Taco Noir

by Steven Gomez

  “She needs to know that she ain’t under this guy’s thumb anymore,” he said. “She needs to get this back.”

  “Well, good luck getting it back to her,” I said. “Don’t let the door smack you on the keister on the way out.”

  “Wattaya mean?” he asked. I guess that the rug had dummied up on him. “I did my part. Didn’t you see me have my moment just then? I gave the pics to you, and now you gotta get ‘em to her.”

  I sighed as a rattling sound made its way through my chest and worked its way into a coughing fit. I closed my eyes and worked my way through it, and when I opened my eyes, Jimmy Two-Fingers was gone and I had a case.

  During the last few years I had cultivated a long list of sources and informants, most of it through favors, intimidation, and good-old fashioned threats. In the past I had been able to track down fences, number runners, enforcers, and even the odd hit-man or two. When it came to tracking down saints, however, that was where the system hit a snag.

  What I learned through my sources was that Ellie Danforth didn’t make bets with any of the bookies in the city, hadn’t tried to have anyone bumped off, wasn’t in the market to buy or sell hot merchandise, and wasn’t looking for any narcotics.

  Sometimes when the pigeon I’m looking for has a taste for the finer things, I can take a peek at the society pages or lay a saw-buck across the palm of a greedy doorman or a desperate waiter. Even a tailor or jeweler could provide me with a something, but this case was going nowhere. People in my line just didn’t know how to work with a “decent” human being.

  For those cases, we usually just drank.

  The park across the street from the Danforth residence was the pride of the city, and unlike the parks on my side of town, they actually had cops who patrolled the neighborhood. My head still pounded to beat the band and I was running a temperature, but I kept an eye on the mansion across the road. I also got run off so many times I was beginning to develop a case of athlete’s foot. Somewhere in my comings and goings the Danforths went on their merry way, and it took me three days before I got a solid bead on Little Ellie Danforth.

  It turned out that Ellie volunteered time at the Sisters of Mercy, a hospital on the East Side, my neck of the woods and about a block from my office. I didn’t beat myself up too much over this. Whatever went on inside the minds of saints and do-gooders was foreign land.

  The lobby inside the Sisters of Mercy was worn, beat, and would have lost in comparison with any hospital outside of a war zone. The line waiting for care was significant in both length and despair. The nurse behind the desk looked as if she had experienced her fair share of misery as well, and when it came to my turn in line, she never bothered to look up.

  “Uh…hello,” I said, channeling my inner Cary Grant. I eventually got the old maid to abandon her interest in the comics section and look up at me, my toothiest grin on display. I managed to turn her frown, but it became a sneer rather than a smile.

  “Take a number,” she barked, pointing towards a wheel that one tends to find in your finer delis. I looked around the waiting room and decided that I might in fact be the sickest person in the group, so I did.

  I waited for the nurse to call my number and, as I did, reluctantly made small talk with a codger who parked himself next to me. For a while he droned on about hemorrhoids, arthritis, and gout, and I silently prayed for my ears to congest as much as my nose. Eventually a candy striper stopped by and dropped off some magazines for the room. The old guy pounced on them like a cougar on venison, and when I reached for one of the magazines for myself, I got the stink-eye from the old coot.

  “I’ll be done in a minute,” he squawked, and I pulled back my hand before any of the fingers went missing. Taking pity on me, the young candy-striper gave me a copy of the morning edition.

  “This should hold you over for a while,” she said. “The doctor should see you shortly.”

  I started to say thank-you to the young woman with the sing-song voice as I took a look at the young biscuit for the first time. She was an angel with raven hair, alabaster skin, and the rosy complexion of someone who didn’t spend their evenings in parks staking out do-gooder heiresses.

  I’d seen the candy-striper before, and the pictures didn’t do her justice. She was Ellie Danforth.

  “Mrs. Danforth?” I croaked, my question fading into a series of coughs and sputters.

  “Why…yes,” answered Ellie, her angelic smile giving way to confusion as to how this scruffy stranger knew her name.

