Survival... ZERO! mh-11 Read online

  I stood up and put on my hat. "Hell," I said, "I'm too old for that crap any more anyway."

  He gave me another of those unintelligible grunts and nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah, sure you are," he said.

  The cabbie wanted to edge out of the heavy traffic so he cut over to Eighth Avenue going north and stayed in the fire lane, making the lights at a leisurely pace. I cranked the window down and let the thick air of the city slap at the side of my face, heavy with smells from the sidewalk markets, laced with the acrid tang of exhaust fumes that belched out of laboring trucks and buses. The voice of the city kept up its incessant growl, like a dog who didn't know whom to pick on and settled on everybody in general. Most people out there never even heard the voice, I thought. Even the smells were the natural condition of things. Someday I was going to get the hell out of here. I was glad I had nothing to do about Lippy. So he was a guy I knew. I knew lots of guys. Some were alive. Some were dead.

  Then we were almost at Forty-sixth Street and I wondered who the hell I thought I was fooling and told the driver to pull over and let me out. I handed him a couple of singles, slammed the door, watched him pull away and crossed the street over to where Lippy Sullivan had died such a messy death. All I could say to myself was, "Damn!”

  CHAPTER 2

  The fat little super who smelled of sweat and beer didn't give me any lip this time. It wasn't because of the first time or because he had seen me there in the midst of the homicide squad with a gold shield cop my buddy. It was because I was the same kind of New York he was, only from a direction he was afraid of. There was nothing he could put his finger on; a squawk wouldn't bother me and could hurt him, and if he didn't play it nice and easy he could play it hard and get himself squeezed.

  So he played it right and whined how he had told everything he knew which wasn't anything at all and let me into Lippy's room with his passkey, idly complaining about how he had to clean up the mess that had been left around before the flies got into it and the stink got worse than it was. Nobody paid him extra and the damn nosy cops wouldn't let him rent the room out until the investigation was over and he was losing a commission.

  I shoved him out of the room, slammed the door in his face and flipped the overhead light on with my elbow. The stain was still there on the floor, but the sawdust was gone and so was the chalked outline of Lippy's body. And so was Lippy's new couch. I had seen it in the super's apartment when he had opened the door for me.

  There wasn't anything special to look for. The cops had done all that. What I wanted was to know Lippy just a little bit better. I could remember a skinny little kid with a banana stalk in a street fight, swinging it out against the Peterstown bunch, then the soda bottle collection to pay for the six stitches the doctor over Delaney's Drugstore had to put in his eyebrow. Some stupid sergeant gave him a B.A.R. to tote during the war and he hauled it all over Europe until he finally got a medal for using it in the right place at the right time. Then he just went back to being Lippy Sullivan again with nobody except the Internal

  Revenue Service and me ever knowing his real first name, and now he was dead.

  So long, Lippy. Wish I had known you better. Maybe I will.

  I had been in too many pads like this not to pick up the little signs. It wasn't what was there. It was what wasn't. There was that little Spartan touch that flipped you right back into an Army barracks where what you had you kept in your pocket. Lippy had been here almost two years and he hadn't collected anything at all. The shade on the lamp had been patched and painted to match the fabric, the old chair in the corner had been repaired where it was possible and the cracks in the plastered walls had been grouted to keep the roaches contained and the drafts out.

  The one cupboard held an assortment of chili, hash, a half-dozen eggs, some canned vegetables, two boxes of salt and an oversized can of pepper. Lippy didn't exactly live high off the hog. But then again, he didn't ask for much, either. He sure didn't ask to get killed.

  I took my time and went through his stuff piece by piece and wound up wondering what he had that made him valuable enough to die like he did. There wasn't one damn place he could have hidden anything and not the slightest sign that he even tried.

  Yet somebody had sliced him up to make him talk.

  Without thinking I sat on the edge of his bed, then stretched out and folded my hands behind my head and looked at the ceiling. It was a lousy bed but a lot better than what we had in the Army sometimes. Come on, Lippy, what was it? Did you have something? Did you see something? Why remember my phone number?

