Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories

There are no heroes in the novels and stories of James Ellroy, nor are there any true villains. For the term “villain” still has a lingering aura of Victoriana about it, as if the vague possibility still floats in the air of ugliness somehow transformed at the end of the tale, redemption achieved. With Ellroy, ugliness merely gets uglier, no one is redeemed, and villainy simply doffs its hat in mocking salute. Ellroy’s is the darkest world possible in late-twentieth-century terms: a Boschean hell of violence and corruption and betrayal and dreadful night, the continuum of what might be termed the new nihilism and the new brutalism.

Yet Ellroy has a comic genius as well, a humor that is black as hag’s midnight but highly developed and splendidly anarchic. Only he would have the gall to feature a third-rate, real-life 1950s squeeze-box player as a hero in the novella Dick Contino’s Blues (1994). Rather than elicit disgust, his serious bad taste will often provoke helpless hilarity. This jaunty (on occasion, necrophiliac) black humor certainly helps keep the blues at bay.

At one stage, Ellroy’s life was as dark and seemingly doomed as the lives of any of the demonic characters about whom he writes. Yet he managed to survive great tragedies; indeed, they appear to have nourished his peculiar vision, causing him no regret. Much of his writing has been profoundly influenced by the murder of his mother in Los Angeles in June 1958. A cause célèbre at the time, the crime was never solved. Ellroy fictionalized the terrible incident in his second novel, Clandestine (1984).

His masterwork thus far is the Los Angeles Quartet, a series that comprises The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992). This massive roman-fleuve is a brilliantly fictionalized account of crime and corruption in the City of the Angels from the end of World War II to the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency. It is a vast, sprawling, and epic canvas, densely written in an increasingly frenetic, wired-out prose that reaches minimalist proportions toward the end, but is still a compulsive read. The one problem Ellroy seems to have in his larger works is character delineation: it seems that when he writes in shorthand, however electrifyingly, character is inevitably lost.

Ellroy’s shorter fiction often has the feel of something sliced from a longer work, a literary outtake that is readable but leads nowhere. On very rare occasions, however, he writes a little jewel of a tale, with a beginning, a middle, a fine twist, and a big finish. “Gravy Train,” the small saga of Stan “the Man” Klein and his love affair with Basko the pit bull, is rude, at times crude, nerve-gratingly and gratuitously vicious — and hilarious.

J. A.

Gravy Train (1990)

Out of the Honor Farm and into the work force: managing the maintenance crew at a Toyota dealership in Koreatown. Jap run, a gook clientele, boogies for the shitwork and me, Stan “The Man” Klein, to crack the whip and keep on-duty loafing at a minimum. My probation officer got me the gig: Liz Trent, skinny and stacked, four useless master’s degrees, a bum marriage to a guy on methadone maintenance and the hots for yours truly. She knew I got off easy: three convictions resulting from the scams I worked with Phil Turkel — a phone sales racket that involved the deployment of hard core loops synced to rock songs and naugahyde Bibles embossed with glow-in-the-dark pictures of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. — a hot item with the shvartzes. We ran a drug recovery crashpad as a front, suborned teenyboppers into prostitution, coerced male patients into phone sales duty and kept them motivated with Benzedrine-laced espresso — all of which peaked at twenty-four grand jury bills busted down to three indictments apiece. Phil had no prior record, was strung out on cocaine and got diverted to a drug rehab; I had two G.T.A. convictions and no chemical rationalizations bingo on a year County time, Wayside Honor Rancho, where my reputation as a lackluster heavyweight contender got me a dorm boss job. My attorney, Miller Waxman, assured me a sentence reduction was in the works; he was wrong-counting “good time” and “work time” I did the whole nine and a half months. My consolation prize: Lizzie Trent, Waxman’s ex-wife, for my P.O. — guaranteed to cut me a long leash, get me soft legitimate work and give me head before my probationary term was a month old. I took two out of three: Lizzie had sharp teeth and an overbite, so I didn’t trust her on the trifecta. I was at my desk, watching my slaves wash cars, when the phone rang.

I picked up. “Yellow Empire Imports, Klein speaking.”

“Miller Waxman here.”

“Wax, how’s it hangin’?”

“A hard yard — and you still owe me money on my fee. Seriously, I need it. I lent Liz some heavy coin to get her teeth capped.”

The trifecta loomed. “Are you dunning me?”

“No, I’m a Greek bearing gifts at 10 percent interest.”

“Such as?”

“Such as this: a grand a week cash and three hots and a cot at a Beverly Hills mansion, all legit. I take a tensky off the top to cover your bill. The clock’s ticking, so yes or no?”

I said, “Legit?”

“If I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’. My office in an hour?”

“I’ll be there.”

Wax worked out of a storefront on Beverly and Alvarado — close to his clientele — dope dealers and wetbacks hot to bring the family up from Calexico. I doubleparked, put a “Clergyman on Call” sign on my windshield and walked in.

Miller was in his office, slipping envelopes to a couple of Immigration Service goons — big guys with that hinky look indigenous to bagmen worldwide. They walked out thumbing C-notes; Wax said, “Do you like dogs?”

I took a chair uninvited. “Well enough. Why?”

“Why? Because Phil feels bad about lounging around up at the Betty Ford Clinic while you went inside. He wants to play catch up, and he asked me if I had ideas. A plum fell into my lap and I thought of you.”

Weird Phil: facial scars and a line of shit that could make the Pope go Protestant. “How’s Phil doing these days?”

“Not bad. Do you like dogs?”

“Like I said before, well enough. Why?”

Wax pointed to his clients’ wall of fame — scads of framed mugshots. Included: Leroy Washington, the “Crack King” of Watts; Chester Hardell, a TV preacher indicted for unnatural acts against cats; the murderous Sanchez family — scores of inbred cousins foisted on L.A. as the result of Waxie’s green card machinations. In a prominent spot: Richie “The Sicko” Sicora and Chick Ottens, the 7-11 Slayers, still at large. Picaresque: Sicora and Ottens heisted a convenience store in Pacoima and hid the salesgirl behind an upended Slurpee machine to facilitate their escape. The machine disgorged its contents: ice, sugar and carcinogenic food coloring: the girl, a diabetic, passed out, sucked in the goo, went into sugar shock and kicked. Sicora and Ottens jumped bail for parts unknown — and Wax got a commendation letter from the ACLU, citing his tenacity in defending the L.A. underclass.

I said, “You’ve been pointing for five minutes. Want to narrow it down?”

Wax brushed dandruff off his lapels. “I was illustrating a point, the point being that my largest client is not on that wall because he was never arrested.”

I feigned shock. “No shit, Dick Tracy?”

“No shit, Sherlock. I’m referring, of course, to Sol Bendish, entrepreneur, bail bondsman supreme, heir to the late great Mickey Cohen’s vice kingdom. Sol passed on recently, and I’m handling his estate.”

I sighed. “And the punch line?”

Wax tossed me a keyring. “He left a twenty-five million dollar estate to his dog. It’s legally inviolate and so well safeguarded that I can’t contest it or scam it. You’re the dog’s new keeper.”

My list of duties ran seven pages. I drove to Beverly Hills wishing I’d been born canine.

“Basko” lived in a mansion north of Sunset; Basko wore cashmere sweaters and a custom-designed flea collar that emitted minute amounts of nuclear radiation guaranteed not to harm dogs — a physicist spent three years developing the product. Basko ate prime steak, Beluga caviar, Haagen-Dazs ice cream and Fritos soaked in ketchup. Rats were brought in to sate his blood lust: rodent mayhem every Tuesday morning, a hundred of them let loose in the back yard for Basko to hunt down and destroy. Basko suffered from insomnia and required a unique sedative: a slice of Velveeta cheese melted in a cup of hundred-year-old brandy.

I almost shit when I saw the pad; going in the door my knees went weak. Stan Klein enters the white-trash comfort zone to which he had so long aspired.

Deep pile purple rugs everywhere.

A three-story amphitheatre to accommodate a gigantic satellite dish that brought in four hundred TV channels.

Big screen TVs in every room and a comprehensive library of porn flicks.

A huge kitchen featuring two walk-in refrigerators: one for Basko, one for me. Wax must have stocked mine — it was packed with the high-sodium, high-cholesterol stuff I thrive on. Rooms and rooms full of the swag of my dreams — I felt like Fulgencio Batista back from exile.

Then I met the dog.

I found him in the pool, floating on a cushion. He was munching a cat carcass, his rear paws in the water. I did not yet know that it was the pivotal moment of my life.

I observed the beast from a distance.

He was a white bull terrier — muscular, compact, deep in the chest, bow-legged. His short-haired coat gleamed in the sunlight; he was so heavily muscled that flea-nipping required a great effort. His head was perfect good-natured misanthropy: a sloping wedge of a snout, close-set beady eyes, sharp teeth and a furrowed brow that gave him the look of a teenaged kid scheming trouble. His left ear was brindled — I sighed as the realization hit me, an epiphany — like the time I figured out Annie “Wild Thing” Behringer dyed her pubic hair.

Our eyes met.

