Back | Next
Contents

Murder Three

John Watson was a professor of sociology at the New New School, at Central Park North. The neat rows of condominiums marched northward through Harlem, each lovingly renovated building flanked on both sides by blockwide vegetable gardens, also lovingly tended by the neighborhood residents. Watson could have taken considerable pride in the role he had played in turning Harlem into a model of peace and prosperity.

All his younger years he had battled the city, the state government, the feds, and the people of Harlem themselves. His enemies had been hopelessness and resistance to change: the indifference of the masses and the brutal opposition of the dope peddlers and slumlords and crooked city officials who made their millions out of the sweat and suffering of Harlem's people.

His allies had been the mothers who had seen their children killed by narcotics, or guns, or knives. And the brighter youngsters who sought a way out of the endless cycle of misery and poverty. They had little power. But they had guts and brains. Then John Watson hit upon a stroke of genius. He made allies of the building contractors and their associated trade unions. Rebuilding Harlem made jobs for nearly a generation of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, masons, truck drivers. It made hundreds of millions for the companies that employed them. The money came from taxes, of course: local, state, and federal. But the payoff, as John Watson spent twenty years explaining to appropriations committees, would be a Harlem that was productive, a Harlem that housed taxpayers, not welfare cases. Not criminals and diseased addicts.

Now, as he strolled along Martin Luther King Boulevard toward Rev. Jesse Jackson Park, Watson took no small measure of satisfaction in the happiness that he saw all around him. Harlem was not heaven; it was not even the Garden of Eden. But it was no longer the rotting, drug-infested ghetto that it had been when he was a child growing up in it.

It was a considerable shock, therefore, when a strange white man stepped out of a car parked in a clearly marked bus stop zone and sank a switchblade knife into John Watson's heart. He died almost instantly, while the white man got back into his car and calmly drove away. None of the stunned witnesses could provide the police with the car's license number, probably because the license plate had been carefully smeared with dirt beforehand.

It was a monument to John Watson's life work that this foul murder was treated as any other would be, both by the police and the media. Everyone was shocked. No one suggested that such an event was only to be expected in Harlem.

 

Eight

Carl sat sweating in the smoky Greek nightclub on Ninth Avenue, watching a fleshy half-naked young woman performing the artfully erotic oriental ritual known in the West as the belly dance.

The place was only half-full, but almost all of the customers were men. Most of them sat up at the bar itself, squinting through the haze of cigarette smoke and muttering an occasional "Yasoo!" at a particularly stimulating movement by the dancer up on the tiny platform that passed for a stage. A three-piece band—reedy clarinet, big-bellied stringed bouzouki, and the inevitable drums—played weaving snake charmer's music. Now and then the drummer would sing in a wavering, almost yodelling high-pitched tenor.

Carl sat alone at a table near the stage, close enough to smell the dancers' heavy perfumes and feel the breeze from their veils as they twirled about. Men staggered up to the edge of the stage now and then to press dollar bills into the dancer's bra or g-string. Carl had never seen that before. In Cambridge, where he had met Lori, the belly-dancing was more of an Armenian clan gathering. Everybody danced before the night was over, linking hands in a long human chain that wended around the restaurant and, sometimes, right out into the street.

But that had been in Cambridge. Now he was in New York. They played by different rules here. It had been a dizzying, stupefying couple of days. Now, as he sipped alternately at a water tumbler filled with milky iced ouzo and a tiny cup of powerful, muddy Greek coffee, Carl wondered how long it would take before P.T. Bunker, the founder and president of Bunker Books, would condescend to meet with him.

"Mrs. Bee wants me to entice you into turning the prototype over to her, so she can show it to Mr. Bee," Lori had told him in the cab as they rode to the club.

"She what?" Carl had snapped.

Patting his knee, Lori said soothingly, "Relax. I'm going to do no such thing. If P.T. Bunker wants to see your prototype, he'll have to see you along with it."

Carl felt his misgivings ease away. Slightly.

