The Gutter and the Grave (4 page)

Toni McAllister.

It’s a good name. It still excites me. It excited me the first time I heard it, as if I were waiting to hear that name all my life, and suddenly there it was. And the girl went with it. She came off the Triborough waving a football pennant, that long blonde hair caught on the November breeze, caught and held there, a spun gold web. Green eyes that echoed the green scarf around her throat. A leopardskin coat, and she wore it as if the animal were still alive, a sleek study in motion, trim and clean, full thighs beneath the woolen dress, slender ankles and the clatter of high-heeled shoes, the subtle swing of leg and thigh and hip, Toni McAllister with a bright orange pennant and a bunch of college boys smoking pipes and wearing tweeds. The smell of perfume and class, both delicate scents, both wafted on the air insinuatingly, touching me, reaching for me, Matt Cordell, the kid from the wrong part of the East Side, but not a kid anymore, a man who watched this invasion from the outer space of upper Park Avenue, Toni McAllister, a fresh breeze in the garbage-smell of the slums.

She stopped before me where I was leaning against the concrete support of the ramp. Her lips pulled back over small even white teeth, widening into a smile. There was another scent now, the smell of alcohol, and
then her voice came and there was a taunting lilt to it, a tease that was repeated in the flashing green eyes.

“Are you a Princeton or a Rutgers?” she said. She continued smiling. She leaned close to me, and our eyes locked, green with brown.

“Come on, Toni,” one of the college boys said.

“Go to hell,” she told him without looking over her shoulder. “Are you a Princeton or a Rutgers?” she said again.

“I’m a Peter Stuyvesant High School,” I said.

She laughed. She threw back her head and laughed, and one of the college boys said, “Come on, Toni, will you?”

“Princeton won,” she said to me. “I’m a Princeton. If you’re a Princeton, I’ll buy you a drink.”

“I’m not a Princeton,” I told her.

“That’s a damn shame,” she said. “Don’t say I didn’t ask.”

“I thought the
gentleman
asked,” I said.

“Are you a gentleman?”

“Not usually. But I’m asking. Let
me
buy
you
a drink.”

“How original,” Toni said, and she hooked her arm through mine, and we left three college boys standing on the pavement waving pennants.

That was the beginning.

The beginning and the end are clearest in my mind. What came in between was something I’d never known before, and it’s impossible to pick any isolated experience and say This was more meaningful than
that, or This caused more pleasure than that. It was all a high-speeding jet plane, and the wash dissolved behind it; it was Matt Cordell and Toni McAllister and the hell with the world. It was Park Avenue mixed with the slums, it was cocktail parties and pool parlors, theatre openings and all-night movies on Forty-Second Street. It was her world and mine, mixed like a Zombie, four thousand kinds of rum, but blended because underneath the exotic name, it was all rum. It was talking about everything under the sun, and it was long periods of silence, the ferry ride to Staten Island with the lights of Manhattan looming against the sky and Toni against me with my arms around her, a cutting wind blowing in over the bay. It was Matt Cordell and Toni McAllister, the impossible suddenly possible.

And after a year, it became Toni Cordell.

And then, of course, the end.

I’d hired a man named Dave Parker to supplement the three men already working for me. He was a clever guy who wasn’t afraid of tackling any case. We got along fine. It was one of those working arrangements where we both seemed to think together. Toni liked him, too. Then I went out of town on a case for about two weeks. I came home one night without calling Toni first—the old bit, so corny it makes me vomit, but it happened, as real as life: hubby coming home unexpectedly, the light burning in the bedroom upstairs, the big surprise grin on hubby’s face, and then the grin turning to ashes because Toni is in the arms of another man, Toni is in the arms of Dave Parker.

I hit him with a .45.

I had a license for the gun, of course, and I pulled it from the shoulder holster, and I went at him, and I kept hitting him because the son-of-a-bitch hadn’t only taken my wife of four months, he had taken a dream, and dreams are the one thing you should never steal from a man. And so I tried to reconstruct a demolished dream by destroying the demolisher, and all I did was destroy myself.

The police were so kind, the bastards. They understood completely, but they took away my license and my gun and my pride.