  I let a curse slip across my lips because Lippy himself had given me the answer. What was it? Yeah ... “No reason, Mike ...no reason." And at a time like that a guy just doesn't lie.

  But he had called for me and without having to say it, told me not to let him go out like that, a nothing nobody with a first name the world would never remember, but with that single phone call he had begged me not to let him be just another statistic in the massive book of records the great city keeps for its unrecognizables.

  All right, Lippy. You are a somebody. Get off my back, will you? Maybe you didn't think there was a reason, but somebody else sure as hell had a good one for killing you.

  I slid off the bed and picked my hat off the floor, then got to my feet and walked to the door. To the empty

  room I said, "Mike, you're getting old. The edge is off. You're missing something. It's right here and you're missing it."

  The super popped the door open before I even knocked. I walked in past him to the couch against the wall, pulled the cushions off and unzipped the covers. Inside was a foam rubber pad and nothing else. I turned it over and felt around the burlap and canvas bottom, but there was nothing there either. I knew the cops had gone through the same routine so I wasn't really expecting to find anything anyway. When I finished I left it like it was and looked at the slob with the half-empty beer can who was hating me with his eyes. "Put it back where you got it," I said.

  "Look, I had to clean ..."

  "Ill clean you, buddy. I'll turn you inside out and let the whole neighborhood watch while I'm doing it."

  "Nobody even paid me ..."

  "You want it now?" I asked him.

  The beer can fell out of his hand and he belched. Another second and he was going to get sick.

  "Put it back," I told him again.

  Jenkins and Wiley were ten minutes away from being off duty, having coffee in Raul Toulé's basement hideaway. I pulled a chair out with my foot, waved for Raul to bring me a beer and sat down. Jenkins curled his beefy face up into a grin and said, "Ain't it great being a private investigator? He don't have to drink coffee. He gets a beer. Just like that. How's it going, Mike?"

  "So-so. I just came out of Lippy's place."

  Wiley nodded and took a sip of coffee. "Yeah, we got the word. Mumpy Henley spotted you getting out of the cab. Ever since you busted him on that assault rap he'd like to peg you. Doing anything illegal, Mike?"

  "Certainly."

  "That's good. Just do it to the right people."

  "I try." I took my beer from Raul and downed half of it. "You guys get anything?"

  Jenkins ran his hand through his mop of hair and shook his head. "Dead end. You know what we got in an eight-block area this past month? Four kills, eight rapes, fourteen burglaries and nine muggings. That's just what was reported."

  "Should keep you guys pretty busy."

  "Natch. We solved six murders, none of the rapes wanted to prosecute, two burglars were apprehended, one by an old woman with a shotgun and another by Sid Cohen's kid .. . and those two bragged about a hundred something they pulled around here. Only that crazy Swede policewoman nailed a mugger. She broke his arm. Nice place to live, but don't try to visit."

  I said, "What about Lippy?"

  Wiley fingered some potato chips out of the bowl in front of him and stuffed them in his mouth. "Not a damn thing. His employers vouch for him, the few neighborhood places he did business with g
ive him an okay, nobody can figure out any reason why he should have been knocked off like that, so what's to say? Most everybody around here thinks it was some nut. It wouldn't have been the first time."

  "How long you figure on staying on it?" I asked them.

  "Not much left to do unless we get a break," Jenkins said. "Now we wait. If it was a psycho he'll probably hit again. Trouble is with that kind, you never know what they're going to do."

  "It wasn't any psycho," I told him quietly.

  They both looked at me, waiting.

  "Just something I feel," I added. "You saw the lab reports. The place was searched."

  "For what?" Wiley finished his coffee and pushed his cup away. "Your friend didn't have anything worth looking for."

  "Somebody thought he did."

  "Well, if they make anything out of those two sets of prints, we may get lucky. Look, I'm going to call in. Who's buying?"

  I grinned at him and picked up the tab. Wiley fished a dime out of his pocket and went to the phone booth while I paid the bill. When he came back he had an amused frown on his face. "You could have been right, Mike."

