Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [73]
“So you’re just gonna give it all up? You’re gonna go back inside, just like that?”
“Shit,” Rex said. He thought about the room with the roaches, the job with the sawdust. He thought about the Landry boy’s eyes.
He thought about things that wasn’t there before someone made them, and he thought about the pressure building, building.
“I was going back in, sooner or later,” he said. “I got tired of it, is all.”
“Well, damn,” the cop said. “What the hell, garbage is garbage, I guess. If we can’t get one of those kids, I suppose we’ll take you.” He looked over to Something’s desk and waited for the brown teeth to smile. “All right,” the white teeth said, “if that’s what you want, I’ll book you. That it, Rex?”
“Yes,” said Rex, and added, not to neither of these fools, but to himself, definitely to himself, “sir.”
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENT IN NEW YORK
BY JUSTIN SCOTT
Chelsea
I will cut her heart out,” Tommy King announced in a loud, clear voice, placing near equal emphasis on each word.
I said, “You shouldn’t be saying that.”
“Who you going to tell?”
“See the blondes at the bar? How do you know one of them’s not a cop? Or a cop’s sister looking to get him promoted?”
Tommy King lowered the decibels to a vodka mutter. “Whoa. Almost blew it. Thanks, Joe.”
We were seated at a four top in the back of Morans, an expensive Irish joint on Tenth in Chelsea around the corner from what I was already thinking of as “my apartment.” Which was premature, considering how negotiations had gotten jammed up. Tommy King was the real estate agent who had steered me to it after a six-month search. The table was roomy because he always reserved for three and gave his name as “Dr.” King.
“I don’t want to give the cops any ideas. Shouldn’t even tell you.” He was finishing off his second martini, not drunk enough to ignore. I was used to his harping on his ex-wife, but suddenly he was vicious, gripping my arm and pulling me close to whisper, “I’m going to buy a surgeon’s scalpel.
What she did to me. I just have to figure out how not to get caught—What’s the matter? You’ve never been mad enough to kill anybody?”
Hoping to shift the subject from ex-wife killing back to business, I said, “Right this minute I could kill the owner of that apartment.”
“No, no, no. Jesus H., don’t even say such a thing.” He ducked lower. “You don’t want to do that. Kill him and you’ll end up negotiating with his heirs. I’m telling you, heirs are the worst. Soon as they inherit free money, it’s not enough.”
“It’s the most beautiful apartment in New York.”
“I used to say that about my wife. The most beautiful woman in New York. She still is, I’ll give her that. Opens up that big smile of hers, she lights the whole street.”
“I didn’t realize you were still seeing her.”
“From a distance. You have to get right in her face to see the evil.”
Tommy waved his glass for a third drink.
I stood up. I’d heard enough evil-ex for one night. From a distance almost sounded like he was stalking her. “I’m out of here. We’ll go up again tomorrow, right?”
“Seven p.m.”
“Why so late?”
“He wants you to see the sun changing colors on the Empire State Building.”
“He’s enjoying jerking me around.”
Tommy put down his glass and said, seriously, “Two things you want to keep in mind, Joe. He can only jerk you around if you show him he’s getting to you. And, he knows what he’s got.”
“What’s that?”
“What you just said, man. The most beautiful apartment in New York.”
It was a walk-up. And the kitchen was a bad joke.
It ran the full length and breadth of the parlor floor of a Greek Revival town house built in 1840. It had two fireplaces and nine-foot ceilings. Listed as a one-bedroom, it had the extra nooks and crannies you find in an old house. One would hold a desk. Another, the upright piano I’d had in storage since I came to New York. It had a view in the back of narrow gardens and a view out front, across the street, of a gigantic plane tree in a green field beside a gothic stone seminary whose church,