by Brad Latham
There wasn’t much of a splash as the car hit the river. Just a soft ker-chunk!, and nothing more. Lockwood sank back against the leather seat, and then mechanically opened the car door and wearily moved to the large, weather-beaten wooden beam at the end of the block. Thirty feet away, the De Soto’s black underside showed briefly, then settled into the oily muck that was the Hudson. Lockwood continued to stand there, numbly watching the trail of air bubbles as they broke to the surface. Finally, after a minute or two, when there were no more bubbles, Lockwood slowly turned and walked away.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Hook Lockwood didn’t like fences. In fact he hated them. To a man. No exceptions. None. It was probably the part of the job he hated most, after the cold bodies of the good and the innocent. But it was part of the job, and so he was doing it. He’d been to Stymie the Fence, to Joe Alley, to Reilly the Grub, to Fats Tricadiccio, to half a dozen others, and now he was about to enter the grime-ridden hovel that Leanie Krepsman called his shop. He was no 100 percent bona fide expert on jewelry. Although he knew his stuff in a basic sort of way, he could be fooled. So he’d unobtrusively pocketed one of Maria Nuzzo’s necklaces while visiting her bereaved husband. Each of them, Stymie, Alley, Reilly and Fats as well as the rest, had affirmed his judgment. It was the real stuff. But none of them had the five thousand dollar pearl necklace. Not that it mattered that they said they didn’t have it: their words meant nothing. It was their eyes that Lockwood listened to when they spoke. They were all weasels afraid of their shadows, and there was no way their eyes could conceal a thing, once fear entered their souls. And The Hook always insured that event taking place. He hated the fences, loathed them, but after all these years of dealing with them, he had to admit, something had formed between him and them, some kind of bond. A bond of repulsion, perhaps, a bond of disdain, of disgust, but anyway, a bond. It sickened him to think that anything, anything at all could tie him to them. But there it was. He briefly rubbed one hand against the other as if trying to clean them, and then pressed down the latch of Leanie Krepsman’s front door.
It was all murk at first. Leanie didn’t believe in electricity—not if he had to pay for it. His shop was open from sunup to sundown, winter, spring, summer, fall. He cursed the short days of winter, railed against the money he lost because of them, but refused to turn on the lights. It was his obsession, and he would do nothing about it. Could do nothing about it. They were all misers, nuzzling coins, pressing them against their flesh, eyes closed in an ecstasy of greed and fear, but of all of them, Leanie was the most avaricious. If puke had value he’d scrape it off the street and sell it, piling it thick on his tongue if that was the only way people would buy it.
“Can’t see me, eh? Leanie sees like a cat.” The voice was high-pitched, almost a cackle.
“Hello, Krepsman.”
“Good to see you again, Mr. Lockwood, good to see you again. I hope I can interest you in something. A player piano perhaps, an art curio, maybe some only slightly worn underwear? A good washing, and it would be as…”
“Leanie,” The Hook cut him off, “I am here to buy. But not any of that.”
His eyes now accustomed to the dimness, Lockwood could see Leanie go tense, his face registering a mixture of anticipation and craven fear.
“Good. Good. I’m always happy to be of service to you. Discounts—Leanie gives discounts. To you. Just to you. You can’t go wrong with Leanie.”
Lockwood ignored him. He was tired and frustrated and hot. At least the other shops had had fans, electric fans. “Someday I’m going to come in here, and plug in every electric appliance I can find.”
“No!” Leanie’s voice was quick with alarm, and then he tried to recover, flustered. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I forget what a sense of humor you have. That is a good one, a nice trick on Leanie.”
“I’m not joking, Leanie. Remember that!” The Hook pulled out the necklace. “Check this over.”
The necklace was out of Lockwood’s hand and the loupe in Leanie’s eye in the time it took the detective to blink. “Hmm, nice, very nice,” Leanie enthused, hissing out the sibillants.
“I’m not selling this. What’s it worth?”
Leanie’s face contorted for a moment in cunning, and then fell, as he realized who he was dealing with. You didn’t trifle with Lockwood. “Twenty-five hundred. Could be even three thousand.”
“That’s in the ballpark,” Lockwood said, and, with the opening gambit over, he pressed on. “It used to belong to a lady. A dead lady. It wasn’t all she owned.”
Leanie began to breathe heavily, terror upon him, but hell, The Hook thought, that means nothing. Half of the others he’d seen today had already done the same thing. Damned sniveling fences.
“A lady was killed for her pearl necklace two days ago. My company insured it, and doesn’t want to have to pay for it. I’ll buy it back. At a discount.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The Hook relaxed. Krepsman did know what he was talking about. It was written all over him, pupils dilating with each lying word.
“Right now it’s just you and me, Leanie,” he told the scarecrow-like figure. “But it could be you and me and Jimbo Brannigan.”
Every muscle in Leanie’s face seemed to plummet an inch. Jimbo Brannigan was a detective lieutenant with the midtown precinct. No. The detective lieutenant with the midtown precinct. A living legend. Brannigan was a hulking figure who thought nothing of holding a thug out the tenth-story window of a building, just to give the man something to think about. Everyone in the underworld knew him and feared him. Mad-dog killers, confronted by Brannigan, instantly became housebroken, ready to “heel” on command. Krepsman had met Brannigan once, The Hook knew, and would never want to see him again.
