Manhattan Noir

cardboard lettered with the words, “God Bless You If You Help Me.” He was smoking a long, filter-tipped cigarette. The smoke formed a gray wreath around his face.

“Evening,” the detective said.

“God bless,” the man said. He groped for his cup and then raised it, shaking the coins inside.

“I’m with the police.” The detective squatted next to the man, pulled out his wallet, and put the man’s hand onto his badge. The man’s eyebrows rose and his mouth crinkled into a smile. He put the cup down.

“How are you doing, officer?”

“Could be worse. You?”

“Good night for me,” the man said, hugging himself against the chill. “Most nights nobody talks to me. Tonight you’re the second.”

“Really? Who was the other?”

He thought for a moment. “Man about your age, I’d say. Little older maybe. Pleasant fellow. Talked to me a while, just a minute ago.” He lifted his cigarette. “Gave me a smoke.”

“Nice of him,” the detective said. “Listen, you notice anything out of the ordinary around here lately?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“We’re conducting an investigation.”

“Well, I haven’t seen a thing,” the man said. He laughed softly to himself.

The detective dropped a handful of change into the man’s cup before walking away.

“My lucky day,” the man said, hugging himself tighter. “God bless you.”

“His name was Michael Casey. He lived off his monthly federal disability check, plus what he picked up panhandling.”

“Damn it!”

“Calm down.”

“I was talking to him last night,” the detective said. “He was sitting next to me, smoking a goddamn cigarette, telling me what a wonderful night it was.”

“You couldn’t have known,” his partner said.

“Sure I could have. I could have figured it out then instead of now. I could have saved his life.”

“We don’t know that.” The partner stopped the car outside Body Beautiful.

The detective got out and walked to the service entrance. The issue of Cosmopolitan was still lying where he had dropped it, crumpled in a dark corner of the doorway. It had dried and hardened and was now stuck to the ground. The detective used a scraper to get it up. Underneath it there was a cigarette butt.

“Bingo.” The detective picked the butt up with a pair of tweezers and dropped it in an evidence baggie. He returned to the car. “I told you there was a cigarette.”

“There are cigarettes on every sidewalk in the city.”

“That’s true, and maybe this one has nothing to do with our case. But I don’t think so. I think that Harold Sladek smoked it. Why? Because the first time we saw it, it was lying on top of that magazine, and the magazine was lying behind his body. Do you think someone came along, smoking, finished his cigarette, and then tossed it over Sladek’s dead body so that it landed on his magazine? I don’t think so.”

“Okay.”

“So: Sladek smoked it. That still doesn’t mean it has something to do with our case. But since we didn’t find any cigarettes in his bags, or even an empty cigarette pack, we can assume that someone else gave the cigarette to him. And we know that someone gave a cigarette to Michael Casey just before he died. And it was the same brand as this one.” He waved the bag in front of his partner’s face.

“Lots of people smoke Chrome Golds.”

“Sure. And lots of homeless people die on the streets. But how many do one right after doing the other? I’ll bet that if we analyze this butt, we’ll find traces of the same poison they found in Sladek’s body.”

“Let’s say you’re right. What would that tell us? We already know Sladek was poisoned.”

“It tells us how it happened.”

“And…?”

“And now we can get the bastard who did it.”

“What do you want to do, arrest everyone who buys a pack of Chrome Golds?”

The detective didn’t have an answer to that.

“Then what? All we can do is keep cleaning up after the guy and hope that one of these days he’ll try his stunt on the wrong person and get himself shot.”

“No one’s going to shoot a nice old guy who’s offering them a cigarette.”

“You don’t know that,” the partner said. “This is New York.”

He sat with a blue knit hat pulled down over his forehead, his hands crammed under his armpits, shivering. Even with two shirts on, he was cold. He had a thin blanket, which he had wrapped and rewrapped around himself, trying to make it hold in as much heat as possible. Under the blanket he had a thermos filled with coffee. Every few minutes he took a swallow.

People passed, hurrying from store to store, from home to theater, from street to taxi. He only saw their legs, their hands swinging by their sides, their packages. Sometimes children passed at his eye level and then he saw adult hands snatch the curious faces away from him. He saw car tires and bicycle wheels. As it got later, he saw less and less. By midnight, he saw nothing but a neon sign across the street and patches of sidewalk, dimly lit in the glow of street lamps.

The doorway he sat in, the entrance to a Burger King that was closed for renovation, was relatively roomy: He was able to stretch his legs almost to their full length. Each night for the previous ten he had sat in a different doorway, on a different street. Unlike Harold Sladek, he was not driven by years of habit. But this doorway was more comfortable than the others had been, and that really did make a difference. He started thinking about staying here, at least for the next few nights.

A pair of high-heeled shoes clicked past, speeding up as they passed him. Sometime later, a taxi braked to a halt a few feet away. The driver got out, unzipped his pants, relieved himself against a tree, got back into his car, and drove away. Then nothing, for several hours.

Closer to dawn than midnight, footsteps approached again. They came at a casual pace, and he waited for them to pass, but they didn’t.

“Hello there,” a voice said.

The detective didn’t say anything. But under the blanket, he put the thermos down and picked up his gun.

“Cold night.”

“Sure is,” the detective said.

The feet moved a few steps to one side, then the knees bent, and then a man was sitting next to him. “What’s your name?”

“What’s yours?” the detective asked.

“Arthur,” the man said. “You can call me Art.”

The detective looked at him. He had a friendly face with great unruly eyebrows, a small mouth, good teeth. Good dentures, more likely. He looked like someone’s grandfather. Was this their killer, this harmless-looking man? The detective stared at him and tried to see in him a serial murderer, a cold-blooded exterminator of the homeless. He couldn’t.

Arthur reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you smoke?”

In wide gold letters, the pack said Chrome Gold.

The detective felt his fingers tense under the blanket, felt the weight of the gun in his hand. What would he do if I said no? Would he find some other way to do it? Or would he just go off and pick someone else to kill?

“Sure,” the detective said. “I smoke.”

Arthur flipped open the top of the pack. There were twenty cigarettes inside, lined up in their perfect rows. Which should have been a tip-off that something was wrong, the detective realized: The pack was already unwrapped, but none of the cigarettes were missing. Why would someone have opened a pack of cigarettes but not have smoked even one of them?

He reached out from under the blanket with his free hand, gripped the pack of cigarettes firmly, and pulled it out of Arthur’s hand.