So Nude, So Dead

by Ed McBain

  She took a cigarette from a crumpled package on the table, smoothed it out with her fingers and then thrust it between her lips. She wore no make-up, and her lips were pale and full, dry after a night’s sleep. Her fingers trembled when she lit the cigarette.

  “What about Jerry?” she asked.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. Listen, are you going to ask me questions? If you’re going to ask me questions, you can leave right now. I’m expecting someone.”

  “Jerry?”

  “No.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone.”

  “The Man?” I asked.

  Her eyes opened wide. “What?”

  “Honey, I’ve seen enough to know someone who’s waiting for The Man. You haven’t had your shot yet, have you?”

  “Nobody asked you.”

  “When’s he coming?”

  She glanced at the clock on the wall. “He should have been here already. Damn it, where is he?”

  She began to pace the room, her shoulders straight, her breasts moving rhythmically from side to side with each step she took.

  “Why was Peter D’Allessio rubbed?” I asked.

  “How the hell should I know?…Are you a cop?”

  “No.”

  “How the hell should I know?” she repeated.

  “What’s Jerry got himself into?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nobody rubs a junkie’s father just because he’s going to the police. One junkie more or less doesn’t mean beans to a pusher.”

  “So?”

  “So why? Why kill the old man? I keep asking myself that.”

  “Go find out if you’re so damned interested.” She looked up at the clock again. “Where the hell is he?”

  “He’ll be here. Relax.”

  “He’d better be here. He’d better be here damn soon. Man, I’m overdue.”

  She crossed to the table and leaned over to put out her cigarette. Then she began pacing again. It was beginning to eat at her. It was beginning to get under her skin and crawl in her blood. I could see a fine film of sweat on her forehead. Her hands were really shaking now, and she kept pulling at the robe. She scratched at her head, then raked her long nails over the skin on her arms. She bit her lips, glanced at the clock again.

  “Jeez, what’s keeping him? What’s keeping him?”

  She walked to the bed and sat down. She got up almost instantly and began walking again. I watched her shivering violently, her teeth chattering now, her face looking as if it were ready to fall apart.

  “Easy,” I said. “Easy.”

  “Get out of here,” she shrieked. “I won’t have you watching me.”

  “Easy,” I told her.

  She walked to the table and reached into the crumpled pack for another cigarette. The pack was empty and she threw it away. I took out a cigarette and offered it to her. Greedily, she snatched at it, and I lit it for her while she continued to shiver.

  She turned away suddenly and said, “I’m itchy. I’m itchy all over. Like bugs were on me. All over, crawling all over me.”

  She unloosened the cord at her waist and threw the robe open, exposing her hard, flat stomach, and the curving whiteness of her hips and thighs. She didn’t care about me now. She only cared about the monkey who was tearing her shoulder to shreds. She ran to the bed and yelled, “God, God!”, throwing herself forward onto the mattress. She wriggled frantically and her back arched high into the air, her leg muscles straining. She subsided in a sobbing heap and shouted, “Where is he? Where is he?”

  Her back arched again, her breasts high, every muscle in her body quivering with the longing for the drug.

  “Come here,” she pleaded. “Do something. Do something for me. Do something. Do something.”

  I walked to the bed and stroked her body gently. She trembled violently, her breath raging into her lungs.

  “Do something! Do something! Please, please, please.”

  I slapped her across the face. “Snap out of it,” I said.

  “Again, again. Hit me again. Please, please.”

  I hit her harder this time, and she moaned softly and reached up, throwing her arms around my neck. Her teeth clamped onto my neck, and she became a writhing, wriggling animal, her screams tearing across the room. I shoved her away and she flopped back onto the mattress, her eyes wide.

  Nothing can help a junkie but the junk.

  When I left her, she was still moaning on the bed, still crying for The Man who could put her out of her misery. On the way down, I passed a short, dark guy in a loud sports shirt, a package under his arm.

  “You’d better hurry,” I told him. “You’re about to lose a customer.”

  He grunted and kept walking up the steps, looking back once to study my face more closely. I studied his face, too, and then I walked down to the ground floor. Instead of going out of the building, I went behind the steps and sat on one of the garbage cans there.

