Brooklyn Noir [2] The Classics

by Tim McLoughlin

  I talked to Herrera’s landlord and Cruz’s former employer and one of his recent girlfriends. I drank beer in bars and the back rooms of bodegas. I went to the local station house, I read the sheets on both of the burglars and drank coffee with the cops and picked up some of the stuff that doesn’t get on the yellow sheets.

  I found out that Miguelito Cruz had once killed a man in a tavern brawl over a woman. There were no charges pressed; a dozen witnesses reported that the dead man had gone after Cruz first with a broken bottle. Cruz had most likely been carrying the knife, but several witnesses insisted it had been tossed to him by an anonymous benefactor, and there hadn’t been enough evidence to make a case of weapons possession, let alone homicide.

  I learned that Herrera had three children living with their mother in Puerto Rico. He was divorced but wouldn’t marry his current girlfriend because he regarded himself as married to his ex-wife in the eyes of God. He sent money to his children when he had any to send.

  I learned other things. They didn’t seem terribly consequential then and they’ve faded from memory altogether now, but I wrote them down in my pocket notebook as I learned them, and every day or so I duly reported my findings to Drew Kaplan. He always seemed pleased with what I told him.

  I invariably managed a stop at Armstrong’s before I called it a night. One night she was there, Carolyn Cheatham, drinking bourbon this time, her face frozen with stubborn old pain. It took her a blink or two to recognize me. Then tears started to form in the corners of her eyes, and she used the back of one hand to wipe them away.

  I didn’t approach her until she beckoned. She patted the stool beside hers and I eased myself onto it. I had coffee with bourbon in it and bought a refill for her. She was pretty drunk already, but that’s never been enough reason to turn down a drink.

  She talked about Tommy. He was being nice to her, she said. Calling up, sending flowers. But he wouldn’t see her, because it wouldn’t look right, not for a new widower, not for a man who’d been publicly accused of murder.

  “He sends flowers with no card enclosed,” she said. “He calls me from pay phones. The son of a bitch.”

  Billie called me aside. “I didn’t want to put her out,” he said, “a nice woman like that, shit-faced as she is. But I thought I was gonna have to. You’ll see she gets home?”

  I said I would.

  I got her out of there and a cab came along and saved us the walk. At her place, I took the keys from her and unlocked the door. She half sat, half sprawled on the couch. I had to use the bathroom, and when I came back, her eyes were closed and she was snoring lightly.

  I got her coat and shoes off, put her to bed, loosened her clothing, and covered her with a blanket. I was tired from all that and sat down on the couch for a minute, and I almost dozed off myself. Then I snapped awake and let myself out.

  I went back to Sunset Park the next day. I learned that Cruz had been in trouble as a youth. With a gang of neighborhood kids, he used to go into the city and cruise Greenwich Village, looking for homosexuals to beat up. He’d had a dread of homosexuality, probably flowing as it generally does out of fear of a part of himself, and he stifled that dread by fag-bashing.

  “He still doan’ like them,” a woman told me. She had glossy black hair and opaque eyes, and she was letting me pay for her rum and orange juice. “He’s pretty, you know, an’ they come on to him, an’ he doan’ like it.”

  I called that item in, along with a few others equally earthshaking. I bought myself a steak dinner at the Slate over on Tenth Avenue, then finished up at Armstrong’s, not drinking very hard, just coasting along on bourbon and coffee.

  Twice, the phone rang for me. Once, it was Tommy Tillary, telling me how much he appreciated what I was doing for him. It seemed to me that all I was doing was taking his money, but he had me believing that my loyalty and invaluable assistance were all he had to cling to.

  The second call was from Carolyn. More praise. I was a gentleman, she assured me, and a hell of a fellow all around. And I should forget that she’d been bad-mouthing Tommy. Everything was going to be fine with them.

  I took the next day off. I think I went to a movie, and it may have been The Sting, with Newman and Redford achieving vengeance through swindling.

  The day after that, I did another tour of duty over in Brooklyn. And the day after that, I picked up the News first thing in the morning. The headline was nonspecific, something like kill suspect hangs self in cell, but I knew it was my case before I turned to the story on page three.

  Miguelito Cruz had torn his clothing into strips, knotted the strips together, stood his iron bedstead on its side, climbed onto it, looped his homemade rope around an overhead pipe, and jumped off the up-ended bedstead and into the next world.

  That evening’s six o’clock TV news had the rest of the story. Informed of his friend’s death, Angel Herrera had recanted his original story and admitted that he and Cruz had conceived and executed the Tillary burglary on their own. It had been Miguelito who had stabbed the Tillary woman when she walked in on them. He’d picked up a kitchen knife while Herrera watched in horror. Miguelito always had a short temper, Herrera said, but they were friends, even cousins, and they had hatched their story to protect Miguelito. But now that he was dead, Herrera could admit what had really happened.

  I was in Armstrong’s that night, which was not remarkable. I had it in mind to get drunk, though I could not have told you why, and that was remarkable, if not unheard of. I got drunk a lot those days, but I rarely set out with that intention. I just wanted to feel a little better, a little more mellow, and somewhere along the way I’d wind up waxed.

