”
“Sure, I was just there. I might’ve let it go at that. Except I can’t shake the guilty feeling that there might have been something I could have done. And even more than that, I still can’t figure on why she sat down right next to me.”
“Maybe she figured she’d be safe if it looked like she was with someone. You don’t look anything special to me, but on that end of Forty-Two you’re a prince compared to all those burnouts and turkeys.” She lit another menthol and blew a dense stream of smoke at Charley’s face. “Fat lot of good that did her though, right?”
“Yeah,” he agreed, sadly.
“So what? She’s gone. That black cop in on the case, isn’t he? Walker or whatever his name was?”
“He talked to you?”
“Of course. I’m her only living relative, as far as he’s concerned.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“What was I supposed to tell him? What the hell do I know?”
“So you don’t have any ideas? About who kil—about who did it, I mean.”
“I got maybe an idea. But nothing so solid I’m going to go to the cops with it.”
Charley raised his eyebrows and leaned in a little.
“Are you kidding? That’s a lead, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you tell Walker about this? At least so they can check up on the guy?”
“And what if I’m wrong? The bastard might do something crazy, me dragging his ass into something like this. Even if I’m right I’d still be putting myself at risk. Serious risk. And that wouldn’t ever bring Lizzie back, neither.”
Lizzie. Charley cringed. She was always getting more and more human. More personal. More dimensional. Lizzie.
“Okay, so who is this cat?”
“Some guy. Got interested in her, real interested if you know what I mean, and he wouldn’t let up. The way I see it, guy like that tails her all the way from the Connection right up to the Harris. Just like you, as a matter of fact. Except this dude killed her at the end.”
Charley drained his glass in one huge gulp and unintentionally slammed it down on the table.
“Wait, she worked at that place with you?”
“Shit, no. I didn’t even like her coming round. She just came to see me about something.”
“About what?”
“About none of your damn business. I don’t know for sure what she was up to between then and the end of the night, but that was when you came into it.”
“What’s this dude’s name?”
“I’m not saying.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want that cop hearing about it.”
“What if I promise not to say anything about it to him?”
“What good’s a promise? Can’t cash a promise, baby.”
“What, you want me to pay you?”
“I want something real. Something solid, dig?”
A girl came around to collect their glasses and dump the ashtray. Charley and Eve each ordered another round.
“Look,” Charley said with a sigh, “this is weighing heavy on me. I don’t really want to be a part of it, but I don’t think I can stay away from it, either. I spent an hour holding your sister’s hand, a hand she reached out when somebody stuck a knife in her.”
Eve winced.
“I’m sorry,” Charley went on, “but that’s how it was. I didn’t know her name until I saw it in the paper, but she’s got to be one the heaviest things that ever got laid on me. I need to sort it out, Eve.”
She laughed bitterly and took a swallow of her drink.
“Imagine if everyone who ever witnessed a crime decided to get so involved. The world’s already awful enough without that, don’t you think?
”
“But I am involved, damn it. She chose me.”
“She chose a seat. You just happened to be in the one next to it. Christ Jesus, you act like you’re in love with her.”
“And you act like you don’t love her at all.”
She screwed up her face and he was already feeling pretty low about having said that when she hauled off and slapped him hard across the face. He’d hated it the first time she did that, but this time he knew he deserved it. Eve killed her drink and scooted out of the booth.
“You don’t know a goddamned thing,” she roared as she loomed menacingly over him. “Do you hear me? You don’t know anything about me or my sister. You’re just another piece of Forty-Second Street trash.”
And with that, Eve stormed out of the bar. Charley went on sipping at his bourbon. Seeing that she had left her Newports behind, he knocked one of them out of the crinkled green package and lit it. He took a long drag and inhaled the menthol smoke deeply. Then his chest almost burst as he exploded into a violent fit of wet, hacking coughs. He never could get a hang of smoking.
He ordered another bourbon and another one after that, indicating on the glass how high he wanted it filled this time. Someone shouted “Happy New Year!” and most everybody laughed. At some point along the way Charley was propositioned by a wobbling streetwalker with a broken shoe, but a bouncer tossed her out before he could weigh his options. He lost count after his sixth drink and passed out on the table before he could rustle up an ninth. When he came to, his cheek was slick with his own drool, and the bouncer was hoisting him out of the booth.
“Go sleep it off somewhere else, pal.”
“But I like it here…,” Charley lamely murmured.
In an instant, he was out on the street.
He looked up Eighth toward Eighteenth and then down the other way at Seventeenth and decided both were hundreds of miles away. So Charley lowered himself down to the sidewalk, leaned up against the cold cement façade of the bar, and passed out again.
It was still dark when Charley regained consciousness next. He was on a sofa, which he could determine by the open air on his right and the soft wall of cushioning that was restraining him to the left. He had a blanket covering him that smelled faintly of lavender, and a clock ticked monotonously from somewhere in the pitch-black room. He didn’t have a clock in his walkup in Alphabet City. He hadn’t any nice smelling blankets, either. He was somewhere else, but he was far too exhausted and comfortable to worry about it right away.
He rolled over and went back to sleep.
Strong black coffee and fried eggs smelled amazing to him—amazing enough that he found himself willing to open his eyes and sit up at its beck and call. The sun was out now, illuminating the tiny apartment in which he had spent the night. There was a display case mounted on the wall over the couch full of ceramic angels and a miniature plastic Christmas tree set up on the end table by Charley’s feet. An old RCA television brooded across the room from him; one of those massive Fifties models in a mahogany finished cabinet with false doors on the base. Charley wondered if it still worked or if it had just come with the apartment.
