Manhattan Is My Beat Page 7

  Thank...

  The man stepped closer. No ... It's all right, she told herself again. He thinks that once he went upstairs I climbed out onto the fire escape and got away through the alley.

  ... you.

  Another step, as cautious as Don Johnson closing in on a dozen drug dealers in Miami Vice. The man paused, a foot away.

  Rune was afraid to lock the dead bolt or put the chain on; he'd hear her. She pressed her palms against the door, pushing as hard as she could. The man walked directly to it, then stopped, inches away. The thin wood--hell, she'd whacked right through it herself--was all that protected her. Rune's small muscles trembled as she pressed against the door.

  Which is when the screwdriver slid out of her pocket. In horror, she watched it fall--as if it were in slow motion. It was a scene from a Brian DePalma movie. She grabbed at the tool, caught it, then fumbled it ... No!

  She reached down fast and managed to snag the screwdriver an inch above the oak slats of the floor.

  Thank you...

  Frozen in position, like the game of statue she played as a kid, Rune listened to the man's labored breathing. He hadn't heard anything.

  He'd have to know she left. He'd have to!

  She slipped the screwdriver back into her pocket, but as she did so, she brushed the claws of the hammer, which was hooked into the waistband of her pants. The tool fell straight to the floor, its head bouncing twice with echoing slams.

  "No!" she shouted in a whisper. Planting her feet on the opposite wall, leaning hard into the door, Rune ducked her head, waiting for the fist that she knew would slam through the cheap wood, clawing for her hair, her eyes. She'd be dead. Just like Robert Kelly. It would only be a matter of minutes, seconds, and she would die.

  But, no ... He turned and ran down the stairs.

  Finally Rune stood, staring at her shaking hands and remembering some movie she'd seen recently where the teenage hero had escaped from some killer and had stood frozen, gazing at his quivering hands; Rune had groaned at the cliche. But it wasn't a cliche at all. Her hands were trembling so badly she could hardly open the door. She peered out, hearing sounds of chatting voices and far-off TVs. Children's squeals.

  Why had he run? she wondered. Who was he? A witness? The killer's accomplice?

  The killer?

  Rune--every muscle shaking--walked fast to the incinerator room, scooped up the diapers, and hurried down the stairs. Two women on the landing nodded at her, preoccupied with their conversation.

  Rune started past them, head down. But then she paused and in an exasperated voice said, "People don't know how to behave anymore. They don't know a thing about it, do they?"

  The women looked at her, smiling in polite curiosity.

  "That guy a minute ago? He almost knocked me over."

  "Me too," one woman said. Her gray hair was in pink curlers.

  "Who is he?" Rune asked, breathing hard, leaning against the banister.

  "That's Mr. Symington. In 3B. He crazy." The woman didn't elaborate.

  So he lived here. Which meant he probably wasn't the killer. More likely a witness.

  "Yeah," the woman's friend added, "move up there last month."

  "What's his first name?"

  "Victor, I think. Something like that. Never says hello or nothing."

  "So what?" the curler woman said. "He's nobody you'd want to talk to anyway."

  "I don't know," Rune said indignantly. "I'd have a couple things to tell him."

  The curler woman pointed to the box of diapers. "Greatest invention ever was."

  "After TV," her friend said.

  Rune said, "Well, sure," and started down the stairs.

  She ran into Amanda on the street corner.

  "Look," the woman said. She'd been to Hallmark and had bought a fake silver picture frame. Inside she'd put a picture of her and Mr. Kelly. It was at Christmas and they were in front of a skinny pine tree decorated with a few lights and tinsel. There was still a smear of adhesive on the glass from the price tag.

  "It's totally cool," Rune said, and started to cry once more.

  "You have babies?" Amanda was looking at the diapers.

  "Oh. Long story. You want them?"

  A faint laugh. "Did that years and years ago."

  Rune pitched them out. "I've got a question. What do you know about Victor Symington?"

  "That guy live upstairs?"

  "Yeah."

  Amanda shrugged. "Not so much. He been in the building for maybe six weeks. A month. He never say hi, never say how you doing. I no like him so much. I mean, why not say good morning to people? What's so hard about that? You tell me what's so hard."