“Please,” Leanie said, without hope.
“No,” Lockwood answered. And waited.
Time hung in the little shop for a while, broken only by the humming of flies, the ticking of a battered clock, and Leanie’s labored breathing. At last, he spoke. “All right. I may have the necklace.”
“Good. Let’s see it.”
Leanie picked his crooked body up off the broken couch, and shuffled across the dirty wooden floor, the oversize, split slippers he wore slap-slapping as he moved. He reached a glass display case, fumbled for a while beneath it, and then returned.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” he asked.
The Hook took the necklace, glanced at Leanie, then strode to the front door.
“ Pay! You have to pay me for it!” Leanie shrieked.
“Can it. I’m not an owl like you, Leanie. I need light to see,” The Hook told him, checking the details of the necklace as Leanie giggled in relief.
“All right. This seems to be it. If it is, you get paid for it, before noon tomorrow.”
“How much?” Leanie’s eyes glittered excitedly in the gloom that surrounded him.
“One thousand dollars.”
“Too little.” Leanie’s face went tragic.
“Okay. Fifteen hundred. But not a penny more.”
Silence. Then, “All right. You’re cheating Leanie, but all right.” The voice was clotted with greed, and Bill Lockwood knew he’d named the magic figure.
“I’ll see you then, tomorrow? Before noon?”
“You’ll see someone from my office. But I’m not leaving. Not just yet,” Lockwood told him.
The frail figure sagged, and reached out for the counter, as if to support itself. “What … else?” it asked, apprehensively.
“I want to know who sold this to you.”
“Oh—oh no, no, no!”
Lockwood stared at the shaking form. “Now.”
“I can’t do that! You know I can’t do that! If it gets out on the street that Leanie betrays confidences, then I’m dead! Dead!”
Lockwood knew it to be true. It had been worth a try, but, “All right, Leanie. I’ll settle for less. Tell me what day you got thi
s. And what time.”
“How much?” Leanie asked, hopeful.
“Nothing.”
“No.”
Lockwood shrugged. He knew these people. Never would they give up something for nothing. They’d rather die first. As long as it wasn’t at the hands of Jimbo Brannigan. “All right,” he offered. “Fifty.”
“Fifty?”
“Right.”
“I don’t know…”
“Fifty-five.”
“Fifty-five?”
“Sixty.”
“All right.”
Lockwood smiled grimly. All right with him, too. He’d been prepared to go to three hundred. “Well?”
“The person—”
“He or she?”
“The person,” Leanie said firmly, “came in yesterday.”
“What time?”
“Around noon.”
“What time?”
“12:47.”
The Hook smiled again. He knew Leanie, knew all his compulsions, including his habit of noting exactly when anyone entered his shop, and departed from it. The Hook looked at his watch: 3:30. Leanie’s mind was about to click off 3:30. The detective spun on his heel and left, dispensing with goodbyes, too anxious to get out of the corruption that hung silently over every inch of the room. “Before noon tomorrow! Remember!” came at him from behind, as he exited.
The insistent July sun beat down hard on him as he closed the door behind him, but he welcomed it, after the fetid atmosphere he’d just escaped. Now came the hard part, checking everyone he could find in the neighborhood, in the hope that one of them could describe the “person” who had entered Leanie Krepsman’s shop at 12:47 yesterday.
There was a kid playing a door away, and he began with him, but the boy gave him nothing, just stared up at him with big brown eyes, and shook his head. Could be the kid knew something, but no way he could ever get him to admit it. This was Tenth Avenue, the West Side, Hell’s Kitchen, and although that was an advantage, because it was a close-knit community where everyone knew everyone and strangers stood out, it was also a community that tended to keep its mouth shut and stick strictly to its own business.
A passing laborer claimed to know nothing, the same for a shabbily-dressed woman, probably back from yet another unsuccessful attempt at job-hunting. Some said, in this year of 1938, that the Depression was over, but The Hook knew too many people who, told that, would stare at you in disbelief, hollow-eyed, gray-faced, awkward and stiff in their attempts not to appear poor.
Krupp the keymaker, who Lockwood used from time to time when certain locks called for certain measures, greeted him as warmly as his Germanic upbringing would allow, but he could contribute nothing. He had no time for staring out his window. There was too much to do, too many things to straighten out, to clean, to keep operating at top efficiency.
Lockwood stopped off at Levy’s candy store for an egg cream, drinking it down quickly, the way it had to be done if you were to get full satisfaction. Levy and his wife tried to be helpful, but they’d noticed nothing either. Lockwood was about to give it up for the day, and come back tomorrow nearer the noon hour, perhaps catching someone whose schedule would regularly bring him past Krepsman’s at that time, when he spotted the old lady across the avenue.
She was leaning out a second-floor window, arms cushioned by a pillow, watching all the street activity, the prime entertainment for a lot of the old immigrants. Lockwood knew the old were the easiest to get things out of, because at their age, how much did they really have to fear? He crossed Tenth, waiting for a horse-drawn ice wagon to pass, then stepped onto the walk beneath the window.
