After the First Death

by Lawrence Block

  If I was going to drink, that in and of itself was acceptable. I could survive one night in a stupor. I could even endure the blackout and hangover which would inevitably follow a bout of heavy drinking. But I was terrified that I might leave the hotel. I had to stay where I was, and when I drink I tend to roam, and when I roam I tend to wind up on Times Square, and I did not want this to happen.

  I got completely undressed and tied all of my clothes in tight knots. Everything, pants, shirt, underwear, everything. I looked at them and thought that what was done could be too easily undone, that I might untie them again while drunk. I was going to soak them in the tub but decided that was silly, I would need them when I awakened, so I compromised by shoving them far under the bed where they would be hard for a drunk to get at them.

  I didn’t think I would try to leave. I was not, after all, the totally irresponsible drunk I had thought myself to be. I had not killed those girls. I had gone with them, as I had gone with others; this was a lamentable human failing, perhaps, but hardly a rare one, nor was it the exclusive province of drinking men.

  I might be crazy. But I was certainly not stupid. I would not walk naked out of my hotel room. I would drink, I would get drunk, I would sleep it off. And, just in case I wanted to roam, there were knots in my clothing to slow me down and give me a chance to change my mind.

  I picked up the bottle. I broke the seal, twisted the cap free, sniffed the contents. I got a water glass from the bathroom and filled it halfway.

  I shook my head, and put the glass down untouched beside the bottle on top of the bureau. And sat down on the bed, and closed my eyes, and saw the girl from my dream with the three blue eyes. I got a chill, and began to shake.

  Hell.

  I got the glass, and drank the whiskey, and filled the glass again.

  15

  I AWOKE WOOLLY-TONGUED BUT CLEABHEADED, IN BED, A PILLOW under my head, the blankets covering me. I got up. My clothes were still under the bed, still tortured by knots. I had evidently made no attempt to untie them and leave the room.

  There was a bit of whiskey left in the bottle. I poured it down the sink and put the empty bottle in the wastebasket I unknotted my clothes, a difficult enough task now and one which would have been impossible for a drunk, and put them on. The cure seemed worse than the disease; my clothes looked as though they had been slept in by the India Rubber Man at Coney Island.

  I took them off again and spread them out on the bed so that they would have a chance to return to their original shape. I showered and shaved and dressed again and went outside for breakfast. It was a little past noon. I had evidently had quite a bit of sleep, but I had no idea when I stopped drinking and went to bed. I had a hole where my memory was supposed to be. It was fairly evident that I hadn’t done anything and hadn’t gone anywhere, but I couldn’t remember much that had happened after the second drink. The alcohol washed the rest of it away.

  I picked up a copy of the Times. There was a lengthier version of last night’s Post story, and a report that the Plymouth had been found with my prints on it. Fast police work. They knew now that I was back in Manhattan.

  In the personal column, there was a legal notice stating that, his wife Petunia having left his bed and board, Peter. Porter would no longer be responsible for her debts. I wondered what on earth Doug wanted. He didn’t figure to be home, but I decided to waste a dime finding out.

  He answered the phone himself. He said hello, and I said hello, and there was a dick somewhere as someone picked up an extension.

  He said, “I had a call from your sister-in-law. She told me what she told you.”

  “So?”

  “Alex, I’ve been sick about it for years. It just happened. Kay and I were having some rocky times, and Gwen, there was always a strong attraction, it just happened, I don’t—”

  “I’m right around the comer,” I cut in. “Okay if I come up?”

  “Sure. Sure, you come right up, Alex.”

  I broke the connection before the cop in the other room could trace the call. He was afraid of me, I realized. Sufficiently afraid to help set up a police trap. I left the booth in a hurry in case they had managed to run a trace in the few seconds we were talking.

