Masters of Noir: Volume Four

by Lawrence Block

  The carpet was deep in the lobby. The elevator rose in silence. I stood there and hated Calder.

  He had the whole top floor. I got out of the elevator and took my gun out of its holster, wondering whether or not the doorman had called Calder yet. Probably.

  I rang the bell.

  "Yeah?"

  A penthouse overlooking the park didn't get Hell's Kitchen out of his speech. Nothing would.

  "Police."

  "Whattaya want?"

  "Open the door and shut up."

  A few seconds later the door opened. He was short, five-six or five-seven. He was wearing a silk bathrobe and slippers that looked expensive. The apartment was well-furnished but for what he had paid he could have used an interior decorator. There was a shoddiness about the place. Maybe the shoddiness was Calder.

  "Come on in,” he said. “You use a drink?"

  I ignored him. “You're under arrest,” I told him.

  "What for?"

  "Murder."

  "Yeah?” A wide smile. “Somebody got killed?"

  "Johnny Blue."

  "I'm covered,” he said. No I'm innocent but I'm covered. “I was playing cards with some fellows."

  "Uh-huh."

  He shrugged heroically. “You want, we can go down to the station. My lawyer'll have me out right away. I'm clean."

  "You're never clean,” I said. “You were born filthy."

  The smile widened. But there was uncertainty behind it. I was getting to him.

  "You're cheap and rotten,” I said. “You're a punk. You spend a fortune on cologne and it still doesn't cover the smell."

  Now the smile was gone.

  "Your sister sleeps with bums,” I said. “Your mother was the cheapest whore on the West Side. She died of syphilis."

  That did it. He was a few feet away—then he lowered his head and charged. I could have clubbed him with the gun. I didn't.

  I shot him.

  He gave a yell like a wounded steer and fell to his knees. The bullet had taken him in the right shoulder. I guess it hurt. I hoped so.

  "You shot him.” It was Fischer talking.

  "Good thinking,” I told him. “You're on the ball."

  "Now what?"

  I shrugged. “We can take him in,” I suggested. “We can book him for resisting arrest and a few other things."

  "Not murder?"

  "You heard him,” I said. “He's clean."

  I looked at Fischer. That was the answer to my college cop, my buddy. Here was a murderer, a murderer with a shoulder wound. Now we would be nice to him. Get him to a hospital quick before he lost too much blood. Maybe drop the resisting arrest charge because, after all, he was a sick man.

  I had my gun in my hand. I stepped back a few feet and aimed. I watched the play of expressions on Calder's face. He didn't know whether or not to believe it.

  I shot him in the face.

  I talked to Fischer while I found a gun in a drawer, picked it up in a towel, and wrapped Calder's fingers around it. It made it look good—he had drawn on me, I shot him in the shoulder, he went on and held onto the gun, and I shot him dead. It would look good enough—there wasn't going to be any investigation.

  "Maybe thirty killings,” I said. “That's what this animal had to his credit. He made beating the law a business. He didn't fool around. And there was no way to get him."

  No answer from my partner.

  "So this time he lost. He doesn't fool around. Well, neither do I."

  I knew Fischer wasn't satisfied. He wouldn't blab, but it would worry him. He would feel uncomfortable with me. I don't fit into his moral scheme of things. Maybe he'll put in for a transfer.

  I hope so.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  MAN WITH A SHIV by RICHARD WORMSER

  1.

  They came through the prison gate, sixteen of them, handcuffed two by two, with four city policemen to deliver them to the prison. They saw their first convict in the shower room, a trusty who took their civilian clothes and thumbed them to the showers. Afterwards, they went along one at a time, and Macalay found himself in a barber chair. Clippers ran over his hair, and he was out again.

  He looked down at his chest. His number was 116911. No. His name was that; he was 116911. And would be for quite a while.

  He'd been here before, on business, to question prisoners. But it was different now. He was not a visitor with a badge in his pocket and a gun checked at the main gate, with a name and a job, a salary and a whistle to blow if the guards were slow letting him out. He was 116911, in a blue denim suit that was too tight across the shoulders and too long in the legs. But he was still big and he still looked like a cop was supposed to look. A cop for a mural or a Police Athletic League poster. He had the requirements, size and an ugly sort of handsomeness.

