Black Cat Weekly #13

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2WHO’S WACKY NOW?

CHET stood there gaping at me, his mouth hanging loose.

“How much you been drinking?” he asked then.

“I had a couple,” I said, “but I never see naked dames with holes in their hearts. I see little green men with puce tophats.”

Chet just stood looking at me, a curious expression on his face.

“Don’t get sore, Terry,” he said, “but, well, you’ve told me about the blackouts and about being in Bellevue and the Government psych wards and all. Are you sure you’re all right, kid?”

“I’ve got a headache,” I replied. “One that’s knocking my ears off. But…” I fumbled in my pocket through the socks and shaving cream until I found the key to Room 616. I tossed it to him. “Drop up and say hello to her. I don’t think she’ll be going anywhere.”

“I’ve got to believe you,” Chet said. “But how the devil did a naked dame get into that room? And where are her clothes?”

“You tell me,” I said. “You’re a detective, aren’t you? But maybe I can offer a couple of suggestions. Since it’s the Little dame, maybe her clothes are in Six-seventeen. And maybe Old Man Little put a little hole in his everloving wife. Sometimes husbands get upset when their wives visit other guys in hotel rooms.”

“Well,” said Chet, “the best thing both of us can do is stay as far away from that room as possible, until we see which way the wind is blowing. Do you think anybody might identify you as the occupant of Room Six-seventeen?”

“There’s a bellhop who saw my Purple Heart. With this scar on my face I’m not too hard to remember. And my fingerprints are around and about.”

“It might be better, kid,” said Chet, “for you to take it on the lammister. Look, you used to bum around the Bowery. The Bowery’s a good place to get lost.”

“I’m dressed pretty fancy for a Bowery flop,” I said. “And it wouldn’t be easy to get a Bowery wardrobe at this time of night. There’s a hotel on Bleecker Street where I might stay tonight. A de luxe flophouse—six bits a night. The Hill, it’s called.”

“Go down there and lock yourself in,” said Chet. “Where can I see you around noon tomorrow,”

“There’s a gin mill just across the street from the hotel,” I told him. “The Hill Tavern.”

“See you there at noon,” said Chet. “Go on now. Get lost.”

My room in the Hill wasn’t quite as commodious as the one I’d had at the Sheridan Towers. But it didn’t have a naked dame with a hole in her heart sitting in the chair.

I took some codeine, went to bed and to sleep.

I wakened around seven and had a shower. I didn’t shave because a stubble would be consistent with my rôle of Bowery wanderer. I ate breakfast in the hotel lunch room, and in a used clothing store that opened at eight o’clock—I had to be out of the hotel by nine—I bought a pair of pants and a coat that didn’t match, a blue-dyed Army shirt, and a cap. Next door was an automatic laundry where I bought a bag, then went back to the Hill and changed my clothes. I stuffed everything but the suit and trench coat and hat into the laundry bag. I just left the hat in the locker. I had left the photograph with Chet. I wrapped the suit up in a newspaper, and hung the coat over my arm.

* * * *

I turned my key in, went back to the laundromat and bought a ticket for a partial dry. I stuffed the clothes into the washing machine, left the place, and tore up the ticket.

Near Tenth, I found a pawnshop and got seven clams for the suit. I kept the trench coat. It was old and nondescript, but it was still water-repellent and when you’re on the bum, on the Bowery, it’s nice to have something to keep you dry.

I tore up the pawn ticket, too. The only identification I had on me was my Social Security card and a Selective Service card stating that I was “1-C Disch.” I bought an envelope and mailed my identification cards to Robert Lee Lincoln, General Delivery, 90 Church Street, New York City. I liked the name better than my own name of Terry Bob Rooke or my other names of George Spelvin and James Smith.

I had a lot of time to kill before meeting Chet at noon, so I walked up to Washington Square Park and watched gals in slacks and close-cropped hair walking dogs. I watched the parade of dowager-bosomed pigeons and thought how the verb “strut” must have been invented for pigeons and generals.

The Greenwich Village Outdoor Art Show was in progress and a little after eleven the painters began to hang their pictures up on buildings and fences that surrounded the park. I’m just an old art-lover, I guess. So being one, I went to look at the pictures. Some were simple enough for even a dumb guy like me to understand—things like dead fish on big platters. But some were pretty bewildering, like the one that had a lot of dislocated eyes and ears and tonsils floating around on a background of rusty, nails, broken chamberpots and empty whisky bottles.

Toward noon, I walked back to the Hill Tavern. Chet hadn’t arrived. I ordered a shell of beer and was working on my second when Chet came in.

I told Chet we could go in the back room and talk and the bartender said to switch on the light. The single, fly-specked bulb in the ceiling showed tables and chairs, a broken-down piano, and murals of naked women with wildly streaming red hair. The naked dames weren’t sitting in chairs, though. They were dancing around like crazy, and since the plaster had begun to peel off some of them looked scaly and leprous.

We sat down and Chet said: “They haven’t found the dame in Six-sixteen yet. Or if they have, they’re keeping it quiet. The chambermaid will probably begin worrying about the linens this afternoon and start knocking. Then they’ll open up with a passkey.”

