After the First Death

“Tell me where you are. I’ll come down, give you the dough. But I don’t want you coming up here. Fair enough?”

Tell me where you are. I almost did, but the operator cut in just then, requesting that I deposit another five cents. I’d already wasted ten cents on the call and that was enough. I stalled her.

Tell me where you are. And he, my good friend, acting no doubt in my own best interests, would tell the police where to find me.

“Broadway and Eighty-sixth Street,” I said. “Southwest corner.” And hung up.

6

I WALKED DOWNTOWN. I HAD ONE DIME LEFT, AND WOULD HAVE needed another to take the subway, and it did not seem worth the effort to hunt up and hustle a second sympathetic faggot. It was simpler to walk.

I stayed on Eighth Avenue as far as Thirty-third Street. Further down there were a batch of Greek and Arabic nightclubs, belly dancers and such, and more street and sidewalk traffic than I cared to be exposed to. At Thirty- third I cut over to Seventh, and stayed on Seventh down to the Village. The Village, too, was crowded, but there was no help for that.

At first as I walked, I thought about money. It was my most immediate need. I was neither hungry nor tired just yet but I could anticipate being both before very long; I would need food and a safe place to sleep, and money could secure them both. I considered letting a homosexual pick me up and then rolling him. The tall slender man who had given me the token had suggested that much to me by assuming I had met just such a fate myself. He did make it sound the simplest of crimes to carry off, but I couldn’t see myself in the role. It would be embarrassing, before and during and after. No.

But there was another way, one which would permit me to draw from my own experience. And, in a sense, even an old score. I thought about it and worked out as many details as it seemed profitable to work out in advance. I got it all set in my mind and then stopped thinking about it.

And thought instead of Robin.

Facts: I had not killed her. Someone else had killed her. Someone had killed her in such a way as to leave me the obvious villain, obvious even to myself. Someone had wanted me saddled with her murder.

Facts: I had not merely been a convenience for the killer. He had gone to great lengths to make sure I was caught. Soaked my clothes with blood. Stole my watch and wallet to make escape all the more difficult. Fitted all the trappings of the murder scene to the earlier murder of Evangeline Grant. The slashed throat, the passed-out post-coital killer, everything.

Conclusion: The murder of Robin had been the means to an end. She had been killed solely to frame me. I drank, I blacked out I stumbled around, I picked up Robin, and all the while the killer lurked in shadows, following, waiting. Robin had bad luck, but I had an enemy.

Who, for the love of God?

I lit my last cigarette. The question was absurd. I didn’t even know anyone. I stayed in my apartment I played chess, I read, I thought about applying for jobs I could never get. I carried on no love affairs, threatened no one’s career, and generally interacted with virtually no one. That there was any person in my life with any motive whatsoever for framing me for murder was utterly inconceivable. Barring the existence of a maniacally impractical joker, it was quite impossible that anyone could have done this to me on purpose.

Odd that I didn’t make the obvious connection then. But I was fatigued, after all, and sufficiently dizzy with the knowledge that I was innocent of Robin’s murder. And the mind tends to take for granted whatever it has learned to acknowledge as fact. So, however obvious the next bit of reasoning might later seem, I missed it for the time being.

A partial explanation may lie in the coincidence of my reaching Fourteenth Street at just that point in my train of thought. I crossed the street and moved through the northern edge of Greenwich Village, and at once my mind busied itself with thoughts of money and how it was to be obtained.

I knew I’d find the sailors. It was just a question of time. There are always several groups of sailors in the Village, and they always drink, and they always look for girls, and it never works out right for them. They all come from places like Des Moines and Topeka and Chillicothe, and they have all heard wondrous stories about Greenwich Village, where all the men are queer and all the women believe in Free Love-a situation which, were it true, would have to engender extraordinary frustration all around.

Poor sailors. There are no streetwalkers in the Village. There are any number of lovely young ladies, of all ages and colors and temperaments, and most of these young ladies look promiscuous, and many of them surely are, and none of them are interested in sailors. They all hate sailors. No one knows why; it seems to be traditional.

I met my sailors just as they were leaving a lesbian bar on Cornelia Street. There were three of them, and they were all somewhere between drinking age and voting age. They had evidently not known the place was a lesbian club. They had evidently not known that the girls therein had even less use for sailors than the average Village females. They had evidently made passes at some of the femmes and had been subsequently put down rather forcefully by some of the butches, and now they were trying to decide whether to be shocked or amused.

The saddest part was that they obviously felt that they were the first sailors to whom this sort of thing had ever happened, and for this reason they were both loathing and treasuring the moment. They were definitely not the first sailors to whom this sort of thing had ever happened. It always happens.

I fell in with them.

We walked and talked together. We talked of lesbians. We talked of women and whiskey the world over. We talked, before very long, of the desirability of locating female companionship as soon as possible.

“I hear the mayor calls this town Fun City,” said one of the sailors, the youngest and drunkest and loudest. “What do you figure is his idea of fun, the mayor’s?”

“Maybe a fast game of parcheesi.”

“The mayor,” said the third, “has never been to Tokyo.”

“Look here, Lou,” said the first, “you live here, right? You must know where we can find some chickens.”

Lou was my name, for the moment. Theirs were Red, Johnny, and Canada. Canada was the oldest. Red was the tallest and Johnny was the youngest and drunkest and loudest. They took me to a bar and insisted on buying me a drink. I ordered milk, mumbling apologetically about an ulcer. I wanted a drink, and thought I could handle it without any trouble, but caution seemed indicated. They had a couple of rounds, flashed large rolls of bills, ogled some girls, and talked again about the need that was paramount in their minds. We left the bar, and they suggested once again that I might know some agreeable women.

“If I thought you boys were really serious-”

“You kidding Lou?”

“Well, there are three girls I know who might be interested. Just kids, really. Nineteen or twenty. Let’s see- Barbara’s an actress, and I think Sheila and Jan are dancers, though they don’t get much work. Beautiful girls, and they like to have a good time.”

I let them coax details out of me. The three girls shared an apartment in the neighborhood. They weren’t tramps or anything of the sort, but they would spend a night with a fellow who came well recommended; after all, they had to eat and show business was hard on a beginner with no additional source of income. They only took guests for the whole night and then they liked to make it a party, with plenty to drink and soft music on the record player and nonstop bedroom activity.

“Real wild Village women, huh?”

“So what are we waiting for? C’mon, Lou-be a buddy!”

Well, I explained, there were other considerations. Price, for example. The girls were no back-alley hookers. I wasn’t sure of the price but I thought it was twenty or twenty-five dollars, and that might be more than the boys wanted to pay.

“That doesn’t sound so bad, not for all night.”

“Look, I’ll level with you, Lou. This is our first night on shore in months. We’re okay in the money department, know what I mean? Twenty or twenty-five is not about to break us.”