Act of Fear (6 page)

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but what?’

‘Look at his dream and his family,’ Marty said. ‘One or the other, and sometimes both. You take me, Dan. Sixteen and a lush for a mother, and the college boys treated me like dirt because I was a town girl and not sorority. I decided to be free and famous. A hundred-to-one it’s the family.’

‘Patrolman Stettin is in it somewhere,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

‘And you get mixed up in a cop beating for fifty bucks?’

‘Maybe Jo-Jo’s already dead,’ I said. ‘Damn it, Marty, I can’t even buy that. All he had to do was go to the cops. They’d have had a cop mugger so fast no one would have noticed Jo-Jo.’

‘So what are you going to do? You decided to be a private cop.’

‘I decided to eat,’ I said. ‘A private cop was the only experience I had to sell around here. If I went back to sea, who would take care of you?’

‘The way you take care of me you could have picked up coins in the street. But go ahead, worry about who would take care of me. I like you to worry about that.’

‘You sound like you want me to make you honest.’

‘Maybe I’m getting domestic,’ she said. ‘Or just tired.’

‘That’ll do it,’ I said, ‘and don’t scare me.’

‘Would it scare you so much?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘and that’s the part that really scares me. I might even like it.’

‘I wish I could put your arm back,’ Marty said.

She was lying there in the dark of the big room, smiling at me from the far end of the couch. Face to face ten feet apart with our legs touching. I touched her leg with my hand. She sipped her martini.

‘No one can put back what’s missing, but you put me back into the world,’ I said.

‘Is that what I do?’

She does. Sometimes Marty is the only reason I can think of for getting out of bed in the morning. Sometimes even Marty isn’t reason enough. I get out of bed anyway. There is a very big question in that fact somewhere.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said.

It takes a one-armed man longer to undress. Marty’s bedroom is large, and the bed is king-sized. There is a radio on the bed table and a TV set for watching when she is alone. A neon sign in the street below blinks red and yellow most of the night. Marty likes the blinking sign below, and she likes the noise of a jukebox that filters up. She is afraid of the dark, of hearing no sounds and no voices. She is afraid of going to sleep. In bed she laughs a lot. She plays games. But when the games are over she holds me tight. I know the feeling. I know the need and the fear that fills our world. And now I found myself wondering what Jo-Jo Olsen needed and where he was. I waited in the bed for Marty and wondered if Jo-Jo, too, was lying in some bed somewhere needing voices, afraid to sleep.

‘Dan.’

Her voice was low. I looked. I expected to see her face close in the dark with the expression that she wanted me. She was not close. She was at the bedroom window looking down at the dark street. I got out of bed and went to her. She held the heavy drapes open a crack.

‘There,’ she said.

At this hour the street was all dark. The neon sign had gone off, the jukebox was quiet. It was the edge of morning, and a faint grey tinged the sky to the east. The street itself was the deep black that precedes the dawn. But I saw them.

‘Yes,’ I said softly.

There were two of them. Shadows hidden in a recessed doorway across the street. I knew them. Not their names and not their faces, but I knew them. If we had been in some other country they could have been secret police or assassins waiting for some leader of men. They could have been the thin and starved rebels in too many countries where tyranny still rules. Here and now, on the Village street, they would be none of those things. They were hoods, gunmen, muscle boys; the soldiers of an underworld that was the shame of the country. And from where they waited they had a clear view of only one building – Marty’s building.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘They must be after me. They won’t try to come in.’

‘Dan, I don’t like it.’

‘Neither do I,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

The ways of fear are strange. We wanted each other.

Marty went to sleep just as the dawn came. I lay awake. The two men down there in the street made all this something else.

I wondered what I had got into for fifty bucks and a kid who wanted to find his friend?

Chapter 7

The ringing of the telephone woke me up at ten o’clock. Marty was still asleep, and I wished I was. But I groaned my way to the telephone. The voice on the other end was unfamiliar and official. It identified itself as a Lieutenant Dolan, New York City Police Department, and its message was that Captain Gazzo wanted to see me – now.

