Brooklyn Noir 2

By the dawn’s early light by Lawrence Block

Sunset Park

(Originally published in 1984)

All this happened a long time ago.

Abe Beame was living in Gracie Mansion, though even he seemed to have trouble believing he was really the mayor of the city of New York. Ali was in his prime, and the Knicks still had a year or so left in Bradley and DeBusschere. I was still drinking in those days, of course, and at the time it seemed to be doing more for me than it was doing to me.

I had already left my wife and kids, my home in Syosset and the NYPD. I was living in the hotel on West Fifty-seventh Street where I still live, and I was doing most of my drinking around the comer in Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon. Billie was the nighttime bartender. A Filipino youth named Dennis was behind the stick most days.

And Tommy Tillary was one of the regulars.

He was big, probably 6’2”, full in the chest, big in the belly, too. He rarely showed up in a suit but always wore a jacket and tie, usually a navy or burgundy blazer with gray-flannel slacks or white duck pants in warmer weather. He had a loud voice that boomed from his barrel chest and a big, clean-shaven face that was innocent around the pouting mouth and knowing around the eyes. He was somewhere in his late forties and he drank a lot of top-shelf scotch. Chivas, as I remember it, but it could have been Johnnie Black. Whatever it was, his face was beginning to show it, with patches of permanent flush at the cheekbones and a tracery of broken capillaries across the bridge of the nose.

We were saloon friends. We didn’t speak every time we ran into each other, but at the least we always acknowledged each other with a nod or a wave. He told a lot of dialect jokes and told them reasonably well, and I laughed at my share of them. Sometimes I was in a mood to reminisce about my days on the force, and when my stories were funny, his laugh was as loud as anyone’s.

Sometimes he showed up alone, sometimes with male friends. About a third of the time, he was in the company of a short and curvy blonde named Carolyn. “Carolyn from the Caro-line” was the way he occasionally introduced her, and she did have a faint Southern accent that became more pronounced as the drink got to her.

Then, one morning, I picked up the Daily News and read that burglars had broken into a house on Colonial Road, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. They had stabbed to death the only occupant present, one Margaret Tillary. Her husband, Thomas J. Tillary, a salesman, was not at home at the time.

I hadn’t known Tommy was a salesman or that he’d had a wife. He did wear a wide yellow-gold band on the appropriate finger, and it was clear that he wasn’t married to Carolyn from the Caroline, and it now looked as though he was a widower. I felt vaguely sorry for him, vaguely sorry for the wife I’d never even known of, but that was the extent of it. I drank enough back then to avoid feeling any emotion very strongly.

And then, two or three nights later, I walked into Armstrong’s and there was Carolyn. She didn’t appear to be waiting for him or anyone else, nor did she look as though she’d just breezed in a few minutes ago. She had a stool by herself at the bar and she was drinking something dark from a lowball glass.

I took a seat a few stools down from her. I ordered two double shots of bourbon, drank one and poured the other into the black coffee Billie brought me. I was sipping the coffee when a voice with a Piedmont softness said, “I forget your name.”

I looked up.

“I believe we were introduced,” she said, “but I don’t recall your name.”

“It’s Matt,” I said, “and you’re right, Tommy introduced us. You’re Carolyn.”

“Carolyn Cheatham. Have you seen him?”

“Tommy? Not since it happened.”

“Neither have I. Were you-all at the funeral?”

“No. When was it?”

“This afternoon. Neither was I. There. Whyn’t you come sit next to me so’s I don’t have to shout. Please?”

She was drinking a sweet almond liqueur that she took on the rocks. It tastes like dessert, but it’s as strong as whiskey.

“He told me not to come,” she said. “To the funeral. He said it was a matter of respect for the dead.” She picked up her glass and stared into it. I’ve never known what people hope to see there, though it’s a gesture I’ve performed often enough myself.

“Respect,” she said. “What’s he care about respect? I would have just been part of the office crowd; we both work at Tannahill; far as anyone there knows, we’re just friends. And all we ever were is friends, you know.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Oh, shit,” she said. “I don’t mean I wasn’t fucking him, for the Lord’s sake. I mean it was just laughs and good times. He was married and he went home to Mama every night and that was jes’ fine, because who in her right mind’d want Tommy Tillary around by the dawn’s early light? Christ in the foothills, did I spill this or drink it?”

We agreed she was drinking them a little too fast. It was this fancy New York sweet-drink shit, she maintained, not like the bourbon she’d grown up on. You knew where you stood with bourbon.

I told her I was a bourbon drinker myself, and it pleased her to learn this. Alliances have been forged on thinner bonds than that, and ours served to propel us out of Armstrong’s, with a stop down the block for a fifth of Maker’s Mark — her choice — and a four-block walk to her apartment. There were exposed brick walls, I remember, and candles stuck in straw-wrapped bottles, and several travel posters from Sabena, the Belgian airline.

We did what grown-ups do when they find themselves alone together. We drank our fair share of the Maker’s Mark and went to bed. She made a lot of enthusiastic noises and more than a few skillful moves, and afterward she cried some.

A little later, she dropped off to sleep. I was tired myself, but I put on my clothes and sent myself home. Because who in her right mind’d want Matt Scudder around by the dawn’s early light?

Over the next couple of days, I wondered every time I entered Armstrong’s if I’d run into her, and each time I was more relieved than disappointed when I didn’t. I didn’t en-counter Tommy, either, and that, too, was a relief and in no sense disappointing.

Then, one morning, I picked up the News and read that they’d arrested a pair of young Hispanics from Sunset Park for the Tillary burglary and homicide. The paper ran the usual photo — two skinny kids, their hair unruly, one of them trying to hide his face from the camera, the other smirking defiantly, and each of them handcuffed to a broad-shouldered, grim-faced Irishman in a suit. You didn’t need the careful caption to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, I went over to Armstrong’s for a hamburger and drank a beer with it. The phone behind the bar rang and Dennis put down the glass he was wiping and answered it. “He was here a minute ago,” he said. “I’ll see if he stepped out.” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked quizzically at me. “Are you still here?” he asked. “Or did you slip away while my attention was diverted?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Tommy Tillary.”

You never know what a woman will decide to tell a man or how a man will react to it. I didn’t want to find out, but I was better off learning over the phone than face-to-face. I nodded and took the phone from Dennis.

I said, “Matt Scudder, Tommy. I was sorry to hear about your wife.”

“Thanks, Matt. Jesus, it feels like it happened a year ago. It was what, a week?”

“At least they got the bastards.”

There was a pause. Then he said, “Jesus. You haven’t seen a paper, huh?”

“That’s where I read about it. Two Spanish kids.”

“You didn’t happen to see this afternoon’s Post.”

“No. Why, what happened? They turn out to be clean?”

“The two spics. Clean? Shit, they’re about as clean as the room in the Times Square subway station. The cops hit their place and found stuff from my house everywhere they looked. Jewelry they had descriptions of, a stereo that I gave them the serial number, everything. Monogrammed shit. I mean, that’s how clean they were, for Christ’s sake.”

“So?”

“They admitted the burglary but not the murder.”

“That’s common, Tommy.”

“Lemme finish, huh? They admitted the burglary, but according to them it was a put-up job. According to them, I hired them to hit my place. They could keep whatever they got and I’d have everything out and arranged for them, and in return I got to clean up on the insurance by overreporting the loss.”

“What did the loss amount to?”

“Shit, I don’t know. There were twice as many things turned up in their apartment as I ever listed when I made out a report. There’s things I missed a few days after I filed the report and others I didn’t know were gone until the cops found them. You don’t notice everything right away, at least I didn’t, and on top of it, how could I think straight with Peg dead? You know?”

“It hardly sounds like an insurance setup.”

“No, of course it wasn’t. How the hell could it be? All I had was a standard homeowner’s policy. It covered maybe a third of what I lost. According to them, the place was empty when they hit it. Peg was out.”

“And?”

“And I set them up. They hit the place, they carted everything away, and I came home with Peg and stabbed her six, eight times, whatever it was, and left her there so it’d look like it happened in a burglary.”

“How could the burglars testify that you stabbed your wife?”

“They couldn’t. All they said was they didn’t and she wasn’t home when they were there, and that I hired them to do the burglary. The cops pieced the rest of it together.”

“What did they do, take you downtown?”

“No. They came over to the house, it was early, I don’t know what time. It was the first I knew that the spics were arrested, let alone that they were trying to do a job on me. They just wanted to talk, the cops, and at first I talked to them, and then I started to get the drift of what they were trying to put on to me. So I said I wasn’t saying anything more without my lawyer present, and I called him, and he left half his breakfast on the table and came over in a hurry, and he wouldn’t let me say a word.”

“And the cops didn’t take you in or book you?”

“No.”

“Did they buy your story?”

“No way. I didn’t really tell ’em a story, because Kaplan wouldn’t let me say anything. They didn’t drag me in, because they don’t have a case yet, but Kaplan says they’re gonna be building one if they can. They told me not to leave town. You believe it? My wife’s dead, the Post headline says, ‘Quiz Husband in Burglary Murder,’ and what the hell do they think I’m gonna do? Am I going fishing for fucking trout in Montana? ‘Don’t leave town.’ You see this shit on television, you think nobody in real life talks this way. Maybe television’s where they get it from.”

I waited for him to tell me what he wanted from me. I didn’t have long to wait.

“Why I called,” he said, “is Kaplan wants to hire a detective. He figured maybe these guys talked around the neighborhood, maybe they bragged to their friends, maybe there’s a way to prove they did the killing. He says the cops won’t concentrate on that end if they’re too busy nailing the lid shut on me.”

I explained that I didn’t have any official standing, that I had no license and filed no reports.

“That’s okay,” he insisted. “I told Kaplan what I want is somebody I can trust, somebody who’ll do the job for me. I don’t think they’re gonna have any kind of a case at all, Matt, but the longer this drags on, the worse it is for me. I want it cleared up, I want it in the papers that these Spanish assholes did it all and I had nothing to do with anything. You name a fair fee and I’ll pay it, me to you, and it can be cash in your hand if you don’t like checks. What do you say?”

He wanted somebody he could trust. Had Carolyn from the Caroline told him how trustworthy I was?

What did I say? I said yes.

I met Tommy Tillary and his lawyer in Drew Kaplan’s office on Court Street, a few blocks from Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. There was a Syrian restaurant next door and, at the corner, a grocery store specializing in Middle Eastern imports stood next to an antique shop overflowing with stripped-oak furniture and brass lamps and bedsteads. Kaplan’s office ran to wood paneling and leather chairs and oak file cabinets. His name and the names of two partners were painted on the frosted-glass door in old-fashioned gold-and-black lettering. Kaplan himself looked conservatively up to date, with a three-piece striped suit that was better cut than mine. Tommy wore his burgundy blazer and gray-flannel trousers and loafers. Strain showed at the corners of his blue eyes and around his mouth. His complexion was off, too.

