The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  Without the accent…

  “Goddamnit,” Charley seethed.

  Eve swallowed a mouthful of coffee and waited with raised eyebrows for him to clarify.

  “We’ve got to find that son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The one who got away. The one who killed your sister and my roommate. The one who threatened me over the phone and kidnapped all three of us and slashed Ursula’s throat. He’s the one, the key to all of this shit.”

  Eve’s eyes were bulging with excitement, her breathing rapid and audible.

  “Okay, great. But we don’t know who he is.”

  “I know who he is,” Charley said. “I can’t believe my dumb brain couldn’t make the link before, but I know exactly who he is.”

  “You do? How?”

  He twisted his neck and it popped, readying himself for the mission that lay ahead.

  “City Council Member Fred Haskett, District 3, Democrat. The great moral crusader, the son of a bitch who wants to shut down the Deuce.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Nope. I memorized his name and face in case I ever got the chance to punch him in his supercilious nose.”

  “Well, if that’s the same guy who stuffed me into the floorboards of that car and slashed you friend’s neck, then I suggest you’re gonna have that chance.”

  Charley cracked his knuckles and marched toward the elevator.

  Chapter 25

  Charley spent the night with Eve, but all they did was sleep. At least that was what he did. What Eve did, he could not say for sure; all he knew was that she was up and ready to go by the time he woke up the next morning.

  She sprung for a cab, and they arrived in front of City Hall on Chambers Street around nine. On the steps leading up to the portico that jutted out of the limestone façade, Charley said, “It’d be some break if we ran into him here.”

  “Don’t be a moron,” Eve admonished. “This is his turf. We’d be fucked and how.”

  “Oh,” he answered sheepishly as they entered the building.

  “What we want is public records.”

  “What do you want to see, his voting record? I can tell you right now it sucks.”

  Despite the trail of blood and misery the councilman for the city’s district three had left in his wake, Charley still found his opposition to Forty-Second Street’s grindhouses a sticking point.

  “I want his home address.”

  “Will they give that out?”

  “They should. He’s a public servant. Everything about him, everything that’s legit anyway, should be on file and open to the public. We’re the public.”

  “Seems not so safe in a city like this,” he said, thinking aloud.

  “Well, Fred Haskett is one man we don’t want to be safe, my friend.”

  Charley pursed his lips and nodded gravely. For a fraction of a second he considered bringing up the telephone directory as a far simpler avenue, but then he remembered all the trouble he had during his ill-fated search for Chester Price. City Hall it was.

  Eve used her finger to investigate the main directory, and from there she led them through the corridors that eventually dropped them at the door to the office of public records. It was essentially a small library with all the uselessly fictional information anyone could ever want pertaining to the cover stories that masked decades upon decades of corruption and graft that made up the city’s life story. Who got paid, what got done, who was involved, and who voted for it. But beyond all of that, there was, somewhere among the billions of papers filed away in there, an address for the councilman for district three. Eve asked a dowdy middle-aged woman on duty what she could dig up for them and, without questioning their intent, she produced precisely what they needed in less than ten minutes. Charley figured it was a wonder councilmen weren’t at the very least harassed at their doorsteps every day, if not outright assaulted.

  He also wondered if there was going to be an assault today, or if that was how it was going to end up in the papers the next day, regardless of what went down. He felt the flesh tighten around his face as they exited City Hall, armed with the information that was going to lead them right to the man who murdered Elizabeth Hewlett.

  According to official city records, Fred Haskett lived in a rent-controlled high-rise in the upper Fifties off Sixth Avenue. Charley and Eve climbed out of the smoky taxi they’d taken a couple of blocks west and walked the rest of the way, stopping dead in their tracks at first sight of the liveried doorman.

  “Fancy,” Charley said.

  “Easy,” Eve came back.

