The magnets were drawing me out of my safe places.
I lay there, immobilized, staring at the lazy ceiling fan until the room was totally dark. At five after
nine the phone rang. It rang for a long time. At twenty after, it rang again. I didn‟t move. I lay there
like a statue. I couldn‟t talk to her, not right then. At nine thirty it rang twelve times; I counted them.
After that, every five minutes. At five of ten I heard a scratching at the door. It sounded like a
cockroach crawling across a kitchen cabinet. I raised upon one elbow and looked over. There was a
slip of paper under the door.
I picked it up and sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes before I turned on the light, it was a
phone message from Dutch Morehead.
Tony Logeto had made the list.
28
THE SINGING ROPE
It didn‟t take me five minutes to get dressed. As I hurried through the lobby toward the garage, the
Black Maria roared into the motor lobby and screeched to a stop. The front door swung open and I
crawled in. Stick dropped it into first arid left an inch of rubber in the drive.
“I hope to hell the place isn‟t far,” I moaned.
“Ten minutes,” he said, pulling the red light on the top of the car and flicking on the siren. it was the
longest ten minutes of my life. We boomed south along the river, where late-returning shrimp boats
were reduced to streaks of light.
The place was near Back O‟Town, a row house that had been converted into pleasant apartments
facing the small river they called Hampton Run. Flat roof, fancy front door; a classy-looking place.
There were a lot of police cars parked haphazardly in the narrow street in front.
Cowboy Lewis was standing by the door, looking very unhappy.
“I fucked up,” he said tightly. “They got by me.”
“Who got by you, Cowboy?” I asked.
“Whoever did them in,” he said, looking at my feet.
“Them?” Stick said.
“There‟s two of „em,” he said, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder toward the building. “Second floor
in the front.”
“Who else?” I asked as we headed for the door.
“Della Norman,” he said.
A new name!
“Should that mean something to me?” I asked.
“She was Longnose Graves‟ favourite lady,” said Stick.
“Yeah, but she was in bed with Logeto „when he got hit,” Lewis added.
I whistled through my teeth.
The mess was in a second-floor bedroom.
“The singing rope,” I said, looking at the man‟s neck.
Dutch‟s “Huh?” told me he had never heard of the trick.
“That‟s what the Vietnamese call it, the singing rope. A knock-off of the Thuggee knot.”
It was also known among the British s the Bombay Burke— Bombay because the Thuggee stranglers
operated in India, Burke being British slang for strangulation, named after an Englishman who tried to
kill Queen Victoria, failed, arid had his neck stretched for his trouble.
It had been more than a dozen years since I had last seen that particular kind of bruise. It was blood
red and about the size of a half dollar, in the soft place at the base of Logeto‟s skull on the back of his
neck. The deep, gnarled, bloody ring around his throat filled in the picture.
“Anybody else here?” Stick asked Dutch.
“Salvatore,” Dutch answered. “He‟s out checking the neighborhood.”
“I haven‟t seen a mark like that since Nam,” I said.
“Beautiful. What in hell next?” said the weary lieutenant.
Cowboy Lewis filled the doorway, the handle of a Cobra .357 looming from the front of his pants,
right over the fly.
“If that goes off accidentally, you‟re gonna have to change your name,” Dutch said. Lewis didn‟t say
anything. “Okay,” said Dutch, “let‟s have the long and short of it.”
“It‟s SOP, Logeto coming over here. It‟s every Monday night, rain or shine, six o‟clock or close to it.
he usually stays an hour, hour and a half. He had two limos and four shooters. He goes in, the four
goons start pitching coins in the hail. Two hours later the mark‟s still there. About eight thirty, I
started getting nervous. Finally I decided to take the door, have a look.”
“By yourself, with four gorillas between you and Logeto? That don‟t call for backup in your book?”
Dutch demanded.
Cowboy shrugged. “I had buckshot loads in the Magnum. I go in, start up the stairs, get some shit,
show the cannon. „You wanna get picked up in a dustpan, flick around‟ is all I told „em.
I put my ear against the door, give a call or two. Nothin‟. So I kicked it in.”
He swung his arm casually around the room, indicating what he had found.
The bed looked like a ploughed field. Covers and sheets half on the floor, pillows on head and foot.
The woman lay on her side naked, her hair sprawled across her face. Logeto was on his face, fully
dressed, both fists clutching the sheets, his feet hanging off the bed but not quite touching the floor.
“So that‟s Della Norman,” I said. Even in death, you could tell she was a dish.
“Apeshit,” Stick said.
“He means Longnose ain‟t gonna handle this too well,” Dutch said, and shook his head ruefully. “A
new wrinkle,” he went on. “What in hell was Tony Logeto doin‟, shacked up with the Nose‟s
favourite lady?”
The arrival of Chess, the ME, broke his thought train. Chess was short and on the tubby side, wearing
old pants and a pyjama top stuffed half in and half out of his pants. He was not too happy about being
there.
“And who do we have here?” he asked.
“Tagliani‟s son-in-law and Longnose Graves‟ girlfriend.”
Chess looked up with a lascivious grin. “Isn‟t that interesting,” he said. “It‟s the best part of the job,
y‟know, the inside stuff. I wonder how Longnose is going to take this.”
“Badly,” Stick chimed in.
Chess put down his black satchel. “Ladies first. Let‟s get some pictures before I mess things up.”
The photographer appeared, shot the room top and bottom, and was gone in ten minutes. The doc
stepped in and started his work, jabbering continually as he did.
“We got a simple strangulation here, on the woman. From the front I‟d say. See the thumbprints here
on her larynx. Death was quick. My guess‟s her carotid, jugular, the whole shooting match in her
throat is crushed. Powerful set of hands at work here.”
He kept probing, talking while studying the corpse.
“You gotta slow down there, Dutch. The freezer downtown is full and we don‟t have but five people
in pathology and I got a vacation comin‟ up in three months. It would be nice to be finished by then.”
“Ho, ho, ho,” Dutch said, his sense of humour wearing thin, as was all of ours.
I looked around the apartment while the ME continued his work. It occupied the front side of the
building. The living room, bedroom, and kitchen all faced the street. The place was decorated in early
nothing. Expensive furniture that didn‟t go together. Her closet had enough clothes in it to start a
salon.
The bathroom and several closets were adjacent to an alley that ran along the side of the building.
There was only one door into the apartment, the one we had all come in through.
I ambled into the bathroom. It was large, with a double sink, commode, step-in tub, and stall shower.
The window over the commode was open and the curtains shifted idly in the breeze. I took a look out.
Straight up to the roof, straight down to the street.
I went back to the scene of the crime.
A new face had appeared. His name was Braun, out of homicide, a short, slender, hawk-faced man