  “Mrs. Danforth,” I sputtered, trying to catch my breath. I reached into the breast pocket of my jacket for the envelope that Jimmy Two-Fingers had provided me. “I have some pictures that were taken of you that you might be interested in.”

  I don’t know what reaction I was expecting, but I wasn’t prepared for what I got. A quick shot to the chin proved to yours truly that just because a dame had been brought up in charm school didn’t mean that she couldn’t put a little shoulder behind a punch.

  “You creep!” spat Ellie, her angelic face contorting to demonic. “I can’t believe that scum like you could be a brazen as to walk right into the Sisters of Mercy and try to put the touch on me!”

  “No, wait,” I stammered, the pain in my head now fighting it out with the pain in my jaw. “You got it all wrong!”

  “Billy! Tim!” she yelled into the nearby hallway. As if by magic two slabs of meat dressed in orderly’s whites appeared, and they didn’t seem to be the nurturing sort.

  “Is this guy botherin’ you, Ellie?” said one of the slabs.

  “This …gentleman needs to be escorted off the grounds,” said Ellie, her jaw as clenched as mine now was. “And you needn’t be delicate about it.”

  I started to protest, but neither Tim nor Billy seemed to be open to debate. Working much faster than I would have thought men so large could work, Tim had one of my arms bent behind me and his free hand around my neck while Billy picked up my legs. Or maybe it was the other way around. Regardless of the order, the effect was the same. I was “escorted” to the side entrance where I was ejected from the Sisters of Mercy with particular care given to distance and propulsion.

  I spent a few moments doing an inventory of the parts of my body that hurt, but gave up when I made it to the ache in my head. The unfortunate part of being thrown out of a hospital is that when it occurs, you are most likely to need one.

  I sat down on the bench outside the hospital and planned my next move. The most prudent seemed to be going home, having a shot, hitting the hay, and then finding Jimmy Two-Fingers and smacking him about the head and upper torso. I suppose there must have been some comfort in the thought, because my eyelids fell like the stock market, and I drifted off to sleep.

  “Excuse me?” said a voice, accompanied by a gentle nudge. I had fallen asleep on the bench, and rolled over onto my side. “Are you all right? Do you have a place to sleep?” It was a familiar voice in a tone much more pleasant than I had previously heard.

  “Mrs. Danforth!” I gasped, turning over to face the young lady. Once again, her features changed from saintly to down-right homicidal.

  “Oh, it’s you again,” she spat, backing up and looking around for what I assume was more simian orderlies. She had a small thermos in her hand, and I thought she was going to brain me with it as she turned.

  “Wait, please,” I said, sitting up. “I’m not the mug who’s been trying to lean on you. I’ve been given these pictures and instructed to tell you that you don’t have anything to worry about. Your blackmailer is out of the picture.”

  Words failed Mrs. Danforth as she opened the envelope and peeked inside. Almost dropping her thermos she quickly stashed the pics in her coat and pulled it closed as if they were gold.

  “Is this on the level?” Ellie asked.

  “Scout’s honor,” I said, getting to my feet before falling back to the bench. A salute was still a little too much for me. “A friend asked me to make sure you knew that you were ou
t of the woods.”

  “Oh thank you!” said Ellie, wrapping her arms around me and hugging me tightly. I felt the air rush from my lungs as the thermos dug into me and I wondered how a society dame had developed such strength. She quickly composed herself and straightened up as I got to my feet.

  “S’okay,” I mumbled as thoughts of a warm bed filled my head. “You have a good life.”

  “I will!” she said, her face once again the beaming, angelic vision that Jimmy had imagined. She waved good-bye and I turned to head homeward. As I did so, Ellie called after me.

  “What caused the blackmailer’s sudden change of heart?” she asked, doubt once again crossing her saintly visage. “Did he come to some harm?”

  “Not at all,” I told the angel. “He’s gone to live on a farm upstate where he has plenty of room to run and play.”

  “Oh good,” she said, turning to walk towards the Sisters of Mercy. “It’s nice when things turn out well.”

