A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  I found a policeman and started to tell him about it, but it was clear he didn’t want to hear it. He explained to me that I would have to go to the stationhouse and file a complaint, and he said it in such a way as to discourage me from bothering. I don’t really blame the cop. With crack dealers on every block and crimes against people and property at an all-time high and climbing, I suppose crimes against animals have to receive low priority.

  But I couldn’t forget about it.

  I had already had my consciousness raised on the subject of animal rights. There was a campaign a few years ago to stop one of the cosmetic companies from testing their products on rabbits. They were blinding thousands of innocent rabbits every year, not with the goal of curing cancer but just because it was the cheapest way to safety-test their mascara and eye liner.

  I would have liked to sit down with the head of that company. “How would you like it?” I would have asked him. “How would you like having chemicals painted on your eyes to make you blind?”

  All I did was sign a petition, like millions of other Americans, and I understand that it worked, that the company has gone out of the business of blinding bunnies. Sometimes, when we all get together, we can make a difference.

  Sometimes we can make a difference all by ourselves.

  Which brings me back to the subject of the horse and his driver. I found myself returning to Central Park South over the next several days and keeping tabs on that fellow. I thought perhaps I had just caught him on a bad day, but it became clear that it was standard procedure for him to use the whip that way. I went up to him and said something finally, and he turned positively red with anger. I thought for a moment he was going to use the whip on me, and I frankly would have liked to see him try it, but he only turned his anger on the poor horse, whipping him more brutally than ever and looking at me as if daring me to do something about it.

  I just walked away.

  That afternoon I went to a shop in Greenwich Village where they sell extremely odd paraphernalia to what I can only suppose are extremely odd people. They have handcuffs and studded wrist bands and all sorts of curious leather goods. Sadie Mae’s Leather Goods, they call themselves. You get the picture.

  I bought a ten-foot whip of plaited bullhide, and I took it back to Central Park South with me. I waited in the shadows until that driver finished for the day, and I followed him home.

  You can kill a man with a whip. Take my word for it.

  * * *

  Well, I have to tell you that I never expected to do anything like that again. I can’t say I felt bad about what I’d done. The brute only got what he deserved. But I didn’t think of myself as the champion of all the abused animals of New York. I was just someone who had seen his duty and had done it. It wasn’t pleasant, flogging a man to death with a bullwhip, but I have to admit there was something almost shamefully exhilarating about it.

  A week later, and just around the corner from my own apartment, I saw a man kicking his dog.

  It was a sweet dog, too, a little beagle as cute as Snoopy. You couldn’t imagine he might have done anything to justify such abuse. Some dogs have a mean streak, but there’s never any real meanness in a hound. And this awful man was hauling off and savaging the animal with vicious kicks.

  Why do something like that? Why have a dog in the first place if you don’t feel kindly toward it? I said something to that effect, and the man told me to mind my own business.

  Well, I tried to put it out of my mind, but it seemed as though I couldn’t go for a walk without running into the fellow, and he always seemed to be walking the little beagle. He didn’t kick him all the time—you’d kill a dog in short order if you did that regularly. But he was always cruel to the animal, yanking hard on the chain, cursing with genuine malice, and making it very clear that he hated it.

  And then I saw him kick it again. Actually it wasn’t the kick that did it for me, it was the way the poor dog cringed when the man drew back his foot. It made it so clear that he was used to this sort of treatment, that he knew what to expect.

  So I went to a shoe store on Broadway in the teens where they have a good line of work shoes, and I bought a pair of steel-toed boots of the kind construction workers wear. I was wearing them the next time I saw my neighbor walking his dog, and I followed him home and rang his bell.

  It would have been quicker and easier, I’m sure, if I’d had some training in karate. But even an untrained kick has a lot of authority to it when you’re wearing steel-toed footwear. A couple of kicks in his legs and he fell down and couldn’t get up, and a couple of kicks in the ribs took the fight out of him, and a couple of kicks in the head made it absolutely certain he would never harm another of God’s helpless creatures.

  It’s cruelty that bothers me, cruelty and wanton indifference to another creature’s pain. Some people are thoughtless, but when the inhumanity of their actions is pointed out to them they’re able to understand and are willing to change.

  For example, a young woman in my building had a mixed-breed dog that barked all day in her absence. She didn’t know this because the dog never started barking until she’d left for work. When I explained that the poor fellow couldn’t bear to be alone, that it made him horribly anxious, she went to the animal shelter and adopted the cutest little part-Sheltie to keep him company. You never hear a peep out of either of those dogs now, and it does me good to see them on the street when she walks them, both of them obviously happy and well cared for.

  And another time I met a man carrying a litter of newborn kittens in a sack. He was on his way to the river and intended to drown them, not out of cruelty but because he thought it was the most humane way to dispose of kittens he could not provide a home for. I explained to him that it was cruel to the mother cat to take her kittens away before she’d weaned them, and that when the time came he could simply take the unwanted kittens to the animal shelter; if they failed to find homes for them, at least their deaths would be easy and painless. More to the point, I told him where he could get his mother cat spayed inexpensively, so that he would not have to deal with this sad business again.

