Ed McBain (31 page)

What do I do now? he wondered.

He needed a doctor, but a doctor was out. What about a druggist? What about Frankie Shea who worked for Old Man Sinisi? What about him? Did Frankie owe him a favor?

No, Frankie did not owe him a favor, Frankie did not owe him the sweat from his armpits. But they'd grown up together, had lighted bonfires together on election eve, had thrown snowballs together, had roasted spuds together when there used to be the empty lot behind Grandoso's Grocery. You figure maybe a guy will do you a favor when your arm is running off into the gutter.

He waited until the drugstore was empty. He knew Old Man Sinisi left the store to Frankie every night after supper, leaving him just enough cash in the register to handle the few sales that piddled in before closing time. So there was no danger there. When the store was empty he walked in, and the bell over the door sounded loudly in the warm, antiseptic stillness. He walked straight behind the counter, running into Frankie as he started to come around front.

"Let's stay back here," he whispered.

"Johnny! The cops are..."

"It's around already, huh?"

"Johnny, you should never have come here. Why'd you come here? Want to get me in trouble?"

"I want my arm bandaged. And something to stop the pain."

Frankie looked at the bleeding arm and his face went white. "How'd that happen? You ... you kill somebody else, Johnny? You..."

"I ain't killed nobody yet. Look, Frankie, fix it for me, will you? You work in a drugstore, you know the ropes. Just a bandage, and something smeared on the cut, that's all."

"I ain't a doctor, Johnny. Hell, I just work here."

"You can fix it. I'll rip your eyes out if you don't."

Frankie stared at him levelly. "Come on in back," he said.

They were in the back of the shop now, in the darkened corner where the retorts and measures rested on a long brown table. Johnny sat and took off his jacket. The cut was worse than he'd thought it was. It spread on his arm in a jagged red streak. He looked at it, and was almost sick, and the pale cast to Frankie's face told him he was almost sick, too.

"I ... I got to go ... go get some bandages," he said. "Out front. I ... I'll be right back, Johnny."

"Hurry up," Johnny said.

Frankie went and he sat and looked at the wall of the back room, at the bottles of pills and powder with the strange, dangerous-sounding names.

He sat waiting, and it wasn't until five minutes had passed that he realized Frankie Shea was taking a damned long time to get a roll of bandage from the shelves out front. A damned long time, and then he remembered there were phone booths just inside the entrance doorway, and he also remembered the time Frankie Shea had ducked out on him, the time the cops had caught them sticking NRA tags on the fenders and bodies of parked cars, gluing them to the metal surface.

Frankie had left him to talk to the cops that time, and whereas that was a long time ago, guys don't usually change a hell of a lot.

Hastily, Johnny slipped into his soggy jacket.

When Frankie came to the back of the store ten minutes later, the cops behind him with drawn guns, Johnny was already gone. There was only a pool of blood on the table to testify to the fact that he'd been there at all.

The Grand was on 125th Street, just between Lexington and Third avenues. It showed the movies the RKO Proctor's didn't run, and it was there that Johnny went, taking a seat near the back, favoring his right arm by leaning over to the left and cradling the gashed wrist and forearm in his lap. The 3-D glasses they had given him were lying useless on his lap, alongside his cradled arm. Without the glasses, the screen was a distorted hodgepodge of color, but Johnny hadn't come here to catch up on the latest Hollywood attempt. He'd come to get a breather.

"You ain't even watching the picture," the girl said.

He turned abruptly, startled, ready to run. The girl was no more than twenty. She wore a white sweater that was filled to capacity. He could see that even in the dark. She was blonde and pretty, he supposed, in a brassy, hard way. He couldn't make out her features too clearly, except for the vivid slash of lipstick across her mouth, and the glow on the whites of her eyes reflected from the screen.

"No, I ain't," he said. He hadn't even noticed the girl sitting there, and he wondered now when she'd come in. She reeked of cheap perfume but there was something exciting about the perfume and her nearness.

"These 3-D things are good," she said, taking the glasses from his lap, her hand long and tapering, brushing against his arm. "Supposed to put these Hollywood women right in your arms. Don't you go for Hollywood women right in your arms?"

"I ... look, I'm busy," he said.

