See Him Die
by Evan Hunter
I liked Harry. He was a good guy. It was going to be too bad for the guy who turned him in.
1
When you’re the head man, you’re supposed to get the rumble first. Then you feed it to the other kids, and you read off the music, and if they don’t like it that’s their hard luck. They can take off with or without busted heads.
So that’s why I was sore when Aiello comes to me and starts making like a kid with an inside wire. He’s standing in a doorway, with his jacket collar up around his nose, and first off I think he’s got some weed on him. Then I see he ain’t fixing to gather a stone, but he’s got this weird light in his eyes anyway.
“What’re you doing, A?” I said.
Aiello looked over his shoulder as if the bulls were after him. He takes my arm and pulls me into the doorway and says, “Danny, I got something hot.”
“What?” I said. “Your head?”
“Come down, man,” he told me.
“Watch the talk,” I warned him.
“Danny, what I mean this is something.”
“So tell it.”
“Harry Manzetti,” he said. He said it in a kind of a hoarse whisper, and I looked at him funny, and I figured maybe he had just hit the pipe after all.
“What about him?”
“He’s here.”
“What do you mean, here? Where here?”
“In the neighborhood.”
“You’re full of it,” I told him.
“I swear to God, Danny. I seen him.”
“Where?”
“I was going up to Louise’s. You know Louise?”
“I know Louise.”
“She lives on the seventh floor. I spot this guy up ahead of me, and he’s walking with a limp and right off I start thinking of the guys in the neighborhood who limp, and all I come up with is Carl. And then I remember Harry.”
“There must be a million guys who limp.”
“Sure, but name me another one, dad. Anyway, I got a look at his face. It was Harry.”
“How’d you see his face?”
“He went up the seventh floor, too. I was knocking on Louise’s door, and this guy with the limp goes down the end of the hall and sticks a key in the latch. Then he remembers I’m behind him, and he turns to cop a look, and that’s when I see his face. It was Harry, all right.”
“What’d you do?”
“Nothing. I turned away fast so he wouldn’t see I spotted him. Man, that cat’s wanted in more states...”
“You tell Louise this?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Dad, I’m sure.” Aiello looked at me peculiar, and then he turned his eyes away.
“Who’d you tell, A?”
“Nobody. Danny, I swear it on my mother’s eyes. You the first one I’m talking to.”
“How’d he look?” I said.
“Harry? Oh, fine. He looked fine, Danny.”
“Whyn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I just now seen you!” Aiello complained.
“Whyn’t you look for me?”
“I don’t know. I was busy.”
“Doing what? Standing in a doorway?”
“I was...” Aiello paused. “I was looking for you. I figured you’d come by.”
“How’d you figure that?”
“Well, I figured once the word leaked, you’d be around.”
“How’d the word leak if you’re the only one knows it?”
“Well, I figured...”
Aiello stopped talking, and I stopped listening. We both heard it at the same time, the high scream of a squad car siren.
“Cops,” I said.
And then we heard another siren, and then the whole damn block was being busted up all at once, sirens screaming down on it from all the side streets.
2
In fifteen minutes, every damn cop in the city was on our block. They put up their barricades, and they hung around behind their cars while they figured what to do. I spotted Donlevy in the bunch, too, strutting around like a big wheel. He had me in once because some jerk from the Blooded Royals took a slug from a zip gun, and he figured it was one of my boys who done it, and he tried to hang it on me. I told Donlevy where he could hang his phony rap, and I also told him he better not walk alone on our block after dark or he’d be using his shield for a funeral emblem. He kicked me in the butt, and told me I was the one better watch out, so I spit at his feet and called him a name my old man always uses, and Donlevy wasn’t hip to it, so he didn’t get too sore, even though he knew I was cursing. So he was there, too, making like a big wheel, with his tin pinned to his coat so that everybody could know he was a cop. All the bulls were wearing their tin outside, so you could tell them from the people who were just watching. There were a lot of people in the streets now, and the cops kept shoving them back behind the barricades which they’d set up in front of the building where Harry was. It didn’t take an Einstein to figure that somebody’d blown the whistle on Harry and that the bulls were ready to try for a pinch. Only thing, I figured, they didn’t know whether he was heeled or not, and so they were making their strategy behind their cars, afraid to show their stupid faces in case he was heeled. I’d already sent Aiello for the boys, and I hung around on the outside of the crowd now because I didn’t want Donlevy to spot me and start getting wise. Also, there were a lot of bulls all over the place, and outside of the tin you couldn’t tell the bulls from the people without a scorecard, and nobody was selling scorecards. So when a bull’s back was turned and the tin couldn’t be seen, he looked just like anybody else — and Christ knows what bull would spot me somewhere doing something, and I didn’t want to take chances until all the boys were with me.
There was a lot of uniformed brass around the cars, too, and they all talked it up, figuring who was going to be the first to die, in case Harry was carrying a gun. Harry was born and raised right in this neighborhood, and all the kids knew him from when he used to be king of the hill. And Harry was always heeled, even in those days, either with brass knucks or a switch knife or a razor or a zip gun, and later on he had a .38 he showed the guys. That was just before he lammed out — the time he knocked off that crumb from uptown. I remember once when Harry cut up a guy so bad, the guy couldn’t walk. I swear. I mean it. He didn’t only use the knife on the guy’s face. He used it all over so the guy couldn’t walk later, that guy was sorry he tangled with a customer like Harry, all right. They only come like Harry once in a while, and when you got a Harry in your neighborhood, you know it, man. You know it, and you try to live up to the rep, you dig me? You got a guy like Harry around, well hell man, you can’t run the neighborhood like a tea party. You got certain standards and ideals, I guess you would call them. So we was all kind of sorry when Harry had to take off like that, but of course he was getting all kinds of heat by that time, not only from the locals who was after him for that crumb uptown, but also he was getting G-heat because the word was he transported some broads into Connecticut for the purpose of being illegal, leastways that’s the way they read it off on him at the lineup, and I know a guy who was at the lineup personally that time, so this is straight from the horse’s mouth.
But if those cops were wondering whether or not Harry was heeled, I could have saved them a lot of trouble if they wanted to ask me. I could tell them Harry was not only heeled but that he was probably heeled to his eyeballs, and that if they expected to just walk in and put the arm on him, they had another guess coming, or maybe two or three. It didn’t make one hell of a big difference anyhow, because the cops looked as if they took along their whole damn arsenal just to pry Harry out of that seventh floor apartment. The streets were really packed now with people and cops and reporters and the emergency cop truck, and I expected pretty soon we would have President Eisenhower there to dedicate a stone or something. I began to wonder where the hell the boys were, because the rooftops were getting lined pretty fast, and if the cops and Harry were going to shoot this thing out, I wanted to watch him pick them off. And unless we got a good spot on the roof, things would be rugged. I was ready to go looking for Aiello when he comes back with Ferdy and Beef.