Taco Noir (15 page)

• For the steak, remove it from the refrigerator about fifteen minutes ahead of cooking time and let it come to room temperature. Preheat your oven to 350 F and put a good old-fashioned cast iron skillet over high heat. Sear both sides of the steak, giving them a good char, and shove the whole thing, skillet and all, into the oven. Continue to cook until the temperature inside the steak is a delicious 145 F.
  

• Remove the steak from the oven and allow it to rest about ten minutes. Place a slice of your buttery garlicky goodness on top and enjoy the sight through swollen, squinty eyes.
  

THE CASE OF THE UNDERCOVER MULLIGAN

Where old friends are in the stew

The apartments in the East Side, for the most part, lack such modern niceties as garbage disposals, circulating fans, and privacy. I know this first-hand because the racket I was causing would have woken up Ulysses S. Grant from his slumber. I beat on the door like Buddy Rich on his skins, and inside I could hear the banging of pots and pans, as well as the feeble assurances that the man of the house was on his way. The door started to open but it took the hand on the other side a half dozen tries to open it. It was summer in the city, and the wood of the door had swelled to twice its size inside the frame, so I didn’t take it as too much of a condemnation that it took the guy inside all his mustard to get the door open.

“Who’s there?” asked the occupant through the chained crack in the door. The man inside was a scrawny, bookish young man with the sharp, twig-like features that would have a hard time standing up to a stiff breeze. In between sentences I could hear the whistle of a deviated septum and the wheeze of a body built by a lifetime lifting number two pencils.

“The person you called at four in the morning begging to come down here,” I sighed, seeing my beaten expression in the pop bottle glasses through the door. The glasses belonged to Hughie Cranski, a small-time pulp writer who made his way in life at five cents a word, going by the pen name Hugh W. Cranston.

I had known Hughie most of my life, starting in grade school when I had walked into the locker room during Phys Ed and caught the starting line-backer corp dangling him upside down over the commode. I ‘convinced’ the home team to give Hughie a pass, and ever since then the kid followed me around like a stray.

Hughie squinted through his grimy lenses and whispered through the crack in the door.

“How do I know it’s you?” As an answer I flicked him in the forehead.

“That do it for you?” I asked, and he unlatched the door and let me in, rubbing his forehead as he did so.

Hughie’s apartment was a Cracker Jack box, making my apartment look like the Taj Mahal by comparison. The hovel was littered with pulp magazines, what looked like rejection letters, and a Charles Atlas mail order course that looked like it hadn’t seen much use. The only bit of order in the sea of chaos was Hughie’s pride and joy, a Royal Classic typewriter and a fresh ream of typing paper.

“Come in,” said Hughie, retreating into his apartment and pointing me in the direction of what looked like a newspaper-upholstered sofa. “Make yourself at home.” I would have, but my home was twenty blocks away.

“Hughie,” I sighed. “When you called me, you said it was urgent….”

“It IS urgent,” said the bookworm, walking to the kitchen and grabbing two small bowls from a shelf. There was a pot on the fire, and I could hear whatever was inside simmering. Whatever was on the fire smelled wonderful, and helped make an otherwise wretched apartment bearable.

“Mulligan Stew,” Hughie said, handing me a bowl and a spoon. “Ma Cranski’s pride and joy. One single pot fed fourteen screaming children.” I started to tell Hughie that I didn’t come fifteen blocks out of my way for a midnight snack, but the stew smelled good and Hughie sweetened the deal by pouring a couple fingers of booze into an old peanut butter jar. We sat down, clinked our glasses together and Hughie threw back his drink, because that’s what he saw detectives do in the movies. I spent the next ten minutes slapping him on the back as he fought for air. When the color returned to his face, I introduced him to a little four-letter detective jargon regarding wasting one’s time in the middle of the night.

“I called you because I’m onto something big and I need you to provide some back-up.” Hughie sat up a little straighter and puffed up his chest. Somewhere in the back of my head I felt a headache rolling up its sleeves to get to some serious work.

“I’m in a new line of work,” said Hughie, reaching into his breast pocket and producing a business card the way that a magician produces a rabbit from his fedora. The card read ‘Hugh W. Cranston, Investigative Reporter.’

