A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “What kind of papers?”

  “Don’t want to go to the hospital.” His teeth were in terrible condition. I tried not to smell his breath. “Like I want yelling from the nurses, too.”

  “What do they yell at you about?”

  “Cost them money, I’m costing everybody money. Yeah, well, maybe they should have thought of that before they put my-Johnny-self in the helicopter. Maybe they should have left me with the rest of the platoon.”

  He lurched away from me. I could see that one leg was shorter than the other.

  I went back to my car. I was driving past a nearby sandwich shop when I saw ambulance 4–12 parked there. I pulled into the space behind it.

  I went into the shop. The medics were sitting at a small table, looking bored. They were hard to miss in their cop-blue uniforms and utility belts hung with flashlights, scissors, tape, stethoscopes.

  I walked up to them. “Hi,” I said. “Do you mind if I talk to you for a minute?”

  The younger one looked through me; no one’s ever accused me of being pretty.

  The older one said, “What about?”

  “I’m representing a suspect in the . . .” I hated to call it what the papers were now calling it, but it was the best shorthand. “The Perrier murders. Of homeless men.”

  That got the younger man’s attention. “We knew those guys,” he said.

  “My client didn’t do it. But he could get arrested. Do you mind helping me out? Telling me a little about them?”

  They glanced at each other. The younger man shrugged.

  “We saw them all the time. Every time someone spotted them passed out and phone in a ‘man down’ call, we’d code-three it out to the park or the tracks or wherever.”

  The older paramedic gestured for me to sit. “Hard times out there. We’ve got a lot more regulars than we used to.”

  I sat down. The men, I noticed, were lingering over coffee. “I just saw you in the park.”

  “Lucky for everybody, my-Johnny-self was sober enough to AMA.” The younger man looked irritated. “ ‘Against medical advice.’ We get these calls all the time. Here we are a city’s got gang wars going on, knifings, drive-bys, especially late at night; and we’re diddling around with passed-out drunks who want to be left alone anyway.”

  The older man observed, “Ben’s new, still a hot dog, wants every call to be the real deal.”

  “Yeah, well, what a waste of effort, Dirk,” the younger man, Ben, shot back. “We get what? Two, three, four man-down calls a day. We have to respond to every one. It could be some poor diabetic, right, or a guy’s had a heart attack. But you get out there, and it’s some alcoholic. If he’s too out of it to tell us he’s just drunk, we have to transport and work him up. Which he doesn’t want—he wakes up pissed off at having to hoof it back to the park. Or worse, with the new ordinance, he gets arrested.”

  “Ridiculous ordinance,” the older medic interjected.

  “And it’s what, maybe five or six hundred dollars the company’s out of pocket?” his partner continued. “Not to mention that everybody’s time gets totally wasted and maybe somebody with a real emergency’s out there waiting for us. Your grandmother could be dying of a heart attack while we play taxi. It’s bullshit.”

  “It’s all in a night’s work, Ben,” Dirk looked at me. “You start this job, you want every call to be for real. But you do it a few years, you get to know your regulars. Clusters of them near the liquor stores—you could draw concentric circles around each store and chart the man-down calls, truly. But what are you going to do? Somebody sees a man lying in the street or in the park, they’ve got to call, right? And if the poor bastard’s too drunk to tell us he’s fine, we can’t just leave him. It’s our license if we’re wrong.”

  “They should change the protocols,” Ben insisted. “If we know who they are, if we’ve run them in three, four, even ten times, we should be able to leave them to sleep it off.”

  Dirk said, “You’d get lawsuits.”

  “So these guys either stiff the company or welfare picks up the tab, meaning you and me pay the five hundred bucks. It offends logic.”

  “So you knew the men who froze.” I tried to get back on track. “Did you pick them up when they died?”

  “I went on one of the calls,” Ben said defensively. “Worked him up.”

  “Sometimes with hypothermia,” Dirk added, “body functions slow down so you can’t really tell if they’re dead till they warm up. So we’ll spend, oh God, an hour or more doing CPR. Till they’re warm and dead.”