“All we want you to do,” Kaplan said, “is find a key in one of their pants pockets, Herrera’s or Cruz’s, and trace it to a locker in Penn Station, and in the locker there’s a footlong knife with their prints and her blood on it.”

“Is that what it’s going to take?”

He smiled. “It wouldn’t hurt. No, actually, we’re not in such bad shape. They got some shaky testimony from a pair of Latins who’ve been in and out of trouble since they got weaned to Tropicana. They got what looks to them like a good motive on Tommy’s part.”

“Which is?”

I was looking at Tommy when I asked. His eyes slipped away from mine. Kaplan said, “A marital triangle, a case of the shorts and a strong money motive. Margaret Tillary inherited a little over a quarter of a million dollars six or eight months ago. An aunt left a million two and it got cut up four ways. What they don’t bother to notice is he loved his wife, and how many husbands cheat? What is it they say — ninety percent cheat and ten percent lie?”

“That’s good odds.”

“One of the killers, Angel Herrera, did some odd jobs at the Tillary house last March or April. Spring cleaning; he hauled stuff out of the basement and attic, a little donkeywork. According to Herrera, that’s how Tommy knew him to contact him about the burglary. According to common sense, that’s how Herrera and his buddy Cruz knew the house and what was in it and how to gain access.”

“The case against Tommy sounds pretty thin.”

“It is,” Kaplan said. “The thing is, you go to court with something like this and you lose even if you win. For the rest of your life, everybody remembers you stood trial for murdering your wife, never mind that you won an acquittal.

“Besides,” he said, “you never know which way a jury’s going to jump. Tommy’s alibi is he was with another lady at the time of the burglary. The woman’s a colleague; they could see it as completely aboveboard, but who says they’re going to? What they sometimes do, they decide they don’t believe the alibi because it’s his girlfriend lying for him, and at the same time they label him a scumbag for screwing around while his wife’s getting killed.”

“You keep it up,” Tommy said, “I’ll find myself guilty, the way you make it sound.”

“Plus he’s hard to get a sympathetic jury for. He’s a big handsome guy, a sharp dresser, and you’d love him in a gin joint, but how much do you love him in a courtroom? He’s a securities salesman, he’s beautiful on the phone, and that means every clown who ever lost a hundred dollars on a stock tip or bought magazines over the phone is going to walk into the courtroom with a hard-on for him. I’m telling you, I want to stay the hell out of court. I’ll win in court, I know that, or the worst that’ll happen is I’ll win on appeal, but who needs it? This is a case that shouldn’t be in the first place, and I’d love to clear it up before they even go so far as presenting a bill to the grand jury.”

“So from me you want—”

“Whatever you can find, Matt. Whatever discredits Cruz and Herrera. I don’t know what’s there to be found, but you were a cop and now you’re private, and you can get down in the streets and nose around.”

I nodded. I could do that. “One thing,” I said. “Wouldn’t you be better off with a Spanish-speaking detective? I know enough to buy a beer in a bodega, but I’m a long way from fluent.”

Kaplan shook his head. “A personal relationship’s worth more than a dime’s worth of ‘Me llamo Matteo y ¿como está usted?’”

“That’s the truth,” Tommy Tillary said. “Matt, I know I can count on you.”

I wanted to tell him all he could count on was his fingers. I didn’t really see what I could expect to uncover that wouldn’t turn up in a regular police investigation. But I’d spent enough time carrying a shield to know not to push away money when somebody wants to give it to you. I felt comfortable taking a fee. The man was inheriting a quarter of a million, plus whatever insurance his wife had carried. If he was willing to spread some of it around, I was willing to take it.

So I went to Sunset Park and spent some time in the streets and some more time in the bars. Sunset Park is in Brooklyn, of course, on the borough’s western edge, above Bay Ridge and south and west of Greenwood Cemetery. These days, there’s a lot of brownstoning going on there, with young urban professionals renovating the old houses and gentrifying the neighborhood. Back then, the upwardly mobile young had not yet discovered Sunset Park, and the area was a mix of Latins and Scandinavians, most of the former Puerto Ricans, most of the latter Norwegians. The balance was gradually shifting from Europe to the islands, from light to dark, but this was a process that had been going on for ages and there was nothing hurried about it.

I talked to Herrera’s landlord and Cruz’s former employer and one of his recent girlfriends. I drank beer in bars and the back rooms of bodegas. I went to the local station house, I read the sheets on both of the burglars and drank coffee with the cops and picked up some of the stuff that doesn’t get on the yellow sheets.

I found out that Miguelito Cruz had once killed a man in a tavern brawl over a woman. There were no charges pressed; a dozen witnesses reported that the dead man had gone after Cruz first with a broken bottle. Cruz had most likely been carrying the knife, but several witnesses insisted it had been tossed to him by an anonymous benefactor, and there hadn’t been enough evidence to make a case of weapons possession, let alone homicide.

I learned that Herrera had three children living with their mother in Puerto Rico. He was divorced but wouldn’t marry his current girlfriend because he regarded himself as married to his ex-wife in the eyes of God. He sent money to his children when he had any to send.

I learned other things. They didn’t seem terribly consequential then and they’ve faded from memory altogether now, but I wrote them down in my pocket notebook as I learned them, and every day or so I duly reported my findings to Drew Kaplan. He always seemed pleased with what I told him.

I invariably managed a stop at Armstrong’s before I called it a night. One night she was there, Carolyn Cheatham, drinking bourbon this time, her face frozen with stubborn old pain. It took her a blink or two to recognize me. Then tears started to form in the corners of her eyes, and she used the back of one hand to wipe them away.

I didn’t approach her until she beckoned. She patted the stool beside hers and I eased myself onto it. I had coffee with bourbon in it and bought a refill for her. She was pretty drunk already, but that’s never been enough reason to turn down a drink.

She talked about Tommy. He was being nice to her, she said. Calling up, sending flowers. But he wouldn’t see her, because it wouldn’t look right, not for a new widower, not for a man who’d been publicly accused of murder.

“He sends flowers with no card enclosed,” she said. “He calls me from pay phones. The son of a bitch.”

Billie called me aside. “I didn’t want to put her out,” he said, “a nice woman like that, shit-faced as she is. But I thought I was gonna have to. You’ll see she gets home?”

I said I would.

I got her out of there and a cab came along and saved us the walk. At her place, I took the keys from her and unlocked the door. She half sat, half sprawled on the couch. I had to use the bathroom, and when I came back, her eyes were closed and she was snoring lightly.

I got her coat and shoes off, put her to bed, loosened her clothing, and covered her with a blanket. I was tired from all that and sat down on the couch for a minute, and I almost dozed off myself. Then I snapped awake and let myself out.

I went back to Sunset Park the next day. I learned that Cruz had been in trouble as a youth. With a gang of neighborhood kids, he used to go into the city and cruise Greenwich Village, looking for homosexuals to beat up. He’d had a dread of homosexuality, probably flowing as it generally does out of fear of a part of himself, and he stifled that dread by fag-bashing.

“He still doan’ like them,” a woman told me. She had glossy black hair and opaque eyes, and she was letting me pay for her rum and orange juice. “He’s pretty, you know, an’ they come on to him, an’ he doan’ like it.”

I called that item in, along with a few others equally earthshaking. I bought myself a steak dinner at the Slate over on Tenth Avenue, then finished up at Armstrong’s, not drinking very hard, just coasting along on bourbon and coffee.

Twice, the phone rang for me. Once, it was Tommy Tillary, telling me how much he appreciated what I was doing for him. It seemed to me that all I was doing was taking his money, but he had me believing that my loyalty and invaluable assistance were all he had to cling to.

The second call was from Carolyn. More praise. I was a gentleman, she assured me, and a hell of a fellow all around. And I should forget that she’d been bad-mouthing Tommy. Everything was going to be fine with them.

I took the next day off. I think I went to a movie, and it may have been The Sting, with Newman and Redford achieving vengeance through swindling.

The day after that, I did another tour of duty over in Brooklyn. And the day after that, I picked up the News first thing in the morning. The headline was nonspecific, something like kill suspect hangs self in cell, but I knew it was my case before I turned to the story on page three.

Miguelito Cruz had torn his clothing into strips, knotted the strips together, stood his iron bedstead on its side, climbed onto it, looped his homemade rope around an overhead pipe, and jumped off the up-ended bedstead and into the next world.

That evening’s six o’clock TV news had the rest of the story. Informed of his friend’s death, Angel Herrera had recanted his original story and admitted that he and Cruz had conceived and executed the Tillary burglary on their own. It had been Miguelito who had stabbed the Tillary woman when she walked in on them. He’d picked up a kitchen knife while Herrera watched in horror. Miguelito always had a short temper, Herrera said, but they were friends, even cousins, and they had hatched their story to protect Miguelito. But now that he was dead, Herrera could admit what had really happened.

I was in Armstrong’s that night, which was not remarkable. I had it in mind to get drunk, though I could not have told you why, and that was remarkable, if not unheard of. I got drunk a lot those days, but I rarely set out with that intention. I just wanted to feel a little better, a little more mellow, and somewhere along the way I’d wind up waxed.

I wasn’t drinking particularly hard or fast, but I was working at it, and then somewhere around ten or eleven the door opened and I knew who it was before I turned around. Tommy Tillary, well dressed and freshly barbered, making his first appearance in Jimmy’s place since his wife was killed.

“Hey, look who’s here!” he called out and grinned that big grin. People rushed over to shake his hand. Billie was behind the stick, and he’d no sooner set one up on the house for our hero than Tommy insisted on buying a round for the bar. It was an expensive gesture — there must have been thirty or forty people in there — but I don’t think he cared if there were three hundred or four hundred.

I stayed where I was, letting the others mob him, but he worked his way over to me and got an arm around my shoulders. “This is the man,” he announced. “Best fucking detective ever wore out a pair of shoes. This man’s money,” he told Billie, “is no good at all tonight. He can’t buy a drink; he can’t buy a cup of coffee; if you went and put in pay toilets since I was last here, he can’t use his own dime.”

“The john’s still free,” Billie said, “but don’t give the boss any ideas.”

“Oh, don’t tell me he didn’t already think of it,” Tommy said. “Matt, my boy, I love you. I was in a tight spot, I didn’t want to walk out of my house, and you came through for me.”

What the hell had I done? I hadn’t hanged Miguelito Cruz or coaxed a confession out of Angel Herrera. I hadn’t even set eyes on either man. But he was buying the drinks, and I had a thirst, so who was I to argue?

I don’t know how long we stayed there. Curiously, my drinking slowed down even as Tommy’s picked up speed. Carolyn, I noticed, was not present, nor did her name find its way into the conversation. I wondered if she would walk in — it was, after all, her neighborhood bar, and she was apt to drop in on her own. I wondered what would happen if she did.