"Too busy to watch the picture?"

He felt an instant panic. Had she heard about him? Did she know he was the one the cops wanted?

"Yes," he said slowly, "too busy."

"Too busy for other things, too?"

He caught the pitch then, and an idea began kicking around in the back of his mind. "Things like what?" he asked.

"Things like a way to kill the night. Better than doing eye muscle tricks in a movie."

"How?" he asked.

"A room on Lex. Not the Waldorf but clean sheets. A bottle, if you can afford it. And a price that's right."

"Like?" His mind was racing ahead now. A room on Lex, away from the eyes of the cops, more time to think, more time to work it out.

"Like seven-fifty for all night. Plus the bottle. You got seven-fifty?" she asked.

"I've got seven-fifty," he whispered.

"Don't let the price fool you. It's quality merchandise, germ-free. I'm feeling generous."

"You're on," he said, making up his mind.

He saw her grin in the darkness. "I knew you was an intellectual," she said. "Come on."

They moved out of the row into the aisle, and she started for the rear of the theater.

"This way," he said. "We'll use the exit down front."

"You ashamed or something?" she asked, her hands on her hips.

He decided to give it to her straight. "I got in a fight. My arm is bleeding. I don't want to attract attention."

She stared at him for a few moments, and then said, "Okay. Come on. Down front."

He gave her money for a jug and then he waited in the darkness of a hallway while she bought it in a brilliantly lighted liquor store. When she came back, she walked on the side of his wounded arm, blocking it effectively from inquisitive eyes.

They walked in silence to a brownstone set next to a delicatessen. She led him up the steps then, and opened the wooden door to her room. It was a small room with a bare bulb hanging overhead and a dresser in one corner. A bed occupied most of the room, and there was a table with an enamel washbasin on a stand alongside the bed.

"Like I said," she told him, "it ain't the Waldorf."

She was not as big as he'd thought she was in the movies. She was, in fact, almost small, except for the breasts that crowded the woolen sweater.

"Which shall we treat first? The arm or the gullet?"

"Have a drink, if you want," he said. "I can wait."

"Yeah, but you're bleeding on my imported Persian rug." She grinned and went to the dresser, taking out a bottle of peroxide and a roll of gauze. She brought him to the basin, rolled up his sleeve, and then said, "You run into a buzz saw?"

"No, a hophead."

"Same thing," she said pouring the peroxide onto the wound.

He winced, holding back the scream that bubbled onto his lips.

"You got glass in there," she said.

"Pull it out, if you can."

She looked at him curiously. "Sure," she said. She wrapped absorbent cotton around a toothpick and then began fishing for the glass splinters. Each time she got one, he clamped down on his teeth hard, and finally it was all over. She drenched the arm in peroxide again, and then wrapped the gauze around it, so tight that he could feel the veins throbbing against the thin material.

"That rates a swallow," she said. She broke the seal on the fifth, poured whiskey for them both into water glasses, and handed him one. "Here's to the hophead," she said.

"May he drop dead," Johnny answered, tossing off the drink. It burned a hole clear down to his stomach and he remembered abruptly that he hadn't eaten for a good long while.

The girl took another drink, and then put the glass and the bottle on the dresser top again. "Well, now," she said. "Let's try and forget that arm, shall we?"

She moved closer to him, and he thought, The hell with the cops, the hell with Angelo, the hell with everyone. The sweater moved in on him, warm and high, soft, beating with the soft muted beat of her heart beneath the wool and the flesh. He pulled her to him, his head pressed tight against the wool.

"Easy now," she said, chiding, smiling. "Easy now, boy. Slow and easy."

A knock sounded on the door.

She broke away from him, and he leaped to his feet.

"Who..." he whispered.

More knocking.

"Get in the closet!"

"The clos...?"

"Go on, move," she whispered urgently.

He went to the closet, thinking, Why's she acting like an unfaithful wife? feeling foolish as hell, feeling like the jackass in some low comedy of errors. The closet door closed on him, leaving him in darkness, leaving him with trailing silk dresses flapping around his face, high-heeled shoes crushed under his big feet. He could not stop feeling foolish, and then he heard the outside door open, and the man's voice.

