Lawrence Block - Manhattan Noir

Richard was sitting on his front step, leaning against a pillar that was topped with a welcoming wrought-iron pineapple he’d had recreated by Spanish craftsmen to match one stolen. The front door closed behind him and I could hear somebody creaking up the steps.

I said, “I got the money. I can meet your price.”

“Too late. A woman’s buying it right now.”

“I can top it by ten thousand.”

“Top what by ten thousand?”

“The extra forty you wanted.”

Richard laughed. “She’s already topped that. I’ve got seven hundred thousand on the table.”

“ Seven hundred thousand? Sight unseen?”

“She saw it this afternoon. Woman looking for a pied-àterre for her boyfriend.”

“ Seven hundred thousand?”

“This woman is so in love she’d have paid a million.”

Richard shook his head. Even he seemed awed and it made him seem more human as he asked, “You know how when somebody is really happy after being unhappy for a long time?

How they glow? This woman is glowing like Venus on a dark night.”

“How’d she find out about it?”

“Your friend Tommy showed it to her broker. Tommy was so excited he was red in the face. He really is a greedy prick.”

“Is Tommy up there?”

“No, he and the broker were here earlier.”

“Did you actually see Tommy King leave?”

“No.”

I thought to myself, Tommy wouldn’t kill her up there.

Richard knew he had set it up with her broker. He’d get caught. Except he didn’t care about getting caught. He thought he was right.

I hesitated for longer than I should have. I knew exactly what would happen, and when it did, the price of that apartment was going to plummet. A bloody murder would knock the price lower than a ghost. All I had to do was walk away from a crime about to happen. Or better yet, just stand innocently chatting with Richard who, as usual, was talking up a storm. All I had to do was listen and wait.

“Hey, Richard,” a woman called down from the front window of the apartment. “Where is that air shaft for the kitchen exhaust?”

She was not the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in New York, but she came close-a perfectly lovely blonde, slim, not boney, sky-blue eyes set wide in a heart-shaped face, and a mouth that wanted to smile. Quite a few years older than Tommy, I thought. I wasn’t surprised they had gotten divorced; what I couldn’t figure out was how they had hooked up in the first place. She just seemed better than Tommy, who while handsome enough to squire a beauty like her around town, had an empty mind and soul even when he wasn’t threatening bloody murder.

She looked down at me gaping up at her, and her smile erased every line that hinted at age. As Richard had said, she glowed. “Hi. I’m Samantha King. Do you live in the building too?”

Before I could answer, she disappeared-like a reverse jack-in-the-box-and the window slammed shut. I ran up the front stoop. The door had swung closed and locked. “Open it,” I yelled. “Unlock the door!”

Richard located the key on the crowded ring on his belt, inserted it, and unlocked the door. I pounded up the stairs.

Halfway up the flight I heard her scream. When I reached the landing something heavy slammed against a wall. The old house had thin paneled wood doors and I ran full tilt into the nearest, splintering it open with my shoulder.

Tommy had chased her into a corner, bent her backwards over a radiator, and was hacking at her chest with his scalpel. He looked up at me crashing into the room. His face was covered in her blood.

“Stop!” I shouted, too late to do any good.

Tommy let the poor woman go and her body slipped off the radiator onto the floor. “I can’t get it out,” he said.

“Should’ve brought a fucking saw.” He reached down and tried to close her staring eyes, but the lids popped open again and all he did was leave bloody prints on her cheeks. He gave up trying, pressed the scalpel to the left side of his neck, and gouged deep.

I got what I deserved.

The Post and the Daily News exaggerated the blood, of course. Times and Sun readers learned that Tommy did not cut his ex-wife’s heart completely out, but had given up halfway and ripped the scalpel across his own throat in what the Sun writer had termed “a spasmodic mea culpa .” Still, there was blood enough.

Marcy Stern, speaking for the real estate brokerage, swore that Tommy King had been “terminated for cause” before the attack. Asked what effect the crime would have on property values in Chelsea, West 20th Street, and Richard’s 1840 town house in particular, she fired back, “Don’t even think of lowballing us.”

Unfortunately for her and Richard-and fortunately for me-no one thought of making any offers at all, lowball or otherwise. I got the apartment for the original asking price and didn’t have to tap my parents’ little nest egg. Richard, shaken, agreed to all my terms, especially a floor-to-ceiling cleaning by professionals before I moved in and a repainting of the room where most of the attack had occurred. I moved in the afternoon of the closing to a home smelling of fresh paint and floor wax.

Samantha was waiting in the window, her heart-shaped face super-imposed on the Empire State Building. Her ghost? Or just my guilty imagination reflected in the glass? Didn’t matter which, I saw her clear as I saw the sunlit spire by day and the white iceberg at night. I tried moving around the room, shifting perspective. At angles, the nineteenth-century glass distorted the light, but she kept moving with me. Wispy hair, blue eyes, paler than in life, and a small, sad smile that grew sadder every day as the lines around her mouth deepened. “Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked one morning. And that night, “You knew he wanted to hurt me.”

After a couple of weeks of her, I called in a broker for a hint of what I could get for the place. He liked it, at first. I didn’t have much furniture yet, but my piano made it look lived in and there were the fireplaces and the killer view from the front windows. All of a sudden he shivered.

“Weird feeling in this place. Like something’s here? You ever notice? Hey, is this where that woman got killed?”

He didn’t wait for my answer.

Samantha was waiting in the window. She said, “The thing that makes me saddest is that I had finally found a great guy. My friends were asking me, does he have a brother?”

I said, “I can’t sell this apartment. I can’t move. I can’t change what I did to you. So I guess I’ll have to get used to you. With a view like this I’ll get used to anything. If I have to live with you, I will. If you can stand it, I can too.”

I awoke the next morning to a mind-shattering screaming roar echoing in the street, looked out the window, and saw a bunch of guys with chainsaws and a crane lopping branches off the plane tree.

I raced downstairs in pants and socks. Across the street sawdust was flying from the main trunk. Marcy Stern was on the sidewalk, taking people’s business cards and handing out pictures of model apartments slated for a new twenty-story residential tower. Each had a wonderful view of the Empire State Building.

“You can’t build here!” I and several panicked neighbors screamed. “The seminary is landmarked.”

“Not this part.”

“The whole block.”

“Not the new part.”

“But-”

“We found the same loophole they did when they built the new part.”

Steel rises quickly in New York. The last Samantha and I saw of my view was a hard-hatted iron worker silhouetted against the Empire State Building like King Kong.