Immoral Certainty

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  In that mood, he didn’t even mind coming into the office, which was what he was doing right now. He would try to get in touch with Anna again, using the office phone. She looked good and scared the last time he saw her; he figured that she’d be softened up by now. He’d put the heavy make on her, say he was sorry, and bullshit like that and she’d come around. He’d have to find out where she lived now; he already knew where she worked.

  “That’s him,” said Balducci. “The dark guy in the leather jacket with the case, crossing the street. Give him a few minutes and ring the number.”

  Raney nodded and got out of the unmarked Ford from which the two of them had been observing the premises of Elegante Credit Furnishings. There was a phone booth nearby. He went in and dialed.

  “Mr. Tighe?”

  “Yes, this is Mr. Tighe, how can I help you?”

  “Well, my name’s Jim Raney. I think we have some mutual friends. I have a business proposition for you and I’d like to meet with you today—buy you a lunch.”

  Felix did not get asked out to lunch all that often, and he didn’t ask what mutual friends. “Give me an hour,” he said. “There’s a chinks across the street from where I work, at Thirtieth and Second. Upstairs, the Peking Gardens. How will I know you?”

  “I’ll know you,” said Raney, and hung up.

  The restaurant proved to be a long, narrow room with a lunch counter and a small collection of tables, at the top of a steep flight of stairs. The lunch rush was in full spate and the place was jammed. Raney and Balducci stood on the landing at the top of the stairs and looked through the glass door. They could see Felix sitting at the counter with his back to them.

  “It’s too jammed,” said Raney. “Let me go in there and get him out.” Balducci nodded assent and Raney went through the crowd to where Felix was sitting. He said, “Felix Tighe? I’m Jim Raney.”

  Felix stood up and the two men shook hands. Raney smiled and said, “Look, it’s too crowded in here. Can we go somewheres else?”

  “Sure,” said Felix, picking up his attaché case. “So, tell me, Jim, what line of business are you in?”

  “Security,” said Raney as they passed through the door. Then he added, “Actually, Felix, I’m a New York City police officer, Detective James Raney. The guy behind you is Detective Peter Balducci. We’re placing you under arrest.”

  Felix’s eyes went wide and he whirled around to find himself looking into the barrel of Balducci’s .38 Chief’s Special. Raney took out his handcuffs and grabbed Felix’s left arm.

  Felix uttered a shrill yell, deafening in that narrow space, threw his attaché case at Balducci’s head and grabbed the detective’s revolver.

  It’s my last couple of months on the job and I’m going to kill a guy, was Balducci’s thought as he squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. Like most policemen, Balducci kept an empty chamber under the hammer of his revolver, and Felix’s hand gripping the cylinder was preventing it from rotating. He saw Felix’s other hand flying like a knife blade toward his face and he ducked. The edge of the hand struck him across the forehead. It was like being hit with a board and it stunned him, but not enough to make him release his grip on the handle of his pistol.

  At that moment, Raney leaped on Felix’s back and tried to apply a choke hold from the rear. Felix bucked forward to prevent this, seized the lapel of Balducci’s jacket and executed a leg sweep that was reasonably effective under the circumstances. Balducci felt himself going over, with the long stairway yawning below him. The pistol was wrenched from his grasp. In a last despairing effort he reached out and sank his fingers into the leather of Felix’s jacket.

  The grip was strong enough to yank Felix off the landing, with Raney still clinging to his back. The three of them went down the stairs together, Felix in the middle and the two detectives on either side, a suspect sandwich on cop.

  Felix was on top of Balducci when they reached the bottom. He managed to brace a leg and heave himself to his feet, with Raney still hanging on his head. Raney saw the Chief’s Special in Felix’s hand, still gripped by its barrel and cylinder. He made a wild try for its handle, which was a mistake, because Felix was then able to grab his wrist with his other hand, bend slightly, twist his body, pull on the arm, and flip Raney over his head into the street.

