The “I-got-him” voice was starting to straddle me, ready to use the fists he’d used on Diego and Farvo and all the other boys. I didn’t wait for him to finish his straddle, and I didn’t waste a lot of time with him. I jackknifed my leg, and then I shot out with my foot, and I felt the sole of my shoe collide with his crotch, and I was sure I’d squashed his scrotum flat. He let out a surprised yell, and the yell trailed away into a moan of anguish. He dropped to the pavement, clutching at his pain, and I got to my feet and said, “Hello, boys.”
I’d underestimated their numbers. There were four of them, I saw, and four was a little more than I’d bargained for. I-Got-Him was rolling on the floor, unable to move, but the other three with him were very much able to move, and two of them were blocking the mouth of the alleyway now, and the third was a big hulking guy who stood across from me on the opposite wall.
“Having a little sport, boys?” I said.
They couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old. They were big boys, and the summer heat had put a high sheen of sweat on the young muscles that showed where their T shirts ended.
“He ain’t drunk,” one of the boys in the alley mouth said.
“Not drunk at all,” I told him. “Does that spoil the kicks?”
“Let’s get out of here, Mikie,” the other boy blocking the alley mouth said.
The boy opposite me kept looking at me. “Shut up,” he said to the boys. “What’s your game, mister?”
“What’s yours, sonny?”
“I’m asking the questions.”
“And I’ve got the answers, sonny. All of them. I figured you for just one crazy bastard at first. One crazy bastard with strong fists and feet. But then things began getting a little clearer, and I began to figure you for more than one crazy bastard. I asked myself, Why? Why beat up bums, guys with no money? Sure, roll a fruit or roll an uptown lush, but why a Bowery bum. It figured for nothing but kicks then, kicks from a deadly dull summer. And then I asked myself, Who’s got time on their hands in the summer?” I paused. “What high school do you go to, sonny?”
“Take him,” Mikie said, and the two boys rushed in from the alley mouth, ready to take me.
The boys were amateurs. They had got their training in street fights or school fights, but they were strictly amateurs. It was almost pitiful to play with them, but I remembered what they’d done to Farvo, just for kicks, just for the laughs, just for the sport of beating the piss out of a drunken bum, and then I didn’t care what I did to them.
I gave the first boy something called a Far-Eastern Capsize. As he rushed me, I dropped to one knee and butted him in the stomach with my head. I swung my arms around at the same time, grabbing him behind both knees, and then raised myself from one knee and snapped him back to the pavement. He screamed when he tried to break his fall with his hands, spraining them, and then his head hit the concrete, and he wasn’t doing any more screaming. I pulled myself upright just as his pal threw himself onto my back, and I didn’t waste any time with him, either. I went into a Back Wheel, dropping again to my knees, surprising the hell out of him. Before he got over his surprise, I had the little finger of his left hand between my own hands, and I shoved it back as far as it would go, and then some. He was too occupied with the pain in his hand to realize that I was tugging on it, or that his body was beginning to lean over my head. I snapped to my feet again, and he went down, butt over teacups. Then I reached down for him and drove my fist into his face with all my might.
Mikie was huddled against the wall. Mikie was the leader of those pleasure-seekers, and I saved the best for Mikie. I closed in on him slowly, and he didn’t at all like the turn of events, he didn’t at all like being on the other end of the stick.
“Listen,” he said. “Listen, can’t we—”
“Come on, bum,” I said, and then I really closed in.
Detective-Lieutenant Randazzo was very happy to close the case. He was so happy that he asked me afterwards if I wouldn’t like him to buy me a drink. I said no thanks, and then I went home to the Bowery, and that night we all sat around and passed a wine jug, me and Danny and Angelo and Diego and the Professor and Marty and, oh, a lot of guys.
My friends and neighbors.
Kid Kill
It was just a routine call.
I remember. I was sitting around with Ed, talking about a movie we’d both seen when Marelli walked in, a sheet of paper in his hand.
“You want to take this, Art?” he asked.
I looked up, pulled a face, and said, “Who stabbed who now?”
“This is an easy one,” Marelli said, smiling. He smoothed his mustache in an unconscious gesture and added, “Accidental shooting.”
“Then why bother Homicide?”
“Accidental shooting resulting in death,” Marelli said.
I got up, hitched up my trousers, and sighed. “They always pick the coldest goddamn days of the year to play with war souvenirs.” I looked at the frost edging the windows and then turned back to Marelli. “It was a war souvenir, wasn’t it?”
“A Luger,” Marelli said. “Nine m/m with a three and five-eighth-inch barrel. The man on the beat checked it.”
“Was it registered?”
“You tell me.”
“Stupid sons of bitches,” I said. “You’d think the law wasn’t for their own protection.” I sighed again and looked over to where Ed was trying to make himself small. “Come on, Ed, time to work.”
Ed shuffled to his feet. He was a big man with bright red hair, and a nose broken by an escaped con back in ’45. It so happened that the con was a little runt, about five feet high in his Adler elevators, and Ed had taken a lot of ribbing about that broken nose — even though we all knew the con had used a lead pipe.
“Trouble with you, Marelli,” he said in his deep voice, “you take your job too seriously.”
Marelli looked shocked. “Is it my fault some kid accidentally plugs his brother?”
“What?” I asked. I had taken my overcoat from the peg and was shrugging into it now. “What was that, Marelli?”
“It was a kid,” Marelli said. “Ten years old. He was showing his younger brother the Luger when it went off. Hell, you know these things.”
I pulled my muffler tight around my neck and then buttoned my coat. “This is just a waste of time,” I said. “Why do the police always have to horn in on personal tragedies?”
Marelli paused near the table, dropping the paper with the information on it. “Every killing is a personal tragedy for someone,” he said. I stared at him as he walked to the door, waved, and went out.
“Pearls from a flatfoot,” Ed said. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”
It was bitter cold, the kind of cold that attacks your ears and your hands, and makes you want to huddle around a potbelly stove. Ed pulled the Mercury up behind the white-topped squad car, and we climbed out, losing the warmth of the car heater. The beat man was standing near the white picket fence that ran around the small house. His uniform collar was pulled high onto the back of his neck, and his eyes and nose were running. He looked as cold as I felt.
Ed and I walked over to him, and he saluted, then began slapping his gloved hands together.
“I been waitin’ for you, sir,” he said. “My name’s Connerly. I put in the call.”
“Detective/First Grade Willis,” I said. “This is my partner, Ed Daley.”
“Hiya,” Ed said.
“Hell of a thing, ain’t it, sir?”
“Sounds routine to me,” Ed put in. “Kid showing off his big brother’s trophy, bang! His little brother is dead. Happens every damned day of the week.”