Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 2, July 1973

Bloody Oasis by Jim Duke

Inside a good man lay dead. Out in the dark Murder waited to strike again. Could I stop it?

Beyond the neat rows of shiny red apples through the market window, Lt. Dave Quinn gazed at the hell of Purple Avenue. He could smell the dope and brothels and numbers. Nick Rizzo’s little corner market had been a clean oasis.

Rizzo had defended his haven for the Purple district’s housewives and for the bums with a nickle who wanted an apple without worms in it and wasn’t spiked with acid.

Pious Nick Rizzo, defender of the good, a brash and bull-strong man. But not even a bull, the lieutenant thought, could sustain a massive skull fracture and survive.

Dave Quinn counted himself among Rizzo’s friends. It started when, as a cop on the Purple district beat, Quinn hit the bottle. Heavy. His wife had kicked him over for a thin-blooded man in a safe job.

“Whatdya wanna give up the living, huh, Davey?” Rizzo said, his dark eyes flaring. “You gotta talent in you for being a good cop. Don’t can it. We need you.”

And finally, with Rizzo’s constant prodding, Quinn managed to claw his way back. If he hadn’t beaten the bottle entirely, at least he was still a cop.

“We got everything wrapped up, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said now.

“Where’s Leroy?”

“In the back. Been bawling for an hour.”

Quinn watched Nick Rizzo’s sheeted body roll out the door on a stretcher and then went through the market to the back room, where Leroy, which is all anyone ever called him, sat like a child banished to the principal’s office. He’d worked as Rizzo’s handyman for the past six months.

If anything, Leroy was bigger than Nick Rizzo. And he was retarded.

“Who would do this, Mr. Quinn?” the big boy-man asked, his eyes still red from crying.

“I don’t know, Leroy.”

“When I come in this morning, I knew soon as I saw the alley door open it was going to be bad.”

Lighting a cigarette, Quinn glanced around the small storage room. Like Nick Rizzo, it was neat. A curtain drawn across a quarter section separated Rizzo’s sleeping quarters. He’d moved in here shortly after his wife died three years ago. Quinn had shared many a cup of tea with Nick Rizzo in this room.

“You here last night, Leroy?”

“No, sir. I did some sweeping and Nick said I should go home and he’d see me in the morning.”

“And you didn’t touch anything when you came in this morning?”

Leroy shook his head emphatically. “I know better, Mr. Quinn.”

“I know you do, Leroy.”

Quinn felt sorry for the big man. Like the collector of stray dogs he was, Rizzo had hired him off the street after Leroy tried to lift an apple. And like the stray dog he was, Leroy had been devoted to Nick Rizzo. Now, his benefactor dead, Leroy’d be on the bum again.

That, the lieutenant thought, was another mark against the killer.

“You go home, Leroy. There’s nothing you can do now.”

“Wish I could help,” Leroy said hopelessly. “I swear I do.” Then his face brightened. “I... I better feed Nick’s guppies!”

“Yeah. You feed the fish.”

The big man fed the fish and shuffled out the door and Quinn watched him finally disappear down the street, swallowed by the district’s daily mob. Shoving his hands deep in his pockets, Quinn was sick of the Purple district. No more Nick Rizzo to offer some redemption. The place was all evil now. He wanted a drink, a good stiff one — or two.

Leaving the Persimmon Bar an hour later, his anger was numbed but not dead. He blinked against the noon sun burning through layers of smog. The Scotch had done something else; it had steeled him for telling Anna.

Brunner’s was a shortorder diner on 3rd. It was noted for good cheeseburgers and hard language and it had a solid reputation among the produce truckers. The lieutenant waited for the last of the lunch crowd to leave before he went in and found a corner table. When Anna Falcone saw him, she looked surprised.

“Sit down, Anna,” he said.

“The boss don’t like me to sit.”

“Never mind that.”

She sat, and he could see she was running thin after the lunch rush; he thought about waiting until later, but he didn’t want her to hear about Nick Rizzo on the streets.

“Anna, sometimes you hate your job?”

She nodded, picking at the sleeve of her blouse.

“Well, times like this I hate mine most of all. Nick’s dead, Anna.”

Her face lost all its color. He got her some water but she pushed it away and buried her face in her arms. Quinn didn’t know what to do then; all he could think was that was the third mark against the killer. Nick and Anna’s love, like all things Rizzo got deeply into, built slowly. Nick believed in protocol. Being basically shy with women, he’d had to develop even the courage to ask Anna for a date.

