The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  The wounded man howled in pain and gazed stupidly at what was left of his right hand. Charley smiled and kicked him square in the knee, but the gunman did not budge. Instead he growled something unintelligible and sprinted off through the dark marsh. Charley just watched him go, listening to the rapid splashing steps through the mire until they faded out to nothing.

  He was dizzy and exhausted. But there was no time for that now. You can sleep when you’re dead, his dad used to tell him. He’d almost gotten all the sleep he could stand before fate intervened and blew up that junk gun.

  Charley steeled himself and hustled back to the house.

  Eve did not move or say anything. She had been standing on the staircase holding the gun this whole time but now she dropped it and sat down on the steps. The gun clattered against the hardwood floor.

  “I…I shot him,” she said weakly.

  “I know you did, but that’s okay,” Charley assured her. “He was trying to kill us, Eve. That’s self-defense. But Andy’s really hurt. Please, you’ve got to call for an ambulance.”

  “I pulled the trigger and he’s dead. I killed him.”

  Charley sighed and looked at Andy. He was still breathing but in bad shape. Charley then went past Eve and across the living room to the kitchen. He picked up the handset and dialed zero, but just as the operator was coming on the line Eve’s fingers jammed down the hook switch. Charley glared at her incredulously. His heart was still beating a thousand times per second.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I just killed a guy, Charley. You call an ambulance and cops come, too.”

  “I told you, it’s self-defense. The law doesn’t expect you to let people murder you while you sleep, you know.”

  “You don’t understand,” Eve said between shaky breaths.

  “Understand what?” Charley was growing impatient.

  “I’m on parole, baby.”

  She said it so matter-of-factly that it took him a second or two to process the information. He cocked his head to one side, like a confused dog.

  “Not only am I forbidden to leave Manhattan,” Eve continued, “I’m sure as hell not allowed anywhere near a goddamn gun.”

  “Parole.” Charley looked like he just bitten down on one of those rotten black eggs he had seen people eating in Chinatown. “What for?”

  “Do we have to talk about this right now?”

  “Yes. Yes, we do.”

  “Solicitation, okay? I’m a whore. I’m a no-good piece of gutter trash shit. Happy?”

  “No,” Charley said. “I’m not. I’ve nearly been killed twice in twenty-four hours, a friend of mine is lying mangled on his own floor with a busted jaw and there’s a dead guy right next to him. And you’re telling me not to call for help because you got pinched for hooking?”

  Eve hauled off and slapped Charley across the cheek.

  “Fuck you, Charley.”

  “The hell did I do?”

  “Just because I got arrested don’t mean I did anything wrong.”

  “Fine. So you’re an innocent woman. Where does that leave us now?”

  She shook a Newport out of the pack on the kitchen table and lit it. She inhaled deeply, held it in for a while, and then exhaled. Nothing came out.

  “First we got to ditch that guy.”

  “Ditch what guy?”

  “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” Eve barked. “We’ve got to get rid of the body. And the gun. Then you can call for help and I’ll be long gone when they get here. It’ll be like I was never here, dig?”

  “Tamper with a crime scene. Great idea. And how do you propose we make a big fat dead guy disappear?”

  “Easy,” she said after another long drag. “The world’s biggest landfill isn’t but five miles away.”

  Chapter 17

  Charley approached the slimy slopes of the massive landfill on the western shore of Staten Island with the headlights off. Eve remained at the Tottenville Colonial, ostensibly to look after Andy and be sure he did not choke on his own blood, which left Charley alone in the front seat of Andy’s Buick with a corpse in the trunk. It was only a fifteen-minute drive, but every second of it was torture on his nerves. He was sure he would get pulled over for some idiotic, paltry little offense and end up in prison because Eve had talked him into disposing of human remains.