  "You said Mr. Kelly never talked about his life much?"

  "No, he didn't."

  "Did he mention anything about a bank robbery? Or a movie called Manhattan Is My Beat?"

  "You know, I think he say something about that movie. Yeah. A couple times. He was real happy he find it. But he never say anything about a bank robbery."

  "Are you going to have a funeral for him? I talked to the police and they said you wanted to bury him."

  The woman nodded. Rune thought: This is what you think of when somebody says a "handsome" woman. Amanda wasn't beautiful. But she was ageless and attractive. "He has no family," Amanda said. "I have a friend, he cuts grass at Forest Lawn. Maybe I can work something out with him to get Mr. Kelly buried there. That's a nice place. If I can stay here in the U.S., I mean. But I no think that going to happen."

  Rune whispered to her, "Don't give up just yet."

  "What?"

  "I think Mr. Kelly was about to get a lot of money."

  "Mr. Kelly?" Amanda laughed. "He never said anything about that to me."

  "I can't say anything for certain. But I think I'm right. And I think this Symington knows something about it. If you see him, will you let me know? Don't say anything to him." She gave the woman the number of the video store. "Call me there."

  "Sure, sure. I call you."

  Rune watched the skepticism surface on her face.

  "You don't believe me, do you?" she asked Amanda.

  The woman shrugged. "Believe that Mr. Kelly was going to get some money?" She laughed again. "No, I no think so. But, hey, you find it, you let me know," she said. Looked at the picture once more. "You let me know."

  Once upon a time...

  Walking west toward Avenue A. Rune looked up and down the street for Symington. Gone.

  The heat was bad. City heat, dense heat, wet heat. She didn't feel like hurrying but she also didn't want to get into a shouting match with Tony so she broke one of her personal rules and hurried to work.

  Once upon a time, in a kingdom huge and powerful and filled with many wonders, there was a princess. A very small princess who no one took seriously....

  She continued along the sidewalk, feeling exhilarated. She'd met her first black knight--a pock-faced man in his sixties, wearing an ugly brown hat--and escaped from him without being broadsworded to death.

  Oh, she was a beautiful princess though she was too short to be a model. A beautiful princess--and would be a lot more beautiful when her hair grew out. Then one day the princess became very sad because a terrible dragon killed a kind old man and stole his secret treasure. A secret treasure that he'd promised to give her part of and that'd also save the bacon of a friend of his who was getting hassled by the creeps at Immigration and Naturalization.

  Third Avenue. Broadway. University Place.

  So the beautiful princess herself set out to find the dragon. And she did and she slayed him, or slew him, or at least bagged his ass so he'd have to hang around Attica for twenty-five to thirty years. She got the treasure of gold, which she split with the friend and they both netted a cool half million.

  Rune walked into the video store, watching Tony inhale the breath that would come out as "Where the fuck've you been?"

  "Sorry." Rune held up her hands to pre-empt him. "It's been one of those mornings.
"

  She stepped behind the counter and logged onto the register so fast that she didn't notice, across the street, the man she'd thought of as Pretty Boy, the one in the meter-reader jacket, slide into a booth in the coffee shop. He continued to watch her, just like he'd been watching her as he'd followed her from the building on Tenth Street where they'd hit the old man.

  Rune grabbed a handful of tapes, started to reshelve them. Thinking:

  And the princess lived happily ever after.

  CHAPTER NINE

  On the phone with Susan Edelman.

  The pink-suited jogger, the one who'd been struck by the car in the alley beside Mr. Kelly's building, couldn't talk long. She was very groggy. "I'm being released, uhm ... tomorrow. Can you ... uhm, call me then?"

  She gave Rune her phone number but it had only six digits, then tried again and couldn't remember the last four numbers.

  Oh, she'll be a great witness, Rune thought sourly.

  "I'll look it up in the phone book," Rune told her. "You listed?"

  "Uhm, yeah."

  "Feel better," Rune told her.

  "I got hit by a car," Susan said, as if telling Rune for the first time what had happened.

