The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (9 page)

Jodie stood. “He knows what we're talking about.
Street crime
.” She came over, extended her hand for Bishop to shake.

As he did, he narrowed his left eye, his face softening. “You know, this could work.”

Savary almost reminded his friend that was what the Gene Wilder character said after reading Baron Frankenstein's secret notebook in
Young Frankenstein
.

Jodie had the last word as they were leaving. “You know how much the U.S. attorney loves being in front of TV cameras? Our superintendent intends to take this to the TV stations if you guys do nothing. Misprision of felony. It's got a nice ring to it.”

As they left, back into the steamy afternoon, Savary asked his sergeant, “You think this'll work?”

“Not a chance.”

“I don't think so either.”

“But they'll have to think about it.”

Jodie turned her face to the sun, closed her eyes, and repeated the oldest NOPD saying, one dating from the dawn of the department, back when NOPD was caught in a war between Irish street gangs, Sicilian mafiosi, wharf thugs, and a corrupt city government.

“It isn't NOPD versus the criminals. It's us against the world.”

EILEEN DREYER

FROM
Crime Square

 

The photo is iconic. A young nurse is caught in the arms of a sailor. Her leg is curled, her foot up, her head impossibly far back as people run past, laughing, waving, dancing along the black-and-white reaches of Times Square. You can almost hear the car horns blaring, the church bells, the shouts and singing and laughter. Joy, relief, triumph, a nation gone mad with giddy, mindless delight. Japan has surrendered and the world celebrates.

The photo has hung in the old woman's house as long as anyone can remember. It's a bit yellowed and spotted now, faded from years of sunlight and cigarette smoke. But wherever old Peg O'Toole has lived, the picture has hung right over the overstuffed tweed chair in the living room. And when anyone asks why, she just shrugs.

“It was the moment that changed my life,” she always says.

And nobody knows how to answer, because they know what she means. At least, they think they do.

“It was an end,” she says, her rheumy eyes distant and thoughtful. “And a beginning. The world changed that day.”

And every time she answers, she wonders if she should tell the truth. She wonders why nobody notices that the photo she has isn't the one that is so famous. The picture Mr. Eisenstadt took when he followed that sailor who was kissing all the girls in Times Square. Peg saw the sailor, too. In fact, he kissed her on the way by. But her kiss wasn't worth capturing. She was too far away to be in the famous shot, caught only in one of the other five Eisenstadt took, her feet visible in her heavy work shoes just beyond a bystander. She was facing her own sailor, but no one could see how they met.

She doesn't have to look at the photo to remember that day, though. She carries it in her memory like a sharp shard of glass. It was the day Jimmy died.

 

The beginning of the end for the Japanese came on August fifth, when high above Hiroshima the bomb bay doors opened on the
Enola Gay
. The beginning of the end for Jimmy came a week earlier, when he was sent home from the Pacific because of a bad back.

It had been three years since Jim had walked through his front door to hang his cap on the hall tree and sniff the air for dinner. Three years since Peg had shared her bed or her dining room table. Three years since he'd seen the twins, then still wobbly toddlers intent on staying upright. They were in kindergarten now, bright-eyed, mischievous kids who could more often than not be found down in the super's rooms building spaceships out of the bits and pieces Mr. Peabody culled from his rounds and eating the cookies Mrs. Peabody made with the sugar she'd hoarded from combining her coupons with those of the other mothers in the building. Everyone could cook. But nobody could bake like Mildred Peabody.

“You must be so excited, Peg,” Mildred said that last day of July, hands caught in the pockets of her flowered apron, the one she wore when whipping up treats for the building's children. “Just think. After all this time.”

Peg's kids, Mikey and Mary Pat, were already ensconced at the Peabodys' kitchen table, the sunlight pouring in on their bent heads like butter from the barred window, beyond which a forest of ankles passed.

She'd gotten the telegram that morning. She'd opened the door to see a boy standing there in his faux uniform, his clipboard and the flimsy yellow envelope raised, as if he didn't want to hold it any longer than necessary, and she swore her heart had stopped.

