Manhattan Mayhem: New Crime Stories From Mystery Writers of America Page 18

  One Saturday morning, Sally got him to go to a new temple on Fourteenth that Izzy had joined. Sam pretended to like the droning lay cantor, the very young rabbi, the short ladies telling him how handsome he was. But it was hard for him to hear anything while in the pews because of Izzy, five rows up, reciting loudly, davening like a man with fumes on the brain during prayer. He didn’t know if Izzy saw him there.

  Sally was taking classes at City College and had to study, so she and Sam necked in the car she’d just purchased and regretted already, and then he drove her home.

  Sunday he took a bus to where Izzy worked at a tire store. Sam knew the street the shop was on. Parking was tight even up to the apron of the shop, and he had to approach between cars. Izzy was outside, signing a paper for a deliveryman who brought a tire that now leaned against Izzy’s shin. When the guy left, Izzy looked after the truck a moment, and then he took the tire to a car on the far side of the shop door. He unlocked the trunk with a key, lifted the trunk gate, and put in the tire; he shut it and looked around again. Sam was already stooped between cars. It was too noisy on the street to talk to him there. He would wait until Izzy was back inside.

  A mechanic came in from the garage at the same time Sam pulled open the shop door and asked Izzy if that was the tire delivery. Izzy said no. The mechanic left grumbling.

  When Izzy faced the front and saw Sam, he said, “You would come here?”

  Sam waited a beat and then said, “Why’d you do a thing like that, Iz?”

  Izzy tipped his head down, looked this way and that at the floor, then met Sam’s gaze and said, “Shut your face, oh-holier-than-thou.”

  “Iz, Iz. You need extra dough? I can—”

  “Not from you.”

  “You can’t do that, Iz, come on.”

  “Maybe it’s not what you think.”

  “Maybe it is,” Sam said.

  Did he have the thing right, though? What if Izzy intended to deliver the tire to someone else, and it was a different tire the mechanic was expecting?

  A customer came in. Sam hung around reading wall charts and tire labels. The man paid a balance from work previously completed, telling Izzy to be sure to thank his boss again for letting him run a tab. When the customer was out the door, Izzy stayed behind the counter. He said, “I got one question.”

  “Fire it up,” Sam said.

  “Are you or are you not a stinkin’ rat-fink Communist?”

  “Look, Izzy, that’s not it, and you know it. Some things, they just come to you. You don’t mean for it to happen. Sally and I love each other, we really do. It’s been a year. No. Seven months, two weeks, and three days I’ve known it was her. I’d like you to be my best man, Iz. Will you do that for us? Day before Valentine’s Day, Sally says, so I won’t forget the anniversary. Do that for us, Iz?”

  The color dropped from Izzy’s face. He reached under the counter and brought up an oil-smeared tire iron, laid it on the counter slowly, and said, “How you like them apples, Sergeant?” Sergeant—with a level of contempt in his voice you’d expect from a bad stage actor. And sure, Sam would know about bad theater, because Sally had him take her to plays uptown, so they could claim some culture, too.

  Like tonight. Tonight he and Sally would hop the subway, grab a dog off a cart, and go see Annie Get Your Gun. Afterward, they would steer around the corner to a hot spot for a drink. Sam’s mother had been helping Sally with a sewing project. She wouldn’t say what; he only knew it was a dress. On the subway, Sally held a giant shawl tight around her so Sam couldn’t see, but when they got off and she spread open the soft-cream shawl, the sight near knocked the wind out of him. The design bared the shoulders, pinched the waist, flowed down to a boat-collar moat at the top of the hips, and then drove a waterfall of ruby red to just below the knees. On her feet were black heels with red silk roses on the tops.

  After the play and a short stop for cheesecake at the end of the block, they walked toward the subway. The air was perfect. You could see the stars even through the sign glare. Sam wished he could conjure the night to go on longer than the ten hours it was meant to be. But when he spotted a police call box two feet down an alley on the way to the subway, he apologized but said he wanted to phone in because Hirsch liked that.

  When she saw him come back from the call box, Sally said, “You have to go now, don’t you? Go, baby. I can get myself home just fine.”

