“Easy now,” she said, chiding, smiling. “Easy now, boy. Slow and easy.”
A knock sounded on the door.
She broke away from him, and he leaped to his feet.
“Who...” he whispered.
More knocking.
“Get in the closet!”
“The clos...?”
“Go on, move,” she whispered urgently.
He went to the closet, thinking, Why’s she acting like an unfaithful wife? feeling foolish as hell, feeling like the jackass in some low comedy of errors. The closet door closed on him, leaving him in darkness, leaving him with trailing silk dresses flapping around his face, high-heeled shoes crushed under his big feet. He could not stop feeling foolish, and then he heard the outside door open, and the man’s voice.
“What took you so long, Bess?”
“Oh, hello, Tony. I was... napping.”
Why? Johnny thought. Why that? Why didn’t she say, I’ve got someone with me, Tony. Come back later, come back in the morning. Why the runaround?
“Napping, huh?” The voice was a big voice. It belonged to a big man. It belonged to a suspicious man. Johnny did not like that voice, and the voice was in the room now, moving in from the outside door.
“What’s this?” the voice asked.
“What? What’s what, Tony?”
“This jacket. You wearing Army jackets now, Bess? That what you doing?”
“Tony...”
“Just shut up! Where is he?”
“Where’s who? Tony, I was just taking a nap. The jacket belongs... belongs to... a fellow came to fix the plumbing. He must have left it here. The plumbing leaked. He...”
“Did the plumbing leak blood? Did it leak blood in that basin there?”
“Tony...”
“You’re a slut,” he shouted. “I’m going to break that guy in two! Where is he?”
“I told you, Tony. There’s no one...”
“And I told you! I told you what would happen if I caught you up to your old tricks again. Where is he?”
The footsteps were advancing across the room now, and it was a cinch Tony would look in the closet first. He dropped to his knees quickly, rooting around on the closet floor for a shoe. He found a sturdy-feeling job with a spike heel, and he got to his feet again and waited.
“You got him in the closet?” the voice asked, close now. And then the door opened on Johnny, and the shaft of light spilled onto his face. He didn’t hesitate an instant. He brought the shoe up, catching Tony on the bridge of his nose.
Tony was big all right, big and bearded, wearing a leather jacket and corduroy slacks. The shoe caught him on his nose, and the line of blood appeared magically, and then he stumbled backward. Johnny swung out with his left hand, catching Tony in the gut. He hit him again with the shoe, and as Tony went down, he heard the girl screaming, screaming, her voice like an air-raid siren. She dropped to her knees beside› Tony, took his head into her lap, and then looked up at Johnny.
“You crumb!” she shrieked. “You filthy crumb! He’s my brother! He’s my brother!”
Johnny was already halfway to the door.
“My brother!” she kept screaming, and he didn’t hang around to listen to the encore. He ran down the steps and out into the street, a little sorry Tony had arrived when he had, and a little sorry he’d left an almost full fifth of good whiskey in the room.
The fifth had cost him close to four bucks. Well, he’d got a bandage for his arm out of it, if nothing else. It didn’t seem to matter at the moment that blood was already beginning to seep through the bandage again.
Detective-Sergeant Leo Palazzo lived in the Bronx. He did not particularly like Harlem, even though he’d been a cop there for sixteen years.
He was holding in his hands now a signed confession from a punk they’d had in before on a possessions charge.
The punk’s name was Andrew Ryan. They’d picked him up on 117th Street and they’d found him with a zip gun and they’d worked him over hardly fifteen minutes before he’d told them everything they wanted to know.
The only thing they really wanted to know was whether or not he’d put a few holes in the liver and heart of Angelo Brancusi. And whereas Ryan was extremely reticent in the beginning he loosened up almost instantly and seemed almost proud of his shooting prowess. A stenographer had worked up a literate-sounding confession and Ryan had scrawled his signature to it, and that had been that. Except for Johnny Trachetti.
“What about the other guy?” Corporal Davis asked Palazzo.
“What other guy?” Palazzo said.
“The one slugged Brown and swiped the RMP. Him.”
“Forget him,” Palazzo said. “He’s clean, ain’t he?”
“Yeah, but I mean...”
“We really ought to drag him in on a resisting arrest charge, not to mention the theft of the car. Teach him a lesson.”
“He was probably scared,” Davis said. “Hell, you’d have run, too.”
“When he knows the heat’s off he’ll come out in the open again.”
“You really going to pull him in?”
“No, the hell with him. We got this Ryan character, that’s all we need.”
Davis wiped a hand over his face. “What I mean, Leo, shouldn’t we wise the kid up? You know, he still thinks he’s got a murder rap hanging over his head.”
“So what?” Palazzo asked.
“Well, hell, he’s out there someplace thinking...”
“Who cares what the hell he’s thinking? He probably done something anyway, the way he ran.”
“Suppose he does something else? He thinks he’s wanted for murder, Leo, don’t you understand?”
“He’ll live,” Palazzo said. “He’s healthy, ain’t he? He’s young. He’s sound of mind and body. From the way Brown tells me he ran, he must be a hardy specimen.”
“A murder rap...” Davis said.
“Murder rap, shmurder rap. So long as you got your health,” Palazzo cracked.
The arm began bleeding in earnest. It started as a slow trickle of blood that oozed its way through the fresh bandage. But the trickle became a stream, and the stream soaked through the bandage and dripped onto Johnny’s wrist, and the drops ran into his cupped palm, hung on his fingertips, and then spattered onto the sidewalk in a crimson trail.
It got colder, too, and he missed his jacket, and he cursed himself for not having grabbed it when he’d left the girl’s room. With her screaming like that, though, it’s a wonder he managed to remember his head even. Still, it was goddamn cold, too cold for October, too cold even for January.
The trail of blood led from Lexington Avenue down to Third Avenue, past the lighted fronts of the furniture stores, past the all-night restaurants and the bakeries that served coffee from big shining urns. He was very conscious of the blood trail, and he wondered if city cops ever used bloodhounds. All he needed was a pack of mutts chasing down Third Avenue after him. He smiled, the picture striking him somehow as amusing. He could almost see his photo in the Daily News, Johnny Trachetti up a lamppost, his pants seat torn to shreds while the mutts stood up on their hind legs and barked and snapped. Caption: Killer at Bay.
Bay, you know. The hounds baying, you know?
Very funny, he told himself, but you couldn’t wrap a joke around your back, and a laugh wouldn’t stop the wind, and the wind was sure cold.
Nor could corny humor hold back the flow of blood from his arm.
Right now, he needed a place for the night.
He remembered the warehouse just off Third Avenue, where the furniture store kept all the new goods. There was a window the guys used to sneak in through, where one of the bars was loose and capable of being swung out of position. They’d taken Carmen Diaz there once when they were all around sixteen and they’d had a jolly old time on the mats the movers used to wrap around the furniture. He wouldn’t forget that time so easily because it had been his first time. Nor would he forget how they had gotten into the warehouse, because that had been the trickiest part.