Small Town

by Lawrence Block

Page 44

 

  “How can I stay here?” he demanded. “People are dying all over the place. ”

  “Nobody lives forever,” Lois told him. “Not even in Hamtramck, although I grant you it must seem that way. Not counting roaches and waterbugs, have you ever killed anything?”

  “No, but—”

  “Or spiders. That’s what women need men for, you know. To kill spiders. The day she saw me kill a spider in the kitchen, Jacqui knew we had a chance of making it together. You’ve had some bad luck, Jerry. One of your customers went home with the wrong guy, and another one opened the door to the wrong guy, but they were two different guys. They’re sure the writer killed Marilyn, and they’re just as sure he had nothing to do with the mess at the whorehouse. ”

  “Mess,” he said, “does not begin to describe it. ”

  “Don’t quibble, Jerry. Stay with me on this. And bear in mind one of the lessons sobriety teaches us. Your lifelong conviction notwithstanding, you are not actually the piece of shit the world revolves around. ”

  “Meaning?”

  “You tell me. ”

  He thought about it. “Meaning I’m the only connection between Marilyn and Molly, and that’s just coincidental. They’re not dead because they had the bad luck to hire me. ”

  “Very good. Now go to a meeting. ”

  “I just came from a meeting. ”

  “So?”

  “I guess another one couldn’t hurt just now. Lois? Suppose it happens again?”

  “Happens again? I don’t . . . oh, you mean if you walk in on a third dead body?”

  “It would be a fifth, actually. A third, what did you call it? A third mess. ”

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If that happens, you can go back to Hamtramck. I’ll even pay your plane fare. But Jerry? No matter how many dead bodies you find, you still can’t drink. ” I N T H E E N D , H E didn’t even take a day off. He couldn’t really afford to; the closing of the whorehouse represented a serious drop in his income. So he got up each morning and took care of the three bars, then serviced whatever residential customers were on his schedule. And went to as many meetings as he could fit in.

  This morning, Saturday, the forecast was for near-record levels of heat and humidity, and you could already feel both indicators starting to climb by the time he got outside. Saturdays and Sundays were light days, morning days, with nothing on his schedule but the three bars. They were apt to be grungier than usual on Saturday mornings, after the intensity of Thank-God-It’s-Friday celebrating, and sometimes a bartender, eager to get out of there after an especially late night, would slack off on his part of the deal, leaving the chairs on the floor, say, and unwashed glasses on the bar top.

  He walked to Death Row, and long before he got within sight of the place he was breathing in the smell of it, the strong odor of a fire that had been put out with water. He paid no attention, because it was something you smelled a lot in that part of town.

  The Hudson piers would catch fire, especially on the Jersey side, and the creosote-soaked timbers would send up plumes of black smoke for hours.

  Then he drew closer and saw four or five people gathered on the sidewalk across from Death Row, which was unusual at that hour, when the block was almost invariably deserted. And he looked at what they were looking at, and saw the windows all broken out on the building’s upper floors, and the streaks of soot and fire damage on the lintels.

  He joined the four men across the street. They were quick to tell him what had happened, although they had slightly different versions. There’d been a fire, certainly, and it had started in the basement leather bar, Death Row, and pretty much gutted the entire structure before the firefighters got it under control.

  “They threw one rough trade type out, and he came back with a gun and opened up on everybody, and then he started a fire. ”

  “I didn’t hear anything about a gun. Just some queen with a resentment, and Buddha was killed trying to keep her from getting in the door. ”

  “Please. It was bashers, it had to be. ”

  “Every time a gay man stubs his toe somebody calls it gay-bashing. ”

  “Well, what do you call it when three gay bars go up in flames on the same night? Do you think they were struck by lightning?”

  “I felt so wonderful during Gay Pride Week, and now this has to happen. I heard there were over thirty people killed at Death Row alone. ”

  “I heard forty. ”

  “I heard twenty-seven, including some of the people who lived upstairs. ”

  “People actually lived upstairs of that hole?”

  “A friend of mine, he’s a nurse at St. Vincent’s in the Burn Unit, and he said they brought in men with third-degree burns over eighty percent of their body. When it’s that bad you’re not expected to live, and it’s probably better if you don’t. ”

  “I can never remember, is it first-degree that’s the worst?”

  “Only with murder. With burns, third-degree is the worst. ”

  “There’s no fourth degree?”

  “Only what the firemen call Crispy Critters. ”

  “Oh, gross. ”

  “I heard it was worse at the other bars. ”

  “No, I heard Death Row was the worst. ”

  “I just hope the cops get them. It must have been two or three of them, because they spilled a whole fifty-gallon drum of petrol down the stairwell. ”

  “The drums hold fifty-five gallons, and when did you turn into an Englishman?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Petrol? She thinks she’s Camilla Parker-Bowles. ”

  “It would have taken at least three men to get past Buddha. ”

  “Or one man with a gun, and is there a law that says every big man with a shaved head has to be called Buddha?”

