“No, man. He was alone. He’s always alone.”
“You know where he lives?”
Luis’ eyes grew big. “Hey, that old geek, he iced Benito?” “I don’t know, but I want to talk to him.” I pointed to Picasso’s latest work. “What do you make of this, Luis?”
“Looks spooked to me, man. Don’t look like the usual shit he paints, you know? Chickens and pigs and shit like that’s his usual thing.”
“Have you been hanging out at the video store all night?”
“Yeah, pretty much. We drank some beer over there in the park,” Luis said, pointing across the avenue, “but the girls they don’t like it there. So we hang out at the V-store with them. You know.”
“Who went into Benito’s store, say in the last hour or two?”
“Oh, I don’t know, lots of people.”
“Did you see the funny old guy in the beret go in there?”
“Yeah, but he come back out with Benito. Then Benito he goes back in, then the old geek he starts painting on the window—real fast.”
“Then what?”
“Then he goes away.”
“Did he come back?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Who went in after he went?”
Luis thought for a second. “I don’t know, really. Maybe ten different people, you know?”
“Who was the last person you saw go in?”
Luis thought. “I don’t know, Hock. I was just hanging out on the corner and I wasn’t really paying much attention, you know? People I might of seen going in and out of Benito’s, they was like just shapes to me.”
“Did you see anything unusual?”
“No, man.” Then Luis smiled. “Except when you come up in that fine black car. That I seen. And then Carolena she starts screaming and everything.”
The lady upstairs made another appearance on the fire escape. She looked down at me looking up at her, then she looked at Luis. And then she shrieked and ran back inside her apartment.
“Who’s that?” I asked Luis.
“My mother, man. I live up there, right over Benito and Carolena’s store. My mother, she don’t speak no English.”
“Your friends, and your mother—could you ask them who went into the bodega tonight? I need a list of names, as best as I can get. And information on anybody who looked like they don’t belong around here. You know what I mean?”
“Sure,” Luis said, nodding. “I can ask.”
I had every confidence that Luis would ask the right questions, and every confidence that any answers would not be particularly helpful. When a killer has an easy job of it—easy in, easy out—the cop’s job is harder at least by half. Nobody notices the easygoing killer; he is invisible, like the public-toilet attendant back in Germany.
“Luis, do you know the old guy in the beret?”
“Like, do I know his name?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I know Benito used to call him Picasso, like the artist Picasso, you know? Benito, he liked the old guy, he tried to help him. But me, I never talked to him.”
“So, this Picasso, he never gave Benito any trouble?”
“No, there wasn’t no trouble. I never heard of trouble.”
“How long had Picasso been painting the windows?”
Luis thought. “I guess about a year. He just showed up, you know? He wasn’t no skell, but he wasn’t right in the head neither.”
About a year, I thought. Right about the time I myself moved back to Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood of my youth.
I asked, “Did Picasso ever talk to you?”
“Well, I used to come downstairs and he’d be painting his chickens and cows and shit on the window. And he’d start saying something. I thought he was talking to me, but then I seen he’s a guy who jabbers to himself, like he thinks there’s somebody right next to him.”
There was probably nothing more that Luis or anybody else on the scene could tell me so I thanked Luis for his help and said I would look him up in a day or so. He got a little shirty about the anticlimax.
“Say, what, you got nothing more for me, man?” he asked indignantly. “Helpful types like me, we ought to get rewarded, you know?”
I looked over in the direction of the barricaded television crews. A boisterous and jostling crowd that I noticed had been swelled by the arrival of newspaper writers and photographers. At front and center of the press mob, I recognized Rill Slattery from the New York Post, and I figured if I ever got to sleep that night I would dream about streamer headlines and cards in hat-bands.
“You know, Luis, you’re right,” I said. “You really deserve something. Something even better than money.”
“What?”
“Your very own fifteen minutes of fame, Luis.”