  “While people wait for an ambulance somewhere else,” Ben repeated.

  “You’ll mellow out,” Dirk promised. “For one thing, you see them year in, year out, you stop being such a hard-ass. Another thing, you get older, you feel more sympathy for how hard the streets got to be on the poor bones.”

  Ben’s beeper went off. He immediately lifted it out of his utility belt, pressing a button and filling the air with static. A voice cut through: “Unit four-twelve, we have a possible shooting at Kins and Booten streets.”

  The paramedics jumped up, saying “ ’Bye” and “Gotta go,” as they strode past me and out the door. Ben, I noticed, was smiling.

  My next stop was just a few blocks away. It was a rundown stucco building that had recently been a garage, a factory, a cult church, a rehab center, a magic shop. Now it was one of the few homeless shelters in town. I thought the workers there might have known some of the dead men.

  I was ushered in to see the director, a big woman with a bad complexion. When I handed her my card and told her my business, she looked annoyed.

  “Pardon me, but your client sounds like a real shit.”

  “I don’t know him well enough to judge,” I admitted. “But he denies doing it, and I believe him. And if he didn’t do it, he shouldn’t get blamed. You’d agree with that?”

  “Some days,” she conceded. She motioned me to sit in a scarred chair opposite a folding-table desk. “Other days, tell the truth, I’d round up all the holier-than-thou jerks bitching about the cost of a place like this, and I’d shoot ’em. Christ, they act like we’re running a luxury hotel here. Did you get a look around?”

  I’d seen women and children and a few old men on folding chairs or duck-cloth cots. I hadn’t seen any food.

  “It’s enough to get your goat,” the director continued. “The smugness, the condemnation. And ironically, how many paychecks away from the street do you think most people are? One? Two?”

  “Is that mostly who you see here? People who got laid off?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe half. We get a lot of people who are frankly just too tweaked-out to work. What can you do? You can’t take a screwdriver and fix them. No use blaming them for it.”

  “Did you know any of the men who got killed?”

  She shook her head. “No, no. We don’t take drinkers, we don’t take anybody under the influence. We can’t. Nobody would get any sleep, nobody would feel safe. Alcohol’s a nasty drug, lowers inhibitions—you get too much attitude, too much noise. We can’t deal with it here. We don’t let in anybody we think’s had a drink, and if we find alcohol, we kick the person out. It’s that simple.”

  “What recourse do they have? Drinkers, I mean.”

  “Sleep outside. They want to sleep inside, they have to stay sober; no ifs, ands, or buts.”

  “The camping ban makes that illegal.”

  “Well,” she said tartly, “it’s not illegal to stay sober.”

  “You don’t view it as an addiction?”

  “There’s AA meetings five times a night at three locations.” She ran a hand through her already disheveled hair. “I’m sorry, but it’s a struggle scraping together money to take care of displaced families in this town. Then you’ve got to contend with people thinking you’re running some kind of flophouse for drunks. Nobody’s going to donate money for that.”

  I felt a twinge of pity. No room at the inn for alcoholics, and not m
uch sympathy from paramedics. Now, someone—please God, not my client—was dousing them so they’d freeze to death.

  With the director’s permission, I wandered through the shelter. A young woman lay on a cot with a blanket over her legs. She was reading a paperback.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m a lawyer. I’m working on the case of the homeless men who died in the parks recently. Do you know about it?”

  She sat up. She looked like she could use a shower and a makeover, but she looked more together than most of the folks in there. She wasn’t mumbling to herself, and she didn’t look upset or afraid.

  “Yup—big news here. And major topic on the street.”

  “Did you know any of the men?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’ve heard.” She leaned forward. “It’s a turf war.”

  “A turf war?”

  “Who gets to sleep where, that kind of thing. A lot of crazies on the street, they get paranoid. They gang up on each other. Alumni from the closed-down mental hospitals. You’d be surprised.” She pushed up her sleeve and showed me a scar. “One of them cut me.”

