Lawrence Block - Manhattan Noir

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.

Battery Park

Aburst of light releases the million eyes of the rain, glimpsing the Gothic towers in dark mist, falling in glittering streams of briefly reflected light, moving inland, toward the blunt point of the island, an outbound ferry as it loads for the midnight run.

So like I said before, it ain’t like she has long, you know?

Yeah, mon. She just hangin’ on now.

Rain streaks down the ferry’s windows where the night riders sit in yellow haze-Toby McBride only one among them, single, forty-two, the bowling alley in trouble, thinking of his invalid mother on Staten Island, money leaching away, watching her Jamaican nurse, such big black hands, how easy it would be.

I figure you could use twenty grand, right?

Twenty, huh?

The rain falls on intrigue and conspiracy, trap doors, underground escape routes, the crude implements of quick getaways. It collects the daily grime from the face of the Custom House and sends it swirling into the vast underground drains that empty into the sea. Along the sweep of Battery Park it smashes against crumpled cigarette packets, soaks a broken shoelace, flows into a half-used tube of lipstick, drives a young woman beneath a tattered awning, blond hair, shoulder-length, with a stuck umbrella, struggling to open it, a man behind her, sunk in the shadows, his voice a tremble in the air.

You live in this building?

Long, dark fingers still the umbrella, curl around its mahogany handle.

Name’s Rebecca, right?

The rain sees the fickle web of chance meetings, the grid of untimely intersections, lethal fortuities from which there will be no escape. A million tiny flashing screens reflect stilettos and box cutters, switchblades and ice picks, the snub-nosed barrel that stares out from its nest of long dark fingers.

Don’t say a word.

Off West Street the rain falls on the deserted pit of the ghostly towers, and moves on, cascading down the skeletal girders of the new construction, then further north, to Duane Street, thudding against the roof of an old green van.

So, when you get here, Sammy?

Don’t worry. I’ll be there.

Eddie squeezes the cell phone, glances back toward the rear of the van, speakers, four DVD players, two car radios, a cashmere overcoat, a shoebox of CDs, some jewelry that might be real, the bleak fruit of the hustle.

I need you here now, man.

You that hyped?

Now, man.

In the gutters, the rushing rain washes cigarette butts and candy wrappers, a note with the number 484 in watery ink, a hat shop receipt, a prescription label for Demerol. It washes down grimy windshields and as it washes, sees the pop-eyed and the drowsy, the hazy and the alert, Eddie scratching his skinny arms, Detective Boyle in the unmarked car a block away, playing back the tape, grinning at his partner as he listens to the voices on the ferry.

We got McBride dead to rights, Frank.

A laugh.

That fucking Jamaican. Jeez, does he know how to work a wire.

At Police Plaza, the wind shifts, driving eastward, battering the building’s small square windows, a thudding rumble that briefly draws Max Feldman from the photographs on his desk, Lynn Abercrombie sprawled across the floor of her Tribeca apartment, shot once with a snub-nosed.38, no real clues, save the fact that she lay on her back, with a strand of long blond hair over the right eye, maybe by a fan of Veronica Lake, some sick aficionado of the noir.

The rain falls upon the tangle of steel and concrete, predator and prey. It slaps the baseball cap of Jerry Brice, as he waits for Hattie Jones, knowing it was payday at the all- night laundry, her purse full of cash. It mars Sammy Kaminsky’s view of Dolly Baron’s bedroom window, and foils the late-night entertainment of a thousand midnight peepers.

On Houston Street, it falls on people drawn together by the midnight storm, huddled beneath shelters, Herman Devane crowded into a bus refuge, drunk college girls all around him, that little brunette in the red beret, her body naked beneath her clothes, so naked and so close, the touch so quick, so easy, to brush against her then step back, blame it on the rain.

Lightning, then thunder rolling northward, over Bleecker Street, past clubs and taverns, faces bathed in neon light, nodding to the beat of piano, bass, drums, the late-night riff of jazz trios.

Ernie Gorsh taps his foot lightly beneath the table.

Not a bad piano.

Jack Plato, fidgeting, toying with the napkin beneath his drink, a lot on his mind, time like a blade swinging over his head.

Fuck the piano. You hear me, Ern? 484 Duane. A little jewelry store. Easy. I cased it this afternoon.

Ernie Gosch listens to the piano.

Jack Plato, slick black hair, sipping whiskey, cocksure about the plans, the schedule, where the cameras are.

Paulie Cerrello’s backing the operation. A safe man is all we need. Christ, it’s a sure thing, Ern.

Ernie Gorsh, gray hair peeping from beneath his gray felt hat, just out of the slammer, not ready to go back.

Nothing’s ever sure, Jack.

It is if you got the balls.

It is if you don’t got the brains.

Plato, offended, squirming, a deal going south, Paulie will be pissed. No choice now but play the bluff.

Take it or leave it, old man.

Ernie, thinking of his garden, the seeds he’s already bought for spring, seeds in packets, nestled in his jacket pocket, thinking of the slammer, too, how weird it is now, gangs, Aryans, Muslims, fag cons raping kids in the shower, deciding not to go back.

Sorry, Jack. Rising. I got a bus to catch.

The eyes of the rain see the value of experience, the final stop of crooked roads. It falls on weariness and dread, the iron bars of circumstance, the way out that looks easy, comes with folded money, glassine bags of weed, tinfoil cylinders stuffed with white powder, floor plans of small jewelry stores, with x ’s where the cameras are.