  The terrifyingly named Fresh Kills Landfill had been in use for over thirty years and covered an area of almost five square miles, every inch of which was blanketed in tons upon tons of the entire city’s refuse. Frequently referred to as a trash mountain, the Kills was actually an entire range of putrid, streaming garbage mountains that hosted whole flocks of swarming seagulls both day and night. Charley piloted the Buick along Richmond Avenue, past the countless reeking drumlins that bordered the eastern periphery of the landfill. He wondered how many bodies lay rotting beneath all that refuse and whether or not one more was bound to make much difference. It was probably not much different than the desert outside of Las Vegas where you could pick almost any spot and find some missing gangster buried there. The thought made his stomach flip. He pulled the heap off the main road where there was a gap between towering mounds that were kept at bay by enormous twisted steel girders. It seemed to Charley as good a place as any.

  He cut the engine and pushed the heavy door open with a noisy creak. The air here was quite warm for January but by no means pleasant. The overwhelming stench of an entire generation’s worth of waste blasted Charley in the face the second he stepped out of the car. He gagged and retched, then tried to hold his breath, but in the end he just pitched over and puked on an old sneaker. His nose was filled with the wet odor of vomit, but it was a far better smell than the dump itself.

  The sky was a pinkish purple on the horizon; soon the sun would be up. Charley hustled to drag the dead man out of Andy’s trunk. He was heavier than he looked and he looked pretty heavy. Charley really had to sweat just to get him on the ground behind the car. Once he managed that much it occurred to him to check the body for some sort of identification, so he retrieved the flashlight he’d brought along from the passenger seat and set to searching the guy’s pockets. There was a leather billfold in the inside pocket of the man’s suit coat, inside of which Charley found seven crisp one hundred dollar bills and one crumpled five. He stuffed these in his own pocket and flipped through the cards in the slots until he came across a driver’s license. Charley shined his light on the flimsy card—the photo more or less matched the dark, shaggy face of the cadaver at his feet—and tried to pronounce the name out loud.

  Branko Dragović.

  Charley wrinkled his brow and pocketed the license next to the cash. He could not figure how this guy got out of the hotel before the cops showed up. Maybe Sol never called them for some reason, or maybe he was only faking unconsciousness. Charley took a deep breath, gagged, and then dug his hands into Dragović’s armpits to drag him into the muck. He managed about ten feet before he had to stop and rest for a minute, then he repeated the process three more times. By then he was up to his knees in slime and muck; rotting food and dirty diapers and whatever dogshit people didn’t just leave on the sidewalk, all of it mixed together and halfway liquefied into a slushy soup bigger than a lot of lakes.

  The gun was in Dragović’s pants pocket where Charley had stashed it, but he took it out again and wiped it all over with his shirt. As soon as he was satisfied that his and Eve’s prints were cleaned off, he put the gun back in the dead man’s pocket and, using the side of his shoe, began shoveling damp garbage over him. In ten minutes Branko Dragović was completely buried in the nasty mire and another ten minutes worth of effort concealed him twice as well. Charley even stomped up and down on the impromptu grave to pack the filth down. For the final touch, he dragged one of the twisted girders from where he entered and laid it over Dragović’s final resting place.

  “Rest in peace, you prick,” Charley said quietly.

  When he got back to the car, he realized
that he was covered in landfill slime up to his waist. He could not very well leave his shoes and trousers behind, so he stripped down to his underwear and stowed the soiled items, his stinking shirt included, in the trunk. Now almost completely naked, he started the engine and drove back to Tottenville smelling the worse for wear and worrying up a storm about Andy and Eve and Sol. There was too much to get straight, too many frayed ends to smooth out. He was spread too thin, and now he could add complicity with the crime of tampering to his ever-lengthening list of things to keep him up at night. He gripped the wheel tightly and felt the broken knuckles on his right hand shift painfully under the skin. The Buick skidded off Richmond and bounced in the dirt for a moment before Charley regained control of the car. While he worked at ignoring the agony in his hand, he anxiously checked the rearview mirror, half expecting to see a bevy of spinning red lights trailing behind him. Explaining his nudity would be the least of his problems at that juncture. But there were no lights; he was safe for now.