  “Do you know who’s fighting whom?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes glittered. “Us women are killing off the men. They say we’re out on the street for their pleasure, and we say, death to you, bozo.”

  I took a backward step, alarmed by the look on her face.

  She showed me her scar again. “I carve a line for every one I kill.” She pulled a tin St. Christopher medal out from under her shirt. “I used to be a Catholic. But Clint Eastwood is my god now.”

  I pulled into a parking lot with four ambulances parked in a row. A sign on a two-story brick building read “Central Ambulance.” I hoped they’d give me their records regarding the four men.

  I smiled warmly at the front-office secretary. When I explained what I wanted, she handed me a records-request form. “We’ll contact you within five business days regarding the status of your request.”

  If my client got booked, I could subpoena the records. So I might, unfortunately, have them before anyone even read this form.

  As I sat there filling it out, a thin boy in a paramedic uniform strolled in. He wore his medic’s bill cap backward. His utility belt was hung with twice the gadgets of the two men I’d talked to earlier. Something resembling a big rubber band dangled from his back pocket. I supposed it was a tourniquet, but on him it gave the impression of a slingshot.

  He glanced at me curiously. He said, “Howdy, Mary,” to the secretary.

  She didn’t look glad to see him. “What now?”

  “Is Karl in?”

  “No. What’s so important?”

  “I was thinking instead of just using the HEPA filters, if we—”

  “Save it. I’m busy.”

  I shot a sympathetic look. I know how it feels to be bullied by a secretary.

  I handed her my request and walked out behind the spurned paramedic.

  I was surprised to see him climb into a cheap Geo car. He was in uniform. I’d assumed he was working.

  All four men had been discovered in the morning. It had probably taken them most of the night to freeze to death; they’d been picked up by ambulance in the wee hours. Maybe this kid could tell me who’d worked those shifts.

  I tapped at his passenger window. He didn’t hesitate to lean across and open the door. He looked alert and happy, like a curious puppy.

  “Hi,” I said, “I was wondering if you could tell me about your shifts? I was going to ask the secretary, but she’s not very . . . friendly.”

  He nodded as if her unfriendliness were a fact of life, nothing to take personally. “Come on in. What do you want to know?” Then, more suspiciously, “You’re not a lawyer?”

  I climbed in quickly. “Well, yes, but—”

  “Oh, man. You know, we do the very best we can.” He whipped off his cap, rubbing his crewcut in apparent annoyance. “We give a hundred and ten percent.”

  I suddenly placed his concern. “No, no, it’s not about medical malpractice, I swear.”

  He continued scowling at me.

  “I represent a young man who’s been falsely accused of—”

  “You’re not here about malpractice?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Because that’s such a crock.” He flushed. “We work our butts off. Twelve hour shifts, noon to midnight, and a lot of times we get force-manned onto a second shift. If someone calls in sick or has to go out of service because they got bled all over or punched out, someone’s got to hold over. When hell’s a-poppin’ with the gangs, we’ve got guys working forty-eights or even seventy-twos.” He shook his head. “It’s just plain unfair to blame us for everything that goes wrong. Field medicine’s like combat conditions. We don’t have everything all clean and handy like they do at the hospital.”

  “I can imagine. So you work—”

  “And it’s not like we’re doing it for the money! Starting pay’s eight-fifty an hour; it takes years to work up to twelve. Your garbage collector earns more than we do.”

  I was a little off balance. “Your shifts—”

  “Because half our calls, nobody pays the bill—Central Ambulance’s probably the biggest pro bono business in town. So we get stuck at eight-fifty an hour. For risking AIDS, hepatitis, TB.”

  I didn’t want to get pulled into his grievances. “You work twelve-hour shifts? Set shifts?”

  “Rotating. Sometimes you work the day half, sometimes the night half.”

  Rotating—I’d need schedules and rosters. “The guys who work midnight to noon, do they get most of the drunks?”

