Ed McBain - Downtown

“Let me tell you what I think happened,” he said.

“No, let me tell you what’s going to happen,” Crandall said. “Jessica and I are going to get out of this car on St. Luke’s Place, and then Mama is going to take you and your lovely little friend...”

“I’m five-nine,” Connie said.

“... out to Long Island someplace...”

“And I don’t want to go to Long Island,” she said.

“The ocean breezes are very nice at this time of the year,” Mama said. “You’ll enjoy Jones Beach.”

“Why are you sending them to Long Island?” Jessica asked, puzzled. “Why don’t we take them to the police instead? This man’s a murderer!”

“Don’t worry,” Crandall said.

“What does that mean, don’t worry? This person killed a person!”

“There are police on Long Island,” Crandall said. “Don’t worry.”

“Why did you do that, Mr. Barnes?” she asked, turning to him. “I’m an actress, as you know...”

“Yes.”

“So I keep wondering about your motivation. Are you a crazy person? Is that it?”

“Ask your director,” Michael said. “Ask him why he went to Charlie Nichols and asked him to hire two other actors...”

“Are you casting another movie?” Jessica asked.

“No, this wasn’t a movie,” Michael said. “This was Christmas Eve in a bar on — why’d Nichols give me your card?” he asked, turning suddenly to Crandall, who sat smiling and shaking his head as if Michael were certifiable.

Jessica, however, was not smiling.

Jessica was trying to understand what the hell was happening here.

Maybe she wasn’t such a dumb bimbo after all.

“You expected me to go to the police, didn’t you?” Michael said.

“He already knows the whole fucking thing,” Mama said suddenly.

Jessica looked at him.

Michael did, in fact, think he already knew the whole fucking thing.

But this wasn’t a movie. This wasn’t the scene where the bad guys said, All right, Charlie, since we’re going to kill you in the next five minutes, anyway, it won’t do any harm telling you all about the terrible things we did. Nor was this the scene where the hero was playing for time waiting for the police to kick in the door, during which suspenseful moments he could explain to the bad guys exactly why they had committed all those gruesome murders. This was real life, such as it was, here in the backseat of this limousine, and the way Michael figured it, Mama was ready to make his move.

Dumb blonde bimbo notwithstanding, Mama was ready. Even if it meant throwing away the blonde with the bathwater. The blonde meant nothing to Mama. Mama wanted home free. Mama had gone into this to kill two birds with one stone. Get paid for ridding himself of a competitor and take over his business besides. Now he had both stones in his back pocket and a switchblade knife in his hand and the only thing standing between him and prosperity was a dumb fuck from Sarasota, Florida. And his Chink girlfriend. So naturally, they both had to go. That was the way Rodriguez thought. That was the way to become successful in America. And if the blonde accidentally happened to become a witness to something she shouldn’t have seen, why then the blonde would have to go, too, and Mama would later give her red shoes to his own mama. The way Michael figured it. Mama was a businessman. And business was business. And ’twas the season to be jolly.

On the other hand, Crandall was now in over his head. Michael guessed that Mama was supposed to have done his job and then disappear into the woodwork again. Supply Crandall with a body, that was all. Charlie Nichols must have told him that he knew someone who could pick up a body for them. His crack dealer. A man named Mario Mateo Rodriguez, familiarly called Mama. No questions asked. Six thousand big ones and he’d deliver a corpse. Crandall was the sort of man who wouldn’t want to know where the corpse was coming from. This was commerce. He needed a dead body. Period. He did not want to know about murder. He preferred believing that Mama would find a dead derelict in a Bowery hallway. Or in a garbage can behind McDonald’s. No great loss to the city. Here’s the money Charlie promised you, six thousand bucks out of the nine I safely drew from the bank, no questions asked, the other three already gone to Charlie and his fellow thespians for their contribution to the scheme. It was nice not knowing you, Mama, good-bye and good luck.

“Mr. Crandall?”

The chauffeur’s voice, coming over the loudspeaker.

Crandall threw a switch.

“Yes?”

“We’re approaching Houston, sir. Will you and the lady still be getting out on St. Luke’s?”

“Yes, please,” Crandall said.

In Vietnam, Michael had simply quit. He had told that colonel to go fuck himself, sir, and he had meant it. He had quit. Because after the way Andrew died, there was no sense pursuing this dumb fucking war any further. This war was all about people doing unspeakably horrible things to themselves and to other people. If he had been the one who’d picked up that baby, if he had been the one who’d reached for that little girl a second before Andrew did, then his hands would have been blown off, his chest would have blossomed with blood, Andrew would have carried him through the jungle, and he would have been the one who was loaded onto that chopper in a body bag, dead. The obscenity had been as much in the randomness of death as in the singularly callous act that had preceded it, the wiring of a baby, yet another random victim. The whole fucking thing was a lottery, and Michael had wanted nothing more to do with it.

He wanted nothing more to do with this, either.

But on Christmas Eve, for no reason and no cause, he had been chosen at random to take part in yet another obscenity.

The promotion of a goddamn movie.

So he went for Mama’s knife.

A lot of people got hurt in that limousine. Including the driver. Who’d been nowhere near that slashing knife. A couple of people got hurt outside the limousine too. What happened was that he had her up against this brick wall in this sort of little alleyway between two buildings on Houston Street and he had his hand up under her skirt and they were both breathing very hard and all of a sudden there was a screeching sound and lights flashing and he thought at first that perhaps he’d had an orgasm since he was only thirteen years old or perhaps she’d had one since she was only twelve or perhaps both of them’d had one together because that was when the earth was supposed to move. But instead it was only a big mother of a black Cadillac jumping the curb and coming up onto the sidewalk and almost into the mouth of the alley, forcing him to fall down on top of her with his hand still up under her skirt, causing him to break his wrist and causing her to lose her virginity, for which dire injuries their separate attorneys said they could collect big money for damages.

This was what Tony the Bear Orso told Michael in his room at St. Vincent’s Hospital. It was still Boxing Day. Eight o’clock in the morning. From the window of his room, Michael could see a rooftop Christmas tree, its branches tossing wildly in the fierce wind.

“It was a terrible accident, sir,” Orso said. “The driver told me everybody was screaming and kicking in the backseat and yelling in Spanish and Chinese and grabbing for guns and knives and kicking at the window separating them from where he was sitting, so naturally he lost control, just like you and me would’ve.”

“Naturally,” Michael said.

“When a person is wielding a sharp instrument,” Orso said, “the backseat of a limousine can become a very small place.”