I dangled the expensive banana peel high above the bar ledge in the soft light of an overhanging globe. The necklace of little cut stones seemed to amplify the dull bar light, breaking it into distinctive sparkling rays. Held close to my amateur’s eye, the white gold and diamond confection was alluring and impressive. I counted twenty-four multifaceted gems aligned like stars in the shape of a heart. Each gem rested in the petrified palm and fingers of petite, but well defined, white gold hands: Twenty-four diamonds, twenty-four little hands. The hands were attached to the heavy heart-shaped body of the setting at the wrists. The orphaned heart appeared unscathed by my clumsy misstep. Its chain, however, would require a new clasp and some skilled untangling. My best guess was that the heart belonged to Johnny Blue’s one-woman fan club.
I threw MacClough’s golf sweater on and stepped out into the darkness. If she hadn’t come by car, I figured I still had a chance to catch her. Those high spikes of hers would leave a nice easy trail in the snow. Even a former insurance investigator like me could follow footprints like those. At least I told myself I could.
I looked for tire tracks out in front of the Scupper. The surprisingly bitter cold and bitting wind contributed to my disappointment when I didn’t find any. My newly revived conscience made me keep on. Her stiletto pumps left a series of triangles and dots in the snow leading toward the Long Island Railroad station. That simplified things a bit. I could check out Carney’s Cabs on my way over.
Old man Carney was head back, slack-jawed and dead to the world. His ancient charred lungs silently sucked in huge gulps of chilled air, exhaling the waste gasses with much noisy pomp and circumstance. He held a burning cigarette-now mostly cigarette-shaped ashes-between two yellow fingers resting on the edge of his desk. The tip of the ashen snake lay in a cheap foil ashtray. The smooth split ends of smoke drifted with the currents caused by the old man’s wheezing. Orange face wasn’t here.
There weren’t any more footprints to follow. The sidewalks are shoveled and the streets are plowed this close to the railroad station. Yes, even in Sound Hill. I scanned the passenger platform from the taxi stand’s doorway. Both eastbound and westbound looked as empty as MacClough’s place, but I decided to walk both sides of the tracks anyway to satisfy a growing curiosity. My very visible breath reminded me that it was pretty damned cold for someone in a bar apron and spring sweater to be playing hide and go seek. Curiosity makes for poor decisions.
The darkness and shadows made it tough to see detail, but I spotted a shaggy tail of dyed mink showing itself from between the clapboard ticketbooth on the westbound platform and a row of four newspaper vending machines which stood shoulder to shoulder against the kiosk’s front wall. An icy raw chill shook me; a chill that had nothing to do with cold fronts or Arctic air masses.
I smelled death from across the tracks. The ragged collection of pelts flapped in the wind, but nothing else was moving over there. I stood, arms folded, and stared, waiting for her to fool me. Waiting for her to leap up and come to me demanding the orphaned heart’s return and the whereabouts of Johnny Blue. Sweat poured over my back, the frigid air trying to freeze the falling drops between my skin and shirt. The night started closing in, but a distant train horn stopped my swoon. I took small, quick steps across the tracks.
No, she would not fool me nor would she fool anyone ever again. Even before I got to the body, I noticed her leaking blood had stained a patch of slush crimson red. I couldn’t help thinking it looked like a fallen cherry snow cone. I was just old enough to remember real snow cones shaved from huge blocks of ice by bald Italian men under the “el” on 86th Street. The only real snow cones you could get in Brooklyn now were in the Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods.
She was there, face down and to the wall, the back of her ratty coat pressed against the legs of the shoulder-to-shoulder newspaper machines. Almost reflexively, I reached over the vending machines trying to find warmth or a neck pulse. Given the wind chill factor and my lack of gloves, it was a fairly futile gesture. My fingers did find wet, gooey, freezing fur and hair. I pulled the collar down, brushed aside the stiff matted hair and tried to find her throat. The nail and top of my left index finger rubbed up against an earring. I slipped the blind finger beneath her adorned left ear. But instead of finding more flesh, my frozen digit plunged into a moist hole with sharp irregular edges.
Christ! I snatched my arm up with enough momentum to launch it into shallow earth orbit. The cold air caused a clot of the dead woman’s blood to roll slowly down the back of my hand like raspberry pancake syrup. Parts of me wanted desperately to be sick. Parts of me wanted to scream my balls off and run and never stop running. But all I could do was gaze at my nearely frostbitten fingertip. It’d touched something in there, in what, I guess, used to be her mouth. It’d touched something that felt like. . well, like feathers!
I wiped the blood off on my pants and pulled at the squat vending machines. They came away easily, more easily, probably, than they had for the killer. She rolled over. I jumped back, sliding off the low platform onto the tracks. Heavy vibrations told me to get my ass up unless I wanted to become a National Transportation Safety Board statistic. I took the advice and went back to the lady in blood and mink.
She was dead. When I yanked the newspaper machines away, physics rolled her onto her back. My finger had touched feathers. The tail end of a yellow downy body and its two frail feet hung out over the woman’s blue lips, her too-red lipstick smeared on the lemon-colored feathers of the little bird. Even I knew what the yellow bird symbolized.
She was a rat, a snitch, stooly. She’d turned, rolled over. She’d broken the silence, whispered in the wrong ears, given someone up. She’d testified, turned state’s evidence, witnessed for the man. She was a singer, a chanteuse, a canary. That’s what the yellow bird meant. It was a mob symbol as time-honored as a tuna in a dead man’s tux. The white-hairs drinking grappa and playing bocce in the park used to talk about their crude code. The method of the rub or the condition of the body was usually an allusion to the sin the victim had committed. The mob had funny notions about sins and absolution. But that was in the old days when gangsters wore scars and hats and used words like grifter and gunsel.
A clanging bell and air horn split the silent night as an old diesel locomotive lumbered into Sound Hill station. I paid it almost as little mind as the two dead canaries stiffening by my shoes. The woman’s washed-out eyes were open to the cloudy skies. They expressed nothing, not even fear. I wondered about the life-flashing-before-your-eyes cliché and if life was painful in review. It’s funny what you think about.
“Hey, buddy,” a sour-smelling whiskey voice spoke into my right ear, “Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth.” A drunken hand clapped me on the back.
I ignored him.
He didn’t much like it. “Ya don’t havta be that-” he slurred indignantly.“Oh shit! Holy fuckin’ shit! Holy Mary. Oh God! Holy fuckin’ shit, man! God! God! What the fuck, man? Christ! Oh God! Holy. .”
I never caught his face, but I assumed he’d seen the cold mink package on the concrete. I watched him run drunkenly down the platform; sliding and cursing as he went. I was relieved that help would soon be here and happy that someone in this hard world had managed to scream for the dead stranger at my feet.
Mop of Anarchy
I hadn’t tasted the apparently hot coffee yet nor could I smell its steam. The cheap porcelain cup rested between my still anesthetized fingers and jittery knees. If the shaking had spilled any of the burning liquid, I couldn’t feel it. I rested my dizzy head on the lip of the Scupper’s century-old bar. A scratchy Red Cross blanket kept slipping off my shoulders and someone, probably lots of someones, kept putting it back. I liked it better on the floor.