Then I clamped a hold on his shoulder and said, “Come on,” yanking him along with me toward the milling press corps. The kleigs fired up and bathed us in mazda light. Trench coats with microphones and notebooks lunged at us. Slattery hollered, “How about a statement!” and then everybody else started yapping for the same until they all looked and sounded like so many hungry, croaking seals at the zoo. So I fed them Luis.
“This young man has your story,” I said to the press, holding up my hands for a little order and quiet. I said to Luis, “Just tell them what you told me. Here’s your reward, kid, you’re going to be on TV.”
Then Luis nervously stood there in the television lights in front of all his friends from the neighborhood and told what he knew of the murder in the shop below his own apartment. As I walked away, I could hear the zoom lenses whirring to get their close-ups for tomorrow’s news thrills.
And I also heard Dr. Reiser’s voice: “… Picasso, my pixilated friend, what makes you the loon you are is that you’re the worst kind of artist there is, the kind that gets ignored.”
Picasso would be ignored no longer. In the morning, he would be the tabloid toast of the town.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Back in the bodega, the widow Carolena had been successfully removed from the body of her husband; a cop was holding her, smoothing her hair and saying, “Take it easy now,” as if he was stroking his own mother’s head at a funeral.
Sergeant Walsh tapped my shoulder. “I seen you had your hands full out there with the press and all, so I went ahead and called out Central Homicide for you.”
“Thanks,” I said. Then I went into the back room and out into the courtyard and through an adjoining tenement building to the side street.
I found a telephone out of sight of the press conference and called Mogaill.
“Jaysus, Hock,” he said, “but you’ve got yourself an industrious murderer, hey?”
“Easy goes it this time.”
“How so?”
“No signs of resistance, and it’s a slow night. The killer walks in, whacks the victim with a shank, and walks out.”
“Nobody sees nothing, am I right?”
It was like the others, like Celia Furman and Dr. Reiser. Easy going. “There was nothing to see,” I said.
“In other words, another zero for my vast files.”
“Well, your guys will be wanting to ask their questions even so, and I’ve got mine, and maybe this time there’ll be answers that add up past zero.” I heard the sound of a bottle clinking glass on Mogaill’s end of the line. “I’ll check with Logue tomorrow to see what comes of the team report.”
“If anything, hey?” Mogaill said. I rang off with him and crossed Tenth Avenue walking quickly, heading east toward Times Square and the Horny Poodle where I could buy myself a badly needed Scotch and maybe turn up a link in the chain of events that had embezzled my furlough.
I glanced over my shoulder. Luis was still performing for the reporters and his friends.
Times Square on a clement April midnight usually gives me a fair idea of the tone of summer to come. Early April is that time of year when an army of grifters, pross, dips, beggars, cons, muggers, pushers, lunatic
s and religionists begin to establish their territories in anticipation of summer’s high season at the crossroads of the world.
I spend a lot of duty hours in Times Square during the summer, which if my mother were alive would fill her not with pride for the many crimes I prevent but with sorrow for the fact that I have not traveled far in life.
When I was a kid growing up in Hell’s Kitchen with my mother because it was one place where our kind of Irish were welcome to live, the nearby streets of Times Square were genteel by today’s scabid standards. Yet still they were a forbidden world to the parochial likes of me, who wore his knickers and neckties to school every day and recited his catechism without needing the old nuns’ sweet-voiced threats of eternal damnation and who sang soprano in the Holy Cross boys’ choir during all three masses each Sunday morning. Naturally, I spent all free hours possible exactly where I would most greatly disappoint my mother.
In those days, heaven was located at the corner of Forty-second and Eighth and it was contained in the fabulous walls of Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus. With money I made shining shoes outside the library over on Fifth Avenue, I played Skee-Ball and pinball at Hubert’s, and shot war-surplus .22 rifles at wooden ducks in a gallery and marveled at the Great Waldo, who ate live mice. I felt sorry for the retired sports heroes reduced to talking to children for their dimes. And I wondered mightily at the knowledge that would one day be mine, when I was old enough to buy a ticket to the special show on the side stage, where I could learn with the sailors the hidden secrets of sex, right there at Hubert’s courtesy of the “French Academy of Medicine, Paris, France.”