  “It sure is,” I said as I started back to the office where I could lie down with some blankets and a hot water bottle. I only got a few steps before I heard a voice call after me. I turned and it was the angel. She ran to me, and I stood there stupid as she did. When she reached me she planted one on my cheek that would have made a statue blush, and I felt her press something into my hands. She smiled and left me in the cold, dark night.

  Looking down, I found the small thermos the angel carried thrust in to my hand. Inside I found what might have been just the thing to chase away my cold, if not turn me into a good man.

  And I wasn’t splitting it with Jimmy.

  ANGELIC CHICKEN SOUP

  1 medium chicken

  1 large onion

  3 sprigs of dill, tied into a bouquet

  4 stalks of celery, chopped

  3 cloves of garlic

  3 tablespoons chopped ginger

  1 turnip, cubed into 1/2-inch pieces

  3 medium carrots, peeled and cut into 3-inch pieces

  Juice of 1 lemon

  2 tablespoons salt

  2 potatoes, cubed into 1 inch pieces

  1/2 cup matzo meal

  2 large eggs room temperature, beaten

  2 tablespoons vegetable oil

  2 tablespoons seltzer water

  1 teaspoon salt

  1/2 teaspoon pepper

  1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh dill

  Take the bird with a little bit of reverence and a little bit of trepidation and give her a quick wash. Toss her into the pot and keep her company with the onion, dill, celery, and salt. Turn up the heat on the fowl and sweat her to a boil. Keep up the heat and skim the foam off the top as you go. Once your bird is good and boiling, lower the heat to medium and toss in the ginger, turnip, carrots, and lemon juice. Cover and cook on low until the bird has served her two hour sentence.

  Season the bird to taste. The chicken should be nice and tender and ready to fall apart. Let the bird cool and carve the meat off of the carcass. Toss half of the meat back into the pot and put the rest on ice for another day. Crank up the heat on the pot and toss in the potatoes. Once you get the fowl simmering again, you’re ready for the matzo balls.

  Toss the matzo meal, eggs, oil, seltzer, salt and pepper into a bowl and work them over. Put them on ice and let them chill for about a half hour. Once the mix is nice and cold, take it out and, with wet hands, work over the matzo with a pugilistic fervor and form the mess into 1 inch rocks. Drop the matzo balls into the soup and cover. Continue to simmer the soup for a half hour longer. Trust me, good things will happen.

  Spoon the soup into bowls and serve. Garnish with a dollop of sour cream or green onions. Or don’t. Either way it’s wellness in a bowl.

  Serves 8, unless they’re greedy.

  THE CASE OF THE HARD-BOILED MONTE CRISTO

  Sometimes you can Count more than just cards

  In this city, gambling is the organ grinder that makes the monkey dance. On the one hand, it is the topic of lectures, debates, and sermons. It gives politicians a target to shoot their intellectual water pistols at. It gives the copy editors something splashy to put on the front page above the fold. It also gives the good people of Hicksville something to raise their torches and pitchforks against.

  If you dig a little deeper into the city’s seamier side, you’ll also find that gambling helps fund some of the soup kitchens in the lower East side, pays for the trash pick-ups at City Hall, and helps line the bottom of the collection plate at St. Dominic’s Cathedral every Sunday.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m no preacher from the church of the natural seven. At the same time gambling was bringing fortune and notoriety to a city growing in leaps and bounds, it was also responsible for little Joey going homeless because dear old dad put the deed to the house on a “sure thing.” It cost many a sweet young thing their diamond rings because their sugar daddies couldn’t cover the action that they asked for. And it also sent any number of schmucks to the bottom of the river because their mouths were bigger than their wallets. In fact, it seemed like some days there just wasn’t enough river to cover them all.

  It was a sad story, but none of that mattered to me. I was holding kings over aces.

  “It’s your bet,” said Sweet Jesse Vasquez, the man hosting this evening’s festivities. Sweet Jesse was a short, bald, round man who spent his life mopping up the rivers of sweat that made their way down his forehead. In order to keep that kind of hydration flowing, Jesse kept a personal pitcher of water and a glass nearby. The man could sweat in a snowstorm, earning him the unfortunate and completely behind-his-back nickname of “Sweat Jesse Vasquez.” As my papa always said, when life deals you lemons, make lemon cocktails. In the case of Jesse’s poker face, the man looked nervous all the time, even when he was collecting his winnings, so I had to fall back on another piece of advice my papa gave me.

