“Yuh.”
“Know a guy named Canetta? Wears an orange jacket?”
A sour look crossed Stu-ard’s face. His head went up and down once, showing he knew him.
“Second floor. Over us.”
“He there now?”
“Yuh, another guy too. Maybe two other guys.”
“You know the guys?”
“One’s Morris, comes here sometimes. I don’t know the other guy-a big guy I seen here yesterday.”
“Thanks,” I said, opening the door. “What are you doing out here in the cold?”
“Hit my baby sister and ran away,” he said, going back to his tooth. I gave him my scarf and wrapped it around his neck awkwardly, getting a suspicious look.
“Detectives get scarves free,” I explained.
“Detectives catch rats?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Dirty rats and killers.”
“I mean real rats,” the kid explained. I thought I saw a drop of blood on his gum from the squirming tooth. “We caught one in the phoney fireplace today. My dad’s home.”
I went inside and found Canetta’s name on the mailbox, scrawled in pencil right on the metal. The downstairs door in the hall was open. The hall was clean. I went up squeaky steps covered with clean but tired carpeting and stopped in front of the two doors on the second floor.
Behind the door on the left I could hear the bark of a small dog, and a woman shouting, “Quiet Peanuts.” Then she said something like, “Sheldon will find out about the noise when he gets home.”
I decided that wasn’t my door. The wind sang bass as I tried the handle on the second door and held my other hand on the.38, which lay cool and comfortable in my coat pocket.
The door was locked. I decided to knock and heard something scuttling inside-maybe one of the rats I was looking for. My nose was running again, but I didn’t have time or a free hand. I knocked again and thought I heard the scuttling sound move toward the door. It came slow and as it got closer, it sounded more like the dragging foot of the mummy from some Universal picture.
“Hello,” I said with a heavy Yiddish accent picked up from vague memories of my grandfather, “is here a Mister Canetta? I’m from landlord mitten da pipes.”
Someone fumbled at the lock inside and I stepped back, expecting to face the kid who had tried to steal my suitcase and whose nose I had broken. The door came open a crack and stayed that way.
“Somevone dere?” I asked. No answer.
I took a deep breath, wiped my nose on my sleeve, pulled out the gun and pushed the door open. I jumped inside and was about to go flat on the floor when I saw him. He was about three or four feet from me in a little reception area. His back was against a mirror on the outside of a closet. His knees were slightly buckled and his mouth was open. Blood trickled from his mouth and poured from his belly. He was a good thirty year older than Canetta-a little guy witha balding head gasping for air he couldn’t get. I moved to him, keeping low in the dark apartment. There was a living room behind me with some light coming in from the morning, but it wasn’t much of a morning.
The living room was furnished with dark, heavy furniture. I kept my back to it, and my eyes down the dark hall going the other way. With my free arm I helped the man sag to the floor. I had never seen him before, but I had the feeling he might be the Chico double I was looking for. The age and size were right. The face and features were probably close, but it was hard to tell. The face in front of me was twisted in pain and surprise. No one would mistake him for a Marx Brother if he were in the same room with the Brothers, but a good bluff might carry it off.
He tried to say something, and his eyes moved in the direction of the hall. I nodded to him that I understood, but I didn’t understand a goddam thing. Something gurgled inside of him and moved up his chest to his throat. It rattled his body and killed him. I lowered him gently and looked at myself in the bloody mirror. My hands were shaking. I held my breath for the count of ten and stepped as quietly as I could over the body and toward the apartment’s hall. The floor was uncarpeted and made of boards that squeaked above the outside wind like a carpenter driving nails.
I moved along the wall, my back against it and my gun pointing forward. A blast of machine gun fire would cut through me like the man in the alcove before I could get off a shot. I hoped the guy with the chopper was gone, but I couldn’t be far behind him. My feet slipped slightly in something wet and sticky, probably the trail of blood from the dead guy who had let me in.
I hit an open door and put as little of myself into it as I could. It was a bedroom with a single window, a single chest of drawers, a painting of a peacock on the wall, and a closet with holes in it. The holes made a curving line, as if someone had done a graph of the weather or stock market in bullets. The man in the hall had probably been shot in the closet, I thought, but something changed my mind-a sound from the closet. I inched along the wall and kicked the door open. There was nothing at eye level and only a few shirts on the hangers inside. Sitting on the floor with a pair of pants and a wire hanger in his clenched fingers was the kid who had tried for my suitcase in Indianapolis. I couldn’t see much of him in the dark, but I saw enough. His nose was bandaged where I had hit him, but it would take more than bandages to take care of what had happened to him now.
One of the bullets that went through the closet had hit him in the neck. Another two had caught him high on the chest. He wasn’t as messy as the guy in the other room, but it looked just as fatal. He saw me and tried to say something.
I got low and moved into the closet, keeping my eyes jumping from him to the bedroom door.
“Get cop,” he sputtered, and started to cough.
“I’ll call the cops,” I said. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. Who shot you?”
He looked at me as if I were crazy. His eyes opened wide and his head moved back and forth. He wet his lips to say something, opened his mouth wide, let out a guttural sound and froze, looking at me. It was a still photograph, a frozen frame of film and time. He would look at me forever unless I moved, because he was dead.
But I didn’t move. The closet door did. It slammed with a crack. I froze.
The question was: was there something about me that made people want to use me for a bullet pin cushion? Did I ask for it by looking like a victim or a person who was worth a quarter of a pound of lead, but not a quarter of an hour of conversation? Those are the kinds of things you think of when you expect to have someone fill you full of holes. At least that’s what I thought. The experience is free for those who have a chance to test it and survive.
Maybe, I thought, I like having people shoot at me. That made me think of my brother’s bullet hole, the only one he had. He didn’t get his on the street chasing some stupid kid who robbed a candy store. He didn’t get his from a former movie star who thought he was coming too close to a secret. He didn’t get his from a mob triggerman in a closet. Phil Pevsner got his in the great war.
Phil had enlisted in 1917 when he was twenty-two. He was big and tough and angry at the Germans. Then he caught a long, thin pointed German rifle bullet in his stomach in some Belgian woods, during some battle that didn’t make the newspapers and was a cinch to miss the history books. Phil had a medal to show for it. The medal had been worth two bucks and a job as a cop. I was sure Phil now imagined suspects as German soldiers-the German soldiers he never got his hands on.
In honor of Phil’s failure to get to the Germans during the war, I had renamed our old dog Murphy, Kaiser Wilhelm, knowing Phil’s fondness for throwing a kick at the animal if I wasn’t around. Phil never really appreciated my consideration. Someplace I had a photograph of Phil just before he shipped out for the week he would spend in Europe. He had his uniform pants tucked into shiny boots, his neat jacket, and his doughboy cap right on the top of his head with the chin strap tight under his chin.
Nostalgia was getting me nowhere. With a corpse in my lap, and my back against a cold wall, I started to feel a chill. I could do without irony. I had found the flu in Chicago, but had avoided the backache I had almost learned to live with. If my back hit now, the triggerman wouldn’t even have to shoot. He could just leave me sitting against the cold wall in a cramped position for an hour or two, and I’d never be able to stand up straight again.
Maybe, I thought, I could yell through the door and persuade the killer that I was the harmless remnant of a man, a soon to be elbow-shaped creature worthy of curiosity, not hatred or fear. Those were my semidelirious
