Dark City Lights

by Lawrence Block

  Did I mention the cat? We used to have a white cat named Minna. Her job was to keep the mice at bay, but there’s only so much one cat can do. Two or three times a week, if she was favoring you, she’d leave a decapitated rodent for you, either on your desk or on the seat of your chair. Usually when that happened, you could find her nearby, demurely purring.

  It happened to me twice, after which I stopped bringing Minna cat toys and treats. I didn’t mind the headless mouse cadavers on my desk. I picked up their remains with one paper towel, and washed the blood off my desk with another. It was the mouse entrails on my cheaply upholstered chair that got to me. What can you say to a cat who think she’s honoring you by leaving you a pile of bloody mouse guts to sit on? You pick her up and coo, “Good girl, Minna! Let’s take this catnip toy over to the Stocking and Lingerie News writer’s cubicle. She’s out right now checking out undies, but I’m sure she’d love to greet you when she gets in.” All the same, Minna would sometimes come back to my desk and curl up next to my computer screen. I don’t know why, after I stopped feeding her. But for some reason she liked me, before she got killed. More about that in a bit.

  So by now you must be wondering who I am and what’s my story. Fair enough.

  My name is Rich Hovanec. Sound familiar? It might if you’re old enough. I used to be an investigative reporter for one of this town’s tabloids. I’m the guy who broke the story about the fire chief who was forcing the guys in one of his engine companies to renovate his house if they wanted to keep their jobs. That’s strictly against the law, and after I broke the story he did time for it. I also dug up the dirt about a prison assistant warden who was sleeping with one of the inmates over at the women’s section at Riker’s Island. This was an especially juicy story because the warden was married and had two kids. And because both the warden and the prisoner were women. And especially because the prisoner didn’t enjoy the relationship, but felt she had no choice if she ever wanted to see the sky again.

  I loved my work. It was fun driving the snakes out of city government, and getting acclaim for it. The paper put me up for a Pulitzer Prize once, although I didn’t get it. Instead it went to a group of reporters in Los Angeles that year. Even so, I was living a high profile life, generating the kind of bad publicity about high profile bad guys that zaps their careers. I liked writing the stories, but to tell you the truth, what I liked best was finding out stuff that nobody knew. And then making sure everybody knew it. The pay wasn’t exactly great, but I lived comfortably enough. Wife, one kid, a modest house out on Long Island. What was not to like?

  Well, eventually there was Stanford G. Bernys, the eminently horrid media mogul. He jetted into town one day from the West Coast on his private airplane, with his private mistress—the one half his age with the big fake eyelashes. You’ve seen her picture. She wears thigh-high boots and looks like she has a rawhide whip in her Gucci purse.

  Stanford G. Bernys wrote a check for ninety million bucks to the ailing publisher of my paper for the whole shebang as casually as you might write a check for the phone bill. Trust me, Old Lady Schreyer was glad to be rid of the thing. She operated it at a loss of roughly two million bucks a year, and she was thinking of closing it down anyway. But at least she loved news that was news. Bernys only loves news that sells papers, no matter how rancid the content. He once put a picture of a bloodstained corpse on the front page, under a headline that said, STOOL PIGEON STOPS COOING. On the inside right-hand page, under a standing headline, TODAY’S BOOTY BEAUTY, there’s always a picture of a hot babe with too much flesh showing. Yeah, the headline writers are having fun. But it’s not really a newspaper anymore. A lot of the time, when they can’t find stories that sink to the level of their subprime concept of journalism, they make stuff up.

  I tried to put up with it for a while, but one day the booze-and-pill head that Bernys installed as editor called me up to his desk. His name, by the way, was Calvin Coalpister. Believe it or not.

  “Hovanec,” he sneered, without any preliminary pleasantries, “your work is shit.”

  I didn’t know where he was going with this insult, and I wasn’t interested in finding out. I must have raised my voice. Can you blame me?