"It's just that it's almost impossible to get to see Mr. Bunker. He's so busy all the time."

"What about when he comes to the office?"

"He never comes to the office," Lori had said. "We never see him. Mrs. Bunker runs the office and he stays in their home down in the Lower East Side."

"That's a pretty posh neighborhood, isn't it?" Carl had asked. "Near the Disneydome and all."

Lori smiled bitterly. "Listen: I know plenty of starving writers, hungry artists, editors who have to take moonlighting jobs just to pay the rent on their studio apartments. But publishers live in posh neighborhoods and drink champagne every night."

No champagne for me, Carl told himself as he took another sip of the ouzo. It was powerful stuff, even iced. Strong flavor like licorice. The waiter had taken one look at Carl and decided he did not look Greek. When he brought the first ouzo, he also brought a stainless-steel bowl filled with ice cubes. "You don't drink it straight," he insisted. "You put ice in it. No friend of Yasmin's is going to throw up on this floor!"

The waiter was watching him now, from the shadows in the corner of the room, a dark scowl of suspicion on his swarthy mustachioed face. There was a table full of young, broad-shouldered men on that side of the stage, laughing and drinking and hollering to the dancer in Greek. They looked like stevedores from the nearby docks. Muscular types, shirts opened to their belt buckles to show off their hairy chests.

A crash from up near the bar made Carl swivel his head. The men up there, older, balder, paunchier, were laughing uproariously. One of them raised his emptied glass over his head and smashed it to the floor. Everybody laughed and applauded.

The ouzo should be relaxing me, Carl told himself. I ought to be loosening up, like everyone else. Instead he felt tense, wary, as if he had been trapped alone in a strange and dangerous land.

The dancer finished with a flourish and a hearty round of "Yasoos" and applause, then scurried offstage with dollar bills flapping from her costume.

The music died. Muttered conversations and occasional bursts of laughter were the only sounds in the club. Carl finished his glass of ouzo, then sipped carefully at the coffee. When he began to taste the mud at the bottom of the little cup, he put it down and signalled to the waiter.

The swarthy man was at his side like a shot. "Another coffee?"

"When does Yasmin come on?"

"She is next."

Carl pulled in a deep breath. His nose wrinkled at the acrid smell of cigarette smoke. "Another ouzo," he ordered.

"And coffee?"

"No. Just the ouzo."

"You don't like our coffee? Too strong for you?"

Carl looked up at him. "I love your coffee."

"Then I bring you another cup."

The man was being protective, Carl realized. "Okay. Another cup of coffee. And another glass of ouzo."

"Hokay."

The waiter also brought a glass full of ice cubes, with a fierce scowl that told Carl he would not tolerate his drinking the ouzo straight.

The band started tuning up again as Carl was pouring the clear liquor over the ice and watching it turn pale milky white, wondering what chemical reaction caused the change in color. Then the club's bass-heavy loudspeaker announced: "And now, our next Oriental dancer—Yasmin! The Armenian Dervish!"

It was Lori all right. She was beautiful. Bare flesh as smooth and flawless as the most perfect fantasy. She moved sensuously, sinuously, hips weaving a spell that soon had Carl breathing hard.

The first part of her dance was all right. The dancers all started with see-through veils that really hid nothing, but at least discouraged admirers from trying to stuff money into their costumes.

Carl gulped at his watered ouzo as slowly, tantalizingly, Yasmin removed her veils. She smiled at Carl as if to say she were dancing especially for him. But although his eyes were riveted on her, he could hear the raucous remarks coming from the table across the way.

Carl felt every nerve in him tightening. It's just their way, he told himself. They're not being crude or obscene. Still, as Lori danced, he found himself glaring at the table full of young stevedores.

She moved toward their side of the stage and, sure enough, one of the hairy grinning apes stood up and tucked a dollar bill in the g-string circling Lori's hips. She danced away from them, back toward Carl, bending over him slightly so that her breasts swayed with the music.

