Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics (7 page)

“It’s small,” Rebecca said, after entering Harry’s dismal attic room. She immediately turned off the lights and closed the lone window in spite of the thick heat.

“I’ve had a run of bad luck,” Harry shrugged. He watched Rebecca make Sally the cat comfortable by offering her some of the nutritionally correct food they’d purchased in Park Slope. Once the cat started eating, Rebecca looked at Harry. She smiled a little and took off her tank top. Harry stared. She put her finger between her legs and stood there looking at Harry. Harry wondered if Mrs. Desuj was going to mind about the cat. He knew Indian people didn’t think highly of cats. Cows were another story of course.

“How come you have a gun?” Harry asked Rebecca.

“I like to shoot things,” Rebecca said.

This worried Harry a little but they could discuss it later. Rebecca came closer and put her hand down the front of Harry’s trousers. Then she made a purring sound and kissed him. Harry looked at her lovely mischievous face and decided that not only had his luck changed, but he was now the luckiest man alive.

Harry had to do a lot of explaining and even break out the book of penal codes given him by a jailhouse lawyer, but he did finally convince Rebecca to leave the gun at home when they went out on jobs. Rebecca was attached to her gun even though she swore she’d only ever shot cans with it.

Harry and Rebecca worked well together. Rebecca could see in the dark even better than Harry and she was aces at the listening part of safe-cracking. Also, Harry knew that Rebecca was his luck.

It was a very lucrative month for Harry Sparrow and Rebecca Church. By September, they’d rented a nice two-bedroom down the block on the other side of Friel Place. The apartment had a tiny patch of backyard where Rebecca hung wind chimes and Sally the cat sunned herself.

By October, Rebecca got a little crazy. Oftentimes she didn’t want to have sex with Harry because it was noisy. Harry bought her earplugs but she could still hear internal noise. Her sensitivity to light became acute and she wore Ray Charles–style glasses morning, noon, and even night. The world was too bright for her.

Harry Sparrow started feeling low.

December came. Friel Place was festive with holiday lights and plastic Santas. Even the Indian families had gotten fancy with lawn and window ornaments.

Harry and Rebecca started planning holiday-season burglaries. Harry felt it would bring them close again, maybe even temper Rebecca’s hypersensitivities.

Harry and Rebecca staked out a slew of houses in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace. Christmas would be their big day. They had their sights on a lovely brownstone in Windsor Terrace. The occupants were obviously away. Newspapers and mail spilled from the box, and when early snow came, the walk went unshoveled. There was one light showing from the second floor but it was always on. The people were definitely away. Harry knew the place would be alarmed so he went for a brush-up course with Mac the Alarm Guy.

Harry and Rebecca set out in broad daylight on Christmas morning. It was a cold, overcast day and the streets were sleepy. Harry quickly picked the back door open. The alarm whined, threatening to start its full song unless someone disabled it pronto. The sound made Rebecca crouch to the floor and cup her hands over her ears. Harry left her crouching like that as he let his nose lead him to the alarm. He deactivated it in just a few seconds, mentally thanked Mac the Alarm Guy, and went back to find Rebecca. She wasn’t there though. And somewhere upstairs there was music playing. Very soft piano music. Maybe it was French. There hadn’t been music playing a few moments earlier. Had Rebecca gone upstairs and started playing records? She usually didn’t want any music. It was all too brash for her ears. Even some of the soft country ballads and Chopin Nocturnes that Harry liked. But maybe she’d lost it so completely she was playing records on the job.

Suddenly, Harry had to take a leak. This was unusual. Harry had trained himself never to need to evacuate on a job. Some burglars liked that kind of thing. Taking people’s stuff and pissing in their toilets too. Harry found this distasteful but he had to go pretty badly. He found a bathroom. He tried to pee. It wasn’t coming though. He stood there with his johnson dangling. He thought about Rebecca. He thought about her fox face and her gymnast body and how for the first thirty-five days they had had sex at least three times a day and thereafter almost never. Because her ears got so bad. Harry was feeling a mix of frustrations. And he still couldn’t pee. He wanted to call out to Rebecca to explain what the hold up was, but that would mean raising his voice, and Rebecca wouldn’t like that.