There were dance halls like the Varsity and the Satin Ballroom and the Tango Palace, where meek little guys in suits met would-be actresses and danced with them to the music of six-piece bands. The Tango was where Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford started out in New York.
Mobsters hung out at the Royal Roost and Zanzibar’s and some, like my favorite, Frank Costello, still wore spats. Other customers came to gawk at the hoods. My friends and I used to watch them coming and going in their big cars.
And there was Birdland, where Charlie Parker played until he died from too much heroin and not enough understanding. There were all-night movies, too, at the Forty-second Street houses where they had premiered, with the stars rolling up in their limousines in front of newsreel cameras.
Somehow the lights were brighter, the neon signs bigger and more robust. The Camel smoker blew perfect rings high above the unruly intersection of Broadway and Seventh, one ring a minute thanks to the trusty Con Ed steam pipes. Maxwell House coffee dripped long past its last drop, on into a seeming infinity. A ten-thousand-gallon Pepsi-Cola waterfall stretched a full block over the roofs of the Bond menswear store and the old Criterion, the real one. Little Lulu skipped eight stories up the side of a building to pluck Kleenex from a box.
Everybody dressed up in evening jackets and gowns to go to the Strand or the Capitol or the Roxy or the Paramount, where the great Frank Sinatra would sing. Broadway actors ate spaghetti suppers at Romeo’s after their shows. The cops were on foot post all night long, and you walked where you pleased.
That was the Great White Way.
Those were the days before people had surrendered their sense of wonder to television, when popular music still soothed the savage breast and musicians had not yet lost their jobs to soulless synthesizer machines. It was a time when everybody wore hats and pressed their clothes, the time before all the neon read Japanese, when the idea of commercial sex was to allure, not to assault. That was the way it was.
In my seven-block hike over to the Horny Poodle, I witnessed the following: a buxom pre-op transsexual hooker voguing on a well-lit corner in red-sequined halter top and matching hot-pants, his johnson lolling out of her fly; two swishes debating the relative orgasm-enhancing merits of Rush and Quicksilver outside a grubby candy shop run by a dour giant in a turban; a loud-faced skell spitting and howling like a rabid dog, dodging cars in the middle of Eighth Avenue; a bag lady hunkered down under a tent of rags and papers, sharing a can of something with a half-bald cat; four teenage chicken fags huddled in a doorway with a crack pipe; a brain-damaged evangelist screeching about Jesus through an electric bullhorn; and a short, muscular drunk with two tall cans of Ballantine in his paws loping after a married couple from Nebraska or someplace like that and snarling, “What’s-a-maddah, you doan like Spanish people?”
I did what I could.
I dialed 911 from a pay phone and reported the cursing dog-man, I tossed a dollar into the bag lady’s tent, and I was glad to see the tourists duck into a hotel lobby. If anybody wanted to take up with the tranny or the chickens or the Jesus jumper, that was between them and their demons.
As for me, I had to get to the corner of Fiftieth and Seventh Avenue and the Horny Poodle. I crossed by the TKTS booth on Forty-ninth, where half-price leftovers to the Broadway shows are peddled. There used to be a statue there called “Virtue.” This was a forty-foot replica of Miss Liberty down in the harbor, erected by a committee of do-gooders from yesteryear to challenge the great American pastime of disparaging New York City. Miss Virtue’s bronze shield read OUR CITY and the poor thing was covered from crown to sandals with big dark stains, symbolizing the out-of-towner mudslinging she suffered; her plaque urged all good New Yorkers to DEFEAT SLANDER.
