Geoffrey Bartholomew - Manhattan Noir 2 - The Classics

“She was in a accident,” the child said, not looking at him.

“That’s too bad,” Simms said consolingly. “But she’s a very lucky little doll to have you to take care of her.” From the pocket of his denim workshirt, he took a pack of chewing gum. Slowly unwrapping a stick, he put it in his mouth. The little girl was watching him. “Would you like some gum?” he asked. She looked back at her doll without answering. “It’s fruit-flavored,” he said. “Here—” he held out a stick “—have some.”

The girl rose and walked over to him. She stood before the stairs he was sitting on and Simms gave her the gum and watched as she unwrapped it and put it in her mouth. As she began to chew, she smiled.

“See, I told you it was good,” Simms said. A lock of hair had fallen over her forehead and Simms reached out and brushed it back. “Now, I told you my name, but if we’re going to be friends you’ve got to tell me yours.”

Just then a woman came out of 704 and strode urgently over to them. “Debbie, what are you doing?” she said irritably.

Simms frowned. Debbie? Debbie? What the hell kind of name was that for a Puerto Rican kid?

The woman took the girl by one arm. “You know you’re supposed to stay right by the door. And not talk to strangers.”

“It’s okay,” Simms said, smiling. “I work here.”

“I don’t give a damn where you work!” the woman snapped. She was pretty — an older version of the child, except that her eyes had no innocence left in them. “What have you got in your mouth?” she demanded of Debbie. “Spit it out,” she ordered, holding her hand under the child’s mouth. “Now get back in the room!” As the little girl hurried away, the woman turned her anger on Simms. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, giving gum to my kid? Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“My name’s George,” Simms said. “I work here.” He held up the toolbelt. “I fix things—”

“Yeah. Well, if I ever catch you giving anything to my kid again I’m gonna fix you .” The woman stuck the wad of gum on the handle of his screwdriver. “Stay away from my kid!”

She stalked away.

A few days later, Simms went down to the maintenance office for some new work orders and Hosey was not at his desk. Simms pulled the curtain aside and looked into the storeroom for him. He wasn’t there, either. It was the first time Simms had seen the storeroom except for an occasional glimpse when the curtains were left open an inch or so. Now he looked around curiously. The cot he’d seen his first day was of the ordinary folding variety, with a blue-striped mattress and a couple of gray blankets that had ST. LUKE HOSPITAL printed on them. An upturned wooden crate served as a nightstand. On it was a cheap little lamp, an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and a glossy porno magazine with a nude woman in bondage on the cover. Standing on the floor next to the cot was an almost empty Jim Beam bottle. A few of Hosey’s extra clothes hung from nails in the wall.

The phone on Hosey’s desk rang. Simms closed the curtain and answered it. “Maintenance.”

“Where’s Charlie?”

Simms recognized Max Wallace’s voice. “I don’t know, I just walked in.”

“Find him,” Wallace ordered crisply. “Then the two of you get up to my office — fast .”

Simms found Hosey over in a section of the basement that had been converted into a laundry room for the welfare tenants. He had the drum out of a clothes dryer and was resetting its axle. Simms told him about Wallace’s call and Hosey put aside his work. “Did he say what it was about?” he asked.

“No,” said Simms. “He just sounded mad — as usual.”

When they got to the security office, Max was with a little black girl of eight or nine and her mother. Wallace glanced at Hosey, glared at Simms, and knelt in front of the girl. “Sweetheart, I want you to look at these two men and tell me if it was either one of them that scared you.” The child hesitated and Wallace gently patted her head. “It’s all right. Come on now, take a look for me.”

The little girl looked at Hosey and Simms, frowned, seemed to ponder, and finally said, “I’m not sure. It was so dark—” Her voice broke and she whimpered a little.

Wallace gestured to her mother. “I’ll talk to her again later. Meantime, try to go on with her normal routine as much as you can. Don’t avoid the subject, but don’t talk about it like it was the end of the world, either. Understand?”

“Yes, all right,” the mother replied in a strained voice. She took her daughter and left.

Wallace sat behind his desk and studied Hosey and Simms with cold eyes. “That little girl,” he said evenly, “was on her way down the stairs to go to school this morning when a man accosted her on the landing between the lobby and two. She says the man tried to kiss her. The light on the landing was out, but she saw that he was a white man and she says he had a funny smell.”

“Well, why pick on us?” Hosey said indignantly.

“You’re white and you’re in the building,” Wallace said.

“For Christ’s sake, there’s probably two or three dozen white guys living in the place,” Hosey argued. “And there’s boyfriends that sneak in and spend the night, there’s johns that some of these women go out and pick up for extra money. You got no right to single us out, Wallace.”

“Nobody said I was singling you out. I always check the obvious first.” The security man reached for his phone. “You can go,” he told them.

His eyes lingered on Simms until he was out the door.

That afternoon, Simms was helping Hosey rehang one of the lobby doors that the kids had misaligned by swinging on it. “Maybe I shouldn’t have got so hot at Max,” the little man mused. “He’s just trying to do his job. It ain’t an easy one, either — there’s lots going on in this place that shouldn’t be going on. Prostitution, drug sales, stolen property being sold—”

“I guess you never expected to see those kind of things in the Algiers,” Simms sympathized.

“Not stuff like that, never,” Hosey declared. “’Course, in any big city hotel you’re gonna get your share of illegal goings-on. Hell, I used to see Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano come in here regular to have a drink in the Oasis Bar — there’s no telling what kind of crooked business they was talking about. And one time we found out there was a high-price call-girl ring operating out of what used to be the penthouse suite. It was supposed to be rented to this wealthy Texas dame and her four daughters — well, they wasn’t her daughters at all, if you know what I mean.”

Hosey grinned. “Funniest thing that ever happened was the time some teller over at Chase Manhattan got conned by a blonde who was a dead ringer for Lana Turner. She was supposed to run away with him, see, after he embezzled a bundle of dough, but what she really did was run away from him — with the dough. The cops arrested him right here in the hotel, sitting on the bed, suitcase all packed, waiting for her to come back.” While Hosey was talking, Simms noticed Debbie’s mother go into the coffee shop across the street from the hotel. Debbie wasn’t with her. “She got caught later on,” Hosey said.

“Who?”

“The blonde that looked like Lana Turner. She got caught down in Florida somewheres. Only had about ten thousand dollars left. Claimed the bank teller only gave her twenty. The bank said a hundred thousand was stole. If you ask me, the bankers probably took the difference.” Hosey used an electric drill on a long extension cord to screw in the last door-hinge. “Well, that about does it. I wish there was some way to keep the kids from swinging on it, but I guess there ain’t. We’ll be fixing it again in a month.”