  I headed back to the hotel. I saw two soldiers in khaki, and somewhere a bell rang. I thought soldiers, soldiers, and something filtered in from the emptiness of last night’s blackout I don’t know where the original thought came from. Perhaps the memory of the three sailors I had victimized in the Village, perhaps the sailors I’d seen last night on Times Square. Whatever the original impetus, I’d worked up a plan in the gentle sea of last night’s whiskey, and these two soldiers had brought it back to me.

  In my room, I stripped down again and got under the shower and washed all the gray out of my hair. I left the hotel, waiting by the elevator until the desk clerk was busy with someone else, then crossing the lobby in a hurry. I found a barbershop three blocks away and got a crew cut.

  I let my fingers do the walking through the yellow pages, and then I let my feet do the walking to a theatrical costumer on West Fifty-fourth Street a few doors from Sixth Avenue. I told a longhaired large-eyed girl that I was supposed to be a major in a PTA play and that my old army uniform didn’t seem to fit me any more.

  “I see,” she said. “What’s the play?”

  “Oh. Uh, it was written by one of our members. It’s an original work. A fight comedy, really.”

  “Would you want a dress uniform or a field uniform or what, exactly?”

  I wasn’t sure what army officers wore on leave in New York. Civilian clothes, probably. “A dress uniform,” I said.

  “I don’t know if I have the right insignia for a major.”

  “Just so it comes close,” I said. “This is just an amateur show, after all.”

  “I see.”

  She went away and came back with a uniform. It fit almost perfectly, and looked better than my own wrinkled clothes. We found an officer’s cap in my size. I checked myself out in the mirror and decided I looked fine. It was still me inside the clothes and cap, but I somehow looked entirely different.

  “When will you be doing the play?”

  “Tuesday night.”

  “Dress rehearsal Monday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then would you want to pick it up Monday afternoon? I’ll reserve it for you.”

  I hadn’t thought of all this. The girl asked questions I hadn’t anticipated, and I was poor at thinking on my feet. “I’d better take it now,” I said.

  “But then you’ll have to pay a whole week’s rental, and you won’t really have any need for the costume until Monday night—”

  “I don’t get into New York very often.”

  “Couldn’t someone pick it up for you? After all, it’s senseless for you to be stuck for rental charges when you’re not using the costume—”

  I blundered through the conversation, eventually taking the tack that I wanted to wear the costume through the non-dress rehearsals as well in order to get the feel of the role. I think I only succeeded in convincing her that I was slightly crazy, but she did see that I wasn’t going to change my mind. With a sigh she packed up the uniform and wrote out receipts and took my deposit—a large one, perhaps because I had convinced her of my mental instability. I gave my name as Douglas MacEwan out of sheer stupid inability to think of an alias promptly. It could have been worse; I could have said I was Alexander Penn. I went away with the uniform under my arm in a large cardboard box, and she went away shaking her pretty head.

  I changed my clothes in a cubicle in the men’s room of a Forty-second Street movie house. I locked myself in, got out of my clothes, got into the uniform, settled the cap on my head, and packed the old clothes into the box. I was going to abandon them there, but the box had the costumer’s name and address on it, and my clothes had the labels and laundry marks that always mean so much to cops on television, so that course seemed dangerous. I left the theater and foun
d a locker in the subway station. For a quarter I locked the clothes up. There was a notice stating that all lockers would be opened after twenty-four hours. I didn’t believe this, but I didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so I took the box with me—the clothes alone couldn’t tell them much. I stuffed the box in a trashcan and went back to Forty-second Street.

  I felt as though everyone was staring at me, and I was sure I was doing something wrong. I dreaded running into some real soldiers and being saluted by them. I was sure I wouldn’t return the salute properly, or would otherwise find a way to reveal myself as an impostor. I forced myself to walk in a properly military manner, head back, spine ramrod-straight, shoulders set, covering the ground with long firm strides. After all those days of slinking along in the shadows, it was difficult to force myself into the role.

  I went to another movie. It was mostly empty at that hour. I sat in the balcony and worked my way through a pack of cigarettes.