Basko hit the water, swam and ran to me and rooted at my crotch. Looking back, I recall those moments in slow motion, gooey music on the sound track of my life, like those Frenchy films where the lovers never talk, just smoke cigarettes, gaze at each other and bang away.

Over the next week we established a routine.

Up early, roadwork by the Beverly Hills Hotel, Basko’s A.M. dump on an Arab sheik’s front lawn. Breakfast, Basko’s morning nap; he kept his head on my lap while I watched porno films and read sci-fi novels. Lunch: blood-rare fillets, then a float in the pool on adjoining cushions. Another walk; an eyeball on the foxy redhead who strolled her Lab at the same time each day — I figured I’d bide my time and propose a double date: us, Basko and the bitch. Evenings went to introspection: I screened films of my old fights, Stan “The Man” Klein, feather-fisted, cannon fodder for hungry schmucks looking to pad their records. There I was: six-pointed star on my trunks, my back dusted with Clearasil to hide my zits. A film editor buddy spliced me in with some stock footage of the greats; movie magic had me kicking the shit out of Ali, Marciano and Tyson. Wistful might-have-been stuff accompanied by Basko’s beady browns darting from the screen to me. Soon I was telling the dog the secrets I always hid from women.

When I shifted into a confessional mode, Basko would scrunch up his brow and cock his head; my cue to shut up was one of his gigantic mouth-stretching yawns. When he started dozing, I carried him upstairs and tucked him in. A little Velveeta and brandy, a little good-night story — Basko seemed to enjoy accounts of my sexual exploits best. And he always fell asleep just as I began to exaggerate.

I could never sync my sleep to Basko’s: his warm presence got me hopped up, thinking of all the good deals I’d blown, thinking that he was only good for another ten years on earth and then I’d be fifty-one with no good buddy to look after and no pot to piss in. Prowling the pad buttressed my sense that this incredible gravy train was tangible and would last — so I prowled with a vengeance.

Sol Bendish dressed antithetical to his Vegas-style crib: tweedy sports jackets, slacks with cuffs, Oxford cloth shirts, wingtips and white bucks. He left three closets stuffed with Ivy League threads just about my size. While my canine charge slept, I transformed myself into his sartorial image. Jewboy Klein became Jewboy Bendish, wealthy contributor to the U.J.A., the man with the class to love a dog of supreme blunt efficacy. I’d stand before the mirror in Bendish’s clothes — and my years as a pimp, burglar, car thief and scam artist would melt away — replaced by a thrilling and fatuous notion: finding the woman to complement my new persona...

I attacked the next day.

Primping formed my prelude to courtship: I gave Basko a flea dip, brushed his coat and dressed him in his best spiked collar; I put on a spiffy Bendish ensemble: navy blazer, gray flannels, pink shirt and penny loafers. Thus armed, we stood at Sunset and Linden and waited for the Labrador woman to show.

She showed right on time; the canine contingent sniffed each other hello. The woman deadpanned the action; I eyeballed her while Basko tugged at his leash.

She had the freckled look of a rare jungle cat — maybe a leopard-snow tiger hybrid indigenous to some jungleland of love. Her red hair reflected sunlight and glistened gold — a lioness’s mane. Her shape was both curvy and svelte; I remembered that some female felines actually stalked for mates. She said, “Are you a professional dog walker?”

I checked my new persona for dents. My slacks were a tad too short; the ends of my necktie hung off kilter. I felt myself blushing and heard Basko’s paws scrabbling on the sidewalk. “No, I’m what you might want to call an entrepreneur. Why do you ask?”

“Because I used to see an older man walking this dog. I think he’s some sort of organized crime figure.”

Basko and the Lab were into a mating dance — sniffing, licking, nipping. I got the feeling Cat Woman was stalking me — and not for love. I said, “He’s dead. I’m handling his estate.”

One eyebrow twitched and flickered. “Oh? Are you an attorney?”

“No, I’m working for the man’s attorney.”

“Sol Bendish was the man’s name, wasn’t it?”

My shit detector clicked into high gear — this bimbo was pumping me. “That’s right, Miss?”

“It’s Ms. Gail Curtiz, that’s with a T, I, Z. And it’s Mr.?”

“Klein with an E, I, N. My dog likes your dog, don’t you think?”

“Yes, a disposition of the glands.”

“I empathize. Want to have dinner some time?”

“I think not.”

“I’ll try again then.”

“The answer won’t change. Do you do other work for the Bendish estate? Besides walk the man’s dog, I mean.”

“I look after the house. Come over some time. Bring your Lab, we’ll double.”

“Do you thrive on rejections, Mr. Klein?”

Basko was trying to hump the Lab — but no go. “Yeah, I do.”

“Well, until the next one, then. Good day.”

The brief encounter was Weirdsville, U.S.A. — especially Cat Woman’s Strangeville take on Sol Bendish. I dropped Basko off at the pad, drove to the Beverly Hills library and had a clerk run my dead benefactor through their information computer. Half an hour later I was reading a lapful of scoop on the man.

An interesting dude emerged.

Bendish ran loan-sharking and union protection rackets inherited from Mickey Cohen; he was a gold star contributor to Israel bonds and the U.J.A. He threw parties for underprivileged kids and operated his bail bond business at a loss. He lost a bundle on a homicide bond forfeiture: Richie “Sicko” Sicora and Chick Ottens, the 7-11 slayers, Splitsvilled for Far Gonesville, sticking him with a two million dollar tab. Strange: the L.A. Times had Bendish waxing philosophical on the bug-out, like two mill down the toilet was everyday stuff to him.

On the personal front, Bendish seemed to love broads, and eschew birth control: no less than six paternity suits were filed against him. If the suit-filing mothers were to be believed, Sol had three grown sons and three grown daughters — and the complainants were bought off with chump change settlements — weird for a man so given to charity for appearance’s sake. The last clippings I scanned held another anomaly: Miller Waxman said Bendish’s estate came to twenty-five mill, while the papers placed it at a cool forty. My scamster’s brain kicked into very low overdrive...

I went back to my routine with Basko and settled into days of domestic bliss undercut with just the slightest touch of wariness. Wax paid my salary on time; Basko and I slept entwined and woke up simultaneously, in some kind of cross-species psychic sync. Gail Curtiz continued to give me the brush; I got her address from Information and walked Basko by every night, curious: a woman short of twenty-five living in a Beverly Hills mansion — a rental by all accounts — a sign on the lawn underlining it: “For Sale. Contact Realtor. Please Do Not Disturb Renting Tenant.” One night the bimbo spotted me snooping; the next night I spotted her strolling by the Bendish/Klein residence. On impulse, I checked my horoscope in the paper: a bust, no mention of romance or intrigue coming my way.

Another week passed, business as usual, two late-night sightings of Gail Curtiz sniffing my turf. I reciprocated: late-night prowls by her place, looking for window lights to clarify my take on the woman. Basko accompanied me; the missions brought to mind my youth: heady nights as a burglar/panty raider. I was peeping with abandon, crouched with Basko behind a eucalyptus tree, when the shit hit the fan — a crap-o, non-Beverly Hills car pulled up.

Three shifty-looking shvartzes got out, burglar’s tools gleamed in the moonlight. The unholy trio tiptoed up to Gail Curtiz’s driveway.

I pulled a non-existent gun and stepped out from hiding; I yelled, “Police Officer! Freeze!” and expected them to run. They froze instead; I got the shakes; Basko yanked at his leash and broke away from me. Then pandemonium.

Basko attacked; the schmucks ran for their car; one of them whipped out a cylindrical object and held it out to the hot pursuing hound. A streetlamp illuminated the offering: a bucket of Kentucky Colonel ribs.

Basko hit the bucket and started snouting; I yelled “No!” and chased. The boogies grabbed my beloved comrade and tossed him in the back seat of their car. The car took off — just as I made a last leap and hit the pavement memorizing plate numbers, a partial read: P-L-blank-0016. BASKO BASKO BASKO NO NO—

The next hour went by in a delirium. I called Liz Trent, had her shake down an ex-cop boyfriend for a DMV runthrough on the plate and got a total of fourteen possible combinations. None of the cars were reported stolen; eleven were registered to Caucasians, three to southside blacks. I got a list of addresses, drove to Hollywood and bought a .45 automatic off a fruit hustler known to deal good iron — then hit darktown with a vengeance.

My first two addresses were losers: staid sedans that couldn’t have been the kidnap car. Adrenaline scorched my blood vessels; I kept seeing Basko maimed, Basko’s beady browns gazing at me. I pulled up to the last address seeing double: silhouettes in the pistol range of my mind. My trigger finger itched to dispense .45 caliber justice.

I saw the address, then smelled it: a wood-framed shack in the shadow of a freeway embankment, a big rear yard, the whole package reeking of dog. I parked and sneaked back to the driveway gun first.

Snarls, growls, howls, barks, yips — floodlights on the yard and two pit bulls circling each other in a ring enclosed by fence pickets. Spectators yipping, yelling, howling, growling and laying down bets — and off to the side of the action my beloved Basko being primed for battle.