I guess there were a lot of things I wondered about, and perhaps that’s what put the brakes on my own drinking. I didn’t want any gaps in my memory, any gray patches in my awareness.

After a while, Tommy was hustling me out of Armstrong’s. “This is celebration time,” he told me. “We don’t want to sit in one place till we grow roots. We want to bop a little.”

He had a car, and I just went along with him without paying too much attention to exactly where we were. We went to a noisy Greek club on the East Side, I think, where the waiters looked like Mob hit men. We went to a couple of trendy singles joints. We wound up somewhere in the Village, in a dark, beery cave.

It was quiet there, and conversation was possible, and I found myself asking him what I’d done that was so praiseworthy. One man had killed himself and another had confessed, and where was my role in either incident?

“The stuff you came up with,” he said.

“What stuff? I should have brought back fingernail parings, you could have had someone work voodoo on them.”

“About Cruz and the fairies.”

“He was up for murder. He didn’t kill himself because he was afraid they’d get him for fag-bashing when he was a juvenile offender.”

Tommy took a sip of scotch. He said, “Couple days ago, huge black guy comes up to Cruz in the chow line. ‘Wait’ll you get up to Green Haven,’ he tells him. ‘Every blood there’s gonna have you for a girlfriend. Doctor gonna have to cut you a brand-new asshole, time you get outa there.’”

I didn’t say anything.

“Kaplan,” he said. “Drew talked to somebody who talked to somebody, and that did it. Cruz took a good look at playin’ drop the soap for half the jigs in captivity, next thing you know, the murderous little bastard was on air. And good riddance to him.”

I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I worked on it while Tommy went to the bar for another round. I hadn’t touched the drink in front of me, but I let him buy for both of us.

When he got back, I said, “Herrera.”

“Changed his story. Made a full confession.”

“And pinned the killing on Cruz.”

“Why not? Cruz wasn’t around to complain. Who knows which one of ’em did it, and for that matter, who cares? The thing is, you gave us the lever.”

“For Cruz,” I said. “To get him to kill himself.”

“And for Herrera. Those kids of his in Santurce. Drew spoke to Herrera’s lawyer and Herrera’s lawyer spoke to Herrera, and the message was, ‘Look, you’re going up for burglary whatever you do, and probably for murder; but if you tell the right story, you’ll draw shorter time, and on top of that, that nice Mr. Tillary’s gonna let bygones be bygones and every month there’s a nice check for your wife and kiddies back home in Puerto Rico.’”

At the bar, a couple of old men were reliving the Louis-Schmeling fight, the second one, where Louis punished the German champion. One of the old fellows was throwing roundhouse punches in the air, demonstrating.

I said, “Who killed your wife?”

“One or the other of them. If I had to bet, I’d say Cruz. He had those little beady eyes; you looked at him up close and you got that he was a killer.”

“When did you look at him up close?”

“When they came and cleaned the house, the basement, and the attic. Not when they came and cleaned me out; that was the second time.”

He smiled, but I kept looking at him until the smile lost its certainty. “That was Herrera who helped around the house,” I said. “You never met Cruz.”

“Cruz came along, gave him a hand.”

“You never mentioned that before.”

“Oh, sure I did, Matt. What difference does it make, anyway.”

“Who killed her, Tommy?”

“Hey, let it alone, huh?”

“Answer the question.”

“I already answered it.”

“You killed her, didn’t you?”

“What are you, crazy? Cruz killed her and Herrera swore to it, isn’t that enough for you?”

“Tell me you didn’t kill her.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Tell me again.”

“I didn’t fucking kill her. What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. He closed his eyes, put his head in his hands. He sighed and looked up and said, “You know, it’s a funny thing with me. Over the telephone, I’m the best salesman you could ever imagine. I swear I could sell sand to the Arabs, I could sell ice in the winter, but face-to-face I’m no good at all. Why do you figure that is?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know. I used to think it was my face, the eyes and the mouth; I don’t know. It’s easy over the phone. I’m talking to a stranger, I don’t know who he is or what he looks like, and he’s not lookin’ at me, and it’s a cinch. Face-to-face, especially with someone I know, it’s a different story.” He looked at me. “If we were doin’ this over the phone, you’d buy the whole thing.”

“It’s possible.”

“It’s fucking certain. Word for word, you’d buy the package. Suppose I was to tell you I did kill her, Matt. You couldn’t prove anything. Look, the both of us walked in there, the place was a mess from the burglary, we got in an argument, tempers flared, something happened.”

“You set up the burglary. You planned the whole thing, just the way Cruz and Herrera accused you of doing. And now you wriggled out of it.”

“And you helped me — don’t forget that part of it.”

“I won’t.”

“And I wouldn’t have gone away for it anyway, Matt. Not a chance. I’da beat it in court, only this way I don’t have to go to court. Look, this is just the booze talkin’, and we can forget it in the morning, right? I didn’t kill her, you didn’t accuse me, we’re still buddies, everything’s fine. Right?”

Blackouts are never there when you want them. I woke up the next day and remembered all of it, and I found myself wishing I didn’t. He’d killed his wife and he was getting away with it. And I’d helped him. I’d taken his money, and in return I’d shown him how to set one man up for suicide and pressure another into making a false confession.

And what was I going to do about it?

I couldn’t think of a thing. Any story I carried to the police would be speedily denied by Tommy and his lawyer, and all I had was the thinnest of hearsay evidence, my own client’s own words when he and I both had a skinful of booze. I went over it for a few days, looking for ways to shake something loose, and there was nothing. I could maybe interest a newspaper reporter, maybe get Tommy some press coverage that wouldn’t make him happy, but why? And to what purpose?

It rankled. But I would just have a couple of drinks, and then it wouldn’t rankle so much.

Angel Herrera pleaded guilty to burglary, and in return, the Brooklyn D.A.’s Office dropped all homicide charges. He went Upstate to serve five to ten.

And then I got a call in the middle of the night. I’d been sleeping a couple of hours, but the phone woke me and I groped for it. It took me a minute to recognize the voice on the other end.

It was Carolyn Cheatham.

“I had to call you,” she said, “on account of you’re a bourbon man and a gentleman. I owed it to you to call you.”

“What’s the matter?”

“He ditched me,” she said, “and he got me fired out of Tannahill and Company so he won’t have to look at me around the office. Once he didn’t need me to back up his story, he let go of me, and do you know he did it over the phone?”

“Carolyn—”

“It’s all in the note,” she said. “I’m leaving a note.”

“Look, don’t do anything yet,” I said. I was out of bed, fumbling for my clothes. “I’ll be right over. We’ll talk about it.”

“You can’t stop me, Matt.”

“I won’t try to stop you. We’ll talk first, and then you can do anything you want.”

The phone clicked in my ear.

I threw my clothes on, rushed over there, hoping it would be pills, something that took its time. I broke a small pane of glass in the downstairs door and let myself in, then used an old credit card to slip the bolt of her spring lock.

The room smelled of cordite. She was on the couch she’d passed out on the last time I saw her. The gun was still in her hand, limp at her side, and there was a black-rimmed hole in her temple.

There was a note, too. An empty bottle of Maker’s Mark stood on the coffee table, an empty glass beside it. The booze showed in her handwriting and in the sullen phrasing of the suicide note.

I read the note. I stood there for a few minutes, not for very long, and then I got a dish towel from the Pullman kitchen and wiped the bottle and the glass. I took another matching glass, rinsed it out and wiped it, and put it in the drainboard of the sink.

I stuffed the note in my pocket. I took the gun from her fingers, checked routinely for a pulse, then wrapped a sofa pillow around the gun to muffle its report. I fired one round into her chest, another into her open mouth.

I dropped the gun into a pocket and left.

They found the gun in Tommy Tillary’s house, stuffed between the cushions of the living-room sofa, clean of prints inside and out. Ballistics got a perfect match. I’d aimed for soft tissue with the round shot into her chest, because bullets can fragment on impact with bone. That was one reason I’d fired the extra shots. The other was to rule out the possibility of suicide.

After the story made the papers, I picked up the phone and called Drew Kaplan. “I don’t understand it,” I said. “He was free and clear; why the hell did he kill the girl?”

“Ask him yourself,” Kaplan said. He did not sound happy. “You want my opinion, he’s a lunatic. I honestly didn’t think he was. I figured maybe he killed his wife, maybe he didn’t. Not my job to try him. But I didn’t figure he was a homicidal maniac.”

“It’s certain he killed the girl?”

“Not much question. The gun’s pretty strong evidence. Talk about finding somebody with the smoking pistol in his hand, here it was in Tommy’s couch. The idiot.”

“Funny he kept it.”

“Maybe he had other people he wanted to shoot. Go figure a crazy man. No, the gun’s evidence, and there was a phone tip — a man called in the shooting, reported a man running out of there, and gave a description that fitted Tommy pretty well. Even had him wearing that red blazer he wears, tacky thing makes him look like an usher at the Paramount.”

“It sounds tough to square.”

“Well, somebody else’ll have to try to do it,” Kaplan said. “I told him I can’t defend him this time. What it amounts to, I wash my hands of him.”

I thought of that when I read that Angel Herrera got out just the other day. He served all ten years because he was as good at getting into trouble inside the walls as he’d been on the outside.

Somebody killed Tommy Tillary with a homemade knife after he’d served two years and three months of a manslaughter stretch. I wondered at the time if that was Herrera getting even, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever know. Maybe the checks stopped going to Santurce and Herrera took it the wrong way. Or maybe Tommy said the wrong thing to somebody else and said it face-to-face instead of over the phone.

I don’t think I’d do it that way now. I don’t drink anymore and the impulse to play God seems to have evaporated with the booze.

But then, a lot of things have changed. Billie left Armstrong’s not long after that, left New York, too; the last I heard, he was off drink himself, living in Sausalito and making candles. I ran into Dennis the other day in a bookstore on lower Fifth Avenue full of odd volumes on yoga and spiritualism and holistic healing. And Armstrong’s is scheduled to close the end of next month. The lease is up for renewal, and I suppose the next you know, the old joint’ll be another Korean fruit market.

I still light a candle now and then for Carolyn Cheatham and Miguelito Cruz. Not often. Just every once in a while.

The best-friend murder by Donald E. Westlake

Park Slope

(Originally published in 1959)

Detective Abraham Levine of Brooklyn’s Forty-Third Precinct chewed on his pencil and glowered at the report he’d just written. He didn’t like it, he didn’t like it at all. It just didn’t feel right, and the more he thought about it the stronger the feeling became.