  “Nope. I’ll take my goodnight kiss on the steps, thank you.”

  He tried showing spirit the whole way to Sally’s place, but he knew his body odor was growing, and he kept his arms to his side. In front of her door he kissed her deeply, let her go in, and waved goodbye through the glass. Then he took himself to the scene of the crime: the old tenement apartments on Avenue C, where Sally’s brother Izzy and her mother lived. He didn’t know what was going on exactly, but he sure didn’t want her there.

  Number 216.

  Detective Hirsch threaded his way down the sidewalk and up the stoop, where barrier rope stretched across the front of the handrails. He showed his ID to the beat cop, then saw Sam approaching and waited. Other cops were keeping away the googly eyes and one female tenant coming home from a shift job. Nothing to see but cop cars on the street.

  Inside was another matter. Inside was blood in moats along the hardwood floor between the walls and carpet. Speckled lampshades and pictures. A blotch of blood had soaked into the shoulder of the light-green couch near the window, where Mrs. Jacobs had held back the curtain the last time Sam saw her. The white doilies were off the headrest and one arm.

  Izzy’s body lay in the kitchen. At the moment Sam came up, the photog was snapping a close-up of Izzy’s face, where a V-shaped cut had been made near his mouth all the way to the cheekbone. Detective Hirsch said that kind of slice was usually meant for chumps in prison, the scarring designed as a dead-sure label for a snitch. It was “off” to have it carved on a corpse. “You taking notes, Rabinowitz?”

  Sam had his notebook out, but had only entered the brush-blood on the doorjamb of the apartment. His head felt full of gelatin. Those weren’t watery eyes, oh no. That wasn’t sour gag in his throat.

  Iz. Stickball Iz. Model airplane Iz. Comrade-in-arms Private Isadore Jacobs. Soon to be brother-in-law Izzy. How could it be? Sam’s thoughts raced to Sally. How could she endure this? He held her in his mind as if he held her in his arms, as if the power could transfer. God help her if anyone told her before he did.

  Detective Hirsch led Sam down the hallway to the bedroom, pointing out smears at elbow level. “He was dragging her. Look here at the marks on the floor,” he said, pointing to black marks. Old lady Jacobs always wore lace-up witch shoes with black soles.

  In the room, Hirsch nodded toward the bed where Mrs. Jacobs lay on her stomach in the middle, head over the side as if searching for something that fell on the floor. Sam could see the side of her face, so he knew it was her, though her hair was tinted red, not the gray as he’d last seen it. Tinted because her mood had improved so much, and Sally had gone over and helped her mother do it, and they almost did it to her own.

  Detective Hirsch said, “Come closer.” Sam did, near the legs of Mrs. Jacobs, and knew what he was supposed to see, and didn’t want to. Hirsch shone his flashlight on her flank, where pale red bruises had formed under smears of blood and feces.

  When Sally buzzed to let Sam in, she was still in her nightgown. With Sam was Sally’s aunt, who lived in Brooklyn. Sally flicked her glance between them but didn’t need to say a thing to know she was about to absorb a horror. They guided her to the couch, and the two sat with Sally and then told her, and took turns cradling the child she became.

  Sam was parked in a room by himself at the station, a closet that had been turned into a place where officers could write reports. Detective Hirsch wanted him to have no distractions. He told him to write down the name of every person he thought Isadore Hadwin Jacobs knew, from kindergarten to Krautland.

  Izzy’s father had
also been informed, of course, and was told to come to the station the next day for an interview, but Sam doubted he was involved.

  Sam kept asking Detective Hirsch if he would please have someone check on Mike Kelley to make sure his friend was all right. Why wouldn’t he be? Sam asked himself, even as he kept seeing Mike and Izzy, Izzy and Mike in most every memory flashing in.

  Because Sam’s mother had gone to Florida for a wedding of a childhood friend, he was able to bring Sally over to his apartment that night. They lay in his bed while she talked and cried, and then they got up and he fixed her something to eat, and they talked, and they lay back down and talked some more. Next to Sam’s bed was a pull-down shade with a chomp at the side. He didn’t remember how it got there. The moon filled it, and the gray shadows of its face seemed to be laughing at him. They slept. He woke with Sally kissing him. It didn’t take long before he entered her, and afterward he was saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and she was whispering, “No baby, I wanted you to, I wanted you to.”

