Ed McBain (10 page)

He cleared his throat again and then said, "Are you waiting for your father?"

She turned then and looked at him. Her eyes were very cold, her mouth was unsmiling. She did not answer, not by voice which she could not, and not by any movement of her head.

"Are you ... are you waiting for your father?" he asked again.

This time her eyes met his squarely, and her mouth curled into obvious distaste. He had seen that look before. He had seen it on the women in the marketplace the times he had gone down to the fish stand his brother operated. It was a look that said, "You are a fish peddler," and this girl, this Panza's daughter, did not need any voice when she could cast looks like that one.

He began to feel warm again, but a different kind of warmth this time. He felt blood rise to his face, and when the girl turned her back to him and lifted one knee, cupping that knee with her clasping hands, he stood there like an idiot for a moment longer, and then he turned and walked slowly back to his boat, thinking,
I've been a fool She's a model I've been a fool.

But he could not take his eyes from her.

And later that afternoon, before the other boats returned, she lifted her skirt as she sat where he could not miss seeing her and she straightened the seams of her stockings, running her long tapering fingers up over her legs, and then fastening the garters. He watched her and the old flame roared higher inside him, and then he saw her smile a superior smile and drop the skirt suddenly and walk to the edge of the dock where the descending sun splashed through the thin dress she wore and showed him the full silhouette of her body.

When Panza's boat came in, she embraced her father as always, and then they walked past Falco's boat, and he may have imagined it, but he thought she swung her hips with more abandon when she passed above him, and he listened to the click of her high heels on the dock, and his hands longed for the touch of her flesh.

He tried to speak to her only once again. She was wearing slacks this time, and a tight, full sweater. She walked deliberately to his boat where he was mending his nets, an excuse he'd given himself for coming in early. She stood above him, her hands on her hips, looking down at him. And finally he looked up and said, "Good afternoon."

She continued looking at him, her hands on her hips.

"What do you want of me?" he asked then, and she did not answer.

"Do you want to torment me? Is that what you want?"

She smiled that superior smile again, the smile one gives to an idiot child.

"Don't play with me!" he shouted. "Do you hear me? Don't play with Falco!"

She threw her head back and opened her mouth, and he knew she was laughing, but no sound came from her lips and he understood then the full extent of her voicelessness, and his eyes narrowed a little.

He went back to mending his nets, and she walked away from him, her head still thrown back in that silent mocking attitude of laughter, her blonde hair glinting in the sun.

He went out alone in his boat the next day.

He went out alone, and he talked aloud to the water, because the water would listen and not repeat. Sitting in the stern shortly after dusk, water lapping at the wooden sides of the boat, the sun edging the waterline far off on the horizon, he told the water of his plan.

"I must have this one," he said. "Can you understand the way I feel?"

The sea said nothing. The sea had listened to men before, and the story Falco told was an old one. The sea only lapped gently at the sides of the boat.

"She's a witch, I know that," he said. "She's truly a witch. But she's
here,
" he said, and hit his heart with his clenched fist, "and she's also in my mind, and I won't rest until I have her. I see her at night, when I sleep. She's always there with those long legs others, and I see her straightening her stockings until I want to scream aloud. And sometimes I do scream aloud, and I wake myself, and she's there even when I'm awake, in the darkness, with her body there before me all the time. She knows what she's doing. She's a witch, and so she knows. But she's also a dummy."

He stared into the black depths of the water, calm and serene, the sun dappling it with oranges and reds and yellows.

"She's a dummy," he said. "There's no voice there, none whatever. Not even to laugh. And if there's no voice to laugh with, can there be a voice to scream with? No. No, she has a body, and she flaunts the body for the taking, but if the body were taken, could she protest the taking?"

He kept staring into the water, the oranges and yellows and reds vanishing now, leaving only a deep blackness that reflected his own face darkly.