  “Hey, you can’t talk like that to me,” I said. “I’m a Pulitzer Prize nominee.”

  He stood up, stuck his face so close mine that I could smell the scotch on his breath, and stared at me with what I can only describe as an evil eye. “Fuck you and the Pulitzer you never got,” he said.

  So I decked him. It was spontaneous, but I freely admit I did it. It was as if my soul had left my body, floated up to the ceiling, and was watching me destroy my own career with one deliberately assaultive punch. It wasn’t a graceful punch either, certainly not a boxer’s punch. My arm straightened and went back, as if it held a tennis racket. Then suddenly my hand turned itself into a fist, my arm rotated forward, and my fist landed on the side of Coalpister’s nose. There was a loud crack and he fell down. When I looked at him lying on the floor, there was blood all over his face and his nose looked like a beet that had been squished by a backhoe.

  Goodbye newspaper career.

  For a while I worked for a bunch of PR agencies and press agents, writing press releases and something they called “pitch letters,” that try to sell editors on assigning stories about the PR clients. I didn’t really hate it, but I didn’t feel like there was a reason to bounce out of bed every morning, either. Once you get used to screwing crooks, con men, and connivers, it’s hard to get off by giving the business equivalent of blow jobs to publicity seekers.

  Then I realized that I never got into the journalism business to write in the first place. I got into the business for the sheer joy of finding stuff out. So I thought a bit about who else does that.

  Well, university graduate students and professors, I guess, find stuff out. I’m talking about stuff like, is there a doubleentendre in an Old English line of a poem about Beowulf? Or how many molecules of nucleic acid are in a cell that . . . oh, never mind. That’s not for me.

  G-men and cops also find stuff out. And they find out stuff about bad guys. Unfortunately, at the age of fifty-three I was a little long in the tooth to take the patrolman’s exam.

  There was once another possibility. In the old days I could have picked a subject to find stuff out about and then write a book about it. But the book business sucks these days. The publishers mostly aren’t taking on new authors, half the planet is self-publishing, and I suspect that nobody except a handful of best-selling authors is making a plugged nickel.

  So I did the one thing I could do. I became a private eye. Well, not really. If you think I’m going to take courses and take a licensing exam, you’ve got another think coming.

  Instead, my business card says, “Sensitive Topic Information Researcher.” Don’t wrinkle your brow. I don’t really know what it means either. But if somebody comes up to Success Deluxe Workplaces and asks me, “Can you find out whether my spouse is screwing around on the side? And can you get me pictures for my divorce lawyer?” the answer is yes, because I do sensitive topic information research, and sleazy affairs in motels are sensitive topics.

  That more or less explains how I came to be sitting across the conference table from a woman named Carmelina Pezzetini, trying to make sure we got through the meeting as quickly as possible. (“You hoff conference room for only one hoff hour, until 2 p.m.,” said Krystyna. “Next hour, conference room reserved for different meetink.”)

  “I want a divorce,” Mrs. Pezzetini told me after she sat down and I closed the conference room door. She looked to be an attractive forty-something—big brown eyes, full lips that I suspected were made that way by Botox, a dress that was a trifle too tight, and huge black leather shoulder bag with brass studs on it.

  “Divorce? That’s not my department,” I told Mrs. Pezzetini. “There are a couple of lawyers down the hall who handle that kind of stuff. Perhaps I should introduce you to Mr. Shmerz.”


  “I already know Marvin Shmerz,” Mrs. Pezzetini said. “He’s the one who gave me your name and pointed out your cubicle.”

  “Oh, I see. So you want proof that your husband is playing around. With gorgeous confirming color photographs, I assume.”

  She reached into her purse—I feared for a cigarette. Smoking isn’t permitted on the premises of Success Deluxe Workplaces. When Mr. Grapler, the landlord, catches one of his tenants or their clients smoking, he usually retaliates by trying to raise the rent.