Two burly shvartzes were fitting black leather gloves fitted with razor blades to his paws; Basko was wearing a muzzle embroidered with swastikas. I padded back and got ready to kill; Basko sniffed the air and leaped at his closest defiler. A hot second for the gutting: Basko lashed out with his paws and disemboweled him clean. The other punk screamed; I ran up and bashed his face in with the butt of my roscoe. Basko applied the coup de grace: left-right paw shots that severed his throat down to the windpipe. Punk number two managed a death gurgle; the spectators by the ring heard the hubbub and ran over. I grabbed Basko and hauled ass.

We made it to my sled and peeled rubber; out of nowhere a car broadsided us, fender to fender. I saw a white face behind the wheel, down-shifted, brodied, fishtailed and hit the freeway doing eighty. The attack car was gone — back to the nowhere it came from. I whipped off Basko’s muzzle and paw weapons and threw them out the window; Basko licked my face all the way to Beverly Hills.

More destruction greeted us: the Bendish/Klein/Basko pad had been ransacked, the downstairs thoroughly trashed: shelves overturned, sections of the satellite dish ripped loose, flocked velvet Elvis paintings torn from the walls. I grabbed Basko again; we hotfooted it to Gail Curtiz’s crib.

Lights were burning inside; the Lab was lounging on the lawn chomping on a nylabone. She noticed Basko and started demurely wagging her tail; I sensed romance in the air and unhooked my sidekick’s leash. Basko ran to the Lab; the scene dissolved into horizontal nuzzling. I gave the lovebirds some privacy, sneaked around to the rear of the house and started peeping.

Va Va Va Voom through a back window. Gail Curtiz, nude, was writhing with another woman on a tigerskin rug. The gorgeous brunette seemed reluctant: her face spelled shame and you could tell the perversity was getting to her. My beady eyes almost popped out of my skull; in the distance I could hear Basko and the Lab rutting like cougars. The brunette faked an orgasm and made her hips buckle — I could tell she was faking from twenty feet away. The window was cracked at the bottom; I put an ear to the sill and listened.

Gail got up and lit a cigarette; the brunette said, “Could you turn off the lights, please?” — a dead giveaway — you could tell she wanted to blot out the dyke’s nudity. Basko and the Lab, looking sated, trotted up and fell asleep at my feet. The room inside went black; I listened extra hard.

Smutty endearments from Gail; two cigarette tips glowing. The brunette, quietly persistent: “But I don’t understand why you spend your life savings renting such an extravagant house. You never spell things out for me, even though we’re... And just who is this rich man who died?”

Gail, laughing. “My daddy, sweetie. Blood test validated. Momma was a car hop who died of a broken heart. Daddy stiffed her on the paternity suit, among many other stiffs, but he promised to take care of me — three million on my twenty-fifth birthday or his death, whichever came first. Now, dear, would you care to hear the absurdist punch line? Daddy left the bulk of his fortune to his dog, to be overseen by a sharpie lawyer and this creep who looks after the dog. But — there has to be some money hidden somewhere. Daddy’s estate was valued at twenty-five million, while the newspapers placed it as much higher. Oh, shit, isn’t it all absurd?”

A pause, then the brunette. “You know what you said when we got back a little while ago? Remember, you had this feeling the house had been searched?”

Gail: “Yes. What are you getting at?”

“Well, maybe it was just your imagination, or maybe one of the other paternity suit kids has got the same idea, maybe that explains it.”

“Linda, honey, I can’t think of that just now. Right now I’ve got you on my mind.”

Small talk was over — eclipsed by Gail’s ardor, Linda’s phony moans. I hitched Basko to his leash, drove us to a motel safe house and slept the sleep of the righteously pissed.

In the morning I did some brainwork. My conclusions: Gail Curtiz wanted to sink my gravy train and relegate Basko to a real dog’s life. Paternity suit intrigue was at the root of the Bendish house trashing and the “searching” of Gail’s place. The car that tried to broadside me was driven by a white man — a strange anomaly. Linda, in my eyes a nondyke, seemed to be stringing the lust-blinded Gail along — could she also be a paternity suit kid out for Basko’s swag? Sleazy Miller Waxman was Sol Bendish’s lawyer and a scam artist bent from the crib — how did he fit in? Were the shvoogies who tried to break into Gail’s crib the ones who later searched it — and trashed my place? Were they in the employ of one of the paternity kids? What was going on?

I rented a suite at the Bel-Air Hotel and ensconced Basko there, leaving a grand deposit and detailed instructions on his care and feeding. Next I hit the Beverly Hills Library and re-read Sol Bendish’s clippings. I glommed the names of his paternity suit complainants, called Liz Trent and had her give me DMV addresses. Two of Sol’s playmates were dead; one was address unknown, two — Marguerita Montgomery and Jane Hawkshaw — were alive and living in Los Angeles. The Montgomery woman was out as a lead: a clipping I’d scanned two weeks ago quoted her on the occasion of Sol Bendish’s death — she mentioned that the son he fathered had died in Vietnam. I already knew that Gail Curtiz’s mother had died — and since none of the complainants bore the name Curtiz, I knew Gail was using it as an alias. That left Jane Hawkshaw: last known address 8902 Saticoy Street in Van Nuys.

I knocked on her door an hour later. An old woman holding a stack of Watchtowers opened up. She had the look of religious crackpots everywhere: bad skin, spaced-out eyes. She might have been hot stuff once — around the time man discovered the wheel. I said, “I’m Brother Klein. I’ve been dispatched by the Church to ease your conscience in the Sol Bendish matter.”

The old girl pointed me inside and started babbling repentance. My eyes hit a framed photograph above the fireplace — two familiar faces smiling out. I walked over and squinted.

Ultra-paydirt: Richie “Sicko” Sicora and another familiar-looking dude. I’d seen pics of Sicora before — but in this photo he looked like someone else familiar. The resemblance seemed very vague — but niggling. The other man was easy — he’d tried to broadside me in darktown last night.

The old girl said, “My son Richard is a fugitive. He doesn’t look like that now. He had his face changed when he went on the run. Sol was going to leave Richie money when he turned twenty-five, but Richie and Chuck got in trouble and Sol gave it out in bail money instead. I’ve got no complaint against Sol and I repent my unmarried fornication.”

I superimposed the other man’s bone structure against photos I’d seen of Chick Ottens and got a close match. I tried, tried, tried to place Sicora’s pre-surgery resemblance, but failed. Sicora pre-plastic, Ottens already sliced — a wicked brew that validated non-dyke Linda’s theory straight down the line...

I gave the old woman a buck, grabbed a Watchtower and boogied southside. The radio blared hype on the Watts homicides: the monster dog and his human accomplice. Fortunately for Basko and myself, eyewitnesses’ accounts were dismissed and the deaths were attributed to dope intrigue. I cruised the bad boogaloo streets until I spotted the car that tried to ram me — parked behind a cinderblock dump circled by barbed wire.

I pulled up and jacked a shell into my piece. I heard yips emanating from the back yard, tiptoed around and scoped out the scene.

Pit Bull City: scores of them in pens. A picnic table and Chick Ottens noshing bar-b-q’d chicken with his snazzy new face. I came up behind him; the dogs noticed me and sent out a cacophony of barks. Ottens stood up and wheeled around going for his waistband. I shot off his kneecaps — canine howls covered my gun blasts. Ottens flew backwards and hit the dirt screaming; I poured bar-b-q sauce on his kneeholes and dragged him over to the cage of the baddest looking pit hound of the bunch. The dog snapped at the blood and soul sauce; his teeth tore the pen. I spoke slowly, like I had all the time in the world. “I know you and Sicora got plastic jobs, I know Sol Bendish was Sicora’s daddy and bailed you and Sicko out on the 7-11 job. You had your goons break into Gail Curtiz’s place and the Bendish pad and all this shit relates to you trying to mess with my dog and screw me out of my gravy train. Now I’m beginning to think Wax Waxman set me up. I think you and Sicora have some plan going to get at Bendish’s money, and Wax ties in. You got word that Curtiz was snouting around, so you checked out her crib. I’m a dupe, rights Wax’s patsy? Wrap this up for me or I feed your kneecaps to Godzilla.”

Pit Godzilla snarled an incisor out of the mesh and nipped Ottens where it counts. Ottens screeched; going blue, he got out, “Wax wanted... you... to... look after... dog while him and... Phil... scammed a way to... discredit paternity... claims... I... I...”

Phil.

My old partner — I didn’t know a thing about his life before our partnership.

Phil Turkel was Sicko Sicora, his weird facial scars derived from the plastic surgery that hid his real identity from the world.

“Freeze, suckah.”

I looked up. Three big shines were standing a few yards away, holding Uzis. I opened Godzilla’s cage; Godzilla burst out and went for Chick’s face. Ottens screamed; I tossed the bucket of chicken at the gunmen; shots sprayed the dirt. I ate crabgrass and rolled, rolled, rolled, tripping cage levers, ducking, ducking, ducking. Pit bulls ran helter skelter, then zeroed in: three soul brothers dripping with soul sauce.

The feast wasn’t pretty. I grabbed an Uzi and got out quicksville.

Dusk.