I hung up and went back to the bed wondering if this was it. Had they found Jo-Jo? Floating in the river? Under a pile of old garbage in a cellar? I had no doubts what Gazzo wanted to talk about. My feelers on Jo-Jo would not have gone unnoticed at headquarters. And Gazzo is Homicide. I looked at the bed, and my whole body groaned to get back in and vanish under the covers. Instead, I took a deep shudder to try to wake up and touched Marty.

She snarled and burrowed deeper into the pillow. She does not like to wake up any more than she likes to go to sleep. Under the sheet she was small and slender and pale. At that moment it did not seem that there could be anything important enough to leave her for. And yet I would leave. If I could.

I went to the window to check. My two shadows were still there. In a way I felt for them; it must have been a long night. I dressed and went to kiss Marty. She swore at me and flopped over.

‘Don’t open the door to anyone you don’t know,’ I said.

I slapped her rump. She opened one angry eye.

‘You got that?’ I said.

She closed the one eye and nodded.

I slipped out and went down to the first floor. I took the back way out into the yard. I went over a fence and through the building behind Marty’s building and out into the next street. To be sure, I did a few fancy turns around the blocks and through a few more doors and back yards. The heat had instantly drained any desire for breakfast. I settled for two cups of coffee at a luncheonette and took the subway downtown to headquarters.

Captain Gazzo is an old cop. I’ve know him since I was a kid. He knew my mother, and he calls me Dan if it’s not official. He never married; he has only his work. Most of the time he is a good cop, the kind who knows that his job is to help the people of the city, not scare them. He knows that a cop is a necessary evil, and he does not complain often when the rights of citizens get in his way, as they must. But he is human, too, and there are times when the restraints make him swear. There are other times when he says he is crazy, because the world he lives in is crazy and you have to be crazy to handle it. He says that he would not know what to do with a sane person, because he never gets to meet any. He includes me with the insane. Maybe he knows.

Despite the morning hour and the heat, Gazzo’s office was dim behind drawn shades. Gazzo says that the sun does not fit with his work. I could tell by the size of his grey eyes that he had not slept well again. There are those who say that the captain never sleeps at all, that he has no bed, that he does not even really have a home. These people say that Gazzo files himself in his own office when other people sleep. But I know that Gazzo has insomnia. He does not hide this. He says that insomnia is the wound-stripe of the cop, the price you pay. He says it just proves that he is human after all.

This morning he waved me to a seat at once. It was an order, not an offer. He wasted no time on preliminaries.

‘Before you go into the act about your rights, protecting your client, and all that, I’ll give it to you. I know you’re looking for a Jo-Jo Olsen. You think he’s missing. He works around Water Street. My birds sang that much. Now you’ll tell me who, what, when, where, why, and how. Okay?’

That is Gazzo’s trademark: he never uses one word when ten will do. He’s been called Captain Mouth and Preacher Gazzo, and the word is that when Gazzo starts talking you’re dead. They say that Gazzo makes men talk who would have held out under a week of rubber hoses.

‘Joseph “Jo-Jo” Olsen,’ I said. I never hold out unless I have to protect myself. I never know when I might need the cops.

‘Olsen works on Water Street at Schmidt’s Garage,’ I said. ‘He seems to be missing since last Friday morning. I’m trying to find out why and where. A kid friend of his hired me. One Pete Vitanza. So far I haven’t found a hair of Olsen.’

‘Joseph Olsen,’ Gazzo said. He was hearing the name. I could see him run it through the thirty years of police work that was all that his brain contained now. The computer of his mind checked the name against the parade of hoods, con men, hustlers, killers, wife-beaters, muggers, and practitioners of every other crime in the book he had come to know in the thirty years. A card clicked out. ‘Any part of Swede Olsen?’

‘Son,’ I said. ‘Swede is hiding him.’