  I waited for about fifteen minutes, and then I heard light steps coming down the stairs. When the steps reached the ground floor, I peeked out and saw the loud sports shirt drifting toward the front door. I gave him a chance to reach the street, and then I started after him.

  With that shirt, you could have tailed him in a snowstorm. It was yellow and green, and it stood out like a beacon for foundering ships. I kept walking after him, quickening my pace when he did, never taking my eyes from the shirt. He turned a corner after we’d walked three blocks, and I ran to the corner, anxious not to lose him. I rounded the corner at a trot and walked right into the business end of a Colt .38.

  “What is it, chum?” he asked. He had a thin, suspicious face with heavy brows and dark brown eyes. He sported a little mustache under his nose, and his teeth protruded over his lower lip.

  “Put up the artillery,” I said. “This is a friendly visit.”

  “I ain’t got no friends, chum,” he told me.

  “Claire Blaney’s one of your friends, isn’t she?”

  He kept the .38 leveled at my stomach. “What if she is a friend?”

  “Is Jerry D’Allessio a friend, too?”

  “What’s your game, chum?”

  “I want to know who killed Peter D’Allessio.”

  “Why?”

  “I just want to know.”

  He pointed the gun downward suggestively. “You want to keep that, you better get the hell out of this neighborhood.”

  “That right?”

  “That’s right, chum.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Suits me fine.” I started to turn away from him, and then I brought my right fist around in a short chop to his gut. He was about to trigger off a shot when I brought the edge of my left hand down on his wrist. He bellowed and dropped the gun, and I kicked it clattering across the sidewalk. I grabbed him then and gave him another hard right on his shoulder, bringing the edge of my hand down like a knife. He brought his shoulder up in pain, and his face screwed up into a tight knot.

  “Where’s Jerry?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I backhanded him across the mouth, and a spurt of blood appeared at the corner of his lips. “Junior, I’m not kidding. I almost killed a lot of guys, and I’m ready to go all the way with you. Where is he?”

  “Wise up. I don’t know.”

  “I’ll wise up,” I told him. I slapped him again, harder. “Where is he?”

  “So help me, I don’t know.”

  This time I gave him my fist, square in his mouth. He was spitting teeth when he finally decided to talk.

  “All right, all right, I’ll show you.”

  “This better be straight goods.”

  “The goods,” he said. “The goods. Honest.”

  I picked his .38 out of the gutter and tucked it into my waistband. I shoved him ahead of me, and then we started out to find the junkie whose father had died.

  * * *

  The sports shirt left me outside a small door in a narro
w alley. He pointed to the door, and then he took off like a big bird, his mouth still bleeding.

  I lifted my hand and rapped on the door.

  There was no sound inside, no light.

  I tapped again.

  “Yes, who is it?” a voice whispered.

  “A visitor.”

  “Go away.”

  “Open up, D’Allessio,” I said.

  “Go away, damn it.”

  “You want it broken in?”

  “Yeah, break it in. Go ahead, break it in.”

  I backed up to the opposite wall of the alley and shoved the sole of my foot against it. When my shoulder hit the door, it splintered with a rushing crack of old wood, and I stumbled into the room, fighting for balance.

  I felt around for a light switch, finally located a pull chain. I yanked it, and a dim bulb splashed some feeble light into the small room.

  D’Allessio was curled up against the wall, on the bed.

  This wasn’t the D’Allessio I’d seen in the wallet. The same long nose was there, and the same pale eyes—but the face was thin, the skin pulled in tight under his cheekbones. His lips were bloodless, and his exposed arms bore the telltale scars of thousands of injections.

  It was his eyes that told the whole story, though. They blinked like blind whirlpools in his head, the pupils large and black and staring. Haunted eyes. Eyes possessed of a ghost, a ghost named heroin.

  “D’Allessio?” I asked.

  “Who’s the strong man? Who’s the man goes around breaking doors?”

  “Matt Cordell,” I told him.

  “Matt Cordell.” He gave a low chuckle that died in his throat. “The disillusioned peeper.” He chuckled again, huddled against the wall like a skinny pack rat.

  “Your father wanted me to find you,” I said. “That was before someone killed him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. He wanted me to find you so he could take you off the stuff. Your father had pipe dreams.”