Levine was a short and stocky man, baggily-dressed from plain pipe racks. His face was sensitive, topped by salt-and-pepper gray hair chopped short in a military crewcut. At fifty-three, he had twenty-four years of duty on the police force, and was halfway through the heart-attack age range, a fact that had been bothering him for some time now. Every time he was reminded of death, he thought worriedly about the aging heart pumping away inside his chest.

And in his job, the reminders of death came often. Natural death, accidental death, and violent death.

This one was a violent death, and to Levine it felt wrong somewhere. He and his partner, Jack Crawley, had taken the call just after lunch. It was from one of the patrolmen in Prospect Park, a patrolman named Tanner. A man giving his name as Larry Perkins had walked up to Tanner in the park and announced that he had just poisoned his best friend. Tanner went with him, found a dead body in the apartment Perkins had led him to, and called in. Levine and Crawley, having just walked into the station after lunch, were given the call. They turned around and walked back out again.

Crawley drove their car, an unmarked ’56 Chevy, while Levine sat beside him and worried about death. At least this would be one of the neat ones. No knives or bombs or broken beer bottles. Just poison, that was all. The victim would look as though he were sleeping, unless it had been one of those poisons causing muscle spasms before death. But it would still be neater than a knife or a bomb or a broken beer bottle, and the victim wouldn’t look quite so completely dead.

Crawley drove leisurely, without the siren. He was a big man in his forties, somewhat overweight, square-faced and heavy jowled, and he looked meaner than he actually was. The Chevy tooled up Eighth Avenue, the late spring sun shining on its hood. They were headed for an address on Garfield Place, the block between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West. They had to circle the block, because Garfield was a one-way street. That particular block on Garfield Place is a double row of chipped brownstones, the street running down between two rows of high stone stoops, the buildings cut and chopped inside into thousands of apartments, crannies and cubbyholes, niches and box-like caves, where the subway riders sleep at night. The subway to Manhattan is six blocks away, up at Grand Army Plaza, across the way from the main library.

At one p.m. on this Wednesday in late May, the sidewalks were deserted, the buildings had the look of long abandoned dwellings. Only the cars parked along the left side of the street indicated present occupancy.

The number they wanted was in the middle of the block, on the right-hand side. There was no parking allowed on that side, so there was room directly in front of the address for Crawley to stop the Chevy. He flipped the sun visor down, with the official business card showing through the windshield, and followed Levine across the sidewalk and down the two steps to the basement door, under the stoop. The door was propped open with a battered garbage can. Levine and Crawley walked inside. It was dim in there, after the bright sunlight, and it took Levine’s eyes a few seconds to get used to the change. Then he made out the figures of two men standing at the other end of the hallway, in front of a closed door. One was the patrolman, Tanner, young, just over six foot, with a square and impersonal face. The other was Larry Perkins.

Levine and Crawley moved down the hallway to the two men waiting for them. In the seven years they had been partners, they had established a division of labor that satisfied them both. Crawley asked the questions, and Levine listened to the answers. Now, Crawley introduced himself to Tanner, who said, “This is Larry Perkins of 294 Fourth Street.”

“Body in there?” asked Crawley, pointing at the closed door.

“Yes, sir,” said Tanner.

“Let’s go inside,” said Crawley. “You keep an eye on the pigeon. See he doesn’t fly away.”

“I’ve got some stuff to go to the library,” said Perkins suddenly. His voice was young and soft.

They stared at him. Crawley said, “It’ll keep.”

Levine looked at Perkins, trying to get to know him. It was a technique he used, most of it unconsciously. First, he tried to fit Perkins into a type or category, some sort of general stereotype. Then he would look for small and individual ways in which Perkins differed from the general type, and he would probably wind up with a surprisingly complete mental picture, which would also be surprisingly accurate.

The general stereotype was easy. Perkins, in his black wool sweater and belt-in-the-back khakis and scuffed brown loafers without socks, was “arty.” What were they calling them this year? They were “hip” last year, but this year they were “beat.” That was it. For a general stereotype, Larry Perkins was a beatnik. The individual differences would show up soon, in Perkins’s talk and mannerisms and attitudes.

Crawley said again, “Let’s go inside,” and the four of them trooped into the room where the corpse lay.

The apartment was one large room, plus a closet-size kitchenette and an even smaller bathroom. A Murphy bed stood open, covered with zebra-striped material. The rest of the furniture consisted of a battered dresser, a couple of armchairs and lamps, and a record player sitting on a table beside a huge stack of longplaying records. Everything except the record player looked faded and worn and second-hand, including the thin maroon rug on the floor and the soiled flower-pattern wallpaper. Two windows looked out on a narrow cement enclosure and the back of another brownstone. It was a sunny day outside, but no sun managed to get down into this room.

In the middle of the room stood a card table, with a typewriter and two stacks of paper on it. Before the card table was a folding chair, and in the chair sat the dead man. He was slumped forward, his arms flung out and crumpling the stacks of paper, his head resting on the typewriter. His face was turned toward the door, and his eyes were closed, his facial muscles relaxed. It had been a peaceful death, at least, and Levine was grateful for that.

Crawley looked at the body, grunted, and turned to Perkins. “Okay,” he said. “Tell us about it.”

“I put the poison in his beer,” said Perkins simply. He didn’t talk like a beatnik at any rate. “He asked me to open a can of beer for him. When I poured it into a glass, I put the poison in, too. When he was dead, I went and talked to the patrolman here.”

“And that’s all there was to it?”

“That’s all.”

Levine asked, “Why did you kill him?”

Perkins looked over at Levine. “Because he was a pompous ass.”

“Look at me,” Crawley told him.

Perkins immediately looked away from Levine, but before he did so, Levine caught a flicker of emotion in the boy’s eyes, what emotion he couldn’t tell. Levine glanced around the room, at the faded furniture and the card table and the body, and at young Perkins, dressed like a beatnik but talking like the politest of polite young men, outwardly calm but hiding some strong emotion inside his eyes. What was it Levine had seen there? Terror? Rage? Or pleading?

“Tell us about this guy,” said Crawley, motioning at the body. “His name, where you knew him from, the whole thing.”

“His name is Al Gruber. He got out of the Army about eight months ago. He’s living on his savings and the GI Bill. I mean, he was.”

“He was a college student?”

“More or less. He was taking a few courses at Columbia, nights. He wasn’t a full-time student.”

Crawley said, “What was he, full-time?”

Perkins shrugged. “Not much of anything. A writer. An undiscovered writer. Like me.”

Levine asked, “Did he make much money from his writing?”

“None,” said Perkins. This time he didn’t turn to look at Levine, but kept watching Crawley while he answered. “He got something accepted by one of the quarterlies once,” he said, “but I don’t think they ever published it. And they don’t pay anything anyway.”

“So he was broke?” asked Crawley.

“Very broke. I know the feeling well.”

“You in the same boat?”

“Same life story completely,” said Perkins. He glanced at the body of Al Gruber and said, “Well, almost. I write, too. And I don’t get any money for it. And I’m living on the GI Bill and savings and a few home-typing jobs, and going to Columbia nights.”

People came into the room then, the medical examiner and the boys from the lab, and Levine and Crawley, bracketing Perkins between them, waited and watched for a while. When they could see that the M.E. had completed his first examination, they left Perkins in Tanner’s charge and went over to talk to him.

Crawley, as usual, asked the questions. “Hi, Doc,” he said. “What’s it look like to you?”

“Pretty straightforward case,” said the M.E. “On the surface, anyway. Our man here was poisoned, felt the effects coming on, went to the typewriter to tell us who’d done it to him, and died. A used glass and a small medicine bottle were on the dresser. We’ll check them out, but they almost certainly did the job.”

“Did he manage to do any typing before he died?” asked Crawley.

The M.E. shook his head. “Not a word. The paper was in the machine kind of crooked, as though he’d been in a hurry, but he just wasn’t fast enough.”

“He wasted his time,” said Crawley. “The guy confessed right away.”

“The one over there with the patrolman?”

“Uh huh.”

“Seems odd, doesn’t it?” said the M.E. “Take the trouble to poison someone, and then run out and confess to the first cop you see.”

Crawley shrugged. “You can never figure,” he said.

“I’ll get the report to you soon’s I can,” said the M.E.

“Thanks, Doc. Come on, Abe, let’s take our pigeon to his nest.”

“Okay,” said Levine, abstractedly. Already it felt wrong. It had been feeling wrong, vaguely, ever since he’d caught that glimpse of something in Perkins’s eyes. And the feeling of wrongness was getting stronger by the minute, without getting any clearer.

They walked back to Tanner and Perkins, and Crawley said, “Okay, Perkins, let’s go for a ride.”

They walked back to Tanner.

“You’re going to book me?” asked Perkins. He sounded oddly eager.

“Just come along,” said Crawley. He didn’t believe in answering extraneous questions.

“All right,” said Perkins. He turned to Tanner. “Would you mind taking my books and records back to the library? They’re due today. They’re the ones on that chair. And there’s a couple more over in the stack of Al’s records.”

“Sure,” said Tanner. He was gazing at Perkins with a troubled look on his face, and Levine wondered if Tanner felt the same wrongness that was plaguing him.

“Let’s go,” said Crawley impatiently, and Perkins moved toward the door.

“I’ll be right along,” said Levine. As Crawley and Perkins left the apartment, Levine glanced at the titles of the books and record albums Perkins had wanted returned to the library. Two of the books were collections of Elizabethan plays, one was the New Arts Writing Annual, and the other two were books on criminology. The records were mainly folk songs, of the bloodier type.

Levine frowned and went over to Tanner. He asked, “What were you and Perkins talking about before we got here?”

Tanner’s face was still creased in a puzzled frown. “The stupidity of the criminal mind,” he said. “There’s something goofy here, Lieutenant.”

“You may be right,” Levine told him. He walked on down the hall and joined the other two at the door.

All three got into the front seat of the Chevy, Crawley driving again and Perkins sitting in the middle. They rode in silence, Crawley busy driving, Perkins studying the complex array of the dashboard, with its extra knobs and switches and the mike hooked beneath the radio, and Levine trying to figure out what was wrong.

At the station, after booking, they brought him to a small office, one of the interrogation rooms. There was a bare and battered desk, plus four chairs. Crawley sat behind the desk, Perkins sat across the desk and facing him, Levine took the chair in a corner behind and to the left of Perkins, and a male stenographer, notebook in hand, filled the fourth chair, behind Crawley.

Crawley’s first questions covered the same ground already covered at Gruber’s apartment, this time for the record. “Okay,” said Crawley, when he’d brought them up to date. “You and Gruber were both doing the same kind of thing, living the same kind of life. You were both unpublished writers, both taking night courses at Columbia, both living on very little money.”

“That’s right,” said Perkins.

“How long you known each other?”

“About six months. We met at Columbia, and we took the same subway home after class. We got to talking, found out we were both dreaming the same kind of dream, and became friends. You know. Misery loves company.”

