Ed McBain - Downtown

“You mean to tell me Connie just picked up the telephone, and you ran on down to meet her?”

“I owe her,” Gregory said, and left it at that.

“Well, I’m grateful to you.”

“How grateful?” Gregory said, and was putting his hand on Michael’s thigh when Phyllis walked over.

“Won’t you introduce me, Greg?” she said.

“Michael, this is Phyllis,” Gregory said, and squeezed Michael just above the knee.

“Care to dance, Michael?”

Michael figured he could do worse.

“Do you come here often?” Phyllis asked.

She was a very good dancer.

The jukebox was playing “It Happened in Monterey.” Frank Sinatra was singing.

“My first time,” Michael said.

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

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Michael said.

“Oh my, she’s modest as well,” Phyllis said.

Her beard was scratching against Michael’s cheek.

“Are you married?” Phyllis asked.

“Divorced,” he said.

“Oh, good,” Phyllis said.

“But very serious about someone,” Michael said quickly.

“Oh, drat,” Phyllis said.

“May I cut in, please?” someone asked.

The someone was Connie.

“I said the Green Garden,” she said.

The three of them sat in a booth.

Connie was irritated because Gregory had taken Michael to the Green Garter instead of the Green Garden, which was a health food place on Orchard Street, and a hell of a lot closer to Gouverneur Hospital than Greenwich Avenue was.

“It all gets down to a matter of precincts,” she said. “The Sixth Precinct is not the Seventh Precinct. If I’d wanted the Green Garter in the Sixth Precinct, I wouldn’t have picked the Green Garden in the Seventh Precinct.”

“I’m contrite,” Gregory said.

He wasn’t being sarcastic, he really did sound enormously sorry for his error. Moreover, as Michael now reminded Connie, he was the one who’d charged to the rescue when—

“Well, not exactly charged,” Gregory said modestly.

“But Michael’s right,” Connie said. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“It’s the stink of the morgue,” Gregory said. “Have you ever been inside a morgue?” he asked Michael.

“Never.”

“About two years ago,” Gregory said, “a friend of mine OD’d on heroin, and I had to go to the morgue to identify him. It truly does stink in there. It can give you a headache in there. It can also make you very anxious. All those dead people stacked up on drawers that slide out.”

“Don’t remind me,” Connie said.

Michael was thinking that at times the stench in Vietnam had been unbearable. He could not imagine any morgue in the world stinking more than a jungle clearing littered with three-day-old bodies.

“He didn’t even look like Crandall,” Connie said.

“You saw him?” Michael asked.

“Yes. A tall, thin man. Pockmarked face. Tattoo on his arm.”

“White?”

“Yes. But that’s the only resemblance.”

“How old was he?”

“My friend at the morgue guessed maybe forty, forty-five.”

“What’s his name?”

“Max Feinstein. I know him from when he was driving an ambulance for...”

“No, I mean the corpse.”

“Oh. Julian Rainey. They finally identified him from his fingerprints. He has a record that goes back forever.”

“Yes, he’s a dealer,” Gregory said, nodding.

“Was a dealer,” Connie corrected. “You mean you know him?”

“Oh, yes, he works this entire downtown area.”

“Used to work,” Connie corrected.

A drug plot, Michael thought. I knew it.

“A red heart, am I right?” Gregory said. “The tattoo?”

“Yes,” Connie said.

“On his left arm.”

“The left arm, yes.”

“And in the heart it says Ju Ju, am I right?”

“I don’t know what it said in the heart.”

“Ju Ju. That’s his nickname.”

“Was his nickname,” Connie corrected.

Michael was looking at both of them.

“I think we have to go back to that warehouse,” he said.

“Without me,” Gregory said.

It was close to midnight when they got there.

Christmas was almost gone.

Not a light showed in the entire building.

“That’s because nobody lives here,” Connie explained. “This is a real warehouse, it’s not like the buildings they’re renting for lofts all over town. People actually store things here.”

“What do you suppose Ju Ju was storing here?” Michael asked.

“Take a wild guess,” Connie said.

Michael looked up at the front of the building. It was seven stories high, with five evenly spaced windows on each floor. From the fifth floor down, huge white letters below the windows announced the building’s original intent, stating its past like a huge poster that faced the East River:

The entire area smelled of fish.

“We’re just a few blocks from the market,” Connie said.

The metal entrance door was locked.

“It was open earlier tonight,” she said. “It’s on the fifth floor. I watched the needle.”

They were both getting very good at using fire escapes. Michael figured that if ever they were trapped in a burning building together, they’d know how to get out of it in a minute. He supposed it was good to know such things. On the fifth floor, they found the window Gregory had earlier jimmied open. It was closed now. Michael guessed the three pizza-eaters had closed it after they’d come into the room and found only Ju Ju’s bed with no one in it. He hoped the pizza-eaters were not still here. He did not think they were; not a light was burning anywhere inside. But you never could tell; in Vietnam, Charlie could see in the dark.

He eased the window open.

Listened.

Not a sound.

He climbed in over the sill, and then helped Connie into the room.

They waited, eyes adjusting to the darkness, moonlight slowly giving shapes to objects...

First the bed with its white wrought-iron headboard and footboard...

Then the bundle of clothes in the corner...

And then the Indian sitting his spotted pony.

Nothing else.

“I think somebody peed in this room,” Connie whispered.

It was not truly a room, Michael now realized, but merely a space defined by a partition. The door to the other side of the partition was slightly ajar. No light beyond it. He went to the door and listened. He heard nothing. He nodded to Connie and opened the door wider. Together they moved into the space beyond the partition. And waited again while their eyes adjusted to what seemed a deeper blackness but only because of its vastness. When Michael felt certain they were alone, he groped along the wall for a switch, found one, and turned on the lights.

If he’d expected a cocaine factory, he was disappointed.

From the evidence here on this side of the partition, you would never have guessed that Ju Ju Rainey was a drug dealer. For here was a department store of the first order, stocked with television sets and cameras, record players and home computers, typewriters and silverware, fur coats and jewelry, cellular telephones—

“A fence,” Connie said. “Lots of dealers accept goods in exchange for dope.”

A drug plot after all, Michael thought.

There were windows on the wall facing the street. Distant traffic lights below tinted the glass alternately red and green. It was still Christmas, but just barely. The wall opposite the windows was lined with clocks. They ticked in concert like a conglomerate time bomb about to explode. Grandfather clocks ticking and locking and swinging their pendulums, smaller clocks on shelves whispering their ticks into the vast silent room.