by Ed Kurtz
Somewhere along the line, somehow, Elizabeth got involved in underground dirty movies. Charley presumed they did not start out as nasty as they got, but probably pretty standard stuff as far as X-Rated material went. Before too long they did get nasty, however; really nasty. He could not say just how bad they got, having seen only one of the loops, but that one was most definitely bad enough. Eve described other things, abuse and humiliation. Charley could barely imagine it. He did not want to.
That was about it for Elizabeth. She agreed to meet Eve on the Deuce on the twenty-seventh, got tossed out by the manager and then was trailed down to the theater where somebody stuck a knife in her back. After that there was the false lead in Chester Price, the burning apartment, poor Franz. As far as Charley knew, the cops still thought Price killed Franz, but he did not buy that at all. Price was just some lunatic junky caught in spider’s web he could not even see. If nothing else proved it, the two Russian guys who failed twice in their effort to knock off Charley did. They were the next item on the list. Charley wrote down Dragović’s name and next to it “other Russian.” Of course he had no idea if they were Russian or Martian, but it would do for the time being.
So, excluding Price as having anything to do with it, that left two victims and two potential killers, one of whom was dead himself. The remaining suspect was still running free, albeit with an obliterated right paw. That they were involved with, if not responsible for Elizabeth’s death was a fact in Charley’s mind. There could be no coincidence between Charley’s sudden and none-too-secret association with the crime and the abrupt appearance of gun-toting killers at both his place of employment and Andy’s house in far-flung Tottenville. But was there anyone behind them? And if so, who? Charley could do nothing better than wildly speculate.
The last item he scribbled was the voice on the phone. Someone called Charley, threatened him, broke into his apartment. Possibly this was the same person directly responsible for Franz’s death. When Price was still suspect number one Charley just assumed that he’d disguised his voice, but now he was sure that could not be the case. It sounded nothing at all like Chester Price and, besides, that dumb junky would never have been so subtle. It had to be someone mixed up with the foreign killers, although this individual had no noticeable accent of any stripe—American as apple pie and cold-blooded murder.
Another big question mark.
The good news was that the loops were gone forever; most, if not all of them. Surely whoever was after him and Eve would expect them to use the films as some manner of bargaining chip, but now that they were annihilated who was to say they ever existed in the first place? But that was only good news if all they wanted was to be left alone. It did nothing for identifying Elizabeth’s murderer, nor did it shine any light on what went down in her last days that could have led to such a grisly end.
Charley’s head reeled. He wanted to take a break from everything but doubted the possibility, not while Franz was probably lying in some morgue and Andy was having his jawbone wired back together.
For the first time he wondered how things would have turned out if he’d gone to see The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh after all.
Charley burst into peals of laughter at the thought. That was how Eve found him when she came in a few minutes later.
“The hell, Charley? What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Nothing’s funny.” He had descended into that hyperventilating phase that always comes at the tail end of a laughing fit. Eve arched an eyebrow at him.
“You know I just got stopped in the archway by my super? Asked me when you and I were getting married. Oh, and she also wanted to know how I ended up with a computer salesman. What do you think about that?”
She had her hands on her hips. Charley liked the cliché.
“I think she’s nosy,” he said, still giggling a little.
“I think you’re full of shit,” Eve responded with a sardonic grin.
“Oh, to hell with this,” he said once he’d gotten most of his breath back. “What do you say to a double bill on Forty-Two, darling?”
Chapter 18
Charley was chomping at the bit to check out City of the Living Dead at the Liberty, the newest gore spectacular from Lucio Fulci. He’d seen Zombie twice, and if there was ever a reason for him to invest in a videotape player, Zombie was it. Between Fabio Frizzi’s pounding synth score, the best eye-poking scene since They Call Her One-Eye, and the mind-boggling battle between an underwater ghoul and a real live shark, Charley could not conceive of a more perfect motion picture. Eve, on the other hand, wrinkled her nose at the notion of ninety minutes of gore spewing, gut munching Euro-fury. They were poring over the Movie Clock together at the counter in the Grand Luncheonette, alternating between taking big bites out of delightfully dripping burgers and arguing about what they were going to see.
