Manhattan Noir Read online

  “He must have got that at the Turtle Bay street fair,” the detective said. “They were giving them away on Saturday. I got one.”

  The partner looked up.

  “Never mind,” the detective said. “Go on.”

  “One sneaker, no laces. One copy of The Dark Half by Stephen King, paperback, no cover. One plastic cup. A roll of toilet paper. A disposable razor. Three, four, five soda cans, empty. One pocket Bible.” He stopped, glanced around. “That’s it.” The partner noticed the issue of Cosmopolitan that was lying in the corner. He picked it up, shook off a cigarette butt, and held it out to the detective. “One more magazine.”

  The detective added it to the list, then flipped his notebook closed and dropped the wet magazine back where it had been lying. He slipped the photos and the business card back into the wallet. “Poor bastard. Guy had a good job once. Had a place to live. Had a family.”

  “Once upon a time. What he had now was a baseball cap and six copies of Cosmopolitan magazine. Seven, excuse me.”

  “What the hell’s wrong with this city? An old man like this lying dead in a doorway, nobody even calls it in.”

  “It’s New York, what do you want?”

  “The man’s lying there, dead. An old man, dead on the street, and people just walk past him.”

  “This is news to you?”

  The detective walked back to the prowl car waiting at the curb. “You know, my father’s name was Harold.”

  “Lots of people’s name is Harold, man. Snap out of it. This guy’s not your father. It’s a homeless man was out in the rain too long. Sad story. Unhappy ending. Life goes on.”

  “Not for him,” the detective said.

  Angela’s finger hovered over the cigarettes, lined up in three neat rows. Finally, her hand darted out and came back with one clamped between thumb and forefinger.

  The man closed the pack, returned it to his pocket, and took out his lighter. Angela cupped her hand around the flame and carefully lit the cigarette. “Thanks,” she said. “Man, what a night.”

  The rain had started again. But behind the huge umbrella they were both dry.

  “Hey,” she said, “you want to have a little fun … ?” She picked up the hem of her dress, pulled it above her knees. She had a purple mark on the inside of one thigh. For the first time, the man stopped smiling. Angela said, “It’s just a bruise.”

  “Thank you, no,” the man said.

  Angela shrugged. She drew on the cigarette. Pushed her dress down over her legs again.

  “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Angela,” the man said, standing up. “Take care of yourself.”

  “Yeah.” She watched him back away. “Thanks for the smoke. Come back if you change your mind.”

  The man nodded.

  “I don’t have any diseases. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “No,” the man said. “I’m not worried about your having diseases.”

  Something in his voice put her off. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean it in the best way. You’re a young woman, Angela. You look very healthy. I’m sure you have no diseases.”

  Angela smiled, a fixed, frozen smile that was part arrogance, part fear, and no part happiness. “That’s right. I’m so clean you could eat off me.”

  “I’m sure,” the man said. “Good night, Angela.”

  The headline the story carried in the Daily News was only slightly inaccurate: “Runaway Poisoned Behind Penn Station.” Angela Nicholas had not run away. She had been thrown out of her home. Her mother emphasized that point, stabbing it into her husband’s shoulder with her index finger while the man looked down at his hands in his lap and mumbled apologies to her, to himself, to God.

  The detective took notes. There had been a fight. There had been many fights. A boy had been the subject of one of the fights. Other boys had been the subject of other fights, or maybe the same boy had. It wasn’t clear. What was clear was that the father had delivered an ultimatum: That boy doesn’t enter this house again or you don’t enter it again.

  Angela had brought the boy back. The next day, her clothes were on the sidewalk. She had beaten on the door, crying, and the mother had wanted to let her back in. But her husband had held her back. When they finally opened the door, Angela was gone. When they phoned around to all her friends—even, finally, to the boy, who hung up on them—they couldn’t find her.

  Three years later, they found her. No, that wasn’t quite accurate, either: The police had found her. The point was, she had been found. But she had been dead.

  Did the police have any idea who had done it? The detective shook his head. He could have told the mother that it had probably been one of Angela’s tricks, but contrary to popular belief in the precinct house, he actually did have a heart. “We currently have no information, Mrs. Nicholas.” Which wasn’t entirely true, since that man, Sladek, had turned out to have been poisoned, too, and with the same poison, so that was—maybe—a starting point. But it was close enough to true. Anyway, he said it.

  “How did it happen? How could this happen?”

  “We aren’t certain. Our lab is working on it.”

  The father finally stirred to life, raising his head, his eyes burning. “You find the man who did this and I’ll kill him.”

  “Haven’t you done enough?” Mrs. Nicholas said.

  “Do you have a daughter, sergeant?”

  “A son,” the detective said.

  “Well, if somebody did to your son what somebody did to my daughter,” Mr. Nicholas said, “what would you do?”

  I’d kill the son of a bitch, the detective said. To himself. “I’d let the proper authorities handle it.”

  Mr. Nicholas shook his head. “With a daughter it’s different.”

