Manhattan Mayhem: New Crime Stories From Mystery Writers of America Read online

  Not long after, in the summer of 1987, Mikey did something even worse.

  The video was sent to me by a friend in L.A. At first, I figured it was some more good San Fernando Valley porno, but no, this was a PBS news story showing some meatball walking across the stage at something-or-other junior high school in Irvine, California. And the meatball is Mikey.

  The auditorium is full of children. Mikey’s got himself a cheap-looking suit and a white shirt but no tie. He’s put on some weight. He’s got a real serious look on his face. A fat lady introduces him as Michael Ticci, and Mikey goes to the podium and takes the microphone.

  And he tells the students he comes from a prominent crime family in New York, where he was born and lived for all his life until a few months ago, when he quit crime, moved to California, got straight. He doesn’t name the family business. He tells about growing up in Little Italy, how it was a wonderful place for a kid, but he always thought there was something wrong about it. Then he tells how his great-great-grandfather built up a “wholesale food and produce” business before not-completely-honest men took it over. He’s standing up there with this kind of frown on his face, talking shit about his own family. In public, on TV, to a bunch of children!

  And you could see the emotion in him. His eyes go kind of squinty and he gestures with his hands and his voice cracks when he talks about “beating that man until he nearly died,” and “Uncle Lou coming back from prison white as a ghost, with black hatred in his eyes,” and how difficult it is to get the smell “of another man’s blood off your hands,” and “what it’s like to live in a world where men substitute love of money for love itself, where money and power are all that matter, where there are no laws or limits.” He said Little Italy was gone now, it was just a skeleton of what it used to be, because organized crime had eaten it out “like a cancer.”

  I watched the whole thing with my guts in a knot. Mikey had finally found something to say. I’d have gotten on a plane to California that day if it wasn’t for the family. I’d have choked him to death bare-handed and pissed on his face when I was done. But the arrangement was the arrangement, and there was nothing I could do about Mikey while Uncle Jimmy was alive.

  Ten years went by, and I’d like to say I didn’t think about Mikey out there in California, but I did.

  I thought about him a lot.

  People like to think God lets things happen for a reason, and they’re right. Why else would the family decide to have a sixty-fifth birthday party for Uncle Jimmy? And why else would Mikey LiDecca decide to sneak back and see his father? And why, when Mikey went to his old house on Grand that morning to see his old man for the first time in eleven years, walked right up and rang the intercom on the gate outside, and when Jimmy heard his son’s voice, of course he let him in, why, when they sat in the old kitchen with Christina and the girls long gone, did Jimmy’s heart just give up? Why did he die in Mikey’s arms right there, one day before he was going to turn sixty-five? Answer me that.

  I offered Mikey a ride home from the hospital, where the medics had rushed Jimmy and Mikey, just in case there was a miracle waiting for the old man. There was not.

  Mikey gave me a long, kind of foggy look. “Thanks, Ray.”

  I parked my Caddy near the house on Grand. “You gotta see this, Mikey.”

  “What’s that, Ray?”

  “It’s not far.”

  We walked down Grand, past Elizabeth and Mott and Mulberry. Like we’d done a million times as boys. It was still sunny out, but cold. Mikey shuffled along next to me, looking down.

  “You said on TV that it got eaten up by a cancer,” I said. “But I say, fuck that, Mikey. It’s smaller, that’s all. It’s still a place for people like us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This. Little Italy. You say it’s dead, but it isn’t. It’s alive. Here. Look at this.”

  I led the way down an alley behind the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas. There were puddles of rain from the night before. I hopped around them, got out ahead of Mikey, then turned and faced him.

  The alley was long and we were halfway down it, protected by the tall buildings. Mikey stopped and looked at me, and I saw that he got it. He finally got something. A little surprised, I think.

  “With Jimmy gone, I can speak for the family now,” I said. “This isn’t just business. It’s personal, too.”

