Dancing in the Dark by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1996)

 

Would you like to know about Preston? It might make it easier if you knew what a …”

“No,” I said, holding up a hand. “I don’t want to know how kind, loving, rich, and funny he is. Call me a sore loser. Call me childish, which you’ve been known to do. My guess is I’ll avoid Preston Stewart movies for a year and then I’ll start going to all of them, looking for signs of decay or melting, wondering how you two hit it off in bed and if he’s still keeping you laughing down on the beach in your tans.”

“I didn’t think you’d be this bitter,” Anne said.

“You caught me by surprise. I didn’t have time to fake it or tell a bad joke or two. The truth just came out.”

Tomorrow Is Another Day by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1995)

Elmo looked around his alley domain. Cars beeped and chugged on Main Street beyond the Farraday. Elmo seemed to listen and then touch his face.

“Just need another tomorrow,” he said. “And who’m I trying to impress, I ask you.”

“You’ve got a point,” I said. “But if you put the shave together with a bath, some clean clothes from Hy’s or Chi Chi’s Slightly Worn on Hoover, you might be able to line up a job.”

“Had one once,” Elmo said with a smile. “Makes me itch. Got no patience. Most guys out here …” He looked around, but there weren’t any guys. “Most guys have a story. What they were. What they walked away from. You know?”

“I know,” I said.

Elmo jangled the coins in his pocket. 

"I got no story. No ambition. What the hell. You’re born one day. Sixty, seventy years later you’re dead. You know?”

“I know,” I said.

Elmo shook his head.

“So,” he went on, “the way I figure it, why waste the sixty, seventy with work, trying to get something you can’t keep anyway. I’m not starvin’. I’m not cold or wet most days. I get plenty of time to read over at the library or wherever.”

“I get your point, Elmo.”

“You think I could really get a job?” he asked, looking away from me. “I mean if I cleaned up okay?”

“Lot of jobs, Elmo. The gravy’s in the navy.”

Mr. Majestyk by Elmore Leonard (Harper Collins 1974)

 

"You know melons, uh?”

“Melons, onions, lettuce, anything you got.”

“You want to work today?”

The girl seemed to think about it and then shrugged and said, “Yeah, well, since we forgot our golf clubs we might as well, uh?”

“After you go to the bathroom.” Majestyk’s gaze, with the soft hint of a smile, held on her for another moment.

“First things first,” the girl said.

“Listen, I don’t say they can’t use them,” the attendant said now. “You think I own this place? I work here.”

“He says he works here,” Majestyk said.

The girl nodded. “We believe it.”

“And he says since the toilets are broken you can use something else.” Majestyk’s gaze moved away, past the attendant and the shelves of lube oil and the cash register and the coffee and candy machines, taking in the office.

“What’re you doing?” The attendant was frowning, staring at him. “Listen, they can’t use something else. They got to get out of here.”

Majestyk’s gaze stopped, held for a moment before coming back to the attendant. “He says use the  wastebasket if you want,” and motioned to the migrants with his hands. “Come on. All of you, come on in.”

As two of the migrants came in hesitantly behind the girl, grinning, enjoying it, and the other two moved in closer behind her, the attendant said, “Jesus Christ, you’re crazy! I’m going to call the police, that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Try and hold on to yourself,” Majestyk said to him quietly. “You don’t own this place. You don’t have to pay for broken windows or anything. What do you care?”

Cops and Robbers by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious Press 1972)

 

Joe

The subway had fucked up again. Paul and I were positioned at a manhole on Broadway, where the people were coming up. They’d been down there for over an hour, and there’d been some smoke, and now they’d had to walk single file in the tunnel for a ways, and come up a metal ladder, and at last out onto the street. It was nine-thirty at night, traffic was being detoured around us, and we had our patrol car between the manhole and the street, flasher going.