  "Oh?"

  "Lippy did have something worth looking for only it wasn't in his room. Captain Chambers took a flyer and checked the local banks. Lippy had over twenty-seven hundred bucks in the Commerce National. Odd deposits every so often. No specific amounts."

  "Nobody found a bankbook on him," I said.

  "It was in his locker where he worked. He had it stuck under a batch of order forms. So now we have a motive."

  "Murder for that kind of money?" I asked him.

  "Hell, around here you could buy a dozen kills for that."

  Siderman's Wholesale Groceries was a busy little place filled with the tangy odors of a farmhouse pantry with all the activity of an anthill. Young Joe Siderman led me back to his office, tossed me an apple and told me to sit down.

  "Tough about Lippy," he said. "He was a good guy. They know who did it yet?"

  I shook my head. "The police think somebody knew about that twenty-seven hundred he had saved up and maybe had it in his room."

  "Crazy world, ain't it?"

  "You see that bankbook of his?"

  "Sure, I found it in his stuff. Nobody woulda known about it for months maybe if that Captain Chambers didn't get me poking around for it."

  "Remember any of the deposits?"

  "You know me, Mike. I'm a nosy bastard, so sure, I took a look. Like mostly from ten to fifty bucks each time. No special dates of deposits though. Sometimes twice a week, sometimes once."

  "Lippy make that much here?"

  Joe shined his apple on his sleeve and took a bite of it. "So we pay minimum wages for his job. It wasn't exactly skilled help. Lippy took home maybe sixty bucks a week. He never made no complaints about it. I don't know how he coulda saved that much these days. He didn't handle no cash here so he wasn't hitting the till. Maybe he played the horses."

  "Nobody's that lucky, Joe."

  "He got it from somewhere."

  "Think maybe one of the others he worked with would know?"

  "Doubt it. He got along good with everybody, but he never really buddied up to nobody special."

  "Screwy," I said. "Why would he keep a bankbook stashed here?"

  "That ain't unusual," Joe told me. "Half these guys what live in furnished rooms ain't got no families and think the job's their home. A coupla guys keep everything in their lockers here. Hell, Lippy even had his Army discharge and his rent receipts in that box. You want me to ask around a little? Maybe somebody knew him better than I thought."

  "I'd appreciate it," I said. I tossed one of my business cards on his desk. "You can reach me here if anything turns up."

  "Sure. Want another apple? They're pretty good. Come from upstate."

  "Next time. Thanks for the talk."

  I got up and started for the door when Joe stopped me. "Hey, one thing, Mike."

  "What's that?"

  "Was Lippy livin' with a broad?"

  "Not that I know of. He never played around. Why?"

  "Just something funny I thought of. We sell the help groceries at wholesale, you know? So always they buy just so much on payday. A few weeks back that Lippy doubled his order three weeks running then cut back down again."

  "He ever do that before?"

  "Nope, but I'll tell you something. It didn't surprise me none. You know what I think? He was always a soft touch and he was feeding somebody who was Larder up than he was. Like I said, he was a nice guy."

  "Yeah. So nice that somebody killed him."

  "Times are tough all over."

  The haze over the city had solidified into lumpy gray masses and you could smell the rain up there. I picked up the afternoon paper at a newsstand on Broadway and went into the Automat for coffee. Upstairs at an empty table I went through both sections of the edition without finding anything on Lippy at all. Tom-Tom Schneider was getting a heavy play, but he was a big hood in the policy racket, handling all the uptown collections. Be honest, I thought, be forgotten. Convicted criminals who bought two .38 slugs in the brain for crossing the wrong man get the big splash. At least they go out with everybody knowing their names. Even then, old Tom-Tom was being crowded a little by the political news, the latest Met scores and a mystery death in the Times Square subway station.

  Somebody behind me said, "Hello, Mike, doing your homework?"

  I looked over my shoulder and grinned. Eddie Dandy from WOBY-TV was standing there with a tray of milk and two kinds of pie, looking more like a saloon swamper than a video news reporter.