I leadfooted it to Wax’s office, the radio tuned to a classical station — I was hopped up on blood, but found some soothing Mozart to calm me down, and highballed it to Beverly and Alvarado.

Waxman’s office was stone silent; I picked the back door lock, walked in and made straight for the safe behind his playmate calendar — the place where I knew he kept his dope and bribery stash. Left — right-left: an hour of diddling the tumblers and the door creaked open. Four hours of studying memo slips, ledgers and little black book notations and I trusted myself on a reconstruction.

Labyrinthine, but workable:

Private eye reports on Gail Curtiz and Linda Claire Woodruff — the two paternity suit kids Wax considered most likely to contest the Bendish estate. Lists of stooges supplied by Wax contacts in the LAPD: criminal types to be used to file phony claims against the estate, whatever money gleaned to be kicked back to Wax himself. Address book names circled: snuff artists I knew from jail, including the fearsome Angel “Fritz” Trejo. A note from Phil Turkel to Waxman: “Throw Stan a bone — he can babysit the dog until we get the money.” A diagram of the Betty Ford Clinic, followed by an ominous epiphany: Wax was going to have Phil and the real paternity kids clipped. Pages and pages of notes in legalese — levers to get at the extra fifteen million Sol Bendish had stuffed in Swiss bank accounts.

I turned off the lights and raged in the dark; I thought of escaping to a nice deserted island with Basko and some nice girl who wouldn’t judge me for loving a bull terrier more than her. The phone rang — and I nearly jumped out of my hide.

I picked up and faked Wax’s voice. “Waxman here.”

“Ees Angel Fritz. You know your man Phil?”

“Yeah.”

“Ees history. You pay balance now?”

“My office in two hours, homeboy.”

“Ees bonaroo, homes.”

I hung up and called Waxman’s pad; Miller answered on the second ring. “Yes?”

“Wax, it’s Klein.”

“Oh.”

His voice spelled it out plain: he’d heard about the southside holocaust. “Yeah, ‘Oh.’ Listen, shitbird, here’s the drift. Turkel’s dead, and I took out Angel Trejo. I’m at your office and I’ve been doing some reading. Be here in one hour with a cash settlement.”

Waxman’s teeth chattered; I hung up and did some typing: Stan Klein’s account of the whole Bendish/Waxman/Turkel/Ottens/Trejo scam — a massive criminal conspiracy to bilk the dog I loved. I included everything but mention of myself and left a nice blank space for Wax to sign his name. Then I waited.

Fifty minutes later — a knock. I opened the door and let Wax in. His right hand was twitching and there was a bulge under his jacket. He said, “Hello, Klein,” and twitched harder; I heard a truck rumble by and shot him point blank in the face.

Wax keeled over dead, his right eyeball stuck to his law school diploma. I frisked him, relieved him of his piece and twenty large in cash. I found some papers in his desk, studied his signature and forged his name to his confession. I left him on the floor, walked outside and pulled over to the pay phone across the street.

A taco wagon pulled to the curb; I dropped my quarter, dialed 911 and called in a gunshot tip — anonymous citizen, a quick hangup. Angel Fritz Trejo rang Wax’s doorbell, waited, then let himself in. Seconds dragged; lights went on; two black & whites pulled up and four cops ran inside brandishing hardware. Multiple shots — and four cops walked out unharmed.

So in the end I made twenty grand and got the dog. The L.A. County Grand Jury bought the deposition, attributed my various dead to Ottens/Turkel/Trejo/Waxman et al. — all dead themselves, thus unindictable. A superior court judge invalidated Basko’s twenty-five mill and divided the swag between Gail Curtiz and Linda Claire Woodruff. Gail got the Bendish mansion — rumor has it that she’s turning it into a crashpad for radical lesbian feminists down on their luck. Linda Claire is going out with a famous rock star — androgynous, but more male than female. She admitted, elliptically, that she tried to “hustle” Gail Curtiz — validating her dyke submissiveness as good old American fortune hunting. Lizzie Trent got her teeth fixed, kicked me off probation and into her bed. I got a job selling cars in Glendale — and Basko comes to work with me every day. His steak and caviar diet has been replaced by Gravy Train — and he looks even groovier and healthier. Lizzie digs Basko and lets him sleep with us. We’re talking about combining my twenty grand with her life savings and buying a house, which bodes marriage: my first, her fourth. Lizzie’s a blast: she’s smart, tender, funny and gives great skull. I love her almost as much as I love Basko.

New York City is the prototypical American urban jungle. More novels and short stories have been written about its ever-changing mean streets, past and present, than about those of any other major city. No writer has done a better, more insightful job of capturing the dark side of Manhattan from 1975 to the present than Lawrence Block in his razor-sharp series about Matthew Scudder, former cop, recovering alcoholic, and part-time private detective.

Scudder was created for the paperback market in the mid-1970s, and first appeared in a trio of novels: The Sins of the Fathers (1976), In the Midst of Death (1976), and Time to Murder and Create (1977). After a four-year hiatus, he reappeared in A Stab in the Dark; a year later, Eight Million Ways to Die was awarded a Shamus by the Private Eye Writers of America for best novel of 1982. Six more Scudder novels have been published since then, as have several short stories (one of which, “By Dawn’s Early Light,” was awarded the Mystery Writers of America Edgar for best short story of 1985). “Scudder has changed some over the years,” Block has written, “but then, who hasn’t?”

Block has been writing high-quality crime fiction for more than thirty-five years, ever since the appearance of his debut short story, “You Can’t Lose,” in the February 1958 issue of Manhunt. His first two novels, Mona and Death Pulls a Doublecross, were published in 1961. Thirty have followed under his own name, and another five under the pseudonyms Paul Kavanaugh and Chip Harrison. In addition to Scudder, Block is the creator of three other notable series characters: unrepentant burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, hero of five novels; Evan Tanner, the spy who cannot sleep, in four titles; and the Nero Wolfeian Leo Haig and his sex-hungry Archie, Chip Harrison, in two adventures published as by Chip Harrison. The best of Block’s short stories can be found in three collections: Sometimes They Bite (1983), Like a Lamb to the Slaughter (1984), and Some Days You Get the Bear (1993).

“Batman’s Helpers,” which first appeared in Playboy in 1990, is a perfect portrait in microcosm of New York City in the 1990s. It is less a crime story than a sociological indictment of that place and this time. Block knows Manhattan, and so will the reader (as much as an outsider can ever know it) after walking its streets with Scudder and the people who inhabit his world.

B. P.

Batman’s Helpers (1990)

Reliable’s offices are in the Flatiron Building, at Broadway and Twenty-third. The receptionist, an elegant black girl with high cheekbones and processed hair, gave me a nod and a smile, and I went on down the hall to Wally Witt’s office.

He was at his desk, a short stocky man with a bulldog jaw and gray hair cropped close to his head. Without rising he said, “Matt, good to see you, you’re right on time. You know these guys? Matt Scudder, Jimmy diSalvo, Lee Trombauer.” We shook hands all around. “We’re waiting on Eddie Rankin. Then we can go out there and protect the integrity of the American merchandising system.”

“Can’t do that without Eddie,” Jimmy diSalvo said.

“No, we need him,” Wally said. “He’s our pit bull. He’s attack trained, Eddie is.”

He came through the door a few minutes later and I saw what they meant. Without looking alike, Jimmy and Wally and Lee all looked like ex-cops — as, I suppose, do I. Eddie Rankin looked like the kind of guy we used to have to bring in on a bad Saturday night. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders, narrow in the waist. His hair was blond, almost white, and he wore it short at the sides but long in back. It lay on his neck like a mane. He had a broad forehead and a pug nose. His complexion was very fair and his full lips were intensely red, almost artificially so. He looked like a roughneck, and you sensed that his response to any sort of stress was likely to be physical, and abrupt.

Wally Witt introduced him to me. The others already knew him. Eddie Rankin shook my hand, and his left hand fastened on my shoulder and gave a squeeze. “Hey, Matt,” he said. “Pleased to meetcha. Whattaya say, guys, we ready to come to the aid of the Caped Crusader?”

Jimmy diSalvo started whistling the theme from “Batman,” the old television show. Wally said, “Okay, who’s packing? Is everybody packing?”

Lee Trombauer drew back his suit jacket to show a revolver in a shoulder rig. Eddie Rankin took out a large automatic and laid it on Wally’s desk. “Batman’s gun,” he announced.

“Batman don’t carry a gun,” Jimmy told him.

“Then he better stay outta New York,” Eddie said. “Or he’ll get his ass shot off. Those revolvers, I wouldn’t carry one of them on a bet.”

“This shoots as straight as what you got,” Lee said. “And it won’t jam.”

“This baby don’t jam,” Eddie said. He picked up the automatic and held it out for display. “You got a revolver,” he said, “a .38, whatever you got—”

“A .38.”

“—and a guy takes it away from you, all he’s gotta do is point it and shoot it. Even if he never saw a gun before, he knows how to do that much. This monster, though” — and he demonstrated, flicking the safety, working the slide — “all this shit you gotta go through, before he can figure it out I got the gun away from him and I’m making him eat it.”

