Law and Order

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  “I cuffed him around a lamppost. Hell, the guy was so damn big and he was in that funny kind of calm state, like he wasn’t really aware of what was happening yet. Well, before anyone else arrives on the scene, wham, up comes these two colored guys, they flash shields at me, one guy says, ‘Gimme the key to them cuffs,’ he takes the key and all hell busts loose. They get this guy off the lamppost; hell, first I thought they were setting him free, when wham! in the stomach; wham! in the guy’s face.” Francis Kelly cupped his hand over his mouth and said to Brian, “Jeez, they was using a jack, Brian; they did it so nice though, you couldna told unless you knew. The guy was spitting teeth, just like in the movies.

  “Holy God, and then these two take my prisoner into their car and I start after them and they tell me, ‘You wait for the ambulance; you stay with the little girl and the mother.’”

  Brian held out his pack of cigarettes to Francis, held a match to one for him and then to his own. “Jeez, Francis, they took your collar away from you?” He turned to Horowitz. “Can they do that, Julie? I mean, hell, it’s Francis’ pinch, right?”

  Horowitz puckered his lips and blew a narrow stream of smoke toward the ceiling and smiled. “Kid,” he said to Francis Kelly, “you seen what that prisoner looked like when they shoved him into the Bellevue ambulance?”

  Francis Kelly’s pale face nodded and he closed his eyes for a moment. “Man, he was bad.”

  “Kid,” Horowitz continued, “did it ever occur to you that that nigger bastard might just kick off from all of them head and body injuries? He looked pretty bad to me.”

  “You think he might?”

  Horowitz threw a friendly arm around Kelly’s shoulder. “Kid, you’re O’Malley’s friend, right? Okay, so I’ll give you a little advice for free. When you get something like that and one of them spade sleuths wants it, consider yourself lucky to get out from under. Now, if they came looking for you after the way they messed him up, and said to you that your prisoner is on the critical at the nut factory and some questions was going to be asked, then you got a beef. Capisce?” Horowitz winked.

  “Well, yeah, I guess, but hell.”

  “You get the commitment papers from the clerk in the court, he hands them to the judge to sign, you bring them over to Bellevue and give them to the D.C. guy there and you’re home free.” He gave Kelly’s shoulder a friendly rap with his knuckles. “Forget it, kid. There’ll be plenty more collars where that came from. What’s the matter, they didn’t teach you nothing like this at the Academy?”

  Francis Kelly pulled his lips back tightly and grimaced. “They didn’t teach us shit at the Academy.”

  Brian O’Malley managed to avoid revealing why he was present and he was glad that Francis Kelly was too upset to ask what kind of collar he’d made.

  Francis Kelly was right: they didn’t teach them shit at the Academy. But Francis was learning what it was all about. He was right in the middle of it. He was getting to be a part of it.

  And Brian O’Malley was out locking up crabby old women for selling pretzels.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THERE WAS NOTHING UNUSUAL about the tenement building where Arthur Pollack lived. The only odd thing to Brian was that he’d never before had a friend with an apartment of his own.

  Brian took the long narrow staircases easily. On each landing were four doors, behind each door were muffled sounds, cooking odors wafted into the hallway, mingled with other fragrances. The third-floor landing vibrated with a male voice which attempted to keep up with a loud, tinny Caruso record.

  On the fourth floor, Brian found 4-C, dropped his cigarette to the linoleum floor, stepped on it, fingered his tie lightly, then tapped. Arthur Pollack opened the door immediately.

  “Hey, Brian, great. Come on in, kid, come on in.”

  The apartment was unexpected. It was brightly lit, the walls were painted white, there were oak-stained bookshelves ranged across one entire wall and they were filled with books and magazines and records. A studio couch against an opposite wall was covered with a dark-red throw and a collection of brightly colored pillows was piled haphazardly to serve as back rests.

  The ceilings were very high; Arthur must have used a tall ladder to place his collection of prints on the wall between the molding and the ceiling. The pictures, some framed, others unframed, were mainly bright splotches of color which didn’t convey much of anything to Brian. The two windows, wide and tall, were covered with shutters. The slats of the shutters slanted downward to catch the fading early-evening light.