  "You got my favorite table," he said.

  I pushed a chair out for him. "Be my guest. I thought you guys ate free in all the best places in town."

  "You get tired of gourmet foods, kid. I go for a little home cooking now and then. Besides, this place is closest to the job."

  "Someday you're going to shave and wear an unwrinkled suit in the daytime and nobody's going to know you," I told him. "A dandy you are by name only."

  Eddie put his pie and milk down, set the tray on the empty table beside us and picked up his fork. "That's what the wife keeps telling me. We people in show business like to change characters."

  "Yeah, sure."

  Between bites he said, "Petie Canero saw you down at headquarters. That Sullivan thing, wasn't it?"

  I nodded and took another pull at my coffee. "It's still cold."

  "You got to be a big man to get any action nowadays. Like Schneider. They'll spend a bundle going after his killers and wind up with nothing anyway."

  "Maybe not."

  "Oh hell, it was a contract kill. Somebody hired an out-of-town hit man and that was it for Tom-Tom. He's been stepping on too many toes trying to get on top. Everybody saw it coming. For one thing, he steps outside without his two musclemen beside him and it's bingo time. The cops ask questions but who's going to talk?"

  "Somebody always does."

  "When it's too late to move in. Right now I wish somebody would say something about that body in the subway. I never saw such a damn cover-up in my life. We all got the boot at the hospital ... nice and polite, but the big boot just the same. What gets me is ... ah, hell."

  I frowned and looked across the table at him. "Well ... what about it?"

  "Nothing. Just that coincidences make me feel funny."

  "Afraid I'll scoop you on your own program?"

  Eddie finished his first piece of pie, washed it down with half a glass of milk and reached for the other. "Sure, man," he grinned. "No, it's just funny, is all. Remember when I did the news for the Washington, D.C., station? Well, I got to know a lot of the local citizenry. So when I went down to the hospital I spotted a couple of familiar faces. One was Crane from the State Department. He said one of his staff was in with an appendectomy and he was visiting. Then I saw Matt Rollings."

  "Who's Rollings?"

  "Remember that stink about the train loaded with containers of nerve gas out West..
. the stuff they were going to dump in the ocean only they wouldn't let it travel across the country?"

  "Yeah."

  "Rollings was in charge of the project originally," Eddie said. "So when I saw Rollings and Crane talking I checked on Crane's friend. She was there with an appendectomy, all right, but she was a young girl in the steno pool who had only been with State six weeks. Seems funny they could have gotten that close in such a short time."

  "She could have been a relative."

  "Unlikely. The girl was a native Puerto Rican."

  "Guys and gals are a strange combination," I said.

  "Not with a wife like Crane's. Anyway, it was a coincidence and I don't like coincidences. They get admittance, we get the boot. All because some bum twitches to death on a subway platform. If they got a make on him it wouldn't have been so bad, but there was no identification at all."

  "It's a shame you guys work so hard for a story," I laughed.

  Eddie finished his pie and milk, belched gently and got up. "Back to the grind, buddy. I got to get my garbage ready for tonight."

  I looked at him, nodded silently and watched him leave. Eddie Dandy had just told what I had forgotten. Damn, I thought.

  Outside it had started to rain.

  The kid perched on the steps of the brownstone lifted the cardboard box off his head and peered up at me. The super, he said, went down to the deli for his evening six-pack of beer. From there he'd go to Welch's Bar, have a few for starters, tell some lies and make a pass at Welch's barmaid before he came home. That wouldn't be for another hour yet. Smart, these kids. Twelve going on thirty. I tossed him a quarter and he put the box back on his head so he could listen to the rain hammer on it and ignored me.

  I didn't bother to wait for the super. I went to the back of the hallway, found the stairs to the basement and snapped my penlight on. I had to pick my way around the clutter of junk to the bottom, then climb over trash that had been accumulating for years before I came to the current collection. Four banged up, rusted cans, each half filled with garbage, were nested beside the crumbling stairwell that led to the backyard and the areaway to the street. Tomorrow was collection day.