I told him about Olsen’s inefficient attempt to beat my brains out last night and a certain amount of my interview with the Olsens. I did not tell him about the gun I had used, and I did not mention my impression that the Olsens had trouble of their own. I also left out the two shadows under Marty’s window. Gazzo seemed interested in what I told him, but with the captain you can never tell. I’ve known him for twenty-five years, and I don’t know if he likes me or hates me. With Gazzo it does not matter. He does his job, friend or foe.

Gazzo rubbed the grey stubble of his chin. ‘And the kid works at Schmidt’s Garage?’

‘He did.’

‘He was there last Thursday, but gone on Friday?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Interesting,’ Gazzo said. ‘You have nothing yet on why he ran or where?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Now tell me what you’ve got, Captain. You didn’t drag me down about some unknown kid. What don’t I know? I know about Patrolman Stettin. Is there more?’

Gazzo smiled. ‘I thought you gave up on the world, Dan.’

‘I try, but it hangs around,’ I said. ‘What’s up, Captain?’

Gazzo pressed a button. A policewoman came in. Gazzo seemed surprised to see her. I know that she has been in Gazzo’s office for years. He still looks at her face to see if she needs a shave. He stares at her blue skirt as if sure that something is wrong. Change comes slow in the dim world of Homicide.

‘Jones file, er, Sergeant,’ the captain said.

Gazzo is resigned to knowing and meeting every perversion and horror man can do to man, but he can’t get used to a female sergeant. When she returned he took the file without a smile.

‘Tani Jones, not her right name,’ Gazzo read from the file. ‘Real name: Grace Ann Mertz. Born: Green River, Wyoming. Parents still there. Caucasian; twenty-two years old; blonde; five-foot-eight; 132 pounds. Model and chorus girl. Worked at The Blue Cellar. A tourist club on Third Street.’

Gazzo looked up at me. ‘Your sparrow works in one of the tourist clubs, right?’

‘Monte’s Kat Klub.’

‘She know a Tani Jones?’

‘Not that I know. When Marty puts her clothes back on she forgets the clubs. When we talk shop, it’s acting. Real acting.’

‘Maybe this time?’ Gazzo said. ‘There must have been talk.’

‘She doesn’t socialize with the club girls, Captain. She spends her time, all she can, with the off-Broadway people,’ I explained. ‘What is it? Dead? Killed? Some time last Thursday or Friday?’

It was a simple guess. Gazzo is Homicide. He was interested in a boy who was on Water Street on Thursday and gone on Friday.

‘Thursday afternoon,’ Gazzo said. He went on reading his file. ‘Lived alone in a four-room luxury apartment in a non-doorman building on Doyle Street. Self-service elevator. Body found Friday morning by maid who comes in twice a week. Death from single gunshot wound in the head, close range. Gun was a .38 calibre, probably a small belt gun according to ballistics. The place had been cleaned out. A lot of jewellery was gone. Worth maybe fifteen thousand dollars appraised value. There was an insurance list of the jewellery. Her boyfriend also confirmed what was gone and that nothing else had been touched.’

The captain watched me the whole time he read. I could not figure why. Unless he thought I knew more than I did. What could I know? All right, I got the picture now: Doyle Street was the next block to Water Street. But, as I said before, we get fifty violent crimes a day on the West Side, and a robbery killing doesn’t rate more than a couple of inches in most papers except the
Daily News.
I don’t read the
News.
I read the crime news in the better papers, sure, but I’ve got my own interests, and if I’m not hired for a job, why would I connect a two-bit killing on Doyle Street with a cop mugging on Water Street? I mean, Doyle is a long street.

‘I suppose the building on Doyle backs towards Water Street?’ I said. ‘Same crosstown block as Schmidt’s Garage on Water?’

‘With an alley on the side that opens into both streets,’ Gazzo said.

I thought about the city. Most cities have slums and middle-class areas all properly separated. The rivers make Manhattan special. Manhattan is an island, and there is little space to move in. The result is that the city moves in circles from good to bad and back to good again. You end up with a city in constant flux; with tenements, businesses, private houses, small factories, and luxury buildings all mixed together. And new buildings on polyglot streets are prime targets for burglars.