  But I was wrong. Carmelina Pezzetini produced a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. She offered me a stick. I declined. She unwrapped three sticks for herself, stuffed them into her mouth, and began chewing vigorously.

  I waited for her chewing to slow down. It took a while.

  “I already know that shithead is cheating on me,” Mrs. Pezzetini finally said, her anger rising as she spoke. “He’s been cheating since three weeks before we got married. It’s no secret. He was on fucking TV with one of his bimbos, coming out of a Chinese restaurant, last month. I don’t want more evidence. I want him out of my life.”

  “Well, that’s why you need a divorce lawyer, not me,” I said.

  “You don’t understand. I’ve already seen three different divorce lawyers, not counting Shmerz. I pay them their retainer, cash money. They take my case. They file divorce papers against my husband. Then a week or two later they call up and tell me they just remembered they’re too busy to take my case, and they send back the money.”

  “You mean you didn’t have to chase a matrimonial lawyer to get your retainer back?”

  “They find out about the life I’m from. I think my husband or some of his people visited one of the lawyers and threw the furniture around. Anyway, everybody’s scared to take my case. Or to try to keep my money.”

  Then it hit me. Pezzetini . . . Pezzetini.

  “Your husband is he, uh . . .?”

  “Connected? The Mafia? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Well, now that you bring it up.”

  She took a couple of hard chews on her gum before she spoke.

  “Yeah, that’s him. Al. Al Pezzetini. In the write-ups in the press, they usually call him Icepick Al.”

  “So where do I come in with all this?”

  “I want him dead.”

  “Umm, with all due respect, Mrs. Pezzetini, killing people is not my profession. I just do research. And I’m not sure I’d want to find out too much about your husband, even if that was all you wanted. It could be bad for my health.”

  “You look like a pretty healthy-looking guy to me,” she said. “Stop acting like a divorce lawyer. Get a pair of balls!”

  I’ve been around newspaper city editors too long to take most nasty putdowns personally.

  “You don’t have to get all agitated,” I told her. “I can understand your frustration. I’m simply saying, what you seem to be asking for isn’t my area of expertise.”

  “You like money?” she asked. She took her bag off her shoulder and plunged her arm into it up to her elbow. A second later her hand emerged holding a fat wad of hundred dollar bills, fastened together with a thick rubber band.

  “Ten thousand dollars down,” she said, “cash money. No record of the transaction.”

  “Not interested,” I said.

  “When he’s dead, you get another twenty. Here’s my card. Just call when it’s done and I’ll get you the money. It’s all tax free. Nobody files 1099s on hit men. I don’t know your tax bracket, but bare minimum, with no taxes this is worth the the same as . . .”

  “You don’t understand, I don’t do hits. I don’t even want to hear about them.”

  “Money,” she said, “money, money, money, money!”

  “I’m a researcher, not a hit man.”

  “Okay, then do some research for me,” she said.

  For a moment, that sounded like a quick and welcome change of assignment.

  “What kind of research are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Find out what will make my husband dead, and how to get it done. Then let me know how it went.” She rose from her chair and opened the conference room door.

  I started to say, “Hey, you can’t . . .”

  But she was gone. I usually stand waiting for the elevator for a full ten minutes. For her, one of the elevators opened its doors the second she pressed the down button. I could run after her and try to hand back her money in the crowded Garment District streets, but that would attract unwelcome attention and might invite a passerby to make a grab for it. Nah, I decided I’d simply lock the money away and do nothing. Sooner or later, she’d fire me and ask for her money back. And I’d happily return it.

  That, I figured, would take four, or maybe six weeks. But I didn’t have a chance to find out. Two days later, I was sitting in my cubicle, at my computer, researching offshore banking. My client was one of the heirs to his father’s estate. He was convinced that while his father slowly faded into the fog of Alzheimer’s disease, a sibling was raiding the old man’s assets and shipping money to some money-laundering bank, either in Switzerland or the Bahamas. To my surprise, I was discovering all kinds of banks in the United States will be happy to help you cheat—cheat on taxes, cheat your siblings, cheat the company you’re stealing from, or hide drug money—by placing your money offshore. They don’t put it that way. Citibank talks about “investing” abroad, but in quirky places like the Isle of Jersey, which is independent of English banking laws, and Switzerland, which strictly enforces banking privacy. You don’t need a very powerful magnifying glass to read between the lines.