“She’s kinda skinny, Davey, but Anna, she’s a sweet girl,” Nick Rizzo had said.

“Wedding bells?” Quinn had half joked.

Rizzo hadn’t said no. But now Anna, hardly a winner with looks, would have to wait many more years, if ever, for her next suitor.

Quinn wanted to touch her now, but all he could do was curl his hands into fists and say simply: “I’ll find the bastard who did it, Anna.”

Outside the diner he felt stupid. He’d blown any finesse with Anna. He’d have to make it up to her; Rizzo would like that. And, Quinn thought, maybe Anna would, too. He rolled his tongue around the dry roof of his mouth. It wanted a drink. Instead he went looking for Kippy.

Kippy was short and skinny and he wore a black toupee which looked like a toupee, but you never told Kippy that. He peddled Pete Vorski’s numbers and pimped for change, but he stayed out of dope, a good mark, and he knew the noise in the Purple district, which was better.

“You want noise on Rizzo,” Kippy said from the cool shadows of a pool room. Hustlers rattled the plastics on felt behind them and a juke box blew hillbilly music.

“I want all your ears working, Kippy,” Quinn said.

“The vine noise says it looks like a punk job. Maybe some hype looking for fix change.”

Quinn shook his head. “The vine’s feeding on rumors. I want good C-note information, Kippy. No rumors, no hunches. Names and addresses.”

“You and Rizzo were tight?”

“Yeah.”

“O.K. I’ll work.”

“You do that. And think about Jess Newman.”

The little man snorted. “Jess won’t like that. Juice peddlers don’t like sniffing. They get itchy, get mean.”

“That’s one reason I want to know where he’s curled up. Nick busted his mouth when Jess tried to push some stuff on grade school kids in his market.”

Kippy’s eyes narrowed. “So you think he—?”

“Right now I’m not thinking much. I’m collecting.”

But later in his apartment, a half empty Scotch bottle on the side table, Quinn lay in bed thinking. His brain was screwed up with images, mostly of himself in his peculiar role as avenging angel. It was, he mused as he stared at the ceiling, an odd role for a half dipsy cop.

He was edging up to sleep when the phone rang. He let it ring five times before he decided to answer.

“Kippy here.”

Quinn eyed his watch. “It’s three in the morning. It better be special.”

“You said dig. I dug. Better than a C-note, I figure. But you know my policy—”

“Yeah, yeah. Pay before say.”

“My place. Thirty minutes. Back stairs.”

It was a four-story, red brick hotel with a busted elevator and the smell of backed-up toilets. Quinn took periodic breathers at each landing on his way up the narrow rear stairway. But he was still panting pretty good when he rapped on Kippy’s door on the fourth floor.

After no answer he removed his .38 from his shoulder holster, stepped beside the door frame, reached out and slowly turned the knob. The door swung open to black, except for the square of dim light on the rug from the neon across the street. Center stage, Kippy lay eagled out staring forever at the ceiling.

The lieutenant grimly noted three stab wounds in the little man’s chest.

By the time he’d finished typing his report on Kippy’s death, the early morning sun was sending a hard shaft of light through his office window. He jammed the duplicates in the “out” slot, yanked the blinds closed and opened Rizzo’s file. Through a curl of smoke from the butt in his mouth, he squinted at the photos of the market interior.

There was the meat cleaver Nick Rizzo’s head had been bashed with hanging on the hook behind the meat counter. Smudged prints. Nick, himself, had fallen where he was hit, in front of his ten-gallon aquarium. The killer had used one of Nick’s crowbars from a tool box in an aborted attempt to pry open the cash register. Smudged prints.

He rubbed his eyes wearily. Any other time he would have shoved it into the file marked Murder Incidental to Burglary. He was thinking this when he got buzzed.

Captain, Burke, a heavy-set twenty-year cop, sat flipping through the preliminary on Kippy’s murder. He frowned when Quinn came into the office.

“Was Kippy nosing for you?”

The lieutenant nodded.

“You figure a connection?”

“I figure.”

“He stumbled onto something on the Rizzo case.”

“Kippy phoned me at three this morning, Captain. He only does that when he’s got information he knows I’ll pay for. He doesn’t like sure cash to wait.”

Burke tossed the folder on the desk. “Okay. But whoever this killer is, I wouldn’t pry unless I had all my senses.”

Quinn lit a cigarette with what he thought was a pretty steady hand. “You mean stay off the hooch.”

“Exactly.”

“Sure.”

