I came out of the alley.
They were there.
Spread out in the street, black figures against the snow, they trotted toward the alley. They, too, had known the Golden Donkey. They came on, men with something in their right hands.
The taller was in the lead, running at me. A face I could not see. Teeth that caught the stray light of a street lamp. A heavy, dark overcoat, its skirts flapping. A hat. A gun held forward.
I turned for the alley.
Shots hammered the night. Suddenly and heavy, like a blow against my ears in the narrow street and thin, cold air. Two shots. There was a scream. High and terrible like the scream of a wounded mountain lion. I went down in the snow, rolled, but it was not me who had screamed.
I rolled, unhit, and came half up, crouched in the snow with my lips back and my teeth bared in an animal snarl. As I came back up, I thought I heard another heavy shot, and two short, slapping sounds. The silenced gun that had shot at me. I was never sure.
Then it was over.
People were gathering from the dark air. There was a police whistle somewhere close. The smaller of the two who had been hunting me lay in the street. Another man lay beyond him against a building. Far off, a block away, a man was running hard. As I stood, he vanished.
I stumbled to the first body. He lay on his back. The front of his overcoat was torn out over bloody holes I could have put both fists in. He was a small, thin man. His hat lay in the snow. He had sandy hair. He was dead.
I pushed past people who gave me room. I had never seen the thin, sandy-haired man before, but I knew he had been the man who had gone before me to City Island to look for Carla Devine. I shouldered through the crowd around the second man who lay close to a dark building. I had seen him before. Leo Zar.
There were two small, neat holes close together in his chest. The overcoat was hardly torn. He breathed; slow and hard; uneven and rattling deep in his punctured chest. I bent down close to his broad, ugly face.
“Zar? Who were they? Zar!”
He breathed, rasping. His small eyes were shut. He was busy, concentrating, trying to live. His fists were clenched, the massive hands holding hard with all his strength to the air. A. 45 automatic lay in the snow.
“Leo,” I said. “Who were they? You were after them.”
The cords in his bull neck, and in his wrists, stood out. His eyelids fluttered, but his eyes did not open.
“… wife… Paul’s… she…”
His barrel chest heaved, rested, then heaved once more in a deep, long breath. His eyes opened. He looked up into my face. His voice was deep and thick with the rasp of gravel.
“Get the damned bitch.”
His breathing stopped. His cold eyes seemed to watch me, puzzled. He took one more ragged breath. His eyes glared up at me with pure hate. Hate that was not for me, but only for the life still in me. I was alive. Then he died, the last hate fading out of his bitter eyes.
Behind me someone giggled. Someone moaned, afraid. I stood up. A policeman was running up. I walked away and ducked into the alley behind the Golden Donkey. No one stopped me. I found a doorway and sat in its shelter inside the alley. I lighted a cigarette. I was not shaking; I was thinking, clearly, that I had finally heard Leo Zar speak.
I smoked. Paul Baron’s wife. Leo had said that Baron had had a wife. He had said, it seemed, that the wife had somehow killed Baron. Yet Leo had been chasing two men. A dying man says what is important. Or does he? A dying man says only what his dying mind thinks. What is important, and what is true, when a man is dying?
When my cigarette was smoked out, I stood up and went back to the rear door of the Golden Donkey. In the restaurant they were all excited. They stared at me. I was a sodden mess. No one spoke to me, and no one stopped me going through.
I walked to Seventh Avenue this time without trouble.
The show was on at the Fifth Street Club. I had two quick shots of Irish and watched it from the bar. My nerves were jumping now at the sound of a glass hitting the bar. Someone who had little left to lose didn’t want me around. One more murder was not going to make a hell of a lot of difference. I drowned my nerves in the whisky, thought that at least the someone was running scared, and concentrated on the show.
The line was six girls wearing just about what girls wear on any beach these days, but there was a big difference in the effect to watch them prancing in a room filled with fully dressed people eating. They did a vigorous bump-and-grind routine, and then went into the lead-in for the star. Misty Dawn was the star.
She appeared at center stage with a flourish. She was worth looking at. She wore more than the girls of the line, but all that did was focus attention to the right places. She bounced where she should bounce, and was hard where she should be hard. Her belly looked like ribbed steel, and moved like a powerful spring. Her face was all pancake, rouge, eye shadow, false lashes, eye liner and lipstick. The face was a mask: a ritual mask passed down through generations of girl-shows.
She was not a bad dancer, and her voice was deep, loud, only a little hoarse when she sang, and as boldly suggestive as it was supposed to be. But, watching closely now, I saw something else. I heard a nuance. She was deftly burlesquing her own act. She was putting them on, the drooling audience. Just enough to amuse herself and those in the know, but not enough to offend the true droolers. She was acting, playing a part and a private game.
When she finished, she ran off in a neat parody of every stripper who ever pranced into the wings like a mare in heat. The stage lights dimmed, and the interim show came on: an overage boy who played gaudy piano and sang in a whisky baritone. I paid and went through the curtain at the side. At the end of a long corridor an old man sat on a chair guarding the portals. I told him I wanted to see Misty, and he shuffled off with the message. He came back at the same shuffle.
“She’s gone out.”
That ended it for him. He sat down again and picked up his copy of Playboy. Girls trotted around the passage with less on them than they wore onstage. The world of night clubs does not breed modesty. For all I embarrassed them, I might have been a water cooler. Maybe that is true modesty.
“Out where?” I said to the old man. “Doesn’t she have a couple of more shows?”
“Next in half an hour,” the old man said, uninterested.
I left him reading, or staring at the pictures of naked girls. The pictures seemed to excite him more than all the real flesh and blood around him. It’s easier to dream from a distance, and paper girls don’t laugh at an old man.
I went back through the club and out into the cold night. I watched even old ladies warily. With a show in half an hour, Misty would not have gone far. She could have eaten or had a drink in the club. I went into the vestibule of the apartment above the club. Everyone agreed that it was where Misty lived. I used the pressure-and-push trick on the downstairs door. When I had it open, I pressed the bell for the apartment where Paul Baron had died, and went fast to the basement door, down, and through to the steps up to the backyard.
The fire escape of the old building was above me. I climbed it to the landing outside the window of the apartment. She was there, seated in a flowered armchair facing the door, her back to me. The room was dim, but I could see her fine legs in the black mesh tights. I could also see the gun in her hand aimed at the closed outside door. It was a tiny, chromium-plated automatic.
The window was not locked, but I could never open it, climb in, and get to her in time. My nerves were still raw, and I didn’t like it, but there are some chances I have to take once in a while. I got my fingers under the upper edge of the lower window frame and shoved as hard as I could.
The window flew up as I said, “Drop it, Misty! I’ll shoot if you turn a hair!”
Reflex was the danger. Her shoulders hunched.
“Drop it!”
The moment passed. She dropped the tiny pistol. It bounced away from her feet. I scrambled in through the window. She turned. Even in the dim light she saw my lone hand as empty as the day I was born. She swooped at the pistol. I made a wild dive. It was almost a dead heat, but I hit her in the dive, knocked her away, and fell on the gun.
I came up with it in my hand. (For some reason women will rarely dive to get something. They will bend,
