Hate is Thicker Than Blood (4 page)

“Right now it’s just you and me, Leanie,” he told the scarecrow-like figure. “But it
could
be you and me and
Jimbo Brannigan
.”

Every muscle in Leanie’s face seemed to plummet an inch. Jimbo Brannigan was a detective lieutenant with the midtown precinct.
No.
The
detective lieutenant with the midtown precinct. A living legend. Brannigan was a hulking figure who thought nothing of holding
a thug out the tenth-story window of a building, just to give the man something to think about. Everyone in the underworld
knew him and feared him. Mad-dog killers, confronted by Brannigan, instantly became housebroken, ready to “heel” on command.
Krepsman had met Brannigan once, The Hook knew, and would never want to see him again.

“Please,” Leanie said, without hope.

“No,” Lockwood answered. And waited.

Time hung in the little shop for a while, broken only by the humming of flies, the ticking of a battered clock, and Leanie’s
labored breathing. At last, he spoke. “All right. I may have the necklace.”

“Good. Let’s see it.”

Leanie picked his crooked body up off the broken couch, and shuffled across the dirty wooden floor, the oversize, split slippers
he wore slap-slapping as he moved. He reached a glass display case, fumbled for a while beneath it, and then returned.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” he asked.

The Hook took the necklace, glanced at Leanie, then strode to the front door.

“
Pay!
You have to
pay
me for it!” Leanie shrieked.

“Can it. I’m not an owl like you, Leanie. I need light to see,” The Hook told him, checking the details of the necklace as
Leanie giggled in relief.

“All right. This seems to be it. If it is, you get paid for it, before noon tomorrow.”

“How much?” Leanie’s eyes glittered excitedly in the gloom that surrounded him.

“One thousand dollars.”

“Too
little
.” Leanie’s face went tragic.

“Okay. Fifteen hundred. But not a penny more.”

Silence. Then, “All right. You’re cheating Leanie, but all right.” The voice was clotted with greed, and Bill Lockwood knew
he’d named the magic figure.

“I’ll see you then, tomorrow? Before noon?”

“You’ll see someone from my office. But I’m not leaving. Not just yet,” Lockwood told him.

The frail figure sagged, and reached out for the counter, as if to support itself. “What … else?” it asked, apprehensively.

“I want to know who sold this to you.”

“Oh—oh no, no, no!”

Lockwood stared at the shaking form. “Now.”

“I can’t do that! You know I can’t do that! If it gets out on the street that Leanie betrays confidences, then I’m dead! Dead!”

Lockwood knew it to be true. It had been worth a try, but, “All right, Leanie. I’ll settle for less. Tell me what day you
got this. And what time.”

“How much?” Leanie asked, hopeful.

“Nothing.”

“No.”

Lockwood shrugged. He knew these people. Never would they give up something for nothing. They’d rather die first. As long
as it wasn’t at the hands of Jimbo Brannigan. “All right,” he offered. “Fifty.”

“Fifty?”

“Right.”

“I don’t know…”

“Fifty-five.”

“Fifty-five?”

“Sixty.”

“All right.”

Lockwood smiled grimly. All right with him, too. He’d been prepared to go to three hundred. “Well?”

“The person—”

“
He
or
she
?”

“The
person
,” Leanie said firmly, “came in yesterday.”

“What time?”

“Around noon.”

“What
time
?”

“12:47.”

The Hook smiled again. He knew Leanie, knew all his compulsions, including his habit of noting exactly when anyone entered
his shop, and departed from it. The Hook looked at his watch: 3:30. Leanie’s mind was about to click off 3:30. The detective
spun on his heel and left, dispensing with goodbyes, too anxious to get out of the corruption that hung silently over every
inch of the room. “Before noon tomorrow! Remember!” came at him from behind, as he exited.

The insistent July sun beat down hard on him as he closed the door behind him, but he welcomed it, after the fetid atmosphere
he’d just escaped. Now came the hard part, checking everyone he could find in the neighborhood, in the hope that one of them
could describe the “person” who had entered Leanie Krepsman’s shop at 12:47 yesterday.

There was a kid playing a door away, and he began with him, but the boy gave him nothing, just stared up at him with big brown
eyes, and shook his head. Could be the kid knew something, but no way he could ever get him to admit it. This was Tenth Avenue,
the West Side, Hell’s Kitchen, and although that was an advantage, because it was a close-knit community where everyone knew
everyone and strangers stood out, it was also a community that tended to keep its mouth shut and stick strictly to its own
business.