Most of the people coming up were just stunned, all they wanted was to get the hell away from there. A few were grateful and said thank you to Paul or me for helping them up the last few steps. And a few were pissed off and wanted to take it out on a representative of the municipal government, which at the moment was Paul and me. These last few we ignored; they’d make an angry remark or two, and then they’d stomp off, and that would be the end of it.

Except this one guy. He stood around on the other side of us, away from the manhole, and yammered at us. He was about fifty, dressed in a suit, carrying an attaché case. He was like a manager or supervisor type, and all he wanted to do was stand there and yell, while Paul and I helped the rest of the people up out of the manhole.

He went on like this: “This city is a disgrace! It’s a disgrace! You aren’t safe here! And who cares? Does anybody care? Everything breaks down, and nobody gives a God damn! Everybody’s in the union! Teachers on strike, subways on strike, cops on strike, sanitation on strike. Money money money, and when they work do they do anything? Do they teach? Don’t make me laugh! The subways are a menace, they’re a menace! Sanitation? Look at the streets! Big raises, big pay, and look at the streets! And you cops! Gimmie gimme gimme, and where are you? Your apartment gets robbed, and where are you? Some dope addict attacks your wife in the street, and where’s the cops?”

Up till then we ignored him, the both of us; like he was a regular part of the city noise. Which in a way he was. But then he made a mistake, he overstepped himself. He reached out and tugged at my elbow, and he yelled, “Are you listening to me?”

They’re not going to start grabbing me. I turned around and looked at him, and he was so amazed he went back a step. The city had finally noticed him. I said to him, “I’m coming to the conclusion you fell coming up those stairs and broke your nose.”

It took him a second to work it out, and then he back-pedaled some more, and yelled, “You mustn’t care much about keeping that badge of yours.”

I was about to tell him what he could do with the badge, pin first, but he was still backing away, and the hell with him. I turned back and helped Paul with a fat old lady who was having trouble climbing because of bad ankles. But I kept thinking about what the guy had said.

How to Rob an Armored Car by Iain Levison (Soho Press 2009)

 

Wilton, while never beautiful, could be at least photogenic after a snowfall. The three gray brick smokestacks of the metal-refinishing plant with the snow-covered mountains as a backdrop made a decent photograph for a freshman arts major trying to capture man’s inhumanity to nature. Over time, this had become Wilton’s purpose. Flocks of Penn State students would come down every spring to catch a black-and-white image of a strip-mined valley or a withered ex–coal miner dying of black lung disease on his disintegrating porch. From the gutted earth of the quarries just outside the town to the abandoned coal mines, some of which were permanently on fire, Wilton was a picturesque icon of poverty and environmental rape.

Nightfall by David Goodis (Centipede Press 1947)

 

Vanning put another cigarette in his mouth, had no desire to light it. He put his hand in front of his eyes, wondered why his fingers weren't shaking. Perhaps he had gone beyond that. Perhaps it was actually a bad sign, his steady fingers. He sat there, his head lowered, feeling sorry for himself, sorry for every poor devil who had ever stumbled into a spot like this. And then, gradually lifting his head, he gradually smiled. It was such a miserable state of affairs that it was almost comical. If people could see him now their reactions would be mixed. Some of them would have pity for him. Others would smile as he was smiling at this moment. Maybe some of them would laugh at him, as they would laugh at Charlie Chaplin in hot water somewhere up in the Klondike. 

      

He sighed. He thought of other men, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, working in factories, in offices, and going back tonight to a home-cooked meal, sitting in parlors with their wives and kids, listening to Bob Hope, going to sleep at a decent hour, and really sleeping, with nothing to anticipate except another day of work and another evening at home with the family. That was all they looked forward to, and Vanning told himself he would give his right arm if that was all he could look forward to. 

      

“Callahan?” 

      

“Yes?” 

      

“Just stay there. Be with you in a jiffy. We're still talking to Seattle on another phone.” 

      

“Make it snappy, will you?” 

     

 “Be right with you.” 