  He did it right. Didn’t even put his hands up. I shot him, and he went down hard. Twice more.

  I walked back the way we’d come, around the puddles, back toward the house on Grand. I felt like some long misunderstanding was now understood. Like the thing he wanted to say was said.

  I felt bad for Mikey, but this was always our thing, and finally he’d gotten that, too.

  T. JEFFERSON PARKER is the author of twenty crime novels, including Silent Joe and California Girl, both of which won the Edgar Award for best mystery. His last six books are a Border Sextet, featuring ATF task-force agent Charlie Hood as he tries to staunch the flow of illegal firearms being smuggled from the United States into Mexico. His most recent novel, Full Measure, is about a young man who returns from combat in Afghanistan to pursue his dreams in America. He lives in Southern California with his family and enjoys fishing, hiking, and cycling.

  EVERMORE

  Justin Scott

  Stark ran west on Eighty-Fourth Street.

  Starry-eyed gentrifiers had renamed the shabby old block Edgar Allan Poe Street. He crossed Riverside Drive against the light, gave a bus the finger and a cabbie a look that made the man reach for the tire iron he kept under the German shepherd on the front seat. It was the winter of 1981; life was already harsh in New York, and just when it seemed the city couldn’t get more dangerous, Stark was on the lam.

  He cut into Riverside Park, turned off the tarmac path, frightened a child, and climbed an enormous rock. It stood high as the fourth floor of the apartment buildings across the drive. He sat beside an old steel door someone had stolen from someplace and glared at the Hudson River.

  On the lam came in two varieties. Holed up in a four-star Bahamas hotel with a suitcase full of dough was good lam. The job gone wrong, a woman gone south with your getaway stash, and witnesses reporting which way you’d gone was bad lam. Bad lam meant you had to pull another job, like right now. But spur-of-the-moment heists promised jail or the morgue. So did sitting on this rock until the cops caught up.

  The old door slid aside, and a cadaverous long-haired man climbed out of the hole it had covered. He sat on the door, gazed at the river, sharpened a pencil with a penknife, and scribbled in an ancient leather-bound notebook.

  “You going to be here long?” Stark asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, when are you going to haul ass outta here and leave me in privacy?”

  Dark, mournful eyes drifted over Stark’s tough and battered face. They took stock of his clothing, the small rip in one knee, the solid lightweight assault boots, and the bulge under his sweat-stained gabardine jacket, which suggested either a firearm or an alarming pectoral. “I would imagine I’ll be here another seven or eight hours. And you, sir?”

  Stark said nothing. He glared at the Hudson, instead, and wondered if he was losing his touch.

  “Poe.”

  “What?”

  The cadaverous fellow extended a bony hand and said again, “Poe. The name’s Poe. Edgar Allan Poe. And you, sir?”

  Stark jabbed the top of the first page of the guy’s notebook. “If your name’s Poe, why’d you write, ‘Ravings,’ a Short Story by E. P. Allan?”

  “Allan’s a nom de plume.”

  “Huh?”

  “A pen name. I had to change my name to sell my stories.”

  Stark nodded. He, too, had changed his name. This morning. Owing to the mismanaged bank job on the East Side. The connection pleased him, and an unusual sense of human fellowship warmed him like a restaurant exhaust fan blowing grease in a winter alley. He stuck his hand
out. “Stark. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Delighted,” said Poe, closing icy and surprisingly strong fingers around Stark’s.

  “I’ve already admitted I’m a writer. May I ask how you make your living, Mr. Stark?”

  “Banks and armored cars.”

  “Do not expect me to be frightened by an armed robber. I’m accustomed to agents and publishers.”

  “I could be a writer,” said Stark. “I could write a hell of a book about my work.”

  “And what would you write for your second book?”

  “I could write ten books. I’ve pulled jobs you couldn’t dream up. Some good, some bad. Human situations, mistakes, betrayals, revenge, scruples. All that stuff.”