  With that she slipped out of her coat, draped it over one arm and sashayed for what remained of the block before she reached the decrepit old guy in the red coat with gold tubing. Beneath the heavy winter coat she was adorned in her usual street clothes—a green halter top and light blue bellbottom jeans that fit like plastic wrap around her waspy hips and prodigious rear—perhaps a little too much for the elderly sentry to take in all at once. His mouth hung open at the sight of her, and when she flashed a toothy, lipstick smile at him he grinned stupidly back.

  “Good evening,” he rasped.

  “Hiya,” Eve squeaked, a few octaves higher than her normal speaking voice. “Just going to see a friend of mine, cutie.”

  Cutie. Charley rolled his eyes.

  “That right?” he wheezed. He was now nodding like he had the delirium tremens, his mouth hanging a little closer to his chest than before.

  “Mary, uh, Goldman. You know where she lives, cutie?”

  “No, no miss, I can’t say I know a Miss Goldman. Lived here long?”

  “Oh, no—why, she only moved to the city last month. Thought I’d finally drop by to show her the sights. Statue of Liberty, Radio City Music Hall, all that jazz, you know.”

  “Sure, sure,” the old guy stammered. “Just gimme her apartment number and I’ll ring her up for you straight away.”

  Charley sneered. He had not thought this was going to work.

  “It’s, uh…” The doorman stared. All was lost. “It’s on the fourth floor, I think…”

  “Fourth floor, is it?”

  He was still smiling, eager as hell to help out the pretty young thing with the enormous cans, but she was getting nowhere fast.

  “Aw crap, I should have written it down. I’ll probably know it when I get up there.”

  No chance, Charley thought.

  “Oh, but I’m afraid I can’t let anybody up doesn’t get the okay from a tenant, miss…”

  “Well that I’ve got,” Eve kept trying, “it’s the dang apartment number that I can’t remember.”

  “That is a sticky wicket,” the old man said.

  Charley let a snicker escape his lips against his best efforts to contain it.

  “Can’t you just let me run up and I’ll have her call down to you?”

  “Run up…?”

  He was processing it, but his face did not look like the odds were in her favor. He did, however, look pained to have to turn the pretty girl away, not that that was liable to make her feel any better about it.

  Finally, after the gears in his skull had managed a full revolution, the old doorman said, “I’m going to have to ring my supervisor.”

  This he did, but to no avail. He hung up shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry, miss, but…”

  “I got it. No can do.” Eve smiled a rumpled smile. “Hey, tough economy. Gotta keep our jobs, right?”

  The doorman shrugged.

  Later, in an all-night greasy spoon a couple of streets down, in the mid-Fifties, Charley sipped bitter coffee and thought about Adam West. Specifically, he was recalling the times on the Batman show when West and Burt Ward would be climbing up the side of a skyscraper, usually encountering washed-up celebrities along the way. That, he thought, would be one way of getting to Haskett. And he probably wouldn’t even have to bother with Sammy Davis, Jr. poking his head out a window, either.
>
  “Now what?” Eve asked bitterly.

  “Don’t know. Too busy a street to take out the doorman.”

  “You’re joking, right? I hope you’re joking.”

  “Of course I’m frigging joking,” he said sharply. “Let’s not forget I’m just about the only person in any way connected to this circus who hasn’t killed anybody yet.”

  Eve’s eyes widened and she displayed her palms in a surrendering position.

  “Not so loud,” she pleaded.

  Charley just sneered and stuck his face back in the coffee cup. Half a dozen bodies in his wake and two in bad shape in hospitals in two different boroughs; a name and a face and a reasonable idea that the guy was guiltier than sin; and here he was stopped dead in his tracks by a guy in his seventies who probably made about three bucks an hour to keep guys like Charley out on the sidewalk. He was frustrated as hell.

  “Maybe we could pay the guy,” she said. “You know, bribe him.”

  “You got any money?”

  “Not really. You?”

  He shook his head, grimly. He had all but abandoned his post at Sol’s flophouse and in all likelihood would not be welcomed back with open arms. That meant no income for the foreseeable future, and his present resources were dwindling fast. Bribery was out.