Carl was panting now. Then another one of the stevedores jumped up on the stage with a fistful of bills and started pushing them into Lori's bra. She looked slightly alarmed.

Before he could think, Carl was on the stage and pushing the young Greek away from her. The music stopped. All the other stevedores got to their feet, fists clenched. The mustachioed waiter dashed up onto the stage and stood between Carl and the others. The rest of the waiters gathered around.

Carl found himself being politely but firmly led by both arms out of the club and out into the street. His waiter shook his head sadly at him and said, "Not enough ice."

It was drizzling. Carl felt like a perfect idiot. And he also felt furious that there were men in there pawing Lori's body. And she was letting them do it! He started walking in the general direction of his hotel, letting the drizzling rain cool him off. He imagined it sizzling to steam as it struck his body, he felt so heated.

After what seemed like an hour's walking he found himself back at the same club. I must've walked around the block, he realized. Like a man lost in the desert, he had made a circle and returned to his starting point.

Briefly he wondered what would happen if the half dozen or so stevedores came out the door right at this instant. But instead, when the club's front door swung open, Lori stepped out, looking worried and slightly dishevelled, bundled in a beige raincoat.

"Carl!"

He started to say hello as casually as he knew how, but his throat was raw and it came out as a croaking "Hi."

"Whatever possessed you  . . . ?"

"I got mad."

She did not seem angry. In fact, she was smiling. "You decided to protect my honor?"

"Something like that."

Almost, she laughed. But she caught herself. "Come on, you can walk me home." She pulled a miniature umbrella from her capacious shoulder bag and opened it. Carl had to snuggle very close to her just to keep his head under its tiny red canopy.

Quite seriously, Lori asked, "Don't you know that the waiters protect all the dancers? This is a respectable club; they don't allow any nasty stuff."

"Just feeling you up onstage, in front of everybody."

"That's nothing. It's like leaving a tip for the waiter."

"Do you enjoy having strange guys paw you?"

For a moment she said nothing. Then, in a small voice, Lori told him, "I'd enjoy it more if someone I knew very well pawed me."

Carl gulped and asked, "How far is it to your apartment?" It was a studio apartment on the second floor of an old redbrick high rise in the Gramercy Park area. Once the neighborhood had been prime real estate, but it had been going steadily downhill for a generation. Still, Lori assured Carl, the building was safe. The automated security system kept strangers from entering the lobby, and the bars on the windows discouraged burglars.

Carl did not notice the automated security system or the bars on the windows or anything other than Lori, the nearness of her, the warmth of her, the scent of her. In his mind he heard swirling reedy music and saw her dancing for him alone. They danced together, the oldest dance of all, entwined in each other on a foldout bed until he fell into an exhausted sleep.

Lori lay next to Carl's peacefully slumbering body. It smoldered like hot lava, and she pressed herself against him. He was out like a light, poor baby. Too much ouzo, she diagnosed. She smiled at the cracked ceiling in the shadows of her little apartment. The noise from the traffic of Third Avenue and the wailing sirens of the ambulances from the hospital across the way did not bother her now.

But something else did. The novel. The novel. The greatest piece of literature she had ever read, in manuscript. Not as good as Tolstoy or Proust or even Dickens, but as good as anything ever written in America. As good as Hemingway or Twain or Fitzgerald, even when he was sober. Better.

They'll never let me publish it. They'll say it's not commercial. It's not a Thorn Birds or a Shogun. It's merely the finest piece of literature written by any American since Christopher goddamn Columbus stumbled ashore. And there's no market for fine literature. That's what they'll say.

But, Lori told herself, if I bring them Carl's electronic book, if the company gets rich on the idea that I brought to them, then I'll have the power to publish what I want to. I'll be able to bring this great work of literature to print.

Carl groaned softly and shifted in the bed. Lori gazed at his naked body, still sheened with perspiration. I'm using you, she said silently to him. She felt a pang of remorse at the realization. But it's all in the service of great art, she rationalized, great literature.

And besides, she almost giggled, I think I really do love you, you big silly knight in shining armor.