Nick's Trip by George Pelecanos (Back Bay Books 1993)

 

The night Billy Goodrich walked in I was tending bar at a place called the Spot, a bunker of painted cinder block and forty-watt bulbs at the northwest corner of Eighth and G in Southeast. The common wisdom holds that there are no neighborhood joints left in D.C., places where a man can get lost and smoke cigarettes down to the filter and drink beer backed with whiskey. The truth is you have to know where to find them. Where you can find them is down by the river, near the barracks and east of the Hill.

An Arctic wind had dropped into town that evening with the suddenness of a distaff emotion, transforming a chilly December rain into soft, wet snow. At first flake’s notice most of my patrons had bolted out of the warped and rotting door of the Spot, and now, as the snow began to freeze and cover the cold black streets, only a few hard drinkers remained.

One of them, a gin-drenched gentleman by the name of Melvin, sat directly in front of me at the bar. Melvin squinted and attempted to read the titles of the cassettes behind my back. I wiped my hands lethargically on a blue rag that hung from the side of my trousers, and waited with great patience for Melvin to choose the evening’s next musical selection.

Melvin said, “Put on some Barry.”

Shoedog by George Pelecanos (Little, Brown and Company 1994)

 

“Hold on a second,” Constantine said. “There’s something I gotta know.”

“What?” Polk said.

“In the meeting, you told Grimes that if something happened to you, your share would go to me.” Constantine stared into the bright blue of Polk’s eyes. “Why?”

Polk smiled. “It’s simple, Connie. That day I picked you up hitchhiking—I asked you for a smoke. Well, you probably don’t remember, but you gave me your last one. It was a small thing to do, I know. But it’s been a long time since someone’s done that. It meant something. It meant something, to me.” Polk smiled at Constantine.

“Take it easy, Polk.”

“You too, kid.”

Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Vintage Crime 1965)

He opened his mouth but closed it again without saying anything. There would only be an argument and this wasn't the moment for it. Instead he drummed slowly with his fingers on the formica table top. He looked at the empty cup with its blue rose pattern and a chip in the rim and a brown crack down from the notch. That cup had hung on for almost the duration of their marriage. More than ten years. She rarely broke anything, in any case not irreparably. The odd part of it was that the children were the same.

Could such qualities be inherited? He didn't know.

The Devil Met a Lady by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1993)

“If I remain in this room for five more minutes, I will surely go mad, mad, mad,” Bette Davis said, grabbing the sleeve of my jacket as I reached for the door.

She looked into my eyes. Hers were large and determined. Mine were red and beady.

I couldn’t blame her. She’d been holed up in a small room in the Great Palms Hotel on Main for almost twenty-four hours with nothing to eat but room-service ham-and-cheese on white and nothing to drink but water and Ruppert Mellow Light Beer. She had the bed. I had the undersized sofa.”

The Great Palms Hotel was a good place to get lost—not in the top twenty-five percent and not in the bottom ten, usually hovering not far from respectable mediocrity.

The Melting Clock by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1991)

“Grasshoppers,” Salvador Dali whispered, shrinking back as I opened the door. He didn’t say “grasshoppers” exactly, it was more like “grah-zoppairs,” but I understood the word as he repeated it, his eyes open wide, his long, dark waxed mustaches curled upward at the end like sharp-pointed black surgical needles.

“A giant monk with an ax is coming through that door behind you in about ten seconds,” I said.

The door I was pointing to shuddered.

“Make that five, Sal. What’ll it be, a couple of grasshoppers outside or a split personality?”

Dali, dressed in a white rabbit suit, removed the deerstalker hat perched on his head and pointed at the splintering door with one hand. Then he did a little dance from foot to foot as if he had to find a toilet.

Poor Butterfly by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1990)

The overture ended. Stokowski sighed, shook his head, and said, “Oboe. You, oboe.”

The oboe player, a very old man, looked up, ready to accept the ax.

“When I coax you with my hand like this,” said Stokowski, demonstrating the hand movement “I want you to play, to help. The flutes were lost. They have improved in quality in the last ten minutes but lost in volume.”

