I touched under my left eye, then pointed to my chin. “Scars, here and here?”
“That’s him.”
I got my wallet out and handed him a C-note. “I wasn’t here, understand? The rent was overdue and you got fed up and popped the latch, found them like this.”
Luck was nodding as he slipped the hundred in his pants. “Okay by me, mister.”
My cab was still waiting.
“What scenic part of the city do want to view next?” the cabbie asked.
“The Waldorf.”
“Astoria?”
“Cafeteria. Near MacDougal Alley.”
7
Late Sunday afternoon at the Waxworks was pretty slow: a sprinkling of hipsters, a handful of civilians catching an early supper or a slice of pie before heading back to the real world after a few hours in Little Bohemia.
The skinny redheaded busboy, whose horn-rimmed glasses were patched at the bridge with adhesive tape, his pimples mingling with freckles to create a Jackson Pollock canvas, was taking a break, slouched in a chair propped against a wall, smoking beneath a no smoking sign decorated with cigarette burns. He had the gawky, geeky look of a teenager having a hard time with puberty; but on closer look he was probably in his midtwenties, and he had a tattoo of a hula girl on his thin right forearm. His busboy’s tray was on the table before him like a grotesque meal.
I sat down beside him and he frowned, irritably, but said rather politely, “You want this table, mister?”
“No, Allen,” I said, and smiled, “I want to talk to you.”
His eyes, which were a sickly green, narrowed. “How do you know me?”
“Friend of a friend.”
“What friend?”
“Joe Greenberg. Or do you know him as Harold Weinberg?”
He swallowed nervously, almost lost his balance in his propped-back chair; righting it, he sat forward. “Joe just works here is all. He’s off right now.”
“He’s off, all right. You wouldn’t happen to know where I could I find him?”
Another swallow. He started drumming his fingers on the table and he didn’t look at me as he said, tremulously, “No. I ain’t seen him today. You try his flop?”
“Matter of fact, yeah. He wasn’t there.”
“Oh, well...”
“Two friends of his were. Dead ones.”
The eyes locked right onto me now; he was surprised, genuinely surprised — these murders were news to him.
“Oh, didn’t he mention that, Allen? That he killed two people? Maybe you knew ’em — Max Bodenheim and his wife Ruth. Good customers.”
The ruddy flesh around the pimples and freckles got pale. “Hell. Shit.”
“If you’re letting him hole up at your place, Allen, you’re putting yourself in line for an accessory to murder rap.”
His lips were quivering. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ... Are you a cop?”
“Private. I was hired to find Bodenheim on a business matter. I don’t want to get involved any more than you do.”
His voice lowered to a whisper; what he said was like a profane prayer: “Shit... I gotta get him out of there!”
Sometimes it pays to play a hunch.
“Allen, let’s help each other out on this...”
In 1954, I was licensed in five states to carry firearms in the course of my business, and New York was one of them. I had learned long ago that while my need for a weapon was infrequent, traveling naked could be a chilly proposition; after all, even the most innocuous job had the potential to turn ugly.
So, after a detour back to the Lexington to pick up my nine millimeter and shoulder harness, I took a cab to the address Allen Spiegel had given me: 311 East 21st, near Second Avenue. Joe/Harold had come up in the world, all the way from the bleak Bowery to the godforsaken Gashouse district.
A wind was whipping the remnants of yesterday’s snow around in a chilly dust storm. Stepping around a derelict huddling in the doorway, I entered the four-story frame rooming house, a cold, dank breeding ground for cockroaches. Allen was waiting just inside, a frightened host in a shabby sweater and faded jeans.
“The pay phone’s on the second floor,” he whispered, nodding toward the stairway. “Should I go ahead and call ’em?”
“After you see me go in. It’s down that way?”
He nodded and pointed.
“Don’t let him see you,” I advised.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
The busboy’s room was toward the back of the first floor, with (Allen had informed me) a window that looked out on a backyard that served as a courtyard for adjacent tenements. I glanced around to see if anyone was looking — nobody was but Allen, peeking from beside the stairwell — and I took out my nine millimeter and, with my free hand, knocked.
The voice behind the door was Joe’s: “What?”
“Allen sent some food over from the Waxworks,” I said. “He thought you might be hungry.”
The silence that followed lasted forever. Or was it ten seconds?
Then the door cracked open and I got a sliver of Joe’s pasty face before I shouldered my way in, slamming the door behind me, shoving the gun in Joe’s face.
“You want to tell me about it, Joe?”
He backed away. He wore a blue work shirt and jeans and he wasn’t smiling, anymore; his eyes bore raccoon circles. He didn’t have to be told to put up his hands.
The room was no bigger than the one at the other rooming house — another of those “furnished rooms,” which is to say a scarred-up table, a couple ancient kitchen chairs, a rusty food-spotted electric stove, unmade Army cot and a flimsy nightstand, fixtures any respectable secondhand store would turn down. The wallpaper was floral and peeling, the floor bare, the window by the bed had no curtains, but a frayed shade was drawn.
On the nightstand was a hunting knife in a black sheath. No sign of a gun.
“You,” he said, pointing at me, eyes narrowing, “you’re that guy from the Waxworks...”
“That’s right.”
“What are you doing here? What are—”
“I had an appointment this afternoon with Max and Ruth. They couldn’t keep it, so I’m keeping it with you.”
He ventured a facial shrug. “Gee, I haven’t seen them since last night at the Waxworks.”
“Gee, then how’d they wind up dead in your flop?”
He didn’t bother trying to take his lame story any further. He just sat, damn near collapsed, on the edge of the cot. That hunting knife was nearby but he didn’t seem to notice it. Anyway, that was what I was supposed to think.
I dragged over a kitchen chair and sat backward on it, leaning forward, keeping the nine millimeter casually trained on him. “What went wrong with your little party, Joe?”
He exploded in a rush of words: “They were just a couple of low-life Communists! Mad Max, hell, he was a walking dead man, and his wife was a common slut! A couple of lousy Reds, through and through!”
“Not to mention inside and out,” I said. “When you hit that artery, it must have sprayed like a garden hose.”
His eyes widened with the memory I’d just triggered.
“You didn’t mean for this to happen, did you, Joe? You just wanted to get laid, right?”
And that wide smile flashed, nervously. “Yeah. Just wanted to tear off a little piece from that gutter-trash quail, like half the fucking Village before me...” The smile turned sideways, and he shook his head. “Shit. She sure was cute, wasn’t she?”
“How’d it happen, Joe?”
Slumping, staring at nothing, he spoke in the singsongy whine of a child explaining itself: “I thought he fell asleep, reading, the old fart. When he ran out of whiskey, you know, I gave him some wine, and after he drained that, I thought the bastard was out for the night. Or I else wouldn’ta, you know, started fooling around with Ruth on the bed...”