Falling Angel (22 page)

“They’ll trace it to Fowler,” I said. “That’s when their problems will start.”

“Forget their problems. What about your problems? Where do you go from New Year’s 1943?”

“No place.” I finished my drink and set the glass on the bar. “I can’t find him in the past. If he’s here in the city, he’ll surface again soon. Next time, I’ll be waiting.”

“Think I’m a target?” Krusemark slid off his Exercycle.

“What do you think?”

“I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”

“Might be a good idea if we kept in touch,” I said. “My number’s in the book if you need me.” I wasn’t about to hand my business card over to another potential corpse.

Krusemark clapped me on the shoulder and flashed his million-dollar smile. “You got more on the ball than New York’s Finest, Angel.” He walked me to the front door, exuding charm like a pig sweating blood. “You’ll be hearing from me; you can count on that.”

THIRTY-NINE

Krusemark’s dynamic-tension handshake stayed with me all the way to the street. “Cab, sir?” the doorman asked, touching his braid-crusted cap.

“No, thanks. I’ll walk a few blocks.” I needed to think, not discuss philosophy or the mayor or baseball with some cabbie.

Two men were waiting on the corner as I came out of the building. The short, stocky one wearing a blue rayon windbreaker and black chinos looked like a high school football coach. His companion was a kid in his twenties with a d.a. haircut and the wet, imploring eyes of a greeting-card Jesus. His two-button green sharkskin suit had pointed lapels and padded shoulders and seemed several sizes too large.

“Hey, buddy, got a minute?” the coach called, ambling toward me with his hands in his jacket pockets. “I got something to show you.”

“Some other time,” I said.

“Right now.” The blunt muzzle of an automatic pointed up at me from out of the V in the coach’s half-zippered windbreaker. Only the front sight was exposed. It was .22-caliber, which meant the guy was good, or thought he was.

“You’re making a mistake,” I said.

“No mistake. You’re Harry Angel, right?” The automatic slid back out of sight into the windbreaker.

“Why ask if you already know?”

“There’s a park across the street. Let’s you and me take a walk over there where we can talk nice and private.”

“What about him?” I nodded at the kid in the sharkskin suit nervously watching us with his liquid eyes.

“He comes, too.”

The kid fell in behind us, and we crossed Sutton Place and started down the steps to a narrow park fronting on the East River. “Cute trick,” I said, “cutting the pockets out of your jacket.”

“Works nice, don’t it?”

A promenade runs along the river’s edge, the water ten feet below an iron railing. At the far edge of the little park a white-haired man in a cardigan sweater walked a Yorkshire terrier on a leash. He was coming toward us but kept to the dog’s mincing pace. “Wait here till that bozo makes himself scarce,” the coach said. “Enjoy the view.”

The kid with the stigmata eyes leaned his elbows against the railing and stared at a barge breasting the current in the channel off Welfare Island. The coach stood behind me, balanced on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter. Further along, the Yorkshire terrier lifted his leg on a litter basket. We waited.

I looked up at the ornate latticework of the Queensborough Bridge and the cloudless blue sky caught in its girdered intricacies. Enjoy the view. Such a beautiful day. You couldn’t ask to die on a nicer day, so enjoy the view and don’t make a fuss. Just stare at the sky quietly until the only witness is out of the way and try not to think of the iridescent undulance of the oily river beneath your feet until they drop you over the railing with a bullet in your eye.

I tightened my grip on the attaché case. My snub-nosed Smith & Wesson might as well have been at home in a drawer. The man with the dog was less than twenty feet away. I shifted my weight and glanced at the coach, waiting for him to make a mistake. The quick flicker of his eyes as he checked the dog walker’s progress was all I needed.

I swung the attaché case full strength, driving it up between the spread of his legs. He screamed with true sincerity and bent double. An accidental shot burned through his windbreaker and splattered off the pavement. It made no more noise than a sneeze.

The Yorkshire terrier strained at his leash, barking shrilly. I gripped the attaché case with both hands and slammed it against the coach’s head. He grunted and went down. I kicked his elbow and a Colt Match Target Woodsman with custom pearl grips spiraled across the concrete.