Eve pointed a greasy fingertip at the ad mat for Galaxina and asked, “How about that one?”
Charley studied the black and white newsprint image of Dorothy Stratten looking awfully naked on the barren surface of some distant planet. The caption next to her read, In the 31st Century Man finally created a machine…with feelings! It was obviously little more than a Barbarella rip-off, but more often than not rip-offs were more fun than the originals to his mind. He never did tire of giant shark flicks or Italian Dirty Dozen knock-offs, no matter how dumb they got.
“All right,” he hesitantly agreed, “we’ll do it your way. But I’m seeing City of the Living Dead before it’s gone, by golly.”
“By golly?” Eve laughed. “God, you’re a spaz.”
Once that was settled they polished off their burgers with haste and paid Pops for his efforts. The grizzled grillmaster grunted by way of reply.
Charley bought their tickets at the box office and ushered Eve past the concession stand with a disapproving glance indicating that popcorn was not a particularly good idea. They sat in the right wing of the auditorium. He could not stomach the idea of sitting in the balcony. He doubted he ever would again.
The picture was okay, nothing to write home about, sort of boring a lot of the time. The crowd was surprisingly subdued, which disappointed Charley since he had hoped to really initiate his new girl into the wild world of late night features on the Deuce. Still, no one was on the hustle and there weren’t any junkies shooting up that he could see. Maybe a slow introduction was better, anyway.
They did not stick around for the second feature, opting to wander east of Broadway instead. The theaters got a lot filthier and the blocks a lot seedier, but there was a well lit counter that served coffee in the upper Forties that way where Charley and Eve cooled out for a bit and made empty small talk. Then, after they were finishing off their respective second cups, Charley cut into the meaningless chatter with something considerably weightier.
“So,” he began with his eyes fixed on the tabletop. “Did you burn the rest?”
Eve’s eyes shot up at him. For a moment he thought he’d made a bad call bringing it up, but her subsequent sad smile quelled those worries.
“No. I just cut em all to pieces and dumped em down the chute at the end of my hall. I don’t figure anyone’s going to go dumpster diving and try to piece em back together.”
“Probably take ten years anyway.”
“Yeah,” she agreed solemnly.
“So that’s done.”
The sweaty guy in the apron and paper hat behind the counter glanced up long enough for Charley to signal for a couple of refills. The guy sharply nodded and waddled over.
Charley narrowed his eyes at Eve. “What now?”
She furrowed her brow and looked puzzled.
“You know,” he went on in a half-whisper, “the guys in the house. The one at the landfill…”
“Christ’s sake, Charley,” she barked. “Why don’t you take out a full page ad in the Times, you idiot.”
“Okay, so I’m an idiot. My question still stands.”
“What now? Now nothing.”<
br />
“But that one guy got away,” he said. “And he can’t be alone. There was this call I got, before….before Franz died. And it wasn’t either of the men who broke into Andy’s house.”
“Price?”
“Doubtful. I really don’t think he’s got anything to do with this. That was a false lead.”
“So you think there’s some kind of syndicate and that they’ll keep coming after us until we’re dead.”
“In a nutshell, yeah.”
“You sound like a seventy-five cent paperback, Charley.”
“Maybe I do, but I’m not writing the story. I sure as hell didn’t make up the murders or the failed attempts at murder that have been chasing me around for the last couple of weeks, did I?”
“No, I’m not saying that. But what do you want to do about it? We certainly can’t tell the cops about Tottenville.”
“I don’t plan to.”
“Then what else is there to do?”
“Nothing until the next time somebody tries to knock me off.”
“And then?”
“Assuming they don’t succeed, I’m going to get me some answers.”
“What if they do succeed?”
“Then I guess the rest is up to you. I’ll be out of it for good, won’t I?”
