Slow Burn (4 page)

“Not in a place like this. Besides, a pro wouldn’t have let a guy get behind her like that without a fight. Her nails were still intact. No sign of a struggle.”

Loomis grinned. “You get all that from Hancock?”

“Fuck you, Floyd.”

Loomis shrugged that off, too. He took a final drag on his cigarette, then flicked it into the gutter. “If she’s not a call girl, then this case just got a whole lot more complicated, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, it did.” I flicked my cigarette into the gutter, too. “At least we’ve got a name in the register. Silas Van Dorn. Written plain as day, too. I know I’ve heard that name before, but I can’t figure out where.”

“Silas Van Dorn,” Loomis repeated. “Probably a phony. But it’s a fancy name for a dive like this.”

It was my turn to smile. “That’s what I said.”

Loomis gave up, digging his hands deep into his pockets. “You picked up the phone on this one, Charlie. That makes you the lead here. Tell me how you want to play it.”

Loomis was right. I was the lead and I had two choices. I could just fill out the paperwork and let the daytime boys run it down. Or, I could dig into this Silas Van Dorn angle on my own. The name was written too neat in the register. Too obvious to be random, even for an alias. I knew the killer must’ve used it for a particular reason. And I still had a few hours until the end of my shift to find out why.

Not the daytime detectives. Not even Floyd Loomis. Me. For the girl’s sake. Maybe for the sake of my own pride, too. Because I’d already been laughed at three times that morning. Once by Frank English, once by Ed Hancock, and once by my own partner.

Maybe I wasn’t much of a homicide man, but I’d been one of the best investigators on the chief’s staff not too long ago. And I was still a cop. It was time to start acting like it.

I pulled down my tie and took off my suit jacket. I knew my shoulder holster would draw stares, but I didn’t care.

“Tell Frank I want those pictures developed as soon as possible. Then follow up with the boys who are running down the day clerk. What’s his name?”

“Clarkson,” Loomis said. “Joe Clarkson. His landlady says he’s been drunk in his room, but our boys’ll straighten him up.”

“Good.” I slung my jacket over my shoulder and started walking north. I had an idea on who might know who Silas Van Dorn was, but I kept it to myself. What Loomis didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. “I’ll call you in about an hour to see where things stand.”

Loomis didn’t look pleased. “Where the hell do you think you’re going? The print boys haven’t even gotten here yet.”

“You wait for them,” I said over my shoulder. “I’ve got some thinking to do.”

I hadn’t gotten two steps when Loomis called back: “You did say ‘thinking,’ not ‘drinking,’ right, Charlie?” A snappy comeback lived for a moment before it died in my throat. I just kept walking north instead.

F
LOYD’S CRACK
about my drinking stung the whole walk up Ninth Avenue. I knew that people were starting to talk about my drinking, but I didn’t have a problem with booze. Not yet, anyway. But booze was starting to become an easy answer to a lot of hard questions I was trying to avoid asking myself. How did I fall this far so fast? Why didn’t I have two nickels to rub together anymore? Why did Theresa leave and take my girls with her?

Questions like that are always hard. But the answer was even harder: Me. I’d gotten myself into this mess. No one else. I’d played the game for damned near twenty years, and made every easy buck I could make. I’d toed the Tammany line my whole life. More so after I’d gotten my badge. I Archie Doyle’s dirty work for him and let him and his cronies break the law. I gathered and sold information for Doyle and busted the rackets he told me to bust. I leaned on Doyle’s rivals and turned a blind eye to the dead bodies his button man – Terry Quinn – left in his wake.

I also picked up my envelope from Doyle’s political headquarters every Friday like clockwork. Part of my job was picking up Chief Carmichael’s payoff, too, seeing as how I’d been his link to the Doyle machine and Tammany Hall.

My conscience never barked once. It purred, just like the Tammany Tiger.

And why not? The Tiger had run this city since before the Civil War. The Tiger was the meanest cat in the concrete jungle. The Tiger had been very fat, and very comfortable, for a very long time. And very, very old.

My party ended the moment Doyle got pushed out of New York at the end of a gun. I thought Doyle had his hooks too deep into this city to ever get run off, but I guess I was wrong. He’d gotten shot up pretty bad in a street war with a rival named Howard Rothman. I didn’t think Rothman had the muscle, but again, I was wrong. Doyle took off, Terry Quinn disappeared and so did my partner, Jim Halloran.

Everyone seemed smart enough to leave town except for me. I stayed and swore I’d help Chief Carmichael find a way to work with the Jews and Italians who’d stepped in to take over Doyle’s rackets. That had been two years ago.

But Chief Carmichael had other plans. He surprised me and everyone else when he signed on with Roosevelt’s Reformers instead of Lucania and his crowd. I’d known the Chief since we were kids, so I knew he’d always been an enterprising boy. Trouble was, Carmichael’s treachery actually made sense.

The Reformers had the full weight of an ambitious governor behind them: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Reformers had momentum. Reform was the future. Reform was now. Doyle was gone and Tammany was the past. Tammany was too big and too old to change.

Carmichael smelled the change in the wind and adjusted his sails accordingly. He signed on with Roosevelt’s Reformers and saved his own ass. His conversion validated their cause and they were all too glad to have him.