“Take the same classes at Columbia?”

“Only one. Creative Writing, from Professor Stonegell.”

“Where’d you buy the poison?”

“I didn’t. Al did. He bought it a while back and just kept it around. He kept saying if he didn’t make a good sale soon he’d kill himself. But he didn’t mean it. It was just a kind of gag.”

Crawley pulled at his right earlobe. Levine knew, from his long experience with his partner, that that gesture meant that Crawley was confused. “You went there today to kill him?”

“That’s right.”

Levine shook his head. That wasn’t right. Softly, he said, “Why did you bring the library books along?”

“I was on my way up to the library,” said Perkins, twisting around in his seat to look at Levine.

“Look this way,” snapped Crawley.

Perkins looked around at Crawley again, but not before Levine had seen that same burning deep in Perkins’s eyes. Stronger, this time, and more like pleading. Pleading? What was Perkins pleading for?

“I was on my way to the library,” Perkins said again. “Al had a couple of records out on my card, so I went over to get them. On the way, I decided to kill him.”

“Why?” asked Crawley.

“Because he was a pompous ass,” said Perkins, the same answer he’d given before.

“Because he got a story accepted by one of the literary magazines and you didn’t?” suggested Crawley.

“Maybe. Partially. His whole attitude. He was smug. He knew more than anybody else in the world.”

“Why did you kill him today? Why not last week or next week?”

“I felt like it today.”

“Why did you give yourself up?”

“You would have gotten me anyway.”

Levine asked, “Did you know that before you killed him?”

“I don’t know,” said Perkins, without looking around at Levine. “I didn’t think about it till afterward. Then I knew the police would get me anyway — they’d talk to Professor Stonegell and the other people who knew us both and I didn’t want to have to wait it out. So I went and confessed.”

“You told the policeman,” said Levine, “that you’d killed your best friend.”

“That’s right.”

“Why did you use that phrase, best friend, if you hated him so much you wanted to kill him?”

“He was my best friend. At least, in New York. I didn’t really know anyone else, except Professor Stonegell. Al was my best friend because he was just about my only friend.”

“Are you sorry you killed him?” asked Levine.

This time, Perkins twisted around in the chair again, ignoring Crawley. “No, sir,” he said, and his eyes now were blank.

There was silence in the room, and Crawley and Levine looked at one another. Crawley questioned with his eyes, and Levine shrugged, shaking his head. Something was wrong, but he didn’t know what. And Perkins was being so helpful that he wound up being no help at all.

Crawley turned to the stenographer. “Type it up formal,” he said. “And have somebody come take the pigeon to his nest.”

After the stenographer had left, Levine said, “Anything you want to say off the record, Perkins?”

Perkins grinned. His face was half-turned away from Crawley, and he was looking at the floor, as though he was amused by something he saw there. “Off the record?” he murmured. “As long as there are two of you in here, it’s on the record.”

“Do you want one of us to leave?”

Perkins looked up at Levine again, and stopped smiling. He seemed to think it over for a minute, and then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Thanks, anyway. But I don’t think I have anything more to say. Not right now anyway.”

Levine frowned and sat back in his chair, studying Perkins. The boy didn’t ring true; he was constructed of too many contradictions. Levine reached out for a mental image of Perkins, but all he touched was air.

After Perkins was led out of the room by two uniformed cops, Crawley got to his feet, stretched, sighed, scratched, pulled his earlobe, and said, “What do you make of it, Abe?”

“I don’t like it.”

“I know that. I saw it in your face. But he confessed, so what else is there?”

“The phony confession is not exactly unheard of, you know.”

“Not this time,” said Crawley. “A guy confesses to a crime he didn’t commit for one of two reasons. Either he’s a crackpot who wants the publicity or to be punished or something like that, or he’s protecting somebody else. Perkins doesn’t read like a crackpot to me, and there’s nobody else involved for him to be protecting.”

“In a capital punishment state,” suggested Levine, “a guy might confess to a murder he didn’t commit so the state would do his suicide for him.”

Crawley shook his head. “That still doesn’t look like Perkins,” he said.

“Nothing looks like Perkins. He’s given us a blank wall to stare at. A couple of times it started to slip, and there was something else inside.”

“Don’t build a big thing, Abe. The kid confessed. He’s the killer; let it go at that.”

“The job’s finished, I know that. But it still bothers me.”

“Okay,” said Crawley. He sat down behind the desk again and put his feet up on the scarred desk top. “Let’s straighten it out. Where does it bother you?”

“All over. Number one, motivation. You don’t kill a man for being a pompous ass. Not when you turn around a minute later and say he was your best friend.”

“People do funny things when they’re pushed far enough. Even to friends.”

“Sure. Okay, number two. The murder method. It doesn’t sound right. When a man kills impulsively, he grabs something and starts swinging. When he calms down, he goes and turns himself in. But when you poison somebody, you’re using a pretty sneaky method. It doesn’t make sense for you to run out and call a cop right after using poison. It isn’t the same kind of mentality.”

“He used the poison,” said Crawley, “because it was handy. Gruber bought it, probably had it sitting on his dresser or something, and Perkins just picked it up on impulse and poured it into the beer.”

“That’s another thing,” said Levine. “Do you drink much beer out of cans?”

Crawley grinned. “You know I do.”

“I saw some empty beer cans sitting around the apartment, so that’s where Gruber got his last beer from.”

“Yeah. So what?”

“When you drink a can of beer, do you pour the beer out of the can into a glass, or do you just drink it straight from the can?”

“I drink it out of the can. But not everybody does.”

“I know, I know. Okay, what about the library books? If you’re going to kill somebody, are you going to bring library books along?”

“It was an impulse killing. He didn’t know he was going to do it until he got there.”

Levine got his feet. “That’s the hell of it,” he said. “You can explain away every single question in this business. But it’s such a simple case. Why should there be so many questions that need explaining away?”

Crawley shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “All I know is, we’ve got a confession, and that’s enough to satisfy me.”

“Not me,” said Levine. “I think I’ll go poke around and see what happens. Want to come along?”

“Somebody’s going to have to hand the pen to Perkins when he signs his confession,” said Crawley.

“Mind if I take off for a while?”

“Go ahead. Have a big time,” said Crawley, grinning at him. “Play detective.”

Levine’s first stop was back at Gruber’s address. Gruber’s apartment was empty now, having been sifted completely through normal routine procedure. Levine went down to the basement door under the stoop, but he didn’t go back to Gruber’s door. He stopped at the front apartment instead, where a ragged-edged strip of paper attached with peeling scotch tape to the door read, in awkward and childish lettering, superintendent. Levine rapped and waited. After a minute, the door opened a couple of inches, held by a chain. A round face peered out at him from a height of a little over five feet. The face said, “Who you looking for?”

“Police,” Levine told him. He opened his wallet and held it up for the face to look at.

“Oh,” said the face. “Sure thing.” The door shut, and Levine waited while the chain was clinked free, and then the door opened wide.

The super was a short and round man, dressed in corduroy trousers and a grease-spotted undershirt. He wheezed, “Come in, come in,” and stood back for Levine to come into his crowded and musty-smelling living room.

Levine said, “I want to talk to you about Al Gruber.”

The super shut the door and waddled into the middle of the room, shaking his head. “Wasn’t that a shame?” he asked. “Al was a nice boy. No money, but a nice boy. Sit down somewhere, anywhere.”

Levine looked around. The room was full of low-slung, heavy, sagging, over-stuffed furniture, armchairs and sofas. He picked the least battered armchair of the lot, and sat on the very edge. Although he was a short man, his knees seemed to be almost up to his chin, and he had the feeling that if he relaxed he’d fall over backwards.

The super trundled across the room and dropped into one of the other armchairs, sinking into it as though he never intended to get to his feet again in his life. “A real shame,” he said again. “And to think I maybe could have stopped it.”

“You could have stopped it? How?”

“It was around noon,” said the super. “I was watching the TV over there, and I heard a voice from the back apartment, shouting, ‘Al! Al!’ So I went out to the hall, but by the time I got there the shouting was all done. So I didn’t know what to do. I waited a minute, and then I came back in and watched the TV again. That was probably when it was happening.”

“There wasn’t any noise while you were in the hall? Just the two shouts before you got out there?”

“That’s all. At first, I thought it was another one of them arguments, and I was gonna bawl out the two of them, but it stopped before I even got the door open.”

“Arguments?”

“Mr. Gruber and Mr. Perkins. They used to argue all the time, shout at each other, carry on like monkeys. The other tenants was always complaining about it. They’d do it late at night sometimes, two or three o’clock in the morning, and the tenants would all start phoning me to complain.”

“What did they argue about?”

The super shrugged his massive shoulders. “Who knows? Names. People. Writers. They both think they’re great writers or something.”

“Did they ever get into a fist fight or anything like that? Ever threaten to kill each other?”

“Naw, they’d just shout at each other and call each other stupid and ignorant and stuff like that. They liked each other, really, I guess. At least they always hung around together. They just loved to argue, that’s all. You know how it is with college kids. I’ve had college kids renting here before, and they’re all like that. They all love to argue. Course, I never had nothing like this happen before.”

“What kind of person was Gruber, exactly?”

The super mulled it over for a while. “Kind of a quiet guy,” he said at last. “Except when he was with Mr. Perkins, I mean. Then he’d shout just as loud and often as anybody. But most of the time he was quiet. And good-mannered. A real surprise, after most of the kids around today. He was always polite, and he’d lend a hand if you needed some help or something, like the time I was carrying a bed up to the third floor front. Mr. Gruber come along and pitched right in with me. He did more of the work than I did.”

“And he was a writer, wasn’t he? At least, he was trying to be a writer.”

“Oh, sure. I’d hear that typewriter of his tappin’ away in there at all hours. And he always carried a notebook around with him, writin’ things down in it. I asked him once what he wrote in there, and he said descriptions, of places like Prospect Park up at the corner, and of the people he knew. He always said he wanted to be a writer like some guy named Wolfe, used to live in Brooklyn too.”

“I see.” Levine struggled out of the armchair. “Thanks for your time,” he said.

“Not at all.” The super waddled after Levine to the door. “Anything I can do,” he said. “Any time at all.”

“Thanks again,” said Levine. He went outside and stood in the hallway, thinking things over, listening to the latch click in place behind him. Then he turned and walked down the hallway to Gruber’s apartment, and knocked on the door.

As he’d expected, a uniformed cop had been left behind to keep an eye on the place for a while, and when he opened the door, Levine showed his identification and said, “I’m on the case. I’d like to take a look around.”

The cop let him in, and Levine looked carefully through Gruber’s personal property. He found the notebooks, finally, in the bottom drawer of the dresser. There were five of them, steno pad size loose-leaf fillers. Four of them were filled with writing, in pen, in a slow and careful hand, and the fifth was still half blank.