A passing laborer claimed to know nothing, the same for a shabbily-dressed woman, probably back from yet another unsuccessful
attempt at job-hunting. Some said, in this year of 1938, that the Depression was over, but The Hook knew too many people who,
told that, would stare at you in disbelief, hollow-eyed, gray-faced, awkward and stiff in their attempts not to appear poor.

Krupp the keymaker, who Lockwood used from time to time when certain locks called for certain measures, greeted him as warmly
as his Germanic upbringing would allow, but he could contribute nothing. He had no time for staring out his window. There
was too much to do, too many things to straighten out, to clean, to keep operating at top efficiency.

Lockwood stopped off at Levy’s candy store for an egg cream, drinking it down quickly, the way it had to be done if you were
to get full satisfaction. Levy and his wife tried to be helpful, but they’d noticed nothing either. Lockwood was about to
give it up for the day, and come back tomorrow nearer the noon hour, perhaps catching someone whose schedule would regularly
bring him past Krepsman’s at that time, when he spotted the old lady across the avenue.

She was leaning out a second-floor window, arms cushioned by a pillow, watching all the street activity, the prime entertainment
for a lot of the old immigrants. Lockwood knew the old were the easiest to get things out of, because at their age, how much
did they really have to fear? He crossed Tenth, waiting for a horse-drawn ice wagon to pass, then stepped onto the walk beneath
the window.

“Good morning. Lovely day, isn’t it?” he yelled up at her. With the old, you started off slowly, with great patience.

“Good morning, good morning, ach, nice it vould be if it didn’t gif so much heat.” The accent seemed to be Slavic, maybe Czech.
“You think it’s hot out there, you should be in this house, the ice is melting in the box, three times this morning I had
to dump the pan.”

She’d talk, all right, Lockwood told himself, if she had anything to talk about. Probably alone all day in the tenement, and
the nights presumably weren’t much better. In all likelihood a stolid Czech husband, bone-weary from too much work and too
little pay, savoring a beer and a cigar. Probably do nothing more than nod the few times he did respond. She’d talk, if she
could. She needed to talk to someone. Anyone. “In the window, at least you get a little breeze,” he told her.

“Breeze. Yah. And flies, too. I tell Marek to keep the streets clean,” she was referring to the butcher shop below her, “but
you think he listens? Pigs. Some people are pigs. Hello Mrs. Laventhal,” she waved to an old woman trudging down the street
who paused, lifted an arm to wave, then continued on, never changing expression. “Ha. That one. Too good for people, she thinks
she is. There’s people like that in this world. Too many, if you’re asking me.”

A fruit truck rumbled by, and the detective waited till it passed. “I’m looking for someone,” he called up to her.

“Me, too. My grandson Mikey—two hours ago I sent him to the store. Children should listen. In the old country they listened,
believe me. But here!”

“Kids.” He waited for her to nod, then shouted again, before she could resume speaking. “I’m looking for someone. Someone
who was here yesterday.”

“Yah? He lives here?”

“I don’t think this person’s from this neighborhood. A stranger.”

“A stranger,” she nodded. “More and more, you see strangers. It’s not like it was.”

“This was yesterday. Around 12:30. 12:47.”

The old woman chortled merrily. “12:47. You timed him with, what you call it, a stopwatch?”

“No. Someone told me. The man whose store he was in. Leanie Krepsman.”

“Ohhhh? Mr. Krepsman?” The woman’s mouth turned down. Leanie was obviously not to her liking.

“Yes. The man visited him. Yesterday. About 12:47 in the afternoon. I was wondering if you noticed him.”

“One man. You expect me to notice him?”

“Like I say, I don’t think he was from the neighborhood. He might have stood out, looked a little different, so you might
have remembered him. What he looked like, his car, if he had one.”

Cars weren’t usual in Hell’s Kitchen. Not many there Could afford one. “12:47. Let me see. Yesterday I had my lunch at eleven
o’clock.” She laughed, a little shamefaced. “Someone like me,” she said, indicating her breadth, “they like to eat, they don’t
wait for lunchtime to have lunch.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You. You’re too skinny to know. Let’s see. Then I washed dishes, made coffee. Swept the floor. It wasn’t so hot yesterday.
I think for a while I sat in the kitchen, I found a piece of cardboard, it made a good fan.”