“Nobody’s taking my gun away from me,” Lee said.

“What everybody says, but look at all the times it happens. Cop gets shot with his own gun, nine times out of ten it’s a revolver.”

“That’s because that’s all they carry,” Lee said.

“Well, there you go.”

Jimmy and I weren’t carrying guns. Wally offered to equip us but we both declined. “Not that anybody’s likely to have to show a piece, let alone use one, God forbid,” Wally said. “But it can get nasty out there, and it helps to have the feeling of authority. Well, let’s go get ’em, huh? The Batmobile’s waiting at the curb.”

We rode down in the elevator, five grown men, three of us armed with handguns. Eddie Rankin had on a plaid sport jacket and khaki trousers. The rest of us wore suits and ties. We went out the Fifth Avenue exit and followed Wally to his car, a five-year-old Fleetwood Cadillac parked next to a hydrant. There were no tickets on the windshield; a PBA courtesy card had kept the traffic cops at bay.

Wally drove and Eddie Rankin sat in front with him. The rest of us rode in back. We cruised up to Fifty-fourth Street and turned right, and Wally parked next to a hydrant a few doors from Fifth. We walked together to the corner of Fifth and turned downtown. Near the middle of the block a trio of black men had set up shop as sidewalk vendors. One had a display of women’s handbags and silk scarves, all arranged neatly on top of a folding card table. The other two were offering tee-shirts and cassette tapes.

In an undertone Wally said, “Here we go. These three were here yesterday. Matt, why don’t you and Lee check down the block, make sure those two down at the corner don’t have what we’re looking for. Then double back and we’ll take these dudes off. Meanwhile I’ll let the man sell me a shirt.”

Lee and I walked down to the corner. The two vendors in question were selling books. We established this and headed back. “Real police work,” I said.

“Be grateful we don’t have to fill out a report, list the titles of the books.”

“The alleged books.”

When we rejoined the others Wally was holding an oversize tee-shirt to his chest, modeling it for us. “What do you say?” he demanded. “Is it me? Do you think it’s me?”

“I think it’s the Joker,” Jimmy diSalvo said.

“That’s what I think,” Wally said. He looked at the two Africans, who were smiling uncertainly. “I think it’s a violation, is what I think. I think we got to confiscate all the Batman stuff. It’s unauthorized, it’s an illegal violation of copyright protection, it’s unlicensed, and we got to take it in.”

The two vendors had stopped smiling, but they didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of what was going on. Off to the side, the third man, the fellow with the scarves and purses, was looking wary.

“You speak English?” Wally asked them.

“They speak numbers,” Jimmy said. “ ‘Fi’ dollah, ten dollah, please, t’ank you.’ That’s what they speak.”

“Where you from?” Wally demanded. “Senegal, right? Dakar. You from Dakar?”

They nodded, brightening at words they recognized. “Dakar,” one of them echoed. Both of them were wearing western clothes, but they looked faintly foreign — loose-fitting long-sleeved shirts with long pointed collars and a glossy finish, baggy pleated pants. Loafers with leather mesh tops.

“What do you speak?” Wally asked. “You speak French? Parley-voo français?” The one who’d spoken before replied now in a torrent of French; Wally backed away from him and shook his head. “I don’t know why the hell I asked,” he said. “Parley-voo’s all I know of the fucking language.” To the Africans he said, “Police. You parley-voo that? Police. Pólicia. You capeesh?” He opened his wallet and showed them some sort of badge. “No sell Batman,” he said, waving one of the shirts at them. “Batman no good. It’s unauthorized, it’s not made under a licensing agreement, and you can’t sell it.”

“No Batman,” one of them said.

“Jesus, don’t tell me I’m getting through to them. Right, no Batman. No, put your money away, I can’t take a bribe, I’m not with the Department no more. All I want’s the Batman stuff. You can keep the rest.”

All but a handful of their tee-shirts were unauthorized Batman items. The rest showed Walt Disney characters, almost certainly as unauthorized as the Batman merchandise, but Disney wasn’t Reliable’s client today so it was none of our concern. While we loaded up with Batman and the Joker, Eddie Rankin looked through the cassettes, then pawed through the silk scarves the third vendor had on display. He let the man keep the scarves, but he took a purse, snakeskin by the look of it. “No good,” he told the man, who nodded, expressionless.

We trooped back to the Fleetwood and Wally popped the trunk. We deposited the confiscated tees between the spare tire and some loose fishing tackle. “Don’t worry if the shit gets dirty,” Wally said. “It’s all gonna be destroyed anyway. Eddie, you start carrying a purse, people are gonna say things.”

“Woman I know,” he said. “She’ll like this.” He wrapped the purse in a Batman tee-shirt and placed it in the trunk.

“Okay,” Wally said. “That went real smooth. What we’ll do now, Lee, you and Matt take the east side of Fifth, and the rest of us’ll stay on this side and we’ll work our way down to Forty-second. I don’t know if we’ll get much, because even if they can’t speak English they can sure get the word around fast, but we’ll make sure there’s no unlicensed Batcrap on the Avenue before we move on. We’ll maintain eye contact back and forth across the street, and if you hit anything give the high sign and we’ll converge and take ’em down. Everybody got it?”

Everybody seemed to. We left the car with its trunkful of contraband and returned to Fifth Avenue. The two tee-shirt vendors from Dakar had packed up and disappeared; they’d have to find something else to sell and someplace else to sell it. The man with the scarves and purses was still doing business. He froze when he caught sight of us.

“No Batman,” Wally told him.

“No Batman,” he echoed.

“I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” Wally said. “The guy’s learning English.”

Lee and I crossed the street and worked our way downtown. There were vendors all over the place, offering clothing and tapes and small appliances and books and fast food. Most of them didn’t have the peddler’s license the law required, and periodically the city would sweep the streets, especially the main commercial avenues, rounding them up and fining them and confiscating their stock. Then after a week or so the cops would stop trying to enforce a basically unenforceable law, and the peddlers would be back in business again.

It was an apparently endless cycle, but the booksellers were exempt from it. The courts had decided that the First Amendment embodied in its protection of freedom of the press the right of anyone to sell printed matter on the street, so if you had books for sale you never got hassled. As a result, a lot of scholarly antiquarian booksellers offered their wares on the city streets. So did any number of illiterates hawking remaindered art books and stolen bestsellers, along with homeless street people who rescued old magazines from people’s garbage cans and spread them out on the pavement, living in hope that someone would want to buy them.

In front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral we found a Pakistani with tee-shirts and sweatshirts. I asked him if he had any Batman merchandise and he went right through the piles himself and pulled out half a dozen items. We didn’t bother signaling the Cavalry across the street. Lee just showed the man a badge — Special Officer, it said — and I explained that we had to confiscate Batman items.

“He is the big seller, Batman,” the man said. “I get Batman, I sell him fast as I can.”

“Well, you better not sell him anymore,” I said, “because it’s against the law.”

“Excuse, please,” he said. “What is law? Why is Batman against law? Is my understanding Batman is for law. He is good guy, is it not so?”

I explained about copyright and trademarks and licensing agreements. It was a little like explaining the internal combustion engine to a field mouse. He kept nodding his head, but I don’t know how much of it he got. He understood the main point — that we were walking off with his stock and he was stuck for whatever it cost him. He didn’t like that part, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

Lee tucked the shirts under his arm and we kept going. At Forty-seventh Street we crossed over in response to a signal from Wally. They’d found another pair of Senegalese with a big spread of Batman items — tees and sweatshirts and gimme caps and sun visors, some a direct knockoff of the copyrighted Bat signal, others a variation on the theme, but none of it authorized and all of it subject to confiscation. The two men — they looked like brothers and were dressed identically in baggy beige trousers and sky-blue nylon shirts — couldn’t understand what was wrong with their merchandise and couldn’t believe we intended to haul it all away with us. But there were five of us, and we were large intimidating white men with an authoritarian manner, and what could they do about it?

“I’ll get the car,” Wally said. “No way we’re gonna schlep this crap seven blocks in this heat.”

With the trunk almost full, we drove to Thirty-fourth and broke for lunch at a place Wally liked. We sat at a large round table. Ornate beer steins hung from the beams overhead. We had a round of drinks, then ordered sandwiches and fries and half-liter steins of dark beer. I had a Coke to start, another Coke with the food, and coffee afterward.

“You’re not drinking,” Lee Trombauer said.

“Not today.”

“Not on duty,” Jimmy said, and everybody laughed.

“What I want to know,” Eddie Rankin said, “is why everybody wants a fucking Batman shirt in the first place.”

“Not just shirts,” somebody said.

“Shirts, sweaters, caps, lunch boxes — if you could print it on Tampax they’d be shoving ’em up their twats. Why Batman, for Christ’s sake?”

“It’s hot,” Wally said.

“ ‘It’s hot.’ What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means it’s hot. That’s what it means. It’s hot means it’s hot. Everybody wants it because everybody else wants it, and that means it’s hot.”

“I seen the movie,” Eddie said. “You see it?”

Two of us had, two of us hadn’t.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Basically, I’d say it’s a kid’s movie, but it’s okay.”

“So?”