“But,” said the bewildered oboe player, his instrument cradled lovingly in his arms, “there was no music when you “pointed at me to play.”

“I am the conductor,” said Stokowski. “If I point at you, coax you, it is because I need you, and you will play even if there is no part for you.”

“You want me to improvise on Puccini?” asked the stunned old man, looking in the general direction of the string section.

“Yes,” said Stokowski. “Yes. Yes if I need it.”

“You want me to play … jazz?”

“I don’t care what you call it,” said Stokowski. “Just do it. Can you do it?”

“Yes,” said the old man.

“Good,” said Stokowski. “Practice.”

“Practice what?” asked the old man.

“Creative flexibility.”

Buried Caesars by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1989)

And we went. Seidman trusted me enough to let me drive my Crosley ahead of him. We got to the Wilshire Station in fifteen minutes, bucking the traffic. The Wilshire had been the hotbed of police activity back in 1923 when my brother Phil joined the force. Phil had come in during Prohibition when the department was at its most corrupt. He became a cop the same month the city fathers appointed August Vollmer, the father of police science, to a one-year term to clean up the L.A.P.D. Vollmer, a clean-living police chief from Berkeley, got nowhere, and when his term was about to expire in September of 1924, billboards began to appear all over the city, saying: “THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER WILL BE THE LAST OF AUGUST.” And it was. I remember seeing the signs and asking Phil what they meant. I remember he rapped me in the head and told me to shut up.

Think Fast, Mr. Peters by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1987)

Jeremy, who had placed himself between Lorre and the glass doors, nodded and said, “I suggest we move away from these glass doors into a more protected area. It is one thing to accept our fate and quite another to tempt it.”

“But,” said Lorre, surreptitiously pulling out a silver case and removing a cigarette, “if our fate is written then we cannot tempt it, only fruitlessly seek to avoid it, in which case we become a source of amusement for the gods.”

“But,” Jeremy said solemnly, “as Schopenhauer said, ‘We must live and act as if we have a choice, a control over our futures, or we will simply sit in the corner and wait for death.’”

“Or,” said Lorre blowing out a puff of smoke, “enter into a state of meditation like certain Buddhist priests who attain the blissful state of Nirvana.”

“Hey, guys,” I said. “This is great, fascinating, but until that great come-and-get-it day, I’d like to keep my client alive, save a dentist, and eat regular. Let’s get this going.”

“As you wish,” said Lorre.”

Smart Moves by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1986)

The bathroom was small, a towel on the floor, the medicine cabinet partly opened. I opened it all the way and found an old straight razor, with a pearl handle and something written on it in German. I lathered, shaved without cutting my throat, looked at myself in the mirror, wiped the drops of soap from my shirt and grinned a horrible lopsided grin at the pug in the mirror who looked as if he were having a good time. It was then I decided for the two-hundredth time that the guy in the mirror was some kind of looney. My ex-wife Anne had seen it in my face long before I did, that young-old face with dancing brown eyes and a smashed nose, smiling when things were complicated and people with assorted weapons were trying to take him apart for scrap.

“This is what it’s all about,” I told the grinning fool in the mirror, not knowing what I was talking about but knowing I meant it and it was the truth. I waited for an echo to answer “Fraud,” or “Nevermore,” but there was no echo and no answer.

The Fala Factor by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1984)

The little black dog on my desk wanted to play, but with a corpse sitting in the corner and a murderer on the way up to my office on the elevator I just wasn’t in the mood. I patted his head, tried not to smell his breath, and said, “Maybe later.”

This didn’t please him. The Scottie lay down, covering the letter telling me where I was to pick up my sugar ration stamp book, put his head on his front paws, and looked up at me sadly. I checked my .38 automatic to be sure it was loaded, aimed it tentatively at the door to my office and hoped that I wouldn’t have to use it,  and, if I did, that it would work. It had never proved particularly reliable in the past.

Down for the Count by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1985)

I tried to ignore the shadow over me, but you can’t do that when it belongs to the heavyweight champion of the world.