  For the first night in a week, it wasn’t raining. The detective looked at the map he’d made, showing the streets from 32nd to 45th on the West Side. The locations where the bodies had been found were marked with red circles. They were spread around—enough so that it didn’t look like there was a pattern. But five homeless people dead in the course of seven weeks? All poisoned? It wasn’t obvious that this was the work of just one person, but that the deaths were connected the detective had no doubt.

  He started at the uptown end, the theater district. As you left the streets dominated by Disney marquees, you found the remnants of the old Times Square: novelty shops, import/export storefronts, peep shows, For Rent signs. Plenty of homeless people to talk to.

  The detective took his time, walking slowly, keeping his eyes open—for what, he wasn’t sure. He stopped whenever he saw someone sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against a street lamp, lying under a filthy quilt in a cardboard box. He introduced himself, asked whether the person had seen anything unusual lately.

  Mostly they said no.

  One man said, “You not going to get anyone to tell you anything. They too scared.”

  “You scared?” the detective asked.

  “Bet your ass I’m scared.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t want to end up dead.”

  “We all end up dead,” the detective said.

  “Not me, man. I’m not ready yet.”

  “So why don’t you tell me, who is it that people are scared of?”

  The man just shook his head emphatically.

  “Why? Why won’t you tell me?”

  “Maybe it’s you.”

  “For god’s sake, I’m a cop. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “You’re a cop don’t mean nothing. You know that, I know that, everybody know that.”

  The detective moved on. Could it be a cop? He thought about it. A frustrated beat cop, maybe, out to clean up the neighborhood in his off time? An old PD hack, about to hit retirement, sick of seeing bums lining the sidewalk? It was possible. He didn’t want to think about it.

  Below Port Authority, the number of homeless people dropped to only one or two per block. The detective
walked down Eighth Avenue, came back on Broadway, walked down again on Sixth.

  At 42nd and Sixth, at the entrance to Bryant Park, a blind man was leaning on a propped-up piece of cardboard lettered with the words, “God Bless You If You Help Me.” He was smoking a long, filter-tipped cigarette. The smoke formed a gray wreath around his face.

  “Evening,” the detective said.

  “God bless,” the man said. He groped for his cup and then raised it, shaking the coins inside.

  “I’m with the police.” The detective squatted next to the man, pulled out his wallet, and put the man’s hand onto his badge. The man’s eyebrows rose and his mouth crinkled into a smile. He put the cup down.

  “How are you doing, officer?”

  “Could be worse. You?”

  “Good night for me,” the man said, hugging himself against the chill. “Most nights nobody talks to me. Tonight you’re the second.”

  “Really? Who was the other?”

  He thought for a moment. “Man about your age, I’d say. Little older maybe. Pleasant fellow. Talked to me a while, just a minute ago.” He lifted his cigarette. “Gave me a smoke.”

  “Nice of him,” the detective said. “Listen, you notice anything out of the ordinary around here lately?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “We’re conducting an investigation.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen a thing,” the man said. He laughed softly to himself.

  The detective dropped a handful of change into the man’s cup before walking away.

  “My lucky day,” the man said, hugging himself tighter. “God bless you.”

  “His name was Michael Casey. He lived off his monthly federal disability check, plus what he picked up panhandling.”

  “Damn it!”

  “Calm down.”

  “I was talking to him last night,” the detective said. “He was sitting next to me, smoking a goddamn cigarette, telling me what a wonderful night it was.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” his partner said.

  “Sure I could have. I could have figured it out then instead of now. I could have saved his life.”

  “We don’t know that.” The partner stopped the car outside Body Beautiful.

  The detective got out and walked to the service entrance. The issue of Cosmopolitan was still lying where he had dropped it, crumpled in a dark corner of the doorway. It had dried and hardened and was now stuck to the ground. The detective used a scraper to get it up. Underneath it there was a cigarette butt.

  “Bingo.” The detective picked the butt up with a pair of tweezers and dropped it in an evidence baggie. He returned to the car. “I told you there was a cigarette.”

  “There are cigarettes on every sidewalk in the city.”

  “That’s true, and maybe this one has nothing to do with our case. But I don’t think so. I think that Harold Sladek smoked it. Why? Because the first time we saw it, it was lying on top of that magazine, and the magazine was lying behind his body. Do you think someone came along, smoking, finished his cigarette, and then tossed it over Sladek’s dead body so that it landed on his magazine? I don’t think so.”

  “Okay.”

  “So: Sladek smoked it. That still doesn’t mean it has something to do with our case. But since we didn’t find any cigarettes in his bags, or even an empty cigarette pack, we can assume that someone else gave the cigarette to him. And we know that someone gave a cigarette to Michael Casey just before he died. And it was the same brand as this one.” He waved the bag in front of his partner’s face.

  “Lots of people smoke Chrome Golds.”

  “Sure. And lots of homeless people die on the streets. But how many do one right after doing the other? I’ll bet that if we analyze this butt, we’ll find traces of the same poison they found in Sladek’s body.”

  “Let’s say you’re right. What would that tell us? We already know Sladek was poisoned.”

  “It tells us how it happened.”

  “And … ?”

  “And now we can get the bastard who did it.”

  “What do you want to do, arrest everyone who buys a pack of Chrome Golds?”