“So how many tee-shirts in extra large do you sell to kids? Everybody’s buying this shit, and all you can tell me is it’s hot because it’s hot. I don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to,” Wally said. “It’s the same as the niggers. You want to try explaining to them why they can’t sell Batman unless there’s a little copyright notice printed under the design? While you’re at it, you can explain to me why the assholes counterfeiting the crap don’t counterfeit the copyright notice while they’re at it. The thing is, nobody has to do any explaining because nobody has to understand. The only message they have to get on the street is ‘Batman no good, no sell Batman.’ If they learn that much we’re doing our job right.”

Wally paid for everybody’s lunch. We stopped at the Flatiron Building long enough to empty the trunk and carry everything upstairs, then drove down to the Village and worked the sidewalk market on Sixth Avenue below Eighth Street. We made a few confiscations without incident. Then, near the subway entrance at West Third, we were taking a dozen shirts and about as many visors from a West Indian when another vendor decided to get into the act. He was wearing a dashiki and had his hair in Rastafarian dreadlocks, and he said, “You can’t take the brother’s wares, man. You can’t do that.”

“It’s unlicensed merchandise produced in contravention of international copyright protection,” Wally told him.

“Maybe so,” the man said, “but that don’t empower you to seize it. Where’s your due process? Where’s your authority? You aren’t police.” Poe-lease, he said, bearing down on the first syllable. “You can’t come into a man’s store, seize his wares.”

“Store?” Eddie Rankin moved toward him, his hands hovering at his sides. “You see a store here? All I see’s a lot of fucking shit in the middle of a fucking blanket.”

“This is the man’s store. This is the man’s place of business.”

“And what’s this?” Eddie demanded. He walked over to the right, where the man with the dreadlocks had stick incense displayed for sale on a pair of upended orange crates. “This your store?”

“That’s right. It’s my store.”

“You know what it looks like to me? It looks like you’re selling drug paraphernalia. That’s what it looks like.”

“It’s incense,” the Rasta said. “For bad smells.”

“Bad smells,” Eddie said. One of the sticks of incense was smoldering, and Eddie picked it up and sniffed at it. “Whew,” he said. “That’s a bad smell, I’ll give you that. Smells like the catbox caught on fire.” The Rasta snatched the incense from him. “It’s a good smell,” he said. “Smells like your mama.”

Eddie smiled at him, his red lips parting to show stained teeth. He looked happy, and very dangerous. “Say I kick your store into the middle of the street,” he said, “and you with it. How’s that sound to you?”

Smoothly, easily, Wally Witt moved between them. “Eddie,” he said softly, and Eddie backed off and let the smile fade on his lips. To the incense seller Wally said, “Look, you and I got no quarrel with each other. I got a job to do and you got your own business to run.”

“The brother here’s got a business to run, too.”

“Well, he’s gonna have to run it without Batman, because that’s how the law reads. But if you want to be Batman, playing the dozens with my man here and pushing into what doesn’t concern you, then I got no choice. You follow me?”

“All I’m saying, I’m saying you want to confiscate the man’s merchandise, you need you a policeman and a court order, something to make it official.”

“Fine,” Wally said. “You’re saying it and I hear you saying it, but what I’m saying is all I need to do it is to do it, official or not. Now if you want to get a cop to stop me, fine, go ahead and do it, but as soon as you do I’m going to press charges for selling drug paraphernalia and operating without a peddler’s license—”

“This here ain’t drug paraphernalia, man. We both know that.”

“We both know you’re just trying to be a hard-on, and we both know what it’ll get you. That what you want?”

The incense seller stood there for a moment, then dropped his eyes. “Don’t matter what I want,” he said.

“Well, you got that right,” Wally told him. “It don’t matter what you want.”

We tossed the shirts and visors into the trunk and got out of there. On the way over to Astor Place Eddie said, “You didn’t have to jump in there. I wasn’t about to lose it.”

“Never said you were.”

“That mama stuff doesn’t bother me. It’s just nigger talk, they all talk that shit.”

“I know.”

“They’d talk about their fathers, but they don’t know who the fuck they are, so they’re stuck with their mothers. Bad smells — I shoulda stuck that shit up his ass, get right where the bad smells are. I hate a guy sticks his nose in like that.”

“Your basic sidewalk lawyer.”

“Basic asshole’s what he is. Maybe I’ll go back, talk with him later.”

“On your own time.”

“On my own time is right.”

Astor Place hosts a more freewheeling street market, with a lot of Bowery types offering a mix of salvaged trash and stolen goods. There was something especially curious about our role as we passed over hot radios and typewriters and jewelry and sought only merchandise that had been legitimately purchased, albeit from illegitimate manufacturers. We didn’t find much Batman ware on display, although a lot of people, buyers and sellers alike, were wearing the Caped Crusader. We weren’t about to strip the shirt off anybody’s person, nor did we look too hard for contraband merchandise; the place was teeming with crackheads and crazies, and it was no time to push our luck.

“Let’s get out of here,” Wally said. “I hate to leave the car in this neighborhood. We already gave the client his money’s worth.”

By four we were in Wally’s office and his desk was heaped high with the fruits of our labors. “Look at all this shit,” he said. “Today’s trash and tomorrow’s treasures. Twenty years and they’ll be auctioning this crap at Christie’s. Not this particular crap, because I’ll messenger it over to the client and he’ll chuck it in the incinerator. Gentlemen, you did a good day’s work.” He took out his wallet and gave each of the four of us a hundred-dollar bill. He said, “Same time tomorrow? Except I think we’ll make lunch Chinese tomorrow. Eddie, don’t forget your purse.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Thing is, you don’t want to carry it if you go back to see your Rastafarian friend. He might get the wrong idea.”

“Fuck him,” Eddie said. “I got no time for him. He wants that incense up his ass, he’s gonna have to stick it there himself.”

Lee and Jimmy and Eddie went out, laughing, joking, slapping backs. I started out after them, then doubled back and asked Wally if he had a minute.

“Sure,” he said. “Jesus, I don’t believe that. Look.”

“It’s a Batman shirt.”

“No shit, Sherlock. And look what’s printed right under the Bat signal.”

“The copyright notice.”

“Right, which makes it a legal shirt. We got any more of these? No, no, no, no. Wait a minute, here’s one. Here’s another. Jesus, this is amazing. There any more? I don’t see any others, do you?”

We went through the pile without finding more of the shirts with the copyright notice.

“Three,” he said. “Well, that’s not so bad. A mere fraction.” He balled up the three shirts, dropped them back on the pile. “You want one of these? It’s legit; you can wear it without fear of confiscation.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You got kids? Take something home for your kids.”

“One’s in college and the other’s in the service. I don’t think they’d be interested.”

“Probably not.” He stepped out from behind his desk. “Well, it went all right out there, don’t you think? We had a good crew, worked well together.”

“I guess.”

“What’s the matter, Matt?”

“Nothing, really. But I don’t think I can make it tomorrow.”

“No? Why’s that?”

“Well, for openers, I’ve got a dentist appointment.”

“Oh yeah? What time?”

“Nine-fifteen.”

“So how long can that take? Half an hour, an hour tops? Meet us here ten-thirty, that’s good enough. The client doesn’t have to know what time we hit the street.”

“It’s not just the dentist appointment, Wally.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t think I want to do this stuff anymore.”

“What stuff? Copyright and trademark protection?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the matter? It’s beneath you? Doesn’t make full use of your talents as a detective?”

“It’s not that.”

“Because it’s not a bad deal for the money, seems to me. Hundred bucks for a short day, ten to four, hour and a half off for lunch with the lunch all paid for. You’re a cheap lunch date — you don’t drink — but even so. Call it a ten-dollar lunch, that’s a hundred and ten dollars for what, four and a half hours’ work?” He punched numbers on a desktop calculator. “That’s twenty-four forty-four an hour. That’s not bad wages. You want to take home better than that, you need either burglar’s tools or a law degree, seems to me.”

“The money’s fine, Wally.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

I shook my head. “I just haven’t got the heart for it,” I said. “Hassling people who don’t even speak the language, taking their goods from them because we’re stronger than they are and there’s nothing they can do about it.”

“They can quit selling contraband, that’s what they can do.”

“How? They don’t even know what’s contraband.”

“Well, that’s where we come in. We’re giving them an education. How they gonna learn if nobody teaches ’em?”

I’d loosened my tie earlier. Now I took it off, folded it, put it in my pocket.

He said, “Company owns a copyright, they got a right to control who uses it. Somebody else enters into a licensing agreement, pays money for the right to produce a particular item, they got a right to the exclusivity they paid for.”

“I don’t have a problem with that.”

“So?”

“They don’t even speak, the language,” I said.

He stood up straight. “Then who told ’em to come here?” he wanted to know. “Who fucking invited them? You can’t walk a block in midtown without tripping over another super salesman from Senegal. They swarm off that Air Afrique flight from Dakar, and first thing you know they got an open-air store on world-famous Fifth Avenue. They don’t pay rent, they don’t pay taxes, they just spread a blanket on the concrete and rake in the dollars.”

“They didn’t look as though they were getting rich.”