Must have been twenty minutes that Harry stood there before giving up on peeing. He was in pain as he went upstairs to look for Rebecca. He had pain from not peeing and pain from Rebecca. But Rebecca Church was his luck and he went to find her.

What Harry saw up there in the high-ceilinged room at the top of the stairs was bewildering. There was trash everywhere. Spent containers of takeout food littered every surface. The furniture beneath the litter was expensive-looking but neglected. There were stains, dust bunnies, and even a pool of vomit. There was one hall light on and it dimly lit the scene. A man was sitting hunched in front of a big black piano, playing very softly. Rebecca was lying under the piano. Harry closed his eyes to put the hallucination away. When he looked again, it was all still there.

Harry wasn’t sure how long he stood there, staring. Rebecca eventually noticed him. She yawned and smiled. When the man stopped playing, she introduced him to Harry. His name, it seemed, was Bernard. His dark hair hung over his eyes. Harry couldn’t see what kind of look Bernard was giving him.

“I’m going to stay, Harry,” Rebecca said, after making introductions.

“What do you mean, stay?”

“Stay here, with Bernard.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Harry heard his voice go up a notch. He sounded hysterical.

Rebecca said that Bernard played music so softly she could listen to it. And that’s all she’d ever wanted. Harry had no idea that’s what she’d wanted or he’d have tried to give it to her. But now it looked like it was too late. In the time it had taken Harry to try to pee in Bernard’s toilet, Rebecca had evidently forged some sort of intimate relationship with the man. She clearly meant it. She was going to stay. Harry didn’t know how long she’d stay or what Bernard thought about any of it, but Rebecca, Harry knew, always got her way. Bernard didn’t look the type to protest anything, especially not Rebecca.

Rebecca was smiling as she told Harry how Bernard had a disease that gave him pain in his fingers. He’d been a concert pianist until the disease came when he turned forty. Now he stayed in his house eating from takeout containers and playing softly.

Bernard looked at Harry blankly as Rebecca reported all this. Harry wanted to bash his skull in.

When Harry showed no sign of leaving, Rebecca produced a gun from an ankle holster hidden below her pants. That got Harry mad. She had sworn she wouldn’t bring the gun. She had broken a promise. Harry believed in keeping promises.

Harry said nothing more to Rebecca. He turned, leaving her and her gun with the dirty piano-playing lunatic.

Harry went home. He figured that was it. Back to the bad luck.

Five days later, Harry ran into McCormick. McCormick had a tip on a horse in the fourth, did Harry want to come to the track? It was cold and the sky was angry and Harry knew he would lose. But he went. Harry wanted to sit out the first race. Maiden three-year-olds going five and a half furlongs. Might as well pick numbers out of a hat, it was that unpredictable.

“Come on, Harry, what’s got into you?” McCormick was egging him on.

Harry rolled his eyes, then looked from his program to the muscled and shining horses in the paddock. He picked out a trifecta. He went crazy. Put a 30-1 over a 6-1 over a 17-1. Miracu-lously, with less than a sixteenth of a mile to go, the three horses in Harry’s trifecta were running in the order he’d bet them. He knew something would go wrong, though, so he looked away. Just walked away from the rail, leaving the crowd to gasp at a dramatic finish.

Harry’s horses had come in. In the right order. The tri paid over ten thousand dollars. Harry had to go to the IRS window and have his picture taken and have his winnings reported to the government. That made him nervous, but the money was nice.

Most important, though, Harry realized his luck was still good. Rebecca Church had given him luck and let him keep it.

Harry Sparrow went home and fed Sally the cat. Rebecca hadn’t even come back for the cat. But that was okay. Harry liked animals.

