Between the Dark and the Daylight

by Ed Gorman

  I worked a different angle. Two dollars, Judy had told me. What was the girl’s market? Sutton Place and Beekman.

  I started with the doormen.

  They were a mixed lot. Insular, territorial, proprietary. Some of them were protective, some of them were condescending, some of them were hostile. All of them were for sale. It was a matter of meeting their price.

  Dede’s own doorman, on Beekman, had an inflated idea of his own importance. I didn’t use her name, of course, which would have gained me nothing in any case, but crossing his palm with silver gained me nothing either. He was either obtuse or willfully ignorant. His knowledge of the neighborhood was sadly deficient, and none of what he shared was useful.

  I had better luck with a colored man at an apartment house on Sutton. He’d been at his trade since before the war, and I put his age at above sixty. He carried himself with brittle dignity, treading that careful line between deference and pride. The nameplate on his uniform read Judah Benjamin, which I thought curiously Hebrew, but it was only coincidence, his last name the residue of some long-dead white slaveholder, his first the legacy of a Bible-thumping mother who’d spent too much time reading the Old Testament. He had a sense of humor about it. I was careful not to press a slight and ambiguous advantage.

  “A white girl, maybe fourteen?”

  I nodded.

  “You looking to turn her out?”

  I’d laid a twenty on the counter, and he’d ignored it. This was a delicate negotiation. I didn’t want him to imagine insult. I put a second cautious twenty down beside the first one. “I could,” I said, “if that were my object. But why then would I be so circumspect?”

  He shrugged.

  “I might tell you a story neither one of us would believe,” I said. “Why bother?”

  “But you mean her no injury.”

  “I’m offering what I’d imagine was a benefit.”

  “A mixed blessing.”

  “What has she got now?”

  He smiled, shifting his gaze away from mine. His eyes were very old. “She has her freedom,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “She has choices.”

  He looked at me again. “I know you,” he said.

  “Or somebody very like me,” I admitted.

  He was on the edge of trust, but his experience told him better. “Russians, Arabs, Jews,” he said, shaking his head. “I came to Harlem a lifetime ago.”

  I had a notion what he was driving at. “I grew up in New York,” I told him. “I was a mick from the West Side. I worked the docks and joined a union, or I signed up with the cops.”

  “You signed up with the mob,” he said.

  I nodded. “I stepped on the third rail,” I said.

  “I grew up in the South,” he said. “My father was a jailbird. A lifer at Angola prison. You know what that means?”

  I could guess, but I really couldn’t imagine.

  “I came North. I left my mother; I left my brothers and sisters behind. I came for the promised land. I was too old to go in the service when the war came. But let me tell you, the ‘30s, the ‘40s, the pussy was unbelievable. It was lying around like bottle caps.”

  “A lifetime ago,” I suggested.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Well.”

  “Let me ask you something, Judah,” I said. “Back in the day, the Cotton Club, the Apollo, when you were a player. Would you have used this girl and cast her aside?”

  He nodded. “A stiff Johnson’s got no conscience.”

  “Let me ask you a different question,” I said. “Russians, Arabs, Jews. What’d you mean by that? I’d think the kid’s natural clientele would be your own tenants, guys coming home after a hard day at the office, don’t get it from the secretary, don’t get it from the wife, buy a quickie on the sidewalk.”

  “I don’t much appreciate your vocabulary,” he said.

  “It gives me some sleepless nights,” I told him.

  The two twenties vanished. His hand passed across the counter in front of him and the bills disappeared, like a magic trick. I thought I’d lost him. I didn’t know how to recover my limited advantage.

  “I can tell you where to find her,” Judah said.

  “That’s a start,” I suggested.

  “Diplomats,” he said. There was contempt in his voice.

  “You talking about the UN?”

  “Yeah, the You an’,” he said sarcastically.