Everybody knew what a telegram meant. And there had been so many in the war that the news wasn't even accompanied by someone in a real uniform anymore, or even the parish priest, his biretta clutched at his chest like a bouquet of condolence flowers. Just some pimply-faced boy rocking back and forth on his heels, a Western Uniform cap on his head, dread tightening his shoulders. A quick stab of an envelope into your hands, a scribble for delivery, and the slam of the outside door. A gold star for a parent's window and blank silence for the wife.

The envelope crinkled in her fist. Her heart thundered as if she'd been the one to climb those four stories instead of the kid. Her first instinct had been to run down the stairs to knock on somebody's door. Collect a witness. Maybe Margie in 2B, who was waiting to hear from her own husband somewhere in the Seventh Air Corps.

It didn't matter, really. Anybody would help her. Hers was a building, a neighborhood, that stuck together. Hell's Kitchen might be poor, but Peg knew everyone in the building and the buildings around her. Often they'd sit out of an evening on the steps and talk, cigarette smoke curling from their fingers, the precious dregs of dinner coffee scenting the air, the kids shrill as a flock of starlings out in the street as they fought their own war with sticks and balls and bare hands.

Maybe she should knock on a door. Ask Mildred or Patty Devon to open the envelope for her. Face what was waiting so she didn't have to.

Could Jim really be gone? Was she alone now? Would she wake every day with only one side of the bed rumpled, no one to help when Mary Pat got sick or Mikey wanted to learn how to pitch? No one demanding an account of her hours or criticizing her food. No one else to help ease the overstretched budget or stretch it even further.

She had gotten a job the week after Jim was drafted. Day after day climbing into her sturdy shoes and work pants, tucking her hair under a net, gathering her supplies for the walk across town. Her lunch, her cigarettes, her lipstick and handkerchief and bus fare for rainy days. A book for her break and one of Jimmy's knives for protection. The small relics of her life.

“Peg?” Mrs. Peabody asked, graying head tilted. “You okay?”

Peg snapped out of her reverie. She was on her way to work, just like always, lunch pail beneath her arm, purse tossed over her shoulder, kids coloring at Mildred Peabody's kitchen table. Peg smiled at her neighbor, having no idea what it was she was supposed to say.

Was she excited? Jimmy was coming home.

“It will take some getting used to,” was all she would admit to, because of course Mildred didn't know. Peg had made sure nobody in the building did. It wouldn't have done any good, only make things worse. Make her an object of pity in good people's eyes.

Mildred laughed and closed her into an overlarge, Noxema-scented hug. “You've done all you can,” she said, hands on ample hips. “It's time to let a man take all this off your shoulders. Get back your real life.”

And Peg felt it again. The lurch of shock when she'd opened that envelope. The flood of disbelief that seemed to engulf her, that kept her from understanding the words.

Coming home. Stop. Be there second week August. Stop. Can't wait for life to get back to normal. Stop. Jim. End
.

“My real life,” Peg echoed Mildred and nodded, suddenly afraid that she'd slip and tell the truth. “Yes. I imagine so.”

She gave Mikey a glancing kiss, the most he would allow, and nuzzled Mary Pat like a stuffed toy, which made her little girl giggle, all red hair and blue eyes and dimples. Sweetness, baby fat, the smell of baby shampoo. Endless possibilities and the luxury of safety. Peg wanted to put down her pail and her purse and gather her children to herself, tightly, too tightly for anyone to wedge their way between them. She wanted to take them and run, but she didn't know where to go.

So she said goodbye and left for work.

She could take the bus, she knew. When she could, though, Peg preferred to walk. She loved the hard energy of New York, fighting with millions of other people for the sidewalk, dodging hats and briefcases and the swirl of wind-ruffled skirts. She loved the neon, even during the day, when it seemed no more than a vague afterimage, and she loved the theaters. She loved seeing the pictures of all the actors who played there, perusing them on the way by like a family photo album of distant relatives: Ethel Barrymore, Ray Bolger, Katharine Cornell, Lunt and Fontanne, Paul Robeson.