Levine carried the notebooks over to the card table, pushed the typewriter out of the way, sat down and began to skim through the books.

He found what he was looking for in the middle of the third one he tried. A description of Larry Perkins, written by the man Perkins had killed. The description, or character study, which it more closely resembled, was four pages long, beginning with a physical description and moving into a discussion of Perkins’s personality. Levine noticed particular sentences in this latter part: “Larry doesn’t want to write, he wants to be a writer, and that isn’t the same thing. He wants the glamour and the fame and the money, and he thinks he’ll get it from being a writer. That’s why he’s dabbled in acting and painting and all the other so-called glamorous professions. Larry and I are both being thwarted by the same thing: neither of us has anything to say worth saying. The difference is, I’m trying to find something to say, and Larry wants to make it on glibness alone. One of these days, he’s going to find out he won’t get anywhere that way. That’s going to be a terrible day for him.”

Levine closed the book, then picked up the last one, the one that hadn’t yet been filled, and leafed through that. One word kept showing up throughout the last notebook. “Nihilism.” Gruber obviously hated the word, and he was also obviously afraid of it. “Nihilism is death,” he wrote on one page. “It is the belief that there are no beliefs, that no effort is worthwhile. How could any writer believe such a thing? Writing is the most positive of acts. So how can it be used for negative purposes? The only expression of nihilism is death, not the written word. If I can say nothing hopeful, I shouldn’t say anything at all.”

Levine put the notebooks back in the dresser drawer finally, thanked the cop, and went out to the Chevy. He’d hoped to be able to fill in the blank spaces in Perkins’s character through Gruber’s notebooks, but Gruber had apparently had just as much trouble defining Perkins as Levine was now having. Levine had learned a lot about the dead man, that he was sincere and intense and self-demanding as only the young can be, but Perkins was still little more than a smooth and blank wall. “Glibness,” Gruber had called it. What was beneath the glibness? A murderer, by Perkins’s own admission. But what else?

Levine crawled wearily into the Chevy and headed for Manhattan.

Professor Harvey Stonegell was in class when Levine got to Columbia University, but the girl at the desk in the dean’s outer office told him that Stonegell would be out of that class in just a few minutes, and would then be free for the rest of the afternoon. She gave him directions to Stonegell’s office, and Levine thanked her.

Stonegell’s office door was locked, so Levine waited in the hall, watching students hurrying by in both directions, and reading the notices of scholarships, grants, and fellowships thumbtacked to the bulletin board near the office door.

The professor showed up about fifteen minutes later, with two students in tow. He was a tall and slender man, with a gaunt face and a full head of gray-white hair. He could have been any age between fifty and seventy. He wore a tweed suit jacket, leather patches at the elbows, and non-matching gray slacks.

Levine said, “Professor Stonegell?”

“Yes?”

Levine introduced himself and showed his identification. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute or two.”

“Of course. I’ll just be a minute.” Stonegell handed a book to one of the two students, telling him to read certain sections of it, and explained to the other student why he hadn’t received a passing grade in his latest assignment. When both of them were taken care of, Levine stepped into Stonegell’s crowded and tiny office, and sat down in the chair beside the desk.

Stonegell said, “Is this about one of my students?”

“Two of them. From your evening writing course. Gruber and Perkins.”

“Those two? They aren’t in trouble, are they?”

“I’m afraid so. Perkins has confessed to murdering Gruber.”

Stonegell’s thin face paled. “Gruber’s dead? Murdered?”

“By Perkins. He turned himself in right after it happened. But, to be honest with you, the whole thing bothers me. It doesn’t make sense. You knew them both. I thought you might be able to tell me something about them, so it would make sense.”

Stonegell lit himself a cigarette and offered one to Levine. Then he fussed rather vaguely with his messy desktop, while Levine waited for him to gather his thoughts.

“This takes some getting used to,” said Stonegell after a minute. “Gruber and Perkins. They were both good students in my class, Gruber perhaps a bit better. And they were friends.”

“I’d heard they were friends.”

“There was a friendly rivalry between them,” said Stonegell. “Whenever one of them started a project, the other one started a similar project, intent on beating the first one at his own game. Actually, that was more Perkins than Gruber. And they always took opposite sides of every question, screamed at each other like sworn enemies. But actually they were very close friends. I can’t understand either one of them murdering the other.”

“Was Gruber similar to Perkins?”

“Did I give that impression? No, they were definitely unalike. The old business about opposites attracting. Gruber was by far the more sensitive and sincere of the two. I don’t mean to imply that Perkins was insensitive or insincere at all. Perkins had his own sensitivity and his own sincerity, but they were almost exclusively directed within himself. He equated everything with himself, his own feelings and his own ambitions. But Gruber had more of the — oh, I don’t know — more of a world-view, to badly translate the German. His sensitivity was directed outward, toward the feelings of other people. It showed up in their writing. Gruber’s forte was characterization, subtle interplay between personalities. Perkins was deft, almost glib, with movement and action and plot, but his characters lacked substance. He wasn’t really interested in anyone but himself.”

“He doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’d confess to a murder right after he committed it.”

“I know what you mean. That isn’t like him. I don’t imagine Perkins would ever feel remorse or guilt. I should think he would be one of the people who believes the only crime is in being caught.”

“Yet we didn’t catch him. He came to us.” Levine studied the book titles on the shelf behind Stonegell. “What about their mental attitudes recently?” he asked. “Generally speaking, I mean. Were they happy or unhappy, impatient or content or what?”

“I think they were both rather depressed, actually,” said Stonegell. “Though for somewhat different reasons. They had both come out of the Army less than a year ago, and had come to New York to try to make their mark as writers. Gruber was having difficulty with subject matter. We talked about it a few times. He couldn’t find anything he really wanted to write about, nothing he felt strongly enough to give him direction in his writing.”

“And Perkins?”

“He wasn’t particularly worried about writing in that way. He was, as I say, deft and clever in his writing, but it was all too shallow. I think they might have been bad for one another, actually. Perkins could see that Gruber had the depth and sincerity that he lacked, and Gruber thought that Perkins was free from the soul-searching and self-doubt that was hampering him so much. In the last month or so, both of them have talked about dropping out of school, going back home and forgetting about the whole thing. But neither of them could have done that, at least not yet. Gruber couldn’t have, because the desire to write was too strong in him. Perkins couldn’t, because the desire to be a famous writer was too strong.”

“A year seems like a pretty short time to get all that depressed,” said Levine.

Stonegell smiled. “When you’re young,” he said, “a year can be eternity. Patience is an attribute of the old.”

“I suppose you’re right. What about girl friends, other people who knew them both?”

“Well, there was one girl whom both were dating rather steadily. The rivalry again. I don’t think either of them was particularly serious about her, but both of them wanted to take her away from the other one.”

“Do you know this girl’s name?”

“Yes, of course. She was in the same class with Perkins and Gruber. I think I might have her home address here.”

Stonegell opened a small file drawer atop his desk, and looked through it. “Yes, here it is,” he said. “Her name is Anne Marie Stone, and she lives on Grove Street, down in the Village. Here you are.”

Levine accepted the card from Stonegell, copied the name and address onto his pad, and gave the card back. He got to his feet. “Thank you for your trouble,” he said.

“Not at all,” said Stonegell, standing. He extended his hand, and Levine, shaking it, found it bony and almost parchment-thin, but surprisingly strong. “I don’t know if I’ve been much help, though,” he said.

“Neither do I, yet,” said Levine. “I may be just wasting both our time. Perkins confessed, after all.”

“Still—” said Stonegell.

Levine nodded. “I know. That’s what’s got me doing extra work.”

“I’m still thinking of this thing as though — as though it were a story problem, if you know what I mean. It isn’t real yet. Two young students, I’ve taken an interest in both of them, fifty years after the worms get me they’ll still be around — and then you tell me one of them is already wormfood, and the other one is effectively just as dead. It isn’t real to me yet. They won’t be in class tomorrow night, but I still won’t believe it.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Let me know if anything happens, will you?”

“Of course.”

Anne Marie Stone lived in an apartment on the fifth floor of a walk-up on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, a block and a half from Sheridan Square. Levine found himself out of breath by the time he reached the third floor, and he stopped for a minute to get his wind back and to slow the pounding of his heart. There was no sound in the world quite as loud as the beating of his own heart these days, and when that beating grew too rapid or too irregular, Detective Levine felt a kind of panic that twenty-four years as a cop had never been able to produce.

He had to stop again at the fourth floor, and he remembered with envy what a Bostonian friend had told him about a City of Boston regulation that buildings used as residence had to have elevators if they were more than four stories high. Oh, to live in Boston. Or, even better, in Levittown, where there isn’t a building higher than two stories anywhere.

He reached the fifth floor, finally, and knocked on the door of apartment 5B. Rustlings from within culminated in the peephole in the door being opened, and a blue eye peered suspiciously out at him. “Who is it?” asked a muffled voice.

“Police,” said Levine. He dragged out his wallet, and held it high, so the eye in the peephole could read the identification.

“Second,” said the muffled voice, and the peephole closed. A seemingly endless series of rattles and clicks indicated locks being released, and then the door opened, and a short, slender girl, dressed in pink toreador pants, gray bulky sweater and blonde pony tail, motioned to Levine to come in. “Have a seat,” she said, closing the door after him.

“Thank you.” Levine sat in a new-fangled basket chair, as uncomfortable as it looked, and the girl sat in another chair of the same type, facing him. But she managed to look comfortable in the thing.

“Is this something I did?” she asked him. “Jaywalking or something?”

Levine smiled. No matter how innocent, a citizen always presumes himself guilty when the police come calling. “No,” he said. “It concerns two friends of yours, Al Gruber and Larry Perkins.”

“Those two?” The girl seemed calm, though curious, but not at all worried or apprehensive. She was still thinking in terms of something no more serious than jaywalking or a neighbor calling the police to complain about loud noises. “What are they up to?”

“How close are you to them?”

The girl shrugged. “I’ve gone out with both of them, that’s all. We all take courses at Columbia. They’re both nice guys, but there’s nothing serious, you know. Not with either of them.”

“I don’t know how to say this,” said Levine, “except the blunt way. Early this afternoon, Perkins turned himself in and admitted he’d just killed Gruber.”

The girl stared at him. Twice, she opened her mouth to speak, but both times she closed it again. The silence lengthened, and Levine wondered belatedly if the girl had been telling the truth, if perhaps there had been something serious in her relationship with one of the boys after all. Then she blinked and looked away from him, clearing her throat. She stared out the window for a second, then looked back and said, “He’s pulling your leg.”

Levine shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

“Larry’s got a weird sense of humor sometimes,” she said. “It’s a sick joke, that’s all. Al’s still around. You haven’t found the body, have you?”