  Another round of steaming coffees came and went before Eve said, “We’ve got to get in there.”

  “I know.”

  “Tonight.”

  “Fine. How?”

  “There’s gotta be some sort of loading dock, something in the back. We could maybe try breaking in that way.”

  Charley mulled this over, his mind skipping back to the Bowery and breaking into Chester Price’s creepy skid row tenement. Of course, Councilman Haskett’s pad was a significant step up from that terrifying house of horrors, but that also suggested that it would be considerably more difficult to get into that way. Nonetheless, Charley could not conceive of a better idea, so he nodded sharply in agreement.

  “Then we’d best be going,” Eve said.

  • • •

  That plan was a total failure. There was a service entrance, but it was locked up tighter than the spandex on a Forty-Second Street whore. Nothing going in and nothing coming out, and there wasn’t anyone around. Once they had determined that both entrances were blocked to them, Charley and Eve just stood around in the back alley for a bit, saying nothing and looking dumb. Eventually she broke the monotony by lighting a cigarette. That was when Charley said, “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I know a guy.”

  They forewent the taxi this time around and opted for the subway instead. Inside half an hour, they were tramping up Forty-Sixth to the corner of Third Avenue. The Italian deli there was doing decent business for the lunch crowd, unlike Charley’s initial visit to Pastore’s. Then there had only been one occupied table. Now they all were, including Louie Cioci at his regular spot. Charley spotted him right away and wondered what would happen if Cioci came in to find someone else at his table. All he knew for sure was that he would never dream of sitting there.

  “Unchained Melody” was leaking out of the speakers overhead, but at least it was an up-tempo version done by Vito and the Salutations. Nobody could eat salami to the sound of the Righteous Brothers doing it. Cioci was ignoring the song, as well as a full cup of coffee on the table, and reading a book. Per usual. The New Industrial State was the title on the worn hardback’s cover. Charley half-smiled at the book. If any organization needed people with a deep grasp of economics, Cioci’s bunch was it.

  Charley silently gestured for Eve to hang back while he went over to get the bearded Italian’s attention. Thirty seconds later, Cioci dog-eared the page, gently set the book down on the table and looked up solicitously at Charley.

  “Charley Charley McCormick,” Cioci said flatly. “No luck on the porn loop front, I take it?”

  “A little,” Charley said. “Found a guy needs talking to. Trouble is I can’t get close to him.”

  “That a fact. Connected?”

  “Probably,” Charley said, though he failed to comprehend what Cioci meant by it.

  “He’s one of ours I don’t see how I can help you.”

  “I don’t think he is.” Charley leaned in close to Cioci like he was about to divulge a state secret. “He’s a councilman.”

  Cioci laughed. It was a raspy, quiet laugh that sounded unpleasant to Charley.

  “Madre del Dio, this kid wants to knock off a politician.”

  “Knock off?” Charley muttered, shocked and embarrassed. “Wait, no…who said anything about knocking off?”

  “If I misunderstood you I apologize,” Cioci said. “I’d offer you a seat at my table, but you’re leaving a lady standing in the doorway. I think that’s rude.”

  Charley hemmed and hawed for a second and then rushed over to drag Eve back to Cioci’s table.

  “Eve, Louie Cioci. Mr. Cioci…”

  “Call me Louie,” he said, taking her limp hand and giving it a hairy kiss on the back.

  Eve drew her hand back in a hurry. Cioci smiled wryly.

  “Sit down,” he said to them both. They did. “So you can’t get close to a public servant, is that it? Seems easy to me.”

  “Sure, if you want everyone in the city on your heels on the same time,” Eve said. “What we want is private time, you dig?”

  “You dig,” Cioci mocked under his breath. He shook his head. “Yeah, so?”

  “So,” Charley said, “this hundred year old doorman won’t let us in the damn building.”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Cioci said dryly. “Now I’ve heard every goddamn thing.”