“I mean it, Quinn. You’re a damn fine cop. You know the Purple district like nobody else. But when you belly-up you do stupid things.”

“Yes, sir.”

As Quinn shut the door behind him, his arid mouth was crying for a drink. But he knew the captain was right. Now that Kippy’s ears were permanently out, he would have to get his shoes dirty.

The dirtiest place to start was Jess Newman’s, wherever in hell that was.

For the rest of the morning he toured the flop houses, burlesque shops and pool halls. He always seemed a step or two behind Jess. The pusher was like an eel, wriggling into whatever hole needed juice pumps. But shortly after one o’clock he found the current hole.

The Kitty Club was a beer bar on Stockstill Avenue, where they bowled with steel discs and it was a good place to get out of the rain, when it rained. The owner-bartender, fat and sixty, perched on a stool behind his cash register reading a comic magazine. The bar was otherwise empty.

Quinn dropped a twenty on the counter next to the register.

“Jess,” he said.

“Through the curtain, first door at the top of the stairs,” the fat man said, pulling the twenty out of sight.

And so was Jess Newman. He didn’t budge when the lieutenant rocked the door back on its hinges. He just rolled his watery grey eyes and said “Hi, cop.”

Pulling up a stool, Quinn sat down beside the dirty-sheeted cot on which the long and lanky man lay.

“How long’ve you been flying, Jess?”

“A week now, man.”

“You’ve landed once or twice.”

“Me?”

“You came down on Kippy.”

Jess grinned, showing his yellow teeth like tombstones in a cave. “Kippy? Kippy who?”

“He was looking for you.”

“Yeah? What for, man?”

“I asked him to.”

Quinn pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Jess blinked “no” to the offer. After lighting his, Quinn sent smoke at the gaunt face on the cot.

“Man shouldn’t play two sides,” Newman said. “Man slips off.”

“Let’s try Nick Rizzo.”

“Poor Nick. Heard he bought it all. Very bad, man.”

“What happened, Jess? You trip out and need some change? Or maybe you remembered Nick’s fist in your teeth.”

“That’s a bummer, too.”

“Where’s your knife, Jess?”

Jess Newman blinked. “Lost it — yeah.”

Quinn flipped the butt against the wall and yanked Newman up by his dirty collar. After he shook him he patted him down, then rolled him over, lifted the mattress and found nothing. He pulled open drawers, checked the bathroom and under rugs.

Finally back at the cot he stared down at the man. “You’re never without that blade, Jess. Now where would a guy keep his toy for—”

Grinning suddenly, Quinn reached toward the pillow. Jess Newman jabbed in his hand quicker and whipped out the six-inch switchblade. The razor edge slashed across Quinn’s hand. Still grinning, he stepped back as Newman got off the cot slow like a big cat.

“Yeah, you’re in flight, aren’t you,” Quinn said.

“Nobody take’s this man’s blade, cop.”

“Is that dry blood on it, Jess? Kippy’s maybe?”

As Newman’s eyes flicked to the blade, Quinn sent his left fist into the lanky man’s sharp jaw. Newman dropped like an empty bladder.

While they booked Jess Newman at the station, his eyes floated around in a sick daze. Quinn watched, but he was angry. Assault on a police officer was a long way from Murder One.

“I can maybe understand you sticking Kippy,” Quinn said. “Lot’s of blood, and you like that. But why didn’t you use the blade end of the cleaver on Nick?”

“What’s this rap get me?” Newman asked, ignoring Quinn’s question.

“You’ll be due in a couple of years.”

Jess Newman smiled. “On my head I could do that.”

“Yeah. On your head. And say hello to some of your pals up there, Jess. Of course they’re dried out now. I figure they’ll want to thank you for bleeding their money for a watered fix or two.”

The man’s already slack face went slacker.

Quinn felt better as he watched Newman escorted down the corridor toward the lockup. But at the steel-plated door Newman snapped his head around.

“I didn’t hit Rizzo! You hear me, Quinn? Chew on that and sleep! I didn’t hit him!”

In his office, Quinn dragged thoughtfully on his cigarette and watched the sun through the window bum across the late afternoon. The city lay hot and slumming under it. People were running in dumb circles trying to catch their tails. All but Nick Rizzo. The man who collected stray animals lay on a cold slab with a label on his toe. Leaning back, Quinn picked at the tight bandage on his hand.

The hand hurt, but no more than his dry mouth and his head, but the head was a different hurt. Jess Newman fitted too easy. His denial was too emphatic. But, somehow, he did fit. Kippy had found a part of it. Maybe all of it. Damn the careless idiot!