"She stays in the shack when she doesn't model," he said, whispering now even though he was alone. "She stays there and she tidies things for that fat slob of a father, Panza, upon whom she showers kisses every night, against whom she presses her young body. For me, she wiggles and she teases, and she says 'Come, come, Falco' with her eyes and legs, but her mouth mocks because Falco is only a fisherman.

"She says, 'Come, come, Falco, come try to take me, Falco,' but she doesn't think she will be taken. She doesn't know she will be taken by me, Falco, nor will she scream for help, by God, because there is no voice in that lovely throat of hers, no voice at all."

And so he talked while waves rolled beneath the wooden bottom of the boat, and the stars appeared in the sky overhead, hard and unblinking.

He waited until all the fishermen were gone the next day. He had told them he had a bad cold and should not be out on the water. Donato laughed at him, calling him a fake fisherman, a fisherman who would not go out because of a cold. But he waited until they were all gone, waited until Panza's sleek red boat had joined the rest of the fleet, and then he stood on the dock until he could no longer make out the crafts heading for sea.

He went back to his boat, and he propped up a mirror in the cabin, and he combed his hair and brushed his teeth, and then he washed his hands. He left the boat and walked down the dock, past the loading platform, over the railroad tracks where the refrigerated cars were loading fish, and then out past the big hatchery, and over toward the shacks dotting the harbor's edge. He knew which shack was Panza's, and he knew the girl was home today when he saw the smoke coming from the metal stovepipe in its roof. He felt no fear. His palms were dry. He felt extremely calm because he knew just what he was going to do, and he knew there was no way he could be stopped.

He walked up the cinder path leading to the shack and then he knocked on the door, and did not wait for an answer. He shoved the door open and stepped into the small room.

It was almost as if she'd been waiting for him.

She was standing by the woodstove when he came in. Her eyes opened slightly wider in recognition. A smile came onto her face.

"Hello," he said.

His heart was beginning to pound now, not through fear, but because he was near her, and whenever he was near her there was a fever in his blood.

She said nothing. She looked at him with that strange smile on her face, a haughty smile, a smile that told him she knew he would eventually come here to her. She moved away from the woodstove, walked to a dresser on one wall of the shack, opened a purse there and removed a package of cigarettes from it. She shook one cigarette loose and hung it on her mouth, and then she moved closer to Falco and handed him the book of matches.

He struck a match, watching her eyes all the time, watching the smile on her mouth. She blew out a cloud of smoke and then went to stand near the dresser and the open purse, putting the cigarettes down behind her. She crossed her arms and Falco's breath caught in his throat.

"Why are you doing this to me?" he asked.

She kept looking at him steadily.

"I'm going to have you!" he shouted. "Do you understand me? Can you hear that, or are you deaf also? I've taken too much from you, too much, and now it's your turn, do you hear me? Do you hear me?"

He reached for her, and she did not scream, nor did she protest. She didn't even seem frightened. Her eyes remained calm and the smile stayed on her full mouth. He took her in his arms, and she leaned back on the dresser with one arm to support herself.

He buried his mouth in her throat, and smelled the deep perfume of her, and he murmured helplessly, "I could love you, you dummy, I could really love you."

He took his mouth from her throat then, and he saw her hand close on the small pistol in her purse. He tried to move away but her hand came up fast, and he felt the muzzle of the gun between the second and third ribs on his left side, and then he heard the explosion. The bullet tore him free from her, and his eyes opened wide in shock, because he had not thought a dummy would have a gun, had not thought a pretty dummy like this one—who could not scream if attacked—would protect herself in some other way.

He staggered back, his hands covering the blood that spurted from his chest. He looked at her face, and the coldness was still there in her eyes, a coldness he could not understand. He moved his lips, but no sound came from his mouth, and he felt his legs weakening under him, and he kept staring at her face, and the coldness there, and he realized suddenly that the coldness was not there for him but for the other man a long time ago, the man who had stolen her voice.