Not that she'd seen many plays. She couldn't afford it. Peg saved up every penny she made for the day Jimmy came back. And every time anybody tried to tempt her to throw away a bit of her money to see
I Remember Mama
or
You Can't Take It with You
or
Harvey
, she reached into her purse and closed her hand around her Westside Savings and Loan book, her talisman against temptation.

She had other things to do with that money, things her mother might have done if she hadn't bought so many theater tickets. She was going to be a nurse someday, striding through a hospital like she owned it in those whispery white-soled shoes. She was going to wear a cap and a gleaming white dress and always look clean and bright, and her kids would be proud of her.

It would be so wonderful to sit in a darkened theater again, though, watching other people solve their problems, watching other women triumph. It made her believe she could, too. Oh, women triumphed in movies, and she went to see those. After all, a nickel was easier to come by. But something about live people saying those words carried portent, promise. And she needed that.

One day
, she thought,
I won't have to wait for someone to give me a ticket as a treat. My problem will be choosing among the different plays I want to see. I'll step out of one of those shiny black sedans that pull up before the theater, straighten my skirt, and stroll through the door as if I belong there
.

I won't go see Mr. John Raitt in
Carousel,
though
, she thought as she passed him smiling down at her from the poster, handsome in his striped shirt and cap. Not again. A few weeks ago her boss, Mr. Goldfarb, had given the two girls who worked for him the tickets he and his wife were going to use. Peg had been beside herself. The seats had been great. The music had been gorgeous and Mr. Raitt magnetic and strong. But how could anyone think Billy Bigelow was heroic? How could a hero say that he could love you so much that he hit you? Her father had loved her mother like that. He'd loved her so much he'd beaten her to death.

So Peg turned away from Mr. Raitt and she kept walking. And in another block she reached her very favorite place in New York.

Times Square.

Every time she walked out of Forty-fourth onto Broadway, she paused to take it in. Not the buildings; those were deteriorating just like Broadway. Burlesque shows were replacing legitimate theaters and seedy hotels springing up where the Astor had acted as cornerstone. Peg couldn't think of a door along Times Square she'd want to walk through right now.

But she stood there just the same, just like every other time, taking in the people. It was like reaching the delta of a river to find the sea, she always thought, a seething, flowing current of humanity, moving, moving, just like waves in a wind. She imagined Times Square as where everything began and ended, where the energy of the city was born to stream away into the different boroughs, the tide funneled through the high walls of skyscrapers. Even on a dull day it was a place of color, people, and neon, the news ticker sliding across One Times Square so that no one could escape the moment.

Just this way had she stood with her mother, holding hands, eyes wide on the wash of energy and life that was New York. Every day they had stopped here on the way home from school. Now she knew it was so they didn't have to get home so soon. But then she was sharing magic with her mother.

“There you are, Mrs. O'Toole,” a raspy voice called as she waited for the light. “Thought I'd missed you today.”

Peg smiled as she turned to see a wide, smiling, graying cop head her way. His hat was pushed back on his head and his baton was in his hand, just like in the movies. Peg often wondered if the movies had copied him or he was copying the movies for the benefit of the tourists who spawned upstream to Times Square in the summer.

“Off to work,” she said, smiling back at him.

He shook his head. “Still don't like you coming home after dark. Sure you couldn't get that early shift back?”

“Better pay in the evening, Officer Paretti. Besides, I like seeing the neon all lit up and sparkling when I come back.”

One furry eyebrow lifted. “You can protect yourself?”

She chuckled. “You'd be surprised. Working for the butcher has built muscle.”

He shook his head. “Tiny thing like you. Just not right. You should be working in a store, somethin' like that. Not choppin' up chickens and steak.”

“If a store paid as much as the butcher does, I'd agree with you. But I was lucky to have Mr. Goldfarb hire me. Best surprise of my life, getting that job. After all”—she leaned closer—“my tips come in chicken livers and ham hocks.”