Ed McBain - Downtown

No, Michael thought, they didn’t break my spirit in any jail.

The V.C. did a pretty good job of breaking it in Vietnam, and Jenny finished the job later.

Kissing Connie Kee like this, he felt like weeping. Not the bitter tears he’d wept in Vietnam when his closest friend, Andrew, died in his arms, or the kind of angry tears he’d wept that day on the boat with the waters of the Gulf threatening the gunwales. He did not know whether there were any kind of tears that could express what he was feeling here and now with this beautiful girl in his arms. Were there really tears of happiness? He had read a lot about them, but he had never shed such tears in his life. He knew only that kissing Connie Kee like this, he wished their lips would freeze together out here in the cold and the dark. He wanted to go on kissing Connie Kee forever. Or even Kee Connie.

He remembered, however, that the police in this winter wonderland of a city thought he had killed Arthur Crandall. He supposed he could go visit his old friend Tony the Bear Orso at the First Precinct, explain to him that the man who’d stolen the car was now the man who’d turned up dead in it — remember we were talking about all this, Tony, old pal, remember I showed you his card? Arthur Crandall, remember? You said it looked like a piece of film, remember? His card. Well, that’s the man who’s turned up dead. In the car he stole from me. So you see, Tony, I can’t be the one who killed him. He stole my car, you see. And the other ones — the phony cop and his phony lawyer girlfriend — stole my credit cards and my license, so maybe it’s the other ones who killed Crandall, but it wasn’t me, it couldn’t have been me. In fact, I was probably sitting right there chatting with you while Crandall was getting himself killed. That’s a definite possibility and something you may wish to investigate. Meanwhile, I’ll be running on back to Sarasota, Tony, give me a call when you break the case, I’ll send you a crate of oranges.

So, yes, maybe he should drop in on the First, it wasn’t everyone in this city who had Police Department connections. On the other hand, if he could not convince Tony the Bear that he’d had nothing whatever to do with the murder of Arthur Crandall, he might find himself sharing a cell with Charlie Bonano — why were so many people in this city named Charlie? Except for Charlie’s News, which was a store selling books, and magazines, and cards, and newspapers, Michael did not know a single Charlie in Sarasota. Did not know any other Charlies in the entire state of Florida, for that matter. But here in New York, three of them in the same night, and two of them named Charlie Wong. Remarkable. The very same night. Two Charlie Wongs. He wondered if Charlie was as common a name as Wong, and he thought of asking Connie — once they were finished with all this kissing — what the statistics on the frequency of Charlies in any given location might be. She showed no indication of wanting to stop the kissing, however, until a light snapped on overhead and someone shouted, “Hey! What the hell are you doing down there?”

They broke apart at once and looked immediately heavenward because this sounded like a demand from a vengeful God instead of a person shouting from the fourth-floor window of the tenement to the right of the hotel — which, they now discovered, was where the shout had come from: a light was showing in the fourth-floor window, silhouetting the person doing all the yelling.

“I’m gonna call the police!” the person — man or woman, it was difficult to tell — shouted.

“No, don’t do that!” Michael yelled, and he yanked Connie out of the glare of the moonshine and ran over the snow and into the shadows created by the rear of Crandall’s building. They both listened. They could sense but not see the person up there straining to catch a glimpse of them in the dark.

“I know you’re still there!” the voice shouted.

They said nothing.

A window slammed shut.

They waited.

Silence.

The light upstairs went out. The backyard was dark and still again. She grinned at him. He grinned back.

And then he leaped up like Superman for the fire-escape ladder, caught the bottom rung on the first try, and yanked it down.

There was a small Christmas tree on one of the filing cabinets, decorated with Christmas ornaments and lights that Michael now turned on to add a bit more illumination than was flowing in from the street lamp outside. The lights had a blinker on them. In fits and starts — on again, off again, yellow, green, red, and blue — Michael and Connie took in the rest of the office.

From the looks of the place, there’d been one hell of a party here. Someone had decorated the single large room with red and green streamers strung from wall to wall, crisscrossing the office like the rows and rows of protective barbed wire around the base camp at Cu Chi. Dangling from the streamers were cardboard cutouts of Santa Claus and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman, all of whom — together with the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin and St. Valentine’s day, especially St. Valentine’s Day — Michael had learned to distrust in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive in February of 1968, when Jenny (then) Aldershot forgot to send him a card asking him to be her valentine. And when, too, what with all that hardware flying around, he’d begun to doubt he’d ever get back home again to Jenny or anyone else, ever get back to shore again. He should have known then and there that one day she’d start up with a fat bastard bank branch manager, oh well, live and learn.

In addition to the streamers and the dangling reminders of Christmases past, there was a huge wreath hanging in the front window, which Michael hadn’t noticed when he was looking up at the window from the street outside. There were also a great many ashtrays with dead cigarette butts in them, and a great many plastic glasses with the residue of booze in them, and a folding table covered with a red paper cloth upon which rested the tired remnants of a baked ham, a round of cheese, a crock of chopped liver, a tureen of orange caviar dip, a basket of crumbling crackers, several depleted bottles of gin, scotch, vodka, and bourbon, and a partridge in a pear tree. Or at least what appeared to be a partridge in a pear tree, but which was actually the tattered remains of a roast turkey on a wooden platter with a carving knife and fork alongside it. There were red paper napkins and green paper plates and white plastic knives and forks in evidence on every flat surface in the room. What at first appeared to be another red napkin lying on top of a large desk otherwise covered with plates and such — blink ON, blink OFF, went the Christmas tree lights — actually turned out to be a pair of red silk panties someone had inadvertently left behind. It must have been one hell of a party.

“Did you ever do it on a desktop?” Connie whispered.

“Never,” Michael whispered back.

He wondered if she was propositioning him.

He also wondered if she was wearing red silk panties under her green silk dress.

“What are we looking for?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He did not, in truth, know what the hell they were looking for. He did not like this entire business of having been accused of murdering someone, did not like the sort of hospitality New York City extended to a visitor from the South, did not in fact like anything that had happened to him tonight with the exception of Connie Kee. He knew for certain — or, rather, felt for certain — that if he went to the police, he would find himself in deeper shit than was already up to his knees. He resented this. He was a goddamn taxpayer, and the police should have been working for him instead of against him. Why should he have to be doing their goddamn job? Well, a taxpayer in Sarasota, anyway.