  Nobody back then used the locution UN much. Most people thought the entire enterprise a joke. It was located out in Flushing Meadows, an ash dump before the 1939 World’s Fair. Now it was slated to be developed on prime east waterfront.

  “Money attracts money,” I said.

  “You ain’t just whistling ‘Dixie,’” he said.

  I smiled. “You don’t strike me as the sort of man who’d be likely to whistle ‘Dixie,’” I said.

  He ducked his head, concealing a laugh in his collar.

  “The girl, then,” I said. “She services these newcomers.”

  “They take it when the tray is passed,” he said.

  “You know her name?” I asked.

  “Maggie,” he said. “May not be the one she was born with.”

  “That’s all?”

  “We pass the time of day. I give her a dollar.”

  “Not two?”

  “I don’t need no blow job from a fourteen-year-old white girl,” he said. “Some kid with no ass in her pants and one step away from the needle.”

  Skin and bones, Deirdre had said. “You know that?” I asked him. Heroin and coke weren’t as common on the street as they are now. Jazz musicians, some Bohemians who smoked dope, but it was a Negro thing, or so many of us were willing to think.

  “Way things are,” he said. “It’s how their pimps keep them under their thumb.”

  “So she’s a hophead?”

  “Not today, maybe, but tomorrow or the next. She might not be courting salvation,” he said.

  I agreed. “Depends what she’s running away from,” I said.

  “Frying pan into the fire.”

  I agreed with that too

  “You can’t fix all the sadness in this world, Irish,” Judah said to me. “Some of it’s beyond repair.”

  He seemed like somebody who’d know.

  I would have tried the beat cops next, but the police found me first. I’d wandered down First Avenue as far as the corner of forty-eighth, where the UN construction site began. It was one hell of a big hole, between First Avenue and the river, and extending six blocks south, the whole of it barricaded with cyclone fencing and plywood. But there were peepholes cut in the plywood every ten or twelve feet, both at adult eye level and for kids, to accommodate sidewalk supervisors. I was looking through one of them, not able to envision much, since the footings hadn’t yet been poured, let alone the concrete forms for foundation work. In fact, the crews had either hit groundwater or the East River was leaking in because the entire excavation was a muddy, sucking wound, swallowing bulldozers and back-loaders, time and money. I wondered how far behind schedule they were by now, and who’d been fool enough to post completion bonds.

  I turned when I heard the car pull up at the curb behind me. It was a big prewar Lincoln, the V-12, but I knew its owner had never been inconvenienced by gasoline rationing.

  A rumpled, overweight guy in a cheap off-the-rack suit got out of the passenger side. He looked irritated.

  “Sergeant,” I said, pleasantly enough. I kept my hands in my pockets, representing no threat. O’Toole would have been all too happy to grind my face into the pavement.

  “Pat would like a word,” he said, inclining his head.

  O’Toole was an errand boy and a precinct bagman, all the more dangerous for being both stupid and aggrieved. He wasn’t, in fine, the sort you’d want to meet if he were off his master’s leash. I had no call to aggravate him further.

  I got into the passenger seat of the Packard. O’Toole left the door open and drifted a fe
w yards off.

  “Mickey,” the man behind the wheel said, smiling.

  “Pat.”

  Patrick Francis Gallagher was a lieutenant of detectives. He’d started out as a harness bull, like so many others, and by virtue of luck and opportunity, and an easy way with the necessities of criminal enterprise, he made ready advancement. He was bent. I wouldn’t complain if he’d been compromised by the Hannahs, my own mob, but he was in the pocket of Frank Costello and a creature of the Italians.

  “What’s your interest in underage whores, Mickey?” he asked me.

  “Word gets around,” I said, ducking the question. I’d only been canvassing the neighborhood that very morning.

  “Enough of the road apples,” he said. “What’s your stake in it? Are the Hannahs looking to expand their territory to the East Side?”

  It was a curve ball, but it gave me an alibi. I swung on it. “I thought this was open turf, Pat,” I said. “Would you be telling me different?”