  When my phone rang, Minna the cat twitched. She had decided to take a nap on my desk, draping herself over the phone cord. She took an annoyed swipe at my hand when I tried to pull the cord from under her, then lazily accommodated me by moving eight inches down my desk and going back to sleep atop a stack of papers.

  “Man comink to see you,” said Krystyna’s voice over the phone.

  “Who? What man? When?”

  Before Krystyna could answer, a hand forcefully clapped my left shoulder. I turned. There was a nicely dressed guy, about fifty years old, standing over me. He was wearing a thoroughly conservative dark gray suit, a blue button-down shirt, and a gray-and-blue striped tie that picked up the colors in his shirt and his suit.

  “I wonder if you know who I am?” he asked me pleasantly. His voice was strong, but unremarkable. He could have been any ivy league guy inquiring about the time of day.

  I hung up the phone, and looked at him. He seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place the face. I told him that.

  “Well, let me give you a hint. I hear via the grapevine that my wife went to see you the other day. She keeps trying to hire lawyers to get a divorce from me. My name is Alvin Pezzetini. Some people call me Al.”

  His dress and demeanor may have been perfectly gentlemanly, but the mere mention of his name gave me the creeps.

  “Look, I’m not a lawyer,” I said.

  “I know that. I checked up on you. You’re some kind of private investigator.”

  “I’m actually a researcher,” I said.

  “Really? Is that your cat?” he asked, pointing to Minna.

  “She’s the office cat. Doesn’t belong to anybody, really.”

  “Good,” he said. “In that case you won’t mind a little demonstration.”

  He snatched Minna from my desk, holding her in the air by the scruff of her neck with his left hand. She let out a protesting screech. He reached into the breast pocket of his elegant suit with his right hand and pulled out an object. And yes, it really was an ice pick, about nine inches long, a small plastic cap of some kind covering the point.

  Al Pezzetini took the cap off with his teeth and then shoved the ice pick deep down through Minna’s chest. The point came out of her body somewhere near her anus, followed by a stream of blood. The whole action took maybe three seconds, and mercifully it appeared to be over for Minna in three seconds after th
at.

  Pezzetini shook the handle of the ice pick vigorously. Minna’s bleeding corpse slid off, and onto my computer keyboard. Pezzetini calmly and meaningfully wiped the ice pick dry on the sleeve of my shirt, while I sat in silent horror. Then he put the cap back on the point, and returned the weapon to an inside pocket of his suit.

  “Kindly cease any and all contact with my wife,” he told me. Then he walked out.

  I thought about it for about a minute, sitting almost paralyzed, as if I had no legs to stand on. I was breathing hard, my hands trembling a little. Then my soul left my body again and floated up toward the ceiling. I hadn’t felt this way since the day I decked Calvin Coalpister and broke his nose in the newsroom of Stanford G. Bernys’ tabloid newspaper. Only this time, it wasn’t my fist that seemed to have a life of its own. It was my mind that was running on autopilot. I found the card that Pezzetini’s wife had left me and dialed her telephone number.

  “Mrs. Pezzetini?” I said, “Rich Hovanec here. Tell me about your husband’s daily routine.”

  KELLER THE DOGKILLER

  BY LAWRENCE BLOCK

  KELLER, TRYING NOT TO FEEL foolish, hoisted his flight bag and stepped to the curb. Two cabs darted his way, and he got into the winner, even as the runner-up filled the air with curses. “JFK,” he said, and settled back in his seat.

  “Which airline?”

  He had to think about it. “American.”

  “International or domestic?”