“They must do all right. Pay two bucks for a scarf and sell it for ten, they must come out okay. They stay at hotels like the Bryant, pack together like sardines, six or eight to the room. Sleep in shifts, cook their food on hotplates. Two, three months of that and it’s back to fucking Dakar. They drop off the money, take a few minutes to get another baby started, then they’re winging back to JFK to start all over again. You think we need that? Haven’t we got enough spades of our own can’t make a living, we got to fly in more of them?”

I sifted through the pile on his desk, picked up a sun visor with the Joker depicted on it. I wondered why anybody would want something like that. I said, “What do you figure it adds up to, the stuff we confiscated? A couple of hundred?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. Figure ten for a tee-shirt, and we got what, thirty or forty of them? Add in the sweatshirts, the rest of the shit, I bet it comes close to a grand. Why?”

“I was just thinking. You paid us a hundred a man, plus whatever lunch came to.”

“Eighty with the tip. What’s the point?”

“You must have billed us to the client at what, fifty dollars an hour?”

“I haven’t billed anything to anybody yet — I just walked in the door — but yes, that’s the rate.”

“How will you figure it, four men at eight hours a man?”

“Seven hours. We don’t bill for lunch time.”

Seven hours seemed ample, considering that we’d worked four and a half. I said, “Seven times fifty times four of us is what? Fourteen hundred dollars? Plus your own time, of course, and you must bill yourself at more than regular operative’s rates. A hundred an hour?”

“Seventy-five.”

“For seven hours is what, five hundred?”

“Five and a quarter,” he said evenly.

“Plus fourteen hundred is nineteen and a quarter. Call it two thousand dollars to the client. Is that about right?”

“What are you saying, Matt? The client pays too much or you’re not getting a big enough piece of the pie?”

“Neither. But if he wants to load up on this garbage” — I waved a hand at the heap on the desk — “wouldn’t he be better off buying retail? Get a lot more bang for the buck, wouldn’t he?”

He just stared at me for a long moment. Then abruptly, his hard face cracked and he started to laugh. I was laughing, too, and it took all the tension out of the air. “Jesus, you’re right,” he said. “Guy’s paying way too much.”

“I mean, if you wanted to handle it for him, you wouldn’t need to hire me and the other guys.”

“I could just go around and pay cash.”

“Right.”

“I could even pass up the street guys altogether, go straight to the wholesaler.”

“Save a dollar that way.”

“I love it,” he said. “You know what it sounds like? Sounds like something the federal government would do, get cocaine off the streets by buying it straight from the Colombians. Wait a minute, didn’t they actually do something like that once?”

“I think so, but I don’t think it was cocaine.”

“No, it was opium. It was some years ago — they bought the entire Turkish opium crop because it was supposed to be the cheapest way to keep it out of the country. Bought it and burned it, and that, boys and girls, that was the end of heroin addiction in America.”

“Worked like a charm, didn’t it?”

“Nothing works,” he said. “First principle of modern law enforcement. Nothing ever works. Funny thing is, in this case the client’s not getting a bad deal. You own a copyright or a trademark, you got to defend it. Otherwise you risk losing it. You got to be able to say on such and such a date you paid so many dollars to defend your interests and investigators acting as your agents confiscated so many items from so many merchants. And it’s worth what you budget for it. Believe me, these big companies, they wouldn’t spend the money year in and year out if they didn’t figure it was worth it.”

“I believe it,” I said. “Anyway, I wouldn’t lose a whole lot of sleep over the client getting screwed a little.”

“You just don’t like the work.”

“I’m afraid not.”

He shrugged. “I don’t blame you. It’s chickenshit. But Jesus, Matt, most P.I. work is chickenshit. Was it that different in the Department? Or on any police force? Most of what we did was chickenshit.”

“And paperwork.”

“And paperwork — you’re absolutely right. Do some chickenshit and then write it up. And make copies.”

“I can put up with a certain amount of chickenshit,” I said. “But I honestly don’t have the heart for what we did today. I felt like a bully.”

“Listen, I’d rather be kicking in doors, taking down bad guys. That what you want?”

“Not really.”

“Be Batman, tooling around Gotham City, righting wrongs. Do the whole thing not even carrying a gun. You know what they didn’t have in the movie?”

“I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Robin, they didn’t have Robin. Robin the Boy Wonder. He’s not in the comic book anymore, either. Somebody told me they took a poll, had their readers call a 900 number and vote, should they keep Robin or should they kill him. Like in ancient Rome, those fighters, what do you call them?”

“Gladiators.”

“Right. Thumbs up or thumbs down, and Robin got thumbs down, so they killed him. Can you believe that?”

“I can believe anything.”

“Yeah, you and me both. I always thought they were fags.” I looked at him. “Batman and Robin, I mean. His ward, for Christ’s sake. Playing dress-up, flying around, costumes, I figured it’s gotta be some kind of fag S-and-M thing. Isn’t that what you figured?”

“I never thought about it.”

“Well, I never stayed up nights over it myself, but what else would it be? Anyway, he’s dead now, Robin is. Died of AIDS, I suppose, but the family’s denying it, like what’s-his-name. You know who I mean.”

I didn’t, but I nodded.

“You gotta make a living, you know. Gotta turn a buck, whether it’s hassling Africans or squatting out there on a blanket your own self, selling tapes and scarves. Fi’ dollah, ten dollah.” He looked at me. “No good, huh?”

“I don’t think so, Wally.”

“Don’t want to be one of Batman’s helpers. Well, you can’t do what you can’t do. What the fuck do I know about it, anyway? You don’t drink. I don’t have a problem with it myself. But if I couldn’t put my feet up at the end of the day, have a few pops, who knows? Maybe I couldn’t do it either. Matt, you’re a good man. If you change your mind—”

“I know. Thanks, Wally.”

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t mention it. We gotta look out for each other, you know what I mean? Here in Gotham City.”

Ed Gorman is among the best American crime writers to have entered the field in the 1980s and 1990s. His novels and short stories provide fresh ideas, characters, and approaches. Told with genuine feeling, in an often lean, deliberately rough-edged style, his tales are an amalgam of pure entertainment, social commentary, symbolic statement, and in-depth studies of people whom he has described as “outsiders trying to make their peace with the world.”

Beginning with his first novel, Rough Cut (1985), Gorman has created a number of series characters — outsiders and misfits all. The first and most prominent, Jack Dwyer, is a former cop, part-time actor, and security guard who has been featured in six novels, perhaps the most satisfying of which is The Autumn Dead (1987). Other noir creations include an older, more complex private detective, Jack Walsh, who appears in The Night Remembers (1991); and Tobin, a five-foot, five-inch film critic with an explosive temper who is the protagonist of Murder on the Aisle (1987).

Gorman is arguably at the apex of his talents in the nonseries short-story form. His 1992 collection, Prisoners and Other Stories, contains twenty-two uniformly excellent dark-suspense tales, one of which is “The Long Silence After.” Its protagonist, Neely, is a quintessential Gorman character, while the story itself is a quintessential modern hard-boiled tale — at or very near the limit to which the form has evolved to date. As Gorman himself states in his introduction to “The Long Silence After” in Prisoners: “We kill so many people in our stories that I worry we have no sense of real death, or the true spiritual cost of dying. In this story, I wanted to give death at least a little dominion.” He has.

B. P.

The Long Silence After (1992)

The flight from Baltimore was bumpy. Not that Neely cared much. Not now.

At Hertz he asked for a city map. The counter woman, sweet in her chignon and early evening exhaustion, smiled sadly. As if she knew why he’d come here. She gave him the map and a brand new Buick that did not yet smell as if somebody had barfed in it and then covered up the stench with Air-Wick.

He had one more stop to make. The Fed-Ex office near O’Hare. A package waited there for him. He did not unwrap it until he got back to the car.

Inside the red white and blue wrapping, inside the well-lined box, he found what he’d sent himself here last night; a snub-nosed .38. From the adjacent small box he took the cartridges. He would never have gotten this stuff through airport security.

Finally now, he was ready.

He spent four hours driving. Street names meant nothing. Sometimes faces were white, sometimes black. He wanted a certain section. Three times he stopped at gas stations and described the area. How there was this drugstore on one corner and a Triple-XXX theater directly across the street and (cheap irony here) a big stone Catholic church a couple blocks down.

Finally, one guy said, Oh, yeah, and told him where he’d find it in relationship to Rogers Park (which was where he was now).

Around nine, just before he saw the drugstore and the XXX-theater, it started raining. Cold March rain. Beading on the windshield, giving all the neon the look of watercolors.

He found a parking garage. A black guy who had a big chaw of chewing tobacco kept spitting all the time he was taking the keys. And kind of glaring. Fucking suburban white dudes. Motherfuckers anyway.

In the front of the XXX-theater was a small shop where you could rent videos and buy various “appliances” (as they are called). He was never comfortable in such places. Probably his strict Lutheran upbringing. These are places of sin.

The man behind the counter had bad teeth and a wandering left eye. Somehow that was fitting in a place like this.

He described the woman he was looking for but the counter man immediately shook his head. “Don’t know her, pal.”

