David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 2

The owner decided that the bartender wasn’t such a good man after all. There was no reason why he couldn’t have handled the same thing in the same way. He could have if he hadn’t let the man frighten him. You couldn’t let these people frighten you, bluff you.

Abruptly, the owner realized that the customer in the field jacket hadn’t left yet. He was standing behind the stool he’d vacated. He was looking at another man, a fat, prosperous-looking man with flowing white hair and horn-rimmed glasses, who had just entered and sat down at one of the booths. The fat man, who was one of the owner’s regular people, had been for years, was looking at the menu and giving his order to the waiter who had instantly glided up to the booth.

The customer stood there, slight, medium height, hunching his narrow shoulders continually under the field jacket, both hands thrust into his pockets, and kept looking at the fat man. He watched the waiter take the fat man’s order and move away. The owner wondered what was bothering the customer now, what was keeping him from leaving. And then he saw.

The prosperous-looking fat man was wearing an expensive sport jacket and slacks and a sport shirt but no tie. He suddenly became aware of the customer in the field jacket staring at him. He glowered back at him, indignantly, reddening around his puffy jowls a little.

The customer walked over to the fat man. He pointed at him and turned to the owner. “Where’s his tie?” he demanded. His voice was raggedly shrill now. It stopped every other sound in the place.

He turned back to the fat man and moved right up next to the booth. He said in the same keening voice, right into the fat man’s now apoplectic face: “You’ve got to wear a tie to eat here, mister. They told me that. I can’t eat here without no tie. You can’t, either. A bare neck like you and I got ain’t no good, you understand?” His voice rose until it hurt the eardrums. He mimicked the owner: “I’m sure you understand.”

He drew a sobbing breath. “You got to have something around your neck. They said so. You got to.” He giggled. “I’ll give you something. I’ll give you a necktie.”

He pulled one hand from his pocket and it held a straight razor. He flicked it open. He reached down and caught the fat man’s long white hair in his other hand and yanked his head back. “A Goddamn necktie you got to have to eat here.” He slashed the razor across the fleshy folds of the fat man’s throat. The fat man’s big head looked as though it was going to fall off his shoulders but it didn’t. The blood came out of him like a red waterfall and went all over the table and as he staggered up out of the booth and before he fell it went across the floor, halfway to the bar.

The customer with the razor jumped back out of the way of the blood. He wheeled as the screams of people at the bar shook the place, as they turned over bar stools, lurched, bleating, toward the door. He grabbed a woman and swiped the long straight blade across her bare arm as she raised it to protect her face. Her wrist and hand hung loosely for a moment from the rest of her arm before she fainted.

The owner stood staring in stupefaction at the customer. He told himself that this couldn’t be. This didn’t happen in his place. And then he saw the customer coming toward him with the razor uplifted. The owner wanted to move, to run. He couldn’t. He wanted to raise his arms to protect himself but they were too heavy. They wouldn’t move. He watched the customer, rabid-eyed, his face twisted grotesquely, rushing toward him and knew that he was going to die but couldn’t seem to understand it. Absurdly, he found himself wondering what had gone wrong, how could this have happened.

Then he saw the bartender pick up a bar stool and run up behind the customer and bring the stool down onto the back of his head. The customer’s knees went out from under him but instead of falling, he half turned around. He saw the bartender with the stool raised and arcing toward him again. The customer said: “I got to have a necktie, too.” He stroked the glistening red blade across his own throat and looked down, smiling hideously at all the new blood before the stool hit him the second time and he went down.

The owner stood there for a long time, looking around, while the customers who hadn’t reached the door before it was all over, tried to help the others who had fainted or gotten knocked down. Nobody was doing anything about the woman with the severed arm.

“Get a mop!” the owner screamed at the bartender. “Don’t just stand here.” He made a deep sucking breath. He said: “My place! My God, my place, look at my poor place!”

He leaned his elbows on the bar by the cash register and put his face into his hands and firmly but gently began to cry.

There’d been a stab-and-assault in the Eighteenth’s bailiwick the night before, and all leaves and days off had been cancelled until we caught the guy. My partner, Ben Muller, and I had been scheduled for relief at eight A.M., but at a quarter past four that afternoon we were still checking out leads. It’s all in the day’s work, of course, but there are some crimes you just naturally take more interest in than others; and when the stab-and-assault victim happens to be only nine years old, you don’t mind the extra hours and loss of sleep at all.

But at a quarter past four, Control gave the signals and coding that meant the killer had been apprehended, and that all off-duty detective teams should report back to their precincts.

Ben, who was driving our RMP car, sighed and turned onto Broadway, heading back uptown to the Eighteenth.

“I’d a little rather we’d grabbed the guy ourselves,” he said. “But now that he’s nailed, I got no thoughts but bed. A cold shower, and then ten straight hours of sack-time.”

I felt pretty much the same way, and started to say so, when the dash speaker rattled and Control broke in again. This time the lady dispatcher’s voice sounded a little sorry for us. The gist of the call was that a suicide had been phoned in from an apartment house at 905 West Fifty-third Street. The assistant M.E. and the tech crew were already there, but the detective team which would normally have handled the squeal was the same team which had just trapped the killer on a roof top. That meant they’d be tied up with him for many hours, and it was up to Ben and me to fill in for them.

Ben touched the siren just enough to get us through the next intersection and fed the RMP a little more gas.

“You and I made a mistake when we signed up with this outfit, Pete,” he said. “We should have taken the examination for fireman, like sensible men.”

I grinned. “Sometimes I think you’re right,” I said.

He turned west on Fifty-third. “The job keeps you young, though,” he said. “I will say that for it.”

“Maybe it’s just that cops don’t live so long,” I said. “You ever think of it that way?

“All the time, Pete. That’s another reason I wish I’d taken the exam for fireman.”

“You’re too fat for a fireman. You’d never get up the ladder.”

“Who’s worried about ladders? I’d stand around and give orders, and let skinny guys like you fool with the ladders.”

“Sure,” I said. “Pull up, Ben. That’s nine-oh-five, there on the corner.”

It was a converted brownstone, like a lot of others in the neighborhood. All New York brownstones look pretty much the same from the outside, but inside, they range all the way from Bohemian pigpens to millionaires’ showplaces.

This was one of the pigpens.

The dead man was in the basement apartment, suspended from a water pipe near the ceiling by a double thickness of dirty cotton clothesline. The apartment itself was something to see. There were two filthy mattresses side by side in one corner, newspapers spread on the cement floor in lieu of a carpet, an exposed toilet and sink in one corner, with an overflowing garbage pail between them, and pornographic drawings on the grimy stucco walls. There were scraps of food and cigarette butts everywhere, and a large cardboard box near the door seemed to be completely filled with empty liquor bottles and beer cans. It was a tossup as to whether the place looked worse than it smelled, or vice versa.