  He was grateful. You see, he wasn’t a cruel man, not by any means. He just didn’t know any better.

  Other people just don’t want to learn.

  Just yesterday, for example, I was in the hardware store over on Second Avenue. A well-dressed young woman was selecting rolls of flypaper and those awful Roach Motel devices.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but are you certain you want to purchase those items? They aren’t even very efficient, and you wind up spending a lot of money to kill very few insects.”

  She was looking at me oddly, the way you look at a crank, and I should have known I was just wasting my breath. But something made me go on.

  “With the Roach Motels,” I said, “they don’t really kill the creatures at all, you know. They just immobilize them. Their feet are stuck, and they stand in place wiggling their antennae until I suppose they starve to death. I mean, how would you like it?”

  “You’re kidding,” she said. “Right?”

  “I’m just pointing out that the product you’ve selected is neither efficient nor humane,” I said.

  “So?” she said. “I mean, they’re cockroaches. If they don’t like it let them stay the hell out of my apartment.” She shook her head, impatient. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. My place is swarming with roaches and I run into a nut who’s worried about hurting their feelings.”

  I wasn’t worried about any such thing. And I didn’t care if she killed roaches. I understand the necessity of that sort of thing. I just don’t see the need for cruelty. But I knew better than to say anything more to her. It’s useful to talk to some people. With others, it’s like trying to blow out a lightbulb.

  So I picked up a half-dozen tubes of Super Glue and followed her home.

  SARA PARETSKY

  Sara Paretsky (1947– ) is regularly reviewed in places where other myste
ry writers are never mentioned. Her novels, dealing as they do with the lives of contemporary women, have found an audience outside genre. She appeals to people who rarely if ever read mystery stories. And she appeals to that generation known as boomers, who has learned the hard way that despite some major advances for women, there is still a substantial way to go before we reach anything like parity between the sexes. But where they’re climbing and clawing their way to the top, detective V. I. Warshawski will be there right beside them.

  Here is Paretsky at the top of her game, much as she is in her latest novel, Total Recall.

  Grace Notes

  I

  GABRIELLA SESTIERI OF PITIGLIANO. Anyone with knowledge of her whereabouts should contact the office of Malcolm Ranier.

  I was reading the Herald-Star at breakfast when the notice jumped out at me from the personal section. I put my coffee down with extreme care, as if I were in a dream and all my actions moved with the slowness of dream time. I shut the paper with the same slow motion, then opened it again. The notice was still there. I spelled out the headline letter by letter, in case my unconscious mind had substituted one name for another, but the text remained the same. There could not be more than one Gabriella Sestieri from Pitigliano. My mother, who died of cancer in 1968 at the age of forty-six.

  “Who could want her all these years later?” I said aloud.

  Peppy, the golden retriever I share with my downstairs neighbor, raised a sympathetic eyebrow. We had just come back from a run on a dreary November morning and she was waiting hopefully for toast.

  “It can’t be her father.” His mind had cracked after six months in a German concentration camp, and he refused to acknowledge Gabriella’s death when my father wrote to inform him of it. I’d had to translate the letter, in which he said he was too old to travel but wished Gabriella well on her concert tour. Anyway, if he was alive still he’d be almost a hundred.

  Maybe Gabriella’s brother Italo was searching for her: he had disappeared in the maelstrom of the war, but Gabriella always hoped he survived. Or her first voice teacher, Francesca Salvini, whom Gabriella longed to see again, to explain why she had never fulfilled Salvini’s hopes for her professional career. As Gabriella lay in her final bed in Jackson Park Hospital with tubes ringing her wasted body, her last messages had been for me and for Salvini. This morning it dawned on me for the first time how hurtful my father must have found that. He adored my mother, but for him she had only the quiet fondness of an old friend.

  I realized my hands around the newspaper were wet with sweat, that paper and print were clinging to my palms. With an embarrassed laugh I put the paper down and washed off the ink under the kitchen tap. It was ludicrous to spin my mind with conjectures when all I had to do was phone Malcolm Ranier. I went to the living room and pawed through the papers on the piano for the phone book. Ranier seemed to be a lawyer with offices on La Salle Street, at the north end where the pricey new buildings stand.

  His was apparently a solo practice. The woman who answered the phone assured me she was Mr. Ranier’s assistant and conversant with all his files. Mr. Ranier couldn’t speak with me himself now, because he was in conference. Or court. Or the john.

  “I’m calling about the notice in this morning’s paper, wanting to know the whereabouts of Gabriella Sestieri.”

  “What is your name, please, and your relationship with Mrs. Sestieri?” The assistant left out the second syllable so that the name came out as “Sistery.”

  “I’ll be glad to tell you that if you tell me why you’re trying to find her.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t give out confidential client business over the phone. But if you tell me your name and what you know about Mrs. Sestieri we’ll get back to you when we’ve discussed the matter with our client.”