  Uniforms are masks. Nobody recognizes a mailman in his off-duty clothes. All along they’ve seen the uniform first and the man within as no more than a supplementary decoration for the uniform. So it stood to reason that it would work the other way around just as well. If a uniformed man was hard to recognize in civilian clothes, then a civilian ought to become invisible when he put on a uniform. That, at least, was the theory, evidently worked out while under the merciful influence of alcohol, and somehow remembered the next day.

  If I was going to get closer to the killer, I had to find out what the hookers knew about it, what one of them might have seen. I had to be able to roam Whore Row after midnight. I had to look as though I belonged there, and I had to look quite unlike Alexander Penn.

  I sat in the balcony and worried a cigarette and began inventing some background material for myself. My name, my rank, my serial number. My outfit. My military experience. Where I was stationed. Such things.

  It didn’t work. I was not an actor, and however elaborate a facade I worked up for myself, I was sure it would crumble at a touch. I gave it up and remained Major Anonymous. If anyone questioned me, if anyone suspected me, I would just turn around and run.

  16

  THE PIMP’S EYES NEVER MET MINE, HE WALKED TOWARD ME and past me and never looked directly at me. As he drew abreast of me he said, “Nice young girls, General.” His voice barely carried to my ears. I kept walking and so did he.

  A few doors uptown from the Metropole a heavyset Negro girl flashed me a quick glance and a quicker smile. I started to slow down, then changed my mind and kept going.

  It was a little past three o’clock in the morning. It was Friday night—or, more precisely, Saturday morning. Things start later on the weekend. I had taken a reconnaissance walk around midnight, and the streets were too full of tourists and teen-age couples fresh from the Broadway movie houses. Now the crowds had thinned way down. By four, when the bars closed, Seventh Avenue would be reduced to buyers and sellers and cops. Everyone would be there for a reason, and everyone else would know what it was.

  I lit a cigarette. My fingers shook, and after I shook out the match. I watched the trembling fingers with clinical interest. I wondered what was shaking me up. It wasn’t the uniform. I had been walking around in it for enough hours to make me quite accustomed to it, if not entirely comfortable in it. My performance as Major Breakthrough (whose comrades in arms include Private Bath, Corporal Punishment and General Nuisance) had improved somewhat.

  What had me on edge, I realized suddenly, was this scene and my role in it. It was something new for me, strangely enough. I had been here before, I had played the John before, but I had never done all of this without the superego well muffled by alcohol. I was now almost painfully sober. I had had nothing more exhilarating than coffee in perhaps twenty-four hours. And this was the first time I had ever attempted to pick up a hooker without having first picked up and knocked off a number of 86-proof hookers well in advance. I was bride-nervous, and all of it at the one time when my interest in the girls’ profession was purely academic. The discovery was as amusing as it was annoying.

  I walked the street and so did they. The pimps mostly lurked in doorways, saying young girls, party girls, sporting girls in their soft voices. I avoided them. Many of them were likely to be Murphy men, con artists who would try to do unto me as I had done to the silly sailors in Greenwich Village. The legitimate ones might actually have girls stashed in apartments or hotel rooms, but those were not the girls I wanted to see. If they weren’t on the street now, they weren’t on the street when I picked up Robin, and they wouldn’t be able to tell me anything.

  The hookers, in their turn, said nothing at all. Some glanced my way or smiled or winked, but most of them merely kept walking and gave no sign that they knew I existed. Some had the blank dead stares of addicts junked up to the eyes, and their boneless shuffle matched the stares. Others simply looked like women, dressed neither well nor poorly, inexpertly but not wildly made up. In other surroundings one would make no quick judgments about them, but in that neighborhood at that hour their calling was instantly obvious.

  But they were not aggressive. They would not solicit, they would not beckon, they would not wiggle and mince and coax. They would wait until they were approached, and I, walking back and forth, pounding the pavement from Forty-sixth Street to Fifty-first and back again, looked at each one several times over and each time passed them by.