  “His name was Eric, and he was a good person. ”

  “You knew him?”

  “He was my friend. ”

  “Then I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . ”

  “That’s all right. ”

  He knew the answer, but asked anyway: “The other bars . . . ” Cheek, he was told. And someplace farther east that nobody had heard of, Harriman’s, something like that.

  He could have corrected them on the name, and told them it wasn’t a gay bar, but why? Why do anything?

  He turned away and walked back home.

  T H E F I R E B O M B I N G S O F T H E three Chelsea bars were immediately gathered into a single case file, and the death toll alone—

  seventy-three killed, plus twelve so seriously injured they were not expected to recover—ensured the investigation would wind up in the hands of the Major Cases squad. Although it took a few hours for the FDNY investigators to officially label the fires as arson, the cops had it listed that way from the beginning. The eyewitness testimony, confused and contradictory as it was, all agreed on one point: each establishment had been deliberately attacked with explosive and/or incendiary devices.

  With 9/11 less than a year old, and with suicide bombings almost a daily occurrence in Israel, there was widespread agreement that terrorism couldn’t be ruled out. Accordingly, FBI investigators coordinated with the team from Major Cases, and the Office of Homeland Security flew up an expert from Washington.

  According to one theory, the virtually simultaneous attacks on the three targets bespoke a high degree of organization. Furthermore, at least one witness at Death Row reported that the attackers wore camouflage gear.

  In response, others argued that the attacks were by no means simultaneous, and that as much as three-quarters of an hour might have elapsed between the first attack, on Harrigan’s, and the third, at Death Row. Even on foot a perpetrator could easily cover the required distance in that amount of time. As for the camo gear, it turned out to have been worn not by a team of attackers but by two of those in attendance; evidently their garb, complemented by paratrooper boots, had been deemed sufficiently in keeping with the b
ar’s ambience as to be allowable under the dress code.

  Both of the camouflaged individuals, one a fashion photographer during daylight hours, the other a stockroom manager, were in Death Row’s notorious back room at the time of the bombing.

  Like almost everyone trapped in that cul-de-sac, they died there.

  Saturday afternoon, a little more than fourteen hours after the initial assault on Harrigan’s, the cops got a break.

  D E N N I S H U R L E Y L I V E D W I T H his wife and three sons in a detached ranch house (an emotionally detached ranch house, his wife’s smartass brother called it) just over the Queens line in Nassau County, near the Hempstead Turnpike and within walking distance of Belmont Race Track, which would have been handy if he cared for horse racing, but he didn’t. He liked to go out in a blue-fish boat when they were running, and he liked to watch sports on television, even golf, and he liked to roast corn and grill steaks and chops in the backyard, which is what he was getting ready to do when his wife came out to tell him Arthur Pender was on the phone.

  “Tell him to come on over,” he said.

  “Tell him yourself,” she suggested, but when he got on the phone Pender didn’t want to talk about backyard barbecues, or Tiger Woods’s chances of a Grand Slam.

  “Those firebombings,” he said. “You hear about them out where you are?”

  “I’m less’n a mile from bein’ in Queens,” he said. “The only difference is the schools, and it’s not as much of a difference as we were hoping. Yeah, of course I heard. We get New York One out here, not to mention it was all over CNN this morning. ”

  “You happen to notice the names of the places got hit?”

  “I noticed where they were. A few blocks to the east and they’d be our headache. ”

  “Be Major Cases either way, but that’s not the point. I’ll give you the names. Harrigan’s, Cheek, and Death Row. Ring any bells?”

  “I don’t think so. Gay bars, right? And the last one sounds like it must have been a charmer, but . . . wait a minute, Arthur. ”

  “Dingdong, huh?”

  “That Polish kid, one we thought linked our case to Charles Street. Except it didn’t, because What’s-his-name was home all night and he could prove it. ”

  “Creighton. ”

  “Yeah, and we didn’t like him for it anyway, once we met him.

  These joints, Death Row and the rest, they were all on his list, weren’t they? Not Creighton’s but the kid’s. ”

  “Pankow’s his name. ”

  “Tip of my tongue, Arthur. ”

  “They weren’t just on his list. They were his list. Went and mopped their floors seven days a week. Only other customers he had were private residences that he went to once a week. ”

  “Jesus. You know, I heard the names myself, but I was watching TV with half my mind on the sports pages in Newsday. I should have caught it. ”

  “You would’ve, next time you heard the news. ”

  “Yeah, maybe. Shit, Arthur, we got to go in, don’t we? I mean, we can’t phone it in, and it won’t wait till morning. ”