  Stark, who had put prison time to good use reading, was impressed to be meeting a writer. He began to tell Poe about jobs he’d pulled—leaving out names, dates, and venues. Poe listened, politely. Now and then he made a note in his book. Stark was wrapping up a redacted version of the morning’s disaster when Poe interjected, “Forgive me, sir, but I’ve got to finish this mystery before the Xerox place closes. They’ve got a special overnight rate, three copies for the price of two. One for my editor. One for me. And one for the girl who lives across the hall.”

  Stark displayed some inside knowledge he had picked up somewhere. “What about your agent? Doesn’t he get a copy?”

  Poe gave a small sad shrug, bent over his book, and resumed scribbling. Stark watched and when his pencil stopped moving figured it was okay to ask another question. “Why’d you have to change your name to sell your stories?”

  Poe looked up, blinking. “What? What? Oh … I write different kinds of stuff. Poems. Novels. Short stories. I mean there’s no way I can write a love poem, a horror novel, and one of these Mystery Magazine pieces with the same name.”

  “What does a name have to do with writing?”

  Poe considered that a moment, and it seemed to make him uncomfortable. “Not writing. Selling. Marketing. You can’t confuse the readers.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The publishers say you can’t confuse the readers.”

  Stark had spent enough time behind bars to understand the merciless logic of the power behind the rules. “I get it.”

  Color rose to Poe’s cheeks. He closed his notebook on his pencil and said, “It’s more than that—here, I’ll show you.” He swung his legs over the edge of the hole in the rock and dropped into it. “Come on! I’ll show you.”

  Stark peered over the edge. Poe was climbing down a rickety ladder.

  “Come! I don’t have all day.”

  The hole looked like the lowest form of on the lam where you huddled in the dark, curled in the fetal position. Still, you took your chances when you saw them; maybe it contained a tunnel that led under Riverside Drive into an apartment shared by Pan Am stewardesses.

  Stark followed Poe down the ladder. The hole wasn’t as deep as it looked. He caught up at the bottom. Poe led him down a rock-sided alley and into a narrow street of low brick row houses. A carriage pulled by horses clattered past. The sunlight was dulled by coal smoke. “What is this?”

  “Greenwich Village, last century—there! There we are.”

  And there was Edgar Allan Poe, walking head down with a group of thin men who were listening to a plump, prosperous-looking business type with a thick gold watch chain draped across his belly.

  The Poe standing at Stark’s elbow said, “The gaunt men are Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. The youngster is Melville. That’s our literary agent doing the talking. Listen to what he says.”

  “How did we get here?” asked Stark.

  “Listen—”

  “Can we get back?”

  “Of course.”

  Stark looked up and down the street and back at the stone alley and saw opportunity. His sharp cheekbones and granite jaw dissolved into a dreamy expression that had last crossed his face when his mother breast-fed him.

  Poe smiled. “Would I be far off the mark?” he asked silkily, “to guess that you are speculating, what if you knocked that agent on the head and took his watch and chain back to Riverside Park in 1981?”

  “I’m a heist man, not a mugger.”

  “Forgive me. I meant no insult.”

  “Any banks nearby?”

  “Plenty downtown,” said Poe. “But when we return to 1981, good luck spending currency issued by the Savings Institute of Butchers’ and Drovers.”

  Stark’s expression changed to that of a man grappling with the concept of attempting to pay a four-star hotel bill with a sack of gold coins.

  Poe said, “Listen to the literary agent instruct the writers.”

  “The publishing business is changing,” the agent was saying. He tugged his watch chain, checked the time, and shoved his thumbs in his vest pockets. “No more little books. No more medium-size books.”

  Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne and Melville started snickering. They exchanged superior looks. Then all talked at once.

  “Absurd!”

  “A good book’s a good book.”

  “Who cares if it’s big or little?”

  “Long, short, you’re done when the story’s done.”