It was just after four o’clock when Quinn parked in the alley in front of the door to Leroy’s basement room. The big, innocent-looking man sat in a comer of his room looking very much like he hadn’t moved for hours. His face was still streaked with dry tear tracks. As he pulled up a wicker chair in front of Leroy, Quinn wondered who those tears were really for.

“Tell me about Tuesday, Leroy. Remember?”

“Don’t like to remember nothing anymore,” the big man murmured, shaking his head. His huge hands lay like infielder’s mitts on his denim-covered legs.

“Was Nick happy, Tuesday?”

“Nick, he was always happy,” Leroy said slowly.

“He say anything about meeting someone?”

“Tuesday?”

“Yeah, Leroy. Remember, he died Tuesday night?”

Leroy began to blubber. “Oh, jeez—”

Quinn pulled his chair up closer. “Tell me how it was when you found him.”

“Remembering’s hard, Mr. Quinn. Nick, he was good to me. Never had nobody good like that. I don’t know what I’m gonna do—”

“The alley door was open.”

Leroy shut his eyes. “It... it was, sir. I went in. I found him. Nick’s head was—”

The lieutenant waved a futile hand and went over to the small rust-stained sink, rinsed out a plastic cup and grimaced down some bad water. It tasted like dead fish had been rinsed in it. He was looking at the rest of the water when a thread began snaking out in his mind.

Nick’s aquarium.

Sitting back down, he looked at the big, retarded man. “You found Nick, Leroy. You got Sampson next door to call us. Then you went back and waited like you should’ve.”

Leroy nodded.

“And Nick never got to feed his guppies. You mean you let Nick’s guppies go without food?”

Suddenly Leroy looked hurt. “Sure I fed ’em, Mr. Quinn. I wouldn’t let ’em — I mean, I know not to touch any—”

“But just feeding fish, that isn’t gonna hurt, huh, Leroy?”

The big man looked relieved. “It seemed all right to do.”

“Okay. Now, something else that seemed right? Anything. Straightening up things, just a little. You see, everything was neat, too neat.”

Leroy’s face went blank, the eyes shut, then the face began to wrinkle up as the thoughts slowly came out inch by inch from the bottom of the retarded brain.

“Tea cups,” Leroy said.

“Tea cups?” Quinn said, puzzled.

Leroy nodded. “On... on the table. Pretty tea cups. And the tea in them would stain them if they were left like that. So I washed both, like I knew Nick would want me.”

“And that’s all?”

After some more thinking, Leroy said: “Yes sir. I didn’t do wrong, did I? Nick, he saved those for special times. Like when you visited him.” He paused. “Or Miss Anna.”

The lieutenant slammed the door behind him. The sky was washed in a faded orange with the late afternoon sun slanting through the smog. He cut his car out of the alley onto Purple Avenue, thinking of Nick Rizzo quietly rinsing his tea cups, his special set, for their rare use.

Still, he was not sure. Anna, the way she was, it made him sick to ask her. In the second pawn shop on Jefferson he found the big display of diamond rings in the window.

The owner’s name was Green and he looked with disinterest at the badge afixed to Quinn’s wallet. “You’re not going to ask me to look through all my receipts, are you, Lieutenant?”

“Not unless you got a good memory. Nick Rizzo.”

“Oh, certainly! Mr. Rizzo was in here Monday and bought a diamond ring. Like I told that funny little man—”

“Kippy.”

“That’s the name. Like I told him, I sold it to Mr. Rizzo for two hundred. He was quite happy. Frankly, so was I. I don’t often make that kind of sale.”

That was Nick, Quinn thought. His fidelity to tradition, to protocol. A proposal of marriage was never to be slighted. It required all the formality, all the special touches. The special tea cups.

Green reached under the glass counter and displayed a diamond ring. “This is it.”

Quinn nodded. “You mean like it.”

“No, this is it. Which is what I told Mr. Kippy. I mean, here I sell Mr. Rizzo the ring on Monday, and a Mr. Smith sells it back to me yesterday.”

“Describe Smith.”

The description, which fitted Jess Newman, made the tie that Quinn suspected, but as he drove to Brunner’s and saw all the pieces swimming in front of him he couldn’t set them right. He began to wonder if he wanted to.

The dinner hour crowd jammed all tables and stools in the small cafe as Quinn scanned the place for Anna’s thin frame. Finally he grabbed a stout little waitress as she tried to elbow by him.