  He was too slippery to give me a straight answer. We were like two card players, feeling out our respective strength early in the game, trying to read each other’s betting pattern before we committed our chips. Gallagher, in this case, checked. “You still answer to Tim Hannah?” he asked.

  “As always,” I told him.

  “Then tell Young Tim to back away,” he said.

  This, of course, had nothing to do with the Hannahs, but a thing takes on its own momentum, and it was about to run over me like a truck with bad brakes.

  I had nothing to report to Dede as yet, but it was early days, or so I thought. I’d put some feelers out myself, my kids were keeping an eye peeled, so all in all, best foot forward. Pat Gallagher might prove to be a riddle, I knew, but for the moment I figured he was just blowing smoke up my ass.

  It was coming on dusk, and the kids began to trickle in. There were half a dozen countinghouses and money drops located across Midtown, but this was a storefront on Tenth Avenue, where my runners congregated at the end of the day, swapping war stories and ragging on each other. The building was owned by the Hannahs, and I’d outfitted the upper three stories: bunk beds, a community kitchen, and some semblance of privacy. They were outlaws, thrown away, and I offered them safety. Not that it didn’t come at a price. They understood what we traded for, and our currency was loyalty, both up and down.

  “Haven’t seen her,” Judy told me.

  “All day?”

  She beckoned another kid over. Roger Tuohy, the Artful Roger, she called him. Ten years old, he was, and already something of a slippery character. Where she’d come up with this literary label, I wasn’t to know. Maybe it was accident, or she’d spent overmuch time in the public library, a warm place for the homeless and otherwise dispossessed.

  “Gone,” he said.

  Gone from her usual haunts, I asked him, or disappeared?

  “Just gone,” he told me.

  They had their secrets, and I wasn’t meant to intrude. They had a private language, a coded vocabulary, from which I was excluded.

  “Where might she go?” I asked Judy.

  She shrugged.

  I bit the bullet. “Somebody very much like you, a girl who grew up in the streets, she asked me to look out for Maggie.”

  Judy, being who she was, went straight for the weak point in my argument. “Why?” she asked. The same question I’d asked, because it was the obvious one, of Dede.

  “She said the girl reminded her of herself, at the same age and in much the same circumstance.”

  “I never thought of you as sentimental, Mickey.”

  Meaning she’d felt the back of my hand in times past. “The street’s a stricter discipline than mine, Judy,” I reminded her.

  “You want us to find her for you.”

  “That’s what I asked of you before.”

  “No, you asked me if I could gain her confidence.”

  I smothered a smile. Kids can be very literal, almost lawyerly. It comes, I’d imagine, from their heightened sense of unfairness. “Same difference, if she’s gone missing,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said, accepting the arbitrary gap in logic.

  “Work in pairs,” I told her.

  “One of us gets pinched, the other one’s around to tell the tale?” she asked mischievously.

  “I was considering your safety.”

  “Tell the truth and shame a liar.”

  “The cops are sniffing around the edges of this, so there’s more to it than meets the eye. I’m thinking the Italians.”

  I was telling her more than she needed to know, and she saw I was residing a trust in her.

  “Watch each other’s back,” I said. “Don’t get careless.”

  She gave me a contemptuous thirteen-year-old’s look, and turned away.

  “Jude,” I said.

  She swung back, impatient with my second guessing her.

  “Something about this doesn’t feel right,” I told her. “If it smells dangerous, back away.”

  “Every time,” she said with a wink and an evil grin, then went off to round up her posse. The girl had more chutzpah than an Italian caporegime, and fewer doubts.

  My doubts began with Dede. I’d taken her at her word, but now I was beginning to think she might have taken me for a ride.

  An unworthy thought, so I put it to the test.

  We met, of course, like conspirators. I couldn’t very well telephone her at home and have her husband answer. I used a method we’d arranged in advance, the after-hours delivery of her dry cleaning. A private note, ten bucks to the Chinaman.

