He buried his mouth in her throat, and smelled the deep perfume of her, and he murmured helplessly, “I could love you, you dummy, I could really love you.”
He took his mouth from her throat then, and he saw her hand close on the small pistol in her purse. He tried to move away but her hand came up fast, and he felt the muzzle of the gun between the second and third ribs on his left side, and then he heard the explosion. The bullet tore him free from her, and his eyes opened wide in shock, because he had not thought a dummy would have a gun, had not thought a pretty dummy like this one — who could not scream if attacked — would protect herself in some other way.
He staggered back, his hands covering the blood that spurted from his chest. He looked at her face, and the coldness was still there in her eyes, a coldness he could not understand. He moved his lips, but no sound came from his mouth, and he felt his legs weakening under him, and he kept staring at her face, and the coldness there, and he realized suddenly that the coldness was not there for him but for the other man a long time ago, the man who had stolen her voice.
His eyes glazed over, and he dropped to the floor, and then he made a crawling, painful reach for her, his big bloodstained hand outstretched. The girl backed away, and the muscles of her throat quivered, and her lips trembled, and then a surprised, awed look came into her eyes.
His hand dropped. He saw her only dimly now, but he heard the scream burst from her mouth, a high, penetrating scream, shrilling into the shack. And then the scream changed to something exultant, something wild in its ecstasy, and it rose higher and higher, louder and louder, assailing his ears until he died.
Private Eyes
Good and Dead
Starting with its very first issue in January of 1953, and continuing through July of 1954, Manhunt published seven stories featuring an alcoholic former private eye named Matt Cordell. All of these stories carried the Evan Hunter byline. Cordell was my stab at creating a private eye character who was something different for his time. It amuses me when some reviewers call the 87th Precinct novels “hard-boiled.” I think of them as bittersweet, lyrical, even sometimes sentimental. But hard-boiled? You want hard-boiled, try the Matt Cordell stories. The one that follows was published in July of 1953, and is the tamest of the lot. In fact, Cordell is almost likable in this story, a trait not often attributed to him.
He was a small man, small in stature and small in social significance. Another bum, another wino, another panhandler. A nobody.
But he was Joey, and we’d shared the warmth of many a doorway together, tilted the remains of countless bottles of smoke together, worked the Bowery from end to end like partners, like friends.
He was Joey, but he was dead.
He was tattered in death, as he had been when alive. His clothes were baggy and ill-fitting, rumpled with the creases of park benches and cold pavements, stinking with the sweat of summer’s heat, crawling with the lice that were the legged jewels of the poor.
“Shall we get the cops, Matt?” someone asked.
I nodded and kept looking down at Joey and at the bright stain of blood on the side of his head, the matted hair soggy and dirt encrusted where the bullet had entered.
Cooper Square, and the statue of Peter Cooper looked down with bronze aloofness, hemmed in by a grilled fence, surrounded by empty park benches. Cooper Square, and a summer night as black as a raven’s wing, sprinkled with a dazzle of stars that Joey would never see again.
I felt empty.
“Why’d anyone want to kill a bum, Matt?” one of the winos asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Across the street, the squat structure that was Cooper Union fought with the Third Avenue El for dominance of the sky. A boy and a girl hugged the shadows of the building, walking their way slowly toward the small park and the cluster of winos. There was a mild breeze on the air, a summer breeze that touched the skin with delicate feminine hands. There was a hum on the air, too, the hum of voices on fire escapes, of people crowding the streets, of the day dying as Joey had died.
And over the hum came the wail of a siren, and the winos faded back into the anonymity of the Bowery, blending with the shadows, merging with the pavements and the ancient buildings, turning their backs on the law.
I turned my back, too. I walked away slowly as the siren got louder. I didn’t turn for another look. I didn’t want another look.
Chink was waiting for me outside the flophouse I’d called home for close to three months.
He was standing in the shadows, and I’d have missed him if he hadn’t whispered, “Matt?”
I stopped and peered into the darkened doorway. “Who’s that?”
“Me. Chink.”
“What is it?”
“You got a minute, Matt?”
“I’ve got a lifetime. What is it?”
“Joey.”
“What about him?”
“You were friends, no?”
I stared into the darkness, trying to see Chink’s face. It was rumored that he came originally from Shanghai and that he could speak twelve Chinese dialects. It was also rumored that he’d been a big man in China before he came to the States, that he’d come here because of a woman who’d two-timed him in the old country. That gave us a common bond.
“You were friends, weren’t you, Matt?”
“We were friends. So?”
“You know what happened?”
“I know he was killed.”
“Do you know why?”
“No.” I stepped into the doorway. There was the sickish smell of opium about Chink, overpowering in the small hallway. “Do you?”
“No.”
“Then why the hell are you wasting my time?”
“I got an idea, Matt.”
“I’m listening.”
“Are you interested?”
“What the hell are you driving at, Chink? Spit it out.”
“Joey. I think he was killed for some reason.”
“That’s brilliant, Chink. That’s real...”
“I mean, I don’t think this was just an ordinary mug-and-slug, you follow? This was a setup kill.”
“How do you figure?”
“I think Joey saw too much.”
“Go smoke your pipe, Chink,” I said. I started to shove past him. “Joey was usually too drunk to see his own hand in front of...”
“Harry Tse,” Chink said.
It sounded like Harry Shoe. “Who’s Harry Shoe?”
“He was killed the other night, Matt. You heard about it, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“They thought it was a tong job. Harry was big in his own tong.”
“What is this, Fu Manchu?”
“Don’t joke, Matt.”
“Okay, Chink, no jokes. What makes you think they tie?”
“Something Joey said when I told him about Harry.”
“When was this?”
“Yesterday. He said, ‘So that’s who it was.’ ”
“That doesn’t mean a damned thing, Chink.”
“Or it could mean a lot.”
“Stop being inscrutable. So it means a lot, or it means nothing. Who gives a rat’s backside?”
“I thought Joey was your friend.”
“He was. He’s dead now. What do you want me to do? The cops are already on it.”
“You used to be a shamus.”
“Used to be, is right. No more. Joey’s dead. The cops’ll get his killer.”
“You think so? They’re already spreading talk he fell and cracked his head that way even though there’s a bullet hole in him. They say he was drunk. You think they’re gonna give a damn about one bum more or less?”