  “Hey, this is quite a place, Arthur. Gee, it doesn’t look like what you’d expect. You know what I mean.”

  Arthur beamed. “Yeah, it’s pretty good. A matter of letting the light in. Come on into the kitchen; we’ll find something to drink.”

  The kitchen was also painted white and the old-fashioned potbelly coal stove, freshly painted black, seemed too shining and clean to be in use, but Arthur assured him that was his cooking stove and provided most of the heat in the flat as well. Against one wall, covered with a huge enamel lid, was a bathtub which stood on lion-claw legs. Covered, it served as a combination table and storage unit for groceries.

  Arthur held up a bottle of Scotch for Brian’s approval, then reached into the top section of the red-enamel icebox and chopped some slivers of ice and dropped them into the glass. Pasted on the upper door of the icebox was a pen-and-ink line drawing, a cartoon of a thin, emaciated policeman who could only be Arthur Pollack.

  The shoulders sagged, the knees bent within baggy, ill-fitting trousers, the gun holster was longer than the short legs, the brim of the policeman’s hat rested on a sharp, beaky nose. Beneath the drawing were printed the words, “Don’t worry about a thing. Arthur is on the job!” There was a long, fragile trailing line and then the signature of the artist, “With love from Arlene.”

  Brian was both surprised and impressed. “Hey, you got a girl friend who’s an artist?”

  “Pretty good likeness, isn’t it? She’s what you call a quick-sketch artist. You know, caricatures. She works Coney Island, the Greenwich Village street show. Wherever she can turn a buck. Mostly though, she works on the second floor of Gimbels, selling ladies’ ‘you-knows.’ Come on, let’s get comfortable.”

  Arthur waved him into the living room and with a flourish offered Brian a modernistic sling chair, which they both stood and studied for a few moments.

  “Wrong end to,” Arthur explained, “just take a deep breath and lower away.”

  Arthur sat, shoeless, cross-legged, on the couch. “I hope you’re good and hungry, Brian. The girls have been cooking up a storm.”

  Brian took a long, deep swallow and glanced around appreciatively. The Scotch sent warm, pleasant waves of easiness through his head and across his chest. “Jesus, Arthur, this is very nice.”

  “There’s even a toilet over there. It’s about the size of a closet, but at least it’s inside my own door. If you’ve ever had to use a common hallway toilet, you’d know what luxury this is.”

  There was a staccato of sharp taps, the sound of long fingernails, followed by a soft, breathy voice outside the door. “Arthur, are you there, honey?”

  Brian was nearly consumed by curiosity. At first when Arthur had invited him for a dinner to be prepared by two “lady friends,” he envisioned fat old aunts or motherly neighbors. But Arthur assured him he’d be delighted and surprised. So far, the apartment surprised him, and he managed to wiggle forward in the strange chair, his eyes on Arthur at the door.

  The room filled with female sound, laughs, tumbling words and little squeals. Arthur had an arm around each girl and he brought them to Brian. “Here are my two favorite girls of all time. Rita and Stella Wasinski, meet my friend, Brian O’Malley.”

  Brian tried to rise but the chair seemed to hold him and he couldn’t grab on to an arm for balance since there weren’t any; he rocked forward, then back again helplessly. The girls grinned, they all laughed and Brian felt color, or the Scotch,
rise to his cheeks.

  “Hey, he’s a good-looking guy,” the older girl said frankly. “You didn’t say your friend was such a handsome guy, Arthur. Don’t he remind you of somebody, Rita?”

  The blond girl, Rita, was the quieter of the two. She glanced at him somewhat shyly, then down at the bowl of food she’d brought with her, then back at him, then to Stella. When she spoke, her voice was a small, childish whisper and her words ended in a tentative laugh.

  “Yeah, I think he looks like Tyrone Power. You know?”

  Arthur and Stella took the assortment of food into the kitchen and the apartment was filled with rich, tempting fragrances, warm tempting spices.

