Nevermore (2 page)

“Glad I’m not a dentist,” the stout man stammered, unwittingly getting a good laugh as he peered at the magician’s molars. “Folks, there’s not a thing in there I can see…. Talking about under his tongue and everything. I’m satisfied his mouth is empty.”

Iris took back the flashlight. Wilma handed Houdini a brimming glass of water. “Hot work always makes me thirsty,” the magician quipped, drinking down the liquid without apparent difficulty. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, you and Mr. Conklin have just seen me swallow a needle-book and a spool of thread. I return them to you … thusly … “

Houdini regurgitated the gag from Martinka’s. The needles and thread remained clenched in his throat. He plucked at the end of his tongue, pulling a single thread from his mouth. Threaded needles dangled every inch or so, a lethal silver fringe glittering in the spotlight. Houdini’s arm extended full length, prompting wild applause from the astonished audience.

Iris took hold of the thread and backed away from the magician, suspended needles unspooling continuously from his mouth as she gracefully crossed the stage. Houdini basked in the ovation. The cheers surged through him, more powerful than the transports of love. Iris held her slender arm high in the air, pinching the end of a fifty-foot catenary curving back to the magician’s open mouth. All along its length, hundreds and hundreds of needles winked and gleamed, flashing reflected light like fangs in the savage, ghostly smile of an invisible monster.

A
QUIET NIGHT AT THE
Twenty-ninth Precinct, unusually quiet for a Friday, although business most often picked up after the theaters let out. Manning the desk, Sergeant Heegan remembered the grand old days before Prohibition when the Tenderloin was the beat of a rookie’s dreams. Not that the payoff from the speaks wasn’t every bit as choice as back when torpedoes like Gyp the Blood and Monk Eastman brawled, bribed, and bought the house a round. Just a bit too genteel and refined nowadays to suit Heegan’s tastes. He preferred his sin out in the open.

Graft, on the other hand, needed to stay under the table, and when roly-poly Leon Fishkin waddled in off the street, bold as brass in his ritzy cashmere topcoat, offering up a thick envelope adorned with the embossed logo of the Zebra Club, the desk sergeant tossed it back in his bloated face, telling him to stick it where the sun don’t shine. Much offended, the portly bootlegger stormed out of the station house, sputtering like an overheated Tin Lizzy.

“The nerve of that fat louse, waltzin’ in here and wavin’ his dough around like a come-on man at the two-dollar window, when any dumb jerk knows how the pickup is made.” Sergeant Heegan addressed his remarks to a lone cop typewriting in the bull pen behind the booking desk. Busy hunt-and-pecking his way through a robbery report, with his tie and collar removed, the sandy-haired detective didn’t glance away from the noisy Remington Standard No. 10 or offer as much as a grunt in reply.

Never satisfied with an inattentive audience, the desk sergeant shrugged and turned back to the
New York American,
folding the newspaper to the sports section, his lips silently forming Damon Runyon’s account of a sparring match between former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson and Luis Angel Firpo, the Argentine contender. Heegan whistled between his teeth in grudging admiration. Seemed the old dinge completely bamboozled the “Wild Bull of the Pampas.”

It was only an exhibition workout but, round after round, not a glove landed on the Negro. Johnson was forty-four, two years younger than Heegan. The middle-aged Irish cop considered himself one tough customer in spite of the silver frosting his thin red hair, yet deep in his heart he knew for damn sure no money on earth could induce him to step into any prize ring with some dago bone-crusher like Firpo.

The telephone rang, shrill as his old lady on a nagging fit. “Damnation!” Heegan set the paper aside and reached for the candlestick instrument. “Twenty-ninth Precinct,” he barked into the mouthpiece, “Heegan speaking.” The operator connected him with a near-hysterical woman. Her frantic voice echoed like the insistent buzzing of a hornet trapped in a bottle. The desk sergeant held the black, bell-shaped receiver several inches from his ear. Although often accused of being a touch deaf, Heegan had no trouble making out every word.

“I saw it with my own two eyes,” the woman screeched. “My apartment faces the street on Thirty-eighth. It came right along as big as you please and turned the corner onto Ninth Avenue.”

“A gorilla, you say,” Heegan inquired with more than a trace of a smile.

“A great big hairy ape!” The woman’s descriptive powers were doubtless enhanced by all the hoopla for last year’s Eugene O’Neill hit on Broadway.