  Always raise when you have a full boat.

  “I’ll raise you fifty, Jesse,” I said, tossing a handful of chips into the pot. True to his nature, Jesse neither blinked nor smiled. He simply tossed in a larger handful of chips than I did.

  “I’ll re-raise an even hundred,” Jesse said, never taking his eyes off the pot. I found myself in that no-man’s land that Texas Hold ‘em players hate but know all too well. That special wilderness where you have just laid down too much cash to back off.

  “I call,” I said, feeling a dry scratchiness in the back of my throat. It was almost enough to cause me to reach for Jesse’s pitcher of water, but that simply wasn’t done. Still unsmiling and perspiring, Jesse laid down his hand.

  “Two pair,” Jesse said. “A pair of red jacks and a pair of black jacks.”

  I threw down my hand in disgust and got up from the table. Losing a hand is always bad enough, but nothing makes it worse than gambling wit. My stack was light about three hundred dollars, and most of that was in Sweet Jesse’s pocket. I decided that I could use a break, and turned my attention to Sweet Jesse’s sandwich tray while the other players took their turn as Jesse’s punching bag.

  When Sweet Jesse floats a game, the great consolation is that although your wallet is sure to be lighter, the spread he lays out for his games guarantees to satisfy.

  Today the sweaty little toad stocked the bar with a nice selection of fancy Hefeweizens and Pilsners, and served them up with a hearty German Potato Salad and thick, warm Monte Cristo sandwiches. I used the edge of the table to pry open one of the ice cold bottles of beer, earning me a glare from a couple of the stiffs at the table. I shrugged and loaded my plate with enough potato salad to reach critical mass, tossing on a sandwich for good measure.

  I watched the other players, Nick the Axe, Psycho Billy, and Barnstorming Pete Wilson push their chips around the table. They were just trading clay with each other as Sweet Jesse ate through them, piece by piece. While I ate, Jesse walked away with every pot but two, sweating and drinking his ice water through it all. Or so I thought.

  On the next hand, the dealer flopped a seven, ten
, and a jack. Billy checked his cards while the other seat holders mucked their hands. All but Sweet Jesse. Jesse raised twenty-five bucks, and without blinking Billy raised fifty.

  The check-raise is an excellent poker strategy, and one of the few times when I feel it is acceptable for a player to check. As soon as Billy threw in his fifty, Sweet Jesse knew that Billy either had the nuts or wanted Jesse to believe that he did. Either way, Jesse threw in his money and they were playing poker.

  The turn was a four, which probably did no one any good. Billy threw in a hundred more, daring Jesse to call. Jesse continued to sweat, took a drink of his ice water, and called. The dealer threw down a deuce.

  Billy bounced, going all in, practically throwing in about two hundred more in chips. Even though this was a paltry sum compared to Sweet Jesse’s stack, the big guy sat, sipping his water, and shuffling his chips. After a moment, he called Billy again, and Billy threw down an eight and a nine, giving him a straight. Sweet Jesse threw out a few curse words with his cards, drained his ice water, and motioned for one of his cronies to re-fill him.

  Jesse didn’t spend much time playing on tilt after losing. The next three hands all went to the fat man in succession, and he even threw down his hole cards when he took Billy’s money, an arrogant move that I always detest in players.

  Jesse was back to his winning form after his setback, sweating his way through the cheaply upholstered chair and winning a blue streak. I helped myself to a little more potato salad and another of the Monte Cristo sandwiches while I watched Sweet Jesse pluck himself some pigeons. I don’t usually drink much during poker games, but the salt of the salad had given me a powerful thirst, so I cracked open another beer. The light Pilsner felt like heaven on my scratchy throat, and I could understand why Jesse kept draining that water pitcher next to him as he played. Except now I noticed that he didn’t. Not since that last losing hand.