End of story. Add a Mexican divorce. Toni Cordell becomes Toni McAllister again. A little too old for the Princeton-Rutgers routine, a little less sleek, the younger competition springing up in the plush Manhattan bistros, but still with the challenge in her green eyes, still with the dazzling even smile and the narrow ankles and the educated hip-and-leg stalk of a leopard.

End of story.

Add a guy with a shattered dream and no profession and a trunkful of memories, painful, the climactic memory the worst of all, a guy who wished
he’d
have been beaten with a .45, truly destroyed, beaten to a pulp until there was nothing left but the memory of a man. Matt Cordell, memory. I drifted to the Bowery. There were a lot of people trying to forget there. And maybe Dave Parker’s face healed, but Matt Cordell carried scars that would never heal. Alcohol is good for scars; it’s an antiseptic.

Now, five years later, I walked where I’d first met her. I was about to do a job again. I felt no pride, I felt no anticipation, I felt no excitement. All that went out of me the night I walked into that bedroom and found my wife Toni with another man’s hands twisted in her long blonde hair.

Christine Archese was a blonde.

She opened the door a crack, looked out at me, and left the chain on. I’m not a wholesome sight to behold. Somewhere under the growth of my beard there is what Toni once called “an Irish boulder jaw,” but it is barely recognizable. My eyes are brown, but they bear the telltale red of the whiskey drinker. I pass for a man sometimes, but only because I once belonged to the human race.

“What do you want?” she said. There was no fright in her voice. I saw level blue eyes in the crack of the door, those and the blonde hair.

“Johnny Bridges sent me,” I said. “I’m a friend of his.”

“What’s your name?”

“Matt Cordell.”

“I don’t know you.”

“Open the door, Christine,” I said. “I’m harmless. And Johnny’s in trouble.”

She hesitated a moment, and then took off the chain. Her eyes swept me quickly as I walked into the apartment. The apartment was furnished with nice Third Avenue department store furniture. It was spotlessly
clean. Christine Archese led me into the living room of the railroad flat and then offered me a chair. I sat. She was a tall girl with a magnificent bosom and good hips, a little thick in the waist and legs, a strong girl with strong hands and jaw, a mouth full and meaningful, eyes like the blue steel of an automatic.

“What kind of trouble is Johnny in?” she asked.

“Let me ask you something first.”

“What do you want to ask me?”

“Was Johnny here today?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Two, two-thirty. I don’t remember exactly. Why?”

“Did he say where he was going when he left?”

“Yes. To look up a friend who’d been a private…” She stopped and sudden recognition crossed her face. “Did you say your name was Matt Cordell?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Oh sure. Well, he…” She studied my face more closely. “Of course. I should have remembered. Your picture was all over the papers when it happened.” She nodded. “Still not over it, huh?”

“Let’s drop it,” I said.

“Sure. Did Johnny find you?”

“He found me.”

“Well, any friend of Johnny’s is a friend of mine,” she said dubiously. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“Maybe you’d better listen to why I’m here first.”

“Why are you here?”

“Your husband is dead. Someone shot him.”

The reaction is always the same. I would rather swim underwater and attach nuclear weapons to Russian battleships than tell a person a loved one is dead. There is nothing funny about death. It always hits a person right between the eyes, an awesome shock that knocks the breath from the chest and suddenly fills the eyes with agony. Nor is the reaction any different when a person is faking. It is almost impossible to tell fake shock from real shock, and so the reaction to news of death is always the same.

Christine Archese reeled back from the blow of my words. I might just as well have struck her. Her mouth opened, and her head jerked back, and then her eyes were knifed with pain, and she brought her hands together in a sudden unconscious gesture and she said, “No!”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She began crying then, suddenly and fitfully. The big breasts heaved, and the strong woman was not that anymore. She was a little girl faced with irremediable sorrow. The tears streaked down her cheeks, and she looked for a handkerchief and found none, and then she ran from the room and into the kitchen and unashamedly bawled into a dish towel. I sat in the living room. The rain outside had stopped. The apartment was silent except for the agonizing sound of Christine Archese weeping in the kitchen. I wished I had a drink.

