Manhattan Is My Beat

CHAPTER THREE

I Haarte didn't like the East Village.

When it came to the coin-toss to see who was going to stake out the target's apartment three weeks ago, after they'd gotten back from the Gittleman hit in St. Louis, he was glad Zane'd won.

He paused on East Tenth and looked for surveillance in front of the tenement. Zane'd been there for a half hour and had said the block looked clean. They'd learned that a while ago the target had vanished from his apartment on the Upper West Side-the apartment the U.S. Marshals Service had provided for him-and he'd given the slip to his minders. But that info was old. The feds might've tracked him down again-those pricks could find anybody if they wanted to-and be checking this building out. So this morning Haarte paused, scanned the street carefully, looking for any signs of baby-sitters. He saw none.

Haarte continued along the sidewalk. The streets were piled with garbage, moldy books and magazines, old furniture. Cars doubled-parked on the narrow streets. Several moving vans too. People in the Village always seemed to be moving out. Haarte was surprised anybody moved in. He'd get the fuck out of this neighborhood as fast as he could.

Today Haarte was wearing an exterminator's uniform, pale blue. He carried a plastic toolbox which contained not the tools of the bug-killers' trade but his Walther automatic on which was mounted his Lansing Arms suppressor. Also inside the box was the Polaroid camera. This uniform wouldn't work everywhere but whenever he had a job in New York-which wasn't often because he lived there-he knew the one thing that people would never be suspicious about was an exterminator.

"I'm almost there," he said into his lapel mike. The other thing about New York was that you could seem to be talking to yourself and nobody thought it was weird.

As Haarte approached the building, 380 East Tenth Street, Zane-parked a block away in a green Pontiac- said, "Street's clear. Saw a shadow in his apartment. Asshole's in there. Or somebody is."

For this hit, the way they'd worked it out, Haarte was going to be the shooter, Zane was getaway.

He said, "Three minutes till I'm inside. Drive around back. Into the alley. Anything goes wrong we split up. Meet me back at my place."

"Okay."

He walked into the foyer of the building. Stinks in here, he thought. Dog pee. Maybe human pee. He shivered slightly. Haarte made over a hundred thousand dollars a year and lived in a very nice town house several miles from here, overlooking the Hudson River and New Jersey. So nice he didn't even need an exterminator.

Haarte checked out the lobby and hallway carefully. The target might not be thinking about a hit and Haarte could possibly just call up on the intercom and say that he was there to spray for roaches.

The target might just let him in.

But he might also come to the top of the stairway, aim into the foyer with his own piece, and start shooting.

So Haarte decided on the silent approach. He jimmied the front-door lock with a thin piece of steel. The cheap lock clicked open easily.

He stepped inside and took the pistol from his toolbox. Started down the hall to Apartment 2B.

Rune was surprised, seeing Robert Kelly's building.

Surprised the way people sometimes are when they come to visit a friend for the first time. She'd seen his modest clothes and had expected modest quarters. But she was looking at piss-poor. The brick was scaly, diseased, shedding its schoolhouse-red paint in dusty flakes. The wooden window frames were rotting. Rust water had trickled down from the roof and left huge streaks on the front step and sidewalk. Some tenants had patched broken panes with cardboard and cloth and yellowing newspaper.

Of course she'd known that the East Village wasn't the greatest neighborhood-she came to clubs here a lot and hung out with friends in Tompkins Square Park on Avenue A, dodging the druggies and the wanna-be gangsters. But, picturing the gentlemanly Mr. Kelly, the image that had come to mind of his home was a proper English town house with frilly plaster moldings and flowered wallpaper. Outside would be a black wrought-iron fence and a neat garden.

Like the set in a movie she'd seen as a little girl, sitting next to her father-My Fair Lady. Kelly would sit in the parlor like Rex Harrison, in front of the fire, and drink tea. He would take small sips (a cup of tea lasted forever in English movies) and read a newspaper that didn't have any comics.

She felt uncomfortable, embarrassed for him. Almost wished that she hadn't come.

Rune walked closer to the building. A three-legged chair lay on its side in the bare-dirt garden outside the front stairs. A bicycle frame was fastened with a Kryptonite lock to a no-parking sign. The wheels, chain, and handlebars had been stolen.

Who else lived in the building? she wondered. Elderly people, she supposed. There were a lot of retirees around there. She herself would rather spend her final years there than in Tampa or San Diego.

But how had they happened to end up there? she wondered.

There'd be a million answers.

Them's the breaks…

The building just across the alley from Mr. Kelly's was much nicer, painted, clean, a fancy security gate on the front door. A blond woman in an expensive pink jogger's outfit and fancy running shoes pushed out the doorway and stepped into the alley. She started her stretching exercises. She was pretty and looked disgustingly pert and professional.