  From his new viewpoint, he saw, somewhat to his surprise, that the guards did very little more than stand around. The actual bossing was done by trusties. Trusties had issued them their clothes; trusties formed them into lines. Now a trusty marched them to an isolation barracks. “You'll be here three weeks,” he said. “Till the doc's sure you ain't gonna break out with something an’ infect us tenderer guys. I'm your barracks leader; the guys call me Nosy."

  One of the new fish said: “This is like the Marine Corps all over again."

  "If you was in the Marines, I don't know how we won any wars,” Nosy said calmly. “Okay. There's a bed for each of you. A shelf at the top, box at the bottom. There's a john through that door. You can't go no place but in here, but if you want lib'ary books, write ‘em out, any they'll bring ‘em to ya. Any questions you got ask me now."

  Macalay said: “Can we have pencil and paper?"

  Nosy didn't answer.

  One of the other cons said: “How about radios?"

  "There's headsets under your shelves, hooked into the prison system ... No more questions? I'll write a duty after each guy's name, put it on the bulletin board here. That door leads to my room."

  "How about you picking up an infection from us?” the former Marine asked.

  Nosy said: “Let's see, you're Rodel, aren't you? Why, Rodel, the warden figgers anything I haven't had'd be plain interesting. Keep the doc on his toes."

  Nosy stood up and tacked the sheet on the bulletin board and went into his room.

  Macalay said: “Seems like a nice kind of guy."

  Nobody said anything. One by one the men got up and looked at their assignments. Rodel got to take care of the washbasins; he told a con named Beales: “You gotta call me mister. You're the wiper of the johns; you gotta look up to me."

  After awhile Macalay went and looked, too. He turned from the list. “Hey, my name isn't here."

  Nobody answered him. He went and knocked on Nosy's door. Nosy yelled a “come in,” and when the door was opened could be seen stretched out on a cot with two mattresses, holding a magazine.

  Macalay said: “You forgot to give me any work."

  Nosy stared at him silently and then went back to reading. After awhile, Macalay shut the door and went back to his cot. Somebody laughed, but when he looked around, there wasn't a smile in the barracks room.

  So now he knew how it was going to be; how it was for a policeman who went to prison. You became a ghost, something that nobody could see or hear.

  It wasn't good. But when he'd made the deal, he knew it wasn't going to be any bed of roses.

  It had started in the rain. There were two of them, as per regulations, two patrolmen in a car, making the rounds. That Macalay wasn't physically fit, his right arm dislocated, was not according to regulations. They were listening to the traffic squad get all the calls while they—Gresham was driving, Macalay on the radio—tooled their weary way through the deserted commercial streets, the rain doing nothing for their spirits, the lack of calls letting them slowly down into a bog of indifference.

  It was Macalay who saw the light, just a flicker of it, in the window of a second story salesroom. His hand on
Gresham's arm stopped the car, and they both watched, and then they were sure of it. There was a flashlight up there.

  So they had gone up, Gresham first, and found the bars in the jewelry place cut away, the electric warning system carefully extracted, as Macalay had dissected angleworm nerves in high school biology. They saw the three men at the safe with the burning-torch, but they never saw the other two.

  After that it was all noise and guns; Gresham dead and one of the safecrackers dying; Macalay in a corner with his right shoulder, the bum shoulder, shot and all the rest of him bruised as a .45 bruises a man; the other four getting away, and later the sergeant's car and the lieutenant's car, the headquarters car and the loft-squad truck all screaming down below.

  And the ambulance and the trip to the hospital and the brass standing around his bed arguing and questioning.

  And finally the hospital orderly—how honest can a skid-row white-coat get?—coming in and turning over the little paper to the inspector. The little paper with two diamonds folded in it that they had found in Macalay's shoe, just where he had put them before blacking out trying to help Gresham, who was already beyond help.