“Get a cop!” I yelled at the open-mouthed gentleman in the cardigan sweater as the Christ-eyed kid closed on me with a short, leather-covered sap in his bony fist. “These guys want to kill me!”

I used the attaché case like a shield and caught the kid’s first swing on its expensive calfskin surface. I kicked at him, and he danced back away from me. The long-barreled Colt lay tantalizingly close. I couldn’t risk stooping for it. The kid saw it too and tried to cut me off, but he wasn’t fast enough. I kicked the automatic under the railing into the river.

That left me wide open. The kid caught the side of my neck with his weighted sap. Now it was my turn to scream. The pain brought tears to my eyes as I hacked for breath. I shielded my head as best I could, but the kid was in the driver’s seat. He struck a glancing blow off my shoulder, and then I felt my left ear explode. As I went down, I saw the man in the cardigan swoop his yapping terrier in his arms and run hollering up the park steps.

I watched his departure on hands and knees through a pink haze of pain. My head roared like an express train on fire. The kid sapped me again, and the train went into a tunnel.

Pinpoints of light dazzled in the blackness. The rough concrete under my cheek felt slick and sticky. I might have been out as long as Rip van Winkle, but when I opened the eye that still worked I saw the kid helping the fallen coach to his feet.

It had been a rough day for the coach. He cupped his groin with both hands. The kid tugged at his sleeve, urging him to hurry, but he took his time and hobbled over to where I was lying and kicked me square in the face. “That’s for you, prick,” I heard him say before he kicked me a second time. After that, I was no longer listening.

I was under water. Drowning. Only it wasn’t water, it was blood. A torrent of blood swept me along, tumbling me over and over. I was drowning in it, unable to breathe. I gasped for air and swallowed sweet mouthfuls of blood.

The bloody tide deposited me on a distant shore. I heard the roaring surf and crawled to keep from being pulled back under. My hands touched something cold and metallic. It was the curved leg of a park bench.

Voices approached out of the fog. “There he is, officer. That’s the man. Oh my God! Look what they’ve done to him.”

“Take it easy, fella,” another voice said. “Everything’s okay now.” Strong arms lifted me from the gory tide-pool. “Just lean back, fella. You’re gonna be okay. Can you hear what I’m saying?”

When I tried to answer I made a noise like gargling. I clung to the park bench, a life raft in a stormy sea. The swirling red mists parted, and I saw an earnest, square face surrounded by blue. A double row of gold buttons shone like rising suns. I focused on the badge until I could almost read the numbers. When I tried to say thanks, I made the gargling noise again.

“You just relax, fella,” the square-faced patrolman said. “We’ll get some help here in a minute.”

I closed my eyes and heard the other voice say, “It was simply awful. They tried to shoot him.”

The patrolman said: “Stay with him. I’m gonna find a call box and send for an ambulance.”

The sun felt warm on my battered face. Each separate injury pulsed and throbbed as if a miniature heart worked within it. I reached up and explored my features. Nothing felt familiar. It was a stranger’s face.

The sound of voices brought the realization that I’d been unconscious again. The patrolman thanked the man with the dog, calling him Mr. Groton. He said to come by the precinct house at his convenience to make a statement. Mr. Groton said he’d be there this afternoon. I gargled my gratitude, and the patrolman told me to take it easy. “Help is on its way, fella.”

The ambulance crew seemed to arrived that very moment, but I knew there’d been another lapse. “Easy does it,” one of the attendants said. “Take his legs, Eddie.”

I said I could walk, but my knees buckled when I tried to stand. I was lowered to a stretcher, lifted and carried. There didn’t seem much point in paying attention to what was going on. The inside of the ambulance smelled like vomit. Above the mounting wail of the siren, I could hear the driver and his partner laughing.

FORTY

The world came back into focus in the Bellevue emergency room. An intense young intern cleaned and stitched my lacerated scalp and said he’d do the best he knew how with what was left of my ear. Demerol made it all seem okay. I treated the nurse to a broken-toothed smile.

A precinct detective showed up just as they were taking me out for X rays. He walked alongside the wheelchair and asked if I knew the men who tried to rob me. I did nothing to discourage his holdup assumptions, and he left after I described the coach and the kid.