“I’m afraid we have. He was poisoned, and Perkins admitted he was the one who gave him the poison.”

“That little bottle Al had around the place? That was only a gag.”

“Not anymore.”

She thought about it a minute longer, then shrugged, as though giving up the struggle to either believe or disbelieve. “Why come to me?” she asked him.

“I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. Something smells wrong about the case, and I don’t know what. There isn’t any logic to it. I can’t get through to Perkins, and it’s too late to get through to Gruber. But I’ve got to get to know them both, if I’m going to understand what happened.”

“And you want me to tell you about them.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you hear about me? From Larry?”

“No, he didn’t mention you at all. The gentlemanly instinct, I suppose. I talked to your teacher, Professor Stonegell.”

“I see.” She stood up suddenly, in a single rapid and graceless movement, as though she had to make some motion, no matter how meaningless. “Do you want some coffee?”

“Thank you, yes.”

“Come on along. We can talk while I get it ready.”

He followed her through the apartment. A hallway led from the long, narrow living room past bedroom and bathroom to a tiny kitchen. Levine sat down at the kitchen table, and Anne Marie Stone went through the motions of making coffee. As she worked, she talked.

“They’re good friends,” she said. “I mean, they were good friends. You know what I mean. Anyway, they’re a lot different from each other. Oh, golly! I’m getting all loused up in tenses.”

“Talk as though both were still alive,” said Levine. “It should be easier that way.”

“I don’t really believe it anyway,” she said. “Al — he’s a lot quieter than Larry. Kind of intense, you know? He’s got a kind of reversed Messiah complex. You know, he figures he’s supposed to be something great, a great writer, but he’s afraid he doesn’t have the stuff for it. So he worries about himself, and keeps trying to analyze himself, and he hates everything he writes because he doesn’t think it’s good enough for what he’s supposed to be doing. That bottle of poison, that was a gag, you know, just a gag, but it was the kind of joke that has some sort of truth behind it. With this thing driving him like this, I suppose even death begins to look like a good escape after a while.”

She stopped her preparations with the coffee, and stood listening to what she had just said. “Now he did escape, didn’t he? I wonder if he’d thank Larry for taking the decision out of his hands.”

“Do you suppose he asked Larry to take the decision out of his hands?”

She shook her head. “No. In the first place, Al could never ask anyone else to help him fight the thing out in any way. I know, I tried to talk to him a couple of times, but he just couldn’t listen. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to listen, he just couldn’t. He had to figure it out for himself. And Larry isn’t the helpful sort, so Larry would be the last person anybody would go to for help. Not that Larry’s a bad guy, really. He’s just awfully self-centered. They both are, but in different ways. Al’s always worried about himself, but Larry’s always proud of himself. You know. Larry would say, ‘I’m for me first,’ and Al would say, ‘Am I worthy?’ Something like that.”

“Had the two of them had a quarrel or anything recently, anything that you know of that might have prompted Larry to murder?”

“Not that I know of. They’ve both been getting more and more depressed, but neither of them blamed the other. Al blamed himself for not getting anywhere, and Larry blamed the stupidity of the world. You know, Larry wanted the same thing Al did, but Larry didn’t worry about whether he was worthy or capable or anything like that. He once told me he wanted to be a famous writer, and he’d be one if he had to rob banks and use the money to bribe every publisher and editor and critic in the business. That was a gag, too, like Al’s bottle of poison, but I think that one had some truth behind it, too.”

The coffee was ready, and she poured two cups, then sat down across from him. Levine added a bit of evaporated milk, but no sugar, and stirred the coffee distractedly. “I want to know why,” he said. “Does that seem strange? Cops are supposed to want to know who, not why. I know who, but I want to know why.”

“Larry’s the only one who could tell you, and I don’t think he will.”

Levine drank some of the coffee, then got to his feet. “Mind if I use your phone?” he asked.

“Go right ahead. It’s in the living room, next to the bookcase.”

Levine walked back into the living room and called the station. He asked for Crawley. When his partner came on the line, Levine said, “Has Perkins signed the confession yet?”

“He’s on the way down now. It’s just been typed up.”

“Hold him there after he signs it, okay? I want to talk to him. I’m in Manhattan, starting back now.”

“What have you got?”

“I’m not sure I have anything. I just want to talk to Perkins again, that’s all.”

“Why sweat it? We got the body; we got the confession; we got the killer in a cell. Why make work for yourself?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just bored.”

“Okay, I’ll hold him. Same room as before.”

Levine went back to the kitchen. “Thank you for the coffee,” he said. “If there’s nothing else you can think of, I’ll be leaving now.”

“Nothing,” she said. “Larry’s the only one can tell you why.”

She walked him to the front door, and he thanked her again as he was leaving. The stairs were a lot easier going down.

When Levine got back to the station, he picked up another plainclothesman, a detective named Ricco, a tall, athletic man in his middle thirties who affected the Ivy League look. He resembled more closely someone from the District Attorney’s office than a precinct cop. Levine gave him a part to play, and the two of them went down the hall to the room where Perkins was waiting with Crawley.

“Perkins,” said Levine, the minute he walked in the room, before Crawley had a chance to give the game away by saying something to Ricco, “this is Dan Ricco, a reporter from the Daily News.”

Perkins looked at Ricco with obvious interest, the first real display of interest and animation Levine had yet seen from him. “A reporter?”

“That’s right,” said Ricco. He looked at Levine. “What is this?” he asked. He was playing it straight and blank.

“College student,” said Levine. “Name’s Larry Perkins.” He spelled the last name. “He poisoned a fellow student.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ricco glanced at Perkins without much eagerness. “What for?” he asked, looking back at Levine. “Girl? Any sex in it?”

“Afraid not. It was some kind of intellectual motivation. They both wanted to be writers.”

Ricco shrugged. “Two guys with the same job? What’s so hot about that?”

“Well, the main thing,” said Levine, “is that Perkins here wants to be famous. He tried to get famous by being a writer, but that wasn’t working out. So he decided to be a famous murderer.”

Ricco looked at Perkins. “Is that right?” he asked.

Perkins was glowering at them all, but especially at Levine. “What difference does it make?” he said.

“The kid’s going to get the chair, of course,” said Levine blandly. “We have his signed confession and everything. But I’ve kind of taken a liking to him. I’d hate to see him throw his life away without getting something for it. I thought maybe you could get him a nice headline on page two, something he could hang up on the wall of his cell.”

Ricco chuckled and shook his head. “Not a chance of it,” he said. “Even if I wrote the story big, the city desk would knock it down to nothing. This kind of story is a dime a dozen. People kill other people around New York twenty-four hours a day. Unless there’s a good strong sex interest, or it’s maybe one of those mass killings things like the guy who put the bomb in the airplane, a murder in New York is filler stuff. And who needs filler stuff in the spring, when the ball teams are just getting started?”

“You’ve got influence on the paper, Dan,” said Levine. “Couldn’t you at least get him picked up by the wire services?”

“Not a chance in a million. What’s he done that a few hundred other clucks in New York don’t do every year? Sorry, Abe, I’d like to do you the favor, but it’s no go.”

Levine sighed. “Okay, Dan,” he said. “If you say so.”

“Sorry,” said Ricco. He grinned at Perkins. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “You should of knifed a chorus girl or something.”

Ricco left and Levine glanced at Crawley, who was industriously yanking on his earlobe and looking bewildered. Levine sat down facing Perkins and said, “Well?”

“Let me alone a minute,” snarled Perkins. “I’m trying to think.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?” asked Levine. “You wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.”

“All right, all right. Al took his way, I took mine. What’s the difference?”

“No difference,” said Levine. He got wearily to his feet, and headed for the door. “I’ll have you sent back to your cell now.”

“Listen,” said Perkins suddenly. “You know I didn’t kill him, don’t you? You know he committed suicide, don’t you?”

Levine opened the door and motioned to the two uniformed cops waiting in the hall.

“Wait,” said Perkins desperately.

“I know, I know,” said Levine. “Gruber really killed himself, and I suppose you burned the note he left.”

“You know damn well I did.”

“That’s too bad, boy.”

Perkins didn’t want to leave. Levine watched deadpan as the boy was led away, and then he allowed himself to relax, let the tension drain out of him. He sagged into a chair and studied the veins on the backs of his hands.

Crawley said, into the silence, “What was all that about, Abe?”

“Just what you heard.”

“Gruber committed suicide?”

“They both did.”

“Well — what are we going to do now?”

“Nothing. We investigated; we got a confession; we made an arrest. Now we’re done.”

“But—”

“But hell!” Levine glared at his partner. “That little fool is gonna go to trial, Jack, and he’s gonna be convicted and go to the chair. He chose it himself. It was his choice. I’m not railroading him; he chose his own end. And he’s going to get what he wanted.”

“But listen, Abe—”

“I won’t listen!”

“Let me — let me get a word in.”

Levine was on his feet suddenly, and now it all came boiling out, the indignation and the rage and the frustration. “Damn it, you don’t know yet! You’ve got another six, seven years yet. You don’t know what it feels like to lie awake in bed at night and listen to your heart skip a beat every once in a while, and wonder when it’s going to skip two beats in a row and you’re dead. You don’t know what it feels like to know your body’s starting to die, it’s starting to get old and die and it’s all downhill from now on.”

“What’s that got to do with—”

“I’ll tell you what! They had the choice! Both of them young, both of them with sound bodies and sound hearts and years ahead of them, decades ahead of them. And they chose to throw it away! They chose to throw away what I don’t have any more. Don’t you think I wish I had that choice? All right! They chose to die, let ’em die!”

Levine was panting from exertion, leaning over the desk and shouting in Jack Crawley’s face. And now, in the sudden silence while he wasn’t speaking, he heard the ragged rustle of his breath, felt the tremblings of nerve and muscle throughout his body. He let himself carefully down into a chair and sat there, staring at the wall, trying to get his breath.

Jack Crawley was saying something, far away, but Levine couldn’t hear him. He was listening to something else, the loudest sound in all the world. The fitful throbbing of his own heart.

The men in black raincoats by Pete Hamill

South Slope

(Originally published in 1977)

It was close to midnight on a Friday evening at Rattigan’s Bar and Grill. There were no ball games on the television, old movies only made the clientele feel more ancient, and the jukebox was still broken from the afternoon of Red Cioffi’s daughter’s wedding. So it was time for Brendan Malachy McCone to take center stage. He motioned for a fresh beer, put his right foot on the brass rail, breathed in deeply, and started to sing.

The song was very Irish, sly and funny, the choruses full of the names of long-forgotten places, and the regulars loved Brendan for the quick jaunty singing of it. They loved the roguish glitter in his eyes, his energy, his good-natured boasting. He was, after all, a man in his fifties now, and yet here he was, still singing the bold songs of his youth. And on this night, as on so many nights, they joined him in the verses.