  Stark nodded. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville seemed to have a point.

  A gleaming lacquered coach drawn by a matched team of four black horses came down the street. The agent raised his arm in a languid wave, and the coach stopped. A liveried footman jumped down and held the door for him. “Change,” he called as he climbed inside. “Change or disappear.”

  “We’ve heard enough,” said Poe. He led Stark back through the stone alley and up the ladder and out of the rock.

  Stark squinted at the Hudson a while, digesting events. Tugboats and barges and heating-oil tankers headed to Albany were all signs of here and now. “Your buddies were right,” he said. “A good book’s a good book.”

  “No,” said Poe. “Our agent was right. Look at Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. Dead as doornails. Melville went sailing. Took him forty years to get Moby-Dick noticed. Nobody would touch Billy Budd with a barge pole until the poor man was a generation in his grave.”

  Stark nodded. Put that way, Edgar Allan Poe had a point. “What about you?” he asked.

  Poe hesitated a long moment before he answered. “I was terrified of disappearing.”

  “So, you changed.”

  “I wrote a big book—still a mystery at heart, but with thriller elements, and sort of multigenerational, almost a saga. My agent called it a saga and took me to lunch. Then he informed me he could not sell my big book under my little-books name.”

  “What’s a little-books name?” Stark asked.

  “I’d written some gothics. But gothics, like all genres, come and go, nice and steady for a while, not much money—four grand and a promise of lead book of the month sometime down the road—then your month finally comes along just in time for bodice rippers or sci-fi fantasies to knock gothics for a loop. Anyhow, my agent told me to use the pen name D’arcy de Chambord. The publisher who bought the mystery saga asked me to shift into big family sagas. D’arcy de Chambord cleaned up. Sold one to the movies, which paid for a house with a swimming pool in Connecticut.”

  “Just there on weekends?” Stark, who liked empty houses, asked.

  “A fellow comes by to feed the wolf hounds.”

  “Well … if you’re making so much money writing sagas, what are you doing these E. P. Allan short stories for?”

  “I’m a writer. I like short stories.… My agent hates them. My book publishers hate them. So, I write them secretly as E. P. Allan.”

  “Which means, you don’t have to pay your agent’s commission?” Stark, whose mind ran along such lines, remarked.

  Poe took offense. “First of all, the commission on forty-nine dollars a story isn’t a hell of a lot of money. Second of all, as soon as I started making big bucks with the sagas, my agent raised his commission to fifteen percent.”

&nb
sp; Stark nodded admiringly.

  Poe said, “The short stories feature the same character. A detective named Block. I figure, when I publish about eighty of them, E. P. Allan will start to get a following. Maybe even an offer for a full-length paperback original. But at the moment, they’re just nice little classy stories that are fun to write.”

  “And thanks to your family sagas, you can afford to write for fun,” said Stark.

  “I wish that were so. Unfortunately, family sagas have gone out of style again. My agent couldn’t give away the last one. If I don’t come up with some new kind of big book, I’ll go broke.”

  “You can always sell the Connecticut house.”

  “Mortgaged to the hilt. I really need another big book deal.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Stark. “I really need another big heist. You know that alley we took to Greenwich Village? Where else does it go?”

  “Funny you should ask,” said Poe.

  This time when they went down the rickety ladder, Stark reached up and pulled the door over the hole. “So we don’t get interrupted.”

  Poe led him into the stone alley. “Where to?”

  “There’s a branch of the Emigrant Savings Bank on Third Avenue I was casing before I went away for a few years. If we went back there in 1971, I know it cold. Two-man job. Everything planned, prepped, and rehearsed. In quick, out fast.”

  Poe shook his head. “That’s only ten years ago. Witnesses, cops, guards will still be around to finger us.”

  “Let me get a look at the job. If it’s still like I remember, we’ll be in quick, out fast, no one will see us.”

  “What if it’s not like you remember?”