 

 

Capt. Ron Clanker, U.S.N. (Ret.)

c/o Army/Navy Home

Chelsea MA 02150

 

Dear Capt. Clanker:

 

It is my great pleasure to tell you that Bunker Books will be happy to publish your novel, Midway Diary. As you will see in the enclosed contract forms, we offer you an advance of $5,000 against all rights to the work.

Let me offer my personal congratulations. I think you have written a fine, sensitive novel that still contains stirring action. It is the best such work I've read since Richard McKenna's The Sand Pebbles. I only hope it sells as well!

 

Sincerely yours,

Lori Tashkajian

Fiction Editor

 

Nine

Two men spent the rest of the week in an agony of suspense.

Carl Lewis felt like an astronaut lost in the dark vacuum of space, hanging weightless and alone, waiting for rescue. P.T. Bunker had agreed to see him, but not today. He was busy. Tomorrow. When the next day came, it was the same story. Sorry, Mr. Bunker is engaged in some very delicate negotiations and cannot be disturbed.

Mrs. Bunker was pleasant, even sweet, to Carl as he came by the office every day. Junior kept casting a shifty eye on Carl whenever they bumped into one another in the corridor. Each afternoon Carl went back to his hotel room, wondering if he should ask Lori to dinner, wondering if their night together was the result of ouzo or true love or just animal passion.

For her part, Lori did not mention their night of lovemaking, although she smiled at Carl warmly and cast him long-lashed glances as if she expected him to make the next move. And he was not certain what his next move should be.

So he waited for his moment with P.T. Bunker. And waited.

Twenty floors higher in the Synthoil Tower, P. Curtis Hawks anticipated the weekend with barely concealed frenzy. He was not waiting for someone else to make himself available. Hawks yearned for the day, Saturday, when he did not have to be in the office. When he could sneak out to New Jersey without the Old Man knowing it. When he could start the machinery that would eventually remove Weldon W. Weldon and install himself as CEO of Tarantula Enterprises—the head spider.

Saturday dawned like a scene out of Edgar Allan Poe: dark and dreary. Rain slanted down from black clouds. The perfect day for sleeping late. But Hawks was up and out of his Westchester County house by seven, leaving his lumpy overweight wife snoring soundly in her bed, her usual tray full of tranquilizers on her night table in easy reach.

It never occurred to Hawks that the same technology that could turn his office into a veritable Hollywood sound studio could also keep track of his private automobile. An electronic chip the size of a fingernail paring could send a signal to a satellite orbiting more man 22,000 miles high, which in turn could pinpoint the car's position anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. If Hawks had realized that, it probably would have affected his driving.

As it was, he sped his heavy Citroën-Mercedes down practically empty throughways in the dreary pelting rain, crossed the Hudson on the Tappan Zee Bridge, and plunged into New Jersey. Within an hour he was at the warehouse.

His warehouse. The primary storage area and distribution center for Webb Press's books and magazines. Hawks's personal, concrete monument to himself. His albatross.

It was a long, low, gray concrete structure, more reminiscent of the bunkers and gun emplacements of the Siegfried Line than a publisher's warehouse. Rows of big trucks, each emblazoned with the stylized spiderweb of Webb Press on their flanks (and a small representation of a tarantula at the edge of the web), lined the parking area. The loading docks were shut tight. The place looked empty and deserted.

Hawks pulled his big sedan up to the front entrance, beneath the marquee that he had personally designed. It was rusting already, even though he had specified that it be made of stainless steel throughout.

Ignoring the streaks of ignominy defacing his creation, Hawks trudged the few feet from his car to the warehouse's front door, huddled inside his trenchcoat against the gusting wet wind.

He pushed at the door. Locked.

He tapped at the security buzzer.

"Name, please?" asked the security computer in the hard, no-nonsense voice of a retired cop.

"Hawks. P. Curtis Hawks."

"Just a moment for voiceprint identification, please."

