Эд Горман - Hard-Boiled - An Anthology of American Crime Stories

“I was just thinking. You paid us a hundred a man, plus whatever lunch came to.”

“Eighty with the tip. What’s the point?”

“You must have billed us to the client at what, fifty dollars an hour?”

“I haven’t billed anything to anybody yet — I just walked in the door — but yes, that’s the rate.”

“How will you figure it, four men at eight hours a man?”

“Seven hours. We don’t bill for lunch time.”

Seven hours seemed ample, considering that we’d worked four and a half. I said, “Seven times fifty times four of us is what? Fourteen hundred dollars? Plus your own time, of course, and you must bill yourself at more than regular operative’s rates. A hundred an hour?”

“Seventy-five.”

“For seven hours is what, five hundred?”

“Five and a quarter,” he said evenly.

“Plus fourteen hundred is nineteen and a quarter. Call it two thousand dollars to the client. Is that about right?”

“What are you saying, Matt? The client pays too much or you’re not getting a big enough piece of the pie?”

“Neither. But if he wants to load up on this garbage” — I waved a hand at the heap on the desk — “wouldn’t he be better off buying retail? Get a lot more bang for the buck, wouldn’t he?”

He just stared at me for a long moment. Then abruptly, his hard face cracked and he started to laugh. I was laughing, too, and it took all the tension out of the air. “Jesus, you’re right,” he said. “Guy’s paying way too much.”

“I mean, if you wanted to handle it for him, you wouldn’t need to hire me and the other guys.”

“I could just go around and pay cash.”

“Right.”

“I could even pass up the street guys altogether, go straight to the wholesaler.”

“Save a dollar that way.”

“I love it,” he said. “You know what it sounds like? Sounds like something the federal government would do, get cocaine off the streets by buying it straight from the Colombians. Wait a minute, didn’t they actually do something like that once?”

“I think so, but I don’t think it was cocaine.”

“No, it was opium. It was some years ago — they bought the entire Turkish opium crop because it was supposed to be the cheapest way to keep it out of the country. Bought it and burned it, and that, boys and girls, that was the end of heroin addiction in America.”

“Worked like a charm, didn’t it?”

“Nothing works,” he said. “First principle of modern law enforcement. Nothing ever works. Funny thing is, in this case the client’s not getting a bad deal. You own a copyright or a trademark, you got to defend it. Otherwise you risk losing it. You got to be able to say on such and such a date you paid so many dollars to defend your interests and investigators acting as your agents confiscated so many items from so many merchants. And it’s worth what you budget for it. Believe me, these big companies, they wouldn’t spend the money year in and year out if they didn’t figure it was worth it.”

“I believe it,” I said. “Anyway, I wouldn’t lose a whole lot of sleep over the client getting screwed a little.”

“You just don’t like the work.”

“I’m afraid not.”

He shrugged. “I don’t blame you. It’s chickenshit. But Jesus, Matt, most P.I. work is chickenshit. Was it that different in the Department? Or on any police force? Most of what we did was chickenshit.”

“And paperwork.”

“And paperwork — you’re absolutely right. Do some chickenshit and then write it up. And make copies.”

“I can put up with a certain amount of chickenshit,” I said. “But I honestly don’t have the heart for what we did today. I felt like a bully.”

“Listen, I’d rather be kicking in doors, taking down bad guys. That what you want?”

“Not really.”

“Be Batman, tooling around Gotham City, righting wrongs. Do the whole thing not even carrying a gun. You know what they didn’t have in the movie?”

“I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Robin, they didn’t have Robin. Robin the Boy Wonder. He’s not in the comic book anymore, either. Somebody told me they took a poll, had their readers call a 900 number and vote, should they keep Robin or should they kill him. Like in ancient Rome, those fighters, what do you call them?”

“Gladiators.”

“Right. Thumbs up or thumbs down, and Robin got thumbs down, so they killed him. Can you believe that?”

“I can believe anything.”

“Yeah, you and me both. I always thought they were fags.” I looked at him. “Batman and Robin, I mean. His ward, for Christ’s sake. Playing dress-up, flying around, costumes, I figured it’s gotta be some kind of fag S-and-M thing. Isn’t that what you figured?”

“I never thought about it.”

“Well, I never stayed up nights over it myself, but what else would it be? Anyway, he’s dead now, Robin is. Died of AIDS, I suppose, but the family’s denying it, like what’s-his-name. You know who I mean.”

I didn’t, but I nodded.

“You gotta make a living, you know. Gotta turn a buck, whether it’s hassling Africans or squatting out there on a blanket your own self, selling tapes and scarves. Fi’ dollah, ten dollah.” He looked at me. “No good, huh?”

“I don’t think so, Wally.”

“Don’t want to be one of Batman’s helpers. Well, you can’t do what you can’t do. What the fuck do I know about it, anyway? You don’t drink. I don’t have a problem with it myself. But if I couldn’t put my feet up at the end of the day, have a few pops, who knows? Maybe I couldn’t do it either. Matt, you’re a good man. If you change your mind—”

“I know. Thanks, Wally.”

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t mention it. We gotta look out for each other, you know what I mean? Here in Gotham City.”

Ed Gorman is among the best American crime writers to have entered the field in the 1980s and 1990s. His novels and short stories provide fresh ideas, characters, and approaches. Told with genuine feeling, in an often lean, deliberately rough-edged style, his tales are an amalgam of pure entertainment, social commentary, symbolic statement, and in-depth studies of people whom he has described as “outsiders trying to make their peace with the world.”

Beginning with his first novel, Rough Cut (1985), Gorman has created a number of series characters — outsiders and misfits all. The first and most prominent, Jack Dwyer, is a former cop, part-time actor, and security guard who has been featured in six novels, perhaps the most satisfying of which is The Autumn Dead (1987). Other noir creations include an older, more complex private detective, Jack Walsh, who appears in The Night Remembers (1991); and Tobin, a five-foot, five-inch film critic with an explosive temper who is the protagonist of Murder on the Aisle (1987).

Gorman is arguably at the apex of his talents in the nonseries short-story form. His 1992 collection, Prisoners and Other Stories, contains twenty-two uniformly excellent dark-suspense tales, one of which is “The Long Silence After.” Its protagonist, Neely, is a quintessential Gorman character, while the story itself is a quintessential modern hard-boiled tale — at or very near the limit to which the form has evolved to date. As Gorman himself states in his introduction to “The Long Silence After” in Prisoners: “We kill so many people in our stories that I worry we have no sense of real death, or the true spiritual cost of dying. In this story, I wanted to give death at least a little dominion.” He has.

B. P.