“What did you find out?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “when I saw you last night maybe I didn’t get the timetable straight. You told me you left Ginny about four o’clock, then sat around the hotel awhile? What time did you leave the hotel again and go to Frayne’s?”

“Why,” I said, “it was about six. I might have fooled around for ten minutes or so, and it took maybe another ten minutes to walk to Frayne’s.”

“So you probably got to Frayne’s between six-twenty and six-thirty, say?” said Chet.

“That’s about right,” I replied.

“And how long did you stay?” Chet asked.

“Three hours, at least. I looked at the clock when leaving. It was nine-thirty.”

Chet sat looking at me in a funny sort of way, drumming his fingers on the table.

“Who served you your drinks, Terry?”

“What is this?” I asked. “Jerry served me before I had my dinner. After I ate, Charley Fravne himself set ’em up.”

“Who waited on you at the table?”

“Mr. District Attorney himself, aren’t you?” I said. “Ray waited on me. Ray, the horse player.”

Chet picked up our glasses. He said, “I’ll get us another drink.”

He went to the bar. When he came back he set a whisky in front of me.

“I think maybe you’re going to need a shot.” he said. He leaned close to me. “I talked to Frayne and to Jerry and Ray. None of them saw you in the place last night!”

I gulped down the whisky before I tried to say anything. I shook my head.

“It just can’t be,” I said.

“But that’s the way it is,” said Chet. “If only one guy had said you weren’t there, I’d think maybe he’d just forgotten. But three of ’em—”

What Chet had told me didn’t make any sense. Three guys who knew me had seen me for three hours or more and had talked about head colds and my pal and my girl friend and racehorses, vet a couple of hours later they couldn’t even remember seeing me.

I looked Chet in the eye and asked him. “Chet do you think I’m lying? Or do you think I’m just plain off the beam?”

He regarded me, as if he were trying to decide.

Then he said, “No, Terry. I don’t think you’re lying, and I don’t believe you’re off the beam. If you were lying, it would have been plain foolishness for you to lie about being in a place where you’re as well known as you are in Frayne’s. There’s got to be an angle somewhere. But how Charley Frayne or his bartender or his waiter could have one is beyond me. How all of ’em could have the same angle in telling a bald lie about an inoffensive character like you makes it even more mysterious.”

“Chet,” I said, “either I’m lying, or three other guys are lying for no apparent reason whatsoever. Or maybe I just think I’m telling the truth. Maybe I’m a character who blacks out and does things like making little holes in the hearts of naked women, and imagine I’ve been doing something different all the time.”

“No,” said Chet. “You don’t believe that, and I wouldn’t believe it even if you told me it was true. I know you were in Frayne’s. I’m no psychiatrist, but I don’t think you’d stick a sharp instrument into the heart of a naked dame, even if you were crazy.” He took a sip of his drink. “I’m going to find out what angle Frayne and Jerry and Ray could possibly have. I’m going to investigate Mr. Malcolm Little, too, and find out something about his late wife’s background. But there’s not a thing we can do until they find her body. You stay lost.”

“When will I see you again?” I asked.

Chet finished his drink. “I figure they’ll find that body this afternoon,” he said. “But I’m going to see if I can get a little advance dope, maybe. I’m going to call on my old pal, Lieutenant Romano of the Homicide Squad. If something’s cooking, I’ll get it out of him one way or another. Call me around six-thirty at the office. Say you’re a client named Jones, just in case.”

After all, another alias didn’t mean much in my young life.

* * * *

Chet left, and I went to the bar and ordered another shot. Sipping it, I considered just how bad a spot I might be in. I knew what Chet meant when he said we couldn’t do anything until they found the woman. Maybe they wouldn’t find her. If I hadn’t been in Frayne’s, maybe I’d dreamed up the woman, too. Maybe I’d even imagined that Ginny had smacked my face.

I wanted to see Frayne, and Jerry, and Ray, and hear those guys say the same thing to my face. And I wanted to see Ginny, to find out about the face-slapping and ask her if I’d acted like one of those schizophrenics the day before. Everything considered, though, I thought it might be better if I postponed seeing her until I’d talked to Chet again, and pick her up outside Parada’s club around three-thirty in the morning.

I headed for the Bowery because I had nothing better to do at the moment. It hadn’t changed during my absence. The same cheap shops with the same guys in pink shirts standing out in front of them. The same rusty garbage cans perfuming the streets. The same dark, sour-smelling saloons with neon beer signs winking through the crepuscular grime of their windows. The same pathetic, rum-dumb sad sacks, stumbling and lurching along.

I walked on down to Grogan’s Elite Palace Café and Bar because I had to run into the old-timers who knew me, eventually, so it might as well be now. Because I had a scarred face from the war they called me “Soldier.”

Grogan’s was hardly a palace and it wasn’t too elite. “Suds,” the bartender, was as massive as the bar. With his big, ugly face he looked like a tough ex-pug, but he was actually a gentle, soft-hearted slob who mothered homeless kittens.