“And what exactly is ‘Investigative Reporter Hugh W. Cranston’ on to?”

“An expose!” shouted Hughie, widening his hands and pointing out the headline of an imaginary newspaper. “Crime! Corruption! Scandal! The seamy underbelly of a thriving, vibrant American Metropolis!”

I had to admit he held my attention.

“And where does the average reader find all the ‘seamy underbelly’ at these days?” I asked.

“Why, in City Hall, of course!”

My hard-working headache turned into a full-blown migraine.

“No!” I told the kid, grabbing him by his thin lapels. “You stay away from City Hall! If you poke a stick into that beehive, you WILL get stung! Fatally!”

Hughie pushed me off of him with a strength I wouldn’t have thought he possessed. Perhaps the Charles Atlas course got some use after all.

City Hall meant Ace Thorndike, the resident worm at the center of the apple. It didn’t matter who sat in the Commissioner’s, Councilman’s or Mayor’s seat, they were all there because Ace Thorndike pulled out the chair for them. Whatever deals got dished up at City Hall, be it construction contracts or jay-walking, Ace got a bite.

The story that Hughie was after wasn’t breaking news. Not in this town. As soon as Ace Thorndike had arrived in this country from parts unknown, he went about taking the city, spreading bribes to any cop with a hand out and taking apart gangs that had the audacity to exist before he made it into this burg. Soon he owned every politician, precinct house, district attorney, and crossing guard in town, and nobody made a move without the official Thorndike stamp of approval.

There was virtually no chance that a newspaper in Timbuktu would run an expose on Ace Thorndike, let alone one in this city. Pursuing this story would only put Hughie in the center of Ace Thorndike’s radar, and unlike the high school varsity defense, I couldn’t call Thorndike off.

“A lot of people have been looking closely at Thorndike, but so far he’s been as slippery as an eel,” said Hughie, jumping up and walking to his desk. He dove into the folders he kept on his desk and pulled one up as if it were the Hope Diamond. He brought it back to the couch and flipped it open. “This time is different! I’ve got the goods on him!”

The folder contained lots of notes on Ace Thorndike, as well as a detailed itinerary of his comings and goings. I would have thought that Thorndike was far too smart to get any dirt on his lily-white hands, but Hughie had pictures of Thorndike leaving the same address on Channel Street every Thursday with a brown paper package tied with string. It all looked perfectly innocent, so I was sure that Hughie could tell me otherwise.

“Okay Hughie, what’s in the package?”

“Beats me!” replied Hughie, with the enthusiasm of a kid looking at a chocolate-covered tricycle. “That’s where you come in.”

“Of course it is.”

Hughie laid out his plan to me over another bowl of the Mulligan stew. We were to sneak into Ace Thorndike’s office, somewhere beneath the main rock at City Hall, pretending to be cleaners and give his files the once over. Hughie was sure that the smoking gun was hidden there, but I thought that the gun wasn’t so much smoking as it was steaming.

“Kid,” I said, in that tone I usually reserve for small children and animals before I steal from them. “This is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. Not only do you NOT stand a chance in hell of getting into Thorndike’s office, you stand every chance of getting into a full body cast.”

Hughie looked at me as if I’d just slapped him across the face with issue number thirty five of “Exciting Detective Digest.”

“Oh,” said Hughie. The hero worship drained away from his face and was replaced with a look I was much more accustomed to seeing. “I get it. You’re not going to back me up on this one.”

“Look kid,” I said, feeling like I was about to shed a layer of skin right onto the couch I sat on. “This isn’t some kind of cheap, dime-store hood you’re looking at. If you go head-to-head with him, he will make you disappear.”

“Fine,” said Hughie, stomping to the door and throwing it open, letting me know that the endless bowl of stew had indeed reached an end. “Clear out of here. I don’t need you anyway if you’re yellow.”

              There was a part of me that wanted to knock the kid into next Tuesday, but there was another part of me that agreed with him.

“Go on,” he told me, jerking his thumb towards the hallway beyond the door. “Blow.”

So I took his advice and did.

