“Watching the water?” one cop asked.
He looked up, trying to feign surprise.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice trembling a little. “I’ve been watching the water.”
“We got a dead man,” the second cop said drily.
He blinked up at the cop, condemning himself for feeling guilty when he was completely innocent.
“A dead man?” he said. “Yeah?”
“This is all news to you, huh?” the first cop said.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
“He got it with a zip gun, this guy,” the cop went on. “You ever own a zip gun?”
“No,” he lied. He had owned a zip gun once, before the cops had begun giving the gangs a lot of trouble. He had ditched the gun then, together with a knife that was over the legal limit in blade size.
“You never owned one, huh?” the cop said drily.
“No, never,” he lied again.
“You know a guy called Angelo?” He knew instantly that it was Angelo Brancusi they were speaking of. He wet his lips. “Lots of guys named Angelo,” he said.
“Only one guy named Angelo Brancusi. You know him?”
“I know him,” he said. “Sure. Everybody knows him.”
“But you particularly, huh?”
“Why me, particularly?”
“Maybe because your name is Johnny Trachetti.”
“That’s my name,” he said. “What’s this all about?”
“Maybe because Angelo tried to rape your kid sister, say two or three weeks ago. Maybe, let’s say, you and Angelo had a big tangle outside the RKO on 125th, with Angelo pulling homemade brass knucks and trying to rip your face apart with them. Maybe that’s why you know him particularly, huh, boy?”
“Angelo tried to work over lots of guys. Everybody knows his brass knucks. He made ’em from a garbage can handle. Besides, he stayed away from me since that time near the RKO. Angelo don’t bother me or my sister anymore.”
“You’re right there, boy,” the first cop said.
“What do you mean?”
“Angelo ain’t bothering anybody anymore,” the cop said. “It was Angelo who got zip-gunned.”
He wet his lips again. Out on the river a tug sent a blast to the sky, high and strident. The blast hung on the silence of the October air, and he could almost taste the brackishness of the river.
“I didn’t shoot him,” he said.
“I know,” the first cop told him. “That’s why you ran like a rat when we came on the scene.”
“Look,” he said, appealing to their common sense now, “I didn’t shoot him. I didn’t like him, but there was lots of guys didn’t like him. Look, why should I shoot him? Hey, come on, you don’t really think...”
He saw the look in the first cop’s eyes. That same look was mirrored on the second cop’s face. He saw, too, the irrefutable logic there. Angelo had been gunned down. Angelo was scum, but he was a citizen of this fair city. Someone had gunned him, and it was like tagging someone for a parking violation. Some big boy upstairs would raise six kinds of hell if this sort of thing went on, people cluttering up the streets with worthless garbage like Angelo. There was only one way to handle a case of this exceptional caliber. Pull in the nearest sucker. Take Johnny because he was as neat a patsy as the next guy, all made to order with an attempted rape on his sister, and a knock-down-drag-out right on 125th, where Angelo had done his best to kill him.
Whatever you do, avoid trouble on your beat. Squelch trouble on your beat. Step on trouble.
Step on Johnny Trachetti.
He read the logic. You can’t fight logic. He didn’t try to.
He brought his knee up into the groin of the first cop, and then clobbered him on the back of the head with both hands squeezed together like the head of a mallet. The cop fell to the pavement like a pile of manure, and his buddy unsnapped the Police Special hanging in the holster near his right buttock. The shot rang out on the crisp autumn air, but Johnny was already behind the squad car, ducking around the grille, heading for the door near the driver’s seat. He knew it was crazy, and he knew you didn’t go around driving cops’ cars, but taking the rap for Angelo’s kill was just as nuts, and he had nothing to lose now, not after the logic he had read.
He heard the second shot, and the third one, but he was already behind the wheel, his head ducked low, his hand re-leasing the emergency brake, his foot on the accelerator. The car leaped ahead, and then the shots came like bursts from a tommy gun, fast and sharp, pinging against the sides of the car.
He heard the first cop banging his nightstick against the pavement, and the pounding was as loud and as frightening as the bark of the other cop’s gun. The last bullet found one of the rear tires, and the car lurched crazily, but he held on to the wheel and kept his foot pressed to the floor, and the rubber flapped and beat the asphalt as he headed for 116th. The cop had stopped to reload, and by the time the next shots came, he couldn’t have hit him if he’d been using a bazooka. He drove down to the York Avenue exit, wondering whether or not he should turn on the siren, a little excited about all of it now, a little reckless-feeling.
He ditched the car, and then ran like a thief up to First Avenue, cutting back uptown. He reached 116th Street, wondered where he should go then. Back home? That was the first place they’d look.
He stood on the corner, looking up toward the Third Avenue El, wondering. When he saw the squad car pull around Second Avenue, he made up his mind, and he made it up fast.
He didn’t run this time. He walked casually, his head turned toward the shop windows that lined the wide street. The corset shop was in the middle of the street, between Second and Third. The plate-glass window carried the fancy legend FOUNDATION GARMENTS, but everybody knew this was the corset shop, and everybody knew it was run by Gussie the Corset Lady.
He walked into the shop quickly. The front room was stacked with dummies wearing brassieres and girdles and corsets and contraptions he couldn’t name. He’d worked for Gussie a long time ago, when he was fifteen, delivering the garments to fat women who should have ordered pants with zippers instead. He heard the hum of the sewing machine in the back room, and he looked out at the street once and then parted the flowered curtains and stepped out of sight.
Gussie looked up from the machine. She was a tall woman in her early fifties, with large brown eyes and full, sensuous lips. She wore her own foundation garments, and she was wearing one now that bunched her full breasts up into the low yoke of her neckline, like the heroine on the jacket of a historical novel.
“Well!” she said. “Who’s after you?”
“The cops,” Johnny said quickly.
She’d been smiling, but the smile dropped from her face now. “What do you mean, the cops? What for?”
“They say I killed Angelo Brancusi.”
“He’s dead?” Gussie asked. She nodded her head emphatically. “Good. He deserved it.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t do it.”
“I didn’t say you did. No matter who did it, he deserved it.”
Johnny glanced through the curtains and out at the street again. “I ran away from them,” he said. “They were planning a run-through. I don’t like working on a railroad.”
“You shouldn’t have run. That was stupid.”
“All right, it was stupid. You didn’t see their eyes.”