As soon as they finished taking pictures of the inside of my head, the doc said he thought it was a good idea if I got some rest. That was okay with me, and I was put to bed in the accident ward and given another needle under the nightshirt. The next thing I remember was the nurse waking me for dinner.

Halfway through the strained carrots, I found out they were holding me overnight for observation. The X rays revealed no fractures, but concussion was still a possibility. I felt too shitty to make much of a fuss, and after the baby-food meal, the nurse walked me to a pay phone in the corridor, and I called Epiphany to say I wasn’t coming home.

She sounded worried at first, but I joked with her and said I’d be fine after a night’s sleep. She pretended to believe me. “Know what I did with the twenty you gave me?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“Bought a load of firewood.”

I told her I had plenty of matches. She laughed, and we said goodbye. I was falling for her. Bad luck for me. The nurse led me back to a waiting needle.

My sleep was nearly dreamless, yet the spectre of Louis Cyphre parted the heavy curtain of drugs and mocked me. Most of it was lost on waking, but one image remained: an Aztec temple rising abruptly above a crowded plaza, the steep steps slick with blood. At the top, looking down in his flea circus soup-and-fish on the feathered nobles below, Cyphre laughed and hurled the dripping heart of his victim high into the air. The victim was me.

Next morning, I was finishing my Cream of Wheat when Lieutenant Sterne paid a surprise visit to the ward. He was wearing the same brown mohair suit, but his blue flannel shirt and no necktie told me he was off-duty. His face was still all cop.

“Looks like someone did a pretty good job on you,” he said.

I showed him my smile. “Don’t you wish if d been you?”

“If it was me, you wouldn’t be getting out for a week.”

“You forgot the flowers,” I said.

“I’m saving ‘em for your grave, asshole.” Sterne sat on the white chair next to the bed and stared at me like a vulture eyeing a squashed possum on the highway. “I tried to reach you yesterday evening at home, and your answering service told
me
you were in the hospital. This is the first they’d let me speak to you.”

“What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?”

“I thought you might be innerested in something we found in the Krusemark apartment, seeing as how you never knew the lady.”

“I’m holding my breath.”

“That’s what they do in the gas chamber,” Sterne said. “Hold their breath. It don’t do no good.”

“What is it that they do up in Sing Sing?”

“What I do is I hold my nose. Because they shit their pants the second the juice hits ‘em, and it smells like a wienie roast in the toilet.”

With a nose like yours, I thought, you’d need both hands. I said: “Tell me what you found in the Krusemark apartment.”

“It’s what I didn’t find. What I didn’t find was the page for March 16th on her desk calendar. It was the only page missing. You get so you notice things like that. I sent the page underneath to the lab, and they checked it for impressions. Guess what they found?”

I said I had no idea.

“The initial
H
, followed by the letters
A-n-g
.”

“Spells
hang
.”

“We’re gonna hang your ass, Angel. You know damn well what it spells.”

“Coincidence and proof are two different things, Lieutenant.”

“Where were you Wednesday afternoon around half past three?”

“Grand Central Terminal.”

“Waiting for a train?”

“Eating oysters.”

Sterne shook his big head. “No good at all.”

“The counterman will remember. I was there a long time. Ate a lot. We joked about it. He said oysters looked like gobs of spit. I said they were good for your sex life. You can check it.”

“You bet your ass I’ll check it.” Sterne got to his feet. “I’ll check it five ways from Sunday, and you know what? I’ll be there holding my nose when they strap you in the hot-seat.”

Sterne reached out a blunt hand. He picked an untouched paper cup of canned grapefruit juice off my tray, downed it in a swallow, and walked out the door.

It was nearly noon before the paperwork was done, and I was able to follow.

FORTY-ONE

Outside Bellevue, First Avenue was all torn up, but no one was working on a Saturday. Wooden sawhorse barricades emblazoned DIG WE MUST surrounded the project, corralling dirt piles and stacked cobblestones. Only a thin skin of tar covered the old paving in this part of town. Random patches of cobbled surface remained from a century ago. Cast iron bishop’s crook lampposts and occasional slabs of bluestone sidewalk were other survivors of a forgotten past.

I expected a tail but spotted none as I walked to a cab stand outside the airline terminal building on 38th Street. The weather was still warm but had clouded over. The weight of my .38 bumped against me in my jacket pocket at every step.