  Rune reshelved a few more tapes, then, as soon as Tony left, she told Frankie she was going for coffee, then booked out of the store.

  Outside, she looked around the streets of the city. Caught a glimpse of somebody who looked familiar--a young man with dark, curly hair--but she couldn't place him. His back was to her. Something familiar about the stance, his muscular build. Where'd she seen him?

  Where?

  But he stepped quickly into a deli, so she didn't think anything more about him. That was one thing about Greenwich Village. You were always running into people you knew. Everyone thought New York was a huge city but that wasn't true; it was a collection of small towns. A Yellow Cab cruised up the street and she flagged it down. She was in the New York Public Library in twenty minutes.

  The books on general city history--there were hundreds--didn't help her much at all. The history of crime in New York ... that was something else. One thing she learned was that in Manhattan there were more bank robberies per square mile than anywhere in the country--and most of them occurred on Friday. The traditional payday. So with that volume of heists, the Union Bank stickup didn't get much coverage. She found a few references to it. The only one that gave any details was in a book about the Mafia, which reported only that the Family probably wasn't involved.

  The newspapers were better--though the robbery didn't get a lot of coverage because it hadn't occurred on a slow-news day. At the same time the hero cop was bargaining with the holdup man for the hostage's life, the rest of the world was following King Edward's abdication, which had filled all the city papers with features and sidebars. Rune couldn't help but read some of the articles; she decided it was the most romantic thing she'd ever heard. She studied the picture of Mrs. Simpson.

  Would anybody give up a kingdom for me?

  Would Richard?

  She couldn't come up with a satisfactory answer to that question and turned back to the stories about the Union Bank robbery.

  After the shootout was over: the robber was in the morgue and the million bucks was missing, though that didn't seem too important at first because the hostage was safe and Patrolman Samuel Davies was a hero. The only hiccup was that there was no satisfactory explanation as to how the robber passed the suitcase containing the money to his partner outside the bank before Davies started negotiating with him.

  An accomplice of the deceased robber, it is suspected, secreted himself outside the bank and, in a moment of confusion while Patrolman Davies was boldly approaching the bank, seized the ill-gotten loot and absconded.

  A month later the question of what had happened to the money had been answered and the newspaper stories were very different.

  Hero Patrolman Indicted in Union Bank Theft-- Boy Admits Hiding Cop's Loot in Mother's House--A "Shame and Disgrace," Says Commissioner.

  Rune, sitting at the huge oak platform of a table, felt a queasy shiver for the cop. The story came out that he'd talked the robber into exchanging himself for the hostage, who fled from the bank. Then he'd convinced the thief to hand over his revolver.

  What happened next was speculation: Davies claimed the robber had a change of mind and jumped him. There was a scuffle. The robber knocked down the cop and went for the gun. Davies tried to pull the pistol away from him. They fought. The gun went off. The robber was killed.

  But a young shoeshine boy testified that he'd been hiding outside the bank, waiting for something to see, when a door above him opened and a man looked out. It was Davies, the cop.

  Yes, sir, I can identify him, sir. He looks just like that man right there, sir, only that day he was wearing a uniform.

  He asked for the boy's address and then handed him a suitcase, told him to take it home.

  He says to me ... he says that if I opened the bag, or I said anything about what happened, I'd go to reform school and get the tar beat out of me every day. I done what he said, sir.

  Davies denied it all--murdering the robber, taking the money, breaking into the shoeshine boy's home in Brooklyn and stealing the suitcase, then hiding the loot somewhere. The policeman made a tearful defendant, the papers reported. But that didn't sway the jury. Davies got five to fifteen years. The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association claimed all along he was the victim of a frame-up and urged his parole. He served seven years of the sentence.

  But controversy around Davies continued after his release. Only two days after he walked out the front door of Sing Sing in Ossining, New York, in 1942 he was tommy-gunned to death at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, in front of the gothic Fifth Avenue Hotel. No one knew who was behind the shooting, though it looked like a professional hit. The money was never recovered.

  Nothing more about the crime appeared in the press until the tiny blurb about the movie Manhattan Is My Beat--the clipping Rune had found in Kelly's apartment.