  She got up to go to the bathroom. Back in bed, she said she was bleeding. Again he said he was sorry. She said nothing this time.

  Despite himself, he fell back to sleep. As dawn was glowing through the hole of the shade, he felt Sally’s warm breath and then her lips on his and heard her say, “Hold me again, Sammy; you have to hold me, or I can’t live.”

  Pain from feeling helpless can be worse than from a thing over and done with, like watching a sick person die versus the death itself. Every day that passed without an answer to who killed Izzy and the mother slapped Sam in the face. He had his own precinct’s assignments, and Sally required much of his off-hours time, so he pestered the detectives in Precinct Seven every other day, until he suspected they conveniently weren’t there to answer. He’d seen Mike Kelley at the services and tried to talk with him, but all Mike did was walk around inside and outside like an ice pop with the color drained out.

  A month to the day after the murders, two men in a basement game room on East Thirteenth were rubbed out. One was a gopher for the owner, the other a regular player. The owner lost only a finger from a pistol shot. He said he knew from the get-go it was mobsters imitating the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The dogs, he called them, wore fake cop uniforms, pretending to bust his joint. “I saw dirty shoes coming down the steps. Then this one mope had a button off. Our cops don’t dress like that.” Proud of NYPD cops even while he broke the law. He ordered them out with an unloaded shotgun from a shelf, and that he shouldn’t have done.

  Detective Samuel Rabinowitz and a probie wrote it up, the probie drawing the scene with templates that had cutouts for arrows and rooms and bodies. Sam asked the owner if he could remember anything else. “Yeah, there was this one, hung back by the stairs. He had a crew cut and red hair. Very pale, like an albino. He was screaming while the shooter grabbed my money and Jimmy was moaning on the floor. I loved that Jimmy, like a son he was. I’m gonna make pig-slop out of them that did it, soon as I can.”

  Was Mike Kelley the only redhead with a crew cut in the borough of Manhattan? Of course not. But Sam’s impulse was to go with what you know.

  He took a jog off his assigned route after looking up the fur store Mike’s uncle on his father’s side owned. Mr. Kelley had to buzz him in—so many walk-away thefts going on, he explained. Mike was in the back; he’d get him.

  Mike and Sam stood squeezed between two racks of furs. Sam’s nose itched. He barely even had to open his mouth when Mike, after being sure his uncle was out of earshot, said, “Not here, Sammy.” He told Sam to meet him in Tompkins Square Park. “That giant elm in the center? The one, you know, half of it’s dead from beetles? Nine o’clock. It’s dark by then.”

  Under a light pole, the light further helped by a full moon, Sam eyed Mike’s boots as the men sat down on the bench. “Fancy wear there, partner.”

  “Pampa boot. Cost a few pennies, yeah.”

  He was going to comment on Mike’s shirt, too, but Mike beat him to it to criticize his own. “Hawaiian now? Stylish. Police work must be good to you.”

  They nodded affirmative to each other and looked across the pathway at the silhouettes of a girl and guy making out on the grass. “You need to go break that up?” Mike asked. “Oh, you don’t have your badge on.”

  “Mike. What you got to tell me?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “You wasn’t where?”

  “That game room that got shot up. Somebody told me someone saw a redhead. It wasn’t me. I heard.”

  “You seen Tino Caruso lately?”

  Mike got up and went to the edge of the walkway. All of a sudden he started doing jumping jacks. He said for Sam to come join him and laughed stupidly.

  Sam went over and grabbed him by the back of the collar and shoved him back onto the bench. “Izzy. What happened with Izzy? You know. I know you know.”

  Mike’s face shone from a burst of July sweat. His eyelashes were pale smiles from the side. But Mike wasn’t smiling, and in a swift motion he lowered his head, and put his hands to his face, and silently sobbed.