He described the woman a little more but the man shook his head again. “Sorry,” he said exhaling Pall Mall smoke through the brown stubs of his teeth.

He didn’t expect to get lucky right off, and he sure didn’t. He started at the west end of the street and worked down it: three bars, a massage parlor, a used clothing store, a tiny soup kitchen run by two old nuns, and a bar with a runway for strippers.

And nothing.

Sorry, my friend. Sorry, buddy. Sorry, Jack.

Never seen/heard of her. You know, pal?

And so then he started on the women themselves.

Because of the rain, which was steady and cold, they stood in doorways instead of along the curbsides. The thirty-four degree temperature kept them from any cute stuff. No whistling down drivers. No shaking their asses. No jumping into the streets.

Just huddling in doorways instead. And kind of shivering.

And it was the same with them: no help.

He’d describe her and they’d shrug or shake their heads or pretend they were thinking a long moment and go “Nope, ’fraid not, friend.”

Only one of them got smart-mouth. She said, “She musta been somethin’ really special, huh?” and all the time was rubbing her knuckles against his crotch.

Inside his nice respectable topcoat, the .38 was burning a fucking hole.

Around midnight he stopped in this small diner for coffee and a sandwich. He was tired, he already had sniffles from the cold steady rain, and he had a headache, too. He bought his food and a little aluminum deal of Bufferin and took them right down.

And then he asked the counter guy — having no hopes really, just asking the guy kind of automatically — and the guy looked at him and said, “Yeah. Betty.”

“Yes. That’s right. Her name was Betty.”

Through the fog of four years, through the fog of a liquored-up night: yes, goddammit that’s right, Betty was her name. Betty.

He asked, “Is she still around?”

The counter man, long hairy tattoed arms, leaned forward and gave him a kind of queer look. “Oh, yeah, she’s still around.”

The counter man sounded as if he expected the man to know what he was hinting at.

“You know where I can find her?”

The counter man shook his head. “I don’t know if that’d be right, mister.”

“How come?”

He shrugged. “Well, she’s sort of a friend of mine.”

“I see.”

And from inside his respectable suburban topcoat, he took his long leather wallet and peeled off a twenty and laid it on the counter and felt like fucking Sam Spade. “I’d really like to talk to her tonight.”

The counter man stared at the twenty. He licked dry lips with an obscene pink tongue. “I see what you mean.”

“How about it?”

“She really is kind of a friend of mine.”

So Sam Spade went back into action. He laid another crisp twenty on the original crisp twenty.

The tongue came out again. This time he couldn’t watch the counter man. He pretended to be real interested in the coffee inside his cheap chipped cup.

So of course the counter man gave him her address and told him how to get there.

Fog. Rain. The sound of his footsteps. You could smell the rotting lumber of this ancient neighborhood now that it was soaked. Little shabby houses packed so close together you couldn’t ride a bicycle between some of them. One-story brick jobs mostly that used to be packed with Slavs. But the Slavs have good factory jobs now so they had moved out and eager scared blacks had taken their place.

Hers was lime green stucco. Behind a heavy drape a faint light shone.

He gripped the gun.

On the sidewalk he stepped in two piles of dogshit. And now the next-door dog — as if to confirm his own existence — started barking.

He went up the narrow walk to her place.

He stood under the overhang. The concrete porch had long ago pulled away from the house and was wobbly. He felt as if he were trying to stand up on a capsizing row boat.

The door opened. A woman stood there. “Yes?”

His memory of her was that she’d been much heavier. Much.

He said, “Betty?”

“Right.”

“Betty Malloy?”

“Right again.” She sounded tired, even weak. “But not the old Betty Malloy.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I ain’t what I used to be.”

Cryptic as her words were, he thought that they still made sense.

“I’d like to come in.”

“Listen, I don’t do that no more, all right?”

“I’d like to come in anyway.”

“Why?”

He sighed. If he pulled the gun here, she might get the chance to slam the door and save herself.

He had to get inside.

He put his hand on the knob of the screen door.

It was latched.

Sonofabitch.

“I need to use your phone,” he said.

“Who are you?”

In some naive way, he’d expected her to remember who he was. But of course she wouldn’t.

“Could I use your phone?”

“For what?”

“To call Triple-A.”

“Something’s wrong with your car?”

“The battery went dead.”

“Where’s your car?”

“What?”

“I asked where your car was. I don’t see no new car. And you definitely look like the kind of guy who’d be driving a new car.”

So he decided screw it and pulled the gun.

He put it right up against the screen door.

She didn’t cry out or slam the door or anything. She just stood there. The gun had mesmerized her.

“You gotta be crazy, mister.”

“Unlatch the door.”

“I ain’t got no money, man. I ain’t got nothing you’d want. Believe me.”

“Just unlatch the fucking door or I start shooting.”

“My God, mister, I don’t know what this could be about. I really don’t.”

But she unlatched the door and he went inside.

He closed and locked both doors behind him.

He turned around and looked at the small living room she stood in. The first thing he noticed was that she had not one but two velvet paintings of Jesus above the worn and frayed couch. There was a 17-inch color TV set playing a late movie with Sandra Dee. There was a pressed wood coffee table with only three legs, a stack of paperback books substituting for the missing leg.

She sat on the couch.

He pointed the gun at her.

She said, sounding exhausted now, “You look crazy, mister. I can’t help but tell you the truth. You really look crazy.”

And now he had some idea of how much weight she’d lost. Maybe forty, fifty pounds. And her facial skin was pulled drum-tight over her cheekbones. And her pallor was gray.

There was a bad odor in the place, too, and he didn’t have to ask what it was.

“You fucking bitch,” he said, waving the gun at her. She’d been right. He heard his words. He was crazy.

She looked up at him from sad and weary eyes. “I’m so tired, mister, just from walking over to the door that I can’t— What do you want anyway?”

“You know this is pretty goddamn funny.”

“What is?”

He started pacing. For a time he didn’t talk. Just paced. She watched him. The floorboards creaked as he walked over them.

“You destroy me and you don’t even remember who I am? That’s pretty goddamned good.”

And then she said, seeming to know everything suddenly, “Oh, shit, mister. Now I know why you come here. And all I can say is I’m sorry.”

He turned on her, seized with his fury. “I’ve got a wife and two children. I’ve got a good business. I’m not gay or some junkie or—”

She said, and now her breathing was ragged, and she looked suddenly spent: “How long have you known?”

But he didn’t want to answer questions.

He wanted to shake the gun in her face, the gun that signified how trapped and outraged he felt.

And so he shook it. He went right up to her and shook it in her face and said, “You fucking bitch, couldn’t you have had yourself checked out before you went on the streets?”

Because that was how it had happened. Him visiting Chicago for an insurance convention. Some executive friend of his from Milwaukee who really liked slumming bringing him down here for a little “black poontang” and—

And a week ago his family doctor, just as incredulous as he was, told him. “David, Jesus Christ, these tests can be wrong sometimes but right now it looks as if—”

Only once in eighteen years of marriage had he been unfaithful.

In Chicago.

Insurance convention.

Black woman.

And now he stood above her. “I can’t tell you how badly I want to blow your fucking head off, you bitch.”

She looked up at him and said, “Maybe you’d be doing me a favor. I got maybe six months to go myself, mister, and this is some hard way to die, let me tell you.” Again she sounded completely spent.

“The worst thing is, I may have infected my wife.”

“I know,” she said. “My old man left me when he found out. But it’s probably too late for him, too.”

“You fucking bitch!” he said, no longer able to control himself.

He brought the gun down hard across her jaw.

Almost immediately she started sobbing.

And then he couldn’t hit her anymore.

He heard in her tears the inevitable tears of his wife and children when they found out.

And he couldn’t hit her at all anymore.

She just sat there and sobbed, her whole body trembling, weaker with each moment.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

She just kept crying.

He started pacing again.

“I can’t believe this. I keep thinking that there’s no way I could—”

He shook his head and looked over at her. She was daubing at her nose with an aqua piece of Kleenex.

“Do you get help?”

She nodded. She wouldn’t look at him anymore. “The welfare folks. They send out people.”

“I’m sorry I was so angry.”

“I know.”

“And I’m sorry I hit you.”

“I know that too.”

“I’m just so fucking scared and so fucking angry.”

Now she looked at him again. “The anger goes after awhile. You get too tired to be angry anymore.”

“I don’t know how I’m going to tell my wife.”

“You’ll do it, mister. That’s the only thing I figured out about this thing. You do what you’ve got to do. You really do.”

He dumped the gun in the pocket of his respectable topcoat. And then he took out his wallet and flicked off a hundred dollars in twenties.

“You really must be crazy, mister,” she said. “Leavin’ me money like that.”

“Yes,” he said. “I really must be crazy.”

She started crying again.

He closed the doors quietly behind him. Even halfway down the walk, even in the fog and even in the rain, he could still hear her crying.

There was a three o’clock flight to Baltimore. He wasn’t sure he had nerve enough to tell her yet but he knew he would have to. He owed her so much; he certainly owed her the truth.

He walked faster now, and soon he disappeared completely inside the fog. He was just footsteps now; footsteps.