  We were at a bar on Third Avenue, in the shadow of the El. This was back when there was a Third Avenue elevated. It was an anonymous kind of joint, but it was busy enough to give us cover. The dinner hour was fast approaching; any saloon in New York that serves liquor has to serve food, even if it’s soggy steam-table discards, and the two of us together were as anonymous as the place. I was waiting on a stool at the near end of the bar, and she’d known enough to wear plaid, not mink.

  Dede and I didn’t bother to act surprised to see each other. I stood up, she took a seat, I sat down again. I was nursing a weak scotch and water. She ordered a Canadian Club and soda. I paid.

  “Have you seen her, spoken to her?” she asked

  “No,” I said, “but a couple of my runners have.”

  “And?”

  “Nobody gets close to her, from what the kids tell me.”

  “Could they?”

  “They’re not a trusting lot, themselves,” I told her “And she’s not one of them.”

  “Could you bring her into the fold, at least get her out of the life?”

  “It was somewhere in the back of my mind,” I admitted

  “But she’d still be an outsider, not an initiate.”

  “All my kids were outsiders, once,” I said. “That’s the appeal of being in a gang, the sense of belonging. You have to understand something, Dede. They’re clannish, they’re tribal, they’re protective of one another. It’s a pack mentality. They won’t accept just any stray dog who happens onto their turf.”

  “In time, perhaps?”

  “Time we don’t have,” I said. “As soon as I started asking around, it put the cat among the pigeons.”

  “What do you mean?” She was genuinely alarmed.

  “I suggested to one of my kids that she try and get close to the girl.” I held up a hand, forestalling comment. “It wouldn’t be clumsy sympathy, believe me. More an actively hostile approach, if I don’t miss my guess, challenging the girl for dominance, or territory. It’s a protocol.”

  “I remember.”

  “My own reconnaissance was less direct.”

  “You talked to my doorman,” she said. She didn’t smile

  “Among others,” I said “Thing is, you’re not the only one he reported it to.”

  “You’re not a physical presence that goes unnoticed.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t choose to mak
e my presence threatening,” I told her. “I might not have been the soul of discretion, but I didn’t see what harm could come of it. In the event, I was wrong.”

  “What happened?”

  “Inside of two, maybe three hours, I’d attracted police attention. A lieutenant of detectives named Pat Gallagher, as crooked as they come. Not a man you’d like to have your name on his list.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He wanted to know my interest.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “As it happens, he provided his own answer.”

  “Which was?”

  “That it had to do with the Hannahs, expanding into new territory. I left him thinking that. It was the easy way. But now I want the truth.”

  “I told you the truth.”

  “You told me a half truth,” I said, “which is as dangerous as a lie. And when I went into it blind, I got ambushed.”

  “I never meant to put you at risk,” she said.

  “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, Deirdre, but you never would have come to me in the first place if you’d thought there was no risk attached.”

  “My husband — ” she began, turning the glass in her hands.

  “Your husband knows you were a whore,” I said, interrupting her. It was a purposely unpleasant choice of words.

  She stopped fooling with her drink and met my gaze. There was enough sorrow there, and steel, that I dropped my eyes. “My husband,” she said, evenly, “has taken advantage of this girl’s services, just as he once took advantage of mine. But we made a deal, something he’s been gentleman enough to let me forget.”

  “Until now.”

  “We all make compromises, Mickey,” she said.

  “And even a van Rensellaer needs his ashes hauled,” I said. “Once in a great while.”

  “He never felt the lack,” Dede said, sad but defiant.

  She was so vulnerable and forlorn, I had to relent. “How come you didn’t tell me any of this before?” I asked her.

  “You would have read the worst into it,” she said.

  “I’m reading the worst into it now,” I said.

  “Even if it were a half truth, Mickey, it was still honest. She reminds me of me, and the choices I had to make.”