The Reformers might’ve been dreamers, but they weren’t fools. Carmichael had to prove his new loyalty by purging old ties to the Tammany Tiger. They demanded that he repent for his sins. I was the oldest tie he had. I was his oldest friend.

I was part of his penance.

Carmichael had been every bit as crooked as me, but he had rank to protect him. All I had to bank on was the detective shield Doyle had pulled strings to get for me and forty years of friendship with the chief. Friendship turned out to be mighty poor currency. Reform was the coin of the Roosevelt realm, and I had empty pockets.

The Reformers had demanded my badge at first. They wanted to arrest me and put me on trial for a career of corruption and bribery. But Carmichael knew I had enough dirt on him and half the department to put them all behind bars for a very long time.

So Carmichael cited friendship and managed to save my job. Not for my sake, but for his. He kicked me off his special detail and banished me instead. He vowed to put the Tiger in the cage and pledged to clean up the department.

But Carmichael had been smart enough to only tease the Tammany Tiger so much; feeding the Reformers low-hanging fruit from the poisoned tree to get in their good graces. It was vintage Carmichael: playing both sides against the middle.

It had been all wine and roses between the Chief and Albany from then on. And with Roosevelt having a good shot at the White House, Carmichael’s bet was looking like it might pay off. I hadn’t complained when the dirty money rolled in and things broke my way. I knew I had no right to kick now that things turned against me. But it still burned, and burned bad. Yes, I’d gotten myself into this mess.

And I was the only one who was going to get myself out of it.

Something told me this dead girl could serve as my own kind of penance for all the times I’d looked the other way. Well, maybe not all of it, but some of it anyway. Guys like me couldn’t get greedy. We had to take what we could get.

I knew the daytime detectives wouldn’t work overtime looking for her killer. I knew what they’d say: people who got themselves killed in places like The Chauncey Arms usually had it coming.

Maybe finding her killer could be my redemption. Carmichael had gotten his. Why not me? Or maybe this was just the pipe dream of a desperate hack looking for a new start. I didn’t know what it was, but I was damned well going to find out. For the girl’s sake. And for mine.

T
HEY CALLED
New York “the city that never sleeps” for a reason. Sure, the Depression had made it drowsier than normal, but never sleepy. I knew the best place for gossip at five in the morning was The Stage Left Bar, commonly known as Lefty’s. It was a small speakeasy tucked away in an alley on Forty-Sixth Street and Broadway. Even back when times had been good, Lefty’s always drew a hard-luck crowd. Stage hands, press agents, bit players and acting types; all on the down-swing looking for work, just like everyone else.

Nobody ever went to Lefty’s for the ambiance or the floor show. The place had neither. People went there to swill bad booze and run their mouths about their troubles. If misery loved company, it was never lonely at Lefty’s. My kind of place.

When I got to Forty-Sixth and Broadway, I stepped over two drunks at the mouth of the alley bickering over a bottle. They stopped fighting long enough to think about jumping me. But when they saw the holster under my arm, they went back to fighting over the bottle. There wasn’t much light in the narrow alley, but I knew where I was going. I found the steel door leading to the place and pushed it in. There’d been a time not too long ago when even a place like Lefty’s could afford to have a doorman, but those days were long gone. For Lefty’s. For everyone.

Lefty’s was nicer than The Chauncey Arms, but not by much. It was a dank, humid little joint with low ceilings and sticky floors. The bar itself was just some two-by-fours nailed together for posts and some wooden planks to cover the front. Even on its best day, it reeked of watered-down gin and desperation, but on a humid August morning, it smelled even worse.

The lack of décor didn’t faze the stagehands and other drunks who’d ambled in from the playhouses along Broadway. Most of the poor bastards were out of work and hoping for their luck to change, like everyone else in this town. But it never ceased to amaze me how they somehow managed to scrape enough dough together to go in there and drink every night. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

The regulars usually eyeballed me when I walked in the place. They knew who I was, and what I used to be. The looks they gave me were always far from admiring. But on that particular morning, the regulars were distracted by a fairer sight in the back of the place. And when I saw who they were looking at, I couldn’t blame them. She happened to be talking to the man I’d come to see. Sometimes my luck wasn’t all bad.

Wendell Bixby was perched in his usual spot: back table near the phone booth. He had his head down, scribbling in a notebook, while a tall blonde whispered to him from across the table. Bixby was the only one in the place not looking at the girl.

Her name was Alice Mulgrew and I’d known her for a long, long time. Even sitting down, it was easy to tell Alice was something to look at: tall and trim with a hell of a figure. She was Harlow-blond and wore a black, off-the-shoulder number that showed plenty of skin. Even in the dingy light of the bar, she glowed. Or maybe she glowed because of it. I never could figure out which.

Too bad Bixby was more interested in the dirt she was spilling than how she looked spilling it. You see, ‘Bixby’s Box’ was one of the most popular gossip columns in the country, thanks to the Hearst newspaper syndicate. One mention in his column either made you or broke you, depending on who you were and how Bixby decided to write it on that particular day. Socialites, businessmen, politicians, philanthropists, philanderers, actors and actresses were all fair game. No one was beyond the influence of Bixby’s pen.