“You sure it’s not just some drugstore cowboy in a raccoon coat?”

“Officer! Will you please listen to what I’m telling you? This was some kind of monkey. It had a young woman in its arms.”

“Carrying a woman…?”

“I saw her long blond hair trailing down over the shaggy black arm. Horrible …”

“Madam, sounds to me like you’ve observed a frolicsome couple on their way to a costume party.”

“This is not Halloween!”

“A simple masquerade, ma’am. Don’t go troubling yourself with thoughts of any gorillas.”

“Shouldn’t you alert the Zoological Society and all menageries and circuses?”

“I’ll be doing just that, ma’am. Have a pleasant evening.” Sergeant Heegan hung the receiver on the hook and laughed out loud. “Get a load of this,” he hooted, spinning around in his oak swivel chair. “Some dumb Dora thinks she’s seen a gorilla on Ninth Avenue …”

The bull pen was empty. Rows of deserted desks and shrouded typewriters stood mute as mausoleums. Heegan was alone. He spun back to his sports section, untroubled by solitude. After a year spent perched like a lighthouse keeper atop the ornate traffic tower at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, he never again felt lonely. The tower went up in 1920, the first of several similar structures bedecked with spread-winged bronze eagles and cornucopia-framed clock faces, standing in the middle of the avenue at intersections ten blocks apart. These were the earliest electric traffic lights in the city.

The sergeant leaned back in his chair, drifting away into memory. Switching the red, yellow, and green beacons had always made him feel important. High above the passing swarm, snug from bad weather, he pitied those poor bastards standing all over town directing traffic with white-gloved hand signals, their apple cheeks puffing, a cacophony of whistles steaming in the chill air.

On most days, the exhaust haze had hung so thick Heegan could barely see the towers nearest him, north and south along the avenue. When he had started on the force, automobiles were an exotic rarity and high winds often whirled tons of dried horse manure, powdered by passing carriage and wagon wheels, into poisonous shit storms so dense you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, let alone take a decent breath. Some things about the old days were not quite as grand as the desk sergeant might have wished.

“Goddamn that dumb kike!” Heegan bellowed, his face redder than his hair.

“Not so dumb as to be without friends in City Hall.” Captain Boyle looked more like a bishop than a policeman, his immaculate hair white as an altar cloth; the lean greyhound face shrewd and intelligent. He spoke in a whisky-mellowed whisper. “How many of your friends are pals with the mayor?”

Subdued by the quiet, patient voice, Sergeant Heegan adopted a more conciliatory posture, like a choirboy caught throwing spitballs. “I know I was way out of line, Captain, but the sight of him there, waving that money around like he was rubbing our noses in it, well, it just got my blood up …”

“You’ve too much heart, Jimmy, that’s your trouble.” The captain remained genuinely fond of Heegan, was in fact godfather to his oldest son. Both men knew he would never rank higher than sergeant and, although neither ever mentioned it, the bright gold badge gleaming on Francis Xavier Boyle’s breast provided a constant rebuke. “Heart’s a grand thing, but when you’re dealing with the public you’ve got to use a little more of what’s up here.” The captain tapped a manicured forefinger against his temple, chuckling inwardly at the image of the sergeant’s head thumping hollow as a melon at the same touch. “You know I’ll have to take you off the desk…?”

“That sheeny bastard!”

“Relax. He was after your stripes.” The captain handed Heegan an envelope. “Report down to homicide at headquarters.”

“Headquarters? What the hell’m I gonna do down there?” “I’m sure you’ll find some way to make yourself useful.”

Sergeant Heegan heard the captain’s words echoing in his mind all through the afternoon. Every time he refilled the detectives’ coffee mugs from the big graniteware pot kept percolating on a hot plate in the squad room lavatory, he thought about making himself useful. No one at homicide knew what to do with him. Several other uniforms served as drivers and in menial backup capacities. None ranked above corporal. So, Heegan brewed the coffee and hung around trading lies with the plainclothes dicks when they weren’t out on call or busy interrogating suspects and typing endless reports. He had no complaints. In another year, he’d have his pension.

Just after dark, a call came in ordering every available man over to an address in Hell’s Kitchen, cutting short Heegan’s rambling blarney once again. On his way out the door, a detective caught the sergeant’s doleful glance. “You waiting for some engraved invitation?” he asked. Heegan made a pistol of his index finger and aimed it at his heart: Who, me?