  Raney landed with a jolt that brought blood to his mouth. He shook his head and staggered to his feet. Felix had the gun right way around now. He pointed it at Raney and squeezed the trigger. It wouldn’t pull. Felix cursed and tried to clear the jam by pulling back on the hammer. He heard it click as the cylinder finally revolved.

  He pointed the cocked pistol at Raney, whose Browning was just clearing his shoulder holster. Raney could see the tiny hole in the barrel of the revolver, as large, it appeared, as the sun at noon. His own pistol was coming up like the slow motion in a nightmare and he knew it would be too late.

  The Chief’s Special exploded and the bullet went whining off against the side of a building. Balducci had dragged himself off the bottom of the stairway, his twisted back shrieking agony, and had flung his arms around Felix from behind, lifting him off his feet and spoiling his shot.

  “Throw him down, Pete, I got him!” Raney yelled waving his Browning. But Balducci did not release his grip, because he realized that as long as he kept the suspect’s arms pinioned, he would be unable to aim, and unable to commit homicide with Balducci’s own gun. This was his only thought, that and the pain. So the two of them did a little waltz on the sidewalk, with Raney as their satellite, circling around in a crouch with his gun waving, trying to avoid the sweep of the captured weapon, and trying to think of a way out of this idiotic stand-off without death intervening.

  In the end, none of the heroic schemes that were running through the minds of the two detectives proved necessary. A patrolman named Donald Olson, who happened to know Raney slightly, came around the corner onto Second, on his way to the Peking Gardens for a bite to eat. He saw Raney, saw the guy with the gun, made the situation in a flash and, setting himself in his usual fast-pitch softball league stance on the side away from the waving revolver, swung from the hips with his long, black nightstick.

  Felix saw the nightstick coming and wriggled desperately. He fired off two more shots and tried to get some purchase with his feet, but Balducci’s grip held. The stick made the same sound against Felix’s skull that a bat makes when you foul one off. Balducci relaxed his arms when he felt his captive slump, and Felix hit the pavement, spraying blood.

  “Shame on you!” said a middle-aged woman who had observed the whole fray from the shelter of a doorway. “Shame on you! Three against one!”

  “You look like shit, Petey,” said Raney solicitously. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off and go lie down?”

  Balducci grimaced and massaged his sacroiliac region. After they had booked Felix and stashed him in the prison ward at Bellevue a friendly nurse had slipped him some Darvon. It helped the pain but not the dull exhaustion. “I’m getting too old for this shit, Jimmy,” he sighed.

  “It’s only another couple a months, Petey,” said Raney with the cheerfulness of relative youth. “You can coast. I’ll pound the mutts, hey? By the way, what’s in the scumbag’s case there?”

  “Well, we got a set of keys. Some pills in prescription vials, under different names. Some order books and business papers. And this.” He tossed Raney a small black book. Raney thumbed briefly through it.

  “A diary and address book. Find anything interesting?”

  “Yeah. For one thing, the day before Mullen and her kid were butchered there’s an entry that says, ‘take care of Big Mouth.’”

  Raney flipped to July 9, the day before the murder, nodded, and then examined the surrounding pages more closely. “Lots of appointments with Anna R. last few months. Here’s one says ‘move in with A.,’ right before that domestic call. So that checks out too. He sees a Denise about once a week too. Quite the stud, Felix.”

  “Yeah. He
re’s a matchbook cover with the name ‘Mimi’ and a phone number. The asshole never sleeps. I found out where he lives, too. Place down on Ludlow. Lives with a guy named Lutz. I called him, said we’d be over in about half an hour.”

  “OK, let’s go,” said Raney. He looked down at his partner, who was still seated in his swivel chair. “You coming?”

  “Yeah,” said Balducci, with a sad grimace. “Help me up, Jimmy. I’m like an old lady here.”

  One-thirty Ludlow was a New Law tenement, which meant that every apartment had to have a toilet and every room required a window. Besides that, its amenities were few. At apartment 203 Steve Lutz answered sleepily to Raney’s knock. He was dressed in a dirty T-shirt and boxer shorts.

  “Steven Lutz?” said Balducci. “I’m Detective Balducci and this is Detective Raney. I called and you said we could look around.”