  I thought we could keep this conversation going all day. “The person you’re looking for may not be the same one I know, and I don’t want to violate a family’s privacy. But I’ll be in a meeting on La Salle Street this morning; I can stop by to discuss the matter with Mr. Ranier.”

  The woman finally decided that Mr. Ranier had ten minutes free at twelve-thirty. I gave her my name and hung up. Sitting at the piano, I crashed out chords, as if the sound could bury the wildness of my feelings. I never could remember whether I knew how ill my mother was the last six months of her life. Had she told me and I couldn’t—or didn’t wish to—comprehend it? Or had she decided to shelter me from the knowledge? Gabriella usually made me face bad news, but perhaps not the worst of all possible news, our final separation.

  Why did I never work on my singing? It was one thing I could have done for her. I didn’t have a Voice, as Gabriella put it, but I had a serviceable contralto, and of course she insisted I acquire some musicianship. I stood up and began working on a few vocal stretches, then suddenly became wild with the desire to find my mother’s music, the old exercise books she had me learn from.

  I burrowed through the hall closet for the trunk that held her books. I finally found it in the farthest corner, under a carton holding my old case files, a baseball bat, a box of clothes I no longer wore but couldn’t bring myself to give away. . . . I sat on the closet floor in misery, with a sense of having buried her so deep I couldn’t find her.

  Peppy’s whimpering pulled me back to the present. She had followed me into the closet and was pushing her nose into my arm. I fondled her ears.

  At length it occurred to me that if someone was trying to find my mother I’d need documents to prove the relationship. I got up from the floor and pulled the trunk into the hall. On top lay her black silk concert gown: I’d forgotten wrapping that in tissue and storing it. In the end I found my parents’ marriage license and Gabriella’s death certificate tucked into the score of Don Giovanni.

  When I returned the score to the trunk another old envelope floated out. I picked it up and recognized Mr. Fortieri’s spiky writing. Carlo Fortieri repaired musical instruments and sold, or at least used to sell music. He was the person Gabriella went to for Italian conversation, musical conversation, advice. He still sometimes tuned my own piano out of affection for her.

  When Gabriella met him, he’d been a widower for years, also with one child, also a girl. Gabriella thought I ought to play with her while she sang or discussed music with Mr. Fortieri, but Barbara was ten years or so my senior and we’d never had much to say to each other.

  I pulled out the yellowed paper. It was written in Italian, and hard for me to decipher, but apparently dated from 1965.

  Addressing her as “Cara signora Warshawski,” Mr. Fortieri sent his regrets that she was forced to cancel her May 14 concert. “I shall, of course, respect your wishes and not reveal the nature of your indisposition to anyone else. And, cara signora, you should know by now that I regard any confidence of yours as a sacred trust: you need not fear an indiscretion.” It was signed with his full name.

  I wondered now if he’d been my mother’s lover. My stomach tightened, as it does when you think of your parents stepping outside their prescribed roles, and I folded the paper back into the envelope. Fifteen years ago the same notion must have prompted me to put his letter inside Don Giovanni. For want of a better idea I stuck it back in the score and returned everything to the trunk. I needed to rummage through a different carton to find my own birth certificate, and it was getting too late in the morning for me to indulge in nostalgia.

  II

  Malcolm Ranier’s office overlooked the Chicago River and all the new glass and marble flanking it. It was a spectacular view—if you squinted to shut out the burnt-out waste of Chicago’s west side that lay beyond. I arrived just at twelve-thirty, dressed in my one good suit, black, with a white crepe-de-chine blouse. I looked feminine, but austere—or at least that was my intention.

  Ranier’s assistant-cum-receptionist was buried in Danielle Steel. When I handed her my card, she marked her page without haste and took the card into an inner office. After a ten-minute wait to let me understand hi
s importance, Ranier came out to greet me in person. He was a soft round man of about sixty, with gray eyes that lay like pebbles above an apparently jovial smile.

  “Ms. Warshawski. Good of you to stop by. I understand you can help us with our inquiry into Mrs. Sestieri.” He gave my mother’s name a genuine Italian lilt, but his voice was as hard as his eyes.

  “Hold my calls, Cindy.” He put a hand on the nape of my neck to steer me into his office.

  Before we’d shut the door Cindy was reabsorbed into Danielle. I moved away from the hand—I didn’t want grease on my five-hundred-dollar jacket—and went to admire a bronze nymph on a shelf at the window.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it.” Ranier might have been commenting on the weather. “One of my clients brought it from France.”

  “It looks as though it should be in a museum.”

  A call to the bar association before I left my apartment told me he was an import-export lawyer. Various imports seemed to have attached themselves to him on their way into the country. The room was dominated by a slab of rose marble, presumably a work table, but several antique chairs were also worth a second glance. A marquetry credenza stood against the far wall. The Modigliani above it was probably an original.

  “Coffee, Ms.”—he glanced at my card again—“Warshawski?”

  “No, thank you. I understand you’re very busy, and so am I. So let’s talk about Gabriella Sestieri.”

  “D’accordo.” He motioned me to one of the spindly antiques near the marble slab. “You know where she is?”