Lockwood waited patiently.

“The New Yorske Listy,” she referred to a weekly local paper, printed in Czech, Lockwood knew. “I already had read it, so
I must have come sat here. Yah. I remember. I did. I remember I heard the ferry, so it must have been about 12 o’clock.”

“Okay. So you sat there forty-five minutes or so, and then someone went into Krepsman’s. Do you remember?”

“Sure. Not many go in there. That man, he doesn’t have good business. I don’t know how he lives. Though I have my, what you
call them, suspicions, yah?”

“You do remember?” He was trying to hold his impatience in check.

“Yah. Such a flashy car, that fellow had. Silver. Big white wheel on the back. You know, some kind white cloth on the what
you call it.”

“Spare tire?”

“Yah. So.”

“Did you see what he looked like?”

“Why not?”

Lockwood gritted his teeth. “So what do you remember?”

“Nice clothes. Very nice. Sharp,” she said, pleased with the Americanism.

“Anything else?”

Big man. Strong. Nice hair. Not bald. Blond.”

The detective had a suspicion.

“Could you see his eyes?”

“Funny. Funny eyes. You know, not like, what you call it, normal eyes.”

“How? How were they funny?”

“Funny? How funny? Well, you almost couldn’t tell what way he was looking.”

“One eye going this way, the other that?” Lockwood shouted, a finger on one hand pointing in one direction, a finger on the
other pointing in another, the two digits indicating a forty-five degree angle.

“Yah.” She laughed. “Like dot. I vas thinking he vas looking at me, but all at the same time I’m thinking he’s looking everyplace
else, too.”

“Wall-Eye Borowy,” The Hook murmured to himself.

“Vot?”

“Nothing.” He waved to her. “That was the friend I was looking for. Thank you.”

“It’s nothing,” she called down to him. “You like to come up, maybe? I could give you some coffee and buchty,” she said, referring
to a Slavic pastry.

“No thanks. I’ve got to go. Thanks again,” and he waved and walked away. Wall-Eye Borowy. Easy. Gray had said it would be
easy. Christ.

Mr. Gray was trying to look unhappy. For him it was easy, since his face had had plenty of practice. But the unaccustomed
lilt in his voice betrayed the disappointment indicated by his words. “You had to pay him that much?”

“$1560? For a five thousand dollar necklace? Come on.”

“Not $1560, Bill,” Gray corrected him, always enjoying any opportunity he could find to be one up on a subordinate. “You’ve
forgotten that very large bill for expenses you also presented me with. The repairs on your car.”

“Sixty-two dollars.”

“Exactly.”

“Chicken feed, and you know it. Besides, with Nuzzo’s withdrawing both claims, we’re ahead of the game. We’ve got a five thousand
dollar necklace and nothing to pay out.”

“Nothing to pay out?”

“Not with Nuzzo’s withdrawing both claims.”

“Withdrawing both claims? What do you mean?”

The Hook, about to light up a Camel, stopped in mid-motion. “Nobody’s called to cancel? He’s had more than a day.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The Hook cursed under his breath. Nuzzo couldn’t be that big a fool. “Let me use your phone a minute.”

“Not long distance?” Mr. Gray asked, alarmed. “We’ve already spent enough on this case. A long distance call—”

“Brooklyn,” Lockwood cut him off. “I’m only calling Brooklyn.”

Mr. Gray shrugged, indicated the telephone, and spuriously turned his attention to some forms. Lockwood knew Gray couldn’t
concentrate now, that when he left the room, the pallid little man would spray disinfectant all over the phone. Deathly afraid
of germs, and maybe even more deathly afraid of people finding out about his phobia.

Lockwood dialed, waited, and then, “Hello,” he said, exhaling a bit more on the mouthpiece than was necessary, enjoying it
as Gray involuntarily flinched. “This is Bill Lockwood of the Transatlantic Underwriters insurance company. Is Frank Nuzzo
there?” A mumbled “Hold on,” and he waited for a moment as muffled voices conversed.

“Yeah?” This time it was Nuzzo’s voice, unmistakably poisonous.

“Bill Lockwood here.”

“I know that.”

“I’m at the Transatlantic. They tell me here that your claims haven’t been withdrawn.”