  “Yeah,” said Lutz backing away from the door. “Hey what’s this about?” he asked.

  “Just checking up on a lead,” said Balducci aimiably. “Where does Felix sleep?”

  Lutz led them into the smaller of the two bedrooms in the apartment. It had a window, as required by law, and was a lot cleaner than the rest of the apartment. The furnishings comprised a neatly made bed, a cheap pine chest of drawers, and several cardboard cartons. The walls were decorated with a pinned-up Bruce Lee poster and a framed certificate attesting that Felix Tighe had been awarded the rank of shodan in karate. Balducci caught sight of it, glanced at Raney and shook his head ruefully.

  “Say, Steve—you mind if we look around through his stuff?” asked Raney. Lutz didn’t mind. The chest contained clothes, all clean and neatly folded. The cartons held an orderly collection of martial arts and business magazines, as well as several ninja-style instruments of destruction—nunchuks and throwing stars and oddly shaped axes in chromed metal.

  There was a rack of hooks in the closet. On one of them hung a pair of black slacks. Balducci looked at them, looked again, fingered the material, and took them down.

  “These Felix’s pants, Steve?” he asked.

  “Yeah, they’re his.”

  “What’ve you got, Pete?” asked Raney, who was reaching under the bed.

  “These pants—they’re stiff with something.”

  “Blood?”

  “Could be.” Balducci took a laundry marker out of his pocket and marked “P.B.” and his shield number on the pocket lining of the black slacks.

  Raney pulled a small brown gym bag from under the bed. Its zipper was locked with a miniature padlock. They opened it with one of the keys they had found in the attaché case.

  “Well, well,” said Raney, after looking inside. He dumped the contents of the bag out on the bed. A passport made out to Felix M. Tighe. A checkbook, ditto. Three clippings from metropolitan papers describing the murder of Stephanie Mullen and her son. A small kitchen knife. And a huge bowie knife in a leather sheath.

  “That’s some hell of a knife,” said Balducci. “Cut somebody’s head off with that mother.”

  Marlene was walking north on Broadway, when she heard the shout: “Hey, good-lookin’” followed by the loud kissing noises used by many men on the streets of New York in order to make themselves attractive to strange women. Marlene trudged steadily on, her face assuming the forbidding grimace of the accosted city woman, an amalgam of fright and helpless rage. Another shout. Ordinarily, she would have spun around and given the asshole the finger, but today she didn’t need the aggravation. She had awakened feeling queasy and depressed and a day of plea-bargaining had improved neither her stomach nor her spirits.

  “Hey, Marlene!”

  Hearing her name called in the accents of her childhood, Marlene at last stopped and turned. She saw the green Ghia with the primered fender and walked toward it, smiling her relief.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “You should be ashamed of yourself. How are you?”

  “Pretty good as a matter of fact,” said Raney. “We just caught the mutt who killed that woman and her kid over in the East Village.”

  “Way to go! Good case?”

  “Not bad. No witnesses, but we got prints, bloodstains, the murder weapon, motive, means and opportunity. It’ll fly unless you guys fuck it up. How about yourself?”

  She shrugged. “The usual bullshit.”

  “Anything new on St. Michael’s? Or the trash-bag killer?”

  At this her face fell. “How should I know? That’s over.”

  “What kind of ‘over’? I thought this was a big deal to you.”

  “Was is the word. Let somebody else get kicked in the ass on that one. I had my share.” She caught the disappointed expression on his face and added, in a tone that revealed her own interest, “Why do you ask? You’re not still screwing around with that?”

  “Yeah,” he said, caution creeping into his voice. “I guess I still am.”

  “You ever get a case there, you could let me know.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Raney sourly, looking at her with a look she didn’t care for at all.

  Marlene twitched at her hair in a nervous gesture. “Well, nice talking to you, Raney, but I got to go. I have to get my hair cut.”

  “Get in, I’ll drive you.”

  “No, don’t bother,” she protested vaguely, “it’s right by the Fourth Street IND.”