His eyes glazed over, and he dropped to the floor, and then he made a crawling, painful reach for her, his big bloodstained hand outstretched. The girl backed away, and the muscles of her throat quivered, and her lips trembled, and then a surprised, awed look came into her eyes.

His hand dropped. He saw her only dimly now, but he heard the scream burst from her mouth, a high, penetrating scream, shrilling into the shack. And then the scream changed to something exultant, something wild in its ecstasy, and it rose higher and higher, louder and louder, assailing his ears until he died.

Starting with its very first issue in January of 1953, and continuing through July of 1954,
Manhunt
published seven stories featuring an alcoholic former private eye named Matt Cordell. All of these stories carried the Evan Hunter byline. Cordell was my stab at creating a private eye character who was something different for his time. It amuses me when some reviewers call the 87th Precinct novels "hard-boiled." I think of them as bittersweet, lyrical, even sometimes sentimental. But hard-boiled? You want hard-boiled, try the Matt Cordell stories. The one that follows was published in July of 1953, and is the tamest of the lot. In fact, Cordell is almost likable in this story, a trait not often attributed to him.

H
E WAS A SMALL MAN, SMALL IN STATURE AND SMALL IN
social significance. Another bum, another wino, another panhandler. A nobody.

But he was Joey, and we'd shared the warmth of many a doorway together, tilted the remains of countless bottles of smoke together, worked the Bowery from end to end like partners, like friends.

He was Joey, but he was dead.

He was tattered in death, as he had been when alive. His clothes were baggy and ill-fitting, rumpled with the creases of park benches and cold pavements, stinking with the sweat of summer's heat, crawling with the lice that were the legged jewels of the poor.

"Shall we get the cops, Matt?" someone asked.

I nodded and kept looking down at Joey and at the bright stain of blood on the side of his head, the matted hair soggy and dirt encrusted where the bullet had entered.

Cooper Square, and the statue of Peter Cooper looked down with bronze aloofness, hemmed in by a grilled fence, surrounded by empty park benches. Cooper Square, and a summer night as black as a raven's wing, sprinkled with a dazzle of stars that Joey would never see again.

I felt empty.

"Why'd anyone want to kill a bum, Matt?" one of the winos asked.

"I don't know," I said.

Across the street, the squat structure that was Cooper Union fought with the Third Avenue El for dominance of the sky. A boy and a girl hugged the shadows of the building, walking their way slowly toward the small park and the cluster of winos. There was a mild breeze on the air, a summer breeze that touched the skin with delicate feminine hands. There was a hum on the air, too, the hum of voices on fire escapes, of people crowding the streets, of the day dying as Joey had died.

And over the hum came the wail of a siren, and the winos faded back into the anonymity of the Bowery, blending with the shadows, merging with the pavements and the ancient buildings, turning their backs on the law.

I turned my back, too. I walked away slowly as the siren got louder. I didn't turn for another look. I didn't want another look.

Chink was waiting for me outside the flophouse I'd called home for close to three months.

He was standing in the shadows, and I'd have missed him if he hadn't whispered, "Matt?"

I stopped and peered into the darkened doorway. "Who's that?"

"Me. Chink."

"What is it?"

"You got a minute, Matt?"

"I've got a lifetime. What is it?"

"Joey."

"What about him?"

"You were friends, no?"

I stared into the darkness, trying to see Chink's face. It was rumored that he came originally from Shanghai and that he could speak twelve Chinese dialects. It was also rumored that he'd been a big man in China before he came to the States, that he'd come here because of a woman who'd two-timed him in the old country. That gave us a common bond.

"You were friends, weren't you, Matt?"

"We were friends. So?"

"You know what happened?"

"I know he was killed."

"Do you know why?"

"No." I stepped into the doorway. There was the sickish smell of opium about Chink, overpowering in the small hallway. "Do you?"

"No."

"Then why the hell are you wasting my time?"

"I got an idea, Matt."

"I'm listening."

"Are you interested?"

"What the hell are you driving at, Chink? Spit it out."