“He dead?” Joe Louis said, breathing heavily. Louis was wearing blue shorts and an extra-extra large white T-shirt stained with sweat. His feet were bare.

“Down for the count,” I said.

About a quarter-mile down the shore some girls were giggling in the surf, the late sun hitting their tanned bodies, their voices bubbling through the white waves hitting the beach and the corpse I was kneeling next to. I looked away from the girls and out over the ocean at the sun heading for Japan. I wondered how I was going to tell Anne about the massive brown figure in the wet sand casting his shadow over me and the badly beaten body. There wasn’t much face left on the body, but there wasn’t any doubt about who it was.

Ralph Howard had always dressed tastefully, conservatively. Even now with sand, salt water, and pinkish blood staining the tan panama suit, the corpse had Ralph’s touch.

Catch a Falling Clown by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1981)

The gorilla was sleeping.

When he woke up he’d find a clown in his cage. There would be no reasoning with Gargantua. He was not a reasonable gorilla. Maybe there are no reasonable gorillas. This was the only nonhuman one I had ever met, and if fate didn’t step very gently in and let me out, it was the only gorilla I would ever meet.

His keeper had told me that Gargantua was so mean that they had to throw live snakes into his cage just to get him to move out so they could clean the floors.

“But gorillas, they don’t eat people,” said the keeper, a knotty twig named Henry Yew. “That is a misnomer. They rends ’em apart or chomps ’em sometimes, but they don’t eat ’em.”

So when Gargantua woke up looking for some succulent head of cabbage to bend or chomp, he would find instead a private detective named Toby Peters. With the war in the Pacific going badly and reports of the Japanese bombing Los Angeles and Seattle, I’d just make a curiosity item in the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times: FAMOUS CIRCUS GORILLA RIPS PRIVATE DETECTIVE. “Maybe the Times would wonder why I had been in his cage dressed as a clown. Maybe not.

High Midnight by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1981)

Both the sun and Mrs. Plaut were in my room when I woke up. The sun was full of energy and pride, having broken through a week of stubborn, cold clouds. Mrs. Plaut’s energy “was no less determined. She stood on a wooden chair and was either adjusting or removing the portrait of Abraham Lincoln from my wall.

“What are you doing?” I asked. Fortunately she didn’t hear me. As it was, she nearly toppled from the chair.

“What are you doing?” I shouted when she made it safely to the floor, portrait in hand. She heard that and turned to me with her lips in a straight, resolute line.

“I am removing the portrait of Uncle Ripley,” she said. “I am also removing the bedspread and the doilies from the sofa. These are precious items for me, and it is not safe for them in this room, especially if you plan to continue to stab people and do who knows what else.”

She scooped up the doilies and the bedspread. I was happy to see them go.

“And another thing,” she said, marching to the door. “You will have to buy your own knives.”

Never Cross a Vampire by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1980)

When we were in the car with Seidman driving and Phil next to me in the back seat, Phil put down the report and said, “Now talk. No jokes, no lies, no errors and you’ll have a no-hitter.”

I talked as we shot through the early morning darkness, headed I didn’t know where. I told him the truth from start to finish including the Shatzkin and Lugosi material.

“So,” said Phil, “what do you make of it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s no link between the two cases. It’s crazy.”

“There’s a link,” said Seidman from the front seat. I could see his sunken-eyed skull of a face in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me. I’m the missing link.”

“And …?” said Phil.

“I’ll work on it,” I said.

“How’s your knee?” Phil said, turning his head away from me out the window.

That was the blow I almost couldn’t handle. My mind went blank, and I reviewed more than four decades of life with Phil. There had never been anything like this.

“Ruth told me,” he explained.

“Told you?”

“The money,” he said.

Seidman pretended to hear nothing.

“I thought you’d break my head if you found out,” I said.

Phil’s hands were in his lap. They wanted to do something, but his mind was stopping him.

“I don’t like it,” he said, “but I need it.”