  They were cousins; Arthur had told him that much. And they were his neighbors two flights down; lived with an old aunt. But Arthur hadn’t told him that Rita smelled of unnamable flowers and was cream-skinned and soft, with high rounded breasts and a waist that curved in sharply and then out again leading to sharp-boned hips and long, long, long thighs and slender legs. Brian’s eyes moved slowly over the girl’s body, at first measuring, then discounting, the clothing, evaluating. She wore a tight-fitting bright-blue dress which pulled across her bust and hips and hiked up above her knees as she perched on the edge of the couch. One ankle-strapped shoe dangled in the air as she crossed her legs and ran a finger along a stocking. She pulled her mouth down, touched a pinky to her tongue, then to the stocking.

  “I get more runs,” she said by way of explanation.

  “I bet you do,” Brian said coolly.

  The girl’s eyes held on his for a moment; they were dark brown and warm and startled, as though he had said something unexpected. Her lips were full and shining with bright-red lipstick and her mouth opened slightly. The line where her orangey pancake make-up started and her own natural pale-white skin began showed clearly along the side of her face, as though she’d made up in a room with poor lighting. Her hand moved to the top of her low-cut dress, as though to shield herself from Brian’s gaze, or to brush away some invisible lint or dust. She seemed about to say something, then looked up at Arthur, who brought them drinks.

  “That food smells great, Rita. Brian, these two are about the best cooks in the world.”

  Stella was bone-skinny and angular, with high cheekbones and a pointy chin. Her hair, which was dyed black, was piled into a high wavy roll along the top of her head. She had small bright eyes, oddly slanted and wide-set, smeared with heavy mascara over the scanty lashes. She sat on the arm of the stuffed easy chair and wrapped long, thin arms around Arthur’s neck; her fingers plunged and raked through his tightly curled hair with an almost maternal gesture.

  “It’s a cinch to cook for this guy. He don’t know from good food, so you just give him something hot and he thinks it’s great. Arthur, you’re gonna make some girl very, very happy someday. She’s gonna think she’s marvelous; anything she does, you say it’s great.”

  Stella laughed raucously and Rita laughed softly and Brian wondered how the hell little Arthur Pollack did it. The girls watched his every move, hung on his every word. They also did his laundry, cleaned up his apartment and cooked for him every chance they had.

  “Are you a policeman, same as Arthur?” Rita asked quietly.

  Brian was surprised that they knew about Arthur. He said, “Yeah, I’m a policeman.” He hesitated, rolled the glass between his palms, then, eyes on the blonde, he asked, “How about you, Rita? What do you do?”

  The words sounded exactly as he’d intended them: soft and low and insinuating. An accusation and an acknowledgment rather than a question. Her face, beneath the hardness of too much make-up, was wounded. Her hands clenched together tightly and she turned toward Arthur, who gave her support with a smile and a slow, friendly wink. It wasn’t at all what Brian had anticipated.

  “Rita is a dancer,” Arthur said. “She’s really good, Brian. Someday, we’ll hear big things about Rita. She can tap holes right through this floor.” His eyes stayed on the girl as he spoke and she relaxed a bit. “The last time we had a great big party here, we had the radio on and they had a record of Fred Astaire tap dancing.” He turned to Brian and laughed. “Isn’t that a silly thing, a record of a tap dancer? Anyway, Rita just tapped along with him, without any preparation at all. She’s just got a natural sense of rhythm, and I swear to God, Brian, she was right on beat the whole record.”

  Rita smiled at him gratefully and pressed the tip of one shoe into the rug. “That was before you got the place fixed up so nice, Arthur. Before you got the rugs on the floor and all.”

  Arthur had released the girl from the lip-biting tension; he did it easily, naturally, without acknowledging that anything wrong or out of line had been said or indicated.

  Brian was more than slightly confused. Hell, the girls were hookers, out and out. Anyone could see that. It wasn’t possible that Arthur didn’t know what they were. Yet he leaned back and smiled and talked and cracked nice little jokes like they were Saturday-night dates.

  Stella collected the glasses for refills and asked Arthur to help her chip some ice.

  Rita became tense again. She bent over a fingernail and studied it and pulled at the cuticle, then she gazed at the walls and bookshelves and finally she came to Brian. A nervous smile pulled at the corners of her full mouth.

  “Arthur’s place is real nice, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh. You known Arthur a long time?”