A block up the avenue from Virtue’s last stand was the Horny Poodle, the last mastodon of the area’s once-ubiquitous topless bars. Its wide double glass doors were frosted with the images of leering white French poodles dressed in cutaway coats and top hats; these portals were illuminated from above by a pair of stupendous pink neon breasts with blinkering puce nipples. The joint sparkled in an otherwise drab strip of changing Times Square real estate, nestled between a gay cinema that night showing “Foaming Fannies” and an all-American newsstand where the reader can buy everything from USA Today to the latest number of Nuns & Nazis magazine.
Strolling through all of this today makes me a little tired, and more than a little sad in my middle-aged heart. But I suddenly realized that since I was officially back on the clock, I could put my Johnnie Walker reds and Molson chasers on my investigative expense account somehow or other and this gave me a small lift.
Then I entered through the double glass doors. Inside the Horny Poodle, the atmosphere was something less than the tit-man’s paradise it was cracked up to be.
A couple of million palm cards passed out in the streets over the last few decades by the likes of Picasso promised a lonesome guy in an adolescent mood the prospect of being surrounded by an adoring, laughing bevy of bare-chested serving wenches. The truth of the matter was that none of the wenches were laughing and the way they slammed down the beers and shots at the little tables clustered around a stage was not adorable to behold. They had slug-eyed expressions, most of them, and poor posture. The ones with acne on their backs and shoulders did not bother to cover up their zits with pancake and body powder. The last thing you noticed about this sullen fleet was that between the chin and the belt each happened to be naked; from the general pall of the place, I was by no means the only customer who felt deflated.
Up on stage was a tall waxy-faced gray-haired guy in a tux trying his best to amuse the disillusioned with a magic act. His strawberry-blonde assistant wore silicone breasts that were too high and one of those topless bathing suits from the Sixties that helped usher in the sexual revolution that I myself missed. Several old revolutionaries in the audience had lain their sleepy heads down amid the empty beer bottles on their tables.
I took a stool at the bar, which was only sparsely populated. One of the glum B-girls scuffed my way on her platform shoes. Her chest looked cold.
“What’ll you have, Clyde?” she said lazily, her voice full of cigarettes.
I could not entirely blame her for this insolence. She had no doubt lived a life requiring her to know far too many men far too well. Still, I do not personally enjoy being called a Clyd
e. And after all, I was still a little tender from recently having seen a fresh murder. I was not in a trifling mood.
So I looked her up and down, thinking uncharitably of what I saw. “You know, you remind me of somebody,” I said.
“Yeah, and who’s that, Clyde?”
“My great-aunt out in Canarsie, the one with the boils and the bad knees.”
“Whatta you, a homo got loose outta the movies next door?”
“You got me wrong, sister. I am in show business, though. In fact, would you be willing to star in my next picture?”
“Oh, we got a smart guy.” She turned and screeched at the bartender. “Benny, come on over here and take care of this homo smart mouth we got with us tonight.”
Then she flipped her head like maybe she had done when she was a miffed little girl and Harry Truman was the president. She scuffed along over to some other clyde down at the end of the bar.
Benny had a hairless head shaped like a kidney bean and he wore black horn-rimmed glasses. He was very apologetic.
“It’s real hard to get the good help nowadays, what can I tell you?” he said. “These babes we gotta hire, they think just because they flash hooters they’re all some kinda divas.
“But I’ll tell you what, buy yourself a nice drink and the second’s on me. How about it?”
I said all was forgiven. Then in a minute there were two nice reds and rocks sitting in front of me, along with a pair of Molsons in sweaty green bottles. And Benny standing by, in the mood to chat.
Naturally, I was anxious to ask Benny all about Picasso. But I have now been at the detective trade long enough to listen closely whenever certain bells go off. This time, the bell was the memory of Inspector Neglio on the day he promoted me to gold shield rank and gave me his standard lecture for the occasion:
“Today, Neil Hockaday, you are a detective. Which means you’re an artist among cops. An artist is somebody who knows how to get function by going with form, you follow? In other words, he’s got finesse. From now on, you’re an artist, Hock. In other words, you should try going sideways after what you want, which in this business is answers to questions. Going sideways, you’ll be very surprised how much you can learn.”
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