On the other side of the tacky little Christmas tree was the kitchenette, which to Charley’s surprise was actually smaller than his own. It was from this closet-sized space that Eve emerged with a plate of eggs and a steaming mug of coffee. The mug had a yellow smiley face printed on it. The girl had a flimsy baby blue negligee on her, her familiar breasts peeking through the sheer fabric, which put a smiley face on Charley. Everything seemed very much in order.
“Happy New Year’s,” she purred as she set the breakfast down on the table beside the sofa. “No black-eyed peas. Just plain old eggs and coffee.”
“I like plain old eggs and coffee.”
“Good. Eat up, then. Hung over?”
Charley regarded his slightly blurry vision and the nagging compression he felt moving around the periphery of his skull like the fluid in a lava lamp.
“Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much.”
“The eggs’ll soak it up and the coffee will help bring you out of the fog. Take your time. I’m going to have a bath.”
He had already devoured the first of the three eggs Eve had fried up for him.
“Wait,” he said with a swallow. “What the hell am I doing here, anyway?”
Eve smiled and gave a cute little laugh.
“I came back for my smokes. Can you believe that? I was just going to give them up for lost, but I really couldn’t do without them. Maybe I wanted to give you another piece of my mind, too. I was pretty well pissed off.”
“That so?” He stuffed another whole egg into his mouth with the fork.
Eve nodded, but she was still smiling. “When I got back to the place, there you were, blacked out on the pavement. Looks like you got rolled, too.”
Charley shot his hands down to his jeans pockets.
“My wallet?”
“Gone, of course. What do you expect?”
“Shit.”
“Cost of doing business,” she said sagely. Then she swept into the bedroom and shut the door behind her.
He finished off the rest of the eggs in seconds and went to work on the coffee, which he savored a little more civilly. It was as strong as it smelled and very bitter. He could hear the water sputtering out of the faucet from Eve’s bathroom. She was humming some tune he did not recognize. He stood up, groaned from the protest his back made, and crossed over to the television. He turned the knob. Nothing.
He drained the mug then and found his Staceys under the plastic tree. He slid into them and lingered in front of the door for a minute, studying its multiple locks and chains and considering leaving without telling Eve. It was hard for him to make sense of the juxtaposition between the girl who’d called him trash and the one who took him home out of pity. They seemed like two different women. Good Eve and evil Eve.
The humming from the bathroom evolved into full-fledged singing, an old standard to Charley’s surprise. Old Black Magic. He backtracked to the sofa and listened to her sing. She wasn’t half bad, and she followed it up with Wee Small Hours and it sounded pretty good. After a while the show was over and Charley could hear the water gurgling down the drain. Then Eve reappeared with a pink towel wrapped around her torso and a white one done up on her head like a turban.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re still here.”
“I was listening to Your Hit Parade,” he said with a smirk. Eve wrinkled her nose. Before her time. Before his, too, but that was Charley’s style.
Charley asked, “What time is it, anyway?”
Eve wandered over to the kitchenette to check. That solved the mystery of the ticking clock. “Eleven-thirty,” she said.
“Then I’d better split. I’d like to ask you something before I do, though.”
“Oh?” Eve raised her eyebrows solicitously.
“What’s the cat’s name?”
“Oh, no. Not that shit again.”
“Please,” he begged. “It’s important to me.”
“But it shouldn’t be. Go home to your chick, man. I’ve got things to do.”
Eve floated back into the bedroom, whipping the towel off her torso as she went. Charley caught just a flash of the blonde delta where her legs met before she vanished from his view.
“I haven’t got a chick and I’m not going ’til you tell me his name.”
“Fine,” Eve snarled. She came back in panties, fastening her bra in the back with a stern grimace on her face. “His name is Chester Price. Good luck with him. He’s an ox.”
“I’ll bring a yoke.”
“You ought to bring a heater. Price is bad news, I’m telling you.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
Charley made for the door and began unlocking it. It was a long process with that many locks.
Eve had gone back into the bedroom again, but she called back, “Your funeral.”
Charley frowned as he went out the d
oor.
He emerged on West Eighteenth, just west of the Flatiron near Union Square and just a few blocks from the cold, damp sidewalk he’d passed out on. Despite the size of her place, Charley was a little surprised to discover that a stripper lived that far up in Midtown. It was a sunny block, not too crowded on the sidewalk. A wholly different view of the city. Charley walked east and stopped in the first drugstore he saw.
It was an old fashioned place, one of the last of its kind, which allowed him to buy a chocolate egg cream at the counter before he headed to the phone booth in the back. That was old fashioned, too—it had a solid oak panel door with a double-glass window and a cracked vinyl stool bolted down beside the phone. On the shelf underneath the payphone was what Charley was looking for, the phonebook. He closed the door and took the receiver off the hook like he was making a call as he started to thumb through the Ps. There were three Chester Prices in Manhattan and another eleven C. Prices listed above that. Fourteen possibles, none of whom was necessarily the man he was looking for. Charley tore out the page, folded it up, and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. He had a notion about the best way to proceed, but not enough dimes to put it into effect in the phone booth. He finished off his egg cream and hurried out to the Union Square station. He’d have to make the calls from home.
None of the three Chester Prices Charley called sounded anything like the voice that had threatened him on the phone. More than that, they all sounded like genuinely respectable fellows, confused by the call but perfectly polite when Charley told them he must have dialed the wrong Chester Price. The first five C. Prices were pretty much the same deal, the sixth was an old man, and the seventh was a dead number. Charley felt like he was getting nowhere fast, but there were still four numbers left for him to call. He took a break from it and put on a pot of coffee and then checked the sofa for Franz. He wasn’t there, which could only mean he was at work, the only thing that could ever force him into a vertical position. Luckily he spent his days reclining in an office chair at a front desk nobody ever visited. It was ideal for him.