Outside, rain had begun to fall, a cold Brooklyn rain, driven by the wind off the harbor, and it made the noises and the singing and the laughter seem even better. Sardines and crackers joined the glasses on the bar. George the bartender filled the empties. And Brendan shifted from jauntiness to sorrow.

The mood of the regulars hushed now, as Brendan gave them the song as if it were a hymn. The bar was charged with the feeling they all had for Brendan, knowing that he had been an IRA man long ago, that he had left Ireland a step ahead of the British police who wanted him for the killing of a British soldier in the Border Campaign. This was their Brendan: the Transit Authority clerk who had once stood in the doorways of Belfast, with the cloth cap pulled tight on his brow, the pistol deep in the pockets of the trenchcoat, ready to kill or to die for Ireland.

The voice was a healthy baritone, a wealth of passion overwhelming a poverty of skill, and it touched all of them, making the younger ones imagine the streets of Belfast today, where their cousins were still fighting, reminding the older ones of peat fires, black creamy stout, buttermilk in the morning. The song was about a vanished time, before rock and roll and women’s liberation, before they took Latin out of the Mass, before the blacks and the Puerto Ricans had begun to move in and the children of the Irish had begun to move out. The neighborhood was changing, all right. But Brendan Malachy McCone was still with them, still in the neighborhood.

A little after midnight two strangers came in, dressed in black raincoats. They were wet with rain. They ordered whiskey. Brendan kept singing. Nobody noticed that his voice faltered on the last lines of “Galway Bay,” as he took the applause, glanced at the strangers, and again shifted the mood.

The strangers drank in silence.

At closing time the rain was still pelting down. Brendan stood in the open doorway of the bar with Charlie the Pole and Scotch Eddie, while George the bartender counted the receipts. Everyone else had gone home.

“We’ll have to make a run for it,” Charlie said.

“Dammit,” Scotch Eddie said.

“Yiz might as well run, cause yiz’ll drown anyway,” George said. He was finished counting and looked small and tired.

“I’ll see you gents,” Charlie said, and rushed into the rain, running lumpily down the darkened slope of 11th Street to his home. Eddie followed, cutting sharply to his left. But Brendan did not move. He had seen the strangers in the black raincoats, watched them in the mirror for a while as he moved through the songs, saw them leave an hour later.

And now he was afraid.

He looked up and down the avenue. The streetlamp scalloped a halo of light on the corner. Beyond the light there was nothing but the luminous darkness and the rain.

“Well, I’ve got to lock it up, Brendan.”

“Right, George. Good night.”

“God bless.”

Brendan hurried up the street, head down, lashed by the rain, eyes searching the interiors of parked cars. He saw nothing. The cars were locked. He looked up at the apartments and there were no lights anywhere and he knew the lights would be out at home too, where Sarah and the kids would all be sleeping. Even the firehouse was dimly lit, its great red door closed, the firemen stretched out on their bunks in the upstairs loft.

Despite the drink and the rain, Brendan’s mouth was dry. Once he thought he saw something move in the darkness of an areaway and his stomach lifted and fell. But again it was nothing. Shadows. Imagination. Get hold of yourself, Brendan.

He crossed the avenue. A half block to go. Away off he saw the twin red taillights of a city bus, groaning slowly toward Flatbush Avenue. Hurry. Another half block and he could enter the yard, hurry up the stairs, unlock the door, close it behind him, undress quickly in the darkened kitchen, dry off the rain with a warm rough towel, brush the beer off his teeth, and fall into the great deep warmth of bed with Sarah. And he would be safe again for another night. Hurry. Get the key out. Don’t get caught naked on the stairs.

He turned into his yard, stepped over a spreading puddle at the base of the stoop, and hurried up the eight worn sandstone steps. He had the key out in the vestibule and quickly opened the inside door.

They were waiting for him in the hall.

The one in the front seat on the right was clearly the boss. The driver was only a chauffeur and did his work in proper silence. The strangers in the raincoats sat on either side of Brendan in the back seat and said nothing as the car moved through the wet darkness, down off the slope, into the Puerto Rican neighborhood near Williamsburg. They all clearly deferred to the one in the front seat right. All wore gloves. Except the boss.

“I’m telling you, this has to be some kind of mistake,” Brendan said.

“Shut up,” said the boss, without turning. His skin was pink in the light of the streetlamps, and dark hair curled over the edge of his collar. The accent was not New York. Maybe Boston. Maybe somewhere else. Not New York.

“I don’t owe anybody money,” Brendan said, choking back the dry panic. “I’m not into the bloody loan sharks. I’m telling you, this is—”

The boss said, “Is your name Brendan Malachy McCone?”

“Well, uh, yes, but—”

“Then we’ve made no mistake.”

Williamsburg was behind them now and they were following the route of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway while avoiding its brightly lit ramp. Brendan sat back. From that angle he could see more of the man in the front seat right — the velvet collar of his coat, the high protruding cheekbones, the longish nose, the pinkie ring glittering on his left hand when he lit a cigarette with a thin gold lighter. He could not see the man’s eyes but he was certain he had never seen the man before tonight.

“Where are you taking me?”

The boss said calmly, “I told you to shut up. Shut up.”

Brendan took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly. He looked to the men on either side of him, smiling his most innocent smile, as if hoping they would think well of him, believe in his innocence, intervene with the boss, plead his case. He wanted to tell them about his kids, explain that he had done nothing bad. Not for thirty years.

The men looked away from him, their nostrils seeming to quiver, as if he had already begun to stink of death. Brendan tried to remember the words of the Act of Contrition.

The men beside him stared out past the little rivers of rain on the windows, as if he were not even in the car. They watched the city turn into country, Queens into Nassau County, all the sleeping suburbs transform into the darker emptier reaches of Suffolk County, as the driver pushed on, driving farther away, out to Long Island, to the country of forests and frozen summer beaches. Far from Brooklyn. Far from the Friday nights at Rattigan’s. Far from his children. Far from Sarah.

Until they pulled off the expressway at Southampton, moved down back roads for another fifteen minutes, and came to a marshy cove. A few summer houses were sealed for the winter. Rain spattered the still water of the cove. Patches of dirty snow clung to the shoreline, resisting the steady cold rain.

“This is fine,” the boss said.

The driver pulled over, turned out the car lights, and turned off the engine. They all sat in the dark.

The boss said, “Did you ever hear of a man named Peter Devlin?”

Oh, my God, Brendan thought.

“Well?”

“Vaguely. The name sounds familiar.”

“Just familiar?”

“Well, there was a Devlin where I came from. There were a lot of Devlins in the North. It’s hard to remember. It was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, it was. It was a long time ago.”

“Aye.”

“And you don’t remember him more than just vaguely? Well, isn’t that nice? I mean, you were best man at his wedding.”

Brendan’s lips moved, but no words came out.

“What else do you vaguely remember, McCone?”

There was a long pause. Then: “He died.”

“No, not died. He was killed, wasn’t he?”

“Aye.”

“Who killed him, McCone?”

“He died for Ireland.”

“Who killed him, McCone?”

“The Special Branch. The British Special Branch.”

The boss took out his cigarettes and lit one with the gold lighter. He took a long drag. Brendan saw the muscles working tensely in his jaw. The rain drummed on the roof of the car.

“Tell me some more about him.”

“They buried him with full military honors. They draped his coffin with the Tricolor and sang “The Soldier’s Song” over his grave. The whole town wore the Easter Lily. The B-Specials made a lot of arrests.”

“You saw all this?”

“I was told.”

“But you weren’t there?”

“No, but—”

“What happened to his wife?”

“Katey?”

“Some people called her Katey,” the boss said.

“She died too, soon after — the flu, was it?”

“Well, there was another version. That she died of a broken heart.”

The boss stared straight ahead, watching the rain trickle down the windshield. He tapped an ash into the ashtray, took another deep drag, and said, “What did they pay you to set him up, Brendan?”

He called me Brendan. He’s softening. Even a gunman can understand it was all long ago.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play games, Brendan. Everyone in the North knew you set him up. The British told them.”

“It was a long time ago, Mister. There were a lot of lies told. You can’t believe every …”

The boss wasn’t really listening. He took out his pack of cigarettes, flipped one higher than the others, gripped its filter in his teeth, and lit it with the butt of the other. Then he tamped out the first cigarette in the ashtray. He looked out past the rain to the darkness of the cove.

“Shoot him,” he said.

The man on Brendan’s left opened the door a foot.

“Oh, sweet sufferin’ Jesus, Mister,” Brendan said. “I’ve got five kids. They’re all at home. One of them is making her first Communion. Please. For the love of God. If Dublin Command has told you to get me, just tell them you couldn’t find me. Tell them I’m dead. I can get you a piece of paper. From one of the politicians. Sayin’ I’m dead. Yes. That’s a way. And I’ll just vanish. Just disappear. Please. I’m an old man now, I won’t live much bloody longer. But the weans. The weans, Mister. And it was all thirty years ago. Christ knows I’ve paid for it. Please. Please.”

The tears were blurring his vision now. He could hear the hard spatter of the rain through the open car door. He felt the man on his right move slightly and remove something from inside his coat.

The boss said, “You left out a few things, Brendan.”

“I can send all my earnings to the lads. God knows they can use it in the North now. I’ve sent money already, I have, to the Provisionals. I never stopped being for them. For a United Ireland. Never stopped. I can have the weans work for the cause. I’ll get a second job. My Sarah can go out and work too. Please, Mister. Jesus, Mister …”

“Katey Devlin didn’t die of the flu,” the boss said. “And she didn’t die of a broken heart. Did she, Brendan?”

“I don’t—”

“Katey Devlin killed herself. Didn’t she?” Brendan felt his stomach turn over.

The boss said, very quietly, “She loved Peter Devlin more than life itself. She didn’t want him to die.”

“But neither does Sarah want me to die. She’s got the weans, the feedin’ of them, and the clothin’ of them, and the schoolin’ of them to think of. Good God, man, have ye no mercy? I was a boy then. My own people were starvin’. We had no land, we were renters, we were city people, not farmers, and the war was on, and … They told me they would only arrest him. Intern him for the duration and let him out when the fightin’ stopped, and they told me the IRA would take care of Kate while he was inside. Please, Mister, I’ve got five kids. Peter Devlin only had two.”

“I know,” said the man in the front seat right. “I was one of them.”

For the first time he turned completely around. His eyes were a cold blue under the shock of curly dark hair. Kate’s eyes in Peter’s face. He stared at Brendan for a moment. He took another drag on the cigarette and let the smoke drift through his nose, creating lazy trails of gray in the crowded car.

“Shoot him,” he said.

The man on his left touched Brendan’s hand and opened the door wide.