Nelson Algren - The New Black Mask Quarterly (№ 1)

After a time, the fireman took the head-piece off Joe’s big blue nose and motioned to his friend at the bar. It was all over.

It took them a long time to get through the mob of kids in the door. It was a Spring night, and the kids wanted to see, but were afraid to come all the way in because it was a tavern.

But they made a path for some sort of serious little fellow with a black moustache. “I’m the doctor,” he told us as if there were only one in the whole precinct.

Still, he must really have been a doctor at that, because he had a gold watch and didn’t in the least mind showing it off. He listened to Joe’s right wrist, gave it a bit of a shake, glanced at the watch, gave the left wrist a shake and looked at the watch again. He shook his head.

It isn’t true what they say about pennies holding down a dead man’s eyes, because they didn’t hold down Joe’s. Maybe he’s got heavy eyes, I don’t know, but the pennies kept rolling off. He tried half a dozen, but they’d slip and roll down the floor. Every time one passed the table I saw Pete’s hand come out — there was one penny the doctor wouldn’t see again.

“Try a dime,” I told him to see if he would think that was heavier, and he did. When he lost that one I said, “Try a quarter.”

“Give me two nickels,” he told me, and two was just what I had. But I didn’t get a dime for them. “The dime is under the table,” he told me.

I wouldn’t bend for it. I knew it was no use.

When he got the old man’s lids closed under the nickels he wrote something in a little book, and left. “The boys will pick him up shortly,” he told us.

What boys? The boys from the Royal Barons S.A.C.? They’ve buried a couple parties, but not officially.

“He meant the ambulance boys,” Phil, the bartender, guessed. “You can’t die in a public place unless you’re a pauper. You got to go to a hospital to make it official.”

“I think he meant the boys from Racine Street Station,” Pete spoke up, and that sounded closest.

“Anyhow, say a prayer for the guy,” Frank asked us, giving up his work at last. And began one himself — “Our Father who art in Heaven” — then the whiskey hit him and he couldn’t remember the rest.

“Hollowed be Thy name,” I remembered, and that was as far as I could go.

“Let’s wait for the priest,” I told Frank.

The kids in the doorway stood aside to let Father Francis through. He didn’t look our way but we took off our caps all the same. He went right to the shuffleboard and did as fast and neat a job of extreme unction as if that old man were lying in bed. Someone brought an army blanket and covered the poor old stiff with that.

Father F. didn’t look our way till he’d made the sign of the cross and pulled the blanket up. Then he came to where we waited.

“Oh, Father ,” Frank shouted like the priest had come just in time to save him. “I forgot the Lord’s Prayer, Father.”

“Remembering it isn’t your trade,” Father F. told Frank, “that’s mine. Has the family been notified?”

Nobody had thought of that. But right away everyone wanted to be the first. John wanted to run straight to Joe’s house, Sam said he’d phone. But Phil said, since it happened in his place, it was his job.

Then, it turned out, nobody knew where the old man lived or even what his full name was. Nobody had called him anything but Joe for years. Some said it was Wroblewski, some said it was Makisch, another said it was Orlov.

“Try looking in his wallet,” somebody said from under the table.

Nobody had thought of that, either.

“Bring it to me, Frank,” Father F. said.

“He was my one friend, let someone else,” Frank declined.

Father F. went over and turned the blanket down and reached in and brought back Joe’s wallet.

Joe’s wallet, fat as leaves. But when he laid it on the bar it just lay there, so thin, so flat, so gone, it looked like it must have had some sort of little stroke of its own. When Father F. reached in, all there was one thin single, nothing more.

Everybody pushed to see.

“What was he doing when he went?” Father wanted to know.

“Playing poker, Father,” we told him.

“Penny ante?”

“Two-dollar limit.”

“Put on Perry Como,” I told one of the kids, because I didn’t care how I spent just then.

Perry came on singing Whither Thou Goest I Shall Go. Oh, he sang it so easy, he sang it so free. And while he sang Phil poured a shot for John and a shot for me. He poured a shot for Father F. and a shot for Sam and a shot for Al and a shot for Frank. Then he poured a shot for himself and lifted his glass.

“To Joe, old Joe,” he made a kind of toast.

“Oh, Frank,” I heard a whisper from under the table. “How you massage! So good ! How God is going to punish!”

William F. Nolan is an authority on Black Mask magazine. His most recent book , The Black Mask Boys (1985), is what he calls a “historical anthology” — a collection of stories, each of which is preceded by an essay about the writer and his role in the development of what is now called the Black Mask tradition. “The Pulpcon Kill ” evolved out of Nolan’s research.

Like his Sam Space novels, about a tough, space-age private eye, “The Pulpcon Kill” pays humorous homage to the past masters of hard-boiled fiction. The story introduces a new private eye, Nick Challis, whose half-brother Bart was the detective in Nolan’s first two mystery novels, Death Is for Losers (1968) and The White-Cad Cross-Up ( 1969 ).

William F. Nolan lives in California.

Late. Beyond midnight. A twenty-four-hour Italian joint in the heart of New York. Big party. Mafia kingpin’s birthday. Everybody laughing it up, drinking, singing off key, yelling at each other. The head honcho is Luigi somebody, and he’s really zonked. Chug-a-lugging from a half-empty bottle of vino. Has a Sweet Young Tiling on his lap. She’s stroking his mustache and he’s squeezing one of her boobs.

Outside, a misting rain makes the pavement shine. The street is quiet and dark. But you can see the party going on through the big plate glass window.

Three long, black limos, pebbled with rain, ease around the corner, rolling slow along the street. Their rear windows come whispering down as they near the twenty-four-hour joint and some shit-mean automatic weapons poke out.

The plate glass window explodes into jagged fragments as each limo glides past, cutting loose with enough firepower to win World War II. Total mayhem inside the Italian joint. Bullets cutting up chairs, walls and people. Luigi goes down in slow motion, gouting ketchup from a dozen wounds, the wine bottle splintering in his hand...

I’d had enough. I got up and walked out. For one thing, I figured I’d seen the best part of the picture and, for another, the air conditioning unit was on the fritz and the theater was too damn hot.

It was a lot hotter outside on Ventura. The San Fernando Valley was having a real bitch of a September heat wave, with temperatures over 105, and some sticky humidity had been added to the package. Tropical storm off the Pacific was messing up the L.A. basin and the weather boys said it would last through the weekend.

I was in a bad mood. Muggy, excessive heat makes me tough to get along with. Result: a fight with the pneumatic red-haired flight attendant in Santa Monica. When she kicked me out of her condo I decided to take in the latest Bronson Mafia movie, just to cool off. Now I was hot and irritated. Figured I needed something cold inside me, so I drove down Ventura to Van Nuys, took a hard right up the alley behind the newsstand, and parked right under the “You Won’t Believe It’s Yogurt” sign.