“Good morning. Lovely day, isn’t it?” he yelled up at her. With the old, you started off slowly, with great patience.
“Good morning, good morning, ach, nice it vould be if it didn’t gif so much heat.” The accent seemed to be Slavic, maybe Czech. “You think it’s hot out there, you should be in this house, the ice is melting in the box, three times this morning I had to dump the pan.”
She’d talk, all right, Lockwood told himself, if she had anything to talk about. Probably alone all day in the tenement, and the nights presumably weren’t much better. In all likelihood a stolid Czech husband, bone-weary from too much work and too little pay, savoring a beer and a cigar. Probably do nothing more than nod the few times he did respond. She’d talk, if she could. She needed to talk to someone. Anyone. “In the window, at least you get a little breeze,” he told her.
“Breeze. Yah. And flies, too. I tell Marek to keep the streets clean,” she was referring to the butcher shop below her, “but you think he listens? Pigs. Some people are pigs. Hello Mrs. Laventhal,” she waved to an old woman trudging down the street who paused, lifted an arm to wave, then continued on, never changing expression. “Ha. That one. Too good for people, she thinks she is. There’s people like that in this world. Too many, if you’re asking me.”
A fruit truck rumbled by, and the detective waited till it passed. “I’m looking for someone,” he called up to her.
“Me, too. My grandson Mikey—two hours ago I sent him to the store. Children should listen. In the old country they listened, believe me. But here!”
“Kids.” He waited for her to nod, then shouted again, before she could resume speaking. “I’m looking for someone. Someone who was here yesterday.”
“Yah? He lives here?”
“I don’t think this person’s from this neighborhood. A stranger.”
“A stranger,” she nodded. “More and more, you see strangers. It’s not like it was.”
“This was yesterday. Around 12:30. 12:47.”
The old woman chortled merrily. “12:47. You timed him with, what you call it, a stopwatch?”
“No. Someone told me. The man whose store he was in. Leanie Krepsman.”
“Ohhhh? Mr. Krepsman?” The woman’s mouth turned down. Leanie was obviously not to her liking.
“Yes. The man visited him. Yesterday. About 12:47 in the afternoon. I was wondering if you noticed him.”
“One man. You expect me to notice him?”
“Like I say, I don’t think he was from the neighborhood. He might have stood out, looked a little different, so you might have remembered him. What he looked like, his car, if he had one.”
Cars weren’t usual in Hell’s Kitchen. Not many there Could afford one. “12:47. Let me see. Yesterday I had my lunch at eleven o’clock.” She laughed, a little shamefaced. “Someone like me,” she said, indicating her breadth, “they like to eat, they don’t wait for lunchtime to have lunch.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You. You’re too skinny to know. Let’s see. Then I washed dishes, made coffee. Swept the floor. It wasn’t so hot yesterday. I think for a while I sat in the kitchen, I found a piece of cardboard, it made a good fan.”
Lockwood waited patiently.
“The New Yorske Listy,” she referred to a weekly local paper, printed in Czech, Lockwood knew. “I already had read it, so I must have come sat here. Yah. I remember. I did. I remember I heard the ferry, so it must have been about 12 o’clock.”
“Okay. So you sat there forty-five minutes or so, and then someone went into Krepsman’s. Do you remember?”
“Sure. Not many go in there. That man, he doesn’t have good business. I don’t know how he lives. Though I have my, what you call them, suspicions, yah?”
“You do remember?” He was trying to hold his impatience in check.
“Yah. Such a flashy car, that fellow had. Silver. Big white wheel on the back. You know, some kind white cloth on the what you call it.”
“Spare tire?”
“Yah. So.”
“Did you see what he looked like?”
“Why not?”
Lockwood gritted his teeth. “So what do you remember?”
“Nice clothes. Very nice. Sharp,” she said, pleased with the Americanism.
“Anything else?”
Big man. Strong. Nice
hair. Not bald. Blond.”
The detective had a suspicion.
“Could you see his eyes?”
“Funny. Funny eyes. You know, not like, what you call it, normal eyes.”
“How? How were they funny?”
“Funny? How funny? Well, you almost couldn’t tell what way he was looking.”
“One eye going this way, the other that?” Lockwood shouted, a finger on one hand pointing in one direction, a finger on the other pointing in another, the two digits indicating a forty-five degree angle.
“Yah.” She laughed. “Like dot. I vas thinking he vas looking at me, but all at the same time I’m thinking he’s looking everyplace else, too.”
“Wall-Eye Borowy,” The Hook murmured to himself.
“Vot?”
“Nothing.” He waved to her. “That was the friend I was looking for. Thank you.”
“It’s nothing,” she called down to him. “You like to come up, maybe? I could give you some coffee and buchty,” she said, referring to a Slavic pastry.
“No thanks. I’ve got to go. Thanks again,” and he waved and walked away. Wall-Eye Borowy. Easy. Gray had said it would be easy. Christ.
CHAPTER
FIVE