  “Don’t I know it!” He chuckled again, his teeth flashing in his gaunt face. “Shake the monkey? Like fun. Lexington, he said. Lexington, Kentucky. Man, he had rocks. That goddam penal colony?”

  “They cure people there,” I said.

  “Sure, criminals. I’m no criminal.”

  “You are now,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He was only trying to help you, Jerry. You had no reason to shoot him.”

  D’Allessio sat up on the bed, and his eyes were wider now, still staring, still lifeless. “You’re off your rocker,” he said.

  “Who else? Cousin Marie? She’s too busy. Claire? For what purpose? Hoss is everything to her, the way it is to you. Edith Rossi? She was trying to help you, and she knew your father was doing the same thing.”

  “You’ve flipped your cork, Cordell. Go break your way out of here. I’m sleepy.”

  “I thought maybe the pushers did it, but what for? You’re dirt to them, Jerry. Dirt under their feet. Your father was a danger to only one person—the person he might’ve told the police about when I wouldn’t help. You.”

  The gun came up from beneath the pillow before I could reach for the .38 in my waistband. D’Allessio held it steady, and he grinned over it, still lying full length on on the bed.

  When he spoke, he spoke slowly, separating the two words. “So what?” he said.

  “So nothing. Your father’s going to cure you after all, Jerry. There’s no better cure than the electric chair. That’s the only permanent cure.”

  “And who’s going to take me to the chair?” he asked.

  “Me.”

  “Ha. Joke.”

  “Sure,” I said, “me. I’m going to take that gun away from you in about three seconds, and then I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest and cart you down to Homicide. Me.”

  “You must be tired of living,” he said.

  “That’s it, friend, that’s it exactly. I just don’t give a damn, you see. You can shoot me but you’ll get it anyway, and if you kill me, you’ll be doing me a favor. Like a mutual friend said, I died a long time ago.” I took a step closer to the bed. “Give me the gun, kid.”

  “Stay where you are,” he shouted. He was sitting up now, his trousers rumpled over his knees, the needle marks showing on his legs, too, marks he’d killed to keep.

  I walked up to the bed, holding out my hand.

  His eyes were wide with fear, and his hand began to tremble. I watched the trigger finger, watched the skin grow white on his knuckle as the finger tightened.

  “Give it to me!” I shouted.

  For a second, I thought he was going to shoot. And then he threw himself full length on the bed, the gun clattering to the floor. He began crying, the sobs ripping into his chest.

  “I’m no good. I’m no damn good,” he said.

  “You just took the wrong trolley, kid.”

  “My own father, my own father. I’m no good.”

  “Come on, kid,” I said. “Come on.”

  He was still crying when I led him out of that dark alley into the sunshine that spilled onto the pavement. He didn’t say a word when the Homicide boys took over. I gave them his gun and told them Ballistics would probably match the bullets in it with the ones found in Peter D’Allessio’s body.

  I didn’t wait for thanks. I headed for the nearest bar.

  I sat and drank, and I thought of the kid and whatever ghost had driven him to drugs and the murder of his own father. The ghost would stay with him right to the end. Ghosts die hard. I know all about ghosts.

  I lifted my glass and I drank.

  More Great Detective Fiction

  From the Author of SO NUDE, SO DEAD

  The GUTTER and the GRAVE

  by ED McBAIN

  Detective Matt Cordell was happily married once, and gainfully employed, and sober. But that was before he caught his wife cheating on him with one of his operatives and took it out on the man with the butt end of a .45.

  Now Matt makes his home on the streets of New York and his only companions are the city’s bartenders. But trouble still knows how to find him, and when Johnny Bridges shows up from the old neighborhood, begging for Matt’s help, Cordell finds himself drawn into a case full of beautiful women and bloody murder. It’s just like the old days. Only this time, when the beatings come, he may wind up on the receiving end…

  ACCLAIM FOR McBAIN:

  “Ed McBain is a master.”

  — Newsweek

  “Ed McBain is, by far, the best at what he does. Case closed.”

  — People

  “McBain tells great stories.”

  — Elmore Leonard

  “A master…McBain gets it right.”

  — Time

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