  The cops didn’t worry me at all, oddly enough. The beat patrolmen were there to make sure that everything remained cool It was not their job to harass the hookers or intercede between them and their tricks. The vice squad bulls could do this if someone downtown told them to. The uniformed cops walked their rounds, ignoring the girls as steadfastly as the girls ignored them in turn. They looked my way now and then, as I walked past them, but they never really looked at me. Their eyes focused somewhere twenty-odd feet over my left shoulder. They saw an army officer looking for a girl, filed the image into the appropriate mental pigeonhole, and forgot me forever.

  I walked, I watched, I waited. I saw other men pick up girls, though this did not happen as frequently as the girls may have wished. I bided my time, painstaking though impatient, sizing up the girls and trying to make a choice. I ruled out the Negro girls, who constituted perhaps sixty per cent of the available talent I did this for the same reason, in a sense, that I was masquerading as a soldier. Race is its own sort of uniform, and the colored hookers would be less apt to have known Robin well, less apt to have noticed when I picked her up, and less likely to have paid any attention to the man who followed us to the Maxfield. I felt, too, that they would be less willing to talk to me, but I was not so sure of this.

  I also ruled out the girls who were very obviously junked up, the ones who moved over the pavement like walking death. And the very old ones, who, I felt, had less in common with Robin and would not be likely to have known her well.

  It was some time before I realized just what it was that I was doing. I was shopping, just as I had shopped often enough in the past.

  I was looking for my type. Young, slender, with a pretty face and sadness in her eyes. The sort that Evangeline Grant had been, that Robin had been, and that many others whose names I never knew, whom I sometimes remembered and sometimes forgot, had also been.

  I wanted conversation, and help, and I was walking the blocks looking for a bedmate.

  She was standing in the entrance to a darkened movie theater on Seventh between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh. She was a little shorter than medium height, slender, darkhaired. She wore a tight black skirt and a pale blue blouse. Her shoes were low heeled and badly scuffed. She had a black leather purse in her hand and a raincoat over one arm. She was smoking a filter cigarette.

  I said, “Nice night.”

  “Uh-huh. But a little cold.”

  “You ought to put that coat on.”

  “I know, but I hate the way I look in it.” Her eyes reached for mine, caught hold. “What time is it?”
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br />   “I don’t know. I think around three-thirty.”

  “Pretty late.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I lit a cigarette. I shifted stupidly from one foot to the other. I said, the words oddly spaced, “Do you want to go out?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay.”

  She tossed her own cigarette aside. “How much will you give me?”

  I shrugged.

  “Will you give me twenty?”

  “All right.”

  Her face, small and birdlike, suddenly lost its tension and relaxed into a quick smile. She moved forward from the shadows and took my arm. She asked if I had a room we could go to. I said that I didn’t Wasn’t I staying at a hotel? I said I was staying with a friend.

  “There’s a hotel a few blocks from here where they know me,” she said. “We shouldn’t have any trouble getting in. The night man knows me. You mind walking a couple blocks?”

  I had a sinking feeling that she was going to lead me to the Maxfield. I asked where the hotel was.

  “Forty-fifth Street.”

  The Maxfield was on Forty-ninth. I said it was okay, and we crossed Seventh and Broadway and headed downtown. We turned the comer of Forty-fifth Street and she made me wait in a doorway to make sure we were not being followed. I waited while she returned to the corner and checked. She was visibly relaxed again when she returned to me.

  “If there are any police back there,” she said, “then they’re invisible. What’s your name?”

  “Doug.”

  “Mine’s Jackie.”

  “Like Jackie Kennedy?”

  “Yeah.” She squeezed my hand. “Jacqueline,” she said. “You figure she’ll sue me for having the same name?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “People get on your back for all kinds of reasons. Like when I had to check for police, that they might be following us. I didn’t mean to leave you standing there like that.”