  I wasn’t drinking particularly hard or fast, but I was working at it, and then somewhere around ten or eleven the door opened and I knew who it was before I turned around. Tommy Tillary, well dressed and freshly barbered, making his first appearance in Jimmy’s place since his wife was killed.

  “Hey, look who’s here!” he called out and grinned that big grin. People rushed over to shake his hand. Billie was behind the stick, and he’d no sooner set one up on the house for our hero than Tommy insisted on buying a round for the bar. It was an expensive gesture—there must have been thirty or forty people in there—but I don’t think he cared if there were three hundred or four hundred.

  I stayed where I was, letting the others mob him, but he worked his way over to me and got an arm around my shoulders. “This is the man,” he announced. “Best fucking detective ever wore out a pair of shoes. This man’s money,” he told Billie, “is no good at all tonight. He can’t buy a drink; he can’t buy a cup of coffee; if you went and put in pay toilets since I was last here, he can’t use his own dime.”

  “The john’s still free,” Billie said, “but don’t give the boss any ideas.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me he didn’t already think of it,” Tommy said. “Matt, my boy, I love you. I was in a tight spot, I didn’t want to walk out of my house, and you came through for me.”

  What the hell had I done? I hadn’t hanged Miguelito Cruz or coaxed a confession out of Angel Herrera. I hadn’t even set eyes on either man. But he was buying the drinks, and I had a thirst, so who was I to argue?

  I don’t know how long we stayed there. Curiously, my drinking slowed down even as Tommy’s picked up speed. Carolyn, I noticed, was not present, nor did her name find its way into the conversation. I wondered if she would walk in—it was, after all, her neighborhood bar, and she was apt to drop in on her own. I wondered what would happen if she did.

  I guess there were a lot of things I wondered about, and perhaps that’s what put the brakes on my own drinking. I didn’t want any gaps in my memory, any gray patches in my awareness.

  After a while, Tommy was hustling me out of Armstrong’s. “This is celebration time,” he told me. “We don’t want to sit in one place till we grow roots. We want to bop a little.”

  He had a car, and I just went along with him without paying too much attention
to exactly where we were. We went to a noisy Greek club on the East Side, I think, where the waiters looked like Mob hit men. We went to a couple of trendy singles joints. We wound up somewhere in the Village, in a dark, beery cave.

  It was quiet there, and conversation was possible, and I found myself asking him what I’d done that was so praiseworthy. One man had killed himself and another had confessed, and where was my role in either incident?

  “The stuff you came up with,” he said.

  “What stuff? I should have brought back fingernail parings, you could have had someone work voodoo on them.”

  “About Cruz and the fairies.”

  “He was up for murder. He didn’t kill himself because he was afraid they’d get him for fag-bashing when he was a juvenile offender.”

  Tommy took a sip of scotch. He said, “Couple days ago, huge black guy comes up to Cruz in the chow line. ‘Wait’ll you get up to Green Haven,’ he tells him. ‘Every blood there’s gonna have you for a girlfriend. Doctor gonna have to cut you a brand-new asshole, time you get outa there.’”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Kaplan,” he said. “Drew talked to somebody who talked to somebody, and that did it. Cruz took a good look at playin’ drop the soap for half the jigs in captivity, next thing you know, the murderous little bastard was on air. And good riddance to him.”

  I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I worked on it while Tommy went to the bar for another round. I hadn’t touched the drink in front of me, but I let him buy for both of us.

  When he got back, I said, “Herrera.”

  “Changed his story. Made a full confession.”

  “And pinned the killing on Cruz.”

  “Why not? Cruz wasn’t around to complain. Who knows which one of ’em did it, and for that matter, who cares? The thing is, you gave us the lever.”

  “For Cruz,” I said. “To get him to kill himself.”

  “And for Herrera. Those kids of his in Santurce. Drew spoke to Herrera’s lawyer and Herrera’s lawyer spoke to Herrera, and the message was, ‘Look, you’re going up for burglary whatever you do, and probably for murder; but if you tell the right story, you’ll draw shorter time, and on top of that, that nice Mr. Tillary’s gonna let bygones be bygones and every month there’s a nice check for your wife and kiddies back home in Puerto Rico.’”

  At the bar, a couple of old men were reliving the Louis-Schmeling fight, the second one, where Louis punished the German champion. One of the old fellows was throwing roundhouse punches in the air, demonstrating.

  I said, “Who killed your wife?”

  “One or the other of them. If I had to bet, I’d say Cruz. He had those little beady eyes; you looked at him up close and you got that he was a killer.”

  “When did you look at him up close?”

  “When they came and cleaned the house, the basement, and the attic. Not when they came and cleaned me out; that was the second time.”

  He smiled, but I kept looking at him until the smile lost its certainty. “That was Herrera who helped around the house,” I said. “You never met Cruz.”

  “Cruz came along, gave him a hand.”

  “You never mentioned that before.”

  “Oh, sure I did, Matt. What difference does it make, anyway.”

  “Who killed her, Tommy?”

  “Hey, let it alone, huh?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “I already answered it.”

  “You killed her, didn’t you?”