  He shrugged. “Not necessarily. We’ve got ’em passing out all day long. It’s never too early for an alcoholic to drink.” He looked bitter. “I had one in the family,” he complained. “I should know.”

  “Do you know who picked up the four men who froze to death?”

  His eyes grew steely. “I’m not going to talk about the other guys. You’ll have to ask the company.” He started the car.

  I contemplated trying another question, but he was already shifting into gear. I thanked him and got out. As I closed the door, I noticed a bag in back with a Garry’s Liquors logo. Maybe the medic had something in common with the four dead men.

  But it wasn’t just drinking that got those men into trouble. It was not having a home to pass out in.

  I stood at the spot where police had found the fourth body. It was a small neighborhood park.

  Just after sunrise, an early jogger had phoned 911 from his cell phone. A man had been lying under a hedge. He’d looked dead. He’d looked wet.

  The police had arrived first, then firemen, who’d taken a stab at resuscitating him. Then paramedics had arrived to work him up and transport him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. I knew that much from today’s newspaper.

  I found a squashed area of grass where I supposed the dead man had lain yesterday. I could see pocks and scuffs where workboots had tramped. I snooped around. Hanging from a bush was a rubber tourniquet. A paramedic must have squatted with his back against the shrubbery.

  Flung deeper into the brush was a bottle of whiskey. Had the police missed it? Not considered it evidence? Or had it been discarded since?

  I stared at it, wondering. If victim number four hadn’t already been pass-out drunk, maybe someone helped him along.

  I stopped by Parsifal MiniMart, the liquor store nearest the park. If anyone knew the dead man, it would be the proprietor.

  He nodded. “Yup. I knew every one of those four. What kills me is the papers act like they were nobodies, like that’s what ‘alcoholic’ means.” He was a tall, red-faced man, given to karate-chop gestures. “Well, they were pretty good guys. Not mean, not full of shit, just regular guys. Buddy was a little”—he wiggled his hand—“not right in the head, heard voices and all that, but not violent that I ever saw. Mitch was a good guy. One of those jocks who’s a hero as a kid but then gets hooked on the booze. I’ll tell ya,
I wish I could have made every kid comes in here for beer spend the day with Mitch. Donnie and Bill were . . . how can I put this without sounding like a racist? You know, a lot of older black guys are hooked on something . . . Check out the neighborhood. You’ll see groups of them talking jive and keeping the curbs warm.”

  Something had been troubling me. Perhaps this was the person to ask. “Why didn’t they wake up when the cold water hit them?”

  The proprietor laughed. “Those guys? If I had to guess, I’d say their blood alcohol was one-point-oh even when they weren’t drinking, just naturally from living the life. Get enough Thunderbird in them, and you’re talking practically a coma.” He shook his head. “They were just drunks; I know we’re not talking about killing Mozart here. But the attitude behind what happened—man, it’s cold. Perrier, too. That really tells you something.”

  “I heard there was no chlorine in the water. I don’t think they’ve confirmed a particular brand of water.”

  “I just saw on the news they arrested some kid looks like a fruit, one of those hairstyles.” The proprietor shrugged. “He had a bunch of Perrier. Cases of it from a discount place—I guess he didn’t want to pay full price. Guess it wasn’t even worth a buck a bottle to him to freeze a drunk.”

  Damn, they’d arrested Kyle Kelly. Already.

  “You don’t know anything about a turf war, do you?” It was worth a shot. “Among the homeless?”

  “Sure.” He grinned. “The drunk sharks and the rummy jets.” He whistled the opening notes of West Side Story.

  I got tied up in traffic. It was an hour later by the time I walked into the police station. My client was in an interrogation room by himself. When I walked in, he was crying.

  “I told them I didn’t do it.” He wiped tears as if they were an embarrassing surprise. “But I was getting so tongue-tied. I told them I wanted to wait for you.”

  “I didn’t think they’d arrest you, especially not so fast,” I said. “You did exactly right, asking for me. I just wish I’d gotten here sooner. I wish I’d been in my office when you called.”