  He sighed loudly and leaned back in his chair.

  “What’s the name of the building?”

  “Don’t know,” Charley admitted. He just gave Cioci the address, which was all he knew.

  Cioci groaned and rolled his eyes around for a moment. Charley and Eve glanced at one another and then back at Louie Cioci. He gazed up at the moldy ceiling tiles for a while and then, when he came back down to Earth, said, “I gotta make a call. Gimme a dime.”

  Cioci presented the palm of his right hand and made anxious motions with his fingers. Charley frowned and dug in his pockets for the dime. He thought he’d heard everything now, too—a syndicate gangster hitting him up for ten cents for the payphone. He gave Cioci the dime and the latter went out of Pastore’s without another word. The next few minutes were passed in awkward silence, punctuated only by Eve’s growly whisper: “Where’d you find this guy?”

  Before he could answer, Cioci returned, a triumphant smile slashing the dark tangle of his prodigious beard. He sat back down, breathing a little too heavily for such a thin guy.

  “Taken care of.”

  Charley blanched.

  “Taken…wait, what did you do?”

  “Chrissakes, what do I look like, a jackass has little old men wiped out? C’mon, Charley. Give me some goddamn credit, here.”

  “So you didn’t…”

  Cioci lowered his head and glowered at Charley from beneath his shaggy eyebrows.

  “He won’t give you any trouble,” he said. “Just be there before one, capiche?”

  “Sure,” Eve said. “We capiche.”

  There was no one in attendance at the entrance to Haskett’s apartment building when they returned at a quarter to one. A snotty-looking woman in furs lingered under the red awning, craning her neck over the exterminated minks on her shoulders in a fruitless search for the old guy. She gave up eventually, making a dismissive noise before tramping down the sidewalk. The nerve, her irritated gait conveyed. Although curious what Cioci had said to make the doorman disappear and to whom he said it, Charley was assured the guy hadn’t been hit and that sounded good enough to him. Maybe he’d wake up with a throbbing headache someplace, but that was an acceptable sacrifice given the gravity of the proceedings. Charley and Eve strode into the lobby.


  It was a nice building, a great deal nicer than either of them were accustomed to. Huge potted plants towered in every corner and there were a lot of corners. Mirrors stretched from floor to ceiling almost everyone they looked, giving the already spacious area the illusion of being twice its size. There were red leather chairs bordering a bland rug and free newspapers available in a rack by the elevators. Charley led the way to the little hall where tall steel doors concealed elevator shafts on either side.

  “Some digs,” Eve said.

  Charley pressed the button and it dimly glowed orange. When one of the elevators arrived with a ding, the steel doors slid open. They stepped onto plush carpet under hidden speakers that droned the soft Bossa Nova sound of “Desafinado,” only it was a hideous piped music version designed for upscale elevator rides and supermarkets.

  “God,” Eve said quietly.

  Charley pressed the button for the fourth floor and the car shot up, hitting the bell for each level they passed. He and Eve rushed out as soon as the doors reopened, anxious to escape the Andy Williams Show from Hell as soon as possible.

  The hallway was clean and brightly lit. It smelled faintly of cleaning solvents. The contrast from the other hallways of Charley’s recent history was staggering; no nauseating culinary concoctions, no human waste, no rats or roaches or deep dark shadows concealing who-knew-what. Just clean crimson carpet with gold trim and fancy brass light fixtures on the walls. Charley and Eve took it all in and then raised their eyebrows at each other. Councilman Fred Haskett was living in style.

  The hallway wrapped around the two elevator shafts in a perfect square, doors spaced evenly on the outer wall. The apartment they were looking for was in the southeast corner of that square, the door identical in every way to the others except for the number, four-twelve, just like the lady in public records told them at City Hall.

  Charley knocked.

  Nothing.

  He knocked again, harder this time.

  Again, nothing.