Ed McBain - Downtown

“No, I only said he shouldn’t be giving it away so fast in case I wanted it.”

“Well, I don’t want it,” Alice said. “It’s all anchovies.”

“I don’t want it, either,” Larry said.

“Then the hell with it,” Silvio said. “Throw it in the garbage, and let’s go do him.”

No, Michael thought. Somebody eat it. Please.

“Well, if nobody wants it,” Alice said, “I’ll take it.”

“In fact, let’s split it,” Larry said.

“Three ways,” Silvio said.

The window opened a crack. Cold air rushed into the room. And what smelled like fish. The black man all in black pushed the window up higher, letting in more cold air and the very definite stink of fish. He climbed over the sill and came into the room. Came directly to the bed. Pulled the handkerchief off his face, leaned in close to Michael’s ear, and whispered, “Connie sent me.”

“Untie me,” Michael whispered.

In the other room, Silvio said, “It’s a sin to make good food go to waste.”

“This is very hard to cut,” Larry said.

“Hold it with the fork,” Alice said.

The black man began untying the ropes. He was no better at untying than he was at jimmying. In the other room, they were silent now. Michael figured they were concentrating on slicing the slice of pizza into three even slices, which was probably more difficult than untying a man tied to a bed. He hoped. He wished they would say something in there. The silence was somehow ominous. Maybe they had already sliced the slice of pizza and already eaten it. Maybe they were at this very moment loading pistols instead of slicing—

“Listen,” he whispered, “don’t you have a knife in that satchel?”

“This’ll only take a minute,” the black man whispered.

He had finally untied the first wrist.

That left two ankles and a wrist to go.

“Get the ankles,” Michael said. “I’ll try the other wrist.”

“Did you hear something just then?” Larry asked.

Silence.

Oh, Jesus, Michael thought.

“No,” Silvio said. “What did you hear?”

“Like somebody talking.” Larry said.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Like next door.”

They all listened again.

The black man had untied Michael’s left ankle and was now working on the right one. Michael was plucking at the knots in the rope holding his left wrist to the headboard. He figured that in about two minutes he would be a dead man.

“I still don’t hear anything,” Silvio said.

“Are you going to finish these Cokes, or what?” Alice asked.

“I’m done,” Larry said.

“Me, too,” Silvio said.

“Me, too,” the black man whispered.

So was Michael.

He yanked his left hand free of the rope, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and went immediately to the window. The black man was right behind him. As they went out onto the fire escape, Michael heard Silvio saying, “Let’s go do him.”

The black man’s name was Gregory Washington.

The name of the club was the Green Garter.

Gregory told him that this was where Connie had said she would meet them. He also told Michael that the club was sometimes known as the Green Farter because it attracted a very old clientele. Michael looked around the place and did not see anyone who looked older than thirty. But Gregory was only nineteen.

A lot of the women standing at the bar, or sitting in the booths or at the tables, seemed to be wearing only lingerie. Garter belts and panties and seamed silk stockings and teddies and negligees and stiletto-heeled shoes that made them look a lot like either the redheaded detective named O’Brien, who’d mistaken him for a cheap hold-up artist, or the redheaded hooker named Hannah, who’d mistaken him for the man in the Carvel commercials. Michael wondered if Frankie Zeppelin had yet found someone to kill Isadore Onions. He wondered whose thigh Isadore’s girlfriend had her hand on now. He wondered if all the women in New York City walked around in their underwear at Christmastime.

“You have adorable buns,” Gregory said. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

Which was when Michael began to suspect that both Gregory and the Green Garter were what you might call gay, and that all these underdressed women were in actuality men.

One of them winked at him.

“Oh, look,” Gregory said. “Phyllis has her eye on you.”

He sounded like Eddie Murphy doing his gay bit in Beverly Hills Cop. In fact, he even looked a little like a younger Eddie Murphy, if there was such a thing as a younger Eddie Murphy. It seemed to Michael that nowadays there were no male movie stars who were his age. All the male movie stars up there on the screen were twenty years old. Making love to stark-naked women who had to be at least in their thirties. The only twenty-year-old movie stars Michael believed were the ones in war movies because in Vietnam almost everybody was twenty years old or younger. Even the lieutenants were twenty years old. The only people who weren’t twenty years old were sergeants.

Phyllis winked at him again.

Phyllis was wearing a blonde wig, a red silk blouse, and a green silk skirt with high-heeled pumps to match. Most of the people in the room, Michael noticed, were dressed in either red or green in honor of the yuletide season, except for the ones who were wearing swastikas and chains and jeans and black leather jackets bristling with metal spikes and studs. They looked tougher and meaner than any man Michael had ever seen in his life, but he guessed they were gay, too, otherwise what were they doing here?

Which was probably what Phyllis, who needed a shave, was wondering about him.

“What time did Connie say she’d be here?” he asked.

“Soon as she does what she has to do,” Gregory said.

“What is it she has to do?” Michael asked.

“Find out who the corpse is.”

“And how does she plan to do that?”

“At the Gouverneur Hospital morgue,” Gregory said. “On Henry Street. ’Cause the corpse was found in the Seventh Precinct, and that’s the only hospital in the Seventh, so she figured that’s where they must’ve took it. She knows a man there works with the stiffs.”

“So that’s where she is now,” Michael said.

“Lucky her,” Gregory said, and grinned.

“Excuse me,” Michael said, “but how do you fit into all this?”

“Oh, very comfortably,” Gregory said, and looked around the room. “I been comin’ here since it opened.”

“I meant, how did you happen to get the job of rescuing me?”

“Oh. Connie asked me to climb on up there.”

“Why you? Are you a burglar?”

“No, I’m a dancer.”

“I still don’t understand how Connie knew I was in trouble.”

“Well, from what she told me, she was waiting outside the Amalgamated when she saw this man carrying you out of the building. Unconscious. You, not the man. So she followed his car to this warehouse near the Fulton Market. The fish market. On Fulton Street. And that’s how come you’re sitting here with me now, doll.”

“Connie just ran into you, is that it? And asked you to...”

“No, she called me on the telephone.”

“And you ran on over with your satchel...”

“I borrowed the satchel from my brother-in-law.”

“Is he a dancer, too?”

“No, he’s a burglar. But he’s white, you wouldn’t ’spect him to have no rhythm.”

“So Connie called you...”

“Right, and asked me to meet her at this warehouse, where she was waiting outside.”

“How’d she know what apartment I was in?”

“It isn’t an apartment building, it’s a warehouse. She watched the elevator needle. And I went up the fire escape to the fifth floor, where I found you, aren’t you glad?”