  A homeless man sat down next to her at the library table. She smelled foulness in the wake of the air around him. Like most derelicts, he managed to seem both harmless and scary at the same time. He whispered to himself, wrote on a piece of wrinkled paper in the tiniest handwriting she'd ever seen.

  One of her watches seemed to be working. She glanced at it. Oh shit! It was after two. Her ten-minute break had stretched to longer than two hours. Tony could be back. She took a cab to the Village but, on impulse, had the cabbie stop at 24 Fifth Avenue, the site of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. She paced back and forth slowly, wondering where Samuel Davies was when he was gunned down--what he'd been doing, what went through his mind when he realized what was happening, if he'd seen the black gun muzzle pointed at him.

  She walked in wide circles, weaving through the crowd, until a cop--a real-life cop, NYPD--who was leaning on a patrol car must have decided she was acting a little suspicious and started walking slowly in her direction. Rune looked at the menu taped in the window of the glitzy restaurant on the corner, frowned, and shook her head. She strolled toward University Place.

  The cop lost interest.

  Back at the store, Tony was waiting for her. He lectured her for a whole two minutes on promptness and she did her best to look contrite.

  "What?" he grumbled. "Thought I'd be out all day, huh?"

  Like you usually are? she thought. But said, "Sorry, sorry, sorry. Won't happen again. Cross my heart."

  "I know it won't. This's your last chance. Late once more and you're outa here. I've got people lined up to get a job."

  "Lined up?" She looked out the front door. "Where, Tony? Out back? In the alley?" She then realized she should be more contrite. "Sorry. Just a joke."

  He glowered and handed her a pink While-You-Were-Out slip. "Another thing, this isn't message central. Now, go get coffee and make it up to me."

  "You bet," she said cheerfully. He eyed her uncertainly.

&nb
sp; The message was from Richard. It said, "Confirming our 'date.' " She liked the quotation marks. She folded the pink slip of paper and slipped it into her shirt pocket.

  "Here," Tony grumbled. Handing her money for the coffee.

  "Naw, that's okay," she said. "It's on me."

  Perplexing the poor man no end.

  "You're from Ohio?"

  It was eight P.M. They were sitting in Rune's gazebo, listening to the Pachelbel Canon. Rune had eight different recordings of the piece. She'd liked it for years--even before it had caught on, the way Greensleeves and Simple Gifts had.

  Richard continued. "I've never met anyone from Ohio."

  She was wearing a black T-shirt, black stretch pants, and red-and-white-striped socks. She'd done this as a homage to Richard's costume the other night. He, however, was in baggy gray slacks, Keds, and a beige Texaco Service shirt with the name Ralph embroidered on the pocket.

  This man is pure Downtown. I love him!

  Rune sang, " 'What's round on the ends and high in the middle? It's O-Hi-O!' That's it. One more syllable and Rodgers and Hammerstein could've written a musical about it."

  "Ohio," Richard said thoughtfully. "There must be something in that. Solid, dependable. Working-class. Sort of metaphoric. You were there and now you're"--he waved his hand around the loft--"here."

  "It's a nice state," she said defensively.

  "I don't mean anything bad. But why'd you come here and not Chicago or L.A.? A job?"

  "No."

  "I know. Boyfriend."

  "Nope."

  "You moved to Manhattan by yourself?"

  "To go on a real quest, you have to go by yourself. Remember Lord of the Rings?"

  "Sort of. Refresh my memory."

  Sort of? How could he not remember the best book of all time?

  "All the hobbits and everybody started out together, but in the end it was Frodo who got to the fiery pit to destroy the ring of power. All by his little-old lonesome."

  "Okay," he said, nodding. Not sure what the connection was. "But why Manhattan?"

  Rune explained. "I didn't spend a lot of time at home in the afternoons. After school, I mean. My dad was pretty sick and my mom'd send my sister and me out to play a lot. She got the dates and boyfriends. I got the books."

  "Books?"

  "I'd hang out at the Shaker Heights Library. There was this book of pictures of Manhattan. I read it once and just knew I had to come here." Then she asked, "Well, how 'bout you?"