PART II

C
OPS
& R
OBERS

BY THE DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT

BY
L
AWRENCE BLOCK
Sunset Park
(Originally published in 1984)

All this happened a long time ago.
Abe Beame was living in Gracie Mansion, though even he seemed to have trouble believing he was really the mayor of the city of New York. Ali was in his prime, and the Knicks still had a year or so left in Bradley and DeBusschere. I was still drinking in those days, of course, and at the time it seemed to be doing more for me than it was doing to me.

I had already left my wife and kids, my home in Syosset and the NYPD. I was living in the hotel on West Fifty-seventh Street where I still live, and I was doing most of my drinking around the comer in Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon. Billie was the nighttime bartender. A Filipino youth named Dennis was behind the stick most days.

And Tommy Tillary was one of the regulars.

He was big, probably 6’2”, full in the chest, big in the belly, too. He rarely showed up in a suit but always wore a jacket and tie, usually a navy or burgundy blazer with gray-flannel slacks or white duck pants in warmer weather. He had a loud voice that boomed from his barrel chest and a big, clean-shaven face that was innocent around the pouting mouth and knowing around the eyes. He was somewhere in his late forties and he drank a lot of top-shelf scotch. Chivas, as I remember it, but it could have been Johnnie Black. Whatever it was, his face was beginning to show it, with patches of permanent flush at the cheekbones and a tracery of broken capillaries across the bridge of the nose.

We were saloon friends. We didn’t speak every time we ran into each other, but at the least we always acknowledged each other with a nod or a wave. He told a lot of dialect jokes and told them reasonably well, and I laughed at my share of them. Sometimes I was in a mood to reminisce about my days on the force, and when my stories were funny, his laugh was as loud as anyone’s.

Sometimes he showed up alone, sometimes with male friends. About a third of the time, he was in the company of a short and curvy blonde named Carolyn. “Carolyn from the Caro-line” was the way he occasionally introduced her, and she did have a faint Southern accent that became more pro-nounced as the drink got to her.

Then, one morning, I picked up the
Daily News
and read that burglars had broken into a house on Colonial Road, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. They had stabbed to death the only occupant present, one Margaret Tillary. Her husband, Thomas J. Tillary, a salesman, was not at home at the time.

I hadn’t known Tommy was a salesman or that he’d had a wife. He did wear a wide yellow-gold band on the appropriate finger, and it was clear that he wasn’t married to Carolyn from the Caroline, and it now looked as though he was a widower. I felt vaguely sorry for him, vaguely sorry for the wife I’d never even known of, but that was the extent of it. I drank enough back then to avoid feeling any emotion very strongly.

And then, two or three nights later, I walked into Armstrong’s and there was Carolyn. She didn’t appear to be waiting for him or anyone else, nor did she look as though she’d just breezed in a few minutes ago. She had a stool by herself at the bar and she was drinking something dark from a lowball glass.

I took a seat a few stools down from her. I ordered two double shots of bourbon, drank one and poured the other into the black coffee Billie brought me. I was sipping the coffee when a voice with a Piedmont softness said, “I forget your name.”

I looked up.

“I believe we were introduced,” she said, “but I don’t recall your name.”

“It’s Matt,” I said, “and you’re right, Tommy introduced us. You’re Carolyn.”

“Carolyn Cheatham. Have you seen him?”

“Tommy? Not since it happened.”

“Neither have I. Were you-all at the funeral?”

“No. When was it?”

“This afternoon. Neither was I. There. Whyn’t you come sit next to me so’s I don’t have to shout. Please?”

She was drinking a sweet almond liqueur that she took on the rocks. It tastes like dessert, but it’s as strong as whiskey.

“He told me not to come,” she said. “To the funeral. He said it was a matter of respect for the dead.” She picked up her glass and stared into it. I’ve never known what people hope to see there, though it’s a gesture I’ve performed often enough myself.