“Anna. Where is she?”

“Dunno, mister. She’s been pretty sick today. While ago, maybe an hour, she was serving coffee to a cop. They talked a little and then the next thing I know she’s gone. Now I gotta move, mister.”

Quinn went back to see Joe Brunner in the kitchen. He was sweating over the griddle that crackled with greasy chops and burgers.

“Anna,” Brunner growled. “Left me shorthanded, that broad! Right out the door!” He slammed a plate of steaming pork chops on the steel serving counter. “Listen, some days she’d come in here, Miss Queen herself. But lately she’s been tight like a drum. Said I wasn’t paying her enough. Man, sixty-five is all I can afford.”

“Address?”

“Brookside apartments on Bell Street. Hey, you see her, tell her maybe I can raise her ten.”

“She’d still want more,” Quinn said.

The ancient globe-like street lamps flickered, then came on full as Quinn parked in front of the two-story apartment building. He found her name on the panel of mail boxes just inside the entrance. Halfway down the hallway he hesitated at her door. His instinct was to knock, but instead he opened it quickly.

The small apartment was a shambles, a pig sty. Wads of paper, soiled bedding and in the bathroom on the floor he found an empty ring container. Newman supplied her and got back at Nick Rizzo that way, he thought. Then, when the cop mentioned Jess was busted, Anna went looking for free Smack. Quinn could see a half-dozen empty heroin bindies, small squares of paper. He kicked the basket, scattering its contents across the floor.

As he went back down the hallway, a door cracked open and a slim, wrinkled face of a woman peered out. “You looking for that Falcone woman, too?”

The lieutenant stopped. “Whatdya mean ‘too’?”

“Maybe an hour ago, a big man. I felt sorry for him, I mean he was sort of slow and he was breathing heavy like maybe he’d been running.”

“And what’d you tell him?” “That she got phone calls from the Kitty Bar the last week or so. We only got the hallway phone, and I’d always have to—”

He managed to cut the twenty minute drive to fifteen, but Leroy was on foot and he didn’t have the traffic to worry about. When he arrived, the bar was crammed to the walls with its mangy patrons. Quinn elbowed slowly through and at the stairway took it in three steps.

When he threw open the door to Newman’s room, Leroy stood in the middle of the floor, staring at the bathroom. Turning slowly to face Quinn, he held out his big hands apologetically.

At the bathroom doorway Quinn looked in at the skinny woman, still in her waitress uniform, but the uniform was soaked nearly tan with an addict’s sweat. He felt her bent neck for a pulse, but there was none. Against the wall above the toilet he could see the damp spot where Leroy had flung her. Her sleeve on her left arm was rolled up, revealing the blood trail from the needle mark.

The basin had the pieces — the spoon, burnt matches and the torn bindle.

The hypo lay crushed on the dirty floor.

“She was bad doing that, wasn’t she, Mr. Quinn?” he heard Leroy say from the other room. “Nick, he always said them were the worst people.”

Quinn drew the back of his moist hand across his mouth. He glanced around for a bottle, anything with a trace of alcohol in it.

“I kept asking her why, Mr. Quinn. I mean she didn’t have to kill him. She said she was sick and needed money and Nick wouldn’t give her none. She said Nick called her a junkie and said here he went and bought a ring for a junkie—”

“Yeah, yeah, Leroy,” Quinn said. He could see good old pious Nick Rizzo, his black eyes flashing, and then turning his back on the frenzied, sick girl to feed his guppies. And there’s that ring in his pocket that can buy her another fix. What’s a tap on the head? And while at it, maybe the cash register. But she was too trip-happy to pop it open.

“Those tea cups, they made me think, just like you, huh, Mr. Quinn? And we were right, it was Anna, you know.”

Turning slowly, Quinn looked wearily at the big man, and Leroy’s eyes suddenly inflated with fear, like an animal that’s trapped but doesn’t really know why he should feel that way.

“I... I done wrong, huh? You think Nick he’d be mad at me in heaven?” He was backing toward the doorway.

Quinn felt numb as he watched him. Then he heard the heavy footsteps as Leroy ran down the stairs and disappeared into the bar.

He hoped Leroy would keep running until he was out of the Purple district, out of the wormy mess in which Nick had tried to maintain his little oasis, his Eden. Only, finally, Nick’s guard dropped. And the district had finally gotten to the Eden, too.

Through its Eve.

The lieutenant went downstairs and found a narrow opening at the bar. He waited patiently for his drink.