  Sam got it out from him. Tino Caruso had had Izzy wiped. The mother wasn’t supposed to be part of it. When Mike heard Mrs. Jacobs had been violated besides having taken a pistol shot to the back of the head, he disappeared for two days, later making an excuse that he tripped on a curb and knocked himself out, and spent those days in a hospital unidentified. That explained the bruises from banging his head against an alley wall, the reason his eyes were ringed in green and black. “He’ll bump me off too, he knows I talked to you.”

  “Doesn’t he live around here? Why’d we come here, then?”

  “Uptown, near Stuyvesant. He’s loaded now, from rip-offs. He works for a big guy named Harry Gross. Some he does on his own, on the side.”

  “Why in hell did you get involved, Mike?”

  “The take-down on Thirteenth, he made me come along. I swear I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

  “And why’d he do Izzy? Why carve up his face like that?”

  “Tino didn’t do it himself.”

  “I don’t care about that. I want the guy who did it. His name?”

  “He goes by Hambone. Izzy flapped his yap about Tino’s new career. Somebody talked to somebody. That somebody was a cockroach. He told Tino. I’m scared like I never been, Sammy. What’ll I do?”

  “You have to go down, Mike, you know that.”

  “Pop me now, Sammy. They send me upriver, I’m meat for the taking.” Then he sank to his knees and cried so hard, no sound came out. Sam pulled him sideways and squeezed, telling him it would be all right, although of course it wouldn’t be. Again, nothing was the same. Nothing ever would be.

  Sam walked Mike to the street, where they were going to go their separate ways. Then Mike said he was sure he saw Hambone’s car drive slowly by. Hambone, the muscle for Tino. The one who cut up Izzy and maybe got nasty with Mrs. Jacobs. A groan came out of Mike, right before he turned and puked in the grass.

  Sam had his handkerchief out for him when he rose back up. “You’re coming with me.”

  When he got Mike to the station, Detective Hirsch convinced the captain to put him in a safe house in Queens until he could be used in a courtroom for state’s evidence.

  When he lifted his cigarette from the ashtray, Hirsch’s fingers made the cig look like a toothpick. Sam wished he had those damn fine weapons. He told Hirsch that Mike Kelley said that Tino meant the game room disaster to be strategic, to send a message to all his suckers.

  “Tino’s IQ can’t lift a fly off a feather. I can locate him before anyone else can. The piece of dirt acting as his muscle is Fishel Gross, a nephew of mobster Harry. He goes by Hambone. Let me put the word out that I maybe want in on Tino’s action. We set it up, we take him down.”

  Detective Hirsch raised his voice to tell Sam to stay out of it until he could put a team together. “For now, you’re under orders to cool it.” Sam left the meeting with an
ache in his gut. He liked Hirsch. He liked the job, his brothers, his badge. Don’t do this, he kept telling himself.

  He’d already found out from Mike that Tino’s routine on Thursdays after eating out was to go home, call up a girl, do their business, and have her gone by midnight so he could fall asleep reading Captain America comics with his Magnavox radio set to WMCA. Clockwork. Sam recalled that was the one thing Tino was good at.

  The night air was stifling, windows open everywhere. Sam studied the building to locate where Tino’s window would be. He took the fire escape on the north side. Some people kept wooden sticks in the window so it would open only so far. Not Tino. He must feel invincible, Sam thought. He stepped through, not even a curtain or drape to push aside, right into his bedroom.

  Tino’s weapon lay on the side table where anyone could lift it. Sam tucked the gun in his waistband and then leaned down to clamp a hand over Tino’s mouth. He almost drew back. The man slept with his nose on—Groucho glasses hooked to a nose, without the furry eyebrows. Did he wear those with his lady visitors? Maybe they thought it was cute.

  He covered Tino’s mouth to wake him up, then made him sit in a chair. Tino, naked except for shorts, kept wrapping his torso with his arms as if he’d never been in a military shower. Sam told him he could put his clothes on in a minute. Sam sat on the edge of the bed with his gun on his leg and decided he wasn’t going to lay it all on Tino right there, right then, but he did say, “It wasn’t your nose you lost, Tino. It was your heart.”

  Tino’s face was scarred beyond what the rifle bullet had done. He must have had some failed surgeries that affected his cheeks; hence, the casual comment about it looking waxy.