  He stepped on the gas and resolved to fix himself a strong drink the minute he got back to the house.

  Eve did not wait around long after Charley got back. He was quiet and sullen and she seemed to take some offense to that. He checked up on Andy as soon as he walked through the door and was horrified at how badly his friend’s face had swollen up—he was barely recognizable. Only the bushy hair and moustache gave him away. He squeezed Andy’s hand and admonished him not to try talking. He said he would call an ambulance as soon as he washed all the grime off in the shower. The atmosphere was so tense that neither of them noticed that Charley had walked in with nothing on but his drawers.

  Charley took his time under the scalding hot stream in the shower. He even shaved, although there really wasn’t any need for it. By the time he was done, Eve had gone. Andy’s Buick was still parked in the driveway when Charley checked, leaving him to puzzle over whether or not she had called a cab or just walked to the train station. The first trains would be leaving right about then. Most people were heading off to work.

  Normal people. People who had not spent the dark early morning hours burying a Russian assassin under a mound of filth in the planet’s largest and arguably most disgusting landfill.

  People who had done dumb things for love, but never that dumb.

  Charley groaned and shuffled off for the kitchen phone to finally get that ambulance out there.

  Andy got bundled onto a gurney and rushed out to Richmond Memorial in Prince’s Bay after one of the paramedics splinted Charley’s fractured fingers and wrapped them up tightly. Charley wanted to ride with him in the ambulance but the lead cop on the scene made him stick around to answer the same questions ad infinitum.

  Who broke into the house? Burglars. Anyone you or the victim know? No, never seen them before. Why did they beat up Mr. Donovan so bad? He tried to stop them. Why didn’t they beat you up, too? I was hiding in the bedroom closet. I’m a coward. Cowardice is not a crime. And who was it that broke into the house again?

  The cop identified himself as O’Rourke and told Charley where he could be reached. No card this time, for which Charley was glad. He hardly wanted his wallet overflowing with policemen’s business cards from the various crime scenes he seemed to frequent. After a while the Colonial was empty except for him. It was close to noon then, and he managed to catch a few hours of sleep on the couch without anybody busting in to murder him. He wanted to get back to Manhattan, see how Eve was holding out and check up on Sol, but first he took a cab out to the hospital. With seven hundred and five bucks burning up in his pocket, he could sure afford it. The cab passed Wolfe’s Pond Park on the way and Charley remembered that gangster who killed those black kids there a couple of months earlier. It was big news at the time (though hardly a rare occurrence) and recalling it now made Charley wonder if there was a square foot anywhere in the city that was at all safe. Anywhere in the world. He doubted it.

  Andy was knocked out cold on all the pain meds they had him on, and his face looked like a piano fell on it. Charley cooled out next to his bed for a while, surreptitiously checked out the nurse’s legs once or twice, and eventually scribbled out a little note to let Andy know he’d been by. The taxicab was still waiting for him in front of the hospital, and he directed to driver to take him all the way into Manhattan. Dragović’s dirty money he did not mind wasting.

  • • •

  “Who pays for de broken window? And de shower, de shower is ruined. Who pays for dat, Chahley? I tell you who. Sol is who.”

  The old German was grousing, mad as hell at Charley for bringing minor destruction to one of his rooms and then vanishing from the face of the earth. Charley was just glad his boss was all right. He had called the cops, as it turned out, but Dragović was gone by the time they got there. The broken window suggested his mode of escape, the same window Charley had been too scared to jump out of himself. He grinned sheepishly at Sol and counted out two of the hundred dollar bills he’d lifted from the corpse he buried at Fresh Kills.

  “Will this cover it?”

  Sol gawked at the greenbacks but quickly recovered, turning his expression from astonishment to uncertainty.

