Johnny Temple - USA Noir - Best of the Akashic Noir Series

Maybe everything else would have been different if she’d left her father as peaceful as she was leaving James John O’Rourke. But had that ever been an option? Could she have done it, really?

Probably not.

She let herself out of the apartment, drew the door shut, and made sure it locked behind her. The building was a walk-up, four apartments to the floor, and she walked down three flights and out the door without encountering anyone.

Time to think about moving.

Not that she’d established a pattern. The man last week, in the posh loft near the Javits Center, she had smothered to death. He’d been huge, and built like a wrestler, but the drug rendered him helpless, and all she’d had to do was hold the pillow over his face. He didn’t come close enough to consciousness to struggle. And the man before that, the advertising executive, had shown her why he’d feel safe in any neighborhood, gentrification or no. He kept a loaded handgun in the drawer of the bedside table, and if any burglar was unlucky enough to drop into his place, well—

When she was through with him, she’d retrieved the gun, wrapped his hand around it, put the barrel in his mouth, and squeezed off a shot. They could call it a suicide, just as they could call the wrestler a heart attack, if they didn’t look too closely. Or they could call all three of them murders, without ever suspecting they were all the work of the same person.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt her to move. Find another place to live before people started to notice her on the streets and in the bars. She liked it here, in Clinton, or Hell’s Kitchen, whatever you wanted to call it. It was a nice place to live, whatever it may have been in years past. But, as she and Jim had agreed, the whole of Manhattan was a nice place to live. There weren’t any bad neighborhoods left, not really.

Wherever she went, she was pretty sure she’d feel safe.

Five past eight. Phelan sat tipped back in his desk chair, appreciating the power of the Beaumont Enterprise . They’d centered the ad announcing his new business, boxed it in black, and spelled his name right. The other ad in the classifieds had brought in two girls yesterday. He figured to choose the brunette with the coral nails and the middle-C voice. But just then he got a call from his old high school bud Joe Ford, now a parole officer, and Joe was hard-selling.

“Typing, dictation, whatcha need? She learned it in the big house. Paid her debt to society. What say you talk to her?”

“Find some other sucker. Since when are you Acme Employment?”

“Since when are you a private eye?”

“Since workers’ comp paid me enough bread to swing a lease.”

“For a measly finger? Thought you liked the rigs.”

“Still got nine fingers left. Aim to keep ’em.”

“Just see this girl, Tommy. She knows her stuff.”

“Why you pushing her?”

“Hell, phones don’t answer themselves, do they?”

“Didn’t they invent a machine that—”

Joe blew scorn through the phone. “Communist rumor. Lemme send her over. She can get down there in two shakes.”

“No.”

“I’m gonna say this one time. Who had your back the night you stepped outside with Narlan Pugh and all his cousins stepped outside behind him?”

“One time, shit. I heard it three. Time you realized gratitude comes to a natural end, same as a sack of donuts.”

Joe bided.

Phelan stewed.

“Goddamnit, no promises.”

“Naw! Course not. Make it or break it on her own. Thanks for the chance, it’ll buck her up.”

Phelan asked about the girl’s rap sheet but the dial tone was noncommittal.

Drumming his fingers, he glanced out his window toward the Mobil refinery’s methane flare, Beaumont’s own Star of Bethlehem. Far below ran a pewter channel of the Neches, sunlight coating the dimples of the water. Black-hulled tankers were anchored in the port, white topsides, striped flags riffling against the drift of spring clouds.

Or that’s the view he’d have once his business took off—San Jacinto Building, seventh floor. Mahogany paneling, brass-trimmed elevator. Now he looked out on the New Rosemont, $1 and Up , where a ceiling fan once fell on the proprietress. The secretary’s office had a window too, where sunlight and humidity pried off the paint on the Rosemont’s fire escape.

8:32. Footsteps were sounding on the stairs to his second-story walk-up.

Wasn’t skipping up here, was she? Measured tread. The knock on the door lately lettered Thomas Phelan, Investigations wasn’t fast, wasn’t slow. Not loud, not soft.

Phelan opened up. Well. Not a girl. Couple crows had stepped lightly at the corners of her eyes; a faint crease of bitter slanted from the left side of her barely tinted lips. Ash-brown hair, jaw-length, roomy white blouse, navy skirt. Jailhouse tan. Eyes gray-blue, a little clouded, distant, like a storm rolling in from out in the gulf. This one wouldn’t sit behind the desk blowing on her polish. The hand he was shaking had naked nails cut to the quick.

“Tom Phelan.”

“Delpha Wade.” Her voice was low and dry.

Delpha Wade. His brain ratcheted a picture toward him but not far enough, like when a Mars bar gets hung up partway out the vending machine.

They sat down in his office, him in a gimpy swivel behind a large metal desk, both included in the rent. Her in one of the proud new clients’ chairs, padded leather with regally tall backs.

“Gotta be honest with you, Miss Wade. Think I already found a secretary.”

No disappointment in those blue eyes, no hope either. She just passed a certificate with a gold seal across the desk. The paper said she typed seventy words a minute, knew shorthand, could do double entry. The brunette with the coral nails claimed all that too, but she’d backed it up with a giggle, not a diploma from Gatesville.

“Your first choice of a job a PI’s office?”

“My first choice is a job.”

Touché. “What number interview would this be for you?”

“Number one.”

“I’m flattered. Get off the bus, you come here.”

The blue eyes let in a smidgen of light. “Course that doesn’t count the dozen applications I wrote out ’fore they showed me the door.”

No wonder Joe was pushing her. “Had your druthers… where’d you work, Miss Wade?”

“Library. I like libraries. It’s what I did there .”

There being Gatesville. Now that she’d brought it up. “How many you do?”

“Fourteen.”

Phelan quelled the whistle welling up. That let out check-kiting, forgery, embezzling from the till, and probably dope. He was about to ask her the delicate when she handed it to him on a foil tray. “Voluntary manslaughter.”

“And you did fourteen?”

“He was very dead, Mr. Phelan.”

His brain shoved: the picture fell into the slot. Phelan’d been a teenager, jazzed by blood-slinging, and reporters had loved the story. Waitress in a bayou dive, waiting for the owner to collect the take. Alone. Two guys thrown out earlier came back—beat her, raped her, cut her. Father and son, that was the kicker. That, and they went for the girl before the cash register. But surprise. Somehow the knife had changed hands. The father’d got punctured and son sliced. When the owner’s headlights showed, dear old Dad ran for their heap and peeled. Delpha Wade had not let nature take its course. She finished off Junior in the oyster-shell parking lot.