Hawks fidgeted in the rain that slanted in under the canopy. A leak in the supposedly stainless steel dripped into a puddle that spanned the front doorway like a miniature moat. Hawks's immaculate Argentinean boots, with their clever inner soles and heels that raised him two inches taller than he deserved, were getting soaked and ruined.

"I'm sorry, sir. Voiceprint does not match."

"Whattaya mean it doesn't match!" Hawks shouted at the little speaker grille. "I'm P. Curtis Hawks. I'm the president of this goddamn company! Open this fucking door or I'll replace you with a Radio Shack robot, you goddamn stupid mother—"

The computer's flat voice cut through. "Voiceprint identification accepted, sir."

The door popped open.

Muttering to himself, Hawks stepped through and out of the rain. Goddamn idiot computer doesn't recognize my voice unless I scream at it. Who the hell set up the voiceprint IDs, anyway?

Fuming and steaming, Hawks stomped through the carpeted reception area and pushed through a steel fire door. The warehouse spread out before him, silent and still, a vast windowless conglomeration of row after row of twenty-foot-high shelving on which rested huge cartons filled with nothing but books. Even taller piles of magazines, neatly baled and wrapped in impervious protective plastic, lay in long rows on the floor. They were not on shelves because there was not enough shelf space for both Webb Press's books and magazines. In his personal direction of the warehouse's design and construction, Hawks had badly underestimated the space needed to store all of Webb's many publications. The brand-new warehouse was far too small the day it opened.

And dangerous.

Hawks had insisted on a completely automated warehouse. "We have the technology," he had snapped. "Let's not be afraid to use it." So there were no human workers in the warehouse, in theory. All the lifting and carrying and sorting was done by clever robots. In theory. Overhead conveyor belts whisked heavy cartons of books from one end of the warehouse to the other with swift, silent efficiency. The only people working there were up in the control center, where they pushed buttons from the comfort of padded chairs. In theory.

In practice the robots were not quite clever enough. They could not reach the shelves higher than ten feet off the concrete floor, and not even the most patient Japanese technicians could teach them to climb like monkeys. The warehouse operators had to hire teenagers and unemployed laborers for that. To keep the facts secret from higher management, these employees were listed in the personnel files as assistant truck drivers. Once the Teamsters got wind of that, of course, they had to be paid as assistant truck drivers.

Hawks's footsteps echoed off the concrete floor as he made his way across the warehouse toward the control center. Should have placed it on the same side of the building as the front entrance and reception area, he told himself. I'll know better next time.

He looked warily above him as he crossed the shadow of one of the overhead conveyor belts. It was not in operation, but still, caution was the watchword. At top speed the conveyors developed a slight wobble, just enough to send a heavy carton of books toppling down to the floor below now and then. The concrete was chipped where the cartons had landed. And there were several chalked outlines of human figures, workers who had been conked by falling cartons. Some wiseass Puerto Rican had started putting up little crosses at the spots where people had been killed, but Hawks had put a stop to that.

The warehouse was costing Webb a fortune. The accident insurance claims alone were enough to keep the company in the red. If the Old Man ever started wondering why so many assistant truck drivers were receiving accident benefits, Hawks might end up working in the warehouse himself.

All the more reason to get the Old Man out of the picture. For good.

With grim resolve, Hawks climbed the clanging metal stairs that led up to the control room. He pushed open the heavy, acoustically insulated door, and saw that the Beast from the East was already there, smiling at him.

Vinnie DeAngelo had won his nickname many years earlier, when he had been in charge of Webb's magazine circulation for the western region of the country. Headquartered in Denver, responsible for getting Webb's magazines prominently displayed on every newsstand between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast, Vinnie had instituted a reign of terror among wholesalers, distributors, truck drivers, and newsstand operators.

He looked fearsome. Six feet even, in every direction. Built like a block of concrete. Absolutely no neck at all; his shoulders grew out of his ears, which were strangely petite and a shell-like pink. A nose that had been broken so many times it looked like a hiker's trail twisting up a steep mountain. Ice-blue eyes. Reddish-brown hair. The control center, built to accommodate three operators at their consoles and at least two more supervisors behind them, seemed crowded with Vinnie in it.