  Raney reached across and flung the curbside door open. “Marlene,” he growled, “get the fuck in this car!” Surprising herself, she entered, and they shot away from the curb.

  “Look, Marlene,” Raney began, when they had driven a few blocks in stiff silence, “you started this shit with Dean, you got me all wound up on it, and now you’re leaving me hang. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Raney, it just didn’t work out. There’s no case. It happens.”

  “No case my ass! Marlene, don’t bullshit a bullshitter. You knew damn well something was going down there, something real big. They yelled at you? Fuck, they yelled at me too. Fuck ’em! I can’t believe you’re that hot for a pension or….” He stopped suddenly, arrested by a thought. “It’s Karp, right? Karp gave you the zinger on this, and you caved right in.”

  It was true enough and it still hurt. Marlene felt the blood rush to her face. “That’s off the wall, Raney,” she snarled. “Karp had nothing to do with it.”

  “Yes, he did. A little pillow talk, a little spankie, and you can the case. I guess I don’t have that problem, counselor, because I’m not fucking my boss.”

  “Oh, go to hell, Raney!” Marlene shouted, and opened her door to leave. But Raney downshifted and tromped on the gas, swinging out into the traffic with such force that Marlene fell back in her seat and the partly opened door swung shut.

  “What’re you, crazy? Let me the fuck out of this car!” she shouted. Raney increased his speed instead, weaving through the traffic, leaving a wake of curses, horns, and rude gestures.

  “You’re not getting out of here until we talk,” said Raney grimly. He swung around a bus and shoved a tape into the cassette player. Chopin’s A minor mazurka blasted from the speakers. After a moment, Marlene leaned back in her seat and took out a cigarette. This was starting to get interesting. She had never been kidnapped by a heavily armed Chopin freak before. And she had to admit he drove like a god. And he was, of course, right about Karp, and she did feel rotten about her lie and about the case.

  Raney skidded the car around the left turn at West Fourth Street and pulled into a small parking lot. He parked the Ghia with its passenger side three inches from a blank wall, turned off the engine, and lit a cigarette. The mazurka ended and the nocturne in G minor came on, slow and infinitely sad.

  “OK, Raney, let’s talk,” said Marlene at length. “You scared the shit out of me, you soothed me with music, I’m jelly. Yes, you’re right—Karp convinced me there was no case. There being no case, it’s agony for me to keep thinking about the damn thing. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. Now, can I get my haircut? Raney? Hello?”

&
nbsp; Raney didn’t answer. When the nocturne was finished he sighed and switched off the deck. He slumped despondently in his seat, ignoring his captive and smoking.

  “You like classical music?” asked Marlene inanely, for want of something to break the silence.

  “No,” he said. “Just this tape. I used to play it in ’Nam. It belonged to a guy I knew. I mean not this particular tape—this is the fourth one I bought. I wear them out. The guy stepped on a mine made out of a one-oh-five shell. There was nothing left of him but a damp spot on the ground. And this tape. I picked it up. The tape played perfect, it was amazing. And I kept it.

  “You know, I drew on a guy today—that East Village killer. I had a couple of clear shots, but I didn’t, you know, pop him. I thought about you, while I was chasing this asshole around, your face was in my mind. This sounds crazy, doesn’t it? You think I’m a real nut case.”

  Marlene thought nothing of the kind. She was filled with an enormous tenderness for him, for his suffering, for the suffering of her brother Dom, who had also, as it happened, stepped on a mine in Vietnam, for the inarticulate grief of the men of her caste and class, from whom she was irrevocably cut off.

  “No,” she said, and put her hand on his. He reached out then and put his hand behind her neck and pulled her towards him and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  It was a good kiss, thought Marlene, delicate tongue action and no clacking teeth. She felt herself kissing back, felt the insistent tingle in the groin and the warm flutters. She imagined herself going somewhere with Raney, a room somewhere, taking off her clothes, lying on a bed, imagined what his body would be like, imagined spreading her thighs….

  And then, almost before she was aware of it, a powerful nausea convulsed her belly. She wrenched away from him, gasped, and was violently sick out the window of the car.