  Rita shrugged and her hand went inside the neckline of her dress to adjust a slipped shoulder strap. “Oh, well, you know. Since he moved in. I guess about a year. A little less than a year, I think”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Rita picked at her nails, then said raggedly and without looking at him, “Hey, look, you don’t have to give me the business, you know?”

  The small breathy laugh was strange. It could mean several things: Don’t take me too seriously; don’t get mad at what I say. Or, okay, so you’re wise to me; well, I’m wise to you too.

  An expression of sadness accompanied the laugh. Beneath all the obvious things she was, there was something mysterious and remote and Brian felt a puzzling sense of shame and regret but wasn’t sure why he should feel either.

  Arthur brought the drinks on a tray and told them, “I went very light on these because Stella tells me she’s got some wine to go with dinner and we don’t want to be so darned looped that we don’t enjoy the food.”

  The girls arranged the table, a shelf which folded down on hinges from the wall, while Arthur and Brian sipped their drinks.

  “We’re gonna go down for the wine and glasses, Arthur,” Stella told him. “Then everything’ll be all set. I got the pans in the oven, so’s it’ll be ready to serve by the time we come back.”

  “Okay, honey, make it fast or I’ll eat everything before you get back. Man, I’m hungry!”

  “Oh, Arthur!”

  They heard their chatter and high heels on the metal-tipped steps. Brian managed to extricate himself from the sling chair and he shook his head. “Buddy, I don’t get this at all.”

  “What, Brian, what don’t you get?”

  Brian lit a cigarette and shook the match out with a wave of his arm. “The whole thing. You told me you’d have a couple of ‘really nice girls’ over. Now, I mean, this Rita is a real dish but...”

  Earnestly, Arthur said, “But they are really nice girls, Brian.”

  Brian squinted down at his friend, then grinned. “Arthur, you’ve been on the job as long as I have, kid. You’ve also been around a helluva lot more than I have. I mean, these girls? Rita, a dancer? Come on!”

  “Oh. Oh, that. Well, sure I know what they do. They’re pros. Heck, Brian, that’s what they have to do in order to eat. But what they are, Brian, see, that’s another thing entirely.”

  “You lost me, Arthur, you just entirely lost me. They’re hookers, right? Jesus, I don’t know, but where I come from a girl is a good girl or a bad girl, right? A nice girl or not a nice girl. Your little playmates might cook
a good dinner, but what the hell, Arthur, they are what they are.”

  Arthur Pollack walked to the window and adjusted the slats. His face was serious and intense and earnest and he leaned against the window sill. “Look, Brian, I don’t want to lecture or anything but it’s just that, well, Rita and Stella are friends of mine. I guess we became friends because our backgrounds were similar. It’s funny, Brian, but an institution kid can always spot another institution kid a mile away.”

  He folded his arms over his narrow chest and said quietly, “When I was six years old, my mother died in childbirth and my father, gee, Brian, he was twenty-seven years old. Couple more years and I’ll be his age. Well, he was left with my baby sister and me, and one day—we lived in Brooklyn then—one day we were walking along Ocean Parkway. He was pushing the baby carriage and I was holding on.” Arthur Pollack raised his hand and studied the palm for a moment. “It’s funny, I can still remember how that smooth metal felt, where I hung on to my baby sister’s carriage. My father let out a funny sound, like he was surprised by something, and fell down. Dropped dead of a heart attack right on Ocean Parkway.”

  Brian could see the small six-year-old Arthur and he could see the twenty-seven-year-old dead father in his friend’s unhealthy face. “Well, my father had one married brother, that’s all the relatives we had in the world. He and his wife took in my baby sister and raised her like their own. And me, well, it was no bargain to take in a six-year-old; they came to see me, out in the orphanage in Rockaway Beach. We had lots of ladies used to come and visit with us and we had fresh air and sunshine and sea breezes.”

  Arthur spoke without self-pity and with a slight hard edge of amusement over life’s condition. He shook his head and continued. “But it was worse for Rita. See, her parents were both alive; they split up and put their six kids in an orphanage. And then took out the oldest; the mother brought home her daughters when each was old enough to go to work. And it just never came Rita’s turn. The mother disappeared; the father never showed.