He grinned sheepishly as the counterman brought their refills over. Eve lit a menthol and sighed the smoke out.
“Christ,” she groaned. “You’re worse than a spaz. You’re a goddamned nutjob.”
First thing in the morning, Charley hopped a bus bound for Staten Island. He spent the next two hours listening to an old woman bitterly complaining about her grandson getting married to a Jewish girl.
“He can’t even get married in a church, for crying out loud,” she moaned. “Jesus wept, I should be glad he didn’t meet a colored girl first.”
She waffled on whether or not the poor kid was dead to her or not, but she eventually settled on just keeping her distance and being nice to the Jewish girl for the entire family’s sake. She figured she was a real martyr, for which Charley mockingly praised her.
When he finally arrived at Richmond Memorial, he found Andy awake but unable to speak—his jaw was wired shut and held together with steel bars. His face was dark and swollen and there were stitches everywhere: some from the beating and some from the surgery. They even shaved off his moustache, revealing a long and deeply creased upper lip that rendered him almost unrecognizable. Charley thought he looked like a truck had run over his head and he said so. Andy reached over to the tray beside the hospital bed, retrieved a notepad and scribbled something on the open page before displaying it to Charley.
Feels like it too, it said.
“I feel like shit bringing this to your house,” Charley said. “It was a bad decision and that’s all there is to it. I’m going to pay for all this, though. The surgery and everything. Not right away, but I’m going to save every goddamn penny and pay it all, I promise you.”
Andy snorted and set to writing again.
Just buy up all the tickets to my movie & we’re even, he wrote.
“I’ll stand on the street in a sandwich board and make everybody see it,” Charley said. “It’ll be bigger than Deep Throat.”
Andy nodded slightly. Charley sat down and cleared his throat. Guilt was nipping at his conscience, and not only because of Andy’s injuries. The truth of the matter was that Charley came to find out what Andy told the cops and to try and find out if Andy was alert enough to have heard Eve’s master plan of dumping Dragović in Fresh Kills.
“You talk to the police already?” he finally managed to ask.
Andy flipped the pages back in his notebook and then handed it over. On the page he’d turned to were his responses to whatever questions he was asked. All of them were pretty much alike.
Don’t know.
Didn’t see.
Blacked out. Beat up.
Don’t know.
Don’t know.
Charley sighed with relief. He hated being complicit with an apparent crime, but he hated the idea of a stretch in stir even more. Andy flipped back to a clean page and wrote: They get away?
“Yeah,” Charley said. “Both of them.”
Andy pursed his lips in distaste. He scrawled MOTHERFUCKERS in all capital letters.
Both men were quiet for a while after that. A nurse came around in the interim to check on tubes and pillows. Her legs were not worth Charley’s leering eyes. When she left, Andy handed his notepad to Charley.
Call Rosenthal, he had written. Arrange delivery of BB. He meant Bloody Birthright. Charley forced an awkward smile.
“Sure, Andy. Reels in your studio?”
Andy gave a thumbs up. Charley felt like the worst person in the world. Before he left, he leaned over and kissed Andy on the forehead. Andy responded by scribbling in his pad again.
Don’t be such a fruit, he wrote.
Andy’s studio was just a back room on the ground floor where he kept all his equipment and a lot of junk. There were cardboard fruit boxes stacked to the ceiling and guitars with no strings leaning against them; broken dolls and discarded family portraits and mountains of sixteen-millimeter reels. Films he made and some he had bought. The prize of the collection was a scratchy print of Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind, Andy’s favorite movie, but there was plenty of all-male porno in there as well. Charley sorted through them until he found the canisters marked “Bloody Birthright,” seven reels in all. These he packed up into two big metal containers that he dragged out to Andy’s garage.