  “I dunno, Chahley. You know dem contractors, dey take you for a ride.”

  Charley nodded and slid another Franklin across the desk at Sol.

  “Shit,” Sol croaked. “Where you get so much money, dann? I doan pay you so good as dat.”

  “Got lucky at Meadowlands,” Charley lied.

  “No chit?” Sol could hardly believe it.

  “No chit, Sol. I bet against the trend and my horse came in first. Hell of a thing.”

  “Hell of a ting,” Sol repeated, hypnotized by the cash in his hand. When he eventually snapped out of it, he grinned and slapped Charley on the shoulder. “You know vat? You take da night off. Go have some fun wit your girlfriend. Take her to a show—but no pornos, okay, Chahley?”

  Charley laughed.

  “Okay, Sol. Strictly softcore for my girl.”

  Sol clicked his tongue disapprovingly and Charley went away chuckling.

  His wad was already diminishing rapidly, so he forewent another cab ride and slummed it on the subway instead. A smelly guy with salt and pepper dreadlocks piled up under a soiled tam moseyed up and down the car’s aisle, rapping about the state of police corruption and how the city took his children away. Like everybody else in there, Charley ignored him.

  He got off in midtown and headed into a greasy spoon for steak and French fries. The lady behind the counter wore an outmoded beehive hairdo and kept calling Charley “hon”—he understood once she explained that she grew up in Baltimore. A couple of bus drivers huddled in the booth next to the juke box and played every single hit the Isley Brothers ever recorded. Charley didn’t mind. He stuck around and dug on the R&B until he’d consumed about a whole pot’s worth of coffee and read through everything in the Post that interested him. That councilman who wanted to wipe out the Deuce was making headlines again, promising to turn everything X-Rated in Times Square into something family friendly. He grinned like Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs from the black and white photo accompanying the article, the caption under which read City Council Member Fred Haskett, District 3 (D). Charley tried to memorize the name and face so he could punch it if he ever ran into the great moral crusader.

  After that he trekked up to Eve’s building on Eighteenth. She was not at home, but he still had the key he finagled out of the super. He let himself in and fell asleep on the sofa as soon as his feet left the carpet.

  It was still light out when he woke up, but Eve had not come back yet. He stumbled into the kitchen and fumbled with the percolator for a little while, but he couldn’t figure it out. A brief search of the cupboards turned up a half-empty jar of instant, so he worked with that instead. When the caffeine started to make its way through his system, Charley ambled into Eve’s bedroom to check on the status of the offending shoeboxes in her closet.

  They were gone, e
very single one. She promised to destroy them all, and it looked to him like she had done just that.

  Fair enough, he thought. Good riddance.

  Now all that remained was to figure out who those foreign gunmen were and what they had to do with Elizabeth’s murder, not to mention her secret life as an underground deviant porn loop star.

  Charley drew in a deep breath. Sure, no big deal.

  A week ago his interest in the murdered girl might have been considered a bit obsessive by a neutral party, but now that he was romantically involved with the sister of the deceased he felt he’d earned a right to his interest. He was no longer simply satisfying his own morbid curiosity but helping to bring closure to the woman with whom he was very quickly falling in love. Not to mention that he had narrowly evaded death twice in the last twenty-four hours and hidden a body under two feet of rotting garbage at his lover’s behest. Involvement had passed the point of choice the minute Branko Dragović checked into the New Rose Hotel. Charley was up to his eyeballs in a full-blown murder mystery whether he liked it or not.

  He dug around the piles of junk in Eve’s messy bedroom until he came across a pad of paper and a pencil. He then mixed another cup of instant coffee and sank into the sofa for a little brainstorming session.

  First, he listed the facts. The Hewlett sisters came up from the Delta several years back with no particular goal in mind. He did not know precisely when they arrived, but it had to be no later than mid-August of Seventy-Six, the earliest date he remembered seeing on the film canister labels.

  For now, he scrawled ’76.