“Might be some drunk sitting in there playing with a gun,” Harold nodded and both policemen drew their service revolvers.
Sam knocked again and the sound echoed through the empty hall which had no floor carpet, only old wooden floors caked with grime which could never be removed short of sanding the wood a quarter of an inch down. A mustard colored cat, displaying the indifference Sam Niles usually feigned, watched from the windowsill.
The wind blew and it was a cold wind, yet Sam was to remember later that he was sweating. He tasted the salt running through his moustache into the dimple of his upper lip. Then they heard it.
At first Sam Niles thought it was the wind. Then he saw the look on Harold Bloomguard’s face in the dark hallway when he moved into a patch of moonlight. He knew that Harold heard it and that it wasn’t the wind.
Then they heard it again. The Moaning Man was saying:
“Mmmmmm. Mmmmmmm. Mmmmmuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh.”
Then Sam was sweating in earnest and Harold’s pale little face was glistening in the swatch of moonlight as he pressed himself against the wall, gun in his left hand. Sam Niles turned the key slowly and then kicked the door open with his toe and jumped back against the wall.
“Mmmmm,” said the Moaning Man. “Uuuuhhhhh. Mmm-mmuuuuuhhhhh.”
“Jesus Christ motherfucker son of a bitch!” Sam Niles, like many men, swore incoherently when he was frightened.
The moans sounded like cattle lowing. They came from inside. Inside in the darkness.
Finally Sam Niles moved. He dropped to his knees and with his flashlight in his left hand and gun in the right, crawled into the tiny apartment ready to switch on the flashlight and ready to shoot. He crept toward the bedroom which was just behind the cluttered kitchen.
Sam Niles smelled blood. And he felt the flesh wriggling on his rib cage and on his back and up the sides of his dripping neck into his temple when the Moaning Man said it again. But it was loud this time and plaintive:
“Mmmmm. Uuuuuhhhhh. Mmmmmuuuuuhhhhh!”
Then Harold Bloomguard, tiptoeing through the kitchen behind Sam who was on his knees, accidentally dropped his flashlight and the beam switched on when it hit the floor and Sam Niles cursed and jumped to his feet and leaped to the doorway his gun following the beam from his own flashlight in the darkness. And he met the Moaning Man.
He was sitting up in bed, his back pressed to the wall. He was naked except for undershorts. Every few seconds the wind would snap the dirty ragged drapes and the moonlight would wash his chalky body which otherwise lay in the slash of light. He held a 9mm. Luger in his left hand and had used it for the first and last time by placing it under his chin, gouging the soft flesh between the throat and the jawbone and pulling the trigger.
The top of the head of the Moaning Man was on the bed and on the floor beside the bed. The wall he leaned against was spotted with sticky bits of brain and drops of blood. Most of his face was intact, except it was crisscrossed with rivulets of blood in the moonlight, filling his eyes with blood. The most incredible thing of all was not that the Moaning Man was able to make sounds, it was that the gun he had killed himself with was clenched tightly in a fist across his body at port arms. He moved it back and forth in rhythm with the moans.
“Oh my God oh my God oh my God,” Sam Niles said as Harold Bloomguard gaped slackjawed at the Moaning Man whose gun hand was swaying, swaying, back and forth with the snapping of the drapes in the wind as he said:
“Mmmmmm. Uuuuuhhhhhhh Mmmmmuuuuuhhhhh.”
And Sam Niles knew that he never would have done what the terrified Harold Bloomguard did next, which was to walk slowly across that room, watching the Luger swaying in the hand of the Moaning Man, the pieces of skull crackling under his leather soles, crackling with each step, until he stood beside the bed.
Sam Niles would forever smell the blood and hear the wind and the snapping drapes and Harold’s shoes crackling on the fragments of bone and Harold’s teeth clicking together frightfully as he moved a trembling hand toward the Luger which the Moaning Man held in front, swaying to and fro as he said:
“Mmmmm. Uuuuu. Mmmmuuuuuhhhtherr!”
And then Harold Bloomguard spoke to the Moaning Man. He said, “Now now now. Hush now, I’m right here. You’re not alone.”
Harold Bloomguard gripped the wrist and hand of the Moaning Man and the moaning stopped instantly. The fist relaxed, dropping the pistol on the bed. The bloody eyes slid shut and overflowed. The Moaning Man died without a sound.
Both policemen remained motionless for a long moment before Harold Bloomguard controlled his shaking and said, “He was calling his mother, is all. Why do so many call their mother?”
“He was dead!” Sam Niles said. “He was dead before we saw him!”
“He only needed the touch of a human being,” said Harold Bloomguard. “I was so scared. So scared!”
Sam Niles turned and left Harold in the darkness with the Moaning Man and called for a detective to take the death report and he did not speak to Harold for the remainder of the watch and demanded a choir practice when they changed into civilian clothes later that night. It was a bitter night for choir practice and only half the choirboys showed up. But Carolina Moon was there so it wasn’t too bad.
ELEVEN
SERGEANT DOMINIC SCUZZI
With a galloping heartbeat Harold Bloomguard entered the opened door of the vice squad office on the first night of his vice assignment. Harold was twenty-five minutes early. He wore a conservative gray suit, white button-down shirt, a paisley tie and traditional wing tip brogues.
The office was open but empty when Harold arrived. It looked different from the detective squad room. It was much smaller. And more cluttered. Covering one wall were three large street maps dotted with multicolored pins. Certain streets were covered with green pins signifying prostitution activity. Other streets were sporadically dotted with pins marking suspected bookmaking locations: cashrooms in the southerly black neighborhoods, phone spots in the northerly white neighborhoods. Cocktail lounges were marked where handbooks and agents operated.
There was a painted motto over the door. It said: “What you say here, What you see here, What you hear here, Let it stay here, When you leave here.”
Harold Bloomguard read that motto with shining eyes. He shook back his thin, ginger-colored hair and smiled enchantedly. For a dreamy moment he sipped from a frothy goblet in Bombay, Macao, Port Said: white linen suits, narrow teeming passages, mingled aromas of spice, rich dried fruit, dusky succulent women, clawing danger. The mystique of the secret agent enveloped this room.
Just then a swarthy unshaven overweight man of fifty in a dirty short sleeve dress shirt shuffled through the door in run over sneakers. He looked Harold up and down and said, “You don’t look big enough to fight, fuck or run a footrace. You one a the new kids on the block?”
“I’m… I’m… are you a policeman?”
“I’m a sergeant. I run the nightwatch.” The man shambled to a desk, rummaged through piles of papers until he found a cigar, belched three times before he offered his hand and said, “Name’s Dom Scuzzi. You can call me Scuz. You Slate, Niles or Bloomguard?”
“Bloomguard… Sergeant.”
“I said call me Scuz. Ain’t no formality in the vice squad. Not since I got rid a that prick, Lieutenant Cotton-Balls Klingham. I’ll never understand how he got on the squad. Cotton-Balls. One hundred percent sterile like they say on the box. Everything about him was sterile, especially his conversation.”