"What took you so long, Bess?"

"Oh, hello, Tony. I was ... napping."

Why? Johnny thought. Why that? Why didn't she say, I've got someone with me, Tony. Come back later, come back in the morning. Why the runaround?

"Napping, huh?" The voice was a big voice. It belonged to a big man. It belonged to a suspicious man. Johnny did not like that voice, and the voice was in the room now, moving in from the outside door.

"What's this?" the voice asked.

"What? What's what, Tony?"

"This jacket. You wearing Army jackets now, Bess? That what you doing?"

"Tony..."

"Just shut up! Where is he?"

"Where's who? Tony, I was just taking a nap. The jacket belongs ... belongs to ... a fellow came to fix the plumbing. He must have left it here. The plumbing leaked. He..."

"Did the plumbing leak blood? Did it leak blood in that basin there?"

"Tony..."

"You're a slut," he shouted. "I'm going to break that guy in two! Where is he?"

"I told you, Tony. There's no one..."

"And I told you! I told you what would happen if I caught you up to your old tricks again. Where is he?"

The footsteps were advancing across the room now, and it was a cinch Tony would look in the closet first. He dropped to his knees quickly, rooting around on the closet floor for a shoe. He found a sturdy-feeling job with a spike heel, and he got to his feet again and waited.

"You got him in the closet?" the voice asked, close now. And then the door opened on Johnny, and the shaft of light spilled onto his face. He didn't hesitate an instant. He brought the shoe up, catching Tony on the bridge of his nose.

Tony was big all right, big and bearded, wearing a leather jacket and corduroy slacks. The shoe caught him on his nose, and the line of blood appeared magically, and then he stumbled backward. Johnny swung out with his left hand, catching Tony in the gut. He hit him again with the shoe, and as Tony went down, he heard the girl screaming, screaming, her voice like an air-raid siren. She dropped to her knees beside› Tony, took his head into her lap, and then looked up at Johnny.

"You crumb!" she shrieked. "You filthy crumb! He's my brother! He's my brother!"

Johnny was already halfway to the door.

"My brother!" she kept screaming, and he didn't hang around to listen to the encore. He ran down the steps and out into the street, a little sorry Tony had arrived when he had, and a little sorry he'd left an almost full fifth of good whiskey in the room.

The fifth had cost him close to four bucks. Well, he'd got a bandage for his arm out of it, if nothing else. It didn't seem to matter at the moment that blood was already beginning to seep through the bandage again.

Detective-Sergeant Leo Palazzo lived in the Bronx. He did not particularly like Harlem, even though he'd been a cop there for sixteen years.

He was holding in his hands now a signed confession from a punk they'd had in before on a possessions charge.

The punk's name was Andrew Ryan. They'd picked him up on 117th Street and they'd found him with a zip gun and they'd worked him over hardly fifteen minutes before he'd told them everything they wanted to know.

The only thing they really wanted to know was whether or not he'd put a few holes in the liver and heart of Angelo Brancusi. And whereas Ryan was extremely reticent in the beginning he loosened up almost instantly and seemed almost proud of his shooting prowess. A stenographer had worked up a literate-sounding confession and Ryan had scrawled his signature to it, and that had been that. Except for Johnny Trachetti.

"What about the other guy?" Corporal Davis asked Palazzo.

"What other guy?" Palazzo said.

"The one slugged Brown and swiped the RMP. Him."

"Forget him," Palazzo said. "He's clean, ain't he?"

"Yeah, but I mean..."

"We really ought to drag him in on a resisting arrest charge, not to mention the theft of the car. Teach him a lesson."

"He was probably scared," Davis said. "Hell, you'd have run, too."

"When he knows the heat's off he'll come out in the open again."

"You really going to pull him in?"

"No, the hell with him. We got this Ryan character, that's all we need."

Davis wiped a hand over his face. "What I mean, Leo, shouldn't we wise the kid up? You know, he still thinks he's got a murder rap hanging over his head."

"So what?" Palazzo asked.

"Well, hell, he's out there someplace thinking..."

"Who cares what the hell he's thinking? He probably done something anyway, the way he ran."

"Suppose he does something else? He thinks he's wanted for murder, Leo, don't you understand?"