Outside, the wind and the rain beat me as hard as my nagging conscious. I stopped into Gino’s Bar and Grill and found Gino reading the comics section and keeping the bar from floating away. I ordered whatever came from the dusty dark bottle that Gino kept under the bar, and then ordered another shot for good measure. It didn’t help much. I could still hear Hughie’s words in my ears.

Going against Ace Thorndike was like walking head-first into a buzz saw, and I was pretty sure it advised against that in the Private Eye’s handbook. Besides, if I were going to continue to do business, I’d need a pulse. Walking away would keep that pulse beating, I just wouldn’t feel so proud of it.

“Ya want another shot?” Gino asked automatically. It was the only exercise his lips had beside moving to the hi-jinx of one Mary Worth.

“Naw,” I told the barkeep as I flipped up the collar on my trench coat. “I gotta go take a beating.”

              “Okay,” said Gino, moving on to the next comic strip. “You have fun now.”

The Thorndike Building was located across the street from City Hall and next to Thorndike Plaza. The address wasn’t Thorndike Boulevard officially, but unofficially, every street in town was. I approached the doorman, who wore a bright, crisp uniform that was so nicely tailored I could barely tell where he hid his gun.

“I’m here to see Ace Thorndike,” I told the doorman. He slowly turned towards me and made a face as if he had just bitten into a three-year old donut.

“MISTER Thorndike isn’t accepting visitors,” he said, maintaining his professional disdain. The implication was that I could take whatever I was selling and beat it, but I was never any good at implications in school, so I held my ground.

“Tell ACE that there is a gentleman down here that has some information on his ocean voyage last August, and some luggage that might have fallen overboard.”

The ape in the doorman suit finally gave me his full attention, making a show of looking down about three inches into my eyes. He neither smiled nor blinked, and his look was enough to make me wish I had stayed at Gino’s. The name I gave him was “Arthur Conan Doyle,” and he took it as if it were last night’s garbage.

The truth was I didn’t know anything about any “ocean voyage” that Thorndike might or might not have taken, but I knew that Niles the Nose, one of Ace’s lieutenants with a nasty gambling problem, had been fished up off the shore late last August. I also knew that Ace had a fleet of yachts in the harbor, and he loved to take his cronies fishing, so I took a shot in the dark, hoping that would be the only one fired tonight.

After a moment or two the doorman returned and led me into an elevator. Inside the elevator was a trained gorilla twice the size of the first orangutan and even more unfriendly, if such a thing were possible. His coat wasn’t a tailored job like the doorman’s, and it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to see that he was packing some serious hardware underneath.

The big man kept his own counsel, barely glancing over at me as we rode up to the penthouse floor. I mentioned something about weight-lifting and over-compensating, but he still kept silent. The elevator doors opened and Thorndike’s goon nodded his head, urging me out. I walked into the lion’s den, and it didn’t escape my notice that my shadow got out after me and kept about five paces behind.

The elevator opened into a small hallway with a single door at the end. The mass behind me hung back, so I opened the dark, mahogany door in the middle of what looked like the Urban Malevolent Society.

              The room was wall-to-wall bookshelves, with the occasional taxidermied grizzly or suit of armor to break up the monotony. I lost count of oriental rugs covering the paneled floor, and the built-in bar on the far wall cost me about ten dollars just to look at. The centerpiece of the room, however, was the giant, mahogany desk that dominated everything. It was a piece of furniture that you could land an aircraft on, and it left no question that the man behind it was in charge. That man was Ace Thorndike.

There were five of them all together, not counting the muscle behind me. They all wore expensive suits, fancy shoes, and the kind of haircuts that I was dying to make fun of. And none of those things disguised the fact that each man in the room would have snuffed out a human life with the same amount of thought they gave to drinking their morning coffee.

“Mr. Doyle?” asked the man at the center of the room. It occurred to me that the books that lined the shelves might just be for show. I told Ace my real name and the boys behind the desk reacted to it like it was a punch line to a dirty joke.

“I’ve heard of you,” said Ace, an obscene grin crossing his face. “You’re that P.I. who works for food.” The trained monkeys behind him all laughed. I had to chuckle a little myself.