“No law says you have to sit on your ass all day long.”

Sergeant Heegan followed the detectives down the long, narrow stairs. There was nothing for him to do, but it had to be an improvement on watching the coffee boil. He rode up front beside a uniformed driver in an open five-passenger 1918 Ford with a canvas top. They set out in a black caravan of four automobiles.

Just for the hell of it, Heegan cranked the siren and they wove through traffic with a great wail, other vehicles pulling out of the way. An unnecessary noise, in the absence of any emergency: the dead meat didn’t care if the cops arrived on time. Technically, it was against regulations, but nobody told Heegan to knock it off. The siren’s scream made the jaded detectives feel important.

When they pulled up at an address on Thirty-ninth Street, just east of Tenth Avenue, a small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. Three patrolmen stood by the entrance. The detectives sauntered inside, leaving Heegan in charge of the uniforms, who now, with the addition of the drivers, numbered seven. The sergeant paced off a thirty-foot perimeter in front of the tenement, telling his men, “Don’t take no naps and keep the rubberneckers back of this here line.” Task accomplished, he made straight for the action, bustling through the building with a hefty swagger.

The body sprawled in the courtyard out back, a dirt lot adrift in trash and almost as crowded as the street, with detectives milling everywhere. A camera on a tripod tilted down into the roped-off trapezoid enclosing the corpse. In the bright magnesium flare of flash powder, Heegan saw a gray-haired woman, shirtwaist stiff with dried blood, her splayed limbs contorted like those of a broken doll flung from some great height.

Heegan made himself inconspicuous on the fringes of the activity, picking up what he could from overheard conversation. Two elderly tenants talked with detectives about the victim. Her name was Mrs. Esp. She was a widow; spoke with some kind of accent. Lived with her daughter on the fourth floor. Other than that, the two wheezing geezers, a man and his wife from the look of it, didn’t know beans. Widow Esp was something of a recluse. They never saw that much of her. The daughter, on the other hand, came and went every day. Had a secretarial job downtown. Lovely young thing, with long golden hair. Not bobbed the way some of them are wearing it.

Heegan edged away from their babble, wanting a closer look at the corpse. The photographer had done with the late Mrs. Esp: having shot her from a dozen different angles, he folded his equipment into a black suitcase. Another man coiled the barrier rope. Several bored detectives leaned over the body, gazing down at her with no seeming interest.

She was a mess. Thick clumps of hair had been yanked free by the handful, laying bare a raw, abraded scalp. Her blotched and bruised face twisted disagreeably, the backwards stare making her look all the more like a twisted doll. Heegan marveled at how deeply her throat had been slashed. The cut ran from ear to ear.

Alone among all the others, a slim, dapper man in a battered “Open-Road” Stetson and double-breasted topcoat stared, not at the body, but straight up at a shattered fourth-floor window. “Long drop, Mr. Runyon,” quipped a detective at his side.

Heegan took a good look at him. So, this was William Randolph Hearst’s blue-ribbon sportswriter. He knew the word along Broadway was Damon Runyon liked to hang out with shady characters. Gamblers. Torpedoes. Small-time grifters. Cops. For all of that, the sergeant had never laid eyes on him before.

“It’s the sudden stop that kills you, Charlie,” Damon Runyon said. He was a small man, with a thin, unsmiling shark-slit mouth. His round glasses gave him an owlish look, the glint of the lenses masking the ironic twinkle in his eyes. The detective chortled appreciatively.

“Turn her over.” Lieutenant Bremmer gave the orders. “Let’s see the rest of the damage.” Heegan glimpsed him earlier in the day, rushing in and out of his office. The lieutenant was built like an energetic fireplug, one of those small men who made up in authority what he lacked in stature. Two detectives immediately took hold of the body and everybody watched as they gently lifted it.

Mrs. Esp’s battered head tore loose from her shoulders, falling with a soft thud into the shadows. Even the most hardened cop gasped in horror. “Eight to five she was already dead when she hit the ground,” smirked Damon Runyon.

About this time, the wagon arrived from the morgue. Bremmer had the team bundle the stiff on a stretcher but told them not to load her until he and the boys had a look upstairs. Heegan went along with the pack, trooping up four flights. They found the door to the Esp apartment locked tight. “Give us a hand here, Sergeant,” barked “Bulldog” Bremmer. Grateful for something to do at last, Heegan reared back his beefy leg and splintered the door open with a single kick.