Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32

I left the car on
Amsterdam Avenue
and walked around the comer onto
West 72nd Street
. With the heat the way it was, I was glad
the Police Department let its people wear a short-sleeved shirt in the summer,
open at the neck, but I could have done without all that weight around my
middle. Pistol, holster, gunbelt, flashlight, one thing after another, all
dragging down on my pants and giving me an uncomfortable bunched-up feeling
around the waist. What I would have liked most of all right then would have
been to take all my clothes off and just stand there in the street and scratch.
But in a way that would have been more against the rules than what I had in
mind.

At the corner of
Amsterdam
and 72nd is the Lucerne Hotel, one of the
spots where the bar-flies live who hang out along Broadway. Broadway between
72nd and 79th streets is lined with those narrow little bars, and every one of
them is the same; the same loud jukebox, the same formica-and-plastic fixtures,
the same fake Spanish decorations, the same big-breasted Puerto Rican girl
behind the bar. All the losers from the single-occupancy hotels in the
neighborhood spend their nights with their elbows on those bars, mooning at the
barmaids, and then at closing time going back alone to their rooms to dream
great seduction scenes before going to sleep. Or, if they have the money, which
they usually don't, they take home with them one of the fourth-rate hookers who
walk up and down Broadway waiting to substitute for the barmaids, who have
lives of their own.

Along the block from the
Lucerne
to Broadway are a bunch of old buildings
with small businesses on the ground floor and old-line tenants in the
apartments upstairs; school-teachers' widows, retired grocers, aging garment
workers. The small businesses include a couple of bars, a delicatessen, a dry
cleaner, a liquor store; the usual collection, each with its piece of red neon
in the window.

Schlitz.
Hebrew National.
Shirts Cleaned. It was ten-thirty at night,
so most of them were closed now with just the neon and their night lights
glowing. Except the bars and the liquor store, of course, and they weren't very
likely either, not on a hot midweek night in June.

Very few people were out tonight. A few kids
ran around on the sidewalks, and cruising cabs ricocheted by at forty miles an
hour, the drivers cooling their left elbows; everybody else was at home, in
front of a fan.

The liquor store was midway to Broadway. When
I reached it, one look through the window past the animated snowman display
told me there were no customers in there; just the Puerto Rican clerk, reading
one of those illustrated paper backs in Spanish, and a pair of winos stocking
shelves in the back. I unsnapped my holster flap and went in.

All three of them glanced at me when I pushed
open the door. The winos went right back to work, but the clerk kept watching
me, his face empty, like everybody when they look at a cop.

The place was air-conditioned. Sweat cooled on
my back, where I'd been sitting in the car. I walked over to the counter.

The PR was as neutral as gray paint,
"Yes, officer?"

I took out the pistol and pointed it generally
at his stomach. I said, "Give me all you got in the drawer."

I watched his face. For the first second or
two, it was just shock, pure and simple. Then he made the switch of identities
in his head—I was not a cop, I was a robber— and he clicked over to the new
right response. "Yes, sir," he said, very fast, and turned toward the
cash register. He just worked here, it wasn't his money.

In the back, the winos had stopped. They were
standing there like a couple of part-melted wax statues, each of them holding
two bottles of sweet vermouth. They were facing mostly toward each other, giving
me their profiles, but they weren't looking at anything in particular. They
definitely weren't looking toward me.

The PR was pulling stacks of bills out of the
cash register and putting them on the counter; ones, then fives, then tens,
then twenties. I grabbed the first stack left-handed and shoved it into my
pants pocket, then switched the pistol to my left hand and did the rest with my
right. Fives in my other pants pocket, tens and twenties inside my shirt

The PR left the cash register open, and stood
there with his hands at his sides, showing me he didn't have any immediate
plans. I switched the pistol back to my right hand and put it away, but left
the flap open. Then I turned around and walked to the door.

I could see them reflected in the windows in
front of me. The PR didn't move a muscle. The winos were staring at me now. One
of them made some sort of unfocused arm movement, gesturing with the vermouth
bottle. The other one shook his head and the bottles in both his hands, and the
movement died.

I left the store, and turned back toward
Amsterdam
. On the way, I closed the holster flap.
Around the corner, I got back into the car and drove away.

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