Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [7]
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.
“Now hold on,” Arthur said, not losing his smile. “Leave some for me. I was just offering you one.” He reached for the pack.
“Oh, I won’t smoke them all,” the detective said. “Don’t worry about that.” He turned the pack over and shook the cigarettes out. Arthur caught a few; the rest fell on the pavement. He started scooping them up.
“Don’t bother, Art.