  After that, it got slower. He talked with Inspector Strane and they'd come to an understanding. He'd had a choice to make—which of two eight balls he'd get behind. And then there was the trial, and the district attorney who had asked the chair for Macalay: “If a man is committing a felony, such as grand larceny, and anyone gets killed as a result of said felony, he is guilty of murder under the law."

  But the jury had only given him ten to twenty. Ten years to twenty years in the pen. A reporter in the courtroom had said: “It doesn't matter. Send a cop to prison, and the cons'll knock him off anyway.” And this reporter, of course, didn't know about the deal between Macalay and Strane which made a special target out of Macalay for the cons....

  So here he was. In Isolation Barracks No. 7, bed No. 11. With a con on either side of him, and cons across the room; but nobody to speak to. He talked to them but he never got an answer, and even when the prison doctor came around once a day, he grunted at Macalay, though he made jokes with the other fresh fish.

  All things pass. The three weeks went by without a contagious disease showing up and Macalay—116911—was put in a regular cell-block, No. 9, on the second tier, and given a regular job, running a stitching machine in the shoe shop.

  The clerks who assigned the jobs were almost all trusties, and they would have given him hard labor, but his shoulder hadn't completely recovered from the bullet wound and the old injury that kept throwing the collar bone out of place. It had been weak and strained the night he'd seen the light in the jewelry-loft; that was why poor Gresham had gone up the stairs first.

  If it hadn't been for the shoulder, it would have been Macalay dead and Gresham wounded, and sometimes 116911 thought it might have been better that way.

  The needles used on a power leather sewing machine are strong, sharp. Set in the end of a piece of broom handle, one of them makes a lovely shiv. Coming to his machine one morning, Macalay found his needle missing. He went to the foreman, his lie prepared.

  "I forgot to tell you last night. My needle broke just as I finished work."

  The foreman looked him over. “Okay. Bring me the broken parts and I'll sign a new one out to you."

  "I threw the broken pieces in the scrap bin. Last night."

  The foreman was a civilian. He raised his hand, and a guard came over. “Take him to the P.K. Keep an eye on him; he stole a needle."

  As the guard marched Macalay out of the shoe shop, all the cons were, for once, bent hard over their work. But he thought he caught a couple of smiles.

  The Principal Keeper was no gentleman; he left all that to the warden. When the guard lined Macalay up in front of him and said: “116911. Stole a needle from the shoe shop,” the P.K. hardly looked up. He just said: “Search him,” picked up a phone and said: “Search 32a, cell block 9,” and went on with his paper work.

  Before the block guards could call back, Macalay was stripped and searched standing at attention, naked in front of the P.K.'s desk. When the call came back that there was no contraband in the cell, the P.K. sighed and got up from behind his desk. He walked slowly around to face Macalay.

  "Where's the needle?"

  Macalay said: “It broke. I threw it in the trash bin last night.” The P.K. brought the heel of his shoe down on Macalay's naked toes. “Where is it?” He twisted the heel a little. It was not made of rubber.

  Macalay said: “I don't know."

  The P.K. hit him in the belly. “Stand at attention,” he said, when Macalay bent over involuntarily. “And call me sir. Where is it?"

  Macalay found a little wind left in him and said: “I don't know, sir."

  The P.K. bawled “Parade rest.” Spray from his mouth landed on Macalay's face.

  Macalay advanced one foot, and started to clasp his hands in front of him. As soon as he separated his legs, the P.K. brought his knee up between them, hard. Macalay passed out.

  He came to in the Hole, in solitary. He was still naked, but there was a suit of coveralls and a pair of felt slippers in his cell. He put them on, and had to walk bent over, because the coveralls were too short. The slippers were too big.

  Nobody tapped on his water pipes, nobody put a message in his oatmeal for two weeks. That was what he ate—a big bowl of oatmeal once a day, put in a Judas-gate in the door every morning, together with a half-gallon jug of water. The Judas-gate only opened one way at a time, so he didn't know if his food was brought by a trusty or a guard.

  That went on for two weeks. Towards the end of that time, Macalay began to have an illusion; he imagined Gresham's dead body was in the cell with him. When he moved from one side of the Hole to the other, the body slowly moved after him. It took a lot of effort not to think about contacting Inspector Strane and begging him to call the whole thing off.