Save our neighborhood…

Rune continued to the front stairs of Mr. Kelly's building. An idea occurred to her. She'd pick up the tape but instead of going back to the store she'd take a few hours off. She and Mr. Kelly could go have an adventure.

She'd take him for a long walk beside the Hudson.

"Let's look for sea monsters!" she'd suggest.

And she had this weird idea that he'd play along. There was something about him that made her think they were similar. He was… well, mysterious. There was nothing literal about him-being unliteral was Rune's highest compliment.

She walked into the entryway of his building. Beneath the filth and cobwebs she noticed elaborate mosaic tiles, brass fixtures, carved mahogany trim. If it were scrubbed up and painted, she thought, this'd be a totally excellent place…

She pushed the buzzer to 2B.

That'd be a fun job, she thought. Finding junky old buildings and fixing them up. But people did that for a living, of course. Rich people. Even places like this could cost hundreds of thousands. Anyway, she'd want to paint murals of fairy tales on the walls and decorate the place with stuffed animals and put magical gardens in all the apartments. She supposed there wasn't much of a market for that kind of look.

The intercom crackled. There was a pause. Then a voice said, "Yes?"

"Mr. Kelly?"

"Who is it?" the staticky voice asked.

"Here's Johnnyyyyyyy," she said, trying to impersonate Jack Nicholson in The Shining. She and Mr. Kelly had talked about horror films. He seemed to know a lot about movies and they'd joked about how scary the Kubrick film was even though it was so brightly lit.

But apparently he didn't remember. "Who?"

She was disappointed that he didn't get it.

"It's Rune. You know-from Washington Square Video. I'm here to pick up the tape."

Silence.

"Hello?" she called.

Static again. "I'll be there in a minute."

"Is this Mr. Kelly?" The voice didn't sound quite right. Maybe it wasn't him. Maybe he had a visitor.

"A minute."

"I can come up."

A pause. "Wait there," the voice commanded.

This was weird. He'd always seemed so polite. He didn't sound that way now. Must be the intercom.

Several minutes passed. She paced around the entry-way.

She was looking outside when, finally, she heard footsteps from inside, coming down the stairs.

Rune walked to the inner door, peered through the greasy glass. She couldn't see through it. A figure walked forward slowly. Was it Mr. Kelly? She couldn't tell.

The door opened.

"Oh," she said in surprise, looking up.

The woman in her fifties, with olive-tinted skin, stepped out, glanced at her. She made sure the door closed before she left the entryway so Rune couldn't get inside-standard New York City security procedures when unknown visitors were in the lobby. The woman carried a bag of empty soda and beer cans. She took them out to the curb and dropped them in a recycling bin.

"Mr. Kelly?" Rune called again into the intercom. "You all right?"

There was no answer.

The woman returned and looked over Rune carefully. "Help you?" She had a thick Caribbean accent.

"I'm a friend of Mr. Kelly's."

"Oh." Her face relaxed.

"I just called him. He was going to come down."

"He's on the second floor."

"I know. I'm supposed to pick up a videotape. I called five minutes ago and he said he'd be right out."

"I just walked past his door an' it was open," she said. "I live up the hall."

Rune pushed the buzzer and said, "Mr. Kelly? Hello? Hello?"

There was no answer.

"I'ma go see," the woman said. "You wait here."

She disappeared inside. After a moment Rune grew impatient and buzzed again. No answer. She tried the door. Then she wondered if there was another door- maybe in the side or in the back of the building.

She stepped outside. Walked to the sidewalk and then continued on to the alley. The pert yuppie woman was still there, stretching. The only exercise Rune got was dancing at her favorite clubs: World or Area or Limelight (dancing was aerobic and she also built upper-body strength by pushing away drunk lawyers and account execs in the clubs' co-ed rest rooms).

No, there was nobody else. Maybe she-

Then she heard the scream.

She turned fast and looked at Mr. Kelly's building. Heard a woman's voice, in panic, calling for help. Rune believed the voice had an accent-maybe the woman she'd just met, the woman who knew

Mr. Kelly. "Somebody," the voice cried, "call the police. Oh, please, help!"

Rune glanced at the woman jogger, who stared at Rune with an equally shocked expression on her face.

Then a huge squeal of tires from behind them.

At the end of the alley a green car skidded around the corner and made straight for Rune and the jogger. They both froze in panic as the car bore down on them.

What's he doing, what's he doing, what's he doing? Rune thought madly.

No, no, no…

When the car was only feet away she flung herself backward out of the alley. The jogger leapt the opposite way. But the woman in pink hadn't moved as fast as Rune and she was struck by the side-view mirror of the car. She was thrown into the brick wall of her building. She hit the wall and tumbled to the ground.

The car skidded onto Tenth Street and vanished.

Rune ran to the woman, who was alive but unconscious, blood pouring from a gash on her forehead. Rune sprinted up the street to find a pay phone. It took her four phones, and three blocks, before she found one that worked.