When he popped the Buick’s trunk, the blinding stench of his waste-soaked clothes blasted him in the face with a vengeance. He had forgotten all about the reeking evidence left behind in Andy’s trunk, but there was no time to deal with it now. Rosenthal set their appointment for four PM, and it was already a quarter past two. Charley slammed the trunk shut, gagged a little and stuffed the containers in the backseat instead. He was halfway across the suspension bridge to Brooklyn before the sea air he let whip in through the open windows cleared out the landfill smell from his nose.
Charley zipped up the interstate on the western shore of Brooklyn and crossed the bridge over to FDR Drive, which he took all the way up to the easternmost end of Forty-Second on the East River, right by the UN. By the time he was nearing the intersection with Sixth, he jammed the Buick into the first street parking he saw and took his time edging back and forth in a failed attempt at parallel parking. That left two and half blocks to lug the heavy steel containers across until he reached Rosenthal’s office on Eighth. Despite the cold air, Charley looked and felt like he had just spent a week in the hotbox from every prison farm movie he ever saw.
Rosenthal was on the phone when Charley poked his head into the office. The big man gestured Charley inside with a finger that said “come here” and wrote out a receipt for the reels without skipping a beat in his conversation.
“Tits,” Rosenthal growled. “You don’t like violence, that’s fine with me. Not every piece of trash plays Times Square got to have blood in it. But if it don’t, I got one word for you. Tits.”
Charley raised his eyebrows and accepted the receipt when Rosenthal pushed it at him. After that, the crusty distributor took his eyes off Charley and kept them that way. It was a brusque way of informing Charley that their business was concluded. He just shrugged it off and turned to go, but then something among the piles of random papers and movie one-sheets and other assorted detritus caught his eye.
At the far end of a shelf in the bookcase closest to the windows Charley saw two short stacks of what looked like eight-millimeter film canisters. He paused in mid-stride and stared at them for a minute. When Rosenthal eventually finished his debate with whatever poor independent filmmaker he was needling, he hung up the phone and said, “Show’s over, kid. Deal’s done.”
“Just a second,” Charley said with uncharacteristic balls. “Quick question for you, Rosey.”
Rosenthal’s mo
uth dropped as he turned to look square in Charley’s eyes.
“Yeah?” he asked incredulously.
“Those reels on the shelf there. Right behind your head.”
Charley indicated what he meant with a pointed finger. Rosenthal followed the invisible line the finger made until his gaze rested on the canisters on the shelf.
“So? What about em?”
“What are they? What’s on them, I mean.”
Rosenthal took one in his hand and blew on it. A thick dust cloud shot up into the air.
“What, this old shit? This’s just porn. Old loops from back in the day, you know. Before you could exhibit dirty movies in a theater.”
Charley stepped over the sundry junk that covered the floor until he reached Rosenthal’s desk and leaned in for a closer look. A title was on the label, typed instead of printed. Felicia’s Follies. Underneath that was a small symbol—a capital R with a circle around it. The circle originated in the stem of the R. Charley put his finger on it.
“R for Rosenthal?”
“Sure, why not? Illegal as hell in those days, but who gives a rat’s ass now? I guess I keep a few around for keepsakes. Hell, I was sort of attached to some of them girls.”
“No kidding.”
“Sure I was. See, I couldn’t just sell these on my own, not so’s I couldn’t end up at the bottom of the East River with cement blocks on my feet. But I made em myself; directed, photographed, edited. You name it. These was all Rosenthal originals.”
“And you gave a cut to the syndicates?”
“The big one at that time, yeah. I had to keep real particular records, probably still got the ledgers in here someplace. Once every couple of weeks this old Italian boy came by, looked over the books with me, and I cut him a check.”
Charley arched one eyebrow.
“A check?”
Rosenthal chortled.
“Yeah. Made out to cash.”
“All right,” Charley said. “Go on.”
“Go on what? That’s it. Come Seventy, Seventy-One, somewhere in there, and if you blinked you’d’a missed it. Times Square just explodes with X rated movies. Behind the Green Door was the first one, I think. Everybody saw it. Your mama probably saw it.”