"Hello, Mr. Hawks," said Vinnie. It sounded almost like an old Mickey Mouse cartoon.

The Beast had a high-pitched little-girl's voice that made people want to laugh when they first met him. Those who did laugh never repeated the error.

"Hello, Vinnie."

"What can I do for you?" asked the Beast.

"I need a favor."

"Such as?"

Hawks glanced around the control center. It was small: merely three electronic consoles and the padded chairs for them, plus two more empty chairs behind them. The wide windows looked out on the warehouse floor. The only door was at Hawks's back. The walls were softly padded to keep out the noise of the machines that clattered during the working day.

"It's time for the Old Man to retire."

For the first time in the years that Hawks had known the Beast, Vinnie's glacial blue eyes widened with surprise.

"The Old Man? Mr. Weldon?" He whispered the name.

Hawks nodded.

Vinnie shifted his ponderous bulk from one foot to the other. "Gee, I don't know. The Old Man  . . ."

"It's got to be done. For the good of the company."

"He's already had a stroke, ain't he?"

"A heart attack."

"Maybe he'll pop off by himself soon."

"This can't wait for nature to take its course, Vinnie." Besides, Hawks thought, the old bastard will probably live long enough to bury us all. Especially me.

"Gee, I don't know," Vinnie repeated.

"I can make it worth the risks you'd be taking."

Hunching his massive shoulders, the Beast replied, "I'm already special assistant to the national manager of magazine circulation. I get more money than I can spend as it is."

"Name your price."

"The Old Man? Gee, I don't know . . . ."

"Name your price," Hawks repeated.

Glancing furtively around, as if afraid that someone was eavesdropping, Vinnie hesitated for agonizingly long moments. At last he said, "See, I met this guy a couple months ago. In the airport in Dallas. He was autographin' books. He's a writer. An author."

Hawks felt his brows knitting. What was the Beast after?

"An' we got to talking on the plane back to New York, an' he told me I ought to write my life story. You know, I'd tell it to him and he'd write it and we'd split the money."

"You want me to publish your autobiography?"

Sheepishly, the Beast nodded his massive head. "Yeah. That's it."

"Aren't you afraid that the police would read it?"

"I ain't done nothin' illegal. Nothin' they got witnesses for."

Hawks started to smile, but quickly suppressed it. Not wise to smile at the Beast; he might get the wrong idea.

"All right, Vinnie," said Hawks slowly, carefully. "I'm sure that Webb Press will be happy to publish your autobiography."

"And make it a best-seller."

"We'll do our best."

"It's gotta be a best-seller," said the Beast ominously.

"Well, your people in distribution would have more to say about that than I would," Hawks replied smoothly. "We'll start with a print run of fifteen thou—"

"A hunnert thousand. Hardcover."

"That's not necessary, Vinnie. Fifteen to start, and we can go back to press as soon as we see they're selling well enough to warrant another press run."

"A hunnert thousand," rumbled the Beast. "This writer guy said it can't be a best-seller unless you print a hunnert thousand hardcover."

"Oh, come on now," Hawks countered—cautiously. "What do writers know about the publishing business?"

Vinnie scowled, a look that many a man had taken to the grave with him.

"I'll tell you what," said Hawks, trying to keep his voice from trembling. "We'll do a first print run of fifty thousand. That'll be enough to get the book on The New York Times best-seller list all by itself. Okay?"

Vinnie thought it over for a while. Hawks could almost hear the laborious grinding of gears inside the Beast's thick skull. Finally, he stuck out his right hand and Hawks let the enormous paw engulf his own hand. Weldon W. Weldon is about to enter that big publishing house in the sky, Hawks congratulated himself as Vinnie pumped his arm nearly out of its socket.

Then he added, And I'm going to publish the autobiography of a goon.

 

Back | Next
Framed