  “What are you, crazy? Cruz killed her and Herrera swore to it, isn’t that enough for you?”

  “Tell me you didn’t kill her.”

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “I didn’t fucking kill her. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said. He closed his eyes, put his head in his hands. He sighed and looked up and said, “You know, it’s a funny thing with me. Over the telephone, I’m the best salesman you could ever imagine. I swear I could sell sand to the Arabs, I could sell ice in the winter, but face-to-face I’m no good at all. Why do you figure that is?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I don’t know. I used to think it was my face, the eyes and the mouth; I don’t know. It’s easy over the phone. I’m talking to a stranger, I don’t know who he is or what he looks like, and he’s not lookin’ at me, and it’s a cinch. Face-to-face, especially with someone I know, it’s a different story.” He looked at me. “If we were doin’ this over the phone, you’d buy the whole thing.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “It’s fucking certain. Word for word, you’d buy the package. Suppose I was to tell you I did kill her, Matt. You couldn’t prove anything. Look, the both of us walked in there, the place was a mess from the burglary, we got in an argument, tempers flared, something happened.”

  “You set up the burglary. You planned the whole thing, just the way Cruz and Herrera accused you of doing. And now you wriggled out of it.”

  “And you helped me—don’t forget that part of it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And I wouldn’t have gone away for it anyway, Matt. Not a chance. I’da beat it in court, only this way I don’t have to go to court. Look, this is just the booze talkin’, and we can forget it in the morning, right? I didn’t kill her, you didn’t accuse me, we’re still buddies, everything’s fine. Right?”

  Blackouts are never there when you want them. I woke up the next day and remembered all of it, and I found myself wishing I didn’t. He’d killed his wife and he was getting away with it. And I’d helped him. I’d taken his money, and in return I’d shown him how to set one man up for suicide and pressure another into making a false confession.

  And what was I going to do about it?

  I couldn’t think of a thing. Any story I carried to the police would be speedily denied by Tommy and his lawyer, and all I had was the thinnest of hearsay evidence, my own client’s own words when he and I both had a skinful of booze. I went over it for a few days, looking for ways to shake something loose, and there was nothing. I could maybe interest a newspaper reporter, maybe get Tommy some press coverage that wouldn’t make him happy, but why? And to what purpose?

  It rankled. But I would just have a couple of drinks, and then it wouldn’t rankle so much.

  Angel Herrera pleaded guilty to burglary, and in return, the Brooklyn D.A.’s Office dropped all homicide charges. He went Upstate to serve five to ten.

  And then I got a call in the middle of the night. I’d been sleeping a couple of hours, but the phone woke me and I groped for it. It took me a minute to recognize the voice on the other end.

  It was Carolyn Cheatham.

  “I had to call you,” she said, “on account of you’re a bourbon man and a gentleman. I owed it to you to call you.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “He ditched me,” she said, “and he got me fired out of Tannahill and Company so he won’t have to look at me around the office. Once he didn’t need me to back up his story, he let go of me, and do you know he did it over the phone?”

  “Carolyn—”

  “It’s all in the note,” she said. “I’m leaving a note.”

  “Look, don’t do anything yet,” I said. I was out of bed, fumbling for my clothes. “I’ll be right over. We’ll talk about it.”

  “You can’t stop me, Matt.”

  “I won’t try to stop you. We’ll talk first, and then you can do anything you want.”

  The phone clicked in my ear.

  I threw my clothes on, rushed over there, hoping it would be pills, something that took its time. I broke a small pane of glass in the downstairs door and let myself in, then used an old credit card to slip the bolt of her spring lock.

  The room smelled of cordite. She was on the couch she’d passed out on the last time I saw her. The gun was still in her hand, limp at her side, and there was a b
lack-rimmed hole in her temple.

  There was a note, too. An empty bottle of Maker’s Mark stood on the coffee table, an empty glass beside it. The booze showed in her handwriting and in the sullen phrasing of the suicide note.

  I read the note. I stood there for a few minutes, not for very long, and then I got a dish towel from the Pullman kitchen and wiped the bottle and the glass. I took another matching glass, rinsed it out and wiped it, and put it in the drainboard of the sink.

  I stuffed the note in my pocket. I took the gun from her fingers, checked routinely for a pulse, then wrapped a sofa pillow around the gun to muffle its report. I fired one round into her chest, another into her open mouth.

  I dropped the gun into a pocket and left.

  They found the gun in Tommy Tillary’s house, stuffed between the cushions of the living-room sofa, clean of prints inside and out. Ballistics got a perfect match. I’d aimed for soft tissue with the round shot into her chest, because bullets can fragment on impact with bone. That was one reason I’d fired the extra shots. The other was to rule out the possibility of suicide.

  After the story made the papers, I picked up the phone and called Drew Kaplan. “I don’t understand it,” I said. “He was free and clear; why the hell did he kill the girl?”

  “Ask him yourself,” Kaplan said. He did not sound happy. “You want my opinion, he’s a lunatic. I honestly didn’t think he was. I figured maybe he killed his wife, maybe he didn’t. Not my job to try him. But I didn’t figure he was a homicidal maniac.”

  “It’s certain he killed the girl?”