  The detective didn’t have an answer to that.

  “Then what? All we can do is keep cleaning up after the guy and hope that one of these days he’ll try his stunt on the wrong person and get himself shot.”

  “No one’s going to shoot a nice old guy who’s offering them a cigarette.”

  “You don’t know that,” the partner said. “This is New York.”

  He sat with a blue knit hat pulled down over his forehead, his hands crammed under his armpits, shivering. Even with two shirts on, he was cold. He had a thin blanket, which he had wrapped and rewrapped around himself, trying to make it hold in as much heat as possible. Under the blanket he had a thermos filled with coffee. Every few minutes he took a swallow.

  People passed, hurrying from store to store, from home to theater, from street to taxi. He only saw their legs, their hands swinging by their sides, their packages. Sometimes children passed at his eye level and then he saw adult hands snatch the curious faces away from him. He saw car tires and bicycle wheels. As it got later, he saw less and less. By midnight, he saw nothing but a neon sign across the street and patches of sidewalk, dimly lit in the glow of street lamps.

  The doorway he sat in, the entrance to a Burger King that was closed for renovation, was relatively roomy: He was able to stretch his legs almost to their full length. Each night for the previous ten he had sat in a different doorway, on a different street. Unlike Harold Sladek, he was not driven by years of habit. But this doorway was more comfortable than the others had been, and that really did make a difference. He started thinking about staying here, at least for the next few nights.

  A pair of high-heeled shoes clicked past, speeding up as they passed him. Sometime later, a taxi braked to a halt a few feet away. The driver got out, unzipped his pants, relieved himself against a tree, got back into his car, and drove away. Then nothing, for several hours.

  Closer to dawn than midnight, footsteps approached again. They came at a casual pace, and he waited for them to pass, but they didn’t.

  “Hello there,” a voice said.

  The detective didn’t say anything. But under the blanket, he put the thermos down and picked up his gun.

  “Cold night.”

  “Sure is,” the detective said.

  The feet moved a few steps to one side, then the knees bent, and then a man was sitting next to him. “What’s your name?”

  “What’s yours?” the detective asked.

  “Arthur,” the man said. “You can call me Art.”

  The detective looked at him. He had a friendly face with great unruly eyebrows, a small mouth, good teeth. Good dentures, more likely. He looked like someone’s grandfather. Was this their killer, this harmless-looking man? The detective stared at him and tried to see in him a serial murderer, a cold-blooded exterminator of the homeless. He couldn’t.

  Arthur reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you smoke?”

  In wide gold letters, the pack said Chrome Gold.

  The detective felt his fingers tense under the blanket, felt the weight of the gun in his hand. What would he do if I said no? Would he find some other way to do it? Or would he just go off and pick someone else to kill?

  “Sure,” the detective said. “I smoke.”

  Arthur flipped open the top of the pack. There were twenty cigarettes inside, lined up in their perfect rows. Which should have been a tip-off that something was wrong, the detective realized: The pack was already unwrapped, but none of the cigarettes were missing. Why would someone have opened a pack of cigarettes but not have smoked even one of them?

  He reached out from under the blanket with his free hand, gripped the pack of cigarettes firmly, and pulled it out of Arthur’s hand.

  “Now hold on,” Arthur said, not losing his smile. “Leave some for me. I
was just offering you one.” He reached for the pack.

  “Oh, I won’t smoke them all,” the detective said. “Don’t worry about that.” He turned the pack over and shook the cigarettes out. Arthur caught a few; the rest fell on the pavement. He started scooping them up.

  “Don’t bother, Art. You’ve got bigger worries.”

  Arthur kept snatching up the loose cigarettes until he heard the gun cock. He looked up and the smile finally disappeared.

  The detective moved the gun closer to the other man’s face. “I’m not going to shoot you, Arthur,” he said, “unless you make me.”

  Arthur’s face was trembling. His hands shook. A few cigarettes slipped back onto the sidewalk. He looked left and right, but the street was deserted.

  “Nervous?” the detective said. He picked two cigarettes off the sidewalk, wiped them roughly on the blanket. He leaned forward and put one between Arthur’s lips. It slipped out as Arthur opened his mouth to talk. “I don’t want—”

  “Oh, you want,” the detective said. He leaned forward and put another cigarette in Arthur’s mouth. He pressed the gun against Arthur’s forehead, Arthur’s head against the wall. “Don’t spit it out.”

  Arthur shifted the cigarette nervously to one corner of his mouth, but he didn’t spit it out.

  “Good.” The detective groped through Arthur’s coat pockets until he found the lighter. He opened it. A flame leapt up. He brought it close to the end of the cigarette in Arthur’s mouth.

  “Please, don’t—”

  “Why not?”

  Arthur shook his head.

  “Why not?” Arthur looked at him miserably, but said nothing. “You’re going to tell me why not, Arthur, or you’re going to smoke that cigarette.”

  “I don’t want to …”

  The detective passed the flame over the end of the cigarette. The paper and tobacco were singed. A drop of sweat rolled down Arthur’s upper lip and onto the cigarette.