She came back into the living room in a little while. Her mascara was streaked and her face was red and
swollen. But she was a woman with good facial bones, and crying did not rob her of the near-beauty that was hers. She sat opposite me very primly and very stiffly. It seemed as if she were trying now to cover what she considered an unforgivable breach in a behavior pattern she had long ago established for herself. This was not a delicately feminine woman. This was not a petite, pouting, fragile china doll who blushed prettily and insisted on candle-lit sex on clean sheets. This was a big woman, peasant stock, a woman who filled every corner of a bed, a woman who had not wept in a long time. And so now, coming back into the living room, she sat with her back stiff and the big bosom thrust forward high and proud, her knees and feet close together, her chin lifted, the fine bones of her face glistening wetly.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She was not apologizing to me. She was apologizing to herself.

“It’s not a sin to cry,” I said.

“Isn’t it?”

“Not when you’ve lost someone you loved.”

“How do you know?” she said.

“I’ve lost,” I told her.

“And have you cried?”

“I’ve cried.” Our eyes locked. “Yes, I’ve cried.”

“Who killed him?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Johnny?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you said he was in trouble. Did he kill Dom?”

“I don’t know.” I told her about the initials on the wall, and she listened attentively, nodding all the while, her hands clasped on her firm lap, her shoulders back.

“I don’t think Johnny did it,” she said when I had finished. “Why should he?”

“Did he tell you why he wanted to find me?”

“The cash register thefts, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“He told me. He certainly didn’t suspect Dom.”

“Did Dom ever discuss the thefts with you?”

“No.”

“Isn’t that a little odd?”

“Well, you see…”

I didn’t see, and I was waiting to see, but a knock sounded on the door just then. Christine rose to open it. I didn’t see who was standing in the doorframe. I knew only that it was a woman, and then Christine threw herself into the girl’s arms and began wailing again. Together, they went into the kitchen, and I heard her yelling, “Dom is dead, oh my God, what am I going to do,” and the other woman tried to hush her and console her, and I was left, sitting alone in the living room again playing “Here’s the church, and here’s the steeple” with my hands. They were out in the kitchen for five minutes, Christine crying, and the other girl trying to sympathize. Then they came back into the living room. I didn’t have to be told who the other girl was. She was Christine’s sister. I’d have bet a pint of wine on it.

She had the same blonde hair. She wore it long, flowing to her shoulders. She had the same excellently boned face, the same startlingly high cheekbones, the straight regal nose, the hard blue eyes. Her mouth was almost too perfectly formed, a gracefully curving upper lip and a full pouting lower lip. She was slightly smaller than her sister, but she still added up to a very big girl. Her throat swept sharply to her rising breasts, caught in a cheap white sweater; a narrow waist pulled in abruptly, bound constrictingly with a black leather belt; the hips flaring out below that, childbirth hips covered with a black skirt taut over firm thighs and good legs. She was no older than twenty-two, and I figured she had at least ten years on her sister. She studied me with unmasked distaste. This was a girl who was used to men, and she didn’t like them bearded and rumpled. She made me feel as if I should run to take a bath. I didn’t.

“This is my sister, Laraine,” Christine said.

I stood up. “How do you do,” I said. “I’m Matt…”

“Sit down before you fall down,” Laraine said.

“Laraine!” her sister said sharply.

“Are you turning your living room into a flophouse?” Laraine said.

“This man is here to…”

“I don’t care why he’s here,” Laraine said. “I know his kind. He should be ashamed of himself.”

“Please forgive my sister.”

“I can take care of myself, thanks,” I said. “I’m sorry I offended you, young lady,” I told Laraine.

“Matt Cordell, the big private eye!” Laraine said. “Look at him! A bum! Nothing but a flophouse bum.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“What do you want? Why’d you come back to the East side?”

“To find a killer, it seems.”

“Do you expect to find him here?”

“Maybe. Where were
you
all day?”

“What!”

“You heard me.”

“Are you trying to say…?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. Somebody killed Dom Archese. I don’t know who. A woman can pull a trigger as well as a man. That’s the wonderful thing about guns. They’re great equalizers in more ways than one. So where were you?”