  When he got back to cell block No. 9, he had a new bunky. It didn't matter to Macalay; none of the cons talked to him anyway. He sat down on his bunk, and the thin mattress and chain-link spring felt wonderful after the floor of the Hole. He pulled his feet up, stretched, and slowly, tentatively closed his eyes; the light hurt them.

  The body of Gresham came back and lay on the floor of the cell. But in a few minutes it faded, and Macalay let out a long sigh.

  The man on the other bunk put down his magazine. “What did you see?” he asked.

  "A body,” Macalay said. “He was my sidekick."

  "I saw my mother,” the other man said. “The time I was in the Hole. Everybody sees something, if he stays in the Hole more than three days."

  Macalay said: “Does anybody—” and then stopped. He suddenly realized he was being talked to. He finished the sentence. “Does anybody ever get less than three days in the Hole?"

  "Not under this P.K.,” the cellmate said. “If he don't end up with a shiv in his ribs, the class of prisoners has fallen off in this can ... My name's Mason. Jock Mason."

  "Macalay."

  "Yeah, I know. You were a cop, Mac. We're willing to forget it. My gang. Jock's Jockeys. If you'd said somebody lifted your needle, all the guys in the shoe shop woulda gotten hacked. We like a guy who keeps his teeth covered."

  Macalay slowly grinned. It never occurred to him to say he might not like to be one of Jock's Jockeys. He said: “Hey. What are we doin’ in our cells?"

  Jock laughed. “It's Sunday morning. Church parade's just gone, an’ lunch'll be coming up in an hour ... A guy loses track of time in the Hole, an’ don't I know it. There's a ball game this afternoon, the Stripes against the Stars. Who do you like?” Jock slowly rolled himself a cigarette and tossed the makings over to Macalay.

  Macalay built a cigarette carefully. He hadn't smoked in four years, but he thought he knew how to roll one from when he was a kid. It looked a little like a tamale, but it held together while he lighted it. He said: “I'll take either side you don't want, for a pack of tailormade
s—when I earn them.” The cons got a quarter a day when they worked.

  Jock said: “You got the Stars. It's a sucker bet."

  "Yeah? They'll lick the numbers off the Stripes."

  Both men laughed.

  2.

  Life changed after that. A prison is a peculiar place; almost everything happens in one that happens in the outside, free world; but it happens fast, in odd corners, just before a guard walks by, just after one has passed.

  So Macalay, as one of Jock's Jockeys, found he could get drunk if he really wanted to; could get as many uncensored letters out as he wanted to; could even have a love affair—if he cared for it, and with a boy who should have been in a women's prison—or an asylum—anyway.

  He passed up the latter two amusements, but once in a while he took on a skinful. Ten to twenty's a hard sentence to pass, and he'd done less than six months of it.

  So he was in on the drunk in Boiler No. 4, which made prison history.

  No. 4 was a power boiler, not a heating one, and it was out of commission while a bunch of cons scaled it. Fitz Llewellen, a lifer, was in on the scaling gang, and he designed a still out of some of the boiler tubes they were cleaning. Since no guard in his right mind would possibly go inside a boiler, the still ran all the time they were chipping No. 4; but Fitz and Jock wouldn't let anybody touch, the white mule till the day before the boiler was cleaned.

  There were six of them in there: Fitz, Jock, Macalay, the Nosy who had been a trusty when Mac was a fresh fish, and two safecrackers named Hanning and Russ, friends Macalay had cultivated with a great show of casualness, and persuaded Jock to take into their gang.

  They passed the popskull around gently at first, with a lot of “will-you-please” and “your turn.” It was pretty good jungle juice; made out of oranges and prunes lifted from the mess hall. Jock's habitual easy gloom lifted, and he began singing, the tenor notes bouncing back off the boiler plate. “Singin’ in the rain, oh singin’ in the rain ... “

  "Shut up,” Russ said. “A screw'll hear you."

  Jock said: “A guy can't shut up forever. I feel good.” He went on singing.